You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (27 page)

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.

Meanwhile, in the United States, critical reception has been so warm as to disconcert the author herself.
¹⁸
Reviewers couched their praise in terms common in Western intellectual response to literature from the so-called
Third World: the book was read not so much as fiction but as a useful report from an “exotic” land. No doubt, as Lee Lescaze writes in the
Wall Street Journal
, “Americans can learn a good deal about South Africa” from this book,
¹⁹
but such benefits are a byproduct rather than the purpose of reading good literature. Writers like Wicomb must send their works out to an international readership,
²⁰
some of whom experience discomfort in encountering the unfamiliar. This Feminist Press edition seeks to encourage a more subtle reading of Wicomb's restrained and oblique stories, in which even the tiniest detail may hint at the emotional valences created by apartheid. A homely milk separator may become an emblem: “Out of the left arm the startled thin bluish milk spurted, and seconds later yellow cream trickled confidently from the right” (5).

III

You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
at once encapsulates particular moments of apartheid South Africa and, given the still-present legacy of apartheid, remains relevant to the country as it exists today. In both her fiction and her essays, Wicomb strives to make the reader aware “not only of power but of the equivocal, the ambiguous, and the ironic . . . embedded in power.”
²¹
The proper function of literature, as she argues, is to offer the reader “the experience of discontinuity, ambiguity, [a] violation of our expectations.”
²²

A country so long riven by multiple and institutionalized divisions cannot reconstitute itself as a unity simply by adopting a constitution and running democratic elections. As indicated in the historical introduction, apartheid legislation deprived most South Africans of
benefits of citizenship that are taken for granted in democracies. As a result, until recently, writers from disenfranchised groups have tended to produce “protest” literature aimed at displaying the effects of apartheid upon those excluded from participation in civil society.
²³

By the early 1980s, however, protest literature and the wider anti-apartheid movement had successfully informed the world, freeing the imaginations of post-protest writers like Wicomb and Njabulo Ndebele to offer the subtle details of their “intimate knowledge” in what Ndebele calls a “rediscovery of the ordinary” that will foster “the growth of consciousness.”
²⁴
In fact, despite obvious differences in subject matter and perspective, many aspects of Wicomb's stories can be described in the same terms as Ndebele's own: they are, as Lokangaka Losambe notes, “internal and deeply rooted in the daily life of the oppressed,”
²⁵
manifesting, as Ndebele himself writes, a “dialogue with the self” that features “the sobering power of contemplation, of close analysis, and the mature acceptance of failure, weakness, and limitations.”
²⁶