Literary Legacies of the South African TRC: Fictional Journeys into Trauma, Truth, and Reconciliation [1st ed.] 9783030430542, 9783030430559

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Literary Legacies of the South African TRC Fictional Journeys into Trauma, Truth, and Reconciliation Francesca Mussi

Literary Legacies of the South African TRC

Francesca Mussi

Literary Legacies of the South African TRC Fictional Journeys into Trauma, Truth, and Reconciliation

Francesca Mussi Gateshead, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-43054-2    ISBN 978-3-030-43055-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43055-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Mariangela, Alfredo and Lucia, who are always there for me

Acknowledgements

This book has been many years in the making, and, along the way, I have had countless conversations with friends and colleagues who have all in one way or another offered useful advice and words of encouragement. To begin with, much of this book was written with the support of the Leverhulme Trust and of the Department of Humanities at Northumbria University, where I currently hold the position of Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. In particular, I wish to especially acknowledge the expert and invaluable help that I have received from Dr Katherine Baxter and Prof. Michael Green. Their respectful and thought-provoking feedback, as well as their unfailing support, has inspired and guided me to the realisation of this book. Certain sections of this book began life as part of my doctoral research, which I conducted at the University of Sussex. I am profoundly grateful to Dr Denise deCaires Narain, my supervisor, for her guidance, clear thinking, critical insights and, particularly, for her support during and after the end of my doctorate. I also wish to thank my examiners, Prof. David Johnson and Dr John Masterson, for their constructive and valuable feedback on my thesis, which has contributed to the writing of this book. I am grateful to Prof. Laura Giovannelli, my MA supervisor at the University of Pisa in Italy. She was the person who introduced me to South African literature and to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Without her first contribution, this book would not have been even possible.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my thanks also to the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (Johannesburg/Cape Town) for their help and support, to Lina Aboujieb, Eileen Srebernik, Jack Heeney and all staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience, editorial guidance and efficiency, and to the anonymous reviewer for their useful suggestions and faith in the project. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my parents for their endless support and for always believing in me. They have encouraged me, guided me, inspired me and comforted me during this long journey. Thank you. * * * I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint, in partial or revised form, portions of the following articles: • “Literary response to the TRC’s Concept of Forgiveness.” In Perspectives on Forgiveness: Contrasting Approaches to Concepts of Forgiveness and Revenge, eds. Jordan Kiper e Susan DiVietro. Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2018. 163–179. Copyrights 2018, Brill. • ‘‘Truth and Reconciliation in Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun”. Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing 33.2 (2018): 73–79. Copyrights 2018. • “The TRC and Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela: Claiming an Ordinary Female Space.” Anglistica Pisana XIII.1–2 (2016): 79–100. Copyrights 2017, Edizioni ETS. • “Engaging with South African Past: the TRC and how theatre performs back”, Commitment: Commonwealth Essays and Studies 38.1 (2015): 91–101. Copyrights 2015, Commonwealth Essays and Studies. • “Revising the TRC’s Concept of Forgiveness in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit.” In Forgiveness or Revenge? Restitution or Retribution? ed. Sheila C. Bibb. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 77–85. Previously published by Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2015. Copyrights 2015.

Contents

1 Introduction: The South African TRC and Its Narrative Legacies  1 2 Trauma: Conflictual Interplay Between Voice and Silence 41 3 Truth-Telling: Hybridity, Authorship and Ethics107 4 Fictional Journeys Towards Reconciliation175 5 Conclusion247 Index255

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Abbreviations

AC ANC CALS CSVR HRVC RRC SAHRC TRC

Amnesty Committee African National Congress Centre for Applied Legal Studies Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation Human Rights Violations Committee Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee South African Human Rights Commission Truth and Reconciliation Commission (or Commission)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The South African TRC and Its Narrative Legacies

Since the 1970s, truth and reconciliation commissions have become increasingly popularised as options for addressing historical injustices, especially within the context of dictatorial regimes.1 Relying on the principles of restorative justice rather than retribution and punishment, truth commissions are non-judicial bodies tasked with bringing together victims and offenders to establish the truth about past violations and to promote healing and reconciliation. As Priscilla Hayner points out: In virtually every state that has recently emerged from authoritarian rule or civil war, and in many still suffering repression or violence but where there is hope for a transition soon, there has been interest in creating a truth commission—either proposed by officials of the state or by human rights activists or others in civil society. (2001, p. 23)

Of the many truth commissions to date, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 1995–2003)2 has been the one that has captured public attention throughout the world, providing a model for subsequent truth commissions (ibid., p. 5). Since it published the first part of its final report in 1998, there has been consistent scholarly interest in the TRC, offering investigations of its engagement with concepts such as trauma, truth, justice, amnesty and reconciliation.3 In addition to attracting a great deal of critical attention, the TRC has also had a significant impact on South African literature. Many works published in South Africa from the 1990s onwards present stories focusing on © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mussi, Literary Legacies of the South African TRC, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43055-9_1

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themes such as memory and truth, guilt and confession, atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation. As the South African novelist Phaswane Mpe has argued, South Africa has a long history of “truth and confession” represented in the genre of autobiography (Attree 2005, p. 144), but this confessional turn has gathered pace with the advent of the TRC. Afrikaner author André Brink also observes that “the enquiries of the TRC [need to be] extended, complicated, and intensified in the imaginings of literature”, otherwise “society cannot sufficiently come to terms with its past to face the future” (1998, p. 30). In the South African context, one fundamental aim of literature during and after the life of the TRC thus becomes to engage with the past as a means of addressing its consequences in the present, and, in doing so, many authors provide an afterlife to the work of the TRC and to people’s testimonies. Mark Sanders’s Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (2007) and Shane Graham’s South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss (2009) are fundamental critical works, as they analyse the interconnections between literature and the TRC’s testimonial work.4 However, while Sanders and Graham focus on literary works published either during the life of the TRC or within a short distance from the completion of its mandate in the early 2000s, this book explores a wider selection of novels, the publication of which ranges from the mid-1990s to the 2010s, in an attempt to prove the steady impact of the South African TRC on the contemporary literary landscape. It seems to me that recent literary scholarship has neglected to emphasise the important role of the TRC and its key concepts—truth, confession, healing, forgiveness and reconciliation—as literary subjects that have attracted and continue to attract the interest of South African authors and, as we shall see, authors from outside South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect: South African Contemporary Writing, for instance, is a most recent, comparative study of contemporary South African literature, which investigates how South African writers have responded to the period since the end of apartheid through the lens of “temporality” and “affect”, especially in relation to the hopes that attended the birth of the “new” South Africa in 1994 and the inevitable disappointments that have followed. Presenting the purpose of his book, van der Vlies explains: While many critics have debated the open-endedness of apartheid-era writing or attended to questions of temporality and form in—for example—

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black South African negotiations of modernity, none has offered an engagement with issues of temporality and affect together in writing, and especially fiction, from or about South Africa since 1994. (2017, p. 23)

Van der Vlies is interested in investigating “how particular kinds of affect are bound to particular forms” (ibid., p.  23) in contemporary South African fiction. He notices that “the temporality of South Africa’s long interregnum has been the suspension of the plot of revolutionary overcoming” (ibid., p. 21), thus placing emphasis on the connection between the open-ended fashion that characterises many South African contemporary novels and sentiments of frustration and disappointment related to the new government’s unfulfilled promises of equality and democracy. While agreeing with van der Vlies’s perspective, I argue that the choice of an open-ended narrative adopted by many South African post-apartheid novels—and with the label “post-apartheid” I refer to the novels published from the 1994-elections onwards, and not only to those published during the political transition—may also reflect a resistance to the TRC’s goals of closure and reconciliation. It thus becomes essential to investigate the ways in which the TRC’s narrative machine has affected and still affects contemporary South African literature. This book intends to do exactly this. Through close readings of novels by a range of writers—some known to international Anglophone readers including J.  M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Zoë Wicomb, some less well-known, including Afrikaans-­ language novelist Marlene van Niekerk, and others from a new generation including Marli Roode and Kopano Matlwa—this book aims to examine the extent to which South African post-apartheid literature, especially fiction, has shown a consistent interest in engaging with questions inherent in the work of the TRC, particularly in connection with the Commission’s definition of gross human rights violations, the limits of truth-telling, and the achievability of closure and reconciliation. This introductive chapter continues with a concise account of the TRC’s process, outlining the main goals of its mandate, as well as highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the three committees that carried out the Commission’s work—Human Rights Violations, Amnesty, and Reparation and Rehabilitation Committees. I then consider the impact of the TRC on South African literature, with a particular focus on how the novel responds to the Commission’s reconciliation process. I start by exploring briefly other literary forms such as theatre and the lyrical and then move to discuss Country of My Skull (1998), Antjie Krog’s personal

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account of her experience while covering the TRC’s hearings as a radio journalist. Finally, I highlight the novel’s particular suitability to engage in dialogue with the TRC’s testimonial and reconciliation process through analysis of Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) and Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust (2000). I conclude this introduction by providing an overview of the subsequent chapters and their main arguments.

1.1   The South African TRC After the first democratic elections in April 1994 and the African National Congress’ (ANC) victory in those elections, South Africa faced overwhelming challenges in reinventing itself as a liberal democracy that respected those human rights that had been violated during apartheid. The establishment of the TRC in 1995 played a fundamental role in this process of political and social redefinition. Authorised by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995, the TRC was set up “to provide for the investigation and the establishment of as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights committed” (Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 1995) during a thirty-four-year period of South African history (1960 to 1994). In alignment with the postamble to the Interim Constitution of 1993 (National Unity and Reconciliation), the mandate of the Commission— carried out through three committees, Human Rights Violations, Amnesty, and Reparation and Rehabilitation—specified the following goals: to investigate past gross human rights violations, afford victims an opportunity to recount the violations they had suffered, grant amnesty to persons who committed abuses during apartheid (as long as crimes were politically motivated and there was full disclosure by those seeking amnesty), take measures towards restoring human dignity, report its findings to the nation, and make recommendations aimed at preventing gross violations of human rights in the future. According to the postamble, the Constitution: provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society […] and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex. (ibid.)

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In No Future Without Forgiveness, Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s memoir about his experience as Chairperson of the TRC’s hearings, Tutu places great emphasis on the importance of transcending the divisions and the strife of the past, which involves “a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, and a need for Ubuntu but not for victimisation” ([1999] 2000, p. 45). Besides drawing from the Christian concept of forgiveness, the TRC was founded on the African ethical concept of reciprocity called Ubuntu in the Nguni group of languages. In A Country Unmasked, Alex Boraine quotes the core belief of Ubuntu as “umntu nugmntu ngabantu, motho ke motho ba batho ba bangwe”, literally translated as “a human being is a human being because of other human beings” (2000, p. 362). A person with Ubuntu is aware of belonging to a greater whole and that all people are interconnected; this means that we are diminished when others are humiliated or oppressed, we are dehumanised when we dehumanise the Other: None is an outsider, all are insiders, all belong. There are no aliens, all belonging in the one family, God’s family, the human family. There is no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free—instead of separation and division, all distinctions make for a rich diversity to be celebrated for the sake of the unity that underlies them. We are different so that we can know our need of one another, for no one is ultimately self-sufficient. (Tutu [1999] 2000, pp. 214–15)

Postulated as the ethical foundation of the TRC, Ubuntu represents and demands responsibility and reciprocity. This African philosophy shares striking similarities with Emmanuel Lévinas Emmanuel Lévinas’ formulation of ethics as an obligation and responsibility towards the Other. The philosopher suggests that subjectivity is realised only when the individual confronts the Other as Other, as an alterity that refuses to be assimilated into the individual’s ego. According to Lévinas to Lévinas, an ethical community is enacted through the “face-to-face” encounter which forces the individual to perceive him or herself in relation to the alterity of the Other: “the face-to-face is a final and irreducible relation which […] makes possible the pluralism of society” ([1961] 1969, p. 291). The South African testimonial process was indeed conceived as a forum for face-to-face encounters among the “wounded people” of the country, where the whole community was compelled to acknowledge the presence of the Other and pay attention to his/her story of suffering.

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Between 1996 and 1998, the TRC took statements from more than 21,000 victims, documenting allegations of over 38,000 human rights crimes, including 10,000 murders. It was found that the most effective way to identify victims was to invite them to complete a statement, since this served to give the Commission the relevant information, while also providing it with a permanent record. The statement-taking process was no simple procedure due to the several different languages spoken by victims, alongside the traumatic experience of listening to gruesome stories. Moreover, because of the huge number of people who made statements, not all of them had the opportunity to tell their stories at the public hearings; while, on the other hand, many of those who submitted written statements were not keen to appear in public. In case of the human rights violations hearings, the related committee had to select a “representative group based on types of victims, places, occasions, and dates on which the alleged offences and abuses took place” (Boraine 2000, p. 109). Finally, once the statements were completed, it was the task of the Investigative Unit to corroborate the essential facts. Because of this long and demanding process, only around 10% of the deponents testified before the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC). The most controversial feature of the South African TRC is related to the provision of amnesty. It is the only truth commission to have included the opportunity for individual amnesty from prosecution as part of its proceedings. In contrast to other earlier truth commissions, which granted general amnesties, the South African model required amnesty to be applied for on an individual basis and all applicants to complete a prescribed form. Applicants also had to make a “full disclosure” of their human rights violations, and only those acts which were demonstrably political—according to strict criteria—qualified for amnesty. For example, deeds committed beyond 10 May 1994 would not be considered for amnesty, and the application deadline was 10 May 1997. Although the Commission’s initial five-­ volume report was handed over to President Nelson Mandela on 28 October 1998, the Amnesty Committee (AC) was still at work and only completed its mandate at the end of May 2001, publishing its final report early in 2003 as part of the TRC’s final report. In most cases, applicants appeared before the AC, which was autonomous in its decision-making, and those hearings were open to the public. There were circa 8000 applications for amnesty from prosecution, but barely more than 1000 were granted (Gready 2011, p. 26). The amnesty hearings were arranged differently from the human rights violations hearings: while the latter had to

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avoid any hint of a courtroom atmosphere and to allow victims to restore their “human and civil dignity”, in the amnesty hearings, perpetrators could be cross-examined by both the AC and the relatives of the victim. Despite its efforts, the TRC has not escaped criticism from the international human rights community, and the provision of amnesty still remains a source of controversy and heated debate. Many critics have raised questions and objections about the very concept of a truth commission and its achievements in comparison with the criminal justice system: can justice in its different forms be served equally well with truth commissions? Should standard forms of prosecutions, such as trials, be preferred? Does the amnesty process satisfy various criteria for justice, or does it distort the trial system?5 Even though the AC recommended prosecution for those people whose amnesty requests had been denied because they did not meet all the compulsory requirements, and although those who never applied for amnesty could be subjected to legal prosecutions and civil suits, much criticism was related to the fact that if perpetrators were granted amnesty, victims were no longer able to sue them. In this connection, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson argue that the truth commission method carries a heavy moral burden which cannot be ignored: these commissions sacrifice the pursuit of justice as usually understood for the sake of promoting other social purposes, such as historical truth and social reconciliation. They contend: justice is not achieved when a murderer or a rapist publicly acknowledges his crimes but is not brought to trial and suffers no further punishment […] Even if the victims received financial compensation, the demands of justice (on virtually any theory of punishment) would not be satisfied. (2004, p. 164)

They also argue that not only did the choice of a truth commission fail to accomplish the main aims of criminal justice, but the TRC also rejected less punitive alternatives such as lustration—denying perpetrators the opportunity to hold public office—which could have represented a kind of minor punishment for the oppressors. Nkosinathi Biko highlights the fact that the families of Bantu Steve Biko, Griffith and Victoria Mxenge, and Dr and Mrs Rebeiro were the first public voices to challenge the amnesty clause within the Act authorising the TRC. He explains that where some South Africans were satisfied by the granting of amnesty, there was a significant number who would have preferred to confront their perpetrators in a courtroom. Biko wonders “whether the process was about truth and

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reconciliation at all. For some it was about amnesty—as a basis for ensuring that those directly implicated in the atrocities of the past were able to join the ranks of the indifferent” (Villa-Vicencio and Verwoerd 2000, p.196). Another issue deeply connected with the granting of amnesty is that of reparations. According to the National Unity and Reconciliation Act, the mandate of the Commission included the “taking of measures aimed at the granting of reparation to, and the rehabilitation and the restoration of the human and civil dignity of victims of violations of human rights”, with reparation defined as including “any form of compensation, ex gratia payment, restitution, rehabilitation or recognition” (Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 1995). The Act also makes a distinction between reparations made as part of a broad, longer-term reparations policy and those made as part of an urgent interim reparations policy. The Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee (RRC) was then created, on the one hand, to determine whether or not individual victims qualified as victims for the purposes of reparations, and, on the other, to make recommendations to the President for both an urgent and a final reparations policy. The urgent interim reparations were to be made as soon as possible during the life of the RRC, the final reparations policy was, in turn, to be included in the TRC’s final report to the President. The President was then to consider these recommendations and make his/her own to Parliament. The joint committee of the House of Parliament dealing with TRC matters had to consider these Presidential recommendations and formulate its own recommendations. Their recommendations were then to be put before Parliament to be debated and approved in the form of a Parliamentary resolution. Finally, the President was required to publish the appropriate regulations to enact this resolution.6 The work of the RRC has been often criticised for its inadequacy (financially speaking) and the delay in the delivery of reparations to victims. Particularly when compared with the “immediate” delivery of amnesty— where perpetrators were exonerated from prosecution as soon as the favourable decision was made by the Amnesty Committee—victims saw no tangible sign of reparations for months and even years after having made a statement or testified at a hearing. The policies for the urgent interim reparations scheme were discussed from the start of the RRC’s work, and recommendations were sent to the government in September 1996. However, regulations were only promulgated in April 1998 and the first payments began in July 1998, as the HRVC was completing its

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mandate. Dr Wendy Orr, a commissioner and a member of the RRC, remarks on the fact that another major quandary was to deal with “the huge gap between the expectations of victims and the understanding of reparation by Government and its capacity (and even willingness) to deliver” (Villa-Vicencio and Verwoerd 2000, p. 241). Orr also emphasises the challenge of defining victims eligible for receiving reparations. According to the Act’s definition of a victim, only those who had been found to have suffered a gross violation of human rights could have access to reparation, and, among them, only those victims who had made a statement by the time the Human Rights Violations Committee closed the statement-taking process on 15 December 1997. This means that millions of South Africans were excluded, because either they may not have suffered a gross abuse of human rights in terms of the Act—but, nevertheless, suffered the daily violations of living under apartheid—or they could not access the TRC, denying them the chance to make a statement before the Commission. Further debates concerned the type of reparation and the amount of money due to victims: whether reparations should have been differentiated according to the severity of need and/or the present financial status. The RRC held a series of public hearings in 1997 and 1998 throughout the country to open up debate on the final reparations policy. After much negotiations and after receiving inputs from victims, NGOs, community-­ based organisations, academic institutions, churches and other organs of civil society, it was decided that victims should receive the same amount of money, regardless of the degree of suffering. In addition to individual grants, the RRC also made several recommendations relating to service provision, community reparations and broader symbolic reparations. Orr highlights that the mandate of the RRC was to draft policy recommendations to be presented to the President, but it was the government which had the power and the resources to implement those recommendations. She admits, however, that one of their failures as the RRC was the inability to deliver immediately some forms of reparation or supportive intervention without waiting for the end of the Commission’s works (Villa-­ Vicencio and Verwoerd 2000, p. 241). As previously stated, this book is more concerned with investigating the consistent impact of the TRC and its engagements with such concepts as truth, confession, healing, forgiveness and reconciliation on the South African literary landscape, rather than providing a critical evaluation of its successes and failures. To put it in other words, I am interested in the ways

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in which writers address questions and problems raised by the work of the TRC and the contribution of literature to discourses of trauma, truth-­ telling and reconciliation. It is important to acknowledge that, despite its evident flaws and limitations, the TRC played a fundamental role in the process of healing and reconciling South Africa, by encouraging perpetrators of both sides to come forward, confess and take responsibility for their crimes, as well as fostering mutual forgiveness as the only basis to move on and build a better future. Against all its failures and mistakes, Archbishop Desmond Tutu argues that the TRC succeeded in keeping alive the idea of a common humanity and made an end of the tyranny of silence by guiding people towards the road to reconciliation. The Commission may represent the first step of that long journey called reconciliation, a journey that must be followed by other steps taken by all South Africans. In his memoir, Tutu highlights: Confession, forgiveness and reparation, wherever feasible, form part of a continuum […] It [reconciliation] has to be a national project to which all earnestly strive to make their particular contribution […] by contributing a culture of respect for human rights, and seeking to enhance tolerance—with zero tolerance for intolerance; by working for a more inclusive society where most, if not all, can feel they belong—that they are insiders and not aliens and strangers on the outside, relegated to the edges of society. ([1999] 2000, p. 222)

On the other hand, literature, and, as I argue, novels in particular, may become an extremely useful critical site from which to question, challenge and keep the dialogue on the past open to understand better the present.

1.2   The South African TRC’s Literary Legacies The prospects for South African literature after apartheid have attracted the attention of many literary critics and cultural commentators, who, since the demise of the apartheid regime, have tried to gauge the shift of South African fiction once its main “subject” was over.7 Atwell and Harlow point out that there have been “predictions of an impasse, and of the end of literary careers built on the diagnosis of apartheid’s ills or the celebrations of resistance to it” (2000, p. 3). In particular, Rob Nixon claims that with the advent of democracy South African writers “have gained key freedoms but lost, in the process, the very stresses that fuelled their creativity”

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(1997, p. 64). On the other hand, Jane Poyner counters that novelists and writers have been able to “reroute” their creativity to the new contemporary context (see Poyner 2008, 2010). In this sense, the TRC constituted, and still constitutes, an important stimulation to new writing. According to academic and writer Njabulo Ndebele, one effect of the TRC has been “the restoration of narrative. In few countries in the contemporary world do we have a living example of people reinventing themselves through narrative” (1998, p. 27). In post-apartheid South Africa, therefore, one fundamental aim of literature during and after the work of the TRC is to represent the past, and particularly the victims of that past, in such a way as to attempt to accommodate the contradictions, opacities and ambiguities unearthed by the Commission. As observed by Shane Graham: the challenge for writers and artists is to tell the story in such a way that it re-enacts its own paradoxes and displacements, but without displacing the survivors from their own tales altogether, and without locking these survivors into a fixed narrative formula. (2003, p. 28)

In Mapping Loss, Graham continues to emphasise the suitability of literature for investigating and challenging the collective memorial narrative and reconciliation processes carried out by the TRC, indirectly establishing a connection between literature and history, literature and politics, and literature and the social within the South African context. The importance of this connection had already been highlighted by Nadine Gordimer when interviewed by Susan Sontag in the late 1980s. While explaining the subject of her writing, Gordimer points out: I write about what I know and feel and see and what I absorb from the life I live and the life around me. And it happens to be, in that country, with what is happening there. […] It’s simply, it’s the air I breath and the food I eat. It’s the bus I get on, it’s the cinema I go to, the library I use. My whole life is implicit with it, and so it comes naturally into my writing. It seeks me out, I don’t seek it. (Gordimer and Sontag 1987, p. 32)

According to Gordimer, in a country like South Africa where the apartheid regime affected every sector of people’s lives, literature becomes tightly interlaced with politics, history and the social. Her interview dates back to a time when apartheid was still at its height, but we can also apply her words to the post-apartheid era and to the historical/political/social

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project of the Commission. It is useful to refer to French philosopher Jacques Rancière and his conceptualisation of a regime of aesthetics, in which “the logic of descriptive and narrative arrangements in fiction becomes fundamentally indistinct from the arrangements used in the description and interpretation of the phenomena of the social and historical world” (2013, p. 33). In addition to highlighting the profound connection between “history” and “story”, “testimony” and “fiction”—“writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth” (ibid., p.  35)—Rancière echoes Gordimer’s words by emphasising how literature and politics are entangled to the extent that “political statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality” (ibid., p. 35). Interestingly, Rancière observes that both politics and literature, as models of speech, “widen gaps, open up space for deviations, modify the speeds, the trajectories, and the ways in which groups of people adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images”(ibid., p. 35). The proliferation of literary works that engage in dialogue with the work of the TRC attests to this connection between politics, history and literature in contemporary South Africa. The next sections show examples of literary texts that explore themes such as testimony, confession, healing and reconciliation. While recognising that different literary forms have engaged in dialogue with the South African Commission and its proceedings, I have decided to focus on the novel genre and on the strategies it uses to investigate, critique and extend the work of the TRC. Notably, Paul Gready posits the concept of “novel truths” as opposed to human rights or truth commission narratives, because the novel genre allows to ask questions rather than seek answers, “rooting out ambiguities, as distinct from genres such as the human rights report, state inquiry or official history” (2011, p. 180). The subsequent chapters will offer, in fact, analysis of a selection of TRC-related novels which show the novel’s particular capacity for challenging the TRC’s testimonial process and the ways in which the Commission envisioned the concepts of trauma, truth and reconciliation.

1.3   Theatre In her study on South African performance and archives of memory, Yvette Hutchison highlights the interdependent relationship between performance and memory, recognising that memory is a fundamental actor in the TRC’s proceedings. She argues that performance:

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has been central to these processes of negotiating memory in a number of ways: insofar as public events have been used to foreground particular memories and histories, in the way in which theatrical productions have supported or challenged these performances of memory, and in the way a performance lens can further nuance particular formulations of memory. (2013, p. 2)

Indeed, it can be argued that South African theatre contended with the Commission earlier than other literary forms. When the first TRC plays emerged in 1996–1997, critic Mark Gevisser emphasised the reciprocal relationship between the Commission and theatre: “Given the inherent theatrically of the truth commission”, Gevisser argues that “it is not surprising that theatre has become the first creative medium to grapple with issues it raises” (1997, p. 4). Geoffrey Davis seconds this observation by pointing out that the challenge to explore the TRC’s proceedings was taken up first by theatre practitioners, since the TRC was regarded as itself a national theatrical event (1999, p. 60). Mike van Graan’s Dinner Talk and Paul Herzberg’s The Dead Wait are among the first plays to engage with the TRC, the former premiered at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in 1996, the latter at the Market Theatre in 1997. Both scripts were substantially reworked after their premieres and performed in the following years both within and outside South Africa. Dinner Talk is a trilogy of two-handers, “Happily Ever After”, “Sisters” and “Thabo for Thabo”, each dealing with a different contemporary South African theme. Although it is only the second section—“Sisters”—that directly engages with the TRC and the implications of truth-telling, the other two playlets also raise important questions that relate to the Commission’s work, in that they expose the violence that persists in post-apartheid South Africa and question the whole reconciliation process by exploring the issue of revenge. On the other hand, The Dead Wait is written as a memory play, which focuses on Josh Gilmore, a white South African and a former soldier for the South Africa Defence Force, who returns to Cape Town from exile in London to testify about his wartime crimes before the TRC’s hearings. The play shifts backwards and forwards in space and time from the present-day TRC’s hearings to the South African-Angolan Border War during the apartheid era. Although the Commission’s proceedings remain ancillary to The Dead Wait, Herzberg addresses questions of guilt, amnesty and the sometimes fragile boundary between the TRC’s categories of “victim” and “perpetrator”.8

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If Dinner Talk and The Dead Wait are traditionally text-based plays, The Story I Am About to Tell (1997) and Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998) are more overtly performative and enter into dialogue with the Commission’s work in more dynamic and experimental ways. The Story I Am About to Tell results from a collaboration between the Khulumani Support Group and the Market Theatre Laboratory. Combining real witnesses at the TRC—Catherine Mlangeni, Thandi Shezi and Duma Khumalo—with stage actors, who also experienced apartheid, the play draws its title from the oath taken by witnesses before the TRC’s human rights violations hearings: “The story I am about to tell is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. The play moves between the victims’ personal testimonies and an imaginary journey to the hearings, during which the actors reflect on the status of white applicants, the evaluation criteria and compensation for amnesty hearings, and thus, ultimately, the issues of justice and reconciliation. Ubu and the Truth Commission goes one step further, interpolating live acting, actual testimony extracts from the TRC’s hearings, puppetry, videos and sound effects. Written by Jane Taylor, this play is the third co-production between director William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company. Besides being a representation of, and a commentary on, the Commission, the play is also textually indebted to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896).9 Jarry’s piece was conceived as a play for marionettes and followed the political and criminal undertaking of Ubu, a sort of parodic Macbeth, who, together with his wife, attempts to grasp all the power for himself. Combining the wild burlesque of Jarry’s creation with the gravitas of the Commission, Taylor’s play aims to expose the weaknesses of the TRC’s proceedings, especially in connection with the amnesty deal, and to explore the complexities of truth-telling within the context of conflicting memories of trauma. Among the body of post-apartheid plays that has been referred to as “Theatre for Reconciliation” (Mda 2002, p. vii), John Kani’s Nothing But the Truth (2002), Mike van Graan’s Some Mothers’ Sons (2005) and Lara Foot-Newton’s Reach (2009) are powerful examples of how South African theatre has continued to engage with questions of memory, truth, healing and reconciliation even following the submission of the TRC’s final report (the five-volume part in 1998 and the section related to the amnesty hearings in 2003). Nothing But the Truth was Kani’s debut as sole playwright and was first performed in the Market Theatre in

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Johannesburg in 2002. Enacting the tensions and conflicts within the microcosm of one family, the play exposes the complexities and ambiguities of establishing the truth—here, in defining a liberation hero—as well as challenging the validity of the TRC’s amnesty deal. The protagonists are Sipho Makhaya, Assistant Chief Librarian at the Port Elizabeth Public Library, and his daughter Thando, who is a teacher while also working as an interpreter at the TRC’s amnesty hearings. The play is set in motion by the news of the death of Sipho’s brother, Themba, the famous liberation hero who went into exile in London and who never returned home to South Africa, even once the political situation had changed. Through Thando’s involvement with the Commission, the play also becomes a vehicle to comment on and evaluate the amnesty process. In particular, Sipho calls into question the notion that revealing and documenting the truth about gross human rights violations committed under apartheid was in itself a sufficient basis to heal and reconcile the whole country. Loss and memory, forgiveness and justice thus become central concerns in Nothing But the Truth, which are explored in the intimate domestic space of Sipho’s family, rather than being exposed in the public eye of the TRC’s proceedings. Mike van Graan’s Some Mothers’ Sons, which premiered at the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF)/PANSA Festival of Reading of New Writing in November 2005, returns to the theme of violent crime in South Africa, how violence affects people and how they respond as individuals, that the author had already explored in “Thabo for Thabo”— the third playlet in Dinner Talk. Both plays feature two characters: Vusi is a Basotho lawyer, who visits his friend Braam, an Afrikaner lawyer (named Steve in “Thabo for Thabo”), in the same cell where they met twelve years before, at the height of the apartheid regime. Then, Vusi, a community and union activist, was a detainee being brutally tortured, and Braam was there to get him out of detention. Twelve years later, the roles are reversed. Braam has been a victim of a terrible violent crime and he has acted in revenge. Vusi is there to try to get Braam out on bail after he had been arrested. The play thus juxtaposes apartheid violence against the violent criminality of contemporary post-apartheid South Africa, as well as two essentially good men and their responses to the violence they experience. While “Thabo for Thabo” lingers on the contemporary scene between the arrested Braam/Steve and his lawyer friend Vusi, Some Mothers’ Sons explores in greater detail the earlier scene when they first

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met in Vusi’s detention cell; in particular, van Graan focuses on Vusi’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle and on how he came to be imprisoned. By highlighting the challenges of South Africa’s criminal justice system, the author raises the question of whether the new democratic South Africa or, in other words, post-TRC South Africa has really achieved the advancement and protection of human rights, particularly the right to life. Lara Foot-Newton’s Reach premiered in 2007 at the Theaterformen Festival in Hanover, Germany, followed by the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town and the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. In this play, Lara Foot-Newton offers a vision of reconciliation that is rooted in the particulars of the interactions between two individuals, who have been both alienated from their own communities. Enacting the encounter between Marion Branning, an elderly white woman, and Solomon Xaba, a Xhosa youth who witnessed Marion’s son’s death, Foot-Newton relies on a recurring archetype in South African literature: the representation of the solitary, ageing, white woman (or man), whose life is intruded upon by the arrival of a younger, non-white man or woman and together they forge an unlikely friendship across the divides of class, gender and race.10 Later on, the audience discovers that Solomon witnessed the murder of Marion’s son but was not sufficiently brave to come forward and tell what he saw to ensure that Marion’s son’s killers were brought to justice. His frequent visits to Marion can be read as an attempt to atone for his wrongdoing and to find a way to confess the whole truth to Marion. The encounter with the Other thus offers the opportunity to reflect on questions related to testimony, truth-telling and confession, but it also offers the possibility of healing and renewal, thus representing in microcosm, through the interactions between these two characters, the larger problems of reconciliation in the new South Africa.

1.4   The Lyrical: Ingrid de Kok Compared to other literary forms, such as drama, memoir or fiction, poetry seems to have engaged with the TRC and its related questions to a lesser extent. Ingrid de Kok speculates that this hesitancy might result from “anxiety about the nature of any representation of such traumatic material”, “fear of contributing uncritically to the notion of a fair political settlement/compromise”, “awareness of the dangers of appropriation”, and “desire to respect the pressures for justice or revenge” (2016, p. 7). While other literary forms are clearly not exempt from the above risks and

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concerns, de Kok here seems to suggest that poets face, if not more, at least different challenges when trying to articulate trauma, especially when a poet is trying to articulate someone else’s trauma. Despite acknowledging these challenges, de Kok has written some of the most beautiful and poignant poems that engage with the TRC, the testimonial process and the articulation/transcription of trauma. The poet’s sequence about the TRC, “A Room Full of Questions”, is included in her collection Terrestrial Things (2002).11 De Kok acknowledges that, while composing this sequence, she was acutely aware of “the dense and unsettled relationship between compositional and ethical issues” and the complex interplay between what she calls “‘decorum’ and ‘risk’ when writing on a subject such as the TRC” (2016, p. 7). In her attempt to approach such difficult material, the poet relies on “a more formal frame”, where her subjects are “those very words and sounds, as well as the reader, the listener who hears, speaks, writes and turns towards or away from words” (ibid., p. 8). The sequence is framed at the beginning and end by two poems, the first called “Parts of Speech” and the final one called “Body Parts”. Jane Wilkinson observes how this framing establishes a cycle in the collection from “fragmented discourse” to “fragments of the body”, in order to show the damage done by apartheid to the physical body, the relation of language and speech to the body, and the failure of language to capture experiences of violence, suffering and survival (see Wilkinson 2004). “Parts of Speech” directly addresses the powerlessness of language in translating those manifestations of trauma which are conveyed through the non-language of the fragmented body. In particular, it registers the tension between the desire for the language of testimony to perform a rehabilitative, healing function—especially in the context of the TRC—and the resistance of certain stories of past atrocities that “don’t want to be told” (line 1) or “refuse to be danced or mimed” (line 6). In the final stanza, the almost desolate poetic voice wonders how it is still possible to “imagine whole words, whole worlds” in the face of what has been unfolded about the past in the TRC’s “courtroom” and “confessional” (line 14): Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds: the flame splutter of consonants, deep sea-anemone vowels, birth-cable syntax, rhymes that start in the heart, and verbs, verbs that move mountains? (lines 21–25)

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Here the poem disassembles the linguistic sentence and makes explicit reference to parts of speech—“consonants”, “vowels”, “syntax”, “rhymes” and “verbs”—suggesting the painstaking labour of language in its attempt to give expression to trauma. “The dialect of record” (line 15) of South Africa’s recent past is incomplete because it cannot convey people’s pent­up emotions while they are testifying at the hearings, especially the grief and sorrow of the victim hearings. “The Transcriber Speaks” is significant in this sense, because it explores a new difficulty in the written articulation of trauma by focusing on the arduous work of the Commission’s stenographers. Told in the first person, the poem opens with a statement that describes the function of the transcribers: “I was the commission’s own captive, / Its anonymous after-­ hours scribe / […] Word by word by word / From winding tape to hieroglyphic key, / From sign to sign, I listened and wrote” (lines 1–6). The poet creates a connection between the process of producing the sound, hearing the sound and transcribing the sound, on the assumption that these sounds can be accurately represented by the words chosen. The possibility of this action is, however, challenged later in the poem, when the transcriber admits that it is impossible for the written record to capture in words the narration of people’s trauma. His/her job is further complicated by the difficult task of transcribing silence onto a printed document. If the witness is left without the language to give voice to his/her experience of trauma, how is the transcriber supposed to interpret and transcribe this type of silence? Constructed in the form of a prayer, the last poem of the sequence, “Body Parts”, addresses a collective “us”, as all South Africans, though in different ways, have been harmed by apartheid, all are broken into parts. The poem catalogues different body parts—the wrist, the ear, the eye, the lungs, the heart and the bone—which are depicted as tortured, broken and dispersed. These anatomical parts are envisaged as separate and suspended and, although they do not get reconstituted into the solution of a single, whole body, the poem hints at the possibility for the “unfixable broken bone” (line 9) to give “new bearings” (line 13). Powerful and carefully crafted, this poem expresses the uncertainty of the future, a future that comes from the broken past of years of oppression and violence and cautiously hopes for a renewal and healing.

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1.5   Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull is a milestone in South African literature of the transition period. Published in 1998, it is the result of the Afrikaans poet’s personal experience while covering the TRC’s hearings as a radio journalist for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. She combines her experience with extracts from both victims’ and perpetrators’ testimonies, interviews, letters and sound bites. Krog manages to meld “official history” and her personal story, describing the procedures of the Commission, quoting extracts of testimonies from too-long marginalised people, and recounting her inner journey towards reconciliation as a white Afrikaner. This personal characteristic of her writing is immediately evident from the beginning of the text, where she alternates the description of the works of the Justice Portfolio Committee—which had been appointed to frame the bill setting up the TRC—and the account of some episodes from her personal life. For example, she describes an episode of violence that took place at her parents’ farm after the 1994 democratic elections: her two brothers shot some black people who had tried to steal from the farm. Krog reports one of her brothers asserting that “like feeling daily how my family and I become brutalized…like knowing that I am able to kill someone with my bare hands…I am learning to fight, to kill, to hate. And we have nowhere to turn” ([1998] 1999, p. 18). This private anecdote shows the violent climate still lingering in the new South Africa, as well as the Afrikaners’ fear of living in a country mainly ruled by black people. The choice of including this episode of violence at the beginning of the text, and, consequently, at the beginning of her account about both the Commission and her personal journey towards reconciliation, attests to Krog’s awareness of the challenges and of the obstacles that South Africa still needs to overcome in order to be healed and reconciled. Country of My Skull is also one of the most controversial works among the TRC-related narratives, often criticised for Krog’s decision to privilege a personal and fictional approach to victims’ testimonies instead of factual analysis. Meira Cook, for instance, argues that Krog’s book “treads an uneasy line between cultural witnessing and imaginative fictionalising, thus begging the related question as to how this account should be read: as historical document or literary text” (2001, p. 75). In “Last Time, This Time” (2006), Krog strongly defends her writing choices and asserts:

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Country of My Skull is my own, highly personalized version of experiences at the TRC. Country of My Skull is NOT a journalistic or factual report of the Truth Commission. In fact, the problem of truth, the ethical questions around the “making” of truth, the use of other people’s truths, the relation between power and truth, and other factors at play in the execution of truth, all form part of the text itself.

In “Fact Bordering Fiction and the Honesty of the ‘I’”, Krog further discusses her narrative choices and warrants her use of the autobiographical “I” on the basis that the “whole point of writing is to interact with the ‘you’”, so that the author “is left with ‘I’” (2007, p. 38). The author’s adoption of the first person “allows [her] access to fact” (ibid., p.  39); being aware that she cannot speak on behalf of all Afrikaners nor on behalf of all victims, the first person gives her access to facts from her viewpoint. It also allows “the reader to piggyback on the ‘I’ into the testimony—safe in the knowledge that ‘I’ would not simply leave like the reporters of a newspaper or radio. The ‘I’ would stop halfway and say: what do I do with what I have just read?” (ibid. p. 40). Most importantly, because she has complete control over the word “I”, Krog is able to forge a new “I”, another “I”. This means that Krog can invent an “I” and, therefore, she admits that she can lie: I use the personal when I am applying a mask to my face. “I” means I can lie […] I make a character called “I.” Many of the things said by the “I,” I would never say. So I invent an “I” and her family, her town, and her continent. I link the “I” with the broader political transformation and let her look at my town to convey local transformation. I give the “I” a poetic voice so that she can express both the nostalgia for the past and the thrill and grill of change. (ibid., p. 40)

Krog’s use of the autobiographical “I” calls for a comparison with people’s testimonies at the TRC’s public hearings. Both Country of My Skull and testimonial narratives, in fact, rely on the use of the first person and, as shown by Krog’s experimental text, the “I” can lie and manipulate language, calling into question the veracity and reliability of first-person narratives and, by extension, of the TRC’s testimonial process. On the other hand, the use of fiction through the autobiographical “I” enables Krog to arrive at her very personal version of the truth without the need to make any objective, definite claims, because, as van der Vlies observes, “fiction [allows to keep] things open” (2017, p. 20).

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Another accusation against Country of My Skull relates to Krog’s use, or misuse, of unacknowledged sources. The poet Stephen Watson, for example, openly accused Krog of plagiarism; in particular, he quoted a passage from Country of My Skull that appeared to be taken from a 1976 essay by English poet Ted Hughes (see Highman 2015, p. 188). In relation to this accusation, Krog defended this “perceived” lack of attribution and acknowledgement of external sources, asserting that her intent in Country of My Skull was to “forge a new vocabulary” where “everybody was a textmaker”. Moreover, she claimed: “my desire to respect this equality of input would have been undermined by a bibliography, as it would have foregrounded certain texts as ‘established truth’ while perhaps implicitly relegating the testimonies of victims to something ‘less’” (2006). She also noted that she had deposited all her source material for Country of My Skull at the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, previously named the National English Library Museum, in Grahamstown for anybody to access. In responding to Krog’s choice to avoid attribution, Kate Highman (2015) explores Krog’s decontextualisation of testimonies in tandem with her decontextualised “borrowings”. In particular, she highlights how Krog edited the testimonies she used not only for punctuation but to manipulate them for narrative purposes. Highman further suggests that, by presenting those fragments of testimonies in quotation marks, thus giving them the authority of statements of the testifiers, Krog projects her own or other scholars’ voice, “performing acts of ventriloquism” (ibid., p. 195). For instance, focusing on a series of unattributed victims’ testimonies that are quoted in  chapter three of Country of My Skull, Highman analyses the third fragment of this series and compares it with a video recording of the testimony itself. Here is the fragment: This inside me … fights my tongue. It is … unshareable. It destroys … words. Before he was blown up, they cut off his hands so he could not be fingerprinted … So how do I say this?—this terrible … I want his hands back. (Krog [1998] 1999, p. 40)

Highman points out how there are many differences between Krog’s transposition and the video recording of the testimony. It is evident that here Krog tries to convey the idea that pain destroys language: pain becomes “unshareable” and destroys “words”, it fights “my tongue” and leaves the testifier with the question “so how do I say this?” All these reflections on language and its relation to trauma appear to be Krog’s

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additions as they are not included into the original transcripts; Highman further notices that the argument according to which pain destroys language had already been made by Elaine Scarry in her 1985 study The Body in Pain (2015, p. 190). In addressing Krog’s assertion that “since 1994 all my work has been not only a response to the black voice […] but also a conversation with that black voice” and that Country of My Skull “was a specific response to the specific black voices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (2007, p. 38), Highman also argues that Krog’s lack of specificity regarding the testimonies and her re-ascriptions and blurring of references serve “to colour, as ‘black’ and indigenous, disparate theories of white writers, lending her narrative of the TRC an appearance of indigeneity and allowing her to affiliate herself (and her work) within an African tradition” (2015, p. 205). Acknowledging her “good intentions”, Highman however emphasises that Krog’s narrative strategies “call up a long, troubling history of racial ventriloquism in South African writing, one intimately linked with plagiarism”(ibid., p. 205). Highman’s argument has a strong resonance with Krog’s choice to dedicate Country of My Skull to “every victim who had an Afrikaner surname in her lips”, victims who are, at least for the majority, black people. This dedication clearly attests to the author’s wish to engage in dialogue with the black voice in an attempt to try to make amends for past wrongdoings. In this regard, Sarah Nuttall observes that Krog engages with her Afrikaner identity, her whiteness, in ways that reveal a “process of becoming someone you were not in the beginning” (2009, p. 58). At the beginning of her journey, which also coincides with the beginning of her book, Krog does not hide her intimacy and complicity with the perpetrators of apartheid, “the men of my race”, “they are as familiar as my brothers, cousins and school friends. Between us all distance is erased” ([1998] 1999, p. 144). Through the contact with the victims and after witnessing their pain, Krog revises the meaning of being white in this new context and claims in Country of My Skull’s closing poem: “because of you/ this country no longer lies/ between us but within […] I was scorched/ a new skin/ I am changed forever” (ibid., p. 423). In this process of negotiating a new identity, the poet finds the courage to ask for forgiveness from all victims of apartheid and beseeches “you whom I have wronged, please/ take me/ with you” (ibid., p. 423). Krog’s closing poem evidently reveals her awareness of the necessity to re-­ negotiate her white, Afrikaner identity in the post-apartheid context, a re-negotiation that, according to the author, can only be made through

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dialogue with the black voice. In light of this, Highman seems correct when arguing that Krog’s narrative choices attempt to “colour” as black the voices and theories of white writers, Krog’s voice included. However, the manipulation of sources such as the TRC victims’ testimonies, as well as the use of fiction through the autobiographical “I”, also serves as clear evidence of the limits of language and of truth-telling narratives, especially within the context of trauma.

1.6   Fiction: Novels The previous discussion of Country of My Skull already emphasises the potential for fiction to explore productively the possibilities and limits of language in the articulation of trauma. Now I turn my attention to the novel, and, as I argue, this literary form is particularly suited to scrutinising and challenging the work of the TRC. Relying on narrative strategies that range from the employment of multiple focalisers and perspectives to the use of indirect discourse and the avoidance of quotation marks, from the adoption of a mélange of genres to unreliable narrators, from non-­ linear to open-ended narratives, novels are able to call into question the very processes of remembering and articulating the past, as well as challenging TRC-related questions of closure and reconciliation. Although theatre can also rely on multiple narrative focalisers and perspectives, the immediacy inherent in live performance must be read in contrast to the safe critical distance provided by novels, a feature that makes them a particularly productive form through which to explore the TRC’s achievements and shortcomings, as well as the effectiveness of the politics of the new South Africa. In addition to its ability to accommodate more easily varied and discordant voices in the same space, the novel offers readers greater control than theatre (live performance especially) to investigate and challenge issues at readers’ own pace and conditions, which, I believe, is a very much welcome asset when addressing trauma and other related issues to the work of the South African Commission. We should not marvel then at the copious number of novels that have been published since the establishment of the TRC to the present day that comment directly or indirectly on its narrative project of reconciliation. Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) is one of the first novels to engage in dialogue with the TRC.  Set during the transitional period in South African politics from the apartheid regime to the first democratic elections in 1994, Magona’s novel is a fictionalised account of American

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student Amy Biehl’s murder by youths in the township of Guguletu in August 1993. Amy Biehl was a white, American graduate of Stanford University and an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, who was visiting the University of the Western Cape as a scholar in the Fulbright Program. On 25 August 1993, while driving a friend home to the township of Guguletu, outside Cape Town, a mob pulled her from the car and stabbed and stoned her to death while shouting anti-white slurs. The four men convicted of her murder were released as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. Adopting the maternal voice of the fictional Mandisa, the mother of Amy’s killer Mxolisi, the novel retells the events of the day of the murder and attempts to articulate the experiences in the young man’s life which might have contributed to Amy’s murder.12 In the “Author’s preface”, Magona points out that her aim in writing the novel was to describe not the world of the victim, which had been much talked about, but “the other world”, that of the perpetrators, usually left more in the background: What was the world of this young woman’s killers, the world of those, young as she was young, whose environment failed to nurture them in the higher ideals of humanity and who, instead, became lost creatures of malice and destruction? ([1998] 2013, p. 5)

The first chapter, “Mandisa’s Lament”, is written in the epistolary mode and formatted in italics. Here, Mandisa directly addresses Amy’s mother in an attempt to help Mrs Biehl “to understand [her] son” (p.  8). Anne Whitehead observes that “motherhood is clearly posited as the common ground that brings the two women together” (2012, p. 185) across both racial and national boundaries. Mandisa’s first-person letter to Amy’s mother thus functions, I argue, as a narrative device which brings together the world of the perpetrator with that of the victim. This narrative strategy directly relates to the TRC’s goal of promoting national unity and reconciliation by creating a space where “victims” and “perpetrators” could confront one another and tell their stories. But Mother to Mother goes beyond the ambit of the TRC by also exposing the everyday impacts of the subjugation of apartheid. The author believes that the TRC has not addressed “the root cause” (Orantes 2010, p. 43) 13 behind the oppressions and violations of apartheid, failing the ordinary people who suffered from ordinary traumas such as the consequences of the pass laws, the forced removals, and the consequent disintegration of the African family

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unit, as exemplified in the lives of Mandisa and her son. The epistolary mode is, in fact, confined to occasional excerpts of Mandisa’s letter to Mrs Biehl interspersed throughout the novel; while the core of Mother to Mother consists of Mandisa’s mapping of memories in a diary format which alternates between the week of 25 August 1993—the day of Amy’s murder—and flashbacks to earlier times and episodes in Mandisa’s and Mxolisi’s day-to-day lives. Through the device of the remembering maternal voice, Mandisa is particularly concerned to describe the devastating effects of the forced removals her family and community had been subjected to under the notorious Group Areas Act.14 She also depicts the less visible violence and restrictions that the structures of patriarchy inflicted upon herself, which, combined with the effects of the apartheid laws, are presented as closely contributing to the creation of Mxolisi as a traumatised victim and, later, killer. Without seeking forgiveness for her son without punishment, Mandisa is rather concerned with trying to explain and contextualise her son’s and her own lives in larger narratives. The juxtaposition of a spectacular event of violence—the murder of Amy Biehl—with examples of quotidian and ordinary traumas must be read both as an attempt to emphasise that this type of extraordinary violence could erupt out of the slow accretion of everyday deprivation and as an implicit criticism of the TRC’s narrowness of scope. Magona’s insistence on the suffering and the social effects of the forced removals witnessed first-hand by Mandisa and her family resonates with Mahmood Mamdani’s pointed critique of the TRC’s exclusive focus on bodily violence enacted against the individual, rather than whole communities. This, for him, produced a “diminished truth”, “established through narrow lenses, crafted to reflect the experience of a tiny minority: on the one hand, perpetrators, being state-agents; and, on the other, victims, being political activists” (2001, p.  59). The violence of apartheid, Mamdani goes on to argue, “was aimed less at individuals than at entire communities. And this violence was not simply political. It was not just about defending power but also about dispossessing people of the means of livelihood” (ibid., p. 59). Mother to Mother was published in 1998, after the conviction of Biehl’s killers and coincident with the TRC’s granting of amnesty to all four youths. Thus, the violence still affecting the years of transition and South Africa’s reconciliation project is central to the novel’s concern. In plot terms, it is notable that the author ends the narrative with Mxolisi’s imminent arrest: Mandisa is taken to see her son by those who are giving him a

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hiding place, but it is evident that the young man will not escape his destiny and will be soon captured. The novel thus engages with the issues of justice and culpability, but it does not attempt to offer any conclusive ending, by withholding both the resolution of the legal trial and verdict and the subsequent amnesty hearings. This open-ended status is paralleled by the formal device of the epistolary mode, which deliberately rejects closure. As highlighted by Meg Samuelson, the conversation is left unfinished: “the dialogic address suggested by the neat symmetry of the title—mother to mother—defers closure by reminding us that there is another story to be told beyond the confines of the novel” (2004, p. 139). The absence of Mrs Biehl’s response to Mandisa’s letter interrupts and suspends the dialogue between the mother of the culprit and the mother of the victim. This resistance to closure implied in the maternal act of witnessing situates the novel in contrast to the reconciliation project initiated by the TRC, the main goal of which was to remember the violent past in order to help people reach “closure” and move forward. By withholding Mrs Biehl’s response, Mother to Mother refuses to underwrite the TRC’s narrative of unity and reconciliation, but rather opens up questions as to the real efficacy of the Commission’s work and the meaning of “closure”, thus alluding to the long road that remains to be travelled to achieve real reconciliation in South Africa. The line “Is not the truth the truth?”, uttered by Sir John Falstaff in William Shakespeare’s Henry IV part 1, is the epigraph of Gillian Slovo’s 2000 novel Red Dust, another text that can be included in what Jane Poyner defines as the new genre of work that overtly enters into dialogue with the South African Truth and Reconciliation  Commission (2008, pp.  103–114). The quotation from Shakespeare foregrounds the main topic explored in Red Dust, that is, the question of truth. Interestingly, Cameron H. McNabb observes that the Henry IV plays, and Falstaff particularly, encapsulate the tension between language and meaning, as they “evoke the plurivocity of language in order to show the multiplicity of interpretations” (2016, p. 338), and they also expose how the truth can be made false and vice versa. Adopting the formulaic strategies of detective fiction and court drama, the novel attempts to offer a critical response to the work of the TRC by exposing the complexities and ambiguities underpinning the process of establishing the truth, as well as some of the flaws inherent in the amnesty deal, with particular reference to the showy performance of the perpetrator/amnesty-seeker. In this context, Dorothy Driver underlines that Slovo’s novel proposes “a view in which truth and

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reconciliation are contaminated by power, and where any stability in the concepts of truth and memory is deftly undermined” (2007, p. 108). Set in the mid-1990s, the novel dramatises the encounter between the victim Alex Mpondo, a MK activist15 and now a prominent ANC Member of the Parliament, and the perpetrator, police interrogator Dirk Hendricks, in the context of the TRC’s proceedings. Sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment in 1993 for the death of a detainee called Desmond Ngoepe, Hendricks has applied to the TRC for amnesty, against the advice of his former colleague Peter Muller, once a senior member of the security force. Despite the fact that Hendricks’s sentence only refers to the death of Ngoepe, he has added to his amnesty application the torture of Alex Mpondo, in case relevant evidence emerges during the amnesty process. Hendricks’s amnesty hearing also prompts a search for the truth about the death of Steve Sizela, Mpondo’s comrade who was caught with Mpondo by the security police. Prosecutor, Sarah Barcant, has been called back to South Africa from New  York by her former mentor, Ben Hoffman, to assist Mpondo oppose Hendricks’s amnesty application and bring to light the torture of Steve Sizela. Similarly to Mother to Mother, Red Dust becomes a crucial opportunity to interrogate and extend the key issues unearthed by the historical and social project of the South African Commission. In search of the truth about what happened to Steve Sizela, Red Dust questions the meanings and implications behind the TRC’s categories of victim and perpetrator. During his amnesty hearing, Hendricks reveals an upsetting truth about Mpondo’s breakdown under torture, which forces the man to confront what he had successfully repressed, as he finally comes to realise the possibility of a terrible truth: Steve Sizela did not betray him, but he betrayed Sizela. From this moment of sudden recognition, which comes as an epiphany to Mpondo, the man occupies the double position of “victim” of torture and, at the same time, “perpetrator”, indirectly responsible for his comrade’s death. Slovo is also particularly concerned with describing the ambiguously close relationship between torturer and tortured: “they were bound to each other, these two enemies, Alex Mpondo and Dirk Hendricks” ([2000] 2002, p.  186), “out of the most terrible circumstances he and Alex had forged a link. It was inevitable” (ibid., p. 200). Besides blurring the two roles of victim and perpetrator, the novel even questions the healing power of truth, wondering “had any of them uncovered [the truth]? And if they had—had it made them better? Sometimes, Alex doubted it” (ibid., p. 171). Red Dust is a clear invitation to readers

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to keep the dialogue with the past open and to reflect on the questions of healing and real reconciliation among South Africans. Mother to Mother and Red Dust represent two examples of an extensive production of novels that engage in dialogue with the work of the TRC. However, they become exemplary as to the capacity for the TRC to attract writers’ interest through time and despite their different backgrounds. Sindiwe Magona, for example, grew up in a township near Cape Town, where she worked as a domestic while completing her secondary education by correspondence and raising her three children as a single mother. On the other hand, Gillian Slovo is the daughter of two famous South African political activists deeply involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, Joe Slovo and Ruth First, and she has lived in the United Kingdom since her parents went into exile there from South Africa in the early 1960s.16 The chapters that follow explore the capacities of fiction— novels in particular—for providing the TRC and people’s testimonies a productive afterlife, for challenging definitions of trauma, truth and reconciliation, for inviting readers to keep the dialogue about the past open and to think actively about the strategies adopted in addressing that past and their implications in the present. They explore these capabilities as evidenced in the work of several of the most significant novelists in the post-apartheid period, authors whose work is internationally known and has been critically acclaimed. Furthermore, they draw attention to three very promising, new generation authors, whose interest in questions of truth-telling, healing and reconciliation attests to the value of the TRC as a literary subject in contemporary fiction. The list of texts is by no means exhaustive, but it does convey the idea of how the TRC’s proceedings have profoundly influenced South African literature to the present day.17

1.7   Overview The following chapters are organised thematically, as they examine novels that address questions of trauma, truth-telling and reconciliation, respectively. Each chapter is also structured according to a chronological order, starting with analysis of novels that were published during the life of the Commission and then moving to discuss later publications in order to show how authors have changed their approach to trauma, truth and reconciliation over time. Focusing on the theme of trauma Chap. 2 investigates the limits of the TRC’s definition of and approach to gross human rights violations through close readings of Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit

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(2001), Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003 and 2013-revised edition) and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006). The chapter begins with a discussion on the TRC’s gendered approach to trauma by focusing on the presence (or lack) of women’s voice at the TRC’s victim hearings. Registering some resistance from women to come forward and tell their private stories of suffering before the Commission, the TRC decided to hold special hearings on women in an attempt to elicit more women’s stories. Dangor’s Bitter Fruit directly challenges the TRC’s approach to women’s stories of suffering by placing emphasis on the “unspeakability” of trauma, especially in relation to cases of rape, and it foregrounds silence as a valid alternative to the articulation of such a private pain in the public context of the TRC’s hearings. The chapter then moves to consider the TRC’s definition of “victim of gross human rights violations”, which was primarily based on single-event bodily violations. The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995, states that gross violations of human rights include “(a) the killing, abduction, torture or severe ill treatment of any person; or (b) any attempt, conspiracy, incitement, instigation, command or procurement to commit an act referred to in paragraph (a)” (“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report”, Vol. 4, Ch. 10, Para. 17). Laura Brown argues that a bodily approach to trauma tends to overlook “the normative, quotidian aspects of trauma in the lives of many oppressed and disempowered persons” (2008, p. 18). Stef Craps also underlines that the very concept of trauma, which is used to describe responses to extreme events across space and time, is a Western artefact18 and fails to address properly the specificities of trauma that have occurred in Non-Western settings. He thus calls for alternative conceptualisations of trauma that need to be more attuned to (post)colonial conditions and to encompass notions of race and racism (2013, p. 4). The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Playing in the Light, which were published some years after the completion of the mandate of the Human Rights Violations Committee (1998), extend Dangor’s discussion of trauma by engaging with the social implications inherent in categories such as gender and race. In particular, Ndebele returns to the subject of ordinary trauma, which, as we have seen, had also been addressed by Magona’s Mother to Mother. This time, however, the author engages with the issue of the ordinary from an exclusive female perspective, as he mainly investigates the impact of apartheid policies on the life of a group of ordinary women. Wicomb, on the other hand, draws attention to the category

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of race by exploring the complexities inherent in coloured identity, as well as exposing the difficulties of articulating or making coloured voices heard in post-apartheid South Africa. Where Dangor explores the problems and implications of articulating (female) trauma in a private versus public context, an issue that had already been addressed, albeit inadequately, by the TRC, Ndebele and Wicomb reshape and expand the definition of trauma in order to comprise the quotidian, ordinary oppressions and humiliations that non-white South Africans suffered during the colonial and apartheid eras but that were overlooked by the mandate of the Commission. Chapter 3 examines the theme of truth and, specifically, the possibilities and limits of truth-telling. Held under the banner “truth: the road to reconciliation”, the TRC’s hearings were founded on the fundamental assumption that telling the truth about past traumas could heal and promote reconciliation among the people of South Africa. Unpacking the concept of truth and interrogating the extent to which it is recoverable thus become necessary to understand fully the TRC’s reconciliation project. Despite distinguishing four notions of truth—namely, factual or forensic truth, personal or narrative truth, social or “dialogue” truth, and healing and restorative truth—the TRC failed to acknowledge properly the existence of many other multi-layered truths resulting from the interpretation, transcription and re-telling processes that characterised the TRC’s narrative machine. The chapter, in fact, begins with exploring the following questions: can we uncover the whole truth? If yes, who is entitled to truth-telling? Who owns the truth? Can stories of trauma be articulated by someone other than the person who experienced them? Do translation, interpretation and transcription affect the veracity of those stories? Can truth really lead to healing and reconciliation? Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun (1998) shows the inadequacy of the TRC’s categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” as tools to determine the truth. Through depiction of a “hybrid” character, Gordimer blurs the boundary between victim and perpetrator, right and wrong, good and evil, challenging the possibility for narrative to capture easily the whole truth. I continue my discussion with analysis of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004, translated in English in 2006) and Patrick Flanery’s debut novel Absolution (2012), which, I argue, extend their explorations of the notion of truth to a more formal dimension. Gordimer’s narrative employs indirect discourse, multiple focalisers and the avoidance of quotation marks, which aim to call into question the process of communication; however, the act of truth-telling is primarily challenged by the representation of a

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victim-perpetrator figure, Duncan, a technique that we have already seen in Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust. On the other hand, both Agaat and Absolution question the validity of narrative projects that purport to present a singular truth. They deploy highly experimental narratives, or more precisely, a highly experimental combination of narratives which intersect each other and provide different versions of the same event(s). In Chap. 4, I turn to consider the concept of reconciliation. Compared to those of trauma and truth, the concept of reconciliation seems to be more challenging to grasp for its dynamic, multi-dimensional nature. The complexity of this notion is, in fact, evidenced by the TRC’s incapacity to provide a clear definition of the term during the life of its work. Differently from the previous chapters, I choose not to start my discussion with a theoretical approach to the concept into focus, but, in an attempt to trace a trajectory of the ways in which the conditions and implications of reconciliation may vary according to historical, political and economic circumstances, I begin my analysis with J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). Though there is already a large body of work dealing with Disgrace, this book must address Coetzee’s novel precisely for the critical attention it has received and for its evident relationship to issues of truth and reconciliation. Concerned with representing manifestations of white guilt and desire for atonement, Coetzee exposes the lingering sentiment of racial hatred between white and non-white South Africans in the post-apartheid era, which is still painfully intertwined with gender issues and violence against women. Questions of confession and forgiveness, atonement and reconciliation invite readers to reflect on racial relationships between white and non-white South Africans in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as on the meaning of public-versus-private acts of forgiveness and reconciliation. The chapter then moves to address the phenomena of gender violence and xenophobia through analysis of Thando Mgqolozana’s Un-importance (2014), Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2016) and Marli Roode’s Call It Dog (2013). I draw attention to how contemporary South African fiction is engaged with the notion of reconciliation and the different meanings this notion has acquired in the post-TRC era. If Disgrace dramatises examples of racial hatred and of gender violence primarily as a problem between white and non-white South Africans, these three contemporary novels present other factors that undermine South Africa’s reconciliation project. On the one hand, Period Pain and Call It Dog address the rise of ethnic violence against black African immigrants; on the other, they also show, alongside Un-importance, how the phenomenon of gender violence can assume different forms, which go beyond the historical counterpoint of

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coloniser and colonised. My analysis also engages with the work of scholars such as Paul Gready and Audrey Chapman, who draw attention to the TRC’s incapacities to address reconciliation from an economic viewpoint, thus causing a general sentiment of disappointment in the new government’s broken promises of equality and democracy, which explains in part the high rates of xenophobic attacks in the 2000s and 2010s. I conclude the chapter by discussing how the open-ended narratives, which characterise all the novels analysed in this book, present an image of the country as still waiting for closure and still plagued by inequality, poverty, violence and racial hatred. The conclusion braids together the literary responses to the work of the South African TRC that are presented throughout the book. By comparing the ways in which the selected novels have engaged with the TRC’s definitions of trauma, truth and reconciliation, I show the novel’s particular capacity for investigating the strategies adopted to address South Africa’s past and present challenges. Through a selection of novels that were published during the life of the Commission and many years after the completion of its mandate, I demonstrate the consistent impact of the TRC on the South African literary landscape, as well as highlighting how the authors’ responses to the Commission’s work and key concepts have changed over time.

Notes 1. Although it did not use the name “truth and reconciliation commission”, the first truth commission occurred in Uganda in 1974 and was known as the Truth Commission: Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearances of People in Uganda to investigate and report on disappearances in the first years of the Amin government from 25 January 1971 until 1974. The early truth commissions established in Latin America are, however, more famous and widely discussed. In 1983, Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons was created by President of Argentina Raúl Alfonsín. It issued the Nunca Más (Never Again) report, which documented human rights violations under the military dictatorship known as the National Reorganization Process. In Chile, shortly after the country’s return to democracy, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in April 1990 to investigate human rights abuses resulting in death or disappearance that occurred in Chile during the years of military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet, which began on 11 September 1973 and ended on 11 March 1990. It was the first commission to use the name

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“truth and reconciliation commission” and most truth commissions since then have used a variation on the title. Other early commissions were established in diverse locations including Nepal (1990), El Salvador (1992), Guatemala (1994) and South Africa (1995). Paul Gready observes that, in the aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, truth commissions “have gone global”: one estimate, in fact, suggests that by mid-2004, thirty-five truth commissions had been established worldwide (2011, p. 4). 2. In connection with the life of the TRC, the year 1995 refers to the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995, which authorised the establishment of the Commission. As explained later, the victim hearings as well as the work of the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee lasted from 1996 to 1998; the year 1998 also coincides with the delivery of the first part of the TRC’s final report. The Amnesty Committee completed its mandate in 2001, delivering the last two volumes of the final report in 2003. 3. See, for example, Boraine (2000), Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd (2000), Richard Wilson (2001) and Ross (2003). More recent studies include Chapman and van der Merwe (2008), Verdoolaege (2008), Gready (2011) and Swart and van Marle (2017). 4. In particular, Graham adopts literature as a line of enquiry into South Africa’s process of memorialisation and preservation of the traumatic past, and its re-organisation of the social space after apartheid. He focuses on literary or dramatic texts that either explicitly address the TRC as content or that “have taken full advantage of the new narrative and dramatic possibilities generated in part by the Commission’s processes” (2009, p. 5). 5. See, for example, Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (2000). 6. See Colvin (2006) for a full account of the reparations policy. 7. In this connection, see, for example, Boehmer, Gunner and Maake (1995), Nixon (1997), Attwell and Harlow (2000) and Barnard and Farred (2004). 8. It is interesting to note that for the first six months of the TRC, as Herzberg started to write The Dead Wait, the Commission had heard only from victims; however, in October 1996, the TRC started to accept amnesty applications from apartheid’s perpetrators as well. 9. The play’s indebtedness to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi is acknowledged by Taylor in her writer’s note in the hardcopy of the play (1998, pp. ii–vii). 10. Examples of such characters abound in the literature of late- and post-­ apartheid years, appearing, for example, in works by J.  M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. Although set before the official demise of the apartheid regime, Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990) perfectly exemplifies this type of ­narrative, where the encounter with the Other “awakens” the privileged white and becomes an opportunity to foster healing.

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11. De Kok’s sequence about the TRC consists of twelve poems. For further analysis, see Sharp (2018). All poems by Ingrid de Kok are here cited from her collection Terrestrial Things (2002). 12. Magona is emphatic that Mother to Mother is a novel, a work of fiction, since she did not interview either of the two families involved in the crime. Indeed, although four youths were convicted for the murder of Amy Biehl, Magona makes only one youth responsible for the killing, here fictionalised as Mandisa’s eldest son Mxolisi. 13. See also Magona’s interview in Attwell, Harlow and J. Attwell (2000). In this interview, Magona asserts that “the African government was waging a war against African families” (p. 285) forcing fathers to leave the household and search for better job opportunities, while mothers and children had to stay behind in the village. In some instances, because wages were so low, or when men deserted the family, women were compelled to go to work and leave the children alone. The absence of one or both parental figures to raise the children was a common feature of African families during apartheid and this painful situation of leaving the children without care forms the emotional core of Mother to Mother. 14. The Group Areas Act of 1950 was the title of three acts enacted under apartheid. These acts assigned racial groups to different residential and business sections in urban areas, causing many non-white people both to have a long-distance commute to go to work and to be forcibly removed from their homes and allocate in specific zones. 15. MK is the abbreviation for uMkhonto we Sizwe, which was the armed wing of the African National Congress. 16. In this connection, see Magona’s autobiography To My Children’s Children (1990) and Slovo’s memoir Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (1997). 17. Further books that engage either directly or indirectly with the work of the TRC and its legacies include: Jann Turner’s Southern Cross (2002), which tackles the issue of betrayal on both sides of the political spectrum and related questions of truth-telling, confession and accountability; Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000) and its investigations of the problems of narrativising the coloured voice; Tony Eprile’s The Persistence of Memory (2004) which explores the question of a wider white complicity in apartheid’s crimes, a question that was inadequately addressed by the TRC; Zakes Mda’s Rachel’s Blue (2014) and its scrutiny of themes such as truth, loss, rape, healing and justice, among others. 18. Rebecca Saunders, in fact, observes that “while trauma theory has primarily been produced in Europe and the United States, trauma itself has, with equal if not greater regularity and urgency, been experienced elsewhere” (2007, p. 15). In connection with Western trauma theory, please refer to

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the work of Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman (1992), Cathy Caruth (1996) and Dominick LaCapra (2001).

Bibliography Attree, Lizzy. “Healing with Words: Phaswane Mpe Interviewed by Lizzy Attree”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.3 (2005): 139–148. Attwell, David and Barbara Harlow. “Introduction: South African Fiction after Apartheid”. MFS 46.1 (2000): 1–12. Attwell, David, Barbara Harlow, and Joan Attwell. “Interview with Sindiwe Magona”. MFS 46.1 (2000): 282–295. Barnard, Rita and Grant Farred, eds. After the Thrill is Gone: The First Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa. Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 103.4 (2004). Boehmer, Elleke, Liz Gunner and Nhlanhla Maake, eds. New Representations out of Neglected Spaces: Changing Paradigms in South African Writing. Special Issue of Journal of Southern African Studies 21.4 (1995): 557–560. Boraine, Alex. A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa, 2000. Brink, André. “Stories of History: Reimagining the Past in Postapartheid Narrative”. In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, 29–42. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998. Brown, Laura S. Cultural Competence in Trauma Therapy: Beyond the Flashback. Washington: American Psychological Association, 2008. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chapman, Audrey R. and Hugo van der Merwe, eds., Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver?. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace (1999). 2nd Edition. London: Vintage, 2000. Coetzee, J. M.. Age of Iron (1990). London: Penguin, 1998. Colvin, Christopher J. “Overview of the Reparations Program in South Africa”. In The handbook of Reparations, edited by Pablo de Greiff, 177–235. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cook, Meira. “Metaphors of Suffering: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull”, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 34.3 (2001): 73–89. Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing. Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit (2001). 2nd Edition. London: Atlantic Books, 2004.

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Davis, Geoffrey. “Addressing the Silences of the Past: Truth and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid Theatre”. South African Theatre Journal 13.1 (1999): 59–72. De Kok, Ingrid. “Whole Words, Whole Worlds?”. Wasafiri 32.2 (2016): 5–11. De Kok, Ingrid. Terrestrial Things. South Africa: Kwela Books, 2002. Driver, Dorothy. “Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust (2000)”. Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 12.2 (2007): 107–122. Eprile, Tony. The Persistence of Memory. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Flanery, Patrick. Absolution. London: Atlantic Books, 2012. Foot-Newton, Laura. Reach (2009). In At This Stage: Plays from Post-apartheid South Africa, edited by Greg Homann. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2009. Gevisser, Mark. “Setting the stage for a journey into SA’s heart of darkness”. Review of The story I am about to tell by The Khulumani Support Group, and Ubu and the Truth Commission, by Jane Taylor, William Kentridge, and the Handspring Puppet Company. Sunday Independent (Johannesburg, South Africa), 10 August 1997. Gordimer, Nadine. The House Gun (1998). New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Gordimer, Nadine and Susan Sontag. “Writers and Politics”. In Voices: Writers and Politics, edited by Bill Bourne, Udi Eichler and David Herman, 25–39. Nottingham: Spokesman, 1987. Graham, Shane. South African Literature After the Truth Commission: Mapping the Loss. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Graham, Shane. “The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa”. Research in African Literatures 34.1 (2003): 11–30. Gready, Paul. The Era of Transitional Justice. The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond. New  York: Routledge, 2011. Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. Why Deliberative Democracy?. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Hayner, Priscilla B. Unspeakable Truths; Confronting State Terror and Atrocities: How Truth Commissions Around the World Are Challenging the Past and Shaping the Future. New York: Routledge, 2001. Herzberg, Paul. The Dead Wait (1997). London: Oberon Books, 2002. Highman, Kate. “Forging a New South Africa: Plagiarism, Ventriloquism and the ‘Black Voice’ in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull”, Journal of Southern African Studies 41.1 (2015): 187–206. Hutchison, Yvette. South African Performance and Archive of Memory. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. Jarry, Alfred. Ubu Roi (1896). New York: Dover Publications, 2003.

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Kani, John. Nothing But the Truth. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002. Krog, Antjie. “Fact Bordering Fiction and the Honesty of “I.”’ River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 8.2 (2007): 34–43. Krog, Antjie “Last Time, This Time”. LitNet. March 20, 2006. Accessed January 31, 2020. https://oulitnet.co.za/seminarroom/krog_krog2.asp Krog, Antjie Country of My Skull (1998). London: Vintage Books, 1999. Citations refer to the 1999 edition. LaCapra, Dominik. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: JHU, 2001. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity (1961). Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother (1998). 2nd Edition. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2013. Citations refer to the 2013 edition. Magona, Sindiwe To My Children’s Children. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1990. Mamdani, Mahmood. “A Diminished Truth”. In After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, edited by Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver, 58–61. Athens and Cape Town: Ohio University Press and David Philip, 2001. Matlwa, Kopano. Evening Primrose (Period Pain, 2016). London: Sceptre, 2017. McNabb, Cameron Hunt. “Shakespeare’s Semiotics and the Problem of Falstaff.” Studies in Philology 113.2 (2016): 337–357. Mda, Zakes. “Introduction”. In Nothing But the Truth, by John Kani, v-ix. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002. Mda, Zakes. Rachel’s Blue. Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2014. Mgqolozana, Thando. Un-importance. Sunnyside: Jacana, 2014. Ndebele, Njabulo. The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003). Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2004. Ndebele, Njabulo. “Memory, Metaphor, and the Triumph of Narrative”. In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, 19–28. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998. Nixon, Rob. “Aftermaths”, Transition 72 (1997): 64–77. Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2009. Orantes, Karen. “The Magic of Writing: an interview with Sindiwe Magona”. In Trauma, Memory and Narrative in South Africa, edited by Ewald Mengel Borzaga and Karin Orantes, 31–48. Amsterdam and New  York: Editions Rodopi, 2010. Poyner, Jane. “Rerouting Commitment in the Postapartheid Canon: TRC Narratives and The Problem of Truth”. In Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina Șandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 182–193. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Poyner, Jane. “Writing Under Pressure: A post-apartheid canon?” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44.2 (2008): 103–114. “Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, 1995 [No. 34 of 1995].” Accessed January 30, 2020. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/rsa/ act95_034.htm. Rancièrre, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, edited by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Roode, Marli. Call It Dog. London: Atlantic Books, 2013. Ross, Fiona. Bearing Witness. Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Rotberg, Robert I., and Dennis Thompson, eds. Truth v. Justice. The Morality of Truth Commissions. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. Samuelson, Meg. “The Mother as Witness: Reading Mother to Mother Alongside South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission”. In Sindiwe Magona. The First Decade, edited by Siphokazi Koyana, 127–144. Scottsville: the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2004. Sanders, Mark. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Saunders, Rebecca. Lamentations and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Sharp, Michael. “Ingrid de Kok’s ‘A Room Full of Questions’ and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission”. In Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, edited by Kenneth Kalu and Toyin Falola, 125–143. African Histories and Modernities series. Cham: Springer Nature, 2018. Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. (1997). London: Hachette Digital, 2009. Slovo, Gillian. Red Dust (2000). New York and London: Norton, 2002. Citations refer to the 2002 edition. Swart, Mia and Karin van Marle, eds. The Limits of Transition: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 20 Years On. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: Cape Town University Press, 1998. The Story I am About to Tell. Performance that premiered at the Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg in 1997. “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report.” Accessed January 30, 2020. http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/index.htm Turner, Jann. Southern Cross. London: Orion Books, 2002. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness (1999). Reprint. London: Rider Books, 2000.

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Van der Vlies, Andrew. Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Van Graan, Mike. Some Mothers’ Sons (2005). In At This Stage: Plays from Post-­ apartheid South Africa, edited by Greg Homann. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2009. Van Graan, Mike. Dinner Talk (1996). Unpublished. Van Niekerk, Marlene. Agaat (2004). Translated by Michiel Heyns. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2006. Verdoolaege, Annelies. Reconciliation Discourse: the case of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008. Villa-Vicencio, Charles, and Wilhelm Verwoerd, eds. Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. London: Zed Books, 2000. Whitehead, Anne. “Reading with empathy: Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother”. Feminist Theory 13.2 (2012): 181–195. Wilkinson, Jane. “‘Scorching a New Skin’: Making Poetry and Refiguring Language in Work by Ingrid de Kok and Antjie Krog”. Step Across This Line: Come si interroga il testo postcoloniale: Proceedings of the 3rd AISLI Conference in Rome 2003, 117–126. Venice: Cafoscarina, 2004. Wilson, Richard. The politics of truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the post-apartheid state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wicomb, Zoë. Playing in the Light. New York: The New Press, 2006. Wicomb, Zoë. David’s Story (2000). New York: The Feminist Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 2

Trauma: Conflictual Interplay Between Voice and Silence

2.1   Women’s Voices and the TRC’s Hearings Ingrid de Kok’s powerful words from her poem “Parts of Speech” (2002) are acutely relevant to the articulation of sexual violence against women within the context of the TRC’s proceedings. Following the brief account of the establishment of the Commission and of its main features as discussed in the previous chapter, I now turn to consider the key concept of trauma and, especially, the TRC’s gendered approach to it. Clearly, it is no coincidence that the question “Does Truth have a Gender?” was at the centre of a debate initiated at a meeting organised by a feminist lawyer, Ilse Olckers, in an organisation called Lawyers for Human Rights in Cape Town in December 1995, after the setting up of the TRC. Gender activists were particularly concerned that a gender-neutral approach by the Commission would miss “the specificity of how apartheid structured identities not simply along the fault lines of race, but also along those of gender” (Meintjes 2009, p.  102). The issue of the gendered nature of the experience of human rights violations during apartheid was also foregrounded in a workshop entitled “Gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” hosted by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) Gender Research Group at the University of Witwatersrand in March 1996, as the Commission commenced its hearings. The workshop resulted in an in-depth and formal submission to the TRC (the CALS’s submission) that discussed the ways in which the Commission should address the gendered dimension of apartheid to understand how differently women © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mussi, Literary Legacies of the South African TRC, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43055-9_2

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and men experienced life under the regime, including also the different impact of gross human rights abuses on them. Although the term “gender” comprises both men and women, the submission’s main focus was on women in the belief that their voices, in particular, often went unheard. Observing a line of continuity between patriarchal subordination and the oppression of women under the conditions of the apartheid regime, they highlighted how critical the intersections between gender, race, ethnicity, class and religion were to understand South Africa’s past. The submission discussed extensively how the conditions experienced by South African women were also deeply affected by patriarchy: Patriarchy refers to the social, political and economic system which provides men with unequal power and authority in relation to women in society. Patriarchy existed in pre-colonial societies, and interacted with colonialism to create specific forms of gender subordination in South Africa. Interlaced with the racial and class development of our country, patriarchy has wound its bonds around South African women. As with other forms of social and political control, dominance of women has often been enforced by violence. While apartheid defined blacks as secondary political and civil subjects, women were given an even further diminished social and legal status through both the customary and the common law and other social mechanisms. It is this social imbalance which has enabled men to devalue women and which can be linked to the prevalence of abusive and oppressive treatment of women and girls in our society. (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1996, point B)

The different kinds of oppression and abuses experienced by women and men were also reflected in two distinctive patterns in testimonial practices, which emerged from the very beginning of the public hearings and continued throughout the work of the Commission, as pointed out by Fiona Ross in her study on women’s testimonies: The first was that although approximately equal in proportions of men and women made statements, for the most part women described the suffering of the men whereas the men testified about their own experiences of violation. The second was that women who had been active in opposing the Apartheid State seldom gave public testimony. (2003, p. 17)

Ross also observes that, as a result of those patterns, women were frequently regarded as “secondary witnesses” by the media and the TRC commissioners themselves. Thus, both concerned by the relative lack of women’s voices

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as direct victims of apartheid brutalities and prompted by the CALS’s submission, the TRC called two public meetings in which it was considered how the Commission could better solicit women’s statements about their experiences of suffering, particularly those related to sexual abuse. The discussion led to the Commission’s decision to hold “special hearings on women”, which took place in Cape Town (8 August 1996), Durban (24 October 1996) and Johannesburg (29 July 1997). As well as further training statement-takers “to question victims sensitively” (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1996, point G), and including specific questions about sexual abuse so as to secure more testimonies about violations suffered by women, the Commission even modified the human rights violations protocol by adding a cautionary note: IMPORTANT: Some women testify about violations of human rights that happened to family members or friends, but they have also suffered abuses. Don’t forget to tell us what happened to you yourself if you were the victim of a gross human rights abuse. (“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report”, Vol. 4, Ch. 10, Para. 5)

As became evident from the special hearings, women did experience human rights violations, and they were interrogated and detained in jail, as well as men. In the testimonies of many women activists, in fact, detention becomes “a space of ugly intimacy, a zone where particular violence and its resultant pain challenged women’s identities and senses of self” (Ross 2003, p. 59). In Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog quotes Thenjiwe Mthintso, chairperson of the Gender Commission, in her opening speech at the special hearings on women held by the TRC in Gauteng, where she emphasised the psychological violence, humiliations and indignities undergone by women in interrogation rooms and cells: Behind every woman’s encounter with the Security Branch and the police lurked the possibility of sexual abuse and rape. […] When they interrogated, they usually started by reducing your role as an activist. They weighed you according to their own concepts of womanhood. […] And they said you are in custody because you are not the right kind of woman—you are irresponsible, you are a whore, you are fat and ugly, or single and you are looking for a man. ([1998] 1999, p. 272)

These testimonies suggest that the violence perpetrated against women operated at both the physical and the psychological levels, aiming to

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destroy their sense of womanhood. Ms Yvonne Khutwane’s testimony about her period in detention is a useful example in this regard: she was one of the few women activists to bear witness before the Commission, and the only woman activist in Zwelethemba to testify in a public hearing of the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC) (24 June 1996). Moreover, she was the first woman to include a description of sexual abuse in her public testimony, a matter of considerable significance for the Commission and gender activists, given the reticence shown by many other women in sharing publicly their stories of sexual harm. The resonance of Ms Khutwane’s testimony is evident in the telling and reinterpreting of her story in media reports and academic studies, and its repeated citation in the Commission’s final report (Vol. 3, Ch. 5, Para. 217; twice in Vol. 4, Ch. 10, Para. 62 and Para. 81; and Vol. 5, Ch. 9, Para. 10–11). Analysis of her testimony transcript reveals how the narration of sexual abuse has been elicited by Ms Khutwane’s questioner, thus foregrounding the Commission’s primary interest in bodily violations.1 Ms Khutwane begins her testimony warning the Commission that her memory for dates is failing; she then carries on to describe a political meeting held at the community hall in Zwelethemba after returning from the funeral of the “Cradock Four” in Cradock 1985. At this point, Ms Gobodo-Madikizela—a psychologist and the HRVC member appointed to assist Ms Khutwane in her testimony—interrupts the witness and asks “Are you trying to clarify how do you get involved into politics? [sic]”. Ms Gobodo-Madikizela’s first intervention is very significant because it anticipates a pattern which characterises the woman’s whole testimony; indeed, Ms Khutwane’s detailed description of her interrogation and subsequent arrest in 1985 is punctuated by prompting questions from Ms Gobodo-­ Madikizela, whose aim seems to be to tease as much detail as possible out of the witness. After being hit in the face and verbally abused by a white policeman, who “could be as old as one of my children”, Ms Khutwane was pushed into a “yellow” police van and driven to her place where policemen were searching for weapons and the evidence for the making of petrol bombs, which could have connected the woman with the burning of the municipal bar in Zwelethemba in June 1985: MS GOBODO-MADIKIZELA: Excuse me mamma—can you please tell me what did they do to you? MS KHUTWANE

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I can just explain that they were just searching at this period and they were going at the backyard and searching the premises and they were tearing the ceiling down. […] MS GOBODO-MADIKIZELA: What were they doing to do as you are here? (sic) MS KHUTWANE […] they came to take me out of the hippo. One of them said to me can I see what I have put myself in, and then they asked me when did I last sleep with a man. I was so embarrassed by this question. And I felt so humiliated—I informed them that I have nobody—I didn’t have a partner and then they asked me with whom am I staying. I informed them that I was with my family. The other question that they asked me is how do I feel when they—when I am having intercourse with a man. This was too much for me because they were repeating it time and again, asking me the same question, asking me what do I like with the intercourse do I like the size of the penis or what do I enjoy most. So the other one was just putting his hand inside me through the vagina, I was crying because I was afraid that we have heard that the soldiers are very notorious of raping people. This one continued putting his say finger right through me, he kept on penetrating and I was asking for forgiveness and I was asking them what have I done, I am old enough to be your mother.

This extract is meaningful at two different levels. First, it clearly exemplifies how the humiliation and sexual harassment experienced by women at the hands of police officers included not only physical violence but also acts of verbal injury, psychological torture and threat of rape. The woman’s body is transformed into an object and a source of constant humiliation, a site of the visible enactment of political and patriarchal power, an instrument to undermine women’s identities. Secondly, it exposes the TRC’s strategy—embodied, in this case, by Ms Gobodo-Madikizela—to solicit Ms Khutwane’s story of sexual abuse. Ms Gobodo-Madikizela, in fact, had to prompt the witness to address the incident of violation twice: “Excuse me mamma—can you please tell me what did they do to you?”, “What were they doing to do as you are here?” Fiona Ross places particular emphasis on the importance of Ms Gobodo-Madikizela’s interventions in view of the fact that Ms Khutwane had not included the story of her sexual harassment as she told it before the Commission in her prior written statement, where Ms Khutwane had described her arrest and torture, and that she was threatened with rape, but had entirely omitted the sexual abuse (2003, p. 88).

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As Ms Khutwane continues her testimony, it emerges that she suffered from many other violations while being interrogated and detained by the police: she was threatened, verbally insulted, humiliated, hit on the face, beaten with the butt of a gun, suffocated with a towel, sexually harassed, her house was also burnt down and one of her sons died of an epileptic attack. Furthermore, she describes her feelings of alienation from her own community following the suspicion of being a sell-out and police informer. It is remarkable that none of the four quotations in the TRC’s final report concerning Ms Khutwane’s testimony makes reference to the arson, her child’s death and her being ostracised by her own peers, but they focus instead on the sexual abuse which she had not even mentioned in the written statement prior to the public hearing. Similarly to the Commission’s attitude, the press reports that followed Ms Khutwane’s public hearing paid very close attention to the sexual violation as if it was the primary event of harm and overlooked all the other harms that the woman endured. Ross pointedly observes that “none of the reports showed how the testimony had been constructed, drawn from her through persistent questions and repetitions”, but, rather, “the event of sexual molestation was presented as though she had intended to speak of it all along and had done so without prompting” (ibid., p. 91).2 Ms Khutwane’s testimony becomes a perfect case study which shows how a narrative can be constructed through questions and repetitions, aiming to place emphasis on one particular aspect—sexual abuse in this case—over others. Ms Khutwane’s testimony also raises important questions as to the definition of human rights violations proposed by the Commission. The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act states that: “gross violations of human rights” means the violation of human rights through (a) the killing, abduction, torture or severe ill treatment of any person; or (b) any attempt, conspiracy, incitement, instigation, command or procurement to commit an act referred to in paragraph (a). (“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report”, Vol. 4, Ch. 10, Para. 17)

The following violations were also considered to fall into the category of severe ill-treatment: rape, sexual assault or harassment; solitary confinement; physical beating resulting in serious injuries; burnings; injury by poisoning, drugs or other chemicals; mutilation; detention without charge or trial; banning or banishment; deliberate withholding of food and water to someone in custody with deliberate disregard to the victim’s health or

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well-being; deliberate failure to provide medical attention to ill or injured persons in custody; and the destruction of a person’s house through arson or other attacks which made it impossible for the person to live there again. The report adds a restrictive clause, however, according to which “while the above acts and omissions would normally qualify as severe ill treatment, individual cases may not, in fact, have met all the criteria of the definition above and thus may not have qualified as severe ill treatment” (ibid.,  Vol. 1, Ch. 4, Para. 120). In other words, in order to qualify as severe ill-treatment, other factors were to be taken into account, such as the duration of the suffering, the physical or mental consequences, and the age, the strength and the state of health of the victim. Interestingly, one could also argue that the TRC’s project was philosophically and theoretically indebted to the work of Western trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, among others. The Commission’s assumption that telling the truth about past traumas could heal and promote reconciliation among the people of South Africa is closely reminiscent of Caruth’s argument that “the history of trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another” (1996, p. 11). This notion that trauma can only be understood when it is enunciated and, more significantly, when it is heard by another is also suggested by the work of Felman and Laub (1992): they, in fact, emphasise the importance for the victim of articulating the traumatic experience as unheard testimony inhibits healing and traps the survivor in a painful repetition of the event. Within this context, I believe that Rebecca Saunders makes a convincing point when arguing that “while trauma theory has primarily been produced in Europe and the United States, trauma itself has, with equal if not greater regularity and urgency, been experienced elsewhere” (2007, p. 15). This is particularly relevant to the type of traumas that occur in a postcolonial, racially biased reality such as that of South Africa, and it thereby becomes necessary to wonder whether the tools of Western trauma theory are adequate to address such a condition. In alignment with this European-American approach, the TRC’s definition of human rights abuses has strong resonance with the description provided by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association of PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder):

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The person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which […] the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others. (Craps 2013, p. 24)

Focusing the attention on bodily violations, one would expect that the TRC had properly addressed the dimension of gender (and of race, as I shall investigate later in the chapter), as this category is socially attributed to the body. The social constructions of that attribution are, however, completely overlooked by the Commission, as evidenced by the exclusion of everyday violence that permeated the lives of many millions of South Africans from the TRC’s definition of trauma. Concerning this, the CALS’s submission proposed: the words “severe ill-treatment” should be interpreted to include a wide range of abuses which took place under apartheid. Detention without trial itself is severe ill-treatment. Imprisonment for treason against an unjust system is severe ill-treatment. Forced removals, pass arrests, confiscation of land, breaking up of families and even forcing people to undergo racially formulated education are all forms of severe ill-treatment. (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1996, point D)

In their testimonies, women—who constituted over half of all deponents—described the absence of men, the disintegration of the family unit because of the pass laws, the silences and secrets that anti-apartheid activism brought, the Group Areas Act which forced non-white people to move to their designated group areas in the townships, and all the effects of the apartheid policy of separated development. These testimonies thus suggest how women were more likely to suffer from such “ordinary” violations, as they were required to stay in the villages to take care of the children and the house, while their husbands had to go to the city to find work to support their families financially. These kinds of abuses were the combined result of apartheid oppression and patriarchal subordination, and they did not fall into the Commission’s definition of gross human rights violations, thus demonstrating the TRC’s failure to properly address the gendered dimension of trauma. In this regard, Mark Sanders observes that another common pattern in women’s testimonies was for them to petition for funeral rites for the dead and disappeared among their loved ones—the requests made before the

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Commission for bodies and body parts, for information about the site of burial of a relative, or for exhumation and proper reburial.3 Although its initial mandate did not classify the abuse of corpses as a gross violation of human rights, the Commission was then led to perform exhumations, which, I suggest, further confirms the TRC’s primary interest in the “body”. On the other hand, despite the CALS’s proposal to extend the definition of gross human rights violations, the ordinariness of apartheid oppression and separate development that I mention above remained located outside the Commission’s radar, and it could only emerge as corollary stories in witnesses’ accounts of bodily violations. As we have seen through analysis of Ms Khutwane’s testimony, the way in which her testimony was conducted by the questioner Ms Gobodo-Madikizela, as well as its retellings in the final report and in media articles, perfectly exemplifies the Commission’s interest in placing emphasis on bodily violations and sexual harm, instead of paying attention to other abuses, such as the loss of a child and her being ostracised by her own community. Mark Libin claims that the mandate of the TRC answers affirmatively to Spivak’s postcolonial question, “Can the subaltern speak?”4 By providing a forum in which victims—mostly non-white South  African people who had been silenced for so long—could relate the stories of their oppression, the Commission did try to afford the marginalised an opportunity where he/she could speak. Although conceived with this idea of allowing the “subaltern” of South Africa to speak, many voices went unheard, especially those of women as primary victims—as I have specified above, over half of the deponents at the TRC’s public hearings were women, but their accounts focused more on the traumas of their loved ones rather than on their owns. This can be explained by two main reasons. First, many women who had suffered from abuses that qualified as gross human rights violations, especially those related to sexual harm, chose not to testify before the Commission, because they were reluctant to share their pain in public and possibly afraid of suffering from another incursion of the state, even if its intentions were benevolent.5 In this connection, Annalisa Oboe observes that at the special hearings on women their testimonies tended to “surface as fragmentary and resistant to language” (2007, p. 66). Echoing Adrienne Rich’s evocative words in “Cartographies of Silence”, where the poet powerfully claims that silence “is a presence / it has a history a form” (1978, pp. 17–18), Oboe points out that women’s silence “may hide profound psychological truths about the storytellers, and can provide meaningful insights into the

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formation of gendered cultural identities”, thus leading one to wonder “whether this insistence on the need to open up, to speak openly, to break the silence, to lift the veil of silence”, as promoted by the TRC, “is not a new violence on women, whose reluctance to tell may stem from subcultural codes of gender behavior that should be acknowledged and respected” (2007, p. 68). My subsequent analysis of Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit shows how literature responds to women’s reluctance to articulate trauma in words in a public context. The novel seems to engage directly with Libin’s reformulation of Spivak’s question about the subaltern’s voice: “can the subaltern be heard?” To put it in other words, did the Commission provide a safe space where victims could speak, particularly when it came to sexual abuse suffered by women? Dangor shows his scepticism in the TRC’s approach to female trauma and proposes silence as a private act of resistance to the Commission’s historical project of collective narrative. Alternatively, Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela—which I discuss after exploring Dangor’s text—addresses the second reason why many women’s stories went unheard at the TRC’s public hearings. Drawing attention to ordinary examples of trauma which were excluded from the Commission’s strict definition of gross human rights violations, the author attempts to give voice to “some stories” that, rephrasing de Kok’s words in “Parts of Speech”, “could not be told” otherwise. As we will see, Ndebele’s narrative operation is twofold: on the one hand, he explores how the combined impact of apartheid oppression and patriarchal subordination affected the lives of four “ordinary” black, South African women; on the other, he tries to “deconstruct” the iconic public image of Winnie MadikizelaMandela by showing how Winnie also suffered from the ordinary humiliations and oppressions of the apartheid regime, a version of her story that did not emerge from the Mandela United Football Club’s nine-day public hearing in which the woman was involved. Although both novels engage with women’s voice and the gendered dimension of trauma, it is important to highlight that Bitter Fruit (2001) investigates the questions of how and if trauma can be articulated, especially in connection with sexual abuse against women, an issue that the TRC had already addressed, although inadequately, as we have seen in this section. The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003), on the other hand, expands this question to a broader investigation of the notion of trauma itself. Ndebele’s text—its 2013 revised edition particularly—was published with a greater distance from the completion of the Human Rights Violations Committee’s mandate (1998), if compared to the publication of Bitter

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Fruit. In addition to proving a consistent impact of the work of the TRC on South African literature, this also suggests that, as times goes by, authors expand their questions, exploring the complexities of articulating trauma and problematising the very definition of this concept in ways that are more attuned to the specificities of South Africa’s reality. This change of focus that characterises later publications with respect to the completion of the TRC’s mandate can also be detected in those novels that engage with the TRC’s concepts of truth and reconciliation, as the subsequent chapters will show.

2.2   Subversive Silence in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit Bitter Fruit opens with the painful encounter between the male protagonist, Silas Ali, and perpetrator François Du Boise, who is depicted by the narrator as “a ghost from the past, a mythical phantom embedded in the ‘historical memory’ of those who were active in the struggle” ([2001] 2004, p. 32). First published in South Africa in 2001, Bitter Fruit is set in 1998, between the publishing of the TRC’s final report and the end of Nelson Mandela’s term as president, a year described by the narrator as “a twilight period, an interregnum between the old century and the new, between the first period of political hope and the new period of ‘managing the miracle’” (p. 255). The novel concentrates on the entanglements of a coloured family: Silas Ali, a former revolutionary, now a lawyer working for the Ministry of Justice and deeply involved in the work of the TRC; Lydia, a nurse, who was subjected to rape by the security police; and Mikey, the product of Lydia’s unacknowledged rape, but raised by Silas and Lydia as their son. The narrative begins with Silas encountering Du Boise, a retired police Lieutenant, who, nineteen years earlier—when Silas was involved in underground activities—had raped Lydia while Silas was chained up helplessly in a police van nearby. This confrontation is significant at two different levels. On the one hand, it dramatises the factual possibility of the encounter between “victims” and “perpetrators” in the “new” democratic South Africa, which was especially fostered by the work of the TRC.6 On the other hand, it sets off a chain of dramatic events, which will culminate in the disintegration of this family unit. The narrative develops around the effects and consequences produced in the three main characters’ lives, following Du Boise’s ghostly

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appearance from the past. Through the use of free indirect discourse and a wide range of character-focalisers, Dangor creates a juxtaposition of perspectives which give the reader access to a subjective and private dimension of trauma and memory that a factual account might struggle to capture fully. By representing trauma, and each character’s way of coping with it, Dangor highlights the complexities, fragmentations and ambiguities of coloured identity in the “new” South Africa, as well as raising questions about the Commission’s ability to deal with, and help people recover from, personal trauma, especially in connection with the issue of rape and sexual violence against women. In Mapping Loss, Shane Graham observes that, through the depiction of the aftermath of rape, the author challenges “a central conceit in the rhetoric of the TRC: the idea that truth, obtained through archiving of memories of victims and confessions of perpetrators, will lead to reconciliation” (2009, p. 94). The connection between Bitter Fruit and the work of the Commission is also suggested by the tripartite division of the text: “Part One Memory”, “Part Two Confession” and “Part Three Retribution” which sit in counterpoint to, as Frenkel observes, “the three steps laid out by the TRC—speak, grieve, and heal” (2008, p. 159). Following the rape, Lydia and Silas’s marriage has been overshadowed both by the memory of the rape, and, even more, by its unspoken trauma, leading the couple to isolate themselves increasingly from each other as time goes by: “So their time spent together passed quietly, each one reading on their own, or listening to their own music through earphones or in their separate sanctuaries” (p. 61). In the immediate aftermath of the rape, it was Silas who initiated a silence which can be read as an act of denial and repression of memory, arising from his inability to empathise with Lydia and comfort her: He knew then, several years before he encountered Du Boise in a shopping mall, that Lydia really wanted to explore some hidden pain, perhaps not of her rape, but to journey through the darkness of the silent years that had ensued between them. He was not capable of such an ordeal, he acknowledged. It would require an immersion in words he was not familiar with, words that did not seek to blur memory, to lessen the pain, but to sharpen all of these things. He was trained to find consensus, even if it meant not acknowledging the “truth” in all its unflattering nakedness. Hell, he had an important job, liaising between the Ministry of Justice and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (p. 63)

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Silas embodies the conflict between two types of memory: on the one hand, a personal memory—the night of Lydia’s rape—that he wants to suppress, and, on the other, a collective, national memory that he is fostering and building through his job for the Ministry of Justice, “trying to reconcile the irreconcilable” (p.  29) and “jiggling those TRC commissioners, the old security people” (p.  257) and the African National Congress.7 Ana Miller even argues that Silas’s “suppression of uncomfortable memories, truths, and emotions and his desire to remain ‘objective’ are not completely separable from the TRC’s own mediation of memory” (2008, pp. 149–50). Notably, Lydia acknowledges that: [Silas’s] “forgetfulness” was not natural, was not an unconscious, pain-­ induced suppression of things too agonizing to remember, but a deliberate strategy, something thought out behind a desk, whisky in hand, ice tinkling, golden liquid contemplatively swirled. That’s why he was so good at his job, helping the country to forget and therefore to forgive, a convenient kind of amnesia. (p. 122)

Consequently, Silas’s silence and denial of the memory of that terrible night effectively both silenced Lydia and became part of her trauma as well: “his fear, that icy, unspoken revulsion, hung in the air like a mist” (p. 129) made Lydia cross “over into a zone of silence” (p. 129). When Silas, finally, tells Lydia about his encounter with Du Boise, she accuses him of bringing back the pain of that memory, after so many years of silence. She also undertakes a self-destructive dance on broken glasses, trying to anaesthetise “a much deeper, unfathomable agony” (p. 21) with her physical pain. Instead of communicating her grief through words, Lydia resorts to a silent painful dance, which must be interpreted as a valid, if also self-destructive, expression of her pain. Carol Kidron, in her fascinating research on Holocaust survivors, deconstructs the Western vision of silence as “negatively marked absence … [which] deviates from the Eurocentric psychosocial norm of voice”; silence, she argues, is “a medium of expression, communication, and transmission of knowledge in its own right or as an alternative form of personal knowing that is not dependent on speech for its own objectification” (2009, pp.  6–7). In Bitter Fruit, silence thus becomes an act of agency through which Lydia is able to communicate meaning when words have failed. Lydia’s silence is not an absence of words, nor of emotions, but, rather, it indicates the absence of an appropriate official setting in which she can

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safely share her pain. Indeed, although she has been silenced for almost twenty years by her husband’s behaviour, and, now, by choice keeps that silence, Lydia has never been voiceless nor unwilling to speak, and this is proved by her desire to start writing a diary three days after her rape, in December 1978. In her journal, Lydia entrusts her inner thoughts and suffering, complaining about the lack of an addressable listener with whom she could share her story of pain: I cannot speak to Silas, he makes my pain his tragedy. In any case, I know that he doesn’t want to speak about my being raped, he wants to suffer silently, wants me to be his accomplice in this act of denial. I also cannot speak to my mother or father. They too will want to take my pain, make it theirs. If they suffer on my behalf, that will be penance enough, they believe. They will also demand of me a forgetful silence. Speaking about something heightens its reality, makes it unavoidable. This is not human nature, but the nature of “confession” that the Church has taught them. Confess your sins, even those committed against you—and is rape not a sin committed by both victim and perpetrator, at least according to man’s gospel?—but confess it once only. There true salvation is to be found. In saying the unsayable, and then holding your peace for ever after. (p. 127)

Neither Silas nor her family are able to provide a setting in which Lydia feels she can safely speak. The passage also shows Lydia’s scepticism of Christian concepts of confession and forgiveness, which profoundly informed the work of the TRC. Indeed, she refuses to testify before the Commission and tell her story at the TRC’s special hearings on women, because “nothing in her life would have changed, nothing in any of their lives would have changed” (p. 156). A public confession of her suffered pain would not have cancelled the violent deed of the rape. Besides rejecting her opportunity to participate in the long journey of “speak, grieve, and heal” initiated and supported by the Commission, Lydia also asks Silas to stop Du Boise’s application for amnesty, which would have exposed her private pain. This time her silence is “both reactionary and subversive” (Gunne 2010, p. 172), an act of rebellion and protest against the TRC and its public use of the Christian rhetoric of forgiveness, which also indicates a rejection of the supposed catharsis that “speaking out” about traumatic events is meant to deliver. Emblematically, after her rapist’s application, she decides to take up her journal again, implying the importance of a private and personal dimension as a site in which to express sorrowful memories.

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Bitter Fruit thus openly criticises the TRC’s public truth-telling process, implying that “truth and confession, over articulated and expressed without conviction […], are rendered meaningless during this period” (Poyner 2010, p. 188). Furthermore, Dangor addresses a specific weakness of the TRC, that is, despite its efforts to elicit women’s stories of suffering—as exemplified by their decision to establish special hearings on women—many women remained silent, refusing to take part in the national reconstruction process. In her critique of the Commission’s (dis) engagement with the issue of sexual violence against  women, Gunne underlines that Dangor represents the TRC as a “space where women’s voices are subjugated by male desire” (2010, p. 175). Silas clearly exemplifies this gendered orientation of the TRC: his idea that there was no need to discuss the rape, as collateral damage of the anti-apartheid struggle, epitomises in fact an attempt at appropriating Lydia’s pain. Conversely, Lydia does not want either the Commission or Silas to appropriate her story: “you don’t know about the pain. It’s a memory to you, a wound to your ego, a theory […] you can’t even begin to imagine the pain” (p. 14). Remarkably, Dangor does not try to absorb and represent the story of Lydia’s rape in his male perspective: the scene of rape is almost absent from the narration, but it is only evoked through vague memories and random comments. Instead, Dangor tries to give voice to Lydia’s sense of uneasiness about the articulation of and the confrontation with her own trauma. The memory of trauma, and the inability to deal with it, eventually drive Silas, Lydia and Mikey, the child of rape, apart, disintegrating their family unit and leading them to different lives in three separate temporal dimensions: Silas lives in the past, “increasingly summoning up happier times” (p. 164); Lydia lives in the present “self-judging, brutally honest” (p. 165); Mikey, “as he has now defined himself, lives only in the future, in the world of young people and young pursuits” (p. 167). The allusion to the fragility of the (African) family structure echoes Sindiwe Magona’s concerns with the same issue that she exposes in Mother to Mother. In different ways, both authors show how deeply apartheid affected the African family unit and how difficult it is to recompose it in the post-apartheid era, in spite of the efforts of the TRC. They clearly imply complications that the Commission did not and could not encompass in its mandate, thus suggesting the importance of carrying on the reconciling process, perhaps, at a more personal and familial level.

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Within this zone of silence, separateness and lack of agency—at least from Lydia’s and Silas’s sides—Lydia, however, grows, undertaking a journey that will free her from the ghosts of her past. Symbols of Lydia’s personal growth are both the car she buys, achieving physical and spatial independence from her husband, and the research team she joins which does control tests on HIV-positive mothers. In this connection, Katherine Mack argues that “Silas’s fiftieth birthday party provides the occasion for Lydia’s final act of separation from her biological and national families and the burdens that they place upon her” (2011, p. 209). During the party, two important events take place: on the one hand, Lydia gives Silas the diary of his father, Ali Ali, which his mother had given to her and which presumably tells the story of Ali Ali’s voyage from India to South Africa. With this gesture, Lydia plans to “hand Silas his heritage […] then walk away, free of him and his burdensome past” (p. 251), free from the memory of her own past also. On the other hand, she dances and has sex with a young, dark-skinned, attractive Mozambican, João. Seeing their lovemaking in a deserted room of the house, Silas reflects: “His wife had found release at last from both her captive demons: from Du Boise and from himself. Now not every man would be a rapist to her” (p. 267). Following Silas’s party, Lydia leaves her house, driving to an unknown destination and disentangling herself from both family and the “new” South Africa: Time and distance, even this paltry distance will help to free her. Burden of the mother. Mother, wife, lover, lover-mother, lover-wife, unloved mother. Unloved, in sum, except for those wonderful, unguarded moments, Mikey, Silas, and, of course, black João, beautiful as jet. Even Du Boise does not matter anymore. (p. 281)

Lydia’s journey towards reconciliation with her painful trauma remains open and uncertain, as much open and uncertain is the novel’s ending. Gunne, in fact, notices that “there is no resolution or redemption at the conclusion of the novel” (2010, p. 176), and this is a feature that characterises all the texts engaging with the work of the TRC, as my following discussions of the other selected novels will show. Dangor describes another story of women’s suffering: Mikey’s friend, Vinu, has been a victim of her father’s sexual abuse for years. Significantly, Vinu decides to confide in Mikey, asking him to listen to her story: “But I want you to listen, really listen, please?” (p.  207). Vinu’s plea to be

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listened to clearly echoes the epigraph of the novel’s second section “Part Two Confession”: “Since in order to speak, one must listen first/ Learn to speak by listening”, a quotation from Mesnevi, a long poem written by a thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi. In addition to placing emphasis on the act of listening to, an act extremely important when testimony and the articulation of trauma are concerned, this quotation from a Muslim poet anticipates Mikey’s turn to Islam in his quest for revenge, as I discuss shortly. Now focusing on Vinu’s story, it is important to underline that her sexual abuse could not qualify as gross human rights violations, thus preventing her from participating in the TRC’s hearings or reconciliation process. Here, Dangor establishes a significant parallel between the contradictory situations the two women experience: on the one hand, there is Lydia’s rape, which could be eligible as an example of gross human rights violations because it was “politically” motivated by Silas’ involvement with the anti-apartheid struggle, and her subversive decision not to speak at the TRC’s special hearings on women. On the other hand, there is Vinu’s sexual abuse, which does not enter the political dimension of apartheid violations and, consequently, not even the Commission’s radar, and her need to speak out and confide in an addressable listener. In the absence of the Commission’s support, Vinu chooses her friend Mikey as the interlocutor for her story of pain. The choice of including her story in the narrative enables Dangor to expose the existence of a wider range of female traumas affecting South Africa’s reality that were not included in the TRC’s mandate, but that still needed to be addressed. Gender violence is a timely and urgent global issue, and I will return to address this phenomenon in relation to contemporary South Africa in Chap. 4, where I explore more in detail the concept of reconciliation. Through the examples of Lydia’s and Vinu’s stories, Dangor thus draws attention to the fact that the TRC could not accommodate all South African women’s stories of suffering. He dramatises the difficulties and contradictions of attempting to articulate and represent sexual violence against women, especially in public contexts such as the Commission’s hearings. In addition to triggering Lydia’s confrontation with her painful memories, the encounter between Silas and Du Boise also motivates Mikey’s quest for a new identity and his personal response to cope with the discovery of being a child of rape. Confronted with the dark secret of his conception, Mikey is compelled to make a journey in search of his roots, which will result in his restless walking through the streets of Johannesburg. It is

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not a coincidence that among his books—which he has stolen from one of his professor’s house—there is a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses: Mikey’s wanderings recall both Leopold Bloom’s day-long wandering through Dublin, and, even before, Odysseus’s long and wandering voyage to return to Ithaca. His quest for roots will lead Mikey to approach the Muslim side of Silas’s family. Indeed, his sense of not belonging, and of being rootless, had been haunting Mikey for a long time, even before his new-found knowledge about his mother’s rape. While he blames his parents for not giving him “the choice of following one of their faiths” (p.  86)—“Silas is a half-hearted Dutch Protestant, his soul confused by the omnipotence of Ali Ali’s Islam” (pp. 87–88), and Lydia’s “secretive and personal” Catholicism—Mikey is welcomed by his Uncle Amin Ali’s family, and, immediately, feels a new sense of belonging: immersed in his family, these are his people, these dark-faced, hook-nosed hybrids; he longs to go and look in a mirror, seek confirmation of his desire to belong. Lydia must be wrong! How can Du Boise be his biological father? (p. 189)

Starting from this first meeting, Mikey begins to read the Koran and to visit regularly Iman Ismail and the Mosque in Newclare, becoming more and more familiar with the Islamic religion. Henriette Roos highlights that “as the narrative unfolds, Islam is presented as the pure alternative to a young man rejecting a degenerate and uncaring Christian/Western style of life” (2005, p. 64). Islam seems to offer a solution to Mikey’s revengeful desires. His need for vengeance, in fact, cannot be fulfilled either by Vinu’s father’s decision to go to counselling and confess his abuse—which is significantly mentioned in “Part Two Confession”—or by Du Boise’s application for amnesty. Rejecting the Christian concept of forgiveness, he turns to retribution by executing the two wrongdoers in the homonymous section—“Part Three Retribution”. Notably, in one interview, Dangor asserts that “in wanting to forgive and forget so quickly, we swept a lot of things under the carpet” (Graham 2009, p. 97). Through the example of Mikey’s revenge, as well as Lydia’s refusal to participate in the healing journey supported by the Commission’s testimonial process, Bitter Fruit questions and destabilises the Christian discourse of forgiving after confession, one of the main assumptions on which the TRC was built, and aimed towards, as a basis for national reconstruction. Not surprisingly, earlier in the text, Mikey had even referred to Archbishop Tutu:

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He can no longer think of the future without confronting his past. Christ, he thinks, I am beginning to sound like Archbishop Tutu. And what does he know? He has never been raped, nor is he a child of rape. (p. 131)

This passage explicitly conveys Mikey’s disavowal of the possibility that the Commission, embodied in this case by the figure of its Chairperson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, could understand, articulate and heal all traumas of South Africans, particularly those related to sexual violence against women. Mikey’s search for a new identity that might accommodate his traumatic discovery about his conception is also dramatised, first, by his request to be called by his real name, “Michael”—as a sign to “have taken back his identity” (p.  206)—and, then, by his new birth, his becoming “Noor”, the avenger. In the end, Mikey thanks Iman Ismail for his help and goes into hiding after killing Vinu’s father and Du Boise: “He, too, is going to die, Noor will be incarnated in his place. May Michael’s truth live on after truth” (p. 277). Although it might be argued that Dangor risks stereotyping Islam as a vengeful religion, I think that the point the author is trying to make is not essentially related to religious issues. The author’s purpose is, rather, to challenge how the TRC adopted the Christian concepts of confession and forgiveness in the public context of the amnesty hearings. To this end, he depicts Mikey as embracing something completely different from the TRC’s Christian-orientated project. Dangor is intimately familiar with Islam, given the fact he was born into an Indian and Muslim family. Nonetheless, I would argue that the novel’s focus on the complexities of articulating trauma in a public context, and on the different responses to trauma enacted by the characters, steers the reader away from a religious-centred reading of the novel. A conclusive remark must be made in relation to Dangor’s engagement with the issue of race. Bitter Fruit, in fact, unmasks how the pervasive legacy of colonial and apartheid discourses of race and miscegenation have been internalised by South African society through the example of coloured identity, which continues to be surrounded by ambiguity, prejudice and shame even after the official demise of apartheid. Here, Dangor depicts coloured people as perceived in post-apartheid South Africa as a hybrid, a “bastard kind” who “weren’t white enough in the past […] they’re not black enough now” (p. 215). Their beauty is also associated with impurity, miscegenation and shame, which exposes the still unresolved contradictions at the heart of coloured identity formation. Dangor

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repeatedly uses paradoxical terms such as “sinister beauty” (p. 71), “dirty honey” (p. 222), “diabolical charm” (p. 244) and “bastard gold” (p. 274) to describe the compelling, overpowering and dangerous beauty of Mikey and Vinu. This paradoxical appeal is also mapped onto their sexual transgressions: Vinu has an incestuous relationship with her father, a white Afrikaner, and Mike, besides being a child of rape, has sexual intercourse with older white women, who cannot turn away from his beauty. The complexities of coloured identity and, in particular, its painful intertwinement with sentiments of shame and racial impurity have not been properly addressed by the TRC’s proceedings, as I shall argue in the final two sections of this chapter, where I discuss the representation of coloured voice through analysis of Zoë Wicomb’s 2006 novel Playing in the Light. Dangor certainly raises questions in relation to the ambiguities and contradictions underpinning coloured identity formation, but his primary focus remains to challenge how the TRC addressed the gendered dimension of trauma, with particular reference to the strategies adopted in eliciting stories of sexual violence against women. The next section will draw attention to the very definition of trauma as provided by the TRC and to the ways in which the bodily dimension of this notion can be challenged and expanded through fiction.

2.3   Storytelling, Female Companionship and Ordinary Trauma in Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela Focusing on the stories of four ordinary women and on the public figure of Winifred “Winnie” Nomzamo Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela, The Cry of Winnie Mandela exposes the plight of those women who lived in the gap of uncertainty, the terrors of loneliness and waiting for their husbands to return after years of enduring absence. Employing as a framework the myth of Penelope, “the ultimate symbol of a wife ‘so loyal and so true’” ([2003] 2004, p. 2) who waited for nineteen years for Odysseus to return home, Ndebele shows, as J. U. Jacobs observes, how “the lives of African women in this country have been overdetermined by the impact of their husbands’ migrant lives” (2006, p.  130). Through the examples of Penelope’s five descendants’ stories (the four ordinary women and Winnie Mandela, who, like Penelope, have suffered from their husbands’ absence), Ndebele reflects on the main causes of South African men’s absence and

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their connections with the economic and political realities rooted in colonial and apartheid policies. Chased off the land by white men’s laws, black men were forced to work in the mines and factories, and, then, in the wake of the country’s economic expansion, they left to pursue other types of careers as teachers, doctors, salesmen or priests. The banning of non-white political organisations after the Sharpeville Massacre in 19608 brought about another wave of dispersion, when many husbands did not go in search of work, but vanished into exile, were detained in jail without trial, or were put on trial for political resistance and sentenced for long periods. The Cry of Winnie Mandela perfectly exemplifies what Ndebele argues in his notable essay “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa” (1994). Here, the author expresses his scepticism about the artistic value of so-called protest literature and its role as a political weapon of the struggle. Relying on the phenomenon of the spectacle, this form of literature: documents; it indicts implicitly; it keeps the larger issues of society in our minds, obliterating the details; it provokes identification through recognition and feeling rather than through observation and analytical thought […] It is the literature of the powerless identifying the key factor responsible for their powerlessness. Nothing beyond this can be expected of it. (ibid., p. 49)

On the other hand, rather than lingering on a rhetoric of the “spectacle” (and thus continuing to denounce the oppressive conditions under apartheid), Ndebele investigates the nuances and complexities of four ordinary South African women who lived despite apartheid. The same logic is applied when he revisits the historical memory of Winnie Madikizela-­ Mandela in a different way from the TRC’s, lending a new dimension of privacy and intimacy to the public iconic figure of Winnie Mandela and to her alleged involvements with the crimes perpetrated by the Mandela United Football Club.9 In Dorothy Driver’s words, Ndebele draws attention to “what he sees as the problems of black South African narrative under white domination”, that is that the “black South African narrative came to a halt under apartheid; [as] it has suffered from a focus on what he calls the ‘spectacular’ rather than the ‘ordinary’” (2009, p. 5). The text is divided into two parts, with an introductory section to each part being presented by a frame narrator who points to the fictional status of the characters and of writing itself. “Part One” consists of the personal accounts of the four ordinary descendants of the mythical Penelope: three

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of them are presented by a third-person perspective (the frame narrator), whereas one is narrated in the first person by the descendant herself (Mamello Molete, aka Patience Mamello Letlala). In “Part Two”, the women speak mostly in the first person, either in dialogue or in monologue, as they imaginatively summon the figure of Winnie Mandela, “the ultimate public symbol of women-in-waiting” (pp. 72–73), while sitting and having tea altogether. Holding these imaginary conversations with Winnie, the four women act as a chorus, each questioning and commenting on aspects of Winnie’s public life before and after her husband’s release. It must be noted that, although the title of the novel might suggest otherwise, Winnie Mandela is not the main narrator of the story, nor its protagonist: nearly half of the book is entirely dedicated to the four “ordinary” women’s stories, while Winnie comes into the picture as a proper character in the last two chapters of the book. In October 2013, ten years after the book came out, Ndebele published a revised edition where, in the “Introduction”, he referred to his decision not to interview Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, since his work was to be considered as a fundamentally creative and interpretative one, instead of a biographical account (2013, Kindle ed.). This choice poses an important question as to the book’s genre. Yanna Liatsos (2006) sees it as a postmodern example of a “historiographic metafiction” blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, self-conscious invention and historiography, in a creatively inspiring way.10 Significantly, Liatsos’s argument seems to be supported by Antjie Krog’s observation that The Cry of Winnie Mandela is not structured in a linear way: “there was no proper beginning to the novel, nor to the individual stories of these women; there was also no end, because the end of the book, like the conversation with Winnie, was imaginary” (2009, p. 56). While the four ordinary women are realistically presented in “Part One”, the book enters the dimension of fiction when they imaginatively join Winnie and the mythological figure of Penelope in the last chapter. This transition from the real to the unreal, from the physical to the metaphysical, is also prefigured by the frame narrator in his introductory section to “Part Two”: Is it possible that our four descendants, as instances of thought turning to desire, can find themselves together in a room? Why not? The intangibility and randomness of imagination permit them absolute mobility. […] In these random journeys they take, they are subject to one requirement: to resist the urge to break out of the confines of thought into full desire. They

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strain at the writer’s leash, wanting to assume individuality of character. But the writer must hold on to the leash, and hope it won’t choke them. That they will have to learn to enjoy movement between the end of the leash and the hand that holds it. ([2003] 2004, pp. 39–40)

This extract prepares the reader to enter the world of imagination and it makes explicit hints at the creator/creature relationship between the writer and his/her characters. A similar kind of transgression also occurs at a formal level of the text: not only does Ndebele fuse aspects of fiction, biography and essay, but he also creates a mélange between “a novel and a storytelling performance and, consequently, between the reading and the listening experience” (Liatsos 2006, p.  123). This oral quality is particularly evident in “Part Two”, when the four women gather to share their stories, holding imaginary conversations with Winnie and playing the roles of both storyteller and listener. The dimension of storytelling performance is further suggested by the reader’s involvement in the narration; in many instances, in fact, the narrator adopts the first plural person pronoun or adjective: “Let’s begin with” (p.  1), “Let’s consider” (p.  7), “Our second descendant” (p. 17), or “What is the possibility of our four descendants of Penelope meeting in a room one day and talking? Yet, unknown to us, they’ve done so” (p.  39). Ndebele justifies this approach to the novel in the “Introduction” to the revised edition: transgressions of borders between literary genres may be analogous to transgressions of borders between races, ethnicities, social classes, and geographical spaces. These categories are not necessarily eliminated, nor is it necessarily desirable that they should be; rather, the possibilities of their interactions as imaginatively explored may prompt new ways of experiencing community. (2013, Kindle ed.)

Ndebele here associates the transgressions between literary genres and forms with the transgressions of borders between races, ethnicities and social classes, suggesting a more fluid understanding of these categories in order to experience new forms of community. In adopting a hybrid, experimental narrative, Ndebele thus seems to acknowledge the importance for the South African nation to smash down the strongholds of race and ethnicity.

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Ndebele’s literary “transgressions” also justify his choice of dramatising the voices of four ordinary women, as well as of Winnie Mandela and Penelope. In an interview with Charles Cilliers, Ndebele asserts that he has often been asked the question as to the challenges for him, as a male writer, of exploring the perspectives of different women: It is one of the questions that necessitated an introduction. Nadine Gordimer wrote to me of some of her impressions of reading the novel. On this particular issue she wrote: “Here’s a feminist fiction of strong emotional conviction written by a man. Perhaps could only be written by a man”. I treasure this comment from a Nobel prize-winning woman of enormous literary accomplishment. I confess, however, to having been somewhat uneasy about the work being described as “a feminist fiction”. I feared that such a well-meant statement might become a label, and I fear labels. While having their uses, they do often simplify and take away depth from anything they are meant to describe. In reality if there is any feminism in The Cry of Winnie Mandela it was one outcome among others, rather than a driving intention. (2013)

If uncomfortable with Gordimer’s label of “feminist fiction”, Ndebele seems to agree with her definition of the writer as an androgynous being (see Gordimer [1975] 1988): the issue of gender should not limit, or affect, the writer’s capacity and imagination to tell a story. As already discussed in Chap. 1, fiction keeps things open (van der Vlies 2017, p. 20), and this “openness” allows a male author to imagine and represent women’s stories and vice versa. In the “Introduction” to the revised edition, Ndebele argues: anyone who wants to tell a story that has seized hold of them can enter the lives of people who are not their own, who live in countries not their own, who are men when she is a woman, and who are women when he is a man. (2013, Kindle ed.)

The Cry of Winnie Mandela explicitly addresses a dimension of the experience of the apartheid state that affected women in a particular way and that was neglected by the TRC. The disruption of the concepts of family and home, the suffering of “ordinary” women who were “living in the zone of absence without duration” ([2003] 2004, p. 8) after their husbands’ departures did not meet the category of “victim” in the Commission’s criteria. Ndebele’s narrative project of rediscovery of the

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ordinary echoes Magona’s representation of Mandisa’s and Mxolisi’s ordinary lives in Mother to Mother, which I explore in Chap. 1. However, if Mandisa’s ordinary story of suffering is inserted in larger narratives of apartheid and colonialism and serves to contextualise her son’s violent crime, Ndebele creates a fictional female setting where four ordinary women, the only protagonists of their stories, can share their pain and recover their agency and femininity. The opening scene immediately presents the hardships of the conditions of black South African women: “departure, waiting, and return: they define her experience of the past, present, and future. They frame her life at the centre of a great South African story not yet told” (p. 1). ’Mannete Mofolo enters the genealogy of Penelope when her husband decides to leave their impoverished homestead and go to work in the mines in Johannesburg. He eventually starts a second family and relinquishes the responsibility of providing for the children from his first marriage to ’Mannete, who never abandons hope for her husband’s return. The husband of Delisiwe Dulcie S’khosana, Penelope’s second descendant, goes to Scotland to study medicine and becomes the first black doctor from his township. His studies continue for years while being financially supported by Delisiwe, who copes with his absence by having short-lived affairs, one of which leaves her pregnant. When he finally returns after fourteen years and finds Delisiwe with a four-year-old child, he divorces her, marries a nurse and moves into the rich white suburbs. The husband of Mamello Molete, the third descendant and only character who speaks in the first person in “Part One”, goes first into exile and is then arrested for being part of the anti-apartheid struggle. During the transitional period of 1990–1994 when political prisoners are released from prison, he files for divorce and marries a white comrade from the resistance movement. The fourth descendant, Marara Joyce Baloyi, is married to a womaniser whose moral excesses make him lose his job. Committed to a tradition according to which the wife must remain faithful, Marara stays with her husband until his death, burying him in a costly casket to live up to her role of beloved and loyal wife—although, as she admits in her account, “in truth, he had become a rag towards which she no longer felt any emotion” (p. 37). The state of waiting is a shared condition for black South African women who have been condemned to a lack of agency by both white domination (first colonialism, then apartheid) and African patriarchal

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culture. David Medalie identifies two main inflections of the scenario of waiting: The first is economic and political, for the waiting of the women is a symptom and a consequence of a society which has separated men and women, either by forcing the men to seek work elsewhere, or by driving them into exile; and the second is related to gender inequality, which turns women into those who wait while others travel and do, which reduces them to enforced passivity. (2006, p. 57)

The hard conditions experienced by black South African women are intensified by men’s expectations that they should be eternally faithful. This added burden is perfectly dramatised by Ndebele’s reference to the myth of Penelope who waited nineteen years for her husband Odysseus to return from his wanderings, becoming “the embodiment of female virtue that gives comfort to them [men], allaying their fears and pampering their vanities” (p. 5). Although their communities expect chastity and patience from the four descendants, and although they have internalised these expectations, they also attempt to exert a certain level of agency: ’Mannete Mofolo leaves to search for her husband, unsuccessfully; Delisiwe, overwhelmed by her longings, has extramarital love affairs; Mamello tries to bring her husband back by writing him a letter. The four women recover their agency fully in “Part Two” by setting up an ibandla labafazi, a Zulu phrase that refers to a gathering of waiting women, where they can share their stories of suffering. This gathering where women can speak challenges the boundary between the private and the public in the same way as the TRC’s public hearings, where victims were supposed to tell their private experiences. There is a fundamental difference between the public approach of the TRC and Ndebele’s alternative space, however: these women have the opportunity to choose the listeners with whom to share their pain. In contrast to the TRC’s hearings, Penelope’s descendants have the certainty that they will be heard and understood by the other members of this female gathering. This private/public space allows them to share their stories of enduring waiting, and, more importantly, to engage in imaginary conversations with the most famous South African woman-in-waiting, Winnie Mandela: Because Winnie waited too. The only difference between us and her is that she waited in public while we waited in the privacy of our homes, suffering

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in the silence of our bedrooms. […] The flight of Winnie’s life promised no foreknown destinations. It was an ongoing public conversation, perhaps too public to be understood. (pp. 44–45)

Their imaginary conversations with Winnie represent a possibility to regain their “female” agency, “a way we can look at ourselves. A way to prevent us from becoming women who meet and cry. Or if we do meet and cry, that we do so out of choice” (p.  46). The ibandla thereby stages what Poyner defines as “an informal and Africanized ‘truth and reconciliation commission’” (2010, p. 190), through which Ndebele draws attention to the stories of everyday suffering engendered by both apartheid and patriarchy that the real truth commission failed to address during its work. As mentioned above, by focusing on bodily abuse—torture, rape, mutilation, the murder of a loved one—the TRC excluded the “more ordinary and systematic subjugation of the apartheid system” (Liatsos 2006, p. 121). Furthermore, as Liatsos emphasises, Ndebele gives voice to ordinary women in the private and intimate dimension of the ibandla, thus counterbalancing the public spectacle of the Human Rights Violations Committee’s hearings, “whose quality resembled that of the testimonial/ protest literature Ndebele criticized in the 1980s, constructing innocent victims pleading to be rescued from the abuses of villainous masters” (ibid., p.  121). Although I would argue that the main goal of the Commission was not to construct “victims pleading to be rescued from the abuses of villainous masters” but rather to promote reconciliation through the truth-telling process, it is undeniable that both the TRC’s hearings and protest literature relied on the most spectacular and “extraordinary” aspect of apartheid violence and trauma. In contrast with this, the stories of Penelope’s descendants (including Winnie) focus on the nuclear home and its undermining by apartheid laws and the migrant labour system, which forced family members to live apart. Following the four descendants’ imaginary conversations, Winnie’s character finally steps into the narrative: “[…] locked into an eternal embrace with you [the four descendants] across time and distance” (p.  103), Winnie perceives that “she can take the risk of unburdening myself to you without feeling violated” (p. 103). Antjie Krog underlines the difficulty and possible danger of writing about Winnie Madikizela-­ Mandela, the “Mother of the Nation”, who was involved in the murderous actions of the Mandela United Football Club, her group of “bodyguards”, a fact which emerged before and during the work of the

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TRC: “it was never easy to be against Winnie, but it was even more difficult to be on her side” (2009, p. 55). Krog’s assertion poses a well-known quandary as to Winnie’s alleged double-dealing and the nature or extent of her involvement in the struggle against apartheid and its aftermath. In Ndebele’s novel, Winnie, “the child of Major Theunis Swanepoel born in his torture chambers” (p. 125), recalls her past history of suffering—the separation from Nelson; the police searching and “violating” the intimacy of her house; the abuses and brutalities endured at the hand of Major Theunis Swanepoel, a security policeman; the banishment in Brandfort— and depicts a personal journey which turned her into the very “law of struggle” (p.  125), “the embodiment of disruption” (p.  108). She describes herself as the offspring of circumstance: “I am not a politician. I am what politics made me. What politics made me, is not me. But what politics made me has become a part of me, a part of what I am” (p. 136). Ndebele does not justify Winnie’s alleged crimes, nor does he want to judge her choices and actions. Rather, his portrayal of her becomes a metaphor for an ambiguous “grey zone” within the liberation movement, which was not immune from allegations of gross human rights violations, as occurred, for instance, in its training camps in Tanzania. In this sense, Brenna Munro’s definition of Winnie as “the Mother of the struggle who fell from grace” (2014, p. 92) is enlightening, because it captures the feelings of both love and hatred that Winnie inspired among South Africans, as well as the violence she suffered and the one she endorsed in her fight against apartheid. The following extract from the novel conveys the contradictions and the ambivalences of Winnie’s character, “representing the ambiguity of post-apartheid society itself” (Medalie 2006, p. 59): I am your pleasure and your pain, your beauty and your ugliness. Your solution and your mistake. Your hell and your heaven. I am your squatter camp shack and your million rand mansion. I am all of you who maim and rape. I am all of you who give love and succour. I am your pride and your shame. Your honour and your humiliation. (p. 137)

This portrayal conveys the dual nature of Winnie’s character, both a victim of apartheid oppression and an “alleged” perpetrator of crimes committed to fight the regime. The complexity of her personality is further reflected at a formal level, as evidenced in the dialogical narrative structure of her section. Aiming to unburden herself and share her personal story with the other Penelope’s descendants, Winnie engages in an intimate conversation

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with a part of herself, her private self, and, in doing so, she tries to leave aside the “‘false’ self of public posturing”, as Poyner points out (2010, p. 191): Your testimonies have restored to me some measure of self-criticism. I’m easy and calm. Although I’m not in your physical presence, I’ve stretched my legs in front of me, and feel deeply the comfort of your presence. […] I, too, Winnie Mandela, will speak to Winnie. I’ll write to her. Address her. I’ll plead with her, cajole her, charm her, scold and rebuke her, interpret her, ask her to answer all your questions, and respond to your insights, if she can remember them all. I, Winnie Mandela, holding on to my precious space of anonymity, will speak to my namesake. (pp. 110–111)

Adopting a confessional mode, Winnie starts her self-reflective and self-­ examined non-linear account of some episodes of her life by addressing the four women, her public personality, “Winnie Mandela”, and, sometimes, her former husband, Nelson. The woman’s dialogic confession is revealed through her continuous self-referential questions, as the following passages illustrate: You could be anywhere. Are you at home? Are you in a court? Are you at the clinic? Are you shopping? Are you at a rally? Here’s hoping you arrived early. Are you at a funeral? Are you dropping in on the poor and the needy at the squatter camp? (p. 111) And he continued to love me, desiring me with the same purity of memory. And me? What about me? Did I remember his body? I’m terrified by the possibility of answers. (p. 131)

The first extract refers to the very moment in which Winnie begins to address and question her public self, while the second passage makes reference to her longing for Nelson’s love during his years of imprisonment. This dialogic self-reflective strategy implies a more varied, polyphonic kind of telling than that demanded by the TRC’s structure. As I explained in Chap. 1, people who wanted to tell their stories before the Commission were first asked to give statements by answering questions in a pre-made form. Once selected as potential witnesses, the whole testimonial act resulted in a guided process, where the accounts of those classified as “perpetrators” were punctuated by the cross-examination on behalf of the Amnesty Committee and/or the family of the victim; while victim testimonies were usually “directed” by the commissioners’ interventions.

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Consequently, the type of testimony performed at the TRC’s public hearings lacks the agency and the polyphonic dimension, which characterise Winnie’s account in Ndebele’s text. It is no surprise then that in this section of the novel entirely dedicated to Winnie’s account Ndebele refers to Winnie’s TRC’s hearing, the spectacle and publicity of which deeply contrast with the intimacy and privacy prevailing instead in the imagined ibandla of waiting women. Describing the hearing as her “hell” and her “heaven”, Ndebele’s character remembers saying at the hearing that she would not take responsibility for things which went wrong: “So”, I said to the world, “you want me to acknowledge my involvement in ‘terrible things’? How can I make a definitive acknowledgement of responsibility for events that arose out of multiple causalities? How can I take responsibility for actions engendered by conditions that fostered human folly? Tell me. The least I can do is to acknowledge some events. They happened. But I would never go on to do what many want me to do. I will never accept responsibility. This allows you all, all of millions out there, wondering about me, to make your choice. You can either love me or condemn me. Take your choice […]”. (pp. 134–135)

As a matter of fact, neither did the real Winnie Madikizela-Mandela confess her wrongdoings before the TRC. Following Archbishop Tutu’s plea, she rather acknowledged that some “things went horribly wrong”11 and that she was deeply sorry for that, but, at the same time, she was very careful not to admit any personal responsibility for those actions. Conversely, the context of the novel allows Winnie to relinquish “the art of technical denial” (p. 134) that she supposedly employed at the hearing and to confide sincerely in Penelope’s descendants about her feelings and emotions. In this regard, Driver observes that “responding to the intimacy the four women offer, Winnie gives an account of herself that abandons political posturing and turns instead to self-reflection and self-doubt” (2009, p. 15). Ndebele also transforms Winnie into a spokesperson for a private dimension of reconciliation when she claims her distrust of the type of “collective” and “public” reconciliation fostered by the TRC: There is one thing I will not do. It is my only defence of the future. I will not be an instrument for validating the politics of reconciliation. For me, reconciliation demands my annihilation. No. You, all of you, have to reconcile not with me, but with the meaning of me. For my meaning is the endless

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human search for the right thing to do. I am your pleasure and your pain, your beauty and your ugliness. Your solution and your mistake. Your hell and your heaven. […] The journey to your future goes through the dot of loving me, despite myself, on the world map that lays out journeys towards all kinds of human fulfilment. (pp. 137–138)

Winnie’s opposition to becoming an instrument of reconciliation in the new South Africa, along with her wish to be accepted despite her paradoxical nature, undermines the thrust of the TRC, the goal of which was to establish as complete a picture as possible of apartheid history—the nature, the causes and the violations committed—as the only basis to move on and build up a better future. Liatsos comments on this: Where the South African truth commission desired to abolish the contradictory perspectives that undermined the creation of a single, moral conclusion of apartheid’s historical memory, Mandela advocates a dual orientation toward the past, whose contradictory insights stimulate the imaginary deftness—that which, according to Ndebele, is contained in “the ordinary” life of the South African black consciousness, and constitutes the formal effects of his latest novel. (2006, p. 132)

The author’s interest in imagining Winnie’s thoughts and emotions is even more evident in the corresponding section of her account in the 2013 edition of the novel. This, in fact, is a section in which Ndebele makes more revisions, especially in relation to Winnie’s memory of the TRC’s special hearing. He includes some extracts of the emotional testimonies of Nicodemus and Caroline Sono, whose son had been kidnapped by the Mandela United Football Club, in addition to imagining Winnie’s reaction to their words. Here I report an extract of Winnie’s interior monologue where her opposition to acknowledging her actions publicly emerges: It was hard listening to Mr and Mrs Sono. Her testimony, in particular, was excruciating. When she opened her arms to pull towards her bosom an imaginary son returning, crying out, and her husband wiped his right eye with a white handkerchief, it was searing. What they felt was real. I knew of the facts that caused their feelings. But could I acknowledge publicly those facts? My posture at the hearing was my answer. So I listened: my face show-

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ing no emotions, except a simulated sneer, a contemptuous chuckle: inner confirmations of my external repudiations. The turmoil inside of me, I would not, would never, show. (2013, Kindle ed.)

This passage points to the presence of a “double consciousness” in Winnie’s character, the conflict between a public posturing self who cannot show any feelings and a private self who is in a turmoil of emotions. Winnie’s words might also be interpreted as the author’s criticism of the public spectacle begotten by the TRC’s hearings. Ndebele seems to read Winnie’s decision not to acknowledge her wrongdoings at the hearing as a form of protest against the TRC’s public process, rather than her cynical indifference. Some lines later, in fact, Winnie proves to be perfectly aware of the brutalities and crimes committed by the liberation movement, when she asks: “How possible is it to lead a lawful life in future after a lawless Struggle?” (2003, Kindle ed.). In dramatising an imagined version of Winnie’s hearing that includes her thoughts and emotions, the 2013 revised edition of the novel adds another layer to the representation of Winnie’s complex character, thus further challenging Justice Michael Stegmann’s definition of Winnie Mandela as a “calm, composed, deliberate, unprincipled and unblushing liar” (Ndebele [2003] 2004, p.  136), which seemed to catch only one side among many of Winnie’s personality.12 The last chapter of the novel, titled “A Stranger”, provides an example of what Van Zyl Smit defines as “a touch of magic realism” (2008, p. 404), that is the appearance of Penelope in the story. While travelling on a “holiday that validates a special kind of reconciliation: reconciliation with themselves” (p.  142), the five women (the four ordinary descendants and Winnie Mandela) meet a white woman with a strange accent who asks them for a lift to Durban. Unexpectedly, the stranger turns out to be Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, known as the paradigm of the faithful and submissive wife. Penelope says that she has embarked on a special kind of reconciliation pilgrimage for more than two thousand years and expresses her desire to meet the five women of the ibandla. As she explains to the descendants, there is a part of her own story that “has never been told” (p. 145) and that stems from the end of Homer’s epic, when Odysseus departs from their home once more to go and perform cleansing rituals. This is when she decided to leave him, too, and go “on my own cleansing pilgrimage” (p. 145):

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[Odysseus] should have returned not only to Greece, but to me as well. It was not enough for him after our rather anxious first lovemaking in nineteen years, to give me an account of his adventures as if he could silence my years of waiting with one night of lovemaking and storytelling. We needed to go on holiday. For him to claim civic responsibility towards Greece was not enough. He also needed to assert personal responsibility towards me. My Odysseus had no idea he had to reconcile himself with me as well. But such was the state of the world’s consciousness at the time. Nevertheless, I did not want to lament that realisation; I made the decision to undertake my own journey. (p. 145)

Similarly to Winnie’s claim for freedom and for a personal level of reconciliation, Penelope appears to regain her own agency by affirming the right to autonomous decision-making. One can thus notice with Krog that, “instead of Africa being dictated to by a Western framework, Ndebele smartly uses Winnie to create an alternative route and African framework for Penelope” (2009, p. 59): this “new” Penelope has given up her former and traditional role of patient, comprehensive and faithful wife, choosing instead to create her own destiny. Interestingly, Driver suggests that Ndebele “initially uses [the myth] in the novel in order to evoke the European attempt to redefine an African femininity and thus to represent Europe in its moment of overbearing colonial contact with Africa” (2009, p. 20). By subverting Penelope’s myth through the example of her five descendants and of the Greek woman herself, we can infer, however, that the author attempts to rewrite the encounter between Africa and Europe in ways in which the South African female protagonists can regain their own agency and femininity. In Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939, Justine McConnell explores the Odyssey paradigm as it has emerged through the works of postcolonial poets, novelists, playwrights and directors of African descent since 1939, the year Martiniquan Aimé Césaire published the first version of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Notably, McConnell highlights a striking difference between some postcolonial responses to the Odyssey and Ndebele’s rewriting of the Greek myth. The journey undertaken by the contemporary Penelopes in The Cry of Winnie Mandela is no longer conceived as centripetal (in line with the nostos trajectory), but as centrifugal, outward-directed, and actively exploring:

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These modern Penelopes are learning to forge identities for themselves—in part similar to the Homeric Odysseus achieving his long-sought nostos by asserting his identity at home, yet these women have no wish to “return”: their journey is, in James Joyce’s terms, centrifugal rather than centripetal. (2013, p. 226)

McConnell observes that postcolonial responses to the Odyssey, although attuned to different geopolitical contexts, tend to focus on Odysseus’s desire to return home and that they place particular emphasis on the nostos-­like parable concerning regained identity. In a postcolonial reality, “it is the theme of returning home (metaphorically or literally), and of regaining an identity that has been temporarily taken away by the hardships that the hero has suffered, which has particular resonance” (ibid., p. 226). On the other hand, Ndebele’s “modern Penelopes have no intention of returning to any past situation: these women are searching for independent identities, but there is no doubt that their quest will be a centrifugal one” (ibid., p. 226). Quite significantly, in the final chapter, they are all travelling on a minibus together and singing the Iphi’ndlela song “Where is the way?” (p. 139). Echoing Winnie’s earlier words—“you’re even more. You are millions of other women who are on this journey with you” (p.  142)—the five women represent an example of those women who have decided to undertake a journey towards freedom and self-reconciliation, after enduring the suffering imposed on them both by colonialism and apartheid and by patriarchal society. In relation to this, Van Zyl Smit highlights that Ndebele has freed “not only Penelope from the confines of unconditional waiting for, and subjection to, her husband but has made the new Penelope the symbol of hope for women in the twenty-first century, not only South African women, but women everywhere” (2008, p. 404). It is no coincidence that the novel is dedicated to Sara Baartman,13 a woman “who endured the horrors of European eyes, was desecrated after her death, and finally returned home, to rest” (Ndebele 2013, “Dedication”, Kindle ed.). Sara Baartman, Penelope, Winnie and the four descendants are thus all interconnected both in their stories of suffering and in their just regained freedom. The end of the revised edition of the novel underlines the profoundness and the importance of women’s interconnectedness and sisterhood:

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They cannot explain why they miss Penelope so deeply after they have just been with her and so briefly. Maybe they desire to know the worlds she has been to and new ones she has yet to visit. Soon they sense their inexplicable longing as disorientation. They have to restore the sense of their presence to one another. They are on a pilgrimage of their own making to recover intimacy, affection, resolve, and their presence in the world. (2013, Kindle ed.)

Within the framework of a revisited version of the myth of Penelope, Ndebele’s novel envisages a private space where ordinary women can share their personal stories of enduring suffering and reconcile with themselves. By rejecting the label of “victim”, those women “reclaim [their] right to be wounded without [their] pain having to turn [them] into an example of woman as victim” ([2003] 2004, p. 35). Ndebele offers the five descendants (and Penelope) the opportunity to regain their own agency and freedom of choice in the private dimension of female companionship. The Cry of Winnie Mandela thereby dramatises an alternative to the spectacle and publicity of the TRC’s hearings, as well as a critique of the “strict” criteria according to which the South African Truth and Reconciliation  Commission decided who were the victims. Ndebele is interested in posing questions about the TRC’s ability to deal with “ordinary” trauma, especially in connection with women and the issues of marriage and family. The author does not pursue the aim of demolishing or denying the goals accomplished by the TRC, but he rather wants to explore facets of everyday experiences of apartheid that would expand the work initiated by the Commission in crucial ways. The novel therefore becomes a site where we can extend and complicate those enquires that have not yet been addressed by South African politics, aiming to “confront the human tragedy together with the immense responsibility to create a new society” (Ndebele 1994, p. 58).

2.4   Race, Colouredness and the TRC As a key instrument of reconciliation and transition to democracy, how did the TRC engage with the more complicated impacts of racial classifications of South Africa’s past? To what extent were racialised identities played out within the TRC’s proceedings? Did the Commission move beyond the replication of binary categories of “black” and “white”? After investigating how the TRC accommodated women’s stories of trauma— both ordinary and extraordinary—this section turns to consider the

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category of race and its social implications, with a particular focus on the complexities of coloured identity. While discussing the category of gender in the first section of this chapter, I highlighted how both gender and race are socially attributed to the body. I also emphasised how the Commission did not address adequately the social constructions of this attribution in relation to the gendered dimension of trauma, as evidenced by the TRC’s decision to exclude from its radar everyday examples of female trauma. This section argues that the TRC also overlooked the social constructions of that attribution with reference to the category of race. My previous analysis of Bitter Fruit, in fact, suggests that race continues to play a crucial role in post-apartheid society and that the TRC’s discourses of nation-­ building and the concomitant implications of “the rainbow nation” have struggled to dismantle racial and racist boundaries and their ramifications. According to Nahla Valji, the persistence of a racist mind-set and racial inequalities in the “new” South Africa can partly be attributed to the avoidance of a necessary and proper dialogue on the issues of race and racism during the life of the TRC (2004). It is ironic, given that the entire political and economic system of the apartheid state was indeed organised on the principle of racial divisions, that specific questions about race and racism were absent from the interrogational framework of the Commission. This is also observed by Madeleine Fullard, who asserts: by circumscribing the borders of its mandate to violence directed at the body, and by implicitly casting race/racism and politics as two separate domains, the TRC effectively sidestepped the traumatic issues and trenchant debates around race, racism and the legacy of apartheid. (2004)

It is worth remembering that the TRC adopted a narrow definition of gross human rights violations, which, on the one hand, focused on bodily violations that occurred in direct consequence of political repression and strife (killing, abduction, torture, or severe ill-treatment), but, on the other hand, it ignored the more endemic everyday violence of the apartheid racial engineering. With the exception of the national desire to build a “future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex”, there are no other explicit references in the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (1995) to racism or race. It is surely no coincidence that, despite confirming the existence and the

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defining role of racism in South African history, the TRC’s final report acknowledges the narrowness of its mandate: Racism 127) There were cases in which people were victims of racist attack by individuals who were not involved with a publicly known political organization and where the incident did not form part of a specific political conflict. Although racism was at the heart of the South African political order, and although such cases were clearly a violation of the victim’s rights, such violations did not fall within the Commission’s mandate. (“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report”, Vol. 1, Ch. 4, Para. 127)

Whereas those who were affected by violent physical repression could participate in the healing journey carried out by the TRC, millions of people who endured the machinations of apartheid through the system of racial classification, the pass laws, the forced removals, the loss of land and their associated system of migrant labour were excluded. Fullard defines the Human Rights Violations (HRV) statements as “a key site of displacing the language and practice of racism from the accounts of the past”. Significantly, she quotes a TRC statement taker who comments: We rejected many, many cases which came to us simply because they were not falling within the political act of the Commission [or part] of the political ambits. […] A lot of people couldn’t accept the fact that because of what this “white” person did to them it is not a gross human rights violation […] the racial issue was never addressed in terms of what happens to people because [they were] discriminated against racially. (2004)

Of course, the HRV statements and testimonies were not entirely devoid of race. Perceptions of race and episodes of racism indeed surfaced from victims’ accounts but as a corollary of the main story, namely, the story of gross human rights violations which fell into the Commission’s strict definitions. These peripheral references to the racially constructed relations of power, which determined the quality of life of many millions of South Africans, “formed an ‘uninterrogated’ landscape in which the gross human rights violations stood” (Fullard 2004). The exclusion of the issue of racism resounds more strikingly in the TRC’s amnesty hearings, which constitute the most legally and politically controversial aspect of the Commission’s functioning. The Promotion of

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National Unity and Reconciliation Act stated that “in order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives committed in the course of the conflicts of the past” (1995). In other words, racism was not to be taken as a motive for committing a gross human rights violation, and the Amnesty Committee could only accept those applicants whose acts took place with a political objective under orders of, or on behalf of, or with the approval of, a known political organisation. In addition to this, the Act also specified some detailed criteria for assessing whether an applicant’s conduct could qualify as being politically motivated or not. Despite the centrality of race and racism in the South African conflict, the amnesty process acted to silence race from the accounts of perpetrators, and, most importantly, this denoted an understanding of race/ racism and politics as belonging to two separate domains—the one private and the other public, respectively (Wilson 2001). Beyond this, the most significant problems concerned the Amnesty Committee’s daily decisions in determining which acts were deemed to be politically motivated and which were not. Such decisions, in fact, proved to be very controversial, and often appeared to be resolved quite arbitrarily. In some instances, racially motivated violence was deemed to be “political”, or carried out in the name of a known political organisation, while in others it was not, with the result that some were granted amnesty for such actions, whereas others were denied it. Rather than being regarded as a mistake or a flaw of the TRC’s proceedings, one strand of academic criticism has argued that, since the Commission was precisely an instrument of reconciliation and national unity, the silencing of racism was a deliberate omission in order to pursue the image of the “rainbow” nation for the new democratic South Africa (Fullard 2004). Nonetheless, the increasing focus on race, and the national debate around racial inequalities which has taken place after the end of the TRC’s mandate—the National Conference on Racism in Johannesburg in 2000 and the World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban in 2001, for example—suggest that the work of the Commission has not been sufficient. Continuing this dialogue on racism, the case of coloured identity has been highly contested in South Africa. Situated in the interstice between white and black racialised social identities, coloured identity has been often dismissed as a social product of the apartheid racial classification system. This reading is blind to the power relations inherent in the cultural

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formation and representation of Coloureds. Zimitri Erasmus, for example, emphasises the need to re-imagine coloured identities in post-apartheid South Africa in a way which does not deny creolisation and hybridity as constitutive of South African historical and political experiences (2001, p. 21). The discourse of racial and ethnic classification in South Africa is rooted in the colonial period, before the establishment of the apartheid regime. Erasmus argues that coloured identities were formed “in the colonial encounter between colonists (Dutch and British), slaves from South and East India and from East Africa, and conquered indigenous peoples, the Khoi and San” (ibid., p. 21). The result was not “just a ‘mixture’ but a very particular mixture comprising elements of Dutch, British, Malaysian, Khoi and other forms of African culture appropriated, translated and articulated in complex and subtle ways” (ibid., p. 21). Despite different configurations, however, both colonial and apartheid discourses of classification are based on biological notions of identity, which have contributed to the ambiguity, ambivalence and negative connotations associated with the category of “coloured”. Analysing the South African Native Affairs Commission (Sanac) Report,14 Thiven Reddy highlights that its main assumption rested on the distinction between “pure races, pure blood”— that is, Europeans and (black) Africans—and “mixed race”, which implied the mixing of blood, such as the case of Coloureds (2001, pp. 64–79). That differentiation led to negative connotations of racial impurity and miscegenation that characterised both the colonial and the apartheid eras. Robert Young traces the origins of miscegenation back to what he identifies as the colonial desiring machine, “a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion” towards black women (2002, p. 149). Although perceived as morally despicable, sexual relations between whites and the natives (and imported slaves) were quite common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: interracial intercourse was then unofficially tolerated in order to provide the colonists with the opportunity to satisfy their sexual desires and impulses with black women, without having the financial burden to import and support European women. Whilst turning a blind eye to this phenomenon of miscegenation, the colonists, however, made sure to maintain the political and social boundaries between themselves and the Other by some forms of sexual control. The uterine descent rule, for instance, postulated that the children of slave black women inherited the legal status of their mothers, thus maintaining the social distance from the white father and relinquishing him from parental responsibility. Another form of social control was the

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prohibition of slave marriages, meaning that only free persons could marry; hence, if a white person wished to marry his black lover, he had first to purchase her freedom. The offspring of this dialectic of attraction and repulsion were those of mixed descent towards whom the colonists tended to adopt a “schizophrenic” attitude: “not accepting them [mixed race people] as white, yet reluctant to have them simply become part of the broader black populace (the indigenous Khoisan and other black slaves)” (Hendricks 2001, p. 39). Mohamed Adhikari (2005) identifies four key features of coloured identity, the first of which is the desire to be accepted into the white dominant society, in order to share white privileges and benefits. This desire of assimilation is very important to comprehend Coloureds’ complicity with the apartheid regime, and the ensuing sense of shame for this complicity— a concept which I elaborate on later in this section. The second feature is Coloureds’ intermediate position between the white minority and the large African majority, captured in referencing coloured people as “brown”, and in Afrikaans as bruinman. The third feature encompasses a range of negative and derogatory connotations which are attached to the concept of colouredness. Coloured people are described in terms of lack or deficiency of racial authenticity. Adhikari observes that “coloured people were therefore deficient in the positive qualities associated with racial purity and handicapped by negative ones derived from racial mixture” (p. 14). These features have contributed to the marginalisation of Coloureds as a group and to the perception of themselves as marginal—the last feature in Adhikari’s categorisation. It was during the apartheid regime, however, that coloured people suffered the most severe violations of their civil rights. The Nationalist Party imposed a racial classification system on all citizens through the Population Registration Act of 1950, which would determine the “lifeworld” of the apartheid subject. The Act required people to be identified and registered from birth as belonging to one of four distinct racial groups: White (Europeans); Black (pure blooded individual of the Bantu race); Coloured (mixed race) and Asians (Indian descendants). These classifications were, however, largely arbitrary, based on considerations such as family background and cultural acceptance as well as on appearance. According to the Act: A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white—and not generally accepted as Coloured—or who is generally accepted as White—and is

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not obviously Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu […] A Bantu is a person who is, or is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa […] A Coloured is a person who is not a White person or a Bantu. (“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report”, Vol. 1, Ch. 2, Para. 26)15

To perfect its classificatory system, and to avoid the crossing of boundaries from one racial group to the other, the government resorted to a series of amendments and other acts. For example, in 1959, Coloureds and Asians were formally classified into various subgroups, including Cape Coloured, Malay, Griqua, Chinese, Indian, “Other Asian” and “Other Coloured”. The Prohibition of the Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 outlawed marriage and sex across the colour line, respectively. The Group Areas Act of 1950 allocated each racial group to different residential and business sections in a system of urban apartheid. An effect of the law was to exclude non-Whites from living in the most developed areas, which were restricted to Whites. Adhikari points out that the Group Areas Act was “probably the most hated of the apartheid measures among Coloureds because property owners were meagrely compensated, long-standing communities were broken-up, and alternative accommodation was inadequate” (2005, p. 4). Fearing to lose their position of relative privilege, and be relegated to the status of Africans, coloured political organisations adopted a separatist strategy with respect to African identity, thus reinforcing the existing racial boundaries and contributing to the exclusion and subordination of African people. Of course, some Coloureds chose the alternative and joined black unity in the antiapartheid struggle, but they represented a tiny minority of the coloured community. Feelings of marginality and vulnerability continued in the 1990s, which, alongside a sense of alienation from the African majority, led the coloured community to ally with their former oppressors and vote for the National Party in the 1994 first democratic elections (ibid., p. 10, see also Wicomb 1998). This brief summary is certainly not exhaustive, nor conclusive. What I want to emphasise is that coloured identities were formed in the context of racialised relations of power and privilege that deeply affected their experiences in relation to both white and black African identities. Erasmus acknowledges that “growing up coloured meant knowing that I was not

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only not white, but less than white; not only not black, but better than black” (2001, p. 13), which made her position fragile and ambiguous. On the one hand, the meaning of being coloured was associated with a feeling of humiliation and shame for being less than white, which also aroused the desire for assimilation into the white supremacy. On the other hand, being better than black justified and encouraged their complicity with the racist dominant discourses about the subordination and inferiority of the black African Other. Bitter Fruit provides us with a significant example through the character of Alec, Silas’s coloured brother-in-law, who confesses to have cooperated with “the cops” (p. 216), the police system, because he knew that, if threatened, he could not have endured the physical pain of being tortured. In an epiphany, Silas connects Alec’s voice with one he had heard on the night of Lydia’s rape, and he deduces that Alec was present that night: “A traitor. Silas stopped himself. What a crude word. Who knows what goes on in the hearts of people who are confronted with such stark choices: work for us, betray your friends and comrades, or endure unending pain” (p.  216). These internal contradictions are thus at the heart of the formation of coloured identity and they persist beyond the apartheid regime. As highlighted by Adhikari, Coloureds continue to feel marginalised in post-apartheid society, but this time from the African government: “first we were not white enough and now we are not black enough” (2005, p. 176).16 One explanation for this sense of marginality and of not being “enough” might be the scant attention given to addressing specifically coloured identity in the TRC’s healing project. While the TRC held special hearings on women, alongside institutional hearings (prisons, business, health sector, legal community, media, faith community), no special hearings focused on the case of coloured people. This is not to suggest that the TRC’s final report disregarded the “visible” conditions of coloured people under apartheid law, but it failed to address the historical and social implications as well as the “in-between” status inherent in coloured identity. In their essay “Crossing the Colour(ed) Line: Mediating the Ambiguities of Belonging and Identity”, Grunebaum and Robins examine how coloured identity was (inadequately) addressed by the TRC through the analysis of a particular testimony by a coloured ANC activist and combatant held at the institutional hearings on prisons. The two scholars place particular emphasis on how the attention was focused on the TRC narrative of heroic suffering and resistance, rather than on the witness’s painful encounter with her own colouredness within the prison community

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(2001, p. 160). Although people from the coloured community bore witness at the TRC’s public hearings, the primary attention of their telling was, indeed, on those traumas which fell into the strict definition of victim provided by the Commission, and excluded racial discourses or what it meant to be coloured during apartheid and beyond. The TRC’s main goal was to give voice to those people who had suffered from bodily violations but had been forced to silence during the apartheid regime, in order to build a national narrative that could foster healing and reconciliation. Many stories of suffering, however, went unheard because of the Commission’s strict definition of gross human rights violations and, as such, were excluded from this collective narrative of healing. We have seen, on the other hand, that fiction is able to give back a certain level of subjectivity to those voices and to draw attention to particular stories of trauma that were excluded by the Commission’s strict criteria. Zoë Wicomb’s 2006 novel, Playing in the Light, provides another perceptive example in this sense, as it addresses the challenges of the coloured experience during the apartheid era and beyond. The following section will examine the protagonist’s quest for truth and her confrontation with the upsetting discovery about her coloured origins. Here, Wicomb indirectly expands the very strict definition of trauma provided by the TRC by bringing to the fore the contradictions and hybrid dimensions inherent in coloured identity, as well as in the construction of race in post-apartheid South Africa. Analysis of the novel will also show how the complexity of coloured identity is reflected in the difficulty of giving voice, narratively speaking, to such an identity.

2.5   The Coloured Voice in Zoё Wicomb’s Playing in the Light: Complicity, Miscegenation and Mermaids Narrated in the third person, Playing in the Light is set in post-1994 Cape Town, precisely during the TRC’s proceedings. The title evokes both Dick Hebdige’s Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (1989) and Toni Morrison’s essay-collection Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992); the latter, in particular, investigates the presence of blackness (especially of an African-American tradition) in American literature. Both works serve to announce Wicomb’s thematic concerns in Playing in the Light: the presence of coloured identity in South African society

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dominated by white supremacy and the phenomenon of passing for white (van der Vlies 2010, p. 588). The novel focuses on Marion, a self-made white Afrikaner woman who owns and runs a travel agency, despite the fact she has never travelled outside the Cape Town metropolis. The novel is then constructed around the protagonist’s difficult confrontation with her past and her discovery about her coloured origins. It follows Marion around Cape Town, from her flat in Bloubergstrand to her city office, from her city office to her parents’ house in Observatory, where her father John has been living alone since the death of Marion’s mother Helen. Marion’s first real travels are both connected with her search for the truth about her past and they take the form of identity journeys: first, to a missionary settlement near Wuppertal in the Cederberg, where the protagonist makes an extraordinary discovery about her real identity as a coloured person; secondly, Marion’s vacation abroad in the United Kingdom to deal with that discovery. Marion’s story is also interspersed with a narrative describing her parents’ own story of passing for white in the 1950s. The practice of passing for white was a direct consequence of both the ambiguous Population Registration Act and the devastating Group Areas Act. To secure the privileges reserved for persons classified as white, John and Helen Campbell— Marion’s parents—took advantage of the paleness of their skin and of the ambivalent definition of white provided by the Act, which was mainly based on appearances. Notably, the narrator observes that Marion’s parents had “history on their side. It was the Population Registration Act that allowed them brand new lives” (2006, p. 113). After discovering her parents’ subterfuge, Marion visits the National Library in Cape Town in the attempt to do some research about the apartheid racial classification system and understand her parents’ story as play-whites. To the woman’s disappointment, there are no records for “play-white”; she and the librarian imagine that play-white “must be a condition of whiteness; but whiteness itself, according to the library’s classification system, is not a category for investigation” (p.  120). The librarian then suggests that they “will have to look up coloureds […] which doesn’t make any sense, but what else can they do?” (p. 120). Since this too leads nowhere, the remaining option is to look up the classification law itself and the various amendments to the term “white”. They find that from 1950 onwards, the legal definition of race was social rather biological, supported by baffling discourses about the appearance of a “white person”, and more unsettlingly, in a 1962 amendment, whiteness is defined “in terms of what is not”

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(p. 121). In response to these contorted and unhelpful racial definitions, Marion hears “shocking laughter pealing from her own throat” (p. 121), which is immediately followed by the librarian’s. This brief scene in the library exposes the arbitrariness and ambiguity of the apartheid racial classification system, where all definitions relied on each other, and most importantly, on one particular definition—that of whiteness—which Marion cannot find (Dass 2011, p. 144). As the narrative unfolds, it is revealed that the idea of “becoming” white occurs when John Campbell is mistaken for white when he applies for a job as a traffic policeman at the Traffic Department in Green Point, a job reserved only for white persons. Helen interprets this event as “a gift, a sign from above that they should set about the task of building new selves, start from scratch and not be content with what happened accidentally” (p. 128). Whether being coloured meant restrictions, “new voters’ roll, job reservation, Group Areas Act” (p.  151), “whiteness is without restrictions. It has the fluidity of milk; its glow is far-reaching” (p. 151). John and Helen then marry hastily without the presence of embarrassing coloured family members or friends; they reinvent themselves as white English-speaking South Africans by refining “the vocabulary of the master race” (p. 124). To anglicise her name, Helen Karlese transforms herself into Helen Charles, thus getting rid of the “nasty possessive. Could it be that these Afrikaans names ended with –se spoke of an unspeakable past, of being the slave of someone called Karel?” (p.  128). Vigilance and secrecy become the Campbells’ guidelines for reinvention. Helen allows herself and her husband no space within which their secret could be articulated, not even in the safety of their bedroom, which instead “had lost its privacy too” (p. 124). Later in the novel, Marion will come to realise that the pursuit of whiteness is all-encompassing and “is in competition with history. Building a new life means doing so from scratch, keeping a pristine house, without clutter, without objects that clamour to tell of a past, without the eloquence—no, the garrulousness—of history” (p. 152). Although this task of identity reinvention did not include reproduction, because a child might have exposed them as Coloureds and play-­ whites, Helen becomes pregnant and decides that her child—who “arrived with pale skin and smooth hair” (p. 125)—“would grow up in ignorance, a perfectly ordinary child who would take her whiteness, her privileges, for granted” (p. 125). Helen Campbell’s achievement would have been her legacy to Marion, “a new generation unburdened by the past” (p. 150). Helen’s obsession with whiteness—and the constant fear of being exposed

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as belonging to the coloured racial category—transforms the woman into a rigid and unaffectionate mother who urges little Marion to keep out of the sun and stay indoors even in summer, in order to preserve the purity of her white skin. Marion’s childhood consists, in fact, of “endless rules and restrictions and excessive fears” (p.  60) and is devoid of friends or visitors: until they acquired decent things, from decent furniture to decent teaspoons, although, no sooner would they get a coveted object than it would be superseded by something even more desirable, more decent. Decency, it transpired, was an endlessly deferred, unachievable goal. (p. 167)

Family members could only visit if they were fair-skinned and able to meet Helen’s expectations in terms of “proper” behaviour. John is thus forced to distance himself from his dark-skinned family; likewise, his sister Elsie, despite having fair skin, is banished from the Campbells’ house due to her lack of table manners. Interestingly, Helen’s obsession with whiteness as racial purity is further conveyed by her repulsion of John’s tender nickname for Marion—“his meermin, his little mermaid” (p.  22). Helen is horrified by the hybrid nature of this mythological creature—half-woman, half-fish—asserting that mermaids should be ashamed “of being neither one thing nor another. No one likes creatures that are so different, so mixed up” (p. 47). Due to the ambivalent nature of the mermaid, which clearly recalls the “in-­ between” condition of coloured identity, Samuelson insightfully observes that this mythological figure “is suggestive of the negative construction of the identity from which Marion’s family ‘passes’ away (‘not fully one thing or another’), and of the experience of ‘passing’ itself” (2010, p.  554). Helen, in fact, has to endure sexual harassment from Councillor Carter in order to obtain the affidavit that defines both John and herself as white persons. Commenting on Helen’s degrading bartering of sex for whiteness, Maria Olaussen highlights that this is also presented “as an act of complicity within a racist society—the identity she wants to attain can be reached only through an act which feeds into racist stereotypes where concupiscence and blackness converge in the white imagination” (2009, p. 155). In her article “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa”, Wicomb discusses the intersection between sex and racial discourses, and the sense of shame associated with miscegenation:

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Miscegenation, the origins of which lie within a discourse of “race”, concupiscence, and degeneracy, continues to be bound up with shame, a pervasive shame exploited in apartheid’s strategy of the naming of a Coloured race, and recurring in the current attempts by coloureds to establish brownness as a pure category, which is to say a denial of shame. (1998, p. 92)

Helen’s attempt to escape the shame of being coloured—and its intermediate status which resembles so closely the condition of the mermaid—can be accomplished only through the (in her eyes) shameful act of miscegenation. To Helen’s relief, miscegenation does not produce only brownness and the “degeneracy” she fears but also whiteness and purity, here exemplified by the affidavit confirming John’s and her white identities, which she obtains in exchange of sex with the Councillor. To return to the character of Marion, Playing in the Light opens with the young woman sitting on the balcony, “the space both inside and out” (p. 1), which signals from the outset the “novel’s engagement with being in transition, liminality and in-betweenness” (De Michelis 2012, p. 75). Moreover, in addition to recalling the liminal condition of coloured identity itself, this scene prefigures the precarious position Marion will soon assume as she discovers the truth about her parents’ story of play-whites. While sitting there, a guinea fowl dies unexpectedly at her feet, and she wonders “will others, the enemies, line up on her balcony wall” (p.  1). The falling of the black-and-white guinea fowl, so ubiquitous in South Africa, foretells Marion’s discovery of her coloured (“black-and-white”) identity and the imminent disruption of her inner life. As Stéphane Robolin points out, “in a novel that explores the complex terms of racial identity in the new South Africa, the death of this fowl symbolically sets the tone for the text’s general mode: disturbing the settled meaning of the past and present” (2011, p. 350). Furthermore, the balcony scene gives the narrator the opportunity to describe Marion’s apartment complex, which is located in the north-eastern seaside suburb of Bloubergstrand and carefully protected by high security measures: Security—you have to pay for it these days, especially if you are a woman on your own. No point in having a glorious outlook on the sea, with the classic view of Table Mountain on the left and Robben Island on the right, if you are not secure. Here, your property is inviolable. (p. 2)

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The narrator’s emphasis on the protection of person and property in “these days”—which also reflects Marion’s concern—suggests the necessity for fortification, militarisation, privatisation and segregation even in post-apartheid South Africa, where the past racial conflicts and subsequent violent acts still affect the country. The residence’s proliferation of monitored security measures and its insulation from the external world, however, do not protect Marion from either the intrusion of the dead guinea fowl or the haunting revelation of her parents’ past. The woman’s journey towards the truth is indeed propelled by ominous signs such as nightmares, haunting memories and blurred images in the waters of the ocean from her balcony view. For example, Marion has recurrent disturbing dreams of an old country house with a loft: In the dream, Marion wanders through the house. It is still; there is no one. But in the kitchen there is the smell of coffee beans just roasted and the palpable absence of a woman who threatens to materialise, first here and then there […] Marion keeps going out to the stoep to get away from the shape of the woman, but cannot tell whether it is the back or the front of the house, and so must return indoors. In the telling, it would seem this is the key to the dream. (p. 30)

In a second dream, this elusive figure of the woman “who threatens to materialise” becomes “an old woman sitting on a low stool” (p. 31) in the loft, who triggers the memory of Tokkie, Marion’s beloved black nanny, a sort of “substitute mother” for the little girl. In reality, Tokkie will turn out to be Marion’s maternal grandmother, who Marion was made to believe was a mere servant in order not to compromise the Campbell’s façade of “white persons”. The link between these nightmares and reality is the picture of Patricia Williams, an anti-apartheid activist, whose photograph has appeared on the cover of the Cape Times newspaper along with reports of her testimony at the TRC’s public hearings about being tortured by the security police. Marion finds Patricia Williams’s features uncannily familiar and her image starts persecuting the young woman, like a personal ghost, who “hisses a command to remember, remember, remember” (p. 54). Marion also comes to associate the face of the woman with Tokkie while watching the ocean from her balcony:

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she stares in horror at an enlarged face floating on the water, a disfigured face on the undulating waves, swollen with water […] It is not until she goes back indoors that recognition beats like a wave against the picture window: Tokkie, it is Tokkie’s face on the water. (p. 55)

On the one hand, Patricia Williams’s image acts as a double, who unsettlingly resembles the dear Tokkie; on the other, she becomes “a silent, personal ghost, who inhabits only [Marion’s] very private life, which admittedly has expanded to include an interest in the TRC proceedings” (p. 76, see also De Michelis 2012, p. 74). Marion’s interest in the politics and history of her country changes throughout the novel. She initially dismisses the TRC’s hearings and avoids newspapers, because: The tired old politics of this country does not divert her. She has no interest in its to-ing and fro-ing, and is impatient with people in sackcloth and ashes who flagellate themselves over the so-called misdemeanours of history, or with those who choose not to forget, who harp on about the past and so fail to move forward and look to the future. (p. 48)

The connection Marion makes between Patricia Williams and her beloved Tokkie prompts her to develop an interest in her country’s political matters, “a world she has never known, never wished to explore” (p. 74). This connection gives Marion the “uncanny certainty” that there is “a mystery about her own birth” (p. 62) and drives her to start a journey to find out more about Tokkie. She assumes (wrongly as it turns out) that she is an adopted child and the old woman played an important role in her adoption. Since she does not obtain any answers from her ageing father, she decides to travel to Wuppertal, where there is said to be someone who knew Tokkie. The young woman believes that Tokkie’s family would be able to give her some information about her biological parents. It is, in fact, in Wuppertal that Marion discovers her coloured origins. Marion visits Mrs Murray who tells her that she had known a woman called Tokkie Karlese. At first, it seems that this person cannot be connected with Marion’s life, but then Mrs Murray, while kneeling to bandage Marion’s injured foot, has an epiphanic experience of recognition, which is reminiscent of the episode in the Odyssey where the maid Eurycleia recognises Odysseus by his scar just above his knee while bathing him.

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Here, Mrs Murray perceives a certain resemblance between Marion and Mrs Karlese: O gits, it’s like seeing a spook, because from down here with your face tilted like that you look the spitting image of Mrs Karlese my dear! […] who would have thought old Mrs Karlese would want to come and spook me, of all people? Now that really is something, that her shadow should fall over your face like this. (p. 97)

While Mrs Murray thinks that her house is haunted by Mrs Karlese’s ghost, this is Marion’s moment of truth, of learning about her lineage and that Tokkie is Helen’s mother, her grandmother. The travel to Wuppertal is enlightening from another point of view, because it also exposes the Coloureds’ complicity with the apartheid racist system. The community Marion finds in Wuppertal is described by her hostess as “decent coloured people” who “voted for the Nationalists” (p. 96). Mrs Murray is making reference to what Wicomb has defined as “the shameful vote of Cape coloureds for the National Party in the first democratic elections” (1998, p.  93) in 1994, which exemplified the ambiguous position occupied by Coloureds during the period of transition to democracy. Marion is not alone in her journey to uncover the past, but is accompanied by her coloured employee Brenda McKay, “her friend and spectral double” (Klopper 2011, p. 151). There are, in fact, meaningful parallels between the two young women that also reveal the different contexts in which they grew up: Marion lives in her own flat, which seems “to spring from the glossy pages” (p. 2) of Home and Gardens magazines, protected by high security measures and cocooned by her four-poster bed; Brenda lives in a dangerous township and shares her bedroom with her mother, forced to listen to her “tossing and sighing, the horrible rumblings of the old lady’s stomach in the heat of the night” (p. 38). Despite these differences, they grow fond of each other and the unexpected encounter with a strange character, Outa Blinkoog, along the road to Wuppertal solidifies their friendship. The old man, who draws a “ramshackle cart” (p. 86) full of beautiful things, is described as a “peacock man, a brightly coloured creature from mythology, a messenger from the gods” (p.  87). Marion and Brenda share an improvised picnic with the old man, who launches “into a narrative that has no end, each fragment leading to another” (p. 88). Van der Vlies underlines the fact that the narration of this enchanting storyteller evokes “the TRC’s project of narrative collection and

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collation” (2010, p. 586). Like the many TRC witnesses who had endured years of painful silence before being given the opportunity to tell their stories at the public hearings, “it is as if the man [Outa Blinkoog] has waited all his life to tell his story: a flood of words bursts unsolicited from his curved, girlish lips” (pp. 87–88). Before leaving the two young women, Outa gives them a farewell present of a lantern made of coloured glass, which allows “the last hour of candlelight [to be] sweetened with bright colour, so there’s no place for sadness” (p. 91). This is a gift “that neither one nor the other will own” (p. 92), but it will come to signify inspiration and willingness for both of them: Marion is impelled to travel, a journey that is part escape from the discovery about her past and part quest for a new identity, and Brenda to fulfil her dream of writing. After learning that her parents had turned their backs on their coloured families and community and crossed over—“play-whites”—Marion is left with “a terrible feeling of emptiness” and displacement because “she is, after all, not the person she thought she was” (p.  106). This discovery urges Marion to reflect on her own hitherto unquestioned “whiteness”, and on the issue of race as envisioned in present-day, supposedly “non-­ racial” South Africa: It may be true that being white, black or coloured means nothing, but it is also true that things are no longer the same; there must be a difference between what things are and what they mean. These categories may have slimmed down, may no longer be tagged with identity cards, but once they were pot-bellied with meaning. The difference—that is what Marion cannot get her head around. How can things be the same, and yet be different? (p. 106)

Marion is in an odd place, where things are different but the same. Once she was white, now she is coloured and she wonders whether she will have to cross over to embrace her new racial identity. Yet, “there can be no question of returning to a place where [her] parents once were” (p. 107), because those places have lost their meaning in the new South Africa. The young woman confides in Geoff, her suitor, that what she can ultimately do is to “keep crossing to and fro, to different places, perhaps that is what the new is all about—an era of unremitting crossings” (p. 107). Through this image of endless crossings from one place to another, Wicomb conveys the sense of hybridity and metamorphosis, which characterises the post-apartheid era, where people need to rediscover a new meaning for

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the concept of racial identity, a meaning that overcomes the rigidity and static nature of the apartheid regime. Furthermore, hybridity also counterposes the binary-based approach that informed the work of the TRC. Against the neat division between blacks and whites, between victims and perpetrators as established by the truth commission, Wicomb foregrounds the hybridity of coloured identity, by demonstrating both its shameful complicity with the apartheid state and the violations that coloured people had to experience due to that very same regime. Marion— the mermaid—is then hybrid with reference to both her newly found coloured identity and her ambiguous position in the history of her country: she is a “victim” of her parents’ decision to play-white, which has deprived the woman of her true origins, but she is also a “perpetrator” for the privileges she has benefited from as (supposedly) belonging to the category of white people for most of her life. As anticipated above, Marion decides to leave her business and travel to Europe, to nowhere in particular. Abdulrazak Gurnah places a particular emphasis on the role of Outa Blinkoog’s lantern in Marion’s decision to go on a journey (2011, p. 274): The candlelight glows green, red and blue through the rough shapes of glass, spreading a magical warmth. Brenda’s cry of delight is silenced by her mother, who turns from the screen to hiss but cannot help smiling her own admiration. […] [Marion] has brought the lantern over on impulse and now, under the warm insistent light, an inchoate thought flickers and writhes into being […] she knows precisely why she has come to see them. I’m going away, she says. (pp. 184–185)

The most important stage of her journey abroad is in London, where Marion rents a small one-bedroom apartment and begins reading South African novels—Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974) and J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977), two novels dramatising the real or imagined re-emergence of dead bodies on pastoral farms where they had been buried, a warning that the past will continue to haunt the present if not addressed properly. It is in “this alien world” (p. 197) in London, where she reads narratives of the place from which she is momentarily far away, that Marion can start to comprehend the history of South Africa and think of it “as her country” (p. 197). Most significantly, after discovering that her history as a white, Afrikaner woman is fiction, cleverly

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crafted by her parents to benefit from the privileges restricted to white people, Marion turns to fiction to find her history, “to get to know those dark decades when the Campbells were playing in the light” (p. 191). Her response to The Conservationist is particularly visceral—“the hole in her chest seems to fill up with words” (p. 190)—and, by identifying with the anonymous “play-white girl with coarse features, cheap make-up, and a give-away hairline of frizzy roots” (p. 190), she wonders “how many versions of herself exist in the stories of her country?” (pp. 190–191). This encounter with South Africa through the practice of reading, combined with the lack of sunlight of the British summer, makes her cry constantly. Marion is grieving for both a loss and a re-discovery of the self, and for all the versions of the “self” she could never know. Her cry thus becomes a cathartic experience, which she embraces: “there is something about being cocooned in a single room, about the bleakness of the days, that must be endured, like sitting an examination” (p. 191). The reference to In the Heart of the Country is also significant. Wicomb appears to engage in dialogue with Coetzee’s insistence on the fictionality of fiction and with his literary agenda about exposing the ideology of power encoded into language. James Wohlpart distinguishes two levels of narrative in Coetzee’s text: Magda’s narrative, the story that she tells, and the narrative technique of the novel, the way in which the story is told (see Wohlpart 1994). The novel is presented in a diary-like format of 266 consecutive sections in which Magda tells her story. Wohlpart argues that Magda attempts to subvert the ideology of power inherent in the master-­ slave discourse by killing her father, an old Afrikaner man, and by bringing about a new order that migh allow her to speak to the servants Hendrick and Anna with the language of the heart: “the words have come out without premeditation. I feel joy. That must be how other people speak, from their hearts” (Coetzee 1977, p. 87). Magda comes to understand, however, that “the destruction of the old order, symbolised in her father, will not allow any subversion of the ideology of power because that ideology is already encoded into language” (Wohlpart 1994, p. 221) and she will have to  return to the master/slave discourse in order to communicate with the servants. Marion’s quest for history through fiction is incomplete though, as she only reads white South African authors—white voices—who show through their narrative choices, especially Coetzee’s, the limits of language to describe the Other. Magda’s failure to find the language of the heart, in fact, creates a meaningful parallel between In the Heart of the Country and

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Playing in the Light: although Wicomb’s text is set in the post-apartheid era, the dialogue with Coetzee’s text suggests that Marion still has to struggle to find a language which is devoid of the ideology of power and through which it is possible to communicate with and narrate the Other, especially the coloured Other. In this connection, Klopper places emphasis on the incompleteness of Marion’s journey towards her coloured origins when he argues that Marion “seems still to be trapped in repression, knowing now where she comes from but unable to act upon this knowledge, ignorant, perhaps resistant, to what it demands of her” (2011, p. 153). Once back in Cape Town, she returns to her old office routine, she “sits at her desk, it’s as if she has not been away” (p. 212). Playing in the Light ends with a quarrel between Marion and Brenda, the protagonist’s coloured double, which suggests that Marion still has a long journey to make to reconcile with her new identity, and, more generally, with the history of her country. After learning that Brenda has written the story of her own father John, Marion is enraged and kicks Brenda out of her car, shouting: “why don’t you write your own fucking story?” (p. 217). This lack of understanding between the two women undermines their newly created friendship, and the choice of ending the novel with a quarrel leaves the reader with unanswered questions: will Marion be able to find “the language of the heart” that Magda could not find in order to communicate and reconcile with Brenda eventually? Will she reconcile with the story of her parents and her legacy? Will she fully embrace her colouredness? And what would that entail? Marion’s response to the discovery of her coloured origins remains unresolved. Looking at the wider TRC’s project of closure and reconciliation, it is no coincidence that the novel is indeed set during the years of the TRC. Wicomb’s choice must be interpreted as an attempt to challenge the TRC’s overly easy discourses of reconciliation, which did not address properly the multi-faceted racial question in South African history and overlooked the profound contradictions inherent in coloured identity, thus perpetuating the racial binary “black-and-white”. This closing scene also has important ethical implications concerning the “ownership” and authorship of the narrative, raising the following questions: who is the narrator? Whose story is this? Who has the right to tell the story? Can the coloured voice finally be heard through Brenda’s act of writing? In a similar way to the role played in Marion’s self-discovery journey, Outa Blinkoog’s gift acts as an inspiring force which encourages Brenda to accomplish her dream of writing a story:

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All her life she has wanted to write, and literally could not get as much as a sentence onto paper, but lately, in the last few weeks […] It started by lighting the lantern in the bedroom while her mother and the others watched television. Just staring at it seemed to drown out the noise so that, well, lying on her bed she just started writing. (p. 217)

Brenda has been looking for a story to write, and explains to Marion the reason why she could not write her own story—the story of an “ordinary” coloured girl—preferring instead John’s story: Writing my own story, I know, is what someone like me is supposed to do, what we all do, they say, whether we know it or not, but Christ, what story do I have to tell? I’m no Patricia Williams, with adventures under my belt. Mine is the story of everybody else in Bonteheuwel, dull as dishwater. […] Now your father, there’s a story—with his pale skin as capital, ripe for investment. (pp. 217–218)

Marion becomes angry and accuses Brenda of appropriating her father’s story: “that’s enough. Get out. I know my father’s fucking story” (p. 218). Brenda responds, “Actually […] I suspect you don’t” (p. 218), hinting at the possibility that Marion might not know the whole story. At the beginning of this section, I presented Playing in the Light as the narrative of Marion’s discovery about her parents’ past as play-whites and of how she responds to this discovery. A third-person narrative voice speaks as if from the woman’s consciousness, recording her thoughts and feelings, conjuring up her memories and images from the past. Interwoven with her story of discovery, there is also the narrative of how her parents created and maintained their white identity, and some of this narrative derives from Marion’s childhood recollections. The final quarrel between Marion and Brenda casts a new light on the novel’s narrative structure, though. As it turns out, while the narrative may tell the story of Marion, apparently from her consciousness, it may not be Marion’s story at all, but someone else’s story, someone who is herself embedded in the third-­ person narrative as a character, that is Brenda (Klopper 2011, p. 150). At the end of Playing in the Light, the reader, in fact, learns that Brenda has written a novel based on John’s recollections, disclosed to Brenda while Marion was travelling abroad. The reader is, therefore, left with the possibility that the novel Brenda has written may be the very same novel the reader has in hand, which tells the story both of Marion’s discovery of her

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coloured ancestry and of how Brenda has come to know that story. According to this interpretation, Brenda might also be the narrator, further complicating the narrative structure. There are, however, some gaps in this theory because some episodes are positioned outside Brenda’s ken. For example, the narrative of Helen’s bartering of sex in exchange for a white identity for herself and her husband, or other family matters, such as the courtship and marriage of Tokkie, cannot be known to Brenda, since they are not known even to John or to Marion herself. Of course, being the narrator, these episodes could possibly, though perhaps not very credibly, be Brenda’s fictionalisation of John’s recollections of the past. Whatever might be the case, the narrative structure is certainly unsettling, and it raises interesting questions related to the authorship, ownership and reliability of the narrative itself. Who is telling the story? Whose story is this? If Brenda is the narrator, is she reliable? Is she telling the truth about Marion’s family’s story, or has she taken some poetic license? Furthermore, does Brenda have the right to tell someone else’s story? The episode with Outa Blinkoog confirms the novel’s interest in the ethics of narrative, with particular reference to the “dangers of narrating or narrativizing” the Other (van der Vlies 2010, p. 587). While recounting her encounter with Outa Blinkoog to her current lover, Marion wonders whether “she and Brenda imagined the man” (p. 106) and realises that “her account of him is silly, a betrayal. Try as she may, she makes him sound clownish” (p. 106). Van der Vlies highlights that, here, the narrative is testing “the limits of its own hospitality, or the ability of any narrative to host the otherness of others’ narratives without doing them harm” (ibid., p. 587). At issue then is the ethical question as to the possibility for writers, historians or witnesses of any kind to tell other people’s story without any attempts to manipulate or appropriate it. This concern is a recurring theme in Wicomb’s fiction, and her previous novel, David’s Story (2000), represents another extraordinary example where she addresses the questions concerning the representation of coloured identity and the narrative encounters with notions of “truth”. The protagonist David Dirkse is a high-ranking coloured MK fighter who decides to write his story in 1991, when the old regime has started to disintegrate. To that end, he hires an unnamed, female writer, whose task is to piece together the information David provides and write his autobiography. From the outset, the novel explicitly sets out to undermine any presentation of the

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narrative as truth. Indeed, in the “Preface”, the unnamed, female writer/ narrator declares that the novel “is and is not David’s story”: He would have liked to write it himself. He has indeed written some fragments—a few introductory paragraphs to sections, some of surprising irony, all of which I have managed to include in one way or another—but he was unwilling or unable to flesh out the narrative. […] He wanted me to write it, not because he thought that his story could be written by someone else, but rather because it would no longer belong to him. In other words, he both wanted and did not want it to be written. ([2000] 2001, p. 1)

The narrator is frustrated with David’s inability to complete the story he claims to want to tell, and, throughout the whole novel, she has to negotiate his story with him, trying to assemble the misremembered fragments David can convey. The most significant gaps in the narrative of David’s Story refer to David’s comrade, Dulcie Olifant, and her story of torture at the hands of both the security forces and the liberation movement in the ANC-run prison camps in Angola. David is also particularly unwilling to disclose that he and Dulcie have shared some form of romantic connection. At some point, the narrator describes a specific fragmentary document David has presented to her: Truth, I gather, is the word that cannot be written. He has changed it into the palindrome of Cape Flats speech—TRURT, TRURT, TRURT, TRURT—the words speed across the page, driven as a toy car is driven by a child, with lips pouted and spit flying, wheels squealing around the Dulcie obstacles. (ibid., p. 136)

Borrowing Andrew van der Vlies’s words, in David’s Story, Wicomb deploys the author/narrator in order to “undermine the veracity of any project pretending to truth” (2010, p. 596). Relying on unsettling narratives and on multiple focalisers, both David’s Story and Playing in the Light challenge the validity of narrative projects that purport to a singular truth; most importantly, they question the possibility for narrative to represent the coloured Other, the coloured voice. Both Dulcie’s story and David’s in David’s Story “cannot be told, […] cannot be translated into words, into language we use for everyday matters” ([2000] 2001, p. 151). In a similar fashion, neither Marion’s nor her parents’ stories can be truly and completely represented, and Brenda’s choice to focus on Marion’s father’s

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story attests to her inability to write her own story. Pamela Scully underlines that Wicomb’s novels “resist the housekeeping work of historical writing. Writing about the past will not make things clearer” (2011, p. 308). In both her novels, Wicomb explores the ways in which people seek to recover and narrate their coloured past, but both instances end with a denial of the narrative itself. Although both novels do not address directly the work of the TRC— David’s Story focuses on the revolutionary period before the 1994 elections, Playing in the Light is set during the TRC’s public hearings but does not elaborate this reference in a significant way, at least explicitly—their engagement with questions of narrativity, especially in connection with coloured voice, make them a provocative and critical source that both challenges and extends the work of the Commission. By expanding the TRC’s definition of trauma to the racial dimension, they problematise the ambiguities of coloured identity; most importantly, they dramatise the narrative difficulties in giving voice to such a historically, culturally and socially contradictory identity, the complexity of which had been poorly addressed by the TRC’s proceedings and its strict definitions. Wicomb’s narrative project calls to mind my previous analysis of The Cry of Winnie Mandela: both Ndebele and Wicomb engage in dialogue with the TRC’s bodily-related definition of trauma by investigating, respectively, the gendered and racial attributions to the body and how these attributions affect the notion of trauma. They therefore shed light on the necessity to redefine the TRC’s concept of victim of gross human rights violations in ways that move beyond bodily violations and take into consideration South Africa’s postcolonial conditions and racial implications. To conclude, this chapter has drawn attention to the issue of trauma, exploring the TRC’s definition of human rights violations and how literature responds to the limits of this definition. Dangor’s Bitter Fruit is particularly interested in exposing the difficulties of articulating sexual violence against women in a public context (Lydia). It also raises important questions with reference to the supposedly healing power of truth (Mikey’s revenge), the “shameful” ambiguities inherent in coloured identity (miscegenation and racial impurity) and the need to bring to the fore examples of sexual violence against women that are not racially motivated (Vinu’s story). Analysis of the novel, however, shows that Dangor’s primary concern is to challenge the way in which the TRC elicited women’s stories of suffering; to put it in other words, Dangor engages with the problems of articulating trauma, proposing silence as a powerful

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alternative to linguistic expressions of pain. On the other hand, The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Playing in the Light address the limits of the TRC’s definition of trauma and the difficulties of articulating it. Ndebele’s text explores the gendered dimension of trauma by focusing on ordinary, everyday humiliations and oppressions that primarily affected women’s lives (Penelope’s descendants) and that were excluded from the Commission’s radar. In the absence of an official setting, such as that of the TRC’s hearings, Ndebele creates a fictional, alternative space where those women can gather, share their painful stories and regain agency through the act of storytelling. Playing in the Light—and, as we have seen, David’s Story—confronts with the racial dimension of trauma by calling attention to the case of coloured identity and to the challenges of giving voice to its problematic ramifications even in post-apartheid South Africa. It is noticeable that this change of focus occurs in literary works such as The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Playing in the Light that, if compared to Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001), were published with a greater distance from the completion of the Human Rights Violations Committee’s mandate (1998). This suggests that, as times goes by, not only has the interest in the work of the TRC persisted in the literary landscape, but authors expand their questions and explorations. They also rely on an increasingly experimental narrative style and structure, on the one hand, blending literary genres such as fiction, biography and essay, and, on the other, employing unsettling narratives that challenge authorship and ownership of the story. Wicomb’s David’s Story is a significant exception to this literary trend as it was published in 2000, a year before the publication of Dangor’s novel. It is impossible to provide a certain explanation, but it must be noticed that Zoë Wicomb has lived in the United Kingdom since the 1970s and, apart three years teaching at the University of Western Cape, she has lived in Glasgow since 1994. This means that she could follow the TRC’s proceedings from a safe geographical and, perhaps, emotional distance. There is no hard evidence in this sense, and yet we cannot deny the possibility that this critical distance has allowed Wicomb to engage more audaciously with the work of the TRC than Achmat Dangor: if David’s Story addresses questions in relation to both the notion of trauma and the problems of articulating it through experimental narrative techniques, Bitter Fruit, in its critique of the TRC’s strategies of articulating women’s pain, continues to adopt primarily the Commission’s definition of bodily trauma.

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Notes 1. Ms Khutwane’s testimony is fully transcribed in the official website dedicated to the work of the TRC, from which the extracts I discuss have been taken. See http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/hrvtrans/worcest/ct00530. htm. For further details, see Ross’s study (2003), with particular reference to chapter four “Narrative Threads”. 2. An example of media article reporting Ms Khutwane’s testimony is “Woman tells truth body of sexual abuse” (1996) (see Ross 2003). 3. See Sanders (2007), in particular chapter 2 “Remembering Apartheid” and chapter 3 “Hearing Women”. 4. See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern speak?” (1994) and Libin, “‘Can the subaltern be heard?’ Response and Responsibility in South Africa’s Human Spirit” (2003). 5. The CALS’s submission had in fact suggested that “the Commission should publicise section 38 of the Act which binds all members and employees of the TRC to the preservation of confidentiality. Women need to know that they can come forward without other people knowing about it, and can give their statement to a person in safe and private conditions. They should be informed that they do not have to repeat their statement in front of the whole Commission in public and under the glare of television cameras. […] Women should be able to request that their statements be taken by women and they be allowed to further elaborate on their statements in closed hearings, possibly only to women Commissioners” (Goldblatt and Meintjes 1996, point G). However, the chapter on women in the 4th volume of the TRC’s final report does not make any reference to the section 38 of the Act, nor to some examples of women’s hearings that were held effectively in camera. This allows us to infer that the Commission did encourage women to describe their stories of sexual harm in a public context, rather than in a private one, for the sake of the healing national journey resulting from the public truth-telling process that the Commission promoted. 6. Sorcha Gunne, in fact, depicts this confrontation as “itself indicative of the new possibilities of post-apartheid space” (2010, p. 169). 7. See Miller (2008, p. 149). 8. The tragedy that went down in history as the Sharpeville Massacre (21 March 1960) refers to an episode of violence occurring at the police station in the township of Sharpeville (in former Transvaal). A crowd of five thousand protesters against the pass laws was eventually attacked by the police, who later claimed that the marchers had begun to stone them. As a ­consequence, sixty-nine people were shot dead and about two hundred suffered injuries.

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9. See, for example, Boraine’s chapter “A South African Tragedy: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela” in A Country Unmasked (2000, pp. 221–257). Here Boraine describes the Mandela United  Football Club’s nine-day public hearing (24 November–4 December 1997) and Winnie Madikizela-­ Mandela’s ambiguous involvement in the violent actions of her group of “bodyguards”. Madikizela-Mandela had started the Football Club to assist young people who were victims of the violent conflicts in the townships, but, in the course of time, they became a gang of thugs who terrorised people, abducting and killing those they regarded as “sell-outs”, those who were collaborating with the police. Winnie Mandela was particularly involved in the abduction of four youths from a Methodist mission house by members of her football club, and one of the abducted youths, Stompie Moeketsi Seipei, was subsequently found dead. This special hearing was highly contested, especially by the African community, for the Commission’s treatment of Winnie Mandela, who had come to be known as “the Mother of the Nation”. 10. Liatsos argues that “In assuming the form of a historiographic metafiction, the novel challenges the stable boundaries separating fact from fiction to explore the potential of their cross-fertilization” (2006, p. 123). 11. To view the full transcript of the hearing, see “Mandela United Football Club Hearings” at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/special/mandela/ mufc9.htm [accessed January 31, 2019]. See also Tutu ([1999] 2000, pp. 134–35). 12. Michael Stegmann was the presiding judge at the 1991 trial investigating Winnie Mandela’s involvement in the abductions and beatings of four boys, one of whom, the already mentioned Stompie Moeketsi Seipei, was later found dead. 13. Sara Baartman has become one of the most famous Khoikhoi women because she was exhibited as a freak show attraction in nineteenth-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus. She was exhibited first in London in order to entertain people because of her “exotic” origin and show what were thought of as highly unusual bodily features, such as steatopygia (large buttocks) and elongated labia. She was finally laid to rest 187 years after she left Cape Town for London. Her remains were buried on Women’s Day, 9 August 2002, in the area of her birth, the Gamtoos River Valley in the Eastern Cape. See Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009). In this fascinating volume, Crais and Scully explore the life of Sara Baartman and her “transformation” into the almost mythological figure of the Hottentot Venus.

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14. South African Native Affairs Commission (1903–1905) was appointed to formulate a language for the state to talk about, for and on behalf of the natives, along with establishing general principles for governing the lives of the subaltern majority. 15. Significantly, the Act defined a coloured person in a negative fashion with reference to other racial groups, namely, in terms of what it was not rather than asserting what it was. This also reflects the fluidity and ambivalence of coloured identity, suggesting that all racial categories are arbitrary constructs rather than reports of reality. For a more exhaustive analysis on the complex interplay between race, language and cultural difference, see “Race”, Writing, and Difference, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (1986). 16. In Not White Enough. Not Black Enough, Adhikari provides a body of evidence that the living standards of Coloureds—especially the working classes—have suffered significantly since the establishment of the democratic government.

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Ndebele, Njabulo. The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003). Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2004. Citations refer to the 2004 edition. Ndebele, Njabulo. South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary. Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1994. Oboe, Annalisa. “The TRC Women’s Hearings as Performance and Protest in the New South Africa.” Research in African Literatures 38.3 (2007): 60–76. Olaussen, Maria. “Generation and Complicity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light.” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 35.1 (2009): 149–161. Poyner, Jane. “Rerouting Commitment in the Postapartheid Canon: TRC Narratives and The Problem of Truth”. In Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina Șandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 182–193. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. “Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, 1995 [No. 34 of 1995].” Accessed January 30, 2020. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/rsa/ act95_034.htm. Reddy, Thiven. “The Politics of Naming: The Constitution of Coloured Subjects in South Africa.” In Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, edited by Zimitri Erasmus, 64–79. Cape Town: Kowela Books, 2001. Rich, Adrienne. “Cartographies of Silence”. In The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977, by Adrienne Rich, 17–18. New York: Norton, 1978. Robolin, Stéphane. “Properties of Whiteness: (Post)Apartheid Geographies in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light”. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 12, no. 3–4 (2011): 349–371. Roos, Henriette. “Torn Between Islam and the Other: South African Novelists on Cross-Cultural Relationships.” Journal of Literary Studies JLS/TLW 21.1/2 (2005): 48–67. Ross, Fiona. Bearing Witness. Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Samuelson, Meg. “Oceanic Histories and Protean Poetics: The Surge of the Sea in Zoë Wicomb’s Fiction.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36.3 (2010): 543–557. Sanders, Mark. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Saunders, Rebecca. Lamentations and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Scully, Pamela. “Zoë Wicomb, Cosmopolitanism, and the Making and Unmaking of History”. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 12, no. 3–4 (2011): 299–311. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern speak?.’ In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited and introduced by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111. New York: Colombia University Press, 1994.

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“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report.” Accessed January 30, 2020. http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/index.htm. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness (1999). Reprint. London: Rider Books, 2000. Valji, Nahla. “Race and Reconciliation in Post-TRC South Africa” (2004). Accessed November 30, 2018. http://www.csvr.org.za/wits/papers/ papnv3.htm. Van der Vlies, Andrew. Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Van der Vlies, Andrew. “The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light”. Journal of Southern African Studies 36.3 (2010): 583–598. Van Zyl Smit, Betine. “From Penelope to Winnie Mandela – Women Who Waited”, International Journal of The Classical Tradition 15, no. 3 (2008): 393–406. Wicomb, Zoë. ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa.’ In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, 91–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wicomb, Zoë. David’s Story (2000). New York: The Feminist Press, 2001. Wicomb, Zoë. Playing in the Light. New York: The New Press, 2006. Wilson, Richard. The politics of truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the post-apartheid state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wohlpart, James. “A (Sub)Version of the Language of Power: Narrative and Narrative Technique in J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35.4 (1994): 219–228. Young, Robert J.  C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995). Reprint. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

CHAPTER 3

Truth-Telling: Hybridity, Authorship and Ethics

3.1   Transcribing, Translating and Re-Telling Testimonies: Different Perceptions of Truths

The TRC’s public hearings were held under the banner “truth: the road to reconciliation”, a banner that foregrounded the two main assumptions on which the whole project was based: first, the truth about the past was recoverable; second, the establishing of the truth would heal the wounds of South Africa by also facilitating reconciliation between “victims” and “perpetrators”. The concept of truth acquires a particular resonance in the amnesty hearings, where perpetrators were asked to “confess” their crimes in exchange for amnesty—as discussed in Chap. 1, amnesty was granted only if the crime was politically motivated and if the applicant made a full disclosure of the truth. Given the primary importance attributed to the role of “truth” and the assumption of its healing power by the Commission for its reconciling project, it is paramount to reflect on the ways in which the TRC dealt with this concept. In particular, I wish to focus on a major dilemma facing the TRC: how to do true justice to the testimonials of those witnesses for whom translation was necessary. Do translation, interpretation and transcription affect the veracity of stories of trauma? Can these stories be articulated by someone other than the person who experienced them? Who is entitled to tell traumatic stories? © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mussi, Literary Legacies of the South African TRC, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43055-9_3

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Among the Commission’s main goals, there was the restoration of voice to those people who had often suffered in silence and isolation through an opportunity to share publicly their sorrowful experiences. For this reason, victims—and also those applying for amnesty—were allowed to tell their stories in the languages of their choice, even though these languages fell outside of the eleven official languages of South Africa. This polylingual and heteroglossic provision demanded the establishment of an extensive translating and interpreting service. While those who appeared before the Commission were able to testify in their chosen language, their words could be heard in four different tongues through simultaneous multiple language translations. The channels available to listeners were English, Afrikaans, the dominant language of the region where the hearing was held, and another additional language of that region. In her analysis, Annelies Verdoolaege points out that English service was provided at every hearing as an indication of the Commission’s language policy to use English as the main language of communication. Besides, of the African languages services, the Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho services were used most widely (Verdoolaege 2008). In Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition, Catherine Cole emphasises that “the very first line of transmission of testimony was mediated and interpolated—not identical to itself. Interpretation was central to the TRC process” (2010, p. 68). The language interpreters thereby become important intermediary figures who link the people giving testimony before the Commission with those receiving that testimony, the audience. Cole also suggests that: The language interpreters were at once protagonists and mediators, actors and audience. They listened intently to the speaker’s words, they were the first to reproduce the deponent’s speech, and they did so in the first person, thereby assuming the speaker’s subject position, the authorial voice. (ibid., p. 66)

Cole highlights the sense of communal bond the interpreters and transcribers created with the witnesses due to the use of the first person while rendering a victim’s testimony. In Country of My Skull, Krog reports the concern of a young Tswana interpreter, who confesses that “it is difficult to interpret victim hearings […] because you use the first person all the time. I have no distance when I say ‘I’… it runs through me with I” (1998, p.  195). Indeed, the interpreters, along with the journalists

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covering the hearings, were provided with counselling because of the profound identification with the witnesses and their painful stories of suffering that they had to translate. Another challenge was to reproduce the speaker’s account as reliably as possible in order to transfer the essential meaning; a TRC statement-taker, in fact, pointed out that: “we were told to keep it as brief as possible and only focus on the major points […] we had to get the facts, but people wanted to tell their story in broad terms” (ibid., p. 63). Despite their aim to concentrate on facts, it was hard for the interpreters and transcribers to find the words and articulate the victims’ sorrow, pauses, silences and moans while giving testimony (see Raditlhalo 2009). Ingrid de Kok’s poems “Parts of Speech”, “The Transcriber Speaks” and “Body Parts” (2002), discussed in Chap. 1, likewise capture the complexity and painfulness related to the act of articulating trauma, the powerless of language in voicing, translating and transcribing traumatic stories. In particular, “The Transcriber Speaks” reflects on the almost impossible task of transcribing people’s stories of pain when they are left without language and can only rely on silence. In “Whole Words, Whole Worlds?” de Kok highlights the connection between the poet and the transcriber, as neither of them “know exactly what the ‘job’ entails but they know that they are not able to perform it adequately”, because “words are limited signifiers of experience”, unable to register the full range of human emotions (2016, p. 10). She also notices that transcribers sometimes skipped some details of the testimonies that they could not understand or hear properly, or, like translators, they unintentionally mistranslated material because of cultural and linguistic divisions. How can this “reduced” version of truth, lacking nuances and emotional content because of the translation and transcription process, be identified with the word truth that appears in the banner “truth: the road to reconciliation”? Cole underlines that “a fundamental question that must be answered is what exactly the TRC meant by ‘truth’” (2010, p. 163). The complexity of this concept also emerged in the debates that took place before and during the life of the Commission, which, in fact, acknowledged four notions of “truth”: factual or forensic truth; personal or narrative truth; social or “dialogue” truth; and healing and restorative truth. Factual or forensic truth refers to the legal or scientific notion of truth as facts corroborated by evidence; “in other words, what happened to whom, where, when and how, and who was involved?” (“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report”, Vol. 1, Ch. 5, Para. 32). Personal or narrative truth refers to a

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more subjective version of truth, which attempts to “capture the widest possible record of people’s perceptions, stories, myths and experiences” (ibid., Para. 37) and to give everyone who had been voiceless for so long “a chance to tell his or her truth as he or she sees it” (ibid., Para. 35). Social or “dialogue” truth endeavours to promote “transparency, democracy and participation in society […] as a basis for affirming human dignity and integrity” (ibid., Para. 42), trying to transcend all the divisions of the past and to listen carefully to the perspectives of all those involved. Finally, healing and restorative truth, which resulted from the storytelling process and the acknowledgement of past abuses, was central to the work of the Commission as it aimed to contribute to the reparation of the damage inflicted during the regime and to the prevention of the recurrence of those abuses in the future. The TRC was set up to “compile as complete a picture as possible” (ibid., Ch. 2, Para. 2) of the events and gross human rights violations committed within or outside South Africa in the period 1960–1994. This propelled the Commission to prioritise factual or forensic truth, trying to gather as much verifiable information as possible. However, although it is a given that the interpreters and transcribers had to focus on “cold facts”, it must also be acknowledged that the so-called personal/narrative truth— which primarily relied on people’s emotional state and on the body language associated with it—seemed to be beyond interpretation. Personal/ narrative truth is something spoken, heard and seen, not read; using Cole’s words, it is “performed” (2010, p. 165). Z. Bock et al. argue that “a number of ‘truths’, both of the narrative and factual nature, have inevitably been lost through the interpretation and transcription process” (2006, p.  2). In support of their argument, they analyse a small selection of victims’ testimonies from the second day of the HRVC’s hearings, 16 April 1996, when three of the four widows of the men known as the Cradock Four testified before the Commission. Interestingly, they compare the official English versions of these testimonies, which are published on the TRC website, with their own translation in English from the source language, Xhosa. As mentioned above, there was, in fact, simultaneous interpretation into four languages—including English—when people delivered their testimonies at the hearings. The scholars have managed to obtain copies of the audio-visual tapes that provide a record of the selected testimonies in Xhosa, as well as the simultaneous English translation as a voice-over. After transcribing the Xhosa testimonies, and translating these into English, they have compared and

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analysed both English versions of the testimonies trying to highlight what had been lost in the official interpretation and transcription process of the TRC. Here, I quote two examples from Bock et al.’s study to reflect on the power of language, when used particularly for translation purposes, to change the meaning of what has been uttered; simultaneously, I place emphasis on the inadequacy of language to express the performative aspect of testimony. In this extract, Mrs Calata described what happened when a family friend went to identify the body of her deceased husband: Xhosa transcription Qha ke wasweleka u Mr Gxuluwa esasimcelile thina as ifamily aye ku identify Wabuya ke wandixelela ukuba (.) hayi ubonile—uye waqiniseka ukuba ngu Fort lowa / kodwa ufumanise into yokuba uxhwithiwe iinwele— zixhwithiwe literal ukuxhwitha iinwele entloko, ulwimi lwakhe lutsaliwe [hand signal] allude ngaphandle, bamsika iminwe / enamanxeba amaninzi emzimeni / xa emjonga apha ebhulukhweni wafumanisa ingathi esiqulubeni utyiwe nayiNJA (.3) akukho nto yandenza buhlungu njengento yokufumanisa ukuba utyiwe naziziNJA/ yandenza buhlungu gqitha loo nto leyo English translation But Mr Gxuluwa whom, as family, we asked to go and identify the bodies / has passed away / He came back and told us that / he saw—he is quite sure that it was Fort / but he discovered that the hair had been pulled out / the hair had been pulled out deliberately / to pull the hair out of the head/ the tongue was pulled out of the mouth [hand signal] it was long out of the mouth / fingers were cut off / He had many wounds in his body / when he looked at his trousers he discovered that it looks like he was bitten by the DOG / (.3) there is nothing that made me feel bad more than knowing that he was also bitten by the DOG / that made me feel very bad Website version (official version) Mr Koluwe, the man we as families asked to go and identify the bodies, has passed away. He said that he had seen the bodies but he discovered that the hair was pulled out, his tongue was very long. His fingers were cut off. He had many wounds in his body. When he looked at his trousers he realised that the dogs had bitten him very severely. He couldn’t believe it that the dogs already had their share. (ibid., pp. 14–15)

This example clearly illustrates how the emotional content has been transformed during the “official” interpretation and transcription process.

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Besides a spelling mistake of Mr Gxuluwa’s name in the website transcription, the English translation made by the scholars focuses more on Mrs Calata’s emotions and perspective as we can observe in the following passage: “that the hair had been pulled out / the hair had been pulled out deliberately / to pull the hair out of the head / the tongue was pulled out of the mouth [hand signal] it was long out of the mouth”. While the website transcription does not insist on what the police had done directly to Mr Calata’s body—cutting off his hair, tongue and fingers—the scholars do not sacrifice this part in order to privilege just facts, but they are careful to translate Mrs Calata’s repetition and commentary. Not only did the police pull out Mr Calata’s hair, but they did it deliberately as Mrs Calata makes clear by repeating it three times. Moreover, the website transcription does not tell us how Mrs Calata felt upon hearing her husband’s body had been bitten by dogs. Indeed, it seems that Mrs Calata is reporting what Mr Gxuluwa, her family friend, felt when he realised what had happened: “he couldn’t believe it that the dogs already had their share”. The other interpretation, instead, does not erase Mrs Calata’s perspective at all; on the contrary, it conveys the woman’s dismay about having her husband’s body thrown to the dogs by the police, a gesture which exposed their inhumanity: “there is nothing that made me feel bad more than knowing that he was also bitten by the DOG / that made me feel very bad”. Another significant example is provided by the following extract resulting from the testimony of Mrs Mhlawuli: Xhosa transcription MRS MHLAWULI: … I suppose inokuba zazikhona ne remarks ebabezenza / but baya bafika phaya bajonga / utata wafumanisa ukuba Tyhini! Nguye nyani uSicelo lo / uthi ‘mntwana wam imeko akuyo’ / wandixelela ukufika kwakhe wathi / ‘mntwana wam imeko akuyo/ iyoyikisa / umntwana wam bamtshisile umntwana wam, umntwana wam bambulele kabuhlungu umntwana wam’ [cries] (.4) MR SMITH: Are you - are prepared to continue Mrs Mhlawuli? English translation MRS MHLAWULI: … I suppose they also made certain remarks / but they went there and looked / my father found that Really! It is him, Sicelo / he says ‘my child the condition that he is in’ / he told me on his arrival and said / ‘my child the condition that he is in / is frightening / my child they burned my child / my child, they killed my child horribly’ [cries] (.4) MR SMITH: Are you - are you prepared to continue Mrs Mhlawuli?

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Website version (official version) MRS MHLAWULI: … I understand there were also remarks. My father in law had a look and confirmed that one was Sicelo. He said the condition in which he was in was really shocking. They had burned him terribly. MR SMITH: Are you prepared to continue? (ibid., pp. 18–19)

This extract refers to the part of Mrs Mhlawuli’s testimony when she reports what her father-in-law said to her on his return from his visit to the mortuary to identify Mr Sicelo Mhlawuli’s body. Comparing the website version with the English translation made by the scholars, we observe a great difference in the way Mrs Mhlawuli addresses her father-in-law: while in the former version, she refers to him as “my father-in-law”, in the latter one, she calls him “my father”, thus revealing the closeness of the relationship between them. The website official version also diminishes the emotional intensity of the testimony when Mrs Mhlawuli recounts her father-in-law’s description of the body as reported speech. In fact, in the Xhosa transcription—and in the English translation made by the scholars—Mrs Mhlawuli repeats the words he said to her as direct speech, and the repetition of the phrase “my child” may be read as an indication of the love her father-in-law had for his son, Sicelo. By contrast, the website transcription chooses to express Mrs Mhlawuli’s father-in-law’s grief using the adjective “shocking” and the adverb “terribly”, which fail to convey his profound suffering. Furthermore, this transcription decides not to mention that Mrs Mhlawuli burst into tears, another significant choice made by the “official” translators which highlights the loss of some emotional content. The TRC’s hearings were held in front of a live audience, and several journalists were assigned to cover them and broadcast extracts of testimonies to let the whole country participate in this restoring and reinventing process in which South Africa was involved. Like the interpreters, the journalists were intermediaries between those people delivering their testimony and the wider public. However, their role expanded to serving as an amplifier, explaining the TRC’s protocols, contextualising and commenting on what was happening at the hearings, and isolating key moments. In this connection, it might also be argued that broadcasting a testimony on television had more impact than reading any transcription in the official website of the TRC or in the final report. Unlike the interpreters and transcribers, the journalists aimed to tell the experiences of the witnesses by both showing images and broadcasting some extracts of victim

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testimonies. Through the simple act of transmitting an image, a scene, or a sound bite, it was possible to recover some performative aspects and emotional content of the testimonies, which, otherwise, tended to be lost in the interpretation and transcription process. In Country of My Skull, Krog outlines all the necessary stages to prepare and produce news bulletins, which aimed to attract as many people as possible and give them a fuller understanding of the TRC’s process. Generally, a bulletin consisted of three audio elements: ordinary reporting read out by a newsreader, twenty-second sound bites of other people’s voices and forty-second voice reports provided by a journalist. In addition to the short time available—which by no means could do justice to all the testimonies—Krog points out that “the past has to be put into hard news gripping enough to make bulletin headlines, into reports that the bulletin-writers in Johannesburg cannot ignore” ([1998] 1999, p.  46). She explains that “bulletin-writers and newsreaders squirm away from whatever is not fashionable or harmlessly clinical. For words like ‘menstruation’ or ‘penis’ there is no place on the news” (ibid., p.  47). It is evident that even though the “truth” broadcast on television was not subjected to the limits deriving from the interpretation process—lack of emotional and performative content, for example—that truth cannot be considered complete either, because it was edited, manipulated and adjusted to accommodate some television requirements. Krog’s description has a strong resonance with de Kok’s poem “The Sound Engineer”— another poem engaging with the TRC’s process that is included in the collection Terrestrial Things (2002): “From the speaker’s mouth/ through the engineer’s ear/ sound waves of drought and flood/ are edited for us to hear […] Listen, cut; comma, cut;/ stammer, cut;/ edit, pain; connect, pain; broadcast, pain” (lines 1–4, 8–10). The poet, here, foregrounds the figure of sound engineers who, like bulletin-writers and newsreaders, have to fragment and recompose material, editing what they hear to make it clearer and more coherent for the general public. Although the Commission acknowledges four categories of truths— factual/forensic, personal/narrative, social or dialogue, healing and restorative truth—I argue that there exist more truths and different perceptions of them. The predictable difficulties generally associated with the articulation of trauma—the witness’s unreliable memory, for instance— are, in fact, exacerbated by the TRC’s multi-narrative machine which, despite its aim to create a safe place for witnesses to tell their own stories, generated many narrators for the same event—the commissioners, the

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translators and interpreters, the reporters and journalists, historians and other scholars. It is important then to wonder as to the ethical implications of the TRC’s testimonial process: who is the real narrator: the witness, the transcribers, the translators, the TRC commissioners, or other commentators? Who has the right to tell the story? Whose stories are these after passing from one context to another? To what extent is the veracity of these stories affected by the TRC’s multi-narrative machine? It seems that victims’ testimonies gradually lost a certain degree of truthfulness once people left the witness box, as their stories became a sort of “public property”, subjected to comments, further analysis and media manipulations. This issue of veracity becomes even more convoluted when it comes to the amnesty hearings: amnesty applicants had to be willing to tell the truth about their crimes, if they wanted to benefit from the possibility of amnesty. Undeniably, there was the concrete risk that amnesty applicants could not tell the whole truth if they thought it was not convenient for their application. This leaves us to wonder whether the witness’s original story can ever be considered truthful, if it can ever coincide with its many retellings and, also, how these many retellings relate to the word “truth” included in the banner “truth: the road to reconciliation”. The TRC firmly believed in the recoverability of the truth, in the articulation of the truth, and the healing benefit derived from sharing the truth about the past. However, the TRC’s multi-narrative machine produced many versions of the same event, differing in their degrees of veracity; this certainly casts doubt on the Commission’s ability to recover the whole truth and, consequently, on the possibility that these partial truths can lead to healing and reconciliation, as promoted by the banner. This chapter continues with analysis of three novels that particularly engage with the concept of truth. By investigating and challenging the recoverability of the truth about the past, they also question the reconciling power associated with that recovery. I start my discussion with Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun, a novel that was published in 1998 and that addresses the complexities of capturing the truth through exploration of the TRC’s categories of victim and perpetrator. The TRC’s proceedings relied highly on these two categories, as the Commission’s main goal was to foster reconciliation through recovery of the truth and to bridge the divide between those who suffered human rights violations—the victims— and those who committed these violations—the perpetrators. By staging a criminal trial, Gordimer exposes the inadequacy of the victim-perpetrator framework to address the “grey areas” that characterise both the apartheid

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and post-apartheid eras; she also draws attention to the concepts of confession, forgiveness, punishment, pardon and justice, thus inviting readers to reflect on a comparison between the trial system and the TRC’s amnesty process. The other two sections examine the magisterial Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2004) and the more recent Absolution by Patrick Flanery (2012), respectively. These two novels engage in dialogue with the notion of truth in terms of both content and narrative structure. While The House Gun dramatises this epistemological crisis of the notion of truth primarily at plot level, Agaat and Absolution expose the elusiveness of any narrative project purporting to a coherent, single truth by portraying unreliable narrators, adopting multiple narrators and enacting multiple narrative levels. This does not want to suggest that Gordimer’s narrative is linear and without formal challenges, as she uses different focalisers and free indirect discourse, but both van Niekerk and Flanery rely on more complex and experimental narrative structures, which call to mind Wicomb’s unsettling narratives in David’s Story and Playing in the Light. Interestingly, Agaat and Absolution were published with a significant distance from The House Gun and, most importantly, Flanery is an American author, two factors that demonstrate the consistent impact of the TRC’s process on literature, both within and outside the South African context. As have been noted in Chap. 2, later publications with respect to the completion of the TRC’s mandate—the HRVC’s mandate, especially—tend to expand their investigations of the TRC-related key concepts, as well as enacting more complicated narrative structures. As I will show, all these novels share a resistance to closure, leaving readers with more questions than solutions, more prompts for further reflection than definite answers.

3.2   Blurring Perspectives: Hybrid Identity and Moral Ambiguity in Nadine’s Gordimer’s The House Gun The House Gun is the first novel by Nadine Gordimer to be set firmly in post-apartheid South Africa. By focusing on a private disaster, “a Dostoyevskyan crime of passion” (Lenta 2001, p. 58), and one which is not directly politically motivated, The House Gun seems to have turned away from the characteristic issues that preoccupied the author in her previous works. Gordimer’s earlier fiction established her strong engagement

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with South Africa’s historical and political situation, her interest in the relationship between the political and the personal as well as the public and the private. As Stephen Clingman has noted, “through the succession of Gordimer’s novels there is … a dialectical interplay, in which the exploration of history and character, of external and internal worlds, becomes entirely indivisible” (1986, pp. 8–9). In an interview with Susan Sontag, Gordimer once commented on how her work reveals an engagement with the history of her country: I don’t choose apartheid as a subject, or oppression as a subject. I don’t go out and look for it. I am what I was when I began to write at nine years old. I write about what I know and feel and see and what I absorb from the life I live and the life around me… It’s simply, it’s the air I breathe and the food I eat. It’s the bus I get on, it’s the cinema I go to, the library I use. My whole life is implicit with it, and so it comes naturally into my writing. It seeks me out, I don’t seek it. (1987, p. 32)

Here, Gordimer is referring to a time when apartheid was still in force and, clearly, represented the historical and political background of her most famous and broadly discussed novels—The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughters (1979), July’s People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987) and None to Accompany Me (1994). In contrast, The House Gun unfolds the non-political story of a young white South African man, Duncan Lingard, who kills a friend and former lover, Carl Jespersen, after discovering Carl’s betrayal with his current girlfriend Natalie. Although staging a personal drama, The House Gun nonetheless shows Gordimer’s engagement with the South African context, and, in particular, with the South African TRC—significantly, the novel was published in 1998, during the work of the Commission. Shaped as a court drama, the reader mainly shares the perspective of Duncan’s bewildered and anxious parents (Harald and Claudia), who try to ascertain the exact nature of the events that occurred and assess personal responsibility, while their son is put on trial. However elusive the relationship between the personal and the historical/political might be in this text, the South African context is certainly invoked both by the narrator and the circumstances, which portray the TRC as the unspoken background to the Lingards’ story. When interviewed about the novel, Gordimer asserted that The House Gun “has to do with intimate human relations and how we know each

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other”, but, clearly, “it doesn’t take place in a vacuum. It takes place in a particular time, in a particular city” (Garner 1998). The narrator, in fact, points out that “this is not a detective story” ([1998] 1999, p. 16), suggesting that the novel does not focus on the murder itself but on other issues. Unlike detective stories where the reader is engaged in finding out the identity of the culprit, in The House Gun there is no mystery to solve, because Duncan’s murderous act is revealed from the very beginning. The attention rather hinges on Duncan’s trial and sentence and on his parents’ attempts to find the truth about Duncan’s motives while coming to terms with this painful discovery. The characters’ exploration of notions of truth, confession, guilt, justice, punishment and reconciliation mirrors the process initiated by the TRC, whereby society attempted to understand itself and negotiate its violent past. Borrowing Kossew’s words, Gordimer “is presenting a kind of microcosm of the wider political process of remembering, forgetting and reconciling that was being played out in the [TRC] hearings” (2001, p.  134). The enactment of Duncan’s trial also invites readers to make a comparison between the trial system and the TRC’s amnesty deal. Of course, being accused of a non-politically motivated crime, Duncan could not have benefited from the TRC’s amnesty process. However, the significance of Gordimer’s narrative choice cannot be ignored: staging a proper trial during a time when South Africa is engaged with the TRC’s process and when amnesty plays an essential role in the reconciliation project cannot but invite reflections on which one of these procedures—the trial system or the amnesty bargain—is a better way to serve justice and act as an instrument of reconciliation. The opening sentence of the novel, “Something terrible happened” (p. 3), signals the irruption of a calamitous event in the liberal middle-class lives of Harald and Claudia Lingard. While watching evening news of disasters elsewhere, in their “townhouse complex with grounds maintained and security-monitored entrance” (p. 3), the arrival of the messenger Julian—who turns out to be a friend of their son Duncan—irremediably upsets the couple’s comfortable life by breaking the news that a man has been shot and Duncan has been arrested for the killing. The couple are forced to connect the political and public dimension of the news on the television with the personal piece of news concerning Duncan’s arrest. The association between “domestic” violence and public/political/historical violence is further suggested later in the text:

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an indoor killing (homeground in the suburbs), lovers’ obscure quarrel, gays’ domestic jealousy, something of that kind, in comparison with the spectacular public violence where you can film or photograph people shot dead on the streets in crossfire of the new hit-squads, hired by taxi drivers and drug dealers who have learnt their tactics from the state hit-squads of the old regime with its range of methods of ‘permanently removing’ political opponents, from blowing them up with car and parcel bombs to knifing their bodies again and again to make bloodily sure bullets have done their work. (p. 157)

Gordimer here traces the origins of post-apartheid violence back to apartheid, illustrating how the legacy of the past regime has affected the domestic sphere and remains insidiously habitual in South Africa. The title of the novel underscores this point: the gun is transformed into a “domestic” item that “happened to be there, on the table” (p.  267) at the time of Duncan’s crime, symptomatic of the normalisation of violence in the post-­ apartheid era. As highlighted by the judge of the trial: But that is the tragedy of our present time, a tragedy repeated daily, nightly, in this city, in our country. Part of the furnishings in homes, carried in pockets along with car keys, even in the school-bags of children, constantly ready to hand in situations which lead to tragedy, the guns happen to be there. (p. 267)

The post-apartheid era seems to engender a “new” culture of violence that invites individuals to own weapons as potential instruments of self-defence, thus transforming the gun into something akin to a house pet, something ordinary and expected. The trope of “the house gun” also becomes a leitmotif, especially in the second part of the novel when Duncan’s trial occurs and the question of responsibility is raised. According to the defence, Duncan—who “breathed violence along with cigarette smoke” (p. 267)—becomes a victim of the “availability” of the gun and bears “no responsibility whatever for the prevalence of violence” (p. 271). The psychiatrist called by Senior Counsel Hamilton Motsamai, Duncan’s defence lawyer, presents violence as an overwhelming and deterministic factor which affects the life of South African individuals, and, in so doing, he diminishes personal responsibility:

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In a society where violence is prevalent the moral taboos against violence are devalued. Where it has become, for whatever historical reasons, the way to deal with frustration, despair or injury, natural abhorrence of violence is suspended. Everyone becomes accustomed to the solution of violence, whether as victim, perpetrator or observer. You live with it. (p. 226)

On the other hand, the prosecutor argues that the endemic violence permeating the social context cannot be regarded as a justification or exoneration, and, therefore, Duncan should be held accountable for the crime he has committed: Yes, the gun was there; the crime of vengeful jealousy with which it was committed is by no means excused by, but belongs along with the hijacks, rapes, robberies that arise out of the misuse of freedom by making your own rules. (p. 270)

Gordimer’s novel thus poses the questions: who are the victim and the perpetrator in post-apartheid South African society? Is Duncan the real perpetrator of the killing, or should society be held responsible for the violence inhabiting the streets, the houses, every sector of people’s lives? Rather than providing answers to these, perhaps unresolvable, questions, the novel raises them in order to invite readers to reflect on the complexity of the present time, which continues to be shaped by the oppression, anger and violence of the apartheid era. From the very outset of the novel, the narrative orbits around the layered meanings of the “truth” of Duncan’s motives and degree of responsibility for his crime. In this respect, Jane Poyner emphasises that: In a novel in which little actually happens, we experience through this painstaking exhumation of truth his parents Harald’s and Claudia’s very private anguish over the shooting—there is no doubt over the young man’s guilt— which allows Gordimer to move the discussion of “truth” into the private, familial sphere. (2010, p. 185)

The first part of the novel is indeed dedicated to the Lingards’ endeavour to understand the facts and the motives which led Duncan to commit such a personal crime of passion. Harald is particularly engaged with finding the truth and tries to review the facts analytically:

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Harald kept himself at a remove of cold attention in order to separate what was evidence against interpretation of that evidence. Circumstantial: that day, that night, Friday, 19th January, 1996, a man was found dead in a house he shared with two other men. David Backer and Nkululeko ‘Khulu’ Dladla came home at 7.15 p.m. and found the body of their friend Carl Jespersen in the living-room. He had a bullet wound in the head. He was lying half­on, half-off the sofa, as if (interpretation) he had been taken by surprise when shot and had tried to rise […] there was an unopened bottle of whisky and a bucket of half-melted ice on a tray on the floor beside the drum. (Evidence combined with interpretation.) There was no usual disorder in the room; this is a casual bachelor household. (Interpretation.) (emphasis added, pp. 14–15)

As it emerges from the above passage, evidence—facts—is entangled with the process of interpretation, which, by definition, might vary according to different perspectives, thus affecting the “truth”. The absolute truth of a story appears therefore to be inevitably dependent on interpretation and subjectivity. This is further confirmed when Duncan’s lawyer, Motsamai, discloses to Harald and Claudia that Duncan had had a homosexual relationship with the victim, Carl Jespersen: not only did Carl betray Duncan’s friendship by having sexual intercourse with his current girlfriend, Natalie, he was also Duncan’s former lover who had rejected him and broken up the affair. This revelation suggests that a feeling of resentment at Carl’s “double” betrayal might have led Duncan to commit his murderous act; however, readers can only presume (interpret) that this feeling of resentment is the true motive behind the crime, as Motsamai’s assertion about the relation between Duncan and Carl is never directly corroborated by Duncan’s words. The novel, in fact, mainly focuses on Harald’s and Claudia’s perspectives, while Duncan and his perspective are left on the margins of the narration, insomuch as the narrator wonders “why is Duncan not in the story?” (p. 151), and “Again, why is Duncan not in the story?” (p. 191). Readers do not have access to the young man’s consciousness and inner thoughts—except from a few glimpses at the end of the novel—and the whole truth of Duncan’s story is consequently jeopardised by this lack of perspective. Elaborating on this, David Medalie highlights that, although some of Duncan’s private reflections are produced in the text, he remains an enigmatic figure; this narrative choice, as Medalie goes on to argue, can be identified with a modernist technique where “the rendering of

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subjectivity serves only to deepen inscrutability; revealing the inner life is not the same as explicating it” (1999, p. 642). In the post-apartheid world of The House Gun, who Duncan Lingard is, what he does, and the reasons that motivate his actions are ultimately indeterminate (see Lewis 1999, p. 71). The indefinite nature of Duncan’s character is also mirrored in his sexual choices: though the term bisexual is never mentioned in the text, Duncan allegedly has love affairs with both boys and girls. His character thus functions multiply in the text: on the one hand, he embodies white violence and shame, inherited from the past and from his being part of the apartheid “beneficiaries”; on the other, his bisexuality provides a new lens through which both his parents and the reader may reconceptualise differences and relationships in post-apartheid South Africa. Adopting Stobie’s words, bisexuality becomes a “space of anxiety, related to excess, unappeasable appetite and violence, but also a space of opportunity […] a mysterious ability to adapt which is essential in contemporary South African society” (2007, p. 71). In The House Gun, bisexuality is, in fact, indirectly associated with the lack of restraint, for example, embodied by both Jespersen who is homosexual but has sexual intercourse with Duncan’s girlfriend and Duncan who is driven to kill his former lover. Despite the inconclusive and uneasy resonances of Gordimer’s deployment of bisexuality, I argue that the hybridity underpinning bisexual subjectivity works convincingly to suggest the uncertainty and ambiguity of the period of transition which characterises South Africa in the 1990s. The same kind of hybridity can be applied to the TRC’s victim-­ perpetrator framework, here exemplified by Duncan. He embodies both roles, as he is a victim of Natalie and Jespersen’s betrayal, and he is a perpetrator for killing Jespersen. Duncan crosses the boundary between the two categories in a similar way to the character of Alex Mpondo in Slovo’s Red Dust: as emphasised in Chap. 1, Mpondo is both a “victim” of torture and, at the same time, a “perpetrator”, indirectly responsible for his comrade’s death. In “Against Standardization of Memory”, Lea David challenges the validity of memorialisation policies promoted by the human rights regime, exposing the ways in which their universalist logic tends to erase complexity and monopolise how we are permitted to remember the past. In particular, she argues that the victim-perpetrator scheme “promotes societal division across binary categories of victim and perpetrators, neglecting temporal and spatial dimensions, and bleaching all grey areas to fit the opposed categories” (2017, p.  316). Through Duncan’s hybrid

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character, Gordimer engages in dialogue with the TRC’s process and its employment of the victim-perpetrator scheme in order to draw attention to the inadequacy of this rigid demarcation to capture the truth about South Africa’s troubled past and present. Gordimer’s portrayal of a hybrid character, as well as her choice of using Harald and Claudia as the main narrative focalisers, leaves readers with a partial, if not biased, account of what really happened: an account that is further complicated by the author’s narrative style. In accordance with Gordimer’s transition from the conventions of formal realism to modernist elements witnessed in her late fiction, The House Gun is characterised by the use of interior monologues and of a visible avoidance of quotation marks for speech—the latter especially occurs when Harald and Claudia are engaged in dialogue. Here is an exchange chosen (almost) at random: He was a happy boy. Wasn’t he. Claudia did not have to ask Harald that question. Of course he was. What did they have to recall from what—the lawyer attributed to them—they “thought over and done with”. As if there were to be something hidden; from him; from themselves. What did Duncan want of them. What did he need of them. Have you still got the letter? One of those box files in the old cupboard we brought when we moved. But there’s only the first page. Yes, he remembered; they had thought of it, unavoidable, in all their confusion after that Friday night. A terrible thing happened the boy wrote. They had accused each other over who was or was not responsible to tell their son we’re always there for you. Always. (p. 158)

This is one of the many examples where Claudia and Harald attempt to comprehend their son and his actions. This particular episode makes reference to the aftermath of one of the Lingards’ many visits to Hamilton Motsamai to discuss the defence strategy: as Motsamai wants to know more about Duncan’s life, he has asked the Lingards to help him understand the young man, and the couple is now recalling a traumatic episode occurred during Duncan’s school days, the suicide of one of his schoolmates. In his analysis of Gordimer’s narrative style, Clingman argues that The House Gun enacts a new mode of communication in post-apartheid South Africa, which is located through “oscillation” (Harald and Claudia) and “triangulation” (Harald, Claudia and Duncan) of voice, consciousness and perspective. He places special emphasis on the fact that Harald and

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Claudia are rendered as “he/she” at crucial moments of decision and perception.1 Following his reasoning: The implication is that Harald and Claudia are in this situation together, must make sense of the impossible together: that awareness is distributed, collective, and collaborative, even when different. Oscillation becomes a less sharp, in its essence a more forgiving, mode of representation; for Gordimer’s work it becomes a different version of perception and—in its deepest sense— communication in South Africa. (2000, p. 149)

I partially agree with Clingman’s observation: the slash mark “he/she” might suggest an oscillation of communication between Harald and Claudia—rather than a sharp separation and incomprehension—and, at the same time, it might also imply a certain degree of their sharing the burden of the knowledge of Duncan’s offence. However, I argue that the use of the free indirect discourse, multiple focalisers, and the avoidance of quotation marks aim to call into question the very process of communication. Instead of being “forgiving”—and, in a sense, reconciliatory— Gordimer’s writing style dramatises the ambiguities and difficulties to establish the truth and to understand and represent the Other—in this case, the Other being Duncan. In this regard, Cheryl Stobie underlines that “such unsettling techniques have the effect of rendering relative a number of issues: truth claims, memory, the ability to know another human being, or even oneself” (2007, p. 65). The passage I quoted earlier from the novel perfectly stages the doubts, the questions, and the complexities of knowing and narrating the truth about the Other. In addition to exposing the contradictory nature of the truth and of the process of establishing it, Gordimer also wonders “does the truth count? Can the truth save you?” (p. 257), in ways that invite reflections on the TRC’s motto “truth: the road towards reconciliation”. In particular, Gordimer problematises the equation confession-forgiveness that was at the core of the TRC’s amnesty deal. Though it could be argued that the act of forgiving should be spontaneous and independent from the perpetrator’s behaviour, it is undeniable that the TRC believed in mutual forgiveness and reconciliation between victim and perpetrator, and, within this context, it was paramount for the perpetrator to confess his crimes and be accountable for them by showing a certain level of contrition. The House Gun, however, calls into question the interdependence between truth and forgiveness promoted by the TRC and affirms a more

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complicated viewpoint: “A judge knows everything. He’s the vicar of the god of justice, as the priest is the vicar of God […] This knowledge, it’s the basis of justice, isn’t it? To know all is to forgive all?—no, that’s fallacious” (p. 261). Consistent with this position, Duncan confesses his crimes, and he is ready to accept the consequences of his own actions, but he shows no sign of remorse or desire to be forgiven during the trial. In the following passage, Duncan meditates on the question of remorse and on his parents’ attempt to understand his crime: [Duncan] knows that there is the unanswered question in their regard on him every time they visit; needing a response. The judge stated it as a fact, not a question. “He has shown no remorse”. How could they know, any of them, what they have a word for. How could they know what they are thinking, talking about. Harald and Claudia, my poor parents, do you want your little boy to come in tears to say I’m sorry? Will it all be mended, a window I smashed with a ball? Shall I be civilized a human being again, for the one, and will God forgive and cleanse me, for the other. Is that what they think it is, this thing, remorse. (p. 281)

Duncan locates remorse beyond mere performance and empty words to be said especially in the public context of the trial. Moreover, his invocation of religion invites a comparison with the TRC and its use of the Christian discourse of confession and forgiveness in the public spheres of politics and law. In this regard, Poyner makes a convincing point when she suggests that: Duncan recognizes the banality to which confession and accountability have been reduced under the auspices of ‘Justice’: that saying sorry in contexts such as this—Duncan’s trial but also, by analogy, the Truth hearings—is inadequate recompense for the crimes committed both outside and under apartheid. (2010, p. 185)

Gordimer’s interest in restoring the issues of confession, contrition and forgiveness to a more private and personal level is also conveyed by her critical insistence on the theatrical aspect of Duncan’s trial: “So it was all a performance, for them, for the judge, the assessors, the Prosecutor, even Motsamai. Justice is a performance” (p. 237). This criticism echoes the TRC’s need for public confessions of human rights violations and public performances of repentance and forgiveness as fundamental steps towards

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reconciliation. Concerning this, Michiel Heyns argues that the accounts of the agents of apartheid before the TRC’s amnesty hearings were not motivated from a real sense of remorse, but rather from a desire for amnesty. Quoting Jacques Pauw, Heyns goes on to argue that “[the perpetrators] may say how sorry they are, but with few exceptions the only emotion they show is their feeling of desperation about their situation, which forces them to face their victims” (2000, p. 45). Gordimer also reflects on the concepts of justice and punishment, with particular reference to the death penalty. Although capital punishment had been declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Law on 6 June 1995, the situation at the time of Duncan’s story (1996) was still uncertain. Motsamai explains to the Lingards that: […] the penalty hasn’t been exacted for some time, there’s been a moratorium, as you know, since 1990, when the scrapping of the Old Constitution became inevitable. It’s all about to go before the Constitutional Court now. […] Only for the time being it’s still on the Statute Book. (pp. 124–125)

By setting her novel in a time where capital punishment had not been formally removed from the Statute Book, Gordimer draws attention to the debate relating to the abolition of the death penalty. Harald, in fact, attends the sittings of the Court where the matter will be discussed, and he comes to the conclusion that the decision regarding capital punishment will not reflect popular sentiment: They—the people clamouring out there beyond the townhouse complex and the prison where Duncan awaits the verdict of his trial—they will condemn him to death in their minds no matter what sentence the judges passes down upon him […] In the air of the country, they are calling for a referendum; they, not the Constitutional Court will have the last judgement on murderers like Duncan. And referendum or not, Harald hears and knows, his son and sleeping Claudia’s shall have this will to his death surrounding him as long as he lives. The malediction is upon him even if the law does not exact it. (p. 241)

It is important to highlight that Duncan’s judgement is delivered some time before the Last Judgement of the Constitutional Law decides to remove formally capital punishment from the Statute Book, and, despite being eligible for the death penalty, he is sentenced to seven years imprisonment. In wake of this, Duncan’s sentence must be interpreted as a

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middle way between the options “a corpse for a corpse, a murderer for a murderer” (p.  241)—that is, the death penalty—and the pardon envisaged by the TRC’s amnesty process. It is worth remembering that Duncan’s personal crime could not be eligible for the Commission’s amnesty bargain, and yet the historical background of the TRC’s proceedings cannot be ignored. The House Gun was published in 1998 when the first part of the TRC’s final report was handed to President Mandela, and, as underlined by Gordimer herself, the novel “doesn’t take place in a vacuum” but “it takes place in a particular time, in a particular city” (Garner 1998). The choice of enacting a proper trial can be read as the author’s desire to challenge the TRC’s amnesty bargain, or rather, the ways in which the amnesty process publicly employed the personal (Christian) mechanism of confessing in exchange for forgiveness. In The House Gun, the sentence becomes both a deterrent act and “a measure of mercy” (p.  273), “punishment as rehabilitation” (p.  272), since the judge takes in consideration some mitigating factors and Duncan’s exceptional emotional status at the time of the crime before deciding the final verdict. The author thereby envisions a concept of justice which includes both the pardon of the amnesty process and punishment of the trial system. This concept of justice, however, belongs exclusively to the public sphere of the law, and, unlike the TRC’s amnesty hearings, it does not intrude into the personal space of contrition and forgiveness of the perpetrator. Duncan, in fact, refuses to show any sign of remorse—at least publicly. In contrast to the Commission’s proceedings, The House Gun restores the concepts of confession and forgiveness to the personal dimension of human actions. One final remark must be dedicated to the child of Duncan’s girlfriend. Despite having an uncertain heritage—being either Duncan’s or Carl Jespersen’s baby—Natalie’s child provides hope, rebirth, a promise for the future and a narrative commitment to hybridity. Writing on the ending of the novel, Clingman underscores that the figure of the child makes this text Gordimer’s most optimistic in a long time: In such a schema—not a triumphalist one by any means—Gordimer figures into this, her first novel set in the postapartheid world, the oscillating profusion of voices that must make South Africa’s future, transcending the past by building new relations beyond the fixed geometry of the old, offering a vision of possibility. (2000, p. 156)

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The presence of the child signals the extent to which the characters are willing to negotiate their reconciliation with the past. Whereas some scholars suggest that Harald and Claudia find “a new way of living in the new South Africa, no longer cocooned in their own ignorance” (Kossew 2001, p. 142; see also Stobie 2007), I rather argue that the couple’s attitude suggests a much more compromised level of reconciliation with the past. They are, in fact, initially reluctant to assume responsibility for the baby, and, only after Duncan’s request, do they accept to financially help the child, but on the condition that “arrangements should be made by Motsamai, and not in personal contact with them” (p.  291). Duncan hopes that in time Harald and Claudia will accept the child as part of their family, but, as for the present situation, they prefer avoiding any kind of contact with him and his mother Natalie, thus rejecting to embrace the promise of life the child can potentially represent. By contrast, Duncan embodies a form of reconciliation that mirrors the contradictions of South Africa’s past. He blurs the boundaries in opposing pairs such as homonormativity and homosexuality, victim and perpetrator, life and death. Recalling a passage from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in the solitude of his cell, Duncan realises the unbreakable bond between victim and perpetrator: The passage about the one who did it and the one to whom it was done. “It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together—as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, the one acting, the other suffering him—share a secret that binds them forever together. They belong to each other”. (p. 282)

Duncan, Carl Jespersen and Natalie function simultaneously as victim and perpetrator, thus making unclear the differences between the two distinct categories—Carl and Natalie, the treacherous adulterous couple, and Duncan, the murderer: “Carl acted, I suffered him, I acted, Natalie suffered me, and that night on the sofa they acted and I suffered them both. We belong to each other” (p. 282). They share a secret “that binds [them] forever together” (p. 282) even beyond Carl’s death, and the product of this secret is Natalie’s child: “is it a girl, it looks like Natalie/Nastasya. No, it’s a boy, it looks like us, Carl and Duncan” (p. 243). Despite the uncertain paternity, Duncan decides to take care of Natalie’s child, and, with his final gesture, he recognises the promise of life—no matter how ambivalent and contradictory—which is epitomised by the baby:

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But I have to find a way. Carl’s death and Natalie’s child, I think of one, then the other, then the one, then the other. They become one, for me. It does not matter whether or not anyone else will understand: Carl, Natalie/ Nastasya and me, the three of us. I’ve had to find a way to bring death and life together. (p. 294)

The child and, most importantly, his hybrid heritage represent a way to bridge the gap that separates victim and perpetrator, or, in this case, Carl, Natalie and Duncan, thus bringing together the dead with those still living. Duncan’s journey towards the reconciliation of opposites is also conveyed through his readings in the confinement of his cell. Dismissing Oedipus’ self-mortification for his crime, Duncan exalts Odysseus’s murder of Antinous—the most ferocious of Penelope’s suitors—demonstrating his awareness that “violence is a repetition we don’t seem to be able to break” (p.  294). The allusion to Homer’s epic poem Odyssey is by no means casual: like Duncan, Odysseus is both a victim and a perpetrator. After a twenty-year absence from his kingdom and his wife Penelope—first the ten-year Trojan war, then his ten-year return journey—Odysseus reaches Ithaca to discover that his household has been threatened by a group of unruly suitors. From the status of victim for his past suffering, the epic hero becomes a brutal avenger and slaughters all the suitors. By invoking the Odyssey, Duncan acknowledges the violence that still affects post-apartheid South African reality, and, most importantly, the contradictions and ambiguities that characterise that reality, a reality where the status of victim and perpetrator often appears to coexist. The House Gun pictures a society still pervaded by violence, where it is difficult to distinguish between individual and collective responsibility, making the Commission’s aim of establishing the truth about the past arduous and, at the same time, ambivalent. In particular, Gordimer exposes the arbitrariness and inadequacy of the TRC’s victim-perpetrator framework, which tended to erase the complexities and all grey areas of that past it attempted to remember and frame. The novel, instead, seems to advocate the existence of multiple perspectives and of hybrid natures such as Duncan’s, who encompasses death and life, good and evil, victim and perpetrator. The questions of reconciliation and closure, however, remain ultimately unanswered: the novel, in fact, ends portraying Duncan in the confinement of his prison cell, his future completely unknown. Despite Duncan’s willingness to accept Natalie’s baby and, most significantly, to recognise his hybrid heritage, readers are left wondering whether

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this recognition will allow Duncan to achieve real reconciliation and closure. Gordimer does not give us any indication as to what might happen during the years of Duncan’s imprisonment, or after the completion of his sentence. In The House Gun, the concepts of truth and reconciliation are extended and complicated, presenting a reality far more ambiguous and indefinite than that suggested by the TRC’s motto “truth: the road to reconciliation”.

3.3   Storytelling, Embroidery and the Echo of Caliban’s Voice in Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk Questions of truth and of the possibility for any narrative project to purport to truth are central issues in Marlene van Niekerk’s monumental second novel Agaat. If The House Gun dramatises a conceptual crisis of the notion of truth primarily at plot level through the portrayal of Duncan’s hybrid nature, Agaat operates at both plot and formal levels, enacting a complex, multi-layered narrative structure that questions the validity of truth-telling. The original text in Afrikaans was published in 2004, while the South African edition of the novel’s English translation by Michiel Heyns came out two years later.2 Agaat focuses on the relationship between a white Afrikaner farm owner Kamilla (Milla) de Wet and her coloured adopted daughter—turned into a servant and later a nurse— Agaat Lourier. Encompassing a period of fifty years, the novel tells the story of these two women, who live on a farm, Grootmoedersdrift, in the Western Cape. The first encounter between the two occurs in 1953 at Milla’s parents’ farm, where a young Milla learns about the mistreatments and sexual abuse little Agaat has been subjected to by her father and brothers. After finding out about this terrible situation, Milla decides to take Agaat to Grootmoedersdrift where she lives with her husband Jak de Wet. Throughout the story, Milla endeavours to turn the highly traumatised, initially mute Agaat into a “refined” coloured woman, providing her with enough education to set her apart from the rest of the farm workers, yet always attempting to maintain control over her. In this sense, as Caren van Houwelingen notices, Agaat’s upbringing leaves her ambivalently placed between feelings of belonging and estrangement (2012, p. 102). Although it is true to say that the novel tells the story of Milla and Agaat, this is perhaps an oversimplistic description given the complex narrative structure and the dominant perspective at play in Agaat. Besides a

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frame narrative provided by Milla’s son Jakkie, the novel has four main narrative strands: the first, which opens the narrative, depicts a dying, almost paralysed Milla, who suffers from motor neuron disease, left mute and chained to her sickbed in the year 1996, significantly the year of the inception of the TRC’s mandate, although there are no explicit references to the work of the Commission. In this first-person narrative, Milla is being nursed by Agaat and provides realistic—sometimes uncomfortable—descriptions of her daily care routine. These narrative sections show Milla oscillating between feelings of guilt for the ways in which she has (mis)treated Agaat throughout their relationship and feelings of suspicions and resentment for past episodes that occurred between the two women. In the second narrative strand, Milla engages in conversation with a younger version of herself that she addresses as “you”. The adoption of this dialogic mode is reminiscent of Winnie Mandela’s self-reflective account that Ndebele enacts in The Cry of Winnie Mandela, as explored in Chap. 2. In a similar fashion to Winnie’s mnemonic journey, Milla critically reflects upon her past, from her marriage in 1947 to her patriarchal and racist husband Jak to her farm life at Grootmoedersdrift with Agaat, from the birth of his son Jakkie to Jakkie’s desertion from the army and escape to Canada in 1985. The third strand consists of diary entries written by Milla, which, in their non-chronological order and highly fragmented form, reveal how the white woman found Agaat, how she rescued the little girl and looked after her education. The last strand is presented in italics to signal its different form from the other sections, as it is not telling a story (linear or non-linear), but is Milla’s stream of consciousness. In a lyrical style, this strand reflects on the two women’s relationship, on Milla’s imminent death and on Agaat’s role as a nurse. In an interview with Hans Pienaar, van Niekerk concedes that “the main textual device that [she] employed in Agaat [was] in order to complicate matters”; for readers, Agaat is only known from: the perspective of, and therefore in the judgement of, an extremely unreliable narrator…[ Milla is] a self-indulgent, delusional diary-keeper, a vainglorious and self-justifying memory machine, an invalid delirious from lack of oxygen lying powerless on her back in a bed. (Pienaar 2005, qtd. in Carvalho and van Vuuren 2009, p. 41)

If the title foregrounds a primary focus on the character of Agaat, the novel is both telling and not telling Agaat’s story. Agaat’s thoughts,

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emotions and speeches are framed by Milla’s dominant perspective, a perspective that is often limited and unreliable. In one of her diary entries, Milla acknowledges that Agaat has always been “a closed book” ([2004] 2006, p.  431), which leaves Milla wondering “What must it feel to be Agaat?” (p.  462). Inference and deduction seem to be the only tools through which Milla can attempt to understand her servant. This unbalanced situation is rendered more complicated by Milla’s disease, which heavily affects her capacity to express herself. Defenceless in her sickbed, Milla wonders whether she is “reading too much into everything [Agaat] does and says. Perhaps I’m imagining her evil. Or her goodness. Perhaps I’ve been delirious all this time because of a lack of oxygen” (p.  330). Confusion and imagination often alter Milla’s state of mind and, consequently, her perception of Agaat. The adopted coloured daughter, turned into a servant and later a nurse, is then marginalised on a narratological level. In The House Gun, the narrator wonders why Duncan is not in the story, and I suggest that a similar question perfectly applies to van Niekerk’s novel: why is Agaat not in the narrative? Carvalho and van Vuuren refer to the debate on Agaat’s perceived silence, which divides criticism between viewing Agaat as “an autonomous character” and considering her “a silenced, marginalised presence” (2009, p. 42). As my subsequent discussion will show, there is a third possible interpretation. Carvalho and van Vuuren argue that “as Agaat is granted no space to ‘speak’ in Milla’s narration, her tale resides in the fissures of the white woman’s narration” (ibid., p. 41). They go on to identify Agaat’s means of expression, which can be classified as verbal and non-verbal. Accordingly, Agaat appropriates Afrikaans language and traditional culture—in the forms of the FAK songs,3 rhymes and fairy tales with which she was raised by Milla and those that she learns with Jakkie from his schoolbooks (p. 304)—in order to improvise her own tunes and, in so doing, she indirectly subverts Afrikaner identity. For instance, Milla writes in her diary that Agaat “was singing [Jakkie] an odd little song with Scripture thrown in an odd tune […] Can’t put my finger on it. After all she got it all from me but what she makes of it is the Lord knows a veritable Babel” and, in this way, “A.’s song was about something else” (p. 305). This song is particularly significant as it establishes a connection between Agaat’s being and the landscape, “the wattle”, “the fennel”, “the end of the river-bend”, “the breadth of the Breede” and “the blood of the bluegum”, which can be read as Agaat’s attempt to assert her own autonomous identity (Carvalho and van Vuuren 2009, p.  45). A more valuable song is that

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which Agaat sings to Milla in the present time: here Agaat chronicles her injuries and losses in a highly fragmented way, from her earliest confinement in the outside room on Grootmoedersdrift (shortly after Milla took her from her abusive parental home) as a “Lockupchild! Without pot!”, to Milla’s harsh disciplining with the “Dusterstick on Agaatarse”; from her position of beloved child for seven years, “sevenyearschild”, to her banishment to the “Backyard” in a “Skivvy-room” with “Highbed”. Following the birth of Milla’s son Jakkie, Agaat is relegated to the role of servant with “Whitecap”. “Heartburied/ Nevertold! Unlamented!”, this song reveals Agaat’s suffering and the extent to which she feels herself to be a victim of Milla’s cruelty (pp. 340–341). Through appropriation and manipulation of traditional Afrikaans rhymes and songs as means of self-expression, Agaat appears to become a modern Africanised version of the Shakespearean character Caliban. As an indigenous inhabitant and legitimate scion of the island on which The Tempest is set, Caliban is “enslaved” and treated brutally by Prospero. Famously stating, “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me” (The Tempest I, ii: 331–332), Caliban has become a symbol of revolutionary, anti-imperialist culture for postcolonial writers, especially since the 1950s.4 Prospero, the coloniser, takes on the task of “civilising” the degenerate, deformed, colonised Caliban, a task that is not entirely successful, as Caliban resists total domination, especially linguistic domination. After accusing Caliban of seeking to violate his daughter’s honour, Prospero holds against the “savage” his attempts at “civilising” him: Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes With words that made them known. (I, ii: 358–363)

Caliban’s response to this charge reflects the futility and irony of imposing language on the colonised; rather than using the language of the coloniser in a productive way, Caliban goes so far as to curse Prospero himself: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. / The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (I, ii: 368–370). Caliban’s scathing statement clearly shows that the colonised is not and

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cannot be perpetually muted because he has a voice, a voice that he wishes to express on his own terms. In a similar fashion, Agaat appropriates sentences and Afrikaans rhymes, songs and proverbs “to her purpose through tone and emphasis. Old trick. She has no respect for what the proverbs really mean, she invents her own language as she goes” (p. 159). Agaat’s attempts at manipulating language are perhaps more evident in Milla’s last, painstaking efforts to spell out sentences on Agaat’s old alphabet chart. This system of communication raises a number of narrative concerns: on the one hand, Milla is compelled to condense a lifetime’s questions into a few words, while on the other, Agaat is actively involved in constructing Milla’s linguistic expressions by providing intonation and the very modulation of their meaning. Agaat seems to create a “skeleton language, written down in print and in script” (p. 364), to the extent that Milla perceives her nurse’s interventions as real linguistic impositions that affect meaning: “don’t put words into my mouth, exclamation mark, I then have to spell out for her. Don’t anticipate my meanings, don’t impose the wrong stress, wrong nuances on me. Exclamation, exclamation, exclamation!” (p. 364). It is important, however, to underline that the narrative is dominated by Milla’s biased and unreliable perspective and, consequently, the old woman’s suspicions of Agaat’s attempts at linguistic manipulation might be a figment of her own imagination. What is certain, however, is that Agaat is not voiceless, although her voice seems to be out of reach for Milla. In her diary entries, Milla recalls Agaat telling little Jakkie fairy tales at every bedtime, each storytelling session beginning with “the first story” and ending with “the last story” (p. 262), “the one story that [Jakkie] always wants to hear last of all & of which he never tires & when she changes one word of it he shouts no! no! that’s not how it goes” (p.  262). Despite her efforts at eavesdropping on this last story, Milla can never fully make out what the story is about. All she manages to understand is its beginning: “once upon a time there was a woman who was terribly unhappy” (p. 262). Milla cannot even rely on Jakkie’s insight for further information as the little boy jealously guards the particulars of this last story: “it’s his & Agaat’s secret” (p. 263) and “he’s not allowed to tell it [because] Agaat will bewitch him if he does” (p. 263). Agaat’s voice and capacity for self-expression are further shown by the non-verbal, performative and highly symbolic communicative methods that she frequently employs. For example, Agaat often engages in a strange, almost ritualistic form of dance as Milla witnesses shortly after

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moving little Agaat to the servants’ quarters. She finds the little girl occupied in “odd steps & gestures against the slope […] sideways & backwards knees bent foot-stamping jumping on one leg jump-jump-jump & point-­ point with one arm at the ground” (p. 126). This odd dance is a powerful means of emotional self-expression, as it is revealed in the epilogue by Jakkie’s narrative voice, who finally reports Agaat’s last fairy-tale. Here it is disclosed that Agaat buried her suitcase “filled with the dress and shoes and things of the child she’d been” and “piled black stones on top of it. And trampled it with her new black shoes and cocked her crooked shoulder and pointed with her snake’s-head hand” (p.  574). Through her almost fierce dance, little Agaat bitterly discards her much loved toys, the majority of which she had collected with Milla, thus signalling her imposed passage from Milla’s adopted daughter to the household’s main servant. Echoing Lydia’s silent self-destructive dance on broken glass in Bitter Fruit, Agaat chooses the body over language to give expression to her pain in being rejected by Milla, her adopted mother figure. Even more significant is Agaat’s mastery of embroidery, which she uses as an important means of non-verbal self-expression. After taking Agaat to Grootmoedersdrift, a Prospero-like Milla takes on the task of “humanising” and “civilising” the little girl, and her educational plan spans from teaching Agaat how to write and read to exposing her to Afrikaans cultural elements such as FAK songs, traditional hymns, classical music and psalms. Her project also includes teaching Agaat farming matters and the art of embroidery, which is “the other half & fine decorative needlework & knitting & crocheting. They belong to the finer things in life they are age-old arts & rich traditions from the domain of woman” (p. 142). In particular, Milla shows her “examples of our embroidered National art & the representations of our History” (p. 143), thus making the craft an instrument of Afrikaans culture indoctrination. Agaat indeed ends up dedicating a great deal of time to embroidery but she transforms it into a means of story-making. In an interview with Leon de Kock, van Niekerk acknowledges the importance and the high symbolic value of the art of embroidery: Agaat can take the embroidery and make it into a borswering, a skild, you know, and a sign of her own power, which is in any case doubtful, because the power is a compromised one. But it is a place where she, with the master’s tools, erects for herself a little bit of autonomy, a kind of sovereignty, and it is important that this sovereignty is a form of art. (2009, p. 141)

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Agaat is very secretive about every embroidery project that she undertakes, and the most important ones are certainly her white-cap, always impeccably starched, and the shroud, “the fourth dress of woman” (p.  541), that she embroiders for Milla. As a homage to the dying old woman, Agaat merges biblical scenes with images from nature, particularly flora and fauna found on Milla’s farm, “Genesis and Grootmoedersdrift in one” (p. 564). The shroud thus reflects the centrality of the agrarian lifestyle in Agaat’s personal mythology, a passion that she developed from the Handbook for Farmers in South Africa, a gift from Milla that Agaat treats as a sacred text. Milla, however, can barely detect the embroidered patterns as her eyes are drying out. She recalls a past memory in which Agaat attempts to explain to little Jakkie how a picture can emerge from under the needle: You fetch it and stretch it and tie it together […] you stich on the stipple, you struggle with pattern, you deck it and speck it in rows and in ranks, in steps and in stripes and arches and bridges, and crosses and jambs of doors and of dams, you trace it and track it and fill it and span it and just see what’s come of the cloth, a story, a rhyme. (p. 541)

Agaat’s words clearly make a connection between the art of embroidery and storytelling, a connection which is further confirmed by her ever-­ changing white cap. This project perhaps enshrines a higher symbolic value than the shroud, as it is embroidered in great secrecy and seems to change over time while chronicling Agaat’s life. Nobody except Jakkie when he was little was ever allowed “to look at it straight on. Over the years even more forbidden, that zone above Agaat’s forehead” (p. 311). Only a momentary lapse brought on by Agaat’s extreme tiredness allows the dying Milla to finally make out what is embroidered in the cap, although she cannot be completely certain that her eyes are not playing any tricks: Am I seeing straight? A harp it seems to be, a syrinx, a tambourine, a trumpet, the neck of a lute. And hands I see, all the wrists bent, all fingers on strings and valves and stops.[…] But I can’t stop looking. It’s like looking into clouds. Everything is possible. (p. 311)

Milla’s inspection of Agaat’s cap is suddenly interrupted by the woman’s awakening, which prevents Milla from fully understanding the whole

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significance embedded in it. Milla’s inability to read and interpret Agaat’s embroidered symbols makes them even more valuable in terms of the authenticity and legitimacy of Agaat’s non-verbal self-expression. If Agaat’s verbal means of communication, such as her appropriation and manipulation of traditional Afrikaans rhymes and language, are undermined to a certain extent by Milla’s dominant perspective and interpretation—or, in the case of the frame narrative, Agaat’s last story is revealed through Jakkie’s perspective—Agaat’s embroidered cap and shroud remain out of reach, far beyond Milla’s ken and, as such, they represent Agaat’s ultimate non-verbal means of self-expression that hold her true story, a story that is uncompromised and, most importantly, unbeknownst to both Milla and the reader. In addition to becoming the tableau on which she writes and rewrites her story, Agaat’s white cap, alongside her white apron, also acts as a racial and social marker, identifying Agaat with both the racial Other and her role of servant. Recalling the last party that she organised for Jakkie’s birthday before his escape to Canada in 1985, Milla recounts an exchange between Jakkie and Agaat while he was trying to persuade Agaat to fly with him wearing her new red scarf instead of her working white cap and apron: You’re not going to fly with me in that apron and with that white cap on your head, Jakkie said to Agaat. I am, said Agaat. You are not your apron and your cap, Agaat, Jakkie said, and turned round to her. I am, Agaat said. (p. 507)

Agaat’s ambivalent position between being Milla’s object of love and the racial Other characterises the relationship between the two women since their first encounter at Milla’s mother’s farm, well before Agaat’s official transition to the servants’ quarters. During that first encounter, Milla demands to know the little girl’s name but she can only make out a guttural sound: This time you heard the ggggg clearly, like a sigh it sounded, like a rill in the fynbos, very soft, and distant […] That was the beginning. That sound. You felt empty and full at the same time from it, felt sorrow and pity surging in

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your throat. Ggggg at the back of your throat, as if it were a sound that belonged to yourself. (p. 547)

Milla’s initial mixed feelings will shape her perception of and relationship with Agaat throughout the whole narrative: at hearing the guttural sound of Agaat’s name, Milla feels at the same time both full and empty, sorry for the little girl’s condition and a sense of belonging, as if Agaat was an object that belonged to her. On the one hand, Milla goes against her own family and community to rescue Agaat from abuse and mistreatment, taking her in as an adopted daughter and trying to look after her as well as she can. On more than one occasion, Milla even seeks refuge in Agaat’s companionship after a row with Jak: Crawled in behind A’s back in tears again last night. J. particularly rough after the whole circus episode & swears & scolds & abuses me to my very soul. Another dress with a broken zip. I suppose I shouldn’t turn to the poor child for refuge. In the end she was the one who comforted me. (p. 529)

But, in the next instance, Milla is adamant that Agaat “must learn to know her place” (p. 469) at Grootmoedersdrift and that Milla is “nooi Milla & Jak is Mr de Wet” (A 524), because “too much intimacy not a good thing now” (p. 469). The white woman thus refuses to transcend racial boundaries for Agaat’s sake, showing an inability to break from apartheid thinking, even though she sometimes transgresses its rules for her own emotional comfort. In her diary entries, she confesses her frustration and nausea for Agaat’s “long jaw, the bulbous eyes that can glare so coercively, the untameable woolly mop, the little crank-handle of an arm, the sly manner at times, the cruelty that sometimes breaks through” (p.  480), clearly drawing on the racial stereotypes that have troubled coloured identities in South Africa during both the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. The woman’s oscillation between love for the coloured little girl and rejection of, if not disgust for, that love resonates with Robert Young’s conceptualisation of the colonial desiring machine (2002) that I discuss in Chap. 2. Entrapped between a desire to establish a connection with little Agaat and a repulsion for her features, Milla embodies the figure of the white Western coloniser. It is certainly not coincidental that Milla performs the colonising act of re-naming the colonised object: not satisfied with Agaat’s original name—“Asgat” or “Aspatat”—she discusses the matter with her own

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doctor, who suggests the name “Agaat”: “it’s close to the sound of Asgat with the guttural ‘g’ […] it’s from the Greek ‘agathos’ which means ‘good’. And if your name is good, he says, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 406). In a similar fashion, Milla also decides on which day to celebrate Agaat’s birthday; since her parents cannot provide this piece of information, Milla picks a random day: Tomorrow is the day! Agaat’s birthday. I feel I must celebrate it so that she can start becoming human here on Gdrift. Explained to her nicely: we commemorate the day that the Lord gave you as gift to yourself and to me. (p. 467)

In both instances—Agaat’s name and birthday—we see the coloniser’s (Milla and her doctor) patronising perspective, according to which the Other, the colonised object, is savage, wild, almost inhuman and therefore needs the coloniser’s intervention to become a good human being. Milla’s pleased reaction to the discovery that Agaat will not be able to bear children as a consequence of the mistreatments and sexual abuse that she endured from her family—“All the better, we both of us thought!” (p. 399)—further confirms her racial prejudices. Being denied the gift of motherhood—at least in the literal meaning of the term, as Agaat will become Jakkie’s confidant and surrogate mother on a more emotional level—Agaat will be unable to continue, in Milla’s racist eyes, the shameful legacy of her coloured origins.5 Milla cannot help but fluctuate between contrasting feelings towards the little girl, between caring for Agaat’s well-­ being and fearing (and discriminating) her otherness; despite her efforts, Milla’s ambivalent attitude will eventually prevent her from developing a sincere and unbiased relationship with Agaat. This already compromised situation further changes when Milla becomes pregnant with her own child. Having fulfilled her long-desired wish of becoming a mother, Milla dramatically reconsiders Agaat’s position and changes her status from adopted family member to the family’s (main) servant and Milla’s right hand—or, as Milla notices, her “left arm”, as Agaat’s right arm is deformed. This dramatic change is endorsed by Agaat’s physical relocation from the household to the outside room in the backyard (an old storeroom transformed into a make-shift bedroom). When Agaat is shown her new room, Milla makes clear what she expects of her behaviour in the future:

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Explained [to Agaat] about the aprons one for every day of the week. See that they’re always clean & stiffly starched & ironed. Showed hr where all the cleaning materials & ironing board & the irons are & the borax & the turpentine for the starch & the blue for the whitening. Underlined I don’t ever want to see stains & creases on hr uniform when she’s working in the house […] The caps were the most difficult. I said I know you don’t like things on your head but you’ll just have to like it or lump it. Asked her nicely she must put on a clean one every day & pin it up nicely. (p. 104)

The passage above clearly displays Milla’s keen intent on subduing Agaat’s hair, which has always been a source of annoyance to her. The cap thus serves to disguise her “untameable woolly mop” (p. 480), a racial marker which, according to Kobena Mercer, “has been historically devalued as the most visible stigmata of blackness, second only to skin” (1994, p. 101). On the one hand, Milla constantly others Agaat, trying to tame her racial traits, while on the other, she creates and exacerbates the distance between Agaat and the other servants, suggesting the idea that the child is too refined for their company: “The kitchen maids are jealous of Agaat. They’re full of gibes. Won’t allow them to come and spoil all my hard work here. […] Don’t take any notice of them, I say, they’re not your sort” (p. 477). Agaat’s in-between position is also mirrored by her spatial relocation to the outside room, which comes to represent a liminal alternative space between the interior of the farmstead and the workers’ hovels, thus trapping Agaat between what Caren van Houwelingen identifies as a sense of belonging and a sense of estrangement (2012, pp. 101–102). As Danyela Demir observes, Milla’s choices have devastating consequences for Agaat’s psyche and lead her to “constantly affirm, yet simultaneously negate her coloured identity” (2016, p. 29). It is then no coincidence that Agaat both attempts to manipulate Afrikaner cultural elements to communicate her own point of view—although these attempts must be read with a certain caution as they are always described within Milla’s biased perspective—and, at the same time, repeats the injuries that Milla inflicted upon her to the other servants. Before exploring Agaat’s mimicry of Milla’s sometimes very cruel behaviour, it is paramount to place emphasis on the last turning point in the dynamics of the two women’s relationship. Milla’s disease triggers a fundamental power shift, which sees Agaat taking the lead at the farm and becoming Milla’s full-time caregiver. In some ways reminiscent of Njabulo Ndebele’s rejection of spectacular displays of violence and trauma in favour

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of a focus on the ordinary daily lives of South Africans, which we have seen in The Cry of Winnie Mandela, van Niekerk offers a piercing—yet sometimes uncomfortable—description of the familiar. The text is filled with the details of everyday household tasks, which are performed by the now putative mistress Agaat and which become an extensive catalogue of mundane, domestic objects, including cooking, a daily body care routine, embroidery and farming. In particular, the author lingers on how Milla’s body and physiological functions are subjected to Agaat’s intense scrutiny and meticulous treatments, often perceived as cruel and discomforting by the bedridden Milla: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, says Agaat, who’s the fairest of them all? I keep my eyes shut. My face flushes hot with defying her. I refuse to look, I wait until she moves away. I hear her adding water to the washbasin. She pulls out the pan from under me. I hear her walk away with it. I peep from the corner of my eye to see what she’s doing. She puts on her glasses, examines the contents in front of the window. […] She writes on the calendar with the pencil suspended there on a string, Leroux’s urine record that he wants to see every time he visits me. My logbook. The motions of my entrances and my exits. Today Agaat looks into the pan again and again as if it contained a message. (p. 70)

A power struggle has always been discernible in the dynamics of Milla and of Agaat’s relationship; from their first encounter, Milla exerted (or at least attempted to exert) her power over little Agaat. We have explored several examples, spanning from the act of renaming the child to Milla’s civilising education plan and her decision to “exile” little Agaat to the outside room as the family’s main servant. Milla’s paralysing disease changes everything in this dynamics and the roles are now inverted. As emerges from this passage, Milla is completely dependent on Agaat’s benevolent care for her quotidian physiological needs. Van Niekerk deliberately employs the everyday to mark this hand-over from the dying white woman, owner of the farm, now bedridden and mute, to the coloured servant “girl”. Notably, this power shift also entails a racial reversal, which witnesses the coloured Agaat taking responsibility for managing the farm, looking after her mistress Milla and, most importantly, compiling Milla’s own narrative. Milla can only rely on blinking as a means of communication and, although the two women are very familiar with this system of communication—they would rely on eye signals when Agaat was little and could not (or did not

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want to) talk properly—the current situation is aggravated by the white woman’s confused mind and by what she perceives as Agaat’s intentional linguistic interference: “[Agaat] can’t always keep her voice neutral. She charges my sentences with her own resonances. Disbelief, emphasis, mockery. She adds on and improvises. To my own ears I sound like running commentary rather than original intention” (p. 365). Milla’s disease can also be read on a symbolic level, as a historical and political allegory for the demise of the apartheid regime and South Africa’s transition to a new democratic order. Van Niekerk seems to engage in dialogue with J. M. Coetzee’s 1990 novel Age of Iron. There, the protagonist is a white old woman, Mrs Curren, a retired Classics professor, who is affected by an incurable form of cancer and who is assisted in her last days by a homeless black man, Vercuil. The motif of cancer—or, in Milla’s case, motor neurone disease—can be read as a metaphor foreshadowing the dismantlement of the segregation system. While Age of Iron was written and published a few years before the official demise of apartheid in 1994, Agaat was published in 2004, but Milla’s disease is significantly diagnosed in 1993, that is, during the negotiation period that culminated with the first democratic elections in 1994. That the old must die to allow a new order to be born clearly echoes Nadine Gordimer’s conceptualisation of the interregnum; quoting the Italian Marxist philosopher and Communist politician Antonio Gramsci, Gordimer argues in her 1981 novel July’s People and in her 1982 essay “Living in the Interregnum” that: It is not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my novel July’s People a quotation from Gramsci: “The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms”. In this interregnum, I and all my countrymen and women are living. ([1982] 1988, p. 263)

Not coincidentally, Milla dies shortly after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission had started its reconciliation and historical rewriting project. Although it could be claimed that the political “interregnum” had officially ended with the 1994 democratic elections, the more challenging transition towards real reconciliation among all South Africans was painfully still at stake during Milla’s final moments. The white Afrikaner woman, representative of the old order, dies to allow Agaat, the coloured Other who should embody the new order, to take over. But does

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Agaat really represent the new, democratic order? Or does she perpetuate some symptoms of the old system? Caren van Houwelingen convincingly argues that van Niekerk revisits the plaasroman genre by reinterpreting its three cardinal ideological assumptions: “patriarchal sovereignty, the white subject’s assumed ownership of the land, and the marginalization of the non-white other, who is rendered as an extension of the landscape and denied his/her rightful ownership of the land” (2012, p. 94). In her interview with de Kock, van Niekerk acknowledges that she read “the old plaasromans again” while working on the novel and that “there was a bit of a conscious retake on that; [she] wanted especially to undermine the plaasroman and the idyll of C. M. van der Heever. [She] wanted to show, look, things are much, much more complicated, usually” (2009, p. 141). The patriarchal authority of the traditional plaasroman is indeed partially replaced in the novel with a matriarchal lineage on Grootmoedersdrift, a farm that Milla inherited from her mother. The name, in fact, as Jakkie points out in the prologue, can be translated as “Granny’s Ford? Granny’s Passion? What does that say? Motor cars there weren’t yet, when the farm, named after my dreaded great-great-granny Spies on Ma’s side, was given its name” (p.  5). However, van Houwelingen goes on to argue that Milla’s interactions with the land are ambiguous and, even though her methods seem to be more attuned to the rhymes of nature than her husband’s attempts at modern exploitation of the land, Milla continues to map and inscribe the land with a domineering and patronising perspective (2012, pp. 98–99). Milla’s position as landowner starts to change drastically with her degenerative motor neurone disease: confined to her sickbed in the narrative present, Milla is denied the possibility to work on—and take ownership of—her land. Not only does Agaat become “putative” mistress of the farmstead, she also controls Milla’s visual access to her land through two symbolic objects: the maps of Grootmoedersdrift and the mirror. Physically unable to move, the maps become a sort of codified inscription of her land that remind Milla of her epistemological power; similar to the remembering and re-living function of the maps, the mirror allows the old woman to see reflections of her garden outside and “to imagine the bits left out, the avenues of agapanthus that must be in full bloom, the borders of gillyflowers and wild pinks and snapdragons and purple and white petunias that Agaat sowed and had planted in the late spring, in early summer, so that [she] might still experience it” (p. 110). Problematically, Milla cannot benefit from the views on the maps and the reflections of the mirror

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without Agaat’s physical intervention; it is Agaat who controls Milla’s access to these objects and, by extension, to Milla’s visual access to her land. Agaat’s role as “new” owner and manager of the farm becomes official following Milla’s death, when Milla’s testamentary decision to bequeath the whole farm to Agaat is revealed. Prisloo and Visagie argue that Agaat could be seen as a possible descendant of the Khoi people—the original inhabitants of the Grootmoedersdrift land—and as such the rightful owner of the land (2009, p. 73, qtd. in van Houwelingen 2012, p. 99). The guttural sound inherent in Agaat’s name seems to confirm that the coloured woman’s connection with the land is ancestral: Do you remember it, Gaat? The sound of the sea in a shell? The sound of the wind in the wheat? […] And everything sounded like your name. Ggggg-aaat, says the black pine tree in the rain, the spurwingend goose when it flies up says gaat-agaatagaat, the drift when it’s in flood from far away, do you remember? (p. 491)

Through the bequeathal of Grootmoedersdrift to Agaat, the author undoes the patriarchal, sexist and racist underpinnings of the plaasroman genre. With this strategic narrative move, van Niekerk responds to one of the TRC’s final recommendations, that is, all unused and underutilised land should be made available to landless people: The Commission recommends that: THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY, TOGETHER WITH LOCAL AND REGIONAL GOVERNMENT, IN COOPERATION WITH THE LAND COMMISSION, UNDERTAKE AN AUDIT OF ALL UNUSED AND UNDERUTILISED LAND, WITH A VIEW TO MAKING THIS AVAILABLE TO LANDLESS PEOPLE.  LAND APPROPRIATED OR EXPROPRIATED PRIOR TO 1994 SHOULD ALSO BE CONSIDERED IN THE AUDITING PROCESS, WITH A VIEW TO COMPENSATING THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LAND. (“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report”, Vol. 5, Ch. 8, Para. 41)

Earlier I posed the question of whether Agaat, by taking over Milla’s leadership, could really represent the new, democratic order. In their farewell to Oumies Milla, the workers say that she was good to them and that “[they] will, [they] will…stay here under Agaat” (p. 542). “The message is clear”, Milla thinks, “I see how they look at each other, how they asses it, the new order” (p.  542). And yet the potential of this new order is

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overshadowed by Agaat’s troubled behaviour, a mimicry of Milla’s own methods (p. 452). While Milla rescued little Agaat from her abusive relatives and ensured her physical healing from the mistreatments she endured, the woman never really helped little Agaat go through her childhood trauma from a psychological viewpoint. Furthermore, Milla, by her own admission, continuously treated the little child harshly, inflicting punishment until she succeeded in bending her will. Agaat was frequently locked up in her room or denied food until she did what Milla demanded her to do. As a result, Agaat is often portrayed repeating or miming these injuries on others—either symbolic objects or real people. The first instance occurs after Milla threatens her with phoning the police to tell them that Agaat has behaved poorly: Gave her a good fright, pretended to be phoning the police, made as if I was telling the constable on the phone how naughty she was, asked that they should come and take her away and lock her up in a cell with bars behind a great iron door without food and without pee-pot. (p. 479)

Less than a month later, Milla witnesses Agaat repeating this same very scene on a doll with which she often plays: [Agaat] deliberately places the doll filled with river sand in such a position that she has to fall off. Then she falls off, then she gets a slap, then she falls off. Then she gets a finger in the eye! Sit, doll, sit! If you can’t sit straight nicely and look at me, and answer me when I speak to you, then I’m phoning the police! Next thing she clambers onto the telephone stool, takes the receiver off its cradle. Hello, hello police? Come and fetch her, lock her up! (p. 481)

In a deeply disconcerting way, Agaat exerts both physical and psychological violence on her doll, acting out the harsh punishments that Milla has inflicted upon her. The repetition of her trauma seems to be Agaat’s only means of expressing her pain. This coping mechanism recurs again during her teenage years, but, on this occasion, Agaat’s targets are the coloured farm workers’ children: There she was commandeering the mothers of the children left and right to catch them and bring them nearer […] You heard her scolding before you even saw her. You peered round the corner. You saw how she grabbed the children by the hair and pulled their heads back and clamped their noses

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until they opened their mouths. With every spoonful she scolded. This is what you get for shitting in the bushes like wild things. Open your porridge-­ hole! This is what you get for wiping your arses with your hands! Swallow! Swallow! (pp. 239–240)

Having been sent to the workers and their families on Milla’s orders to hand out medication after pork measles has spread out on the farm, Agaat pours out all her frustration and pent-up emotions by acting out once again Milla’s cruel behaviour towards herself when she was first brought to the farm. On that occasion, Milla had forced open little Agaat’s mouth and make her swallow a sleeping pill: “Swallow, you hissed, swallow so you can calm down, swallow, I’m not taking any more nonsense from you” (p. 560). On the one hand, Agaat’s mimicry reveals the extent to which she was affected and traumatised by Milla’s cruelty and harsh methods, but, on the other, it also casts doubts on her potential to embody a new, democratic order. These doubts are confirmed, if not strengthened, by Jakkie’s words in the epilogue. Placing emphasis on the novel’s prologue and epilogue, Jean Rossman cogently asserts that Jakkie’s frame narrative is possibly “the realm for ‘broaden[ing] the view’ of Milla’s narrative monopoly” (2012, p. 37). According to Jakkie’s perspective, Agaat is an “Apartheid Cyborg. Assembled from loose components plus audiotape” (p.  564). This portrayal foregrounds how Agaat has been shaped by her adopted mother/ mistress’s strict education and turned into a hybrid figure who seems intended to replay Milla’s master discourse (audiotape), leaving the reader to question whether Agaat, as inheritor of the land, can perform real change at Grootmoedersdrift. Despite the power shift, and the implicit racial reversal, which should reflect the dismantlement of the apartheid state and South Africa’s transition to democracy, Agaat appears to be bound, in Jakkie’s view, to perpetuate the “lessons of the masters engraved in her like the law on the tablets of stone. […] The promised land is hers already, her creator is keeping remote control. Six feet under” (p. 564). Although praising Agaat’s character and ability to run the farm, Jakkie’s words have a more sinister meaning, as they envision Milla as a haunting presence who will maintain control over Agaat and the farm from beyond the grave. The novel’s complex and layered narrative structure engenders multiple readings and defies definite closure, raising more questions than providing answers: will things at Grootmoedersdrift change for the better with

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Agaat’s leadership? Will Agaat treat the coloured workers as equals or will she consider them as her subjects in the wake of Milla’s hard lessons? Will Agaat be able to embody the new democratic order? These questions remain unanswered and our capacity to answer them remains hampered by the fact that any insights originate from either Milla’s or Jakkie’s inevitably biased perspectives. Laura Buxbaum rightly suggests that Milla can be considered both perpetrator of trauma (i.e. her behaviour towards Agaat) but also someone who suffers from it, as she often had to endure her husband’s violence (2013, p. 92). I would further argue that Agaat occupies the same ambivalent position, pertaining to both realms, victim and perpetrator at the same time, somehow reminding readers of Gordimer’s character Duncan Lingard in The House Gun. Van Niekerk has argued that her main motive and interest in writing Agaat was to explore: the working of powers in intimate relationships, […] to show how people can, you know, abuse each other. And how they can abuse each other while they love each other. […] how someone is subjected to a form of power, can take aspects of that power, and mime them back, and make themselves stronger in the process. (De Kock 2009, p. 141)

Agaat’s position between the white family and the other coloured workers, as well as her ambivalent character of victim and perpetrator, mirrors the ambiguities inherent in colouredness that I have discussed in Chap. 2 and of which the coloured community’s vote for the National Party in the 1994 first democratic elections was a clear manifestation. In addition to defying closure, Agaat also questions the possibility of real reconciliation, as exemplified by the final stream-of-consciousness passage that ends Milla’s narrative and precedes Jakkie’s epilogue. While relating her passage to the afterlife, Milla imagines to mend the broken mother-daughter bond with Agaat. The constant refrain of “who”, who is the person accompanying Milla in her final moments, is finally answered: who breathes beneath me as if I’m lying on a living bedstead my pulse ignited with another pulse my breath to the rhythm of another my insight capsulated in sturdy scaffolds my sentences erected on other sentences like walls built on a rock? Who? Where are you agaat? Here I am. (pp. 560–561)

Agaat’s imagined response attests to Milla’s desire to be reconciled with the daughter she has cast out. This desire of reconciliation becomes more

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explicit while Milla is “crossing over” to the other side: the woman imagines her “soul to go/ in my overberg/ over the bent world brooding/ in my hand the hand of small agaat” (p. 561). Milla’s final thoughts go to her adopted daughter Agaat, thus revealing the woman’s profound wish of reconciliation. The text, however, does not provide any insights as to whether Milla’s wish can ever be fulfilled, nor can we be certain that Milla’s portrayal of Agaat holding her hand in her final moments is not the imaginary product of Milla’s altered mind. Furthermore, even though Milla’s fantasy of being held by Agaat coincided with the reality, without access to Agaat’s thoughts and emotions, we can never know the extent to which Milla’s wish of reconciliation is reciprocated by Agaat. The possibility of reconciliation is further challenged by the location of Milla’s final stream-of-consciousness passage; Milla’s final moments are, in fact, preceded by a section of self-dialogic narrative, where Milla confronts a younger version of herself while she is mistreating little Agaat: You held the dropper of valerian at the ready and on entering grabbed the child, clamped fast her head, forced open her mouth. You felt something snapping in you over the way you were treating her. The only remedy, you told yourself. […] Swallow, you hissed, swallow so that you can calm down, swallow, I’m not taking anymore nonsense from you. (p. 560)

This passage makes reference to the moment when Milla decided to rescue little Agaat from her abusive parents and take her to Grootmoedersdrift. When faced with the little girl’s resistance to follow her, Milla recurs to harsh methods to make Agaat behave properly, thus perpetuating, to some extent, the kind of abuse that Agaat had suffered at the hands of her family. The adoption of the dialogic mode allows Milla to reflect critically upon her past actions, observing how her younger self justified her mistreatment of little Agaat, because that kind of behaviour was “the only remedy”. The choice of juxtaposing Milla’s fantasy of reconciliation with an episode that openly disrupts such a wish makes the possibility of real reconciliation between the two women even more ambivalent and undetermined. I referred previously to the debate over Agaat’s perceived silence cited by Carvalho and van Vuuren, who identify two main critical views, Agaat as “an autonomous character” and “as a silenced, marginalised presence”. Analysis of the novel confirms that the character of Agaat is central to the narrative—it is no coincidence that her name is also the novel’s title—but

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Milla’s overwhelming (and to a certain extent Jakkie’s) narrative voice prevents readers’ access to her thoughts and emotions. Agaat cannot therefore be considered an “autonomous character” in narratological terms, but that should not draw readers to the conclusion that Agaat is not an “autonomous person” with her own identity and story. However contradictory she is and compromised by her difficult and painful upbringing, Agaat is not voiceless and has her own story to tell. We have seen that her preferred method of self-expression is embroidery, which significantly remains out of reach of Milla’s domineering perspective. Also significant is the fact that Agaat’s childhood abuse remains the “unspeakable original trauma”. Buxbaum points out that there are three versions narrating “the beginning” of Agaat and Milla’s complicated dynamics: Jakkie’s recollection of Agaat’s “last” bedtime story in the epilogue; Milla’s second-person narrative, which retraces Milla and Agaat’s first encounter; and Agaat’s fragmentary accusations for being racially othered and harshly mistreated by her “adopted mother” when she finally displays the longed-for maps to the bedridden Milla (van Niekerk [2004] 2006, pp.  337–341, see also Buxbaum 2013, pp. 94–95). Remarkably, the sexual abuse of which Agaat was a victim at her parents’ place is not articulated. This narrative choice is extremely important, because van Niekerk seems to indirectly call into question one of the TRC’s main tenets, that is, its reliance on testimony and truth-telling for their implicit healing power. Not all traumas can be easily articulated, and language cannot be considered the only means of self-expression. Buxbaum rightly wonders how trauma can be represented if the person is incapable of speaking about their trauma or of testifying to it (ibid., p. 91). We might also ask whether the person is willing to speak about their trauma, or if this choice may depend on other factors, such as, for example, the possibility of telling your own story before an unbiased listener. Agaat’s slippery character and story do not point to absence or voicelessness, but, on the contrary, invite readers to reflect on the idea that certain stories are too sorrowful to tell and that some people might prefer other ways of expressing and coping with their own pain. Even more importantly, Agaat questions the very core of the TRC’s truth-telling process, that is, that the whole truth can be achieved and that a single, consistent narrative can be created. In the epilogue, Jakkie finds his mother’s diaries and notices that they have been re-read and edited many times by Milla, “as if she’d had trouble rendering the whole truth in just one version” (p. 566). In contrast with the TRC’s final goal to create a single,

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coherent narrative of collective memory and national reconciliation after having uncovered the whole truth about past apartheid oppressions, Agaat, and by extension van Niekerk, advocates a more fragmented, multi-layered narrative, one capacious enough to accommodate gaps and inconsistences, and which raises questions and invites self-questioning in order to continue the rightly praised, but also inevitably flawed memory work initiated by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As my analysis of the next novel will show, Patrick Flanery continues van Niekerk’s narrative work and further disrupts the TRC’s agenda of a single, coherent, national narrative.

3.4   Lies, Fabrications and Gaps: Narrative Explorations in Patrick Flanery’s Absolution I conclude this chapter by reflecting on the possibilities and limits of truth-­ telling, and the related ethical concerns, with a discussion of American author Patrick Flanery’s 2012 debut novel Absolution, which was shortlisted for the annual Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. Although a novel by an American author might seem “out of scope”, at least at first glance, within the context of post-apartheid literature, I see Absolution as further evidence of the South African TRC’s impact on writing in this period. In an interview, Flanery explains how his interest in South Africa can be traced back to his high school years in the 1980s, when he was taught South Africa’s history and current events. South Africa was then “long in [his] consciousness”, but it was during his time at Oxford, when he met his partner (who is South African) that he began travelling frequently to visit the country, as well as focusing his research on South African literature and film, thus germinating “the ideas and experiences that produced Absolution” (Davis 2013). Absolution revolves around Sam Leroux, a young academic returning from New York to his native South Africa to write the biography of Clare Wald, a celebrated but very reclusive and quite irascible South African novelist. “I would’ve chosen my own biographer, but I don’t know anyone who would agree to undertake the task. I’m a terror” (2012, p. 4), Clare warns Sam from the outset. In addition to revealing Clare’s difficult character, this quotation also sets the tone for the whole novel: as the narrative unfolds, the reader realises that Clare’s initial statement is indeed a lie, because Clare did choose Sam as her own biographer. There are buried

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connections between the two protagonists, connections that both of them struggle to recognise and reconcile, and that orbit around the mysterious disappearance of Laura Wald, Clare’s daughter, who was involved in radical and violent activities during the years of the anti-apartheid struggle. From the very first page, Absolution presents itself as a story full of secrets, unspoken truths and intentional lies, which build up a mosaic of perspectives. Set in the post-apartheid era, around 2009,6 the novel relies on a multi-­ layered narrative structure that combines different genres, including first-­ person narrative, third-person memoir excerpts, the epistolary mode and diary entries. There are four main narrative strands that, at some point, intersect with each other: Absolution opens with Sam’s first-person, present-­tense narrative, which focuses on his return to South Africa, his interviews with Clare in relation to the biography, and his feelings and questions about the past, in particular about what happened to Laura, whom Sam met in difficult circumstances when he was a child. There are also several references to the poverty and violence still raging in post-­ apartheid South Africa, as well as the widely spread contemporary security paranoia.7 The second strand consists of Clare’s third-person memoir, Absolution,  from which the novel’s title is taken. In Clare’s words, this memoir is a “weird hybrid of essay and fiction and family and national history, although it’s really the latter—both fiction and something that is not quite fiction but less than proper history and memoir” (p.  340).8 Here, Clare recalls many episodes of her life, the most recurrent one being the house invasion that she suffered and that forced her and her assistant/secretary Marie de Wet to move “from the old house on Canigou Avenue to her new fortress in Bishopscourt” (p. 76). The timeframe is not specified in the text but some hints place the house invasion in the post-­apartheid era, where her previous house was “[n]o longer safe because the neighbourhood was too mixed, not white enough any more” (p. 77). The Absolution narrative strand often refers to Clare’s feeling of vulnerability and her wish no longer to “be outside her own locked and gated property after sunset” (p. 249), because “[y]ou cannot stay in this country without walls to protect you. Walls and razor wire, electrified. Guard dogs, too” (p. 22). The narrative follows with Clare’s private diary entries, addressed to her missing daughter Laura, which become, in Clare’s own words, a “fractured narrative of longing and lamentation” (p. 57). Relying on Laura’s personal notebooks and her last letter to her mother, Clare attempts to

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reconstruct what happened to Laura in her last days prior to her disappearance—or alleged death. Clare admits that there is a “struggle” between the little she knows about what really happened to her daughter—“what was reported officially, what was reported to me in the last letter from you, the notebooks you kept before you disappeared completely, Laura” (p. 57)—and what she imagines that happened, as imagination is Clare’s last resource to fill in the gaps in Laura’s story. This narrative strand also engages in dialogue with Sam’s narrative directly, as Clare here confesses her discomfort at having her life scrutinised by Sam’s questions: “I wanted it, I agreed on him, which means he is, by my hand, not just conjured, but authorized” (p. 62), and yet Clare perceives her relationship with Sam as asymmetrical, where he is her captor, invading her home and mind, and she is his hostage (pp. 24, 62). The last narrative strand is perhaps the most confusing one, as it is not immediately clear who the narrator is. Deploying a third-person perspective, it focuses on Sam’s childhood, especially between 1989 and 1999, after his parents’ brutal death (they were anti-apartheid activists who died while attempting to place a bomb in front of a police station) and his being forced to join his dubious uncle Bernard. This strand reveals how Sam’s parents and Laura knew each other and shared the same anti-­ apartheid feelings, and how they were both willing to take action to defend the cause. The connection between Sam and Laura is very profound: she is “as close to a mother as any he had left in the world. […] The boy wanted to ask Laura if she could be his mother, now that his own mother was dead, but he didn’t” (p. 178). Following his parents’ death, little Sam meets Laura while he is travelling with his uncle and their stories entangle in ways that readers only start to understand towards the end of the narrative. Significantly, it is only two-thirds of the way into the novel that the third-person narrator adopts the first-person voice and reveals himself as “Sam, in other words me, or some version of me” (p. 230), only to continue the account in the third person. These four narrative strands alternate in ways that create a full narrative cycle repeating itself (almost) throughout the whole novel. This cycle is interrupted by the mention of some transcripts of (invented) TRC’s victim hearings, which, meaningfully, report the stories of victims injured or killed by ANC bomb attacks, and, in so doing, they implicitly enter in dialogue with Sam’s parents’ and Laura’s own stories of radical anti-­ apartheid activism. Another significant interruption of the narrative cycle occurs at the end, when the 1989–1999 narrative is not followed by a new

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full cycle of the four narrative strands but only by Sam’s and Clare’s present narratives, to which the novel’s end is entrusted. Within this multi-­ layered narrative mosaic, Flanery examines questions of truth and memory, confession, absolution and forgiveness as well as exposing South Africa as a country affected by crime, poverty and inequality in the post-­apartheid era. Through his exploration of the problematical, sometimes cryptic, relationship between Sam Leroux and Clare Wald, or, in other words, between biographer and subject, Flanery also investigates the possibilities and limits of biographical narratives. This focus on biography shows the author’s indebtedness to South African authors such as Nadine Gordimer and, particularly, J. M. Coetzee, in terms of both content and form. Not coincidentally, Sam’s “introductory” readings in South African literature are Dusklands and The Late Bourgeois World, Coetzee’s 1974 novel and Gordimer’s 1966 novella, respectively (p. 232). It is worth noticing that Clare bears resemblance, to a limited extent, to Gordimer, as they are both venerable, internationally acclaimed, white South African female novelists. The home invasion suffered by Clare and her secretary Marie mirrors a widely reported incident involving Gordimer and her domestic servant.9 Like Gordimer, moreover, Clare is a secretive person and has refused to write an autobiography;10 during one of her interviews with Sam, Clare explains her motives: “I can’t see my life as a totality, or as a continuous narrative. I wouldn’t know how to write my own life in that way” (p. 69). Sam then suggests the possibility of writing fragments, if not a whole autobiography, a suggestion that Clare partially agrees with, as she “can write about periods of [her] life but not [her] whole life”, although she fears that she “wouldn’t know what to put in and what to leave out”, with the risk of “leav[ing] out so much there would be very little left” (p. 69). Furthermore, Clare rejects the liberal label to embrace a more radical political view, which recalls Gordimer’s radicalisation in her political beliefs following the enforcement of the apartheid law in the 1960s. It is no surprise then that Sam, and by extension Flanery, mentions Gordimer’s novella The Late Bourgeois World as one of his fundamental readings, as this text signals Gordimer’s rejection of white liberalism—“this book really marks the end of what I had to say about white liberalism in South Africa” (Riis 1980, p.  20), Gordimer states in one of her interviews. However, Clare’s political engagement remains a controversial matter throughout the whole book. In her letter to Laura, Clare recounts her progressive political radicalisation, which translated into “writing and publishing and attending meetings the wife of a professor should not have attended”

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(p. 171), along with her alleged responsibility in the deaths of her sister (Nora) and her brother-in-law (a member of the National Party)—a point I shall come back to later. And yet, Clare also recognises that she and her husband were always “so law-abiding” (p. 148) and “too passive, too pacifist for [Laura]” (p. 295), never brave enough to take real action against the government. Clare’s mild opposition to the apartheid regime is further reflected in her position in regards to censorship. Unlike Gordimer, who had three of her books banned (A World of Strangers [1958], The Late Bourgeois World [1966] and Burger’s Daughter [1979]),11 Clare was never victim of the State Publications Commission Board, as she came to know her “molester”, the censorship machine, “as intimately as [she] knew [her] husband—perhaps more so” and she chose “to adapt, to keep [her] children and [herself] alive” (p. 37). Later in the text, she further develops her position and describes the figure of the censor as “a bodily invader, always with [her], entirely within [her], internally bloodsucking” (p. 46). As she confesses to Sam, censorship affected her writing deeply: I spent decades writing in such a way as to avoid having my books banned. I wrote books, effectively, which the censors could not understand, because they lacked the intelligence to read beyond the surface, and the surface itself was almost opaque to them, darkness etched in darkness. Is that the confession you were hoping to extract—that I consciously wrote evasively, to remain in print? I did. I don’t consider it a crime. (p. 46)

Clare’s views on censorship clearly resonate with J.  M. Coetzee’s own position on the same issue. In the “Acknowledgements” section of the book, Flanery, in fact, specifies that Clare’s arguments about censorship are informed by Coetzee’s essay collection Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. In the preface to this work, Coetzee describes censorship as an occupation that does not attract “intelligent, subtle minds” (1996, p. VIII); on the contrary, it “puts power in the hands of persons with a judgemental, bureaucratic cast of mind that is bad for the cultural and even the spiritual life of the community” (ibid., p. 10). Coetzee’s objection is based on judgements of the censors’ quality of mind and explicitly informs Clare’s argument about censors’ lack of intelligence, mentioned in the quotation above. In a similar fashion, Clare’s description of the censor as a “bodily invader” that she came to know “as intimately as her

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husband” recalls Coetzee’s account of the writing transaction under censorship: Working under censorship is like being intimate with someone who does not love you, with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses himself upon you. The censor is an intrusive reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction, forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your words in a disapproving and censorious fashion. (ibid., p. 38)

Clare adopts the same discourse as Coetzee when she refers to her censors’ verdict concerning her books: “they found them ‘not undesirable’, which is not to say that they were judged in any way ‘desirable’, only that they were not offensive enough to be actively undesired” (p.  47). Following the censor’s line of work in Giving Offense, Coetzee introduces the category “undesirable”, the category under which the censor “uneasily and even haphazardly assimilates the subversive (the political undesirable) and the repugnant” (1996, p. VII). He goes on to highlight that “undesirable” does not mean “not able to be desired”, as most English adjectives beginning in-/un- and ending -able/-ible would indicate, but it means “that ought not to be desired” or “that may not be desired” (ibid., pp. VII-VII). In his essay “The Writer, The Critic and The Censor: J. M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature”, Peter McDonald reflects on the official response from the State Publications Commission Board to three of Coetzee’s novels, namely, In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983). Examining the reports justifying the release of these three novels, McDonald places emphasis on the fact that the censors’ decision not to ban any of these texts was primarily dependant on their “manifest literariness”, which mitigated their potential undesirability (2004, p.  291). In other words, Coetzee’s texts were judged too literary for popular appeal, and, according to the censors, they were able to attract only a very restricted readership, the intelligentsia. McDonald highlights that: No content was inherently or absolutely undesirable, since its power to offend or threaten depended on the number and kind of readers it was likely to reach and/or on the way in which those putative readers were likely to respond to it. (ibid., p. 291)

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This perspective, according to which the aesthetic qualities of Coetzee’s novels rendered any potentially undesirable content innocuous, immediately evokes Sam’s comments about Clare’s books: “And if one reads the censor’s reports on your books, they’re all judged too ‘literary’ to pose any risk of fomenting unrest among ‘average’ readers” (p. 46). It is important, however, to underline that the fact of being spared by the censor’s scythe does not necessarily mean that Clare was immune to the effects of censorship (p. 47), nor is she uncritical of the government, both the old and the new one. In a fictionalised conversation with her son Mark in the Absolution narrative strand, for instance, Clare asserts that: I am of the generation, as are you (more’s the pity), who will be able to say that they lived through two corrupt nationalist governments. The question is whether we will survive the second, some members of which see us as its unfinished business, its potential fifth columnists, and its dormant antagonists. […] They are the ones who see all whites as parasites, and they are the analogues to those of the old regime who saw all blacks as terrorists or idlers. (p. 252)

Obviously, the fact that Clare’s critical remarks about the new democratic government are to be found in the Absolution narrative strand, or, in Clare’s own words, a hybrid text, half memoir half fiction, poses questions about their reliability and veracity, as I shall explore shortly. Flanery’s focus on biography, on the relationship between the biographer and the subject of biography, as well as his adoption of a complex, multi-faceted narrative structure unequivocally call to mind Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Summertime (2009) and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000). Earlier I emphasised how ethical questions concerning authorship, the factual recoverability of the truth (or of the past) and the possibilities of narrative manipulations are central issues in David’s Story  (see Chap. 2). Similarly, Foe, David Attwell argues, pays more attention to the telling of the story than the story itself, subjecting the authority of textualisation to careful scrutiny (1993, p.  104). He goes on to suggest that Coetzee’s focus on the possibilities and limits of authorial narrative is a response to the conditions writers such as himself are forced to confront, a clear reference to the physical and psychological oppression of apartheid. Succinctly, this re-imagining of Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century masterpiece Robinson Crusoe (1719) introduces the female character of Susan Barton, who, on a return trip from Bahia in an unsuccessful attempt

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to find her abducted daughter, is cast adrift during a mutiny and finds herself on the island with Cruso and Friday, who is mute, as he has no tongue. The circumstances of Friday’s mutilation remain mostly uncertain. After being rescued by a passing merchantman, Cruso dies aboard ship while Susan and Friday are left to make their way to England. Once arrived in England, Susan drafts a memoir, “The Female Castaway”, which focuses on her adventure on the island and seeks out a ghostwriter, Mr Foe, to have her story told. The novel consists of four parts: Susan’s memoir of her adventure on the island opens the narrative; it continues with a series of letters addressed to Foe, letters that he does not receive because he is evading his creditors; the text then proceeds to an account of Susan’s problematic relationship with Foe and her struggle to maintain control over her story and its meaning; and it ends with a sequence spoken by an unnamed narrator (possibly Coetzee himself) who, entering what seems to be Foe’s house, finds the lifeless bodies of Susan and Foe, and a dead or sleeping Friday. Coetzee’s narratological choice to portray both Susan and Foe, respectively the narrator and the ghostwriter charged with narrating the story of the island, as dead seems to point to the dissolution of the narration in an act of authorial renunciation. Earlier in the text, Susan also acknowledges that, despite Foe’s attempts, the story of the island cannot be written in all its fullness without Friday’s contribution: To tell my story and be silent on Friday’s tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell Friday’s secret is the tongue he has lost. ([1986] 2010, p. 67)

In this regard, Lewis MacLeod points out that “the nature of the conflict between Susan and Foe is […] narratological, and, by extension, ontological […] It’s a conflict about establishing and maintaining the limits of a discursive framework” (2006, p. 5). In addition to challenging the possibility of achieving the whole truth and producing a complete narrative, Friday’s linguistic inaccessibility also suggests the existence of diverse modalities of communication, which are not just limited to the use of words, but that can be related to other forms of self-expression such as music and dancing—although Susan seems not to be able to understand them. The ending of the novel is entrusted to Friday, whose enigmatic and silent presence gains in power as he is finally granted the possibility to present his own version of the story in the form of a roar:

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His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (Coetzee [1986] 2010, p. 157)

If this brief account cannot give justice to this multi-faceted novel in its entirety, it certainly points to the author’s intentions in exposing the limits of truthful narration, as well as the mystifying power of language and its liability to fabrications and manipulations. Returning to Absolution, Flanery seems to adopt Coetzee’s narrative style, and, most importantly, his ethical questions concerning the limits of truth-telling, by presenting Sam, the biographer, and Clare, the subject, as unreliable, reticent, and, to some extent, deceitful narrators from the very outset of the novel. In Sam’s narrative strand, for example, there are many allusions to a previous acquaintance with Clare, to a connection between them—“there was the other time, too, of course” (p. 3)—but they both decide not to acknowledge this connection openly. Sam also admits to have been manipulating his interviews with Clare for his own personal agenda: “I know that her sister’s story is a detour from the main route. This is not the real story I want, but it might be a way of getting here in the long run” (p. 12). Clare perceives Sam’s hesitations and, on several occasions, asks him to share what he may have been holding back: I’ve begun to think you rather hide your lamp under a bushel. You are cleverer than you like people to think. There is something both endearing and unnerving in that. Why don’t you kick off that bushel these last few days? Ask me the unaskable. Give truth the reins. (p. 159)

In parallel, Clare recognises Sam at once, but, like him, she fails to acknowledge her memory of him, except within the intimacy of her diary-­ letter to Laura: Of course, I remembered Sam at once. Rather, in Amsterdam I half-­ recognized him, and in the weeks that followed learned to trust my memory of him. How could I forget? I do not acknowledge this to him when he sits so uncomfortably before me, squirming on the couch in my study, his palms sweating in this room that I always keep cool. It would be a lie to say I

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remain silent about our connection because I wish to torture him. I have no such wish. In truth, I am terrified of what may yet be revealed. (p. 61)

As the narrative, or it would be more appropriate to say narratives, unfold, readers come gradually to learn that Sam, the young academic who has been assigned the task of writing Clare’s biography, is the same nine-yearold Sam who was taken to Clare by Laura’s comrades, Timothy and Lionel, before Laura’s disappearance, the same child that Clare refused to take in and look after as one of her family member. It is not until the end, however, that Clare allows herself to remember fully her first encounter with Sam. Tortured by Laura’s ghost, the old woman recalls how: [Timothy and Lionel] pushed the boy forward, assuming he was mine, and in that movement of two small feet it all became more complicated. Logic said I had no responsibility. No one could make him mine but you, and you were there only on the page, elusive and direct. You did not tell me to take him […] I needed direction. I waited for command. I know that waiting is a form of cowardice. (pp. 361–362)

From the very beginning, Sam and Clare are portrayed as two people hiding a painful connection that neither of them is willing to share with the other, a narrative choice that leaves readers to wonder whether Sam and Clare can ultimately qualify as reliable narrators. This perspective is confirmed by Clare’s son, Mark, who writes a letter to Sam warning him against any attempts at depicting his father, Professor William Wald, his sister Laura and himself. In this letter, Mark also foregrounds Sam’s reputation for “exaggeration and character assassination” (p.  38), as well as depicting his mother Clare as “a duplicitous and self-serving woman who says whatever she thinks will make her appear in the best light. […] Her statements about her children—myself in particular—are not to be trusted” (p.  38). Mark’s words leave little doubt about his mistrust of both Sam’s and Clare’s narrative credibility, thus cautioning readers not to trust what they are reading. Perhaps more puzzlingly, both narrators from the other two narrative strands—the Absolution and 1989–1999 narratives, which we know have been written by Clare and Sam, respectively— reinforce this position by exposing both Clare’s and Sam’s fallible memory. For example, the third-person narrator of the 1989–1999 narrative strand highlights some gaps in Sam’s memory of what happened after his parents’ death:

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He tried to remember who had first told him about his parents being dead— it must have been the police or Mrs Gush, the old toothless woman—but there was a gap, as if the film of his memory had been cut and entire days of footage lost and burned up in a broken projector, bubbling yellow and black into whiteness. (p. 275)

Similarly, in the Absolution narrative strand there are many instances in which the third-person narrator places emphasis on Clare’s bad memory, especially in connection with the home intrusion that she suffered: “[s]he could not remember coming downstairs, nor could she remember having seen blood, but the tents suggested this was impossible; there was blood everywhere, and the smell of the invaders came back to her” (p. 21). Later in the text, Clare seems to even start doubting when the invasion occurred: “[i]t was the end of the month. When had the invasion occurred? The beginning of December a year ago, or the end of November a year before that? The dates were fuzzy in her head” (p. 166). Caught in a metafictional narrative loop, the Absolution narrative strand is rendered more controversial, if possible, by Clare’s statements about narrative and truth-telling in her diary-letter; here, she explains to an imagined Laura that her profession as writer allows her “to fabulate and fabricate” (p.  255) and that, in contrast to her children who inherited their father’s love of the truth, she “cannot help seeing that as an indictment of [her] own professional lying” (p. 255). According to Clare’s perspective, professional writing entails at best failing to narrate the whole truth, but at worst it might also mean lying. It is no surprise then, when commenting on her own work,  Absolution, Clare acknowledges that “there are failures in the book, things I wished to say but could not, for the sake of others, things I said badly, less directly, than I should have liked” (p.  269). Furthermore, while discussing with Sam the narrative nature of her book, Clare emphasises the hybrid quality of her book, “both fiction and something that is not quite fiction but less than proper history or memoir” (p. 340). This description obviously begs the question as to what extent readers can trust that the events portrayed in Absolution truly occurred or whether they are the product of Clare’s imagination. Giving voice to readers’ perplexities, Sam rightly asks Clare whether the home invasion and Clare’s determining role in her sister’s assassination, which are described in Absolution, are real or fictional events. If Clare immediately admits that the home invasion was real, she chooses to leave her alleged complicity in the murder of her sister shrouded

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in mystery, leaving Sam (and, by extension, the reader) the task to decide if it was fiction or non-fiction: All I will say is that there is no evidence to support either conclusion—that the historical Clare Wald did or did not make herself complicit in the assassinations of the historical Nora and Stephen Pretorious, as distinct from the fictional analogues for all three of those individuals, which is how I would urge anyone to read the characters in that book. (p. 340)

Significantly, the ending of the novel is entrusted to the enigmatic and contradictory Clare, who warns us against trusting Sam’s sincerity: There is no guile about him. And that, I know, is the quality of the greatest of liars. I am prepared for the biography, when it finally appears, to bear no resemblance to the drafts he shows me. I hope that will not be so, but as much as I have—almost despite myself—come to love him and believe all that he tells me, to want to keep him close and put him in the place where you once stood, I do not trust him, and never shall. (p. 385)

The only reasonable conclusion left to readers is that both Sam and Clare are unreliable and sometimes even intentionally deceitful narrators. Besides blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, between truth and imagination, Flanery’s debut novel seems also to call into question the very act of life-writing in a Foe-like way. Although Sam and Clare are very much alive, their narrative credibility is continually challenged throughout the novel, the final words of which cast doubt on the veracity of life-writing as a whole, including biographies, memoirs, autobiographies and, by extension, one could also add testimonies (if the latter do not have the task of narrating one person’s whole life, they, however, as much as life-writing narratives, require those who are bearing witness to be, at least theoretically, truthful and reliable). This opens up a series of questions that become extremely relevant to the context of the South African TRC and the healing power supposedly generated by its testimonial narratives: how can one express the truth of the self? In other words, how can testimonies, or life-­ writing narratives such as biographies and autobiographies, be completely truthful? Who is entitled to tell these narratives? The TRC believed in the healing power inherent in the act of truth-telling, but, if these life-writing narratives are potentially subject to either the whims of narrator’s memory

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or his/her intentional fabrications, how is healing supposed to take place or even begin in the first place? Absolution also invites reflections on the existence (or not) of one single truth. Evoking once more Coetzee’s narrative style, and, in particular, the narrative questions outlined implicitly in his 2009 novel Summertime, the third and most experimental volume in Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life,12 Flanery calls into question the possibility of achieving the truth, and of being able to narrate that truth, by presenting multiple versions of the same event. In Summertime, John Coetzee, the fictional surrogate of the author, being cast as deceased, is less a character than a composite textual figure, consisting of John’s notebook entries, which frame the transcriptions of interviews conducted by the fictional biographer Mr Vincent. The result is a highly fragmented narrative, comprising multiple versions of John Coetzee, generated by both his (alleged) notebook fragments and the interviewees’ different accounts about their relationship with the late Coetzee.13 Although striving for the truth, the truth about John Coetzee, Summertime questions the possibility of achieving what Coetzee calls “the one and only truth” (Coetzee and Kurtz 2015, p. 68). In a similar fashion, Absolution engenders multiple versions, particularly with reference to the death of Sam’s uncle, Bernard, and the last days of Laura, prior to her disappearance. I have already mentioned how Clare desperately attempts to reconstruct Laura’s last days, gathering as much information as possible from diverse sources (including some TRC’s documents, and Laura’s notebooks and last letter to her mother) and supplying with her own imagination when the official history proves to be inadequate. Now I turn my attention to the ways the novel originates at least four different stories about Bernard’s death. The 1989–1999 narrative, for instance, depicts little Sam, first imagining killing his uncle (p. 67), and then killing the man for real by rolling over his sleeping body with a truck during the night: [Sam] sat down next to the man and put Bernard’s left arm in his lap and held it for a long time, pressing his fingers against the dead wrist […] He could see the wallet in Bernard’s jeans and took it out and counted the money and then took the ring off the finger and the gold watch and removed the new leather boots that were too big for the boy though he knew he would grow into them soon. […] He folded Bernard’s arms in a cross over

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his chest and straightened his legs. There was no one to see him do it except for a crow in the tree and even she was asleep. (pp. 96–97)

According to this version, it is only after Bernard’s murder that little Sam meets Laura and they go together to her associates’ place, the safe-house of Timothy and Lionel, to then part ways again. Clare’s reconstruction of the same event is completely different, as she places Sam’s and Laura’s meeting before Bernard’s murder and also hypothesises that Laura is responsible for the man’s death. Allegedly reporting Laura’s version of what happened that she wrote in her notebooks, Clare describes how Laura’s motherly concern for Sam’s well-being leads her to kill Bernard by driving “back and forth over him until he was still” (p.  89), all the time making sure that Sam was keeping his eyes closed. Clare does not believe this version of the story, and she thus tries “for another, one that fits with what [she] know[s] [Laura was] capable of doing” (p. 89). Clare’s own version displays a more brutal side of Laura that did not emerge in the previous one. Here Laura does not use the truck but kills Bernard by bringing a stone down on his brow, “over and over, until [her] arms and face were covered in a thick splatter. So one could get blood from a stone” (p. 89). In striking opposition to Laura’s description of what happened, Clare’s version of Laura does not show any maternal concern with Sam having witnessed his uncle’s murder from the truck passenger seat and, furthermore, she does not spare the child her violent nature, as she roughly grabs Sam’s feet and pulls him out of the truck, “knocking his head against the four metal steps. It left a red trail, speckled with stars of pale tissue” (p. 90). Which version is to be believed? The last encounter between Sam and Clare, which takes place, narratologically speaking, within Sam’s narrative, provides the last version of Bernard’s murder. Sam and Clare meet in Johannesburg and finally acknowledge their shared past through their connection with Laura. Sam, however, decides to withhold what he has come to realise to be the truth of what really happened: “I realize, in this moment with Clare, that I finally know the truth of that night. We did it together, Laura and I” (p.  375). Showing complete awareness of the manipulative potential of language, Sam prefers to portray Laura as a saviour and not a killer in cold blood, “for Clare’s sake”, “knowing that the story [he’s] about to tell is no longer the truth” (p. 376):

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I assemble the version I want her to know, the feeling of doing it, my foot on the accelerator and my hand on the wheel and gearshift. It runs like a film on a loop that lives inside me and which I live inside. (p. 376)

Perhaps sensing Sam’s lie, Clare reflects on the fallacious nature of history, which is “not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened” (p.  377). Clare’s remark can be read within the context of the South African TRC’s national project to rewrite the history of past gross human rights violations perpetrated during apartheid. We have already seen how the history compiled by the Commission cannot be considered a complete picture, as it could not account for those people who did not fall into the criteria of either “victim” or “perpetrator”, nor could it account for those who were not able or willing to share their own stories with the Commission. In her evaluation of “history”, Clare carries on to suggest what she identifies as “the record of memory”, believing that “even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth. Perhaps the literal truth is not what you have remembered, but the truth of memory is no less accurate in its way” (p. 377). Clare’s words become a commentary on Flanery’s narratological choices to adopt multiple narrators and viewpoints, giving life to contradictory, often unreliable, versions of the same event. Flanery seems to advocate the existence and the validity of highly fragmented, potentially imperfect, multiple narratives, which are no less true, as they derive from people’s subjective perspectives. To complicate things further, Clare’s decision to give Sam both her book and diary at the end of the narrative (pp. 229, 343) as a form of acknowledgement of their shared past begs the question whether the book we have in hand has been written entirely by Sam (the narrator of the other two narrative strands). Resonating with the closing scene of Playing in the Light, Absolution places emphasis on ethical questions about the “authorship” of the narrative, and, suggestively, invites readers to be alert to and engage actively with the narrative in order to try to understand who the narrator is, whose story is being narrated, and, most importantly, who has the right to tell that story. In addition to engaging with the TRC’s narrative architecture, as well as foregrounding a fragmented and flawed narrative as an alternative to the Commission’s proposal of a single, coherent, national history, Flanery also explores some key concepts of the TRC’s reconciliation project, such as the definition of victimhood and questions of public-versus-private acts of confession and absolution. Analysis of the novel has shown that Sam

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and Clare hold an ambivalent position, as they are both victim of the apartheid regime and (alleged) perpetrators of violent crimes: Sam is a victim of his parents’ anti-apartheid struggle, but he also claims to be responsible for Bernard’s murder; on the other hand, Clare is a victim of the anti-apartheid struggle as she lost her daughter Laura to the cause but, like Sam, she is also a perpetrator for her role in her sister Nora’s murder. Significantly, neither of them decides to take part in the TRC’s public victim hearings, seeking more private pathways towards absolution and reconciliation. In particular, Clare rejects the label “victim”, as she cannot “come to think [herself] as a ‘Victim’ in the way that others were victims. […] I do not like this word, victim, with all of its Latinate baggage” (p. 24). Moreover, she hardly believes that she would have achieved the truth of what happened to her daughter, had she made an official statement to the Truth and Reconciliation  Commission. Similarly, Sam has turned down the opportunity to attend the hearings about his parents, choosing silence over public testimony (p. 367). Absolution, however, does not deny its characters the possibility of confession, although they choose to perform this act in a private setting. For instance, Clare first confesses her alleged contribution to the murder of her sister and brother-in-law, Stephan (a high-ranking member of the National Party), to Laura in her diary-letter narrative, in a desperate attempt to show, much more to her benefit than Laura’s, how alike mother and daughter were. Here, Clare recounts how, while attending a radical anti-apartheid meeting, she disclosed Nora and her husband’s location, thus jeopardising their lives; on seeing their bodies the day after the murder, the woman admits to have thought: I have done this. I have made this happen. I delivered the assassin to my sister’s door. I was not shocked by their deaths […] The only thing that shocked me was my own capacity to give away the very information that led to my sister’s death and to feel, in the aftermath, no remorse. (p. 172)

Later in the text, in the Absolution strand, Clare chooses Mark as her confessor and judge (p.  314) to stage a TRC-amnesty-like hearing and makes her confession. Although labelling the TRC as a circus of sorts (p. 287), the old woman feels that: an amnesty hearing is what I most need—a judicial process, a hearing of the truth in a formal way, and a judge to pass sentence, to tell me that the thing

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I did was done not just out of personal spite, but for political reasons (pp. 287–288).

Notably, Clare is not interested in the bargain of confession-amnesty-­ forgiveness promoted by the TRC; rather, she is seeking reassurance that her giving away her sister’s location was motivated by political reasons and not by her personal dislike of her sister: The political or the personal? […] I knew how the information would be used and what the consequences would be. In retrospect it felt as much like a political decision as a personal one. […] In eliminating [Nora’s husband], I felt as though I were striking a blow against the whole office of the apartheid state. Nora was collateral damage, as one now says. (pp. 291–292)

Clare’s son, Mark, refuses to take part in this artificial process and does not pass judgement on Clare’s alleged crime; however, Clare’s confession leads him to make his own confession, “a secular confession of shortcoming, as [Clare’s] was something like a secular confession of carelessness” (p.  352). Apparently, before her disappearance, Laura had gone to her brother and asked for money to start over, but Mark did not believe her, as he thought that that money would have been used to support violent anti-apartheid actions, and he refused to help her. Interestingly, Mark underlines that “these are confessions that we can only make to each other” (p. 353), or, in other words, in private, once again rejecting the TRC’s deal of public confession in exchange for amnesty and forgiveness. Sam too performs an act of confession when he tells his wife Sarah the truth about his parents’ terrorist actions in the anti-apartheid struggle and their subsequent deaths (p. 277). If Clare and Mark place emphasis on the need for private, secular confession, Sam embodies a different flaw in the TRC’s amnesty deal, as he exposes its core weakness, the possibility of participants either lying or withholding the truth. On a first occasion, when Sam and Sarah had been together over a year, he told her “something about Bernard, although he spent days building up to it, playing the script he was writing over and over to be sure he would know how to answer the questions that might come” (p. 274). Later, before their marriage, Sam finally builds up the courage to tell Sarah about his parents and how they died in a terrorist attack that they had planned, but he cannot find the words to confess the truth about his uncle Bernard: “[i]n the end I didn’t tell her about Bernard. I still haven’t. I tell myself that now it’s too

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late, and that no good could ever come from the telling” (p. 278). The TRC’s amnesty deal required perpetrators to be completely honest about the crimes that they had committed in order to be eligible for amnesty and to be “forgiven”; although Sam’s crime could not qualify for the TRC’s amnesty bargain, as his crime was not politically motivated, his “half” confession highlights how it is easy to lie or manipulate the truth, thus jeopardising any project purporting to access the truth. One last observation must be dedicated to the concept of absolution, which is, after all, the novel’s title, and its related concept of repentance. In an imagined conversation with the ghost of her sister Nora, Clare replies to her sister’s accusation of not being “sufficiently penitent”: “[y]ou are a terrible sinner, and yet you don’t go to church, you ignore tradition, you do nothing to demonstrate that you regret or repent” (p. 220). Clare counterposes her right to repent in her own terms: “[e]ach person has her own form of repentance. I repent in my own way, in private […] I repent in ways that even you, the dead, may not see” (p. 220). Throughout the novel, Clare continuously seeks Laura’s absolution; indeed, Clare’s greatest regret is that she feels that she has failed Laura by refusing to take little Sam in when Laura’s comrades showed up at her door many years back and, most importantly, that she could not make amends to earn her daughter’s absolution. Lost in her imagination, Clare ponders whether, if Laura had been arrested instead of vanishing towards an uncertain future, she could have attempted to: Aid your defence, might yet have had correspondence with you, seen you again, come to know you better, to repair all that I failed to do, to make you love me again. I would have made amends, repented to you, sought your absolution for my failures against you. (p. 318)

In her quest for absolution, Clare envisions reaching out to Sam and letting him in as “a kind of restitution” (p.  61), a form of repentance for failing both Laura and Sam, and her book Absolution plays a pivotal role in this quest. Clare’s book is in fact dedicated to “my children—those I kept close, and those I denied” (p. 308), thus including her children Mark and Laura but also Sam, to whom she denied her affection so long ago. Her book and her diary-letter to Laura become means to exorcise her demons, means to mourn not only for the loss of her daughter, but also for her parents and her sister Nora (p.  383). They also become instruments of self-expression to give voice to what she cannot say aloud and, in

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particular, to perform the ultimate confession: before their last encounter, Clare gives Sam both her book and diary (pp.  229, 343) in order to acknowledge her shared past and memory of him. The question of whether Clare is granted her wish for absolution remains open, however. If we assume that she and Sam are reconciled with each other and part their ways in a renovated mother-son relationship— “Clare holds my hand, gripping it in a way that my mother used to, holding it so hard it hurts” (p.  380)—there is no way for Clare to know whether Laura, had she been alive, would have forgiven her mother for her wrongdoings. Clare’s request for absolution remains inevitably suspended between hope and fear of having it denied. Through Clare’s example, Flanery poses fundamental questions such as: how can someone truly repent if the person he/she injured is dead? How can the dead grant absolution? How can someone be reconciled with the dead? These questions become remarkably relevant to the context of the TRC and its amnesty hearings. If the TRC was set up to promote reconciliation among South Africans for the atrocities committed during the apartheid era, if the amnesty hearings were meant to encourage perpetrators to come forward and take responsibility for their crimes in exchange for forgiveness and amnesty, how can all of this really take place if the people against whom those crimes were committed are dead? Who can forgive and grant absolution in place of the dead? Are the victims’ families allowed to forgive on behalf of their loved ones? In light of this, can reconciliation ever take place? Flanery’s book does not provide answers to these questions, but it certainly invites readers to reflect on them and on the possibility of seeking alternative paths towards public displays of forgiveness and reconciliation. As have been noted, this chapter has explored the possibilities and limits of truth-telling, placing emphasis on the existence of different layers of truth, many of them produced by the TRC’s multi-narrative machine of transcribing, translating and retelling processes. I have also underlined how these layers of truth created by the TRC’s narrative process, however, cannot capture the full range of human emotions, leaving much emotional content of people’s testimonies unaccounted for. Analysis of the selected novels further challenges the TRC’s task of creating one single, coherent national narrative. In particular, Gordimer’s 1998 novel The House Gun questions the Commission’s reliance on the victim-perpetrator framework to determine the truth about the past. Through the portrayal of Duncan Lingard’s hybrid nature, Gordimer exposes the inadequacy of the

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categories of victim and perpetrator, as they tend to erase all the complexities characterising both South Africa’s past and present. On the other hand, both van Niekerk’s Agaat and Flanery’s Absolution, which were published with a greater distance from the completion of the HRVC’s mandate than Gordimer’s novel, engage with the notion of truth both at plot and narratological levels. In addition to deploying unreliable and deceitful narrators, both novels enact complex, multi-layered narrative structures, which often engender different readings of the same events. Besides a frame narrative provided by Milla’s son Jakkie, Agaat consists of four narrative strands, which are all narrated by Milla’s biased perspective. These strands are deeply intertwined and chronicle the story of Milla’s relationship with Agaat, jumping back and forth in time. My analysis of the novel has shown that the character of Agaat is “narratologically” marginalised and silenced by Milla’s domineering voice; however, Agaat is not voiceless as evidenced by her embroidery projects, which significantly remain out of reach of Milla’s narrative. Van Niekerk here draws attention to the impossibility for language to articulate all traumas, inviting readers to reflect on the idea that certain stories are too sorrowful to be told and that some people might prefer other ways of expressing their own pain. Absolution’s narrative structure mainly relies on two narrators, Sam and Clare, although Clare’s strand also employs excerpts from her daughter’s notebooks and letters. All the narrative strands intersect in ways in which it is implicitly suggested that the novel at hand may have been written by Sam, thus placing emphasis on questions about “authorship” and ownership of the story, and, most significantly, prompting reflections on the possibility (or impossibility) for any narrative projects such as biographies and testimonial writing to purport to single, coherent truths. The narrative choices of later publications such as Agaat and Absolution show the same narrative shift that we have seen in relation to the literary responses to the notion of trauma discussed in Chap. 2. Compared to Gordimer’s conceptual exploration of the TRC’s category of truth, van Niekerk and Flanery expose the frailty of such category both at plot and narratological levels, in ways that relate to Ndebele’s and Wicomb’s narrative operations in The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Playing in the Light, respectively. Despite engaging with the concept of truth from different angles, The House Gun, Agaat and Absolution, however, all resist closure and call into question the possibility of reconciliation through the act of truth-telling and confession, leaving readers with more questions than solutions, more prompts for further reflection than definite answers. As we have come to

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notice, this resistance to closure is a literary feature shared by all the selected novels analysed so far. The next chapter highlights how all the authors discussed in this book prefer open-ended narratives to show that reconciliation cannot be anything but an ongoing project.

Notes 1. An example where the narrator uses “he/she” to identify Harald and Claudia might be after the messenger’s announcement of Duncan’s arrest: “He/she. He strides over and switches off the television. And expels a violent breath. So long as nobody moved, nobody uttered, the word and the act within the word could not enter here. Now with the touch of a switch and the gush of a breath a new calendar is opened. The old Gregorian cannot register this day. It does not exist in that means of measure” (p. 5). 2. See Michiel Heyns’s article “Irreparable Loss and Exorbitant Gain: On Translating Agaat” (2009, pp. 124-35). This is a fascinating article where South African author and translator Michiel Heyns extensively discusses the difficulties that he is met with while translating van Niekerk’s novel; he particularly reflects on the cultural aspects that are embedded in language and on how translation into a foreign culture can render them only approximately, if at all. 3. The acronym FAK stands for the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge (Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Associations), which is a non-profit, non-­governmental Afrikaans cultural organisation, founded in 1929. The term “FAK songs” thus refers to traditional, Afrikaans songs. 4. Within the postcolonial context, The Tempest has been the text perhaps most widely chosen for counter-discursive interrogations of the Shakespearean canon, and according to Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, it has been the most important text used to “establish a paradigm for post-colonial readings of canonical texts” (1989, p. 188). See also Mannoni ([1950] 1964), Dorsinville (1974), Zabus (1985), Cheyfirz (1991) and Said (1994). 5. As discussed in Chap. 2 through analysis of Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, sentiments of fear, shame and racial impurity were usually associated with miscegenation and coloured identity during the apartheid era, and, to a certain extent, they continue to linger in the post-apartheid period. 6. There are some clues in the novel that help readers understand the timeline: Clare, for example, on more than one occasion, says that twenty years have passed since Laura’s disappearance (p. 224), and, since her daughter went missing in 1989, we can easily deduce that the novel’s present time is approximately 2009.

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7. For instance, an important episode of violence is certainly the house intrusion at Sam’s friend’s (Greg’s) house, where everybody avoids injury thanks to the effectiveness of security measures such as panic buttons and security company guards (pp. 157–158). 8. To distinguish Flanery’s book Absolution from Clare’s fictional memoir Absolution, the second narrative strand, I will refer to the latter as Absolution, that is, in roman type. 9. In this regard, see, for example, Andrew Meldrum’s article, “Gordimer’s Sorrow for Men Who Robbed Her” (2006). 10. See Gordimer’s interview with Nancy Topping Bazin, “An Interview with Nadine Gordimer” (1995, p. 586). 11. In connection with the ban of Burger’s Daughter, Gordimer herself wrote a critique and account of the censorship in What Happened to “Burger’s Daughter”; or, How South African Censorship Works (Gordimer et al. 1980). 12. Scenes from Provincial Life (2011) comprises Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime. While Boyhood (1997) narrates the young John’s childhood in South Africa, Youth (2002) describes his move to London towards the end of his graduate studies, and, finally, Summertime (2009) depicts a period of his life in the 1970s, when Coetzee had returned to South Africa after having lived in the United States. 13. For further reading in relation to Summertime, see Powers (2016), Effe (2017) and Uhlmann (2017).

Bibliography Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford: University of California Press, 1993. Bazin, Nancy Topping. “An Interview with Nadine Gordimer.” Contemporary Literature 36.4 (1995): 571–587. Bock, Z., et al. “An Analysis of What Has Been ‘Lost’ in the Interpretation and Transcription Process of Selected TRC Testimonies.” Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistic Plus 33 (2006): 1–26. Buxbaum, Laura. “Remembering the Self: Fragmented Bodies, Fragmented Narratives in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf and Agaat”. Journal of Literary Studies 29.2 (2013): 82–100. Carvalho, Alyssa and Helize van Vuuren. “Examining the Servant’s Subversive Verbal and Non-Verbal Expression in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat.” Journal of Literary Studies 25.3 (2009): 39–56. Cheyfirz, Eric. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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Clingman, Stephen. “Surviving Murder: Oscillation and Triangulation in Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun.” MFS 46.1 (2000): 139–158. ———. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Coetzee, J. M. Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, Summertime. London: Harvill Secker, 2011. ———. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Foe (1986). Reprint. London: Penguin Books, 2010. ———. Life & Times of Michael K (1983). New York: Penguins Books, 1985. ———. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). New York: Penguins Books, 1982. ———. In the Heart of the Country. London: Secker and Warburg, 1977. ———. Dusklands (1974). New York: Penguins Books, 1982. Coetzee, J. M. and Arabella Kurtz. The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy. London: Harvill Secker, 2015. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission. Stages of Transition. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit (2001). 2nd Edition. London: Atlantic Books, 2004. David, Lea. “Against Standardization of Memory.” Human Rights Quarterly 39.2 (2017): 296–318. Davis, Nicole. “An Interview with Patrick Flanery.” The Boar. April 21, 2013. Accessed January 30, 2020. https://theboar.org/2013/04/interview-patrickflanery. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe (1719). Ware: Wordsworth Classics Editions, 1992. De Kok, Ingrid. “Whole Words, Whole Worlds?” Wasafiri 32.2 (2016): 5–11. ———. Terrestrial Things. South Africa: Kwela Books, 2002. De Kock, Leon. “Intimate Enemies: A Discussion with Marlene van Niekerk and Michiel Heyns about Agaat and its Translation into English.” Journal of Literary Studies 25.3 (2009): 136–151. Demir, Danyela. “‘Break and Be Broken’, she said, ‘That is the Law of Life’: Loss and Racial Melancholia in Marelene van Niekerk’s Agaat.” Journal of Literary Studies 32.3 (2016): 21–35. Dorsinville, Max. Caliban Without Prospero. Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1974. Effe, Alexandra. “Coetzee’s Summertime as a Metaleptic Conversation.” Journal of Narrative Theory 47.2 (2017): 252–275. Flanery, Patrick. Absolution. London: Atlantic Books, 2012. Garner, Dwight. “The conscience of South Africa talks about her country’s new racial order.” The Salon Interview. March 9, 1998. Accessed January 30, 2020. https://www.salon.com/1998/03/09/cov_si_09int/. Gordimer, Nadine. The House Gun (1998). New York: Penguin Books, 1999. ———. None to Accompany Me (1994). Penguin Books: New York 1995.

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———. A Sport of Nature (1987). Penguin Books: Harmondsworth 1988. ———. “Living in the Interregnum” (1982). In The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, edited by Stephen Clingman, 261–284. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988. ———. July’s People (1981). Bloomsbury Publishing: London 2005. ———. Burger’s Daughter (1979). Bloomsbury Publishing: London 2000. ———. The Conservationist (1974). Penguin Books: Harmondsworth 1978. Gordimer, Nadine and Susan Sontag. “Writers and Politics”. In Voices: Writers and Politics, edited by Bill Bourne, Udi Eichler and David Herman, 25–39. Nottingham: Spokesman, 1987. Gordimer, Nadine et  al. What Happened to “Burger’s Daughter”; or, How South African Censorship Works. Johannesburg: Taurus 1980. Heyns, Michiel. “Irreparable Loss and Exorbitant Gain: On Translating Agaat.” Journal of Literary Studies 25.3 (2009): 124–135. ———. “The Whole Country’s Truth: Confession and Narrative in Recent White South African Writing.” MFS 46.1 (2000): 42–66. Kossew, Sue. “‘Something Terrible Happened’: Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun and the Politics of Violence and Recovery in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” In Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Sue Kossew and Diane Schwerds, 133–143. New  York: Nova Science Publishers, 2001. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull (1998). London: Vintage Books, 1999. Lenta, Patrick. “Executing the Death Sentence: Law and Justice in Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country and Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 13.1 (2001): 49–69. Lewis, Simon. “Under the Sign of the Gun: Welcome to Postmodern Melancholy of Gordimer’s Post-Apartheid World”. Critical Survey 11.2 (1999): 64–76. MacLeod, Lewis. “‘Do We of Necessity Become Puppets in a Story?’ Or Narrating the World: On Speech, Silence, and Discourse in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.” Modern Fiction Studies 52 (2006): 1–18. Mannoni, Octave. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. New York: Praeger, 1964. McDonald, Peter D. “The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor: J. M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature.” Book History 7 (2004): 285–302. Medalie, David. “‘The Context of the Awful Event’: Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun.” Journal of Southern African Studies 25.4 (1999): 633–644. Meldrum, Andrew. “Gordimer’s Sorrow for Men Who Robbed Her.” The Guardian. November 2, 2006. Accessed January 30, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/02/books.southafrica. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Ndebele, Njabulo. The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003). Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2004. Powers, Donald. “Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J. M. Coetzee’s Afterlives.” Life Writing 13.3 (2016): 323–334. Poyner, Jane. “Rerouting Commitment in the Postapartheid Canon: TRC Narratives and The Problem of Truth”. In Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millenium, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina Șandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 182–193. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Raditlhalo, Sam. “Truth in Translation: The TRC and the Translation of the Translators.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 32.1 (2009): 89–101. Riis, Johannes. “Nadine Gordimer: Interview”. Kunapipi 2.1 (1980): 20–26. Rossman, Jean. “‘There’s another story here’: Skewing the Frame in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat.” English Academy Review 29.2 (2012): 34–45. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T.  Vaughan. Rev. ed. The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series. London: Arden, 2011. Slovo, Gillian. Red Dust (2000). New York and London: Norton, 2002. Stobie, Cheryl. “Representations of ‘the Other Side’ in Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun.” Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 12, no. 1 (2007): 63–76. “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report.” Accessed January 30, 2020. http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/index.htm. Uhlmann, Anthony. “J. M. Coetzee and the Uses of Anachronism in Summertime”. Textual Practice 26.4 (2017): 747–761. Van Houwelingen, Caren. “Rewriting the Plaasroman: Nostalgia, Intimacy and (Un)homeliness in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat.” English Studies in Africa 55.1 (2012): 93–106. Van Niekerk, Marlene. Agaat (2004). Translated by Michiel Heyns. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2006. Verdoolaege, Annelies. Reconciliation Discourse: the case of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008. Wicomb, Zoë. Playing in the Light. New York: The New Press, 2006. ———. David’s Story (2000). New York: The Feminist Press, 2001. Young, Robert J.  C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995). Reprint. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Zabus, Chantal. “A Calibanic Tempest in Anglophone and Francophone New World Writing.” Canadian Literature 104 (Spring 1985), 135–150.

CHAPTER 4

Fictional Journeys Towards Reconciliation

4.1   Private Forms of Expiation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace I now move to consider the TRC’s key concept of reconciliation, which, compared to those of trauma and truth, is the most difficult to grasp for its dynamic, multi-dimensional nature. The complexity of this notion is evidenced by the TRC’s incapacity to provide a clear definition of the term during the life of its work. Despite carrying the name of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Richard Wilson, in fact, observes that “defining exactly what was meant by reconciliation remained one of the great incomplete tasks of the TRC” (2001, p.  101). Rather than adopting a theoretical approach to the concept into focus as I have done in my previous chapters, I have decided, in light of this lack of conceptual clarity, to begin my discussion by analysing J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace. In particular, I investigate how the author envisages the notion of reconciliation in the years immediately after the official demise of the apartheid regime. Coetzee seems to conceptualise this notion in terms of gender and race, highlighting how post-apartheid South Africa continues to be plagued by a type of violence that still sees white and non-white people in opposition. The chapter then elaborates further on the issue of gender violence and on the different forms it may assume according to social, economic and political circumstances. On the one hand, I address the increasing phenomenon of domestic violence through analysis of Thando Mgqolozana’s 2014 novel Un-importance; on the other, I discuss the © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mussi, Literary Legacies of the South African TRC, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43055-9_4

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timely problem of xenophobia that characterises the post-apartheid period. Analysis of Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2016) and Marli Roode’s Call It Dog (2013) shows that the element of ethnicity must be added to the gender-race relationship, highlighting how rape has become a correctional weapon in post-apartheid (and post-TRC) South Africa to give expression to ethnic hatred against black immigrants. In a similar way to what I have argued with reference to the notions of trauma and truth in my previous chapters, novels that were published with a greater critical distance from the completion of the Commission’s mandate further extend and problemitise their critical reflections on the TRC’s concept of reconciliation. If Disgrace perpetuates apartheid oppositions by presenting examples of gender violence primarily as a problem between white and non-white South Africans, later publications such as Un-importance, Period Pain and Call It Dog engage with this notion in ways that go beyond the TRC’s demarcation between “victims” and “perpetrators”, between black and white South Africans, thus drawing attention to a more complex and varied understanding of reconciliation. They also present reconciliation as an ongoing project in contemporary South Africa. Disgrace is J. M. Coetzee’s first post-apartheid novel and combines the story of David Lurie—a fifty-two-year-old university professor who writes “books about dead people” ([1999] 2000, p. 162)—with a larger narrative that addresses, on the one hand, issues of white guilt, atonement and reconciliation, and, on the other, the complexities of articulating sexual violence against women in post-apartheid South Africa. By enacting two parallel stories of sexual violation—Lurie’s harassment of his coloured student Melanie Isaacs in the first half of the novel and the gang rape of his daughter Lucy in the second half—Disgrace features interracial rape prominently and “sets up an internal debate on what it means adequately to respond to an experience of disgrace and bodily violation for perpetrator as well as for victim” (Boehmer 2002, p. 344). Indeed, while Bitter Fruit explores the issue of rape primarily from the victims’ (and their families’) perspectives, Coetzee’s novel embarks on examining the perpetrator’s side as well as the victim’s. Disgrace is perhaps the most famous and widely discussed novel among the ones analysed so far, but precisely for the critical attention it has received and for its evident relationship with issues of apology, forgiveness and reconciliation, I could not not include it in this chapter dedicated to fictional journeys towards self-reconciliation and reconciliation with the Other.

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Evoking Achmat Dangor’s attentiveness in exploring and representing sexual violence against women without attempting to appropriate their story, Coetzee engages with the ethical complexities of addressing such a delicate issue in ways that criticise the Commission’s efforts to encourage women to share their stories of sexual violence publicly. In opposition to the TRC’s public approach, the author tries to renegotiate women’s privacy and intimacy by exploring silence as a more accommodating space for women’s painful memories. Borrowing Fiona Ross’s words, “silence is a legitimate discourse on pain and there is an ethical responsibility to recognise it as such” (2003, p. 49). Acknowledging the importance of silence, Coetzee adopts it as a narrative strategy to represent something that cannot be represented because it is beyond his ken, and to restore to women the agency to reconcile with their pain in their own terms. Given its attention to highly problematic issues such as the case of interracial rape, it is certainly no surprise that Disgrace has attracted a mixed reception, especially in its first year of publication, ranging from hostility and accusations of racism because of its pessimistic portrayal of post-apartheid racial relations, to deeper explorations which unveil the paradox faced by the white South African writer. Jane Poyner observes that Coetzee’s central concern in both his fiction and his critical works reflects the postcolonial struggle between “narrativising the lost or silenced (hi)stories of the oppressed (black) Other” and the risk of “assuming the authoritative (and hence, by analogy, colonialist) stance [he seeks] to challenge” (Poyner 2000, p. 67). His preoccupation with the peril of imposing his white, Afrikaner, colonising perspective on the (hi)stories of the Other is, in fact, reflected in his slippery language and constant questioning of authorship, as I discuss later on. The African National Congress’s oral submission to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC)’s Inquiry into Racism in the Media on 5 April 2000 represents one of the most significant examples of a racialised reading of the novel. According to Peter McDonald, the ANC employed Coetzee’s text “as an historical witness to the persistence of racism among white South Africans” because it portrayed the Black as a “‘faithless, immoral, uneducated, incapacitated primitive child’, a version of white racism they traced back to J. B. M. Hertzog, the father of ‘so-­ called pure Afrikaner nationalism’” (2002, p. 323). This observation apparently alludes to David Lurie’s description of Pollux, the youngest of David’s daughter Lucy’s black rapists: “a violent child in the body of a young man […] Deficient. Mentally deficient. Morally deficient” (pp. 207–208). The

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ANC’s criticism was echoed by other commentators and reviewers; Jakes Gerwel, professor of literature  and Director-General of the President’s office under Nelson Mandela, for instance, expressed his dismay at the novel’s portrayal of the “almost barbaric post-colonial claims of Black Africans”, at its representation of “mixed-race [bruin] characters” as “whores, seducers, complainers, conceited accusers”, and at its “exclusion of the possibility of civilized reconciliation” (McDonald 2002, p. 325). On the other hand, Peter McDonald observes that “even if read as a story of the politics of identity it is difficult to see that the novel would have a racial, let alone a racist, effect on this analysis” (ibid., 329). He calls for “other, more radical ways of reading” the novel that consider “its charged story, artful rhetoric, dense allusiveness, and studied refusal to moralize” (ibid., pp. 329–330). Carine M. Mardorossian suggests another critical focus, arguing that Coetzee’s undertaking challenges “normative approaches to rape, justice, and human relationship”, and, instead of confining post-apartheid violence to racial frameworks, the author highlights “the inextricable relation between incommensurable categories of identity such as gender, class, or ethnicity in the application of legal and moral authority” (2011, pp. 74–75). My own reading of the novel shows that the author is primarily interested in the ethical complexities of representing rape and sexual violence against  women, as well as in exposing the powerful interplay between gender and race still at work in post-apartheid South Africa. Without explicitly referring to the work of the TRC, Coetzee’s novel poses questions which range from the ethical implications of perpetrators’ public acknowledgements and the exploration of “white guilt”, to the representability of sexual harm on women—in particular, the case of interracial rape—and the existence of a suitable audience for these stories of female abuse in the context of transitional South Africa. From the very beginning of the novel, the protagonist, David Lurie, fifty-two years old and twice divorced, is presented as an outcast, a man alienated both from his society and work, a man “out of touch, out of date” (p. 13). Once professor of modern languages, particularly fascinated by English Romanticism, he has become adjunct professor of communications at the Cape Town Technical University following “the great rationalization” (p.  3) of his department. Although he is allowed to teach a special-field course once a year (Romantic poets), “because that is good for morale” (p. 3), for the rest he teaches without passion Communications 101 and Communication 201, making “no impression on students. They look through him when he speaks, forget his name” (p. 4). His masters

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have been Wordsworth and Byron, “his imaginative domain is one of classical myth and learning, people with gods and angels and heroes and devils. His cosmography is Dantean or Miltonic, with heaven and hell, Eden and an underworld” (Coleman 2009, p.  607). However, when David gives a class on Byron’s poem “Lara, A Tale”  (1814), he is not able to arouse his students’ interest: “heads bent, they scribble down his words. Byron, Lucifer, Cain, it is all the same to them” (p. 34). Lurie, therefore, appears to have a cultural legacy to transmit, but it is one in which his students have no interest, and this contributes to his marginalised state. His passion for Romantic poetry is indicative of Lurie’s character and, in a sense, anticipates his behaviour with his student Melanie. In his career as a scholar, he has written three poorly received critical works, including Wordsworth and the Burden of the Past. In the South African context, the word “burden” inevitably assumes a remarkable significance in relation to the burden of guilt experienced by white liberal South Africans, like Coetzee and David Lurie, for their “unwilling” complicity in their country’s history of violence during apartheid. However, later in his career, Lurie chooses to turn his academic interest towards the life and work of the scabrous Byron, which establishes an implicit connection between Byron’s libertine life and the protagonist’s promiscuity. His lechery is also anticipated in the opening sentence of the novel, where the third-person narrator hints at the protagonist’s problem of sex: “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (p. 1). Besides referring to Thomas Hardy’s preface to his novel Jude the Obscure,1 this statement introduces Lurie’s solution to his “problem of sex”, namely, his weekly visits to the “exotic” prostitute Soraya, whose photograph in Discreet Escorts’ book depicts her with “a red passion-­ flower in her hair and the faintest of lines at the corners of her eyes” (p. 7). Whatever the uncertainty with which Soraya’s racial identity is indicated, her “honey-brown body, unmarked by the sun” (p. 1) clearly classifies the woman as non-white. Sohinee Roy (2012) highlights the importance of Disgrace’s opening paragraph, which signals the new direction undertaken in post-apartheid South Africa: in this new context, interracial sexual relations are no longer prohibited.2 The narrative structure deployed in the novel consists of a third-person narrator whose focus is Lurie’s perspective; the use of the present tense throughout the text also “adds to the immediacy and proximity with which the protagonist’s viewpoint is represented” (Mardorossian 2011, p. 78). Everything is seen through Lurie’s eyes, and, as readers, we are led

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to sympathise and agree with Lurie’s actions and his “readings” of those actions—such as, for instance, his sexual act with the coloured student Melanie—which are inevitably affected by his white, Afrikaner identity. Despite being an outcast within the university community, his position as male and Afrikaner cannot but influence his perspective and the ways in which he perceives the Other. There are, however, some linguistic clues in the narrative, which expose the disjunction between the authorial voice and Lurie’s perception of reality. For example, the phrase “to his mind” in the opening sentence, or the expression “To some degree, he believes, his affection is reciprocated” (p. 2),3 conveys a certain degree of discrepancy between the narrator and Lurie as the narrative focaliser, encouraging readers to distance themselves from the protagonist’s perspective. Concentrating on an analysis of verbal aspects and tenses of the novel, Mark Sanders also places particular emphasis on the phrase “to his mind”, which, by separating the auxiliary verb “have” from its participle “solved”, affects the perfective aspect of the verb phrase: Indicating transcendent aspect, the perfective “has solved” secures the narrative present. Before its syntax can be completed, however, the perfective is sundered by an aside alerting the reader that the action narrated is not over—that, as the narrator gently intimates by splitting “has solved” in two with the words ‘to his mind’, the solution Lurie imagines himself to have found [for his problem of sex] is premature. (2007, pp. 172–173)

The prematurity and incompleteness of Lurie’s solution to his problem of sex—that is, his weekly encounter with a non-white prostitute—is also reinforced through the use of the present tense in the following two sentences of the novel’s opening paragraph: “On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters” (p.  1). Sanders argues that the iterative aspect enshrined in the present tense of these verbs “retroactively permit[s] one to read the perfective ‘has solved’ as iterative: indicating habitual action, not the completed action it typically indicates” (2007, p.  173). In addition to providing some insights into Lurie’s character, these syntactic clues are also important in terms of narrative strategy, because they invite readers to question the effective reliability of both the narrator and the narrative focaliser/Lurie. From the outset of the novel, Coetzee deploys a narrative strategy hinting at the possibility for the narration to be incomplete or flawed in a certain sense,

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rather than claiming authenticity or factual objectiveness, which, in turn, indicates a much more ambivalent and complex approach to the question of “truth-telling” than that on which the TRC relied. Lurie’s overwhelming willingness to indulge his sexual appetite, far from being under control, leads him to sexually abuse one of his students from his Romantic course: Melanie Isaacs. Similarly to Soraya, Coetzee does not resort to apartheid racial terminology to classify Melanie’s identity, but, from the novel’s description of her features, we can clearly deduce that Melanie belongs to the coloured community: “she is small and thin, with close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large, dark eyes” (p. 11), familiar signifiers to describe the “Cape” coloured population. Lurie also gives her a new name “Melàni: the dark one” (p. 18), which hints at her non-white identity. Roy places an emphasis on this “relative” absence of specific racial markers, arguing that “the racial silence in Disgrace identifies the racial ideology and practice of ‘new South Africa’ with David Goldberg’s concept of the postracial” (2012, p.  702). Roy goes on to argue that the “post-apartheid fear of racial reference” must be ascribed to apartheid abuse of the racial category as a divisive classifier which aimed to secure white privilege. Supporting Goldberg’s assessment, she claims that “postracial racelessness signals the suppression of race instead of its disappearance” (ibid., p.  703). Roy’s study discloses the complex entanglements behind racial and sexual dynamics, which were created by the apartheid regime and a history of colonisation that still affect the post-apartheid South African present. Coetzee’s stylistic choice thus shows his awareness of the shortcomings of language itself to represent the Other without the risk of inscribing both Melanie and, as we have seen above, Soraya into a fixed category still loaded with racist symbolism. Lurie’s behaviour, for instance, exemplifies the ambiguous complicity between sexual desire and racial power, which is mirrored in the description of all the “sexual acts” between the man and Melanie. They are portrayed through the professor’s dominating perspective and emotions: On the living-room floor, to the sound of rain pattering against the windows, he makes love to her. Her body is clear, simple, in its way perfect; though she is passive throughout, he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion. When he comes back the rain has stopped. The girl is lying beneath him, her eyes closed, her hands slack above her head, a slight frown on her face.[…] Averting her face, she frees herself, gathers her things, leaves the room. (p. 19)

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He has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple like a marionette’s. Words heavy as clubs thud into the delicate whorl of her ear. ‘No, not now!’ she says, struggling. ‘My cousin will be back!’ But nothing will stop him. He carries her to the bedroom, brushes off the absurd sleepers […] She does not resist. All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. […] Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. (pp. 24–25, emphasis added)

These two quotations make reference to two different sexual encounters between Lurie and Melanie, and, on both occasions, the repulsion and unwillingness expressed by the girl’s body are completely ignored by the man, who even comes to think that “she even helps him”. Lurie is reluctant to call his act “rape”, and his domineering perspective, Mardorossian underlines, brings the reader “into an uncomfortable proximity to and complicity with the white masculinist subject’s way of thinking” (2011, p.  78). Lurie’s dominant viewpoint epitomises both the colonising and patriarchal discourses which entrap the female subaltern voice of Melanie, “the dark one”. Lurie’s sexual abuse of Melanie acquires “additional complexity” when the novel suggests a distressing association between the student and Lucy, Lurie’s daughter. Following the episode of violence, Melanie visits Lurie visibly distressed and he receives her as she was her daughter: “he makes up a bed for her in his daughter’s room, kisses her good night […] He sits down on the bed, draws her to him. In his arms she begins to sob miserably” (p. 26). Despite his attempts at comforting Melanie, Lurie, however, continues to feel “a tingling of desire” for the girl (p. 26); he reveals a lack of self-knowledge, a confusion between feelings of care and desire to the point where he wonders what Melanie has come to represent for him: “Mistress? Daughter? […] What is she offering him?” (p. 27). Alerted by this perverse association between Melanie and Lucy, and by those narrative clues that I have discussed earlier, the reader cannot escape the sensation that what David did to Melanie is definitely illicit—the same way it would be illicit if Lucy were in the girl’s place. The implicit allusion to incest might be interpreted as an aggravating circumstance of David’s

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behaviour, which makes his account of “not rape, not quite that” (p. 25) even more unreliable to the reader’s eyes. Notably, the two classes of Romantic poetry that Lurie teaches echo this feeling of wrongdoing. Analysing Wordsworth’s passage about the Alps, from Book 6 of The Prelude (1850), he lingers on the verb “usurp upon”, reminding the students that “usurp upon means to intrude or encroach upon. Usurp, to take over entirely, is the perfective of usurp upon; usurping completes the act of usurp upon” (p. 21). This preference for the verb “usurp upon” over the perfective “usurp” unmistakably recalls Lurie’s “intrusion” into Melanie’s body, signifying, on the one hand, the girl’s reluctance for the sexual act, and, on the other, Lurie’s intention to carry on this unwelcome relationship. Following Melanie’s boyfriend’s threatening visit, Lurie also teaches a class on Lord Byron’s poem “Lara, A Tale” (1814), which invites a comparison between Lurie and Lucifer, the “erring spirit” (p. 32) who “doesn’t act on principle but on impulse, and the source of his impulse is dark to him” (p. 33). Lurie seems to follow favourably his masters’ disgraceful fate: the libertine Byron; the Count Lara, a mysterious outcast with the stamp of Cain on his forehead; and, finally, Lucifer, the fallen angel, whose name echoes the professor’s surname, “Lurie”. Following Melanie’s rape charges, the University decides to investigate these charges and to determine possible disciplinary action by establishing a committee which manifestly mirrors the TRC hearings—in particular, the AC’s hearings, where perpetrators were asked to disclose the whole truth. Significantly, Manas Mathabane, professor of religious studies, is appointed as the chairman of the disciplinary committee and might be regarded as the corresponding Christian rhetoric embodied by Archbishop Tutu at the TRC’s hearings. Mathabane specifies that “this is not a trial but an inquiry. Our rules of procedure are not those of a law court” (p. 48); in fact, as pointed out by Roy, “instead of investigating the rape charges and dispensing justice, the inquiry’s efforts seek to reach a compromise” (2012, p. 706). Despite his plea of guilty to all the charges laid against him, the committee also demands that Lurie make a public statement “in the spirit of repentance” (p. 58), which should come “from his heart” (p. 54) and “express contrition” (p. 54) for what he did, along with accepting to undergo counselling. Lurie categorically refuses both to go to counselling and to make such a public statement; instead, he questions the sincerity of a public apology:

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He shakes his head. “I have said the words for you, now you want more, you want me to demonstrate their sincerity. That is preposterous. That is beyond the scope of the law. I have had enough. Let us go to playing it by the book. I plead guilty. That is as far as I am prepared to go”. (p. 55)

Confiding in his daughter later in the novel, Lurie criticises the public nature of what was required of him: “Private life is business […] They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn’t oblige” (p.  66). By rejecting the act of “public” apology-­statement as envisaged by his university, Lurie proves not to be interested in the kind of repentance that the public arena of the disciplinary committee might offer him, because repentance “is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse” (p. 58). Through the character of Lurie, Coetzee engages in questioning how the TRC transformed the Christian concepts of confession and forgiveness from private and personal moments to public instruments of reconciliation. Conversely, the novel proposes an alternative journey which entails private forms of repentance, redemption and reconciliation. The author does not show if this private dimension is itself effective; relying on an open-ended finale, Coetzee challenges the idea of closure inherent in the TRC’s narrative process and foregrounds South Africa’s project of reconciliation as still ongoing. After his refusal to “perform” a public apology, David is forced to resign from his academic position, and decides to “escape” to his daughter Lucy’s isolated farm in the Eastern Cape, initiating his private journey to redemption. Whilst he is “a man of the city” (p. 6), his lesbian daughter Lucy is “a frontier woman of the new breed” (p. 62), “no longer a child playing at farming, but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou” (p. 60), who has a rifle and the dogs she takes care of as her only defence. This change of scenery foregrounds the second episode of interracial rape—the gang rape of David’s daughter Lucy—, which exposes “the farm space” as “a violently contested boundary in post-apartheid South Africa” (L. V. Graham 2003, p. 438). In the apartheid era, the farm was a space dominated by white farmers, the colonisers,4 but, following the demise of apartheid, the new government has been promoting a land reform programme, which aims to return to black South Africans their land, and to foster a new redistribution of power.5 However, significant restitution claims are yet to be solved, and most of the land is still white-owned, demonstrating that the current land reforms have been inadequate to address this social and power

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injustice.6 In this sense, the character of Petrus, Lucy’s African assistant, epitomises the difficulties and ironies generated by the attempts at more equal redistribution of land in South Africa. As the narrative unfolds, Petrus changes his status from “gardener and the dog-man” (p.  64) to Lucy’s “co-proprietor” (p.  62) and, later, the only proprietor of Lucy’s land, as it is suggested that Lucy will sign the land over to Petrus in exchange for his protection (p.  204). As we shall see later, the circumstances in which these transformations occur make the question of land restitution to black South Africans—here represented by Petrus—and post-apartheid operations of racial power reversal controversial and suspicious. In addition to the issue of land redistribution, the farm is presented as a compromised space still affected by violence and racial hatred in the post-apartheid era; indeed, this space becomes the setting for Lucy’s rape by three unnamed intruders—“two men and a boy” (p.  91). Attwell observes that the rapists’ racial identity is not conveyed by racial or ethnic markers, but it is rather suggested by their language, “Is no one there” (p. 93), meaning “there is no one there”, and “Hai” (p. 95), spoken with derision directed at Lurie (Attwell 2002, p.  336). Conversely, the first excursion into racial discourse is made by Lurie himself after the intruder’s mocking remark: He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa. He is helpless, an Aunt Sally, a figure from a cartoon, a missionary in cassock and topi waiting with clasped hands and upcast eyes while the savages jaw away in their own lingo preparatory to plunging him into their boiling cauldron. (p. 95)

From this passage, the reader can guess the rapists’ non-white racial identity, against which David’s high cultural training can do nothing. The protagonist’s consciousness and imagination are clearly still saturated by the racist language of empire and apartheid—the black Other is the “savage”—and this example seems to foreground the difficulty for the “new” South Africa both of achieving racial reconciliation and of finding a new language in which to imagine the Other that is not affected by racist ideology. Mardorossian, however, suggests that this episode of violence should not be exclusively read within racial (and racist) frameworks, “but as the context through which other sites of gendered violence get normalized

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(and deracialized)” (2011, pp. 74–75). The fact that Lucy’s rape remains off stage7 is enlightening in this sense: the contrast between Melanie’s violation, which is “luridly represented via Lurie” (L. V. Graham 2003, pp. 442–443), and the absence of Lucy’s profaned body invites us to read these two scenes against one another, revealing Coetzee’s attempt at exposing “the masculinist and racist bias through which the first one is represented and naturalized” (Mardorossian 2011, p. 80). Lurie is reluctant to admit the gravity of Melanie’s abuse, but, in case of his daughter’s assault, he does not hesitate to claim “violation […] yes, it was a violation” (p. 119). The contrast between these two ways of addressing female violence adopted by Lurie underscores Coetzee’s purpose to challenge the normalisation with which the post-apartheid era still addresses violence against non-white women perpetrated in white contexts. Most importantly, it suggests that Lurie still lacks a certain amount of self-knowledge as he is unable to make connections between his own behaviour and that of Lucy’s rapists, who are significantly African men. Despite his post-­ apartheid location, Lurie shows to have a colonial, biased perspective, which, at this time of the narrative, allows him to acknowledge wrongdoing only if perpetrated by black people but not if committed by his white, Afrikaner self. Lucy decides not to report the rape to the police and, talking with her father, she explains the reason of her silence: This has nothing to do with you, David […] as far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone. (p. 112)

Violence made the boundary between public and private very unstable under apartheid, and this instability appears to continue even now in the post-apartheid era. The work of the Commission too continues to step across this boundary by inviting victims to tell their heart-breaking stories in the public context of the hearings. Lucy’s assertion that her story is private must be read as her attempt to reclaim her private space and the terms on which her feelings might be articulated, her attempt to re-­ negotiate the boundary between public and private spheres. Her refusal to speak also “signals her recognition that individual stories like those by the TRC tended to obscure the larger truth of oppression of the marginalized majority, the mundane everyday reality of apartheid” (Poyner 2010,

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p. 187). Through Lucy’s silence, Coetzee implies a more sceptical attitude to the work of the Commission at least at two different levels: first, not all the victims had the opportunity or the willingness to participate in the healing journey initiated by the TRC; secondly, although providing for some sort of accounting, the public truth-telling process could not cancel nor change the memory of past brutalities and crimes. Moreover, Lucy’s insistence on the impossibility of reporting her rape in “this place being South Africa”, “at this time” (p.  112) shows her awareness that “representing the self is inseparable from representing others” (Mardorossian 2011, p.  76): according to the young woman, her rapists’ racial identity and the subsequent racial implications of her rape would have eclipsed the personal dimension of her suffering, her story of a woman being sexually violated by a group of men. Lucy fears that her story would have been heard exclusively through racial and racist frameworks, thus contributing to what Lucy Graham identifies as “black peril” hysteria, making Lucy play a role in a history of oppression.8 In this sense, we must interpret David’s comment about the rapists’ racial identity, as implying that if they had been “white thugs from Despatch” (p.  159), perhaps, Lucy would be less inclined to withdraw into silence. He goes even further suggesting that his daughter’s rape was “history speaking through them […] a history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors” (p. 156). Aligning with her father’s position, Lucy too expresses the guilt of white liberals by acknowledging that her rape might be regarded as the price she has to pay for the abuses perpetrated against the (black) Other during apartheid: “[…] what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves”. (p. 158)

Shortly after, however, Lucy attempts to readdress her rape from a gendered and more personal perspective: “Hatred…When it comes to men and sex, David, nothing surprises me anymore. Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange—

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when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her—isn’t it a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood—doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?” You are a man, you ought to know: does one speak to one’s father like that? Are she and he on the same side? (p. 158)

Racialist readings of the novel have proved a certain tendency of critical attention to focus on the category of race and on South Africa’s history of racism, often disregarding the gendered dimension of sexual violence against women. In the passage above, Lucy attempts to reclaim her own feminist perspective for what happened to her, a perspective that associates her father with other male rapists. This highlights their distinct views on gender roles and sexuality, with Lucy being presented as more conscious of gender identity and David as rather complacently heteronormative. Yet, in a country like South Africa, the social categories of race, gender and class cannot but be inevitably intertwined, and Lucy, as well as David, proves to be aware of the racial and “historical structures in which sexuality operates” (Attwell 2002, p. 339). Rape itself becomes a “familiar metaphor of colonization” (Pechey 2002, p. 381), since women as much as the land are considered “objects” to possess, property to invade and conquer. There are many associations between women and “objects” in the novel, signifying that a woman does not own herself: for example, “a risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes […] That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars; shoes; women too” (p. 98), or “because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it” (p. 16). The “objectification” of women and the connection between women and the land are further evidenced in Lucy’s choice to sign her land over to Petrus in exchange for the man’s protection from her rapists, as I discuss later. The absence of any description of Lucy’s rape demonstrates Coetzee’s awareness of the ethical complexities of representing sexual violence without further betraying the violated body. Lucy is adamant that what happened is just hers, and David—and, by extension, the reader—cannot understand because they were not there. Lucy Graham argues that Coetzee challenges Western artistic traditions and approaches to the act of rape, which she describes as “obscured and legitimized by representations that

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depicted sexual violation in an aesthetic manner” (2003, p. 440). Indeed, after the farm attack, a memory from childhood comes to Lurie: In an art-book in the library there was a painting called The Rape of the Sabine Women: men on horseback in skimpy Roman armor, women in gauze veils flinging their arms in the air and wailing. What had all this attitudinizing to do with what he suspected rape to be: the man lying on top of the woman and pushing himself into her? (p. 160)

In spite of being unable to comprehend Lucy’s suffering—“[…] when rape is concerned, no man can be where the woman is?” (p. 141), he wonders—Lurie seems to be conscious of the inadequacy of the Western attitude towards sexual violence against women, a scepticism which he also manifests in his comment about Byron shortly after: in the light of what happened to Lucy, “Byron looks very old-fashioned indeed” (p. 141). Coleman, however, underscores that, in remaining silent, Lucy “runs the risk of conferring ownership of the story on her rapists” (2009, p. 607); Lurie, in fact, points out that, following Lucy’s silence, “the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners. How they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman was for” (p. 115). Lurie himself tries to own his daughter’s story and tell her what happened that terrible day: “You were raped. Multiply. By three men […] You were in fear of your life […] And I did nothing. I did not save you” (p. 157). As Lucy later says to her father: You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through. Well, contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor. I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions. (p. 198)

Lucy claims ownership of her story as well as her own decisions: she is the main character of her story and she is the only one who can decide about her own life. Within this context, Lurie’s insistence that his daughter should tell her story resonates ironically, given his own inability to see the paradox between Lucy’s chosen silence and Melanie’s impossibility to speak when Lurie is dominating her from a sexual viewpoint. Lucy’s silence must also be read in contrast with the Commission’s efforts to encourage

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women to speak out about their own traumas at the special hearings on women. If Lurie’s account of the violence suffered by Melanie represents an example of an attempted act of “misappropriating” the girl’s story—a risk that the TRC often ran into through the testimonial, translating and transcribing processes as I have argued in Chap. 3—, Lucy’s silence becomes her medium to claim ownership over her own story. Coetzee seems thereby to suggest that the female Other cannot be easily made to speak, not even in post-apartheid South Africa. This conclusion can also be extended to the public setting of the TRC’s hearings, which was supposed to provide witnesses with a safe space where they could tell their stories, but it failed to avoid the risk of appropriation on behalf of the commissioners, the journalists, the interpreters and transcribers and the audience itself. This is relevant to sexual harm against women and, in particular, the case of interracial rape: despite the Commission’s efforts, many women who could qualify as victims of gross human rights violations chose not to testify before the TRC because they were not ready to, nor willing to share their pain in public. This suggests the inability of the TRC’s public platform to accommodate all situations and needs. By encouraging women to share their stories of violence publicly, the TRC proved not to fully comprehend the hybrid space occupied by the case of interracial rape, where race and gender, political and personal, public and private are painfully and inevitably entangled. In terms of storyline, the attack at the farm—particularly Lucy’s principled refusal to conform to his father’s expectations and denounce her rapists—lays the foundation for Lurie’s expiatory journey. Following his daughter’s rape, Lurie is finally prepared to apologise to Mr Isaacs and his family for what he has done to Melanie, and to ask for their forgiveness. Moving from the public context of the university disciplinary hearing and its demand of a public statement, he is willing to “say what is on [his] heart” (p. 165) in the private setting of the Isaacs’s house: “I am sorry for what I took your daughter through. You have a wonderful family. I apologize for the grief I have caused you and Mrs Isaacs. I ask for your pardon” (p. 171). To express the remorse he refused to show at the public inquiry, he humbly “gets to his knees” (p. 173) before Mrs Isaacs and Melanie’s younger sister and “touches his forehead to the floor” (p. 173). Through the example of Lurie’s gesture, Coetzee is restoring to the moments of confession and contrition that dimension of privacy and personal connection with the Other that the TRC had undermined in the public context of its hearings. It might be argued that the theatricality and performativity

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of this gesture are reminiscent of the public spectacle of the TRC’s hearings. I think, though, that the context and the type of audience are significantly different here: Lurie chooses his own audience in front of whom he performs his act of contrition and asks for forgiveness, rather than passively accepting the public setting of the university disciplinary committee. This gesture, however, only represents a first step of his long private journey to redemption for his wrongdoing and it cannot change his state of disgrace. Conversely, Lurie suggests to Mr Isaacs that his disgrace is a permanent state of being: In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened between myself and your daughter. I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. It is enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term? (p. 172)

Interestingly, this invites a comparison between Lurie’s position as an outcast within the university community that was presented at the beginning of the novel and his current choice of embracing disgrace. While his initial position as an outcast was imposed by others, Lurie is now willing to accept his disgraceful condition as the punishment he deserves and claims his right to decide “his own terms” in dealing with his shame. Perhaps, the most important change in Lurie’s worldview is signalled by his relationship with animals, which also dramatises his relationship with the Other. Boehmer rightly observes that “the primary other in the alternative ethical schema explored in Disgrace is not human, not historically degraded human, but the ‘wholly other’, as Spivak has described it—in this case, the extreme alterity of the stray dog” (2002, p. 343). In the first half of the novel, Lurie shows his lack of concern and empathy for the “wholly marginalised”, the silent animals, which he considers as belonging to “a different order of creation” (p. 74) from humankind. In spite of accepting Lucy’s advice to help Bev at the animal clinic, “he is repelled by the odours of cat urine and dog mange and Jeyes Fluid that greet them” (p. 72). Lurie’s preconceptions of animals are, however, challenged later in the novel through his contact with dogs. His job at the animal refuge mainly consists of helping Bev put down the dogs, which “are brought to the clinic because they are unwanted: because we are too menny” (p.  146). While Bev administers the lethal injection, he holds

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them still, and little by little he forms a close bond with the dogs under his care. This new affection for animals is also exemplified by his attempt to preserve the dogs’ bodily dignity; in fact, he bags and “escorts” their corpses to the incinerator in order to stop the workmen from beating and breaking their bones so that they can fit inside the machine: It would be simpler to cart the bags to the incinerator immediately after the session and leave them there for the incinerator crew to dispose of. But that would mean leaving them on the dump with the rest of the weekend’s scourings: with waste from the hospital wards, carrion scooped up at the roadside, malodorous refuse from the tannery—a mixture both casual and terrible. He is not prepared to inflict such dishonour upon them. (p. 144)

Lurie cannot prevent the dogs’ death, but he is determined to treat their bodies with dignity and respect. As the narrative unfolds, he realises that “the clinic […] becomes his home” (p. 211), the dogs are his dogs, and he feels love for them: during the session, “he and Bev do not speak. He has learned by now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (p. 219). Boehmer asserts that the novel “thus proposes animals as the essential third term in the reconciliation of human self and human other, where reconciliation equates with the embodying of an elastic, generous ‘kind-ness’” (2002, p. 346). As an example of an utmost gesture of love, Lurie decides “to give up” the dog “he has come to feel a particular fondness for” (pp. 214–215): being conscious that “a time must come, it cannot be evaded” (p. 219), he enters the operating room “bearing him in his arms like a lamb” (p. 220). The Christian symbolism of this image can also be interpreted as a further attempt to restore the Christian moment of love, and, by analogy, forgiveness and reconciliation, to a more private and personal dimension in clear contrast with the TRC public context. It is not a coincidence that Lurie apologises to Mr Isaacs and asks for his forgiveness while developing a growing sympathy for animals, for the extreme alterity that they represent. His identification with dogs and his respectful carefulness for their bodies constitute part of Lurie’s (secular) atonement, which allows him to begin the reconciliation process with himself and with the Other, especially with his daughter. With Lucy expecting a child and choosing to accept Petrus’s proposal of marriage and

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protection, Lurie initially confesses to Bev that he is not getting on well with his daughter, and has decided to pack his bags and move out from Lucy’s place. Lurie does not understand Lucy’s determination in remaining in that place with the risk of being subjected to other attacks; moreover, he agrees even less with Lucy’s desire to keep the child, the product of her rape: The gang of three. Three fathers in one […] They were not raping, they were mating. It was not the pleasure principle that ran the show but the testicles, sacs bulging with seed aching to perfect itself. And now, lo and behold, the child! […] What kind of child can seed like that give life to, seed driven into the woman not in love but in hatred, mixed chaotically, meant to soil her, to mark her, like a dog’s urine? (p. 199)

His different perspective of the fate of animals causes Lurie to reconsider his relationship with his daughter. By the end of the novel, his destructive fury at Lucy’s rape lessens and he comes to accept her choices: So: once she was only a little tadpole in her mother’s body, and now here she is, solid in her existence, more solid than he has ever been. With luck she will last a long time, long beyond him. When he is dead she will, with luck, still be here doing her ordinary tasks among the flowerbeds. And from within her will have just issued another existence, that with luck will be just as solid, just as long-lasting. So it will go on, a line of existence in which his share, gift, will grow inexorably less and less, till it may as well be forgotten. (p. 217)

Parallel to Lurie’s “expiatory” journey, Lucy undertakes her own path towards reconciling herself with the consequences of her rape. After discovering her pregnancy, she decides not to abort but to learn to love her child: “Love will grow—one can trust Mother Nature for that. I am determined to be a good mother, David. A good mother and a good person” (p. 216). For the sake of peace, her own and her child’s peace, Lucy is “prepared to do anything, make any sacrifice” (p.  208), even accepting Petrus’s proposal of marriage and protection. Despite Lurie’s attempts to dissuade her from staying at the farm and keeping the child, and despite knowing that one of her rapists is Petrus’s relative, Lucy looks at her marriage with the man as an advantageous “alliance, a deal. I contribute the land, in return for which I am allowed to creep in under his wing” (p. 203). As anticipated earlier, the text once again suggests a connection between women, land and objects: accepting Petrus’s protection and proposal of

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marriage, Lucy accepts to hand over control of her land and, to a certain extent, of herself to Petrus, the black Other. Refusing to act in terms of abstractions—“guilt and salvation are abstractions” (p.  112)—the young woman is not trying “to expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present” (p. 112). On the contrary, in her attempt to understand how she can live in post-apartheid South Africa, as McDonald argues, Lucy negotiates “a postcolonial future for herself and the mixed-race child she is carrying” (2002, p. 329). Proving to be very “adaptable”, Lucy is prepared to live as Petrus’s tenant and wife, and be under his protection and control, rather than giving up her life in the farm and running away towards a safer place. She chooses to live like a “dog”: Lucy:

“Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at a ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity”. David: “Like a dog”. Lucy: “Yes, like a dog”. (p. 205) The phrase “like a dog” recalls the last sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where the protagonist, K., is finally executed: “‘Like a dog!’ [his killer] said: it was as if he meant the shame [or disgrace] of it to outlive him” (qtd. in McDonald 2002, p. 329). Lucy’s choice to start at ground level, at the mercy of Petrus, is significant on two different levels. On the one hand, it overturns the colonial relationship between the coloniser and the colonised Other by transforming Lucy into the (black) Other’s tenant and almost “employee”. It must be highlighted that, however, the circumstances of this racial/power shift are, at the very least, controversial, as Lucy’s decision to sign over her land to Petrus has been prompted by her episode of violence; it seems that Coetzee intentionally casts doubts on the real possibility for racial power reversal in post-apartheid South Africa. On the other hand, Lucy’s choice also signals the beginning of her private ethical journey towards self-reconciliation, which opposes the quasi-­ religious reconciliation fostered by the public process of the TRC, where victims were supposed to benefit from a cathartic effect after sharing their painful stories in public. However, it is important to note that, unlike Kafka’s novel, the phrase “like a dog” here does not necessarily equate

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Lucy’s self-reconciling journey with “abjection”; indeed, Lurie’s redemption is made possible by his acquired ability to recognise human and animal affiliations, and Lucy’s respect and love for animals is anticipated early in the text. Father’s and daughter’s downfalls have certainly been propelled by two very different sets of events—he actively participates in his own, while she is forced to succumb to her rapists’ violence—; however, both characters have to rise again from their disgraceful and shameful condition, willing to start at a ground level. Opposed to the cold winter with which the novel opens, the characters’ new start is symbolised by “a season of blooming” (p. 216), where “the bees must be in their seventh heaven” (p. 216). And this new start also implies a new order, “a new world they live in, he and Lucy and Petrus” (p. 117), where Petrus is “his own master” (p. 114) and Lucy and Lurie have become his tenant and the dog-­ man, respectively. Through the example of Lurie’s private journey to redemption, self-­ reconciliation and reconciliation with the Other, Coetzee shows his scepticism about the public context where the process of confession and forgiveness demanded by the South African TRC should take place. Similarly, Lucy’s journey to self-reconciliation occurs in private; she even refuses to report the crime to the police because of her claim of privacy. Aligning with this, Coetzee also proves to be aware of his “potentially” limited and biased male standpoint, and deliberately chose not to turn Lucy’s silence into voice by adopting narrative strategies that mark this impasse rather than further violating her story. Silence, however, does not mean absence as Adrienne Rich’s poem (1978) reminds us; on the contrary, silence is full of meanings in Disgrace. Rejecting the concept of shame as a subjective emotion or feeling, in his monograph The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Timothy Bewes proposes shame as “an event of incommensurability: a profound disorientation of the subject by the confrontation with an object it cannot comprehend, an object that renders incoherent every form available to the subject” (2011, p. 3). This discrepancy between subject and object, between content and form, is particularly evident in postcolonial writing, where these writers experience “a situation in which the ethical (or aesthetic) obligation to write and the aesthetic (or ethical) impossibility of writing are equally irrefutable” (ibid., p.  43) because of their “historical situatedness in the aftermath of the colonial project” (ibid., p.  42). Within this framework, Lucy’s silence becomes shameful, because it dramatises the ethical complexities of trying to give form to such an elusive and complex matter, the issue of interracial

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rape, in a context still affected by racial and gender bias. As readers, we are left with the task of carrying on the work of the TRC to identify a more suitable context where the Other, especially the female Other, can finally speak in his/her own terms. Moreover, as many critics have highlighted, Disgrace does not offer a solution nor a closure but an “input” to start the journey towards reconciliation that South Africa needs after its long history of colonisation and racial discrimination. In this regard, Sanders stresses that the progressive tense of Lurie’s last sentence—when he carries his “favourite” dog to the surgery to let Bev kill him, “yes, I am giving him up” (p. 220)—suggests that “the book’s ending may not be an end” (2007, p. 177), but it pictures “a new footing, a new start” (p. 218). In contrast with the TRC’s main goal to depict “as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights committed” during apartheid (Promotion of National Unit and Reconciliation Act, 1995), Coetzee’s novel may be regarded as a warning that the summary of past crimes fostered by the Commission—in this case represented by the university disciplinary committee—does not entail automatic closure and reconciliation. The next section will continue to engage with questions of reconciliation by focusing on the alarming rates of violence against women in contemporary South Africa, the phenomenon of xenophobic violence and on the ways in which the public process of reconciliation and closure promoted by the TRC need to be extended and followed by more effective social and political interventions.

4.2   Violence Against Women in Post-Apartheid South Africa In addition to reflecting on the meaning and impact of public displays of apology, forgiveness and reconciliation, Disgrace draws attention to the phenomenon of sexual violence against women in post-apartheid South Africa. The country has seen exceptionally high rates of this phenomenon and it has been described as an endemic problem (see Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, p. 7), thus questioning the rainbow image of the new South Africa and inviting further analysis of the TRC’s real contribution to reconciliation in the country. Within this context, Louise du Toit underlines that South Africa has the highest rates of rape for any country not at war and that the numbers even exceed some war contexts (2014, p.  101).

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Holtmann and Domingo-Swarts point out that the number of rapes reported to the South African Police Service seems to have increased steadily since the 1990s.9 A 2009 Medical Research Council study reported that three women die at the hands of their intimate partner every day (see Abrahams et al. 2013, pp. 1–8). It should not be surprising that, following her official visit to South Africa from 4 to 11 December 2015 as the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Dubravka Šimonović described South Africa as still “a young democracy deeply influenced by its historical violent past characterised by race, class and gender divide [sic]”, a country where: The violence inherited from the apartheid still resonate [sic] profoundly in today’s society dominated by deeply entrenched patriarchal norms and attitudes towards the role of women [which make] violence against women and children, especially in rural areas and in informal settlements, a way of life and an accepted social phenomenon. (“Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences on her Mission to South Africa”, 2016, p. 3)

Perhaps even more disturbing is Šimonović’s observation that “there are no centralized statistics on incidents and types of violence against women”, with the exception of the recording of sexual offences under the Sexual Offences Act by the South African Police Service, released annually (ibid., p. 4). Hence, these alarming and unprecedented statistics on femicide, rape and domestic violence cannot be considered indicative of the real prevalence and persistence of violence against women, in light of the massive under-reporting of all forms of gender-based violent crimes (ibid., p. 4, see also Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, p. 8). Holtmann and Domingo-­ Swarts assert that domestic violence is believed to be less well reported, while sexual offences are the least well reported. Possible reasons include a combination of factors, spanning from women’s low confidence that their complaint will be properly addressed or result in a conviction, to their fear of not having their stories believed or of experiencing resistance from service providers who display negative attitudes towards them. Sometimes, Holtmann and Domingo-Swarts argue, the victim is not aware that what has occurred is an offence and, as such, that they have a right to file a report and seek assistance (2008, p. 108). The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) usefully distinguishes different forms of sexual violence, generally grouped

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into intimate partner violence and non-intimate partner violence, which may include gang rape, rape homicide, school- and workplace-related violence and so forth. Citing recent studies, such as South Africa’s 2016 Demographic and Health Survey, the CSVR reports that one in five women older than eighteen has experienced physical violence, and that this figure is higher in the poorest households, where at least one in three women has reported physical violence. While recognising that all women are potentially at risk, the CSVR remarks that violence against women often occurs in the social space of marriage, family, neighbourhood and schools, and that some women are more vulnerable than others; in particular, they place emphasis on how younger women and black/coloured women, as well as irregular migrant women, women with disabilities and sex workers, are at higher risk than others in South Africa of experiencing sexual offences (Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, pp. 10–12). At this point, it is necessary to underline that sexual violence against women—in whatever form—is not a unique South African phenomenon, nor can it be circumscribed to only the post-apartheid era. The steady increase in already exceptional figures since the transition to democracy, however, allows us to surmise that the measures and actions taken by the new government during the transition period and following the TRC have proved to be insufficient and unsatisfactory in addressing this aspect of the inheritance of apartheid. In Chap. 2, I extensively discuss the TRC’s incapacity to elicit women’s stories of suffering or of experiences of violence at the public hearings, as well as the narrow definition of “victim of gross violations of human rights”, which excluded the most ordinary, quotidian examples of trauma. The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (1995) confined acts of gross human rights violations to the killing, abduction, torture or severe ill-treatment of any person, and, although the definition of “severe ill-treatment” evolved to include violations such as rape, sexual assault and abuse, Andrea Durbach (2016) rightly underscores that the TRC Act did not accord a distinct category of gross human rights violations to rape and sexual violence against women. This failure to incorporate sexual violence within the TRC’s definition demonstrates the Commission’s inability to understand and address the intersections between race, gender and politics often underpinning sexual violence against women, despite the evidence that sexual violence was often employed “to undermine resistance and enforce political acquiescence” (Nordstrum 1997, qtd. in Durbach 2016, p. 223).

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The literature acknowledges that, despite the significant advances towards gender equality and the many efforts to eradicate violence against women (both in terms of legal protection and intervention by state and non-state actors, such as civil society organisations), high levels of femicide, rape and other forms of sexual violence have persisted, thus suggesting that entrenched gender disparities have outlived political and social reconstructing in the new South Africa (Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, pp. 4, 11, see also Durbach 2016, p.  222). This obviously has raised security concerns for women in contemporary South Africa, alongside inspiring calls for a more targeted and focused investigation to understand the specific gendered dynamics at the origins of sexual violence against women and to develop relevant interventions. Responding to such calls, Tina Sideris (2013), for instance, seeks to outline the psycho-social conditions which create the possibilities for intimate partner violence, exploring the association of masculinity with domestic violence in the aftermath of political transition. Based on a two-year study conducted at Masisukumeni Women’s Crisis Centre, in the rural area of Nkomazi district, Sideris observes that masculinity is particularly informed by patriarchal ideology in this social context.10 In particular, Sideris continues, the authority given to the head of the family is a key symbol of what it means to be man and this authority marks the boundaries of gender differences and roles. Domestic life thus becomes the site where masculine power is exerted, and, therefore, threats to this power can be cause for violence. Sideris identifies apartheid policies of racial discrimination and class exploitation, as well as the persisting economic inequality that continues to affect the post-apartheid era, as potential emasculating agents which contribute to fuelling men’s violent reactions within the domestic environment. On the one hand, men were often forced to leave their household and seek employment elsewhere in the apartheid era. The Cry of Winnie Mandela and, to an extent, Mother to Mother dramatise this condition, where, during men’s long periods of absence, women remained heads of households and managed to sustain their families, thus exercising significant degrees of power which, in turn, threatened male domination. On the other hand, the new democratic government’s endorsement of gender equality, combined with the widespread poverty and unemployment which prevent men from providing and controlling the resources needed by the household, continues to destabilise gender hierarchies even in the post-apartheid era. As a consequence,

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Sideris concludes, men often resort to violence as a means to re-assert their power and control over the household (ibid.). Louise du Toit provides another theory through which the high levels of violence against women, especially rape, may be interpreted. She argues that rapes do not originate from a specific crisis of masculinity in contemporary South Africa, but “from a confluence of factors that channel male dominance displays into this violent manifestation” (2014, p.  118). Du Toit rejects colonialism, poverty, the new constitutional order’s endorsement of women’s rights or the dismantling of patriarchy as possible causes for rape, foregrounding instead the interpretative frame of ontological violence. She presents sexual violence against women as “an aspect of the performance of masculinity” (ibid., p. 118): what I call ontological violence aims to redescribe or redraw the very limits of the real, of the truth, of the world itself. What I thus argue is that the thrill of raping another person lies precisely in the embodied, manifested power, indeed the sovereignty that this act bestows on the perpetrator. The new world of the perpetrator is built on the ruins of the victim’s world. (ibid., p. 120)

Du Toit further asserts that sexual violence is particularly tempting for men in South Africa, as it is relatively risk-free (the reporting rate is very low and convictions are scarce), police work is not efficient and victims, rather than perpetrators, tend to be blamed for the rape (ibid., p. 119). Although one can agree with some of the insights of du Toit’s theory, her argument is not entirely convincing—and quite troubling in certain instances—for one main reason: by deploying “ontological” to explain the causes of sexual violence against women, du Toit seems to suggest that the potential for violence is inherent in the nature of men (as male perpetrators), which implies that positive solutions to this natural predisposition might not exist. Besides, in describing rape only in terms of an act being perpetrated by men against women, she automatically excludes other forms of sexual violence that might be performed by women and/or that might be directed at children or other men.11 It is beyond the purpose of this book to evaluate current theories that seek to provide a framework explaining the high levels of violence against women in post-apartheid South Africa. However, I believe that the general concerns raised by this endemic problem and the different interventions elicited in the attempt to (re)address it are significant indicators of

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certain key issues. On the one hand, they show how sexual violence against women is perceived as a major problem that dramatically challenges the so-long wished-for reconciliation of the country, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief and sex, as recited by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (1995). On the other, they also speak to the intricate nature of this phenomenon and to the need for a multi-faceted approach, encompassing the individual-level factors of women’s socio-­ economic realities, as well as the macro-structural factors (i.e. patriarchal structures, social and economic policies) that shape women’s lives (Sibanda-Moyo et  al. 2017, p.  6). Turning my attention now to the literary-­fictional dimension, the following sections are dedicated to the discussion of two contemporary South African novels, Thando Mgqolozana’s (2014) Un-importance and Kopano Matlwa’s (2016) Period Pain, which respond to this emergence of violence against women by exploring different forms of and perspectives on the phenomenon, while also reflecting on the significance of truth-telling, apology, forgiveness and reconciliation within the context of trauma. Despite their apparent simplicity, these texts are timely, engaged and politically aware, and, furthermore, show the ongoing impact of the TRC on post-apartheid literature, both in terms of content and form. Whereas Disgrace dramatises the phenomenon of violence against women primarily as a problem between white and non-white South Africans, Mgqolozana’s and Matlwa’s novels show how this phenomenon can assume different forms and affect more varied contexts, which go beyond the historical contraposition between the coloniser and the  colonised. In particular, we will see how Un-importance engages with gender violence from the angle of domestic violence, while Period Pain addresses a new form of racism, xenophobia, and the ways in which rape is deployed as a correctional weapon in post-­ apartheid South Africa.

4.3   Domestic Violence, the Perpetrator’s Story and Reconciliation in Thando Mgqolozana’s Un-importance Thando Mgqolozana’s third novel, Un-importance, is deceptively simple in terms of narrative architecture. It presents a stream-of-consciousness-­ like narration by Zizi, a student at the University of Western Cape and SRC (Student Representative Council) presidential candidate, about the

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last twelve hours before his appearance “to the masses as President-elect to make the declaration of his intent” (2014, p. 41). Conjuring up a world of student life, in particular student politics, Mgqolozana presents a microcosm of society, exploring a wide range of issues that show the author’s commitment to engaging with the TRC-related concepts of truth-telling, confession, accountability and reconciliation. The first-person narrative opens with Zizi focusing on his task of completing his political manifesto, a task that is interrupted as “[t]here are people at my door” (p. 1), outside his on-campus accommodation. The narrative also reveals that Zizi had just returned to his room after searching for his girlfriend Pamodi, who had left Zizi’s room saying she was going to the bathroom, only to disappear. While in search of Pamodi across campus, Zizi embarks on a journey that brings him into contact with other people, each meeting triggering a different memory. This journey, however, soon becomes an emotional, soul-searching reflection on what it means to be a person with integrity. Adopting a confessional tone, the protagonist/narrator ponders the potential ramifications of his (mis)behaviour in his relationship with Pamodi and weighs the significance and impact of past decisions and actions. These reflections are interwoven with other memories that provide readers with further insights into Zizi’s life and character. Later in the novel, when Zizi finally resumes writing his speech after his journey, readers make a significant discovery: rather than preparing a usual presidential address, Zizi has decided “to tell a story” (p. 80)—the story of his literal and, most importantly, self-reflective journey, which is basically the book readers are currently reading. The novel’s closing sentence, in fact, reads as follows: “my mind is fixed on the first line of the manifesto you have just read: There are people at my door” (p. 146), which is also the opening line of the novel. Evoking to a certain extent the perpetrator’s act of confessing performed at the TRC’s public hearings, Zizi’s political manifesto—or, from a reader’s perspective, Mgqolozana’s novel—becomes the student’s written confession of the violence he perpetrated against his girlfriend. Simultaneously, Un-importance also calls to mind Disgrace, as in both instances the authors foreground the perpetrator’s perspective in their accounts of violence against women. However, while Coetzee chooses a third-person narrator who adopts Lurie’s viewpoint, and, at the same time, inserts some linguistic clues to warn readers against fully believing Lurie’s interpretation of his sexual violations, Mgqolozana’s use of a first-person narrative complicates things for readers. The use of the first person, in fact, tends to facilitate a self-identification between the reader

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and Zizi the narrator, and, on the surface, it prompts the former to believe Zizi’s perspective almost unquestioningly. To avoid this uncomfortable sympathy with the perpetrator’s side, however, Mgqolozana presents a narrator who is overly critical and, sometimes, excessively offensive towards Pamodi, especially in the first part of the novel, a strategy that, I suggest, may be interpreted as the author’s narrative attempt to expose Zizi’s biased perspective, thus inviting readers to take the latter’s words more cautiously. Zizi shows the same lack of self-­ knowledge as Lurie with respect to his behaviour, especially towards women, and this makes his role as narrator potentially unreliable. The first pages of the novel provide a useful example: before Pamodi’s disappearance and before Zizi’s journey, the couple squabble over Pamodi’s being away all day and not letting Zizi know her whereabouts. Zizi does not believe Pamodi’s explanation that she attended a friend’s poetry performance and the altercation becomes a little rough, especially when Zizi holds Pamodi by the arm to prevent her from ending the discussion and leaving his room. The description of Pamodi that emerges from Zizi’s narrative is very unpleasant; some examples follow: she rolled her eyes upwards like she was a dying cow. She was also chewing her gum, and now she seemed to be doing so even more aggressively—again like a cow. (p. 3) For a few seconds I’d contemplated the idea of letting her go, recomposing myself, getting myself another girlfriend—perhaps someone prettier, sharper, more respectful, with a less complicated background, someone with no ulcerations in her alimentary canal, a reasonably straight jawline, a better-­ maintained set of hair extensions, someone who knows the purpose of attending university, has read a little bit of Biko, does not think all men must go to the gym […]; in short, anyone but Pamodi—anyone with a sizeable combination of the things Pamodi lacks. (p. 4)

The unjustified aggressiveness that emerges from Zizi’s harsh comments inevitably invites readers to ask to what extent they can trust his side of the story when, for instance, he suggests that he “was only holding her by the elbow, and not roughly either, maybe just a little awkwardly” and that Pamodi, being “the authority on performing hurt” (p. 4), exaggerates her pain. Once again evoking Coetzee’s narrative strategies adopted in Disgrace, it is also important to remember that we only have access to the perpetrator’s perspective, while Pamodi’s (Melanie’s in Disgrace) remains

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out of reach and, as such, we cannot claim to have a complete, truthful picture of the event—this is a point I shall return to later. More explicit is the second episode of intimate partner violence that occurs three weeks prior to the time of the narration, presented as a flash-­ back later in the novel during Zizi’s wanderings across campus. A drunken friend of Pamodi, Oza, reveals that Pamodi is still in contact with her ex-­ boyfriend Likhaya (p. 33). Oza also implies that Pamodi is keeping a big secret about an event that occurred the previous year. Once alone, the couple address Pamodi’s secret and she finally tells Zizi about the sexual violence that she suffered from Likhaya in the past: after discovering the truth about her biological mother, a very distressed Pamodi had sought comfort in her then boyfriend Likhaya, but, rather than finding sympathy and a considerate listener, Pamodi was subjected to an extreme act of violence. First, Likhaya tried to force himself upon her; second, prevented from performing by his drunken state, the young man resorted to brutal violence: he tied Pamodi’s hands to the tow bar of his car and dragged her through the street, as the girl was supposed to keep up with the moving car. Notably, this episode of violence is not narrated in direct speech; it is Zizi who reports Pamodi’s story. It is useful to remember that Zizi is writing this manifesto/confession after having embarked on his self-reflective journey in search of Pamodi, a journey that helped him to reflect on his past behaviour and, as I discuss later, to re-think the act of violence performed against Pamodi. The choice not to use Pamodi’s direct words might be interpreted, albeit retrospectively, as a form of respect towards her pain and her “ownership” of the story. Zizi’s first reaction to Pamodi’s story of suffering, however, is unsympathetic and shows the young man’s inability to comprehend the girl’s pain and give her his full support: “It was a terrible crime. It was a terrible story. She was so young and already she had gone through life’s most horrifying trials. But how could she lie to me like this!” (p. 39). Not only does he reinscribe Pamodi’s painful story in order to express his own annoyance at what he identifies as Pamodi’s lies, but when the girl calls him out for his unsympathetic ear and for trying to impress her friend Oza—“you left me crying, alone. I needed you. But you went with [Oza] […] she knows her way out. But you went with her. And you don’t see anything wrong with it” (p. 40)—Zizi resorts to violence and slaps Pamodi (p. 40). As he explains later in the novel:

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Learning that Pamodi’s ex—a man who had violated her and tied her to the back of a car and dragged her guts on the ground—was still in her life, humiliated me. But to be accused of making moves on Oza sunk a thorn into my frog’s delicate skin. (pp. 40–41)

This passage crystallises Zizi’s one-sided version of the event: he is more concerned with the impact of Pamodi’s story on his honour than with Pamodi’s suffering. Consistent with this attitude, it is Zizi’s preoccupation with the potential damage that the revelation of his actions could cause, did Pamodi decide to go to “the Bellville police station to have [him] arrested, or worse, [to cry] in a friend’s room and [spill] her guts about what she’d call [his] ‘history of domestic violence’” (p. 23), that leads him to undertake his search for the girl. Zizi is, in fact, extremely worried that his public image could be completely tarnished by Pamodi’s charges, and, although he expresses some sort of regret for his deed (p. 41), he does not sound very convincing, as his major concerns remain his reputation and his victory in the upcoming SRC election: There is no better time to pull a campus politician down than when he or she is running for SRC office. And not just any time or position, but on eve of the said politician’s appearance to the masses as President-elect to make the declaration of his intent. [Pamodi] is out there tonight, I thought, undoing my presidential stature, which was beginning to crystallise in the minds of the masses. (p. 41)

Structured as a stream-of-consciousness narration, Zizi continuously jumps forward and backward in time, so that his memories and reflections on past events do not follow a chronological order, but are triggered by his random encounters with people or his visits to different places in his search of Pamodi. Zizi’s visit to the Basil February building is particularly interesting, as it allows the author to draw attention to gender harassment and rape occurring on campus, thus seconding Coetzee’s preoccupations in Disgrace, which, as we have seen, are exemplified by Lurie’s rape of his student Melanie (see L.  V. Graham 2003, p.  438). The Basil February building is described as being “famous for the art of erotics” (p. 56); it is a place where Congress, a sort of chauffeur to the outgoing SRC, creates sex opportunities for comrades, including Zizi’s political organisation:

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[Congress] takes comrades to a spot where they will pick up a bunch of— we’re told, but we’re doubtful—willing schoolgirls, gives them booze, takes them to the beach, feeds them, and at the end of the day, they’re brought to Basil February. Those who don’t end up in a comrade’s room, sleep with Congress, or rock up at a random student’s room crying, “My friends left me; I don’t know where I am. Bahambe naba, bhuti”. (p. 56)

The author returns to the theme of the lack of safety for women on campus later in the text, when Zizi goes to the Barn, another stop in his wanderings, and saves his drunk female friend and deputy, Amaze, from being taken advantage of by a group of ex-comrades hanging out at the pub. The reason behind Zizi’s chivalrous gesture, however, seems to go beyond his concern for his friend’s welfare, as Zizi makes clear that Amaze “wasn’t going to be their victim on my watch. She was my responsibility, and it was a presidential thing to do” (p.  71), especially because she was going to “get [Zizi and his organisation] the much-needed Coloured vote” (p. 73). Zizi’s comments insinuate that political strategy is at the origin of his intervention, as Amaze is a key figure in his campaign: “She is the perfect draw card for an organisation that is predominantly Xhosa in a largely still Coloured university, and in a student political arena that is overwhelmingly male-dominated, in a campus and world of female majorities” (p. 73). While drawing attention to women’s safety on campus, the author also suggests that racial reconciliation is still a work in progress in the new South Africa and, as my subsequent analysis of Period Pain will show, it is particularly challenged by a new form of racism, xenophobia. A major turning point in Zizi’s personal journey is when, resigned to not finding Pamodi, he returns to his accommodation to work on his political address, only to be interrupted by a knocking on the door, which brings us back to the novel’s start. From this point onwards, the narrative is more focused on the impacts of Zizi’s journey on the present, with flashbacks becoming ever rarer. While Zizi expects that the police have arrived to arrest him, he is utterly surprised—and terrified—to find a “mob” of girls, Pamodi’s friends, led by Oza, who have come to claim Pamodi’s phone (pp. 85–87). It is clear that, while Zizi was searching for his girlfriend, Pamodi had found refuge and comfort in her friends’ support and that they are now aware of “the broken side” of Zizi (p. 87). This confrontation between Zizi and Pamodi’s enraged friends functions as a catalyst for Zizi’s admission of culpability. It is after registering the disappointment in Sqojiji’s eyes, an old acquaintance of Zizi among the

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group of girls, that he takes responsibility for beating Pamodi: “[i]t is unbearable to think that as I sit here, writing this speech, one of the people who trusted me the most is thinking of me as a violent, remorseless man” (p. 108). Zizi finally acknowledges that: I have failed to be in private what I lead the masses to believe I am in public. I have lost integrity. No, I didn’t lose it. I never had it. You can’t lose what you didn’t have. […] No matter how I look at it, I chose to react the way I did. There were eighty-three other ways in which I could have decided to react, and I chose to slap her, and watched the shock in her face. […] So it must be that I lack integrity. (p. 108)

Zizi distinguishes between private and public images, between who you are in the private sphere and who you are in the public domain, thus implying that one person could potentially be more or less true according to the context. This reflection is particularly relevant to the South African TRC’s public hearings and the public eye in which perpetrators were supposed to make sincere confessions of their politically motivated crimes as the bargaining end of the amnesty deal. Zizi’s epiphanic realisation of his lack of integrity sets off another flashback, the last one in the narrative, which refers back to an episode of his adolescence, when he “first questioned [his] integrity [while] growing up in the homeland” (p.108). It is his aunt Rita’s wedding and, when the priest claims that the bride has never been touched before, Zizi lacks the courage to come forward and tell what he knows to be the truth, namely, that his aunt is not a maid. This episode is significant on two different levels. First, it draws attention to another episode of gender violence: the victim is the eleven-year-old Zizi who was abused by his aunt Rita (pp.  110–111). While statistics show that women are the ones most affected, Mgqolozana reminds readers that gender violence affects different genders (see Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017). Second, the recollection of this episode prompts Zizi to confess his acts of violence to the masses, as “they should know what they are choosing when they vote next week” (p. 115). Zizi cannot go back to his aunt’s wedding, “stand up, remain standing, proceed to the priests and whisper the truth to them” (p. 114), he cannot change the past, but: I have decided I am not going to lock myself into false existence any further than I already have. If I have never had integrity, this is the time to form

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some. If I am to choose the image of my legacy, it will be of a leader with personal integrity. […] I will give the masses a chance to decide whether or not to place their confidence in someone who has committed crimes such as I have committed on Pamodi. (pp. 114–115)

In his journey towards accountability and self-discovery, Zizi also becomes aware that he is living an exaggerated life (p. 126), and, in particular, that being an important person is not as satisfactory as he used to believe: The problem with being important is that you are not responsible for it. […] Everything you do, no matter how small or private, is illuminated. Your actions and non-actions are put on a pedestal. For you, there is only one context—importance—and everything has to fit into that equation. […] At some point, you are bound to make a judgement call that is seen as wrong, that is seen as a betrayal of your importance—you should have known, they’ll say […] So you live in perpetual awareness of being watched, and you develop a fear of being seen to make mistakes. To be important is an awful existence. (p. 125)

Zizi now rejects the status of importance that he acquired with his political activities and wishes to go back home to “be good and unimportant” (p.  126), because “[m]eaning is embedded in the most unimportant things. We are here to find meaning, and that means we have to exert ourselves in unimportance” (p. 120). If being unimportant equals being good, we must infer that the equation must also be valid for their opposites—that is, being important equals being bad. Through the example of Zizi, the author suggests an uneasy association between politics, public image, the status of importance and wickedness (as the contrary of being good), which must be read alongside Zizi’s earlier criticism of the new South African government: “that was in the first decade of freedom, when everything was new and no one thought seriously about anything the new leaders said, and before those leaders betrayed students in indefensible ways” (p. 28). Zizi goes on to say that “the memories of the past regime and the present betrayal are too harsh and too fresh in [the masses’] minds to be ignored. The masses are searching for redemption. Voters are” (p. 28). If, earlier in the novel, Zizi intended to distinguish himself from the new leaders by emerging as a sort of redeemer, he now realises that he cannot play that role anymore because of his crimes and that the only way to be good again is to become unimportant.

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Evoking the atmosphere of the TRC’s public hearings, Zizi delivers his presidential speech/ confession of his wrongdoings in front of the masses, the Vice-Chancellor and a group of commissioners. Following the speech, Zizi returns to his accommodation “to add this last part and tidy up the just-read manifesto” (p.  144). As a sort of afterthought, Zizi places emphasis on the act of truth-telling rather than on the consequences: “I don’t matter (although before last night I did): it is what I have done that does” (p. 144). Zizi and the reader do not know the implications of his “act of defiance” (p. 144), as he defines it in his confession, and his future remains mostly uncertain. In withholding Pamodi’s response to Zizi’s confession—Zizi is not even sure that she was among the audience listening to his speech—the author purposefully leaves readers to wonder whether Pamodi will forgive him or not, whether Zizi will be expelled and/or arrested for his crimes, whether his confession will lead him to obtain “absolution” from the masses and win the SCR elections, or whether reconciliation will ultimately take place. In a similar fashion to Magona’s Mother to Mother, Un-importance’s open ending seems to invite readers both to be cautious and to call into question the equation of truth with reconciliation. Mgqolozana’s warning must then be read against the TRC’s motto “truth: the road to reconciliation”, especially within the context of the amnesty hearings, during which perpetrators were expected to make truthful confessions. Mgqolozana’s concerns with the actual contribution of truth-telling to reconciliation have a strong resonance with the data collected through an eight-year project carried out by the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the CSVR, which started in 1998 while the TRC was completing the initial five volumes of its report, and which studied the impact of the TRC on South Africa. The result of this comprehensive study is the volume Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? One chapter is particularly enlightening as it sheds light on the perspectives of survivors who testified in the TRC’s amnesty hearings (Phakathi and van der Merwe 2008, p. 119).12 Here Phakathi and van der Merwe highlight how most of the interviewees believed that the full truth had not yet been revealed, especially in connection with information about missing relatives or the whereabouts of the remains of those who were deceased. They go on to assert that the majority of the interviewees expressed the view that amnesty applicants did not show remorse or genuinely ask for forgiveness, thus jeopardising the prospect for real reconciliation (ibid., pp. 124–132).

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Referring back to Zizi’s previous distinction between public and private selves, Mgqolozana also draws attention to the possibility for perpetrators (and for people in general) to pretend and be dishonest in a public context. Not only does truth-telling not necessarily lead towards reconciliation, but the very act of telling the truth cannot be always fulfilled. Without making explicit reference to the South African TRC, Un-importance shows how the TRC’s related issues of truth-telling, accountability and reconciliation, especially gender reconciliation, are still urgent and unresolved issues in contemporary South Africa. The next section focuses on analysis of Period Pain, a novel that was published a couple of years later than Un-importance but which continues to engage with the endemic phenomenon of violence against women by exploring the victim’s side of the story, as well as the interrelations between gender and a new form of racism that affects contemporary South Africa.

4.4   Painful Intersections Between Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain Carrying on the introspective project initiated by Mgqolozana in Un-importance, Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain is a raw, uncompromising and intensely emotional account of a young woman’s struggle to find her own place in contemporary South Africa, before and in the aftermath of tragedy. In her journal, Masechaba, the protagonist and narrator, interweaves her personal story with the daily injustices she faces as a doctor in a government hospital. As analysis of the novel will show, Matlwa uses Masechaba’s story to tear apart the notion of South Africa as a “rainbow” nation and to take readers into the heart of the country’s socio-political problems, navigating episodes of xenophobia, the so-called corrective rape and a failing healthcare system. The novel is divided into four main parts, each presenting collections of journal entries that chronicle Masechaba’s story. Each group of journal entries is introduced by Bible passages, thus establishing a direct connection between a particular passage of scripture and Masechaba’s story. “Part One” consists of seven collections of journal entries, which are introduced by as many quotations from the Bible and explore different aspects of Masechaba’s life, past and present. The following three sections only have one collection each and this has the effect of quickening the pace of the narrative.

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“Part One” introduces readers to Masechaba’s health problem of dysfunctional uterine bleeding, a problem that she perceives as a punishment from God and that has crippled and controlled every aspect of her life, especially the years of her adolescence: “I became a loner. Not because I wanted to be alone. But because it was easier for everyone that way” ([2016] 2017, p.  7). Consistent with the whole narrative structure, Masechaba’s problem with severe bleeding is anticipated by a specific passage from the Bible, Mark 5:25–34: And a certain woman, which had an issue of blood, twelve years, and had suffered many things of many physicians, and spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse, when she heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and touched His garment. (p. 6)

Like the woman in the biblical passage, Masechaba undergoes many treatments in search of a cure for her faulty uterus: “in and out of hospital [she] went, transfusion after transfusion, pill after pill, patch after patch, injection after injection” (p.  11). Although endometrial ablation is able to grant her some reprieve, Masechaba believes that “the beast was only sleeping, and could wake at any moment” (p. 12). She is convinced that a hysterectomy represents the only solution to her problem, and this conviction comes in the form of a God-sent message: So on job-shadow day, when I saw […] a neurosurgeon climb onto the operating table and let his colleague release the pinched nerve from his back that had been troubling him all morning, I knew immediately that it was a message from God, and that it was in this very manner that I would get the abhorrent organ cut out of me and destroyed, once and for all. (pp. 12–13)

At that very moment, Masechaba decides that she will embark on a medical career in the hope that she can convince her future colleagues to remove her womb to stop her unbearable bleeding. The novel’s title, Period Pain, clearly refers to Masechaba’s bleeding condition and, as the following discussion will show, Masechaba’s menstrual pain is a recurring metaphor for the bleeding state of South Africa, still plagued by violence and racial discrimination. “Part One” explores different aspects of Masechaba’s life in an unchronological order, including her special relationship with her brother Tshiamo and the extreme conditions in which she works at the hospital.

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For example, we soon learn that Tshiamo, consumed by his own demons, committed suicide two years before the time of the narration, leaving Masechaba heartbroken to such an extent that she has been sending emails to the dead Tshiamo in order to feel close to him again. Masechaba is completely aware that her brother is dead and does not expect him to respond to her emails, but she claims the right “to mourn whichever way [she] saw fit” (p. 16): I know Tshiamo’s dead, thank you very much. Thank you for being so concerned that I’m unaware of the worst thing that’s ever happened in my life. Thank you, you’re all so terribly kind. But can I choose to forget for just a moment? […] And, if it’s no inconvenience to you, can I please continue sending emails to my dead brother who was my only friend, the only person who cared to see me, who cared to give me of his time and interest and humour? Can I pretend he will be back from his art workshop at 6pm with a smile and an empty lunch bag in his hand? Is that ok with you, world? (pp. 16–17)

The world, however, does not let her mourn her brother in the way she prefers: when her mother and friends learn about the emails and start talking about Masechaba practising witchcraft, she has no choice but “to stop sending emails to Tshiamo and to instead write everything in this stupid journal that is read by no one but God” (p. 18). The journal thus becomes an instrument for coping with her pain, the pain of losing Tshiamo, but also the pain that she witnesses every day at the hospital. Her journal also becomes a place in which she can share things “you never say. You write them in your journal but tell no one” (p. 61). Masechaba appears to lament the lack of a sympathetic ear in a way that recalls Lydia’s situation in Bitter Fruit, where neither Lydia’s husband Silas nor Lydia’s family are able to provide a setting in which she feels she can safely share her pain. Both women thus resort to verbal silence and choose the private space of their journals as a place in which to pour their feelings out. Lydia also expresses her scepticism regarding Christian concepts of confession and forgiveness, which, as I have argued, represents an indirect critique of the TRC’s Christian-based work. In a similar fashion, despite acknowledging God as the only recipient of her journal-letter(s), Masechaba is often led to question God’s motives and teachings throughout the novel, especially when a new tragedy strikes her, as happens between “Part Two” and “Part Three”.

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Momentarily leaving aside Masechaba’s complicated relationship with God, the novel also offers a critique of South Africa’s healthcare system through Masechaba’s medical profession: Patients die all the time. Nobody expects you to save all of them all the time. We do what we can. And with our crumbling health system, our staff shortages, our social challenges, well, what can people really expect? We do what we can. This is the mantra I sing to myself, day and night, night and day. I sing it to others, they sing it to me. (p. 22)

Masechaba feels completely overwhelmed by all the suffering, the helplessness, the fear and the contempt that fill a doctor’s life in South Africa (p. 25). In particular, she exposes the flaws of the health system by underlining the poor conditions in which “hundreds of people [are] crammed into a ward designed for a couple of dozen” and “a sea of dying arms and mangled bodies [are] glued to mangled beds” (p. 25). She is totally unprepared by her training for the realities of working in an understaffed, under-­ resourced and overcrowded hospital, and she soon becomes disillusioned with these extreme working conditions to such a point that, when her patients who are in deep pain die, she feels relief (p. 30). Masechaba also complains to her mother that “many horrific things our people overcome daily […] go undocumented. I tell her that somebody must list them, all the bad things that are happening to them, to me, to us. Somebody needs to write them down” (p. 24). Masechaba’s comments about all the everyday suffering that she witnesses at the hospital, but that goes undocumented, cannot but be read as a critique of the TRC’s work, the main goal of which was indeed to record, to document people’s suffering as a fundamental component of the new government’s strategic plan of promoting reconciliation among all South Africans. Through Masechaba’s eye-­ witnessing, the author indirectly engages in dialogue with the TRC’s proceedings by placing emphasis on the need to record and document everyday examples of pain that occur at the hospital, which, otherwise, would go unnoticed. This line of criticism aligns Matlwa with Sindiwe Magona’s and Njabulo Ndebele’s explorations of ordinary trauma, which aimed to counteract the TRC’s strict focus on extraordinary, bodily violations of human rights. However, while Magona and Ndebele reflect on the impact of apartheid policies on the African family and, in particular, on women’s lives, Matlwa  extends her critique to the institutional level by looking at the

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health system. It is also important to highlight that Period Pain (2016) is a much more recent novel than Mother to Mother (1998) and The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003, although Ndebele published a revised edition of The Cry in 2013); in light of this, Masechaba’s portrayal of South Africa’s flawed health system might be interpreted as the author’s disenchantment with the rainbow nation image of the new South Africa. Most importantly, it also invites readers to reflect on the poor strategies adopted to address everyday problems which still afflict black South Africans almost twenty years after the end of the TRC’s mandate and which inevitably contribute to undermining the TRC’s so widely promoted reconciliation project. “Part One” also introduces the novel’s preoccupation with the urgent issue of xenophobia, a new form of racism that affects members of the “black minority” who have migrated to the new South Africa from other African countries (see Adjai and Lazaridis 2013). Masechaba first encounters examples of racial discrimination through her friendship with Nyasha, a confident, outspoken Zimbabwean doctor, who is treated poorly by her colleagues because she is a “foreigner”. Nyasha is a medical officer in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department, awaiting a specialist training post, although, as Masechaba points out, “it was well known in the hospital that if it wasn’t for her foreign nationality, she would already be a consultant obstetrician-gynaecologist, because she was a surgeon extraordinaire” (p.  34). Racial discrimination also affects the hospital patients: “the nursing sisters there are mean and cruel, especially to the foreign patients. They call them dirty” (p. 43). Masechaba is cognisant of the increasing sentiment of racial hatred towards immigrants pervading her country—“I feel bad about how our country treats them. We should know better, what with apartheid and all” (p.  36)—, and, most significantly, that this is fast becoming “the very thing [South Africans] fought so long and hard to destroy” (p. 44). And yet, Masechaba cannot find the courage to stand against it and fight for what she thinks is right, because she is “a coward. If this were apartheid, I’d be one of those quiet white people who just stood by and watched it happen. (p. 44). Expressions of racial discrimination are not exclusively directed at immigrants, however; sentiments of distrust and prejudice persist between blacks and whites. For example, Masechaba’s friend and colleague Nyasha often expresses her hatred for white people, who are to blame for everything (p. 46); she also describes black South Africans’ behaviour towards white people as “too nice”, “too accommodating”, “too soft”, weak and pathetic: “[African people] need to stop bending over backwards,

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breaking our backs to make [white people] feel comfortable, welcome, safe. Put a white man in charge and he’ll only serve his own interests” (p. 46). Surrounded by so much racial hatred and suffering, in particular her patients’ pain that she cannot stop, Masechaba wonders why South Africa is still such a broken place: Why did You let it get so bad? Why don’t You do something about it? I don’t want to be a part of it, of this. I hate it here. I can’t be happy. You can’t ask me to be happy in this. One has to be crazy to be happy in this. I’m only a human being, I’m not a god. I’m not Jesus. I’m not You. Why do You ask so much of me? (p. 31)

Invoking God—that “you” with a capital letter—Masechaba asks Him why He has done nothing to help her country heal. This passage testifies to Masechaba’s faith in God, but, on the other hand, it also shows Masechaba’s contrasting feelings towards God, who is often perceived as absent and uncaring, especially as the narrative progresses and Masechaba is strained by tough challenges. In “Part One”, Matlwa also establishes a deep connection between Masechaba’s menstrual problems and the new racial hatred towards immigrants which is “bleeding” the new South Africa dry. In one of her journal entries, Masechaba narrates how one morning she had to leave the operating theatre because of her severe menstrual cramps; her pain was so intense that she was afraid that she would fall over and contaminate the entire operating theatre. Indeed, although her menstrual flow had considerably reduced after undergoing endometrial ablation, “the monthly cramps had persisted like clockwork, maybe as a reminder that the beast is not dead, only sleeping” (p. 60). Nyasha comes to her rescue by offering Masechaba two tablets and her bottled water. Witnessing this scene, Sister Dlamini, one of the nurses, exclaims: “Sies doctor! […] O na le sebete ne? Batho bag a se batho. You can get sick drinking from their bottles” (p. 60). Completely insensitive to Nyasha’s feelings, Sister Dlamini gives voice to her profound prejudice against foreigners, who, she believes, are potential carriers of diseases. Trying to downplay the situation, Nyasha shrugs and observes that “It’s just a period South Africa’s in […] Growing pains”; “Like period pain”, Masechaba jokes (p. 60, emphasis added). The author thus compares Masechaba’s menstrual pain, her period pain (which is also the novel’s title), to the xenophobia that pervades contemporary South Africa. This comparison invites two possible interpretations: on the one hand, it

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refers to the typical length of time of menstruation and, as such, it could have a positive connotation, suggesting that xenophobic violence is temporary; on the other, it also suggests that xenophobia, or racial hatred in general, will be as periodic a phenomenon as women’s monthly periods, affecting South Africa in an endless cycle. Interestingly, neither one nor the other possibility is confirmed, leaving the reader with ambiguity— which also mirrors the author’s choice of an open-ended narrative, as I discuss later. As already anticipated, “Part Two” consists of only one collection of journal entries and is introduced by a short verse from Jeremiah: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (p. 67). The image of a deceitful and wicked heart finds its correspondence in Masechaba’s depiction of a significantly worse social situation, where xenophobic violence is spreading like wildfire (p. 70) and things are spiralling out of control (p. 74). This part of the novel opens with the TV news announcing that “a mob of 20 South African men set a street of shops belonging to a community of Somalians in Sechaba township alight” and that “three young Somalian girls were stoned to death, and many families had to flee their homes” (p. 68). Masechaba is obviously shocked by the growing violence and tries to distance herself from it by asserting that “those murderers didn’t represent the ordinary South African. They were criminals, mobsters, lowlifes” (pp.  68–69). On second thoughts, however, she admits that even her mother is not welcoming towards foreigners: “she frowns every time I mention Nyasha and refuses to try the food she’s cooked. Ma—church-going, God-fearing, people-loving Ma” (pp. 68–69). These episodes of xenophobic violence also start to eat away at Masechaba’s friendship with Nyasha; the latter, for example, accuses Masechaba of having purposefully neglected a foreign patient, who had sustained third-degree burns to 80% of his body: “You don’t care, do you? He’s just another foreigner to you, another kwere-kwere! […] You were the only chance he had, and instead you chose to go back to bed. You think you’re different, Masechaba, but you’re all the same” (pp. 72–73). Until now Masechaba has shown her indignation at manifestations of racial hatred, but she has not taken concrete action to try to stop it. Her fight with Nyasha, however, acts as a catalyst and triggers an unpredictable chain of events that changes the course of Masechaba’s life. In the first place, Masechaba decides to draw up and distribute a petition to support “foreigners” and show the world that “this isn’t who we are, and that

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those thugs out there going around killing foreigners don’t represent the majority of us. Maybe this petition will bring this madness to an end” (p. 75). The reader is, however, left with doubts as to the real motives behind Masechaba’s initiative to try to stop the violence: “I want to surprise [Nyasha]. Then she will see just how much I love her, just how different I am, just how much I care” (p. 75). This passage casts doubts over whether Masechaba’s decision to stand up to xenophobic violence is motivated by a selfless feeling of indignation or by her desire to prove to Nyasha that she is different; either way, Masechaba’s petition earns her much praise and publicity in the press, and the young woman feels that she is finally “at the forefront of something good” (p. 76). At the same time, she is not spared an equal amount of criticism from her colleagues and nurses; for example, Sister Palesa warns Masechaba that there is a risk that she might “irritate people and get [herself] hurt” if she does not stop this “nonsensical” petition (p. 77). Nyasha also advises her to stop and “leave it to the real activists” (p. 77), but Masechaba believes that she has finally found something worth fighting for, and “Part Two” ends by describing the young woman as having no intentions of stopping her fight against xenophobia. By contrast, “Part Three” presents a radical change of mood, which is partially introduced by the following passage from Jeremiah: I say to myself, I will not mention His name, I will speak in His name no more. But then, it becomes like a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it. (p. 81)

Here a tortured Jeremiah is fighting an internal battle against God, a battle that he cannot win because his faith is much stronger and the prophet realises that he does not have any choice but to surrender to God and speak in His name. This passage forewarns readers of Masechaba’s own painful journey towards healing and towards a renewed belief in God, but not before going through stages of rage, desperation and depression. A grief-stricken Masechaba opens this section by asking God why He did not intervene but let a group of men rape her: Where were You when it happened? Did You watch? Did You cringe? Did You cry? Did You know all day? […] You knew this lay on my horizon and You said and did nothing? And if You cared, because You claim You do, did You watch? All of it? From beginning to end? With eyes wide open? Was

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there no knot for me in Your stomach, no lump in Your throat? Me, Your child? You watched them rape me and didn’t blink, didn’t even blink. You, God, watched them tear me apart, divide me among themselves, and You stood and stared. […] Now, after the event, You want to console me? That’s very nice. That’s very, very nice. Go away! (pp. 82–83)

Although little happens in terms of plot—indeed, the rape occurs “off-­ stage”, between “Part Two” and “Part Three”—this section might be considered the core of Period Pain, exploring Masechaba’s excruciating pain in the aftermath of rape and the emotional battle raging inside her. She oscillates between feelings of devotion and rage towards God, one moment asking Him to leave her alone, and the other begging Him to comfort her—“Lord, please give me a hug. If You’re there, please give me a hug” (p. 84). Despite accusing God of never responding to her prayers, or answering her heart-wrenching questions (p. 86), Masechaba does not seem to be able to refrain from invoking God’s help: “Lord, there’s so much pain in my heart. If only You would hold it for me, even for just a little while, so my weary soul might rest and my tired body recover” (p. 116). Her pain is not only emotional, but also physical, as the rape seems to have caused her bleeding to start over again (p. 90): It’s been a while since I bled like this […] It’s been years since I’ve felt such rage for the dysfunctional flesh within my pelvis, years since I’ve wanted to stick my fist all the way up my vagina and yank the demon out. (p. 91).

Caught in a downward spiral, Masechaba comes to wish she could disappear (p. 85), developing thoughts of suicide (pp. 86, 89); her mind also starts approaching the edge of insanity, as she hears voices inside her own head, what she calls her “background whispers” (pp. 96, 98–99). Most notably, Masechaba confides in her journal that “there is no vocabulary for the pain [she] feels”, that she does not know how to construct a sentence “that explains that they made [her] into a shell” of herself (p.  102). Reminding readers of other female characters who have gone through a similar type of trauma, such as Lydia in Bitter Fruit and Lucy in Disgrace, Masechaba’s pain cannot be articulated in words, because the language at her disposal is unable to communicate the “turmoil” she has inside (p. 102). Pain becomes “unnamed”, or, perhaps, it would be better to say “unnameable”: “How do I explain […] that it’s more than my

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‘dignity’ they stole, it’s more than a violation they subjected me to? That it would have been better to die than to be spooned out and left that way?” (p. 102). Although the TRC is not mentioned explicitly, Masechaba’s inability to express her pain in words invites readers to challenge the reconciliation project carried out by the South African Commission, and, in particular, its core assumption according to which truth-telling—or, to put it in other words, granting victims the possibility of sharing their painful stories—can facilitate healing and forgiveness, especially within the context of women’s suffering (see Chap. 2). If pain cannot be articulated, can someone expect to heal? How can forgiveness even start to take place if someone is unable to describe or express the extent of their pain? Masechaba, in fact, utterly rejects the prospect of forgiveness when she tells Father Joshua what had happened—and not how she feels, it is important to underline here. Masechaba refuses to comply with the priest’s invitation to forgive her rapists and does not say Amen at the end of the prayer (p. 105). The young woman does not even want God to forgive them: “They knew exactly what they were doing. If I die and end up in heaven, I don’t want to have to see them there, I don’t want to have to mingle with them” (p. 105). Another subtle critique of the TRC’s work can be found in relation to its interpretation and translation service and to the ways in which its work produced many incorrect “retellings” of the same story of suffering (see Chap. 3). When Masechaba goes to the police station to view her initial statement, for instance, she notices that “they’d written it all wrong”, leaving out details that were important to her, such as the fact that her attackers said “Where are your kwere-kwere friends now?” and not merely “Where are your friends now?” (p. 124). Masechaba feels that her initial statement has been “reinterpreted” (p. 124), but she does not correct the officer, who smelled of drink (p. 125), clearly signalling her mistrust in the possibility of having her story of suffering correctly understood. Masechaba’s caveat about what her assailants said to her during the rape— “Where are your kwere-kwere friends now?”—is significant, as it enlightens readers as to the reasons behind the men’s attack and once again exposes the deep intertwinement between race and gender that lingers in contemporary South Africa. While reminiscent of the racial implications of Lucy’s gang rape portrayed in Disgrace—where Lucy is a young white Afrikaner woman raped by a group of black men in the aftermath of the democratic elections—the enactment of Masechaba’s rape draws our attention from racial discrimination between blacks and whites to sentiments of

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xenophobia that have started to plague the country in the post-apartheid era. Masechaba’s violence is, in fact, defined as “corrective rape” by her psychotherapist Dr Phakama; according to this perspective, rape becomes a tool: to correct what their society deems abhorrent behaviour. [Dr Phakama] says in our society many people don’t like foreigners, and the men who raped me might have seen my behaviour as threatening societal norms, and felt their duty to correct me. She said this has been seen in the gay and lesbian community, but she hadn’t seen it reported in the context of xenophobic violence. (p. 112)

Reliving the violence that she endured, Masechaba recalls the men saying that she was a “disappointment”, “running around with kwere-kwere, the very kwere-kwere that were ruining [South Africa], stealing our jobs, using up our grants”, and that, for this reason, Masechaba needed “to be taught a lesson, so others would see that the community didn’t hesitate to discipline traitors” (p.  106). Through Masechaba’s dreadful experience, Matlwa shows how gender violence is still used to convey racial hatred in contemporary South Africa, but this time violence is not directed towards a white person like Lucy in Disgrace, nor is it enacted by a white person against a black or coloured South African person like Lydia in Bitter Fruit. In Period Pain, gender violence is perpetrated by black South African men against a young black South African woman, who was trying to support black people originating from other African countries who had gone to South Africa to find a better life. At some point, Masechaba realises that she can no longer hide in her house and that she has “to get up and move past this. It’s done. There’s no point kneading it any further” (p. 134); therefore, she decides to overcome her fears and go back to work at the hospital, as we see in the final section of the novel, “Part Four”. Her journey back to normality is, however, complicated by the unexpected discovery of her pregnancy. Enclosed in her own pain, the possibility of pregnancy had never crossed her mind, especially because of all the procedures she had endured to try to calm her “raging uterus” (p. 138). The initial feelings of shock and disbelief, and other mixed feelings at discovering that a little baby, conceived through sexual assault, was “living, growing, thriving in the darkness” (p.  138) soon give way to a new feeling of hope: her little baby girl looks “like a blank page, like a fresh start. My fresh start” (p. 141). In a similar fashion

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to Disgrace and The House Gun, the child thus becomes a symbol of hope and strength, a powerful instrument of healing. It is certainly no coincidence that Masechaba names her little girl Mpho, her “gift”, because, despite coming from so much darkness, Mpho gifts Masechaba with love and a new life. Mpho is described as “those night-­time flowers that only bloom when the sun is long forgotten, like the evening primrose with all its healing powers” (p.  149). As evidence of Mpho’s healing powers, Masechaba admits that she does not “even write in this journal as much as I used to. I don’t need to, I suppose. For once in my life, my heart is still” (p. 149). The last journal entry of the novel describes Masechaba’s apprehension about having to take Mpho to get her immunisation injections. The pain the little girl will suffer is completely different from Masechaba’s period pain or the pain of being violated; this pain is “necessary” as it will “save [Mpho], protect her, spare her from suffering in the future” (p. 149). The novel thus seems to conclude with a tone of hope and a renewed faith in God, as anticipated in the passage from the scripture introducing “Part Four”: “You are my God; apart from You I have no good thing” (p. 137). It is important to highlight that the 2016 African edition is titled Period Pain—the one title I have been making reference to in my analysis—while the 2017 English edition is titled Evening Primrose: two titles that are completely different and yet deeply interconnected. It is widely known that, among its healing powers, evening primrose oil can be used to treat premenstrual symptoms in a highly effective way. The two titles thus stand at opposite poles of the same spectrum: on the one hand, we have women’s period pain, which, as we have seen, Matlwa uses as a metaphor for South Africa’s societal pains; on the other, we have the healing power of the plant evening primrose. Given their opposite meanings, we can infer that each title bestows the novel’s ending with different connotations: Period Pain seems to suggest that Masechaba’s pain as well as South Africa’s will be cyclic, like menstruation, and that it will take time to reach the “menopause stage”; while Evening Primrose invites a more positive reading that focuses on the benefits of a healing journey rather than on the pain itself. Which reading should we consider more appropriate? In an interview concerning the novel, Matlwa asserted that: I doubt there is a single, one shot solution. Ours is a pain that has been centuries in the making, and perhaps the worst thing we can do is to look for quick fixes. But the idea that it will be a painful road to recovery is one

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that I think both Masechaba’s personal journey and that of South Africa’s share. (Johannesburg Review of Books, 2017)

The author suggests that South Africa’s journey towards recovery will be a painful and long one. In complete alignment with the other novels explored in this book, Period Pain/ Evening Primrose leaves readers with an open ending, filled with more questions about how to achieve reconciliation, rather than solutions to the problem.

4.5   Xenophobia: A New Form of Racism in Post-­Apartheid South Africa “[Ma] insists that foreigners are crafty, and that Nyasha is only being my friend to steal all my knowledge and overtake me. […] [Foreigners] come to our country to take from us all the things we fought for” (p. 47). This excerpt is from Period Pain and refers to Masechaba’s mother’s mistrust of Nyasha, who, she believes, has befriended Masechaba out of personal interest, thus illustrating how prejudice and discrimination against foreigners pervade people’s everyday lives. In their paper “Migration, Xenophobia and New Racism in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, Carol Adjai and Gabriella Lazaridis make a significant distinction between what they define as old racism, “discriminatory treatment at the hands of a race (a biological group) different to one’s own”, and xenophobia, a phenomenon that can be linked to new racism, also known as “discriminatory treatment of the ‘other’, on the basis of the other’s national origin or ethnicity” (2013, p. 192). They go on to observe that xenophobia and new racism share many aspects, such as, for instance, the perception of the Other as a threat, the exclusion and/or discrimination on the basis of the Other’s cultural origin, and the tightening of immigration policies (ibid., p. 193). A number of xenophobic events have taken place in South Africa over the last two decades following the establishment of the TRC. The xenophobic attacks that occurred in May 2008, starting in the Gauteng province and then spreading to the coastal cities of Durban and Cape Town, are perhaps mostly known outside South Africa for their appalling violence: this series of attacks against non-nationals left 62 dead and about 150,000 immigrants displaced (ibid., p. 195). However, this type of violence perpetrated by black South Africans against black non-nationals was

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nothing new. As underlined by Adjai and Lazaridis, xenophobic violence showed earlier signs of appearing in South Africa: in 1998, three foreigners were thrown off a moving train in Pretoria by South Africans returning from a rally that blamed foreigners for unemployment, crime and the spread of AIDS; in the same year, a Rwandan refugee was beaten up by a taxi driver and received cuts and bruises to his face, ear and body because he was foreign; the South African Broadcasting Corporation Two Way Programme reported that thirty refugees were killed in 1999, and one refugee had acid poured over his entire body; in August 2000, residents of Zandspruit Natal burnt down the shacks of Zimbabwean foreigners living in the settlement; in 2001, Cape Town City Council recorded twenty-two stabbings of migrants attacked because they were foreign; Somali shop owners were chased out of a township outside Knysna in 2006 and at least thirty shops were damaged; in August 2007, thirteen Somali shopkeepers were found murdered in their shops in Cape Town, while nothing had been taken by the attackers (ibid., p.  196). A distinct trait of all these attacks is that only black Africans were targeted, while non-nationals coming from Europe and South East Asia were excluded from this explosion of xenophobic sentiment (ibid., p. 196). Violence against foreigners also broke out after the gruesome attacks in Gauteng province: for example, in 2015, Durban and Johannesburg witnessed violence against non-nationals following Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini’s statement that foreigners should “go back to their countries”; in the period from 2016 to 2018, several protests in South African communities have seen shops and property owned by non-nationals being robbed and non-nationals being beaten up, or hiding in local police stations out of fear. In response to this increasing violence, the SAHRC established the National Investigative Hearing on Migration, Xenophobia and Social Cohesion in South Africa, which took place between 7 and 8 February 2018. The hearing intended to come to some understanding of the state of xenophobia in South Africa; it aimed to identify the underlying causes and manifestations of xenophobia, to review measures taken so far to combat xenophobia and evaluate their effectiveness, alongside assessing the effects of xenophobia on non-nationals and on South African society as a whole (see  “Media Advisory: National Investigative Hearing on Migration, Xenophobia and Social Cohesion”, 2018). Among the stakeholders to make a submission to the SAHRC’s hearing on migration, xenophobia and social cohesion in South Africa was the CSVR, which, in its submission, identified the high levels of inequality and

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poverty affecting many communities in South Africa—where service delivery of basic socio-economic rights and resources is a challenge—as the main underlying cause of xenophobic violence. Within this context, the CSVR observed: The struggle for survival, and competition for scarce resources such as jobs, financial opportunities, housing, water and electricity among other things heightens this discrimination and stigmatisation of foreign nationals in South African communities—resulting in migrants becoming easy targets for violence and blame (i.e. “frustration scapegoats”). (“CSVR Submission on National Investigative Hearing on Migration, Xenophobia and Social Cohesion in South Africa”, 2018)

Other factors contributing to xenophobic violence include the government’s failure to recognise early signs of this phenomenon and to ensure that prevention strategies and initiatives were put in place. The media’s reporting of sensational and inflammatory incidents, labelling criminals according to nationality, is also a trigger of xenophobic violence. Finally, the statements made by community leaders in South Africa represent another trigger of xenophobia: people who are in positions of power and influence, and whose words, whether positive or negative, are able to mobilise communities and cause great damage. For example, in 2016, Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba stated that “illegal foreign nationals living in Johannesburg must be treated as criminals” and his further statements in 2017 resulted in xenophobic attacks in Jeppestown, Rossetenville, which later spread to Pretoria (ibid.). Adjai and Lazaridis argue that the increase in unemployment, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the ongoing gap between rich and poor and, most importantly, the African National Congress’s struggle to meet high expectations in terms of tolerance, equality, resources, wealth redistribution and respect for human rights it set when it came in power in 1994, “have culminated in creating a disempowered population” (2013, p.  193). They also point out that: the economic policies embraced by the South African government through the Redistribution and Development Program from 1994 to 1996 and the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy from 1996 onwards did not build houses fast enough, nor alleviate unemployment currently at 40%. (ibid., p. 194)

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Xenophobia thus becomes “an expression of disillusionment of the government’s ability to deliver” (ibid., p. 194) on the promises it had made (as Zizi complains in Un-importance), and the Other, the black African Other, becomes the racialised target of these frustrations, thus undermining South Africa’s project of reconciliation. Within this context of racial discrimination, it is useful to refer to The Limits of Transition: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 20 Years On, a 2017 collection of essays evaluating the accomplishments and limitations of the South African TRC twenty years after the end of its work. In this volume, William Gumede connects racial reconciliation with the economic inequality still plaguing contemporary South Africa, and with the lack of emphasis on economic redress during the TRC’s process. He points out that “apartheid left ‘socio-economic maldistribution’ against the victims and in favour of the oppressors” and, in light of this, reconciliation responses should “focus on redistribution for those historically disadvantaged as well as recognition—firstly acknowledgement of the victims oppression and social equality for the previously ignored victims” (2017, p.  61). The apartheid regime was an all-­ encompassing system, affecting not only individuals but also all institutions and professions, and public and private sectors. Yet the TRC, Gumede observes, “did not thoroughly investigate the different sectors of economy—and their role in perpetuating the evil system” and “the hearings [institutional hearings] that did deal with sectors, such as the media, were limited” (ibid., p. 67). According to Gumede, racial reconciliation is unlikely to take place without engaging with social justice and economic redress: “No sustainable future can be built in South Africa unless black South Africans are adequately compensated—or perceive they are—for past discrimination, of which legacy continues to day” (ibid., 87). Gumede traces continued racial discrimination in contemporary South Africa back to economic inequality, a condition both the TRC and the government in the post-TRC period contribute to maintaining by overlooking economic redress in their limited strategies. This view had been anticipated by earlier scholarship. For example, Phakathi and van der Merwe, in a chapter in Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver?, explore the impact of the TRC’s amnesty process on victims of human rights violations, and they report that the majority of the interviewees considered the financial reparations to be insufficient and that this prevented the TRC’s amnesty process from delivering a just outcome: “[a]ccording to survivors, the Amnesty Committee clearly spelled

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out the conditions of amnesty, but it failed to do so on the issue of reparations” (2008, p. 125). I have already discussed the issue of reparations in Chap. 1, but it is useful to point out that reparations were not only seen as a financial payment; Phakathi and van der Merwe place emphasis on how many survivors “identified the need for social and economic development as key to achieving reconciliation, highlighting the need for combating crime, creating jobs, and alleviating poverty” (ibid., p. 131). That the repair of economic relationships should play a fundamental role in South Africa’s reconciliation project has also been argued by Paul Gready in The Era of Transitional Justice. Critically engaging with the keywords of the South African TRC—truth, justice and reconciliation— Gready argues that “reconciliation is intrinsically relational” (2011, p. 196), and highlights the importance of repairing relationships, specifically community and economic relationships: it is the economic realm that provides the structural underpinnings of sustainable reconciliation, and that while relational economic reconciliation will be resisted by many and is difficult to operationalise, it has a vital contribution to make to a redistributive agenda in South Africa and elsewhere. (ibid., p. 211)

Seconding arguments of others mentioned here, Gready points out that the TRC “failed to adequately address systemic economic abuses and legacies, as it privileged a narrow civil and political rights focus” (ibid., p. 212). On the one hand, he underlines that one should not expect truth commissions to “solve every problem under the sun” (ibid., p. 215), but, on the other, he also acknowledges that the South African TRC “missed the opportunity to present [economic inequality and poverty] as a meta-­ narrative of the apartheid past and the reconciliation sought in the future” (ibid., pp. 220–221). All these scholars seem to draw the same conclusion: real reconciliation has been and continues to be undermined by the lack of emphasis on the socio-economic inequality that affects South Africa; they also underscore the TRC’s limited mandate and its inability to draw sufficient attention to the interconnections between apartheid, economic inequality among South Africans and the post-apartheid goal of racial reconciliation. Despite making no reference to the phenomenon of xenophobia, their concern with racial reconciliation strongly resonates with the underlying causes of xenophobic violence identified by the CSVR’s submission. The lack of

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emphasis on economic maldistribution in the TRC’s work, coupled with the lack of effective strategies addressing it from the new government, certainly constitutes one of the main factors that has led many black South Africans to perceive foreigners as threatening figures. In the eyes of frustrated and disillusioned black South African people, migrants become dangerous competitors in terms of jobs and resources, easy targets for violence and blame. Moving to the closure of the chapter, the final section will discuss Marli Roode’s 2013 novel Call It Dog, a text that engages with questions of racial reconciliation, and, in particular, of xenophobia. Unlike Period Pain, this novel makes reference to the xenophobic attacks that, like a vice, gripped the township of Alexandra in May 2008. As my subsequent analysis will show, Call It Dog also resumes the exploration of the father-­ daughter relationship, thus evoking Coetzee’s characters David Lurie and his daughter Lucy. Aligning with the chapter’s overall focus on reconciliation—gender and racial reconciliation, but also interpersonal reconciliation (i.e. David and Lucy, Zizi and his girlfriend) and reconciliation with personal pain (i.e. Masechaba’s rape)—Call It Dog gives us the opportunity to reflect on how questions of reconciliation, dramatised here through the father-daughter relationship, have changed since the publication of Coetzee’s novel during the life of the TRC.

4.6   Father and Daughter in Marli Roode’s Call It Dog: A Journey Towards Reconciliation? Marli Roode’s debut novel narrates the story of Jo Hartslief, a South African-born, London-based journalist, who returns to her natal country after ten years in the United Kingdom to report on anti-immigrant riots that have broken out in Alexandra, clearly making reference to the real xenophobic attacks that took place in South Africa in May 2008.13 Narrated in the first person by Jo, the novel opens with the young journalist answering the summons of her estranged father, Nico. He is on the run from the police, wanted for the murder of Vusi Silongo, a black man who was abducted by special forces from his township home in the early 1980s—at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle—and never seen again. Nico maintains his innocence and wants Jo to help him clear his name by locating a witness who claims to have seen Nico with the victim. He also complains that he is being pursued by the police because he is Afrikaner, “a

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white man living in a black man’s country […] they don’t want any truth or reconciliation any more, just someone to blame” (2013, p. 10). Nico’s statement is an indirect reference to the work of the South African TRC, suggesting that he does not believe in the efficacy of the Commission’s truth- and reconciliation-related projects, but also that reconciliation between black South Africans and Afrikaners is still a long way from being achieved. There are, in fact, many examples in the text suggesting that prejudice and racism still run deep in South Africa. These sentiments are particularly represented by Nico’s racist and stereotypical comments against black people: “Thank fuck blacks are so lazy—they had a smoke first” (p. 8); “I mean, all blacks look alike to me anyway” (p. 9); “I hate Jo’burg. It’s really becoming one of those typical black African cities, you know?” (p. 15); “In my head, black people don’t walk dogs. They don’t even fucking own dogs, and the dogs bark at blacks” (p. 26). Nico struggles to accept the new South Africa’s political landscape. From the outset of the novel, it is also evident that Nico and Jo do not maintain a normal father-daughter relationship; indeed, they have not seen each other over the past three and a half years (p. 5). Despite this estrangement, Jo decides to help her father, and the two of them embark on a road trip guided by Nico’s whims, which takes them to locations related to the crime and to Nico’s past. In a similar fashion, the reader too embarks on a journey towards questions of truth and reconciliation, dramatised here by the father-daughter relationship: is Nico telling the truth? What happened to Vusi Silongo? To what extent is Nico involved in this crime? Is Jo his companion, accomplice or captive? To complicate this already troubled dynamics, another character, Paul Silongo, comes on the scene: Paul is Vusi’s son and the man who started the whole investigation or, in Nico’s words, “the one after [him]” (p. 81). Paul is also the reason why Jo first decides to return to South Africa: being a prominent ANC figure, a Deputy Premier of the province of Gauteng, Jo was supposed to interview him, but, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that Jo’s and Paul’s lives are profoundly intertwined in more than one way. As mentioned earlier, Call It Dog dramatises the anti-immigrant/xenophobic attacks that started in the township of Alexandra and then spread to other South African cities, such as Durban, in May 2008. In the form of sporadic flashbacks, recollections of the violence that Jo witnesses while visiting Alexandra keep haunting her memory and narrative: “I close my eyes. Even here, hundreds of miles from the Alexandra, I can still smell burning rubber” (p.  15); “I remember running, crouching in the

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alleyways between shacks. The smell of singed hair and burning rubber” (p. 29). Later in the novel, in a chapter titled “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, Jo gives a full account and readers are finally provided with all the details of that terrible day: almost two weeks prior to her journey with Nico, Jo had gone to Alexandra to report on the riots with her colleague, photographer Tumelo Kgotso. Heading to the Alexandra police station, where foreigner refugees were sheltering in tents, Jo bears witness to manifestations of every kind of violence: We swerved to avoid a man lying on his side in the road. […] His head was bleeding, the pillowcase wrapped around it dark and wet. Further along the road, a policeman pinned a man down with his knee. […] Four policemen, one at each corner of a mattress, carried an injured woman past me to the station entrance. Her breasts were bare and bloody, her face hidden by a towel. (p. 184)

Roads have become battlefields; foreigners are trying to flee; cars have been burned and tipped over, with their tyres missing; policemen guard the gates of the police station with their shotguns raised, ready to lock them at any sign of trouble; men throw the abandoned possessions of foreigners into the fire. In Jo’s words: “this was a place abandoned by God and the whites” (p. 185). Roode makes her description more realistic by relying on facts, such as “the elbow test”, which was a street-side practice performed by the police to verify people’s ethnicity: the police would stop people in public spaces and quiz them about their nationality and origins. Civilians were asked to translate the word “elbow” from English into Zulu as proof of South African nationality (see Landau 2010; Steinberg 2018). Jo asks Tumelo if he will be alright by himself while she tries to get one of the policemen to talk to her, and, in response to Jo’s concern, the photographer assures her that he will be safe as he is able to pass the elbow test: “If you know the Zulu word for elbow, you’re not a foreigner” (p. 186). The novel relies on other facts as it portrays community leaders shouting anti-immigrant slogans in front of the police station (pp. 188–190), anticipating the CSVR’s submission to the SAHRC’s 2018 hearing on migration, xenophobia and social cohesion in South Africa and their preoccupation with community leaders being potential triggers of xenophobic sentiment: community leaders are people in positions of power and influence, and their words,

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whether positive or negative, are able to mobilise communities and cause great damage, as exemplified by Roode’s text. Amidst this chaos and violence, Jo meets Paul in front of the police station, while he is trying to help a crying woman. At this point in the narration, Jo is still unaware of the ways in which her and Paul’s lives are bitterly entangled because of Nico’s alleged involvement in the murder of Paul’s father. This random encounter in front of the police station is significant on different levels: on the one hand, their verbal exchange reveals that Jo and Paul have become more intimate than a normal relationship between interviewer and interviewee would imply; on the other, Roode uses this encounter to explore in more detail the phenomenon of xenophobic violence, its gender implications and the role of the government. Through the character of Paul, Roode voices criticism of the government and the ANC, as Paul goes to the police station to assist refugees with his sister Lindiwe—a social worker for the shack-dwellers’ association—without the knowledge of the party because “They wouldn’t like it” (p.  187). This subtle critique becomes more explicit when Paul blames the government for the current situation: We’ve cleaned up the city for the World Cup and forced people further away from jobs. We talk about “illegal immigrants” like they’re responsible for all our problems. We’ve failed to raise people up out of a hand-to-mouth existence. We should’ve refused to build any more golf courses until everyone in this country had a house. But wealth is still white and poverty is still black. (p. 188)

Paul’s criticism—and, by extension, the author’s—once again echoes the concerns expressed in the previous section, in which I discussed how the work of the CSVR and of other scholars highlights the still great divide between rich whites and poor blacks in contemporary South Africa, as well as drawing attention to the need for more effective governmental strategies to address xenophobia and its consequences. As the violence escalates, and they are locked out of the police station, Jo and Paul are forced to run and to find a way out from the violence spreading in the township: The men began to dance towards the station, lifting their knees almost to their chests as they advanced. Hammers, clubs, even a golf club, throbbed

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in the air as they toyi-toyied. Behind us, the police station gates swung shut, locking Lindiwe and Tumelo in, locking us out. (p. 190)

In their attempt to get to the river, Jo and Paul witness violence, rage, fear and desperation: women and children try to seek refuge in the dark, narrow alleyways between shacks; men set fire to cars, build barricades to block off streets, and, armed with hammers and guns, run towards the police station where refugees are being sheltered (p. 191). At some point, Jo and Paul hear the wrenching screams of a foreign woman being raped and beaten up inside a shack by a group of men, who want “to turn [her] mind to be normal” (p. 192). Crouched in the alleyway, they have no choice but to wait and “to listen to what was happening inside” (p. 191): The woman gagged and the men laughed. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and tried to stand, wanting to run into the shack and drag the men off her, but Paul tightened his grip on my arm and pulled me closer. He shook his head, closed his eyes. His face was wet. I rested my forehead against his shoulder. (p. 191)

Adopting a similar narrative strategy to Disgrace, Period Pain and Bitter Fruit, Roode decides to place the rape scene off stage in order not to further violate women’s stories of suffering, and, as I have argued in previous sections, this choice might be interpreted as a critique of the TRC’s efforts to elicit women’s traumatic stories at the special hearings on women. Readers only read about the woman’s screams and the men’s cruel comments through Jo’s account, while the brutality of the violation is left to their imagination. If Disgrace and Bitter Fruit depict a context of racial hatred between white and non-white South Africans, Call It Dog and, as previously discussed, Period Pain describe a crime perpetrated against a kwere-kwere, a foreign national woman, by an indefinite group of black South Africans. The latter novels engage with the “new” post-apartheid threat of xenophobic violence, thus adding the element of ethnicity to the bitter relations between gender and race that characterised the apartheid era. Turning the attention to the categories of truth and reconciliation, Roode uses Jo and Nico’s daughter-father relationship and their journey in search of the truth of what happened to Vusi to explore questions of truth-telling and reconciliation in the post-TRC context. The author is

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particularly interested in exposing the limits of truth narratives by raising doubts about Nico’s account of facts. Not surprisingly, Jo often questions the veracity and reliability of his father as a narrator—“[h]e’s not being very convincing. […] I wonder how long he plans to string me along with this on-the-run-from-the-police story” (p.  42)—and keeps demanding that he stop lying to her: “I can’t help you unless you stop spinning your usual shit and tell me the truth” (pp. 21–22). The portrayal is that of a compulsive liar, who “likes to lie to people, make them believe a complicated and completely false backstory that he’s made up on the spot” (p. 44). For example, while telling Jo the circumstances of the warrant for his arrest, Nico specifies that he had never seen Vusi Silongo before (p. 9), only to admit sometime later that he had seen the man die and that he now wanted to take Jo to the place where everything happened (p. 22). The two then embark on a trip leading to Dundee, where Nico spent a couple of years in the early 1980s, and where Vusi’s murder supposedly took place. As the narrative unfolds, Nico’s story becomes ever more unconvincing, and Jo starts wondering about the real extent of her father’s involvement in the crime, as “the list of things that don’t add up is too long” (p. 47). The protagonists’ journey allows Jo and the reader to have access to some details of Nico’s mysterious life and of Vusi’s murder—the veracity of which is, however, challenged by Nico’s contradictions and changes of version. After deserting the army in 1979 and following three years in Europe, Nico decided to go back to South Africa in 1982 and hide in Dundee under the fake identity of Erik Klavier, believing that the army could not discover his whereabouts. While running a tourist spot on behalf of a Dutch middle-aged couple in 1983, Nico was forced at gun point—as he tells Jo (p.  46)—to witness and “cooperate” with three men who lodged in one of the rondavels to torture Vusi: They’d made me carry a generator up here, and they brought it over to where he lay. […] Then they taped electrodes to him, one to his right nipple and the other to his penis. I remember, the tape was such a bright blue. […] And then they played radio. (p. 49)

Using the narrative pattern of telling one version of the story and later adjusting it, Nico claims that he did not know Vusi’s torturers, but he then changes his version and confesses that they were his comrades during the

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tours in Namibia—although he also asserts that he had not recognised them immediately (pp. 51, 63). Most notably, Nico’s description of Gideon van Vuuren—Vusi’s killer and the leader of the group of torturers—is perhaps one of the most disputable parts of his story. Presented as a sort of larger-than-life character, Gideon recalls, although remotely, the Conradian figure of Kurtz, both for his cruelty and elusiveness. In Nico’s narrative, Gideon is an insanely dangerous killer who “really liked to kill blacks” (p. 57), a fanatical soldier who would keep as a trophy his victim’s “ears on a piece of wire around his neck” (p. 59). In the attempt to make his persona even more horrific and fearful, Nico also reveals to an astonished Jo that Gideon was responsible for her mother’s death. Jo always believed that her mother, Karen, had died in a car accident, but, according to Nico’s new version, it was Gideon who killed Karen: as a warning to me, not to talk to anyone. I was seeing a shrink at the time and he found out […] You were supposed to be in the car. That’s why I let your grandmother take you out of the country. (p. 161)

Gideon’s existence is emblematically never confirmed in the text: Jo’s friend, Naledi, who works at the Department of Justice and whom Jo calls to “[c]onfirm investigation. Check army records” (p. 60), cannot find any records of Gideon, “not even as an alias” (p. 75). While Naledi finds evidence confirming the existence of the other two men, Danie Strydom and Jaco Eloff—the former has taken his mother’s maiden name, the latter seems to have disappeared since 1997, but there is an old girlfriend who could provide further information (p.  78)—Gideon remains a haunting ghost, a blurred image in Nico’s story. Further undermining Nico’s credibility as a narrator, Jo discovers irrefutable evidence of the complicity between her father and Vusi’s murderers. At the end of their journey, and once they have parted their ways, Jo comes into possession of pictures portraying Nico in friendly relations with Danie, Jaco and a fourth man, probably Gideon, although Jo cannot be certain, as she has no description of him (p. 303). These pictures finally open Jo’s eyes, as they reveal Nico’s lies: he was their friend and “[h]e wasn’t forced into letting them use the lodge. Maybe he even suggested it. And they didn’t just stay in the main house while they worked. He swam and played with the dog and made them all coffee” (p. 304). Jo, as well as readers, can never have access to Vusi’s story, and the only option left to

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them is to use their imagination. After Jo’s discovery of the pictures, the narrative continues with an untitled chapter where the young woman tries to imagine Vusi Silongo and his last days (p. 306). Jo is aware of the limits of her imagination (and of her narrative), acknowledging that she “can’t imagine the pain, just the torturers’ words, their actions and instruments” (p. 311), because she knows “too much about men like Gideon and not enough about Vusi” (p. 309). Despite not adopting such an experimental narrative style as van Niekerk and Flanery, Roode manifests the same concerns that we have seen dramatised in Agaat and Absolution. She clearly questions the possibilities of truth-telling by placing emphasis on Nico’s—the alleged perpetrator’s—inclination to omissions, lies and fabrications, and thus indirectly engages with the literature critiquing the TRC’s amnesty deal and the likelihood of perpetrators making truthful confessions. She also exposes the complexities of capturing the truth by presenting a blurred reality that evokes the types of hybridities represented in The House Gun. Gordimer’s depiction of Duncan, a character who crosses the boundaries between victim and perpetrator, is reminiscent of Jo’s ambivalent behaviour after she learns of Nico’s alleged crime. When she agreed to embark on this journey with her father, Jo thought that she “could handle him, that [she] had a say in what [they] did” during the journey (p. 81), but she soon realises that she has become a sort of prisoner. The young woman identifies herself as “an isolated pawn” (p. 70), with her movements under constant surveillance by her father, who seizes both her mobile phone and her South African passport (pp. 32–33, 80). And yet, simultaneously, she does not turn him in to the police when occasion arrives and, by implication, becomes his accomplice: I could leave tomorrow. Get him to stop at a petrol station, go inside and ask someone to call the police for me. Forfeit my passports and report my phone as stolen. A few hours at the British Consulate in Pretoria would be better than who knows how long with my father. But I’ll give him one more chance. (p. 143)

Earlier in the novel, Jo recalls driving and trying to remember Afrikaans children’s songs while her father sleeps in the back seat—another opportunity where she could have taken Nico to the police. Her attempt to remember Afrikaans words that she still knows is particularly significant, as she asserts that “I listed the words I still knew—those of elf, spell,

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magic—and gave up listing the ones I didn’t know or thought I should learn—torture, accomplice, complicit” (p. 72). The first series of words takes the reader to the realms of fairy-tales and children’s stories (and by extension to the possibility of lies and deceits), signalling, on the one hand, Jo’s desire to reconnect with a period of her life when she and her father were close, and, on the other, the possibility that Jo is under Nico’s spell. The second series of words is equally significant as it evidently refers to Vusi’s murder and Nico’s alleged involvement in the crime as an accessory. This series could also be used to describe partially Jo’s role in the whole situation: she does not trust her father and continuously questions his credibility but, nevertheless, she does not act upon her suspicions and keeps helping him (“accomplice, complicit”), because, as she confides in her friend Naledi at the end of the book, “he was my dad, you know?” (p. 322). Jo and Nico’s journey turns out to be unsuccessful as they do not discover the identity of the witness accusing Nico of Vusi’s murder. Their interviews with Danie and Jaco’s ex-girlfriend do not provide many useful elements, and their journey comes to an abrupt end after their visit to Nico’s parents’ house in Nature Valley, a visit that allows him to retrieve some precious gold coins—“the real reason we’re here”, Jo concludes (p.  175). On their way out of Nature Valley, Nico suddenly announces that they are being followed, specifically that Gideon is following them. Meaningfully, Nico does not pronounce Gideon’s name, but only says “it’s him” (p. 180), knowing that Jo will understand to whom he is referring. This might be interpreted, I suggest, as a deliberate move by Nico to add some drama to the escape scene, perpetuating the image of Gideon as a haunting figure, a ghost that cannot be named or seen. On the other hand, Jo points out that “[t]he road behind us is empty now, just a sharp turn dropping off into the forest” (p. 179)—thus leaving readers to wonder whether the two are really being followed or if this is another of Nico’s fabricated stories. Whatever the case, Nico starts driving faster under the heavy rain in a desperate attempt to elude his (made-up? imagined?) pursuer, but their escape ends in a violent car crash. This accident signals the epilogue of Jo and Nico’s journey, as well as of their relationship: following the car crash, Jo wakes up in a hospital to discover that her father has disappeared, taking with him his side of the story. In a similar fashion, Jo’s present narrative of the car crash is interrupted to allow her to go back in time and narrate her involvement in the Alexandra riots, which I discussed earlier. Only after recalling the horror and the emotional pain of that

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terrible experience, does Jo return to the present-tense narrative and describe her post-accident awakening in the hospital. Thirdly, the car crash can also be interpreted as a sort of watershed in Jo’s life, marking a new stage of her journey towards the truth of Vusi’s murder. “Once again, I’m nothing but a passenger” (p. 205), she bitterly observes, although circumstances have now changed, as this time it is Paul whom Jo has decided to help find the truth. Obsessed with what really happened to his father Vusi—“It’s all [Paul] can think about these days, finding out exactly what happened to him” (p. 230) Paul’s sister, Lindiwe confides in Jo—Paul shows that he is liable to lies and manipulations in ways that are not dissimilar to Nico’s dishonest behaviour. Following the car crash, Jo and Paul cross paths again, and Paul acknowledges that he had always known that Jo was Nico’s daughter and that Nico was allegedly Vusi’s killer (pp. 240–41). In hindsight, this revelation sheds new light on Paul’s behaviour, signifying a certain level of staging when Paul accepted Jo’s interview request: while pretending ignorance, Paul had known Jo’s relation with Nico from the very beginning of their acquaintance. Roode thus expertly uses the character of Paul to continue to question the possibilities of truth-telling and the very quest for the truth. A relevant episode that corroborates the author’s commitment to engaging with questions of truth-telling is Jo’s visit to Brigadier van der Westhuizen. In her attempt at helping Paul find out new information concerning Vusi’s death, Jo agrees to visit the brigadier, and, on that occasion, discovers that Jaco Eloff—one of Vusi’s torturers—had manifested a desire to talk to the TRC, possibly in relation to his activities as a member of apartheid special security forces. Even more remarkable is the brigadier’s subtle suggestion that Jaco was killed in order to prevent the possibility of him appearing as a witness at the TRC’s hearings, and potentially revealing “dangerous” truths (pp. 226–227, 245). So far we have seen how Roode addresses the issue of truth from different angles: on the one hand, she uses Nico’s lies and fabrications (and Paul’s disputable behaviour) to question people’s willingness to tell the truth; on the other, she also invites readers to ponder the achievability of the truth by revealing how this concept might consist of complex, often contradictory layers, which make it difficult to fully capture the whole truth. Despite the characters’ many efforts, the truth about Vusi’s murder, as well as his burial site, or the extent of Nico’s involvement in the crime and Gideon’s real identity, ultimately remain out of reach. This uncertainty inevitably brings readers back to the TRC’s motto: “truth: the road

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to reconciliation”. The TRC gave a critical role to people’s testimonies and acts of truth-sharing, as contributions to healing and reconciliation. Within this context, we have seen that Mother to Mother and Absolution, for instance, raise the question as to what extent people can really reach closure and find forgiveness and/or reconciliation when the person harmed is dead. The House Gun and Agaat indirectly critique the TRC’s truth-telling/reconciliation equation by showing it to be, at its best, a hybrid and contradictory type of reality, and, at its worst, a biased and one-sided one. Call It Dog perfectly aligns itself with this trajectory of questions and invites readers to reflect on the TRC’s truth-reconciliation assumptions: if we cannot find the truth, how can we truly heal and reconcile? How can Paul, Jo and Lindiwe find closure without the truth of Vusi’s murder or the truth about the role played by Nico? Can they eventually achieve reconciliation? Roode leaves readers with more questions than solutions, opting for an open-ended narrative. The last chapter, titled “We Who Are Homeless”, describes two ceremony-like moments mourning for the dead. In the absence of any updates about Nico’s whereabouts, or Vusi’s burial site, Paul, Lindiwe and Jo reunite at Alexandra Cemetery and, together, build a solid line of stone and plant some flowers around the grave of a stranger, as a monument to Vusi Peter Silongo (p. 328). This occasion also allows Jo to shed some light on her mother’s death, as Paul shows her the police report on Karen’s accident and the medical examination report. Although these reports seem to disprove Nico’s allegation that Karen was killed and, as such, they provide further evidence of Nico’s lies, there are still many other questions left unanswered for Jo: Why did she let it drift? Was she tired? Had I woken her the night before, to tell her about nightmare? Or was I up too early, too noisy with my recorder? I want to find the people she worked with, ask if there was anything different about her that day. But no one will remember it or her in enough detail. Even I can’t. (p. 330)

In a similar way to their celebration of Vusi’s memory, Jo, Paul and Lindiwe head to Louisa Road, the road where Karen died, and together they mourn Jo’s mother. The novel closes with the image of Jo crouching on the slope, “[t]here’s no landmark or monument. Just the veld fire’s trails, dark as a lithograph or a potato print. It’s enough. I pick up some earth and hold it in my hand” (p. 333). These memorial ceremonies seem

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to point to a certain level of acceptance reached by the characters, acceptance that they might not know all the details concerning the death of their loved ones. I use the word “acceptance” as opposed to closure and reconciliation, because Call It Dog ends with too many unresolved queries to conclude that the characters achieve real closure or reconciliation, at least in the TRC meaning: will Jo return to her life in the United Kingdom? Will she decide to stay in South Africa? Will she start a relationship with Paul? Will she meet her father again? Will she ever be able to forgive her father for all his lies? All the novels presented and examined in this book address the concept of reconciliation from several angles and explore how its meaning may vary. Reconciliation is personal when it refers to people’s personal healing journey in the attempt to reconcile themselves with a painful discovery or with a trauma from their past (e.g. Lydia and her memory of the rape, Penelope’s descendants and their hard lives without their husbands, Marion and her uncovering of her coloured origins, or the Lingards and their discovery of  Duncan’s crime); while reconciliation becomes inter-­ personal when it seeks to reconcile two or more people divided by violence and pain (e.g. Lurie and the Isaacs, Milla and Agaat, Clare and her daughter Laura, Zizi and his girlfriend, Marion and Brenda, or Jo and Nico). Reconciliation can include gender issues (the suffering of Penelope and their descendants, Vinu’s incestuous relationship with her father, or the violence against Pamodi perpetrated by her ex-boyfriend and, later, by Zizi), racial hatred between white and non-white South Africans (Milla’s cruel behaviour towards Agaat or the strong prejudice against coloured people displayed in Bitter Fruit), and, as the last novels of this chapter show, ethnic resentment against other African peoples (xenophobic violence represented in Period Pain and Call It Dog). Questions of reconciliation have also shown how gender and race/ethnicity are deeply intertwined in South Africa, both in the apartheid, postapartheid and post-TRC eras: for example, Bitter Fruit focuses on a rape perpetrated by an Afrikaner police officer against a coloured woman during the apartheid period; Disgrace explores the interconnections between gender and race in post-apartheid South Africa by enacting a gang rape committed by black South African youths against a white Afrikaner woman; Period Pain and Call It Dog draw attention to the timely phenomenon of xenophobia and to the ways in which gender is still used to express racial/ethnic hatred. Finally, reconciliation can take place in a public context, as envisioned and supported by the work of the TRC, or it can

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occur in a more private, familial dimension, as dramatised in the novels analysed in this book. In this sense, Disgrace provides an exemplary case: Lurie, in fact, goes against the university committee’s wishes and refuses to acknowledge his crime in the public arena in favour of a private apology and moment of forgiveness in Melanie’s house. Analysis of the selected texts shows that the narrative choice of an open-­ ended narrative is a recurrent motif in those novels engaging with the work and key concepts of the South African TRC.  Authors have been shown to privilege openness over closure, especially in connection with the concept of reconciliation, prompting readers to reflect on what reconciliation really means, what forms it can assume, whether it can ever be achieved, and what strategies should be adopted to achieve it. They also seem to suggest that reconciliation in South Africa is a long, complicated process, the implications of which are constantly subject to change and adjustment according to historical, political, economic and cultural circumstances. As highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, the TRC was unable to provide a clear definition of reconciliation, which attests to the complexity of this notion. Scholars have placed particular emphasis on the inaccurate definition of reconciliation provided by the Commission; for instance, Andrew Chapman, drawing on analysis of the TRC’s final report and transcripts from the victims’ hearings, notices the lack of a clear conception of reconciliation from both the Commission and the commissioners’ interventions (2008, pp.  45–65).  Paul Gready also  highlights that “the multi-dimensional nature of reconciliation was acknowledged by the TRC, but the challenge of coherence was restated rather than resolved” (2011, p. 158). The selected novels dramatise the complexity of the notion of reconciliation, and expose the TRC’s limited focus by drawing attention to neglected issues such as gender violence and xenophobia. The question thus becomes: how can we accomplish the TRC’s goal of reconciliation in the post-TRC era? Or rather, what does reconciliation mean and what does it entail in contemporary South Africa? These are not easy questions and it is certainly beyond the scope of this book—or, more generally, of literature—to provide a clear, definite answer to the question of reconciliation. Literature, however, can play its part and contribute to discourses of reconciliation by posing uncomfortable questions and by inviting readers to reflect on and engage with reality through imagination. I would like to conclude this chapter with a quotation from Métis, Saskatchewan artist David Garneau:

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Art moves us but does not necessarily move us to action. Gestures in the aesthetic realm may symbolically resist the dominant culture, but there is little empirical evidence to show that art leads to direct action or that viewing it makes us better people. And yet some of us do feel changed, and we continue to make and enjoy the stuff as if it mattered, as if it made a difference. What art does—and what is difficult to measure—is that it changes our individual and collective imaginaries by particles, and these new pictures of the world can influence behaviour. (2015, p. 76)

Here Garneau reflects on the power of art to influence our behaviour, but what is literature if not an expression of art? Literature does not necessarily move people to action, nor can it provide answers to societal problems, but it does make us pause and think about how to face challenges.

Notes 1. Coleman observes that in his preface to the novel, Hardy mentions “the problem of sex”, defining it “as the ‘deadly war waged between flesh and spirit’” (2009, pp. 600–601). The scholar carries on arguing that “Hardy’s dark novel” enacts “a fictional universe dominated by the tragedy of the sexual instinct” (ibid., pp. 600–601). As the novel unfolds, Lurie indeed becomes a victim of his own sexual instincts as well. 2. During apartheid, both the Immorality Act (1950–1985) and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949–1985) forbade any kind of sexual relationship between white and non-white people. See Roy (2012). 3. This quotation from Disgrace refers to Lurie’s opinion about his relationship with the prostitute Soraya. 4. Agaat presents a perfect example that shows how the farm, or plaas in Afrikaans, is loaded with symbolic meaning for the Afrikaner mythology of belonging to South Africa. Control and ownership of the land is achieved through the farm, which thus becomes a representative of the hierarchy and power of the colonial past. 5. After the first democratic elections in 1994, the issue of land was addressed by developing two key pieces of legislation: the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act (or, more simply, the Land Restitution Act) and the 1997 Land Reform White Paper. Together they had three main aims: land restitution, in order to allow people who were evicted from their land to get it back; land redistribution to address the racial inequality in land ownership; and redress. As a creature of the Land Restitution Act, the Land Claims Court was established in 1996 with the primary focus on dealing with land resti-

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tution/ land claims cases. To see past or more recent judgement, see the Land Claims Court of South Africa. 6. In this regard, see, for example, “South Africa Passes Land Expropriation Bill” (2016), Cousins’s article “Why South Africa needs fresh ideas to make land reform a reality” (2016), and Rickard’s article “Land Claims Backfire as Courts Rule Against Communities” (2018). For a more comprehensive study of land claims and land restitution in South Africa see: Walker et  al. (2010), Netshipale et  al. (2017), Brandt and Mkodzongi (2018), Kepe and Hall (2018). 7. The third-person narrator does not describe the scene of Lucy’s rape, but, instead, he focuses on David’s perspective, recounting how the attackers trap him in the lavatory, and, then, set him on fire. Luckily, David’s wounds will not be so severe as much as they appear at first sight. 8. L. V. Graham identifies the “black peril” hysteria “with the sensationalised media accounts of white women raped by black men […] during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [which] reflected white anxieties in times of social and economic crisis” (2003, pp. 434–435). Graham carries on specifying that this white paranoia, of course, reappeared in the transition period of the 1990s. 9. See Holtmann and Domingo-Swarts (2008). They report that “during the 10 years of democracy the number of reported cases of rape rose by 17.8% to its 2003/2004 level of 52.733 cases” (p. 110). 10. Tina Sideris (2013, pp. 169–193). Sideris, however, highlights that masculinity is not homogeneous and that intimate partner violence is a factor that cuts across class, race, culture and ethnicity. She thus warns readers against reading her chapter as a suggestion that all men in rural areas are violent or that intimate partner violence does not occur in urban areas or amongst the privileged classes. 11. Du Toit, for example, describes rape as “the theater and the woman’s body the stage and props in and on which men have the chance to perform their masculinity both to themselves and to their male audience” (2014, p. 118). Later in the article, she confirms this unilateral vision which sees women as victims and men as perpetrators when she asserts that “the act of rape aims at the destruction of the sexual and personal integrity of the victim, and the rapist intuitively understand the extent to which a person’s sexuality lies at the core of her being”, (ibid., pp. 119–120, emphasis added). While cognisant of the fact that, according to statistics, women are the most affected in gender violence, we should never forget that gender violence affects all genders and that violence in general affects all ages. 12. Interviewees were survivors of incidents that took place in the years between the mid-1970s and early 1990s.

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13. In connection with the time of narration, the novel, in fact, directly mentions the riots in Alexandra (2013, p.  3) and how they spread to other cities, such as Durban (ibid., p. 15). Besides this, the author also refers to the 2010 World Cup South Africa is preparing for.

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Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation and Oxfam South Africa, 2017. Accessed January 30, 2020. https://www.csvr.org.za/pdf/CSVRViolence-Against-Women-in-SA.pdf. Sideris, Tina. “Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Psychoanalytic Insights and Dilemmas”. In Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in South Africa: Contexts, Theories and Applications, edited by Cora Smith, Glenys Lobban and Michael O’Loughlin, 169–193. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013. “South Africa Passes Land Expropriation Bill”. Al Jazeera. May 27, 2016. Accessed January 30, 2020. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/south-africapasses-controversial-land-ownership-law160527033515636.html. Steinberg, Jonny. “Xenophobia and Collective Violence in South Africa: A Note of Skepticism about the Scapegoat.” African Studies Review 61.3 (2018): 119–134. “The Land Claims Court of South Africa”. Accessed January 25, 2020. https:// www.justice.gov.za/lcc/judgments.html Walker, Cherryl, Anna Bohlin, Ruth Hall, Thembela Keep, eds. Land, Memory, Reconstruction and Justice: Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Wilson, Richard. The politics of truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the post-apartheid state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière argues that “the real must be fictionalized to be thought” (2013, p.  34). This proposition, Rancière cautions, should not be read as an attempt to claim that everything is fiction; rather, the French philosopher places emphasis on how fiction and history or, in other words, the logics of fiction and the logics of facts are deeply intertwined. This interpenetration, he goes on to argue, is “specific to an age when anyone and everyone is considered to be participating in the task of ‘making’ history” (ibid., p. 35). This last argument is particularly relevant to the South African context of the transition period. Following the official demise of the apartheid regime in 1994, South Africa decided to confront the past and embark on a shared future founded on a human rights, democratic culture. The South African TRC played a major role in this political, social and historical process, as it aimed to contribute to writing the history of the gross human rights violations that occurred during apartheid and to fostering healing and reconciliation among all South Africans, irrespective of class, gender and race. From the year of the Commission’s establishment in 1995 until the submission of its final report in 2003 (including the completion of the Amnesty Committee’s mandate), South Africa was engaged in “making” history as a fundamental basis to move forward from the violence of the apartheid era and to build a better future. The previous chapters have shown how fiction, novels in particular, becomes a powerful critical site of investigation through which the work © The Author(s) 2020 F. Mussi, Literary Legacies of the South African TRC, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43055-9_5

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of the TRC and the historical, collective narrative that it produced can be addressed, challenged and extended. In this book, I have not tried to demolish nor to deny the achievements accomplished by the work of the TRC.  South Africa has benefited greatly from the experience of a truth commission. The TRC uncovered valuable information about the abuses of the apartheid system and it contributed to promoting a human rights culture. In exploring the selected novels, I have sought to demonstrate that fiction provides a productive and insightful source for unearthing and engaging with the limitations and ambiguities inherent in the TRC’s testimonial process, thus showing how fiction and history, fiction and testimony, borrowing Rancière’s words, “come under the same regime of meaning” (2013, p. 34). In her discussion of narratives of promise and failure in South Africa, Jennifer Wenzel makes a similar point in relation to the intersections between fiction and the history of South Africa’s transition. Although she examines literary and historical texts that engage with the Xhosa Cattle-Killing movement of 1856–1857 to show how writers have re-imagined ideas associated with the cattle killing to speak to their contemporary predicaments, her argument concerning the potentialities of fiction also applies to the context of the TRC’s process. Wenzel argues that fiction offers “alternatives to the foreclosures inherent in reading history as narrative […] particularly in reading the South African democratic transition in terms of a narrative closure that assumes a single, inevitable trajectory to the postapartheid present” (2009, p. 162). The TRC was, in fact, set up to produce a coherent, collective narrative of human rights violations of the apartheid system in order to foster sentiments of forgiveness, reconciliation and closure among all South Africans, aiming to create the conditions where “victims” and “perpetrators” of the past regime could co-exist peacefully. Analysis of the selected novels has shown how fiction, on the other hand, critically responded and continues to respond to the work of the Commission by foregrounding alternative pathways to the TRC’s public narrative of truth and reconciliation. The proliferation of novels that engage directly or indirectly with the work of the Commission since its inception in 1995 provides clear evidence of the profound impact of the TRC’s proceedings on South African society and literature. Writers from different backgrounds—in terms of ethnicity, religion and historical conditions—have chosen to investigate the TRC’s key notions of trauma, truth and reconciliation and their related concepts of confession, punishment, forgiveness, healing and closure. The novels discussed here attest to this diversity and, most importantly, to the

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consistent interest in the work of the TRC as a literary subject. The internal structure of the main chapters reflects this trend, as they include novels that engage with the notions of trauma, truth and reconciliation and reflect on the ways in which these notions are challenged and extended over time, especially when addressed from a greater critical distance with respect to the completion of the Commission’s work. The concepts of trauma, truth and reconciliation are tightly intertwined within the context of the TRC’s process, and all the selected novels address these concepts to different extents. Chapter 2 focused on the notion of trauma and on the literary responses to the TRC’s definition of gross human rights violations. As my discussion demonstrated, the gendered and racial dimensions of trauma, the difficulties of articulating trauma— specifically in relation to cases of sexual violence against women—and the shortcomings of the Commission’s focus on single-event bodily violations, which excluded the ordinary, everyday humiliations and oppressions suffered by millions of South Africans during apartheid, have been important themes for fiction since the TRC. Chapter 3 examined the notion of truth and the limits of the act of truth-telling within the context of testimonial narratives. There we saw how, despite acknowledging four categories of truth, the TRC’s narrative machine produced many other multi-layered, often contradictory, versions of truth, resulting from the interpretation, transcription and re-telling processes. The existence of multiple versions of the same event, combined with the possibility of the testifier’s unwillingness to tell the truth and with the inadequacy of the victim-perpetrator framework to capture the complexities of the past and of the transition period, call into question the Commission’s goal of creating a coherent, collective narrative of the past. This limit to truth-telling narratives is powerfully reflected in the unreliable narrations or open-­ ended forms exemplified in the novels discussed. Finally, Chap. 4 addressed the concept of reconciliation, which, compared to trauma and truth, seems to be the most challenging to grasp for its dynamic, multi-dimensional nature. The complexity of this notion is evidenced by the TRC’s incapacity to provide a clear definition of the term during the life of its work. In this chapter, I have underlined how reconciliation is still an ongoing project in South Africa, the actualisation of which is challenged by the increasing phenomena of gender violence, both racially and non-racially motivated, and of xenophobic hatred. Analysis of the novels has shown a change of focus in relation to the authors’ approach to the notions of trauma, truth and reconciliation over

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time. In particular, those novels that were published with a greater distance from the completion of the Commission’s mandate—especially the Human Rights Violations Committee’s mandate (1998)—further expand these notions at plot and/or narratological levels. I began my interrogation of the TRC’s definition of trauma through analysis of Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, a novel that directly responds to the strategies adopted by the Commission to elicit women’s stories of suffering: by exposing the difficulties of articulating sexual violence against women in a public context, such as that of the TRC’s hearings, Bitter Fruit proposes silence as a powerful alternative to linguistic expressions of pain. As a corollary to the main storyline, Dangor also brings to the fore examples of sexual violence against women that are not racially motivated. However, Bitter Fruit, in its critique of the TRC’s approach to female trauma, continues to adopt the Commission’s definition of bodily trauma. By contrast, later novels such as Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (and, exceptionally, Wicomb’s earlier novel David’s Story) have expanded the notion of trauma from a conceptual perspective, as well as investigating the complexities of articulating it through narrative experimentation. Relying on narrative techniques that, on the one hand, blend fiction, biography and essay, and, on the other, question authorship and ownership of the story, these two later texts explore the social attributions to the body in terms of gender and race and how these attributions affect the notion of trauma. As we have seen, Ndebele’s novel is particularly interested in investigating ordinary examples of female trauma, while Wicomb’s texts both engage with the ambiguities of coloured identity. Both authors foreground the importance of redefining the TRC’s concept of victim of gross human rights violations in ways that move beyond bodily violations and take into consideration South Africa’s post-colonial conditions and racial implications. The same change of focus evidenced in TRC-related later publications can also be observed in relation to the authors’ approach to the concepts of truth and reconciliation, as shown in Chaps. 3 and 4, respectively. Starting from the concept of truth, Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun interrogates, albeit indirectly, the TRC’s victim-perpetrator framework by staging a trial for murder; through depiction of Duncan Lingard’s hybrid character, the author exposes the inadequacy of this framework to determine the truth about the past. The rigid demarcation between the world of victims and the world of perpetrators is inadequate to capture all the “grey areas” that characterise both the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

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If Gordimer primarily engages with the notion of truth at plot level, the other two novels analysed in Chap. 3 explore this notion in terms of both content and narrative structure. Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat and Patrick Flanery’s Absolution draw attention to the elusiveness of any narrative project purporting to a coherent, single truth by portraying unreliable narrators and by adopting multiple narrators and enacting multiple narrative levels. Both van Niekerk and Flanery rely on more complex and experimental narrative structures than Gordimer’s, thus exposing the frailty of the category of truth—especially in relation to the articulation of trauma— both at plot and narratological levels in ways that relate to Ndebele’s and Wicomb’s narrative operations in The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Playing in the Light. In Chap. 4, I focused on the notion of reconciliation and on the ways in which gender and race are painfully interlaced, thus affecting negatively the actualisation of reconciliation both in the post-apartheid and post-­ TRC eras. The chapter begins with analysis of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, showing how the author dramatises the phenomenon of violence against women primarily as a problem between white and non-white South Africans. Later novels such as Thando Mgqolozana’s Un-importance, Marli Roode’s Call It Dog and Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain, however, reflect how gender violence can assume different forms and affect more varied contexts, which go beyond the historical contraposition between the coloniser and the colonised that Disgrace seems to perpetuate. In particular, we have seen that Un-importance engages with gender violence from the angle of domestic violence, without any racial implications; while Call It Dog and Period Pain address a new form of racism, xenophobia, and the ways in which rape is deployed as a correctional weapon in post-­ apartheid South Africa. Another aspect that I have wanted to highlight in Chap. 4 is that all the novels examined in this book address the concept of reconciliation, foregrounding different meanings of this notion: reconciliation can be conceptualised in relation to gender, racial or ethnic violence; reconciliation can be sought at personal, interpersonal or national levels; finally, reconciliation can take place in a public context, as envisioned and supported by the work of the TRC, or it can occur in a more private, familial dimension. The different forms of reconciliation envisaged in the selected novels suggest a more complex and ambivalent concept than the type of reconciliation promoted by the TRC’s motto “truth: the road to reconciliation”. Furthermore, I have placed emphasis on how the narrative choice of an open-ended finale is a recurrent motif in these novels.

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Enacting openness rather than closure, especially in connection with the concept of reconciliation, the selected texts prompt readers to reflect on what reconciliation really means, what forms it can assume, to what extent historical, political, economic and cultural circumstances can affect its meaning, whether reconciliation can ever be achieved and what strategies should be adopted to achieve it. In “Against the Standardization of Memory”, Lea David questions the validity of memorialisation policies that mandate normative standards and that promote universalist human rights values within the context of conflict and post-conflict settings. Particularly, she questions the adoption of the “facing the past” ideology, borrowed from the tenets of Western psychology and trauma theory, as a path towards healing the societies in transition from authoritarian to democratic orders. According to David, the facing-the-past agenda makes “no real distinction between the ways in which individuals reckon with their traumatic memories and the ways in which collectives engage with their painful past”, when, in reality, “individual and collective reckoning with the past are far from being identical” (2017, p. 310). She goes on to argue that nation-building discourses on reconciliation often neglect individual needs and social/economic/cultural differences. Although focusing on memorialisation policies in general, David’s arguments apply to the case of the South African TRC and to its motto “truth: the road towards reconciliation” as an effective strategy to foster forgiveness between the “victims” and “perpetrators” of the apartheid system. We have seen, for example, the limits of the Commission’s definition of gross human rights violations, as well as the shortcomings of the truth-telling process and of the conceptualisation of the reconciliation project. As my discussion demonstrated, fiction—novels in particular—has engaged with the work of the TRC in an attempt to give back a certain level of subjectivity to those voices that fell outside the Commission’s strict criteria. These novels propose alternative pathways to the public journey towards reconciliation as supported by the Commission. Focusing on individual stories, fiction acknowledges the existence of multiple voices and perspectives that could not be captured in the TRC’s efforts to create a coherent, collective narrative of truth and reconciliation. My discussion also emphasised how the way in which fiction has addressed the TRC’s concepts of trauma, truth and reconciliation has changed over time. Novels published during the life of the Commission have primarily responded to the limits and contradictions inherent in the TRC’s proceedings, while later publications have used the TRC’s key notions as

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framework to continue to respond to the TRC as a political/historical/ social project, but also to read more contemporary challenges, such as the increasing phenomena of domestic violence against women and of xenophobia. In countries deeply affected by traumatic political and historical situations, fiction and history become intrinsically connected and interdependent in the analysis of the past and the present. Not surprisingly, long before the establishment of the South African TRC, Nadine Gordimer had highlighted the interconnections between her fictional writing and history: The change in social attitudes unconsciously reflected in the stories represents both that of the people in my society—that is to say, history—and my apprehension of it; in writing, I am acting upon my society, and in a manner of my apprehension, all the time history is acting upon me. ([1975] 1988, p. 115)

Fiction must be considered a useful instrument of investigation that can assist society in reflecting on the past and on the way that past has been addressed by political, historical and social projects, such as truth commissions. Writers act as facilitators who keep the dialogue about the past open for reinvestigation and reinterpretation, raising questions and casting light on new perspectives and approaches to better understand the legacies of the past in contemporary South Africa.

Bibliography Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace (1999). 2nd Edition. London: Vintage, 2000. Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit (2001). 2nd Edition. London: Atlantic Books, 2004. David, Lea. “Against Standardization of Memory.” Human Rights Quarterly 39.2 (2017): 296-318. Flanery, Patrick. Absolution. London: Atlantic Books, 2012. Gordimer, Nadine. The House Gun (1998). New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Gordimer, Nadine. “Selecting My Stories” (1975). In The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places. Edited by Stephen Clingman, 111–117. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988. Matlwa, Kopano. Evening Primrose (Period Pain, 2016). London: Sceptre, 2017. Mgqolozana, Thando. Un-importance. Sunnyside: Jacana, 2014. Ndebele, Njabulo. The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003). Banbury: Ayebia Clarke, 2004.

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Rancièrre, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, Edited by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Roode, Marli. Call It Dog. London: Atlantic Books, 2013. Van Niekerk, Marlene. Agaat (2004). Translated by Michiel Heyns. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2006. Wenzel, Jennifer. Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Wicomb, Zoë. Playing in the Light. New York: The New Press, 2006. Wicomb, Zoë. David’s Story (2000). New York: The Feminist Press, 2001.

Index1

A Adhikari, Mohamed, 80–82, 102n16 Adjai, Carol, 214, 222–224 African National Congress (ANC), 4, 27, 34n15, 53, 82, 152, 177, 178, 224, 228, 230 Afrikaans, 19, 80, 85, 108, 130, 132–135, 137, 170n3, 234, 240n4 Afrikaner, 2, 15, 19, 20, 22, 60, 84, 92, 93, 130, 132, 140, 142, 177, 180, 186, 219, 227, 228, 238, 240n4 Alexandra, 227–229, 235 Amnesty Committee (AC), 6–8, 33n2, 69, 78, 183, 225, 247 Angola, 97 Apartheid regime, 10, 11, 15, 23, 33n10, 42, 50, 79, 80, 82, 83, 92, 142, 154, 165, 175, 181, 225, 247 Ashcroft, Bill, 170n4 Attwell, David, 33n7, 34n13, 156, 185, 188

B Bantu, 80, 81 Bewes, Timothy, 195 Boehmer, Elleke, 176, 191, 192 Boraine, Alex, 5, 6, 33n3, 101n9 A Country Unmasked, 5, 101n9 Brink, André, 2 Buxbaum, Laura, 147, 149 C Cape Town, 13, 16, 24, 28, 41, 43, 83, 84, 94, 101n13, 222, 223 Caruth, Cathy, 35n18, 47 Carvalho, Alyssa, 131, 132, 148 Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), 41, 43, 48, 49, 100n5 Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR), 197, 198, 209, 223, 224, 226, 229 Clingman, Stephen, 117, 123, 124, 127

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Mussi, Literary Legacies of the South African TRC, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43055-9

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INDEX

Coetzee, J. M., 3, 31, 33n10, 92–94, 142, 153–158, 162, 171n12, 175–196, 202, 203, 205, 227, 251 Age of Iron, 33n10, 142 Disgrace, 31, 175–196, 201–203, 205, 218–221, 231, 238, 239, 240n3, 251 Dusklands, 153 Foe, 156 Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, 154, 155 In the Heart of the Country, 92, 93, 155 Life & Times of Michael K, 155 Summertime, 156, 162, 171n12 Waiting for the Barbarians, 155 Cole, Catherine M., 108–110 Coleman, Deirdre, 179, 189, 240n1 Craps, Stef, 29, 48 D Dangor, Achmat, 28–30, 50–60, 98, 99, 177, 250 Bitter Fruit, 28, 29, 50–60, 76, 82, 98, 99, 135, 176, 212, 218, 220, 231, 238, 250 David, Lea, 122, 252 De Kock, Leon, 135, 143, 147 De Kok, Ingrid, 16–18, 34n11, 41, 50, 109, 114 Defoe, Daniel, 156 Robinson Crusoe, 156 Domingo-Swarts, Carmen, 197, 241n9 Driver, Dorothy, 26, 61, 70, 73 Du Toit, Louise, 200 Durbach, Andrea, 198, 199 Durban, 43, 72, 78, 222, 223, 228, 242n13

E English language, 30, 108, 110–113, 130, 155 Erasmus, Zimitri, 79, 81 F Felman, Shoshana, 35n18, 47 Flanery, Patrick, 30, 116, 150–170, 171n8, 234, 251 Absolution, 30, 31, 116, 150–170, 171n8, 234, 237, 251 Foot-Newton, Lara, 14, 16 Reach, 14, 16 Forced removals, 24, 25, 48, 77 Fullard, Madeleine, 76–78 G Garneau, David, 239, 240 Gauteng, 43, 222, 223, 228 Goldblatt, Beth, 42, 43, 48, 100n5 Gordimer, Nadine, 3, 11, 12, 30, 33n10, 64, 92, 115–130, 142, 147, 153, 154, 168, 169, 171n11, 234, 250, 251, 253 Burger’s Daughters, 117, 154, 171n11 The Conservationist, 93, 117 The House Gun, 30, 115–130, 132, 147, 168, 169, 221, 234, 237, 250 July’s People, 117, 142 The Late Bourgeois World, 153, 154 None to Accompany Me, 117 A Sport of Nature, 117 A World of Strangers, 154 Graham, Lucy Valerie, 184, 186–188, 205, 241n8 Graham, Shane, 2, 11, 33n4, 52, 58 Gready, Paul, 6, 12, 32, 33n1, 33n3, 226, 239

 INDEX 

257

Griffith, Gareth, 170n4 Group Areas Act, 25, 34n14, 48, 81, 84, 85 Guguletu, 24 Gumede, William, 225 Gunne, Sorcha, 54–56, 100n6

Klopper, Dirk, 90, 94, 95 Kossew, Sue, 118, 128 Krog, Antjie, 3, 19–23, 43, 62, 67, 68, 73, 108, 114 Country of My Skull, 3, 19–23, 43, 108, 114

H Hayner, Priscilla, 1 Herzberg, Paul, 13, 33n8 The Dead Wait, 13, 14, 33n8 Heyns, Michiel, 126, 130, 170n2 Highman, Kate, 21–23 Holtmann, Barbara, 197, 241n9 Homer, 72, 129 Odyssey, 73, 74, 89, 129 Human rights, 1, 3, 4, 6–10, 12, 15, 16, 28, 29, 32n1, 41–43, 46–50, 57, 68, 76–78, 83, 98, 110, 115, 122, 125, 164, 190, 196, 198, 213, 224, 225, 247–250, 252 Hutchison, Yvette, 12 Hybrid/hybridity, 30, 58, 59, 63, 79, 83, 86, 91, 92, 190, 234, 237, 250

L Laub, Dori, 35n18, 47 Lazaridis, Gabriella, 214, 222–224 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 5 Liatsos, Yanna, 62, 63, 67, 71, 101n10 Libin, Mark, 49, 50 London, 13, 15, 92, 101n13, 171n12

J Johannesburg, 15, 16, 43, 57, 65, 78, 114, 163, 223, 224 Joyce, James, 58 Ulysses, 58 K Kafka, Frank, 194 The Trial, 194 Kani, John, 14 Nothing But the Truth, 14, 15 Khulumani Support Group, 14 The Story I Am About to Tell, 14

M Mack, Katherine, 56 Magona, Sindiwe, 4, 23–25, 28, 29, 34n12, 34n13, 55, 65, 209, 213 Mother to Mother, 4, 23–29, 34n12, 34n13, 55, 65, 199, 209, 214, 237 To My Children’s Children, 28, 34n16 Mamdani, Mahmood, 25 Mandela, Nelson, 6, 51, 127, 178 Mandela, Winifred “Winnie” Nomzamo Zanyiwe Madikizela, 60 Mann, Thomas, 128 The Magic Mountain, 128 Mardorossian, Carine M., 178, 179, 182, 185–187 Matlwa, Kopano, 3, 31, 176, 201, 210–222, 251 Period Pain, 31, 176, 201, 206, 210–222, 227, 231, 238, 251 McDonald, Peter, 155, 177, 178, 194 Medalie, David, 66, 68, 121

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INDEX

Meintjes, Sheila, 41–43, 48, 100n5 Mgqolozana, Thando, 31, 175, 201–210, 251 Un-importance, 31, 175, 176, 201–210, 225, 251 Miscegenation, 59, 79, 86, 170n5 N National Party, 81, 90, 147, 154, 165 Ndebele, Njabulo, 11, 29, 30, 50, 60–75, 98, 99, 131, 140, 213, 214, 250 The Cry of Winnie Mandela, 29, 50, 60–75, 98, 99, 131, 141, 169, 199, 214, 250, 251 O Olaussen, Maria, 86 Open-ended narrative, 23, 32, 170, 216, 237, 239 P Pass laws, 24, 48, 77, 100n8 Pechey, Graham, 188 Phakathi, Timothy Sizwe, 209, 225, 226 Poyner, Jane, 11, 26, 55, 67, 69, 120, 125, 177, 186 R Rancière, Jacques, 12, 247, 248 Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee (RRC), 3, 8, 9, 33n2 Rich, Adrienne, 49, 195 Cartographies of Silence, 49

Roode, Marli, 3, 31, 176, 227–240, 251 Call It Dog, 31, 176, 227–240, 251 Ross, Fiona, 33n3, 42, 43, 45, 46, 177 S Samuelson, Meg, 26, 86 Sanders, Mark, 2, 48, 180, 196 Shakespeare, William, 26, 133, 170n4 The Tempest, 133, 170n4 Slovo, Gillian, 4, 26–28, 31 Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, 28, 34n16 Red Dust, 4, 26–28, 31, 122 Sontag, Susan, 11, 117 Sotho, 108 South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), 177, 223, 229 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 49, 50, 191 T Taylor, Jane, 14, 33n9 Ubu and the Truth Commission, 14 Tiffin, Helen, 170n4 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Commission, TRC), 1–32, 41–51, 55, 64, 75–83, 92, 98, 107, 109, 114, 123, 127, 142, 149, 165, 168, 175, 190, 209, 213, 219, 225, 228, 234, 237, 247, 249, 251 Tutu, Desmond, 5, 10, 58, 59, 70, 183 No Future Without Forgiveness, 5

 INDEX 

U Ubuntu, 5 V Valji, Nahla, 76 Van der Merwe, Hugo, 33n3, 209, 225, 226 Van der Vlies, Andrew, 2, 3, 20, 64, 84, 90, 96, 97 Van Graan, Mike, 13–16 Dinner Talk, 13–15 Some Mothers’ Sons, 14, 15 Van Houwelingen, Caren, 130, 140, 143, 144 Van Niekerk, Marlene, 3, 30, 116, 130–150, 169, 170n2, 234, 251 Agaat, 30, 31, 116, 130–150, 169, 234, 237, 240n4, 251 Van Vuuren, Helize, 131, 132, 148 Verdoolaege, Annelies, 33n3, 108

259

W Wicomb, Zoë, 3, 29, 30, 34n17, 60, 81, 83–99, 116, 156, 169, 170n5, 250, 251 David’s Story, 34n17, 96–99, 156, 250 Playing in the Light, 29, 60, 83–99, 116, 164, 169, 170n5, 250, 251 X Xenophobia, 31, 176, 201, 206, 210, 214–217, 220, 222–227, 229, 230, 238, 239, 251, 253 Xhosa, 16, 108, 110–113, 206, 248 Y Young, Robert, 79, 138 Z Zulu, 66, 108, 223, 229