Gendered Inclusions and Exclusions in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story

David's Story (2002) pertinently brings to the fore the way in which the female body was (ab)used and the female voice silenced in the name of a phallocentric South African nation-building project both in the early nineteenth century and the post-1990 transitional period. In doing so, it courageously strays from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's implicit assumption that healing and reconciliation ultimately serve the higher goal of forgetting and moving on. This article traces the means by which Wicomb shifts the focus to the way in which, despite the discursive silencing of the experiences of torture and rape within the ANC?s armed wing Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), female cadres were able to carve out a space of agency in which they could speak through endurance, defiance, and even silence.