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.

Accusing her of matricidal writerly tendencies (the mother appeared to have died in a story Frieda has written, as in an earlier chapter in this very book), the older woman declares:

You’ve killed me over and over so it was quite unnecessary to invent my death.

This story speaks to recurring themes Wicomb would elaborate on in a body of work that grew slowly but with extraordinary depth and impact over the next 40 years. She returned repeatedly to the complex operation of impulses to tell other people’s stories, or reveal the defining truth about one’s own.

Such projects are always naive or compromised, hubristic and frustrated. Life is too complex, and the lives about which Wicomb would write most often were subject to the ebb and flow of forces that individuals have little control over. They unfolded against the socio-political backdrop of colonial-, apartheid-, and post-apartheid-era South Africa.

Life proceeds in the cracks, against the grain, under the radar; it was the dark humour, the absurdities, the small triumphs of the everyday, that Wicomb’s fictions so often revelled in. A Trip to the Gifberge encapsulates these themes, but also the quality (by which I mean the texture, the feeling), of Wicomb’s writing so wonderfully well. Only always apparently straightforwardly realist, it is always more nuanced and meta than at first glance.

Her writing is never afraid to be “critical of that which you love and are part of”, as she told me in the interview that closes Race, Nation, Translation, a collection of her remarkable essays she allowed me to edit in collaboration with her. Perhaps that’s the lesson demonstrated by Frieda in that astonishing debut.

This was a lesson Wicomb claimed she had learned from South African-born writer Bessie Head, who lived in exile in neighbouring Botswana. Wicomb called Head “the only coloured woman who, at the time that I tried to write, was a published author”.

Wicomb herself left South Africa for exile in the UK at the end of the 1960s. She saw no future for herself in a country in the grip of apartheid rule and that had not yet seen the rise of Black Consciousness politics.

Head’s 1971 novel Maru, in particular, Wicomb would say, gave her “the courage or perhaps permission to write”. It was Head’s fearless critique of what she perceived as racism by Batswana people towards the indigenous Masarwa that served as exemplary for a refusal to bend to ruling elites or discourses, wherever or whomever they may be.

Head, like Wicomb, had been classified “Coloured” by South Africa’s racist population registration laws. Both felt an affinity, or would be identified colloquially by others, with these indigenous minorities. It was brave of Head to criticise her hosts. Likewise Wicomb, though a supporter of the anti-apartheid movement, was not afraid to critique the African National Congress (ANC) who were fighting for freedom in South Africa.

It was a peculiar irony that when Wicomb first encountered Maru, in its Heinemann African Writers Series paperback, it was with a photograph of her own face on the cover. Eminent South African photographer George Hallett had, she recalled, taken it at a party in London or Paris.

Wicomb’s essays from the period of South Africa’s transition to democracy (in the late 1980s into the mid-90s) remain some of the sharpest reflections on the pitfalls of national consciousness in the case of South Africa. She was clear that it will never do for nationalism to pretend that there is only one people, one story, one experience. This would be a recipe for tension and disappointment.

By contrast, “where discursive formations admit of cracks and fissures”, where the stories on which nations are based are honest about tension and disagreement, there can be found an insurance against autocracy. Wicomb’s reflection on South Africa’s former president Nelson Mandela for The New Yorker magazine showcases precisely this interest in the human aspect of history, what we can’t know, what defies the official narrative.

Admitting the variety, embracing the fractures, this was the lesson of all of Wicomb’s writing, from her essays through to the staggeringly audacious David’s Story (2000). The novel weaves the story of a struggle veteran’s search for his Griqua origins with a complex uncovering of the fate of another freedom fighter, Dulcie, and the history of violence in the ANC’s own camps in Angola.

This is among the finest of those novels that offered an accounting with the past in the first decade of the “new” South Africa. It sits (in my view) on that shelf of masterpieces that includes Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela. Among these, it is perhaps the most ambitious.

Wicomb followed this novel with no-less-bold books about race, storytelling, family secrets, and those who were written out of the official versions of history: Playing in the Light (2006), October (2014), Still Life (2020).

In an exchange with her the week before I learned of her sudden death she had not (I told my fellow editors, excitedly) definitively said no to my request that she contribute a chapter on Head to a scholarly volume on modern South African writing. What a coup, I’d said: Zoë Wicomb on Bessie Head. She needed a couple of weeks to think about it, however, she’d told me. She had not been feeling herself.

I feel acutely the awkward disjunction between public critic-self and private-self in this moment. Those of us who produce academic scholarship about living writers project ourselves, and our subjects, consciously or not, beyond the point of their death. We have an eye on the long view, on reputation, the place of the work in the canon. I hear Mrs Shenton in my ear: “You’ve killed me over and over so it was quite unnecessary to invent my death.”

Others will write about the dates and movements that constitute the biography, offer more detailed accounts of the fictions that have cemented Wicomb’s place as one of the three or four most significant South African writers of the last half century. I have made some of these arguments myself.

Now that she has gone, too soon, that public voice feels inadequate to the other self’s loss, one shared by many. I wish that, like the young writer-character Frieda, I might bring back from the dead the figure many of us lucky enough to come into Wicomb’s orbit thought of as a fierce mother to our writer-intellectual selves. Remarkably generous, she would always tell you precisely what she thought, and we were always the better for it.

Written by Andrew van der Vlies, Professor, English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.