ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a discussion of Zoe Wicomb by observing the tension in her writing between the value of travel and the value of rootedness. Wicomb's The One That Got Away has been much discussed for its deployment of South African-Scottish connections. The idea of travel as cosmopolitan experience and enrichment is put under even greater pressure in another story in The One That Got Away. This one is called 'There's the Bird That Never Flew' and is clearly an ironic echo of the earlier one. These two stories, in themselves and in ironic contrast to each other, dramatise a debate in Wicomb's writing between the enriching experience of travel, which might be taken as a kind of cosmopolitanism, and the wish to stay at home, which might seem like a kind of complacency or provincialism. The debate that Wicomb conducts is complex and subtle, and the chapter demonstrates this point through the discussion of her two novels.
