by Zoe Wicomb
‘Die Stem’
Afrikaner national anthem
doekie
headscarf
dominee
minister of the Dutch Reformed Church
donga
ravine
dorp
small town
D.V.
Deo volente (Latin), God willing (common pious expression)
Ewe
greeting (Hello)
geelbos
type of bush
gelyk
simultaneously
gemake
made (Afrikaans prefix ge- forming the past tense)
goggas
insects
gorra
well
grenadilla
passion fruit
Hotnos
abbreviation of Hottentots
Hottentots
derogatory name for the Khoi-Khoi Cape aboriginals
Jantjie Bêrend
medicinal herb
kak
shit
kambroo
wild root vegetable
karos
blanket or shawl of animal skin
Khoi-Khoi
Cape aboriginals
klawerjas
card game
kloof
ravine
koeksisters
doughnuts
konfyt
melon preserve
kooigoed
bedding
koppie
small hill
kyk
look
lekker
nice, good
mealie
corn
mebos
dried-apricot confection
meid
girl (derogatory)/servant
melktert
custard tart
miskien
perhaps
moffies
homosexuals (derogatory)
Môre
Good morning
Old Cape Doctor
southeasterly wind
Oom/Oompie
Uncle (respectful form of address)
ounooi
female employer; white madam
oupa
grandpa
ousie
respectful term for older woman
pasop
watch out; be careful
plaasjapie
country bumpkin
platteland
rural areas
pondok/pondokkies
shack/little shacks
roeties
unleavened Indian bread
shebeen
unlicensed drinking place
sies
expression of disgust
skollie
hooligan
Slamse
derogatory term for Muslim
sousboontjies
stewed bean dish
soutslaai
a succulent (ice plant)
stamp-en-stoot
dish of beans and mealies (colloquial)
stoep
a small platform with verandah at the entrance to a building
tokolos
evil mythical creature
Vaaljapie
cheap locally produced white wine
veldskoen
stout shoe made of crude leather
vetkoek
flat bread fried in oil
vygies
a succulent related to the fig
ysterbos
bush, shrub
p. 114: ‘Kosie, gebruik jy alweer my tyd om to skinder. Waarom moet julle kaffers tog so skree. So ’n geraas in die hitte gee ’n beskawe mens ’n kopseer.’
‘Kosie, don’t use my time for your gossiping. Why do you kaffirs have to shout like this. Such a racket in the heat gives a civilised person a headache.’
p. 177: ‘Suikerbossie’k wil jou hê/Wat sal jou Mamma daarvan sê . . .’
A popular folk song in which a girl is affectionately called a protea
LITERARY AFTERWORD
I
You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town is remarkable both for its high literary achievement and for its unique status within South African and, indeed, world literature: it is the first book-length work of fiction set in South Africa by a coloured woman writer.1 Although the book is not autobiographical in any but a superficial sense, the background of the protagonist, Frieda Shenton, is that of her creator, Zoë Wicomb, whose brave imagination has set before us a discomfiting heroine—frank, sometimes amused, often uncertain. Through ten connected stories, Wicomb offers a portrait of her protagonist’s coming of age as a coloured woman and as a writer. Race and gender, shaped by the historical complexities of South Africa, profoundly affect Frieda’s experiences and perspective, as well as her development as a writer.
This essay explores the unstable nature of Wicomb’s narrative and the shifting identities of her characters as it traces Frieda’s development from a sharp-eyed child eluding her mother’s control to a mature woman capable of re-visioning her mother and her world. The little Frieda whom we first glimpse crouching under a kitchen table is a keen observer, too young perhaps to feel burdened by the weight of history, yet already aware of the politics of class and color that shape her family and community. Frieda-the-writer, wryly refracting her thirty-year-old memories through the lenses of her adult self, never loses touch with the naïve and revealing vision with which her child self once observed the world.
Frieda’s world is a violent world, in a violent state of flux, even though violence as such is only glimpsed. The cumulative effects of centuries of oppression mark her from the very year of her birth, 1948, the year that the National Party took power under the slogan of apartheid, the doctrine of a forcibly maintained “apartness” of races. Wicomb’s amused interest in the varieties and oddities of her characters’ attitudes tempers the inherent grimness of her subject matter. Her mingled tones are evident the title of the first story, “Bowl Like Hole,” which calls attention to the twin absurdities of apartheid and the English language. “Bowl” is pronounced like “hole,” not like “howl”; and no one howls with grief in this nonetheless deeply painful book.
No one should miss Wicomb’s astringent wit. Little Frieda peeking “through the iron crossbars of the table” sees her mother’s “two great buttocks” as representing “the opposing worlds she occupied” (4). No child would draw such a comparison, of course; it is the adult narrator who amuses herself with the interpretation, at the same time hinting at the profoundly oppositional nature of life in South Africa. Other early examples of humor are situational, as when Mr. Shenton and the driver battle to open the car door for Mr. Weedon (3); or when Mr. Shenton gamely carries on a two-way conversation by assuming responses from his silent cousin, Jan Klinkies (18); or when Tamieta, at the memorial for the assassinated Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, listens to the rector’s “Ladies and gentlemen” and thinks: “Yes, it is only right that she should be called a lady. And fancy it coming from the rector. Unless he hasn’t seen her” (59).2 Wicomb satirizes such pretensions, but at the same time suggests what lies beneath them—a desire for dignity and recognition in a world that renders most of its inhabitants invisible.
Wicomb also makes sure to alert her readers even before page one to a dominant tone of seriousness. Epigraphs warn that “trouble” lies ahead in this “history of unfashionable families” and signal as well Wicomb’s multiple intellectual origins, for she chooses the coloured South African poet Arthur Nortje3 and the English novelist George Eliot. Like Nortje himself, Wicomb disregards the warning in the second epigraph; she takes us “beyond / . . . the intimate summer light / of England” to the barren landscape of Little (or Klein) Namaqualand. In Eliot’s ironic words, these stories about “respectable” people disregard “the tone of good society.” On the very first page, we observe a group of children engaged in “unfashionable” activities: they “empt[y] their bowels and bladders” in the bu
shes or gape with “their fingers plugged into their nostrils.”
As the children gaze “with wonder and admiration” at “the magnificence” of Mr. Weedon’s Mercedes—representing the routinely exercised power of the minority whites—the adult Frieda, in a characteristic narrative attitude, allows us to understand her characters’ perceptions, even as we are distanced from them. Conflicting points of view mark the narrative from the start, as Frieda endeavors to become independent of the debilitating class and social stereotypes, perpetuated by apartheid, that deform coloured vision. The Shentons’ belief that their single English ancestor raises them higher than other Afrikaans-speaking coloureds painfully illustrates the internalization of white values. English-speaking Mr. Weedon is, in Mrs. Shenton’s whispered words, “a true gentleman,” from whom the contemptible Afrikaans-speaking Boers “could learn a few things” (3). The Boers, or Afrikaners, are the whites to hate; and because history made Afrikaans the mother tongue of most coloureds, to speak English is, in part, to defy Afrikaner authority. As noted in the historical introduction, both language and constructions of ethnicity are deeply tied to class. In her regard for the English, Mrs. Shenton is expressing such class distinctions, as we see when she praises “civilised” Mr. Weedon because he employs a “registered Coloured” driver so light-skinned as to appear white (4).
A good deal of Wicomb’s wit emerges from slyly contrasting points of view; her skill lies in creating various points of view, while permitting Frieda to move gradually toward increasingly aware and more consistent adult perceptions. As “Bowl Like Hole” proceeds, the narrative expands beyond Frieda’s immediate realm, moving beyond the schoolyard and from beneath the kitchen table, to follow Mr. Shenton’s and Mr. Weedon’s trip to the mines. Wicomb creates Mr. Weedon’s point of view—his “deep fear of appearing foolish” before the coloured miners, his awareness of the “disgust” that lies behind their apparent deference—as well as Mr. Shenton’s temporizing as he omits translations of Weedon’s more foolish comments (7–8). Certainly there is humor in Mr. Shenton’s omissions and in the Shentons’ puzzlement over the inconsistencies of English pronunciation. The imperfection of their understanding calls into doubt the rightness of any single point of view, including Frieda’s.
You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town details Frieda’s coming of age, revealing the impact of Frieda’s experiences on her maturing consciousness. Part of what is narrated is Frieda’s changing perspective; in the course of the book, her own point of view undergoes profound transformations. Wicomb’s brilliant command of this shifting narrative ground is revealed in “A Clearing in the Bush” and “A Fair Exchange.” “A Clearing in the Bush” alternates between Tamieta’s story and Frieda’s, illuminating the class differences that separate these two coloured women, both from the country and now both at the university: Tamieta as a canteen worker, Frieda as a student. Tamieta knows Frieda and her “father who drives a motor car” (46)—his material triumph underlining his middle-class status, however uncertain it may be. To Tamieta, Frieda is “the Shenton girl” (48), her social class making her too remote to matter much. To Frieda, Tamieta is barely noticeable, and the story demonstrates the young Frieda’s failure of imaginative sympathy. But when the mature Frieda returns from her alienating residence in England with a more developed social consciousness and a more capacious imagination, she listens so well to Skitterboud, an unschooled Griqua shepherd, that she can tell his story and even submit to his reproof. The humility of her submission is another kind of triumph; we learn only toward the end of “A Fair Exchange” that she herself has written this account, and her listening and questions become part of the story.
Throughout You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, as the South African scholar Dorothy Driver writes, “there is rarely a moment at which any one judgment rests without being nudged or more directly interrogated by another.”4 The very title of the book, which draws on a sentence spoken by Frieda’s white boyfriend (73), throws out a challenge: to say you implies a speaking I, and in the title story, Michael’s you excludes Frieda’s I. Michael’s breezy assurance betrays the fault of white liberalism in South Africa: the dominant minority group controls assertions of “fact,” denying the felt experience of the dominated majority. The moment likewise reflects a male dismissal of female experience. Although Frieda is not literally lost, for she does get off the bus at the prearranged spot, she remains lost in a world without clear psychic navigational guides, left to form her own sense of direction by seeking—and questioning—truths.
Wicomb’s readers, too, may sometimes feel lost in a book requiring constant reassessment of what they thought they knew. Words like ambivalence and ambiguity characterize critical writing about Wicomb’s work; they also characterize her own fiction and essays. Even the question of genre—a novel? stories?—is difficult to settle. Frieda is the “focal character” in most stories, so the book is indeed, as Wicomb says in an interview with Eva Hunter, “novel-like”;5 yet “the gaps between the stories” preclude calling it a novel, for Wicomb has deliberately created what she describes as “chaos on the page” in order to unmask “the camouflage of coherence that socio-political structures are about.”6 Like much other twentieth-century literature that reflects the incoherent quality of history, this postmodern book challenges its readers to make tentative sense out of its gaps and inconsistencies—to search for patterns of meaning in its revisionary fabric and, in doing so, to question our definitions of literature and of “truth.”
II
Wicomb’s readers will recognize right away that she is out to challenge them, just as she challenges her protagonist, and just as she challenges herself. She shares with her flawed heroine a stubborn independence of mind and a hard-won courage to look steadily at what remains when a “fastidious” God flees humankind (81). The most obvious example of the courage to change one’s mind comes at the very end of the book—and for that reason, anyone who relishes surprise should finish the book before reading the present paragraph. We may think we know that Mrs. Shenton dies while Frieda is a child; we may even have admired her widower-father’s valiant, if awkward, efforts to raise his motherless child. But the final story challenges and undermines our understanding. Resurrecting a supposedly dead mother, Wicomb forces us to acknowledge that Frieda is a fictional character distinct from Wicomb herself.
Near the end of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Mrs. Shenton angrily suggests that because Frieda has “used the real” for some of her details, people will suppose her stories to be autobiography (172). Wicomb has, at times, suffered the same fate at the hand of reviewers and critics. “In a sense,” Wicomb has confessed, “I deliberately flirted with autobiography, almost maliciously catching my reviewers out.”7 In reality, as in the book, the process is considerably more complex. Like many writers, Wicomb has “drawn extensively on [her] own experience” for such details as dung-smeared floors, for characters who are “amalgams of various people [she has] known,” and for elements of family stories.8 Born, like Frieda, on the edge of Namaqualand in 1948, Wicomb grew up in a Griqua village with “a little school but no shop,” so remote that “there were still old people who spoke the old Khoi language.” The men were employed as laborers in the gypsum mines or on farms, the women as domestic servants in nearby towns.9 Wicomb’s parents, like Frieda’s, were Afrikaans-speakers who “identified English as a way out of oppression,” her mother encouraging Wicomb and her brothers to speak in the imported BBC accents of South African radio newsreaders.10
Wicomb, like Frieda, studied English literature at the Afrikaner-dominated coloured University of the Western Cape (B.A. 1968) and in 1973 left for exile in Britain. Enrolling for an honours degree in English at Reading University (B.A., 1979), she discovered that a graduate of the University of the Western Cape was worse educated than a student who had completed the college preparatory course at a British secondary school.11 During the next ten years, Wicomb taught in schools and in adult education, worked in the
anti-apartheid movement, wrote You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, and took a master’s degree in literary linguistics (1989) at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. Then, in 1991, feeling herself “an alien in Britain,”12 she returned to South Africa to teach at her greatly transformed alma mater. Moving back to Scotland in 1994, she now teaches in the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde University. She has recently completed her second full-length work of fiction, a novel entitled David’s Story, forthcoming from The Feminist Press in fall 2000.
Whether in South Africa or in exile, Wicomb has contributed to the revitalization of South African intellectual life. She was a founding editor of the Southern Africa Review of Books, a journal initially produced by exiles in Britain, to which she has contributed reviews and essays. In trenchant essays, she trains an unflinching eye not only on the “new” South Africa but also on the inescapable legacy of the old. One element of her nonfiction relevant to You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town is her feminism. Wicomb credits “black consciousness” and “feminism” equally in giving her the courage to write, and she calls herself “a black feminist.”13
Apartheid has affected not only Wicomb’s mind and imagination but also the publication history of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. When, in 1987, the book first appeared in Britain and the United States, official South African censorship made publication at home impossible, and there is still no South African edition. Despite the work’s watershed status as the first book of fiction by a coloured South African woman set in South Africa,14 critical reception in South Africa has been slow, although certain South African critics, like Driver, have recognized that the book offers “a new mode in South African writing.”15 That the work is written by a coloured woman and features a coloured woman protagonist may, in fact, help to explain the relative lack of notice, as does the date of publication. Annemarié van Niekerk, in her review of the book in the South African journal Staffrider, describes how male dominance of South African intellectual life has marginalized black and coloured women writers.16 In the late 1980s, the final convulsions of the apartheid era produced oppositional reductive binaries described by André Brink as “us and them, black and white, good and bad, male and female.”17 With South African ears deafened by literal and figurative explosions, few could hear Wicomb’s quiet complexities. Yet another reason for neglect may be that as an exile, Wicomb was what South Africans call an “outside” writer.