15. Driver, “Transformation,” 52.
16. Annemarié van Niekerk, review of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Staffrider 9, no. 1 (1990): 94–96, 94.
17. André Brink, “Interrogating Silence: New Possibilities Faced by South African Literature,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, 14–28 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16.
18. Wicomb, interview with Hunter, 84.
19. Lee Lescaze, “Tales Out of South Africa,” Wall Street Journal 11 May 1987: 25.
20. Wicomb’s international audience includes not only those who have read the original text but those who have read translations into other languages — thus far into French, Swedish, German, Dutch, and Italian.
21. Zoë Wicomb, “Culture Beyond Color?” Transition 60 (1993): 27–32, 32.
22. Wicomb, “An Author’s Agenda,” 24.
23. Njabulo Ndebele, whose essays have propelled South African literary redefinitions, identifies the main characteristic of protest writing as “spectacle” that “documents” and “indicts implicitly;. it establishes a vast sense of presence without offering intimate knowledge.” Protest literature, he adds, privileges “group survival” at the expense of “dreams for love, hope, compassion, newness and justice” (Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary, introduction by Graham Pechey [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994], 49–50).
24. Ibid., 58.
25. Lokangaka Losambe, “History and Tradition in the Reconstitution of Black South African Subjectivity: Njabulo Ndebele’s Fiction,” in New Writing from Southern Africa: Authors Who Have Become Prominent Since 1980, ed. Emmanuel Ngara, 76–90 (London: James Currey, 1996), 76.
26. Ndebele, South African Literature, 50.
27. Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 100.
28. Ibid., 96, 100.
29. Zoë Wicomb, “Comment on Return to South Africa” in Into the Nineties: Post-Colonial Women’s Writing, ed. Anna Rutherford, Lars Jensen, and Shirley Chew, 575–76 (Armidale, New South Wales; Mundelstrup, Denmark; Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire: Dangaroo Press, 1994), 575.
30. Judith L. Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 229.
31. The United Democratic Front, a coalition of previously existing organizations against apartheid, was formed in 1983. As indicated in the historical introduction, the Black Consciousness movement led politically active coloureds to refer to themselves as black. After Wicomb’s return to South Africa, Brink grouped her with writers who were neither “outside” nor “inside”—“those who were exiled and have returned, bearing in their writing the scars of both experiences” (“Reinventing,” 44).
32. Njabulo Ndebele, Fools and Other Stories (1983; reprint: New York and London: Readers International, 1986), 106.
33. Wicomb, “Shame and Identity,” 105.
34. Boitumelo Mofokeng et al., “Workshop on Black Women’s Writing and Reading,” 1990; reprinted in South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990–1994, ed. M. J. Daymond, 107–29 (New York: Garland, 1996), 116.
35. Brink, “Interrogating,” 15.
36. Zoë Wicomb, “To Hear the Variety of Discourses,” 1990; reprinted in South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990–1994, ed. M. J. Daymond, 45–55 (New York: Garland, 1996), 47.
37. Verwoerd was assassinated on 5 September 1966. The boycott, a mild demonstration in American eyes, must be seen in historical context. In 1960, the student government of the brand-new University of the Western Cape expired virtually at birth when students refused to accede to administration insistence that whites be seated in front during a student-planned event. The head of the university belonged to the Broederbond, the elite Afrikaner secret society that backed apartheid with enthusiasm. See Nortje, “Staff,” 25–26.
38. Wicomb, “To Hear,” 47–48. Elsewhere, Wicomb says that gender was “suppressed by the national liberation struggle” (interview with Hunter, 90). Three of the participants in a “Workshop on Black Women’s Writing and Reading” agreed with her, saying: “The women’s struggle and the national liberation struggle need to be waged simultaneously”; one, however, argued that the struggle must be private and domestic because “to stand up on a platform. would be like hanging your dirty linen in public” (Mofokeng et al., “Workshop,” 121–22).
39. References to the Tricameral Parliament, which was instituted in 1984, indicate that the final stories take place around that time. Moira calculates that “ten, no twelve years” have passed since Frieda’s departure (148).
40. Here, it seems, Frieda reflects her creator’s experience: “In the latter half of the book the heroine is in Britain, but I refuse to comment on it because my experience there was about being silent. I was certainly not going to give my heroine any voice in Britain” (interview with Hunter, 87).
41. “Die Stem van Suid Afrika” (“The Voice of South Africa”) is the Afrikaners’ national anthem, celebrating their trek over the Drakensberg; Wicomb discusses the anthem’s author, C. J. Langenhoven, in “Five Afrikaner Texts and the Rehabilitation of Whiteness,” Social Identities 4, no. 3 (1998): 363–83, 369–70.
42. Wicomb herself has commented that “I have to kill off the father, in order for her to speak” (interview with Hunter, 94).