You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (26 page)

As we drive back we watch an orange sun plummet behind the hills. Mamma's limp is pronounced as she gets out of the bakkie and hobbles in to put on the kettle. We are hungry. We had not expected to be out all day. The journey has tired her more than she will admit.

I watch the stars in an ink-blue sky. The Milky Way is a smudged white on the dark canvas; the Three Kings flicker, but the Southern Cross drills her four points into the night. I find the long axis and extend it two and a half times, then drop a perpendicular, down on to the tip of the Gifberge, down on to the lights of the Soeterus Winery. Due South.

When I take Mamma a cup of cocoa, I say, ‘I wouldn't be surprised if I came back to live in Cape Town again.'

‘Is it?' Her eyes nevertheless glow with interest.

‘Oh, you won't approve of me here either. Wasted education, playing with dynamite and all that.'

‘Ag man, I'm too old to worry about you. But with something to do here at home perhaps you won't need to make up those terrible stories hey?'

G
LOSSARY

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 Nortje
³
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 bushes or gape with “their fingers plugged into their nostrils.”