You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

by Zoë Wicomb

Zoe Wicomb's complex and deeply evocative fiction is among the most distinguished recent works of South African women's literature. It is also among the only works of fiction to explore the experience of "Coloured" citizens in apartheid-era South Africa, whose mixed heritage traps them, as Bharati Mukherjee wrote in the New York Times, "in the racial crucible of their country.

"Wicomb deserves a wide American audience, on a part with Nadine Gordimer and J.M.Coetzee." - Wall St. Journal

Wicomb is a gifted writer, and her compressed narratives work like brilliant splinters in the mind, suggesting a rich rhythm and shape."-Seattle Times

"[Wicomb's] prose is vigorous, textured, lyrical. . . . [She] is a sophisticated storyteller who combines the open-endedness of contemporary fiction with the force of autobiography and the simplicity of family stories."-Bharati Mukherjee, New York Times Book Review

For course use in: African literature, African studies, growing up female, world literature, women's studies

Zoe Wicomb was born in 1948 and raised in Namaquland, South Africa. After 20 years voluntary exile, she returned to South Africa in 1991 to teach at the University of the Western Cape. She currently lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Marcia Wright is professor of history at Columbia University and a member of the executive committee for the Women Writing Africa series. Carol Sicherman is professor emerita of English at Lehman College, CUNY.

Genres: Fiction, Africa, South Africa, Short Stories, African Literature, Literature, Feminism

Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Zoë Wicomb attended the University of the Western Cape, and after graduating left South Africa for England in 1970, where she continued her studies at Reading University. She lived in Nottingham and Glasgow and returned to South Africa in 1990, where she taught for three years in the department of English at the University of the Western Cape She gained attention in South Africa and internationally with her first work, a collection of short stories , You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), which takes place during the apartheid era. Her second novel, David's Story (2002), takes place in 1991 toward the close of the apartheid era and uses the ambiguous classification of coloureds to explore racial identity. Playing in the Light, her third novel, released in 2006, covers similar terrain conceptually, though this time set in contemporary South Africa and centering around a white woman who learns that her parents were actually coloured. She published her second collection of short stories, The One That Got Away. The stories, set mainly in Cape Town and Glasgow, explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendships, family ties or relations with servants.

She was a winner of the 2013 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction.

Zoe Wicomb resides in Glasgow where she teaches creative writing and post-colonial literature at the University of Strathclyde.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
From the Virago new writers series; this is a series of connected short stories which are semi-autobiographical. It is an examination of the experiences of the Coloured community in South Africa during the apartheid era from the 1960s. The connecting factor is Frieda Shenton growing up in the 1960s in the Coloured community, leaving in the early 1970s and returning in the late 1980s. There are some very good short stories here and Wicomb captures the tensions of being inbetween. Her parents have aspirations and feel that learning English and being more like the English is a way out, especially for their daughter. Wicomb describes well the difficulties of mastering an alien culture and pronunciation ("Fowl, howl, scowl, and not bowl,"). The community is perceived as being caught between the Black majority and the White minority; there is a sense as Homi Bhabha puts it, of a “borderline existence”. Another concept used by Bhaba comes into play as well, “ambivalence”, in that there are opposing perceptions pulling on Frieda. It is very much an inbetweeness which Wicomb does well to capture in stories of everyday life.
In one of the most powerful stories “You can’t get lost in Cape Town” Wicomb examines an illicit relationship Frieda has with a working class white man. Interracial relationships are banned and her family would disown her. When pregnancy ensues she has a choice between an abortion and a happy marriage in England. But Frieda does not want to be “duped by a dream”. The stories examine Frieda’s identity; influenced by colour and gender. She is trying to exist in the fractures of a society which has no space for Black or Coloured women. It is also important to remember Wicomb’s phrase “so called coloured”. Wicomb focuses on ethnicity. The family traditions, reverence of a Scottish white ancestor, religion, language are all battlegrounds for Frieda as she tries to establish her own identity. This is about female discourse and Wicomb has later argued, “If white patriarchal culture is about unequal power relations, how can we fail to infer that empowering black men will advocate the mimicking of white patriarchy”, and she has followed this collection with a number of novels which continue the themes she starts here.
Lest I get carried away with analysis; there is humour and poignancy here and the last two stories concerning Frieda’s return and her relationship with her mother are very powerful. The reader does feel that Frieda’s mother’s comments about Frieda’s writing and her “terrible stories” comes from real experience, so heart-wrenching is the encounter. Wicomb has the ability to capture the feel of the environment she writes about and she captures the geography she writes about very well. I have sketched over the stories as they are better read fresh. They are also well worth reading.

[Rima · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was quite a boring and disappointing read. I couldn't invest in any of the characters including the semi-protagonist Frieda because Wicomb introduces the characters at a distance.

I think it's because I've become used to reading one voice in post colonial texts so it makes sense that Wicomb felt multiple voices would do justice to telling the story of Apartheid South Africa.

My favourite part has to be the last chapter / story showing Frieda and her mother's reunion. Huge respect for a woman who held her morals and lived in Apartheid South Africa but also respect for a girl who tried to escape it only to realise that it's not all together a bad thing.

[Jenny Newman]

This is a dark & depressing story about a young girl born into & growing up in apartheid South Africa. There is much despair and dysfunction about her life that is told with immense bitterness and an odd determination to seek out her misery in everything that involves and affects her. She is fortunate have a university education where she can break the mould of a young coloured girl growing up in the 60s in South Africa and emigrate to a more 'unfettered' existence in the UK. When she returns after more than a decade, her relationship with her mother is still bitter.

The story is a little confusing to read because the language vacillates between South African slang and very good vocabulary. It could be quite frustrating for readers without knowledge of South African slang. Also, until I read about the mother in the latter years, I thought she was dead because there was no reference to her in the earlier years!

This book is in the same depressing category as 'Disgrace' by JM Coetzee.

[Skalett · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a technically bad book, it is a work of literary fiction and has a lot to unpack in it. However, I can't help but feel that it was a catharsis for the author to write it and an ordeal for the reader to read it. Every page features the main character feeling guilty, unsure, uncomfortable and self abasing. She can't even go pee without feeling guilty. I'm sure I'm supposed to learn something about apartheid and what it does to the racialised body, but all it did was repel me.

[Todd Denning · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely quick read. Wicomb’s style is easily interpretable, unlike some of the other SA authors, but still has the depth of feeling and emotion which dominates this genre.

Its perspective is refreshing in a genre which can often be dominated by wealthy struggling white men. Frieda’s character is both inspiring and unsettling simultaneously.

Would recommend!

[Izzy Q · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narrator is really hard to follow... the overall story is confusing at parts but the way it's written is awesome. If you want to read it, you must have a great load of patience...

[Fred Daly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Linked stories set in South Africa. Interesting, with some very nice moments, but overwritten at times.

[Ojaswi Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant— Wicomb plays with words, narratives, and time. She is a true genius and I’m in awe of much of what she’s written. This book is everything I wanted Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to be.

[Ben Albertyn]

“Suikerbossie’k wil jou hê,
Wat sal jou Mamma daarvan sê...”

[Daniel Fester · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was a mess

[J B]

This book is very lyrical and evocative narrative of the physical and social setting of the narrator's milieu in South Africa, strewn with observations particular to her life as a young woman and as a young person struggling with their own anxieties. However, the book is difficult for me to fully appreciate for two reasons : one, without a reading guide or a heavy reliance on the glossary in the back of the book, it can often be hard to follow the meaning of certain scenarios from page to page. If you are not familiar with these South African terms, there is a movie for this book, I would recommend watching it and then reading the book. Two, while the narrator makes highly nuanced observations that reverberate with a sense of reality and specificity, like her remarks when meeting Henry, they are sometimes lost on me because at some point I lost my sense of the who the narrator was as the vignette chapters shifted characters, focus, and time and focus on external description. Despite all this I did admire the style and the self-awareness of the narrator.

[Lisa Lundström · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the Apartheid era in South Africa. The book is constructed as a series of short stories loosely connected to each other and explores how the everyday life under the cruel system looks like for different individuals.

The main protagonist is a coloured woman who falls in love with a white man. Their relationship leads to an unplanned pregnancy that has to be taken care of discretely. He can't come with her to the doctor, because their relationship is not legal, and also the abortion can't be done in a real hospital. Later on the protagonist moves abroad and only returns to South Africa many years later with an ambivalent relationship towards her country of birth. This is also one of the main themes of the book - how to deal with the mixed feelings about a country that is still divided, even after the formal political divide is gone.

One can also speculate about the autobiographical element of the novel. Is the story loosely based on Wicomb's own experiences? There are similarities to the life stories of the main protagonist and the writer.

The book is written in a quite a poetic way and demands its readers attention also because a lot of the meaning is hidden between the lines. The different chapters also start in medias res which can be a bit confusing in the beginning. The writing is beautiful though and the story gripping.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim volume of interlinked stories about a Coloured woman in South Africa, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town brings to light exactly the kind of life that too often does get lost to racism and sexism. Frieda, an English-speaking girl in a Afrikaans-speaking area of Cape Province during Apartheid, wins a place at the University of Cape Town, which leads her into the classic dilemma of those who are first in their families to be educated: not truly accepted in white male society, she also becomes alienated from her home.

Yet while the outlines of this dilemma may be familiar, Wicomb infuses her stories with such details that the reader comes away having learned something new.

God bless Virago for publishing women's writing over so many years.

[Atie Reynaert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first time - the first time I can recall - reading a short story sequence and I was quite surprised by how hard it actually is to find your way between the different stories, characters, settings and jumps in time. Since I found it very hard to grasp the story due to these technical reading difficulties, I offer You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town three stars. I did however really like the contents as it offered me a new insight on Apartheid. However, I am quite sure that it will become easier to read and comprehend short stories as the course of English literature on short story cycles advances.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this collection - and it is really very important to note that it is just that; a collection of stories that appear to concern the same main character, but which are not necessarily in order. Reading this book as a novel can greatly affect the way you see it, with many finding it confusing. Instead, recognising that it is a collection of stories helps place the "chapters" (stories) in context. When read this way, it is a series of compelling stories of a young, coloured woman in apartheid South Africa, and all of the intersections of oppression that that entails. It also has some darn good writing and striking wording to pick apart.

[Moushine Zahr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book I read from South African author Zoe Wicomb. I read a French edition of the novel. I was confused reading throughout the book. It is presented as a short story book, but it is neither a novel nor a real short story book. All the short stories are connected to each other by the same characters, but told in different period of life of the leading character. Even the themes of these stories are confusing because I wasn't sure if it were about family or discrimination or a bit of both. I didn't understand much. I had the feeling that only readers from South Africa can understand the stories and relate to them.

[Annie Schoonover · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could give this book, like, three and a half stars. I didn't really enjoy the process of reading it — it was a little too dense for me and I wasn't the hugest fan of the prose style. That being said, the book really stayed with me, and the more time I spent thinking about it, the more I liked it. It's a brilliant exploration of the intersections of gender and race in Apartheid South Africa. Wicomb captures these complexities beautifully and intelligently. Even though I had a hard time getting through this book, I'm glad I read it.

[Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The effect of this book is cumulative. After the first couple of stories I wasn't sure where it was going, especially as the style is discursive and the narrative is alluded to rather than made explicit. But Wicomb evokes scenes of heartbreaking tenderness, and renders the veld and the people born from it in such finally observed detail that by the end the effect is a really powerful meditation on memory and the stories we choose to tell about our lives, dislocation, and our roots and the futures we choose for ourselves.

[Miriam hoimir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read a pocket Dutch version that I've had for ages; 'In Kaapstad kun je niet verdwalen'.
More depth in finally reading it now after I've travelled in the area a bit.
Some of the coming-of-age Weltschmerz is "unique, just like everyone else" but in general an interesting portrait of the times.
By far the strongest story is the last one, a non-political one on reuniting with her mother and the massive tensions and moods that go with it are very well laid out.

[Henrik Keeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally made it through this book (third time’s a charm), and what an original, haunting, beautiful and challenging collection of texts this is. I need to read this again and get my hands on more of Wicomb’s work. Fabulous!

[Lizole Jalajala · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read it for English Lit class and it's one of those I'll return to and read without academic pressure. Interesting way of writing btw, bit hard and tricky to wrap your head around. But once you get it, it feels like you've entered an exclusive club.

[Thomas Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent stories that capture much of South Africa's history

[Montana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my all time favorite books. When I read it, I lost track of everything else. I don't have my own copy because I keep giving it away.

[Marni · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure of this book. I had a little trouble following it.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

An experimental text to be sure, with instances of heartbreaking realness.

[Anna Ciriani-Dean · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one went over my head...

[Clare Grové · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took about 80% of the book to be done for me to finally get the disjointedness. Yet, I kept on reading, as the style in terms of phrasing and diction is sophisticated and enthralling.

[Zanna Hugo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough read, but necessary. Some of the issues in the book are dated and some are still present. Enjoyed it despite jarring verbiage here and there. Talented writer indeed!

[Matthew Molinaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

first encountered wicomb last year as I was putting together my thesis proposal with mp, she's so smart and precise, it's unreal

such a searing work

[Brad Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to understand what was going on in these connected stories.