“I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book”,or: Zoë Wicomb,textuality,propriety,and the proprietary

Abstract

This essay considers the representation of authorship and of writing and reading in — and the manner in which various institutions of publication and reception negotiate the conditions of authorship of — South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb’s first book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987). Variously described as a short-story cycle or novel-in-stories, this deftly metafictional work offers a meditation on the gender and race-inflected difficulties of authorship under apartheid, a condition in which language, race, and propriety, the issue of the properties of the literary and the ownership of stories, are inevitably imbricated. It asks how we might better understand the conditions of Wicomb’s work in its different editions and published versions by exploring the author’s engagement with ideas of authorship and responsibility. It asks what Wicomb’s representations of the propriety and the proprietary interests involved in postcolonial authorship reveal about her own work’s fate in the world, and what questions such an analysis poses for the study of postcolonial print — and literary — cultures.

In “A Trip to the Gifberge”, the final chapter or story in South African author Zoë Wicomb’s ¹ You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987a), the narrator-protagonist Frieda Shenton is on a trip to South Africa from England, where she has lived for some time. Visiting her mother, Hannah, in Little Namaqualand in the arid north of what was then the Cape Province, she announces that a book of her stories is due to be published. The older woman is appalled:

“Stories,” she shouts, “you call them stories? I wouldn’t spend a second gossiping about things like that. Dreary little things in which nothing happens, except… except…” and it is the unspeakable which makes her shut her eyes for a moment. Then more calmly, “Cheryl sent me the magazine from Joburg, two, three of them. A disgrace. I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book. Not that one could trust Cheryl to keep anything to herself.” (1987a: 171) ²

We might speculate about whether Hannah thinks it improper that her daughter writes at all, whether the subject matter appals her (if indeed we are to read the preceding chapters as Frieda’s work; the subject matter includes death and abortion), or whether her objection is to the impropriety of Frieda’s work appearing in “magazines”, cheap print commodities that are, moreover, published in far-off Johannesburg. For Little Namaqualanders, for whom Cape Town is the centre of learning and culture, Johannesburg stands for all that is crassly commercial or disreputable — although at least publication there means that family in Cape Town are unlikely to encounter these periodicals.

Mrs Shenton’s objection to her daughter’s trespass on the private space of family narratives is a judgement, too, on the writer’s impulse to collect and to archive. We might assume that the stories whose publication so appals Frieda’s mother are those the reader has encountered in the preceding chapters, stories in which Frieda has not adhered to a code of propriety that marks her family as respectable. (Here, too, lurks the spectre of shame associated with coloured ³ identity in some imaginaries.) By representing a writer figure in tension with those about whom she writes, Wicomb announces in this, her first book, an interest in the politics of mediation that will continue to characterize her oeuvre. In her novels David’s Story (2000b, 2001) and Playing in the Light (2006), and in the stories collected in The One That Got Away (2008a), Wicomb has repeatedly explored the problems attendant on representing others or on recounting or bearing witness to the narratives of any other person. ⁴ In the context of her native South Africa, of course, this interest evidences a clear ethical imperative shared by a number of writers in the late- and post-apartheid periods.

But Wicomb’s narratives are also commodities offered to readers in particular material form, whether this be, to use the language of the fictional world of “A Trip to the Gifberge”, stories in “magazines from Jo[hannes]burg” or a “Cape Town book” (171). In fact, as one might expect, none of the constituent chapters of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town appeared in Johannesburg magazines; any expectation that they might have done, if based on the presumption that Frieda stands in some direct relationship to Wicomb herself, raises the spectre of the autobiographical imperative sought too often in readings of work by third-world female writers. Wicomb has always resisted readings that insist on approaching a work like You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town as necessarily autobiographical because of the author’s ethnicity or origins. Commenting on this expectation in a pointed critical essay entitled “To Hear the Variety of Discourses”, she complained about a tendency that “prevails in the white cultures of Europe and the USA”, in which writing by black women is too often read “as autobiography, or artless record as that genre is curiously considered” (1990: 42). “[W]hether written in first or third person”, she continued, such writers are understood to have produced (in her words) “social documents that speak of our personal experiences and grievances and which therefore are primarily of social and anthropological value” (1990: 42). Wicomb explains that she sought to counter the autobiographical by inventing a character who was very different from her (“an only child; fat; goes to a white school; returns to South Africa”), but that she also “flirted with”, simultaneously subverting “the genre, because”, she recalls, “I was aware that it would be read as autobiography anyway, and it seemed funny to me, especially with the mother [being] dead quite early in the story, and then she’s alive at the end” (Wicomb, 2009a: np). It is true, of course, that Frieda dramatizes what Wicomb calls her own “isolation, as well as the awful fact that [she] didn’t want to be [in Britain]” at the time of writing the book, and yet “couldn’t go back to South Africa” (2009a: np). But we should guard against the danger of foregrounding an exclusively autobiographical interpretation of the text. Saikat Majumdar, for example, offers something like this too-easy elision in his otherwise valuable suggestion that “Frieda/Wicomb firmly inscribes an ethico-political resistance […] that is contingent on her celebration of the power of the local, the ordinary, and the minute detail” (2006: 318; my emphasis). I will return to this danger, and the extent to which the paratexts of the various material instantiations of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town flirt with it, later.

It is also the case, however, that You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town was indeed not a Cape Town book. First published in 1987 by the feminist Virago Press in London, and by Pantheon in the United States, it was later republished in the City University of New York’s Feminist Press “Women Writing Africa” series (2000a), framed by scholarly material (an introduction and afterword; the Press also published David’s Story, in 2001). It only became a “Cape Town book” in 2008, when Umuzi, an imprint of what was then Random House South Africa (and is now Random House Struik), published a revised version with substantial textual variations. Wicomb’s own frequent foregrounding of the materiality of text in her fiction, her interest in writer figures and in the conditions of the production of narrative, thus stages — at the same time as the material instantiations of this work have to navigate — complex trajectories amongst local and global affiliations, kinds of affect, constructions of identity, and forms of validation. While critics have responded to Wicomb’s sensitive deconstruction of multiply repressive sign-systems and the politics of language under apartheid in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (Driver, 1996, 2010; Marais, 1995), considered the work in a framework of diasporic writing (Flockemann, 2001), engaged with the extent to which its racial politics is inextricably linked to its textual practice (Gaylard, 1996; Raiskin, 1996), and paid attention to the manner in which the book offers a critique of “grand and dramatic narratives of colonial domination and its public resistance” (Majumdar, 2006: 304), no one has yet offered an analysis of Wicomb’s representation of the development of a proto-postcolonial writer-figure in the book in a manner that also engages with the text’s own materiality, and, crucially, its self-awareness in this regard.

While she might not be alone in this — Wicomb’s near contemporary, J.M. Coetzee, on whose work she has published enlightening and perceptive commentary (see Wicomb, 2002; 2009b), evidences similar self-awareness — it is incontrovertible that while Coetzee is marked (or perhaps (un)marked) as a white male writer mentioned in the same (academic) breath as Ian McEwan or Peter Carey, Wicomb, a female writer of colour, has had to navigate different sets of pressures and restrictive expectations. Engaging with Wicomb’s texts’ strong sense of the predicaments of writing, which is to say writing as process and writing as material and symbolic product, requires a mode of analysis that pays attention both to the literary critical and to the book-historical. By bringing to bear a set of questions informed by recent postcolonial history-of-the-book scholarship, we may see revealed the mutual benefits of each of these modes of attention to the other – but also appreciate the imperative of considering the pay-off of historical and materialist concerns for literary criticism, and vice versa, in the context of global literary and cultural production.

How, I want to ask in the rest of this essay, might we understand better the conditions of Wicomb’s “work” (in this case, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town) in its different editions and published versions? By exploring the author’s engagement with ideas of authorship and responsibility, including with the gender- and race-inflected difficulties of authorship under apartheid, a condition in which language, race, and propriety, the issue of the properties of the literary and the ownership of stories, are ineluctably imbricated. What does Wicomb’s representation of the propriety and the proprietary interests involved in postcolonial authorship reveal about her own work’s fate in the world? I ask first how You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town imagines these processes and conditions, of authorship and of materiality, before considering how the book, in its various material forms, is implicated in processes like those it imagines.

Textual materiality: Representing writing in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987)

Hannah’s comments in “A Trip to the Gifberge”, with which I began this essay, illustrate how concerned Wicomb is to investigate the complexity of the performance of authorship — its propriety in a particular socio-historical context, and the conditions under which it leads to material artefacts in the form of printed “stories”. The manner in which she exploits the multiple valences of textual materiality in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town can be traced through several of the chapters or stories in the volume. An investigation of the conditions under which incipient authorship becomes possible begins in earnest in the fourth, entitled “A Clearing in the Bush”, which is the first story actually set in Cape Town — although its setting is crucially on the margins of the city. The title refers not only to a makeshift clearing in the dense alien Port Jackson brush, eucalyptus, and wattle trees of the sandy Cape Flats (41), but to the “Coloured university” (46), now the University of the Western Cape, established here by the apartheid government. ⁵ The university is in the clearing; it is — symbolically — the clearing in which coloured subjects might, in the discourse of apartheid’s “civilizing” and en-lightening pretensions, seek to leave the dark bush and aspire to whiteness. Here we see Frieda as a diligent student afraid to stray from the concrete paths on campus. She does not associate with the disreputable layabouts who take shortcuts through the bush, or the “Skollie boys” who “sit all day long on the deserted [railway] platform” nearby (41–42). These boys are those whom members of the coloured community who have internalized the discourse of civilization deem other: they are excluded from the clearing in the bush by “a fringe of respectably tall Port Jackson and bluegum trees” (41; my emphasis).

Respectability is a recurring concern in the book. In the first chapter, “Bowl Like Hole”, the reader has seen the young Frieda taunted by her mother with the suggestion that she is “sitting under the table like a tame Griqua” (9). In the second story, Cousin Jan’s wife, Truida, who had been able to read and interpret the official letters ordering the family’s removal from an area designated for white occupancy under the apartheid Group Areas Act (41 of 1950), is nonetheless stigmatized for having “something nylonish about her hair” (14). Frieda is herself obsessed with her hair in the third story, careful to treat it to avoid it appearing “fuzzy” (26). Frieda’s parents have been careful to emphasize their family connections to European antecedents in an attempt at a received notion of propriety that, they believe, separates them from the purported barbarity of indigeneity: “We, the Shentons, had an ancestor, an Englishman whose memory must be kept sacred, must not be defiled by associating with those beneath us. We were respectable Coloureds” (116). Propriety is reinforced by repetition, through which “Christian” values associated with whiteness might be naturalized, though the banality of markers of this aspiration to a racially marked politesse reveal themselves as markers, too, of the anxiety associated with being always liable to labelling as other, as dark, and lacking “civilized” values; think, for example, of how Aunt Cissie’s “apparently endless stream of maxims encapsulates a prudential middle-class morality” (in Gaylard’s apt formulation; 1996: 182). Cissie, who shares a name with Zainunnisa “Cissie” Gool (1897–1963), a leading civil rights campaigner and the first coloured woman called to the Bar in the Cape, and yet who bids her niece not to “start with politics now” before announcing, as if to confirm the colour-blindness of success, “but I got a new TV you know” (168).

The effects of the harmful internalization of the Manichean logic of racial categorization by members of a community occupying a notional space between two impossible points of imagined purity is clear in all of these vignettes: a pervasive condition of shame in the coloured psyche, what Wicomb calls “our condition of postcoloniality” (1998: 92) in her best-known essay. Shame is significant not least because, as Marcia Wright remarks (in her introduction to the Feminist Press edition of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town), “[a]t the heart of […] ambiguity for coloured peoples are the implications of their mixed ancestry” — the suggestion that their origins lie in miscegenation — “and two sorts of prejudice: prejudice against them because of colo[u]r and prejudice against such women in particular as (presumptively) available for sexual liaisons” (2000: xvii). Shame leads to complicity, too: historically, to the phenomenon of “passing” for white (which Wicomb explores in Playing in the Light); and closer to the present, in 1994, coloured voters helped deliver control of the Western Cape province to the National Party, the party of apartheid, in the first free elections. A continued reliance on mixing, fragmentation, and the provisional in discussing the state of being coloured after 1994 — as opposed, legalistically, to “Coloured” — seemed dangerous, Wicomb argued. She identified in Homi Bhabha’s engagement with Nadine Gordimer’s depiction of mixed-race characters in the Nobel laureate’s 1990 novel, My Son’s Story, a pernicious kind of “postcolonial theorizing” that, in relying on metaphors of the interstitial (“hybridity”, the “borderline”, the “inbetween”, a “third space”), echoed what Wicomb calls a “tragic mode where lived experience is displaced by an aesthetics of theory” (1998: 101). She pleads instead for a rejection of the “mythical excess of belonging or exorbitance of coloured identity” in favour of a new emphasis on the lived performance of multiple overlapping identities in what she calls a “larger South African community” (1998: 105).

It is precisely this project on which Frieda Shenton tentatively embarks, and it is in “A Clearing in the Bush” that we see her beginning consciously to negotiate the politics of representation and of writing. The reader is granted access to the thoughts and actions not only of Frieda, but also of an older coloured woman, Tamieta Snewe, also from Namaqualand, who works in the college canteen. The chapter finds both Frieda and Tamieta on campus the day after the assassination of white Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the chief ideologue of apartheid’s most brutally legalistic and repressive period, on 6 September 1966. Tamieta’s co-worker in the college canteen, the street-smart Charlie, reports that he has overheard a student refer to Verwoerd as “the architect of this place” (43). Charlie takes this literally (understanding Verwoerd to be an architect), but the comment hints at the rhetoric amongst students who are organizing a boycott of the memorial service for the slain Prime Minister. Charlie’s excuse for missing the service, that he has to purchase material for his troupe’s performance in the annual New Year’s minstrel carnival, raises the question of performance and performativity, the claiming of public or civic space by those deemed marginal or undeserving, as well as stereotype and sly civility. While Tamieta chides Charlie with a derogatory term for Muslims (“I don’t know how you Slamse can put yourself on show like that for the white people to laugh at on New Year’s Day” (47) ⁶ ), Charlie tells how, after midnight, the tables are turned, and it becomes acceptable to smear black polish on white spectators’ faces (48) in a carnivalesque upsetting of hierarchies that suggests incipient agency and a space for potential resistance.

Tamieta, oblivious to the impending boycott and its political implications, finds herself the only coloured woman at the service; the only students in attendance are young men being trained to take up positions in the (coloured) “mission” church affiliated with the white Dutch Reformed Church, the official church of the apartheid regime. Frieda stays away, but before she leaves campus has to complete an overdue essay assignment on “Fate” in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (42). The reader here encounters Frieda writing for the first time, although not about her own experience or in her own terms (several stories later, before she leaves for a life in England, she is still seeking an escape from the heat of Namaqualand in “the bright green meadows of Hardy’s England” (90)). Nonetheless, here the incipient writer-narrator struggles with text in a particular context, suggesting that writing, whatever the young character may think, is never separated from political implications: this is a “Coloured” university; Frieda is taught by a white Afrikaner, Retief, named for a legendary proto-Afrikaner figure (the pioneering Voortrekker leader, Piet Retief), who parrots lecture notes from the correspondence University of South Africa (40). The younger Frieda, as distinct from the older implied narrating character, intuits a connection between her subject — morality, fate, gender — and her own subject status: “I cannot start writing. I have always been able to distinguish good from bad but the story confuses me and the lecture notes offer no help. Murder is a sin which should outrage all decent and civilised people” (42). The last sentence repeats the Tess lecture notes (this is made clearer in the 2008 revised text (2008b: 52)), suggesting the university administration’s expectation of a normative, explicitly Christian response from the students to Verwoerd’s assassination.

Although “A Clearing in the Bush” might be read as switching between a narrating protagonist’s focalization and an omniscient third-person narrator, it might also be read, if we are inclined in the light of the revelations of “A Trip to the Gifberge” to read the first nine chapters as stories written by Frieda, as the mature character’s sustained attempts at sympathetic identification with others (here Tamieta). The focalized account of Tamieta’s thoughts on the day of Verwoerd’s memorial service, read alongside the young Frieda’s account of struggling to write on a topic dictated to her by others, suggests a conscious contrapuntal patterning, albeit one not yet altogether without a condescending ventriloquism. Frieda is much preoccupied with the problem of empathy: she demands of her friend, Moira, whether she feels “any sense of horror or shock or even distaste at the assassination” (54). Should she imagine herself in the position of those close to the architect of apartheid, or is that a bridge too far? Moira’s challenge — does Frieda think that Moira is “[m]orally deficient” for not empathizing with the Verwoerd family — is answered by a rambling response that suggests Frieda is uncertain about settling on a final answer. She suggests that her father would think Moira “inhuman”, but Frieda herself thinks that appeals to “common humanity” (like her father’s, perhaps) elide the difficult problem of identifying with “a particular human being”: “All I can tell of the human condition is that we can always surprise ourselves with thoughts and feelings we never thought we had”, she concludes (in the 2008 revised text, the final five words become “never thought ourselves capable of” (2008b: 63)).

Inter/textuality: Becoming author

However we read the problematics of empathy, there are several suggestions that the chapter “A Clearing in the Bush” marks the beginning of Frieda’s self-conscious reflections about the politics of representation in the two senses of the term, that is, in Gayatri Spivak’s elaboration (in the context of her critique of Deleuze’s “run[ning] together” of vertreten and darstellung), “as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘representation,’ as in art or philosophy” (1999: 256). The younger Frieda Shenton is shown to struggle with the tension between these senses in her desire to find a way of writing that allows her to feature — but not to overwhelm — the voices of others. Moira’s retort to Frieda’s disquisition about “common humanity” highlights the fact that the issue has to do with writing: “You’re always ready with a mouthful of words. I’m surprised that you have any trouble with knocking off an essay” (54). There is no question that there is a proper response to the assassination for Tamieta; she is, after all, the kind of woman who strains to keep the Sabbath (45). Her presence at the memorial service allows her to distance herself from the “barbarism” with which the white Rector indicts the absent coloured students (58), yet Tamieta is so mortified with shame – at being the representative coloured woman (taking upon herself the destructive self-identification of colouredness with the shame of miscegenation); on account of her naïveté in not knowing about the boycott — that she finds she cannot sing the hymn at the memorial service: “the words remain printed in a book” (60). Text and experience are not yet intimately and properly linked for Tamieta, nor for the young Frieda, who, we are to believe, grows up to write a story that sets out this state of incomplete development.

In the sixth story, “Home Sweet Home”, Frieda recalls how it astonished her family that, despite her education, she has not been happy in Cape Town (86). Yet it becomes clear that the narrator’s growing sense of her own agency, including as a storyteller, can no longer be accommodated in the world circumscribed either by her family’s expectations or by the limited opportunities open to non-white subjects of the apartheid state. Of her family she comments that “[t]heir stories, whole as the watermelon that grows out of this arid earth, have come to replace the world” (87). Her stories are constitutively different, and she shares two of them (in her text, though not with her family). The first is about her experience on a train en route to the family rendezvous (“No, they will not like this story”, she thinks (90)). The second comes at the end of the chapter and is both an apparently straightforward narration of Frieda witnessing a mule sinking into quicksand in the nearby riverbed (103) and also a heavily symbolic vignette, the mule being, in Judith Raiskin’s words, a “colonial symbol of the ‘cross-breed’ mulatto” (1996: 226). ⁷ Frieda’s identification with the animal suggests her own sense of suffocation; her construction of its doomed struggle offers an assessment of coloured identity in the over-determined sphere of race politics. The story challenges the reader to question the veracity of the narration, or at least intuit its self-consciousness, because it highlights its own contingent realism through its obvious symbolism in a text that, in retrospect, reveals itself to be concerned everywhere with semiotics. “A Clearing in the Bush” is full of references to attempts to decipher obscure meanings: Tamieta is concerned that her itch has a “marrow-deep meaning” (39); Frieda is preoccupied by the semiotics of cat-calls and whistles (52); Charlie’s whiteface is surely a kind of signifying. ⁸

The final chapters show Frieda investigating the limits of her authority as a storyteller, realizing how much she does not know (or that cannot be written), and testing ways of accommodating other voices and other narratives in her own — of playing host to them in the way that characters in Wicomb’s later fictions do more or less overtly throughout. In the seventh chapter, “Behind the Bougainvillea”, for example, she finds herself in a doctor’s surgery. While waiting for the white doctor to finish attending to his white patients and return to his surgery to attend to the “Coloured” and black patients, Frieda feels like an outsider as she hears conversations in languages that she cannot understand (113): she thinks she hears isiZulu (114–115), though of course it is isiXhosa (119). In this story we see her, and other characters, reading: in the waiting room she encounters “two girls sharing a photo-story” (110) that turns out, tellingly, to be “the romance of a blonde heroine” (114); these are characters participating in the state’s valorization of whiteness. Frieda’s reading matter, on the other hand, suggests a narrative that opens the possibility of refusing white models. The narrative dwells on a passage that draws attention to the imprecision of racial identification, describing a character as partially sunburnt “browner” than a European “would be, yet not so distinctly brown as to type him as a Hindu or Pakistani and certainly he was no Negro” (111). The silent quotation is from William Golding’s Darkness Visible (see Golding, 1985/1979: 207) and we might infer that, in one of Wicomb’s many moments of careful allusiveness, the narrator is here punning on Golding’s title to critique the pernicious nature of the metaphorization of race (dark: white; evil: pure). It is also in a dark lens that Frieda is herself visible — reflected in the sunglasses of a young man, Henry Hendrikse, whom she knew as an adolescent (and in whose name we might discern the English Henry reflected in an Afrikaans version of the name, with a possessive suffix). Frieda subsequently has a sexual encounter with this man despite the fact that her father thinks him not good enough for her on account of being too dark. Frieda’s narrative resists her father’s attempts to impose his interpretation on her: Henry Hendrikse’s near blackness is an alternative to her family’s backward-looking and servile desire always to remember their white ancestor (116).

There is another allusion here, too, I believe, which reinforces the text’s interest in the links amongst literacy, authority, and subjectivity. Henry Hendrikse is meant surely to evoke the name Hendrik Hendrikse, who acted as secretary to the Griqua leader Adam Kok II, at Philippolis, from 1828, subsequently serving Adam Kok III (Ross, 1976: 34–36). Hendrikse, educated at the mission school in Griquatown, subscribed to and read colonial newspapers to Kok and other leaders; he was well known to leading liberal Cape politicians and scientists of his day (the London Missionary Society’s John Philip introduced him to Sir John Herschel, British astronomer and president of the Royal Society, during the latter’s time at the Cape); and he was forthright in his views about Griqua autonomy, reportedly stating that although he had “read many books”, he “never read that liberty was obtained in any country without fighting” (quoted in Dick, 2012: 43). Amongst other goods for which Hendrikse petitioned the colonial government on behalf of the Griqua community were history books in Dutch, and two pairs of spectacles (Dick, 2012: 43, citing Schoeman, 2002: 114). Writing and resistance are brought together evocatively here – in Wicomb’s allusion to Hendrikse, and particularly to his glasses – in a series of emblems of the power of reading and self representation.

As Frieda’s father cannot reclaim her narrative, she begins to explore alternative narrative modes in her developing story, crucially in the following chapter, “A Fair Exchange”, in which spectacles figure once more. Here we encounter Frieda hearing — and, crucially, writing (not merely, as in the previous story, reading) — the story of an uneducated, illiterate Griqua man called Johannes September, nicknamed Skitterboud (142). The encounter affords Frieda an opportunity to negotiate the claims of an oral tradition and develop an alternative mode of social operation (see Raiskin, 1996: 228). The exchange of the title — Frieda’s glasses for the man’s story — reveals in her a humanity that offers a new vision, but also material for a narrative. But crucially it is Frieda, not September, who is invested in retrieving this narrative of and for another and who claims an ability to give coherence to something that would otherwise remain fragmentary: “only here is the story given its coherence. I am after all responsible for reassembling the bits released over the days that I sought him out”, Frieda comments (136). We should of course be cautious about her presumption to impose order, and we should notice that Frieda’s original purpose in seeking out Skitterboud was that she thought he might be able to provide her with dagga (marijuana), a means of relieving her boredom during her visit “home”. In the event she does “not have the courage to ask about the dagga. I am content with the story” (137). The story is proxy for intoxication, just as the journey in the final chapter, discussed in the opening paragraphs of this essay, in being to the Gifberge, the poison mountains, associates stories with impropriety — and even with danger and death.

Material textuality: Packaging You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987, 2000, 2008)

Dorothy Driver suggests that Wicomb’s work, whether criticism or fiction, “offers a model of reading in which irony is key not only to understanding existing discursive formations of the subject and nation, but also to exploring new positions that the subject might more comfortably inhabit” (2010: 524). These “new positions”, Driver argues, “emerge in the ironic gaps” that open up in Wicomb’s work “between the words of the text and a represented image, for instance, […] or between the overt and the hidden” (2010: 524). This is precisely what we see in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Wicomb’s complex exploration of the nexus between propriety, as construed differently by various of the characters, the proprietary (the questions of who owns stories), and property — in relation both to the properties of the literary and to the text’s material instantiations or commodifications — is itself proleptic, I suggest, in that Wicomb’s text foresees its own (possible) future material states. In this it is also always ironic (in a manner that differs from that glossed by Driver), given that Wicomb, though critically acclaimed and widely regarded amongst South African writers and literary scholars as one of the most brilliant writers of her generation, remains comparatively less well known than many of her contemporaries. A writer who professes to hate self-promotion, she has consistently refused to engage an agent. She affirms that she “deliberately chooses to be published by small presses, free from the larger houses’ interfering editors demanding rewrites on a whim or from publicists drawing up an impossible round of interviews” (Robinson, 2006: 20). In an age of cultural commodification, then, Wicomb resolutely refuses to be packaged and promoted, and most of her books have come circuitously to publication.

As I have indicated, the book only appeared from a South African publisher in May 2008, finally becoming a Cape Town book more than two decades after first publication, when Umuzi, the literary imprint of Random House South Africa, published a revised text with an introduction by a pre-eminent South African literary scholar, David Attwell, now Professor at the University of York. Insofar as the text in the volume published by Umuzi incorporates a number of silent revisions it should, I would contend, be regarded as a different — or at least an amended — work. The revisions are extensive and occur throughout the text: in some cases, Wicomb has cut passages of interior monologue or free indirect discourse and simplified metaphors; in others she has inserted words, sometimes with the effect of increasing the local flavour of the text, which also does not include either version of the glossaries appended to the Virago or Pantheon editions. In “A Clearing in the Bush”, for example, the Afrikaans mos (“just”) is inserted in the Umuzi version: “it’s mos all part of the same person” (2008b: 48, compare 1987a: 38). The exclamation ag (“oh”, or perhaps “oy”) finds its way into Tamieta’s thoughts, which become “melktert [milk-tart] thoughts”, that is: thick, sweet and custardy (2008b: 54). “But it will not last” (1987a: 44) becomes: “But ag, it won’t last” (2008b: 54). In “A Trip to the Gifberge”, we see examples of Wicomb revising a description. In the original text, the patch of verandah (stoep) on which Hannah’s chair has been a near-permanent fixture is an “unpolished square” (1987a: 170); in the 2008 text it is, perhaps more plausibly, “the polished patch of red stoep that clearly indicates its place” (2008b: 178). ⁹

But how did You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town originally come to be published, and what role did the publication contexts play in the autobiographical readings discussed earlier? While a South African oppositional publisher might have been an obvious choice for You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Wicomb “didn’t want to send it to a white publisher in South Africa” because of the cultural boycott (Wicomb, 2009a: np). But in the years immediately following, South African presses did, in fact, show interest in publishing You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Wicomb recalls that leading oppositional publishers Ravan contacted Virago a “couple of years” after publication: “They wanted the book, but then, after a year or so they ran out of funds, and shortly after closed down” (2009a: np). However, when Wicomb tried to interest David Philip, another stalwart progressive publisher of the late apartheid period, in publishing a South African edition in the early 1990s, he showed little interest (Wicomb, 2009a: np).

The publication of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town by Virago meant that the book found itself on a list with strong feminist credentials and one interested in representing women’s writing from around the world, including South Africa. In contrast with Wicomb, Nadine Gordimer responded with disdain to the designs of Virago and the Women’s Press on her backlist in the 1970s. She thought Virago’s name coarse (“Ugh!” she wrote to her agent) and, despite the prospect of a new audience (which she called derisively “women’s libbers”), regarded the lists as being “dreary enough to bring out the latent machismo in anyone” (quoted in Roberts, 2005: 389). Such lists, in other words, seemed to her to subordinate the aesthetic — and possibly also the political — to identity politics. Whether or not this characterization was fair, the representation of writing by women from South Africa by these presses was certainly a nuanced undertaking. Laura Chrisman, in an essay that focuses on three Pandora publications (two from 1987, the same year as Virago’s publication of Wicomb’s book, and one from 1989), has suggested that such feminist presses tended to focus on white women’s creative writing while presenting black women as “documentarists” (2003: 112). Chrisman suggests that publishers’ sales strategies consistently “subordinate[d] black women’s aesthetic individuality” while, in presenting white writers’ work, always stressing “their aesthetic distinctiveness” (2003: 113). Part of the reason, she suggests, had to do with anxieties about the sensitivities of British readers in the wake of the 1981 and 1984 (so-called) race “riots” in Britain – mentioned, incidentally, by Frieda’s Aunt Cissie in “A Trip to the Gifberge” (168).

We might speculate that the insistence on the documentary tied the work as closely as possible to a specific (non-British) location, although this is not to suggest that work by black women writers was not seen as also evocative of more generalized (or generalizable) conditions of gender — and race — oppression. However we may wish to apply some of Chrisman’s observations to Wicomb, the paratexts of the Virago edition of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town clearly conspire to suggest the autobiographical despite acknowledging that Wicomb’s work was fiction: the author biography makes strong claims for Wicomb’s credentials as a South African woman qualified to write about conditions in the country. It reads:

Zoë Wicomb was born in Cape Province, South Africa, in 1948. After completing an Arts degree at the University College for Cape Coloureds, Western Cape, she came to England […] and studied English Literature at Reading University. She now lives in Nottingham, where she teaches English and lectures on Black literature and in women’s studies. An active member of the Nottingham Anti-Apartheid Movement, she frequently gives talks on South Africa to local groups. (1987a: cover)

The 1987 Pantheon paperback edition also played on the writer’s putative autobiographical signature in the text. It appeared with a photograph of a young woman — who is recognizably Wicomb — on its cover (1987b). ¹⁰ This is in fact a holiday picture, taken by Wicomb’s partner, Roger Palmer, which she happened to have to hand when Pantheon asked for a photograph in line with its practice of featuring full-face photographs of authors on the covers of its Modern Writers series. Wicomb says she refused this request (2009a: np). The result offers a figure — perhaps legible as the chief character — in a landscape (that is “authentic”, in being suggestive of Namaqualand), but it also confirms a conflation of author and narrator in a way that an obvious author photograph that matched the series model might not have done.

The material appearance of the Pantheon edition may not have caused, but it certainly did nothing to discourage, Bharati Mukherjee’s enthusiastic review of the book in The New York Times in May 1987, which drew explicit links between Wicomb and Frieda. Mukherjee quoted Wicomb saying: “My parents were both Afrikaans speakers, but they were rather ambitious and wanted their children to speak English. [….] So they taught us, but it was an English they weren’t very sure of themselves – no one within 200 miles spoke it” (Mukherjee, 1987: 7). A reader picking up the collection on the strength of Mukherjee’s endorsement would discover a strikingly similar narrator-protagonist, taught English by her parents, including a mother uncertain about certain pronunciations.

In the Feminist Press edition (2000a), Freida’s narrative is book-ended with appreciative scholarly paratexts that serve both to suggest that Wicomb’s text is serious fiction worthy of academic study, but also emphasize its status as writing by a woman, and furthermore by an African woman interpreting Africa for a western reader (the series is “Women Writing Africa”) — producing text that requires additional contextualization. The introduction by Marcia Wright explains who the Griqua people of Little Namaqualand are (2000: xi-xvii), outlines apartheid legislation and its social impact (xi-xvii), and glosses issues of respectability and shame for the coloured community (xvii-xxi). A “Literary Afterword” by Carol Sicherman emphasizes “the unstable nature of Wicomb’s narratives and the shifting identities of her characters as it traces Frieda’s development” through the narrative (2000: 187). It also included a much-expanded glossary (72 entries, up from 48 in the 1987 edition). I am suggesting that, for a reader approaching the book as fiction, the paratexts thus distance the text — suggesting that socio-historical background, in particular, requires extensive elucidation — from the category of the universal, or accessible, literary text, as understood tacitly by the average western reader. Alternatively, and perhaps additionally, they endorse a documentary historical reading not so removed from an autobiographical one.

Wicomb’s works’ difficult journeys into print have continued, and the tendency to make links to the documentary and autobiography still haunts Wicomb’s career. A decade after Pantheon (at the time a literary imprint of Random House in the United States) published You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town in 1987, its erstwhile editor, André Shiffrin, then running New Press, refused the manuscript of David’s Story, regarding it (in Wicomb’s recollection) as too “po-mo”, urging that it be recast as a first-person narrative (Wicomb, 2009a: np), in other words as something more closely resembling the narrative of a life by a subject in the position of an autobiographical narrator. Other likely presses in Britain and South Africa also thought the novel too difficult, before the Feminist Press, which had approached Wicomb for permission to reprint You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, asked if she had anything else ready for publication (Wicomb, 2009a: np). Only after David’s Story’s acceptance in New York was a South African edition negotiated with Kwela; the American edition appeared from the Feminist Press with a long “Afterword” by Dorothy Driver (2001), South Africa’s leading scholar of feminist literature and women’s writing from the country (then Professor of English at the University of Cape Town). Both Feminist Press texts additionally associate Wicomb’s work with significant institutional benefactors in the United States: the publication of David’s Story was supported, through the “Women Writing Africa” series, by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and America’s National Endowment for the Arts; their You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town had been part-funded by the Ford Foundation.

Unexpected locations, versions old and new

In 2008 Umuzi published both The One That Got Away, a collection of Wicomb’s stories, some of which had appeared in small magazines over the course of nearly two decades, as well as the revised South African edition or version of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. But the 2008 Umuzi edition was not the first time that text from the book had appeared in South Africa. One of the chapters, or stories, had appeared in a magazine, though not in Johannesburg but Cape Town — and after the appearance of the Virago edition in the United Kingdom — in 1988. This, were it true of one of Frieda’s stories, would doubtless have horrified Hannah Shenton even more than the imagined Johannesburg publications; that the chapter-story was “A Trip to the Gifberge” is doubly ironic. It was published unabridged in May 1988 in the (Southern hemisphere) autumn issue of Upstream: A Magazine of the Arts, a small left-liberal magazine run by Douglas Reid Skinner from a post-office box address in Rondebosch, Cape Town. Officially published by the Poetry Book Society of South Africa, Upstream was one of the few remaining (struggling, as confirmed by Skinner’s pleading “Editorial Notes”; see 1988a little, liberal magazines publishing short fiction, book reviews, and poetry (in both English and Afrikaans) in South Africa. Carrying advertisements from local (liberal) booksellers and publishers, it was also supported by insurance companies (AA Life, Old Mutual) and the country’s principal paper producer (SAPPI). It was determinedly internationalist (carrying reviews of David Gascoyne, Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, and Les Murray, amongst others, alongside those of work by local writers such as Rob Berold, Mike Cope, Peter Wilhelm), but also decidedly local — as witnessed in Skinner’s speculation, in his concluding editorial round-up, “Book Corner”, about whether there were sufficient “ex-South Africans” in Britain to support the publication of the South African Review of Books, which had just launched there (1988b: 50). This concern with the international and transnational, and with diaspora, ¹¹ makes the journal an appropriate venue for Wicomb’s story, concerned as it is with the tensions between local and global, and, indeed, with the politics of specific sites of publication.

The journal was also much concerned with the tension between the literary and with the exigencies of the political. It had recently — in volume 5(2), published in May 1987 – played host to an attack on the poverty of black protest poetry by the young poet and University of Cape Town academic Stephen Watson, an associate editor of the magazine, which attracted a great deal of attention (including a counter-attack from Kelwyn Sole, and support from Lionel Abrahams). And the issue (volume 6(1)) preceding that which included Wicomb’s “A Trip to the Gifberge”, contained “The Novel Today”, the text of the much-cited address by J.M. Coetzee at the Weekly Mail book fair in Cape Town in 1987. Coetzee’s carefully polemical distinction between the discourses of history and fiction, the former demanding conformity to an ideologically interested version of truth (and its own conceptualization of verifiability), the latter able to choose to rival rather than supplement such truths (1988: 2–5), seems a particularly apt co-text for Wicomb’s delightfully playful — yet always ethically directed — examination of signification and supplementarity, of the prerogative of fiction that explores social and political issues with complexity, subtlety, and an awareness of its own status as discourse entering into a contested cultural field of position-takings, to stage its own impropriety, and to foreground its inevitable implication in networks of proprietary (which is to say material) relationships.

However, we might still ask how the appearance of this fragment affects our (generic) reading of Wicomb’s complete work, retrospectively. Critics have been unable to decide what to call You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. André Viola, in one of the first critical essays on the text, calls it a “collection” and also a “cycle” of stories (1988: 231, 235). Sue Marais opts for the similar “short fiction cycle” (1995: 29). In an early review, Barend Toerien called it “episodes of a novel, a kind of Bildungsroman” (1988: 43). Eva Hunter, in her 1993 interview with Wicomb, calls it the author’s “first novel” (see Wicomb, 1993: 93), and Constance Richards concurs in calling it a postcolonial novel (2005: 22). For Carol Sicherman, in the “Literary Afterword” to the 2000 Feminist Press edition, it is an “episodic novel” (2000: 187), while Marcia Wright’s “Historical Introduction” in the same book suggests it consists of “connected stories” (2000: vii). Dorothy Driver uses the phrase “composite novel”, drawn from a study of the short story cycle (2010: 530, n38). Perhaps the publication of “A Trip to the Gifberge” as an autonomous fiction, under the sign of the author’s name, in a magazine expressly affiliated with the cause of local literature, complicates Wicomb’s anxiety about her work being read autobiographically; perhaps it simply adds rich and enjoyable irony to Wicomb’s playful interrogation (surely the most playfully serious and theoretically informed in current South African writing) of the propriety of publication of such fiction, in such overdetermined circumstances, in such a time and place.