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