This article analyses the representation of identity in Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives. It is an autobiographical text focusing on issues of guilt, complicity and entanglement that resonates with a literature of shame, as recently identified in postcolonial studies. Vita, the protagonist, expresses how she is creatively blocked by her guilt as a beneficiary of apartheid and this is mirrored in her relationship with Royce where she is a beneficiary of his powerful and wealthy patronage. Vita’s story, highlighting feminist issues of complicity, is also a metafictional device that represents the writer’s feelings about her post-apartheid, colonial identity. In a series of confessional letters between herself and Royce, Vita maps her journey to selfhood. My paper critically examines the literary and deconstructive features of Dovey’s text in which a rite of passage is represented as a textual interrogation of self.

本文分析了塞里德温·多维的《逃犯花园》中的身份表征。这是一部自传体文本，关注内疚、共谋和纠缠等问题，与最近在后殖民研究中发现的羞耻文学产生共鸣。主角薇塔表达了她作为种族隔离制度的受益者是如何因内疚而创造性地受阻的，这反映在她与罗伊斯的关系中，她是罗伊斯强大而富有赞助的受益者。维塔的故事突出了女权主义的同谋问题，也是一种超小说手法，代表了作者对她在种族隔离后的殖民身份的感受。在她和 Royce 之间的一系列忏悔信中，Vita 描绘了她走向自我的旅程。我的论文批判性地考察了 Dovey 文本的文学和解构特征，其中通过仪式被表示为对自我的文本审问。