You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town was the first book by Zoë Wicomb. Published in 1987 (by Virago in London), it was a collection of inter-related short stories, set during the Apartheid era and partly autobiographical, the central character being a young Coloured woman growing up in South Africa, speaking English in an Afrikaans-speaking community in Namaqualand, attending the University of the Western Cape, leaving for England, and authoring a collection of short stories. This work has been compared to V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. As Rob Gaylard notes, "Central to Wicomb's collection of stories is the question of identity, and intimately bound up with this are the polarities of home and exile. Significantly, the stories were written while Wicomb was in exile in England."

You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town was also published in the US in 1987 by Pantheon Books, and in 2000 by The Feminist Press at CUNY. The book was translated into Italian by Maria Teresa Carbone as Cenere Sulla Mia Manica (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1993), with an Introduction by Dorothy Driver, who suggests that Wicomb's stories are without precedent, that no one previously had written from the pariticular perspective a woman brought up "Coloured" in South Africa.

Gaylard sees the stories collectively as a kind of bildungsroman, noting that "...while Wicomb's work has obvious affinities with that of Bessie Head and Arthur Nortjé (whose poetry supplies two of the epigraphs for her collection), her stories may also gain by being viewed in the wider context of postcolonial writing. Comparison with the work of recent women writers from the Caribbean may be particularly rewarding: writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff share a preoccuption with the problems of a mixed or hybridized identity; they often write about home from the perspective of exile and often appropriate first-person narrative forms in order to do so."