ABSTRACT
In a pathbreaking essay entitled 'Home Truths', Derek Attridge identifies the 'troubling of location' as Zoe Wicomb's characteristic writerly gesture. The spatial shifting between Wicomb's two half-homes may usefully be discussed as transnational, but since her writing often sees associations between Scotland and South Africa in their local rather than national aspect, the term translocal is more appropriate. Wicomb's writing makes frequent references to shared accents, shared culinary practices and a common taste in foods; these create a fine webbing across local domains that may otherwise have been seen in terms of difference, whether national or ethnic. In South African literary studies, the 'ordinary' is associated primarily with Njabulo Ndebele, and critics have rightly identified Wicomb's interest with his. Wicomb's essay argues that any particular setting, which is a representation of physical surroundings 'crucially bound up with a culture and its dominant ideologies', may bear a cluster of 'ready-made, recognizable meanings'.
