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.
Frieda is too newly returned, too out of touch with changes, to figure out Henry’s relationship to the apartheid government, whether he is its enemy or its tool. The deliberate lack of clarity is unsettling, and intentionally so. Ending the story with Mr. Shenton’s naïve question “[W]hat would the government need spies for?” (124), Wicomb wants her readers to experience the unspoken answer with the force of the mental “dynamite” of Frieda’s “terrible stories” (182): this is a government built on spies and murderers. Frieda’s cousins, “all UDF people,” need no glasses to see the official cruelties to which Mr. Shenton is blind (170). By the time the book closes, Frieda is on the verge of her cousins’ insight.
Frieda sees many things with new insight, nothing more so than her own mother. She brings her mother the same bunch of proteas, the official South African national flower, that her aunt has presented at the airport as a welcome-home gift, provoking Frieda’s “revulsion” (165). Staring down at the proteas, the mother “has never seemed more in control,” and we remember why Frieda has had to escape. Now, however, she receives the proteas and “leans them heads down like a broom against the chair” (169–70).