Prodi-gals: Statelessness and Place-lessness in Lauretta Ngcobo’s “The Prodigal Daughter” (2012)

ABSTRACT Political exile is an integral part of post-1994 liberation struggle narrative in South Africa. Lauretta Ngcobo’s autobiographical short story, “The Prodigal Daughter”, is the title story of Prodigal Daughters (2012), an anthology of South African women’s stories of political exile during the anti-apartheid struggle. I enter the analysis through Ngcobo’s intertextual reference to the gendered figure of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). The parable creates a clichéd schema of exile which lends itself to a feminist critique through the figure of the female “prodi-gal” (Carter 1985). Drawing on a black feminist conception of placelessness, I examine racial and gendered hierarchies of citizenship in relation to political exile and consider Ngcobo’s female “prodi-gal” as speaking back to the constructed radical subalternity of black South African women. Reading exile as a narrative form I argue that both the anthology and Ngcobo’s personal account are informed by a gendered insider/outsider perspective of the liberation movement: insider or “in place” as an activist but outsider “out of place” as a woman. I firstly analyse the notion of “statelessness” in relation to the racialised hierarchy of citizenship under apartheid as external exile. I then analyse “place-lessness” with reference to the marginalisation of women within patriarchal liberation movements while in political exile – this I read as internal exile. Over and above the historicising of women’s political exile, Ngcobo’s narrative recasts the exiled “women’s place” as a space of political agency through its erasure of the separation between the political and personal. By contrasting the gendered division of labour and resistance with the “domestication” of women’s activism in exile, Ngcobo challenges the perceived gender-neutrality of political exile. The male figure of the prodigal is thus re-cast as a female “prodi-gal”, creating a feminist schema for women’s political exile.