1 Published in: Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal: Writing Scotland & South Africa. Ed. Kai Easton and Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 2017. https://www.routledge.com/Zoe-Wicomb--the- Translocal-Writing-Scotland--South-Africa/Easton-Attridge/p/book/9781138237414 Unsettling Homes and the Provincial-Cosmopolitan Point of View in Zoë Wicomb’s October Meg Samuelson Although once insistent that she could not set fiction anywhere besides in the Cape region from which she hails, Zoë Wicomb has gradually allowed Glasgow, the city in which she has long been resident, to enter her writing. 1 While retaining a focus on the provincial, her oeuvre is thus incrementally pervaded by another perspective. October (2014) offers the most extended elaboration of this perspective to date. Infused with uncanny allusions and an unsettling use of free indirect discourse, the novel conveys the unhomeliness of home and simultaneously dethrones the privileged perspective assigned to the exile. In his ‘Reflections on Exile’, Edward Said notes that, while it may seem ‘peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile’ given its unbidden and mutilating quality, the ‘detachment’ that it affords can defamiliarise notions of home that otherwise ‘recede into dogma and orthodoxy’. 2 Catapulting its subjects to ‘transcend national or provincial limits’, the state of exile can enable them to evade ‘the exclusions and reactions of prejudice’; at the same time, however, it is a condition ‘predicated on the existence of, love for, bond with, one’s native place’. 3 Thus, exile brings forth a particular perspective that Said describes as ‘contrapuntal’ (or counterpoint). 4 Identifying a type of music in which distinct melodic lines intersect, ‘contrapuntal’, when translated into a literary-critical concept, names a dual point of view that issues, respectively, from home and exile. ‘Most people’, Said observes, are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two’, which ‘plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions’. 5 Wicomb’s writing encourages a revisiting of Said’s formulation. Rather than producing what Said presents as the contrapuntal vision of the exile, it comes to assemble a provincial-cosmopolitan point of view that articulates a translocal voice. 6 This voice issues from a conjoined perspective that is located, simultaneously, here and there, and which recognises both the limits of the local as well as the ways in which the provincial point of view can also challenge the orthodoxies of the cosmopolitan. It emerges across Wicomb’s oeuvre. Her inaugural book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), nearly declines to represent the space of exile altogether. The decade between the protagonist’s departure and a return visit is compressed into a terse sequence that self-consciously foregrounds its artifice: the narrator’s heartfelt tears at being ‘in the wrong bloody hemisphere’ 7 are framed as a cliché of the same order as the print of a Tretchikoff Weeping Rose adorning a wall in what is identified as home. If this first collection is apparently structured by a binary of home versus exile – of the place that quivers into life in her fiction and that which she finds ‘impossible’ to represent beyond the coldest convention – Wicomb is already beginning to deconstruct it: the same interview that proclaims the impossibility of writing exile admits that the sense of ‘belonging’ to home is itself a fiction, and the one story that reaches across the divide registers the triteness of tears in both locations. 8 The subsequent novels – David’s Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006) – are still largely set in the Cape but feature characters enjoying short sojourns in