The Tailored Suit: Re-Membering and Gendering Can Themba’s “The Suit”

This paper examines the short film The Tailored Suit (2011), written and directed by Kitso Lelliott, in order to consider 1950s Sophiatown’s sociocultural legacy pertaining to race and gender in South Africa. The film is inspired by the work of Can Themba, a writer and journalist who worked at Drum magazine in the 1950s. Though the establishment of a cosmopolitan black identity was significant in its undermining of Nationalist Party segregationist ideology, the struggle for equality was predicated on a racial struggle that subsumed a gendered agenda. Here the work of Can Themba and Drum magazine, which have become mythologized in contemporary South Africa, are interrogated with particular emphasis on Themba’s iconic short story, “The Suit” (1963). Through engagement with Themba’s text, I foreground the processes through which black women have been subjected to multiple, compounded subjugation. In response to the representations of black femininity in the short story “The Suit,” the film The Tailored Suit privileges black women’s articulations, foregrounding the agency of marginalized subjects. From the periphery, subjugated women can destabilize the hierarchical social structures that subordinate and objectify her. By troubling representations of black woman in “The Suit,” part of an iconic historic moment prefiguring the contemporary sociocultural milieu, the reimagining in the short film offers a fragmented frame of reference, positing an alternate to a homogenizing masculine discourse on history. In The Tailored Suit history and memory are stitched into the fabric of the present, at times indistinguishable as they bleed into one another and the “dismembered and unaccounted for” memories of the marginalized begin to appear.