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).