Zoë Wicomb’s first book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), is a tour through episodes in the life of a writer-character, Frieda Shenton. She’s not unlike but crucially not exactly like Wicomb (child of South Africa’s Namaqualand, graduate of what is now the University of the Western Cape, expatriated to Britain, both at an angle to and in love with her homeland).
It ends with a self-reflexive reckoning with the costs of writing. Writing about what – or who – you know can be both an act of love and perceived as exploitation.
The final chapter – or story (the book’s status as novel, memoir, or collection of short fictions is debatable) – is called A Trip to the Gifberge. (That’s the mountain range in the background of the image of a young Wicomb on a dusty Northern Cape road that graces the book’s cover, taken by the author’s life-partner, the artist Roger Palmer.) Arguing with Frieda up there in the mountains (over a protea – national flower of South Africa – about who gets to define its symbolism), Mrs Shenton accuses her writer-daughter of shamelessly, or shamefully, using family stories to make her own name.
