Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature: South Africa's Wounded Feelings [1st ed.] 9783030559762, 9783030559779

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN AFFECT THEORY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature: South Africa’s Wounded Feelings Mark Libin

Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

Series Editors Adam Frank University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada Joel Faflak Western University London, ON, Canada

The recent surge of interest in affect and emotion has productively crossed disciplinary boundaries within and between the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, but has not often addressed questions of literature and literary criticism as such. The first of its kind, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism seeks theoretically informed scholarship that examines the foundations and practice of literary criticism in relation to affect theory. This series aims to stage contemporary debates in the field, addressing topics such as: the role of affective experience in literary composition and reception, particularly in non-Western literatures; examinations of historical and conceptual relations between major and minor philosophies of emotion and literary experience; and studies of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and disability that use affect theory as a primary critical tool. Editorial Board Members Louis Charland (Western University) – History and Philosophy of Affective Terms Patrick Colm Hogan (University of Connecticut, Storrs) – Cognitive and Affective Science of World Literature Holly Crocker (University of South Carolina) – Medieval Literature and Affect Theory David James (University of Birmingham, UK) –Modernism, the Contemporary Novel, and Affect Theory Julia Lupton (University of California, Irvine) – Renaissance and Theatre Kate Singer (Mount Holyoke College) – Affect and Romanticism Jane Thrailkill (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) – Affect and American Realism Donald Wehrs (Auburn University)

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14653

Mark Libin

Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature South Africa’s Wounded Feelings

Mark Libin Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media University of Manitoba Winnipeg, MB, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism ISBN 978-3-030-55976-2 ISBN 978-3-030-55977-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55977-9 © 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. Cover credit: Maximilian Buzun/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The seeds of this book were germinated in the classroom. I have taught post-apartheid literature courses at the University of British Columbia and the University of Manitoba, as well as seminars in ethics and Trauma Theory. The intelligent and sensitive students who have contributed to classroom discussions of many of the texts dealt with in this book have shaped my thoughts and feelings about this material and I owe these students immense gratitude. As I began my research into post-apartheid literature, I was invited to South Africa to lecture at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria. I would like to thank my generous hosts at that time, Dr. David Medalie and Dr. Reingard Nethersole. Arlene Young was instrumental in introducing me to Affect Theory, through the Affect Research Group she initiated at the University of Manitoba and the resulting international conference the group hosted. Being a part of that luminous conference provided me with the lens I had been searching for, through which to focus my thoughts on postapartheid literature. Arlene also gave me valuable feedback on my first chapters, for which I am grateful. The late Michael Wessels provided encouraging feedback at the early stages of this project, and I am deeply indebted to him for his generosity. Thanks to Jonah Corne for providing me with valuable resources on the subject of documentary film.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to be a member of the faculty at the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, and to be able to work and teach among the enthusiastic and supportive colleagues who populate the venerable Sixth Floor of Fletcher Argue. I feel lucky to be a part of such a cohesive and inclusive department. Thank you to Ryan Jenkins, who first approached me on behalf of Palgrave Macmillan and the Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism Series and asked me to submit a proposal. I am grateful to my current editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe for their advice and guidance. And patience. I offer grateful thanks to Mukoma wa Ngugi, who provided welcome encouragement as well as perceptive advice. Over the course of this process, I was blessed with two wonderful research assistants. Timothy Penner and Annah Coleman helped me move this project forward. I want to thank my three wonderful children: Shoshana, Misha and Shai. Despite their collective penchant for brouhaha, they did their very best (I know it was their best) to give me space and time to work. Thank you all for putting up with my piles of papers on the dining room table, stacks of books in the living room and some alleged crankiness on my part. And profound gratitude to my wife, Méira. Thank you for your editorial wisdom and for your canny intellectual insights. Thank you for the long walks we spent discussing the project, for engaging with the subject with thoughtfulness and for providing me with burgeoning ideas. Besides being my least gentle editor, you have always been my most enthusiastic supporter. I genuinely could not have begun, let alone completed, this project without you. I would also like to acknowledge the historical time in which I completed this manuscript, the spring and summer of 2020. Writing about political transformation and emotional upheaval took on resonance as many of us found our lives upended by the encroaching pandemic, and then felt the shocking and righteous eruption of anger in the protests of Black Lives Matter. These defining historical moments compel us to invest ourselves in a public exercise of hope and optimism. Portions of Chapter 3 appeared in Textual Practice as “Can the Subaltern be Heard? Response and Responsibility in South Africa’s Human Spirit ”. Textual Practice 17.1 (2003): 119–140.

South African History: An Eccentric Timeline of Political Affect

1652

1795 1806 1835–1840

1856–7

1880–81 1899–1902 1912 1914 1934

Jan van Riebeeck founds the Cape Colony at Table Bay in the name of the Dutch East India Company. Descendants from this original Dutch colony will become the Afrikaner community of South Africa. First skirmishes between British forces and Dutch settlers. Britain takes control of the Cape Colony. Afrikaners (also known as Boers) migrate from the Cape Colony (now under British control) in what becomes known as the “Great Trek”. Boers eventually found the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse prophesizes that the British will be driven from South Africa if the Xhosa kill all their cattle and burn their crops. The resulting famine decimates the Xhosa population, with almost 80% of the population perishing. First South African (Anglo-Boer) War. Second South African (Anglo-Boer) War. Native National Congress, later renamed the African National Congress (ANC), is founded. National Party formed. Status of the Union Act passed, which reifies South Africa as a “sovereign independent state”.

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SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY: AN ECCENTRIC TIMELINE OF …

1948

1950

1960

1961

1963–1964

1976

1984

1985 1986 1987

National Party elected to government and legislates apartheid. Both the National Party and its apartheid policies will remain in effect until 1994. Enactment of apartheid laws, including the Population Registration Act, in which every South African is classified in a pre-designated racial group; the Group Areas Act, in which South African land became subdivided and restricted to certain racial groups; the Suppression of Communism Act, which effectively banned the Communist Party and any other party determined by the government to promote Communism. The ANC will be banned under this act in 1960. Sharpeville Massacre. A mass demonstration, protesting against Pass Laws, is fired upon by the South African police, leaving 69 people dead. National government bans the ANC. ANC forms the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the “Spear of the Nation”. An armed wing co-founded by Nelson Mandela, devoted to a sabotage campaign against the National Government. Rivonia Trial. Nelson Mandela and several other prominent members of the ANC sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorism. Soweto Uprising. Youth protesting mandatory Afrikaans instruction in schools demonstrate in the streets of Soweto and are violently suppressed by South African police. The confrontation sparks a wave of uprisings and general strikes in black townships across South Africa. P.W. Botha declares State of Emergency in attempt to quell ongoing township rebellions. State of Emergency will last five years, during which time covert police death squads, such as the Vlakplaas Five, eliminate “terrorists” with impunity. Bishop Desmond Tutu wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Killing of the Cradock Four. Killing of the Guguletu Seven. Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. The largest battle in the secret war with Angola waged by South Africa, and

SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY: AN ECCENTRIC TIMELINE OF …

1989

1990

1993 1994

1996 1998 1999 2007 2009 2011

2012 2013

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second largest battle in the history of the African continent, after the Battle of El Alamein during the Second World War. Murder of Stompie Seipei by members of the Mandela United Football Club, allegedly ordered by Winnie Mandela. National government, led by F.W. de Klerk, unbans the ANC and other anti-apartheid political parties, and releases Nelson Mandela from prison. American Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl murdered in Guguletu. First democratic elections in South Africa. Election of Nelson Mandela and ANC party. ANC holds power from 1994 till the present day. First public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings begin. Truth and Reconciliation Commission releases its final report. Thabo Mbeki takes over as ANC leader from Nelson Mandela and as President of South Africa. Jacob Zuma elected chair of the ANC. ANC again wins national elections. Jacob Zuma elected as President. Julius Malema suspended from position of leader of ANC Youth League and expelled from ANC after being convicted for hate speech for his repeated singing of “Dubula iBunu” (“Shoot the Boer”), at public rallies. Marikana Massacre. Police open fire on striking miners, killing 34. Nelson Mandela dies at age 95.

Contents

1

Introduction: Reading Feeling/Apartheid’s Bitter Fruit

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2

Domestic Bliss

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3

“Revealing Is Healing”: Ubuntu, the TRC Hearings, and the Transmission of Affect

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Seeing and Time: Durational Time in Ubu and the Truth Commission and Long Night’s Journey into Day

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Compassion Fatigue: White Empathy and White Guilt in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

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Shame, Guilt and Complicity in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother

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Conclusion: How Close Is Too Close? Anger, Reconciliation and the “Born Free” Generation

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CONTENTS

Works Cited

249

Index

257

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Reading Feeling/Apartheid’s Bitter Fruit

A Nation Built on Feeling For at least a decade, the world witnessed the remarkable and inspiring transformation of South Africa from a violent and repressive regime, a pariah nation, into a peaceful democratic republic. With a timeline that moves rapidly from the giddy optimism surrounding the unbanning of the ANC and the freeing of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, to the exultant spirit of the first democratic elections in 1994, to the emotional culmination of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, South Africa has been portrayed as the exemplary case for honestly and emotionally facing the trauma of its brutal past and incorporating its lessons into the model of an inclusive utopian republic—realizing the dream of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu once termed the “Rainbow Nation”. But how does an entire country collectively heal from such a traumatic past and facilitate a peaceful reconciliation among its citizens? And of what might the cultural and artistic expressions of such a dramatic transformation consist? The new constitution of South Africa encoded the urgent necessity for collective healing from the cultural trauma of apartheid in its provision for national reconciliation: “there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization”.1 The fulfilment of these national “needs” was to culminate in the public hearings of © The Author(s) 2020 M. Libin, Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55977-9_1

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the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the public articulation of the suffering of victims and the appeals for forgiveness from the perpetrators. Broadcast nationally via newspapers, radio and television, these emotional testimonies would allow the national community to coalesce, unified by empathy and ubuntu, and heal together, curtailing the devastating trauma of history.2 The political and social impetus to create a new South African citizen for a “new” egalitarian South Africa resulted in a compelling societal incitement to feel in particular ways: to feel compassion, empathy, guilt, forgiveness, to name the most prominent affective positions being foregrounded in South Africa after 1994. The cultural icons of the “new” South Africa, specifically President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, explicitly modelled the fledgling affective citizenship of the country Tutu idealistically christened the “Rainbow Nation”. Such modelling was dependent upon the public prominence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings that took place from 1996 to 1998. These hearings became performative forums, eliciting the profound feelings of both victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations and broadcasting this affecting testimony to the nation, as well as to the world at large, so that these feelings could then be empathized with and even mirrored by the viewing/listening/reading audience. This book elaborates upon the premise that cultural and national identity in South Africa has undergone a radical transformation to supplant the harsh hierarchical, political, economic and social divisions created during the apartheid era (1948–1994) with a harmonious and egalitarian nation that was born when Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994, and that this transformation may be measured and evaluated in large part through the lens of affect. Through an examination of a range of South African texts produced during and after that historic date, I will demonstrate that the transition from the “old” South Africa to the “new” Rainbow Nation involved the deployment of a variety of affects intended to transform previously disenfranchised South Africans into fully-fledged citizens, to convey the traumatic tales of victims as well as perpetrators of apartheid-era human rights violations to the nation, and finally to transcend the trauma of the recent past and reconcile the divided cultures of the “old” South Africa. The spectacle of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an event that permeated the lives of virtually every South African as well as much of the global community,

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provides an exemplary case for how the “new” South Africa was intentionally constructed on a foundation of affect: pain, grief, hope, shame, remorse, compassion and forgiveness. The ethical ideal connected with, and foundational to, the “new” South Africa was quickly consolidated and brought to fully embodied life in two venerated figures who, not coincidentally, became, respectively, head of state and chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu, as a consequence of his chosen vocation, moved without difficulty into the position of spiritual advisor to the nation. His recourse to the African concept of ubuntu, or interrelatedness—which will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 3—aligned seamlessly with his Anglican faith, and his Christian beliefs added gravitas to his entreaties for confession, forgiveness and reconciliation. While Tutu represented a sort of spiritual bedrock for the values prized by the incoming ANC government, Mandela represented the realized potential of the angry black South African to transform himself into a genial, forgiving and thoroughly reconciled citizen of the “new” South Africa. As such, Mandela became the prototype for the recently acculturated citizen. Entering prison in 1962 as an angry revolutionary and guerilla fighter, co-founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC, Mandela walked out of prison in 1990, a smiling elder statesman advocating peaceful negotiations with the ruling National Party and championing national reconciliation.3 Because the National government that imprisoned him banned all photographs of Mandela and similarly made it illegal to quote him, it appeared to be a moment of shockingly instantaneous metamorphosis as the young, imposing and combative terrorist who entered incarceration emerged, twenty-six years later, as a distinguished, genial leader: more frail yet astonishingly serene, amiable, warm and forgiving. The image of the benevolent Mandela emerging from Victor Verster prison on February 11, 1990—an image, as History Professor Martin Leggassick remarks in his 1998 review of Mandela’s autobiography, that has been “reproduced […] in the South African media almost daily”4 —visually embodies themes that have been carefully and consciously deployed by the ANC government in the social, political and cultural narratives of the Rainbow Nation: the theme of personal transformation as a means of achieving national reconciliation and the complementary thesis of the need, as Sarah Nuttall suggests, “to find a place between public resistance and private healing;

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and between private resistance and public healing”.5 Nuttall discusses Mandela’s autobiography as a prototypical representation of the postapartheid zeitgeist insofar as it conspicuously emphasizes the importance of making the private public. As Nuttall notes, Mandela “makes it clear that the autobiography is a ‘memory’ which is not exclusively his: in prison it was ‘edited,’ as Mandela wrote it, by fellow prisoners Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada. The monologic voice becomes dialogic”.6 In his review article, Legassick similarly notes the public intentions of Mandela’s supposedly private autobiographical voice, intentions made evident through the editing process. When Mandela quotes from his famous Rivonia Trial speech, for example, the extracts that he has chosen “excise any reference to the word ‘nationalisation’”.7 Mandela’s autobiography textually represents the contemporaneous impetus to cede the privacy of individual identity for the greater public good, an impetus that reaches its full expression in the mandate of the TRC hearings to showcase personal confessions from victims and perpetrators alike. The hearings, which will be discussed further in the following chapters, are notable for being the first such process open to the general public and reported on widely by national and international media—making the personal grief of victims and the complicated remorse of the perpetrators readily available to the national as well as the international community. In addition, the TRC hearings became, in the opinion of its architects, the recovered history of the nation; the individual testimonies comprising the archives of a dark, previously suppressed history of apartheid. Just as Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom relates the history of the nation through the story of one suffering but heroic individual to the point where Mandela becomes conflated with the nation as a whole, so too did each testimonial at the TRC hearings become one recovered voice within a chorus intent on expressing a diverse and traumatic national history. As Jane Taylor writes in the introduction to her acclaimed multimedia performance, Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998), at the hearings “individual narratives come to stand for the larger national narrative. The stories of personal grief, loss, triumph and violation now stand as an account of South Africa’s recent past. History and autobiography merge”.8 The next chapter of this book will establish the terms of this discussion of the relationship between affect and national identity, specifically focusing on the concept of proximity to the “other” for whom the South African citizen is supposed to feel. The ideal of the “new” South Africa

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necessarily involved dissolving the barrier of “otherness” promulgated and legislated during the apartheid era, and gathering the once-divided population into the accepting community of ubuntu. The African philosophy of ubuntu was recuperated and championed by Tutu in the first years of the democracy as the underlying philosophy of South Africa as well as the necessary antidote to all the evils of the previous apartheid era. As Tutu writes in his memoir, No Future Without Forgiveness: Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the sunnum bonum — the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good, is to be avoided like the plague. Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive to this good. To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. What dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me. It gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them.9

Tutu’s summary of the “great good” encapsulated in ubuntu makes explicit the incentive for the new citizen of the Rainbow Nation to forgive past wrongs by explaining forgiveness as not only an ethical imperative but a pragmatically self-interested one. It also imagines a new community of citizenship that is bound through affect: the emotional registers of the apartheid era—anger, resentment, lust for revenge, aggressive competitiveness—are expunged by embracing ubuntu, and replaced with the positive affective registers of resilience, survival, and emergence. Tutu’s version of ubuntu, to be clear, is intimately coupled with a political programme,10 but more significantly to this study, is that this political agenda is fundamentally an affective one as well, where reconciliation is the ultimate goal; a goal achieved through empathy and compassion: In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and so have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might have conditioned them.11

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Tutu’s vision of reconciliation and forgiveness, the cornerstones of his version of ubuntu philosophy, thus ultimately depends on a prevailing experience of empathy for the other. It is only through a compassionate connection with the other, he argues in his memoir, that one can overcome the desire for revenge and retributive justice and reach a state of harmonious coexistence. Thus, the future of South Africa, to which the title of his memoir alludes, is dependent on a rigorous, compassionate proximity to otherness, and to the positive affective connections this proximity generates. The newly minted citizen of the nascent Rainbow Nation, Tutu contends, is one who, more than anything else, feels the part. They are compassionate, capable of forgiving but not forgetting, and able to balance the sting of memory against the balm of forgiveness. The perpetrators of atrocities, as well, must rediscover their humanity by developing empathy towards their victims, and so experiencing the common humanity of those that they previously considered inhuman. Through these affective revelations, victims, perpetrators and bystanders can all be gathered into the ubuntu of the emergent community. Thus, a defining aspect of South African culture and cultural production after 1994 became the response to the overriding incitement to feel in certain ways; the response to an affective project designed to shape the bodies of its populace into obliging and obligated citizens of the Rainbow Nation. Post-apartheid culture can be understood as phenomenological in its emotional discourse, a dynamic but unpredictable exchange of affective registers. In this critical understanding, I am influenced predominantly by Sara Ahmed’s approach to affect theory, as elaborated in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. In her remarkable study, Ahmed pushes against a school of affect theory influenced by Gilles Deleuze and represented most prominently by Brian Massumi, which defines affect as disembodied “intensities”, autonomous from the body of the subject and indefinable in terms of emotion. Massumi defines affect as “thinking, bodily—consciously but vaguely, in the sense that is not yet a fully formed thought. It’s a movement of thought, or a thinking movement”.12 Emotion, according to Massumi, is a “very partial expression of affect”, and therefore cannot “encompass all the depth and breadth of our experience of experiencing”.13 Yet, as I will demonstrate throughout this study, naming this “very partial expression of affect” and exploring its articulation in representational form offers both depth and breadth in terms of providing a complex and concrete foundation for analysis. As we have already seen through Tutu’s discussion of the significance

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of ubuntu, the naming of specific emotional responses can be crucial to understanding the South African post-apartheid text, its author and its reader. Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, and later in The Promise of Happiness , argues for the sustained analysis of emotions, which “involve forms of intensity, bodily orientation, and direction that are not simply about ‘subjective content’ … [or] ‘after-thoughts’ but shape how bodies are moved by the world they inhabit”.14 Following Ahmed, this study will focus on the specific emotions being invoked by the texts in question as part of the larger post-apartheid cultural project, which I interpret as one consciously productive of feelings such as empathy, guilt, compassion and shame. Such feelings are directly connected—by figures such as Tutu—to the production of a successfully reconciled Rainbow Nation, and thus, their individual manifestations are fundamental to the emergent zeitgeist. As will be discussed in the chapters that follow, the TRC hearings, with their inspirational slogan, “Revealing is Healing”, become an exemplum of how individual subjects are compelled to express themselves as openly and emotionally as possible in order to bring about not just personal, but national, healing. Even the fiction of the period surrounding the TRC hearings reflects the affective structures of the testimonial process: the confessional narrative, or even the narrative that rebukes the idea of confession, cannot but be seen as a complex aesthetic response to the TRC’s agenda. The culture surrounding the TRC hearings and its affective, collective, response to a traumatic past provide an opportune setting with which to explore Ahmed’s contention that “emotions, or how we respond to objects and others” are what “shape” the “I” and the “we”.15 At the same time, I am indebted to Eugenie Brinkema’s assertion in her study, The Forms of the Affects, that there is always a formal dimension to affect that must be taken into consideration in any analysis of affective representation. Like Ahmed, Brinkema contests the Deleuzian notion that affect is a phenomenon that is “immediate and automatic and resistant”, a phenomenon that specifically resists linguistic articulation.16 As Brinkema contends, when affect is defined as an unnamed intensity, “one can only speak of its most abstract agitations instead of any particular textual workings”.17 Throughout her book, Brinkema focuses on the formal qualities of particular affective expressions—grief, disgust, terror—taking pains to establish how affect is established formally, structurally, through the miseen-scène of the films she analyses.18 My study will discuss several different genres of representation—novel, memoir, poetry, film, drama and audio

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recording—and in each case will strive to determine how formal structures of each work—narrative point of view, literary style, camera work, sound editing, mise-en-scène—bring the reader closer to the affective subtext of each work than any surface reading could produce.

The Shock of Affect But how close is too close? For Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop, the purveyor of ubuntu philosophy, there is likely no such concept as “too close” in terms of interpersonal relations. The new constitution and the TRC implicitly prescribe a radical emotional proximity between the citizens of South Africa. Most notably, the testimony that was specifically selected for the public hearings was chosen in order to resonate emotionally, and spur empathetic connection, with the audience in the room as well as those listening on radio and watching on television.19 Interpersonal proximity, however, can be unpredictable and volatile. The crossing of lines, the violation of personal boundaries, the unpredictable emotional responses that are provoked when the subject is confronted with overwhelming affect, can be shocking to the witness of traumatic testimony. It is this shock of being too close—like the static charged shock that sometimes occurs between people brushing against each other—that this study is concerned with: the shock of unexpected, disruptive and disorienting emotions. It is precisely this sort of unexpected and disorienting emotional shock that is delivered in Achmat Dangor’s 2001 novel, Bitter Fruit . A novel about suppressed family secrets and the volcanic upsurge of emotions they ultimately provoke, Bitter Fruit relates the story of the Ali family, a family implicated in the TRC hearings both professionally and personally. On its surface, the novel documents the affective drama and emotional turmoil that may occur when, as Jane Taylor suggests, “history and autobiography merge”. But because its central narrative about the trauma of apartheid era human rights violations acts as a basis for the far more unexpected and shocking theme of incestuous desire, I foreground Bitter Fruit as an especially revealing example of how Dangor interrogates the unexpected consequences of an ubuntu philosophy: effectively asking, how close is too close? Bitter Fruit tells the story of the three members of the Ali family: the patriarch Silas, once a freedom fighter and now a government liaison to the TRC; his wife, Lydia, who was raped twenty years ago by an Afrikaner

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policeman, François Du Boise, a horrifying act that Silas was forced to listen to; and Mikey, the product of that rape. The novel is set in 1998, as the TRC is starting to wind down, but begins with the explosive flare up that occurs when Silas encounters Du Boise, by happenstance, for the first time in two decades. “It was inevitable”, begins Dangor’s novel, the opening sentence fragment indicating the tragic fatalism that will ostensibly structure Bitter Fruit . Silas is paralysed with surprise and anger when he encounters Du Boise in a shopping mall, but when he reveals the encounter to Lydia, she erupts with the pain of a long-suppressed traumatic memory. She physically performs her pain in front of Silas by slicing up her bare feet on broken glass, and spends the first half of the novel in the hospital recovering from her self-inflicted wounds. The novel focalizes itself through each member of the Ali family in turn, so that the reader becomes intimately familiar with Silas’s detached officiousness, Lydia’s haunted memories of her rape as well as her sadness at Silas’s inability to respond compassionately to her after the attack, and Mikey’s curiosity as he slowly moves towards discovering the secret of his genealogy. Lydia resists Silas’s appeals that she testify before the Truth Commission, replying bitterly, “You think Archbishop Tutu has ever been fucked up his arse against his will?”,20 and the marriage disintegrates further when Silas informs Lydia that he has learned that Du Boise will be applying for amnesty. The novel ends with Lydia abandoning the family and travelling on her own into the wilderness. Mikey ultimately reads Lydia’s diary and discovers the truth about her rape and his conception. Mikey responds by murdering Du Boise and making plans to escape to India, while Silas, whose career has been “to ensure that everyone remained objective, the TRC’s supporters and its opponents, that they considered the law above all, and did not allow their emotions to sway them”, is abandoned to his taciturnity.21 What I’ve just described here is a grim but perfectly efficient melodrama of the post-apartheid era, a tragedy in which the horrors of the past continue to haunt the present. Read this way, the novel adheres seamlessly to the ideological framework of the TRC, an interpretation that certainly explains the international acclaim surrounding Bitter Fruit , including a nomination for the prestigious Booker Prize in 2004. The critical response to Bitter Fruit has understandably focused on the theme of the traumatic past returning to haunt an individual and contaminate a family, shattering the present and leaving the future murkily ambiguous. Thus, Ronit Frenkel suggests that in the novel, the idea of “repressed

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histories becoming overwhelming in their silent presence is set against the notions of articulation on different levels, with Bitter Fruit acting as a means of excavating the silences of the TRC”.22 Shane Graham focuses on the same theme of trauma and identity, contending that Bitter Fruit “thematizes the paradoxes of traumatic memory and of telling impossible stories about being robbed of language and self”,23 and Ana Miller concurs that Bitter Fruit is fundamentally concerned with the “representation of personal and collective trauma” and its relationship to the reconciliation process.24 In each of these critical analyses, there is a sustained focus on Lydia’s trauma and Silas’s wilful amnesia and inability to empathize with her trauma. All of this is relatable and aligns perfectly with conventional expectations of the profound stress involved in the reconciliation process, in terms of the tension between past and present, silence and speech, and the ability to feel ubuntu, or empathetic connection. When following the thematic trajectory outlined above, Bitter Fruit presents itself as a tragic story about the failure of various types of proximity; the intimate proximity between husband and wife, Silas and Lydia, has been irrevocably ruptured by the violence of apartheid, with Mikey’s murder of Du Boise confirming that violent sundering by effectively replicating it. Dangor’s novel, as the critics I have listed above all concur, interrogates the reconciliation process as an effective means of healing individual trauma and further questions the ability for one individual to successfully empathize with another’s suffering. To fail in these respects, according to the novel, ultimately ensures that the trauma of the past continues to reverberate into the future.25 It was precisely these issues that I was expecting to be addressed as I started reading Bitter Fruit , but what I encountered within the novel was far more shocking and challenging—both theoretically and emotionally— than these more readily recognizable themes. Lydia’s rape is certainly foregrounded and described vividly and viscerally over the course of the novel, but what is even more surprising—an initial surprise that developed into a deepening horror each time I read the novel—is that Mikey, the child of that rape and thus the personification of the traumatic past, is defined almost exclusively by his hyperbolic sexual magnetism. Almost every female character, and this includes his mother, Lydia, finds herself sexually attracted to Mikey. Indeed, it was the sudden, powerful shock of realizing that Lydia’s sexual desire for Mikey is real and painstakingly elaborated upon in the novel, that jolted me out of my critical comfort

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zone and made me reorganize my thinking about Bitter Fruit , and about the vicissitudes of affect in post-apartheid South Africa more generally, a thought process that has produced this book.

Emotional Shock The surprising incestuous attraction between Lydia and Mikey is not so subtly foreshadowed early in the novel, when Mikey visits his mother in the hospital. The narrative takes care to document Silas’s discomfort at the way Mikey “burrowed his head deep into his mother’s breasts”.26 The novel emphasizes the eroticization of Mikey—whose childish nickname becomes palpably disturbing as his sexuality is foregrounded—when he recalls his game of “playing Gandhi”, with his young aunt, Mireille. The ostensibly ascetic activity involves the couple lying naked beside each other on a bed, consciously resisting carnal desire.27 The palpable sexual energy radiating between Mikey and his aunt does not go unnoticed even if it is never consummated, and Mireille is sent off to live in Canada in order to preserve the family honour. As the novel unfolds, Mikey has torrid affairs with Silas’s lesbian friend, Kate, as well as his married English professor, Shirley Graham. He is an inexhaustible fount of carnal desire, particularly where older women are concerned, and this includes, most shockingly, his mother, Lydia: It was Mikey whom she held now, and drew to her, and kissed, the way she had always wanted to draw a man to her, at her behest, for her own comfort and pleasure. Her lips on Mikey’s lips, her tongue touching, just touching, the wetness of his mouth. She led him to her bed, and he lay down almost dutifully, his eyes closed. And then he was gone, fallen through a trapdoor into a haven of unconsciousness.28

Unlike the passage where Mikey nuzzles into Lydia’s bosom at the hospital, this encounter is treated neither delicately nor briefly: Dangor dwells on Lydia’s incestuous desire with queasy deliberation for several pages, expounding on Lydia’s thoughts about the kiss as she tries to make sense of her indecent yearnings: She thinks: I kissed my son, carnally, on his lips. Then softens the harshness of this thought, the cat-o’-nine-tails lash of her own confession, by placing it all ‘in context.’ She is a survivor,

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after all, or so she has been told. She kissed her son carnally, she thinks, and he did not respond. Did she then kiss him with carnal intent? This objectified language helps. She kissed him and he started to kiss her back, then withdrew. She held him to her and felt his hard body, no, felt the hardness of his sex.29

Further on, Lydia assures herself that Mikey felt a similar longing; she “knows instinctively that his desire was as strong as hers, that there was pure lust in him”, but that his training at “playing Gandhi” saved them both from a “truly cruel pleasure”.30 Even after multiple readings, I find my feelings of shock and repulsion intensify as the narrative prolongs Lydia’s meditations on the reciprocal sexual attraction between herself and her son, her melodramatic ruminations heightening my feelings of unease. What added to my surprise and discomfort was discovering how studiously critics and reviewers disregard this aspect of a novel in which its protagonist is characterized almost exclusively by his sexual magnetism. The theme of incest seems unavoidable—until you read the critics I have already cited and notice how the novel’s erotic content has been almost completely overlooked. Despite each of these analyses being focused on affect—in the form of Lydia’s trauma—the overwhelming shocking affect of sexual desire, particularly incestuous desire, is erased from critical appraisals of the novel. The issue in reckoning with Dangor’s novel, I would argue, is not because, as Massumi might have it, identifying the emotions in play simplifies the issue. The Deleuzean presupposition that naming feelings amounts to a domestication of the corporeal intensities of affect seems to underestimate the shocking passions circulating in the Ali home. Indeed, Vilashini Cooppan’s article, “Affecting Politics: Post-Apartheid Fiction and the Limits of Trauma”, alone among critical appraisals, directly addresses the sexual attraction that Lydia feels for Mikey, but instead of searching for the narrative significance of these feelings, she generalizes them into “the raw physical intensities of sex and freedom [that] mix together like the bloodlines and histories of these new South Africans”.31 For Cooppan, trauma and affect are intrinsically interconnected, but affect does not require a specific emotional category in order to be evocative of trauma. The sexual intensity experienced by Lydia and Mikey is important as an “intensity”; it does not need to be dissected further, it simply points towards the trauma: “the space of a history that is both traumatic and affective, both then and now, the taboo touch between

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mother and son figures the larger history that no character in the novel can escape”.32 In this case, Brinkema’s criticisms of Deleuzean affect theory seem entirely valid: the critic identifies the source of the intensity but contains it within a very generalized thematic framework of trauma and history, leaving it unclassified and unscrutinized, an “abstract agitation” rather than a specific emotional phenomenon. The extant analysis of Bitter Fruit ignores particularities of the emotional discourse and thus creates a seemingly insoluble critical problem. Rather than engaging with what is most disturbing and disorienting about the novel, the critics seem to reorient themselves using the conventional lodestars of trauma, race and history—thematic pathways that allow them to bypass the daunting obstacle of sexual lust and incestuous desire. Not only are Lydia’s feelings for Mikey explicitly defined and articulated, they are also inexorably connected to her personal trauma. The narrative persistently reminds us that Mikey is the product of rape, and focalizes Lydia’s memory, recalling that she knew definitively that she was pregnant the moment the assault ended. After her son was born, she “remembered smelling Du Boise’s scent on the baby, a faint stench, the premature decaying of a man who harboured some dreaded disease”.33 Besides emphasizing the trauma of the rape and the deadening aftereffects for Lydia, Bitter Fruit also associates the trauma with a breaking down of personal boundaries. That Lydia, rather mystically, seems to know that Mikey has been conceived, and for her to smell the scent of Du Boise on the newborn, suggests that the boundaries between Lydia, Mikey, and Du Boise are dangerously permeable. Lydia’s shocking sexual attraction to Mikey directs me to what will be a key word throughout this study—proximity. I am again following Ahmed’s supposition that emotions are ways in which bodies orient themselves towards each other, as well as towards objects; emotions measure out the space between one body and another. I would suggest, in the light of this spatial figuration of affective relationships, that the relationship between Mikey and Lydia is delineated by a markedly inappropriate proximity, a transgression of the conventional moral boundaries between mother and son. This, of course, is a phenomenon not anticipated by ubuntu theology—the idea of being too close to one another, too interconnected—and Dangor confronts his readers with a post-apartheid society where proximity becomes a form of contagion. For it is not only Lydia who is drawn by carnal desire towards Mikey—almost every woman in the novel is similarly attracted to the young man. Even his father,

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Silas, we are shown, is titillated by Mikey’s sexual life, speculating on the possibility of Mikey having engaged in an incestuous relationship with Mireille.34 Mikey is a character without personal boundaries; he is an object, a magnet for feelings, his only agency defined, as in the “playing Gandhi” game, in terms of refusal. Nowhere is Mikey’s status as a passive object of desire made more explicit than when Kate finds herself alone in the house with Mikey, and watches him through his bedroom window: She peered in through a narrow window, no more than a tall glassed-in slit in the wall, and saw Mikey dimly outlined, lying on his bed. In the darkened room, his naked body was illuminated by a blue glow emanating from his stomach. His arms lay languidly across his body, his hands cupping his genitals. Kate stood at the window, trapped in its monastic narrowness, watching Mikey’s lips move like those of a novice priest ferociously asking his God to forgive him the ineluctable sins of his young body.35

Her objectifying gaze confuses his naked body with the “glowing fragment of Kaaba stone” that Mikey inherited from his paternal grandfather,36 just as it confuses sexuality with spirituality. Like the Kaaba stone, Mikey becomes the enigmatic, fascinating object of Kate’s predatory female gaze. Indeed, throughout the novel, the women who lust after Mikey, including of course Lydia, describe him in terms conventionally reserved for a Lolita figure. As Lydia herself assesses him, Mikey is a subset of his own beauty, a naïve who is also dangerously knowing, whose beauty is both seductive and sinister in its desirability: “Mikey the irresistible ‘innocent’ waiting for his prey, setting his trap, conscious of his own intentions once his mind has been made up, deliberate, dramatic almost”.37 Mikey is quantified as a sexual object, but at the same time the reader is constantly reminded that he personifies a traumatic object; he is the embodiment of apartheid human rights violations. As a character, then, Mikey represents the fundamental conflation of boundary breaking carnality—effortlessly seducing older women, lesbians, married women, his own relatives—and repressed trauma. He is the traumatic secret personified, yet, shockingly, that trauma appears to deliver a powerful sexual charge to anyone in range. To think about affect in Bitter Fruit is therefore to reckon with the vexing intersection of sexual desire and traumatic memory. Indeed,

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we discover at the conclusion of the novel that this affective knot is not merely located within the Ali home, but entangles other families as well. As the novel draws to its conclusion, Mikey’s friend, Vinu Viljoen, confesses to him that she has for years been engaged in an incestuous relationship with her father—also an ex-MK freedom fighter—and now feels betrayed by her father’s confession to his analyst that he has committed child abuse. It is a betrayal, she feels, to reduce their years-long act of love to a criminal offense.38 The failure of conventional social and sexual boundaries, the disorientation that such unbounded proximity produces, is pervasive throughout the novel, indicting contemporary South African society as a whole. What we might perceive in Bitter Fruit is a sustained but implicit interrogation of the effects of affective proximity on individual citizens of post-apartheid South Africa, an interrogatory project that I find articulated in a broad range of representational genres reflecting the TRC hearings and meditating on its role in shaping the emergent nation. The public promulgation of the ubuntu theology of Tutu and Mandela raises questions with its simple truisms that “revealing is healing”, and that proximity begets empathy begets reconciliation at both a personal and a national level. To adopt Ahmed’s terminology, this national ideology strives to reorient or realign the citizenry in the direction of empathetic connection and reconciliation. Throughout this study, beginning with my focus on Mikey Ali, I will demonstrate how textual representations of the TRC—in the form of novels, poetry, drama, documentary and audio compilation—reckon with the issue of proximity and the intense, volatile emotions that such intimate encounters enflame, not only within the text but also for the reader, viewer and listener who engage with these cultural artefacts. For proximity is not just a narrative theme in Bitter Fruit , but a fraught issue that must be negotiated by the reader. The conspicuous averting of eyes among literary critics and reviewers of Bitter Fruit evidences how even the scholarly reader can avoid confronting disturbing or unfamiliar affect. Refusing to reckon with the shocking feelings of Lydia, Kate and Mireille is itself a position in relation to the affective structure of the novel. The refusal to confront the startling theme of sexual transgression in Bitter Fruit seems to reflect an overwhelming desire on the part of the critic to avoid emotions that disturb, that refuse to fit into a conventional thematic structure of recovered traumatic memory.

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The more one focuses on the complex intermingling of historical trauma and sexual desire, the more one feels one’s position in relation to the text and its issues shifting. Mikey, as the embodied conflation of haunted memory and unbounded lust, jars the attentive reader into an affective response that is surprising and unusual. This response is not as simple and undemanding as the compassionate response that Lydia’s trauma elicits, and thus it challenges the reader’s desire to feel empathy for the protagonists of Bitter Fruit . Feelings are contaminated inside and outside the text: Dangor’s use of the taboo of incest seems designed to intentionally tangle every possible reader in its web of distaste. Dangor confronts us by mixing the incompatible and the unimaginable— trauma and incest—and it is no coincidence that he portrays what would have been classified as a mixed race family to deliver these complexly intertwined emotions. Both Frenkel and Miller, in their analyses of Bitter Fruit , scrupulously explore the importance of “race”, or at least of racial classifications, to the narrative. In an earlier conversation with Vinu, prior to her confession, she and Mikey discuss the ugliness of their “bastard names”, contrasted to the beauty of “bastard people”.39 Just before Mikey learns about Vinu’s incestuous relationship with her father, he meets with his Imam and learns the story of Silas’s father, Ali Ali. The story details the rape and impregnation of Ali’s sister by a British officer in India, and relates how Ali murders the officer in revenge and flees to South Africa. The story ends with a definitive pronouncement by the Imam on the bitter fruit of miscegenation: “You conquer a nation by bastardising its children”.40 Despite the authority with which this pronouncement is dispensed, the issue of mixed race is not represented in Bitter Fruit as a condition of victimhood. Indeed, Mikey’s narrative concludes with him murdering Vinu’s father and his own biological father, Du Boise, and preparing to flee back to India, thus completing a cyclical journey that began with Ali Ali’s act of retributive justice and his flight from India. Mikey is never portrayed as a victim, nor is his father, Silas. Mixed race in Dangor’s novel does not represent the “conquered nation”, but more likely gestures towards the forbidden sexual taboo of miscegenation. Writ large, the idea of “bastard people” expands the theme of the inextricable entanglement of colonial violence and sexual desire, a theme once again embodied in the figure of Mikey. Proximity, as it is articulated in Bitter Fruit , offers a distinct and disturbing challenge to the idea of emotional proximity privileged in

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Tutu’s ubuntu. Dangor’s narrative of interpersonal proximity explores a transgression of personal boundaries, a dark and sordid attraction to trauma, a carnal desire to revisit and reconnect with the traumatic event that brings the novel to a grim conclusion. Whereas in ubuntu philosophy, “a person is a person through other people”, in the world of Dangor’s novel, other people persistently threaten the individual’s sense of subjectivity, of secure selfhood. Rather than the secret of Lydia’s rape, and Mikey’s parentage, leading the Ali family to bond over the revelation of suppressed truths and subsequently help each other to achieve personal healing, the taboo seductiveness of the trauma sends each member of the family flying off in their own direction, with both Lydia and Mikey becoming fugitives from their previous lives. Proximity gives way, ultimately, to distance, with each character left isolated and solitary.

Proximity and Affect Birkema’s argument that Following from affect is not an abstract intensity, a prelinguistic possibility, but rather a structural device for textual representation, I have concentrated on the complex affective knot objectified in the character of Mikey Ali. Emotional affect—in this particular case traumatic melancholy and carnal desire—not only shapes the narrative, but also defines the relationship between reader and text. As I continue through this study, I will demonstrate how the issue of proximity and affect is explored in a variety of different texts in different genres. It is, I argue, each text’s particular affective core that gives it its distinct structure and its specific resonance of meaning. The texts that I will focus on position themselves in relation to the mainstream ideology of the “new” South Africa and the TRC hearings, but each presents a unique emotional response to the government’s incitement to feel empathy for the victims of apartheid, and every response yields a unique structure and signification. In the chapters that follow, I will be focusing on the emphasis the ANC government placed on promoting and performing a politics of affect for the nation, and also how this particular programme is questioned, challenged or subverted by the cultural artefacts being produced in the same period. My next chapter articulates a methodology that gauges affect in terms of proximity to otherness by examining two fictional representations of an exemplary model of the tense spatial relationship between whites and blacks in South African society: black domestic servants and their white employers. The relationship between the white “madam” and

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the black servant is a compelling and provocative one in the apartheid era, since it places the “other” within the intimate domestic space of white colonial power. The relationship manifests an equation of mutual interdependence, and in so doing generates strong feelings of resentment, based on that sense of dependency and obligation, on either side of the imbalance. In both of the novels discussed in the following chapter—Méira Cook’s The House on Sugarbush Road (2012) and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981)—the relationship between domestic and employer becomes a microcosm of the dilemma of the white liberal to fully exonerate themselves from the privileges and oppressions of apartheid. Even though Cook’s novel was published thirty years after Gordimer’s, both narratives focus on the hierarchical but interdependent relationship between black domestics and white employers. More than this, the focus on literary representations of the South African domestic offers a fortuitous vantage point to discuss the response of North American readers to South African post-apartheid literature and its prevalent but complicated appeal to affect. As a North American reader of African literature, I am assuming a social stance that is also inevitably an affective stance. It is for the purpose of delineating that position that the first novel I deal with in the next chapter is Méira Cook’s The House on Sugarbush Road, which allows me to analyse not only the text itself, but also the emotional responses Cook, a Winnipegbased writer, received from members of book clubs in Canada as she hosted discussions of her novel. These responses ultimately coalesce into a composite figure that I will term the “book club reader”. Book club readers represent, in this case, the bourgeois liberal readers who have been conditioned, for almost two centuries, to understand the reading act as an endeavour that enlightens them and allows them to connect with the contexts, perspectives and emotions of others.41 In her study, Empathy and the Novel, Keen identifies the “middlebrow reader” as one “who populates the book clubs and buys most of the fiction sold in the United States and Great Britain”, but more importantly she identifies this reader’s interests as “seek[ing] empathetic reading experiences”.42 Keen argues that the middlebrow or, as I term them, the “book club readers”, understand narrative as a “moral technology”, that “open[s] the readers’ hearts and minds to markedly different others”, and that this conception of reading as empathetic action “make[s] up a core element of middlebrow readers’ self-image”.43 In terms of reading literature representing other countries, and particularly the oppressed of other countries, book

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club readers engage with the text of the marginalized other in order to experience an uncomplicated connection; their reading practice allows them to forget their own socio-economic position and its implications in the global circulation of capitalism and occupy an idealized space of benevolent empathy. Through reading, they realize boundlessly compassionate versions of themselves, selves that might heal the problems of the world through a textual relationship with oppressed others. My next chapter elucidates the figure of the book club reader by demonstrating the powerful affective response that can occur when the soothing presuppositions of their reading practices are challenged by the text they encounter, when the otherness of the text assumes a proximity that threatens the comforting illusions that the reading act generally affords. It is in these cases of discomforting proximity that we may begin to discern the power of affect to challenge the book club reader’s compassionate approach. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on a range of media representations of the Truth Commission Hearings in order to demonstrate how the hearings served as a forum for convening a shift in cultural affect, a shift intended to produce the newly minted citizen of the Rainbow Nation. That citizen is one delineated almost entirely by their affective response to the horrors of the apartheid past—a hybrid creature selectively constituted from grief, guilt, melancholy, forgiveness and hope. The hearings themselves, I will argue, represent an exclusive platform for this affective performance. In this chapter, I interrogate the narrative of national trauma, arguing that the political and cultural power of the hearings is derived not from the specifics of the delivered narrative, but by the force of affect transmitted to the public through various public broadcasting systems. What is integral to the success of the TRC in consolidating a new national identity is that the country experiences and ultimately adopts the emotions of the individuals on the stand—be they victims or perpetrators—and is required to experience empathy (identification) rather than sympathy. In this context, I examine the concept of ubuntu, the philosophy of empathy and interdependence invoked repeatedly in the official mandates of the TRC, as well as in the writings of Archbishop Tutu, as the channel through which cultural affect is invoked, organized and deployed in the service of an ideal configuration of the new postcolonial citizen. Through ubuntu, the disparate individuals who offer up their testimony before the hearings—victims, witnesses, perpetrators—are connected to one another

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under the emotional umbrella of the traumatized, the alienated, the broken. These discrete and often opposing scripts are woven together into the larger cultural zeitgeist of ubuntu as a way of naturalizing and, indeed, nationalizing, the imperative to empathize; an imperative that extends outward, and strives to incorporate, the general audience. Ubuntu does not only become the credo for the new country, but it develops into a generalized imperative that measures the citizens of the “new” South Africa in relation to their ability to feel. In Chapter 3, I analyse Ingrid de Kok’s poem sequence, “A Room Full of Questions” (2002), devoted to the TRC hearings, and South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2000), an audio anthology produced by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), reflecting their coverage of the TRC hearings. Chapter 4 deals with two visual performances focused on the TRC hearings: an avantgarde multimedia dramatic production, Ubu and the Truth Commission (2007), written by Jane Taylor and William Kentridge, and the American documentary film Long Night’s Journey into Day (2000), produced by Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann. While diametrically opposite in terms of aesthetics and politics, both productions concentrate on the status of the perpetrator of human rights violations, and both manipulate space and time to question the specific conditions by which the viewer might empathize with and forgive a perpetrator. In Chapter 5, I discuss creative, fictionalized versions of the TRC hearings, specifically analysing the writers’ complex, often conflicted, negotiation with feelings of complicity and compassion. The two narratives discussed in this chapter—Antjie Krog’s hybrid text, Country of My Skull (1998) and J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace (1999)—stand in direct contrast to each other in terms of tone and structure. Krog’s text is multigeneric, fragmentary and polyvocal—blending actual testimony from the hearings, memoir (both actual and fictionalized) and poetry—in an effort to represent the overwhelming trauma Krog experienced as a journalist covering the TRC hearings. Coetzee’s novel is more conventionally focalized through its protagonist, disgraced university professor, David Lurie, a detached and libidinous intellectual whose distinguishing characteristic is an inability to empathize with other human beings. The reader of Disgrace is asked to follow Lurie through a journey that leads him from a refusal to confess to his infractions to an unlikely form of redemption brought about by helping pariah dogs face euthanasia.

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Both of these texts stake a claim in relation to compassion—the feeling par excellence in terms of the national drive for reconciliation and ubuntu that was embodied in the TRC hearings. Yet, although Krog and Coetzee enunciate, through their respective texts, radically differing views about the value of compassion in the “new” South Africa, both Disgrace and Country of My Skull complicate the idea of compassion, forcing the reader to re-evaluate their place as a “witness” to the traumatic narratives of the TRC hearings. By juxtaposing these two disparate texts, I focus on complex questions about the nature and value of affective states such as compassion, shame and guilt, and their function in allowing the bourgeois white South African citizen to effectively integrate into post-apartheid society. My sixth chapter furthers the discussion of the discourse of shame by analysing two novels that directly appropriate the confessional mode in order to solicit forgiveness from the intended reader. Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1993) and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) both feature first-person narrators who confess to their complicity in the crimes of the apartheid era, and both address the reader, obliquely or directly, to ask for the response of forgiveness. The narrators of these texts admit to feelings of shame, that most powerful and levelling of affective responses, but at the same time as they attempt to connect with their reader through their confessions, I will argue that the alibis that they deliver actually conceal another secret, another shame, that raise further questions about forgiveness and reconciliation. I conclude this study with a brief discussion of the 2016 play I See You, by contemporary playwright, Mongiwekhaya. The play, which documents an evening of prolonged violence initiated by a policeman, formerly of the MK, and a young black student, a “born free”, provides a shocking example of how proximity and affect remain a highly charged issue even two decades after the end of apartheid. My study concludes by demonstrating how the philosophy of ubuntu continues to underlie the issues identified in South African society to the present day, that the challenge of South Africans to connect with, and relate to, each other, still dominates the foreground of national culture.

Notes 1. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 200 §. Peace Accords Matrix. Notre Dame, IN: Kroc Institute for International

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, 1993. Retrieved 31 August 2019. https://peaceaccords.nd.edu/provision/truth-or-reconcili ation-mechanism-interim-constitution-accord. As will be discussed at length in this book, ubuntu is an African philosophy of interdependence and reciprocity. As Michael Battle suggests in his discussion of the importance of ubuntu to the theological approach of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the term is derived from the Xhosa proverb, “ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu” translated as “each individual’s humanity is ideally expressed in relationship with others,” 39. Nelson Mandela’s image became so thoroughly reinvented, especially internationally, that I once discovered that my son had chosen to write a report on him in fourth grade as part of an educational unit on Nonviolent Civil Disobedience (with the teacher’s approval). Mandela has become a champion of non-violent human rights, alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., despite his early efforts at armed insurrection. Leggassick, Martin. “Myth and Reality in the Struggle Against Apartheid.” Journal of South African Studies 24 (1998): 445. Nuttall, Sarah. “Telling ‘Free’ Stories? Memory and Democracy in South African Autobiography Since 1994.” In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, 75–88. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998, 76. Nuttall, Sarah. “Telling ‘Free’ Stories? Memory and Democracy in South African Autobiography Since 1994,” 77. Leggassick, Martin. “Myth and Reality in the Struggle Against Apartheid.” Journal of South African Studies 24 (1998): 449. One of the main concessions ceded by the ANC in their negotiations with the National government for a peaceful transition to democracy was the suppression of the ANC’s calls for nationalization of all industries and trades, codified in the ANC’s Freedom Charter of 1955. The Freedom Charter explicitly declared that “The people shall share in the country’s wealth,” and that “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people.” Although many of the declarations of the original Freedom Charter were incorporated into the new South African Constitution in 1994, any mention of nationalization or wealth distribution was dropped. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007, ii. Ubu and the Truth Commission, and its innovative and experimental multimedia representation of the TRC hearings, will be discussed extensively in Chapter 4.

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9. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1999, 31. 10. See also Michael Battle. Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2009 and Christoph Marx. “Ubu and Ubuntu: On the Dialectics of apartheid and Nation Building.” Politikon 29 (2002): 1. 11. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1999, 271. 12. Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015, 10. 13. Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect, 5. 14. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 230. 15. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness , 10. 16. Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, xiv. 17. Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects, xiii. 18. Brinkema, Eugenie, 37. 19. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition. Bloomington, IN and Indiana, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010, 9. 20. Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit . Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001, 18. 21. Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit , 59. 22. Frenkel, Ronit. “Performing Race, Reconsidering History: Achmat Dangor’s Recent Fiction.” Research in African Literatures 39 (2008): 159. 23. Graham, Shane. South African Literature After the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 95. 24. Miller, Ana. “The Past in the Present: Personal and Collective Trauma in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit .” Studies in the Novel 40 (2008): 146. 25. In his article, “‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature,” David Medalie argues that the unresolved imposition of the traumatic past on the present is an abiding theme in post-apartheid novels. His essay contends that the traumatic wounds of South Africa’s past continue to haunt the present tense, refusing to be integrated through any productive act of reconciliation. Although he does not mention Bitter Fruit in his analysis, he gestures broadly to South African fiction since 1994, suggesting that this is a ubiquitous cultural concern articulated frequently in the country’s literature. We could conjecture, perhaps, that literary critics focusing on Bitter Fruit might recognize this prevalent theme of historical haunting and settle into it without noticing the important thematic differences that become apparent with further scrutiny.

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit . Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001, 25. Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit , 33. Dangor, Achmat, 146. Dangor, Achmat, 149. Dangor, Achmat, 150. Cooppan, Vilashini. “Affecting Politics: Post-Apartheid Fiction and the Limits of Trauma.” Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel (n.d.): 56. Cooppan, Vilashini. “Affecting Politics: Post-Apartheid Fiction and the Limits of Trauma,” 57. Dangor, Achmat, 109. Dangor, Achmat, 43. Dangor, Achmat, 72. Dangor, Achmat, 30. Dangor, Achmat, 61. Dangor, Achmat, 185–87. Dangor, Achmat, 147. Dangor, Achmat, 183. See Carolyn Betensky. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010 and Suzanne Keen. Empathy and the Novel. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2007, 101. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2007, 104. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel, 104–5.

CHAPTER 2

Domestic Bliss

Calata’s Cry The public hearings on gross human rights violations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission commenced on April 15, 1996, in the town hall in East London, South Africa. To those seeking to distil meaning from the TRC hearings, however, the true commencement took place on the second day of the hearings, April 16, and was signalled by the sudden, spontaneous and agonized cry of claimant Nomonde Calata. Recounting the murder of her husband, Fort Calata, one of the so-called Cradock Four—black activists who were murdered by South African security forces in 19851 —Nomonde Calata interrupted her verbal testimony by erupting into what was interpreted by almost everyone who witnessed the scene as a wail of pure anguish and sorrow. Calata’s surprising outburst became, almost instantly, the iconic event for representing and embodying the TRC hearings. On the SABCproduced audio collection, South Africa’s Human Spirit, the recording of Calata’s testimony and the resulting cry is one of the first sound bites presented in Volume One of the series, and thus one of the primary introductions to the Truth Commission. Indeed, the narrator of the track declares that Calata’s cry “ushers in” the Truth Commission as the audio shifts from Calata’s cry to the sound of Tutu leading the assembled witnesses as they chant the Xhosa hymn “Senzeni Na? (What have we done?)”.2 © The Author(s) 2020 M. Libin, Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55977-9_2

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The mournful, anguished cry of Nomonde Calata was readily identified, by journalists as well as commissioners, as the auditory emblem of the TRC’s role in South African society. In his memoir, No Future Without Forgiveness, Tutu describes Calata’s howl of pain as the “defining sound of the TRC”.3 In Country of My Skull , Antjie Krog’s poetic, fictionalized memoir recounting her time as a journalist for the TRC hearings, Krog devotes a significant portion of her narrative to Nomonde Calata’s poignant, personal and historic cry. In Krog’s text, her narrator persona4 discusses Calata’s testimony at length with a fictional friend, Professor Kondlo. Krog intersperses the faux-dialogue between the narrator and Kondlo about the significance of Calata’s story, with lengthy extracts from official transcripts of the testimony, including the famous emotional outburst.5 Kondlo ardently contends that “this crying is the beginning of the Truth Commission — the signature tune, the definitive moment, the ultimate sound of what the process is all about”.6 Kondlo then proceeds to offer an analysis of why this sound, which he admits will “haunt [him] for ever and ever”, has such profound significance: The academics say pain destroys language and this brings about an immediate reversion to a prelinguistic state — and to witness that cry was to witness the destruction of language … was to realize that to remember the past in this country is to be thrown back into a time before language.7

Krog’s narrative persona does not, at any point, disagree with her fictional friend’s conflation of South Africa’s apartheid history (1948–1994) and a “prelinguistic” past. The extremity of this claim that “pain destroys language” and that the act of remembering precedes linguistic articulation, epitomizes the belief that is implicit in the high-flown assessments of Calata’s cry by Tutu and by the voice-over commentary of South Africa’s Human Spirit —that the aim of the TRC hearings was to allow the country access to pure, unmediated affect. Calata’s cry of pain, precisely because it was interpreted as spontaneous and authentic affect, provoked a wide range of emotional responses from the South African citizens who heard and witnessed her anguish. Alex Boraine, the deputy chairperson of the TRC, concurs with Krog’s description of Calata’s cry in his memoir, A Country Unmasked, in which he describes the outburst as a “primeval and spontaneous wail from the depths of her soul” which “caught up in a single howl all the darkness and horror of the apartheid years […] the collective horror of the thousands

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of people who have been trapped in racism and oppression for so long”.8 In Boraine’s reckoning, the agonized cry represents, as in Professor Kondlo’s assessment, a prehistoric or “primeval” howl; an expression of affect so genuine and immediate that it transcends the boundaries of subjectivity and even history. At the same time, however, the cry manages to epitomize history, capturing in the singular emotional outburst “all the darkness and horror of the apartheid years”. Finally, and most importantly, Calata’s cry becomes universal, embodying “the collective horror of thousands of people”. The cry simultaneously organizes history, erases history and gathers the nascent community of the new South Africa together in a single and singular act of witnessing, sharing and healing. Alternately, however, the extremity of pain and despair transmitted through that grief-stricken cry also contains the power to alienate and repel the listener. As Boraine writes, “many people told me afterwards that they had found it unbearable and switched off the radio”.9 This response attests to the potent force of affect and the resonance it created even in those who experienced it at a remove—by way of radio or television transmission, through written accounts of the proceedings, and through fictionalized iterations, as in the conversation between Krog’s narrator and Professor Kondlo. Even negative and seemingly apathetic responses— turning off the radio and ostensibly turning away from the past as well as the future of South Africa—were charged with powerful emotion: the cry was “unbearable” for these listeners, and so their decision to switch off the broadcast was a result of overwhelming feeling rather than callous indifference. That listeners recall silencing the radio in their later discussions with Boraine bears evidence to the lasting emotional impact of Calata’s cry. Thus, a single cry of pain was able to generate a vast array of affective responses for the South African citizen. Empathy, sympathy, discomfort, repulsion, complicity, guilt, allegiance, self-aggrandisement, remorse; these positions are all potential prelinguistic responses available to the auditor who witnesses the traumatic eruption of Nomonde Calata’s emotion. As Catherine Cole argues in her analysis of the TRC hearings through the lens of performance studies, the affective power of the hearings was conveyed, in large part, through its emphasis on immediacy and presence: The TRC’s embrace of public display placed enormous stock in being present and face to face. The liveness of the hearings, the physical presence of victims and perpetrators in one room before a crowd of witnesses,

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the ability of audiences to see the faces and experience testimony in real time, to hear the rhythms, phrasings, and intonations of speech — all these elements seemed to carry a truth effect capable of inspiring in some an innate confidence that what was transpiring was somehow real and genuine.10

Broadcast through radio, television and print media, the South African TRC hearings—the first ever such proceedings to be publically disseminated11 —convey their “liveness” and immediacy, enabling what Teresa Brennan has termed, in her eponymous study, “the transmission of affect”. In her investigation of the fluid nature of supposedly subjective emotions, Brennan contests the Western “myth” of the self-contained ego, a myth that reassures the individual “that their affects and feeling are their own, and that they are energetically and emotionally contained in the most literal sense”.12 Brennan counters these assumptions by mounting the argument that affect circulates freely between individuals, even though the ego either asserts its boundaries in order to shore up the ideal of its autonomy, or endorses this fluidity in order to project negative affect upon the other: My theory […] postulates an origin for affects that is independent of the individual experiencing them. Or they come from us, but we pretend (habitually) that they come from the other. Envy, anger, aggressive behavior — these are the problems of the other. Overtolerance, overgenerosity — these are our problems.13

The TRC hearings, in their conception and in their performance, convey the idea that the individual can be deeply influenced by affects that originate independently of their own experiences, an influence so profound that the individual somatizes the experiences attached to the affect. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed likewise argues that a thorough understanding of affect vexes discrete definitions of “self” and “other” as well as conventional distinctions between the “individual” and the “group”: In my model of sociality of emotions, I suggest that emotions create the very effect on the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and an outside in the first place. So emotions are not simply

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something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have. Rather it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.14

In particular, Ahmed reflects on the paradoxical blurring of public/private boundaries in the experience of pain, wherein the essentially private and singular nature of pain ironically incites the victim to seek acknowledgement of others at the same time that the experience of suffering draws the empathy or interest of witnesses: We can see that the impossibility of inhabiting the other’s body creates a desire to know ‘what it feels like.’ To turn this around it is because no one can know what it feels like to have my pain that I want loved others to acknowledge how I feel. The solitariness of pain is intimately tied up with its implication in relationship to others.15

Brennan’s and Ahmed’s assertion that traumatic pain opens the subject’s body to the larger community reverberates through this study. The texts that I will discuss frequently examine the questions that arise when individual trauma is communicated to, or appropriated by, a witness to that pain. In a future chapter I will discuss Antjie Krog’s manifestation of secondary traumatic symptoms in Country of My Skull , symptoms contracted as a result of her prolonged exposure to traumatic testimony. There will also be an opportunity to recall Ahmed’s formulation on the relationship between the sufferer of pain and their “loved others” in Lucy Lurie’s enigmatic refusal to explain her trauma to her father, David, in Disgrace. Similarly, I will discuss the way in which Mandisa, Sindiwe Magona’s protagonist in Mother to Mother, directly addresses her demands for acknowledgement and empathy for the hardships endured by herself and her son, Mxolisi, to the mother of the young woman Mxolisi has murdered. She argues that the white American mother could not possibly comprehend the depths of their feelings since she has not experienced the debilitating effects of apartheid, and yet she also insists that since both writer and reader are mothers, they both are bonded through the understanding of what it means to lose a child. Ahmed’s theorizing of pain reflects tellingly on the transmission of affect at the TRC hearings, specifically through the anguished cry of Nomonde Calata.

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Empathy, Ubuntu and Proximity The potential for the transmission of affect through public hearings and public broadcasting is even more significant when it involves cultures that more readily accept the fluidity of somatic boundaries in the context of profoundly felt emotion. This cultural acceptance will be clarified in a longer discussion of ubuntu in the following chapter, but the cry of Nomonde Calata offers a salient “sounding” of the cultural accretions that are recognizable in this non-linguistic, preverbal, expression of pain. Cole’s analysis of this symbolic moment leads her to interview Calata, who revealed that she had stifled her grief-stricken cry from her husband’s death until the moment it erupted in the town hall of East London: That is why I screamed — because I wanted the pain to come out. I was tired of keeping it inside me because even the time when my husband died, people would not allow me to cry because I was expecting a baby, so they were thinking that my crying would affect the baby.16

Calata recounts that she was prevented from crying because of the threat of transferring her sorrow and pain to her unborn child, thus demonstrating the prevalent cultural belief that proximity to negative affect results in the unavoidable transmission of that affect. More specifically, the anxiety of Calata’s community regarding the emotional well-being of her unborn child reflects a belief in the porous boundaries between proximal subjects, most particularly that of the mother and her child. The various textual explorations of pain and suffering that I will discuss in this book continually circulate around the issue of the effect of proximity on affective reaction. Of course, the slippery boundaries between the maternal body and the child it produces17 are, in some ways, a figurative representation of the problem of proximity and its relation to affect. Indeed, the relationship between proximity and affect appears to be directly proportional, hence the ANC government’s desire to bring each South African citizen into intimate contact with the victims selected to testify at the TRC hearings.18 Underwriting the project of publicly broadcasting the testimony of victims was the received belief that empathy can be fostered by bringing the suffering subject into extended contact with sympathetic witnesses. The idea that the intimacy of witnessing produces empathy was fundamental to the project of the TRC hearings and is foundational

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to an understanding of literature that solicits the reader’s sympathetic understanding. At the same time, however, the empathy of the witness becomes a fraught issue when distinguishing between the authentic testimony of victims of apartheid-era human rights violations and the literary representation of trauma. Historically, advocates for literature have claimed that the literary text is a powerful vehicle for cultivating genuine empathy. The question of whether readerly empathy towards fictional characters translates equivalently to compassion for living human beings, however, is not easily answered. In her study, Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen argues: that the very fictionality of novels predisposes readers to empathize with characters, since a fiction known to be “made up” does not activate suspicion and wariness as an apparently “real” appeal for assistance may do. I posit that fictional worlds provide safe zones for readers’ feeling empathy without experiencing a resultant demand on real-world action. This freedom from obligation paradoxically opens up the channels for both empathy and related moral affects such as sympathy […].19

Keen’s suggestion is provocative in its assertion that the “freedom from obligation” implicit in reading fiction allows readers to experience empathy more readily, a contention that challenges the widely held belief that relating to fictional characters provides readers with a moral education that allows them to bring a mature sense of compassion to real-life situations. Carolyn Betensky, in Feeling for the Poor, discusses the Victorian social-problem novel as a literary project designed specifically to promote “bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes”,20 so much so that in the Victorian era, “reading becomes something to do about the pain of the other”.21 The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has presented herself as a staunch advocate for literature’s power to foster empathy and develop an evolved sense of ethics. As she argues in Poetic Justice, the literary imagination is the ingredient missing from contemporary public discourse, leaving our society “lack[ing] in the capacity to see one another as fully human”.22 According to Nussbaum, reading humanizes us in the same way that our exposure to the anguished testimonies of the victims of apartheid at the TRC hearings was meant to humanize the citizens of South Africa. Both the reading act and the act of witnessing seem effectively suited

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to reconnect an individual with what Tutu terms the spirit of ubuntu, an African philosophy of interconnectedness and community. Ubuntu, which will be discussed more thoroughly in the following chapter, has been embraced by Tutu as providing an alternative to Western individualism. The word itself is incorporated into the provision of the South African constitution that established the need for the TRC, declaring: “there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization”.23 As Michael Battle elaborates, ubuntu emphasizes interdependence over self-sufficiency, the concept originating from a Zulu proverb, “ubuntu ungamntu abantu”, which Battle translates as “a person depends on other people to be a person”.24 According to Tutu’s ubuntu philosophy, community is fundamental to subjectivity: a person is essentially incomplete unless they maintain an active, sympathetic connection to their society and culture. It is the affective response, the individual’s response of compassion and empathy, that signals the success of the philosophy of ubuntu. Reading through the lens of ubuntu, one could argue that apartheidera South African writers consistently crafted their novels to rouse the political sympathies of an international readership, attempting—whether unconsciously or not—to employ literature as a vehicle for empathy, to create a global sense of ubuntu in order to rally citizens and their governments against apartheid. It is important to note, as Lewis Nkosi most famously contends in his essay, “Constructing the ‘Cross-Border’ Reader”, that for the writers of anti-apartheid literature, particularly through the 1970s and 1980s, the intended readership was white, bourgeois and foreign. This was a necessary consequence of the National government’s tendency to ban any novel that seemed politically seditious, but also stems from the understanding that preaching to the choir would do nothing to advance the material and pragmatic causes that fuelled protest writing. As Nkosi suggests: Any literature which lays claim to being ‘contra’ apartheid within the South African conditions, especially the realist ‘protest’ text, can never be exclusively addressed to [the] internal community of oppressed readers for that would make no sense: such a text would be continuously telling people who already know it that they are oppressed.25

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According to Nkosi, late apartheid-era novelists such as Mongane “Wally” Serote, Miriam Tlali and Nkosi himself26 directed their “protest” texts to a “cross-border reader” under the assumption that realist novels provoked affect27 in the exact fashion that Betensky describes the goals of the Victorian social novel: to promote “bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes”.28 Literature’s alleged humanizing power operates best, just as broadcasts of the TRC hearings operate most effectively, by bringing the reader/audience into close proximity with the other. It is worth noting that proponents of the power of literature to cultivate a developed sense of empathy in readers—Nussbaum being a significant example—do not rely on texts that foreground a didactic agenda: indeed, such advocates are wary of narratives that explicitly preach the value of empathy.29 The powerful relevance of literature does not arise from its didacticism, rather it is the prolonged exposure to otherness that literature affords, in the form of fictional characters, that fosters the kind of humanistic understanding of otherness that, in a just and compassionate society, can be extended to the real world.30

Domestic Bliss This study began for me with a consideration of the literary representation of the South African domestic worker, an important figure in terms of the hypothesis that empathy operates in direct proportion to proximity. In South Africa, from the apartheid era through to the present day, black domestic workers are ubiquitous in white households of almost every economic stratum. In her landmark 1989 study of domestic workers in the apartheid era, Jacklyn Cock notes that, at the time of her study, domestic service constituted a “significant source of employment for almost one million black women”.31 Before 1994, because of the strict pass laws that forced blacks to live in townships far removed from white urban neighbourhoods, black domestic workers frequently resided as “live-ins”, being afforded a small room on the white employer’s property (although not, typically, within the employer’s residence) that would allow them to work from early morning to late evening without needing to factor in the time-consuming commute from the black townships. As Cock suggests:

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The domestic servant […] frequently works irregular hours; she receives part of her payment ‘in kind’ and the ‘live-in’ domestic servant is accommodated at the workplace. Employer control often extends into the servant’s ‘private life’ — for example the regulation of visitors and the inspection of the servant’s rooms and goods.32

The prevalence of domestic workers in South African society during the apartheid era ensured that the relationship between “maids” and “madams” was often the “only significant inter-racial contact whites experience”,33 and thus potentially one of the most revealing in terms of the correlation between proximity and empathy, a correlation that Sarah Nuttall will come to term an “entanglement”, which she defines as “an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored, or uninvited”.34 Nuttall’s first rubric of entanglement, she contends, concerns the inevitable historical entanglement that apartheid paradoxically creates through its policies of segregation. “The deepest truth of South African history”, Nuttall argues, is that “the more dispossession occurred the more blacks and whites depended on each other”.35 The complex interrelationship between the black domestic and white madam reveals a tantalizingly knotted entanglement of affect for us to trace. The domestic situation in South Africa offers an illuminating cultural distinction from the country I write from, Canada, where the bourgeois citizens of major cities may successfully avoid direct encounters with its marginalized others, for example the First Nations, if they so choose. In South Africa, the marginalized Other may often be in the kitchen preparing your meal; there is no way for whites to avoid perpetual reminders of the racial inequities of the country. The idea for this study began for me with a virtual encounter between the South African domestic and the white Canadian reader, mediated specifically through Méira Cook’s 2012 novel, The House on Sugarbush Road. Cook, born in South Africa and writing in Winnipeg—and therefore acutely aware of the particular national dynamics of proximity to otherness—organizes her novel, set immediately after the democratic elections of 1994, around the relationship between the domestic worker, Beauty Mapule, and her white employers of the past thirty years, the Du Plessis family. Beauty has faced numerous challenges throughout her life, including the death of her first husband, the murder of her young daughter and caring for her drug-addicted grandson. Disenfranchised and

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forlorn, she spends much of the novel struggling to find the funds, and an honest contractor, so that she might build a house of her own. Beauty Mapule is ostensibly a figure of striking pathos as she dominates the foreground of Cook’s novel. It came as a surprise to Cook, when she was invited to book clubs around Winnipeg as well as elsewhere in Canada, when the reaction to Beauty’s character was, frequently, not sympathy for the downtrodden, disenfranchised and ageing domestic, but rather antipathy and even hostility. What was it that provoked the readers—predominantly middle-class white women—to reject an empathetic association with Beauty’s plight? The answer—arrived at during conversations with Cook—was the presentation of Beauty’s character as angry. Indeed, from the opening paragraph of the novel, Beauty’s anger is presented as a central narrative event: Whenever she grew angry thinking of Lucky’s neglect, Beauty Mapule reminded herself that he was her boy, her first-born, her lucky charm. Only she wished he would send money for Rothman now and again. No, she wasn’t angry but she was sad through to her bones even though she must hide this sadness to the world. Always and wherever she was, even here in this late-night winter kitchen, Beauty dragged her sad anger around her as if it was a goose down quilt, pulling it across her shoulders and over her head, blocking out the world in soft hisses and drifting feathers. Yes, anger was always soft like this, a punch in the stomach with no strength behind it. A kiss on the lips from someone who was about to leave you.36

This paragraph offers a complex meditation on the shifting boundaries between anger and grief, but it is significant that these silent feelings— emotions that Beauty believes “she must hide” from the world—register somatically as she works under harsh conditions in the “late-night winter kitchen” in the house of her employer. Beauty’s emotions—because they are directly attached to her feelings about her son, Lucky, and grandson, Rothman—remain fluid and ambiguous, finally manifesting as “a punch in the stomach with no strength behind it”. Her anger continues to flare for other reasons, however, and is less abstruse in its manifestations. More pointed, but no less complex, is her malicious anger towards her employer’s grandson, Benjamin Du Plessis, an emergency room doctor she has cared for since he was a baby. Thinking about him as a child and now as an adult, Beauty expresses a violent and contradictory state of affect:

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In truth, she’d never stopped loving the little boy, that little boy whom she’d held and rocked to sleep. Whose food she had cooked and whose sheets she had washed. No, she loved him still but the man he’d become and whose food she still cooked and sheets she still washed she did not love, no quite the opposite. It was a riddle but one she did not care to solve except through spite and such small daily acts of belligerence as lay within her scope. Shrugging now, clearing her throat of the accumulated phlegm of disgust, Beauty spat into her cooking oil.37

This passage is characteristic of Beauty’s disposition throughout the novel both in terms of the palpable and vindictive fury she feels, and the ambiguous motivations for that anger. Her rage is no longer a soft punch but a forceful assault: she not only spits in the food she prepares for Benjamin, but also deliberately overcooks it; she steals change from his pockets while he showers; she burns his clothes while ironing them. Yet, while directing this hostility towards Benjamin, Beauty cannot, or according to the narrator “does not care to”, comprehend the nature of her hatred, since she still feels love for the young boy he once was. More shockingly, the “man he’d become” is a caring and dedicated emergency room doctor and a compassionate liberal humanist. Benjamin has continually tolerated Beauty’s insolence, funded Rothman’s education, all the time ministering to destitute patients in the public hospital where he works. And yet, paradoxically, Benjamin’s profound liberalism is what Beauty most loathes about him: Yebo, the boarder bled like a liberal, just like. Bled for the blacks, the poor, the sick, the dying. There was so much pain and so much pity in his heart but Beauty was sick of washing the blood from his clothes. One day, truly, he would bleed to death, that one. But meanwhile he was just fine, thank you very much, even with all the blood loss and meanwhile he still gave Beauty his socks and underwear to wash, his shirts to iron. Meanwhile he still expected her to clean his bathroom, vacuum his bedroom, ask Agremon to wash his car on Saturday afternoons. And although he paid her handsomely, some would say overpaid her because of his bad conscience, and Beauty made sure to hold her hand to the small of her back when she climbed the stairs to his room — hau! phew! yoh yoh yoh! — such money, Beauty knew, was also bloody.38

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Beauty stands as a sharp rejoinder to the comforting notion that sufficiently liberal gestures can assuage the anger of the oppressed. The fact that Beauty feels no gratitude for Benjamin’s kindness and largesse is what conceivably disturbed the white middle-class readers of Cook’s novel, as her characterization disrupted the historically entrenched expectations of the Western book club reader—expectations that conform not only to gendered and classed stereotypes but to a codified understanding of how reading is supposed to make the reader feel. The book club reader of the late twentieth century, one might argue, was profoundly influenced, if only indirectly, by the literacy advocacy efforts of talk show host Oprah Winfrey, particularly through her televised meetings of Oprah’s Book Club. Oprah’s Book Club had a welldocumented positive effect on the book publishing industry, causing a surge in community book clubs and in book purchases. As critics such as Mary Lamb have argued, it is important to consider the gendered nature of the reader as it is conceived and shaped by Oprah’s Book Club, especially since book club membership has historically been predominantly female.39 Oprah’s Book Club, Lamb argues, does not just specifically address a female readership, but actively “advocates literacy as a means of improving women’s lives” through personal growth and social interaction.40 In pursuit of this goal, Winfrey encourages a “reading process consonant with a mediated, apolitical version of consciousness raising that emphasizes individual adjustment to social ills rather than critical imaginings of social alternatives”.41 The female reader, in this model, is meant to connect empathetically with a novel’s protagonist and follow their emotional and spiritual journey from crisis to enlightening resolution. Trysh Travis offers a similar reading of the ethics of Oprah’s Book Club when she connects it to the theology of American New Thought religion. Specifically, Travis discusses the valorization of empathetic identification in the reading experience Oprah models for her Book Club readers. “As she discussed books”, Travis observes, “Winfrey modeled a clear three-stage process of ‘opening’ in which empathy melted the perceived barriers separating readers from one another and merged them into an enchanted community”.42 Winfrey believes, Trysh contends, that reading fiction “had the capacity to change not only personal life, but also the broader social world”.43 What becomes clear to those following Winfrey’s conceptualization of reading, however, is that the reader’s relation to the “broader social world” does not involve direct social activism. Trysh observes that Winfrey’s “focus on a higher spiritual realm”

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meant that she never advocated “action in the world” against structures of oppression. Lamb similarly contends that Oprah’s Book Club advocated translating systemic problems into “concrete, affective terms” that a protagonist must rise above.44 Lamb cites the difference between “soft” and “hard” consciousness raising—the former involving inner growth, the latter, direct social action—to argue that Oprah’s Book Club imagines and endorses reading as soft consciousness raising, validating personal experience without advocating political intervention.45 Although Oprah’s Book Club addresses its readers in a specifically gendered way, the historical and contemporary construction of reading as an act of “soft consciousness raising” that is a social benefit in and of itself, this perspective is bound neither by gender nor history. Betensky has argued that the Victorian social-problem novel used the representations of the poor in order to teach the bourgeois to feel, and in so doing to discover “sympathy for themselves”.46 Nussbaum similarly equates reading with the cultivation of pragmatic empathy, or what she terms “narrative imagination”, an ability to be an “intelligent reader” of other people’s stories, an ability honed by an early education in literature.47 In each of these responses, emanating, respectively, from popular culture, literary criticism and Western philosophy, the cultivation of empathy in the reader is considered a good in itself and is uncritically praised. We might note that all three of these arguments gravitate to social-problem novels as the central reference point in their argument. Nussbaum’s love of Dickens reflects Oprah’s love of novels in which the protagonists rise above personal and social adversity to prove themselves, and these choices coincide with Betensky’s argument that the social-problem novel was meant to provide an affective education for the bourgeois reader of the nineteenth century. Beauty’s anger against Benjamin, a paragon of bourgeois liberalism, provides a shock to book club readers who have been instilled with the sense that their reading about the underprivileged and marginalized is valorized by society at large, including by the underprivileged. As Betensky argues, the Victorian social-problem novel also constructs an implied working-class reader who experiences a reciprocal sympathy for the bourgeois who feels for them.48 The enlightened middle class are the true heroes of the social-problem novel, Betensky argues, and often attain this noble status simply by listening attentively and feelingly to the complaints of the working class. The working-class characters accordingly come to feel admiration for the middle class because they

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recognize this act of attentive listening. Thus, as Betensky concludes, the bourgeois reader reads “along with the Other, through the eyes of the now-educated-about-us Other, about ourselves as we’ve idealized ourselves for ourselves”.49 The inability of Beauty to celebrate Benjamin for his liberal sympathies becomes a stinging rebuke to the Western bourgeois reader who is acclimatized to the encoded sympathy of the underprivileged Other. The novel’s South African context, and its careful and uncompromising exploration of the dynamic between black domestic worker and white employer, seems informed by Cock’s Maids and Madams and her documenting of the sentiments of reciprocal sympathy consistently projected by “madams” who also saw themselves as benevolently liberal: “My [name] is just like one of our family”; “We love [name] and she loves us”. And, most instructively, “I’m a good employer and [name] is grateful to me”.50 As Cock points out, these phrases reflect an attitude that blithely overlooks the grossly unequal power structure governing the relationship between domestic worker and employer’s family, adopting instead the fantasy that their servants recognize and bask in the inherent good-heartedness of their madams. As Cock argues, the perception that their servant “is one of the family” demonstrates that the employers understand the domestic’s life as totally enmeshed with that of her employers. Predictably, none of the domestic workers in Cock’s sample imagined herself as a member of the employers’ family.51 Indeed, although personal interaction between employer and domestic is almost exclusively limited to the work situation, Cock found that “the majority of employers said they liked their servants as people, and got along well with them”.52 Thus, concludes Cock, although “the structure of worker-employer relationship is extremely hierarchic and unequal, in terms of content it is often coloured for the employer with emotions of kindness, affection, and generosity. It is precisely the unequal nature of the relationship and the mutual recognition of such inequality that allows the relationship to be described so often as a close and friendly one”.53 The proximity experienced by the employer to the domestic worker is inherently false, sentimentalized and dishonestly masks a seemingly insurmountable distance. In The House on Sugarbush Road, the discomfort experienced by the Canadian book club reader is provoked by the narrative’s stripping away of the sentimental veneer of proximity. Beauty’s caustic and

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ungrateful attitude represents a direct assault on the reassuring middleclass belief that benevolent liberalism and enlightened compassion are enough to overcome the hardship and alienation experienced by the racialized domestic: separation from her family and home, neglect of her own children in order to care for the employer’s family, lack of financial alternatives, entrapment into a life that is a constant indignity.54 The idea that liberalism ought to act as a soothing balm for the colonized others that are its beneficiaries is deeply engrained in Western society; so engrained that Beauty herself struggles with this ideal. In the passage above, she reminds herself that she is not just paid a “handsome” wage, but “some would say overpaid” because of the “bad conscience” of her liberal employer. Elsewhere, Beauty enumerates examples of employers who are stingy and mean-spirited, an attempt at rationalization that should generate feelings of gratitude towards Benjamin and Ouma Du Plessis: All the other madams hated their girls to get cheeky, wouldn’t allow trunk calls, locked the phone up tight. Like Juffrou Terheyden, Rosie’s madam, or Mrs. Jacobs who wound a rubber band around the rotary dial and Sisi just took it off when she wanted to use the phone and put it back after and foolish Mrs. Jacobs didn’t understand why her phone bill was so high. Screamed bloody murder at the Baas, Who you phoning, jou donner? Who you talking to behind my back? Served him right, thought Beauty, for what he was making Sisi do out back by the servant’s quarters, siestog.55

Beauty is aware of the bad “madams” and “masters” who denigrate and abuse their domestics, but this understanding, rather than producing a reflexive sense of gratitude, creates conflicted emotions that are directed towards her more altruistic employers. Despite her attempts to convince herself of her good fortune in being employed by the Du Plessis family, Beauty’s resentment is unassuaged and increasingly directed against Benjamin’s sincere and well-meaning, but intrinsically problematic liberalism. She is unable to internalize the statements of reciprocal sympathy of the sort catalogued by Cock, statements that would successfully categorize her as a successful domestic servant, which would allow her to cohere to the idealized metanarrative of the black Mammy.

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Mammy According to Chanequa Walker-Barnes, the Mammy figure is usually depicted as a mature, overweight, dark-skinned woman; the consummate caregiver for white families because of her perfect balance of affection and deference. Although she often elicited humour through her sassiness, she was still essentially “maternal, submissive, loyal, obedient, amiable and non-threatening”.56 Completely devoted to her employers, the Mammy also served as “a confidante and moral guide, keeping her young charges in line”.57 The Mammy stereotype is not only comforting but—because of the solace it offers white Americans—enduring.58 The Mammy figure is recognizable in classics such as Prissy in Gone With the Wind and Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbird, and her lasting appeal can be recognized in recent popular manifestations, most notably the novel (2009) and motion picture (2011) The Help.59 Indeed, the release of the film version of Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel prompted the American Association of Black Women Historians to issue a statement decrying “‘the disappointing resurrection’ of the Mammy stereotype [in] the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own”.60 The Mammy figure serves as a balm to the white liberal conscience by demonstrating that the black domestic is essentially loving and nurturing to a white family as long as her loyalty is reciprocated with kindness and appreciation. In her socio-historical discussion of The Help, Suzanne W. Jones reconfigures the conflict as one “not so much between blacks and whites as between good and evil whites”, a formulation that allows “white readers and viewers to side with Skeeter, hate Hilly, and experience hopeful optimism about improved race relations and friendship across the color line as maids collaborate with Skeeter to write The Help”.61 As Jones suggests, the Mammy figure enables white readers to situate themselves according to a Manichean binary of “good and evil whites”, thus bypassing morally complex and potentially prejudicial issues of racial and economic disparity. This stereotype has been transposed not only onto the black domestics who serve South African households, as Cock has catalogued, but also onto the Filipina domestic employed in Canadian households, report Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis in their study of foreign domestic workers in Canada. Bakan and Stasiulis suggest that the idealized image of the Filipina nanny is similarly “docile and loyal”, and

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that such domestics are perceived by prospective Canadian employers as “‘naturally’ nurturing, docile and ‘good with children’”,62 predisposed towards their servitude, and in fact appreciative of the opportunity to care for and even love her employer’s house, children and pets. Through the belief in the “‘naturally’ nurturing” predisposition inherent in the temperament of the Filipina nanny, employers continue to perpetuate the stereotypical characterization of their domestic as a “member of the family”, an integral part of the household, and ultimately congratulate themselves on their generosity as employers.63 The Mammy figure proves valuable in understanding the various and contradictory representations of domestic labour in South Africa both before and after the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. Here, as in the American South, the black female domestic was ubiquitous in white households, providing such comprehensive childcare duties that they were often recognized as a sort of surrogate mother for white children. The valorization of the domestic servant’s capacity for loyalty and love of the employer’s family goes hand in hand with the exploitation of the black worker to the present day, a paradox embodied in various domestic training and employment agencies which offer tutoring in household chores. One such agency, situated in Johannesburg, South Africa, is tellingly named Domestic Bliss. Domestic Bliss specializes in skills training for domestic worker s including instruction in cooking, cleaning and child care, the company name denoting the affective response that the proprietors promise to reproduce in the middle-class households that they service: a state of domestic bliss. Unlike the conventional idiom that associates “domestic bliss” with a happy and loving marriage, the Johannesburg agency attributes this form of pleasure to the harmonious relationship between the employer and the domestic. As one of the prominently featured testimonials featured on the website of Domestic Bliss (www.domesticbliss. co.za) attests, “You have one very happy customer and one very happy trainee. Many thanks to you [and] your staff for all your efforts!”64 The implication is clear: the satisfied employer is happy and grateful that she has a domestic worker compliantly attuned to her particular desires in terms of cooking and child care,65 and the domestic worker is “very happy” because, presumably, she is able to fulfil her employer’s expectations. Numerous images on the Domestic Bliss website silently support the perpetuation of the Mammy stereotype, including one depicting a smiling black woman in a traditional domestic uniform holding a smiling

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white toddler on her lap.66 The corporate logo of Domestic Bliss features two stick figures with blacked-in heads to confirm racial identity.67 The female figure bears striking similarity to the figure usually demarcating a lavatory door, except for the blackened head, the white apron she wears and the broom she holds at attention. More subtly, the rounded hips of the female suggest that she is a true “ousie”, evidenced by her ample, maternal hips.68 The marketing strategies of this successful agency evidences the persistence of the “relationship of paternalism” that is masked, as Cock argues, in the romanticized fantasy of the domestic as an integral member of the larger, blissful family. The fugitive promise of “domestic bliss” is the narrative subtext underwriting Beauty Mapule’s relationship with Benjamin Du Plessis, and the Canadian book club reader’s relationship with The House on Sugarbush Road. It is the desired affect—the feeling that acts as a contrapuntal heartbeat, marking out the arrhythmia of dissonance, difference and the distance between self and its racialized other in these equations of employer/domestic, white/non-white. This relationship is remarkable in its proximity, entirely contained within the domestic space of the employer’s house. The title of Cook’s novel identifies the contested zone of affect and identity implicit in the domesticated space of the house. For Beauty’s great ambition, articulated and aspired to throughout the novel, is to build a house of her own, a house in Hammanskraal, a small town approximately 100 kilometres north of Johannesburg. The money that Beauty earns throughout her employment in the Du Plessis household, as well as her other myriad, often illegal, piecemeal jobs—including selling marijuana that she secretly grows in the Du Plessis’ backyard and pilfering the small change she habitually steals from Benjamin’s briefcase and pockets—all contribute to the construction of this new house; a house that may or may not be built, depending on the honesty and the reliability of the contractor that Beauty has hired. Yet, despite Beauty’s frequent discussions with the Du Plessis family about her deeply felt desire for a house of her own, Ouma Du Plessis and her grandson, Benjamin, cannot truly comprehend Beauty’s aspirations, as Ouma reports to Ben: Ag, people are all the same! she countered. But how can we ever know what goes on in another person’s head? Take Beauty, for instance. She comes to me the other day, comes to me out of the blue. Says Mandela wants all the people to live in houses. Where’s her house? she wants to

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know. Beauty, I told her, you live in a house right now. If this is her house, she says, then she’s getting rid of all the flowers. Right now. And she grabs the vase of roses by my bed and before I can say mampara she’s off to the kitchen and that’s that for the rest of the afternoon.69

Ouma’s ruminations offer a salient glimpse at the affective dissonance experienced over the contested ground of the house. “People are all the same”, asserts Ouma like a good liberal humanist—suggesting that there is no real otherness in the world, no reason to perceive Beauty as Other, although she contradicts herself by admitting that other people’s thoughts and feelings are ultimately unknowable: “But how can we ever know what goes on in another person’s head?” These paradoxical assertions do not represent a deep philosophical quandary, but instead the careless ease with which liberal platitudes are parcelled out. Both of Ouma’s assertions—that people are the same; that their motives are opaque—work to cancel out the particular, singular and disputative voice of Beauty Mapule, her ambitions and motivations, and more importantly, her anger. Ouma, it is clear, is not attempting to understand the complexities of Beauty’s mind, but is, rather casually, dismissing her temper as irrational and therefore inexplicable since Ouma appears to be unable to understand the crucial distinction between Beauty’s compromised residence in the servant’s quarters behind her employer’s kitchen and the promise of a fully paid-up house of her own. The members of the Du Plessis family strive to act kindly towards their black servant—and certainly the apartheid period, with its deliberate cruelty and legislated inequalities towards black workers necessitated a conscientious effort to act benevolently, since to do nothing was to acquiesce to evil. But such effort only foregrounds the proprietary character that such a stance assumes. Indeed, both Benjamin and Ouma take just such a proprietary interest in Beauty’s grandson, Rothman, using Beauty’s requests for money to fund his latest ambition—he wants to be a DJ and so requires a radio and suitable wardrobe—as opportunities to intervene in the young man’s life and offer constructive guidance: Listen Beauty, [Ouma] said, this is a very serious matter, you must tell your grandson he must pull himself together and knock those tsotsi ideas out of his head. Let him rather concentrate on school, I said. If he works hard and matriculates in a couple of years then we’ll talk about where to send him next. Benjamin sighed. I’ve tried to talk to her about Rothman but —.70

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This attitude, as can be inferred from the phrasing of Ouma’s lectures, objectifies Rothman, and by extension Beauty, to dependant subjects under the purview of the altruistic, benevolent yet essentially colonial gaze.

Beauty’s Anger The provocative nature of Beauty Mapule’s character in The House on Sugarbush Road does not originate in our inability to ascertain the reasons for her anger. Instead, the power of Beauty’s fury resides precisely in the reader’s inability to understand its provenance and reach. There are indeed many reasons for her anger that are readily apparent within the novel. Certainly, the patronizing liberal attitude of her employers serves to infantilize Beauty—their insistence, for example, that she does not need a house of her own because she lives in their house (albeit in the servants quarters at the back), or their attempts to counsel her in matters of child rearing. The opening paragraph also locates the resentment Beauty feels towards her son, Lucky, for his neglectful attitude towards her. The novel offers a poignant scene where Beauty attempts to visit Lucky, his middleclass wife, and their children, only to be shamed by her shabby clothes and her gift of homemade putu wrapped in tinfoil. There is also anger— an anger that directly relates to her hatred of Benjamin—regarding the senseless murder of her daughter, Givvie. Benjamin and Givvie were the same age, and Beauty has vivid memories of the two children playing together, eating together and bathing together.71 It is strongly intuited that Beauty resents Benjamin for simply being alive when Givvie, her real child, is dead.72 What was so disturbing to the book club readers about Beauty’s character was not, I would argue, the enigmatic quality of her anger: certainly her anger could be explained and contextualized. Conventional narrative strategies, however, are generally designed to appease the book club reader by bringing that anger to an affective resolution by the novel’s conclusion. A culminating act of benevolence by the Du Plessis family would allow Beauty to finally make her peace with them, or, alternately, the narrative might end with a crescendo of pathos, having Beauty realize the dream of her house is unattainable, for example. Either of these conclusions would allow the book club reader to sympathize with Beauty, and thus to finish the novel with a feeling of benevolent liberal compassion, a feeling that Heike Harting might describe as “humanitarianist”,

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as she defines it in her study of Western representations of the Rwandan genocide. As Harting argues, even though “humanitarianist consciousness” may acknowledge the history of colonialism, it remains steadfastly “predicated on the naturalization of affect and perception as a subjective process lodged within the individual and constituted outside the history and politics of race”.73 The internalization of humanitarianist affect ostensibly frees Western readers from history and their tacit complicities in its injustices. Cook’s conclusion, however, places the reader at a narrative impasse that essentially signals an affective deadlock as well, in the sense of Lauren Berlant’s definition of an impasse as “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic”.74 It is such an “impasse”, precisely because of its presentness and enigmatic quality, which threatens the identity of the bourgeois reader with its unresolvable affect. Berlant’s definition of impasse resonates against Keen’s hypothesis that fiction bolsters readers’ empathy insofar as “fictional worlds provide safe zones for readers’ empathy without experiencing a resultant demand on real-world action. This freedom from obligation paradoxically opens up channels for both empathy and related moral affects such as sympathy”.75 Empathy is possible and desirable, that is, providing that the characters and narrative situations, in their fascinating but potentially threatening otherness, remain safely at a remove and drained of any threatening negative energy. The “intense presence” of a narrative such as Beauty’s, however, brings about an impasse that compels readers to react as though they have been personally attacked, stripped of the prized image of themselves as sympathetic readers and benevolent liberals, and accused instead of being exploiters. As Cock documents, “these women [employers] do not see themselves as exploiters. A press report on this research provoked some resentful letters addressed to me personally, one of which specifically stated, ‘I resent being called an exploiter’”.76 Similarly, the characterization of Beauty Mapule as resonantly, unappeasedly angry, and the narrative impasse this creates at the conclusion of the novel, goads the book club reader because it does not allow the reader to feel the feelings they want to feel. Instead, the reader is disoriented by their negative identifications, evicted from their previously sheltered position of readerly empathy and forced to reorient themselves to the otherness of the narrative and the distance between themselves and the post-empathetic character.

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The impasse created at the conclusion of The House on Sugarbush Road is, fittingly enough, a violent home invasion. Since the house is the contested space of the novel, a terrible logic governs the violent conclusion, as Rothman, Beauty’s drug-addicted grandson, aided by an accomplice, breaks into Ouma’s house, manhandles her and proceeds to ransack the house. The outcome is shockingly brutal: Benjamin returns home in the midst of the robbery and is fatally gunned down by Rothman, and Ouma, although rescued in time, has been bound so tightly that her hands need to be amputated. By the end, Ouma Du Plessis has lost her memory and become inert and unknowing until she dies shortly afterwards. What is most shocking, however, is the narrative’s silence regarding Beauty’s role in the robbery. The reader is presented with the suspicions of Sergeant Visser, the police officer investigating the invasion, and of Ouma’s daughter, Magda, both of whom point out that Beauty has been truant from work on the day of the robbery, ostensibly at a doctor’s appointment. The reader is allowed access to Beauty’s reaction to these accusations, but her feelings don’t indicate whether Beauty is guilty or not, only that she intends to make a public display of her innocence by remaining Ouma’s steadfast servant: “If that Sergeant Visser came around again he would see what such a one as Beauty was worth and he would be sorry, truly, for his ugly thoughts”.77 Ouma, however, cannot afford to consider the possibility of Beauty’s guilt. Old, alone and now severely disabled, Ouma depends on Beauty more than ever. The novel ends with an articulation of their highly problematic entanglement: Ouma vacillates between amnesia, suspicion and denial, whereas Beauty remains with Ouma in order to prove her innocence, although she also appears to experience complex feelings of guilt and obligation. In Maids and Madams, Cock describes this symbiosis by articulating her sociological work as a study in the politics of dependence: “While the key to understanding the domestic worker’s situation is her dependence on her employer, the employer is frequently in an extremely dependent situation herself”.78 Cook’s novel narrativizes this theme of discomforting, damaging but inextricable enmeshment, and in so doing disorients the reader from the cloistered space they inhabit as the enlightened and empathetic reader. Instead, the reader is coerced into the uncomfortable space of the employer: asked to decide on Beauty’s guilt based on circumstantial, but nevertheless compelling, evidence; asked to consider how they might act on similar suspicions; and above all to contemplate the possibility that the domestic workers, manual labourers,

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servers, waiters, gardeners and nannies labouring on their periphery might harbour similar fantasies of vengeance. The impasse Cook creates, then, by forcibly maintaining the discomfortingly intimate proximity between white employer and black domestic, is one in which the white reader is forced to abandon the false optimism of the present tense—the false present of reading—and confront the far more unsettling immediacy of her situation as a privileged Westerner, as an employer of a marginalized, racialized Other. The narrative forces the liberal white reader into proximity with the figure of the Other in a manner that emphasizes close identification yet simultaneously coerces the reader to comprehend the devastating consequence of this intimacy. It is a compromised and uneasy proximity where each party finally understands, intimately, that undisclosed and perhaps undiscloseable feelings circulate between them. Cook’s impasse of coerced intimacy recalls a similarly provocative narrative impasse in Nadine Gordimer’s 1981 novel, July’s People. Although Gordimer’s novel was written in one of the darkest periods of the apartheid era, its narrative conjectures the future collapse of apartheid. In July’s People that conclusion is imagined as the result of violent revolution, an event that was grimly anticipated by both white and black South Africans during the late apartheid period of the 1980s.79 Gordimer’s novel documents the harrowing experiences of the Smales family after they have been displaced by an uprising in the city, and rescued by their houseboy, July, who has managed to smuggle them out of the battle zone and hidden them in his home village deep in the bush. The first words of the novel are spoken by July, but his words are the formalized offering of morning tea to the Smales, now living in a ramshackle hut. It is immediately clear that July continues to perform the role of the dutiful and loyal houseboy, who like the black Mammy, simply does not want to cede, or is incapable of relinquishing, his role as subaltern. Thus, July continues to offer up tea every morning, faithfully reproducing a ritual anchored in the cultural conventions of colonialism in general and apartheid specifically, despite the fact that all the trappings of civilization were left behind when the Smales fled Johannesburg. The narrative of July’s People is propelled by the tension between the suddenly outdated roles of domestic and employer played out by the Smales family and July, and the potential new and often threatening identities starting to emerge from the rubble of the old world.

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Distance from the Other is a central theme in Gordimer’s novel—a distance experienced by the Smales and consequently by the white bourgeois reader and sustained by class and privilege. Gordimer’s narrative is cast in a third person omniscient voice that is not only detached from the white protagonists it focalizes, but is also surprisingly candid and judgemental. Early in the novel, for instance, the narrator recalls the growing signs of civil unrest and impending revolution in South Africa, and contrasts Bam and Maureen Smales’s sentimental declarations about their attachment to a country they are hesitant to flee with their genuine and more pragmatic motivations: They had thought of leaving, then, while they were young enough to cast off the blacks’ rejection as well as white privilege, to make a life in another country. They had stayed; and told each other and everyone else that this and nowhere else was home, while knowing, as time left went by, the reason had become they couldn’t get their money out.80

From the beginning, the Smales are implicated in an economic and sociopolitical system that they genuinely loathe but cannot abandon because of the privileges it affords them. The system traps them, as a similar system traps the Du Plessis family, as well as the Western reader. It is a complex system that allots privilege based on exploitation, and which allows the privileged to ignore that exploitation by maintaining a distance from it, through recourse to liberal humanist sentiment, the “humanitarianist consciousness”, as Harting defines it. This privileged consciousness takes the structural injustices of our society into account, but grants us a personal exemption on the basis of our sympathetic feelings. The central protagonist in July’s People is Maureen Smales,81 and the narrative repeatedly emphasizes her past as a mine boss’s daughter and her seemingly intimate childhood relationship with her black nanny, Lydia. The story of young Maureen and Lydia, the only personal back story presented in the novel, appears to be offered as a way of defining Maureen’s relationship with July in the present. The past history of Maureen and Lydia, the narrative implies, shapes the present relationship between Maureen and July. This “shape”, as Sara Ahmed asserts more generally, is created and sustained through emotion: “emotions are not simply something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have. Rather, it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and ‘we’ are shaped by, even take the shape of, contact

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with others”.82 To follow Ahmed’s argument, Maureen’s sentimental attachment to Lydia “shapes” Maureen as a child, a shape she will retain throughout her life and ultimately impose upon her relationship with July. An extended passage early in the novel details the loving and apparently reciprocal relationship that Maureen shares with Lydia, but then questions, even undercuts, this relationship by “framing” it through the lens of a distant camera: One afternoon a photographer took a picture of Maureen and Lydia. They saw him dancing about on bent legs to get them in focus, just there at the shops while they crossed the road. When he had taken his photographs he came up and asked them if they minded. […] Years later someone showed it to Maureen Smales in a Life coffee-table book about the country and its policies. White herrenvolk attitudes and life-styles; the marvelous photograph of the white schoolgirl and the black woman with the girl’s school case on her head. Why had Lydia carried her case? Did the photographer know what he saw, when they crossed the road like that, together? Did the book, placing the pair in its context, give the reason she and Lydia, in their affection and ignorance, didn’t know?83

This narrative aside performs a multiple and complex function: on the one hand, it undermines Maureen’s sense of “knowing” the black servants that have surrounded her all her life, a knowledge based entirely on the fond feelings projected upon one particular maternal black body by a sentimental white child. Maureen “shapes” these black bodies through her belief in her own empathy, a belief that proceeds from her apprehension that the domestic servants in the mine boss’s house are uncomplicated, affectionate and compliant. On the other hand, the passage also challenges the reader’s knowledge of this hierarchal yet benevolent relationship. The reader becomes the photographer, “dancing about on bent legs to get them in focus”; an interloper, off-balance but somehow certain of what he is capturing on film. When Maureen discovers the image “years later” in the pages of Life magazine, she is forced to look at herself from a distance: a distance established by the passing of time, but also because the image is presented in an American magazine. She is asked to see herself, and her relationship with Lydia, through the eyes of a foreign reader.

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Maureen and the reader are made all too aware of the insurmountable problems and contorted manipulations involved in “placing the pair in its context”. Context is what Maureen denies, but it is also what is manufactured by foreign eyes, eyes whose view is wavering and distorted. Context, Gordimer seems to be telling us, is synonymous with distance, with a struggle to comprehend that is always held at bay by emotion, time, space.

July’s Outcry The present tense narrative of July’s People portrays the manner in which the identity of the other—an identity based on a fundamental lack—unsettles the identity of the white liberal subject when that context suddenly shifts. July’s insistence on continuing to perform his duties as a houseboy disconcerts Bam and Maureen because his actions remind them that the societal context that underwrote their relationship of subservience and supervision has been destroyed as a result of the revolution from which July has rescued them. At the same time, however, when July acts autonomously—for example when he drives Bam’s jeep without asking permission—the Smales are similarly perturbed. There is no relational configuration, it becomes apparent, that allows the Smales to experience a genuine connection with July. As the novel progresses, the Smales family is called before the village chief, who addresses July by his “real” name, Mwawate, and Maureen is suddenly struck by the fact that not only has she never heard the name before, but more insidiously, that it has never occurred to her that her servant had a different name: “Of course, ‘July’ was a name for whites to use; for fifteen years they had not been told what the chief’s subject was called”.84 Significantly, it is July’s essential unknowability that increasingly vexes Maureen, and Gordimer maintains that opacity in the face of readerly curiosity. Neither Maureen nor the reader understands why July discourages Maureen from giving her ailing son the herbal medicines that he administers to his own children.85 As readers we cannot be certain that July understands his own motivations—why he makes such racialized distinctions—or whether he fully comprehends his own subjectivity. Although it is a commonplace in postcolonial narratives to ironically juxtapose the subaltern’s clear-eyed understanding of his/her highly circumscribed role in the world with the perceptions of well-meaning Westerners who blithely misinterpret that role, Gordimer instead posits

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a more challenging notion: that the societal upheaval represented in this novel reveals not only that Maureen fails to understand July but that July is similarly unable to relate to Maureen, and that neither of them fully comprehends their personal motives and desires, especially now that their respective roles in the hierarchical structure of apartheid have been displaced.86 The final confrontation between July and Maureen occurs when the Smales discover that Bam’s hunting rifle has been stolen and conclude that July’s friend—a villager who remains unnamed—has taken it. It is Maureen who confronts July about the theft because Maureen has always acted as the family’s representative; based on her “shaping” as the mine boss’s daughter, she perceives herself as possessing special knowledge of and compassion for black servants. It is this perception, however, that brings Maureen and July into an affective impasse that subsumes and displaces both employer and domestic. She confronts him directly with the theft because, as Gordimer elucidates, “she was stampeded by a wild rush to destroy everything between them”. Provoked by Maureen’s accusations, July explodes in a manner that, to Maureen and the reader, resists easy comprehension: Suddenly he began to talk in his own language, his face flickering powerfully. The heavy cadences surrounded her […] she understood although she knew no word. Understood everything: what he had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him. But for himself — to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others. She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people.87

July’s untranslated outburst is delivered in “his own language” and so is literally as well as figuratively inexplicable. Maureen, perhaps because she is shocked by the unreadability of July’s response, counters with her own display, which she knows is equally incomprehensible to July: The incredible tenderness of the evening surrounded them as if mistaking them for lovers. She lurched over and posed herself, a grotesque, against the vehicle’s hood, her shrunken jeans poked at the knees, sweat-coarsened forehead touched by the moonlight, neglected hair standing out wispy and rough. The death’s harpy image she made of herself meant nothing to him, who had never been to a motor show complete with provocative girls. She laughed and slapped the mudguard vulgarly.88

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Just as July declares his unknowability to Maureen through angry, explosive language, so too does Maureen manipulate her culturally coded, sexualized body to declare herself indecipherable to July. More than this, Maureen’s sexuality is itself a complex sign, since she is aware that in her present state, deprived of the cosmetics and beauty aids she once relied upon, she no longer recognizes her own body. What is performed, then, is the collision of two subjects both expressing, violently and transgressively, the awareness that they know neither the “shape” of the other, nor, more perniciously and likely as a consequence of this realization, the shape of their own somatic and subjective boundaries. As both July and Maureen crash against the affective borders of their subjectivity, they are constitutionally, circumstantially and contextually unable to redefine their relationship. It is significant that the final scene of the novel, when Maureen runs towards the sound of a helicopter, also defies clear resolution. Although she does not know who is in the helicopter—soldiers who might save her or militants who might execute her—she races towards it without thought or restraint. Indeed, in her heedless flight she fails to identify with her own family, experiencing her husband and children merely as disembodied, unnamed voices: “She is running to the river and she hears them, the man’s voice and the voices of the children speaking English somewhere to the left”.89 The narrative concludes with Maureen sprinting, away from both the past and the present, towards the chimera of a helicopter that alone will decide her future.90 Gordimer does not attempt to resolve the impasse occasioned by the impossibility of ethical understanding; of the insurmountable distance between the subject and its Other that defies all forms of knowing. As a consequence, the reader must understand and redefine their readerly and affective role in much the same way that the photographer in Gordimer’s parable of proximity dances about on bent legs—undignified, ineffective, awkward—desperately trying to achieve focus while kept slightly off-balance by what Ahmed terms the “aboutness of emotions”.91 Ultimately, the incomprehensible anger of Beauty and July, two domestic s who destroy the myth of proximity, intimacy and empathy between employer and servant, starkly challenges the architects of the “new” South Africa who propose, as the next chapter will discuss, that proximity to powerful emotions allows for productive affective connections between oppressor and oppressed. As the TRC hearings offer the promise that all South Africans can apprehend each other by sharing their

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feelings, proposing a radical empathy that builds a new community out of various but always authentic affective responses, the narrative of the angry domestic, as portrayed by Cook and Gordimer, challenges these presuppositions and asks the South African citizen, as well as the Western book club reader, to distinguish genuine connection from a false but comforting sense of proximity born strictly out of white liberal desire.

Notes 1. The Craddock Four included Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sicelo Mhlawuli and Sparrow Mkhonto. They were United Democratic Front (UDF) activists who were abducted, tortured and killed by the state security police in the Eastern Cape on June 27, 1985. Their bodies, as well as their vehicle, were then burned. 2. Kapelianis, Angie and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. CD. Johannesburg: SABC, 2000, Track 6. 3. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999, 148. 4. Country of My Skull , and Krog’s use of a narrative persona that is both autobiographical and fictionalized, will be analysed more extensively in Chapter 5. 5. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull : Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998, 56. 6. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull : Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, 57. 7. Krog, Antjie, 57. 8. Boraine, Alex. A Country Unmasked. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 102. 9. Boraine, Alex. A Country Unmasked, 103. 10. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010, 91. 11. Although the first truth and reconciliation Commission was instituted in Chile in 1991, South Africa’s TRC was the first to stage public hearings. 12. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, 25. 13. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect, 13. 14. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 10. 15. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 29.

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16. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010, 79. 17. It is worth noting that Ahmed’s most personal example in her discussion of “the contingency of pain” is a meditation of her experience of “living with” her mother’s chronic illness (29–31). 18. It is important to remember that the victims who testified publicly were specifically selected to do so through an arduous process of investigation, research and preliminary interviews. As Cole observes, “for every case heard [publicly], nine others were not selected” (5). 19. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2007, 4. 20. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 2. 21. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel, 1. 22. Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, xiii. 23. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 200 § (1993). Peace Accords Matrix (Date of retrieval: (8/31/2019), https://peaceaccords. nd.edu/provision/truth-or-reconciliation-mechanism-interim-constitut ion-accord, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. 24. Battle, Michael. Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2009, 39. 25. Nkosi, Lewis. “Constructing the ‘Cross-Border’ Reader.” In Altered State? Writing and South Africa, ed. Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, and Kenneth Parker, 37–50. Sidney: Dangeroo, 1994, 47. 26. See Nkosi’s 1983 novel, Mating Birds, Serote’s 1981 novel, To Every Birth Its Blood, and Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan (1979) and Amandla (1980), all classic examples of the South African genre of protest realism. 27. One might note the similarities between Nkosi’s representation of South African literature and Frederic Jameson’s self-professed “sweeping hypothesis”, in “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, that all so-called third world literature consists of “national allegories”: “Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (Jameson 69).

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28. Both Nkosi and Betensky fail to account for any aesthetic or creative motivations informing the writers and novels they refer to, and instead focus exclusively on the political agenda behind the production of literature. 29. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2007, 20. 30. Nussbaum argues, in her aptly titled “Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion”, that to understand how “such a complex sentiment be learned”, one must “focus simply on one point, of great importance both to philosophical tradition and to our contemporary concern with moral development: the moral importance of tragic drama and related narrative literature” (39). 31. Cock, Jacklyn. Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers Under Apartheid. London: The Women’s Press, 1989, 2. 32. Cock, Jacklyn. Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers Under Apartheid, 2–3. 33. Cock, Jacklyn, 3. 34. Nuttall, Sarah, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on PostApartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009, 1. 35. Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on PostApartheid, 2. 36. Cook, Méira. The House on Sugarbush Road. Winnipeg: Enfield & Wizenty, 2012, 7. 37. Cook, Méira. The House on Sugarbush Road, 36. 38. Cook, Méira, 37. 39. Lamb, Mary R. “The ‘Talking Life’ of Books: Women Readers in Oprah’s Book Club.” In Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, ed. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley, 266–291. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, 258. 40. Lamb, Mary R. “The ‘Talking Life’ of Books: Women Readers in Oprah’s Book Club,” 258. 41. Lamb, Mary R., 256. 42. Travis, Trysh. “‘It Will Change the World If Everybody Reads This Book’: New Thought Religion in Oprah’s Book Club.” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 1032. 43. Travis, Trysh. “‘It Will Change the World If Everybody Reads This Book’: New Thought Religion in Oprah’s Book Club,” 1031. 44. Lamb, Mary R. “The ‘Talking Life’ of Books: Women Readers in Oprah’s Book Club.” In Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, ed. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley, 266–291. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, 261. 45. Lamb, Mary R. “The ‘Talking Life’ of Books: Women Readers in Oprah’s Book Club,” 261.

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46. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 4. 47. Nussbaum, Martha C. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Revised Edition). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 95. 48. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 85. 49. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel, 95. 50. Cock, Jacklyn. Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers Under Apartheid. London: The Women’s Press, 1989, 113–15. 51. Cock, Jacklyn. Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers Under Apartheid, 112. 52. Cock, Jacklyn, 112. 53. Cock, Jacklyn, 112–13. 54. The despair and anger of the domestic servant will also be explicitly voiced by Sindiwe Magona’s narrator, Mandisa—known as “Mandy” by her employer—in Mother to Mother and will be discussed more extensively in Chapter 6. 55. Cook, Méira. The House on Sugarbush Road. Winnipeg: Enfield & Wizenty, 2012, 30. 56. Walker-Barnes, Chanequa. Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014, 85. 57. Walker-Barnes, Chanequa. Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength, 85. 58. As I prepare this manuscript for submission, it seems hopeful that my assertion that the Mammy figure is enduring might be disproved. In this summer of 2020, the international protests that have followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis seem to have sparked an eruption of gestures of racial progressivism in international corporations. As I write this, Pepsico has decided to retire the name and likeness of Aunt Jemima on its pancake products, and the corporate owners of Uncle Ben’s rice and Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake syrup have decided to follow suit. It remains to be seen whether this will signal the death knell for the persistent representation of the Mammy, but one can hope. See, for example, “Uncle Ben’s and Mrs Butterworth’s follow Aunt Jemima phasing out racial stereotypes in logos” CNN Business. Accessed 5 July 2020. https:// www.cnn.com/2020/06/17/business/uncle-bens-rice-racist/index.html. 59. The Help relates the stories of African American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. It was a New York Times bestseller and was nominated for several literary awards,

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60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

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including The Orange Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and South Africa’s Exclusive Books Boeke Prize. The film version was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Jones, Suzanne W. “The Divided Reception of The Help.” Southern Cultures 20 (2014): 12. Jones, Suzanne W. “The Divided Reception of The Help,” 18. Bakan, Abigail B, and Daiva Stasiulis. “Foreign Domestic Worker Policy in Canada and the Social Boundaries of Modern Citizenship.” In Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada, ed. Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, 29–52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997, 43. The nurturing quality ascribed to the domestic also implicitly associates her with simplicity, naiveté and even immaturity. Cock notes that the “most typical viewpoint is that servants are like children. Thus, the core characteristic of the relationship is a paternalism which involves a dependence on the part of the servant and confirms the employer’s sense of superiority” (121). “Testimonials.” Domestic Bliss , 2009. http://www.domesticbliss.co.za/tes timonials.html. Accessed 6 April, 2016. Domestic Bliss offers courses in child care, laundry and household management, as well as a variety of specialized cooking classes designed to suit employers’ tastes, including “summer cooking”, “winter cooking”, “healthy cooking” and ethnic cuisine such as Italian, Jewish and Thai (http://www.domesticbliss.co.za/skills.html). This image may be found at http://www.domesticbliss.co.za/skills.html. This image may be found at http://www.domesticbliss.co.za/index.html. “Ousie” functions as the South African equivalent of Mammy. An Afrikaans slang term for a maid, it has accrued various cultural connotations including a maternal, docile temperament and a full-figured maternal body, much like the culturally ubiquitous images of Mammy in Gone with the Wind, Aunt Jemima or Mrs. Butterworth. Cook, Méira. The House on Sugarbush Road. Winnipeg: Enfield & Wizenty, 2012, 56. Cook, Méira. The House on Sugarbush Road, 57. That Beauty was able to bring her daughter to work with her, and that Givvie was allowed to play with Benjamin, is another example of the liberal attitude prevalent in the Du Plessis household. Jacklyn Cock discusses the devastating impact on family life, especially children, that domestic work caused during the apartheid era, with most of the interviewed domestics saying that they were forced to take care of their employers’ families, neglecting their own families in the process (41–46).

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73. Härting, Heike. “Global Humanitarianism, Race, and the Spectacle of the African Corpse in Current Representations of the Rwandan Genocide.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28 (2008): 63. 74. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 4. 75. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2007, 4. 76. Cock, Jacklyn. Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers Under Apartheid. London: The Women’s Press, 1989, 121–22. 77. Cook, Méira. The House on Sugarbush Road. Winnipeg: Enfield & Wizenty, 2012, 305. 78. Cock, Jacklyn. Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers Under Apartheid. London: The Women’s Press, 1989, 106. 79. Gordimer’s novel was written while South Africa was governed by P. W. Botha, a notorious hardliner known popularly as “Die Groot Krokodil” (The Big Crocodile). Botha was explicit in his declarations that the republic would never capitulate to “terrorism”. Declaring that South Africa was being subjected to a “total onslaught” from within and without, he devised what he termed a “total strategy” to quell this upheaval. Botha’s liberal use of army troops in black townships to suppress unrest led many South Africans to fear that the only viable solution to the struggle against apartheid would be a bloody war of attrition. 80. Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People. Toronto: Penguin, 1981, 8. 81. One could certainly argue that the main protagonist in the novel is July, but the omniscient narrative focuses mainly on Maureen’s thoughts, feelings and experiences. July, by contrast, is presented as opaque in terms of his background, context and inner life. As shall be argued, it is crucial to the narrative that July is essentially unreadable to the Smales, and by extension, unreadable as a fictional character. In terms of readability, it is Maureen who dominates the textual foreground. 82. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 10. 83. Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People. Toronto: Penguin, 1981, 32–33. 84. Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People, 120. Although this never occurs to Maureen, the revelation of July’s birth name might cause the reader to question the name of Maureen’s childhood nanny, Lydia. As Cock observes, in her research findings “only 10 percent of the employer sample knew their servants’ full Xhosa names” (117). We might also note the way Maureen exempts her family from agency through the syntax of the passive voice: “they had not been told” his name, as though they were victims of the system rather than beneficiaries of it. 85. Gordimer, Nadine, 60.

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86. The idea that the oppressed understand their circumscribed position and as a result have more comprehensive insight into their status not only serves conventional narratives in terms of providing sufficient pathos to those characters, but also establishes these characters as a valuable repository of social wisdom for the good liberal whites who seek to understand their own position within the system. The critique of The Help put forward by the American Association of Black Women Historians comes readily to mind—as black women who are able to convey and interpret their own experiences allow a young white woman to discover her own identity.See also Amitav Ghosh’s. The Hungry Tide, Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us, or Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger or Last Man in Tower for further representations of the underprivileged as self-aware guides for the book club reader. 87. Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People. Toronto: Penguin, 1981, 152. 88. Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People, 153. 89. Gordimer, Nadine, 159. 90. In her article, “Endings and a New Beginning: South African Fiction in Transition”, Elleke Boehmer cites the final scene of July’s People as exemplary of the thematic structure of late apartheid fiction, which she argues, consistently favoured “Suspension, the zero ending, the dying fall, a closing down of options”; conclusions that manifested the pessimism for the future that comprised the nation’s zeitgeist at that time (50). 91. Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People. Toronto: Penguin, 1981, 7.

CHAPTER 3

“Revealing Is Healing”: Ubuntu, the TRC Hearings, and the Transmission of Affect

For the Emotional Record As I have written in the previous chapter, the cry of Nomonde Calata was repeatedly categorized as the “defining sound” of the TRC hearings because it allowed the country proximity to what was interpreted as pure, unmediated affect.1 The first national truth Commission to hold public hearings, the South African TRC seemed intent on generating and showcasing exactly such displays of performative emotion. Cody Corliss suggests that “the oral component of the hearings provides an emotional record to compliment the historical one”.2 The purpose of this “emotional record” was to bring about restorative justice and reconciliation on a broadly national scale, in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to restore ubuntu to a wounded nation: We contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice, which was characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence. Here the central concern is not retribution or punishment. In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense.3

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Libin, Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55977-9_3

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The mission of the TRC, as Tutu makes clear, was to reintegrate both victim and perpetrator within the spirit of ubuntu; the vehicle for this reintegration was to be emotional proximity, a proximity that generated a contagiously empathetic response that would unite the nascent national community. As evidenced by the number of witnesses who have described Nomonde Calata’s cry as the authentic starting point of the TRC process, the power of the public displays of emotion that occurred over the course of the TRC hearings was predictably effective in creating emotional proximity. The evocative nature of the highly personal and at times horrifying testimony that was given centre stage at the hearings captured the attention, the sympathy and the imagination not only of the South African nation but of much of the world. It is unsurprising, then, that the TRC hearings generated a proliferation of representations in a variety of media, dominating the consciousness and the conscience of the South African people. This chapter, paired with the following chapter, will focus on four specific examples of textual or artistic representations of the TRC hearings: poetry, audio anthology, dramatic performance and documentary film. Each of these forms is distinct, raising specific questions about the individual artist’s ability to achieve intimate proximity to the subject of testimony, whether that subject is categorized as victim or perpetrator. My analysis will demonstrate how each medium allows for yet another perspective, a distinct approach, to the challenge of achieving authentic empathetic connection with fellow South Africans. In this chapter, I will focus on a sequence of poems by Ingrid de Kok, entitled “A Room Full of Questions,” as well as the audio anthology commemorating the TRC hearings produced by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), entitled South Africa’s Human Spirit . The poems are notable for the questions de Kok raises, through subject matter as well as poetic style, about the spectator’s relationship to the testimony of the TRC. In poems specifically focused on the figure of Archbishop Tutu, and on the role of translators and sound editors, de Kok’s poetry delineates the tension between intimacy and distance, between affect and emotion, which arises out of the desire for reconciliation. The other text discussed in this chapter is an audio anthology of compact discs released by the SABC devoted to their coverage of the TRC hearings, entitled South Africa’s Human Spirit . The content of this anthology is essentially journalistic, consisting of recordings of testimony from victims and perpetrators as well as from the commissioners involved

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in the hearings. The audio clips are organized in terms of thematic content, including two discs entitled “Worlds of License” focused on the testimony of perpetrators, a disc entitled “The Bones of Memory,” devoted to victims’ testimony, a disc entitled “Windows of History,” that draws together reflections on the successes and failures of the hearings, and a disc entitled “Slices of Life,” which focuses on the theme of imprisonment both physical and metaphorical. As described by the producers of the anthology in their précis of the disc included in the liner notes, this final segment of the anthology focuses on “the imprisonment under apartheid of all south africans [sic] — physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.”4 The imagery of imprisonment, as well as the issue of mediation and proximity, is similarly evoked through the packaging in which this anthology was originally sold: the CDs are housed in a stylized metal cage with a small lock securing the contents. This chapter will explore the issue of barriers and boundaries that seem to be elaborated through the theme of the cage, a theme that gestures towards to the persistent desire to break through subjective boundaries in order to achieve an authentic understanding of the wounded victims of apartheid.

“A Need for Ubuntu ” In its many iterations across various locales in South Africa, the TRC hearings were transformative on an emotional and ethical scale. They were also influential as interventions into geographical and spatial sites of cultural meaning. As the Commission traversed South Africa in the course of their hearings on gross human rights violations, they would often intentionally reclaim spaces that once symbolized the authority of the apartheid regime.5 The Commission would set up its proceedings in edifices such as town halls that, just a few short years prior, had served as administrative centres of apartheid legislation for those very communities.6 The space that the hearings occupied, and the way they occupied that space, was always carefully considered by the Commission in planning their forums. To name but a few considerations, the Commission was concerned to factor in whether the committee should sit on a raised platform or on level ground with the audience, whether witnesses’ tables should be raised, and what the proximity of victims to perpetrators might be. The commissioners of the TRC hearings were intent on transforming the structures of the old apartheid regime into congenial and equitable venues that would lay the foundation for the new nation.

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A common feature of the hearings, and one central to delivering a transformative message, was the motivational banners that signified not only the presence of the TRC, but also reiterated its mandate. These banners, which often spanned the width of the room and were generally positioned behind the commissioners’ table, were emblazoned with slogans such as: “TRC: The Road to Reconciliation,” “Let Truth Be Heard: Unite a Nation,” “Tell Us What Happened: Your Story Counts,” but most frequently the banner read, “Revealing is Healing”.7 This simple, direct slogan announced the mandate for the TRC to solicit “revealing” testimony, as well as offering its audience a shorthand to the ideological underpinnings of the Commission: that healing the wounded nation could be achieved through the transmission and reception of traumatic testimony. The TRC was established based on the terms of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act , Act 34 of 1995, which defined the basic structure of the Commission’s manifold tasks: • provid[ing] 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; • the granting of amnesty to persons who make full disclosure of all the relevant facts relating to acts associated with a political objective; • affording victims an opportunity to relate the violations they suffered; • 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; • reporting to the Nation about such violations and victims; • the making of recommendations aimed at the prevention of the Commission of gross violations of human rights.8 The TRC consisted of three committees, two of which held public hearings in the period between April 1996 and October 1998: the Human Rights Violations Committee and the Amnesty Committee. The first hearing of the Human Rights Violations Committee began on April 15, 1996, and the final report of the TRC was submitted to President Nelson Mandela on October 29, 1998. With a generous budget and a staff of over three hundred individuals, the South African TRC was one of the

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most generously funded and comprehensive truth commissions assembled to date.9 Although it was not the first truth Commission ever established,10 it was the first to stage public hearings—hearings that were not only open to the public over the entire two and a half year period in which the Commission travelled the country, but were also broadcast live on national radio and television, and, as will be discussed, re-mediated in a variety of genres in the creative and aesthetic arts. It was precisely this public aspect of the TRC which directly inspired a proliferation of art forms dedicated to the legacy of apartheid and the confessional nature of the hearings, as though both governmental agencies and artists were united in a common desire to repair a broken social system. The image of the nation as wounded and in need of healing was a prevailing metaphor utilized by the TRC to allegorize its project as reparative in nature. It was an image specifically invoked by the TRC Chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in his official opening of the TRC Human Rights Violation Hearings in the East London City Hall on April 15, 1996. In his memoir, No Future Without Forgiveness, Tutu transcribes his opening address in full, including this evocative assessment of the TRC mission: Thank you, all of you here in South Africa and round the world who have prayed and are praying for the Commission and its work. We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past; to lay the ghosts of that past so that they will not return to haunt us. And that we will thereby contribute to the healing of a traumatized and wounded people — for all of us in South Africa are wounded people — and in this manner to promote national unity and reconciliation.11

Integral to this statement is its inclusive definition of national trauma: “for all of us in South Africa are wounded people.” Tutu characterizes the people of South Africa—the people destined to be reconfigured through this restorative process into citizens of the new South Africa—as profoundly injured. The injuries are suffered by the victims, the perpetrators, the complicit and the bystanders; every citizen has been wounded by apartheid, because the lacerations have been inflicted on the soul of the country, the ubuntu of the nation. The African philosophy of ubuntu invoked by Tutu has iterations throughout the sub-Saharan region of the continent. A classic, and oft-cited definition of the term can be found in John Mbiti’s 1969 monograph on African Religions and Philosophies:

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[The individual] owes his existence to other people … He is simply part of the whole … Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say, “I am because we are; and since we are, I am”. This is the cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man.12

Michael Battle, in his discussion of Tutu’s theology, roots the concept in the Zulu proverb, “ubuntu ungamntu abantu,” which Battle translates as “a person depends on other people to be a person”.13 According to ubuntu philosophy, community is essential to subjectivity: an individual is incomplete unless he or she maintains a connection with the society or culture of which he or she is a part. Tutu, in particular, adopted the concept of ubuntu and relied upon it to provide the underlying theology justifying the main projects of the TRC: the Human Rights Violations Hearings and the Amnesty Hearings. The provision in the new South African constitution that established the need for the TRC draws explicitly on the concept of ubuntu in its intention to circumvent a Manichean binary distinguishing victim and perpetrator: “there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization.” Only through a reconnection with the spirit of ubuntu will the community wounded by apartheid be able to heal body and soul and give birth to a healthy new republic. Through his insistent recourse to ubuntu—a philosophy that he describes as the essential element in the African Weltsanschauung —Tutu argues that those complicit in the apartheid regime’s systematic agenda of torture, displacement and murder were also “victims” of apartheid, since by committing atrocity they became disconnected from the spirit of ubuntu essential to the welfare of the individual and the maintenance of a healthy body politic.14 Rather than imagining a community that is homogenous in its composition and objectives, ubuntu philosophy assumes that the society on which the individual depends “in order to be a person” is fundamentally pluralistic and heterogeneous; both the person and the community are always in a state of dynamic interaction. Since individuals exist only through their relationships with others, being an individual means “being-with-others”.15 Social harmony, according to Tutu, strives for “sunnum bonum — the greatest good,” and forgiveness

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is more than simply altruistic—it is understood as “the best form of selfinterest”.16 Victim and perpetrator alike suffer from the loss of ubuntu because “what dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me”.17 Consequently, the public venue of the hearings—whether assembled to recount human rights violations or to establish the case for amnesty— became a space for the restoration of this life-giving, spirit-sustaining force. As the slogan, “Revealing is Healing,” suggests, the public act of sharing initiates the healing process. The TRC hearings make manifest what Lauren Berlant has termed, in the context of the American political sphere, a zone of “public intimacy”.18 Berlant’s coinage of this apparent oxymoron, public intimacy, collapses the distinction of what is political and what is personal for the purpose of “defining how citizens should act”.19 In the particular case of the TRC hearings, the physical dimensions of the forum encouraged the blurring of the personal into the political for the purpose of mandating how citizens should feel. Public intimacy, in the case of post-apartheid South Africa, played out in a space of performative affect, affect meant to resolve itself in expressions of empathy and reconciliation. Such spaces of public intimacy, Berlant argues, beckon the prospective citizen of the idealized nation to embark on a “secular pilgrimage” in order to be “miraculated” by the promise encoded within them.20 Although it would be fatuous to describe South Africans’ attendance at the TRC hearings as a pilgrimage, one could certainly see how architectural setting is designed to invoke a sense of “miraculation” that in this case would involve reconnecting to the spirit of ubuntu after a dark period of exile. The message of reconnection and healing was encoded in the banners, in the public staging and broadcast via the emissaries of the Commission and the media, but most importantly it was embodied in the victims and perpetrators who had been selected to testify. One of the most famous and thus rebroadcast dramatizations of this reconnection to ubuntu was voiced by Cynthia Ngewu, the mother of Christopher Piet, one of the Guguletu Seven, a group of aspiring anti-apartheid activists who were entrapped, ambushed and murdered by the security police in 1986. The group of activists who would become known, posthumously, as the Guguletu Seven, were infiltrated by undercover agents of the security police who then offered the young men training and supplied them with guns and grenades to prepare them for an eventual militant attack.21 On March 3, 1986, the fledgling revolutionaries were driven to the site

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where, they were informed by the agents, they would mount an attack on a police bus. Unbeknownst to them, twenty-five heavily armed police officers were waiting in ambush and immediately opened fire on the seven youths. It was reported that only one member of the group, Christopher Piet, was able to return fire before he, too, was killed—shot twelve times in the head. The aftermath of this ruthlessly efficient ambush was subsequently broadcast widely on South African television, presented as a testament to the proficiency of the South African security forces in confronting the imminent threat of terrorist insurgency. Christopher Piet’s mother, Cynthia Ngewu, not only had to endure the violent death of her son, but also the horror of watching footage of his dead body dragged along the ground on the evening news. The planned executions of the Guguletu Seven became an important milestone in the history of the anti-apartheid movement, considering the triumphant manner in which these deaths were broadcast to the nation, and the exoneration of the police officers during an inquest into the incident held that same year. Consequently, the testimony of the mothers of the Guguletu Seven became a showcase event for the TRC hearings, and Ngewu’s ostensibly unsolicited endorsement of the spirit of ubuntu during those hearings became a much-cited touchstone for the ideological mandate of the Commission. Asked by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a member of the TRC Human Rights Violations Committee, if she agreed with “many people in the country” that the police perpetrators should face punitive prison sentences, Ngewu famously replied: I do not agree with this view. We do not want to see people suffer in the same way that we did suffer. We do not want to return the suffering that was imposed upon us. So I do not agree with that view at all. We would like to see peace in this country … I think that all South Africans should be committed to the idea of re-accepting these people back into the community. We do not want to return the evil that perpetrators committed to the nation. We want to demonstrate humaneness towards them, so that they in turn may restore their own humanity.22

Ngewu quickly became the living embodiment of the credo, “Revealing is Healing,” the humane face of the official call for ubuntu. Able to express her grief and horror at the public execution of her son and his companions, Ngewu was also capable of articulating her personal journey from being “full of hatred […] because of the way my son was

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— was killed” to a state of forgiveness where she hoped to “restore” the “humanity” of the perpetrators.23 The fact that public broadcasts of the aftermath of the ambush allowed the populace to connect with Ngewu’s grief also enabled her audience personal access to her feelings of compassion. It is Ngewu’s “revealing”—revelations not only of pain but also of forgiveness and empathy, of ubuntu—that offered the nation a model of “healing,” a convincing statement on human interdependence and the belief, as Tutu has suggested, that forgiveness is “the best form of self-interest.” As Ngewu states: This thing called reconciliation … if I am understanding it correctly … if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed Christopher Piet, if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back … then I agree, then I support it all.24

Eloquent, courageous, maternal, Ngewu rapidly became an unofficial spokesperson for the TRC precisely because she represented the authentic intersection of traumatic testimony and the articulation of ubuntu philosophy. Annelies Verdoolaege contends that those who testified at the Human Rights Violations hearings were consistently “addressing a wide range of discourse participants by not only playing ‘to the gallery’ but also ‘to the media’ and — at a historically significant level — ‘to the archive’”.25 Ngewu’s message, and its presentation of the speaker as a genuine adherent to the principles of ubuntu—was perfectly suited to reach the receptive ears not only of the gallery but also the media and the historical archive.

Representing Ubuntu As the circulation of Ngewu’s statements on reconciliation attest,26 the affective mission of the TRC hearings was mediated through what Goodman describes as multifold “cycles of performance.” Goodman usefully articulates the layers of mediation and interpretation that were essential to the success of the TRC hearings as follows: “direct testimony” of the victims and amnesty applicants were received and elaborated on by “empathic interlocutors,” the TRC commissioners who actively and sympathetically responded to the evidence.27 From there, the message was relayed to “sympathetic interpreters,” which included the journalists who edit and “amplify” the testimony and its interpretations by

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TRC commissioners, and this compassionate version was then broadcast to the “audience,” which included local, national and global viewers and listeners.28 The final “cycle of performance” in Goodman’s model includes “Public Space, Art and Culture,” which encompasses the translations and representations disseminated through film, drama, visual art, fiction and poetry.29 As Goodman contends, these “cycles of performance,” which can also be referred to as representations or re-mediations of the traumatic events being recounted by the victim or perpetrator, all functioned on a circuit that “designate[d] what kind of character a person should possess in order to belong [to the] new (and imagined) nation”.30 The work of representing the trauma of apartheid began with pre-selection; the decision as to which testimonies would be offered at public hearings. As is by now well known, the TRC Commission undertook extensive behind-the-scenes research and pre-interviews in order to determine which testimonies would be included in the Human Rights Violations hearings. A number of factors were considered when preparing for these hearings, including the fair distribution of gender and ethnicity. There was also the goal of balancing testimony involving human rights violations by the state against violations by the liberation movements. In an interview with Catherine Cole, Commissioner Mary Burton affirms that the approximately twenty people who would testify at each local venue were chosen in order to “somehow reflect the totality of the experience of that particular region or that particular city”.31 Cole quotes Commissioner Yasmin Sooka, who similarly notes that the “newsworthiness” of the testimony was highly relevant to the selection process: “You kind of look through a whole lot of shootings, you kind of looked for the one that would resonate the most with people”.32 Thus, the “direct testimony” offered for interpretation and translation was already mediated by the TRC selection process. Throughout the process, the commissioners continued to play an active role in the hearings, becoming, in Goodman’s phrase, “empathic interlocutors.” Goodman notes that in these public venues the commissioners “acted as intermediaries and interpreters, translating and emphasizing certain elements of the story to fit the TRC mandate and the vision of reconciliation”.33 In the summation phase following each testimony, the Commission would focus on certain narrative details to draw specific lessons about the past for the attentive audience. Goodman maintains that this process of interlocution consisted of three recognizable phases:

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“first, the dignity of [the] individual was asserted; next, the suffering was universalized; and finally, individual traumatic event(s) were inserted into the narrative of the new nation”.34 The audience attending the public hearings was also an essential component of the re-mediation of the affective message of the TRC and the new ANC government. As Cole suggests, the “live audience served as a kind of Greek chorus,” in its active and audible responses to the testimony.35 The audience, Cole contends, was offered a “status and prestige unknown during the old regime” and was allowed to express empowerment through its direct engagement with testimony.36 The audience and the commissioners both became, in effect, transmitters and amplifiers of the testimony, using their proximity to the victim or perpetrator as a circuit for engagement, interpretation, translation and amplification. The issue of proximity becomes integral to understanding the affective power of the TRC hearings. Even though Goodman’s model of “cycles of performance” seems to be spatial in its outlay, with each “cycle” at a further remove from the traumatic event being narrated, it quickly becomes evident as one reads accounts from all of the parties engaged in the narration—commissioners, translators, journalists, even distanced bystanders—that the affective power of testimony, a power heightened through the dramatic presentation of testimony, is not diminished by one’s supposed remove from the narrative event. Rather, representatives of each cycle tend to recount the emotional crisis as immediate and profound, something they personally experience as empathetic identification inevitably overwhelms them.

Precarious Proximity The issue of proximity underlines the implicit relationship between ubuntu and affect in the project of citizenship within the new South Africa. Critics of the TRC project emphasize how the focus of the Human Rights Violations hearings drew attention away from the legal institutions and systemic injustices that generated the majority of repressive effects on the population. Mahmood Mamdani succinctly expresses the drawbacks of the TRC’s focus on individual violations: The TRC has displayed a systematic lack of interest in the crime which was institutionalised as the law. It has been interested only in violations outside the law, in benefits which are corruptions, but not in the systematic benefit

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which was conferred on beneficiaries at the expense of the vast majority of people in this country.37

As Mamdani argues, the TRC focused strictly on individual trauma instead of more generalized systemic injustices, foregrounding shocking personal experiences rather than conceiving of the “experience of apartheid as banal reality”.38 This focus, of course, was intended to forge an emotional link between the individual victims of extraordinary violence (or, similarly, the individual perpetrators of horrendous crimes) and their audience. In this way, the shocking nature of the testimony generates an emotionally fraught intimacy, drawing the audience into a complex entanglement with the victims’ pain.

Ubuntu, Levinas and the Face to Face The recourse to ubuntu articulates the desire to create a space of public intimacy in which the audience experiences an emotional connection with the subject of testimony. Christoph Marx and Michael Battle both explore the ways in which Tutu’s ubuntu philosophy has become an “ubuntu theology,” woven through with Christianity’s emphasis on the paramount role of confession and forgiveness. In contrast to conventional Anglicanism, however, ubuntu philosophy emphasizes the otherness of individuals and the pluralism of community. Since individuals exist only through their relationships with others, identity changes as relationships evolve: being an individual means “being-with-others.”39 In this formulation of ubuntu, the African philosophy bears striking similarities to the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s idea that the starting point for understanding human identity is through appreciating the centrality of subjective interrelationships. For Levinas, the origin of language, and thus the origin of human subjectivity, is always rooted in the individual’s responsiveness to, and responsibility for, the other. Just as the entreaty to ubuntu gains urgency in the post-apartheid context—called upon as it is to heal the trauma of the preceding decades—so too does Levinas’s philosophical meditation on the centrality of response to human subjectivity derive its urgency from its origins in the trauma of the Second World War and the Shoah. Levinas spent the war years in a POW camp for French soldiers, a frame of reference that consistently informs his philosophy. The preface to his first major work, Totality and Infinity (1961), begins by contrasting the concept of morality with

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the “permanent possibility of war,” and thereby locates the origins of his inquiry in his wartime experience; an experience he comes to perceive as the abiding horror of human existence: “The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means — politics — is henceforth enjoined as the very exercise of reason. Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naïveté”.40 Politics, which Levinas equates with the “very exercise of reason,” is itself the act of war, and thus war becomes inextricable from our conception of reality: “… war does not only affect it [philosophical thought] as the most patent fact, but as the very patency, or the truth, of the real”.41 Like Tutu, Mandela and the other architects of the TRC, Levinas is consumed with the question of how to escape the politics of war and violence and sustain a viable ethical stance. Although conceived quite separately from, and without knowledge of, the philosophy of ubuntu advocated by Tutu and Mandela, Levinas also perceives the political as that which fails to distinguish between victim and aggressor: But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.42

In his conception of politics as indistinguishable from war, Levinas provides a useful lens through which to assess apartheid-era South Africa. It is also in this context that Levinas delineates a notion of ethics that is already a form of post-war reconciliation with others, and through that reconciliation emerges a liberation of the individual self. In his complex figuration of an ethics of responsibility, Levinas suggests that subjectivity is fully realized only when the individual confronts others as alterities unable to be assimilated into the individual’s ego. The other stands outside the subject’s comprehension, irreducible, compelling the individual to approach: to speak and to greet this enigmatic other. According to Levinas, the “face-to-face” encounter—an individual invoking the Other through greeting and naming—creates an ethical

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proximity in the form of a sacrifice of self for the other: “I not only think of what he is for me, but also and simultaneously, and even before, I am for him”.43 An ethical community begins through the face-to-face encounter that forces individuals to perceive themselves in relation to alterity: “the face to face is a final and irreducible relation which […] makes possible the pluralism of society”.44 The ethical subject comprehends the other through a discourse of response and responsibility and understands the “face” of the other as an imperative “demand”: the face represents “a hand in search of recompense, an open hand. That is, it needs something. It is going to ask you something […] it is a request and an authority”.45 Thus, the face of ethical subjectivity that Levinas invokes is not only the physical face, but also the voice of the other. Identity, he conjectures, is commensurate with “saying,” an act of articulation that amounts to the “very exposition of Being”.46 In a striking parallel to Levinas’s philosophy of ethical interdependence, the TRC hearings endeavoured to construct a setting in which the audience could experience this form of unmediated face-to-face contact with the other on the witness stand, through the sight of the human face and the sound of the human voice. The same challenges of interdependence confronted those seeking to represent the TRC hearings through news broadcasts or artistic media: to frame the testimony in a style or mode that somehow elided the “re” in representation, that seemed to transcend framing devices to allow access to the pure spirit of human interconnection, to ubuntu. This chapter and the one that follows examine four distinct attempts at representation through four different genres of artistic production: poetry, audio compilation, documentary film and drama—each form engaging in a renewed, always fraught, negotiation with the attraction and resistance of intimate proximity.

(Dis)Embodied Language The title of South African poet Ingrid de Kok’s 2002 collection, Terrestrial Things, invokes the intimacy and power of the lyric voice. As the epigraph to the book attests, the title is derived from Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” (1900), a poem that conveys a scene of such utter desolation that the narrator feels trapped in a frozen “crypt” with the “corpse” of the waning nineteenth century. The narrator’s relentless pessimism is finally leavened by the song of the thrush, itself a lyric poem

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capable, through its “ecstatic sound” of expressing “some Blessed hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware.” For all its modern nihilism, Hardy’s poem exemplifies the evocative force of Romantic lyricism: the narrator speaking intimately to the reader about how nature speaks intimately to him. The intended effect, one might argue, is a feeling of powerful interconnection between the reader and the poem’s subject: nature. The narrator serves, in the Romantic ideal, as a conduit between the reader and the subject of the poem, providing unmediated access to the natural world that will ultimately transform the reader into a better, more emotionally responsive individual. This formulation demonstrates the parallels between lyric poetry and Levinas’ conception of the face-to-face encounter, with each narrative—whether poetic or philosophical—striving to allow the subject a direct correspondence with something distinctly other than him or herself. Ingrid de Kok’s 2002 poetry collection, Terrestrial Things, is as wideranging in its subject matter as its title suggests: it is comprised of four distinct sections: the first a relatively short sequence about travelling in Italy, the final a short sequence on the ravages of AIDS in Africa. Between the first section on Italy and a third section meditating on the poet’s childhood, de Kok includes a section consisting of twelve poems, entitled “A Room Full of Questions,” a lyric sequence that is entirely focused on the TRC hearings. The twelve poems represent the historic event by adopting as many perspectives as possible: dealing with victim testimony in some poems, perpetrator confessions in others, while other examples focus on the roles of commissioners, transcribers and sound engineers. Through her detached third-person narration throughout the sequence, de Kok seems to be trying to compile a lyric record of the hearings that resists personal subjectivity while still representing the intense emotional impact of the experience. In relation to the poems that comprise de Kok’s sequence, however, the Romantic lyricism of the Hardy poem functions as a marker with which to measure a crisis in the lyric. Although these poems consistently strive towards a realization of the public intimacy that the TRC hearings generated, the poems also encode an awareness of the impossibility of such connection that ensures that the reader’s response remains suspended at the level of affect in the Deleuzean sense—a nameless anxiety unable to coalesce into a coherent or unambiguous emotion such as empathy. By treating the testimony as a distinct object, strangely

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autonomous from the individual testifying, de Kok’s TRC poems trouble the traditional relationship between the poetic subject and the reader, portraying a complex entanglement in Nuttall’s sense of an uninvited intimacy gained, a relationship established that is tangled, complicated and ensnaring.47 The relationship between testimony and audience—an audience that encompasses poet and reader—is foregrounded from the opening poem of the sequence, “Parts of Speech.” Not only is there no discrete firstperson narrator here to guide us through the emotional terrain of the poem, no lyric thrush, so to speak, but the “stories” described in the opening two stanzas are anthropomorphized into entities distinct from, and resistant to, any storyteller: Some stories don’t want to be told. They walk away, carrying their suitcases held together with grey string. Look at their disappearing curved spines. Hunchbacks. Harmed ones. Hold-alls. Some stories refuse to be danced or mimed, drop their scuffed canes and clattering tap-shoes, erase their traces in nursery rhymes or ancient games like blindman’s bluff.48

The first line of the poem simultaneously personifies the stories and characterizes them as resistant to their own telling. Rather than permitting connection, these stories “walk away” from the speaker and the reader, rendering the speaker speechless, and the reader textless, in other words, without a text to read. These stories are figured as radically other—the other demanding, in Levinas’s reckoning, an obligation, a responsibility from its audience. Neither the poet nor the reader can easily engage with these resistant stories, but the poem’s focus on them, even in their disappearance, represents an ongoing attempt to respond to their unresponsiveness. Personification in this poem is a device that both familiarizes and alienates the stories from their audience. De Kok gives the stories a form that the reader can easily envision: as “hunchbacks” carrying suitcases in their tap-shoes, they become visual images fully realizable in the reader’s imagination. At the same time, these are images in retreat, elusive stories

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silently disappearing from sight. The reader is cautioned that these stories do not want to be told, but is then directed to “Look at their disappearing curved spines.” The contradictory imperative creates tension by figuring the audience as simultaneously distanced and observant, alienated and included—a tension that finds its stylistic expression in the final line of the first stanza: “Hunchbacks. Harmed ones. Hold-alls.” This line offers a rapid-fire succession of proper nouns that identify the stories, nouns linked by alliteration at the same time that they are severed from each other by both the caesurae of the periods and the aspiration of the “h” sounds. The repetition of the aspirate “h” emphasizes the sensation of these words being exhaled, pushed away from the speaker even as the speaker articulates them; they are words in recession; and the technical linguistic term for the “h” sound is particularly evocative: a voiceless glottal fricative. The stories de Kok describes are voiceless, knowable only as they recede from her. The haunting sense of words unmoored from their stories and their speakers is further articulated in the third stanza, a verse that occupies the centre of the five-stanza poem: And at this stained place words are scraped from resinous tongues, wrung like washing, hung on the lines of the courtroom and confessional, transposed into the dialect of record.49

This stanza functions as the volta for the poem, moving away from active, personified words to words as inert material objects, and abused objects at that. Here, words are violently detached from their speakers, “scraped from resinous tongues,” “wrung” and “hung” before finally being “transposed.” Words here are at the mercy of an unnamed, disembodied force that severs them from human origin, rendering them distant and disfigured, wrenching them from one discourse to another (courtroom, confessional) until they are mere records of themselves, “transpositions.” The final two stanzas are organized as rhetorical questions posed by a disembodied speaker to a detached reader: Why still believe stories can rise with wings, on currents, as silver flares, levitate unweighted by stones, begin in pain and move towards grace,

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aerating history with recovered breath? 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?50

The concluding movement of the opening poem of de Kok’s TRC sequence poses the first questions for the “room full of questions.” Proffered by an unknowable speaker, the intangible questions wonder at the power of words to heal, to move “towards grace.” The heavy emphasis on the glide consonant “w” provides the dominant sound of this redemptive movement, but, as opposed to the certainty of Hardy’s speaker in “The Darkling Thrush,” de Kok’s speaker is uncertain whether hope remains a possibility. The questions raised in the final two stanzas of “Parts of speech” are distinctively poetic questions about how to wrest meaning from language, or whether language can even muster the power of meaning and transformation. At the same time, these questions invoke the Levinasian ideal of the face-to-face encounter and the power of that unmediated confrontation to yield empathy and comprehension. If stories resist their own telling, if words lack the power to transform themselves through imagery, if speech is now in “parts”—dismembered, disfigured, and amputated from the tongues of speakers—how is a face-to-face encounter possible? The poem, devoid of faces, begins the sequence with sorrowfully open questions. The abstract figuration of “Parts of speech” is countered by a resolute concreteness in the next poem: “The Archbishop chairs the first session.” Many of the poems in “A Room Full of Questions” specifically reference events or individuals at the TRC hearings, and “The Archbishop chairs the first session” is explicit about its relationship to the scene that has inspired it.51 Despite the denotative title, de Kok includes a subtitle to doubly ensure that the reader is aware of the historical specificity of her poem: “THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION. APRIL 1996. EAST LONDON, SOUTH AFRICA”.52 Contrasting with the abstract meditation of “Parts of speech,” “The Archbishop chairs the first session,” with its capitalized subtitle, frames itself as though viewed through the lens of a documentary camera, reassuring the reader of its objectivity.

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The first two stanzas display this objective style, presenting the reader with descriptive information without the overt imposition of a narrator, the lines themselves brief to the point of curtness: On the first day after a few hours of testimony the Archbishop wept. He put his grey head on the long table of papers and protocols and he wept. The national and international cameramen filmed his weeping, his misted glasses, his sobbing shoulders, the call for a recess.53

The lines in this poem are concentrated and unadorned, focusing succinctly on Tutu’s emotional display, reiterated twice in the first stanza: “the Archbishop wept” and “and he wept.” The allusion to the famously brief biblical verse, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35), is unmistakable. The power of the verse resides in its brevity, and de Kok here invokes the gospel to emphasize, in a seemingly objective way, the spiritual similarities between Jesus Christ and Desmond Tutu. The opening stanzas thus offer a disarming conflation of the objective and the spiritual, the concrete and the metaphysical. The verse from John describes Christ’s response to encountering Lazarus in his tomb and foregrounds Christ’s boundless compassion before he performs the miracle of resurrecting the dead man. Thus, the shortest verse in the Bible encapsulates both the power of human emotion and the possibility of resurrection. De Kok’s poetic representation of Tutu infuses compassion and the hope for rebirth into the spectacle of the TRC hearings. The poem begins and ends by emphasizing that Tutu’s emotional breakdown occurred on the first day of testimony. The title names itself after the “first session,” and the opening lines rely on the language of commencement: “On the first day / after a few hours of testimony.” The poem concludes with a stanza consisting of a single line,

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again stressing the originary moment and the singularity of the event it describes: “That’s how it began”.54 Just as the plaintive cry of Nomonde Calata has been described by journalists, writers and critics as the definitive commencement of the TRC hearings—as when the SABC journalists providing narration on South Africa’s Human Spirit recollect Calata’s cry as “ushering in” the HRV hearings—so too does de Kok locate the “beginnings” of the TRC in a moment of spontaneous emotional breakdown. Such unexpected and necessarily wordless outpourings of emotional sublimity set the stage for the face-to-face encounter par excellence—the subject suddenly confronted with the austere, inarticulate suffering of the Other cannot fail to respond with equally unadorned empathy; the emotional outburst wordlessly connecting victim with witness. It is certainly the wordless, language-less nature of the outcry that makes the transmission so direct and authentic, instantly translatable and universally relatable. Calata’s outburst is unmediated, even by language. In the case of de Kok’s poem, however, the focus is not on a testifier but on a mediator, on what Goodman terms an “empathic interlocutor”.55 Indeed, de Kok’s poem ascribes the “beginning” of the TRC process to the empathic interlocutor—the human symbol of hope and reconciliation and, of course, ubuntu: Archbishop Desmond Tutu. From this perspective, the poem adheres to the ideological trajectory of the TRC and the ANC government—it identifies the “beginning” of the process as a spontaneous and natural emotional outburst, and attempts to align the reader with the weeping Tutu. In theoretical terms, the Levinasian face-to-face is achieved through the mediation of Tutu, who dramatically provides the audience with the emotional cues necessary to achieve an empathetic connection with the other. Just as in “Parts of speech,” the victim who generates the testimony is absent from the representational frame. In this case, the testimony is only evident in its aftermath, its observable effect on Tutu. Significantly, neither the testimony nor the victim is mentioned in the poem. As the second stanza attests, the “national / and international cameramen” train their lenses on Tutu, not the victim. The poem, of course, maintains the same focus—and by extension the same objectivity—as the journalistic cameramen; its short, concrete lines eschew the figurative with as much vigour as “Parts of speech” embraces it. “The Archbishop chairs the first session” presents itself as objective, detached, even as it focuses our attention on the weeping, Christ-like figure of Tutu, all the while

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reminding the reader that this scene is the authentic starting point of the TRC hearings. “The Archbishop chairs the first session” focuses on the primacy of powerful emotion as a conduit for empathy, but at the same time is concerned with the effects of mediation and representation upon that affective message. Thus, the representation of a supposedly concrete, objectively rendered image of Tutu is already conditioned by biblical allusion, and in the second stanza, the poem breaks the representational framework entirely to show the cameramen in the process of capturing Tutu’s image. The second stanza reminds the reader that the image is mediated through national and international media; that this moment of emotional vulnerability has already been translated into a commodifiable symbol and inserted into a larger narrative. The first two verses negotiate a tension between the idea in stanza one that a spare language, free from metaphor, is able to present an image objectively, and the notion in stanza two that such an image is always already metaphorized, and narrativized by the camera or the poet, thus putting into question the possibility of an authentic empathetic encounter. The third stanza returns even more pointedly to the idea that the image of the Archbishop has already been co-opted through various interpretations and translations. As Susan Spearey notes, here the poem’s speaker, “after recognizing the profusion of discourses produced in response to this moment — media accounts, anthropological analyses, art installations, doctorates, books, and even the poem itself — addresses the reader directly”.56 The contradiction in Spearey’s argument is clear as she categorizes the “poem itself” as part of the “profusion of discourses” before arguing that the same poem cuts through that profusion by directly addressing the reader. This contradiction is inherent in the stanza itself: It doesn’t matter what you thought of the Archbishop before or after, of the settlement, the commission, or what the anthropologists flying in from less studied crimes and sorrows said about the discourse, or how many doctorates, books and installations followed, or even if you think this poem simplifies, lionizes romanticizes, mystifies.57

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Spearey contends that this stanza “invites the reader to suspend cognitive responses” and to “begin again by experiencing the affective dimensions” of the scene described.58 Certainly, the last two stanzas mark a return to the seemingly unmediated purity of the event itself, including the final reminder that this emotional breakdown should be considered the originary moment of the hearings: There was a long table, starched purple vestment and after a few hours of testimony, the Archbishop, chair of the commission, laid down his head, and wept. That’s how it began.59

The question, however, is whether the speaker’s admonition to the reader to forget the interpretations, the translations, the mediations that immediately claim this image into a pre-existing political or ideological narrative are ultimately, as Spearey suggests, overwritten by the “affective dimensions” of the image of Tutu weeping. Does the poem’s admonition of itself as a simplification and lionization of Tutu and, by extension, the TRC hearings, exempt it from exactly that criticism, and does the poem thus successfully return us to the pure spirit of ubuntu that would have us empathize with a man who is represented as wholeheartedly empathizing with the victims of human rights abuses? That the poem refers to its own biases before returning to a language of non-figurative description in the concluding stanzas lays bare the same affective tension that informs “Parts of speech”: the poet struggles to find language adequate to construct a proximity between herself and the victims whose testimony she witnesses. As a poet, however, she cannot forget that language itself is a mediating device, styled by the poet to achieve a desired effect, a desirable affect. The tension between empathetic connection with testimony and the awareness that language is a mediating force that holds the reader at a remove from the thing itself is an explicit concern in another poem from this sequence, “The sound engineer.” Like “The Archbishop chairs the first session,” “The sound engineer” begins with a lengthy, epigraphlike subtitle that anchors the stanzas that follow to their specific historical context: “Of the professionals engaged in Truth Commission reporting, the highest turnover was apparently among reporters editing sound for

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radio”.60 Again, the poet imbues the poem with documentary authenticity, reassuring us that an unproblematic connection exists between the lyrical and the historical. The poem is specifically about the technological manipulation of testimony, the sound engineer an invisible intermediary between the testifier and the witness, as the opening lines make clear: From the speaker’s mouth through the engineer’s ear, sound waves of drought and flood are edited for us to hear61 :

As the words of testimony are transferred from the speaker to the engineer, they are instantly metaphorized, becoming “sound waves of drought and flood.” In this way, the sound engineer’s mediation is perceived as an aesthetic imposition or transformation. The end-rhymes of lines two and four, an unusual occurrence in de Kok’s poetry, further emphasize the aesthetic constructions involved in presenting the supposedly raw testimony of the TRC hearings. The engineer is at first represented as only an ear, ostensibly open to the words emanating from the speaker’s mouth, but the first stanza suggests that the ear, far from being passive or receptive, shapes the words into edited forms at the very moment of hearing. The second stanza emulates the mechanics of editing and further highlights the uneasy connection between representation and authenticity: Listen, cut; comma, cut; stammer, cut; edit, pain; connect, pain; broadcast, pain; listen, cut; comma, cut. Bind grammar to horror, blood heating the earphones, beating the airwaves’ wings.62

These lines structurally and phonetically perform the act of sound engineering through the heavy reliance on caesurae in the form of commas and semicolons, as well as the deployment of alliteration in the repetition of words beginning with hard c’s and words beginning with b’s. Graham argues that the structural devices utilized in this stanza demonstrate what he terms a “dual operation of containment and intensification” that is

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crucial to the significance of the poem. As Graham contends, the caesurae, as well as the repetition of “comma” and “cut,” serves to “contain” the horrors of the testimony being edited, rendering it “cold and clinical”.63 What might be noted as well, though, is how the first four lines of the stanza consist of a proliferation of verbs without a corresponding object— that object being the recorded testimony ostensibly in its raw, unedited form. Once again, the stories seem to have disappeared and only their effect, “pain,” remains. The chaotic flood of verbs—themselves demonstrating the vicissitudes of editing, of exerting control over devastating testimony—finally subside into identifiable nouns in the final two lines, as the poet asks the reader to envision “blood heating the earphones” and the beating of the “airwaves’ wings.” The final image of the stanza, the “airwaves’ wings,” returns to the gliding consonants, the w’s and s’s, that, as in “Parts of speech,” promise uplift and transcendence. At the same time, the apostrophe in “airwaves’ wings,” although grammatically correct, interjects a visual and verbal stumble that slows down reading after the rapid staccato of the first four lines. Language reveals itself, in this final line, as both a vehicle for transcendence and an awkward stumbling block. Just as in “The Archbishop chairs the first session,” “The sound engineer” concludes with an image that reassures the reader that ubuntu is possible and that genuine empathy, free from ideological or political mediation, is a worthy and obtainable goal. After the subtle interrogation of how testimony must ultimately be edited for broadcast, and can therefore always be understood as a representation and a manipulation of the original story, de Kok’s poem ends with a complex and dynamic image of the sound engineer’s ear collapsing under the pressure of the testimony from which he has tried to remain objectively, aesthetically, and technologically removed: “The sound engineer hears/ his own tympanic membrane tear”.64 The image portrays a violent becoming— the rending of the membrane representing the breeching of the corporeal boundary between self and other. The sound engineer “hears” this impossible hearing, this tearing, witnessing the moment when his subjectivity is no longer autonomous and he becomes part of the testimony, part of the wounded nation. His wound—and the deliberate use of the redundant word “own” in the final line—emphasizes the wounding of his subjectivity, ironically drawing attention to his body at the moment that its autonomy is compromised by communal trauma.

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Both “The Archbishop chairs the first session” and “The sound engineer” conclude with an image of an individual giving himself over to collective trauma: respectively, the Archbishop with his head on the table and the sound engineer’s perforated eardrum. Each image represents this surrender as remarkably painful to the subject, yet at the same time both poems endorse the intimacy between victim and witness to the extent that the distinction between the two becomes irrelevant: anyone suffering the effects of testimony becomes a victim of its story. De Kok, however, is aware that this effect is linguistic, can only be linguistic, as is the nature of testimony. Language, the poet knows, is always already mediated, whether literal or figurative, whether purporting to objectivity or exploring subjectivity. De Kok’s poems remain, therefore, prisoners of their medium and their self-awareness. Unable to represent an unproblematic surrender to ubuntu, these poems perform an affective tension, an anxiety generated by the desire to achieve proximity overshadowed by a shrewd foreknowledge of the limits of language.

The Cage of Public Intimacy The three de Kok poems I have focused on function to delineate the coincidental intersection of poetry, ubuntu and of Levinas’s ethical philosophy. Each poem presents a scene in which poet and reader are confronted with the suffering other, which, in turn, demands of the witness a meaningful response. This response—which Levinas would have described as the interpellation of the face of the other—is provoked through the literal image of the face (albeit withdrawn) in the case of “The Archbishop chairs the first session,” but also through the face manifest as voice in “The sound engineer.” “Parts of speech,” through its anthropomorphized language, translates words into embodiments of otherness. The imperative to “respond” to the face of the other that Levinas endorses implies hearing the call of the other—listening to and responding attentively to the voice of the other. That voice can manifest itself visually, as evidenced in the dramatic and cinematic productions in the following chapter, but it can also be an aural response. This chapter focuses on a language, written or oral, that strains towards the other, attempting to connect through voice. De Kok’s poetry suggests that, in our attempts to engage with traumatic testimony, we become editors, we become cameras, we inevitably frame and metaphorize and narrativize the language we apprehend.

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Yet since we, the compassionate witnesses, strive for interconnection, for proximity, for ubuntu, this dilemma does not discourage us from attempting to engage emotionally with the testimony. Instead, it impels us more insistently. We desire, out of compassion, to inhabit the space of the suffering other, even as we become aware of the barriers and cages that restrict our movements towards empathy. Nevertheless, we continue to push against the limits of our own experience, attempting to traverse the terrain of subjectivity and occupy two spaces, two faces, simultaneously. On my first research trip to South Africa in 1999, I came back to Canada not only with many of the novels that continue to engage and challenge me, but also with one of the oddest cultural artefacts that I have yet to encounter. South Africa’s Human Spirit is an audio compilation of six compact discs containing a selection of reports from the hearings originally broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). The CDs include recorded testimony from the hearings mediated by narration from journalists who covered the historic event. The audio tracks are interspersed with renditions of protest songs, hymns, anthems and readings of South African protest poetry. The peculiarity of this collection lies in its packaging: the discs are housed in a metal cage—slightly larger than the CDs themselves—adorned with a metal embossment of the African continent. A dark green stone mounted on the stylized map represents South Africa. A small padlock, the sort used for luggage, secures the cage while two leather throngs extend from the cage, one securing the key to the padlock, the other bearing a small tag announcing the title of the anthology.65 The cage, which is both beautiful and startling, offers an architectural depiction of the fraught nature of proximity to the traumatized other, an effect I experienced profoundly as a first-time listener. When I returned to Canada and began listening to South Africa’s Human Spirit , I would play the CDs in my car as I drove back and forth to campus each day. Although this occurred more than twenty years ago, the experience remains vivid in my memory: alone in the cabin of my car, locked in with the voices of the TRC hearings, laid open emotionally to the pained voices testifying through the audio system. At the time, I held a postdoctoral position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and had just returned from a research trip to Johannesburg, where I gave lectures at the University of Witwatersrand, and the geographical discrepancy between the two locations could not have been more pronounced. Wits was a large urban

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university, located in the core of the city, fortified by gates and security checkpoints upon entry. UBC was situated on the Western coast of Vancouver in the midst of a rainforest, overlooking the Pacific. Both terrains, however, were marked off by colonialism, as the University Endowment Lands remains the unceded territory of the Musqueam First Nation of British Columbia, despite the BC government’s claiming it and apportioning it to the UBC in 1910. Every morning I would drive from my rented apartment through the luxurious splendour of West Point Grey and finally into the lush greenery of the Endowment Lands—at that time a still largely undeveloped swath of rainforest. The misty, pacific beauty of the landscape contrasted sharply with the drought-stricken landscape I associated with South Africa, but the two achieved a disorienting juxtaposition as I listened to South Africa’s Human Spirit . I often found myself in tears as I drove—opened to the suffering of a distant world and closed off from the world outside my windshield. Yet even as I was pulled into the world of the TRC hearings I could still see and marvel at the gentle British Columbia landscape, a landscape I had neither grown up with nor had yet comfortably accepted as my own, and this contradictory equation became for me, the experience of engaged reading. The precisely drawn borders—radical proximity and extreme distance—became an inextricable part of my experience of listening to South Africa’s Human Spirit. It is the paradoxical nature of this empathetic proximity that is represented in the metal cage housing the audio CDs comprising South Africa’s Human Spirit, and which I find manifest in the memory of listening to the CDs in a car moving through a still unfamiliar Canadian city. The space of intimacy created through access to testimony recorded on the CDs is one of constraint and discomfort. The sense of urgency emanating from the recorded testimony creates an aural space where proximity does not seem volitional but rather obligatory: the listener becomes a witness who cannot stop listening. I believe that attraction, that sense of being bound to the audio subject, is rooted in compassion, in the feeling that turning off the stereo is a turning away from the pained face of the survivor. The careful production of the CD collection reflects that sense of urgent and even obligatory engagement between compassionate listener and testifying subjects. The compact discs present the voices of victims and perpetrators seemingly without mediation, preserving moving registers of emotion—words riven with tears, voices lowered in shame or

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raised in anger—that render the speaker fully present and knowable to the listener. Yet the speaker is neither present—except as a recording— nor knowable in the sense that other people, particularly those whose experience is so different from our own, remain and perhaps should remain opaque. To counter this prospective alienation, the producers of the anthology ensure that the voices resonate clearly through insistent phatic soundings that make manifest the distressed bodies of the speakers. The audio medium is utilized by the producers of South Africa’s Human Spirit specifically to allow the oral testimony to transcend the written word by registering not just words but also emotional cues and outbursts. Beginning with Nomonde Calata’s non-linguistic wail of pain, a long list of tracks showcasing the emotional registers of the human voice follows, including the shaky, tearful but resolute statement of Dawie Ackerman,66 the barely constrained anger and pain in Tony Yengeni’s demands of Jeffrey Benzien,67 and the rhetorical lifts and falls of voice in Tutu’s impassioned beseeching of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to apologize for the death of Stompie Seipei.68 Interpellant phrases of this urgent nature, Roland Barthes has argued, are diminished through the transcription of speech to writing and ultimately distance the speaking subject from the reader. Often considered marginal “scraps of language” because they do not directly convey the narrative message, they are edited from the written text, but are actually significant insofar as they represent the “appeals [and] modulations … through which a body seeks another body”.69 In the transcription of speech, these dramatic moments are lost, and so, Barthes suggests, is the body.70 The editors of South Africa’s Human Spirit, in preserving the immediacy of speech as their medium of communication—and by including the ragged, emotional shards of non-language such as weeping, ululating, pauses and even breathing— demonstrate a poignant desire to retrieve the body: to restore the broken and buried bodies of countless victims of apartheid in order that they may be incorporated into a new national community. Such an aesthetic commitment to the immediacy and materiality of the speech act indicates how invested the producers of South Africa’s Human Spirit are in the ubuntu philosophy that Tutu promulgates. Through these fraught encounters—structured as hearings —the community is compelled to listen as the other announces their presence. Indeed, the process of testifying frequently involves a literal staging of performative face-to-face encounters. Volume 3 of South Africa’s Human Spirit records two cogent examples of victims who frame the proximity of the

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face-to-face encounter as a plaintive demand issued to those who have damaged them. The first of these confrontations involves the testimony of former security policeman Jeffrey Benzien, who tortured his prisoners by forcing a wet sack over their heads. During the hearings, ANC Cabinet member Tony Yengeni, who endured Benzien’s interrogation techniques, demanded that the policeman re-enact the torture Yengeni had suffered at Benzien’s hands for the Commission and its audience. With the help of a volunteer from the gallery, Yengeni was able to observe himself subjected to the wet bag torture by Benzien.71 Yengeni’s request for reenactment seems predicated upon his desire to scrutinize Benzien’s face as the policeman reverted from amnesty claimant to torturer. Yengeni resituates himself within the appalling scene and consequently unmasks himself: he can now observe Benzien, while Benzien, in turn, is confronted with the previously hidden face of his victim. Both Benzien and Yengeni are thereby forced to encounter the unconcealed face of the other. A similar encounter involves Dawie Ackerman, whose wife was killed during a machine-gun attack at St. James’ Church in Cape Town in 1993. Testifying to the horrors of the attack and the pain he continues to suffer as a result of his loss, Ackerman concludes by confronting the amnesty applicants who claimed responsibility for the attack: “I would like to hear from each one of you, as you look me in the face, that you are sorry for what you’ve done. That you regret it and that you want to be personally reconciled”.72 Ackerman compels the men to look him “in the face,” to recognize him as a suffering individual, after which he declares that he is now able to forgive “unconditionally”.73 For both Yengeni and Ackerman, the source of their individual trauma is located in the face of the other: each man scrutinizes the face of his tormentors in an urgent search for significance, a desire to negotiate a relationship that will free the victim from trauma and the perpetrator from guilt. Both of these encounters, staged as they are in what Berlant has termed the sphere of public intimacy, open up the painfully personal details of individual trauma to an international viewing audience, initiating a highly-charged face-to-face encounter. Confirming the TRC’s philosophical reification of the interpersonal encounter, metaphors of the face frequently recur in descriptions of the hearings included in South Africa’s Human Spirit. In Volume 5, which is devoted to reflections on the TRC’s successes and shortcomings, announcer Tim Modise offers the most cogent articulation of this transformative trope:

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Journalists who have covered the beat from day one will probably say that the commission’s greatest success is the face and voice it has put to apartheid. The public space and recognition it has given to the scarred faces and broken voices of victim, perpetrator, and ultimately survivor.74

Modise’s statement does more than simply contextualize the reflections of Commissioners, such as Yasmin Sooka and Mary Burton, that follow his introduction. As the anthology moves towards its conclusion, Modise implicitly commends the listener of South Africa’s Human Spirit who, through careful and empathetic attention to the recordings, has succeeded in reconstructing the “scarred faces” and “broken voices” of a hitherto dispersed and almost fatally wounded South African community. But how does such congratulatory rhetoric, however well deserved, justify the packaging of the anthology in a locked cage? If, as Modise implies, the face of the other is located within the aural space created by the TRC and by South Africa’s Human Spirit, does the structure of the cage represent an inability or an unwillingness to recognize this face? Ubuntu philosophy represents the other as an alterity that transforms the subject through its otherness. The American philosopher Alphonso Lingis, in an analysis of community that echoes Levinasian theory as well as, if only by happenstance, Tutu’s ubuntu philosophy, suggests that “community forms when one exposes oneself to the naked one, the destitute one, the outcast, the dying one. One enters into community not by affirming oneself but by exposing oneself to expenditure at a loss, to sacrifice”.75 In this utopian formulation, Lingis challenges the anxiety that overcomes individuals when confronted by the other who represents victimization, suffering or death, an anxiety designed to shield the individual from contamination, the fear that the individual might become that suffering body. The denial of sameness is a defensive mechanism, borne out of an anxiety that such egalitarian thinking endangers the comfortable status of the bourgeois. The cage housing the CDs of South Africa’s Human Spirit may most cogently represent this anxiety, a human despair at the intractable otherness that thwarts the desire to engage with the other, to hear the victim’s testimony, and therefore to rejoin this ethical and harmonious community. In such a guise, the cage may represent the inability to overthrow apartheid’s systemic and legislated othering of its population.

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Vis-à-Vis The philosophy of interconnection that provides justification for the TRC’s agenda is most graphically illustrated through the peripheral language of human contact: asides, improvisations, slips and outbursts that reveal unofficial but nevertheless significant acts of communication, cogent examples of Levinas’s concept of “saying.” The second disc in South Africa’s Human Spirit includes the recording of a media briefing with former South African President P.W. Botha, who refused to appear before the TRC to answer charges regarding his government’s culpability in gross human rights violations.76 Notoriously unrepentant, Botha convened a press conference prior to his criminal trial on charges of contempt, and the CD preserves his unofficial remarks as he attempts to ascertain whether his microphone is turned on. “Can you all hear me?” Botha asks above the murmur of the audience. “Those of you who can’t hear me, put up your hands,” he continues, this informal badinage changing tone suddenly after a pause, with the conclusion of the sentence: “and salute me”.77 Nervous laughter punctuates Botha’s remarks, but the performative aside illustrates how wilfully the politician turns away from his audience and from the citizens of his country in general. First addressing those who may be listening, Botha’s joke reveals his desire to speak only to those who cannot hear him and further instructs these un-hearing subjects to salute him. In this case, it is useful to over-analyse the former leader’s attempt at humour, especially since it almost certainly fails as humour for listeners who perceive Botha as an arrogant, villainous figure still clinging to the remnants of the apartheid past he dedicated himself to maintaining. The joke fails because it is not directed towards an audience sympathetic to the TRC’s call for reconciliation. Rather, it is directed, as Botha declares, to those who stand in defiance of the process, remaining loyal to a nation that no longer exists, and therefore to himself as a spokesman for this vanquished state. Botha, as he is represented on the CD, demonstrates what it means to deliberately remove oneself from the community. He conveys his disavowal of emerging national institutions by refuting their existence: he refuses to respond to the TRC’s subpoena just as he declines, in his ostensibly humorous opening remarks, to address the journalists who represent the inaugural nation; those who “can’t” hear him. Botha moves from the aside to a highly rhetorical political speech that may best be described as

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a relic of his days in power, haughtily declaring himself a “believer” who is “blessed by his creator,” recounting the “revolutionary and communist counterattacks” against his “fatherland” as a “total onslaught,” and declaring his unwillingness to apologize for his government’s “legal actions” in “resisting attacks on our political system.”78 Botha continues by asserting that the apartheid system has been misrepresented by its opponents: “I expressly stated in the open that apartheid is an Afrikaans word, and can easily be replaced by a proper positive term — good neighbourliness. Good neighbourliness”.79 Here, the audio track picks up a low rumble of laughter from the press gallery, which Botha hears, instantly assuming the authoritarian tone of a headmaster by scolding the assembly: “Who’s laughing? Who’s laughing?” The righteous indignation detected in Botha’s attempt to single out those who dare to laugh at him connects directly with his opening aside: both indicate his disinterest in responding to the faces he sees in the press gallery before him, as well as to the larger audience listening to the taped statement and, it is implied, to the still larger population of former citizens over whom he once presided. Botha lectures the new South Africa from his besieged garrison in the old regime, with the defiant conviction that the new nation simply does not exist. Maintaining a tone of haughty arrogance throughout—“I must say I’m enjoying myself,” remarks Botha as the conference ends—the former president makes a public spectacle of his inability to recognize the representatives of the new community who stand before him in attitudes of responsiveness.80 This track clearly demonstrates the philosophy guiding the production of South Africa’s Human Spirit. The sound editors amplify the almost silent language of the aside, the muffled laughter, the sudden exclamation in order to foreground a concealed act of communication and meaning-making, allowing us to recognize the face of P.W. Botha by hearing the voice he does not want to be made public. Other examples of apartheid operatives turning away from the face of the other are more ambiguous and ultimately more resonant. The two discs comprising Volume 3 of the anthology are devoted to the testimony offered at the amnesty hearings, including that of Jacques Hechter, one of the notorious “Five Cops,” collectively charged with more than sixty gross human rights violations for atrocities committed during their time in the South African Security Branch. Hechter’s testimony is notable because it raises the question of whether amnesty may be granted for cases of amnesia. Hechter insists he does not remember executing the black men

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that he and his fellow operatives abducted, tortured, and subsequently murdered, although, he maintains, “bits and pieces” are returning to him through conversation with his co-accused, Paul van Vuuren. Speaking in Afrikaans, Hechter asserts that because he cannot recall his actions, he feels no sense of responsibility for his murders: I can remember the electrocution, but only after it was told to me. I can more or less remember the specific place where it happened. It was on a farm. There was a gate. I remember the narrow dirt road. It’s a white, white chalk road. I can remember lots of trivialities. There was also guinea fowl. Those are the kind of things I can remember. But the actual serious deeds, I can’t remember them.81

The reader’s sentiments are echoed by Commissioner Bernard Ngoepe, who conducts Hechter’s cross-examination. Ngoepe expresses palpable shock and disbelief that Hechter remembers the presence of guinea fowl rather than his execution of the three activists. The policeman insists, however, that he only remembers “trivialities.” If Hechter is telling the truth, then he, like his former leader P.W. Botha, finds himself unable to apprehend his proximity to the other or to respond empathetically to the other’s emotion-laden voice. Although his denial of the existence of this other—the black South Africans at his mercy—is not asserted as arrogantly as Botha’s, Hechter similarly finds himself detached from the community he addresses because of his inability to imagine, remember or recognize the faces of those he has killed. Disengaged from his narrative, the story of his role in the old regime, Hechter is detached from the narrative of the new community, just as the national narrative is disrupted by Hechter’s inability to reconnect with the national community he has harmed so grievously. The audio-text of South Africa’s Human Spirit, however, has been edited to repair the inadequate testimony of Jacques Hechter. In the same track, immediately before Hechter testifies to his memory loss, his coaccused, Paul van Vuuren, relates the complete narrative of the executions in precise and graphic detail: We interrogated Harold Sefolo the same way as Jackson Maake and Andrew Makupe. We used a yellow, portable Robin generator to send electric shocks through his body and to force him to speak. There were two wires. One was attached to his foot and the other to his hand. When we put the generator on, his body was shocked stiff. Sefolo was a very

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strong man and believed in what he was doing. After he was interrogated, he admitted to being a senior ANC organizer in Witbank. He gave us even more information after Joe Mamasela shoved a knife up his nose. He was pleading for his life and asked if he could sing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” Then he said we might as well kill him. After we shocked Maake to death, Mamasela covered his body with an ANC flag. Sefolo was still singing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” when we shocked Makupe to death.82

Van Vuuren’s account provides an overwhelmingly graphic depiction of the murders before Hechter can announce his inability to recall the same event: for the listener, the executions are remembered before they can be forgotten, inscribed before they are erased. The decision to place van Vuuren’s graphic testimony before Hechter’s incomplete testimony, despite the real-life chronology, serves to establish “memory” in the listener. To further this project of reclaiming memory, the editors of South Africa’s Human Spirit, perhaps in direct response to Hechter’s professed amnesia, his denial of his victims, incorporate the voice of Mandla Sidu, singing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”83 the moment after van Vuuren recalls Harold Sefolo singing the anthem while Andrew Makupe was electrocuted, the song becoming background music for the remainder of the testimony. “The Five Cops” amnesty hearing, related through a plurality of voices, becomes notably complex at this point. In the way that it is edited and arranged, the audio-text reinscribes the memory of Harold Sefolo, Jackson Maake and Andrew Makupe through a detailed, textured account of their deaths, before the same memory is denied—turned away from— by Jacques Hechter. This dialogic text seems designed to mend the fabric of the narrative before it is unravelled, rendering Hechter’s amnesia both more shocking and less contagious. The editors—and one can’t help but recall de Kok’s representation of the sound engineer’s labours—intensify the resonance of van Vuuren’s account by adding the voice of singer Mandla Sidu to ventriloquize the irretrievable voice of Sefolo in the moments before his death, thus returning the body of Sefolo to the scene of memory and the space of ubuntu. Van Vuuren’s testimony, in effect, reconstitutes Hechter’s memory, as does Sidu’s singing. Each voice adds to the polyphonic re-enactment of Hechter’s “forgotten” murders and each serves to return the dead Sefolo to the space of public intimacy, of private and communal memory, in the same way that Barthes has suggested that a voice is embodied through

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“appeals” and “modulations” which signify empathy.84 The editors of South Africa’s Human Spirit seem determined, through their complex staging of Hechter’s trial, to retrieve the body of Sefolo from the nullifying space of the policeman’s amnesia, thereby ensuring that Sefolo’s swan song is heard by Hechter and the larger South African community. In this way, the editors use the missing body and absent voice of Sefolo as an affective bridge between amnesia and memory, between alienation and ubuntu. The conspicuous editing project that overlays the Hechter testimony lays bare the intentions of South Africa’s Human Spirit, and the TRC in general, to utilize affect in the service of reconciliation and ubuntu. The TRC itself, and Tutu in particular, deploy this strategy to great effect, an effect that is particularly evident when the anthology turns its attention to the infamous Winnie Madikizela-Mandela hearing. One of the most publicized spectacles of the TRC, the Madikizela-Mandela hearing provides a cogent example of a witness refusing to testify, an alleged perpetrator who declines to confess. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela and a powerful executive in the ANC Women’s League, was summoned before the TRC to answer allegations that the “Mandela United Football Club”—a group of youth activists residing in her house in Soweto from 1986 onwards—was responsible for a series of abductions and murders of suspected police informers. She and other members of the “Football Club” were convicted of the murder of 14-year-old Stompie Seipei in 1991, and although she never served her sentence, prominent members of the ANC immediately distanced themselves from Madikizela-Mandela.85 The TRC’s subsequent attempts to investigate this and similar allegations of human rights abuses commissioned by Madikizela-Mandela were thwarted by the powerful and charismatic leader—the woman who had been popularly known as the “Mother of Africa”—and for this reason many critics deemed the hearings a disheartening failure, a triumph of spectacle over justice, and a discouraging testament to the limits of the TRC to extract confession and effect reconciliation.86 Yet, in a retrospective moment, solicited by the editors of South Africa’s Human Spirit, while responding to the question of what the “defining moment” of the hearings was for her, Commissioner Yasmin Sooka recalls the Madikizela-Mandela inquiry. “The Winnie Mandela hearing had really moments of greatness,” she enthuses.87 Defying the obvious criticism that Madikizela-Mandela flagrantly thwarted justice and ethics, Sooka reminds

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the listener of the impassioned speech made to Madikizela-Mandela by Tutu, included in Volume 4 of the anthology. Sooka asks the reader to reflect on the speech in which Tutu begs the defiant MadikizelaMandela—who has to this point denounced the witnesses against her as an assortment of liars and lunatics—to admit that “something had gone horribly wrong” during the period when she led the Mandela Football Club. As in the example of the Hechter hearing, the audio-text immediately obliges Sooka and the listener by materializing that memory and replaying the speech: There are people out there who want to embrace you. I … I still embrace you because I love you and I love you very deeply. There are many out there who would have wanted to do so, if you were able to bring yourself to say: “Something went wrong.” And to say: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for my part in what went wrong.” I beg you! I beg you! Please! You are a great person and you don’t know how your greatness would be enhanced if you had to say: “Sorry. Things went wrong. Forgive me.” I beg you!88

The speech—with its impassioned rhetoric of sincerity, its tone of anguished desperation, its almost liturgical repetition of the words “sorry,” “love” and “forgive,” and punctuated as it is by Tutu’s humble plea “I beg you”—provokes acute discomfort in the listener. Even as he dictates an apology for Madikizela-Mandela, he allows her to adopt the passive construction—“what went wrong”—in order to evade direct responsibility. Sooka acknowledges that many onlookers have interpreted Tutu’s appeal as an example of the weakness of the TRC masquerading as generosity, an instance of the Archbishop prostrating himself and devaluing his authority in an attempt to provide a graceful exit, a facesaving escape, for the still-powerful Madikizela-Mandela. At the same time, Sooka calls such criticisms “misinterpretations” and asserts her view that the scene demonstrates “the reality” of what the Truth Commission “is all about”.89 The “reality” that Sooka attributes to these hearings is, in her words, “about saying things have gone wrong and we take responsibility for it”,90 an evaluation which recalls the precepts of ubuntu and its emphasis on communal interrelationships. In actuality, what distinguishes Tutu’s exhortations as a success is the profound emotional and mental energy he expends in his appeal. Certainly, Madikizela-Mandela’s response to the Archbishop’s pleading seems inarticulate, affectless and therefore

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insincere, unconvincing in contrast to his emotional entreaty when she finally responds by parroting his words: “I am saying it is true. Things went horribly wrong. For that, I am deeply sorry”.91 Thus, the speech cannot be judged a success, cannot be categorized as “definitive,” on the basis of Madikizela-Mandela’s response. Rather, it can only be valued, as it is valued by Sooka, as an endeavour productive of its own significance. Sooka admires Tutu because, as Chairman of the TRC, Tutu extends himself in order to connect with the other, with MadikizelaMandela, despite her apparent indifference to his emotional pleas. It is precisely Tutu’s willingness to exert himself emotionally, to subjugate and efface himself in order to bring about disclosure and reconciliation, that motivates Sooka to identify this speech as a “defining moment” in the proceedings. It is Tutu’s display of compassion, his deployment of personal affect, his willingness to bare himself in the sphere of public intimacy, that is interpreted by Sooka as embodying the spirit of ubuntu and justifying the efficacy of the TRC for revealing and healing the nation.

A Long and Winding Road Sooka’s paean to Tutu’s efforts to extract a sincere response from the seemingly remorseless Winnie Madikizela-Mandela echoes Ingrid de Kok’s poetic meditation on Tutu’s emotional response to the TRC. De Kok’s poem labours to convince the reader, as well as the poet perhaps, that “it doesn’t matter what you thought of the Archbishop before or after,” and invokes the discourses that contextualize his reaction, including her own poem. Sooka’s account similarly asks us to disregard the flat, unaffected response from Madikizela-Mandela that reframes Tutu’s exhortations as futile and even slightly embarrassing. The crux of the matter remains that the spectator—and this would include de Kok, Sooka, as well as the reader/listener—desires unmediated access to the pure emotional power of Tutu’s response. Indeed, we want to believe that Tutu’s response transcends concerns about representation and mediation. Tutu is represented by both de Kok and Sooka (and more generally by South Africa’s Human Spirit ) as a portal to ubuntu, a gateway to the pure, unmediated emotion required to achieve reconciliation with the past. At the same time, though, neither de Kok nor the producers of South Africa’s Human Spirit can effectively ignore the issue of mediation and representation that challenge the desire for genuine emotional

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identification. Tutu stands both as an exemplum of saintly compassion and forgiveness and as a stark example of our reliance on the symbolic value of his role as an avatar of ubuntu, emotion and reconciliation. The cage that houses the CDs for South Africa’s Human Spirit and the “broken tympanic membrane” described in de Kok’s poem each offer their respective audiences a crucial image for reckoning with the fault lines of proximity and affect, a symbol for the precarious space of public intimacy. The witness remains locked into a tension that has not been reconciled: the perforated eardrum, the cage of public intimacy, the car driving through Vancouver filled with the voices of apartheid’s torture victims. I continue to drive, then, and to explore the unstable terrain of mediation and affect in the following chapter with attention to two visual and performative representations of the TRC hearings. This chapter will focus on verisimilitude and realism in the form of the film documentary, A Long Night’s Journey into Day, but also on the deployment of what is artificial, aesthetic and deliberately alienating as represented by William Kentridge and Jane Taylor’s avant-garde play, Ubu and the Truth Commission.

Notes 1. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999, 148. 2. Corliss, Cody. “Truth Commissions and the Limits of Restorative Justice: Lessons Learned in South Africa’s Cradock Four Case.” Michigan State International Law Review 21 (2013): 286. 3. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999, 54–55. 4. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. CD. Johannesburg: SABC, 2000. 5. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010, 9. 6. In his study of post-apartheid literature, Shane Graham offers a sustained analysis of just such a striking transformation of space when he focuses on the conversion of the Old Fort Prison into the Constitutional Court building—an exercise in incorporating remnants of the old prison into a new edifice for democratic freedom (14–17). 7. Goodman, Tanya. Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009, 93.

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8. Goodman, Tanya. Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa, 12. 9. Hayner, Priscilla B. Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions. New York: Routledge, 2002, 41. 10. The first truth Commission took place in Uganda in 1974 and was an inquiry into the disappearance of Ugandan citizens since 1971. The most recent truth and reconciliation Commission, at the time of writing, took place in Canada between 2008 and 2015, devoted to giving voice to the indigenous survivors of the residential school system, and concluded that the system amounted to cultural genocide. The final report submitted by the Commission to the federal government included 94 “calls to action” meant to foster a spirit of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians, and to heal the wounds of the residential school system. The Commission emulated the South African model by making many of its hearings public, and the archives of both public and private testimony are currently open in the holdings of the University of Manitoba. A number of sources have tried to track the progress of the federal government in addressing the 94 calls to action, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. On its “Beyond 94” website, it continues to record how many of the calls have been completed, how many are in progress (both in terms of actual actions being taken and, in a separate category, simply proposed actions), and how many have not been addressed at all. https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform-single/ beyond-94?&cta=1. 11. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999, 114. 12. Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophies . 2nd ed. Johannesburg: Heinemann, 1989, 106. 13. Battle, Michael. Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2009, 39. 14. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999, 31. 15. Louw, Dirk J. “Ubuntu: An African Assessment of the Religious Other.” In The Paidiea Project On-Line. Boston: Boston University, 1998. http:// www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Afri/AfriLouw.htm. Accessed 14 May 2018. 16. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness, 31. 17. Tutu, Desmond, 31. 18. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, 1. 19. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, 1. 20. Berlant, Lauren, 6.

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21. The two askaris [black members of the security police] who infiltrated the group—Jimmy Mbane and Eric Maluleke—survived the ambush and were both rewarded financially for their role in luring the young men to their deaths. 22. Krog, Antjie, Nosisi Mpolweni, and Kopano Ratele. There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009, 11. 23. Krog, Antjie, Nosisi Mpolweni, and Kopano Ratele. There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile, 11. 24. Krog, Antjie, Nosisi Mpolweni, and Kopano Ratele, 12. 25. Verdoolaege, Annelies. “The Audience as Actor: The Participation Status of the Audience at the Victim Hearings of the South African TRC.” Discourse Studies 11 (2009): 441. 26. Ngewu’s comments are quoted at length and commented upon in There Was This Goat by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele. Goodman’s Staging Solidarity and Cole’s Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission. She is featured in South Africa’s Human Spirit and in several documentaries on the TRC Hearings, including Long Night’s Journey into Day and The Guguletu Seven. 27. Goodman, Tanya. Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009, 41. 28. Goodman, Tanya. Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa, 41. 29. Goodman, Tanya, 41. 30. Goodman, Tanya, 40–42. 31. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010, 9. 32. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition, 9. Again we might recall Verdoolaege’s suggestion that the testimony was meant to elicit meaningful responses from the “gallery” and the media as well as to find its rightful place in the archive of national history. 33. Goodman, Tanya. Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009, 64. 34. Goodman, Tanya. Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa, 68. 35. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010, 13. 36. Cole, Catherine M. Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition, 14.

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37. Mamdani, Mahmood. “Reconciliation Without Justice.” Southern African Review of Books 46 (1996): 3. 38. Mamdani, Mahmood. “Reconciliation Without Justice,” 4. 39. Louw, Dirk J. “Ubuntu: An African Assessment of the Religious Other.” In The Paidiea Project On-Line. Boston: Boston University, 1998. http:// www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Afri/AfriLouw.htm. Accessed 14 May 2018. 40. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003, 21. 41. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity, 21. 42. Levinas, Emmanuel, 21. 43. Levinas, Emmanuel. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Seán Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, 7. 44. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003, 291. 45. Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas.” In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, 168–180. New York: Routledge, 1988, 169. 46. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998, 37. 47. de Kok, Ingrid. Terrestrial Things. Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2002, 1. 48. de Kok, Ingrid. Terrestrial Things, 21. 49. de Kok, Ingrid, 21. 50. de Kok, Ingrid, 21. 51. Other poems that point directly to the event or individual that inspired it include “What kind of man?,” which refers to the public confrontation between Tony Yengeni and Jeffrey Benzien; “Revenge of the imagination,” which meditates on the testimony of Margaret Madlana; and “A commander grieves on his own,” which is based on the testimony of Major-General Marius Oelschig. 52. de Kok, Ingrid. Terrestrial Things. Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2002, 22. 53. de Kok, Ingrid. Terrestrial Things, 22. 54. de Kok, Ingrid, 22. 55. de Kok, 28. 56. Spearey, Susan. “‘May the Unfixable Broken Bone/[…]Give Us New Bearings’: Ethics, Affect and Irresolution in Ingrid de Kok’s ‘A Room Full of Questions.’” Postcolonial Text 4 (2006): 5. 57. de Kok, Ingrid, 22. 58. Spearey, Susan. “‘May the Unfixable Broken Bone/[…]Give Us New Bearings’: Ethics, Affect and Irresolution in Ingrid de Kok’s ‘A Room Full of Questions,’” 5. 59. de Kok, Ingrid, 22. 60. de Kok, Ingrid, 33.

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61. de Kok, Ingrid, 33. 62. de Kok, Ingrid, 33. 63. Graham, Shane. South African Literature After the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 72. 64. de Kok, Ingrid, 34. 65. A photograph of the packaging of South Africa’s Human Spirit may be found online at sabcmedialib.blogspot.com/2016/10/sabc-trc-cd-collec tion-oral-memoir-of.html. 66. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. CD. Johannesburg: SABC, 2000, Disc 3a, Track 7. 67. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Disc 3a, Track 8. 68. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, Disc 5, track 3. 69. Barthes, Roland. The Grain of the Voice. Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Hill & Wang, 1985, 4–5. 70. Barthes, Roland. The Grain of the Voice, 5. 71. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. CD. Johannesburg: SABC, 2000, Disc 3a, Track 8. 72. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Disc 3a, Track 7. 73. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, Disc 3a, Track 7. 74. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, Disc 5, Track 5. 75. Lingis, Alphonso. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, 12. 76. Pieter Willem Botha was President of South Africa from 1978 to 1989. Known throughout his career as “Die Groot Krokodil” (The Great Crocodile), he was renowned for his steadfast and ruthless determination to maintain the status quo of white minority rule in South Africa. In order to quell resistance from the ANC and other black liberation movements, he implemented a state of emergency that lasted from July 20, 1985 until August 22, 1988. During that time, human rights abuses against the black population escalated on a massive scale. 77. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. CD. Johannesburg: SABC, 2000, Disc 2, Track 12. 78. This section of Botha’s speech is delivered in Afrikaans and is translated for the anthology by Cobus Bester.

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79. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. CD. Johannesburg: SABC, 2000, Disc 2, Track 12. 80. Botha was subsequently convicted of contempt but the conviction was appealed and overturned. Botha died in 2006, legally exonerated and publicly unrepentant. 81. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. CD. Johannesburg: SABC, 2000, Disc 3a, Track 4. 82. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Disc 3a, Track 4. 83. “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” is a Xhosa hymn that became the anthem of the liberation movement during apartheid and was incorporated into South Africa’s national anthem after 1994. 84. Barthes, Roland. The Grain of the Voice. Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Hill & Wang, 1985, 4–5. 85. See, for example, the ANC’s official statement on the Mandela Football Club, broadcast over Radio Freedom in 1989. https://www.politicsweb. co.za/documents/what-anc-said-about-winnie-mufc-and-stompie-at-the, or the statement by the Mass Democratic Movement, also from 1989, on the same subject. http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/statement-bymass-democratic-movement-on-winnie-mandela. 86. Madikizela-Mandela died in April 2018 while this book was being written, and the response to her death is worth considering in terms of how her image was always public and thus always mediated. Whether she was the heroic “Mother of the Nation” who was lionized as the “first woman president South Africa never had,” or the villainous and defiant murderer who went from mother to “mugger” of the nation, her representation was always a matter of contentiousness and subject to the manifold political currents guiding national politics. A thorough assessment of how Madikizela-Mandela’s image was mediated by various political factions can be found in Sean Jacobs’ article in the Jacobin, “A Human, Not a Myth.” The article can be accessed online at https://www.jacobinmag. com/2018/04/winnie-madikizela-mandela-anc-funeral-legacy. 87. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. CD. Johannesburg: SABC, 2000, Disc 5, Track 3. 88. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, eds. South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Disc 5, Track 3. 89. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, Disc 5, Track 3. 90. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, Disc 5, Track 3. 91. Kapelianis, Angie, and Darren Taylor, Disc 5, Track 3.

CHAPTER 4

Seeing and Time: Durational Time in Ubu and the Truth Commission and Long Night’s Journey into Day

Time and Trauma My memories of driving through Vancouver while listening to the CD collection, South Africa’s Human Spirit, influenced my thinking on the interplay between the audio text and the aesthetic design of the cage as a decorative housing for the compact disc collection, specifically on the tension between mediation and proximity and the contrast between the Canadian scenery I drove through and the empathetic space evoked by the aural text. I would like to briefly return to the image of driving and listening in this chapter’s discussion on William Kentridge and Jane Taylor’s play, Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997) and the documentary film Long Night’s Journey into Day, produced and directed by Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann (2000), not because I intend to privilege listening when discussing these two examples of audio-visual media, but because the driving image is a moving image, and this chapter’s focus on two performative texts allows me the chance to consider movement as a function both of space and time. This chapter, then, will explore the relationship between temporality and proximity, time and empathy. Our complicated relationship to historical time has been a persistent theme in analyses of the TRC hearings, attempting as it does to give body and voice to a previously silenced past in order to allow the nation to both assimilate and transcend that past as the present leans into the © The Author(s) 2020 M. Libin, Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55977-9_4

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future. The TRC hearings become, in this equation, a dynamic junction through which past, present and future meet and enliven one another. This optimistic equation, as I have already observed, can be challenged by scrutinizing both the TRC and its subsequent media representations. For example, David Medalie’s recent essay, “‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature”, focuses on three contemporary novels—J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat —in order to argue that these narratives demonstrate that in the “new” South Africa, the historical past is “more likely to darken the present than to illuminate it”.1 According to Medalie, post-apartheid fiction consistently demonstrates that the collective traumatic past is irresolvable, remaining a paralytic force in the lives of its present-day characters; there is no sense of overcoming the past or marching boldly into the promising future of the Rainbow Nation. Ubuntu has still not been realized, according to Medalie, and past grievances continue to entrap individuals in their solipsistic despair. Indeed, the texts that have so far been discussed in this present study seem to validate Medalie’s assessment that little has changed in the national consciousness in the twenty-five years since the country’s first democratic election. Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001) structures itself around the trauma of Lydia’s rape by police and focuses on Mikey as a permanent reminder of the indelible, irresolvable past. Cook’s The House on Sugarbush Road (2012) portrays the pain and anger that underlies Beauty’s every action, and delineates the same inability to achieve proximity and empathy between employer and employee as Gordimer dramatizes in her late apartheid novel, July’s People (1981). Ingrid de Kok’s poetry (2002) on the TRC hearings explores the difficulties of achieving empathetic proximity to the suffering victims of apartheid, and the cage that contains the CDs of South Africa’s Human Spirit (2000) offers a stark material icon for the distance between the listener and the witness of apartheid era atrocities. Reflecting on Medalie’s grim diagnosis, I realize that the story of how this present chapter came to be is also a story of time and movement, and offers a more optimistic perspective on the issue of how South Africa might move from its traumatic past into a future that is selfreflective without suffering from collective paralysis. My thinking about this chapter began when I first started researching contemporary South African literature at the University of British Columbia. The documentary Long Night’s Journey into Day was broadcast on television, and I was

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profoundly moved by it, so much so that I began every course on South African literature with a screening of the film, as a resource to establish both historical and emotional context. In the past, I had screened other documentaries, such as Bill Moyer’s Facing the Truth, but none were as effective in conveying the emotional power of the TRC hearings while at the same time posing resonant questions to the viewer about the nature of guilt and forgiveness. In the eighteen years that have passed since I first viewed the documentary, a distance began to emerge between the thirty-year-old sessional instructor who first watched the film with tears in his eyes and the more sceptical associate professor who saw the generalizations and simplifications that the documentary was utilizing in order to heighten its emotional impact. Distance is an apt word to describe the relationship between this changing perception of myself—my more experienced and critically literate self recalled the younger and ostensibly more naïve version of myself with discomfort and shame, as though the earlier version had been somehow manipulated by Long Night’s Journey into Day. In 2010, while preparing to teach my first graduate seminar on the theme of reconciliation, I selected the documentary for its power to evince emotional responses from students, but also as an opportunity to dissect the strategies and structures implemented by Reid and Hoffmann to produce these emotional effects. I strove to select a companion piece that would be performative but contrasting in the techniques employed, and decided on Kentridge and Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, a drama that was renowned for its radical aesthetics and its highly oblique approach to the politics of the “new” South Africa. The pairing was ideal, setting up a marked contrast between the orthodox realism of the documentary and the equally committed surrealism of the multimedia drama that not only immersed my graduate students in post-apartheid South African culture, but allowed them to see that representations of that culture were already under heated aesthetic contestation. These two artistic representations of the TRC hearings offer strikingly different approaches to the subject matter they address, and indeed are intended for two different types of audiences. As a theatrical performance, Ubu and the Truth Commission was at least initially intended for a local audience, an audience that was aware of, and responsive to, the controversial amnesty hearings. As a documentary conceived by American filmmakers Reid and Hoffmann, Long Night’s Journey into Day was specifically aimed at a North American audience, and its style

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and content facilitate the Western viewer’s understanding of the complex issues and emotions portrayed in the film. More to the point, the two productions are informed by radically different aesthetic notions on how to evaluate the sincerity of the perpetrator’s confession and thus how to determine whether the community should forgive them. Ubu and the Truth Commission employs a variety of anti-realistic theatrical techniques designed to thwart the audience’s ability to equate characters on stage with real humans. Long Night’s Journey into Day, on the other hand, relies heavily on talking head interviews with perpetrators, victims and even commissioners in order to simulate a virtual face to face with real, emotionally responsive, human subjects. This provocative contrast also inspired the art critic Jill Bennett in her intriguing contribution to affect theory, Empathic Vision, and she devotes a chapter to discussing the differences between Long Night’s Journey into Day and Ubu and the Truth Commission in terms of the production of affect, particularly empathy, in the performances’ respective audiences. Bennett derives her theory of affect from the Deleuzian privileging of pre-emotional, pre-linguistic “intensities”, and so approaches the comparison from an evaluative perspective, declaring from the first that the documentary film relies upon what Brecht has termed “crude empathy”, a form of identification with the other that is strictly emotional and ultimately solipsistic: “What is wrong with this kind of experience is, of course, that another’s experience—in this case, a profoundly alienating and fundamentally secret one—is assimilated to the self in the most simplistic and sentimental way; anything beyond the audience’s immediate experience remains beyond comprehension”.2 Conversely, Bennett praises Ubu and the Truth Commission for promulgating the alienation effects that Brecht has championed, and therefore holding the audience at a distance from the drama that provokes intensities but does not resolve affect into knowable emotion. But as my own evolving response to Long Night’s Journey into Day might evidence, proximity can change over time, and as proximity changes the emotional response is similarly reoriented. Approaching performative texts as fluid and unfolding, rather than static and fixed, I have come to understand that time becomes an affective structure in both Ubu and the Truth Commission and Long Night’s Journey into Day. As an affective structure, however, the passing of time in these dramatic texts is not a conventionally chronological one, but what Lawrence L. Langer, in his writings on Holocaust testimonies, terms “durational time”.3 Focusing

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on the processual nature of each text as it moves forward through theatrical performance in the one case, film editing in the other, I suggest that viewers experience the time of textual interaction as durational time rather than chronological time, and in this way their relationship to the text may be rendered more fluid. This chapter will explore how the audience’s perceptions and responses vary over periods of time in relation to each performative text, and will discuss how these changes are structurally enacted by the directors of Ubu and the Truth Commission and the filmmakers of Long Night’s Journey into Day. While the avant-garde aesthetic of Ubu and the Truth Commission makes its subversion of dramatic structure readily apparent to the audience, I will also dissect the framework of realism in Long Night’s Journey into Day to demonstrate how cinematographic techniques are subtly deployed to guide the viewer through the film’s ideological trajectory. The techniques utilized by each performative text function to allow the viewer to experience living through the durational time that afflicts the victims of historical trauma and testimony. Analysing the affective discourse of Ubu and the Truth Commission before moving to discuss Long Night’s Journey into Day provides a demonstration of Langer’s concept of how temporality functions in relation to a traumatic event. Whereas Ubu and the Truth Commission attempts to represent the recurrence of trauma through theatrical devices, performing durational time and subjecting its audience to the alienating effects of that temporal suspension, Long Night’s Journey into Day enacts what Langer describes as the desire to restore the traumatic subject to chronological time; to bring the traumatic event to a conclusion and to reinstate coherence and meaning. Langer would argue, and my analysis of the documentary will concur, that such a return is impossible, and that the traces of unresolved trauma continue to disrupt chronology and meaning making. Seen in comparison with Ubu and the Truth Commission, Long Night’s Journey into Day reveals both the impetus to establish chronological time and the ultimate failure to offer a reassuring resolution to the disordering impact of the traumatic event.

Anaesthetic Time Theorizing the complexities of traumatic memory in his ongoing study of Holocaust testimonies, Lawrence L. Langer has frequent recourse

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to the French poststructuralist Jean-François Lyotard, and his conception, in Heidegger and “the jews”, of “‘an aesthetics of the memory of the forgotten, an anesthetics’”.4 This unique aesthetics is necessary, Langer contends, because traumatic memory does not, cannot, function like conventional memory or linear narrative. As Langer suggests, memory generally functions “to protect continuity or to verify disruption, to conceal or to flay”,5 but this is not the case in his experience with the memories of Holocaust survivors, which manifest as a “constantly re-experienced time”.6 Attempting to recover traumatic memory, Langer insists, is impossible in the conventional sense, since the traumatic memory is “uncovered and then re-covered, buried again beneath the fruitless struggle to expose the ‘way it was’”.7 Despite our attempts to restore these memories to chronological time and in that way restore coherence and, most importantly, significance, to the traumatic narrative, durational time resists these attempts. As Langer asserts, “Chronology anticipates something. Duration anticipates nothing”.8 If durational time is not only a symptom experienced by Holocaust survivors, but can be more generally experienced by victims of trauma such as those testifying before the TRC, then it stands as an insurmountable obstacle to ubuntu and reconciliation. The testimony cast in durational time refuses the anticipation of a compassionate response, of healing, of a restorative narrative that integrates the individual, the nation and history. The concept of durational time attempts to describe the experience of the victim, and my recourse to this idea as I analyze these two works indicates my hypothesis that both Long Night’s Journey into Day and Ubu and the Truth Commission foreground the victim’s perspective on the amnesty hearings. This presupposition is not, however, a universal critical consensus. Notably, in her analysis of Ubu and the Truth Commission, Jill Bennett compellingly argues that the play, particularly in its use of Kentridge’s animation throughout the performance, could be defined as a “sadistic text”.9 Citing Georges Bataille, Bennett contends that what she calls the “sadistic text” is “simply a catalogue of torture and barbarism”, distinguished by “speed, repetition, and multiplication, becoming increasingly frenetic as the actions of the sadist are repeated ad nauseum”.10 Certainly, Bennett accurately observes that the multiple techniques deployed in the performance of Ubu and the Truth Commission resist awakening the audience’s empathy or compassion, yet I would argue

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that what Taylor and Kentridge are attempting to represent is the durational time of the victim; an authentic rendering of the complex, ongoing suffering of the traumatized subject. They accomplish this ambiguous effect through their reliance on an array of unexpected and disorienting theatrical devices, including the use of puppets, projected sequences of animation, minimalist settings and props, unexpected casting choices and absurdist dialogue. The play as a whole is not a whole, but a hybrid collaboration between playwright Jane Taylor, celebrated visual artist and animator William Kentridge, and the Handspring Puppet Company, thus throwing into doubt any preconception that the performance will offer a consistent and traditionally coherent perspective. These devices make manifest, in a bewildering number of ways, the multiple temporalities that overlap each other, never cohering in the mind of the victim, and thereby offering us a version of the “anesthetics” of memory that Langer, via Lyotard, proposed. By foregrounding its indebtedness to Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play, Ubu Roi, while situating Jarry’s absurd protagonists, Ma and Pa Ubu in what resembles a contemporary South African context, Ubu and the Truth Commission immediately conflates temporal and political contexts that add considerable unease to the theatre-going experience. Taylor and Kentridge recast the historically anachronistic Ubus not simply in a contemporary milieu, but in a politically-charged setting, and thus create an aesthetic and temporal friction between the absurdist past and a specific political present. In Taylor and Kentridge’s reimagining, the play’s central protagonist, Pa Ubu, is now a former agent of the state who eventually decides to submit his apology for the murders and torture he has committed to the “Commission to determine Truths, Distortions and Proportions”.11 In alignment with Jarry’s original, the script is minimalist in terms of narrative, characterization and motivation. The plot itself is simple, even simplistic: Ma suspects Pa of sexual infidelity because he disappears every night and returns in the morning with “red on your collar, and tufts of hair on your sleeve”.12 After one more nightly outing with his companion Brutus—a puppet ingeniously composed of three dogs’ heads attached to a suitcase—Pa decides to destroy the evidence of his unspecified but undoubtedly gruesome crimes by forcing crumpled documents into the mouth of Niles—a puppet comprising a crocodile’s head and tail attached to a handbag. Ma, however, discovers the evidence inside Niles and decides to make it public for the purpose of celebrity. Pa, following Niles’s

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advice, frames Brutus for the crimes and applies for amnesty before the Commission. Each of Brutus’s heads receives a different prison sentence, but Pa is granted amnesty on the strength of his “apology”, and the final scene depicts Ma and Pa sailing off to freedom in a small sailboat. In Ubu and the Truth Commission, Taylor and Kentridge set themselves the task of representing the issues raised by the TRC amnesty hearings without simply replicating the broadcast media coverage of events with which their audiences would be exceedingly familiar. In his “Director’s Note”, Kentridge recalls another popular play that was performed in Johannesburg and that also dealt with the TRC hearings: The Story I Am About to Tell , produced by Boddy Rodwell and Lesego Rampolukeng with members of the Khulumani Support Group for victims and survivors of state violence (1997). In this play, three members of the Khulumani Support Group played themselves on stage, essentially repeating the testimony they once delivered at the TRC hearings in front of a theatrical audience.13 As described by Kentridge, The Story I Am About To Tell is intended to replicate the public intimacy of the hearings on stage, allowing the audience to connect with actual victims of apartheid crimes. Knowing that the performers’ testimony is authentic and that the face of the performer is the face of the victim, it seems almost impossible to avoid what Bennett terms the “crude empathy” of unproblematic identification with the victims on stage. In his recollection of The Story I Am About to Tell , however, Kentridge denies experiencing what Brecht would describe as an assimilation of the victim’s experience in a “simplistic and sentimental way”. Rather, Kentridge notes the jarring disjunctions that occur when the audience is confronted with an actor who is not an actor: There is a huge gap between the testimony at the Commission and its reperformance on stage. And these are not actors. In fact it is their very awkwardness that makes their performances work. One is constantly thrown back, through their awkwardness, into realising these are the actual people who underwent the terrible things they are describing.14

Kentridge recalls that the most moving moment he experienced as an audience member was when one of the survivors forgot his lines on stage: “How could he forget his own story—but of course he was in that moment a performer at a loss for his place in the script”.15 As Kentridge makes clear, even what appears to be a direct recourse to

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verisimilitude may be disrupted by the inevitable gap between testimony and performance, the gap between the individual as victim and as actor. In this anecdote, Kentridge delineates the dynamic interplay between proximity, perspective and temporality. The intent of The Story I Am About to Tell is to create a space of affective proximity, to establish a compassionate connection between victim and audience through the performance of testimony in the intimate space of the theatre. The actor’s slippage, his awkwardness, which Kentridge experiences as a moment of great pathos, is caused by the gap between the individual as victim and the individual as performer, a gap demarcated by durational time. The movement from testimony to script, from victim to actor, represents a temporal shift, and the sudden disjunction between the person on stage and the story he is “about to tell” is caused by his movement from one role to the next over that period of time. In recalling this lapse—a time lapse—in the performance he witnessed, Kentridge reminds us that when discussing trauma one is always referring to at least two different time periods: the time of the traumatic event and the time of the testimony. In this case, dramatists have foregrounded a third distinct time period: the time when that testimony is performed for the audience. My previous chapters have already identified examples of the specific ways in which the temporal nature of the traumatic event has been exploited for the sake of emotional effect. The cry of Nomonde Calata gains power through repetition and dissemination, yet that power paradoxically signifies the immediacy of her pain. The cry, as it has been amplified by journalists and Commission members, collapses the temporal distance between the traumatic event and the testimony, conflating two discrete moments into one agonized and continuous articulation. Similarly, Ingrid de Kok’s representation of the sound engineer who, while editing the previous day’s testimony, nevertheless experiences its immediacy, conflates three distinct temporal moments into a single image of pain, as do the sound editors of South Africa’s Human Spirit when they dramatize the testimony of Jacques Hechter and in that way return the erased body of Harold Sefolo to the scene of representation. Ubuntu, it would seem, requires that the witness connects as directly as possible not just with the victim in the present but with the victim’s past. Compassion involves helping to shift the narrative of the traumatic event from durational to chronological time in order to impose closure and significance and thereby ease the victim’s pain.

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Staging Time(s) Rather than aiming to close the gap between testimony and performance, thus correcting the effects of time lapse on its audience’s perspective, Ubu and the Truth Commission foregrounds these gaps and exploits the shifting perspective of the audience as a means to intensify affect. One of the primary methods that the play utilizes to maintain this perspectival uncertainty is its inclusion of both puppets and live actors, a device that serves to decontextualize the events and testimony presented on stage and also functions to visually represent the overdetermined nature of durational time. Ubu and the Truth Commission opens with a view of a vast monochromatic stage set, a single spotlight trained on a puppet who is patiently making soup.16 It is important to note that all the puppets in this production are lifelike in appearance, with dark weathered faces that suggest aged, or at least wizened, black African men and women: these puppets appear ravaged by time. Notably, the two handlers required to operate each puppet are always fully visible to the audience. Thus, unlike Jim Henson’s Muppets, for example, who despite their otherworldly appearance appear to move and speak autonomously and thereby invite immediate identification, the Handspring puppets announce their artificiality: we watch them being manipulated and observe as their handlers deliver their lines. The opening scene consists of a single puppet, an elderly black woman, along with the puppet’s two handlers, one of them in this case being actor Busi Zokufa, who also plays Ma Ubu. Zokufa takes on the expressiveness of the puppet’s face as the puppet concentrates on making soup, even smacking her lips audibly as the puppet tastes the soup. Even in these opening seconds, the audience’s concentration is divided between the face and body of the puppet, and the face and voice of Zokufa. Despite the single spotlight trained upon an ostensibly solitary performer, the gaze of the audience is in a constantly distracted state, never allowed to settle on a coherent, unified image. As Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev suggests, the puppets “act like masks worn by the actors, and we project onto them, perceiving them as real, until, suddenly aware of the puppet handler, we snap back into an acknowledgement of the fiction”.17 Only ninety seconds into the online performance, the relative calm of this scene is disrupted by the noisy arrival of Pa Ubu, who bellows, “Pschitt!!” as he kicks over the pot of soup.18 Although his approach is

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concealed by the pervasive darkness of the monochromatic stage set, the spotlight immediately widens as Pa Ubu collides with the pot, and one puppeteer scurries away with the old woman puppet. Pa’s cacophonous entrance subsequently turns into a raucous argument with Ma, but what the entrance ultimately demonstrates is the stark disjunction between the world the puppets inhabit and the world that Pa and Ma occupy. The puppet’s time and space are explicitly distinct from the time and space of the Ubus. Act Two begins in a similar fashion, with a puppet representing a spaza shop owner setting out his wares on a table.19 As the stage directions indicate, Ma and Pa interact with the goods on display while remaining oblivious to the puppet at the other end of the table: The process of setting up shop is slow and deliberate. While this proceeds, Ma Ubu and Pa Ubu settle down at the table to eat. They are unaware of the individual presence of the shop-keeper, but become aware of the goods available for their own consumption. The shop-keeper throughout is unaware of who steals his belongings, although he is painfully aware of their disappearance. He has a limited arc of vision, so that he never looks at either extreme end of the table, where the Ubus sit.20

Such scenes inventively establish that the puppets inhabit an entirely separate world from the Ubus; neither party makes contact with the other except through material objects. Once again, the audience is confronted with a fractured perspective. Viewing the spaza shop owner involves a gaze that vacillates between puppet and puppeteer, but the audience’s perspective is also compelled to shift between the shopkeeper and the Ubus. The stage is split between the world of the shopkeeper and the world of the Ubus, but it overlaps as well, since the Ubus avail themselves unthinkingly of the shopkeeper’s wares. The audience is confronted with a scene of multiple discrete personae—the puppeteers, the spaza owner, the Ubus—all inhabiting the same space but interacting without acknowledging one another. Each persona occupies the same stage, while inhabiting a distinct temporal moment. Establishing that the puppets exist in a separate time and space than the Ubus is crucial, since the major role of the puppets over the course of the play is to represent victims of human rights violations. Bennett’s focus in her approach to Ubu and the Truth Commission is on the puppets’ testimony and the “affective intensity” this provokes in the audience due

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to the stark contrast between the live actors playing the Ubus and the puppets testifying to their suffering. As Bennett suggests, a “tension is maintained between the grotesque self-absorption of Ubu and the affective intensity of the witness statements. Neither text speaks to the other; they are enacted within distinct realms”.21 Bennett, whose methodological approach is decisively Deleuzean, does not become more specific in her definition of this intensity or the mechanisms by which it operates on the audience. She remains, instead, committed to the idea that this affective force is powerful precisely because of its indefinability. The testimony’s power, though, derives from foregrounding the temporal shifts that occur in its iterations, simulating for the audience the overlapping presences of durational time. The testimony in Ubu and the Truth Commission, both visually and aurally, performs various temporal shifts from traumatic event to testimony to performance to broadcast, personifying each of its stages of transformation. In contrast to The Story I Am About to Tell, in which the face of the performer is unmistakably the face of the victim, the puppets in Kentridge’s production present a “face” that is definitively not the face of the victim. On stage, the testimony becomes disembodied, unmoored from an origin since it emanates from multiple sources: the puppet figure; the two handlers, one of whom recites the speech in Zulu or Xhosa; and, simultaneously, another actor who translates the testimony into English while standing in a booth to the side of the puppet. As in the grief-stricken poems of Ingrid de Kok, testimony here is represented as language that has slipped free of a discrete origin. In Ubu and the Truth Commission, the affect is heightened because the speech is not just disembodied but multiplied, dispersed, each face and each voice representing a different time in the unfolding spectrum of the trauma, an anaesthetic aesthetics revealing the interminable but “fruitless struggle to expose ‘the way it was’”.22

The Way It Was More than just a vehicle for encouraging compassion for the victims of human rights violations, the ubuntu theology of Tutu and the TRC also provides a space for the perpetrators of these crimes to regain their humanity, as Tutu exhorts: “what dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me”.23 Forgiving the perpetrator, which entails recognizing that individual as a human being capable of repentance, is an essential element in healing the nation and reestablishing ubuntu. The media’s approach

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to the perpetrator, as I have discussed in the previous analysis of South Africa’s Human Spirit and will revisit in this chapter’s analysis of Long Night’s Journey into Day, highlights intense moments of direct, intimate and often problematic encounter: the amnesia of Jacques Hechter, for example, was interpreted as a symptom of Hechter’s innate morality— his inability as a human being to fathom the evil he had previously perpetrated. In a similar attempt to reconnect an infamous perpetrator with his humanity, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a psychologist attached to the TRC, conducted extensive interviews with the infamous police commander Eugene de Kock. De Kock, who garnered the nickname “Prime Evil” for his activities as the commander of a counter-insurgency unit of the South African Police Force responsible for innumerable acts of abduction, torture and murder, had already been sentenced to two hundred and twelve years imprisonment for crimes against humanity when Gobodo-Madikizela began interviewing him in his prison cell. The resulting book, A Human Being Died That Night, documents the journey both Gobodo-Madikizela and de Kock undertook to recover the assassin’s humanity and learn forgiveness. Aligning with the underlying ideology of the TRC, in Gobodo-Madikizela’s account, the face-to-face encounter proved effective in comprehending and restoring the humanity of even the most despicable of offenders.24 Because the terminology used, and the highlights of the TRC hearings that were widely publicized and broadcast, implied that these encounters were almost instantaneous, Gobodo-Madikizela’s memoir is particularly instructive as it elaborates on the difficult process that is required for such a face-to-face encounter to achieve successful resolution. The TRC hearings often capitalized on the dramatic potential of what appeared to be a spontaneous meeting between victim and perpetrator; it privileged the moments in the procedures that seemed unscripted and instinctive. In A Human Being Died That Night, Gobodo-Madikizela details the multiple private, unscripted encounters with de Kock that led to what she considered a breakthrough in empathetic connection, when de Kock finally “seemed to recognize the profound pain and destruction he had caused, not only to the victims of his actions, but also to an entire society oppressed by the system for which he had fought”.25 While it is ultimately affirmed in Gobodo-Madikizela’s memoir that even the worst offender, the “Prime Evil”, can reconnect with his latent humanity and compassion, and seek out genuine repentance for his

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crimes, the narrative also documents the amount of time such a journey might take; a journey that involves both perpetrator and interlocutor. The process is disturbingly immersive, and Gobodo-Madikizela poignantly recounts how her own memories are triggered each time she meets with de Kock. On her first visit she is briefed on protocol by the head of the maximum-security block where de Kock is held, and Gobodo-Madikizela is agitated by the woman’s Afrikaans accent, which “never fails to trigger a memory in me of the bad old days of apartheid”.26 At a subsequent meeting, de Kock casually speculates about how he could never have spoken to her “ten years ago”, and this phrase, Gobodo-Madikizela insists, sends both of them spiralling back into painful memories: Images from de Kock’s catalogue of unspeakable acts seemed to flood his mind, stopping him in his tracks as he tried to imagine what our encounter would have been like had we met ten years earlier. My own imagination was transported to that time of madness, and I thought about all those people whose paths had crossed his.27

Gobodo-Madikizela’s memoir begins with the promise of a straightforward account, a journalistic description of her ongoing encounters with de Kock, but the narrative unfolds in an increasingly digressive and even circular trajectory, seeming to reflect the psychologist’s own experience of durational time. Her encounters with de Kock lead her to meditate on the nature of trauma, inspiring recollections of interviews she conducted with victims of rape. Her recollection of the interviews in turn leads her to recall her own experience of attempted rape, her thoughts finally returning back to the rape victims, as the circuit of obsessive thought reverses on itself.28 Eventually, though, these circuitous routes converge on Gobodo-Madikizela’s ability to connect with de Kock on an empathetic level; a return to narrative chronology. Rather than providing us with a reassuring exit from the closed circuit of traumatic memory, as Gobodo-Madikizela’s memoir does, and as I will discuss, the filmmakers of Long Night’s Journey into Day similarly attempt, Taylor and Kentridge keep the audience trapped in the dreamlike cacophony of durational time. In so doing, they conceive a performance that refuses a singular focus, a focalized point of view and consistent characterization. Consequently, their aesthetic thwarts the audience’s ability to synthesize and thus comprehend the perspective of the perpetrator. In its aesthetics, or its “anesthetics”, Ubu and the Truth Commission seems to

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be aligned less with Gobodo-Madikizela or Tutu’s ubuntu, and more with Holocaust documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s philosophy, which insists that any attempt to understand the perpetrators of such horrific atrocities constitutes an obscenity in itself; an attempt to humanize, to rationalize the inhuman.29 Rather than struggle to construct a direct correspondence, an empathetic alignment between audience and perpetrator, Taylor and Kentridge strive for an uncanny effect, simulating a proximity that is both familiar and defamiliarizing, layering the multiple temporalities of a traumatic event upon each other. Filling up theatrical space with layers of time, they foreground the dizzying and insurmountable gap between perpetrator and witness. In transposing Alfred Jarry’s infamous dramatic characters, the Ubus, onto the contemporary South African stage, Kentridge and Taylor also translate Jarry’s anarchic aesthetics not only into a local context, but into a specifically political one. Jane Taylor offers her interpretation of Jarry’s Ubu Roi in her introduction to the play, carefully noting both where the original character and plot adhere to her playscript and where it diverges. For Taylor, Ubu Roi is “a kind of parodic Macbeth who, together with his wife, attempts to seize all power for himself;” he is “notorious for his infantile engagement with the world”, inhabiting a “domain of greedy self-gratification”.30 In his infantile behaviour, Taylor’s Ubu corresponds with Jarry’s original creation, but as Taylor notes, the translation of the play into a contemporary context makes a significant difference in terms of the audience’s response to the clownish Ubu. Taylor suggests that historically, “there is a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks”, and that this pleasure emanates, in part, from “the fact that in the burlesque mode that Jarry invents, there is no place for consequences. While Ubu may be relentless in his political aspirations, and brutal in his personal relations, he apparently has no measurable effect upon those who inhabit the farcical world which he creates around himself”.31 Taylor’s play robs its audience of that “particular kind of pleasure” by suggesting that her Ubu’s actions have had horrifying effects on his world, and in this way the techniques of Ubu and the Truth Commission are more Brechtian than absurdist, searching for a form that effectively challenges the audience to reconsider their moral positions. As Roland Barthes suggests, Brechtian theatre is intended to challenge the audience and to incite political action; it is a “moral theatre which asks, with the spectator, what is to be done in such a situation?”32 That is, in contrast to a realist drama such as The Story I Am About to Tell , where

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the emotional response elicited from the audience is unvaryingly one of compassion emanating from an immediate personal connection with the victim, the response to Ubu and the Truth Commission is significantly more ambiguous and troubled. Barthes contends that Brecht’s approach to dramaturgy is grounded in the idea that “the responsibility of a dramatic art is not so much to express reality as to signify it. Hence, there must be a certain distance between signified and signifier: revolutionary art must admit a certain arbitrary notion of signs”.33 Ubu and the Truth Commission dispassionately severs signifiers from seemingly every signified available to the dramaturge: language, characterization, narrative, setting and visual representation. In so doing, the play suspends the audience in the gap between signifier and signified, in the space of translation, the space in which signification exists only as a possibility. This is the space, Langer would insist, of durational time: a temporal zone of suspension where meaning is perpetually deferred by the disorienting force of trauma. Whereas a lyric poet such as Ingrid de Kok only has recourse to the medium of language—and thus produces poetry that announces its self-awareness of how language is limited in its ability to authentically connect individuals—Taylor and Kentridge exploit a variety of media—language, visual performance, music, puppetry—in order to stimulate affect. As the way both visual and aural cues are multiplied and dispersed through the use of the testimonial puppets has demonstrated, playwright Taylor, together with visual artist and animator Kentridge, are dedicated to foregrounding the lag between visual presentation and dialogue in order to maintain palpable affective tension. To this end, one of the most haunting effects employed in Ubu and the Truth Commission is produced in the interplay between the performance on stage and the animation that appears on the screen behind the performers. The projections are a constant feature throughout the performance, from the opening moments, when an animated sequence introduces the major dramatic motifs of the play: “the Ubu mannekin, the camera tripod, and the all-seeing eye”,34 through to the play’s conclusion, in which Ma, Pa and Niles sail off into another animated sequence, “an image of Ma Ubu and Pa Ubu’s boat floating on a sea, towards the giant eye. The eye turns into a setting sun, as the boat floats off toward the horizon”.35 Animation acts as an ongoing supplement to, and comment on, the stagecraft taking place in front of the screen.

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The projections perform myriad functions within the play, presenting dramatic motifs, offering ironic commentary, functioning as a form of Brechtian chorus, and providing figurative or symbolic representations of narrative tropes. The projections become even more provocative when they represent the atrocities associated with Pa’s former career in the death squad. Act Two ends with Pa Ubu attempting to conceal the evidence of his crimes by stuffing documents down Niles’s throat, despite the crocodile’s suggestion that there are “some tougher bits” that will not be “so easily digested”36 : A A A A

piece of tongue that would not be silent, beaten back that ignored the ache, hand up-raised in gesture defiant, blood-red heart that would not break.37

Bearing out Niles’s lyrical caution—in this case expressed in rhyming poetic metre (yet another form of theatrical distancing)—Act Three begins with Ma Ubu discovering the discarded documents inside the crocodile-suitcase that is Niles. As Ma examines the papers, the screen fills with images, the first of which is a ball of paper uncrumpling itself to reveal a simply rendered sketch of a white room with an empty chair, a tub of water and a noose swinging like a pendulum overhead. It is clear from this opening that the montage that follows is intended as a visual representation of the document Ma is reading. The document takes on a life of its own on the screen, becoming an animated manifestation of the “piece of tongue that would not be silent”. The image of the page literally shifts sideways, the white background turning black as the single room is replaced with a darkened outline of a building bearing the unmistakable resemblance to John Vorster Square, the central police headquarters in Johannesburg and the site of countless suspicious disappearances and deaths.38 Almost every window in the black building is white with light, obscured partially by various silhouettes. The “establishing shot” of the building swiftly fades as the camera zooms in, but the image nevertheless shocks by revealing that every room in the ominous structure is occupied by figures engaged in sinister activities. The animation is dizzyingly rapid in its shifts and transformations. As the camera zooms speedily in on the building, a single silhouetted man falls past the windows. A chilling audio track plays throughout the sequence, assaulting the audience with a tinny, distorted soundscape of

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human screams, ghostly cries, the horrible crashing of metal against metal, and the distant sound of gunshots. The accelerated movement of the camera, with its rapidly shifting perspective, is accompanied by the cacophonic soundtrack. The quick, jarring cuts do not allow the audience time to absorb conflicting images, and the multilayered soundtrack makes it difficult to discern individual components of the aural fusion being broadcast. The projections act as an audio-visual onslaught, immersing the audience in a world saturated with violence and horror. Curiously, the animated scenes of violence are intensified by the absence of perpetrators in the frame. The final scene in the sequence, for example, reveals the silhouette of a man seemingly tied to a chair in an empty room. Metallic clanging echoes through the theatre, the figure jerking in time to the noise as if he is being punched, electrocuted or shot, although no other figure or device is apparent within the frame. In other scenes, a camera tripod becomes a self-propelled gun, and a man swinging upside down from a noose is knocked back and forth by invisible blows. The effect is not to exclude the torturer from the scene, but to render the purview of the torturer omnipresent. The images represent a perpetual state of brutality, making manifest the overwhelming nature of durational time as it is experienced by the victim. In the sequence described, the screen above the stage reveals the traumatic past as vividly, frenetically animated in the present tense. The suppressed contents of Pa Ubu’s secret documents are unleashed upon the screen, a superimposition of the past upon the present, a spatial representation of overlapping and interminable events. The effect of the animation in conveying durational time is heightened by the unusually laborious process of creating these sequences—a process designed to make itself visible to the viewer. Christov-Bakargiev notes that unlike the conventional process of drawing individual cells to represent each moment of an animated sequence, Kentridge creates a drawing in charcoal and pastel and then alters it by erasing and re-drawing the image. Rather than viewing animation as a progressive sequence of discrete events designed to conceal their origins, Kentridge’s animated sequences announce themselves as an ongoing and multilayered process. As Christov-Bakargiev suggests, this method of animation “causes the viewer to perceive the spatial and temporal disjunctures of the drawing, rather than creating an illusion of fluid movement”.39 In addition, traces of erasure and re-drawing remain visible in the new images, creating an unsettling palimpsest effect—the

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previous drawing lingering like a vestigial ghost within the outline of the current drawing. The effect on the audience of the processual nature of Kentridge’s animation is heightened in the latter half of this sequence, which is briefly interrupted when the screen goes dark. Beneath a single spotlight, Pa Ubu begins “testifying” in Afrikaans, with Ma Ubu reading the English translation from one of the sheets of paper she has stolen from Niles: Ons het dit ‘tubing’ genoem. We called it ‘tubing.’ Ons vat ‘n binneband en trek dit oor die gesig van die gevangene. We would take an inner tube, and put it over the face of the detainee. Ons sny ‘n spleet in die binneband vir die tong. We cut a slit in the tube for the tongue. Die hoe ons die waarheid kry. This is how we got the truth.40

Although we see Pa Ubu standing on the stage, describing the tortures and murders he has committed in excruciating detail, the audience is aware that this is not the actual public testimony of Pa Ubu, but rather an embodied translation of the secret documents that Ma Ubu reads. The language here controls the actors, and in a sense it controls the audience as well. Without a specific origin, the testimony of the perpetrator is as unmoored and disorienting as is the victim’s testimony when vocalized by puppets, puppeteers and translators. The not-so-simultaneous translation—and in this scene Ma’s English translation is delivered before Pa’s Afrikaans “original”—once again manipulates the audience’s sense of temporality, perspective and proximity. This brief but affecting scene between animation sequences—made all the more resonant because it occurs on a dark stage in front of a blank screen—is a jarring example of how Ubu and the Truth Commission performs the failure of chronological time in order to restore order and meaning to a post-traumatic world. As Pa’s translated testimony concludes, Ma tears open another packet of documents, and the screen lights up once again with an animated montage interspersed with vintage documentary footage of South African soldiers marching, driving tanks and opening fire on anti-apartheid protestors. Punctuated by abrupt jumpcuts, the alternation between film footage and animation creates an unsettling juxtaposition that reveals

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the radically unstable distance between perpetrator and audience, artifice and reality, past and present. Here, more than in the first sequence, Kentridge’s processual approach to animation is foregrounded, as charcoal lines snake out of microphones, telephones and showerheads, invading the adjoining frames where they pierce the bodies of victims in the next cell. The final image is of an otherworldly, hybrid creature, a cross between a compass, a tripod, and a spider drawing a web of lines that circulate through all the cells in the building. As Bennett contends, these radiating lines represent “lines of connection and lines of flight, suggesting the irrepressible flows of violence”.41 Yet they are also timelines—temporal lines of connection and flight, simultaneously interweaving and isolating the various moments of history, trauma, performance and animation occupying space upon Taylor and Kentridge’s stage. Kentridge’s idiosyncratic method of animation functions as yet another subgenre within this multimedia drama, foregrounding the interactive disconnections emanating from the stage out into the theatre, the audience, the world. The whirlwind of activity through which the play continually reorients its audience’s focus—from puppets to human actors, from human actors to projections—refuses the spectator a comforting seat outside the frame of the performance. The disjunctive script at once distances the audience from identification with realistic characters and events on stage and incorporates them into the unfolding drama, compelling viewers to confront their complicity in what is not a closed chapter of history but an ongoing and pervasive nightmare of violence and denial. The play’s conclusion is consistent with its ruthlessly maintained inconsistency. Brutus, the three-headed dog, having been “cover[ed] in dirt” by Pa, is convicted by the Commission, with each head receiving a different sentence. The one “head of political affairs” is exonerated, the other “head of the military” is sentenced to “thirty years of leadership in the new state army”, and the third head, the foot soldier that carried out orders, is sentenced to “two hundred and twelve years imprisonment”.42 Pa submits a “confession” to the Commission that diverges significantly from the evidence Ma found in Niles. As the caption on the screen declares “Ubu Tells the Truth”, Pa proclaims himself an “honest citizen” standing “before you with neither shame nor arrogance”.43 In his rehearsed testimony, Pa equates himself with the audience: “Like all of you, I eat, and sleep, and dream dreams. These vile stories, they sicken

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me”.44 Through his monologue, we experience the play’s direct rebuff of the idea that the perpetrator can be understood on a human level, empathized with, or be integrated into a community based on ubuntu. When Pa finally attempts the note of contrition that he understands is expected of him—“There is only one thing I will have to live with until the day I die—it’s the corpses that I will have to drag with me to my grave, of the people I have killed. Remorse, I can assure you, a lot, a hell of a lot”—the audience response is clearly meant to correspond with Lanzmann’s “obscenity of understanding”. By casting Jarry’s Pa Ubu in the role of the apartheid era perpetrator, though, Taylor and Kentridge frame the characterization as broader in its implications; Pa Ubu represents not one individual policeman, but the totality of apartheid criminals, the instigator of every act of violence we have seen on screen to this point. Screen projections draw the play to its ironic non-conclusion, reinforcing the futility of trying to foreclose on the past, as Pa and Ma float happily away on a boat, looking forward to “a clean start”, “a clean slate”, “a new beginning” and a “bright future”.45 With these platitudes ringing in the audience’s ears, the screen reveals an animated image of Ma and Pa’s boat sailing off into a giant eye that transforms into a setting sun. The transformation of the eye into the sun begins with a horizontal line emerging to bisect the eye; that line becoming the horizon over which the setting sun positions itself. The eye is thus crossed out, bisected by the “bright future” of the new country. This is the ostensibly mindful and nurturing eye of the TRC, of the country as a whole, being struck through; the mission to recover the traumatic past of a nation being foreshortened by the desire to bring closure, to return the country to chronological time. The eye must necessarily also represent the eyes of the audience members, the citizens of South Africa who have been immersed in the dizzying and disorienting trauma of the past, lost in the time lag between past and present, before the single line of optimism attempts to wipe the slate clean. It is this attempt to foreclose on the past, to restore time to its normative chronology, that will resonate with, and likely haunt, the audience as they leave the immersive space of the theatre and move dazedly out into a world that more easily simulates normalcy and continuity.

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Night and Day As Bennett contends, Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann’s documentary, Long Night’s Journey into Day presents an apparently unproblematic perspective on the TRC amnesty hearings, particularly when contrasted with Ubu and the Truth Commission. Bennett, setting up a stark evaluative dichotomy between the two productions, ultimately concludes that Long Night’s Journey into Day represents “crude empathy”, which she defines as a “simplistic and sentimental” assimilation of the trauma of the other into the self. As a result of this, Bennett concludes that the audience mistakes solipsism for empathy since, “anything beyond the audience’s immediate experience remains beyond comprehension”.46 The structure of the documentary, with its heavy reliance on talking head interviews with victims, perpetrators, as well as TRC commissioners and lawyers, lends credence to Bennett’s assessment that Reid and Hoffmann’s objective is to create the space for a face-to-face encounter between viewer and interviewee. In so doing, the filmmakers organize their portrayal of the amnesty hearings in such an order so as to instil meaning and impose narrative closure upon the traumatic episodes upon which they focus. The film’s title, of course, is indicative of its ideological trajectory: the viewer is meant to “journey”, along with the country itself, into the new “day”. As opposed to the ironic sun that provides the final image of Ubu and the Truth Commission, the daylight that will dispel the “long night” of South Africa’s traumatic past is here presented as inevitable as it is welcome. The title itself references chronological time, as night, no matter how long it might seem to last, is unfailingly followed by day.47 The film leads the viewer through a narrative journey into understanding the unique and laudable character of the TRC amnesty hearings, and into realizing how ubuntu is possible as a result of perpetrators coming forward with genuine repentance in their hearts. That is not to say that each of the four cases selected for the documentary concludes in a joyful reconciliation. Rather, as viewers “journey” from one segment of the film to the next, they are meant to experience distinctly different responses to various perpetrators. The first segment of the film deals with the black youth applying for amnesty for the murder of American Fulbright student Amy Biehl, the case being one of the most famous examples of reconciliation in the history of the TRC. The second segment, on the murder of the Cradock Four, focuses on the more ambiguous case of former policeman Eric Taylor, who claims to have

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changed his mind about apartheid after watching the film Mississippi Burning, and attempts to apologize to the widows of the men he murdered. The third segment documents the amnesty hearing of Robert McBride, a former MK guerilla who killed three white civilians when he bombed a pub in Durban, but closely scrutinizes Sharon Welgemoed, the unforgiving sister of one of the women killed. The final segment focuses on former police officer, Thapelo Mbelo, when he meets with the widows of the Guguletu Seven and asks them directly for forgiveness for his role in their husbands’ murders. Each of these four cases allows the viewer to evaluate the perpetrator separately, but each segment, as I will discuss, utilizes cinematic techniques and careful editing to guide the audience towards a specific judgement. Whether the viewer’s reaction coalesces into forgiveness, suspicion, or outright rejection of the perpetrator’s apologies, the documentary ultimately endeavours to invoke closure on the segments and the film as a whole, returning the audience to the solace of chronological time. Despite these well-meaning intentions, however, Reid and Hoffmann’s documentary still exhibits the markings of a trauma that cannot be so easily resolved, and, when closely examined, the narrative’s inability to seamlessly convey a message of harmonious reconciliation becomes apparent.

“The Eyelashes of This Suffering” My experience of repeated viewings of Long Night’s Journey into Day over the years has allowed me to chart my own level of maturing knowledge of South African history, culture and even geography. The documentary, made by two American filmmakers who have no previous connection to South Africa, is clearly targeted at a North American demographic, an audience that likely has little prior knowledge of South Africa, apartheid, or the TRC hearings. Reid and Hoffmann approach their subject as strangers—they have no specific connection to South Africa and have only undertaken this particular project because of their interest in the inspiring transformation of the country and the extraordinary spectacle of the TRC hearings. In an interview, Reid clarifies her comfortable distance from her subject, and how her role as a sort of documentary tourist actually allows for a richer perspective: “People appreciated that we’d come so far to hear their story. It also helped not having any baggage—people couldn’t ask us where we were 10 years ago, because we weren’t here”.48

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In this offhand statement, Reid reveals not only that she feels no complicity in South Africa’s apartheid past, but neither, in her estimation, does anyone in South Africa feel she ought to. Instead, they “appreciate” that American filmmakers take an interest in their political, social and judicial affairs. The viewer of Long Night’s Journey into Day is similarly positioned as an innocent but concerned bystander—the North American audience is figured from the opening credits of the film as relatively uninformed about the history and politics of South Africa, and therefore burdened with even less political and historical “baggage” than the filmmakers themselves. As opposed to the audience in Ubu and the Truth Commission, the viewing audience of Long Night’s Journey into Day is not meant to experience feelings of complicity or entanglement in the events they are witnessing. Durational time is not a factor, for the viewer is neither a victim nor a perpetrator; rather, the viewer has been interpellated, through the film’s cinematic techniques, as an objective, detached juror. This interpellation is not made explicit to the viewing audience. Rather, the film’s intent appears to be to ease the viewer into an understanding of a distant but extraordinary event and to enable a genuine face-to-face encounter between the viewer and the film’s subjects. In alignment with the mission of the TRC hearings, Reid and Hoffmann set out to bring the audience into intimate proximity with their subjects, allowing viewers to experience empathy for both the victims and the perpetrators who are in the process of seeking forgiveness for their crimes through the amnesty hearings. The primary technique for achieving this empathetic connection is the close-up shot, and the talking head interview is the predominant device utilized by Reid and Hoffmann to relate the four stories they have selected. Every person featured in the documentary is filmed sitting in what appears to be their native habitat—be it home or office—while talking directly to the camera. The interviewer is neither shown nor are her questions recorded; the only voice heard is that of the interviewee. In their bracketing out of the interviewer, Reid and Hoffmann’s approach appears to be inspired by film theorists such as Jean Epstein, who argue that the cinematic close-up is the “soul of the cinema”.49 Contending that proximity is a crucial factor for identification with, and empathy for, the other, Epstein argues that in film, the close up provides that generative intimacy:

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The close-up modifies the drama by the impact of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I stretch out my arm I touch you, and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes of this suffering. […] The close-up limits and directs the attention. As an emotional indicator, it overwhelms me. I have neither the right nor the ability to be distracted. It speaks the present imperative of the verb to understand.50

Epstein’s meditation on the power of the close-up aligns conveniently with the project of the TRC hearings: to provide a performative arena within which the audience may experience the “intimacy” of pain, an intimacy presumably so acute that the viewer might be able to “count the eyelashes” on the face of suffering.51 Pain and suffering become the physiological face of the witness in this assessment, and the physiological face issues a Levinasian command to recognize and understand its presence and its pain. In the specific case of Long Night’s Journey into Day, the reliance on the face-to-face encounter, through its embrace of the observational genre of documentary filmmaking, is complicated by the focus on perpetrators as well as victims. Rather than simply evoking sympathy or compassion, the close-ups of various perpetrators compel the viewer to evaluate the face of the other and decide whether these subjects are sincere in their apologies or whether they are akin to Pa Ubu in merely paying lip service to remorse in order to evade justice. Although Reid and Hoffmann never explicitly state that their intent is to position the viewer as a virtual judge, and the observational style of the documentary claims to value objectivity over reflexivity, a close analysis of the variance in style employed by the filmmakers reveals that they—like Taylor and Kentridge—manipulate perspective and proximity in order to provoke, and, to a noticeable extent, shape, the viewer’s emotions.

Shadow of the Acacia Tree From its opening frame, Long Night’s Journey into Day introduces itself to an audience that is not expected to possess a functional knowledge of South African history or politics. Over an establishing shot of grey storm clouds, superimposed expository titles inform the viewer: “For over forty years, South Africa was governed by the most notorious system of racial domination since Nazi Germany”. Having thus encapsulated a long and complicated history into a single sentence and a provocative analogy, the

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title cards then offer an equally abbreviated description of the TRC and the amnesty hearings: When it finally collapsed, those who had enforced apartheid’s rule wanted amnesty for their crimes. As a political compromise, the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was formed. Amnesty would be considered on a case by case basis, in exchange for the truth. Those already convicted came hoping for pardon. Those whose crimes were still unknown came out of fear of being exposed. Some came seeking redemption. Over 22,000 victims told their stories to the TRC. 7,000 perpetrators, from all political parties, applied for amnesty. These are four of their stories.

The titles cards describe both the amnesty process and the structure of the film, but are clearly aimed at viewers with no prior knowledge of the history of apartheid or that of the TRC. This assumption that the audience are relative newcomers to the subject is delineated even more explicitly in the establishing shots serving as background to the expository text as well as the audio track that introduces the film. The initial close-up of dark clouds fades into an aerial shot of a single acacia tree, followed by the image of a large group of acacia trees, finally returning to the single acacia tree. The next frame returns to the storm clouds before revealing a panoramic view of an urban cityscape and then moving into the first segment of the film, the Amy Biehl case. The audio track throughout this sequence plays a stirring rendition of “Uyadela”, a liturgical piece performed by the Imilonji Kantu Choral Society.

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Beyond the expository script, then, the film begins with an audio-visual representation of South Africa that is touristic, clichéd and imprecise yet is crucial to the message the film intends to convey to its North American viewers. The pairing of the acacia trees with the spiritual chorus of “Uyadela” presents an image of South Africa as a natural and harmonious entity. The choral style—formally known as isicathamiya, but popularly known as African a cappella or gospel—will be familiar to viewers who have heard the vocal tracks of Ladysmith Black Mambazo on Paul Simon’s 1986 album, Graceland. The sound is texturally rich: multiple voices blend together not in unison but in complementarity, weaving in and out of the harmony, one female voice adding ululations as the chorus rises. The effect is powerful and affirming: as in gospel, the music not only envelopes the listeners in sound but endeavours to inspire a sense of transcendence. The hymn is elegiac and optimistic, combining the singularity of individual voices with the power of the group. The a cappella performance affirms that the powerful effect is a unique and exclusive achievement of the human body and spirit: the human voice resounding individually while also blending with its community of voices. The establishing shots of acacia trees offer the clearest evidence for the conscious framing of this film. As the “Africa is a Country” blog has effectively documented, the acacia tree stands as the stereotypical symbol for a generic and homogenous view of the continent.52 The image is easily recognized even by the uninformed Western viewer, and provides an image of South Africa that is pastoral, idyllic and depopulated. Although the story it introduces is set in Guguletu, a massive, overcrowded township outside Cape Town, the images of nature replace the dense urban sprawl and squalor of the township, deliberately returning the viewer to a peaceful landscape undisturbed by politics or violence. By pairing soaring choral voices with this transcendent view of South Africa, Reid and Hoffmann present a simplified but triumphant framework for the film that follows, a vision of a country that has risen above the evils of the past to return to its natural state of awe-inspiring beauty. The “long night’s journey”, we are reassured from the outset, will soon arrive at “day”. For the viewer more educated in South Africa’s history of apartheid and emancipation, the conspicuous framing of the opening sequence jars their sense of continuity. Conspicuous framing, however, turns out to be an essential element in the documentary’s message. Intended as it is for the Western, or non-South African viewer, the opening sequence of Long Night’s Journey into Day is structured in such a way as to invite

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the audience to join the chorus, to welcome the stranger, the ones who “were not here”, and permit them to become valued members of the documented proceedings. The fact that this is a highly mediated view of the TRC hearings does not seem to pose an ethical challenge for Reid and Hoffmann. Rather, their documentary implies that mediation is an essential component on the road to reconciliation. Mediation, according to the narrative arc of this documentary, leads viewers to a specific and necessary emotional response, provides catharsis and effectively integrates them into the process of reconciliation.

Framing the Face The choice of an observational documentary style in filming Long Night’s Journey into Day means that Reid and Hoffmann present all their aesthetic, structural and technical choices without commentary. As a result, these choices appear to be self-evident when in fact they are deliberate and freighted with encoded biases. The sequential order in which the four stories are presented is one such example of a structure—in this case the predominant structure of the film—that is presented as though self-evident or natural. Positioning the Amy Biehl case as the first segment of the film is crucial in providing an opportune entry point for the North American audience as well as for establishing the documentary’s position regarding the transformative power of restorative justice via the face-to-face encounter. Biehl, an American Fulbright student who had come to South Africa to volunteer in underprivileged communities and to help register blacks to vote in their first election, was murdered when she drove into the Guguletu township during a violent student demonstration. Her parents subsequently became exemplars of the message of restorative justice and reconciliation when they not only supported the amnesty applications of the three young men who had been convicted of Amy’s murder, but started a foundation in their daughter’s name in South Africa. The aim of the Amy Biehl Foundation at its inception was to mitigate youth violence in the township by sponsoring a variety of afterschool activities. In choosing to begin their documentary with this powerful story of compassion and forgiveness, Reid and Hoffmann forge a connection with the North American audience by presenting an American victim of South African violence, and proceed to guide the audience through an exemplary story of amnesty, reconciliation and empathy. The first

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segment begins with archival footage of white police officers attacking black demonstrators as a voice-over delivered by the British actor, Helen Mirren, introduces the Biehl case53 : In the final days of apartheid, violence escalated throughout South Africa. Thousands died, but one death made headlines around the world. Amy Biehl, a young American student, was killed in a black township by a mob chanting anti-white slogans. After spending three years in jail, her convicted killers were among the first to apply for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The narration distinguishes Biehl’s murder as extraordinary, distinct from thousands of other political deaths, because she was a young, white, attractive, talented, economically privileged American student who was killed by black demonstrators. From the moment that her name is invoked, and throughout the segment that follows, photographs of Amy with her diverse group of South African friends—indicating a warm personality untainted by racism—fill the screen to remind us of her absence and her presence. In retrospect, the viewer of the film will note that significantly more images of Amy Biehl are shown than images of the South African victims in any of the three segments that follow her story. It seems logical to place the Amy Biehl segment first, to allow for easy identification with American audiences. The Biehl family provides a link between American audiences and the South African community, exemplifying the relationship that Reid and Hoffmann believe they have with their subject matter: neither Amy Biehl nor her documentarians carry political baggage or have reason to feel complicit in apartheid. Amy Biehl epitomizes the perfectly innocent victim, and the photos of Biehl smiling joyfully as she poses with the black university students she has befriended reinforce this perception. The segment proceeds with footage from the amnesty hearings for the three black men convicted of Biehl’s murder. The camera first establishes a medium shot of the young men sitting at a table listening to a voice recite their testimony, followed by a medium close-up of the young men’s lawyer reading the affidavit of Mongezi Manqina, one of the convicted murderers, to the Commission in English.54 The camera pans across the room as the defence lawyer reads the affidavit, moving from his face to

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a tight close-up of Mongezi Manqina to a medium shot of the commissioners at their table and finally to a close-up of Peter and Linda Biehl, Amy’s parents, listening sombrely to the testimony. The reading of the affidavit cedes to a close-up of Peter Biehl describing his reaction to the news of Amy’s death, and it is in this scene that the significance of close-up shots in terms of the documentary’s inherent ideological concerns becomes evident. As Peter Biehl recounts writing a letter to his dead daughter during the plane journey to South Africa, he turns sideways at one point, and we realize that he is looking at his wife who is beside him but situated outside the shot. The decision to keep Linda Biehl outside the frame seems an unusual choice, and when Reid and Hoffmann later film Linda’s interview, the frame is similarly cropped: the viewer can glimpse Peter Biehl’s sleeve at the periphery. This interview with Peter Biehl, the first of the film but a representative example of how these scenes will be orchestrated throughout the documentary, is presented seemingly without the mediation of the filmmaker or interviewer and is framed as a medium close-up of a single individual. The effect is one of transparency, however practiced or manipulated this transparency is: the subject is telling the viewer his story, compelling the viewer’s undivided attention and compassionate response. To do so, Reid and Hoffmann focus as often as possible on a solitary individual, going so far as to cut Linda Biehl out of the shot when Peter is being interviewed. Reid and Hoffmann’s intention, to concentrate on a single speaking subject as often as possible, becomes increasingly evident as the segment continues. For just as the shot of Amy’s parents is narrowed to a close-up of each individual, the film’s documentation of the amnesty applications of the three murderers immediately narrows to confine itself exclusively to the story of Mongezi Manqina. The concentrated focus on a single perpetrator will be the modus operandi of Long Night’s Journey into Day: the second segment on the Cradock Four will concentrate on one policeman, Eric Taylor, one of six former police officers applying for amnesty; the third segment focuses exclusively on Robert McBride’s application for amnesty and makes no mention of any co-conspirators; and the final segment contrasts the amnesty claim of Thapelo Mbelo against that of Michael Bellingan—the only two police officers to apply for amnesty for the murders of the Guguletu Seven. Bellingan, it is clear, is only introduced into the narrative to contrast the white policeman’s seemingly recalcitrant application against Mbelo’s more sincere attempts at reconciliation.

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In their desire to focus on an individual perpetrator regardless of the number of amnesty claims in a particular case, Reid and Hoffmann adopt the same strategy that Mahmood Mamdani criticizes in the TRC hearings in general: foregrounding individual action and responsibility as opposed to systemic injustice in an effort to put a human, and therefore relatable, face on the process of reconciliation.55 As Jill Bennett argues, the film is committed to the philosophical stance of Tutu and the TRC, asserting that the “personal face-to-face” is fundamental to an “ethical transaction”.56 The singular focus on Manqina to the exclusion of the other two applicants is foundational to the “ethical transaction” Reid and Hoffmann will recreate in this segment. It is surprising, then, that the first personal interview on the perpetrator’s side, with members of the Manqina family, begins with a medium shot that includes four of Mongezi’s relations. The speaker in this segment is Neliswa Solatshu, Mongezi Manqina’s cousin, who is sitting on a couch in the family home beside another cousin, Sizwe Makana, while she relates her initially callous response to Biehl’s death: To be honest, I didn’t care much because aw, she’s a White lady. She’s White, she’s White. How many Blacks have been died, aw, so. ..at first because, I didn’t know that my cousin was also involved there. But even if he was, I would remain feel the same - She’s a White woman, then what the, what the hell must I care about her?57

This brief sequence enlarges its frame in order to emphasize the strong familial bonds of the Manqina family. Three cousins of the perpetrator are interviewed, all sitting on the same couch and visible within the frame. Although this is only a slight alteration in the filming style, a subtle widening of the frame, it readjusts the proximity of the viewer to the subjects of the interview in a manner consistent with the implicit message of the sequence. The family members describe how they were so politicized at that time that their cousin Mongezi’s violent assault on Amy Biehl was neither surprising nor affecting, and further recall that they were unable to feel any compassion for the murdered white woman. As the family describes their shared feelings of oppression and their lack of sympathy for the white victim, the North American viewer, the outsider, is pushed away from the encounter through the widening frame of the shot.

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Indeed, even when Mongezi Manqina is filmed in a tight close-up, sitting in an armchair, he is not completely alone. He describes his lost childhood and how, the day before he killed Amy Biehl, his friend was shot to death in front of him by a police officer, the friend dying in his arms. As he speaks we see a young girl—only the top of her head visible—pass back and forth behind his chair. Although Mongezi Manqina is framed in the standard close-up shot for face-to-face interviews that Reid and Hoffmann rely upon throughout Long Night’s Journey into Day, in this case the frame is permeable, demonstrating that Mongezi is more connected to his family than to the viewer, and also signifying his vulnerability, his lost childhood through the little girl who does not fit into the narrative frame but still briefly signifies her vagrant presence. There follows a subtle but dramatic narrative turn that exemplifies the ultimate message of the film. Reid and Hoffmann document, with recourse to a voice-over by Linda Biehl, the Biehls’ meeting with the Manqina family, and the message of forgiveness and reconciliation the Biehls bring with them to the township. In news footage excerpted from the SABC archives, the Biehls warmly embrace members of the Manqina family, reassuring them that they intend to support the three perpetrators’ appeals for amnesty. Reid and Hoffmann then cut to an interview bite of Mongezi’s mother, Evelyn Manqina, who speaks emotionally about the compassion she feels for Linda Biehl as a suffering mother: “It’s going for Christmas time. Each and every house is sitting with his family, around the table enjoying themselves. She’s going to sit at the table, but when she’s sitting and eating she’s thinking that hmm, there’s somebody short here”. For the contemporary viewer, even briefly exposed to the reality television shows that have saturated the airwaves for over twenty years now, the use of the interview bite as a form of narrative contextualization will feel familiar to the point of transparency. Reid and Hoffmann utilize Manqina’s compassionate reflection to contextualize the scene that precedes it—reassuring the viewer that, although captured on film and therefore at least to some degree staged, the warm embrace between the Biehls and the Manqinas is genuine in its expression of mutual affection. Through the use of the interview bite, Evelyn Manqina is foregrounded as the prevailing narrative voice in this sequence: a voice that articulates the spirit of empathy and racial interconnection that the TRC hearings were devoted to fostering.

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The emotional journey from the Manqina family’s initial lack of compassion to Evelyn Manqina’s sympathy is thus mapped out for the viewer through varying camera shots. With her tearful concern for Linda Biehl, Evelyn Manqina is presented as a benevolent representative of the perpetrator’s side, the face of repentance that the viewer can most intimately relate to. Clearly, the Biehl case was selected as the first segment in Long Night’s Journey into Day not only because it offers a connection between the victim and the American viewer, but also because it presents a consummate case of forgiveness, empathy and healing. Through subtle variations in the proximity of the close-up shot, Reid and Hoffmann ultimately ease Evelyn Manqina into the frame as the embodiment of ubuntu and reconciliation. This identification is confirmed at the end of Long Night’s Journey into Day, the film concluding after three separate segments, with Evelyn Manqina once again affirming her heartfelt sympathy for Linda Biehl: “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t feel good, I’m just in between. I just think of the other mother. Now I’m going to get Mongezi. What about that poor woman? She’s not going to get her child anymore. That is my reason”. The return to Manqina in the final moments of Long Night’s Journey into Day, after the conclusion of the fourth segment, is surprising since, in the intervening hour, the narrative has moved from the Biehl case to the other three stories of amnesty applicants. The interview bite of Manqina is edited into the final moments in order to conclude with the message that a genuine face-to-face encounter—and the film tacitly validates the generalization that maternal feelings are indisputably authentic—restores both victim and perpetrator to a state of humanity and empathy.58 Through what on the surface appears to be a detached and objective observational style, Reid and Hoffmann have encoded the ideological underpinnings of Tutu and the TRC hearings into the first segment of their documentary. After some of the more ambivalent cases of professed contrition documented in the other three segments, Manqina’s professed feelings offer a positive conclusion to the film by returning the viewer to chronological time—reaffirming the documentary’s encoded meaning, marking a closure insofar as we are reassured of the power of the human spirit to transcend history and trauma in the name of compassion. Yet the sudden return of Manqina also breaks the chronology that structures Long Night’s Journey into Day. Temporal linearity must be manipulated, it becomes clear, in order to restore the significance and healing promised in Langer’s definition of chronological time.

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Reading the Face Although Long Night’s Journey into Day implicitly advocates the face-toface encounter as a recognition of difference and interdependency that validates the humanity of both self and other—the film also figures the viewer as capable of, and responsible for, assessing the sincerity of the perpetrator. This positioning is achieved subtly and almost transparently, since the first episode’s focus is on Evelyn Manqina, the guiltless but compassionate mother of the perpetrator. It is difficult not to accept the elderly woman’s emotional response as genuine, an authenticity, that, in turn, proves the efficacy of the TRC’s reconciliation model. At the same time, though, it signals to the viewer that the emotional response of the perpetrator is the currency of empathetic exchange, and that affect is the mark of sincere repentance. Reid and Hoffmann situate the viewer in the position of arbiter more clearly in the next segment, which focuses on Eric Taylor’s application for amnesty for his part in the murder of the Cradock Four.59 In this episode, the documentary focuses exclusively on the emotional journey of Eric Taylor and does not give any interview time to the other five amnesty applicants.60 This is the same technique utilized in the first story, when Reid and Hoffmann concentrated only on Mongezi Manqina, but in this segment Taylor is presented without any family surrounding him, and the filmmakers frame the scenes involving Taylor in a different style, to different effect, than the scenes involving the Manqina family. The opening shot of the Cradock Four sequence situates the viewer within a well-attended service of the Dutch Reformed church of which Eric Taylor is a congregant. The camera focuses on a female choir director as she gracefully conducts a choir that is singing an Afrikaans hymn. The camera pauses for a moment to capture the communal scene before zooming in on Taylor, surrounded by churchgoers singing along to the hymn, securely ensconced within a harmonious community of good Christian Afrikaners. The importance of this seemingly insignificant detail is later elucidated in the fourth episode, which details Thapelo Mbelo’s request for amnesty for his role in the murders of the Guguletu Seven. Retrospectively, Mbelo’s discussion, in the fourth segment, of the sense of security that Afrikaner policemen find among their own communityexplains the filmmakers’ intent in choosing to open this second segment with the church scene.

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In the fourth and final sequence, we are introduced to Mbelo, who has applied for amnesty alongside Michael Bellingan, the two being the only applicants among the twenty-five police officers who were actively involved in the ambush of the seven young men. Reid and Hoffmann again narrow their focus to a single individual, Mbelo, while Bellingan is featured only in contrast to Mbelo because he is a white Afrikaner who, as Mbelo asserts, is protected within his community61 : Bellingan is a white man. I’m a black man. For me, it’s more because I had to face my black brothers and sisters. And that’s a daily thing. So Bellingan’s story is another one. Every day, maybe out of this when the commission goes off, when they knock off, he is going to the bar with his white friends. I have to go to my black brothers and sisters. So we are not on par.

The introductory shot of Eric Taylor ensconced in his Afrikaner church among the white congregants encourages the viewer to evaluate his sincerity: Is he as expedient as Bellingan, who hedges his bets because he knows he will always be welcome in his cloistered community, or is he as repentant as Mbelo—putting himself at personal risk in order to seek forgiveness from the widows of the Cradock Four? As Bennett argues, the TRC hearings are devoted to “a politics of encounter in which responses to testimony are not only visible but sought and measured”,62 and it seems as though Reid and Hoffmann are inviting an exercise in measured judgement that involves comparing and contrasting the individual segments of the documentary. The act of evaluation depends on re-viewing the documentary, and with each viewing a greater understanding is developed of how the segments relate to each other and how these relations shape the viewer’s perspective on each amnesty case. The filmmakers’ approach to their documentary remains, technically, observational and detached, and so they continue to present the subject as though he is speaking directly to the viewer, free from outside mediation or editorial intervention. This ostensibly objective approach creates a striking point of contrast when Taylor divulges the Damascene moment when he realized the emotional and moral implications of his actions and so began to atone for his role in the murders: “I saw a film, I think it was about in ’89, 1990, Mississippi Burning, which is also about Apartheid”. The documentary obligingly inserts a clip from Mississippi Burning —a scene in which the police shoot civil rights activists in their

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car—as Taylor’s voice-over reveals how the movie changed his perspective: “It made quite an impression on me, especially the involvement of the police in the assassination of activists. I started realizing that that’s actually not what policing is all about, it should rather be about protection than assassination”. Mississippi Burning is the only movie that is referenced in the documentary. This extratextual addition is compelling in its singularity, and because Long Night’s Journey into Day otherwise refuses to delve into the historical past, preferring to maintain its focus steadfastly on the present moment of the TRC hearings. As Bennett observes in her analysis of the Guguletu Seven segment, the young men who were killed are never characterized as individuals in their own right, but exclusively represented as sons, their identity mediated through the testimony of the bereaved mothers.63 That is, there is no attempt to dramatize the lives of the Cradock Four or Amy Biehl or the Guguletu Seven—their presence is intuited through those who are left to mourn them. The inclusion of the clip from Mississippi Burning is extraordinary, and adds a layer of fictionalization to Taylor’s account of personal reckoning. That Taylor finds empathy not through a face-to-face encounter with his victims or their families, but through a Hollywood movie, distances the viewer. As the segment continues, unobtrusive but telling technical details coalesce to guide the viewer towards a final judgement of the Afrikaner. Although he is given the same medium close-up as other interviewees—Peter and Linda Biehl and Evelyn Manqina—the shot is angled so that we can clearly discern his kitchen in the background behind him, empty and unlit. Compared to the interview scenes with the Manqina family, Eric Taylor’s environment—darkened, empty, devoid of food or creature comforts—symbolizes the isolated nature of his condition. Rather than using the close-up as an opportunity for the viewer to observe Taylor’s emotions and to connect with him empathetically, the viewer instead perceives Taylor as disconnected, isolated, forsaken. Later in the segment, in contrast, Nomonde Calata is interviewed while she works busily in her kitchen with her grandchildren helping her. It is worth considering why the meeting between Taylor and the widows of the Cradock Four is not filmed, as it is in the case of the Biehls’ visit to the Manqina family, or later as in Mbelo’s meeting with the mothers of the Guguletu Seven. The documentary includes the latter encounters, filmed in each case with a preponderance of close-ups of the faces of perpetrators and victims in order to convey the emotional

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freight of the meeting.64 Taylor had a similar meeting with the widows of the Cradock Four, a meeting discussed in Cody Corliss’s essay on the viability of restorative justice, which uses the case of Taylor’s amnesty application to delineate the limits of restorative justice. Corliss offers an account of Taylor’s meeting with the Cradock Four widows, prior to the amnesty hearings, which, he reports, did not provide emotional resolution because Taylor, anxious not to undermine his amnesty claim, was unwilling to disclose pertinent information to the widows. Although Reid and Hoffmann choose not to provide footage of the meeting, they do include footage of Nyameka Goniwe and Nomonde Calata describing the encounter: Nyameka Goniwe: He wanted to just talk to the family because this has become heavy on his soul. And immediately I said “no this is not possible for me because I do not want to see him.” Nomonde Calata: I told him that “ah Mr. Taylor, it is going to be very difficult for me to say that I forgive you for what you did to me. Because you have caused so much pain to me and my family. You actually robbed my children from their father love. Because Fort loves his children very much. He was my husband, but he was a friend also, he was everything to me. Nyameka Goniwe: I’m not going to absolve him, I mean, if he wants, you know, to feel lighter, I’m not the person who’s going to do that. I refuse to do that. Umm, he can use, I mean, the TRC for that.

Taylor’s response to the meeting is not included in Long Night’s Journey into Day, and so the film’s only account of this abortive face-to-face interchange is provided exclusively by the victims, Goniwe and Calata. The perpetrator’s account is excluded from the documentary, and thus Taylor is tacitly assigned blame for its failure. By excluding his side of the story, the filmmakers signal that Taylor is responsible for the failure to achieve a meaningful reconciliation with the victims and, as a result, the viewing audience is discouraged from feeling compassion for him. The impetus to judge Taylor is further incited when lawyer George Bizos, acting on behalf of the widows in their attempt to derail the policemen’s amnesty application, describes the experience of the audience in the proceedings much like Aristotle describes the audience’s response to a well-made tragedy:

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Here we are, the actors on the stage — it’s unusual to have a judicial proceeding on a stage, but here we are on a stage and an audience, and when they see them squirm, it’s part of the… it’s part of the cathartic process. Here you were, the all powerful that would come and arrest us in the middle of the night and not give account to anyone, you “white masters,” and now you are not the super humans you thought that you were. You are subjected to cross-examination by a person who’s on our side. I think that that is an important aspect of the TRC’s work.

The process of the TRC hearings, as Bizos suggests, was designed to overturn the systemic hierarchies that sustained apartheid. The authority of judgement is conferred upon the audience—the heretofore disenfranchised population—while the former representatives of the so-called justice system are now held to account by a more perfect morality. Reid and Hoffmann invite those who watch their documentary to join that audience and share their sense that accountability is now possible, and so also is genuine repentance; the emotional reactions of those on the stand are the true measure of those men. However, whether or not we are aware of it, each element that frames the perpetrator’s story influences our response to the face on screen. The closing minutes of the segment bring the story of Taylor’s amnesty application to a conclusion, and also guide the viewer to a verdict regarding Eric Taylor’s supposed contrition. The amnesty claims for the policemen, it is revealed, may be denied on the grounds that the policemen have not provided “full disclosure” about the nature of the murders. Their applications are being contested on the basis that one of the Cradock Four, Sicelo Mhlawuli, was unknown to police when they killed him, and therefore his murder cannot be classified as a politically motivated crime.65 The documentary records Bizos’s cross-examination of Taylor, with the lawyer aggressively focusing on the question of whether or not Mhlawuli was known to the Port Elizabeth police, and concluding bluntly that Taylor’s testimony, along with the testimony of his former colleagues, consisted of a “big pack of lies”. At the end of the cross-examination scene, Reid and Hoffman cut to a close-up of Taylor, again seated in front of the darkened empty kitchen, as he recounts the hearings: “Terrible. I expected it to be different from a normal court case, it was actually worse than a normal court case. I mean we’re talking about reconciliation here, it’s … it’s part of the process and I think it … it was like a war out there”. Taylor’s lack of self-awareness—having served as a

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policeman at a time in history when a “normal court case” was one that always absolved white police of wrongdoing—generates another moment when the viewer is asked to question Taylor’s sincerity. The final images in this segment emphasize the distance between the perpetrator and the victims, a cross-cut sequence that returns to Taylor’s church with an opening shot of young blonde girls in white chiffon dresses dancing in a circle while other children hold candles that illuminate the darkness surrounding them. The documentary then cuts to footage of Nomonda Calata sitting in her church in Cradock. In this scene, harsh daylight streams through the windows and open doorway, its glare intensified by unadorned concrete walls. The black congregants sit on pinewood pews and sing from visibly worn prayer books as the procession of altar boys march over faded red carpeting. By juxtaposing these two churches, a sequence that should reinforce a sense of spiritual commonality instead signals a massive economic disparity. Calata and Taylor continue to exist in two separate worlds, and returning to the beatific Afrikaner church after showing Bizos’s harsh interrogation of Taylor, reinforces the idea that Taylor still occupies a secure seat within the space of cloistered white privilege: a peaceful space undisturbed by any acknowledgement of poverty, oppression or violence. Although the narrative structure of this segment is meant to lead the viewer to a decisive verdict on the authenticity of Eric Taylor’s apology to the Cradock widows, the sense of closure and resolution, and therefore meaning, never fully materializes. The filmmakers’ cross-cutting between the two churches leaves the viewer suspended between these unresolved realities, and they end the segment preserving that uncertainty, never revealing whether Eric Taylor’s application for amnesty was successful. The lack of resolution does not allow the trauma of the past to be put aside as neatly as it was in the first segment, and the sadness clearly registered on the faces of both Calata and Taylor mark the ongoing repetition of the durational time of that terrible evening in Cradock. What remains is a sense of unresolved and unresolvable entanglement; an intimacy bound up in anger and regret.

Journey’s End Despite the seemingly objective and unmediated perspective Reid and Hoffmann establish through their cinematography, an approach that encourages the viewer to feel as though they are experiencing a genuine

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encounter with the documentary subjects, the techniques that the filmmakers employ serve to mediate the representation of the subject and guide the viewer towards assessing the sincerity of the perpetrator. Carefully staged close-ups, the selection of mise-en-scène in order to convey implicit emotional cues, the use of extra-documentary footage to shade and colour the story being told; these cinematographic techniques all function as a whole to solicit judgements from the viewing audience about the sincerity of each subject, with the intention of including the viewer in the process of reconciliation. The framing that has been effectively encoded in the first two episodes continues to influence the viewer’s responses in the final two segments. Although the subject of the third story is the amnesty claim of Robert McBride, the viewer’s focus is drawn away from McBride to the outspoken sister of one of the women killed in McBride’s bomb attack.66 Sharon Welgemoed beseeches the viewer to pay her deceased sister the proper respect, and to maintain a vigilant suspicion of McBride, and in her belligerent protestations she immediately alienates herself from the viewer’s sympathies. Welgemoed’s statements, and her angry face, represent—even more than Eric Taylor—the face of white supremacy in South Africa. Welgemoed’s aggrieved complaints—and the film only preserves her belligerent statements—operate under a logic that would be undoubtedly understood by the viewer as retrograde and racist. She asserts that McBride should not be considered a hero, since “all he did was contribute to the violence, hatred, and segregation that we all wanted to disappear”. Rather, she maintains, her sister and the other victims of the bombing were the true heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle because “they died to further everybody else’s cause, so that this country could be free. Not by choice, I admit, but they did die for their freedom”. During classroom screenings, this statement has never failed to elicit unsolicited laughter from students. Welgemoed’s final statement, filmed as she stands in front of a large suburban house is similarly aggressive, emphatically refusing the spirit of ubuntu and the possibility of reconciliation: “Just because we happen to have a white colour skin we can’t be held accountable for all the atrocities and the horrors that apartheid brought with it. We didn’t even support it”. She pauses noticeably before the final sentence, “we didn’t even support it”, and this pause signals the mendacity of the phrase, the shopworn afterthought that Welgemoed knows is necessary to justify her claims of victimhood. The final phrase ensures her alienation from

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the viewer and confirms the verdict that she was actually an unabashed benefactor of apartheid, an oppressor who now insists on her own victimhood. Just as the sound bites from P.W. Botha function on South Africa’s Human Spirit, so too do Welgemoed’s singularly offensive statements in Long Night’s Journey into Day demarcate the negative space outside community, outside of ubuntu. Her anger and privilege are emphasized by Reid and Hoffmann, and as a result the film refuses to validate her grief for her dead sister. According to the logic of the film, her inability to recognize her racism renders her similarly incapable of familial love, and therefore undeserving of the viewer’s compassion. The documentary’s progressive structure is in evidence again as Welgemoed’s narcissistic self-justifications lead us into the final segment of Long Night’s Journey into Day: Thapelo Mbelo’s appeal to the mothers of the Guguletu Seven.67 In contrast to the Cradock Four episode, in this segment the filmmakers document the meeting with frequent recourse to close-ups of Mbelo and the mothers, determined to orchestrate an authentic face-to-face encounter through this cinematic device. As a result, Mbelo appears courageous and sincere in his apology, in sharp distinction to his fellow applicant, Michael Bellingan, and the other police officers who declined to apply for amnesty. The segment concludes with one mother declaring that she forgives Mbelo. Reid and Hoffmann then cut to an interview bite from Evelyn Manqina once again expressing her heartfelt sympathy for Linda Biehl. The overarching trajectory of the film is to show how emotional responses—responses made visible to the viewing audience—are fundamental to reconciliation and to the restoration of ubuntu, the attempt to free South Africa from its historical trauma and to restore a healing chronology. The tears of Evelyn Manqina remain the overriding symbol, for Reid and Hoffmann, of the success of the TRC mission to vanquish the trauma of apartheid. Allowing the viewer to judge Taylor and Welgemoed, and find them lacking, only strengthens the audience’s conviction that what they recognize as remorse in Manqina and Mbelo is authentic. Through their cinematography, the filmmakers train the audience to evaluate the emotional authenticity of each perpetrator and to feel reassured as the film concludes that their participation has moved the process forward—one step closer to the end of the “long night” and the onset of the hopeful “day”. Although the message of Long Night’s Journey into Day is ultimately optimistic, this hopeful resolution is dependent on a perspective and

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proximity that cannot be achieved without editorial manipulation. Even though the film silently judges Eric Taylor for relying on a Hollywood movie to give him perspective on his criminal past, Reid and Hoffmann compel the viewer to rely upon the documentarians’ deliberate framing of their subjects to reach conclusions about sincerity and responsibility. We might here reconsider the dramatic process undertaken by Taylor and Kentridge in Ubu and the Truth Commission, a process that could be understood as a deliberate unframing of the very issues that Reid and Hoffmann try to frame. Reid and Hoffmann’s documentary aestheticizes the framework that the ANC government incorporated into the TRC process, an aesthetics that generates the desired emotional affect for the new post-apartheid citizen. Ubu and the Truth Commission invents an aesthetics that searches out the emotional reaction provoked by witnessing those frameworks dismantled, revealed to be prefabricated scaffolding that cannot contain the unruly array of feelings circulating through the populace. While the documentary indicates what the “day” at the end of apartheid’s “long night” should look like, Kentridge and Taylor have already bisected the rising sun of that day, to reveal the searching, wandering, blinking eye beneath its shining surface. Indeed, although the final words of Evelyn Manqina affirm compassion and reconciliation, they also express the durational time of mourning. The film’s break with its own chronology in order to allow Manqina to reiterate her wounded feelings simultaneously offers the viewer closure while denying its possibility. The aesthetics of ubuntu, in both texts, have been circumvented by the “anaesthetics” of irresolvable traumatic memories and the impossibility of fully comprehending, or representing, “the way it was”.

Notes 1. Medalie, David. “‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in PostApartheid Literature.” English Studies in Africa 55 (2012): 3. 2. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 111. 3. I am indebted to Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died That Night for directing me to Langer’s notion of durational time. 4. Langer, Lawrence L. “Memory’s Time: Chronology and Duration in Holocaust Testimonies.” In Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays, 13–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 15.

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5. Langer, Lawrence L. “Memory’s Time: Chronology and Duration in Holocaust Testimonies,” 14. 6. Langer, Lawrence L., 15. 7. Langer, Lawrence L., 15. 8. Langer, Lawrence L., 18. 9. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, 115. 10. Bennett, Jill, 115–16. 11. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007, 17. 12. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission, 3. 13. Taylor, Jane, xiii. 14. Taylor, Jane, xiii. 15. Taylor, Jane, xiii–xiv. 16. The Handspring Puppet Company has posted a full performance of Ubu and the Truth Commission on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lVgT_x53z14. In my discussion I will refer to the published text of the play as well as to the uploaded performance. 17. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. William Kentridge. Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1998, 18. 18. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007, 1. 19. A spaza shop is an informal convenience store historically located in the black townships, usually run out of a private home. 20. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission, 27. 21. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 117. 22. Langer, Lawrence L. “Memory’s Time: Chronology and Duration in Holocaust Testimonies.” In Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays, 13–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 15. 23. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999, 31. 24. One might be ironically reminded of Frantz Fanon’s encounter with R—, a “European police inspector” and torturer who puts himself in Fanon’s psychiatric care as his violent outbursts against his wife and children escalated to the point of torture. Rather than trying to reclaim his humanity by denouncing torture and recognizing the humanity of his victims, R— “asked me in plain language to help him torture Algerian patriots without having a guilty conscience, without behavioral problems, and with total peace of mind”. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004, 196–99. Unlike Gobodo-Madikizela, Fanon’s experiences have compelled him to dismiss the humanity of the colonizer as being either absent or irrelevant.

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25. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. A Human Being Died That Night. New York: Mariner Books, 2004, 137. 26. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. A Human Being Died That Night, 19. 27. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, 44. 28. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, 89–92. 29. Lanzmann, Claude. “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann.” American Imago 48.4 (1991): 481. 30. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007, iii. 31. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission, iii. 32. Barthes, Roland. “The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism.” In Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, 71–76. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 75. 33. Barthes, Roland. “The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism,” 74–75. 34. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007, 3. 35. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission, 73. 36. Taylor, Jane, 33. 37. Taylor, Jane, 35. 38. Almost one hundred activists died while in custody at John Vorster Square, and it was common for those deaths to be officially ruled suicide: the detained had, according to police inquests, jumped from windows, slipped on bars of soap while showering, or hung themselves in their cells. For a starkly ironic rendering of these inquest rulings, see Chris van Wyk’s widely anthologized poem, “In Detention”. 39. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. William Kentridge. Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1998, 12. 40. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007, 43. 41. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 116. 42. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007, 63. The unusual length of the sentence is a clear allusion to the sentence handed down to Eugene de Kock, and would ring familiar to the play’s local audience. De Kock has publicly argued that high-ranking authorities such as F.W. de Klerk authorized his criminal activities. 43. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission, 67. 44. Taylor, Jane, 67. 45. Taylor, Jane, 73. 46. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 111.

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47. Ironically, the title gestures towards a viewing audience that is not particularly well-versed in Western culture: an audience able to recognize the allusion to Eugene O’Neill’s famous play in the documentary’s title but not dwell on the fact that the subject matter has no relation to the subject of O’Neill’s drama. The title reverses the pessimistic tone of O’Neill’s original, but offers no allusive connections at all, functioning merely as a convenient and recognizable pun, and a similarly reductive co-opting of a foreign country. 48. Hattenstone, Simon. “Meet Your Family’s Killers.” The Guardian, May 18, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/may/18/culture. features1. Accessed 20 July 2018. The film was released several years after the TRC submitted its final report and concluded hearings. 49. Epstein, Jean. 1977. “Magnifications and Other Writings.” October 3: 9. 50. Epstein, Jean. 1977. “Magnifications and Other Writings.” October 3: 14– 15. 51. Bennett connects Reid and Hoffmann’s preference for the observational, talking head style of interview to the style chosen by Geoffrey Hartman and his colleagues to film the Holocaust testimony included in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, housed at Yale University (104–5). In his essay on the aesthetics of Holocaust testimonials, “Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era”, Hartman elaborates upon this choice: “We were determined to keep the survivors at the center, visually as well as verbally. Despite TV’s disdain for ‘talking heads’, that is exactly what we aimed for. The survivor as talking head and embodied voice” (Hartman 117). Hartman’s phrase, “embodied voice”, indicates the importance of the close-up shot and the accompanying audio track to fully represent the trauma of the Holocaust: the face establishing presence, and in that sense also representing chronology. 52. A blog post by Elliot Ross entitled, “The Dangers of a Single Book Cover: The Acacia Tree Meme and ‘African Literature’”, was inspired by a tweet by Simon Stevens that featured a photographic montage of thirty book covers that prominently feature an acacia tree in its design, ranging from H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. The blog notes that the image is featured on novels from African countries where the acacia tree is not even a native species. The post identifies the orientalist and homogenizing gaze that the West focuses on Africa, reducing the vast continent to a single recognizable image. 53. This is one of the few voice-overs in the film, and the only one with the voice provided by Helen Mirren. There is no clear explanation as to why Mirren was chosen for this one soundbite, but it is certainly conceivable that her recognizable voice and British accent provides a bridge for the

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North American audience; the British accent being more familiar to the audience than a South African accent. The lawyer is never identified by name in the documentary. The caption that introduces him simply identifies him as “lawyer” for the claimants. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, Sindiwe Magona performs an identical act of amalgamation in her novel, Mother to Mother. A fictional recreation of the Amy Biehl case, Magona explicitly states, in her introduction, that the single murderer in her novel is a composite of the three convicted killers. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 109. I am indebted to the online transcript provided by California Newsreel as a companion to the documentary for direct quotations from the film. The transcript can be found at http://newsreel.org/transcripts/longni ght.htm. It is upon this received idea that mothers share a strong sense of empathy and identification with each other that Sindiwe Magona bases her fictionalized account of the Amy Biehl murder, Mother to Mother. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, Magona has admitted in interviews to initially feeling little compassion for the story of Amy Biehl, much as Neliswa Solatshu confesses her disinterest in Long Night’s Journey into Day. Magona’s novel, however, in which she takes on the fictionalized persona of the mother of one of the killers, allows Magona to connect with Linda Biehl as mothers who have both suffered the loss of a child. The Cradock Four—Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli—were anti-apartheid activists intercepted by police while driving home from a political meeting. Three of the group, it was later discovered, were mentioned in a secret communiqué from the State Security Council that insisted they be “permanently removed from society, as a matter of urgency”. The police murdered them and burned their bodies in an effort to destroy evidence of their involvement. The other amnesty applicants alongside Taylor were Gerhardus Lotz, Nicholas van Rensburg, Harold Snyman, Johan van Zyl and Hermanus du Plessis. Unlike Mbelo’s unconditional application for amnesty, Bellingan will not admit to any wrongdoing, but applies for amnesty in case someone else can prove he has committed an offense. The documentary emphasizes this recalcitrance and films one of the commissioners angrily accusing Bellingan of “hedging his bets”. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 105. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, 106.

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64. Bennett offers a sustained analysis of the filmed encounter between Mbelo and the mothers of the Guguletu Seven (105–12), particularly in the way that the overt expression of emotion is paramount to the viewer’s reception of the scene. 65. The three essential criteria for amnesty were that applicants had to submit individual applications; the acts for which they applied had to have had a clear political objective; and applicants were required to give full disclosure of the relevant facts about the incidents for which they applied. 66. Robert McBride was an MK soldier who led a guerilla cell that bombed the Why Not Restaurant and Magoo’s Bar in Durban on June 14, 1986. The attack killed three white women and injured sixty-nine others. McBride was captured and convicted for the Durban bombing, and sentenced to death, but later reprieved while on death row. In 1992, he was released after his actions were classified as politically motivated. Even though he had already been granted a pardon, he still applied for amnesty and subsequently appeared before the TRC. 67. The story of the Guguletu Seven is recounted in detail in Chapter 3.

CHAPTER 5

Compassion Fatigue: White Empathy and White Guilt in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Compassion Fatigue The discussion of the fraught interrelationship between domestic servant and employer in Chapter 2 has instructively demonstrated how genuine affective proximity, even in the case of actual physical proximity, can be illusory as well as elusive. In both The House on Sugarbush Road and July’s People, the totalizing system of apartheid legislation functions as a seemingly insurmountable obstruction to the empathetic pathway between the liberal white employer and their black servant, at the same time that it fosters the illusion of genuine understanding and communication by allowing the liberal employer to feel exceptional to the system as a consequence of their benevolence. In both novels, the liberal employers cultivate a sense of altruism as a result of their awareness of the intolerance and cruelty that resides outside their domestic space. Ouma and Benjamin Du Plessis, Bam and Maureen Smales, assess how other domestics are treated by their neighbours and congratulate themselves on their generosity and compassion towards Beauty and July, respectively. In this sense, their self-affirming identity as compassionate liberals is dependent on the repressive structures of apartheid; the repressive nature of the system convinces them that even the smallest gestures of respect or kindness are truly heroic. Although Cook’s novel is set in the post-apartheid era, the relationship

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between Beauty and the Du Plessis family is more or less identical to the situation in the Smales household, sadly demonstrating that it is in the most intimate corners of South Africa—the domestic space of the white home—where the conventions and structures of apartheid have taken deepest root. In these two novels, the compassion of white bourgeois liberals is dependent upon the unjust social conditions that surround the domestic space—a space they conceive of as a garrison against the cruel world outside their doors. Feelings of munificence arise from the relativism that allows these liberals to compare the privileges allotted to their domestics to those denied by other employers and the state itself, but it is also strengthened by the sense that there is very little to be done outside of these fleeting individual gestures of compassion. Trapped in a society that is fundamentally unjust and repressive, the liberal can only attempt conciliatory gestures to the oppressed other. As previous chapters have demonstrated, the mandate of the postapartheid ANC government is to remove the societal barriers that limit the individual’s scope of social action and to facilitate a broad national culture of compassion and empathy. Under the new system, white liberals can no longer satisfy their self-worth within a personally circumscribed territory—rather, the boundaries of empathy and social action encouraged by these feelings expand to coincide with the borders of the nation itself. The white liberal is now expected to function as a proactive citizen of the Rainbow Nation, and this function involves a much more expansive affective programme. White liberals are now being asked to feel compassion for the entire nation, not simply for their own domestic servant, and to translate this compassion into a larger programme of action—to help heal the wounded nation. The two most internationally recognized literary texts1 to come out of South Africa after the 1994 elections—Antjie Krog’s fictionalized memoir, Country of My Skull (1998), and J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999)— both foreground, though in markedly different ways, the theme of this national demand for empathy and its accordant breakdown in the form of “compassion fatigue”. The unofficial mandate of the TRC hearings may be described as the task of creating a climate of radical empathy—of compassion that transcends individual experiences and, through powerful affect, overcomes the divisive history of apartheid to replace it with a national climate of ubuntu—and both Country of My Skull and Disgrace directly engage with that mandate. Krog’s Country of My Skull offers

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a remarkable textual performance of just such an experience of radical empathy. Indeed, Krog’s compassion is so consuming that she herself begins to manifest psychological symptoms of trauma. In the course of her narrative, she is so transfigured by the testimony she witnesses as a journalist that she is able to empathize with beneficiaries such as herself, with victims and most provocatively with the various apartheid assassins who apply to the Commission for amnesty. Her performance of radical empathy is so overwhelming that her subjective feelings begin to eclipse the feelings of victims, perpetrators and beneficiaries, ultimately threatening to appropriate the stories of the real victims of apartheid atrocities. Coetzee’s Disgrace also concerns itself with a culture demanding radical empathy, but the protagonist of the novel, David Lurie resists experiencing compassion as passionately as Krog’s narrative persona embraces it. Coetzee’s novel presents an embodiment of “compassion fatigue” in the person of an academic who is resolutely unable to feel sympathy towards anyone, who is capable only of challenging the prevailing cultural demand for affect and refusing its ostensible claim on him. Lurie appears to represent the white liberal so overwhelmed by suffering and despair that he has pre-emptively refused to allow himself to identify with any suffering human subject, including the student he has had an affair with, his daughter who has been brutally raped and the destitute blacks he encounters daily. Opaque to the world and opaque to himself, his only form of affective connection appears to be with dead or dying animals, an enigmatic relationship that raises the question as to whether Lurie is capable of experiencing genuine compassion at all. These two literary texts foreground the issue of whether a white liberal South African can effectively and productively connect with the dark past and volatile present of their country, and each narrative, while providing a provocative and opposing perspective on this crucial question, also raises serious and indissoluble ethical questions regarding their respective philosophical stances.

On Feeling: Country of My Skull Compassion fatigue, also known as secondary traumatic stress,2 is a psychological condition defined by medical experts in the field of traumatology as “a syndrome of symptoms nearly identical to PTSD except that exposure to a traumatizing event experienced by one person becomes

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a traumatizing event for the second person”.3 Figley’s description of the transmission of traumatic affect recalls the discussion in Chapter 2 of the public response to Nomonde Calata’s cry of pain, and of Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of suffering’s power to blur the boundaries between feeling bodies.4 Cases such as the national response to Nomonde Calata starkly illustrate, as Ahmed argues, how the “solitariness of pain is intimately tied up with its implication in relationship to others”, as the suffering body announces its unknowable agony to the community, paradoxically compelling the sympathetic community to engage with the suffering that is unknowable to them.5 The cry of pain brings about a spontaneous dissolution of the boundary between the self and the other. Shoshana Felman reports vividly on the secondary traumatic effects suffered by those who “witness” the testimony of victims of trauma, defining the literature of trauma as an “alignment between witnesses”.6 Her psychoanalytic account of the post-traumatic symptoms manifested by her Yale graduate students as a result of prolonged exposure to the recorded testimony of Holocaust victims is foundational and has become one of the cornerstones of the theoretical construction of traumatic affect propounded by, among others, Dominick La Capra, Dori Laub and Cathy Caruth.7 Caruth argues that the traumatic event cannot be “assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event”.8 An event so powerful as to “belatedly” cause trauma in those who experience it also has the power, argue Caruth and Felman, to “possess” the secondary witness. Caruth and Felman, both writing concurrently with the 1994 elections and the TRC hearings, contribute to the prevalence of a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma and the susceptibility of secondary witnesses to its transmission. The understanding of trauma as contagious, aligned itself with the political and ethical goals of the ANC government and the TRC Commission insofar as it allowed personal traumas to be also understood as communal, national traumas. The affective agenda of the TRC hearings was to transmit a traumatic narrative that could be accepted by a South African audience as a viable part of their own personal narrative, allowing them unmediated access to empathy. As Jane Taylor points out in the introduction to her acclaimed multimedia performance, Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998), at the hearings, individual narratives represent a larger national narrative: “The stories of personal grief, loss,

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triumph and violation now stand as an account of South Africa’s recent past. History and autobiography merge”.9

On Feeling---Country of My Skull Country of My Skull exemplifies the national affective project of the ANC and the TRC by dramatically performing that agenda through the lens of the narrator’s persona. Krog’s text reflects a poetic attempt to write a memoir documenting her experience as a journalist covering the TRC hearings for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) under the name Antjie Samuels. As a journalist, and thus a first-hand witness to the public hearings, Krog blends what appears to be objective reportage of the proceedings, and most particularly of the testimonies offered at the public hearings, with her personal experience as a witness to traumatic testimony. Krog is also a poet—the surname “Krog” is the author’s nom-de-plume—and so she exercises her poetic licence quite liberally in Country of My Skull , blurring generic lines between personal memoir, cultural history and journalism, as well as incorporating elements of both fiction and poetry. Even her inclusion of testimony provided at the TRC hearings is subject to obvious creative revisioning, being presented to the reader in a number of disparate forms. As Méira Cook catalogues in her essay on Country of My Skull , testimony appears in a variety of competing and sometimes contradictory forms: “as transcripts from the TRC hearings, as unsigned versions of stories presumably culled from the testimony of victims, and as fables and allegories by or about victims that have been reframed by Krog in her guise as a memoirist”.10 At the same time, Krog frequently interjects personal anecdotes and subjective feelings into the multi-generic tapestry of testimony and reportage. Thus, despite the prominent markings of journalistic non-fiction in the use of direct quotation, proper names, places and dates, Country of My Skull presents itself as a highly unstable narrative: a text equally interested in documentation and disorientation, factual account and fictional allegorizing. In this volatile hybrid form, Krog’s text reproduces the narrative persona’s crisis of identity—a crisis provoked by her own conflicting feelings of guilt, complicity and compassion. What is immediately experienced, when reading Country of My Skull , is how journalistic reportage consistently supplicates itself to a narrative of empathy and compassion. Before the hearings begin, for example, Krog’s narrator documents how the process that will be adopted by the TRC

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is delineated, debated and challenged, and almost immediately establishes the terms of her own empathetic travail when she quotes Desmond Tutu on who he believes would constitute an ideal member of the Truth Commission: “People who once were victims. The most forgiving people I have ever come across are people who have suffered — it is as if suffering has ripped them open to empathy”.11 Tutu’s articulation of empathy is of a wound, and Krog’s narrative persona obliges this definition by allowing her feelings of compassion to wound her; this wound festers into secondary traumatic syndrome in short order. Throughout her memoir, Krog relates the stark and debilitating effects of secondary trauma experienced by herself and her fellow journalists, with explicit symptoms—as Figley, Caruth and Felman all predict—almost identical to those suffered by victims of PTSD: hypervigilance, hopelessness, guilt, social withdrawal, sleeplessness, physical ailments, fear, chronic exhaustion, disconnection and diminished self-care. What is particularly striking about Krog’s version of compassion fatigue, however, is that its onset begins before she hears a single word of testimony from a victim of gross human rights violations: When I was first told to head the five-person radio team covering the Truth Commission, I began to cry, inexplicably, on the plane back from Johannesburg. […] After three days, a nervous breakdown was diagnosed. Two weeks later, the first hearings on human rights violations began in East London.12

Only a few paragraphs later, Krog offers what seems to be the key to her nervous breakdown when a counsellor explains the transmission of traumatic symptoms from interlocutor to audience by way of the suffering journalists: In the second week of the hearings, I do a Question and Answer on a current affairs program. I stammer. I freeze. I am without language. I put the receiver down and think: Resign. Now. You are clearly incompetent. The next morning, the Truth Commission sends one of its own counselors to address the journalists. “You will experience the same symptoms as the victims. You will find yourself powerless — without help, without words.” I am shocked to be a textbook case within a mere ten days.13

More shocking than the counsellor’s warnings about the debilitating symptoms the journalists will encounter is Krog’s obliging transformation

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into a “textbook case” two weeks before the hearings actually begin. The power of traumatic affect is so pervasive, at this historical moment, that Krog suffers from pre-traumatic stress syndrome. She is, as Tutu forecasts, already “ripped open to empathy”, already wounded before she approaches the scene of the catastrophe. Krog performs her traumatic syndrome predominately through the stylistics of her writing. Her conspicuous use of the passive voice and her sudden shifts in pronouns allow her to represent herself as the victim of her own narrative. It is also significant how temporality becomes disorientatingly unhinged in the two passages cited above: compressed on one hand and telescoped on the other. The narrative moves instantaneously from her tears on the airplane to her nervous breakdown three days later and even more swiftly to the opening of the hearings two weeks hence. There is a similar compression between the airing of the current affairs programme and the arrival of the counsellor the next morning: temporality has been radically fragmented by the explosive force of trauma, one aftershock following another with incomprehensible rapidity.14 The text itself is radically fragmented, moving without narrative explanation through time, space and genre. The experience of trauma is replicated in the disjointed structure of Krog’s narrative, and the text thus becomes a focalizing lens through which the reader of Country of My Skull experiences the trauma of the victims of apartheid-era human rights abuses. The crucial question raised by Country of My Skull , however, is: Which trauma do mainstream, book club readers experience through the reading act? Are they given direct access to the victim’s trauma, or do they partake in the compassion fatigue of Krog’s narrative persona—the secondary trauma experienced by what Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith term the “beneficiary of apartheid”.15 In their analysis of Country of My Skull , Schaffer and Smith demonstrate how Krog positions her narrator as a complicit beneficiary, one who “confesses a wrong and seeks forgiveness and absolution”.16 More problematically, however, Krog represents herself as “visibly suffering alongside the victims whose suffering she witnesses”.17 Krog provides space for the victims within her text through her inclusion of their testimonies, but her narrator also occupies the space of the victim, and as such, she offers a traumatic testimony of her personal suffering, running the risk of usurping the reader’s compassion and displacing the victims she is ostensibly trying to represent.

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Fluid Identities As Lauren Berlant remarks in the introduction to her anthology on compassion, “there is nothing simple about compassion apart from the desire for it to be taken as simple, as a true expression of human attachment and recognition”.18 Krog’s narrative is structured around the desire for the “simple” expression of “human attachment and recognition” as much as it is undercut by the pervasive knowledge that, as Berlant suggests, “there is nothing simple” about this act of compassion. Berlant’s point underscores the political and hierarchical relations rendered almost invisible by our privileging of compassion as what Martha C. Nussbaum has termed “the basic social emotion”. Berlant counters the universality of Nussbaum’s claim by reminding us that compassion necessarily implies privilege: “the sufferer is over there. You, the compassionate one, have a resource that would alleviate someone else’s suffering”.19 The act of compassion involves a relationship of hierarchical power, an enshrinement of privilege, in this case between the white liberal “beneficiary” of apartheid and its predominantly black victims. Krog’s narrative performs the implicit struggle of the compassionate beneficiary: the struggle— and its failure—to focus the reader’s sympathy on the victim rather than drawing attention to the over-compassionate storyteller. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag conflates the experience of compassion with impotence and suggests that the act of witnessing allows the bystander to escape this experience of impotence and, indeed, of complicity: “So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence”.20 Carolyn Betensky similarly argues that the social-problem novel engaged its Victorian bourgeois readers with the implicit message that simply learning about the issues of poverty, and experiencing sympathy for the impoverished, was a form of social action sufficient in itself—as a reading act—to markedly influence the inequities of British society. The relationship between the Victorian bourgeois and the impoverished masses, as described by Betensky, might be effortlessly transposed onto the relationship between the white South African liberal and the oppressed black majority: If members of the middle and upper classes did not know about the oppression of their brethren, it was reasoned, they could not be expected to do anything to address it. However, the same strategies that made

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the acquisition of this social knowledge so central to the remediation of injustice simultaneously allowed for this knowledge to become an end in itself.21

Both Sontag and Betensky contend that the Western bourgeois are conditioned by the media that exposes them to the misfortunes of the larger world to accept their emotional response, their sympathy as sufficient to appease any guilt they might feel about their privileged position. Krog’s narrator, as we have already seen, surpasses the societal expectations marked out by Sontag and Betensky by suffering from compassion fatigue even before the object of compassionate sympathy appears on the scene. Merely knowing that she will have to encounter the testimony of apartheid victims in the course of her assignment drives Krog’s narrator to a nervous breakdown, two weeks before the hearings actually begin. Krog’s narrator, then, is already fatigued before her compassion is solicited, begging the question of what experience has caused her to reach this state of emotional exhaustion prior to her exposure to traumatic testimony. The answer, implied in the very nature of Krog’s narrative, is that she herself is a victim, not merely a potential witness to victimhood. Early in Country of My Skull , Krog quotes the minister of justice, Dullah Omar, as he vigorously debates the definitions of victims and perpetrators. The first section of Krog’s text devotes itself to the heated controversy among politicians and potential commissioners about who might be classified as a victim and who as a perpetrator—whether, for example, members of the ANC might be classified as human rights violators in their acts of terrorism, or whether such guilt is possible in the context of a “just war”. Through the ostensible act of reportage—seemingly a collection of press conferences and interviews conducted with journalistic objectivity— Krog encodes her crisis of identity as an attempt to reach some form of intellectual and emotional resolution: Is she a victim or a perpetrator? a witness or a participant? an impotent white liberal or a co-survivor of the apartheid regime? Although offered as possible reply to that question, the quotation she includes from Dullah Omar marks the precarious boundaries of the inquiry that preoccupies Country of My Skull : “We can make a distinction among perpetrators, but I hope this law will teach us all that we cannot make any distinction among victims”.22 Despite being transcribed in Country of My Skull without comment, Omar’s configuration of diverse identities under the auspices of the TRC establishes crucial terms for Krog’s narrator’s struggle to define her own

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identity in the post-apartheid world. Throughout her text, Krog identifies herself as an Afrikaner woman and, as such, a direct beneficiary of apartheid. In addition to the guilt she feels as a beneficiary, she is persistently haunted by the kinship she experiences towards Afrikaner culture, Afrikaner politics and most devastatingly, the Afrikaner perpetrators of extraordinarily sadistic apartheid crimes. Country of My Skull is dedicated to “every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips”, yet Krog’s narrator agonizes continuously over her deeply felt intimacy with the politicians and policemen she fundamentally loathes: They are as familiar as my brothers, cousins, and school friends. Between us all distance is erased. Was there perhaps never a distance except the one I have built up with great effort within myself over the years? From the faces alone, I can tell who was taken up by the Broederbond, who is a Rapportryer, a Ruiterwag, who is working class. […] From the accents, I can guess where they buy their clothes, where they go on holiday, which car they drive, what music they listen to. What I have in common with them is a culture — and part of that culture over decades hatched the abominations for which they are responsible. In a sense, it is not these men but a culture that is asking for amnesty.23

In the above passage, the vague “they” refers specifically to the socalled Vlakplaas Five, elite members of a police hit squad responsible for assassination and torture. It is this extreme example of government trained and sponsored murderers that, paradoxically, compels a sense of inappropriate, placatory, masochistic identification in Krog’s narrator.24 Embodied in the familiar trappings of her culture, Krog’s narrator cannot help but experience a devastating proximity with men who appear to the world to be the most sadistic of psychopaths. In the presence of these men, the boundaries of Krog’s personal subjectivity break down, forcing her—through powerful and specific cultural signifiers—to identify with them. Yet, as she concludes, the identity of every Afrikaner breaks down, becoming one homogenous cultural entity: “I shrink and prickle. Against. Against my blood and the heritage thereof. Will I forever be them — recognizing them as I do daily in my nostrils? Yes. And what we have done will never be undone”.25 Krog’s narrator’s sense of cultural complicity is deeply, viscerally, perhaps even hysterically, experienced—an affective force so powerful that it consumes her psychologically and physiologically. Krog earnestly details the somatic symptoms visited on her as she experiences the haunting

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testimony of the victims of apartheid. At certain points, she becomes disoriented, obsessed and yet paradoxically silenced by the horrifying disconnection between traumatic testimony and the quotidian world: I walk into my home one evening. My family are excitedly watching cricket on television. They seem like a happy, close-knit group. I stand in the dark kitchen for a long time. Everything has become unconnected and unfamiliar. I realize I don’t know where the light switch is. I can talk about nothing but the Truth Commission. Yet I don’t talk about it at all.26

Krog’s narrative style expresses the hysterical nature of her response to the hearings; she is physically overwhelmed and consistently feels alienated from her home and family: “My hair is falling out. My teeth are falling out. I have rashes. After the amnesty deadline, I enter my house like a stranger. And barren. I sit around for days. Staring”.27 As Mark Sanders suggests, Krog’s recurrent trope of alienation and displacement is performative: it “helps her story to mime, almost in silence, without in any way claiming an identity with apartheid’s victims, what takes place at the hearings, when witnesses testify to police or soldiers invading their houses, and to being forced from their homes”.28 Sanders’s suggestion that Krog’s story is “miming … almost in silence” its identification with apartheid’s victims, however, seems to mistake explicit gestures for implicit silences. As earlier passages have demonstrated, Krog unambiguously makes the connection between her physiological symptoms and her affinity with the victims. Early in her text, Krog documents the warnings of a specially appointed counsellor, cautioning the assembled journalists that they “will experience the same symptoms as the victims”.29 Later, she elaborates on the persistent traumatic effects suffered by her colleagues before shifting suddenly to the compassion fatigue suffered by translators employed at the hearings: But those in and around the commission have been singed into their own versions of Vlakplaas units. We from the press can only talk to each other. We look each other up, we buy food for each other, we live each other’s stories — we experience the process through a thousand eyes. […] We all want to resign. We all yearn for another life. At Tzaneen a young Tswana interpreter is interviewed. He holds on to the tabletop; his other hand moves restlessly in his lap. “It is difficult to interpret victim hearings,” he says, “because you use the first person all the time. I have no distance when I say ‘I’ … it runs through me with ‘I.’”30

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This passage provocatively signals the major fault line of identity that is explored in Country of My Skull , and points clearly to where these cleavages occur. The journalists and interpreters, suffering from emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue, have essentially become the victims of apartheid, ceding their identity to those whose words they interpret. The metaphor that Krog uses to describe this traumatic manifestation, however, figures the journalists as forming “their own versions of Vlakplaas units”. In this surprisingly unself-conscious and exaggerated figuration, Krog’s narrator conflates the most abject of victims with the most atrocious of perpetrators. In the persistent narrative pendulum swing between perpetrator and victim identification, Krog’s narrator demonstrates that she is at once perpetrator and victim, casualty and beneficiary, storyteller in control of a compassionate narrative and that narrative’s descent into story. In the discourse of Country of My Skull , the Vlakplaas assassins are equivalent to those they have murdered, all represented as victims of a larger systemic disorder known as apartheid.

Playing with Pronouns Krog’s meditation on the journalists’ trauma and the interpreters’ identification issues demonstrates the permeability of subjective boundaries and the fluidity of subjectivity that is central to the narrative of Country of My Skull . The language with which Krog describes the journalists’ affect, their mental and emotional disregulation, and with which she links the transmission of affect to the unnamed Tswana interpreter’s reaction to the hearings, foregrounds the potential for pronouns to destabilize identity. The Tswana interpreter stresses the power of the pronoun to challenge the boundaries of subjectivity when he asserts—while fidgeting nervously—that by translating in the first person, he temporarily becomes the “I” for whom he translates. Although there is no chronological relationship between the paragraph discussing the journalists’ reaction and the interpreter’s statement about the subsuming power of translation work, Krog arranges the text to bring these two paragraphs into dialogue, from which emerges a recognition of the destabilizing function of pronouns in the text. The paragraph on the journalists foregrounds the first-person pronoun from the moment Krog’s narrator aligns herself with “we from the press”. This pronominal usage is unambiguous in its referents, but as the paragraph proceeds, Krog’s reliance on pronouns functions to undermine the pronouns’ specificity.

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Through repetition, the first-person plural pronoun becomes unmoored from its original referent; in this case, the repeated use of “we” moves the pronoun progressively further from “the press”, resulting in a more abstract and generalized “we”. The text assimilates not only Krog’s narrative persona but also the persona of the reader into the “we” of the passage. This strategy performs the mandate of the TRC and the ANC government of the time: narrative subjectivity, and by implication, national subjectivity, becomes vulnerable, permeable and finally fluid. Krog’s text doggedly performs the affective programme of the TRC through demonstrating how her compassion overwhelms her so that she relinquishes the fixity of her discrete self, her individual subjectivity, surrendering her once stable “I” to various sympathetic “you”s and “we”s and “ours”. As Betensky suggests in her study, the “feeling for the poor” represented in the social-problem novel is always compromised. It is, at best, “an impure mix of benevolent and narcissistic desires”, and such texts therefore attest to “complex, unsteady attempts to […] look after the other and to look after the self”.31 Krog’s text, split as it is between the other and the self, manifests the desperate desire to relinquish the narrator’s identity for the sake of complete empathy, and the equally imperative desire to preserve those subjective boundaries in order to eloquently and compassionately convey the victims’ narratives. A further example of this deployment of pronominal fluidity occurs when the narrator offers a portrait of Roelf Meyer, a former National Party leader who was instrumental in negotiations with the ANC, and later joined Mandela’s cabinet. Listening to Meyer provokes profound if not slavishly guilty feelings in Krog’s narrator, causing her, once again, to consider her personal identity as an Afrikaner and its cultural ramifications in the post-apartheid era: Is truth that closely related to identity? It must be. What you believe to be true depends on who you believe yourself to be. I look at the Leader in front of me, an Afrikaner leader. And suddenly I know: I have more in common with the Vlakplaas five than with this man. Because they have walked a road. And hundreds of Afrikaners are walking this road — on their own with their own fears and shame and guilt. And some say it; most just live it. We are so utterly sorry. We are deeply ashamed and gripped with remorse. But hear us, we are from here. We will live it right — here — with you, for you.32

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Sudden pronominal shifts in the narrative voice effectively articulate shifts in identity and therefore in affect. The first paragraph appears without context and disappears just as swiftly, invoking a rhetorical “you” that subsumes both the writing and the reading subject, as well as the perpetrators who are ostensibly the subject of her philosophical meditations on truth and identity. The second paragraph abruptly shifts from abstract meditation to a concrete, albeit vague encounter with the “Afrikaner leader”. Krog’s deliberate omission of his name, as well as her erasure of the contextual specifics of the encounter, displaces his identity and constitutes a powerful expression of her relationship to him. Her specific use of the first-person singular delineates the differences between them and briefly instantiates her own, always fluctuating and precarious, subjective boundaries. She is “I” because he is definitively “he”, ontologically different from her, emphatically other. Her rejection of the “Afrikaner leader” compels the narrator to rediscover her authentic community, and once again, she shocks herself by acknowledging that it is with the torturers and assassins that she finds her most secure cultural identification. In her explanation as to why she identifies with the Vlakplaas killers, another significant pronominal shift occurs: “Because they walked a road, and through them some of us have walked a road”. The metaphoric “road”, whatever else it means, connects “them” and “us” and creates a convenient temporal and spatial passage that allows this “us” to be shifted back to the “they” that, in turn, takes into account “hundreds of Afrikaners”. The narrator’s “they” is utilized briefly in order to allocate feelings of “fear and shame and guilt”, before those feelings return again to the “we” that repeatedly marks the most cogent site for the articulation of emotion. This “we”, sufficiently distanced from the “hundreds of Afrikaners” it ostensibly references, now allows an almost universal claim of guilt and abjection: “We are so utterly sorry. We are deeply ashamed and gripped with remorse”. The final pronominal transaction of the passage is the most telling in its clash of specificity and abstraction. The “we” who are deeply ashamed are located more definitively in terms of geography—“But hear us, we are from here”—yet the “here” deliberately obscures the proper noun and so can only describe a generalized collective living in an unnamed space. The final “you”—“We will live it right — here — with you, for you”—similarly refers to a specific group while gesturing away from that group by avoiding a proper noun. The rhetorically doubled “you” implicitly refers to the victims of apartheid human rights violations and is directed, almost

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exclusively, to black South Africans. The we/you dichotomy established by these sentences articulates the traditional opposition, entrenched in the apartheid system, of the white “we” addressing the non-white “you”. Krog’s omission or obfuscation of proper nouns invokes a racialized dichotomy while simultaneously deferring it.33 Mark Sanders also discusses the syntax of utterance in Country of My Skull and observes that in literary discourse, “‘I’ and ‘you’ refer […] to nothing beyond the speaker and the addressee, individually or jointly, at the instant of utterance. […] The pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ as ‘referents,’ a ‘reality of discourse,’ are interdependent positions in language that can be taken up by any speaker or writer, and his or her addressee”.34 The “I” and “you” in Krog’s meditation on Roelf Meyer are merely one example of many such passages in Country of My Skull that drift away from their direct referents and thereby offer themselves as vacant positions to be, as Sanders suggests, “taken up by any speaker or writer and his or her addressee”. This means that not only can Krog’s narrative persona assume either pronominal position, but the reader is likewise permitted to imagine herself as either the “I” of the speaker or the “you” of the addressee. Krog’s deliberate linguistic convolutions frequently compel the reader to simultaneously occupy the position of the speaker and the addressee, or at least to move fluidly between these positions. Such interchangeability is signalled in the final sentence: “We will live it right — here — with you, for you”. The speaking “we” of the text gestures towards an implied community that may well encompass the reader, and this “we” is charged with not only aligning itself with the oppressed “you” being addressed, but ultimately supplanting it: “we will live it […] with you, for you”. The final pronominal act suggested in this passage is the assimilation of the “you” into the “I”, allowing the reading subject to occupy the position of speaker and addressee simultaneously, since the “we” can now “live” for the “you”. More to the point, the speaking (reading) subject has now been written into the position of both the perpetrator and the victim,35 as the perpetrators declare their willingness to “live for” the victims.36 The linguistically derived permeability between these two seemingly irreconcilable subject positions allows both writer and reader to affectively occupy these positions and to fulfil—through the compassionate feelings that comprise the affective foundations of the text—the mandate of ubuntu understood to be the precondition for a new South Africa. Krog’s narrative persona performs for the reader, enabling the reader to experience an unfettered

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empathy that conflates victim, perpetrator and beneficiary within a single affective community.37 Krog’s performance of subjective fluidity and overflowing compassion, however, has also been widely criticized for appropriating the testimonies and, as such, the identities of the victims, and for supplanting those identities—themselves only just emerging from traumatic silence—with her own privileged identity. Krog’s traumatic histrionics result in the foregrounding of her own persona over the testimony of the victims, and her conspicuous use of pronouns dramatizes how she, in her role as author, occupies a similar position to the Tswana translator: she has become the testifying “I” as she translates the hearings for her readers. The medium of translation, in this case, is pure affect: by constantly asserting that she feels radical empathy for the participants in the hearings, she argues, ultimately, that she is them. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith cite Allen Feldman on the disturbing notion of “the trauma aesthetic”, which delimits the identity of the survivors to victims of an event, and which underscores how the “audience of witness and the perpetrator … both attain their subject position and relation to the victim through the display of pain, and they both use the marked body of the victim to construct memory, to restage truth”.38 In Country of My Skull , the “marked body of the victim” becomes the site where Krog’s narrative persona attains her precarious subject position and indeed “restages truth” in order to do so. The idea of restaging truth is endorsed, in Country of My Skull , as one way of “telling” or offering testimony to one’s trauma. This is explicitly discussed when Krog allows a journalist named Patrick to interrupt the narrative and protest, “Hey, Antjie, but this is not quite what happened […]”.39 Krog’s narrative persona replies brusquely that her refashioning of her journalistic experiences is deliberate and necessary: I’m not reporting or keeping minutes. I’m telling. If I have to say every time so-and-so said this, and then at another time so-and-so said that, it gets boring. I cut and paste the upper layer, in order to get the second layer told, which is actually the story I want to tell.40

Krog infamously inserts a fictional affair between her narrative persona into the text as well, utilizing this fictional transgression as an allegory for the brutal violations being testified to at the hearings. As Cook, in her pointed critique of Country of My Skull , contends, Krog “aggrandizes the romantic subplot by veiling it in the language of amnesty”,

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allowing the narrative to yoke together the grief of black South Africans with the petty bourgeois dalliances of the privileged class.41 Krog allows scandalous fabrication to overwhelm the solemnity of facts in order to “get the second layer told”: a layer of hysterical, subjective affect. Yazir Henry—himself a victim of apartheid who testified before the TRC—criticizes Krog for appropriating the testimonies and histories of victims, including his own. He is also acutely aware of the manner in which Krog’s strategic use of pronouns creates territories of inclusion as well as exclusion: Krog’s employment of the collective pronoun ‘we’ allows a white Afrikaner identity to be superimposed on a much larger group of South African identities, simultaneously excluding multiple other black identities, experiences, and bodies. Instead of ameliorating the tensions by addressing the grounds upon which such reckonings may take place […] her work continues to avoid responsibility and to recuperate the silence in the face of atrocity.42

Henry further notes that throughout her text, Krog “creates the term ‘you’ to act as an all-encompassing vocative, conflating the multiplicity of different group experiences into one singular experience in line with an uncritical reading of the term ‘Reconciliation’”.43 The very techniques Krog employs to achieve compassionate proximity with the participants in the TRC hearings, to replicate textually the interconnectedness and interdependence of ubuntu, are rejected by Henry as an act of appropriation, as the erasure through homogenization of the oppressed others within the apartheid regime.44 Krog’s text implicitly elaborates the fault lines of the affective mandate of the TRC and the new South Africa. Charged with the imperative to experience compassion for the victims of apartheid, Krog responds wholeheartedly, adopting as her guideline Dullah Omar’s assertion, “We can make a distinction among perpetrators, but I hope this law will teach us all that we cannot make any distinction among victims”.45 Krog uses her position as beneficiary to draw the perpetrator into the broad, distinctionless realm of the victim. By erasing the distinction between victims, and by portraying herself as one of those victims “ripped open to empathy”, she invites the accusation that she has superimposed her white bourgeois sentiments over the authentic suffering of black victims. Country of My Skull serves as a test case for the limits of compassion, for the efficacy

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of white guilt and for the subjective boundaries of national or cultural community. Clearly, Krog believes that affect provides the cornerstone of the new nation, and that compassion and empathy, felt so strongly as to manifest somatically as symptoms visited on the suffering body, offer the only way towards a harmonious community. Country of My Skull provides an interactive platform in which author and reader may embrace the symptoms of compassion fatigue as a sign that they have been accepted in the spirit of ubuntu and into a notional, national community. They have suffered deeply for the victims, and through their excessive feelings, they have themselves become the victims. Krog’s text demonstrates that feeling equals proximity, and that proximity equals community. Affect, according to Country of My Skull , isn’t just the basis of identity in the new South Africa—affect is identity.

On Not Feeling: Disgrace Placing the two texts side by side, it would appear that J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, takes the contrary position to almost everything Country of My Skull endorses. David Lurie’s narrative uses the provocative tension between distance and proximity offered by free indirect discourse, as opposed to Krog’s highly-charged first-person narrative. Krog’s narrator suffers from a compassion that knows no boundaries, but Lurie, a jaded and libidinous academic, refuses to feel or to engage affectively with the other human beings who surround him, in this way implicitly refusing the philosophy of ubuntu. A university literature professor reduced to teaching communications in “this transformed and, to his mind, emasculated institution of learning”,46 Lurie compensates for his professional emasculation with sexual conquest, moving briskly from paid “exotic” escorts to faculty support staff, until he finally happens upon Melanie Isaacs, a student in one of his classes. With Melanie, he undertakes an ill-considered and ultimately disastrous sexual liaison that culminates in his being brought up on charges of harassment and forced to face a university disciplinary committee. Refusing to comply with their demands for a full and heartfelt apology, Lurie instead resigns his academic post and retreats, in disgrace, to his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the Eastern Cape. There he seems to find a compromised peace in volunteering at a veterinary clinic run by Lucy’s friend, Bev Shaw, where his primary task is to dispose of the bodies of euthanized dogs.

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Lurie and Lucy subsequently become the victims of a violent home invasion as three black men rob the house, rape Lucy and set Lurie on fire. The consequences of the attack emphasize the emotional distance between Lurie and his daughter as both attempt to deal with the aftermath of the home invasion, Lucy’s rape and her resulting pregnancy. Lurie’s attempt to empathize with his daughter is rebuffed by Lucy, who asserts that since Lurie wasn’t “there”, he couldn’t possibly understand her experience.47 Lurie, for his part, cannot comprehend why Lucy refuses to visit justice on her attackers, but instead conceives of the rape as “the price one has to pay for staying on”.48 He is even more shocked by her decision to keep the baby and to “marry” her former farm assistant, Petrus, who has now become the dominant landowner in the region.49 Lurie leaves Lucy’s home to move closer to the veterinary clinic and in his abjection befriends a crippled dog. The novel ends as Lurie prepares his new companion for euthanasia, and his final words on the subject become the concluding sentence of the novel: “Yes, I am giving him up”.50 Even without Krog’s narrative persona as a point of comparison, David Lurie is remarkable for his lack of empathy, dearth of compassion, and his resolute self-centredness. These negative characteristics are narratively foregrounded; the subject of compassion and empathy is much-debated in the novel, with Lurie consistently arguing against the value of these emotions. A particularly cogent example occurs when Lucy and Lurie exchange views on the subject of kindness to animals and what Lucy terms “the higher life” which she associates with her father’s academic pursuits: You think I ought to be painting still lives or teaching myself Russian. You don’t approve of friends like Bev and Bill Shaw because they are not going to lead me to a higher life. That’s not true, Lucy. But it is true. They are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That’s the example that people like Bev try to set. That’s the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beasts. I don’t want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us. Lucy, my dearest, don’t be cross. Yes, I agree, this is the only life there is. As for animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution.51

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This lengthy exchange provides an important allegory for the issues reckoned with in the novel as well as the concerns of post-apartheid culture. Lucy voices empathy and compassion for animals—here standing in for any disenfranchised other, particularly the racialized other of South Africa—she can imagine what it might feel like to “have to live as dogs or pigs live under us”.52 Through an empathetic imagination, Lucy is able to respond to the suffering of the disenfranchised, and her actions in life, we are told, are guided by such emotional identifications. Lurie, on the other hand, speaks in the voice of the old apartheid regime, declaring the animals ontologically separate from humans and therefore denying the possibility of imagining their experiences.53 He relegates Lucy’s speech to the realm of “guilt” or “fear [of] retribution”, thus rationalizing her compassion and replacing it with what Mark Sanders identifies as long-held colonial “phantasies of retribution and the corresponding wish to make reparation”.54 Although Lurie offers the token concession that human life is “not higher, necessarily” than animals—a claim that feels disingenuous—he cautions Lucy to approach the subject with “perspective” and again dismisses the notion of affective identification in favour of “simple generosity”. Generosity, simple or not, implies a handing down of kindness from a higher position, from a “higher life” to a lower form. Whereas the Latin etymology of compassion is to “suffer with”, implying that one suffers equally to the object of one’s compassion, the Latin etymology of generosity connects it with nobility and the magnanimous gesture of the aristocrat: it is handed down from a person of higher stature to a person of lesser status. With his recourse to generosity, Lurie linguistically reinstates the “higher life” that he pretends to disavow, and continues to relegate the suffering and disenfranchised to a lower order, one that should be grateful for “simple” acts of magnanimity. The exchange between Lurie and his daughter is important for the larger truth it illuminates about David Lurie’s ability to use his rhetorical skills as a defence against encroaching feelings of compassion. By deploying his talent for oratory, Lurie deliberately distances himself from compassion, refusing the moral impetus to respond to suffering with sympathy. The manifestation of such resistance, as Lauren Berlant notes, can present itself through a variety of reactions:

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… scenes of vulnerability [can often] produce a desire to withhold compassionate attachment, to be irritated by the scene of suffering in some way. Repeatedly, we witness someone’s desire not to connect, sympathize, or recognize an obligation to the sufferer; to refuse engagement with the scene or to minimize its effects; to misread it conveniently; to snuff or drown it out with pedantically shaped phrases of carefully designed apartheids; not to rescue or help; to go on blithely without conscience; to feel bad for the sufferers, but only so that they will go away quickly. […] the aesthetic and political spectacle of suffering vulnerability seems to bring out something terrible, a drive not to feel compassion or sympathy, an aversion to a moral claim on the spectator to engage.55

The aversion to a moral claim of engagement is most evident in Lurie’s confrontational meeting with the university disciplinary committee. The disciplinary hearing is frequently read as an allegorical representation of the TRC hearings, and Coetzee emphasizes the committee’s multi-racial configuration as well as the limitations of their mandate: “‘The body here gathered, Professor Lurie,’ says Mathabane, opening proceedings, ‘has no powers. All it can do is to make recommendations’”.56 Manas Mathabane, the chair of the inquiry, is introduced as a Professor of Religious Studies, an explicit evocation of Archbishop Tutu’s chairing of the TRC. It is, however, the motivations of the committee members, and Lurie’s attack on their motivations, that amount to the novel’s most scathing commentary on the TRC hearings. Brought before the committee to answer to Melanie Isaacs’s charges, Lurie immediately realizes that he is possessed by a sense of “vanity and self-righteousness. He is going into this in the wrong spirit. But he does not care”.57 Although he is, by his own admission, affectively disengaged from the inquiry, he is also vocal about his “philosophical” reservations to the process.58 It is remarkable that just as Krog’s narrator expresses the symptoms of secondary stress syndrome even before being exposed to traumatic testimony, so too does Lurie express his profound “philosophical” objection to the inquiry preemptively, before the members of the inquiry initiate that process. Both protagonists react emotionally in advance of the actual events that ought to stir their emotional responsivity. Whereas Krog’s narrator surrenders herself to a debilitating flood of affect in advance of the testimony, Lurie represses feelings of compassion and empathy before the members of the disciplinary committee convene. In both texts, the protagonists are all too aware of the process into which

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they are about to immerse themselves, and are therefore able to anticipate the emotional weightiness of that process. In both cases, as well, the experience that they expect is a purely affective one. Krog’s protagonist knows, before the hearings begin, that her duty as a citizen of the new South Africa is to feel, as deeply as possible, the array of affect appropriate to the cultural moment: compassion, shock, sadness, guilt, contrition, forgiveness. David Lurie similarly anticipates the demand for certain emotions—that he too will be expected to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of the committee, the requisite expressions of compassion, shock, sadness, guilt and contrition. As a perpetrator, Lurie is keenly aware that his affective response to his reported misdeeds will be subject to the evaluation of the committee and will likely determine the outcome of the inquiry. Lurie’s reactions, from the outset until the committee’s final recommendation to the rector, are thus perversely calculated to rebuke any sense of connection to, or feelings about, the affair with Melanie Isaacs and its ramifications. After asserting his philosophical objections to the inquiry, he aggressively proclaims his guilt, thereby thwarting the committee’s desire to explore the matter: “‘I am sure the members of this committee have better things to do than rehash a story over which there will be no dispute. I plead guilty to both charges. Pass sentence, and let us get on with our lives’”.59 Lurie’s provocative stance lays bare the true intention of the disciplinary committee as well as what Coetzee implies is the true intention of the TRC hearings: to plumb the emotional depths of both victim and perpetrator and to satisfy a larger need for contrition. When asked to engage with Melanie’s statement, Lurie coldly rebukes this attempt to bring victim and perpetrator into dialogue by dismissively granting her statement validity without reading it: Now Farodia Rassool intervenes. ‘You say you accept Ms Isaacs’s statement, Professor Lurie, but have you actually read it?’ ‘I do not wish to read Ms Isaacs’s statement. I accept it. I know of no reason why Ms Isaacs should lie.’ ‘But would it not be prudent to actually read the statement before accepting it?’ ‘No. There are more important things in life than being prudent.’60

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These rebukes expose the covert agenda of the committee members, as Farodia Rassool, in particular, is enflamed by Lurie’s impassivity: ‘Professor Lurie says he accepts the charges. Yet when we try to pin him down on what it is he actually accepts, all we get is subtle mockery. To me that suggests that he accepts the charges only in name. […] The wider community is entitled to know […] what it is that Professor Lurie acknowledges and therefore what it is that he is being censured for.’61

Lurie responds by focusing on the affective component of Rassool’s argument: “‘Then what do you advise me to do? Remove what Dr Rassool calls the subtle mockery from my tone? Shed tears of contrition? What will be enough to save me?’”.62 The register of Lurie’s discourse, evident in the word “contrition” and his use of the verb “save”, demonstrates his subversive desire to draw attention to the inquiry’s conflation of sexual misdemeanours and religious morality. In his rhetorical questioning of what might be enough to “save” him, Lurie compels the reader to recognize the hypocritical self-righteousness of the committee—professing to correct grave historical wrongs but bound up in a prurient interest in Lurie’s emotional and sexual life.

Affect and the Death Drive Lurie’s perverse confrontation of the disciplinary committee involves the disgraced academic belligerently interrogating the official morality championed by the committee while simultaneously flaunting his rampant heterosexuality. This provocative rhetorical sparring illuminates the similarities between Coetzee’s characterization of Lurie and critic Lee Edelman’s equally provocative definition of the figure of the queer as a sinthomosexual. Although in Edelman’s theorization the sinthomosexual is primarily represented in queer figures, the criteria for Edelman’s Lacanian category is a refusal of the heteronormative fantasy of reproductive futurity.63 Whatever sexual partners the sinthomosexual may choose, it is his conspicuous lack of compassion, his inability to “love”, that marks him off as a threat to the larger society: With no sympathy for the subject’s desires and no trace of compassion for the ego’s integrity, with no love insofar as love names the subject’s defense against dissolution, sinthomosexuals, like the death drive they are

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made to represent — and made to represent insofar as the death drive both evades and undoes representation — endanger the fantasy of survival by endangering the survival of love’s fantasy, insisting instead on the machinelike working of the partial, dehumanizing drives and ceaselessly offering access to their surplus of jouissance.64

Edelman’s sinthomosexual represents a definitively amoral embodiment of libidinal drives and thus an uncanny rendering of the death drive. Resembling the subject but rejecting the fundamental ethos of subjectivity (the heteronormative fantasy of reproductive futurity), the sinthomosexual confronts the subject with the fragile boundaries of its own identity. Bearing in mind that he is heterosexual and that he has produced a daughter, Lurie still bears strong similarities to Edelman’s sinthomosexual. From Coetzee’s opening paragraph, Lurie is introduced in terms that emphasize his sexuality. More specifically, his sexual drives are introduced as a “problem” that must be pragmatically solved: “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well”.65 The solution, we are informed, is an uncomplicated weekly rendezvous with an “exotic” prostitute named Soraya. The relationship, Lurie imagines, is ideal precisely because of its marked lack of feeling: In the field of sex his temperament, though intense, has never been passionate. Were he to choose a totem, it would be the snake. Intercourse between Soraya and himself must be, he imagines, rather like the copulation of snakes: lengthy, absorbed, but rather abstract, rather dry, even at its hottest.66

Lurie’s sexual relationship with Soraya convinces him that he does not require emotional attachment, only libidinal satisfaction: “His needs turn out to be quite light, after all, light and fleeting, like those of a butterfly. No emotion, or none but the deepest, the most unguessed at: a ground bass of contentedness, like the hum of traffic that lulls the city-dweller to sleep, or like the silence of the night to country folk”.67 It is as this embodiment of libidinal drive without attendant emotions—sex without love, sex without empathy—that Lurie presents himself to the academic disciplinary committee. In a telling exchange after he questions whether shedding “tears of contrition” would be “enough to save” him, Lurie offers a cynical account of his relationship with Melanie:

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‘Very well,’ he says, ‘let me confess. The story begins one evening. […] I was walking through the old college gardens and so, it happened, was the young woman in question, Ms Isaacs. Our paths crossed. Words passed between us, and at that moment something happened which, not being a poet, I will not try to describe. Suffice it to say that Eros entered. After that I was not the same.’ ‘You were not the same as what?’ asks the businesswoman cautiously. ‘I was not myself. I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorcé at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros.’ ‘Is this a defense you are offering us? Ungovernable impulse?’ ‘It is not a defense. You want a confession, I give you a confession. As for the impulse, it was far from ungovernable. I have denied similar impulses many times in the past, I am ashamed to say.’68

In this exchange, Lurie articulates the inherent amorality of the sinthomosexual, confronting the colleagues who have demanded an emotional, personal and heartfelt confession with a celebration of libidinal drives cloaked in lofty classical terms. Describing himself as a “servant of Eros”, Lurie confounds his audience—an audience which includes the reader—by stripping his “confession” of any sense of agency or emotion, arguing that because of the chance encounter, “I was not myself”.69 Even more provocatively, Lurie repositions himself as a supplicant by asserting that he is not trying to defend himself, but only providing the committee with what they want from him. He completes his rhetorical incursion by arguing that the “impulse” he succumbed to could have been “governed” if he had so chosen. The question of the “governability” of one’s libidinal impulses is crucial to understanding Lurie’s positioning of himself in relation to his colleagues. Lurie consciously presents himself, through his rhetorical flights of fancy, as self-possessed yet faithful only to his basic biological drives—antagonistic to any species of morality or feeling that might attempt to “govern” these drives. Such a presentation figures, as Edelman would articulate it, the place of the social order’s death drive. Lurie’s refusal to read Melanie’s confession effectively silences her since the reader is consequently denied access to Melanie’s account of the relationship. Lurie similarly obfuscates his own narrative under disingenuous signifiers that gesture towards another historical moment and another culture altogether, and by indicating that he was at once the “servant” to an “ungovernable impulse” and that he was master of the impulse, and could easily have governed it. Such rhetoric reveals Lurie’s “confession” to be

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an endless signifying chain, leading away from any potential signified and any possible significance.70 Lurie embodies the devastating social potential of Edelman’s sinthomosexual, itself an embodiment of the question posed by Lacan: “Does it go without saying that to trample sacred laws under foot … itself excites some form of jouissance?”.71 David Lurie undoubtedly derives jouissance from “trampling” on the ethical dictates of his community, refusing to surrender what “the wider community” feels it is “entitled to”. It is Rassool who identifies the community’s expectations and who also protests that Lurie has deliberately thwarted those expectations: Farodia Rassool intervenes: ‘We are again going round in circles, Mr Chair. Yes, he says he is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is a part. That is why I say it is futile to go on debating with Professor Lurie. We must take his plea at face value and recommend accordingly’.72

Rassool demands, on behalf of the community, that Lurie’s actions be judged within a larger historical and societal framework, and that his official statement addresses his place within the cultural moment. Lurie, however, argues that what the committee actually requires, and indeed the only thing that will slake their desire, is an affective performance— an authentic display of feeling to prove that the supplicant is genuinely ashamed, guilt-stricken and remorseful. His confrontation with Rassool gives voice to that previously unspoken desire: ‘No,’ says Farodia Rassool. ‘That would be back to front. First Professor Lurie must make his statement. Then we can decide whether to accept it in mitigation. We don’t negotiate first on what should be his statement. The statement should come from him, in his own words. Then we can see if it comes from his heart.’ ‘And you trust yourself to divine that, from the words I use — to divine whether it comes from my heart?’ ‘We will see what attitude you express. We will see whether you express contrition.’73

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Lurie manages to both expose and reject the conflation of ethics and contrition that the committee proposes. Through his provocative resistance to affect, he seduces Rassool into her own “confession”, a confession that reveals the underlying intent of the committee to mend history through coerced displays of “contrition”. As Edelman suggests, the sinthomosexual is a shameless exemplum of the anti-social impulse, a creature who: forsakes all causes, all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow and for the perfection of social forms. Against the promise of such an activism, he performs, instead, an act: the act of repudiating the social […] the sinthomosexual stands for the wholly impossible ethical act. And for just that reason the social order, repeating in the form of compassion the negativity it abjects, proves incapable of standing him.74

Lurie’s perverse stance at his disciplinary hearing exposes the visceral underpinnings of the proceedings that prove the ethical act “wholly impossible”. As Rebecca Saunders argues, Coetzee’s novel poses the question of “whether the visceral (conceived as the emotional, instinctive and deeply embodied) can be reasonable, or is in necessary opposition to reason”—a question aimed pointedly at the ANC government and the TRC hearings.75 Lurie relies on the visceral as a justification for his unethical actions, but relentlessly exposes the viscerality—the same irrational and insatiable drive for satisfaction—in the committee’s attempts to bring about ethical proceedings. In this way, as Edelman suggests, he is intolerable to the logic of social organization because he exposes its essential illogic. Lurie’s diabolical talent is the ability to build eloquent chains of signifiers without ever allowing these chains to lead to a knowable signified. As opposed to Krog’s highly personal narration, a narration that foregrounds her subjectivity, Coetzee chooses free indirect discourse to express David Lurie’s character and relate his story. This narrative mode deftly expresses the tension between proximity and distance, focalizing David Lurie’s point of view while maintaining a third-person remove from his character. Through this form of narration, we are at once seduced into the illusion of full identification with the protagonist, and shown, linguistically, the gap that separates our reading selves from the written character. Michael G. McDunnah notes that the focalization of Lurie through free indirect discourse is so thorough that several reviewers and critics

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have mistakenly described Disgrace as a novel written in the first person.76 The challenge of free indirect discourse, McDunnah suggests, is that we “are reluctant to associate ourselves with David Lurie, who seems a man entirely lacking in sympathy, unable or unwilling to enter into the being of another”.77 McDunnah argues that we are meant to “think ourselves” into Lurie’s character, which is itself an immensely difficult task.78 Even more insurmountable is the ability to gain any sort of proximity to other characters in the novel. The narrative style of Disgrace allows Lurie’s consciousness to dominate, rendering it impossible to access the thoughts and feelings of Melanie, Lucy or Petrus. This question of access to human consciousness is an important theme in Disgrace for just as Lurie denies himself and the reader access to Melanie’s testimony, so is he denied access to Lucy’s experience of rape.79 Lucy purposefully rebukes her father’s attempts to empathize, asking him to refer only to his own experience: “You tell what happened to you, I tell what happened to me”.80 Tellingly, Lucy’s refusal to allow her father access to her feelings provokes in Lurie a response similar to his forceful colonizing of Melanie Isaacs. As the focalized narration makes plain, Lurie understands his sexual relationship with Melanie as coercive and colonizing even as he downplays its violence, describing it as “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core”.81 His response to his daughter’s trauma, in which he viscerally attempts to invoke the father-child relationship, can be described as similarly “undesired”: ‘My child, my child!’ he says, holding out his arms to her. When she does not come, he puts aside his blanket, stands up, and takes her in his arms. In his embrace she is stiff as a pole, yielding nothing.82

Just as Lurie refuses to reveal his story to the disciplinary committee, barring them access to his thoughts and feelings, so too does Lucy, in strikingly similar terms, bar her father from her experience of rape: “This has nothing to do with you, David. You want to know why I have not laid a particular charge with the police. I will tell you, as long as you agree not to raise the subject again. The reason is that, as far as I’m concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter”.83 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues, in her reading of Disgrace, that the “relentless” focalization on David Lurie acts as a visceral spur to the reader when Lucy refuses David access to her narrative: “When Lucy is resolutely

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denied focalization, the reader is provoked, for he or she does not want to share in Lurie-the-chief-focalizer’s inability to ‘read’ Lucy as patient and agent. No reader is content with acting out the failure of reading. This is the rhetorical signal to the active reader, to counterfocalize”.84 The reader, like Lurie, pushes against the boundaries of narrative in order to “divine”, as Lurie puts it to the committee, the secret recesses of his daughter’s heart. Although we cannot accurately “divine” Lucy’s motivations or feelings, the reader’s attempt at counterfocalization foregrounds the understanding that we cannot ever confidently ascertain this sort of knowledge about the “chief focalizer”. In the end, Lurie refuses all claims of consistency and the degree of self-knowledge that would render him knowable to himself and to the reader.

Unknowable to Himself Lurie’s consistent failure to recognize his motivations and accordant behaviour is starkly evidenced by the narrator from the opening sentence of the novel: “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well”.85 The function of free indirect discourse becomes apparent in the opening sentence, which attests to the narrator’s intimate knowledge of Lurie’s thoughts but also, through subtle syntactical coding, to an ironic detachment from Coetzee’s protagonist. The multiple adjectival and adverbial qualifiers in the opening sentence hinder the sentence’s ability to reach its intended predicate— “solve the problem of sex”—and indicate a disjunction between the subject and its predicate, the protagonist and his self-awareness, and finally a disjunction between the reader and the focalized character.86 Grammar functions to support a larger theme in the novel, the gap between Lurie’s sense of himself and his subjectivity, his persona, the imago by means of which he presents himself to the world and to the reader.87 It is apt that the gap between Lurie’s self-description and his selfknowledge is first articulated as a convoluted syntactical declaration, since the disgraced academic uses language as the engine by which he aggressively propels himself through the world. When Lurie enters the committee room to face his inquiry, for example, he reminds himself that his feelings are inappropriate to the context and even self-destructive: “Vanity, he thinks, the dangerous vanity of the gambler: vanity and selfrighteousness. He is going into this in the wrong spirit. But he does not

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care”.88 These two concurrent attitudes of vanity and self-righteousness further evidence Lurie’s status as sinthomosexual, an instantiation of the death drive: an anomie that is startling because it is fully self-aware. Indeed, an insouciant lack of self-knowledge characterizes Lurie’s demeanour throughout the novel. His opening ruminations about his non-relationship with Soraya, for example, and the contentment he attests to as a result of their affectless reptilian copulation are contradicted by sudden and unexpectedly paternal feelings when he accidentally spots Soraya with her children one day: “The two little boys become presences between them, playing quiet as shadows in a corner of the room where their mother and the strange man couple. In Soraya’s arms he becomes, fleetingly, their father: foster-father, step-father, shadow-father”.89 Lurie’s fantasy of paternal propriety contradicts his disinterest in Soraya, but the story he tells himself about their imaginary presence demonstrates his inability to truly understand his own motivations, since he does not actually experience paternal love or responsibility towards these anonymous boys. More poignantly, Lurie’s flawed experience of fatherhood demonstrates the gap between his self-knowledge and Lucy’s filial experience. When he first arrives at Lucy’s farm, Lurie finds himself meditating fondly on what he believes, at least at that moment, to be his overwhelming paternal love: Attractive, he is thinking, yet lost to men. Need he reproach himself, or would it have worked out like that anyway? From the day his daughter was born he has felt for her nothing but the most spontaneous, most unstinting love. Impossible she has been unaware of it. Has it been too much, that love? Has she found it a burden? Has it pressed down on her? Has she given it a darker reading?90

This meditative passage meanders from one vexing thought to the next, creating yet another compelling signifying chain that fails to reach a determinate signified that would allow us to understand Lurie’s relationship with Lucy. We first overhear Lurie lamenting that his daughter’s assumed but unconfirmed lesbianism renders her “lost to men”, and then he attempts to exonerate himself of the guilt he feels for her “lost” sexuality, reflecting his inherent belief that the beauty of women should be the uncontested property of men. Lurie’s meditation then shifts, without explanation or logical connection, to his self-affirming belief in the authenticity of his paternal love, a love that is both “spontaneous”

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and “unstinting”. He worries that the profound love that he bestows on his daughter may be a “burden” to her, and finally wonders, cryptically, if she has “given it a darker reading”. We have already been told that Lurie has not seen Lucy for a year, and when he finally arrives at her residence, “for a moment he does not recognize her”.91 Indeed, every exchange between Lurie and Lucy indicates an amicable distance: they treat each other with respect, but not with familial love. Lucy is a discrete and unknowable woman, essentially a mystery to Lurie. He is unsure of her sexuality or the nature of her relationships, and he is confused as to how “he and her mother, cityfolk, intellectuals, should have produced this throwback, this sturdy young settler”92 ; even the novel that he finds her reading is “not what he would have expected”.93 It is unsurprising, then, that Lucy denies her father access to her feelings about her rape, since Lurie’s paternal attachment to Lucy does not seem any more authentic than his imagined relationship with Soraya’s shadow children. Lurie’s self-aggrandizing meditation on his “unstinting” love for his daughter foregrounds his lack of self-knowledge, as well as his inability to comprehend others. As a man seemingly without affect, as a sinthomosexual governed by his basic drives, Lurie is unable to relate to others in an empathetic or ethical way. Lurie silences Melanie Isaacs’ voice by refusing to read her testimony or communicate with her after the charges have been laid, his detachment and even alienation from Lucy are apparent, despite his transient feelings to the contrary. Even when Lurie appears to be making moral progress, as when he travels to the Isaacs’ home to beg forgiveness, it is clear that his libidinal drives overwhelm his sense of humility, contrition and compassion. Lurie’s painful moral education is the subtext of his perverse failure to elicit compassion, as his “not quite rape” of Melanie is juxtaposed with Lucy’s rape, and his refusal to “confess” at his inquiry is paralleled with Lucy’s refusal to share her traumatic experience with her father. The reader’s optimism, when Lurie travels to the Isaacs’ residence to beg the family’s forgiveness, is deflated when his “apology” involves an anachronistic performance of contrition before Melanie’s parents and her younger sister, Desiree: Sitting on the bed are Desiree and her mother, doing something with a skein of wool. Astonished at the sight of him, they fall silent.

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With careful ceremony he gets to his knees and touches his forehead to the floor. Is that enough? he thinks. Will that do? If not, what more? He raises his head. The two of them are still sitting there, frozen. He meets the mother’s eye, then the daughter’s, and again the current leaps, the current of desire.94

Throughout his visit, Lurie finds himself fantasizing about Melanie, her sister Desiree, and even evaluates the mother’s beauty. As abject as his act of repentance may seem, it is subverted by the libidinal drive that he experiences and readily acknowledges. His gesture of abject repentance is so startlingly anachronistic that it renders Desiree and her mother “frozen” and silent, once again allowing Lurie to seize control of the narrative while silencing others. Lurie’s most uncompromised empathetic relationship in the novel is ultimately with animals and specifically with dead or dying animals. In what appears to be a narrative of moral progress, Lurie shifts from his argument that animals have no souls and that Bev Shaw’s euthanizing animals constitutes misplaced sentimentalism,95 to devoting himself to the task of disposing of dog carcasses in a dignified manner.96 As critics such as Michael Marais have argued, Lurie’s affiliation with animals, particularly dead or dying animals, represents the manifestation of ethical living that the reader of Disgrace has been hoping the disgraced academic might achieve. Marais argues that Lurie’s relationship with dead and dying dogs, because it is essentially valueless in the world, epitomizes a Levinasian ethics—an encounter with otherness in which the subject recognizes his inherent responsibility to the other.97 Certainly, Lurie expresses his labour in terms of metaphysical responsibility, referring to himself as a “dog undertaker; a dog psychopomp; a harijan”.98 The final scene of the novel, when Lurie allows Bev to euthanize the lame dog that has recently befriended him, is replete with the language and imagery of profound spiritual sacrifice: He can save the young dog, if he wishes, for another week. But a time must come, it cannot be evaded, when he will have to bring him to Bev Shaw in her operating room (perhaps he will carry him in his arms, perhaps he will do that for him) […] and then, when the soul is out, fold him up and put him away in his bag, and the next day wheel the bag into the flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up. He will do all that for him when his time comes. It will be little enough, less than little: nothing.99

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Contrary to Marais’s assertion that Lurie’s sacrifice of the dog, Driepoot, represents “the transformation of his desire for the Other into self-substituting responsibility”,100 James Boobar contends that Lurie persists in “his attempt at ultimately avoiding dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense by evading otherness”, and that his supposedly sympathetic gesture towards Driepoot may represent Lurie’s monologic control over the terms of meaning within this narrative.101 There is no discussion between Lurie and Bev that would indicate to the reader why “a time must come” for Driepoot, and why Lurie couldn’t adopt the dog, allowing it to live out its natural life. Such sentiment, however, clashes with the sacrificial discourse that bolsters Lurie’s identity. His methodical thoughts, thoughts that turn the euthanizing of a dog into a sacrificial offering, represent one more instance, as in the case of the disciplinary inquiry, where he allows a rhetorical stance to determine the trajectory of his life and the lives of others. The focalized narrative, while expressing Lurie’s description of his metaphysical duty to the dead dogs and his careful tending of their carcasses, also reveals his overlooking of the destitute human beings who share the area around the hospital incinerator: By the time the orderlies arrive in the morning with the first bags of hospital waste there are already numbers of women and children waiting to pick through it for syringes, pins, washable bandages, anything for which there is a market, but particularly pills, which they sell to muti shops or trade in the streets. There are vagrants too, who hang about the hospital grounds by day and sleep by night against the wall of the incinerator, or perhaps even in the tunnel, for the warmth. It is not a sodality he tries to join. But when he is there, they are there.102

The doubled voice of free indirect discourse, a voice of proximity and distance, allows the reader to glimpse those whom Lurie has overlooked throughout his life, just as it allows the reader to strain to contemplate of silence of Melanie and Lucy. The destitute blacks of South Africa are mentioned, equally briefly, earlier in the novel when Lurie first visits Bev Shaw’s clinic: “As soon as he gets out of his car there are children all around him, begging for money or just staring”.103 In each case, Lurie’s gaze sweeps past these abject others and focuses on the animals that surround him. The reader is asked, subtly, to “counterfocalize”, as Spivak

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suggests—this time on the debilitating poverty of South Africa, on the others who are overlooked in favour of Lurie’s animal ethics. What this “counterfocalization” accomplishes, finally, is providing the reader with the awareness that Lurie cannot feel empathy for other human beings, even his own daughter; rather, his feelings gravitate towards species that he has already defined as ontologically separate, as nonhuman, the appropriate beneficiaries of “simple generosity”, but not the proper recipients of empathy. Without the possibility of an empathetic connection, these animals cannot represent themselves, which is yet another way for Lurie to deftly seize control of their narrative. Both Country of My Skull and Disgrace ground their narratives as part of a cultural zeitgeist: feeling is knowing; feeling is understanding. Whereas Krog’s narrator feels excessively, and thereby becomes subsumed in a narrative of knowing and understanding so overwhelming that she is transformed from victim to beneficiary to perpetrator, Lurie’s nature is completely alien to compassion and as a result, he is incapable of knowing his lovers, his daughter or himself. He purports to understand dogs, but ultimately incorporates them into a symbolic discourse in which their deaths are inevitable and sacrificial, scapegoats to his sense of ethical progress. As Krog’s text attempts to bring the reader into sympathetic alignment with her narrative persona, and in turn with the victims and perpetrators whose testimony she translates into her own suffering, Coetzee’s novel holds the reader at a critical distance from a narrator who cannot sympathetically align with any species capable of articulating their own feelings. Being unable to feel anything for Lurie, the reader is unable to penetrate his lofty rhetoric to discover anything definitive about him or his world. Whereas Krog’s text takes as its foundation the idea that the new South Africa is a country of introspective affect, Coetzee posits the corrosive notion that these affective displays are performative, and that every member of South African society is as alienated from themselves and from their community as they were during the apartheid regime. Each of these texts, however, challenges the reader to imagine a productive role for the white South African in the new post-apartheid state. Whether feeling too much or feeling nothing at all, the white bourgeois protagonist effectively manages to become at once the focalizer and the focalized. In both Country of My Skull and Disgrace what the reader is left with is a clear view not of the human landscape of suffering in the new South Africa, but of the white protagonist staring, in fascination, at themselves.

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Notes 1. Country of My Skull has been published widely internationally and has become recommended, if not required reading, for anyone interested in the TRC hearings. As Yazir Henry remarks, Krog’s narrative “has become a foundational text for second- and third-order reading audiences of the SA TRC as well as an introductory text for many a person travelling to South Africa for the first time” (110). Country of My Skull was also adapted into a movie, In My Country, by John Boorman in 2004. Disgrace has enjoyed overwhelming international and critical success, winning the Booker Prize and preceding Coetzee’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Disgrace was also adapted into a film, by Steve Jacobs, in 2008. 2. Figley, Charles R. “Compassion Fatigue: Toward a New Understanding of the Costs of Caring.” In Secondary Traumatic Stress: Self -care Issues for Clinicians, Researchers, and Educators, ed. B. Hudnell Stamm, 4. Baltimore: The Sidran Press, 1995. 3. Figley, 11. See, for example, Beck, Cheryl Tatano, “Secondary Traumatic Stress in Nurses: A Systematic Review.” Archives of Psychiatric Nursing 25.1 (2011): 1–10 and Huggard, Peter, “Secondary Traumatic Stress: Doctors at Risk.” New Ethicals Journal (September 2003): 9–14. 4. See also Teresa Brennan on the transmission of traumatic pain (47–48). 5. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 29. 6. Felman, Shoshana. “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 13–60. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 14. 7. Caruth’s seminal 1995 anthology, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, charts out the course of trauma studies in a time coincident with the TRC hearings. 8. Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 1–12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 4–5. 9. Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007, ii. See Chapter 2. 10. Cook, Méira. “Metaphors for Suffering: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull .” Mosaic 34 (2001): 74–75. 11. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull : Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998, 23. 12. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull , 50–51. 13. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull , 51.

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14. The disruption of temporality is consistent with the psychoanalytic interpretation of trauma advocated by Caruth, Felman and Laub, adapted as it is from Freud’s definition of melancholia as the inability to move past the loss that defines the condition, as well as from his later studies of the traumatic dreams of soldiers. As Caruth (1995, p. 5) explains: “The returning traumatic dream startles Freud because it cannot be understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits” (emphasis mine). 15. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. “Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the Beneficiary: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull .” PMLA 121 (2006): 1579. 16. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. “Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the Beneficiary: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull ,” 1582. 17. Schaffer and Smith, 1581. 18. Berlant, Lauren. “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding).” In Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant, 1–13. New York: Routledge, 2004, 7. 19. Berlant, Lauren. “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding),” 4. See also Ahmed’s (2014, p. 22) citation of Elizabeth Spelman in the same vein: “Compassion, like other forms of caring, may reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordination responsible for such suffering.” Ahmed’s (2014, p. 22) chapter on “Pain” in The Cultural Politics of Emotion articulates a like-minded discussion of how the compassionate gaze can “fix” the other in a position of suffering. 20. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, 102. 21. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 19. 22. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull : Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998, 15. 23. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull , 121. 24. In this context, Shane Graham observes that Country of My Skull is concerned with “Krog’s coming to terms with her whiteness, with her Afrikaner heritage, and with her perceived kinship with so many of the amnesty applicants” (21). 25. Krog, Antjie, 171. 26. Krog, Antjie, 63. 27. Krog, Antjie, 65. 28. Sanders, Mark. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 158.

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29. Krog, Antjie, 50. 30. Krog, Antjie, 169. 31. Betensky, Carolyn. Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 20–21. 32. Krog, Antjie, 125. 33. See Henry, 127. 34. Sanders, Mark. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, 159. Sanders bases his discussion on his reading of Émile Beneviste, citing Beneviste’s linguistic terms in his explanation. Sanders’s discussion, as well as his entire book-length discussion of the TRC and its literary representations, is informed by his Derridean methodology. 35. By this stage in the text, I would suggest that the beneficiary position has already been assimilated into the position of the perpetrator. 36. Reflecting on her use of the first-person pronoun in her text, Krog suggests, among other reasons, that she relies on the first-person voice because “if I say the word ‘I,’ I call forth the word ‘you.’ You have to respond” (103). She also implicitly invokes her allegiance to a philosophy of ubuntu when she argues that “‘my story’ can never be wholly mine, alone, because I define and articulate my existence with and among others, through various narrative models — including literary genres, plot structures, metaphoric themes and so on that my culture provides” (105). See Krog, “‘I, Me, Me, Mine!’: Autobiographical Fiction and the ‘I’.” English Academy Review 22.1 (2005): 100–7. 37. Laura Moss notes that the narrative persona in Country of My Skull is at least fragmentary, if not multiple. Moss contends that “four of the characters in Country of My Skull are Antjie, Antjie Krog, Antjie Samuel, and Antjie Somers. The Antjies share in the task of first person narration” (90). 38. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. “Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the Beneficiary: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull .” PMLA 121 (2006): 1581. 39. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull : Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998, 225. 40. Krog, Antjie, 225. 41. Cook, Méira. “Metaphors for Suffering: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull .” Mosaic 34 (2001): 83. 42. Henry, Yazir. “The Ethics and Morality of Witnessing—On the Politics of Antjie Krog (Samuel’s) Country of My Skull .” In Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, ed. Ewald Mengel and Michela Borzaga, 107–40. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012, 127.

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43. Henry, Yazir. “The Ethics and Morality of Witnessing—On the Politics of Antjie Krog (Samuel’s) Country of My Skull ,” 132. 44. For similar criticism of Krog’s narrative positioning, see Fiona Ross, “From a ‘Culture of Shame’ to a ‘Circle of Guilt.’” Rev. of Country of My Skull , by Antjie Krog. South African Review of Books, June 1998, www.uni-ulm.de/~rturrell/sarobnewhtml/ross.html. 45. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull : Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998, 15. 46. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull : Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, 4. 47. Krog, Antjie, 112. 48. Krog, Antjie, 158. 49. It is made clear by Lucy that the marriage is simply a business arrangement to place Lucy under Petrus’s protection in exchange for control of her land, and that there is no sexual component to the relationship. 50. Krog, Antjie, 220. 51. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 74. 52. I argue that animals function allegorically in this particular exchange, but that is not to say that animals are consistently allegorical throughout the text. Quite the contrary, Coetzee’s narrative makes sport of interpreting animals allegorically or metaphorically by alternating references to figurative animals with references to literal animals. This deliberately vexing conflation takes many forms, but the most illustrative example is in the final scene, when Lurie carries the crippled dog into the surgery room “like a lamb” (220). 53. Here one can recall the literal meaning of the Afrikaans word “apartheid”: “apartness.” The same terms defined segregationist positions in the United States, under the slogan “separate but equal.” 54. Sanders, Mark. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 142. 55. Berlant, Lauren. “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding).” In Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant, 1–13. New York: Routledge, 2004, 9–10. 56. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 47. 57. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace, 47. 58. Coetzee, J.M., 47. 59. Coetzee, J.M., 48. 60. Coetzee, J.M., 49. 61. Coetzee, J.M., 50. 62. Coetzee, J.M., 51–52.

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63. “Though it functions as the necessary condition for the subject’s engagement of Symbolic reality, the sinthome refuses the Symbolic logic that determines the exchange of signifiers; it admits no translation of its singularity and therefore carries nothing of meaning, recalling in this the letter as the site at which meaning comes undone […] As the template of a given subject’s distinctive access to jouissance, defining the condition of which the subject is always a symptom of sorts itself, the sinthome, in its refusal of meaning, procures the determining relation to enjoyment by which the subject finds itself driven beyond the logic of fantasy or desire.” (Edelman 35) 64. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 74. 65. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 1. 66. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace, 2–3. 67. Coetzee, J.M., 5. 68. Coetzee, J.M., 52. 69. This declaration offers a stark contrast with Krog’s narrator who, as we have seen, is often “not herself.” When Krog’s narrator is not herself, though, she is always someone else: either a victim or a perpetrator. When Lurie is “not himself,” he is decidedly no one. 70. Coetzee writes at length on the subject of secular confession as an interminable narrative in his 1985 essay, “Confessions and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky” (Contemporary Literature 37.3 [Summer 1985]: 193–232). In this article, Coetzee identifies the desire to confess as the desire for an individual to tell an essential truth about themselves, but argues that the secular confession has no clear teleology. Without a higher authority to evaluate the confession and offer absolution, the secular confession becomes an exercise in self-reflexive doubt: the truth of the confession, as well as the motivations that fuel the confession, can never be guaranteed. 71. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 85. 72. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 53. 73. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace, 54. 74. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, 101. 75. Saunders, Rebecca. “Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission.” parallax 11 (2005): 99. 76. McDunnah, Michael G. “Sympathy, Subjectivity, and the Narration of Disgrace.” In Encountering Disgrace: Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, ed. Bill McDonald, 15–47. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009, 18.

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77. McDunnah, Michael G. “Sympathy, Subjectivity, and the Narration of Disgrace,” 16. 78. McDunnah, Michael G., 16. 79. McDunnah notes that Lurie consistently denies Melanie the agency required to tell a story that is genuinely her own. When he is summoned before the disciplinary committee, Lurie imagines that Melanie, rather than having taken matters into her own hands, “must have ‘crumbled’ under pressure from her parents and boyfriend” (23). 80. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 99. 81. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace, 25. 82. Coetzee, J.M., 99. 83. Coetzee, J.M., 112. 84. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching.” diacritics 32 (2002): 22. Spivak attributes the term “focalization” to Mieke Bal and prefers it to “free indirect discourse” because, she explains, “it emphasizes the fluidity of narrative — the impression of (con)sequence as well as the transactional nature of reading” (22). 85. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 1. 86. See also McDunnah, 17. 87. Sanders also provides an extended reading of Disgrace that is focused on grammar, in this case on the present tense narration of the novel and the emphasis on the perfective tense of significant verbs (170–80). 88. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 47. 89. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace, 6. 90. Coetzee, J.M., 76. 91. Coetzee, J.M., 59. 92. Coetzee, J.M., 61. 93. Coetzee, J.M., 76. 94. Coetzee, J.M., 173. 95. Coetzee, J.M., 73–74. 96. It is worth noting, in terms of Lurie’s lack of self-knowledge, that when he criticizes Bev Shaw and suggests that her vocation is so “cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat” (73), he finds himself astounded by his own feelings: “He is surprised by his outburst. He is not in a bad temper, not in the least” (74). 97. Marais, Michael. “‘Little Enough, Less Than Little: Nothing’: Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee.” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 180. 98. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 146. 99. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace, 219–20.

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100. Marais, Michael. “‘Little Enough, Less Than Little: Nothing’: Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee.” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 178. 101. Boobar, James. “Beyond Sympathy: A Bakhtinian Reading of Disgrace.” In Encountering Disgrace: Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, ed. Bill McDonald, 48–63. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009, 51. 102. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999, 145. 103. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace, 80.

CHAPTER 6

Shame, Guilt and Complicity in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother

Ag, Shame The word “shame” proliferates throughout South African discourse in a surprisingly cavalier manner. As anyone familiar with casual South African conversation knows, the exclamation, “Shame!” or “Ag, shame!”, is an ubiquitous and familiar response to a wide variety of declarative sentences. As many websites devoted to South African slang report, the term is frequently used and “can mean anything from ‘oh cute’ — usually said ‘ag shame,’ to ‘you poor thing’ to ‘I feel sorry for you’”.1 Thus, “shame” means everything and nothing, begging the question: Is South African culture utterly suffused in shame to the point that it has become quotidian, or is shame as an affect so overwritten by commonplace discourse that it has ceased to signify?

A Shameful Confession The two novels focused upon in this chapter—Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples (1993) and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998)—are distinct from each other in obvious ways: one novel is written by an Afrikaner man, the other by a Xhosa woman; one is a narrative portraying what Michiel Heyns describes as an “erotic patriarchy”, the other is invested in constructing what Meg Samuelson describes as “the maternal

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voice”. Both novels, however, style their narratives as confessional, and both protagonists make explicit the shame they are confessing to. I begin with my own shameful confession: what you are reading right now is an extensively revised, even overhauled, draft of this chapter. My first attempt, an attempt which took a significant chunk of the summer of 2017, was returned to me by my best and fiercest critic and dismissed as rubbish. This is not in itself shameful—chapters go through revisions all the time. What was shameful was my gentle reader’s verdict that I was “reading with the grain” of these two novels, and therefore, I was merely paraphrasing their narratives with the addition of comments from other critics. There was no critical tension in my reading; there was nothing that hadn’t been said before and better. I was mortified. At the same time, I realized that another common characteristic of the novels was to seduce the inattentive reader with the promise of a shameful secret that is obligingly revealed at the end of the story. The revelations of shame that were being presented as the startling but inevitable conclusion to a gruelling process of soul-searching introspection by the respective protagonists of the novels are intended to entice readers into believing they had solved a complex mystery and had therefore gained a genuine understanding of the two narrators confessing directly to them. It is doubly embarrassing for a critic of South African literature to be so easily beguiled by the sense that he has hit upon the authentic identity of a protagonist through a linear reading of their confession, considering one of the seminal works of South African literary criticism is J.M. Coetzee’s 1985 essay, “Confessions and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky”, which carefully examines what Coetzee suggests is the endless trajectory of confession that is a product of the secular age. The secular age, Coetzee argues, allows for confession, but not for absolution, which he describes as “the end of the episode, the closing of the chapter”.2 Without a discrete addressee for one’s confession, and without a clear means of resolving that conclusion in a definitive way, the secular confession, for Coetzee, represents “a potentially infinite regression of self-recognition and self-abasement in which the self-satisfied candor of each level of confession of impure motive becomes a new source of shame and each twinge of shame a new source of self-congratulation”.3 The shift from the medieval period to the modern age marks the transformation of the act of confession from a religious act to a psychoanalytic exercise, and thus confession becomes not only an inquiry without conclusion but turns shame into a source of pride for knowing one’s intimate self so well.

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Timothy Bewes also argues forcefully for the inability to effectively articulate shame linguistically in The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Bewes contends that “the substance of shame is fundamentally a gap, an absence, an impossibility”, and therefore, shame cannot be articulated within the content of the work, but rather as “the materialization of the discrepancy between content and form, of the inadequacy of form with respect to content”.4 Shame, as Coetzee and Bewes concur, cannot be located in the written confession of a narrative’s protagonist. The pathetic flaw in my initial reading of The Smell of Apples and Mother to Mother was my confidence in identifying the written simulation of shame and accepting it unproblematically as the “truth” of each confession. The confession that I offer you is equally proof that the narrative confession is essentially impure and complicated by ego. If you are reading this version, then it has successfully passed my fierce editor’s scrutiny, so I have received the editorial absolution that I needed and have reached, as Coetzee suggests, the “end of the episode”. What was the purpose of my confession, then, if I have already been released from the shame I experienced, if I already know that I cannot articulate that shame without succumbing to “self-congratulation”? My confession has provided a creative segue into my topic, and hopefully illustrated the issues I mean to address in Behr’s and Magona’s novels, but it has also been intended to achieve an affective proximity between my reader and myself. By directly addressing you, the reader and confessing to my embarrassment, I have fashioned an affective proximity that common sense dictates should bring us into empathetic alignment with each other.5 Both The Smell of Apples and Mother to Mother are deliberately structured to establish a proximal relationship to their intended reader, and I would argue that this reader is, in both cases, the white book club reader first hypothesized in Chapter 2. Despite the significant differences in these two narratives, both explicitly encode a confessional discourse, and an alluringly shameful secret, into their narrators’ addresses to their intended readership. These respective confessions demonstrate how confessional discourse compulsively seeks out a satisfactory form of closure and, as Coetzee suggests, a “liberation from the oppression of memory”.6 Without recourse to divine absolution, each of the narrator’s attempts to achieve closure by establishing a sympathetic proximity to their addressee, and by ultimately transferring their personal shame onto that addressee, the reader.

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Confession, Agency, History The confessional discourse continually strives, from its outset, to resolve the guilt or shame that necessitates it, and thus it may be productive to begin a discussion of The Smell of Apples and Mother to Mother with their ostensible conclusions.7 Although the two narrators of these novels are markedly different from each other, as are the narratives they “confess” to the reader, the resolution of these confessions are strikingly similar to each other, and equally problematic in their articulation. The Smell of Apples is structured as a bildungsroman and narrated by Marnus Erasmus, who is eleven at the time of the story’s primary setting: December 1973. Narrated in the continuous present by the young Marnus, the reader is immersed in his thoughts, feelings and speculations as certain portentous events dovetail: the mysterious visit of “Mister Smith”, a Chilean general who arrives covertly to meet with Marnus’s father, Johan; the disappearance of Little-Neville, the son of Doreen, the family’s Coloured maid, who is finally discovered after having been assaulted and severely burned by three white men for allegedly stealing coal; and, finally, the narrator’s inadvertent discovery of the most traumatic of family secrets as he accidentally spies on his father raping Marnus’s best friend, Frikkie Delport. Sex, then, announces itself as the secret to be revealed and understood if Marnus is to comprehend himself, and this thematic of sex—particularly forbidden sex—aligns Behr’s novel with a distinctly Freudian narrative. The Freudian narrative of the need to uncover a suppressed sexual secret in order to free the subject, though, is precisely the target of Michel Foucault’s discussion of confessional discourse in his History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. As Foucault suggests, the recurrent theme that sexuality is unspeakable and that “only the removing of obstacles, the breaking of a secret, can clear the way leading to it is precisely what needs to be examined”.8 The modern confession, according to Foucault, becomes a dominant mode in modern discourse by convincing the Western subject that sexuality is “something akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing abusively reduced to silence, and at the same time difficult and necessary, dangerous and precious to divulge”.9 Western society, Foucault suggests, erroneously promises us that confession is a valuable form of self-interrogation that will lead the subject to essential insights about themselves: the very premise that undergirds Freudian psychoanalysis.

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The Smell of Apples appears to ratify what Foucault has termed the “repressive hypothesis” by introducing and interweaving the voice of an older Marnus, marked off from the text by italics, who narrates his final days as a soldier in the South African Defense Forces, fighting in the secret war in Angola in June of 1988.10 Early in the novel, the older Marnus articulates the project of revisiting the events of December 1973 in an attempt to reach an understanding of himself through this confessional recollection: Perhaps that summer ultimately determined it. Possibly not even the whole summer — just that one week in December. Yet, by now, I know full-well that you cannot satisfactorily understand an event unless you have a picture of everything that accompanies it: the arrival of the visitor cannot be divorced from what preceded his coming. To understand my own choice, I need to muster as much of the detail as possible.11

The adult Marnus, distanced typographically and temporally from the main protagonist of the story, nevertheless represents the voice of the confessant, the voice of the narrator striving to achieve understanding and closure. This foray into introspection, however, is thwarted by the battle Marnus becomes immersed in; indeed, he is in danger through most of his narrative as he describes being separated from his unit after an attack and he spends much of his time fleeing enemy forces. Startlingly, the absolution he has been searching for comes in the form of death as he is killed in a bombing raid: The black section-leader’s face is beside me. He asks whether I have any feeling in my legs. He tells me I will be fine. I try to shake my head, to warn him. I try to speak to him, to tell him that I knew all along, just like all the others. But I am dumb. I feel Dad’s face against my chest and his arms around my head, and I feel safe. But now it is a different safety. Death brings its own freedom, and it is for the living that the dead should mourn, for in life there is no escape from history.12

The death of Marnus provides us with a conclusion that is blatantly, vexingly inconclusive. His final attempt to speak, to articulate his selfknowledge, fails him as he finds himself “dumb”. More importantly, however, Marnus’s final sentences shift from the subjective to the universal and ultimately foreclose on the possibility of any escape from

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shame, the shame of living, except through death. The living, Marnus tells us in his last words, are trapped in history, a history of shame and horror, and a history against which we all are powerless. Magona’s Mother to Mother concludes with its narrator, Mandisa, similarly invoking the power of history to control our lives, and our collective inability to escape historical destiny. Mother to Mother is a fictional account of the infamous 1993 murder of American Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl during a riot in the black township of Guguletu. In reality, four black youths were convicted for the murder, which garnered international attention because Biehl was a young American woman who was in South Africa to help register blacks for the upcoming 1994 elections. The shock of such a murder, especially since apartheid had already effectively ended, was a sensational news item in itself, but the story garnered even more attention when Biehl’s parents travelled to the TRC hearings to support the killers’ ultimately successful appeal for amnesty. As Magona makes clear in her “Author’s preface” to Mother to Mother, although Biehl was killed by a “mob of black youth”, in her novel “there is only one killer”.13 Magona thus creates a narrative situation that more easily facilitates confessional discourse by focusing the guilt of the murder on a single fictional individual: Mandisa’s son, Mxolisi. Mandisa appeals to the fictionalized Linda Biehl, explicitly addressing her in the opening words of the first section of the novel, “Mandisa’s Lament”: “My son killed your daughter”.14 In so doing, Mandisa constructs her own identity as well as her addressee’s—they are both mothers first and foremost, and the circuit of communication between the black South African and the white American, the perpetrator and the victim, is possible because of the unifying identity of motherhood. Mandisa repeatedly refers to Biehl as her “sister-mother” to emphasize the maternal kinship they ostensibly share. The murder, according to Mandisa, does not make them adversaries but soul mates: My Sister-Mother, we are bound in this sorrow. You, as I, have not chosen this coat that you wear. It is heavy on our shoulders. I should know. It is heavy, only God knows how. We are not asked whether we wanted it or not. We did not choose, we are the chosen.15

The final sentences of this apostrophe are crucial to an understanding of Mandisa’s representation of the murder of Amy Biehl: both mothers are not merely helpless to stop this murder from taking place, but they have

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been consigned to their tragic roles: they are “the chosen”. The biblical diction here confirms the irrevocability of history and destiny for both the victim and the perpetrator. This theme of historical inevitability is foregrounded late in the novel, prior to the final chapter where Mandisa offers Linda a terrifyingly vivid description of her daughter’s final moments. Before the murder is recounted, however, Mandisa offers Linda a distant memory from her childhood, when she remembers telling her grandfather, Tatomkhulu, that they had learned in school that day about the Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse and the Cattle Killing of 1856–1857.16 Tatomkhulu swiftly intercedes to correct the colonialist reading of Xhosa history that Mandisa had been taught, which concluded that the reason the Xhosa believed the prophesy was because they were “stupid and ignorant”.17 Taking on the “voice of an imbongi of the people”, Tatomkhulu proceeds to recount the tale of the Cattle Killing as though he had been there, channelling the pain and anger of the Xhosa nation. In his lyrical, evocative performance, the cattle slaughter is a “noble sacrifice”, necessary because “the more terrible the abomination, the greater the sacrifice called for”.18 The lessons of Tatomkhulu are immediately transposed onto the description of Mxolisi’s violent attack of Amy Biehl. Just as Nongqawuse’s vision is explained as a manifestation of her nation’s seething hatred of white settlers, Mxolisi is figured, throughout the final pages of the novel, as a mere instrument of the larger mob. Mxolisi is not an individual charged with making ethical choices, but instead has become the “enactment of deep, dark private yearnings of a subjugated race. The consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe”.19 Mandisa is unambiguous and specific in her description of Mxolisi as lacking in individual responsibility for the murder of Amy Biehl and her final descriptions of him absolve him of any subjective consciousness, representing him instead as an embodiment of history, seeking, as Nongqawuse once sought, to turn the cruel natural order upside down: My son was only an agent, executing the long-simmering dark desires of his race. Burning hatred for the oppressor possessed his being. It saw through his eyes; walked with his feet and wielded the knife that tore mercilessly into her flesh. The resentment of three hundred years plugged his ears; deaf to her pitiful entreaties. My son, the blind but sharpened arrow of the wrath of his race.20

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Mandisa’s assessment of Mxolisi’s crime echoes Marnus’s final words about his own shameful life: each protagonist ultimately confesses only to powerlessness against the terrible forces of history, and each is absolved of their shame because they were not active agents in their crime, but merely the “sharpened arrow” of history.

The Seductive “Secret” That both novels’ protagonists ultimately relinquish their agency at the end of their narratives raises the issue of whether they are complicit in any crime, and whether they feel any guilt or shame. In doing so, each narrative draws attention to the distinction between guilt and shame—terms with subtle differences in their meaning but significant ramifications in this fine distinction. Do the confessions proffered by Marnus and Mandisa reveal their guilt or their shame to the reader? The contrast between the two feelings is subtle but crucial, and the subject of wide-ranging discussions from classicists to philosophers to Lacanian psychotherapists. Writing on the Lacanian distinction between guilt and shame, for example, Jacques-Alain Miller offers the following definition: guilt is the “effect on the subject of an Other who judges, thus of an Other that contains the values that the subject has supposedly transgressed”. The Other that one invokes in the affect of shame, however, precedes the judging Other, and instead is “one that only sees or lets be seen”.21 Miller concludes that guilt is related to desire, whereas shame is related to what Lacan describes as “that which is most intimate in the subject”.22 In concert with Miller, many critics agree upon the intimate and the intrinsic nature of shame. Bernard Williams reminds us that for the Greeks, the concept of shame was directly linked with nakedness, particularly sexual nudity: “The word aidoia, a derivative of aidos, shame is a standard Greek word for genitals, and similar terms are found in other languages”.23 In the Judeo-Christian world, the foundational text for the overt connection between nakedness and shame is biblical, where the eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve is immediately followed by the advent of shame, symbolized specifically in the couple’s sudden awareness of their naked bodies in Genesis 3:7: “And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons”. The naked body here stands as the archetypical symbol of Western shame, but it is also crucial to note that the shameful response is entirely subjective and innate. The

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judging God does not enter the garden until the following sentence; the shame of Adam and Eve “precedes that judging Other”. Jean-Paul Sartre similarly contends that shame is distinctive in that it precedes guilt and is fundamental to subjectivity. His famous analogy illustrating shame is of the voyeur spying through a keyhole who suddenly hears footsteps approaching him. Before the voyeur is actually seen, he experiences shame because “I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness … I see myself because somebody sees me”.24 This definition of shame is innate and entirely subjective: the subject becomes a subject because he sees himself through the eyes of an imagined Other. Shame, for Sartre, “is the recognition of the fact that I am that object which the Other is looking at and judging”.25 The Other does not need to be looking and judging; the subject just needs to imagine himself through the gaze of the Other. As Emmanuel Levinas later remarks, shame is the understanding of “being riveted to oneself” (64).26 All of these formulations of shame share a common emphasis on the intrinsic nature of the affect; shame is the act of looking at oneself as though one were the distanced but approaching Other. Both The Smell of Apples and Mother to Mother explicitly conjure the spectre of shame in their respective narratives by replicating this sense of the subject looking at themselves as an Other. The split subjectivity of Marnus—the double narrative voice of the eleven-year-old and the twenty-six-year-old—offers the most cogent example of this sort of distanced perception of oneself. Although as a soldier Marnus meditates on the idea of “muster[ing] as much of the detail as possible” about that one week in December, the narration of the boy and the narration of the adult are relegated to discrete sections with no overlap between the two. The narrative strands run parallel with each other, never intersecting, giving the reader the sense that the adult observes the child’s life as an Other who does not judge, but as Miller suggests, “one that only sees or lets be seen”.27 Throughout his narrative, the soldier Marnus is represented as an Other detached or alienated from his subjectivity, thus seemingly in accord with the critics’ definitions of the shamed subject. As Bewes suggests, shame “results from the experience of incommensurability, between the I as experienced by the self and the self as it appears to and is reflected in the eyes of the other”.28 A salient example of this sense of incommensurability occurs when the adult Marnus explores his body as though it belongs to a stranger:

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When I look down again, I realise I’m still holding my dick. The head, enfolded by the soft foreskin, is half flattened by the pressure of thumb and index finger. Curling through the opening of my fly are long dark hairs. I stoop forward against the tree-trunk, and push my pelvis up and forward. The object between my fingers is light brown and covered in tiny wrinkles. When I flatten it slightly by pulling it further out through the fly, the powder-blue vein, which runs from the base right up to the head, stands out clearly. I can see the blood pulsing on the inside of the vein, but I’m not sure.29

Just as the soldier looks back at his childhood from a detached distance, so too does he examine his genitalia—that originary source of shame— with equal impassiveness. His final remark indicates that he is even unsure whether there is blood pulsing through his veins, so profound is his divergence from himself. The Smell of Apples is a novel specifically structured to evoke this sense of incommensurability and to ultimately demonstrate that it emerges as a function of the catastrophic alliance between apartheid ideology and familial love. Such an alliance is, ostensibly, the source of the shameful confession that the novel has to make, the seductive promise of a secret that the narrative extends to the beguiled reader. This promise of a secret is encoded in the voice of the eleven-year-old Marnus, couched in the continuous present, as he compulsively quotes his elders, particularly his father, Johan, and unthinkingly ventriloquizes his parents’ platitudes and rhetoric, seamlessly integrating their ideological discourse into his sense of identity as well as his perception of the world around him. As Rita Barnard contends, drawing on her own personal experience as “a child of the Afrikaner elite”, Behr’s novel “offers a veritable compendium of the sayings, stereotypes, and justifications that made up the everyday banality of apartheid. It analyses the system’s ideological workings in a knowing and remarkably claustrophobic fashion. The narrative traces a closed circle”.30 This narrative “circle”, as has already been noted, is decisively closed when the adult Marnus offers his universalized tragic vision of a subjectivity always already doomed by history. It is through the young Marnus’s faithful recreation of his father’s truisms and family stories that the reader may fully comprehend how the boy’s impressionable mind has been colonized by Afrikaner ideology. Examples of Marnus ventriloquizing an oppressive and patriarchal ideology abound:

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[Dad] says he’ll never forget what the Communists and the blacks did to Tanganyika. And Dad says we shouldn’t ever forget. A Volk that forgets its history is like a man without a memory. That man is useless. Dad says the history of the Afrikaner, also the Afrikaners of Tanganyika and Kenya, is a proud history. We must always remember that and make sure one day to teach it to our own children. Even the Prime Minister, Uncle John Vorster, said something similar in Pretoria the other day when someone asked him about the Coloured question. Uncle John said that the Coloureds will never be able to say that we did to them what the English did to the Afrikaners. The Afrikaners’ struggle for self-government, and for freedom from the yoke of British Imperialism, was a noble struggle. But now the blacks are trying to do to the Republic exactly what they did to Tanganyika. They’re trying to take over everything we built up over the years, just to destroy it as they destroy everything they lay their hands on. Of all the nations in the world, those with black skins across their butts also have the smallest brains. Even if you can get a black out of the bush, you can’t ever get the bush out of the black.31

This lengthy citation demonstrates the adroit performativity of Behr’s narrative as it reveals the successive layers of Marnus’s ideological conditioning. The soliloquy begins with insistent anaphora and attribution, the repetition of “Dad says”. These repetitive tropes create an effect that Jay Rajiva describes as hypnotic,32 and they emphasize the received element of the wisdom Marnus conveys, and also draw attention to the statements about “the blacks” in the following paragraphs, which appear without attribution. The shift from quotation to paraphrase highlights the ease with which the youth assimilates the opinions of his elders into his consciousness, presenting his father’s opinions as unmediated truth. Marnus’s speech demonstrates the patrilinear nature of Afrikaner culture, a community where even the Prime Minister is known through the familiar patronymic, “Uncle John”. It foregrounds the way in which family history—in this case the story of the Erasmus family’s roots in Tanganyika—swiftly becomes the history of the Afrikaner culture, and the way in which cultural expression immediately becomes political rhetoric. Political topics, however, devolve rapidly into racist generalizations and truisms. In this case, the weak comparison between the Afrikaners’ struggle against British Imperialism and the black and Coloured struggle against apartheid is further reduced to the racist notions that “those with black skins across their butts also have the smallest brains”, and that “even if you can get a black out of the bush, you can’t get the bush out of

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the black”. As Rajiva suggests, aphorisms such as these function as “a silence, allowing parental and authorial voices to compartmentalize lived experience in order to corrode or trivialize its ethical meaning”.33 Marnus’s voice articulates a complicity that predates his ability to be conscious of such insidious indoctrination.34 At the same time, his conscious parroting of truisms serves to evoke the child’s basic innocence while implicating the reader in the act of discerning this patriarchal indoctrination. As David Medalie contends, the ventriloquizing narration renders the reading of The Smell of Apples “much like wearing bifocal lenses: one sees what the young Marnus sees, then, with a quick shift or perspective, one sees what the boy, enclosed in his false education, cannot see”.35 Medalie’s suggestion brings to mind Sartre’s analogy of shameful self-recognition, with the reader representing the Other who does not judge, but simply, as Miller phrases it, “only sees or lets be seen”. The reader is enlisted to fill in the gaps in the boy’s knowledge, asked to import their enlightened, anti-racist attitude into the narrative, yet is asked not to judge Marnus because the boy is clearly shown to be guilty of nothing more than filial love. According to the logic of the “shameful secret” that is encoded in the novel’s narrative structure, the reader fills the role of the Other approaching the voyeur in the hallway. The theme of spying and voyeurism is central to The Smell of Apples , and references to this motif are almost always connected to Marnus’s professed feelings of shame. Importantly, what Marnus describes as shame is, by the definitions offered by the philosophers and psychoanalysts, actually a confession of guilt. Early in the novel, for example, Marnus describes his experience of being watched and judged when he is caught allowing Frikkie to copy his math homework: “I could feel the whole class’s eyes on me and I wanted to sink into the earth with shame”.36 What Marnus identifies as shame would be considered guilt by Sartre and Miller: he has been caught in a lie and feels himself judged by those who are ethically superior to him. Similarly, the arrival of the Chilean general, known only as “Mister Smith from New York”, begins with a scene of spying that again echoes Sartre’s analogy of the shameful voyeur. When Johan arrives at the Erasmus home with the General, Marnus watches them from his bedroom window until he is finally spotted by Mister Smith: When he’s almost right beneath my window he notices me looking down at him. Before I can pull away, he smiles up at me. […] He carries on smiling and then lifts one hand and makes a sort of salute in my direction.

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I lift my hand and try to smile back while I bite my bottom lip. I’m embarrassed at being caught peeking out the window. Mum always says it’s only Makoppelanders that peek out of windows.37

Marnus again recognizes his affective state as one of embarrassment and shame, and when he is later formally introduced to Mister Smith he feels his ears “go red because he saw me peeking through the window. […] Mum says peering through windows is the kind of thing one expects from poor whites in Woodstock”.38 This prolonged example, however, demonstrates the delicate balance between guilt and shame being teased out. On the one hand, the General does not appear to mind being spied on, and smiles and salutes Marnus. The salute, in a sense, not only acknowledges Marnus but recruits him into the world of duplicitous secrecy, and it is worth noting that Marnus’s first impression of the General is how similar he looks to Johan, who will come to represent the most horrifying aspects of mendacity.39 Yet, at each instance, Marnus imagines his mother’s scorn and her association of voyeurism with an inferior social class. The judging Other is always present in Marnus’s consciousness, and so his shame gives way instantly to guilt. The confusion between guilt and shame is relevant, in The Smell of Apples , insofar as the representation of shame is designed to create a proximity to the reader, to cultivate an extratextual bond with the reader, and to allow this relationship to guide the reader to the “shameful secret” which supposedly represents the heart of the narrative, but actually moves both narrator and reader away from the authentic source of narrative shame. The same can be said of Mother to Mother, which presents the reader with a narrator fiercely determined to articulate her shame to the empathetic reader Magona constructs for her. In Magona’s novel, the ideal reader is explicitly constructed as a white middle-class American woman, the “sister-mother” with whom Mandisa connects directly through maternal identification. With her narrative firmly anchored to the essentialist premise that motherhood is a universal form of identity, Mandisa immediately connects her own circumstance of motherhood with a deep and abiding shame. The shame that Mandisa attempts to express is the disgrace of being the mother of Mxolisi, the murderer of Amy Biehl. Her first words to Linda Biehl proclaim her guilt by association: “People look at me as though I did it. The generous ones as though I made him do it ”.40 These blunt assertions manifest a struggle that defines the novel as a whole—the

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struggle between guilt and shame. Whereas in The Smell of Apples the active tension between guilt and shame is personified in the split subjectivity and doubled narrative of Marnus Erasmus, in Mother to Mother this friction is manifest in the contradictory assertions of its narrator. The opening sentences of “Mandisa’s lament” clearly evoke the definition of guilt offered by Miller, as the “effect on the subject of an Other who judges, thus of an Other that contains the values that the subject has supposedly transgressed”. The novel represents Mandisa as presenting herself to the “Other who judges”, via the silent persona of Linda, and beginning with the frank confession, “My son killed your daughter”, Mandisa further expands the category of the “judging Other” by invoking the “people” who surround her and look at her “as though I did it”. In what follows, however, Mandisa bristles against the confession that she initially proffered, and attempts to absolve herself of her guilt by assigning blame elsewhere: As though I could make this child do anything. Starting from when he was less than six years old, even before he lost his first tooth or went to school. Starting, if truth be known, from before he was conceived; when he, with total lack of consideration if not downright malice, seeded himself inside my womb. But now, people look at me as if I’m the one who woke up one shushu day and said, Boyboy, run out and see whether, somewhere out there, you can find a white girl with nothing better to do than run around Guguletu, where she does not belong.41

In a defiantly unmaternal move, Mandisa first denies any parental influence over her son—a theme that will manifest itself throughout the novel—and then shifts the blame to Amy, who is guilty of “run[ning] around […] where she does not belong”. Amy’s responsibility for her murder is reiterated over the course of Mandisa’s narrative: “But let me ask you something: what was she doing, vagabonding all over Guguletu, of all places, taking her foot where she had no business?”,42 and the young student’s part in her own death is consolidated into Mandisa’s foreclosure on agency when she redefines Mxolisi as the “sharpened arrow of the wrath of his race”. In this conclusion, all of the parties involved— Mxolisi, Amy, Mandisa and Linda—are constructed as passive, doomed figures manipulated into participating in the “consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe”.43

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If there is shame in Mandisa’s confession, it may be discerned in her agitated attempt to distinguish between passivity and agency, between actor and victim. Her discourse is markedly conflicted as she struggles to articulate the difference between historical inevitability, or the will of the community, and autonomous individual choices. Indeed, Magona’s narrative is deliberately structured to foreground the theme of passivity and to present it as both inevitable and irresistible. The most prominent example of this is Mandisa’s detailed explanation of how Mxolisi became the product of a virgin birth. Historically, the notion of virgin birth reifies the idea of woman as essentially maternal. Her identity as a sexual being or autonomous agent is secondary at best. The original virgin mother, Mary, is depicted as virginal because her role as mother to Jesus—a role for which she is “chosen” precisely because the purity of her faith—is meant to suppress any idea of Mary as a sexualized subject. She is chosen by God because she has no cause for shame, specifically for sexual shame. In an overt reversal of the idea that a virgin birth is a pure, guiltfree birth, Mandisa describes how Mxolisi’s conception is preceded by relentless scrutiny of her genitalia, reminding us of Williams’ assertion that shame originates in the sexual organs. As Mandisa enters adolescence, her mother becomes increasingly anxious about how many of Mandisa’s township friends are falling pregnant, and so takes on the role of vigilant gatekeeper of Mandisa’s virginity, charged with guarding her against unwanted pregnancy: ‘Come, lie down, here,’ she said the first time. Puzzled, I looked at her and at the white towel to which she pointed. Why had she spread a clean towel on the floor? I wondered. ‘Take off your bloomers and lie down on the towel.’ […] There was a struggle, brief and feeble on my part. However, when Mama wanted something done, it got done. And in the manner she wanted it done. That was the beginning of many a trial for me. Mama’s making sure I remained ‘whole’ and ‘unspoilt’ as she said.44

Mandisa’s genitalia signify as a symbol of shame even before the fact, so much so that Mandisa’s mother cannot even trust her own visual inspection of Mandisa’s hymen to detect the shameful secret of intercourse, and consequently sends her away from the urban township of Guguletu to her village of origin, Gungululu, “where children still know how to behave”.45

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The discourse around sexuality as “shameful”, as Mandisa repeatedly describes it, reiterates itself in the village when Mandisa’s grandmother realizes that Mandisa has already missed several periods and the village midwife is summoned to perform the now commonplace task of inspecting Mandisa’s genitals. After the midwife has scrutinized Mandisa she “looked and saw that what I said, that I had done no shameful thing, was true”.46 It is decided that Mandisa “had been jumped into”, thus confirming the ongoing passivity that defines Mandisa’s life.47 Once the object of maternal scrutiny, she subsequently becomes the unwilling receptacle of her unborn son, who has actively “jumped into” her. Mandisa repeatedly describes Mxolisi as the astonishingly proactive agent in his own birth. In the opening page of the novel, she asserts that Mxolisi “seeded himself inside my womb”, and again two paragraphs later she recalls the “first unbelieving shock” of “his implanting himself inside me”.48 In her description of Mxolisi’s conception, one that is returned to repeatedly in order to properly articulate the conflicted nature of the mother-son relationship, Mandisa simply presents herself as the container of her unborn son. Yet, this representation of the unborn child as a wilful and autonomous free agent conflicts with her conclusion that Mxolisi was simply a weapon for the enraged and desperate Xhosa culture, a passive agent of history. This ambivalence, this inability to decide whether Mxolisi is active or passive, is strikingly illustrated when Mandisa describes Mxolisi leaving the house on the day of the murder. In Mandisa’s account to Linda, Mxolisi first stands like “a general surveying his armies, up and down the street he looks”.49 What he sees, however, is the group of student militants who subsume him: “The group opens up and swallows him. In their midst, he is lost. You couldn’t tell him from the others now”.50 The shift is startling from Mxolisi’s representation as a strident, authoritative general to an insignificant segment of a “gigantic, many-limbed millipede”,51 from complete autonomy to “swallowed” and rendered indistinguishable from any other member of the mob. What Mandisa struggles with as she strives to distinguish the active from the passive is the matter of assigning blame for Amy’s murder. As with the description of Mxolisi being swallowed by the “millipede”, Mandisa’s bitterness is directed at the community surrounding her. Mandisa consistently describes large groups of blacks in disparaging terms: the queues at the bus station are like “gigantic columns of ants disturbed into disarray”, or like “the intestines of a pig that children are roasting

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over an open fire”.52 When she attempts to exit the bus, she describes the crowds of people as a “stupid, mindless, hodge-podge of unthinking, unfeeling stupid riffraff”.53 As Samuelson observes, Mandisa’s contempt for others is so profound that in “the wake of the killing even neighborly concern, a central feature of ubuntu, is experienced as intrusive prying”.54 Despite her apparent acceptance of Tatomkhulu’s tale of a nation filled with sadness and anger, and despite her painstaking account of the hardships her community suffers under apartheid, Mandisa ultimately conflates the people around her with a historical force that robs her, and her son, of their autonomy and renders them helpless victims destined for a tragic fate.55 Seeming to oscillate between shame and guilt, yet consistently trying to shed these feelings and assign the blame to someone or something else—Mxolisi, apartheid, Amy, her community,56 history—the affect that Mandisa actually appears to manifest is anxiety. As the Lacanian critic Joan Copjec contends, anxiety “is this feeling of being anchored to an alien self from which we are unable to separate ourselves nor to assume as our own”.57 Anxiety is precisely what occurs when the subject feels herself to be violently wedged into the shape of history or, as Copjec articulates it, “one had to submit to a destiny one did not elect and often experienced as unjust”.58 Throughout the novel, Mandisa struggles against a destiny that she first bluntly acknowledges and then attempts to disavow, creating a tense relationship of attraction-repulsion with her “sister-mother” Linda. At once seeking Linda out to confess her guilt and pushing her confessor away by accusing Amy of victimizing Mxolisi, Mandisa demonstrates her desperate linguistic attempt to “separate” herself from the “alien self” she cannot recognize; her obsessive protests against her unjust destiny.

Extratextuality According to Lacan, suggests Copjec, anxiety is the affect that registers our encounter with the excessive force of the death drive. Copjec contends that this anxiety exceeds us by gesturing towards the lack that defines us, attaching us “to the ontologically incomplete past into which we are born”: it is the “affective result of our relation to ancestral desire”.59 The death drive, as Freud hypothesizes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, can be perceived only in moments of anxiety, and makes itself manifest in the compulsion towards repeating the subject’s movement from, and simultaneously drawing away from, this overwhelming anxiety.

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For Freud, the subject’s relation to the death drive is most effectively illustrated in the fort-da game he observes in a toddler playing. Freud’s interpretation of the fort-da game conjectures that this game demonstrates the “compulsion to repeat” the primal trauma of the young boy’s life—the separation from the mother. It is in the oscillating rhythm of the game—casting the toy away and drawing it back by its string—that the child replicates the separation from, and reunification with, the mother figure. Such a conception of the death drive and its relation to anxiety effectively articulates the attraction-repulsion relationship that Mandisa constructs with Linda, causing the narrative to oscillate between confession and blame, between shame and denial. The fort-da game is essentially about proximity, more specifically, the proximity of the mother figure to the subject. Mandisa’s narrative constructs an ideal reader, a maternal figure who is essentially a better mother than the narrator, in order to initiate the push and pull of shame and displacement from writer to reader, from narrator to fictional addressee. By design, then, Mandisa’s narrative exceeds the novel’s textual framework, reaching out past its generic boundaries to make contact with the reader. The extratextual features of Mother to Mother are signalled from the outset, since the novel is explicitly a fictionalized account of a real event; the Amy Biehl murder. Magona’s inclusion of an “Author’s preface” details the facts of the Biehl murder and explains her compression of four convicted murderers into a single fictional killer, ensuring that the reader understands that the narrative exceeds the boundaries of conventional fiction. The narrative’s intent to incite readerly empathy through personal confession is declared by Magona from the outset, and evidences her certainty that affective response is enhanced by proximity. In an interview with David Attwell, Barbara Harlow and Joan Attwell, Magona reveals that her sympathetic interest in the Amy Biehl murder is entirely based on a personal connection to one of the perpetrators’ mothers: Amy Biehl was killed on 25 August 1993. I was in New York where I live now. I was shocked. I was saddened. But in the ways in which these things are; these things happen. You know, people get killed. My sadness, I must confess, was kind of distant and impersonal. Six months later, I went home for the elections; I discovered that one of the four men implicated in her murder, who were then on trial, is the son of a childhood friend of mine.

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Well, that changed things a bit, because I was catapulted into a situation where I had empathy for the mother of the perpetrator of such a crime.60

As Magona explains it, one’s personal relationship to a news item, no matter how shocking, will always be “distant and impersonal”. Empathy, a word Magona emphasizes in her account, derives from a personal relationship with the subject of misfortune. As for the Biehls, with whom she has no personal connection, Magona admits to only “a vague kind of sympathy”.61 Thus, although Magona’s conception of empathy allows her to create a text that exceeds the conventional boundaries of fiction, it also demarcates the limits of her capacity to construct sympathetic characters. Her personal empathy, as she tells her interviewers, extends only as far as her childhood friend, but not as far as the Biehls themselves. Mandisa’s fictionalized desire to connect with Linda Biehl is ultimately obstructed by the boundaries of her, and Magona’s, empathetic imagination. The silent, distanced figure of Linda Biehl thus serves an ambivalent purpose and provokes similarly equivocal reactions from Mandisa. Linda Biehl, as the object of Mandisa’s apostrophic address, remains a silent confessor at the boundaries of the textual frame, constructed by Mandisa as the “sister-mother” who is readily equipped, by virtue of their shared maternal status, to empathize fully with Mandisa and absolve her of Amy’s murder. Linda is effectively essentialized and universalized and then projected into the space of the reader of Mandisa’s narrative, the space ostensibly occupied by the white book club reader to whom this novel is marketed. By addressing herself to the silent, liminal figure of Linda Biehl, Mandisa/Magona hails the white book club reader and interpellates this reader into the circumscribed role of the all-forgiving mother, the reader who understands because she reads Mandisa’s narrative with a desire to comprehend and to forgive. It is noteworthy that by the time of the novel’s publication in 1998, the parents of Amy Biehl had already come forward to publicly support the application for amnesty submitted by the four murderers, and had established the charitable Amy Biehl Foundation to benefit township youth. The Biehl family—Peter, Linda and Amy—thus enter the national discourse on reconciliation as exemplums for the authentic performance of compassion, forgiveness and engagement with the other. In her treatise on confession and forgiveness in post-apartheid South Africa, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela names the Biehl family as exemplary of an act of

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forgiveness that “does not overlook the deed” but instead “rises above it”.62 Gobodo-Madikizela cites Linda Biehl, in particular, as an embodiment of a capacity to forgive that has a transformational power over two of Amy’s murders. Linda, as Gobodo-Madikizela quotes her, has “not hatred in my heart”, but is focused only on “how these young men can reenter the community and rebuild their lives”.63 While Magona is constructing her narrative, Linda Biehl is already establishing herself in political discourse as a pure and authentic symbol of compassion and forgiveness. Magona’s narrative, then, extends itself extratextually to compel the white reader to conflate herself with the figure of Linda Biehl, and thus situate herself—as has been argued in Chapter 1—comfortably according to a Manichean binary of “good and evil whites”. By hailing the reader as Linda Biehl, Magona asks the reader to accept the compassionate characteristics of Linda Biehl and forgive her characters in the same manner as the Biehls did. Although Behr’s bifurcated narrator does not explicitly address an intended reader as Mandisa does, the structure of The Smell of Apples tacitly enlists the reader in the act of interpreting Marnus’s narrative—the “bifocal” reading process—in such a way that the significance of the novel is created in the extratextual space where narrator and reader coincide. Indeed, the scene in which Mister Smith notices Marnus spying on him from the bedroom window, and acknowledges the boy by saluting him, might serve as an effective representation of the relationship between the reader of The Smell of Apples and its narrator. Usually allowed to remain an invisible spectator, the reader of fiction is recognized as a spy in the Erasmus house, and enlisted in the act of decoding the secrets that young Marnus perceives but cannot fully comprehend. There are several scenes within the novel where Marnus is represented as a reader as well as a spy, offering the reader of The Smell of Apples a reflection of themselves in a novel that, as Barnard notes, is preoccupied with the theme of mirrors and reflections.64 In one pivotal episode, for example, Marnus and Ilse discover a letter from their mother Leonore’s sister, Karla, who has earlier been shunned by Johan and Leonore because of her outspoken feminism. Ilse enlists Marnus in the act of steaming open the envelope and secretly reading the letter—an entreaty from Karla, now living in England, that Leonore opens her eyes to the injustices of apartheid for the sake of the next generation:

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And you, my sister, what will you do if, one day, one of your children were to think and act differently from you? In closing, I must beg you to remember one thing: our children might laugh at us as we do about the Middle Ages. But possibly, our children will never forgive us. Please embrace Ilse for me. All my love, Karla.65

The covert interception of Tannie Karla’s letter offers a complex encoding of the act of reading that reflects outward towards the reader of Behr’s novel. The letter is presented in its entirety and almost entirely without narrative commentary. Prior to the letter’s transcription, Marnus describes Ilse softly reading the letter aloud to Marnus, occasionally stopping to listen for approaching footsteps.66 For his part, Marnus offers only a succinct comment on the letter before Karla’s entreaty is presented to the reader: “I didn’t understand everything Tannie Karla wrote”.67 After this brief interjection—noteworthy in its brevity in a novel that frames every observation young Marnus makes as overwritten by parental subtext—the letter is presented without such commentary and is followed immediately by a section break. In relation to Tannie Karla’s letter, Marnus is merely a silent, invisible and ultimately uncomprehending reader. Karla’s entreaty to Leonore, specifically concerned as it is with the fate of her children, cannot be understood by the child narrator of the event. The irony of this quandary is encoded in the letter: Karla understands that Marnus is already a lost cause in terms of his escape from ideological indoctrination; her closing request to “embrace Ilse for me” excludes Marnus from the promise of love and nurturing. At the same time as it offers a representation of the reader as a manifestation of Sartre’s silent voyeur, Karla’s letter also activates what Medalie terms the “bifocal” lens of the reader. The extratextual reader, cued by Marnus’s claim that he “didn’t understand everything” that was written, is interpellated as the one who understands everything, the one who is able to interpret what Marnus fails to comprehend. The reader consistently performs this “bifocal” reading, an activity that breaks the frame of the narrative by making the reader an active participant in the narrative itself. The conscription of the reader into the interpretive act reaches its denouement when Marnus’s spying accidentally allows him to witness the rape of Frikkie. Throughout the encounter, Marnus believes that it

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is Mister Smith who is raping Frikkie, since it takes place in the General’s bedroom and Marnus has earlier noticed the physical resemblances between Johan and the General. Confusion and anxiety pervade Marnus’s description of the scene until the boy finally notices a key physiological detail: “Even before the pyjama-shirt has moved halfway up, I can see: the scar is gone from the General’s back”.68 Marnus provides the detail of the missing scar without offering the solution to this expository paradox; he is unwilling or unable to recognize who the rapist really is, so the burden of that narrative revelation is placed solely upon the reader, who must again employ their “bifocal” vision to understand Marnus’s misrecognition of Johan. The reader is hailed from their comfortable space of distanced invisibility into a closer and more intimate proximity with the naïve young narrator. This proximity, once again, is meant to establish empathy and understanding, providing Marnus’s shameful confession with a sympathetic confessor. Just as Mother to Mother constructs an extratextual reader that the narrator can both gravitate towards and push against, so too does The Smell of Apples draw the reader into close proximity with Marnus and then push them away. In the case of Behr’s novel, though, the distancing move is entirely extratextual and occurred in the year following the publication of the novel. Specifically, Mark Behr’s speech confessing to spying for the apartheid government while he attended Stellenbosch University establishes another sort of surprising extratextual relationship with the reader; a relationship that starkly alienates the reader from the novel and its narrator. Timothy Bewes begins his meditation on The Event of Postcolonial Shame by recalling Gilles Deleuze’s assertion that narrative is rooted in “the shame of being a man”,69 and this assertion finds its extratextual equivalence in Mark Behr’s notorious 1996 confession that he once served as a spy for the apartheid government. Behr’s confession— first presented as a speech at the “Living in the Fault Lines” writers’ conference in Cape Town in July 1996—begins by announcing itself as necessary and provocative but at the same time “drenched in shame”.70 Behr not only confesses to his crimes of complicity with the apartheid government, but painstakingly dissects the web of factors that motivated him to acquiesce to the apartheid regime:

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At the age of 22 I was approached by what was probably a well-meaning relative who was a high-ranking officer in the South African Police Force. What motivated my acceptance of the offer was certainly having my studies paid, but having been through the training of the South African Defence Force, and having been extremely proud of my officer status, there must have been some political motive as well. There could have also been a misguided design at imitating and becoming part of the masculinist codes which I, since childhood, had both loathed and adored.71

Cataloguing a range of motivations, Behr creates a confessional discourse, as Nic Borain argues in his angry critique of the speech, where there “is no chink in the words for us to enter and engage with him. He has pre-empted any possible criticism by exhaustively criticising himself”.72 That is, Behr’s confessional narrator in this instance distances himself from the intended audience as he begins to scrutinize his own motivations as though he were personally solving the mystery of himself. Behr’s confession thoroughly details possible motivations, generating an exhaustive self-critique that distances the reader from the textual scene, but what Borain’s critique overlooks is that almost every item in the catalogue is couched in the conditional—“probably”, “must have been”, “could also have been”—which offer the reader the “chinks” through which we might, if not engage, certainly interrogate Behr’s confession. Behr proffers his motivations as possibilities —he definitively admits to a financial incentive, but is more tentative and uncertain about the other factors influencing him. Indeed, he mentions, in a self-congratulatory aside, that he once wrote an essay in his final year of secondary school arguing the absurdity of apartheid policies, thus adding to his enigmatic sense of himself as a young liberal thoroughly corrupted by a repressive system.73 Trying to retrace the roots of his complicity, Behr can only examine himself at a remove, and thus the reader is kept similarly at a distance. Much like the adult voice of Marnus trying to comprehend the events of his childhood, both narrator and reader encounter a conspicuous and possibly insurmountable gap between the event and its significance. Among his inventory of motivations, at once reticent and gauche, Behr’s most provocative suggestion is that it was the desire to partake of the “masculinist codes” of his culture that impelled him to commit his shameful acts. As Deleuze suggests, the shame of being a man—or in this case, of not being a man—propels the narrative of Behr’s life, a narrative

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that inevitably becomes entangled in the narrative of his bildungsroman. In his confession—his professed attempt to arrive at the truth of his life to date—Behr invokes the compelling power of what Heyns, in his analysis of The Smell of Apples , terms the “erotic patriarchy”. This system, as Heyns contends, coerces the male subject into complicity not through violence but through the more insidious power of “paternal tenderness”.74 Importantly, Behr’s real-life motivations align with Heyns’s analysis of The Smell of Apples , and thus the extratextual confession leads the reader inevitably back to the novel itself as its ultimate solution. Behr’s assertion that he has “both loathed and adored” these “masculinist codes” echoes Marnus’s perpetual struggle to prove himself a man in the eyes of his father, and his father’s ultimate seduction of him back into the illusion of familial stability at the end of the novel, after Marnus witnesses the rape of Frikkie: He smiles at me across the boat and asks: ‘Tell me first, my little bull, is there froth in the water yet in the mornings when you have a pee?’ I smile and nod my head. Dad laughs and says yes, I’m big enough to go tiger-fishing now, and Mum should stop worrying about me.75

By drawing attention to these connections between his personal issues and the themes portrayed in the novel, Behr’s disclosure reconfigures The Smell of Apples as the culmination of his confessional discourse, the alibi for the shameful activities of Behr’s youth. By returning the reader to the novel, the confessional discourse claims to bring itself to its ultimate destination, the endpoint of its trajectory. That terminus is the dying Marnus’s declaration that he has ultimately been powerless against the forces of history, and that the only genuine escape from history is through death. His final words grant him absolution through that death, a death that confirms that he was a passive victim of history, culture, and—as is signified by his final imagining of his father’s embrace—his human desire to be loved.

Unspeakable Shame Both The Smell of Apples and Mother to Mother consciously construct a confessional discourse that creates an extratextual bond with their readers, beguiling those readers onto a course towards a “shameful secret” that actually releases the protagonists of these novels—and in Behr’s case, the author—from the genuine but inarticulate shame that pervades each

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narrative. As Copjec argues in her comparison of anxiety, guilt and shame, the important difference between these three affective states “lies not, as Levinas would have it, in the vanishing of all hope of escape but, rather, in the vanishing of the imperative to escape”.76 This imperative to escape, Copjec continues, is replaced by another: “to hide, conceal, or refuse to disclose” the true nature of one’s shame.77 Both novels present narratives of anxiety and guilt in order to preserve the opacity of their real origins, namely shame. The two novels each utilize death as the most effective recourse to concealment. Each narrative ends in a violent death that confirms, for its narrator, the irrevocability of fate and their own status as doomed victim of a malevolent history. Death is reliable, one might argue, because it subsumes all characters, all objections, all narratives; it is the ultimate foreclosure on meaning. Yet, what is surprising is that the narratives in question exceed death, and this excess represents the essential secret that cannot be contained, articulated and foreclosed upon. It is in this excess that genuine traces of shame reveal themselves: a shame that fuels a confessional discourse that cannot be adequately concluded, that cannot find its terminus in absolution, that circulates perpetually between narrator and reader. The excessive conclusion of The Smell of Apples derives from what appears to be an elegant solution to a daunting narrative problem, specifically, how to conclude a first-person narrative in which the narrator dies. Behr solves the matter of utilizing a dead narrator by returning to the voice of the eleven-year-old Marnus after the soldier has died, replicating similar shifts in voice that have occurred throughout the novel, and allowing the novel to conclude with the words of a live child rather than a dead adult. This final narrative shift, however, exceeds the death of the narrator by allowing the narrator to continue to exist past his textual death. The shift also marks a return to young Marnus’s voice at the exact moment that he retreats back into wilful naiveté. The final scene of Marnus’s childhood—the final scene of the novel—involves Marnus deciding that “it’s better” that Frikkie has refused to confess to him about the rape: “If he didn’t want to tell me about Dad, then he’ll never tell anyone. And it’s right that way”.78 Feeling secure that Frikkie will suppress the secret of his rape, Marnus allows his father to cajole him back into the world of the erotic patriarchy when Johan declares that Marnus can now go “tiger-fishing”, and the novel’s concluding sentence confirms that Marnus’s viewpoint is now as naïve as when the novel began: “It’s

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a perfect day, just like yesterday. One of those days when Mum says: the Lord’s hand is resting over False Bay”.79 The final invocation of God’s divine presence, as well as the assertion that both “today” and “yesterday” have been “perfect” days, dramatizes Marnus’s reversion to an earlier state of innocence and self-delusion, reinstating a tone of Edenic nostalgia and effectively reversing the imagery of the original sin and rotten apples that had previously signalled a fall from grace. The reader, of course, remembers all these previous events, and the final scene reactivates their bifocal vision: the reader has been co-opted into the shameful secret that Frikkie and Marnus have agreed to suppress, and the empathetic proximity with Marnus, the always innocent victim of corrupt parents and a corrupt culture, is re-established. The idea that the secret that Marnus names is the key to the narrative is reaffirmed for the reader, who is again disturbed from their position at the literary keyhole by the sound of footsteps. The other point of excess in this final scene, however, is crucial to understanding the actual source of shame within the narrative. Just before the morning departure for vacation, after Marnus has decided that with Frikkie “the secret will always be safe”, Marnus falls asleep and revisits a recurring dream where he and Frikkie are “galloping along Muizenberg Beach”.80 This dream has been mentioned earlier by Marnus, but, as is fitting in these final moments, the dream now reaches its surprising apotheosis: “I laugh and turn to look at Frikkie. But it’s not Frikkie on the horse next to me. It’s Little-Neville”.81 The sudden substitution reveals the surplus of unarticulated shame driving Marnus’s narrative, a shame that exceeds the novel’s own textuality to reflect on the novel’s author and its readers. Little-Neville, the son of the Erasmus’s maid, Doreen, spends most of the novel as an absent presence on the periphery of the family drama. He is expected home from school, Marnus is told, but never arrives.82 There are fleeting references throughout the novel to Little-Neville’s disappearance, almost always dismissed as needless anxiety on Doreen’s part by Marnus’s mother, Leonore. As the novel nears its conclusion, Little-Neville is discovered, having been severely burned in a railway yard by three white men. Despite Leonore’s discomfort about Little-Neville’s attack, an event that cannot fit easily into the racist truisms and biblical platitudes that usually organize her worldview, she takes Ilse and Marnus to visit Doreen and her son in his hospital room, and Marnus’s first glimpse of Little-Neville produces a reaction of fascination and repulsion:

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The bed is covered with a big plastic sheet that looks like a tent. LittleNeville is lying on his stomach. There are tubes inside his nose and his eyes are shut. […] He’s completely naked and his arms are tied to the bed with strips of plastic to stop him from scratching the burns. His legs are drawn wide apart so that they won’t rub together. Between his thighs, across his bum and all over his back it looks like a big piece of raw liver. The medicines and ointments and everything smell too terrible, and I put my hand over my nose. I don’t want to see anymore.83

His senses overwhelmed to the point of synesthesia, Marnus’s attention shifts back and forth between the prone, abject figure of Little-Neville and the beautiful scenery outside the window—the same scenery Marnus will eventually focus on in his concluding thoughts on his “perfect day”. The scene ends with Leonore trying to offer Doreen consolation through religious truisms, and a brief altercation between Ilse and Leonore. All these details seem relevant to understanding the members of the Erasmus family—Leonore’s inability to feel empathy for her maid and her family, Ilse’s emerging social conscience—but most relevant, as critics have noted, is the visual parallel between Little-Neville on the hospital bed and the forthcoming imagery of Frikkie’s rape. This conspicuous similitude draws attention to an allegorical chain of signification that offers a concise summation of the novel’s theme of indoctrination. The violent, racist attack on Little-Neville is linked to the violent rape of Frikkie, which in turn signifies the way Marnus has been symbolically raped by his father and the ideology of apartheid, throughout the novel. Little-Neville’s purpose, narratively speaking, appears to be to initiate that associative chain, metonymically connecting a direct victim of apartheid, by virtue of his status as Coloured, to the insidious victimization of Afrikaner youth by apartheid. Yet the metaphoric significance of Frikkie’s rape could certainly be understood without the inclusion in the novel of Little-Neville. The child’s burned and tortured body remains excessive precisely by virtue of its peripheral nature. His inclusion exceeds the narrative by offering the reader, and Marnus, a fleeting glimpse of the world outside the insular garrison of the Erasmus family home. By allowing Doreen into the intimate family scene, the Erasmus family unintentionally opens a small peephole to the outside world in all its violence and horror. LittleNeville’s attack resonates as the footsteps in the hallway as the Erasmus family peers through this peephole, awakening the family to their shame.

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Little-Neville’s character is not only excessive but also ephemeral; Marnus cannot bear to look at him in his hospital bed and, as such, cannot bear to allow him into his narrative. Certainly, the closest contact Marnus has with Little-Neville is in the dream that precedes the novel’s conclusion. The dream is in itself excessive as all dreams are—overflowing the boundaries of reality and conflating realism and symbolism. The dream establishes a brief but fleeting proximity between Marnus and LittleNeville, and consequently between the reader and Little-Neville. Yet, when Marnus wakes up the dream is forgotten and replaced, as has already been argued, with the renewed innocence of Marnus as the family is once again integrated and bound together in prayer and praise of their South Africa. Marnus’s voice returns to its original sense of innocence, expressive of familial love and Christian faith, and concluding with words quoted directly from “Mum”. The reader’s sympathy is once again focused on Marnus, and their bifocal vision has been activated one last time, ensuring a final confirmation of proximity. Thus the shame of The Smell of Apples is its inability to accommodate the suffering of blacks or Coloureds as anything more than an excess that cannot be borne or adequately incorporated into a narrative. The narrative itself cannot bear to look at Little-Neville’s suffering for any length of time, and averts its eyes in order to pay attention to the victimization of Marnus. The narrative cannot help but insist that the real victim of apartheid is Marnus, and by extension, Mark Behr. The novel and the confessional speech at the Faultlines conference each function solely to generate sympathetic proximity to Marnus and to Mark Behr. The narrative knows that the real victim is Little-Neville, but cannot face up to that truth; its purview is, excluding the brief glimpses outside itself, insular and self-pitying. The shame of the narrator and the author results from their collective insistence that the reader experience a sympathetic proximity to them as victims of apartheid, inciting a complicity to forget the true victims of apartheid, in this case represented by the tortured and abject body of Little-Neville, because Little-Neville is only a body—he is never a subject in the sense of being upright or one who meets Marnus’s gaze. The desire to be recognized as the victim of her own narrative is also the secret shame of Mandisa in Mother to Mother. In this case, the shame is expressed linguistically, in the tendency to blame Amy for her own death, but may also be manifest in the silent, invisible space occupied by Linda Biehl. As in the case of Little-Neville, Linda Biehl exceeds the narrative space of Magona’s novel: although she is the reader towards

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whom Mandisa’s confession is addressed she offers no response, and consequently no absolution. Although Mandisa is able to describe Amy’s death in graphic detail, she is not able to construct a voice with which Linda can respond to Mandisa’s story or her confession. Consequently, Linda, the real victim in this story of random violence, is denied her status as victim. The other grieving mother, Linda remains an excessive presence that the narrative only briefly acknowledges as faint footsteps in the corridor, reminding Mandisa of her intrusive presence invading Linda’s private grief. Ultimately, the shameful confession that each of these novels makes is their inability to forge an empathetic connection with the suffering other, the genuine victims of a larger historical narrative. Unable to avoid declaring themselves victims in need of sympathy, the proximity these narrators establish with the reader enlists the reader in the shameful act of complicity that masquerades as empathy.

Notes 1. “South Africa: Important Phrases.” Tripadvisor Canada, August 5, 2017. www.tripadvisor.ca/Travel-g293740-s604/South-Africa:Important. Phrases.html. 2. Coetzee, J.M. “Confessions and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky.” Comparative Literature 37 (1985): 194. 3. Coetzee, J.M. “Confessions and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” 222. 4. Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 39. 5. See my discussion of the value placed on affective proximity for the project of post-apartheid reconciliation in Chapter 2. 6. Coetzee, J.M. “Confessions and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky.” Comparative Literature 37 (1985): 194. 7. The language that I find myself utilizing to describe the trajectory of the confessional discourse insistently reminds me of Freud’s description of the “death drive” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). As Freud (1984, p. 308) would have it, the death drive manifests itself in a compulsion towards repetition in a drive toward ultimately restoring “an earlier state of things”. This resonates with Coetzee’s description of the confession as an endless iteration of itself as it reaches toward the final state of absolution which is also an “earlier state of things”, namely innocence. 8. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, 34.

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9. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, 35. 10. The South African Defense forces were involved in a number of covert “border wars” between 1966 and 1990 that involved incursions into South West Africa (Namibia), Angola and Zambia in their attempts to contain or defeat local independence movements supported by the Soviet Union, China and, in the case of Angola, Cuba. Often these incursions onto foreign soil were kept secret and publicly denied at the time. The battle that seems to be alluded to in The Smell of Apples , the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, took place between January and March 1988 and was the second largest battle fought on the African continent after the Battle of El Alamein. 11. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples . New York: Picador, 1995, 31. 12. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples , 198. 13. Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998, V. 14. Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother, 1. 15. Magona, Sindiwe, 201. 16. The young prophetess Nongqawuse reported to the Xhosa that she had been told by the spirits of the elders that if they sacrificed all their cattle and burned all their crops, the spirits of the dead would return and drive the white settlers from the African continent. The Xhosa slaughtered approximately 400,000 head of cattle and burned more than 600,000 acres of land and the ensuing famine resulted in the deaths of as many as forty thousand people. For a detailed account, see JB Peires’s The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1989. 17. Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998, 175. 18. Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother, 178. 19. Magona, Sindiwe, 210. 20. Magona, Sindiwe, 210. 21. Miller, Jacques-Alain. “On Shame.” 22. Miller, Jacques-Alain. “On Shame.” 23. Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 78. 24. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1966, 284. 25. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 285. 26. Levinas, Emmanuel. On Escape. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 64. 27. Miller, Jacques-Alain. “On Shame,” np. 28. Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 24.

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29. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples . New York: Picador, 1995, 65. 30. Barnard, Rita. “The Smell of Apples , Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology.” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 207. 31. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples . New York: Picador, 1995, 38–39. 32. Rajiva, Jay. “The Seduction of Narration in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples .” Research in African Literatures 44 (2013): 85. 33. Rajiva, Jay. “The Seduction of Narration in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples ,” 89. 34. Rita Barnard (2000, pp. 212–13) offers a sustained discussion of this form of indoctrination in terms of Louis Althusser’s concept of ideological interpellation in her analysis of The Smell of Apples . 35. Medalie, David. “‘Such Wanton Innocence’: Representing South African Boyhoods.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 12 (2000): 51. 36. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples . New York: Picador, 1995, 6. 37. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples , 30. 38. Behr, Mark, 35. 39. Behr, Mark, 30. 40. Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998, 1. 41. Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother, 1. 42. Magona, Sindiwe, 2. 43. Magona, Sindiwe, 210. 44. Magona, Sindiwe, 95. 45. Magona, Sindiwe, 99. A significant theme in Mother to Mother is the reversal of roles between parents and children after the Soweto riots of 1976, with the children holding power over their elders. Mandisa’s autobiographical reflections describe a traditional situation in her childhood home in Blouvlei where children once respected their elders, but she contends that this natural order is overturned when they are displaced to Guguletu, and the mothers are forced to work away from home in order to support the family (Magona 1998, p. 67). This hierarchical shift between parents and children is a common theme in South African literature of the era, reflecting a political situation which was spearheaded by students, since most adult leaders of the resistance were either in prison, in exile, or had been killed. Mandisa describes the students of Guguletu as holding absolute power over their parents: “These tyrants our children have become, power crazed, at the drop of a hat, these often absurd demands on us, their parents” (24). The theme is also prominent in Zakes Mda’s 1995 novel, Ways of Dying. 46. Magona, Sindiwe, 112. 47. Magona, Sindiwe, 112. 48. Magona, Sindiwe, 1–2. 49. Magona, Sindiwe, 11.

226 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

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Magona, Sindiwe, 11. Magona, Sindiwe, 11. Magona, Sindiwe, 24. Magona, Sindiwe, 39. Samuelson, Meg. “Reading the Maternal Voice in Sindiwe Magona’s To My Children’s Children and Mother to Mother.” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 230. Mandisa begins her narrative, and therefore the account of her misfortunes, at the moment her village of Blouvlei is forcibly evicted by the apartheid government and relocated to Guguletu. When he is four years old, Mxolisi accidentally betrays some older friends to the police, who proceed to shoot the activists to death in front of the young boy. Mandisa also describes how community expectations and authority thwart her from becoming the “me I would have become”. She convinces her father, for example, that she doesn’t need to marry Mxolisi’s father, China, but could stay in her parents’ home and continue her education. Soon after, though, Mandisa’s father’s decision is overruled by the clan, and Mandisa’s dreams of education are doomed (128). Copjec, Joan. “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema.” Filozofski vestnik 27 (2006): 18. Copjec, Joan. “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema,” 18. Copjec, Joan, 20. Attwell, David, Barbara Harlow, and Joan Attwell. “Interview with Sindiwe Magona.” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 283–84. Attwell, David, Barbara Harlow, and Joan Attwell. “Interview with Sindiwe Magona,” 284. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. A Human Being Died That Night. New York: Mariner Books, 2004, 117. Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. A Human Being Died That Night, 170. Barnard, Rita. “The Smell of Apples , Moby-Dick, and Apartheid Ideology.” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 212. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples . New York: Picador, 1995, 111. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples , 109. Behr, Mark, 110. Behr, Mark, 177. Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 1. Behr, Mark. “Living in the Fault Lines.” Security Dialogue 28 (1997): 115. Behr, Mark. “Living in the Fault Lines,” 117. Borain, Nic. “The Smell of Rotten Apples.” Mail & Guardian, July 12, 1996, 27. https://mg.co.za/article/1996-07-12-the-smell-of-rottenapples.

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73. Behr, Mark. “Living in the Fault Lines,” 117. 74. Heyns, Michiel. “Fathers and Sons: Structures of Erotic Patriarchy in Afrikaans Writing of the Emergency.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 27 (1996): 93–94. 75. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples . New York: Picador, 1995, 200. 76. Copjec, Joan. “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema.” Filozofski vestnik 27 (2006): 11–29. 77. Copjec, Joan. “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema,” 26. 78. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples . New York: Picador, 1995, 199. 79. Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples , 200. 80. Behr, Mark, 199. 81. Behr, Mark, 199. 82. Behr, Mark, 31, 61. 83. Behr, Mark, 189.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: How Close Is Too Close? Anger, Reconciliation and the “Born Free” Generation

Malema’s Song How close is too close? At a rally for university students in March 2010, almost sixteen years after South Africa’s first democratic election, Julius Malema, then president of the ANC Youth League, caused a national scandal by singing the lyrics “shoot the Boer” [Dubul’ ibhunu] from the old anti-apartheid song “Ayasab’ amagwala” [The cowards are scared].1 Once a courageous statement of resistance, now that the transition to a full democracy was almost two decades old, with the ANC remaining the country’s elected ruling party since 1994, this song now seemed a reckless incitement to hatred and violence. Indeed, Malema persisted in singing these lyrics at rallies throughout that year and was eventually convicted of hate speech in September 2011. Rather than distancing themselves from Malema as the outcry grew more intense, however, prominent members of the ANC defended his choice of lyrics. The song, they contended, was “part of the ANC’s history, part of their struggle”, and rather than constituting an immediate call for violent reciprocation against white South Africans, it was simply a “way of commemorating South Africa’s recent history”.2 Malema similarly maintained that the song was “still relevant to the current conditions of our struggle” and was therefore not an instance of hate speech but part of the ongoing struggle for black South Africans to survive.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Libin, Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55977-9_7

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I introduce my conclusion with this anecdote because it offers a provocative and performative illustration of the complicated, volatile relationship between South Africa’s apartheid past and its post-apartheid present. Despite the peaceful transition to democracy, heralded both domestically and internationally as a political miracle, despite the profound, nation-wide emotional catharsis that erupted as a result of the TRC hearings on gross human rights violations and the subsequent amnesty hearings, despite the continued re-election of the ANC by overwhelming majorities since 1994, the strident voice of Julius Malema calls out to the victims of apartheid who remain unreconciled—unable to move from a traumatic past into a democratic present. Without the immediate crisis of apartheid looming over him, Malema continued to superimpose a discourse of emergency onto the quotidian lives of black South Africans, thereby constructing their day-to-day existence as a violent struggle against ongoing evil. The dissonance inherent in the singing of an apartheid-era chant in a society that has been democratic for almost twenty years indicates a kind of temporal and political impasse, in the sense of “impasse” as defined by Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, as “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic”.3 I have employed Berlant’s term earlier, in Chapter 2, to describe the affective tension experienced by the book club reader who is confronted by Beauty Mapule’s insoluble bitterness towards her benevolent liberal employers in Méira Cook’s novel, The House on Sugarbush Road.4 Beauty’s surreptitious resentment, I argued, creates an impasse for the book club reader by rebutting the inculcated belief that reading about global inequality is a virtue in and of itself: by suggesting that the benevolent middle-class liberal remains complicit in the oppression of the marginalized, and that the marginalized might resent this complicity. The impasse I want to examine in this conclusion also counts the lingering anger of black South Africans as its primary symptom, although the object of their anger is less clearly defined than that of the fictional Beauty Mapule. Malema’s war cry gives voice to this anger and this impasse, articulating a collision between a past that has not yet passed and a present that is yet to fully arrive in terms of reconciliation and a realization of the optimism invested in it. This impasse makes evident a knot of entanglement, as Sarah Nuttall uses the term to describe postapartheid culture in general: “an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted,

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or ignored or uninvited”.5 In this case, the entanglement is of a temporal nature, involving the clandestine but volatile connection between the historical past and the emergent present. The traumatic wounds that the TRC promised would be healed continue to fester, and despite periods of potential recuperation, they continue to flare up at unpredictable moments, in surprising ways. The protracted impact of the past upon the present is portrayed in a compelling fashion in the 2016 play, I See You, by first-time playwright Mongiwekhaya. The play dramatizes a violent yet disturbingly intimate encounter between Buthelezi, a former freedom fighter who is now a policeman, and Ben, a South African born, American raised, university student. In its portrayal of the claustrophobic relationship between past and present, Mongiwekhaya dramatizes a generational entanglement, an uninvited intimacy—one that Ben futilely tries to resist. In this play—which was well received both critically and commercially—the past generation imposes itself, violently, on the present generation, demanding that the present settles its outstanding debt to its immediate forebears. The premise of I See You is not extraordinary in historical or political terms, but rather details an ordinary situation suddenly transformed into a violent, disturbing conflict, a situation which forces the audience to reconsider the parameters of the ordinary. As such, it is unlike other texts I have discussed, all of which deal with the affective aftermath of the crisis of apartheid. As Berlant contends, “the genre of crisis can distort something structural and ongoing within ordinariness into something that seems shocking and exceptional”.6 Both Julius Malema’s political rallies and Mongiwekhaya’s ostensibly post-political play offer tantalizing examples of the deployment of this exceptional “genre of crisis” in a contemporary context.

Retracing Our Steps Twenty years after the 1994 general elections, the question of the centrality of the apartheid era to contemporary South African culture and literature remains a point of ongoing critical debate. In terms of criticism, the consensus appears to be that literary culture would have a healthier influence on society if it were to renounce its obsession with the past. As early as 1998, Elleke Boehmer, for example, encouraged South African writers to abandon the pessimistic realism of the apartheid era and seek out new forms and possibilities.7 In a similar vein, David

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Medalie’s 2012 essay, “‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature”, focuses on three post-apartheid novels— J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat —arguing that these narratives demonstrate that in the “new” South Africa, the historical past is “more likely to darken the present than to illuminate it”.8 Like Boehmer, Medalie argues that the power the past exerts on post-apartheid literature keeps its readers imprisoned in a perpetual melancholic state. Despite Medalie’s contention, however, a number of novels produced prior to 2012 wrestled with issues facing contemporary South Africa without recourse to the historical past. Phaswane Mpe’s 2001 novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, for example, deals with the violence, hatred and fear that permeate the inner-city neighbourhood of Hillbrow, Johannesburg. The neighbourhood is homogeneously black, and the daily threats to the lives of its citizenry are not directly imposed by a white middleclass, suburban minority, but by other residents of Hillbrow, in the form of violent crime, AIDS and xenophobia. As portrayed in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, the local news no longer focuses on the TRC hearings but rather documents an endless litany of death and mayhem: For formal news, there was Radio Lebowa — now Thobela FM — broadcasting snippets of car hijackings and robbers’ shoot-outs with the Johannesburg Murder and Robbery Squad every news hour. Five men were found with their ribs ripped off by what appeared to have been a butcher’s knife … Two women were raped and then killed in Quartz Street … Three Nigerians who evaded arrest at Jan Smuts Airport were finally arrested in Pretoria Street for drug dealing … Street kids, drunk with glue, brandy and wild visions of themselves as Hollywood movie drivers, were racing their wire-made cars through red robots, thus increasingly becoming a menace to motorists driving through Hillbrow, especially in the vicinity of Banket and Claim Streets … At least eight people died and thirteen were injured when the New Year’s Eve celebrations took the form of torrents of bottles gushing out of the brooding clouds that were flat balconies …9

Mpe’s novel was welcomed by critics as an important move forward for South African fiction since it presented the surprising idea that many South African citizens are far too preoccupied with imminent threats to their lives in the form of murder, rape and AIDS to ruminate on the ongoing legacy of apartheid. The massive death toll from both crime and

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AIDS has become the reality of a new era that might be termed postpost-apartheid—an era with no tangible or meaningful connection to the oppressive past. Welcome to Our Hillbrow was followed by the publication of other novels by black South African writers, their narratives also focusing on the daily struggles of contemporary urban life: K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Kgebetli Moete’s Room 207 (2006) and Niq Mhlongo’s After Tears (2007) are among the critically-acclaimed examples of this emergent genre. The protagonists of these novels do not dwell on memories of apartheid, nor do they spend much time interacting with white South Africans. Their communities appear to be as circumscribed by racial identity as they were during the apartheid era, although the struggle for survival is no longer defined as a contest against the white minority, but against unjust social realities in which the characters are irrevocably subjugated, whether these involve sexual orientation (Duiker), economic hustling (Moete) or familial expectations (Mhlongo). The emotional repercussions of the apartheid era, it seems clear in these novels, are no longer felt by the general populace of South Africa; the nation has eased back into what Langer terms chronological time, and its struggles are now resolutely contemporary, social, economic and global. South Africa’s present situation is now the purview of the next generation, the so-called born free generation.10

Born Free The literary investment in the “born free” generation, and the consequent divestment from the legacy of apartheid, would have to be considered a triumph for the ideology of reconciliation and ubuntu that suffused the last years of the twentieth century. That is to say, what appears to be the complete indifference of the “born free” generation to the past seems to confirm the successful completion of the Truth and Reconciliation process: the trauma of the past has been successfully articulated and resolved and is therefore no longer a factor in the present. The contemporary generation appears to have been liberated from the entanglements of the past and successfully integrated into the global cosmopolitanism of the current moment. This sense of a generation truly “born free”—not just free to vote but unencumbered by the racism and political inequities of past generations—instils South African literature of the twenty-first century with an optimistic aura, giving the impression that, as far as its artists and

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writers are concerned, the nation has transcended the worst of its history. Even the novels I have just mentioned, narratives that might otherwise be perceived as bleak and hopeless in their inventory of poverty, crime and death, are optimistic in this sense. As Berlant suggests, optimism does not need to feel uplifting in order to be operative, “at any moment it might feel like anything, including nothing”.11 To argue for the optimism of Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Room 207 , After Tears or The Quiet Violence of Dreams may seem perverse given the sustained suffering experienced by the various characters, but each of these narratives, by turning away from a narrowly political imperative, implies that contemporary South African society has been emancipated from a debilitating attachment to its traumatic past, even though that liberation has not been accompanied by an end to poverty, violence or xenophobia. Nevertheless, the sense that these narratives convey—that the born free generation suffers no after effects, and indeed has no substantial historical memory of the apartheid era—characterizes Berlant’s theorizing of what she terms “cruel optimism”.12 Mongiwekhaya’s 2016 play, I See You, goes further than the aforementioned texts to expose the impasse that underlies and challenges such historical optimism. In his debut play, Mongiwekhaya, aka Mongi Mthobeni, tests the idealism underpinning the “born free” generation by bringing it into violent contact with the apartheid generation over the course of a painfully protracted evening—another long night’s journey into day, as it were.13 Set in 2012, the play focuses on two characters as representatives of their particular generations: Shenge Buthelezi, a fiftyfive-year-old former MK soldier who now works as a policeman, and Ben Mthombeni, a university student who, although born in South Africa, was raised in the United States. The action of I See You begins when, after a routine traffic stop, Buthelezi, with the help of his partner, Zulu Masinga, takes Ben into custody under the auspices of obtaining a blood alcohol test. It is clear to everyone involved that this detainment is contrived, the beginning of a sadistic game being played with the student. The two policemen single out Ben because he is, they feel, a “cheeseboy” and a “coconut”—a privileged black man who they find in the company of a young Afrikaner woman; a youth who clings to an anglicized given name and claims not to know any African languages. Over the course of the night, the officers take Ben on a nightmarish ride around the city, during which Buthelezi repeatedly tortures the young man, beating and throttling him and twisting his handcuffs mercilessly behind his back:

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That was a small twist. If I twist a little harder, I could break both your wrists without me sweating. […] With a strong lift and twist, I could dislocate both of your shoulders. It’s harder work for me, but the agony you feel if I did that …? (Whistles ).14

Sadistically twisting the cuffs, Buthelezi forces Ben to “dance the pantsula” and to speak in Xhosa as the youth writhes and screams in agony.15 Buthelezi, a man whose past identity and pride has been displaced by the historical amnesia of the present generation, is dedicated to visiting a specific form of retributive vengeance on Ben which involves forcing the youth to acknowledge his repressed cultural identity. Enmeshed as they are in an uninvited intimacy, both Buthelezi and Ben are compelled, by their antagonism towards the other, to confront—albeit from different angles—the impasse of the present. Buthelezi is introduced in the first scene as he washes himself with water from a bucket in preparation for his Friday night shift with Masinga. As he swabs himself down, he is backlit by a flickering moon and the Johannesburg cityscape, the key feature, the stage directions instruct, being “the Nelson Mandela Bridge, lit up with all the colours of the rainbow”.16 Sharing the stage with Buthelezi is DJ Mavovo, who remains in a radio booth throughout the play. The stage directions describe Mavovo as a “shamanistic presence” who is the “personification of the Nelson Mandela Bridge”; and we listen to her on-air patter as she promises that the music she plays will “heal the wounds of the past” just as her voice will “soothe the savage beast”.17 The visibly distraught and isolated Buthelezi, shirtless and solitary on a dark stage, stands in front of the glowing Mandela bridge and does not seem to react to the mollifying lines of the DJ’s monologue, thereby undermining the messages of hope conveyed by them. Mongiwekhaya continues to foreground the disjunction between the past and the present throughout this opening scene. Buthelezi turns on the TV as he bathes himself, and as he changes channels, he and the audience hear fragmented audio clips that together create the soundtrack for a nation suspended between the promise of the past and the harsh realities of the present. The first channel he flips to offers a report of Nelson Mandela’s failing health, on the next channel we hear Desmond Tutu explaining ubuntu, while the third channel broadcasts a report on the Marikana Massacre complete with audio of police shouting orders and the noise of gunfire.18 These sound bites establish the play’s tone:

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taken all together as they are intended, they articulate exhaustion, disillusionment and defeat. Buthelezi, the freedom fighter out of time, out of context, out of sync, is goaded by the rainbow colours of the Mandela Bridge and the facile promise of music to soothe his wounds. His erstwhile struggle to transform society has resulted in a country where now it is black policemen who gun down striking miners. As the scene changes the tone shifts noticeably, as we are introduced to Ben and his companion, Skinn, a seventeen-year-old “Zef” Afrikaner woman who has just picked Ben up in a bar.19 Both Ben and Skinn, it is soon revealed, have adopted newly-chosen first names, and both are reluctant to reveal their original given names. We also discover that Skinn, née Yvette Skinner, has been abused by an ex-boyfriend, thus creating a parallel with Ben, who will later be abused by Buthelezi. In his construction of these parallels between Ben and Skinn, Mongiwekhaya implies that all members of the new generation are trying to break free from their true selves, which connect them to a traumatic past. In the first scene introducing Ben and Skinn, the two have just met at a bar and are smoking weed as they drive towards the next bar, flirting with each other while distractedly scanning their phones, checking each other’s Facebook pages, comparing how many virtual friends each one has accumulated while superficially speculating on the real nature of friendship in a digital age. Significantly, there is nothing in their dialogue or behaviour to distinguish them in terms of culture or nationality; they are presented as stereotypical representatives of the millennial generation: solipsistic, distracted, superficial, more focused on the virtual world of their phones than the physical world surrounding them. Ben and Skinn represent a new generation that believes itself literally “born free”: free of trauma, free of history, free of any responsibility to the past. The couple flirt without any hint of racial barriers separating them or of the historical antagonisms that would have previously rendered them—a black man and an Afrikaner woman—mortal enemies. It is only when their car is stopped by Buthelezi and Masinga that cultural identity becomes a pressing issue, as the two policemen taunt Ben for his inability to understand either Xhosa or Zulu.20 The policemen’s derision is palpably menacing, conveying the aura of power that was once the sole purview of white authority. By 2012, however, this aggressive entitlement has been transferred to black authority figures such as Buthelezi. Indeed, in the first scene, Masinga cautions Buthelezi about the restraining order taken out against him by an estranged girlfriend, indicating from the

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outset that Buthelezi leads a somewhat lawless life.21 Buthelezi confirms this impression when he shrugs off the warning, reassuring Masinga that the “police don’t arrest the police”.22

Quotidian Crises Like Malema’s resistance song, Mongiwekhaya’s play sounds an emergency alarm in the midst of ordinariness, or more to the point, echoes the sounding of an alarm long after all the emergencies have been reported. The texts that I have focused on in previous chapters have all been set in the midst of the historical transformation of the post-apartheid era, concerned with the then-urgent question of how to reconcile a nation to its violently oppressive past. In contrast, the novels of the first decade of the twenty-first century are frequently concerned with more immediate but equally devastating crises, most specifically the AIDS epidemic ravaging Southern Africa and being effectively ignored by Thabo Mbeki’s ANC government.23 These novels belong to a post-post-apartheid genre, a genre no longer preoccupied with the decades of apartheid rule, but instead directing their attention to the crises of the present day. I See You distinguishes itself from other texts in the post-post-apartheid genre by avoiding reference to any of the ongoing political emergencies that are the central concern of contemporaneous texts: violent crime, AIDS, poverty, xenophobia. Instead, the play depicts a crisis of an entirely personal nature, expressed strictly in interpersonal terms, focused on the nature of individual identity and how it is defined within a national, historical context. In the scene where Ben and Skinn are pulled over, while the policemen goad Ben about his status, his lack of native knowledge and his keeping company with a white woman, Skinn tries to resolve the situation by offering Buthelezi a bribe.24 Ben is immediately seized and escorted to the police van, Buthelezi telling him, “I just want you to know that everything that happens to you tonight is to teach your ‘friend’ a lesson”.25 The lesson, intended for both Skinn and Ben, is essentially a history lesson, a lesson in the inextricable symbiosis between power and identity, between pain and self-knowledge. What follows is an agonizing mentorship process for Ben as he is violently coerced into recognizing his South African roots, his mother tongue and his original given name: Somandla.26 Buthelezi beats the youth while airing his grievances about the state of the nation. That Ben does not understand why he is being detained and tortured, Buthelezi

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insists, is “all the reason you need for being here”.27 The officer’s grievance, of course, is that his fight for freedom has culminated in what he considers to be a national betrayal: “I fought for this country. And when it was won, the cowards who spent their lives trying to be white instead of fighting to remain true to their heritage, suddenly returned and gave it away again”.28 In reprisal for this betrayal, Buthelezi launches a sustained assault on Ben’s sense of security and autonomy. The youth is brutally tortured by Buthelezi, who twists Ben’s handcuffs behind his back in order to “teach” him the pantsula dance. The university student’s liberal humanist certainty that “who I am is not defined” by anyone, neither Buthelezi nor Ben’s absent father, is overwhelmed by the duress of unremitting pain and fear as Buthelezi shouts that “who you are is completely defined by me! By everyone who came before you! By what happened and what we chose to do about it!”29 Finally, Ben is broken by the pain in his wrists and shoulders, and opens himself up to the loneliness and isolation that he feels as the result of the suppression of his cultural identity: Do you know what happens when you lose your language? The world ceases to have shape. No shape no words no nothing nothing no thing. You are vanished. A ghost haunting a little boy’s body. I was three years old and when my mother took me overseas. I only spoke Xhosa then. No one else spoke that language. My mother wouldn’t answer me. I couldn’t remember the days. Only the nights. When everyone was asleep I’d hear voices. Are you a ghost? Are you really here?30

Buthelezi, who at this point has taken on the attributes of a previously suppressed history, batters at Ben’s psychic defences until his sense of identity is overwhelmed and he is forced to recognize the loneliness and isolation of his repressed self, Somandla. At the same time, however, even as the policeman brutally asserts his authority over the youth, Buthelezi is haunted by his sense of himself as a historical anachronism, a freedom fighter who has outlived his cause. The entanglement dramatized in I See You involves an intimacy that is unwanted by either participant, an intimacy that forces both Ben and Buthelezi to face their repressed fears. Although Ben mourns an identity that was lost with his original language, he also recognizes that Buthelezi’s identity is similarly under erasure, questioning whether he is a ghost, whether he is “really here” or simply the trace of a forgotten history. Even

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in a position of unquestioned authority, Buthelezi cannot fully signify as a subject. The three principal actors in this crisis are taught a painful existential lesson about how immaterial they are in the worlds they inhabit. Skinn— desperate to help Ben but realizing, as Buthelezi has forewarned, that the police will not betray one of their own—phones into DJ Mavovo’s show, attempting to incite the listening audience to help locate Buthelezi’s van. The “shamanistic” Mavovo, however, the “personification of the Nelson Mandela Bridge”, and the self-declared “eyes and ears of Jozi”,31 refuses to help Skinn and instead cuts to a commercial break in order to silence the desperate woman.32 DJ Mavovo functions as an ironic commentary on the empty symbols of optimism propping up South African society. She is, indeed, a personification of the Nelson Mandela Bridge, insofar as the bridge is a colourful landmark that has no tangible social effect on the population, but merely expresses the ideal of the Rainbow Nation. Similarly, DJ Mavovo may be the “eyes and ears” of the city, as she claims, but she refuses to act on what she might see or hear. Mongiwekhaya alludes to a larger cultural trope of the radio DJ as omniscient narrator, or Greek Chorus, of his community—a trope that finds its representation in the character of Wolfman Jack in George Lucas’s 1973 film, American Graffiti, or, more relevantly, in the character of Mister Señor Love Daddy in Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing —in order to ironically undercut the audience’s expectations of the moral stature of this character. Another conventional representation of compassion, and therefore of optimism, that is subverted in I See You is the stereotype of the young female doctor of colour. When Buthelezi and Masinga take Ben to the hospital to submit to a blood alcohol test, the doctor administering the test is Dr. Pravesh, a thirty-year-old woman of Indian descent. By casting the doctor as young, female and neither black nor white but Indian, Mongiwekhaya sets up certain expectations in the audience that this character will be compassionate, even sensitive, and will conduct herself without bias. It is therefore particularly shocking that Dr. Pravesh witnesses unadorned police brutality without betraying any emotional reaction, let alone intervening on behalf of the abused prisoner in her care. When Ben refuses to verbally consent to the blood test, Buthelezi begins to throttle his prisoner with his bare hands. Masinga reacts in horror to the attack, but Pravesh, according to the stage directions, hears her phone beeping and begins texting a reply.33 Buthelezi twists

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the cuffs behind Ben’s back again, the youth shrieking in agony before finally giving verbal consent to the blood test, after which Pravesh calmly administers the test as though nothing unusual has transpired. Both DJ Mavovo and Dr. Pravesh are presented as figures of potential hope for Skinn and Ben, as well as for the audience. The fact that both are females of colour, their roles signalling benevolence and compassion, is essential to the presentation of the play’s erosion of optimism. At the same time, although she ignores Ben’s agony, Dr. Pravesh displays no partiality towards Buthelezi. She informs Ben, as she draws his blood, that she has learned through experience to mind her own business.34 In the process, she has lost her sense of ethics and her compassion, and as she puts it, simply patches people up and sends them “back out there”.35 The reactions of both of these characters suggest to the audience that the events of this night will have no tangible effect, create no ripple on the surface of urban Johannesburg life. It is a drama played out between two people, without any larger significance or repercussions—the most ordinary of crises. The play concludes with dialogue that is muted and desultory in tone, reflecting an erosion of optimism and a flattening out of affect. In the morning, Masinga completes Ben’s paperwork prior to his release, assuring him that, officially, the entire episode will disappear as though it never occurred: I’m going to do you a favour. I’m setting your court case one year from now. Between now and then do you know how many cases we go through? So many that we can’t handle them all. This case file will be buried under a mountain of unsolved cases. By this time next year, it will be as if it never happened.36

Masinga’s words render the evening’s shocking events banal, consigning them to the realm of bureaucracy, merely one more example of an already overwhelming wave of similar episodes. Events such as these, Masinga assures us, are ultimately ephemeral and inconsequential. They are simply a sequence of moments, like the changing of channels in the first scene, transient in their duration and negligible in their effect.

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Dramatic Mentorships In its dramatic pairing of Ben, a young man whose father disappeared during the apartheid years, and Buthelezi, an authority figure with no family of his own, the audience of I See You might recognize a metanarrative of mentorship and self-discovery, the oft-repeated story of a disenfranchised youth who learns valuable lessons through the intervention of a benevolent elder figure. Indeed, one of the most popular plays in the history of South African drama—Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … and the boys (1982)—adapts this narrative to transmit an emotional protest against segregation and offers a compelling point of comparison with I See You. Set in 1950, Fugard’s play dramatizes the loving relationship between Hally, a white youth from a troubled family, and Sam, a black waiter at the tea room owned by Hally’s parents. Fugard’s play provides another example of the precarious intimacy between white employer and black domestic—an affective quandary that has been thoroughly explored in Chapter 2 of this study. In “Master Harold” … and the boys, Sam acts as an infinitely wise, benevolent elder who offers the precocious young Hally valuable insights into the realities of apartheid and the vicissitudes of familial love. Hally, like Ben in I See You, is shaped by the absence of his biological father—in Hally’s case the father is an illiterate, alcoholic invalid—and Hally’s enlightenment in terms of understanding himself and his complicity in the apartheid system arises after a shockingly emotional argument with Sam. By the end of the play, Sam has established himself as the true father figure of the play by virtue of his indefatigable patience with, and compassion for, Hally. Even when Hally suddenly asserts his white privilege, demanding that Sam addresses him as “Master Harold”, Sam somehow understands that the reaction is an angry defence against the youngman’s ambivalent feelings about his real father. The journey the white protagonist makes, in Fugard’s immensely popular play, from “Hally” to “Harold”, from ignorance to an understanding of the power dynamics inherent in his culture, is clearly attributed to the wise mentorship of Sam the waiter, the elder black man who has experienced oppression but is willing to convey its harsh lessons without bitterness or anger. This enduring narrative—an explicit gesture towards the sympathetic white reader/audience—is the most important structural manifestation of optimism to be challenged by Mongiwekhaya’s play. In I See You, the audience is again presented with a privileged

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youth—a “cheeseboy”—turning apathetically away from the history of his country while an older black man who has experienced oppression takes him on a journey of enlightenment. That Sam’s mentorship is not Buthelezi’s, that Hally’s apprenticeship is not Ben’s, speaks to the dramatic shift in focus from the apartheid era to that of the postpost-apartheid, and the erosion of optimism that has accompanied this shift. Nevertheless, the final exchange between Ben and Buthelezi appears to follow the conventional trajectory of such a narrative of mentorship and self-discovery, with the protagonist arriving at a more profound understanding of his world, an understanding that shapes the preceding events. In the hospital, before Buthelezi throttles Ben, Ben responds to Buthelezi’s request for verbal consent for the blood test by replying calmly, “I see you”, and “I love you”.37 Whether this effects Buthelezi’s reaction at all is questionable at the time, but as the youth leaves the police station, he shares his personal reflections on the long night that has passed: Ben: Behind your name. Behind your skin. When you close your eyes. What’s there? Buthelezi: Nothing. Ben: Yeah. Nothing. Behind everything you think you are, there is the darkness and the silence. Buthelezi: (irritated) Why did you say ‘I love you’? Ben: So you could hear the darkness answer you.38

The exchange ends here, with Buthelezi ordering Ben to “Foetsak”.39 Ben departs with Skinn and reintroduces himself to her using his given Xhosa name, Somandla as a signal that he has begun to embrace his past, that Buthelezi’s cruel mentorship has had a lasting impact on him. That the play is named after Ben’s statement of recognition that both protagonists share an existence filled with darkness and silence, that its title reflects the acknowledgement of interconnection, offers a reassuring sense of closure for the audience, a sense that the two characters’ brutal encounter has resulted in them finally “seeing” each other. Without indicting Mongiwekhaya, who has based this play, as he has repeatedly told interviewers, on a terrifying Friday night he personally experienced as a young man in Johannesburg,40 we might still read this attempt at closure as a conspicuous failure—a failure, not due to a lack

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of talent on the part of the playwright, but rather in terms of the characters’ inability to philosophically or aesthetically resolve an intractable situation. Indeed, as the same sort of failure encountered in every text I have analysed in this book—the inability to achieve the affective proximity to another that would allow for the conditions of ubuntu and in so doing to heal the wounded feelings of the past. What has been at issue throughout this study has been the relationship between proximity and intimacy, the potential of the face-to-face encounter for achieving ubuntu and reconciliation, and the narrative of I See You similarly explores this potential. In a 2016 interview with WhatsOnStage, Mongiwekhaya explains that his play is ultimately about the intimacy that is established, under extreme duress, between Buthelezi and Ben: “When I was writing it one thing I realised was that it was an intimate night, there was sort of like a father and son thing between us, it felt like I knew him very personally”. Yet, at the same time, Mongiwekhaya portrays the philosophy of ubuntu as little more than an ephemeral word on an old television programme, destined to be flipped past and forgotten. The climax of the tense drama is marked by Ben uttering confessions of intimacy, “I see you”, and “I love you”. These statements, however, as the stage directions indicate, serve only to irritate Buthelezi. Irritation, as Sianne Ngai contends in Ugly Feelings, is a “conspicuously weak or inadequate form of anger”, a symptom of the subject’s suspended agency in relation to the cause of the emotion.41 Irritation, argues Ngai, is a feeling that is “explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release”.42 Ben’s repeated declarations of acknowledgement provide neither character with emotional catharsis, nor do they serve to resolve the action of the play or move either character forward. The narrative resolves only because Ben is tortured into giving verbal consent for his blood work; it resolves because Dr. Pravesh accepts his consent without concern that it has been offered under duress; because the unwieldy bureaucracy of the courts will inevitably erase the events we have witnessed; because morning predictably follows night.

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What Remains What remains affecting in I See You, and in the other texts I have examined in this study, is the jarring impact of intimacy and its unpredictable and often shocking manifestations. These texts, all representing in some way the influence of the TRC hearings on South African culture, collectively demonstrate that affect is an unanticipated and usually surprising response to the ideology of optimism endorsed by the ANC government and the TRC—the vibrant concept of the Rainbow Nation. Affect is the unruly reaction to the desire to reconcile, to resolve the trauma of the past in a hasty and perhaps unnatural way. Affect is the eruption of autonomous identity when confronted with a trauma that threatens to subsume that identity. I think back to Nomonde Calata’s plaintive cry in the middle of the community hall hosting the TRC hearings—a nonlinguistic sound that breaks through the words of testimony, confession and even prayer, in order to announce that Calata still exists, and that her pain endures. I have since drawn attention to similar surprising but declarative expressions of identity: Lydia’s incestuous desire for Mikey, Beauty’s seething rage against her employers, Lurie’s refusal to feel compassion for other humans, Krog’s desire to dissolve her own identity in compassion, the bifurcated shame of Marnus, the confused love, hatred and indifference of Mandisa, all of these characters’ reactions, and readers’ reactions to such startling and disruptive affect, chart the closest point of contact between one individual and another. I have chosen I See You for my final text in this sustained argument not because it provides a conclusive summation of my reading of disruptive affect in post-apartheid narratives, but because it gestures to what might be the next phase of the intimate, irritating entanglement of the South African polis. As critics such as Medalie have argued, the past still lingers like a disaffected ghost, and the optimism that was previously mustered in response to that trauma has been diluted to such an extent that the instinctive explosions of affect that marked earlier representations can no longer be sustained. Despite the prolonged violence exerted by the past, embodied in Buthelezi, upon the present, characterized by Ben, despite the sustained brutality of the narrative, the morning brings only a banal cessation of hostilities. Both characters walk away from the event without any emotion beyond that of irritation. This irritation marks the point of contact, of friction, between the real world and the optimistic promise of

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the Rainbow Nation, but whether it can overcome the fatigue, whether any balm can be applied to relieve the persistent chafing sensation, is left in question, in suspension, in the realm of perhaps. I See You, finally, reminds me again of Malema’s singing “Shoot the Boer” at his political rally. Doing so certainly invokes the murderous anger of a culture, but it is now directed at a culture that is aware that there are no more Boers to shoot. The emotions that were once unproblematically directed against the machinery of apartheid can no longer be sustained now that the enemy is more indiscriminate and subtle, hard to identify, even harder to confront. Rage is subjugated into irritation, a constant inflammation that agitates the skins, and disquiets the tempers, of South Africans without relief: neither the relief of swatting at the irritant nor the hope for a balm. I See You represents a post-post-apartheid South Africa, a society still aware of both the trauma of apartheid and the hope of genuine transformation, but exhausted at the thought of either.

Notes 1. The term “Boer,” derived from the Dutch word for farmer, historically came to describe the Afrikaner community as a whole, as in the antiquated term “Anglo-Boer War.” During the apartheid era, the word “Boer” became a generalized label that anti-apartheid activists used to describe the oppressor. 2. “ANC’s Julius Malema Defends ‘Shoot the Boer’ Song.” BBC News, April 20, 2011. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13140335. 3. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 4. 4. Although set in the period after the first elections, it is worthwhile noting at this point that Cook’s novel was published in 2012, approximately the same time that Malema sang “Ayasab’ amagwala”. Cook thus seems to be attuned to the disillusionment of her contemporary time even as she encodes it in a narrative set fifteen years earlier. 5. Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on PostApartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009, 1. 6. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 7. 7. See Boehmer’s “Endings and a New Beginning: South African Fiction in Transition.” 8. Medalie, David. “‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in PostApartheid Literature.” English Studies in Africa 55 (2012): 3. See my discussion of Medalie’s essay in Chapter 3.

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9. Mpe, Phaswane. Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001, 4–5. 10. One might look, as well, to the internationally recognized science fiction novels of Lauren Beukes, some of which portray future dystopias set in South African cities, but which are not—as was the case with, for example, Neill Blomkamp’s popular science fiction movie District 9 (2009)—simple allegories of apartheid. Instead, novels such as Zoo City, set in a reimagined Johannesburg, and Moxyland, a cyberpunk novel set in a futuristic Cape Town, offer broader investigations into the relationships of subjects, urban spaces and technology. 11. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 2. 12. See Berlant: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Cruel Optimism 1); “the affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (2, emphases hers). 13. Besides being Mongiwekhaya’s first play, it was also the first play produced through a collaboration between the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and the Royal Court Theatre in London, England. 14. Mongiwekhaya. I See You. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, 37. 15. The pantsula is a frenetic but politically expressive form of dance that began in Sophiatown in the 1950s and evolved as a way of expressing anti-apartheid sentiments in the townships of the 1980s. 16. Mongiwekhaya. I See You. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, 3. 17. Mongiwekhaya. I See You, 3. 18. The Marikana Massacre took place on August 16, 2012, when South African police opened fire on striking miners at the Marikana platinum mine, killing 34 strikers and wounding 78. 19. “Zef” is a slang term for Afrikaners who are conspicuously, often performatively, working class. “Zef” is the South African equivalent of British “chav” or American “trailer trash” culture. 20. Mongiwekhaya. I See You. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, 17. It is established earlier in the scene, by Skinn, that Ben doesn’t understand Afrikaans either. 21. Throughout the play, Masinga is agitated that Buthelezi’s focus on Ben is keeping them from a previously scheduled rendezvous to pick up a package. The specifics of this meeting and this package are omitted, but it is implied that the partners are involved in some form of illegal trafficking.

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22. Mongiwekhaya. I See You. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, 7. 23. Mandela’s successor as ANC leader, Thabo Mbeki, infamously refused to accept scientific and medical evidence about AIDS and its treatment. Mbeki, who served as President of South Africa from 1999 to 2008, argued that the root cause of AIDS was poverty, and went so far as to refuse global offers of free antiretrovirals, and even to ban antiretroviral treatment in public hospitals, while his Minister of Health publicly advocated for a “natural” cure for AIDS consisting of lemon, garlic and beetroot. Studies have calculated that as a result of Mbeki’s denialist policies, at least 300,000 South Africans died needlessly of AIDS, and at least 35,000 babies were born with the HIV virus. See, for example, Sarah Boseley, “Mbeki Aids Denial ‘Caused 300,000 Deaths.’” The Guardian November 26, 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/ 26/aids-south-africa For an incisive analysis of the articulation of the AIDS crisis in Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, see Neville Hoad’s chapter, “An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism” in his book, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 24. Mongiwekhaya. I See You. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, 19. 25. Mongiwekhaya. I See You, 20. 26. The name Somandla, we are told by Buthelezi, means “The Almighty” (58). The ironic nature of our protagonist’s name seems evident. His chosen moniker, Ben, meaning “son,” seems more apt. 27. Mongiwekhaya. I See You. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, 36. 28. Mongiwekhaya. I See You, 36. 29. Mongiwekhaya, 56. 30. Mongiwekhaya, 58. 31. Mongiwekhaya, 47. 32. Mongiwekhaya, 48. 33. Mongiwekhaya, 66. 34. Mongiwekhaya, 67. 35. Mongiwekhaya, 67. 36. Mongiwekhaya, 69. 37. Mongiwekhaya, 65. 38. Mongiwekhaya, 71. 39. Afrikaans: “Piss off!” or “Fuck off!”

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40. See, for example, the playwright’s 2016 interview in WhatsOnStage, where he maintains that the play is autobiographical, and that seeing it performed in rehearsal was both traumatic and cathartic (Ben Hewis, “Mongiwekhaya: ‘The Hardest Thing is Being Brave Enough to Tell Different Kinds of Stories.’” WhatsOnStage, March 1, 2016. https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/mongiw ekhaya-interview-i-see-you-royal-court_39860.html). 41. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, 35. 42. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings, 6.

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Index

A Ackerman, Dawie, 88, 89 affective structure, 9, 15, 108, 246 African, 22, 225 African National Congress (ANC), 1, 3, 17, 22, 30, 71, 80, 89, 94, 95, 102, 103, 146, 154, 156, 157, 165, 179, 229, 230, 237, 244, 245, 247 Afrikaner, 162, 165 Ahmed, Sara, 6, 7, 13, 15, 23, 28, 29, 49, 50, 53–55, 59, 156, 187, 188 The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 6, 7, 28, 54, 59, 187, 188 The Promise of Happiness , 7, 23 Amy Biehl Foundation, 213 anger, 5, 9, 28, 35, 37, 38, 44–46, 53, 57, 88, 106, 143, 145, 201, 211, 230, 241, 243, 245 anxiety, 30, 75, 85, 90, 211, 212, 216, 219, 220 apartheid, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 14, 17–19, 21–23, 26, 29, 31–34,

44, 48, 52, 57–60, 63, 65–68, 70, 72, 73, 88, 90–92, 98, 103, 106, 112, 118, 123, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 139, 142, 144–146, 150, 153, 154, 159–166, 169, 172, 186, 190, 200, 204, 205, 211, 214, 216, 217, 221–223, 225, 226, 229–234, 237, 241, 244–246 Archbishop, 79, 81, 82

B Bakan, Abigail B., 41, 58 Barnard, Rita, 204, 225 Barthes, Roland, 88, 94, 102, 103, 119, 120, 148 Bataille, Georges, 110 Battle, Michael, 22, 23, 32, 55, 66, 72, 99 Beauty, 45 Behr, Mark, 216, 222, 225 The Smell of Apples , 21, 195, 197–199, 203, 204, 206–208,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 M. Libin, Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55977-9

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258

INDEX

214, 216, 218, 219, 222, 224–227 Bennett, Jill, 108, 110, 112, 115, 116, 124, 126, 135, 139, 140, 146–151 Benzien, Jeffrey, 101 Berlant, Lauren, 46, 59, 67, 89, 99, 160, 172, 188, 190, 230, 231, 234, 245, 246 Betensky, Carolyn, 24, 31, 33, 38, 39, 55–57, 160, 161, 165, 188, 189 Feeling for the Poor, 57 Bewes, Timothy, 197, 203, 216, 223, 224, 226 Biehl, Amy, 126, 130, 132–137, 140, 145, 150, 200, 201, 207, 212–214, 222 Boehmer, Elleke, 55, 60, 231, 232, 245 Boobar, James, 185 book club reader, 18, 19, 37, 39, 43, 45, 46, 54, 60, 159, 197, 213, 230 Booker Prize, 187 Boraine, Alex, 26, 27, 54 Borain, Nic, 217, 226 Botha, P.W., 59, 91–93, 102, 103, 145 Brecht, Bertolt, 108, 112, 119–121, 148 Brennan, Teresa, 28, 29, 54, 187 Brinkema, Eugenie, 7, 13, 23 Burton, Mary, 70, 90 C Calata, Fort, 150 Calata, Nomonde, 25–27, 29, 30, 61, 62, 80, 88, 113, 140, 141, 143, 156, 244 Canada, 223 Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 99

Cape Town, 23 Caruth, Cathy, 156, 158, 187, 188 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, 114, 122, 147, 148 Cock, Jacklyn, 33, 39–41, 43, 46, 47, 56–59 Coetzee, J.M., 20, 21, 154, 155, 173–176, 179, 181, 186, 187, 190–193, 196, 197, 223 “Confessions and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky”, 196 Disgrace, 20, 29, 106, 154, 155, 170, 180, 184, 186, 187, 190–193, 232 Cole, Catherine, 23, 27, 30, 54, 55, 70, 71, 98, 100 collective trauma, 10, 85 Commission, 89 compassion, 2, 3, 5–7, 16, 19–21, 24, 31–33, 36, 40, 45, 52, 55–57, 69, 70, 79, 86, 87, 97, 98, 110, 113, 116, 117, 120, 129, 132, 134, 136–138, 141, 145, 146, 150, 153–155, 157–161, 163–165, 167–173, 175, 179, 183, 186–190, 213, 214, 239, 241, 244 complicity, 20, 21, 27, 124, 128, 157, 160, 162, 206, 216–218, 222, 223, 230, 241 confession, 3, 4, 7, 11, 15, 16, 21, 72, 75, 95, 108, 124, 177, 179, 191, 196–198, 200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 209, 212, 213, 216–219, 223, 243, 244 Cook, Méira, 18, 34, 35, 37, 43, 46–48, 54, 56–59, 106, 153, 157, 168, 187, 189, 230, 245 The House on Sugarbush Road, 18, 34, 39, 43, 45, 47, 56–59, 106, 153, 230

INDEX

Cooppan, Vilashani, 12 Copjec, Joan, 211, 219, 226, 227 Corliss, Cody, 61, 141 Cradock Four, 25, 98, 126, 134, 138–140, 142, 145, 150

D Dangor, Achmat, 8, 23 Bitter Fruit , 8–11, 13–16, 23, 24, 106 de Kock, Eugene, 117 de Kok, Ingrid, 20, 62, 74–80, 83–85, 94, 97, 98, 101, 102, 106, 113, 116, 120 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 7, 12, 13, 75, 108, 116, 216, 217 Domestic Bliss, 42, 58 domestic worker, 17, 18, 33–35, 39–43, 47, 48, 50, 52–54, 57, 58, 153, 154, 241 Duiker, K. Sello, 233, 234

E East London, 158 Edelman, Lee, 175–179, 191 empathy, 2, 5–8, 10, 15–20, 24, 27, 29–35, 37, 38, 46, 47, 50, 53–56, 59, 62, 67, 69, 71, 72, 75, 78, 80–82, 84, 86, 87, 90, 95, 105, 106, 108, 110, 117–119, 126, 128, 132, 136–138, 140, 150, 153–159, 165, 168–173, 176, 180, 183, 184, 186, 197, 207, 212, 213, 216, 220, 221, 223 “crude empathy”, 108, 126 entanglement, 15, 16, 34, 72, 76, 128, 143, 218, 231, 238 Epstein, Jean, 128, 129, 149

259

F Feldman, Allen, 168 Felman, Shoshana, 156, 158, 187, 188 Foucault, Michel, 198, 199, 223, 224 Frenkel, Ronit, 9 Freud, Sigmund, 188, 211, 212, 223 Fugard, Athol, 241

G Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, 68, 117–119, 146, 148, 213, 214, 226 Goniwe, Nyameka, 141 Goodman, Tanya, 69–71, 80, 98–100 Gordimer, Nadine, 18, 48, 49, 51–54, 59, 60, 106 July’s People, 18, 153 Graham, Shane, 10, 98, 188 Guguletu Seven, 67, 68, 100, 127, 134, 138, 140, 145, 151 guilt, 2, 7, 19, 21, 27, 47, 89, 107, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 170–172, 174, 178, 182, 198, 200, 202, 203, 206–208, 211, 219

H Hardy, Thomas, 74, 75, 78 Harting, Heike, 45, 46, 49 Hechter, Jacques, 94 Henry, Yazir, 169, 187, 189, 190 Heyns, Michiel, 195, 218, 227 Hoffmann, Deborah Long Night’s Journey into Day, 20, 98, 105–110, 117, 118, 126–129, 131, 132, 134, 136–138, 140, 141, 145, 150 Human Rights Violations Committee, 68

260

INDEX

I identity, 2, 4, 10, 19, 43, 46, 51, 60, 72, 73, 140, 153, 157, 161–166, 168–170, 176, 181–183, 185, 192, 196, 199, 200, 204, 207, 209, 233, 235–238, 244, 245 impasse, 46–48, 52, 53, 230, 234, 235, 243 interpellation, 85, 88, 128, 213, 225 intimacy, 30, 48, 53, 62, 67, 72, 74, 76, 85, 87, 98, 128, 129, 143, 162, 230, 231, 235, 238, 241, 243, 244 irritation, 244, 245

J Jarry, Alfred, 111, 119, 125 Johannesburg, 158, 232 Jones, Suzanne W., 41

K Keen, Suzanne, 18, 24, 31, 46, 55, 56, 59 Kentridge, William, 20, 98, 105, 107, 110–113, 116, 118–120, 122–125, 129, 146–148 Krog, Antjie, 20, 21, 26, 27, 29, 54, 100, 154, 155, 157–171, 173, 174, 179, 186–191, 244 Country of My Skull , 20, 26, 29, 54, 154, 155, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164, 167–170, 186–190

L Lacan, Jacques, 178, 202, 211 La Capra, Dominick, 156 Lamb, Mary, 37 Langer, Lawrence L., 108–111, 120, 137, 146, 147, 233

durational time, 108–111, 113, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 143, 146 Lanzmann, Claude, 119, 125, 148 Laub, Dori, 156 Leggassick, Martin, 3, 4 Levinas, Emmanuel, 72–76, 78, 80, 85, 90, 91, 101, 129, 184, 203, 219 face-to-face, 73–75, 78, 80, 88, 89, 108, 117, 126, 128, 129, 132, 135–138, 140, 141, 145, 243 liberal, 18, 36–40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 58–60, 153, 154, 160, 217, 230, 238 Lingis, Alphonso, 90, 101, 102 Lyotard, Jean-François, 110

M Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie, 88, 95–97, 103 Magona, Sindiwe, 21, 29, 57, 150, 195, 226 Mother to Mother, 21, 150, 195, 197, 198, 200, 203, 207, 208, 212, 216, 218, 222, 224–226 Malema, Julius, 229–231, 245 Mamdani, Mahmood, 71, 135 Mammy, 40–42, 48, 58 Mandela, Nelson, 1–4, 15, 22, 42, 43, 64, 73, 95, 165, 235, 236, 239, 247 Mandisa, 212, 213 Manqina, Evelyn, 135–138, 140, 145, 146 Marais, Michael, 184, 185, 192, 193 Marikana Massacre, 235, 246 Marx, Christoph, 23, 72 Massumi, Brian, 6, 12, 23 Mbeki, Thabo, 237, 247 Mbiti, John, 65

INDEX

African Religions and Philosophies , 99 McDunnah, Michael G., 179, 180, 191, 192 Mda, Zakes, 106, 225, 232 The Heart of Redness , 232 Medalie, David, 23, 106, 146, 206, 215, 225, 232, 244, 245 mediation, 34, 37, 63, 65, 69–71, 80, 81, 83–87, 97, 98, 103, 105, 132, 134, 139, 140 Meyer, Roelf, 165, 167 Mhlongo, Niq, 233, 234 Mikey, 11 Miller, Ana, 10 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 16, 23, 202, 203, 206, 208, 224 Modise, Tim, 89 Moete, Kgebetli, 233 Mongiwekhaya, 21, 231, 234–237, 239, 241, 243, 246–248 I See You, 21, 231, 234, 237–239, 241, 243–247 Moyer, Bill, 107 Mpe, Phaswane, 232–234, 247

N National Party, 165 Ngai, Sianne, 243, 248 Ngewu, Cynthia, 67–69, 100 Ngoepe, Bernard, 93 Nkosi, Lewis, 32, 33, 55, 56 Nongqawuse, 201, 224 Nussbaum, Martha C., 31, 33, 38, 55–57, 160 Nuttall, Sarah, 3, 4, 22, 34, 76, 230, 245

O Omar, Dullah, 161, 169

261

optimism, 1, 41, 48, 125, 183, 234, 239–241, 244, 246 Other, 39, 44, 48, 49, 53, 73, 80, 101, 129, 185, 202, 203, 206–208 otherness, 5, 6, 17, 19, 33, 34, 44, 46, 72, 85, 90, 184, 185 P Parts of speech Ingrid de Kok, 80 perpetrator, 2, 4–6, 19, 27, 61–63, 65–72, 75, 87, 89, 90, 95, 108, 116, 117, 119, 122–130, 133–138, 140–145, 155, 161, 162, 164, 166–169, 174, 186, 189, 191, 200, 201, 212, 213 Eric Taylor, 126, 134, 138–146, 150 Eugene de Kock, 117, 118, 148 Jacques Hechter, 92–96, 113, 117 Jeffrey Benzien, 88, 89 Mongezi Manqina, 133–136, 138 Paul van Vuuren, 93, 94 Robert McBride, 127, 134, 144, 151 Thapelo Mbelo, 127, 134, 138–140, 145, 150, 151 Vlakplaas Five, 162, 164, 166 Piet, Christopher, 69 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act , 64 proximity, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15–17, 19, 21, 30, 33, 34, 39, 43, 48, 53, 61–63, 71, 74, 82, 85–88, 93, 98, 105, 106, 108, 113, 119, 123, 128, 129, 135, 137, 146, 153, 162, 169, 170, 179, 180, 185, 197, 207, 212, 216, 220, 222, 223, 243 public intimacy, 67, 72, 75, 89, 94, 97, 98, 112

262

INDEX

R Rainbow Nation, 1–3, 5–7, 19, 106, 154, 239, 244, 245 Rajiva, Jay, 205, 206, 225 reconciliation, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, 21, 23, 54, 55, 61, 62, 65, 67, 69, 70, 73, 80, 91, 95, 97–99, 107, 110, 126, 127, 132, 134–138, 141, 142, 144–146, 213, 223, 233, 243 Reid, Frances Long Night’s Journey into Day, 20, 98, 105–110, 117, 118, 126–129, 131, 132, 134, 136–138, 140, 141, 145, 150 repentance, 2, 3, 5, 6, 19, 21, 66, 69, 72, 98, 107, 116, 117, 125–128, 132, 136–139, 142, 159, 174–176, 178, 179, 183, 184, 213, 214 Rodwell, Boddy, 112 The Story I Am About to Tell , 112, 113, 119

S Samuelson, Meg, 195, 211, 226 Sanders, Mark, 163, 167, 172 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 203, 206, 215, 224 Saunders, Rebecca, 179 Schaffer, Kay, 159, 168, 188, 189 Seipei, Stompie, 88, 95 Serote, Mongane “Wally”, 33 shame, 3, 7, 21, 87, 107, 124, 165, 166, 178, 190, 195–198, 200, 202–204, 206, 207, 209–212, 216–224, 226, 227, 244 Smith, Sidonie, 159, 168, 188, 189 Sontag, Susan, 160, 161, 188 Sooka, Yasmin, 70, 90, 95–97 South Africa, 23, 54, 167, 213, 233 South African, 58, 60, 225, 231, 244

South Africa’s Human Spirit: An Oral Memoir of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 20, 25, 26, 54, 62, 80, 86–95, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 113, 117, 145 Spearey, Susan, 81 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 180, 185, 192 Stasiulis, Daiva, 41, 58 subjectivity, 27, 32, 51, 66, 72–75, 84–86, 162, 164, 165, 179, 181, 203, 204, 208 T Taylor, Jane, 4, 8, 20, 22, 98, 105, 111, 112, 118–120, 124, 125, 129, 146–148, 156, 187 Ubu and the Truth Commission, 98, 105, 107–112, 114–116, 118–120, 123, 126, 128, 146–148, 156, 187 Ubu and the Truth Commissionc, 4, 20, 22, 147 Tlali, Miriam, 33 “‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature”, 106 trauma, 1, 2, 4, 7–10, 12–17, 19–21, 23, 27, 29, 31, 64, 65, 69–72, 84, 85, 89, 106, 109–111, 113, 116, 118–120, 122–127, 137, 143, 145, 146, 149, 155–159, 161, 163, 164, 168, 173, 187, 188, 198, 212, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 244, 245, 248 Travis, Trysh, 37 TRC Hearings, 7, 20, 63, 67, 68, 140 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 1–4, 7–10, 15, 17, 19– 23, 25–31, 33, 53, 54, 61–66, 69–75, 78–83, 86, 87, 89–91,

INDEX

95–98, 100, 102, 103, 105–107, 110, 112, 116, 117, 125–130, 132, 133, 135–139, 141, 142, 145, 146, 154, 156–158, 161, 165, 169, 173, 174, 179, 187, 200, 231, 232, 244 Tswana, 168 Tutu, Desmond, Archbishop, 1–3, 5–9, 15, 17, 19, 23, 25, 26, 32, 54, 62, 65, 66, 69, 72, 73, 79–82, 88, 90, 95–99, 116, 119, 135, 137, 147, 158, 159, 173 Rainbow Nation, 22, 23, 55, 61, 65, 79, 80, 99, 158 U ubuntu, 61, 62, 65–69, 71–74, 80, 82, 84–86, 88, 90, 94–98, 110, 116, 125, 126, 137, 144–146, 154, 167, 169, 170, 189, 211 ubuntu, 1, 3, 5–8, 10, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 30, 32, 233, 235, 243

263

V van Niekerk, Marlene, 106 Agaat , 232 Verdoolaege, Annelies, 69

W Walker-Barnes, Chanequa, 41 Welgemoed, Sharon, 144, 145 white liberal, 18, 41, 51, 54, 154, 155, 160, 161 Williams, Bernard, 202 Winfrey, Oprah, 37

Y Yengeni, Tony, 88, 89, 101

Z Zokufa, Busi, 114