You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (30 page)

38
. Wicomb, “To Hear,” 47–48. Elsewhere, Wicomb says that gender was “
suppressed
by the national liberation struggle” (interview with Hunter, 90). Three of the participants in a “Workshop on Black Women's Writing and Reading” agreed with her, saying: “The women's struggle and the national liberation struggle need to be waged simultaneously”; one, however, argued that the struggle must be private and domestic because “to stand up on a platform . . . would be
like hanging your dirty linen in public” (Mofokeng et al., “Workshop,” 121–22).

39
. References to the Tricameral Parliament, which was instituted in 1984, indicate that the final stories take place around that time. Moira calculates that “ten, no twelve years” have passed since Frieda's departure (148).

40
. Here, it seems, Frieda reflects her creator's experience: “In the latter half of the book the heroine is in Britain, but I refuse to comment on it because my experience there was about being silent. I was certainly not going to give my heroine any voice in Britain” (interview with Hunter, 87).

41
. “Die Stem van Suid Afrika” (“The Voice of South Africa”) is the Afrikaners' national anthem, celebrating their trek over the Drakensberg; Wicomb discusses the anthem's author, C. J. Langenhoven, in “Five Afrikaner Texts and the Rehabilitation of Whiteness,”
Social Identities
4, no. 3 (1998): 363–83, 369–70.

42
. Wicomb herself has commented that “I have to kill off the father, in order for her to speak” (interview with Hunter, 94).