You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (28 page)

For all these similarities, there is a radical difference between Ndebele's subject matter and Wicomb's—differences stemming from Ndebele's black identity and Wicomb's coloured identity. While the characters in works by Ndebele and other black contemporaries strive to recuperate black collective history, Wicomb's characters find their “roots in shame” about coloured historical origins in miscegenation and slavery.
²⁷
From these roots grew “coloured complicity” in hiding their “Xhosa, Indonesian, East African, or Khoi origins,” as well as their enslavement.
²⁸
This led in turn to a shameful coloured “history of collaboration with Apartheid.”
²⁹
The effect of Wicomb's work is to condemn this complicity by coloured
people, especially those with more education and power. But she is not without compassion for the characters who seek a modicum of power and “respectability” at the expense of blacks and “inferior” coloureds; the trap they have fallen into is one set by apartheid.

In “Shame and Identity,” Wicomb signals her own complex attitude: she uses our to characterize coloured complicity with apartheid. In so doing, she asserts imaginative sympathy with attitudes that she condemns intellectually—sympathy in its root meaning of “suffering with.” Such sympathy is the essential ground of her ability to imagine, without condemning, Skitterboud's obedience to his “baas” (master) and Tamieta's baffled presence at the memorial for Verwoerd. The adult Frieda who narrates the book recognizes her student self as too limited to perceive Tamieta as
ours
; by the time she returns from England,
us
and
them
are close enough for her to hear the rich nuances of Skitterboud's story.

In
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
, Frieda's task is to work toward an ability to accept
our
rather than
their
as a pronoun for coloured people—and in the end, her black compatriots as well. This task requires a humility at variance with the superiority inculcated by her anglophile relatives. Frieda's conflict with her mother makes
our
even more problematic; for, in addition to the expectable mother-daughter competition, she must contend with a mother who encapsulates the social snobbery of upward-striving coloured people. The young Frieda follows her mother's dictates, but at the same time she uses
they
and
their
to distance her own family: she wants to destroy the “wholeness” of “their stories, whole as the watermelon” (87). Until the final story, the mother stands for
everything that the adult Frieda reviles, teaching her child what Judith L. Raiskin has described as “English and the cosmetics of self-hatred.”
³⁰

Wicomb has a surprise in store for readers who think they have sorted out
our
and
their
and
my
, who think they know the mother depicted in “Bowl Like Hole” and “Behind the Bougainvillea.” When Mrs. Shenton apparently dies of respiratory illness, and Little Namaqualand offers the child no alternative female role models of appropriate education and status, Frieda must depend on her father's judgment. Echoing her mother's insistence on rising above her station, Mr. Shenton presses his daughter to leave home and further her education: “‘You must, Friedatjie, you must. There is no high school for us here and you don't want to be a servant. How would you like to peg out madam's washing and hear the train you once refused to go on rumble by?'”(24). Ensuring Frieda against sexual advances that might compromise her future, Mr. Shenton stuffs her with delicacies “marbled” with fat; compliant, she “eat[s] everything he offers” (24). Small wonder that Frieda-the-writer kills him off in the same story, “A Trip to the Gifberge,” in which she takes a drive with her newly appreciated mother, tracing a route laid out—but never taken—by the father.

The final story suggests that knowledge of Griqua history may help an unashamed Frieda to identify in the future with the plight of coloured people, and even identify with black resistance. Shame has driven both her exile and her return to face her mother's challenge to embrace her people's history. Such an embrace, as the historical introduction explains, was made possible by the Black Consciousness movement, which took place during Frieda's years in England and which enabled
the renewed alliance across racial lines represented by the United Democratic Front.
³¹
Coloured intellectuals like Nortje and Wicomb could find encouragement in the view of black intellectuals like Ndebele that “history will always clean your soul,” as a wise uncle tells his nephew in one of Ndebele's stories.
³²
The prerequisite for such a cleansing exists in Wicomb's unblinkered vision. If coloured South Africans accept their own “multiple belongings” with pride, Wicomb proposes in “Shame and Identity,” their shame will dissipate.
³³

IV

In tracing the story of Frieda's development, which she tells both pitilessly and sympathetically, Wicomb shows how deeply Frieda has been affected by her inescapable heritage of race, class, and gender. Equally important, Wicomb explores Frieda's choices: her choice to leave and return to South Africa, her choice to become a writer. It is the adult Frieda, a writer, who narrates the story of her own development and who, in contrast with Wicomb herself, publishes her stories in magazines before assembling them into the book that we read (written, of course, by Wicomb). In the first six stories, up to her departure for England, the writer-to-be at once yearns for self-expression in words and rejects them as “mere escape” or, worse, as “betraying or making a fool of me” so that she cannot “ever tell” the horror she has seen (103, 98, 103)—the horror reflected in the very stories that we are reading. Frieda-the-writer speaks the unspeakable in stories superseding while incorporating the sad anodynes of family stories that “have come to replace the world” (87). By using the first person, “writ[ing] from under
[her] mother's skirts” (172), Frieda refuses “to be nice” and use the third person, a requirement that has so often silenced black South African women.
³⁴
Frieda, and Wicomb behind her, invades what Brink calls those “territories of historical consciousness silenced by the power establishments” and their collaborators.
³⁵

Frieda pays a heavy cost in self-conscious misery for her awareness of issues of gender. She knows exactly what is meant when her father talks of resmearing the dusty floors: “he meant I should, since I am a girl” (18). She also knows that she “should be pleased” that she is “not the kind of girl whom boys look at” (21); but boys whistle at her anyhow. Mr. Shenton warns Frieda that servant-hood is the fate of the uneducated; but for educated women there are subtler forms of servitude. While the educated Moira, whom boys do look at, isn't a servant in the literal sense, she suffers confinement as the subservient wife of a man of inferior mind.

Earlier in the book, in the 1960s, Frieda's fellow students endorse the argument, openly scorned by Wicomb in her critical writing, that “the gender issue ought to be subsumed by the national liberation struggle.”
³⁶
As the male students huddle in the back of the cafeteria, planning the boycott of the memorial service for Verwoerd and whistling at the women,
³⁷
they assume (justifiably) that they can exclude the women from the conversation and still obtain their compliance (49–55). Wicomb's explicitly feminist rejection of such behavior in an essay published three years after
You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
is already implicit in her fiction: “I can think of no reason,” she writes in “To Hear the Variety of Discourses,” “why black patriarchy should not be challenged alongside the fight against apartheid.”
³⁸
Wicomb's independence of mind regarding gender parallels her rejection of coloured timidity and acquiescence. Frieda belongs to a racial category whose ambivalence has often led to denial and self-betrayal. Frieda fears that she will be “drawn into the kraal of complicity” (114) and led to defend the “play-white” behavior that she abhors (4).

But it will take time for Frieda to assert her independence from dominant racial and gender definitions. In “A Clearing in the Bush,” Frieda self-consciously “tug[s] at the crinkly hairshaft” of her “otherwise perfectly straight” hair (49)—hair texture being a potent racial and political signifier—and struggles to write an essay on Thomas Hardy's
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
But she fails to summon up the moral or intellectual strength to contest her professor's condemnation of Tess. Attracted to Tess's affirmation of her own moral code in the face of a hostile and denigrating society, and warmed by the “amiable hum” of coloured cafeteria workers, Frieda “wantonly move[s] toward exonerating Tess” (48–49), but she cannot (yet) write subversively. In the end, Frieda's essay parrots the Afrikaner professor, Retief, who in turn parrots material that he has received from the University of South Africa. By echoing Retief's party line, Frieda has “branded [Tess] guilty and betrayed [her] once more” (56). She commits this intellectual betrayal—of herself as well as of Tess—at a significant moment in contemporary South African history, on the day after Verwoerd's assassination. Equally impure, Frieda's motive for observing the boycott of the memorial service is to gain time to write her overdue essay on Tess.

Frieda's relationship with Michael, a highly unusual contravention of both custom and law, signals her
capacity for social and political rebellion—a capacity barely realized while she remains in South Africa. On one of her “stolen” days with Michael, they go to “Cape Point, where the oceans meet and part. . . . fighting for their separate identities” (75). Out of this emblem of South African race relations Frieda writes a cliché-ridden poem “about warriors charging out of the sea, assegais gleaming in the sun, the beat of tom-toms riding the waters” (75–76). Resembling an exoticizing movie, the poem that “did not even make sense to me [Frieda]” (76) is patronizingly admired by Michael as if it were an art film. In the end, they can neither understand nor liberate one another, and the relationship ends painfully, with Frieda's abortion.

Several years later, recognizing that she must literally go far in order to achieve self-understanding and self-expression, Frieda resolves to emigrate, despite her family's disapproval. In the ironically titled departure narrative, “Home Sweet Home,” she mocks the family icons and tells two stories that she must conceal from her family. The story about a mule caught in quicksand connects with the social and political themes of the book. Under the pretext of a sentimental visit to the landscape of her childhood, Frieda leaves the family gathering in order to escape their words of self-betrayal and complicity. Her protective father, warning predictably against puff adders, is oblivious to the impalpable sociopolitical danger symbolized by the quicksand that fatally sucks in the unwary. The story ends with a terrifying emblem of a sterile people doomed by its inability to resist. Its hind legs sinking into the quicksand, the mule brays, struggles, and then

              
balances on its hind legs like an ill-trained circus animal, the front raised, the belly flashing white as it staggers in a grotesque dance. When the hind legs plummet deep into the sand, the front drops in search of equilibrium. Then, holding its head high, the animal remains quite still as it sinks. (103)

The dignified acquiescence of the mule as it dies vainly seeking equilibrium suggests the attitude of Frieda's family and the reason for her exile. She must distance herself from their acceptance of the fate imposed by South African history. She also leaves to escape the apocalypse hinted at in the changed landscape, for she is wrong to think that “in the veld you can always find your way home” (73). Instead of “landmarks blaz[ing] their permanence” (73), she discovers a landscape altered by a tumultuous flood “more forceful than anything I'd ever known as a child” (92). The new landscape bespeaks horror: the “swirling” flood of black rage that will alter the South African political landscape beyond recognition.

During the twelve years of Frieda's exile, which conclude in the mid-1980s,
³⁹
that rage has expressed itself. In the interim, Frieda has felt like “a Martian” in England, where the view from her window shows not Hardyesque “bright green meadows” but “lurid yellow of oil-seed rape sag[ging] like sails under squalls of rain” (123, 90, 112).
⁴⁰
Back in a South Africa tense with black resistance, Frieda is ready both to speak the unspeakable and to see with a new clarity of vision.

A healing of the wounds of apartheid depends on vision, and it is with literal, as well as figurative, vision that “A Fair Exchange” begins and ends. At the beginning, Meid remembers a girl who was “not blinded but struck
dumb” when she looked defiantly at the midday sun (125). Wicomb hints at, then spares Frieda such a fate: defiance punished not by lack of vision but by lack of words to express the nearly unspeakable pain that she observes. The final section reveals that Frieda has written the illiterate Skitterboud's story, illustrating a type of representation common in societies in which many people are not literate. Frieda gives Skitterboud her glasses, and he gives Frieda his story: it is “a fair exchange.” If Frieda can retain Skitterboud's lesson that he knows more than “experts” (140), she will be worthy of writing his “terrible stories” (182).

To prepare Frieda for Skitterboud's story, an ambiguous image of glasses appears in the preceding story, “Behind the Bougainvillea.” As she sits outside in the dust—her position disproving the figuratively blind Mr. Shenton's assurance that the newly “civilised” Boers permit coloured patients in the doctor's waiting room (105)—she sees her own face, “bleached by an English autumn,” reflected in the “round mirror” of a fellow patient's dark glasses (111). She averts her gaze and buries herself in a novel, finding not escape but “shame” in the English author's racism. Soon after she complicates her own position further by submitting sexually to the “stranger” of the dark glasses, having recognized him as Henry Hendrikse, a friend of her youth turned either revolutionary or government spy. The unresolved contradiction baffles the reader, who does at least know that he is the very same Henry whom her father had reviled years ago as “almost pure kaffir” (116). Perhaps inspired by his African darkness, he has learned to speak Xhosa, which Frieda mistakes for Zulu.