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 bushes 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.