Help me remove my baby from my back
because it is time to make love:
the only chore I do without
my baby on my back
—Boitumelo Mofokeng, “With My Baby on My Back”
Reality and Weirdness
Published in 1988, James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture is an insightful exploration of metropolitan modernist aesthetics against the backdrop of a troubled global modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is, moreover, representative of a critical momentum in the developing relationship between literary and anthropological discourse in the late twentieth century. The book has been considered a critical work in the so-called literary turn in anthropology, which was already exemplified by the influential collection co-edited by Clifford, Writing Culture, published in 1986.1 In his introduction to the collection, Clifford points to the rising popularity of literary approaches in a range of disciplines he calls “the human sciences,” noting several anthropologists who have shown an interest in literary theory and practice, including Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Claude Levi-Strauss. Their interest, he claims, has precedents in an earlier generation of anthropologists, such as Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict. Examining the rhetorical constitution of ethnographic discourse as opposed to its supposedly scientific or objective “core,” Clifford argues that any understanding of the “literariness” of the discipline must hinge not merely on “good writing or distinctive style” but on the larger way “literary processes—metaphor, figuration, narrative—affect the way cultural phenomena are registered.”2
In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford identifies a spectral affinity between ethnography and surrealism. “Surrealism is ethnography’s secret sharer,” he writes, “for better or for worse—in the description, analysis, and extension of the grounds of twentieth-century expression and meaning.”3 At the heart of this affinity is a dialectic that is essential to both literary and anthropological discourse—between the familiar and the alien, the ordinary and the strange. In literary criticism, a preoccupation with this dialectic has had a long and distinguished critical history, ranging from Russian formalism to recent critical interest in the ethical implications of literature following the work of Emmanuel Levinas.4 And significantly, in an essay in Writing Culture, Vincent Crapanzano identifies a Levinasian understanding of Otherness that must lie at the heart of the ethnographer’s work: “He must render the foreign familiar and preserve its very foreignness at one and the same time.”5 In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford substantiates this dialectic by drawing attention to Bronislaw Malinowski’s prescription of balance between the “coefficient of weirdness” and the “coefficient of reality,” which must constitute the ethnographer’s reading of alien cultures and their lifestyle practices. The ideal study should be able to contextualize the initial appearance of alienness in other cultures in terms of the normal, regular, or ordinary, even as a sense of their strangeness and difference is preserved for the reader. This relationship between the ordinary and the strange is dialectical (in a Hegelian or Marxist sense) rather than simply oppositional—they complement and, indeed, make each other possible by their mutual antithetical coexistence. For surrealism, an integral component of the absurd is the quotidian, with which the absurd enters into a disruptive relationship. Anthropological humanism takes the strange and alien in foreign cultures and tries to render it comprehensible, to establish it as part of the ordinary and the everyday as they are produced within the studied cultures.
A similar dialectic of the familiar and the strange also forms the foundation of our pleasure in literature. Empathy—an affect that is crucial to our appreciation of fictional characters—hinges on our recognition of the familiar and the identifiable. But familiarity alone does not make art. A successful literary work also depends on a rendition of the utter strangeness of the familiar, whether achieved through language, formal structure, narrative, or other means of aesthetic innovation. The unresolved tension between the familiar and the strange that forms the core of aesthetic pleasure can also relate to a similar negotiation of the banal and the transcendental or, to use a more immediate set of terms, the boring and the interesting. “The act of writing,” Patricia Meyer Spacks reminds us, “implicitly claims interest (boredom’s antithesis) for the assertions of questions or exclamations it generates.” Banality and boredom, by defining the condition of aesthetic failure, form the “displaced, unmentioned, and unmentionable possibility” of literature.6 Beyond that, however, there is a specific cultural-historic implication to this narrative that culminates in the haunting kinship of ethnography and surrealism delineated by Clifford. While the classic charge of literature is to transcend the banal, the more empirical category of the everyday has, since the Enlightenment, given the emergent world of prose fiction its unique shape, and high modernism has radically engaged the banal as a subject of aesthetic representation in its own right. That anthropology’s functionalist turn—led by Malinowski—was preoccupied with the mundane “imponderabilia” of everyday life around the time when modernism’s interest in the banal culminates in its radical poetics is surely significant in the light of Clifford’s identification of the modernist affinity of ethnography and surrealism.7
The ethnographic definition of alienness also has a concrete material implication. Historically, this definition has evolved through anthropology’s exploration of cultures that are alien to the European ethnographic gaze, rooted outside the metropolitan West. Accordingly, the interaction of the ordinary and the dramatic shaping the mutual affinity of ethnography and surrealism derives much of its significance from the encounter between the metropolitan literary-modernist subject and cultures alien to this subject. Black Africa provided the most significant of these cultures, but the indigenous cultures of the Pacific islands and parts of Asia also figured extensively in such anthropological encounters. Such cultural “otherness”—whether or not it was always conceived as such—constituted significant components of the contemporary aesthetic instinct, famously exemplified in the exhibition of African masks that influenced Picasso and the conception of Cubism. Anthropology, even in its most traditional versions, had made such “otherness” its principal object of enquiry. Studies of the development of modernism and of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropology have established that some of the main historical influences behind the importance of the non-Western “Other” included the growth, consolidation, and ultimately the disintegration of colonial empires around the world. It was the growing immediacy of the indigenous cultures of the colonies that catalyzed intense aesthetic and anthropological interest in such cultures. This interest was most visible within the metropolitan centers of Europe that were colonial powers—most significantly France but also Britain and other nations.
The coming together of such competing values brought about by the colonial encounter, in this landscape of ethnographic surrealism, produced a reality that is no longer unified, homogenous, or epistemologically uncontested. Even the anthropological imagination of the colonial encounter embeds itself within this epistemological conflict. Peter Pels has identified three ways in which anthropologists think of colonialism: “as the universal, evolutionary progress of modernization; as a particular strategy or experiment in domination and exploration; and as the unfinished business of struggle and negotiation.”8 Each of these processes entails acts of epistemic and material violence, leading to a violation of discrete and demarcated spatial boundaries, thus placing mutually inconsistent modes of imagining history in a potentially explosive contact. Mary Louise Pratt uses the term “contact zone” to describe the space of this interaction, which she defines as “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”9 The epistemological consequence of this contact is the production of a reality whose shape, contours, and texture are more contested than ever before. The Malinowskian “coefficient of weirdness” is set into conflict with the “coefficient of reality” in a rapidly changing order where such values often become interchangeable over time. While this conflict is central to the actual experience of such cultural realities, it is perhaps even more crucial in the representation of such realities, as surrealism and ethnography illustrate in their respective contexts. This epistemic conflict in many ways lies at the heart of the historical process of colonialism, with the colonial power seeking to normalize—or, to use Roland Barthes’ terms, turn into the ahistoric structure of myth—the European paradigm of history, the success of which completes the ideological work of colonialism.
The instincts of high modernism, whether in literature or the visual arts, manifestly trouble this ideological project of colonialism, as Clifford’s demonstration of ethnographic surrealism illustrates. However, if experimental modernism’s negotiation of the ordinary and the fantastic is incomplete without its historic encounter with cultural otherness from its colonial empires, it is just as important to examine this negotiation within discourses within which the colonies have produced themselves. The anthropological equivalent of this discourse is autoethnography, which defines texts “in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms.”10 If it is possible to understand the epistemological and aesthetic conflict in the colonial contact zone as an unresolved dialectic of the familiar and the strange, the banal and the dramatic, it is worth exploring how autoethnographic discourse has produced this tension.
My archive here is the literary equivalent of autoethnographic discourse, the cultural act through which fringes of the empire outside the range of Western civilization have written back to the metropolitan center—Anglophone postcolonial literature from the global South. Anglophone literature, especially the genre of prose fiction that traces part of its legacy to the European Enlightenment, is one of the most significant cultural products of the global British Empire, especially in locations in the global South where literature in English has come to constitute a new archive inextricably linked to colonialism and the development of postcolonial identity. Within this global body of Anglophone literature, however, I wish to turn to a historically specific moment. If colonial contact and contestation over the representation of reality is marked by a continuing tension between the spectacle of colonial intrusion and the ordinariness of local spaces, this particular moment of cultural history marks, for the first time, a clearly articulated polemic regarding the respective importance of the ordinary and the spectacular in the representation of postcolonial reality. It is an inevitable debate for any discourse that takes narrative form, as historians and narratologists of the twentieth century have come to understand alike. The fundamental question, in history and philosophy as in fiction, has been whether narrative, a temporal category, can possibly unfold outside its obligation to unique events. Or are the endlessly repeated conditions of human life, which make up the domain of the ordinary everyday, also an appropriate venue for narrative? Is the ordinary everyday, as Stanley Cavell believes, a viable ground from which to appreciate better the eruption of events, or does an exclusive or predominant focus on events define an epistemological self-sufficiency? To rephrase this in terms of the dialectic identified by Clifford, do the ordinary and the dramatic throw each other into relief? Or do the full implications of the dramatic tremors along the arc of global history become clearer through an exclusive attention to the turbulent events themselves?
Late-twentieth-century Anglophone cultural politics in certain locations of the global South intervenes in this conversation through a range of forms. These forms include debates over the respective significance of turbulent upheavals of colonial and postcolonial history and the constitution of an ordinary everyday outside the major signposts of conventional historiography; between the aesthetic and political import of representing the dramatic happenings in the public sphere on one hand, and, on the other, the fragments of quotidian life as experienced in the intimate folds of the private sphere; between bold lines of fictionalized history visible on a national plane, on one hand, and the culturally idiosyncratic minutiae produced in regional spaces that trouble and disperse the notion of modern nationhood, on the other. Not that these categories are all held in distinct and demarcated spaces all the time, but it so happens that in the course of this debate—carried out implicitly in fiction and explicitly in theoretical writing—many of these categories have come to be perceived as polarities. This, therefore, is the most opportune moment to examine not only the aesthetic exploration of the everyday but also the presentation of such an everyday within the radical affective frameworks of banality and boredom in English-language literature from the peripheries of empire beyond the cultural limits of the West. To do that, we need to begin with an examination of the evolving tension between the representation of the historical spectacle and that of the everyday within the cultural politics of Anglophone postcolonial fiction.
Genre and Narration in the Colony
A quick survey of fiction and criticism from postcolonial cultures written in European languages through much of the twentieth century confirms an argument that has only recently begun to be articulated by a handful of voices—an argument that, if essentialist, is doubtless strategically so. This argument points to male postcolonial fiction writers’ predominant focus on abstracted versions of the colonial struggle in larger, national spaces, in public lives of nations constructed more by a pan-national bourgeois sensibility than by those embedded in local realities. Moreover, the incidents valorized by dominant models of historiography—such as riots, genocides, wars, nationally organized anticolonial movements, and electoral upheavals—have been more often the subjects of male writers. The most celebrated and prominent site of these subjects has been the much-theorized “national allegory,” a genre that has established itself as a predominantly masculine construct. The novelistic national allegory, invested in the very concept of “nationhood” and its evolution in larger public spaces, focuses on some of the most spectacular stories of the nation. This focus on the dramatic is usually embodied through narrative techniques rooted in the fantastic, the magical realist, and the mythical. Many of these features are to be found in the canonical postcolonial national allegories, such as Ben Okrie’s The Famished Road, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Narratives of power and oppression in the global South predominantly have been produced by what Kelwyn Sole calls “a culture of the spectacular—the flaunting of material excess cheek by jowl with social poverty, the brutal displays of power and victimhood.”11 They have come to dominate perceptions of sites of postcolonial nationhood with a suspicious easiness, precisely because they have “allowed readers only an aesthetics of recognition, indictment, and ideological confirmation.”12 The predominance of such perceptions indicates what I would call an ethnographic naïveté in the reading of power relations of colonial domination and anticolonial struggle. Not only is the production of the spectacular contingent on its dialectic with the quotidian, but the quiet folds of the everyday, usually invisible because of their very pervasiveness, contain ebbs and flows of power and resistance that do not always run parallel to the narratives of mainstream history. Instead, I focus on an alternative tradition of fiction where the relation between the ordinary and the dramatic comes to represent the troubled global modernity that for Clifford has called for a merging of the ethnographic and surrealist worldviews. There is a quotidian, homespun texture of local life—often tucked away in the intimate folds of the private sphere—where the turbulence of colonial intrusion is refracted in a complex and subdued manner. This is the texture of life that is easily overlooked in the more dramatic modes of narration that in effect end up privileging the macronarrative of power and resistance over every other aspect of indigenous experience.
It is not at all surprising that one of the most politically urgent of colonial contexts, that of twentieth-century South Africa, has been a major site for these cultural contestations. The definition of South Africa as a colonial context, however, is a complex historical affair. British colonial rule in South Africa came to an end, if not in 1910, when the Union of South Africa ceased to be a British colony and became a dominion of Great Britain, then in 1931, when the union was granted independence from Britain with the passage of the Statute of Westminster. However, apartheid rule, long considered a form of colonial domination, intensified in South Africa when the Afrikaaner-led National Party was elected to power in 1948. Viewed this way, colonialism in South Africa does not end until 1994, when the dismantling of apartheid is formally celebrated by the election of the African National Party and the presidency of Nelson Mandela. Within this historical framework, much of twentieth-century South Africa would appear to be both colonial and postcolonial at the same time. In the following pages, I focus on Anglophone literature that derives its cultural legacy from the British colonial domination of South Africa as well as the central public events concerning apartheid and the antiapartheid movement.
The South African text where the protagonist’s fate stands most unequivocally for the fate of the nation in the manner of the national allegory is—perhaps unsurprisingly—Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. But it is probably the genre of “protest literature” that has become the more recognizable literary context to the struggle against apartheid and also the dominant narrative paradigm in twentieth-century South African literature. Going back at least to Sol Plaatje’s chronicle of internecine warfare in Mhudi (written in 1919 and published in 1930), the first novel published by a black South African, the genre of protest literature includes a range of important South African works, such as Lewis Nkosi’s novel Mating Birds and his play Rhythm of Violence and Miriam Tlali’s novel Muriel at Metropolitan.13 A concern with the traumatized public sphere remains a consistent feature of most works of “protest literature,” whether it assumes thematic centrality, as in Rhythm of Violence, or whether it is expressed through a metaphoric reflection on the microcosm of the private sphere, as in Tlali’s autobiographically driven novel Muriel at Metropolitan. It is perhaps as a historical inevitability that in South Africa the need to narrativize the past to understand and redress its injustices and human rights violations under apartheid has been established as a vital one, as Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly argue in their introduction to their critical anthology Writing South Africa. This need was institutionalized in the establishment of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995, chaired by the Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The commission provided a forum of grievance, amnesty, and justice for the witnesses, victims, and perpetrators of crimes sponsored by the state under the apartheid regime. Under such a historical climate, the narrativization of the most dramatic stories of oppression, violence, and resistance have understandably come to constitute one of the most significant literary paradigms.
However, the dominance of such narrative paradigms have also been the subject of a sustained critique in South Africa, not only for the aesthetic limitedness they pose but also for their inadequacy in helping to understand a historical situation that far transcends any form of simple Manichean opposition. One of the most openly polemical of these critiques from the aesthetic standpoint was articulated by the South African activist and lawyer Albie Sachs, who insisted, in the 1989 African National Congress seminar on culture, that claims of culture as a weapon of struggle should be banned, at least for a period of time. Academic critics have also taken note of this crucial conflict. “Perhaps for obvious reasons,” Elleke Boehmer writes, “the heat of opposition to apartheid caused writers to favour certain formal decisions over others, to adopt an upfront, hard-hitting, mimetic aesthetic, and therefore to pay less attention to form as such, to experiment, nuance and the play for ambiguity for its own sake.”14 Brian Macaskill also identifies this as “a tension common to recent South African literatures” and summarizes it as “perhaps only an ostensible disparity, of demands for revolutionary struggle on the one hand and aspirations for a more private aesthetic on the other.”15 Such arguments concern a large number of interrelated issues. Admittedly, a straightforward opposition between revolutionary political concerns and aesthetic experimentation is not necessarily the concern of the postcolonial national allegory, which can be quite radical in its experimental poetics. But the specific aesthetic component that I am concerned with here—the production and the celebration of the texture of ordinary life—seems to be absent from the fantastically structured national allegory well as from the overt macropolitical concerns of South African protest literature. Instead, both offer a celebration of the grand, the traumatic, and the spectacular moments of national history.
The black South African writer Njabulo Ndebele famously criticized the insistent privileging of what he calls the “spectacular” events of the public domain in South African “protest” literature as a means of apprehending the ethics and politics of racial oppression under apartheid. Opening his essay “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary,” Ndebele writes: “The history of black South African literature has largely been the history of the representation of spectacle. The visible symbols of the overwhelmingly oppressive South African social formation appear to have prompted over the years the development of a highly dramatic, highly demonstrative form of literary representation.” Following Barthes’ analysis of the wrestling match, Ndebele identifies the “manifest display of violence and brutality” as central to “the highly organised spectacle of the political wrestling match of the South African social formation,”16 which has dominated the narrative politics of South African fiction. This culture of spectacle, consequently, is governed by a binary aesthetic: the dramatic juxtaposition of power and disenfranchisement, what Kelwyn Sole calls “an aesthetics of recognition, indictment and ideological confirmation.”17 In a related essay, “Redefining Relevance,” Ndebele elaborates on this binary aesthetic:
We were shown in this literature the predictable drama between ruthless oppressors and their pitiful victims, ruthless policemen and their cowed, bewildered prisoners; brutal farmers and their exploited farm hands; cruel administrative officials in a horribly impersonal bureaucracy, and the bewildered residents of the township, victims of that bureaucracy; crowded trains and the terrible violence that goes on in them among the oppressed; and a variety of similar situations.18
In contrast to this public spectacle of violence, Ndebele advocated the minute details of the “intimate knowledge” embedded in private, internal consciousnesses, which go beyond the binary nature of this spectacular aesthetics and for which the “rediscovery of the ordinary” was an essential precondition.19 Thoba, Ndebele’s young protagonist in some of the stories in the collection Fools, gets tentative access to this intimate knowledge from the textured atmosphere of the domestic everyday around him and through his relations with his playmates, family members, and other members of the local community within which he grows up. As a black male, however, Thoba enjoyed a privileged status within the dominant traditions of anticolonial nationalism that has furnished the ideology of protest literature, even though Ndebele’s own work lies outside this genre. Instead, the work I explore disavows the certitudes of masculine liberation struggle and the monolithic confidence of Black Nationalism, which has often tended to set itself up in a binary opposition to Afrikaaner Nationalism. I focus on a linked collection of short stories by the first female South African writer of mixed racial heritage—“coloured” under the apartheid classification—whose discomfort with mainstream anticolonial narratives is traceable to her racial and gendered identity.
Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, coinciding with nearly the entire period of apartheid rule in South Africa. The book resembles Ndebele’s collection in many ways but pushes much further this polemical attempt to rediscover the ordinary in the midst of a racially, politically, and ethically embattled South Africa. Wicomb’s text exemplifies this important alternative narrative wherein the minute texture of the ordinary is foregrounded in a striking critique of the grand and dramatic narratives of colonial domination and its public resistance. The child of somewhat similar middle-class parents, Wicomb’s young narrator-protagonist, Frieda Shenton, is a “coloured” female and perhaps a slightly more articulate version of Ndebele’s Thoba.20 In the opening story, Frieda is a child under ten, and in the last couple of stories, she is a woman around forty. Her psychological, emotional, intellectual, and physical growth is the subject of this linked collection of stories, which sometimes appears to be a loosely structured novel. This growth takes place in the private and domestic realms of family and close friends, through the persistent weaving of an ordinary everyday. This everyday is both shaped and periodically punctured by the extraordinary upheavals rocking the public life of the nation under apartheid. Such is the intrusion of the English colonizer in the everyday routine of the local community (“Bowl Like Hole”), the political assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966 that perturbs the predictable routine of work and play in Frieda’s school (“A Clearing in the Bush”), and the abortion that becomes a watershed moment in Frieda’s life (“You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town”).
Among Ndebele’s contemporaries, it is Zoë Wicomb whose work—especially the present collection—represents one of the most successful and sensitive fictionalizations of the “rediscovery of the ordinary.” Carol Sicherman writes, in her literary afterword to the Feminist Press edition of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town:
In fact, despite obvious differences in subject matter and perspective, many aspects of Wicomb’s stories can be described in the same terms as Ndebele’s own: they are, Lokangaka Losambe notes, “internal and deeply rooted in the daily life of the oppressed,” manifesting, as Ndebele himself writes, a “dialogue with the self” that features “the sobering power of contemplation, of close analysis, and the mature acceptance of failure, weakness and limitations.”21
However, Wicomb’s “rediscovery of the ordinary” takes place in a context that is arguably more complicated than that of Ndebele’s Fools. Her linked stories form a fractured female künstleroman in the context of a creolized South African community. They offer an alternative to the dominant narratives of the postcolonial public sphere that have been predominantly masculine and embedded in a Manichean black-white binary. Writing from a self-imposed exile in Scotland, Wicomb provides a delicate ethnography of the community she left behind in a manner reminiscent of another exiled writer, James Joyce. Her künstleroman evokes Joyce’s more tenuously linked stories about the mundane lives of ordinary Dubliners, which provide a similar literary ethnography about the community left behind and a similar skepticism about mainstream anticolonial struggle. The growing Frieda, in her sensitive observation of the nuances of quotidian life, comes to us through a portrait of the artist as a young girl that recalls Joyce’s own autobiographically inflected künstleroman. In the end, there is in fact something about Frieda’s abiding, intricate interest in the banal and the marginal that resonates with the complexity and indirectness of the modernist artist’s relationship to political upheavals in the public sphere. Graham Pechey’s pithy summary of Ndebele’s important and crucially timed invitation attends to this engagement with the ordinary that in turn becomes a complex and implicit venue of history:
Njabulo Ndebele … in the dying apartheid years … called so eloquently for a post-heroic culture of irony, the local, the ordinary: that is to say, a culture, or a literature, preoccupied not with the polar conflicts of “the people” versus “the state” but with textures of life which have eluded that epic battle and have grown insouciantly in the cracks of the structures that South Africa’s fraught modernity has historically thrown up.22
Kelwyn Sole has also called for the continued relevance of Ndebele’s plea on behalf of the ordinary in postapartheid South African poetry in his aptly titled essay “Quotidian Experience and the Perspectives of Poetry in Postliberation South Africa.” The relevance, Sole points out, is most immediately apparent in poetry by women, which displaces questions of power from the spectacular public sphere into private domains of quotidian domesticity. Indeed, since 1990 and continuing into postliberation South Africa, Ndebele’s vision of the rediscovery of the ordinary has been realized most sensitively by a number of women poets who had been active in the struggle against apartheid. This position would closely approximate Wicomb’s as well as that of her fictional protagonist Frieda Shenton. Sole provides the examples of the Durban poets Nise Malange and Boitumelo Mofokeng, who cast into their poetry the multilayered oppressions endured by women through the nexus of race, class, and gender in the course of the daily burdens of the workaday. Such is the quotidian experience of suffering, for instance, tellingly articulated in Mofokeng’s poem “With My Baby on My Back,” lines from which form the epigraph to this chapter.
The growing Frieda, too, experiences the realities of apartheid not through grand public-sphere spectacles but through the domestic domain, where the complex hierarchies of class are played out in the “coloured” community of Namaqualand and Cape Town. More importantly, the ordinary, workaday sites of oppression shape her consciousness of liberation struggle, just as they shape the worldview of the postliberation poets of the quotidian. In many ways, therefore, both Wicomb and Frieda share this small but significant emerging counterculture of the ordinary that Ndebele had envisioned.
My exploration of Wicomb’s linked stories, in certain ways, looks back to the delineation of similar motifs in the short stories of Katherine Mansfield. Wicomb, like the late colonial modernist Mansfield, locates the narrative consciousnesses of her fictions within the realm of the domestic. When the narrator-protagonists of such works set foot in the public sphere and acquire a sense of its turmoil, their knowledge of the public events and forces of mainstream history are refracted through the resolutely private nature of their consciousness.
Unlike the personality, consciousness, and kinship structures associated with Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children or the spirit-child in The Famished Road, the private and the domestic experiences that shape Frieda do not turn into allegories or mimetic metaphors for the public life of the nation-state. The linked short stories In You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town create a certain hesitant, gradual unfolding of the magical banality of the everyday that rarely preoccupies other eloquent chronicles of the sub-Saharan female experience, such as Tsistsi Dangarembga’s riveting bildungsroman Nervous Conditions or the novels of Bessie Head or of Ama Ata Aidoo. Both Head’s A Question of Power and Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, for instance, demonstrate a far more intense and direct involvement in the turbulent macropolitical history of the colonial or postcolonial nation-state, as does, for that matter, Wicomb’s own novel, David’s Story, published in 2000. In David’s Story, set in 1991 after the release of Nelson Mandela, Wicomb fuses the personal narrative directly to a larger historical trajectory of anticolonial struggle, not only through the main characters’ involvement with the liberation movement spearheaded by the African National Congress but also through the ancestry of the protagonist David Dirkse, which includes some of the most significant leaders of the Griqua people, most notably Andrew le Fleur in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. David’s exploration of his own role in the contemporary liberation movement is critically entwined with his research into le Fleur’s life and his leadership of the Griqua people. It is not only the spectacle of anticolonial struggle but, perhaps more crucially, the larger arc of historical inquiry that takes this novel farther away from an immediate apprehension of quotidian life, a narrative movement that also marks Wicomb’s more recent novel, Playing in the Light. This powerful and remarkable novel, while originating in the quotidian pattern of the life of the protagonist, Marion Campbell, quickly upsets its initial quotidian rhythm through Marion’s discovery of the racial secrets of her own family lineage.
You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, therefore, is significant in its persistent attachment to quotidian life not only in the larger context of the cultural history of Anglophone South African fiction but also in the more immediate context of Wicomb’s own writing. The form of the short story seems to provide a generically intimate space within which the tentative but curious subjectivity of the growing girl is meaningfully situated in a subtle and idiosyncratic relation with that history. However, even though You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town shares some features with a modernist collection such as Dubliners, the celebration of the ordinary in late-twentieth-century Anglophone fiction from the global South differs from the representations of banality, boredom, and the ordinary in canonical modernist texts from the early decades of the twentieth century in some crucial respects. While banality and boredom are represented in the earlier texts predominantly as a marker of the sociopsychological consequences of colonial rule, in certain Anglophone texts from the global South, they are primarily revealed as a mode of understanding postcolonial reality missed by the urgent constructions of fictional historiography in the late colonial or postcolonial public sphere. If a significant seed of high modernism’s idiosyncratic elevation of the banal fragments of life can be found in its impatience with the functional deployment of such fragments by Edwardian realism, a small minority of Anglophone writers from the global South point to spaces neglected by the valorized genres of postcolonial narration, ironically because of their very embeddedness in the clear light of the mundane everyday.
Banality, Grandeur, and the Clash of Historiographies
This is exactly why Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, even more than anything else she has published subsequently, has a seminal importance in this polemical tradition that rediscovers the ordinary at a crucial moment of Anglophone culture politics in the global South. It appeared in the critical last years of apartheid, when the contention surrounding the ethics of representing South African reality had attained a critical momentum, not least because of Ndebele’s controversial intervention. Wicomb’s collection was published in 1987, during the years between Ndebele’s own fictionalization of the intimate ordinary in the short-story collection Fools (1983) and the book in which his polemical essays were brought together (1991).23
You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town reinvigorates the conflicted interaction of the ordinary and the dramatic that has historically shaped important parallels between modernity, colonialism, and literary modernism. Wicomb uses the perspective of the growing child to encapsulate reality marked by the colonial conflict as a striking interaction of the ordinary and the extraordinary. In these linked stories, the power of this interaction often depends on the narrator’s impressionability to the foreignness represented by the colonial intrusion. The consciousness of a maturing female child serves Wicomb well in this portrayal, as it turns out to be singularly impressionable not only to the strange and transformative force of colonial intrusions but also to the rootedness and regularity of everyday domestic lives perturbed by such intrusions. Especially within the amorphous consciousness of the early stories, the ordinary and the extraordinary enter into a mutually disruptive relationship that echoes the violence of the colonial encounter, especially the rude force with which Western modernity makes its incursion into the communal life of rural Namaqualand. To the village children, this intrusion is a striking and magnificent affair, as we see in the very second paragraph of the opening story, “Bowl Like Hole”:
A vehicle swerving meteor-bright across the veld signalled a break in the school day as rows of children scuttled out to hide behind the corner, their fingers plugged into their nostrils with wonder and admiration. They examined the tracks of the car or craned their necks in turn to catch a glimpse of the visitor even though all white men looked exactly the same. Others exploited the break to find circuitous routes to the bank of squat ghanna bushes where they emptied their bowels and bladders. On such occasions they did not examine each other’s genitals. They peered through the scant foliage to admire the shiny vehicle from a safe distance. They brushed against the bushes, competing to see, so that the shrivelled little leaf-balls twisted and showered into dust. From this vantage point they would sit, pants down, for the entire visit while the visitor conducted his business from the magnificence of his car.24
It is a classic scene, one made memorable from the earliest of colonial expeditions into undiscovered rural terrains of non-Western countries, where the paraphernalia of the European traveler is examined eagerly by a troupe of local dark-skinned children. The key difference, however, is that the perspective describing this event is autoethnographic. If the entry of the magnificent car (a Mercedes, we learn soon) into the daily life of the village symbolizes the abruptness of colonial intrusion into indigenous life, the intrusion is narrated, significantly, as a conflict of the ordinary and the dramatic as such values are configured within local culture. The cross-cultural implication of this conflict, even though represented within this autoethnographically structured fiction, is not lost upon the reader situated outside this culture. That the very appearance of the vehicle is an exciting interruption of ordinary life is made clear not only by the use of flamboyant adjectives such as “meteor-bright” but also by the fact that the incident is potent enough to signal “a break in the school day” and bring out “rows of children” who plug their fingers “into their nostrils with wonder and admiration.” The wonder and surprise impel them to crane “their necks in turn to catch a glimpse of the visitor,” who is dramatic and extraordinary because of his whiteness but is also, ironically, indistinguishable individually for the very same reason. So fascinating is the phenomenon of the white man and his “shiny vehicle” that whether they continue to stand there or run off to empty “their bowels and bladders,” they keep their eyes riveted on the visitor and his car “for the entire visit.”
The very dramatic quality of this intrusion, on the other hand, is highlighted by the materiality and solidity of the ordinary everyday that the intrusion ruptures. Frieda displays an ethnographer’s commitment to the most marginal and quotidian of details, which sometimes appear ordinary, other times grand, in her burgeoning consciousness. In this scene, the daily routine contains “circuitous routes to the bank of squat ghanna bushes,” where the children empty “their bowels and bladders,” and the expected mutual examination of “each other’s genitals” occurs. The last is a routine practice that is apparently left out in the dramatic scheme of things, as the view of “the shiny vehicle” makes stronger claims on the children’s attention at the moment. To the reader located outside the immediacy of this culture, the figuration of the mutual examination of genitals as an ordinary, everyday practice becomes a commentary on the very local nature of the value systems that construct the dualities of the ordinary and the dramatic. It is this value system that portrays the swerving vehicle as an extraordinary event and the social examination of genitals in this community of schoolchildren as an entirely ordinary practice that loses interest before the more magnificent spectacle of the white man and his shiny car. The Malinowskian duality of the “coefficient of weirdness” and the “coefficient of reality,” while shaping each other, easily change places with the corresponding change of perspective from culture to culture as the ethnographic gaze moves back and forth between them. They continue to jostle and shape each other, as local and foreign, the familiar and the alien persist in the final contestations of their evaluation of the spectacle:
Children tumbled out from behind the schoolroom or the ghanna bushes to stare at the departing vehicle. Little ones recited the CA 3654 number plate and carried the transported look throughout the day. The older boys freed their nostrils and with hands plunged in their pockets suggested by a new swaggering gait that it was not so wonderful a spectacle after all. How could it be if their schoolmaster was carried away in the Mercedes? (6)
The very fascinating power of the situation depends on the complete exclusion of all local peoples from its constituent elements, all of which are quickly and clearly established as representing a foreign, white, and, by implication, imperial force. Its claim as an exceptional event is seriously damaged by its inclusion of a local person, even if it is the schoolmaster, who, at any event, has a distinct and superior status within the community. The dramatic force of the incident is contingent on the preservation of its utter difference, its existence on a completely different world order. It is this difference that enthralls the locals.
The local in this incident from Wicomb’s story is synonymous with the pattern of ordinary life and linked to the tired iterations of the banal, while the foreign is coincident with the grand and the extraordinary. This value system entails a reversal of the ethnographic gaze. “The master narrative of ethnographic authority,” James Buzard points out, “features a controlled submission to alien ways, a demonstration that the self is uniquely positioned with regard to the culture that it penetrates while never losing its footing in Western rationality.”25The ethnographer’s gaze comes from outside and tries, as Malinowski insists, to read pattern, significance, and, most importantly, the culture’s rootedness in quotidian life, in customs and institutions that initially appear strange and alien. Wicomb shows the gaze directed by the locals (significantly, children) toward the Englishman, with one of their more privileged and articulate representatives, Frieda, offering an autoethnographic account of the foreign intrusion into the local life of the village. Within this autoethnographic gaze, not only do we witness the reversal of the alien and the familiar as they might have been framed in the ethnographer’s gaze but also the eagerness of the local children to preserve the alien quality of the intruding phenomenon as essential to its value as a grand spectacle. If the ethnographer, motivated by Western rationality, is invested in making sense of what they see as alien and strange and therefore reading them as ordinary and everyday, the local children are invested in preserving the utter foreignness of the foreign, in not reading them as ordinary.
The interaction of the ordinary and the extraordinary has a certain representational effect that is the persistent feature of the stories that I discuss in this chapter. Beyond that, however, it is the symptom of a larger historiographic conflict that is characteristic of post-Renaissance European colonialism. This disjuncture of meaning, of life-worlds, is symptomatic of the incompatibility of colonial and indigenous modes of imagining history. More importantly, however, as demonstrated by the scene with the man in the Mercedes, this incompatibility of local and colonial historiographic modes has been undone to a certain extent by the very force of colonialism, and a clear relationship of hierarchy has been established between the two models. Consequently, social events can now be evaluated on a common scale, and the result is obvious, as for instance from the “wonder and admiration” preserved for the white man and his car and the barely disguised disdain for their own schoolmaster, a local. In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies historicism to be the epistemological force that had enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century. It is at such moments of colonial and local encounters that the power—and the simplicity—of such an argument become clear. The ideological success of colonial domination depends on the degree to which the colonized people have internalized the primacy of European historiography and the “backward” location of their own culture within that European model. “Wonder and admiration” are reserved for the shiny Mercedes because in the context of rural Namaqualand, it represents an “advance” within the European historiographic framework that the locals have internalized as their own. The schoolteacher, in spite of his position within the local community, is not seen as a credible participant in this “advance.” Ironically, in the very next sentence, his daughter (the narrator-protagonist Frieda) makes a case for her father’s importance and of his inclusion in the “shiny” vehicle of European modernity by reiterating the fact that “Father was the only person for miles who knew enough English” (6): that is, on the basis of his command of the language that has undisputed privilege within this hierarchy.
The interaction of conflicting values and meanings in the stories I discuss in this chapter reflects not only the initial incommensurability of local and colonial historiographic modes but also the hierarchy of power between the two modes that is ideologically established in both indigenous and European minds. This ideological power structure has “coloured” many traditional ethnographic accounts and travel stories, as postcolonial theorists—most famously, Edward Said in Orientalism—have argued. Moreover, as Johannes Fabian argues in Time and the Other, anthropology provided significant justification to the colonial enterprise by strengthening the West’s belief in “natural” or evolutionary time, which eventually became a political and economic legacy. Progress could now be universalized and easily measured:
It promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of time—some upstream, others downstream. Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization (and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary time.26
Political and economic value judgments, such as those encapsulated in the terms “primitive,” “savage,” and “Third World,” imply hierarchized locations along this unidirectional, linear slope of time. The conceptualization of the banal and the extraordinary, the ordinary and the dramatic is also done with reference to this time slope. As this scene from Wicomb’s story shows, what is branded as banal and what is considered striking depends on who is speaking and to what extent they have internalized the ideology of the time slope. Banality is the aesthetic form of incomplete or subaltern modernity—a state of not-yet-there-ness where excitement and eventfulness can only be seen at a distance, not experienced within one’s immediate reach. The natural venue for the conflict of the banal and the striking, therefore, is the contact zone of the colonial encounter.
The banalization of one’s life is one of the most damning markers of backwardness. The sense of the banality of life in the village as realized in the sensibility of the children corresponds to the boredom that anthropologists have recently demonstrated to be a powerful affective malaise afflicting people in parts of sub-Saharan Africa well into the early years of the twenty-first century. “In Ethiopia,” Daniel Mains points out, “the inability to experience progress, in the sense of actualizing a future that is different from one’s present, caused time to expand rather than contract for many youth, producing a sensation that was akin to Western notions of boredom.” It is “akin” but not identical to boredom (or, more accurately, “ennui”) as embodied in the context of “romantic individualism” of the metropolitan West, since it is molded not by the failure of the realization of “individual humanity” but by the inability “to actualize their expectations of progress.” Boredom is the apparently unlikely but immediate affective consequence of lack or absence: “the absence of entertainment, the absence of health, and the absence of modernity.”27 The result is a sense of the endless prolonging of empty time ironically comparable to Western-metropolitan versions of boredom. Such is the natives’ relationship with their sense of their own lives and habitat in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, where their “crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression” evolves not only from their desire for the distant metropolis but also through the arrival of metropolitan tourists who derive aesthetic pleasure from the same cultural and historical contexts that seem to imprison the sadly immobile natives.
In Wicomb’s story, the white man and his Mercedes become, as objects of unfulfilled colonial desire, markers of grandeur and excitement that form a disruptive contrast with the banality in the collective life of the local community. Following the ideological interpellation of such a desire into the collective mind of the colonized, the quotidian everyday of indigenous life waits for the continual intrusions of colonial force to provide the narrative drive essential to both the life and the fictions that depict it. As Spacks points out repeatedly in her study of boredom, the banal and the boring defy the possibility of narrative. It is hardly coincidental that Wicomb’s story—and the book itself—opens its narrative at the moment the white man in his Mercedes appears in the rural community. This dramatic event puts the local children into motion, and it does the same to the narrative. Following the ideological overpowering of indigenous historiography, both narrative and historiographic progress will now be dictated on colonial terms.
The Praxis of Refusal
For the eventfulness of progress, then, the colonized has to wait. Waiting, in fact, is the recognized historiographic trope that characterizes the colony’s relation to Western modernity. It is a trope that takes on added complexities in the historical context of twentieth-century South Africa. At several key points throughout Wicomb’s book, waiting defines the temporality of these stories, shaping and drawing out the oppressive, iterative quality of time that hangs heavy as characters wait for something to happen, even for something as seemingly private and apolitical as the train’s arrival or one’s turn with the doctor. The German word for boredom, langweiler, evokes an unpleasant prolonging of time, and few motifs consolidate the social and psychological impact of painfully prolonged time with those of boredom as seamlessly as the trope of waiting. In the story “When the Train Comes,” it is the oppression of prolonged time no less than the disturbing presence of the boys close by that Frieda’s father hopes to fight with tricks that seem sadly banal to his teenage daughter. However, if the final fringes of adolescence reveal to Frieda the banality of childhood distractions, it is in the mature sensibility of an adult Frieda that the act of waiting assumes a disturbing political immediacy. This becomes clear in the doctor’s waiting room in the story “Behind the Bougainvillea.”
The management of quotidian temporalities, this story reveals, is a revealing index of localized modernity. When Frieda, back from England for a visit with her family, plans to make an appointment to see the doctor, her father says, “I don’t think you can make appointments, not yet. This isn’t Cape Town, you know. You just go along and wait” (106). But if provincial South Africa is denied the modernity of arranging appointments, it is at least granted the consolation modernity of a waiting room, as her father points out: “But there’s a lovely waiting room with a modern water lavatory” (106). What he neglects to mention is that the modern amenity of the waiting room, like all facilities in the segregated nation, is not available to everyone. Occupying the indoor waiting room for white patients, the “coloured” Frieda (who passes as white fairly easily) is unable to experience even the private discomfort brought about by waiting without being drawn into a gnawing awareness of such discomfort as a racially uneven experience. “It is in any case absurd to pretend,” she knows well, “that I have assumed this as my position for waiting. I turn and meet the thousand eyes of those squatting in the yard. They have been watching” (106). Aware of the segregated spaces to which the lightness of her skin allows an ethically ambiguous access, she watches the nonwhite patients waiting out in the yard, haunted by the feeling that they’ve been watching her in turn. The most private and idiosyncratic gestures of boredom are revealed in terms of their relation to race and class. Ways of resisting the boredom of waiting, meanwhile, depend on one’s political identity and, crucially, one’s cultural literacy: “They register the tension of the moment by shifting and scratching as people do who ease the discomfort of waiting. I settle on my haunches against the wall and open my bag for a book but cannot bring myself to haul it up. Such a display of literacy would be indecent” (106). Nothing is private in this racially charged world where hierarchies are not only blatant but also institutionalized, branded on every single quotidian experience. Abandoning the more socially pretentious act of reading, which would further demarcate her from those waiting out in the sun, Frieda chooses instead an appropriately uncouth bodily gesture: “Instead I draw up a paper handkerchief and ostentatiously blow my nose” (106).
Empty time, such as that embodied in the act of waiting, is a loaded motif for Wicomb, as it is for her autobiographical protagonist, Frieda Shenton. The moment of reckoning where the writer, the narrator, and the protagonist become indistinguishable from one another comes in the last story of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, where Frieda’s mother lashes out at the vacant temporality of the stories: “‘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’” (171). The lack of events is as much an internal problem in these stories as it is a metafictional commentary on the aesthetic worldview that shapes them. Moreover, the aesthetic of vacant, banal time has a larger political significance.
If the various lures of excitement, modernity, and progress spring from the edifices of racial and colonial power, Zoë Wicomb’s insistent aestheticization of banal temporality is a critical refusal of such power structures. Frieda persistently subverts this spectacle of dramatic action with intricately plotted production of humdrum inertia, through which she transports select moments of the everyday to the affective extreme of the banal. Beyond this deceptive subversion of the ideological structures of colonialism, her celebration of the banal also marks a highly effective resistance against the totalizing historiography of the national narrative. The political import of what I call the counternarrative of the banal becomes fully clear against our awareness of the national public sphere that forms the historical context to You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. This is in fact a phase of South African political history replete with dramatic events and issues, mostly related to apartheid and the struggles against it. Many of them cast direct or indirect shadows on the stories, such as the assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the Black Consciousness Movement and the leadership of Steve Biko, the formation of the United Democratic Front, strikes, constitutional changes, and the formation of Zimbabwe.
Some of these events catalyze personal crises in Frieda’s life, either directly or indirectly. However, it is striking and, on the surface, quite inexplicable that often during moments of such crises, Frieda’s narrative sensibility demonstrates a sensual and psychological immersion in objects or situations of daily life that would normally appear to be trivial and marginal. A perfect example is the bus ride in the title story, “You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town.” For the longest time, we are not told (though there are very delicate hints that become fully meaningful only after we have access to the facts) that Frieda is on her way to Cape Town to get an abortion, illegal under the laws of the time. This is not only a highly unusual situation in the life of a teenage girl from Frieda’s class, race, and cultural background but a racially “guilty” one, and one that is literally criminalized under the then current Immorality Act, since her boyfriend and the father of her child, Michael, is white. Moreover, for her abortion, Frieda is going to a private residence in the white part of segregated Cape Town, where, as it turns out, she has to pass as white. Michael, who is to meet her in Cape Town and accompany her to the abortionist’s home, utters the richly ironic sentence that is to become the title of the story and the book. “A look at my anxious face compelled him to say, ‘You can’t get lost in Cape Town’” (73). The sheer comfort and ease with which he makes the assertion is clearly rooted in his privileged race and gender. Moving around in the city with a clear sense of direction, just like the relatively aimless indulgence of flânerie, illustrates a physical and political agency that is easily available to him but not to Frieda. Michael overlooks his “coloured” girlfriend’s exclusion from this confident and knowledgeable mobility, which is what ensures that one never gets lost in Cape Town.
However, it is part of Wicomb’s narrative irony that most of the information regarding the planned abortion is withheld from us for the first several pages of the story, during which time Frieda’s mind seems to be a strange amalgam of boredom and distraction. She shows only the faintest concern about the journey she has embarked on and on the thought whether one can or cannot “get lost in Cape Town.” Her mind instead hovers distractedly over trivial details, such as the leather bag of the bus conductor, the tumbling coins in his hand, the five-rand note in her own, the chatter of the two women in front of her, the pieces of roast chicken they are sharing, the half-eaten drumstick and the bare bone in their hands. Next to the life-changing situation she is soon to face, it seems that her mind deliberately takes refuge in banalities. In hindsight, the pervading sense of banality seems to affirm indirectly the sweeping significance of the pregnancy and its abrupt termination—a significance that is almost concealed, not unlike the way the staccato exchanges and the overarching boredom seem to overshadow a similar preoccupation in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” Some things in life are urgent to the point where they perhaps do not bear talking or even thinking about. Both stories demonstrate that banality and boredom are not only conscious strategies but also particularly ironic ones. In Frieda’s case, this strategy is not merely a protective effort to rid her mind of the enormity of the situation or distract it from the reality of her fears and concerns. This becomes clear not only from a careful reading of this story but of comparable situations in other stories.
In “Home Sweet Home,” in the midst of the larger, urgent concerns about emigration, family, and clan, as Frieda prepares to leave a restless, rapidly changing South Africa for a new life in England, her mind follows a similar whimsical pattern, focusing on trivial, marginalized details that are only occasionally epiphanized into larger significances. Such is her sudden fascination with the raindrops falling on the iron roof of the sitting room of her house: “And inside, below, always the tap-tap of the roof as the iron contracted, tap-tap like huge drops of rain falling individually, deliberately. But drops of rain would sizzle on the hot iron and roll off evaporating, hissing as they rolled. So merely the sound of molecular arrangement in the falling temperature of the iron” (101). In the very next moment, her eyes and mind drift toward Aunt Nettie brushing with her duster: “She dusts well, with a practised hand—that is, if the criteria for dusting are indeed speed and agility. Her right wrist flicks the duster of dyed ostrich feathers across surfaces, the left hand moving simultaneously, lifting, before the duster flicks, and then replacing ornaments” (102).
Such moments abound in Wicomb’s book, creating an abiding chain of engagement with the delicate materiality of the minute and the trivial. The eccentric Jan Klinkies emerges as a metafictional figure, a conscious architect of marginalia. He is the sensitive arranger of discarded tin cans, whose design is so subtle that it is easy to miss:
But I suspected that careful aesthetic considerations had been at play. The cans so callously shoved aside might have been placed one by one, interrupted by the stepping back to appraise from a distance and perhaps replace or reposition. There is the business of balance, for instance; the wrong shape could bring the lot toppling down and you’d have to tap sliding cans carefully back into place. And a starting pattern can gradually lose its regularity until a completely new one is formed. It is perhaps only the beginning, the first small mound that you step back from, that is totally pleasing. With such a great number and variety of cans the permutations of summit and slope must be endless. Perhaps it was precisely that consideration that made Jan Klinkies appear a detached observer. (16)
This story, too, encapsulates the sensibility of a young child, albeit written in the retrospective vision of the adult. But its conclusion marks the protagonist’s development toward the more mature years of adolescence. It ends with the magical sight of a constellation of discarded tin cans: “The tree barely moved, but the branches stooping heavily under the hundreds of cans tied to them with wire rattled and sent off beams of blinding light at angles doubtlessly corresponding to a well-known law” (20).
The preoccupation with the banal is especially noticeable when it arises at times of emotional and psychological crisis. There is an element of irony in the emphasis on banality as a conscious narrative impulse during such moments. Rummaging in her bag for the letter from Uncle Hermanus, where he writes about the extraordinary experience of the snow-covered Canada to where he has emigrated, Aunt Cissie’s hand touches a banal but reassuring reminder of her domestic life and its rootedness in the local: “Her eyes caper at the secrets awakened by her touch in that darkness, secrets like her electric bill, so boldly printed in words and figures, protected from their eyes by the thin scuffed leather” (83). If immigration poses something of a dramatic crisis for the immigrant as well as for those left behind, the crisis also offers a rich moment for introspection offered by a banal detail. In “Behind the Bougainvillea,” Frieda recollects how in England, far from home and family, the pouring rain and the intricately shaped raindrops come to metaphorize her emotions of longing and the pain of exile:
From the window I had been watching the lurid yellow of oil-seed rape sag like sails under squalls of rain. On the beam in the kitchen drops of rain lined up at regular intervals, the bright little drops meeting their destruction in an ache for perfection, growing to roundness that the light from the bare electric bulb would catch, so that the star at the base grew into a bright point of severance and for a second was the perfect crystal sphere before it fell, ping, into the tin plate and splattered into mere wetness. But then, before the fall, the star would spread into an oval of reflected light, pale and elliptical on the shadowed beam, an opal ghost escaping. (112)
Frieda’s preoccupation with the carefully wrought banal detail at moments of crisis is not merely the creative caprice of a fiercely original, artistically inclined sensibility in a state of crucial personal, cultural, and historical transition—it is also an intensely political act. Naomi Schor’s arguments for the delineation of the minute detail as feminine as opposed to the grand, sweeping structures of abstract knowledge are important here:
To focus on the detail, and more particularly on the detail as negativity, is to become aware, as I discovered, of its participation in a larger semantic network, bounded on the one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose “prosiness” is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over by women.28
Schor argues that within Western aesthetic and epistemological traditions, the masculine suspicion of the minute detail has been recycled from classicism into neoclassicism and the Enlightenment, culminating in Hegel’s organicist aesthetics: “The contempt Hegel flaunts for ‘the little stories of everyday domestic existence’ and ‘the multiform particularities of everyday life’—in short, for all he lumps under the dismissive heading ‘the prose of the world.’”29
In this light, I would read Frieda’s persistent preoccupation with the loaded trivialities of intricately shaped raindrops, tiny chicken drumsticks, delicately jingling coins—in sum, the nontranscendental prose of the world—as a refusal to be drawn into the masculinized abstraction of grand, national conflicts. Such an idiosyncratic withdrawal into the erratic and the marginal indicates an active participation in what Graham Pechey calls “the textures of life which have … grown insouciantly in the cracks of the structures” of “South Africa’s fraught modernity.”30 The spectacular, when it makes its disruptive appearance in the context of the local and the familiar, immediately establishes itself as an intrusion by alien forms of power structures and knowledge systems.
However, we would do well to remember that Ndebele had warned against a possible criticism of the model of contemplative interiority defining both Frieda’s and Wicomb’s character. “It will lambast interiority in character portrayal as bourgeois subjectivity.”31 While the identification of psychological interiority as necessarily bourgeois is itself indicative of the kind of problematic politicoaesthetic climate Ndebele criticizes, the kind of interiority celebrated by Wicomb and Frieda, admittedly, does not escape this criticism entirely. Throughout the book, the contemplative celebration of the quotidian and its banal extremes remains a personal privilege for the educated, upwardly mobile, creative Frieda. Such contemplation remains noticeably outside the conscious reach of disenfranchised figures such as Tamieta and Skitterboud. It is indicative of Frieda’s growth and maturity that the young Frieda ignores Tamieta, while the older Frieda, returned from England, listens with attention to Skitterboud’s story.
A sense of banality can just as soon be an index of inadequacy as it can be a gesture of refusal and resistance. In fact, it has been the argument of this book that the inadequate and fractured nature of subaltern modernities finds aesthetic expression in the banal. The transformation of the banal into a radical narrative instinct requires a kind of creative agency that might be available to Frieda but is unavailable to more deeply disenfranchised figures within colonial society. The character of Tamieta, the cook from Namaqualand in the university cafeteria in “A Clearing in the Bush,” is a telling example. As an uneducated, rural woman of an underprivileged class, Tamieta in many ways approximates the position of the indigenous subaltern, occupying a social position distinct from that of the educated, middle-class Frieda. Tamieta’s position is characterized by her lack of access to knowledge provided by education and social privilege, which is available to Frieda and her friends at the university. This lack of access also implies an exclusion from the national public sphere and, more crucially, the anticolonial movements that are usually defined and shaped by the nation’s elite. It is obvious that even within the educated, politically aware student community there is a gendered hierarchy through which knowledge and, subsequently, the ability to participate is transmitted. Thus Frieda and her friend Myra sit wondering what is going on, observing the irregular behavior of the boys in the school—including that of their close friend, James—till James comes and informs them of the planned boycott of the memorial service for the assassinated prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, to be held in the afternoon. In Tamieta’s case, of course, no one tells her anything at all. This exclusion culminates in the sad irony of the last scene, where Tamieta sits puzzled in the memorial service, the only person of color to attend, the rows of empty chairs stretching like a confusing questionnaire before her. None of the student activists—not even the veteran Mr. Johnson, who goes from class to class to inform the students of the planned boycott and invite their participation—thought it worth their while to include Tamieta in their plans or even to share any information with her. Moreover, it is doubtful how she might have responded even if she had been informed, not necessarily sharing their subscription to an anticolonial movement clearly dominated by the educated elite.
Lack of knowledge, which coincides with the inability to participate in the macropolitics of anticolonial movements in the public sphere, not only prevents an intellectual and political transcendence of the everyday but rather molds the everyday with an overarching sense of emptiness and banality in the lives of those excluded. Those left out are stranded in the solitary confinement of a private consciousness that is affected by the upheavals in the public sphere but that fails to grasp the significance of such upheavals. Such subjects are also excluded from the masculinized public sphere of macropolitics that decisively shapes the private and domestic lives to which women are confined but that declines to share knowledge or participation across gender lines. Frieda and Myra sit wondering over the inaction and the vacuum suddenly created by their exclusion from the visibly important and exciting activities occupying the boys:
James always sits with us. We have learned to make allowances for the filtered version of friendship that boys offer; nevertheless his behaviour today is certainly treacherous. Why has he gone without explanation to join the dark tower of boys peering down on to the table at the back? It is clearly not the klawerjas game that holds their attention. Someone screened from our vision is talking quietly, then bangs a fist on the table. The voices grow more urgent. We watch James withdraw from the inner circle and perch on the back of a chair shaking his head, but he does not look across at us. (51)
Egged on by a sense of urgency by her obvious exclusion from the excitement at the boys’ table, Myra suggests that she and Frieda try to find out what is happening: “‘I think,’ says Moira, ‘we should go and join them. If they’ve got something important to discuss then it’s bound to affect us so ought to go and find out’” (52). Eventually, James provides the withheld information at Myra’s request: “We’re organizing the action for this afternoon’s memorial service. We must make sure that nobody goes” (53). Carol Sicherman, in her literary afterword to the Feminist Press edition of the book, points out that the male students are unfortunately right in their sexist assumption that they can exclude the female students from the conversation and nevertheless obtain their compliance. She draws attention to Wicomb’s declared challenge to the patriarchal structure of anticolonial leadership exemplified in the university boycott in this story. “I can think of no reason,” Wicomb writes, “why black patriarchy should not be challenged alongside the fight against apartheid.”32
It is in this manner that in Wicomb’s stories those domains of everyday life filled with dramatic upheavals are repeatedly brought into pointed and often polemical contrast with banal and empty moments. An immersion into the latter is, for Frieda, often a personalized site of refuge or a consciously articulated gesture of protest or resistance. But that this capacity of resistance or refusal is uneven is demonstrated by the fact that Tamieta does not have access to the liberating potential of banality enjoyed by Frieda. Nevertheless, it is significant that the story opens with an event of quotidian materiality—the itch on Tamieta’s back and her inability to remedy or understand its symbolic meaning except through a nameless sense of foreboding: “Tamieta, leaning against the east-facing walls, rolls her shoulders and like a cat rubs against the bricks to relieve the itching on her back. Which must mean something ominous, such a sudden and terrible itch, and as she muses on its meaning, on its persistence, the rebellious flesh seems to align itself with the arrangement of bricks now imprinted on her back” (37).
If Frieda, Myra, and the other female students are excluded from conscious agency vis-à-vis the masculinized protest movement, Tamieta exists much farther down in this hierarchy of power and knowledge. The materiality of her body that opens her story is in fact expressed through a rhetoric of animality that is telling—we are told that she “rolls her shoulders and like a cat rubs against the bricks to relieve the itching of her back.” She is fully aware of her significant social difference from Frieda, who comes from Little Namaqualand just like Tamieta herself, and that awareness is laced with irony and resentment: “She casts a resentful look at the girl just sitting there, waiting for her coffee with her nose in the blinking book. She too is from the country. Tamieta knows of her father who drives a motor car in the very next village, for who in little Namaqualand does not know of Shenton?” (46).
Just as gender is an important determinant for involvement in liberation movements, class affiliation and education, too, significantly affect participation. For Tamieta, not only is the students’ gesture of protest beyond all understanding or awareness, but upheavals in public history are of no concern to people like her or Charlie, whom she rebukes for showing an interest in such history: “It’s because you listen to other people’s conversations that you forget the orders hey. You’ll never get on in this canteen business if you don’t keep your head. Never mind the artitex; clever people’s talk got nothing to do with you” (43). Her lot is with the mechanical production and preservation of the slice of everyday life left in her charge. In the university cafeteria she is neither privileged nor empowered to understand the meaning of the interruption of this quotidian order by dramatic events such as protests and boycotts. Her exclusion from political agency in the public sphere is therefore both willed and forced. It leaves her with the conviction that politics is none of her concern. Suspended in the vacuum of a disenfranchised private sensibility, she lacks the political and aesthetic agency of the socially and educationally privileged Frieda to turn the exclusion into a finely honed critique of the inequalities perpetuated by the liberation movements themselves.
The fact that the story opens with the unexplained, unremedied itch and closes with another confusing and embarrassing situation whose meaning Tamieta does not understand is therefore a clever structural choice on the author’s part. The spectacle of the liberation movement is, as always, claimed by the privileged. Exclusion and deprivation from meaning and knowledge can only deepen her enslavement to an everyday that, in the end, lends itself to an oppressive banality. While the few present members of the audience maintain the ritual silence of grief at the end of the meeting as the story comes to a close, Tamieta cannot focus her mind on the significance of the incident, nor on the meaning of the boycott. Instead, her mind wanders, as it did in the opening of the story, to a relatively trivialized affliction of her body and to sundry domestic needs: “The heads hang in grief. Tamieta’s neck aches. Tonight Beatrice will free the knotted tendons with her nimble fingers. She does not have the strength to go into town for the wool, but Beatrice will understand” (61). She leaves the memorial service confused and full of questions but finds herself only thinking of the wool she needs to get—“the parcel of clothes tucked under her left” arm—and the rain she needs to avoid, rather than the day’s events. Her day, for her no different from yet another ordinary day, notwithstanding its dramatic political significance, ends with her affective immersion into the banal.
With the requisite space made for this important criticism about differential empowerment within the racial groups oppressed by apartheid, there is still no denying the radical political implications of Frieda’s preoccupation with the minute, the fragmentary, and the ordinary precisely at such moments of crisis. Making deserved allowances for Wicomb’s personal aesthetic ethos, I would suggest that the impetus behind her troubling of the dramatic nature of the “polar conflicts”33 is rooted within the dimensions of her identity as a woman and a “coloured” person. Aspects of these identities not only resist the structures of apartheid and colonialism but also refuse to fit neatly into struggles against such structures. Frieda’s recourse to the minute and banal detail located within the domestic everyday can be read as a feminist critique of the masculinized sphere of macropolitics that have often sought to keep the women out of its domain just as much as it can be read as a commentary on the complicated relation that people of mixed racial heritage have had with black nationalism.
In the story “Ash on My Sleeve,” the adult Frieda and Myra reflect on the past and the present of the racial confusion and disowned identities of interracial peoples. The story is set in the 1980s, well after the United Democratic Front had established the solidarity of all races classified as “nonwhite” in segregated South Africa under the crucial influence of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement. “Just think,” Myra says, “In our teens we wanted to be white, now we want to be full-blooded Africans. We’ve never wanted to be ourselves and that’s why we stray” (156). In her essay “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” Wicomb draws attention to the negative recognition accorded to the “coloured” in South Africa, through the negativity of its demographic definition under the Nationalist Government’s Population Registration Act of 1950: “not a White person or a Black.”34 Officially recognized as a negativity and often ignored between competing models of nationalism, being “coloured” was a matter of shame not only because of its undefined location but because of the violation that defines its origins: “Miscegenation, the origins of which lie in a discourse of ‘race,’ concupiscence, and degeneracy, continues to be bound up with shame, a pervasive shame exploited in apartheid’s strategy of the naming of a Coloured race, and recurring in the current attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame.”35
Her keen awareness of her identity as a “coloured” person, complicated further by her education and middle-class origins, shapes the unpredictability of Frieda’s behavior, sensibility, and metafictional consciousness at every step. This behavioral and imaginative unpredictability works not only with respect to anticolonial nationalism but also in terms of her place in her community (a community that is often upwardly mobile and desires to be seen as white) and finally, within her own intimate relations. If in a flush of youthful romanticism and creativity she writes a clichéd poem as an effort to symbolize race relations in South Africa, she recognizes its imaginative poverty immediately, but her white boyfriend Michael is obtuse about it and admires it in a patronizing way. If, as Lewis Nkosi argues, “in South Africa there exists an unhealed … split between black and white writing, between on the one side an urgent need to document and to bear witness and on the other the capacity to go on furlough, to loiter, and to experiment,”36 Frieda’s “coloured” identity seems to bind her to both urgencies at the same time.
“Coloured,” female, educated, and creative, growing up in a middle-class community that demonstrates a complex mix of Anglophilia and an undertaking of upward social mobility, Frieda has to assert her unique, individual agency through private and idiosyncratic acts ranging from the smallest of behavior patterns, reveries, and whims to the larger radical decisions of life. Her creative immersion in the banal moments, marginalized objects, and the unusual minutiae of details helps to shape an aesthetic ethos that responds consistently to her unique personal location and destiny as an educated “coloured” woman in the given milieu. It is little wonder that through her intriguing investment in the banality of the everyday around her, she emerges as singularly ill suited to the dramatic historiography of anticolonial nationalism that dominates models of protest literature and the national allegory of the time. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town shares ethnography’s valorization of the ordinary and trivial detail of life as sites of critical knowledge production. But in the end, a strategic representation of the heightened banality of such details inscribes something of a counterethnography. It embodies a worldview that not only refuses to take part in the valorized and predominant anticolonial struggles but that also provides a significant if overlooked alternative to the more visible and acclaimed modes of postcolonial narration.