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

Abstract

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