by Zoe Wicomb
Frieda sees many things with new insight, nothing more so than her own mother. She brings her mother the same bunch of proteas, the official South African national flower, that her aunt has presented at the airport as a welcome-home gift, provoking Frieda’s “revulsion” (165). Staring down at the proteas, the mother “has never seemed more in control,” and we remember why Frieda has had to escape. Now, however, she receives the proteas and “leans them heads down like a broom against the chair” (169–70).
In “A Trip to the Gifberge,” the mother, though still at times harsh, is different from the rigid, censorious woman whom Frieda has “killed” in her stories. Whereas in earlier stories Mrs. Shenton kowtows to the Englishness in her husband’s family, now she burns with long-remembered anger at the contemptuous epithet “Griqua meid” (165) bestowed by her father-in-law. Can this be the mother who disparages little Frieda as a “tame Griqua” (9)? The mother has Griqua eyes and cheekbones that contest the “curious high bridge” of her nose that is her European heritage (164). At the end, mother and daughter acknowledge with pride their Griqua forebears who inhabited the interior of the Cape when the Dutch pushed northward in the eighteenth century.
Mrs. Shenton becomes a thematic vehicle for Wicomb’s view of South Africa as she and Frieda travel up into the mountains, reclaiming both land and ancestry, in a journey that mockingly emulates the Griqua trek over the Drakensberg in 1861. When she disputes Frieda’s arrogant doubt that proteas grow in the mountains, she is proven right. Her plan to take a bush back for her garden provokes predictable scorn in Frieda: “‘If you must,’ I retort. ‘And then you can hoist the South African flag and sing “Die Stem”’” (181).41 Mrs. Shenton lays claim to her Griqua heritage, to the land and to the proteas, with a comprehensive vision that silences Frieda:
“You who’re so clever ought to know that proteas belong to the veld. Only fools and cowards would hand them over to the Boers. Those who put their stamp on things may see in it their own histories and hopes. But a bush is a bush; it doesn’t become what people think they inject in it. We know who lived in these mountains when the Europeans were still shivering in their own country. What they think of the veld and its flowers is of no interest to me.” (181)
Arguing for the priority and neutrality of nature, and asserting Griqua knowledge of the land, the mother again surprises us; once an Anglophile, she now finds European models irrelevant. And Frieda—acknowledging her “ancestors who roamed these hills” (172), having told her “terrible stories” (182)—moves toward a closer understanding of her roots.
Returning to South Africa after her father’s death, Frieda-the-writer finds herself freed from the eager cringing before European authority and the culpable naïveté that have accompanied his loving indulgence of her.42 By the end of the book, Frieda feels that there might be a space for her in Cape Town, where—through writing—she would continue “playing with dynamite” (182). When the narrative ends with Frieda’s mother’s question, “But with something to do here at home perhaps you won’t need to make up those terrible stories hey?’”(182), the effect is both rhetorical and ironic. For in bringing forth her brave heroine and in depicting her struggle to find her place as a coloured woman and a writer, Wicomb has paved the way for more stories to be told.
Carol Sicherman
Pleasantville, New York
December 1999
NOTES
This afterword draws, with the kind permission of the publishers, on two of my previously published essays: “Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town: The Narrator’s Identity,” in Black/White Writing: Essays on South African Literature, ed. Pauline Fletcher (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated Universities Press, 1993); and “Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town: A New Clean Voice,’” in Nwanyibu: Womanbeing in African Literature, ed. Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru and Ketu H. Katrak (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1997).
1. For the handling of coloured, see the historical introduction to this edition, note 1.
2. In the same mingled vein of serious wit, the narrator remarks that “a tapeworm cannot protect me forever” (40). The allusion is to the adventitious reprieve given to her overdue essay by Verwoerd’s assassin, who claimed that a tapeworm had urged him to kill the prime minister (see note 37).
3. The first epigraph comes from Nortje’s “Waiting”; the second, from “Immigrant” (in his posthumous volume Dead Roots: Poems [London: Heinemann, 1973], 90–91 and 92–94 respectively). Just six years older than Wicomb, Nortje attended the University of the Western Cape, went into exile in England and Canada, and committed suicide at twenty-seven (Hans M. Zell, Carol Bundy, and Virginia Coulon, eds., A New Reader’s Guide to African Literature, 2d ed. [London: Heinemann, 1983], 437–38). See Nortje’s two essays about the University of the Western Cape, “The Staff” and “The Students,” in Arthur Nortje and Other Poets, 23–31, 8–11 (Athlone, South Africa: Congress of South African Writers, 1988). For an analysis of Wicomb’s use in “Ash on My Sleeve” of the final line of Nortje’s “Waiting” (“the night bulb that reveals ash on my sleeve”), see Sue Marais, “Getting Lost in Cape Town: Spatial and Temporal Dislocation in the South African Short Fiction Cycle,” English in Africa 22, no. 2 (1995): 29–43, 38–39. Wicomb seems to allude to Nortje in her story “In the Botanic Gardens,” in which the apparent death by suicide of a humble South African mother’s brilliant son, Arthur, brings her to Glasgow (“In the Botanic Garden,” in The End of a Regime? An Anthology: Scottish-South African Writing Against Apartheid, ed. Brian Filling and Susan Stuart, introduction by Emeka Anyaoku, 126–34 [Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991]).
4. Dorothy Driver, “Transformation Through Art: Writing, Representation, and Subjectivity in Recent South African Fiction,” World Literature Today 70, no. 1 (1996): 45–52, 49.
5. Zoë Wicomb, “Zoë Wicomb Interviewed by Eva Hunter—Cape Town, 5 June 1990,” in Between the Lines II: Interviews with Nadine Gordimer, Menán du Plessis, Zoë Wicomb, Lauretta Ngcobo, ed. Eva Hunter and Craig MacKenzie, 79–96 (Grahamstown: National English Literary Museum, 1993), 80.
6. Ibid., 92.
7. Ibid., 93. Wicomb has explained her “killing” and then resurrecting Mrs. Shenton as an attempt to counter “the stereotypical way in which black women’s writing is viewed” as a autobiographical expression of “our need to air our grievances” (private communication between Wicomb and the author, 15 September 1990; similar comments appear in Wicomb, interview with Hunter, 93). Elsewhere, Wicomb has given a different spin to the mother’s death, suggesting that “the reason the mother doesn’t have an influence is because she is suppressed, she is silenced by the father. Perhaps her reported death in the early stories can be read as her suppression” (interview with Hunter 94–95). See Marais, “Getting Lost,” 38, and André Brink, “Reinventing the Real: English South African Fiction Now,” New Contrast 21, no. 1 (1993): 44–55, 53.
8. Wicomb, interview with Hunter, 93, 84.
9. Ibid., 81, 89.
10. Ibid., 89.
11. Private communication.
12. Wicomb, as quoted in Thulani Davis and Joe Wood, “To Soweto with Love: Black South Africans Respond to the Release of Nelson Mandela,” Voice Literary Supplement, 20 February 1990: 25–26, 26.
13. See Wicomb, “An Author’s Agenda,” Southern African Review of Books 2, no. 4 (February/May 1990): 24; interview with Hunter, 88.
14. Wicomb finds some common ground with Bessie Head, the only other well-known coloured South African woman writer (whose fiction, however, is set in her adopted country, Botswana); see Wicomb’s essays “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, 91–107 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 96–97, and “Reading, Writing, and Visual Production in the New South Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30, no. 2 (1995): 1–15,
10–13.
15. Driver, “Transformation,” 52.
16. Annemarié van Niekerk, review of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Staffrider 9, no. 1 (1990): 94–96, 94.
17. André Brink, “Interrogating Silence: New Possibilities Faced by South African Literature,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, 14–28 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16.
18. Wicomb, interview with Hunter, 84.
19. Lee Lescaze, “Tales Out of South Africa,” Wall Street Journal 11 May 1987: 25.
20. Wicomb’s international audience includes not only those who have read the original text but those who have read translations into other languages—thus far into French, Swedish, German, Dutch, and Italian.
21. Zoë Wicomb, “Culture Beyond Color?” Transition 60 (1993): 27–32, 32.
22. Wicomb, “An Author’s Agenda,” 24.
23. Njabulo Ndebele, whose essays have propelled South African literary redefinitions, identifies the main characteristic of protest writing as “spectacle” that “documents” and “indicts implicitly; . . . it establishes a vast sense of presence without offering intimate knowledge.” Protest literature, he adds, privileges “group survival” at the expense of “dreams for love, hope, compassion, newness and justice” (Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary, introduction by Graham Pechey [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994], 49–50).
24. Ibid., 58.
25. Lokangaka Losambe, “History and Tradition in the Reconstitution of Black South African Subjectivity: Njabulo Ndebele’s Fiction,” in New Writing from Southern Africa: Authors Who Have Become Prominent Since 1980, ed. Emmanuel Ngara, 76–90 (London: James Currey, 1996), 76.
26. Ndebele, South African Literature, 50.
27. Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 100.
28. Ibid., 96, 100.
29. Zoë Wicomb, “Comment on Return to South Africa” in Into the Nineties: Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, ed. Anna Rutherford, Lars Jensen, and Shirley Chew, 575–76 (Armidale, New South Wales; Mundelstrup, Denmark; Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire: Dangaroo Press, 1994), 575.
30. Judith L. Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 229.
31. The United Democratic Front, a coalition of previously existing organizations against apartheid, was formed in 1983. As indicated in the historical introduction, the Black Consciousness movement led politically active coloureds to refer to themselves as black. After Wicomb’s return to South Africa, Brink grouped her with writers who were neither “outside” nor “inside”—“those who were exiled and have returned, bearing in their writing the scars of both experiences” (“Reinventing,” 44).
32. Njabulo Ndebele, Fools and Other Stories (1983; reprint: New York and London: Readers International, 1986), 106.
33. Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 105.
34. Boitumelo Mofokeng et al., “Workshop on Black Women’s Writing and Reading,” 1990; reprinted in South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990–1994, ed. M. J. Daymond, 107–29 (New York: Garland, 1996), 116.
35. Brink, “Interrogating,” 15.
36. Zoë Wicomb, “To Hear the Variety of Discourses,” 1990; reprinted in South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990–1994, ed. M. J. Daymond, 45–55 (New York: Garland, 1996), 47.
37. Verwoerd was assassinated on 5 September 1966. The boycott, a mild demonstration in American eyes, must be seen in historical context. In 1960, the student government of the brand-new University of the Western Cape expired virtually at birth when students refused to accede to administration insistence that whites be seated in front during a student-planned event. The head of the university belonged to the Broederbond, the elite Afrikaner secret society that backed apartheid with enthusiasm. See Nortje, “Staff,” 25–26.
38. Wicomb, “To Hear,” 47–48. Elsewhere, Wicomb says that gender was “suppressed by the national liberation struggle” (interview with Hunter, 90). Three of the participants in a “Workshop on Black Women’s Writing and Reading” agreed with her, saying: “The women’s struggle and the national liberation struggle need to be waged simultaneously”; one, however, argued that the struggle must be private and domestic because “to stand up on a platform . . . would be like hanging your dirty linen in public” (Mofokeng et al., “Workshop,” 121–22).
39. References to the Tricameral Parliament, which was instituted in 1984, indicate that the final stories take place around that time. Moira calculates that “ten, no twelve years” have passed since Frieda’s departure (148).
40. Here, it seems, Frieda reflects her creator’s experience: “In the latter half of the book the heroine is in Britain, but I refuse to comment on it because my experience there was about being silent. I was certainly not going to give my heroine any voice in Britain” (interview with Hunter, 87).
41. “Die Stem van Suid Afrika” (“The Voice of South Africa”) is the Afrikaners’ national anthem, celebrating their trek over the Drakensberg; Wicomb discusses the anthem’s author, C. J. Langenhoven, in “Five Afrikaner Texts and the Rehabilitation of Whiteness,” Social Identities 4, no. 3 (1998): 363–83, 369–70.
42. Wicomb herself has commented that “I have to kill off the father, in order for her to speak” (interview with Hunter, 94).