Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa : Interviews. [1 ed.] 9789042031036, 9789042031029

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Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa

Matatu Journal for African Culture and Society ———————————————————————

EDITORIAL BOARD Gordon Collier Geoffrey V. Davis

Christine Matzke Aderemi Raji–Oyelade †Ezenwa–Ohaeto

Frank Schulze–Engler Chantal Zabus

TECHNICAL AND CARIBBEAN EDITOR Gordon Collier

————————————  ———————————

BOARD OF ADVISORS Anne V. Adams (Ithaca N Y ) Eckhard Breitinger (Bayreuth, Germany) Margaret J. Daymond (Durban, South Africa) Anne Fuchs (Nice, France) James Gibbs (Bristol, England) John A. Stotesbury (Joensuu, Finland) Johan U. Jacobs (Durban, South Africa)

Jürgen Jansen (Aachen, Germany) Jürgen Martini (Magdeburg, Germany) Henning Melber (Windhoek, Namibia) Amadou Booker Sadji (Dakar, Senegal) Reinhard Sander (San Juan, Puerto Rico) Peter O. Stummer (Munich, Germany) Ahmed Yerima (Lagos, Nigeria)

— Founding Editor: Holger G. Ehling —  Matatu is a journal on African and African diaspora literatures and societies dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue between literary and cultural studies, historiography, the social sciences and cultural anthropology.  Matatu is animated by a lively interest in African culture and literature (including the AfroCaribbean) that moves beyond worn-out clichés of ‘cultural authenticity’ and ‘national liberation’ towards critical exploration of African modernities. The East African public transport vehicle from which Matatu takes its name is both a component and a symbol of these modernities: based on ‘Western’ (these days usually Japanese) technology, it is a vigorously African institution; it is usually regarded with some anxiety by those travelling in it, but is often enough the only means of transport available; it creates temporary communicative communities and provides a transient site for the exchange of news, storytelling, and political debate.  Matatu is firmly committed to supporting democratic change in Africa, to providing a forum for interchanges between African and European critical debates, to overcoming notions of absolute cultural, ethnic or religious alterity, and to promoting transnational discussion on the future of African societies in a wider world.

Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa 

Interviews

Edited by

Ewald Mengel Michela Borzaga Karin Orantes

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Matatu

Number 38

Cover photo (Vienna, 13 September 2008) courtesy of Jean Paul Reiterer, Michela Borzaga, and Ewald Mengel Cover design: Gordon Collier & Pier Post Published with the financial support of the FWF (Austrian Science Fund) The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3102-9 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3103-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Introduction

vii

INTERVIEWS WITH SOUTH AFRICAN AUTHORS Articulating the Inarticulate:

3

— An Interview with André Brink

Washing Dirty Linen in Public:

19

— An Interview with Zoë Wicomb

The Magic of Writing:

31

— An Interview with Sindiwe Magona

Speaking Through Silences:

49

— An Interview with Susan Mann

The Things We Still Don’t Say:

61

— An Interview with Maxine Case

INTERVIEWS WITH SOUTH AFRICAN PSYCHOLOGISTS Political Violence, Children, and Trauma Response:

75

— An Interview with Miriam Fredericks and her Team

But Even Bodies Never Speak Pure Languages:

103

— An Interview with Don Foster

Testing the DSM Model in South Africa: — An Interview with Ashraf Kagee

127

INTERVIEWS WITH SOUTH AFRICAN ACADEMICS Commissioner of Transitional Justice:

139

— An Interview with Alex Boraine

Vanitas Vanitatum:

155

— An Interview with Neville Alexander

A Better Past:

173

— An Interview with Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela and Chris van der Merwe

‘De-Othering’ the Perpetrator:

187

— An Interview with Annie Gagiano

The Grand Narrative of Life:

211

— An Interview with Tlhalo Raditlhalo

Gender Is a Matter of Life and Death:

227

— An Interview with Helen Moffett

Biographical Notes Notes for Contributors

249 255

Introduction

T

after the fall of apartheid, South Africa is still struggling with the memory of its traumatic past. So it comes as no surprise that trauma literature has flourished in the last two decades. Trauma, memory and narrative are closely interrelated, because one way of coming to terms with a person’s and/or a nation’s traumatic past is by transforming traumatic memory (hot memory) into narrative memory (cool memory) through the telling of a story. The interviews collected here were conducted in the Cape Town area between January and March 2009. Originally only intended to provide background information for our project “Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel,”1 we soon realized that they are of interest to a larger readership because they provide fascinating insights into the present condition of the South African soul, the country’s hopes and anxieties, and the state of a nation that is still struggling with the burden of the past. In this context, ‘trauma’ is one of those concepts that have been heavily debated, torn apart, abused, and misused, similarly to other terms that have become popular in the past twenty years – for example, that of the ‘postcolonial’. However, what emerges from the interviews is that ‘trauma’ is a fundamental category, from an epistemological, cultural, and – above all – human standpoint. All of the interviews testify to the fact that this term cannot be used glibly or in a facile way, but that it becomes most meaningful in conjunction with other predicates and adjectives, within a more accurate WENTY YEARS

1 The project is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (F W F ) and is based in the English Department, University of Vienna.

© Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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syntax and grammar that attempt to capture its unpredictable temporality, its eclecticism, its complexity, its strengths and weaknesses. In his recent book The Trauma Question, Roger Luckhurst writes: Without a multi-disciplinary knowledge, there can only be an unappetizing competition between disciplines to impose their specific conception of trauma. We need another model for understanding the tortuous history and bewildering contemporary extent of a paradigm that is an intrinsically inter-disciplinary conjuncture.2

Accordingly, the choice of interview partners was based on the conviction of the importance of this interdisciplinarity and the belief that trauma should be approached best from various perspectives, experiences, and disciplines. Therefore, the interviews were conducted with fourteen experts from various fields, including literature, psychology and politics. As far as the prolific South African literary scene is concerned, the interviews are intended to examine the complex relationship between trauma and literature more closely. Roger Luckhurst describes this liaison as follows: Trauma, in effect, issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge. In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma.3

South African writers have certainly embarked on this challenge since the demise of apartheid, coming up with diverse novels, new styles and new playful forms. André Brink, for instance, sees trauma and all its related issues as something that South African writers cannot get away from, since they are too much a part of South African reality. He perceives literature as “a medium of sharing, of articulating the inarticulate, sometimes the inarticulatable.” By “imagining the real,” literature can, on the one hand, bear witness in a time of terror and trauma, and, on the other, reach out and touch people, narrating trauma from different perspectives. In her interview, Zoë Wicomb reminds us of the tricky nature of memory and memorializing, of the permanent risk of ‘misremembering’. She takes Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a sophisticated example of how trauma can be 2 3

Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008): 14. Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 79.

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Introduction

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narrated in the dialectical relationship between remembering and forgetting. According to her, the potential of literature lies, in fact, in the investigation of how memory operates: Perhaps one of the more naive assumptions of public memorializing was that the recounting of the past is about the natural flow of memory, akin to the natural flow of tears that will accompany the telling of atrocities. What is lost in that assumption is the remembering subject’s organization of information into that which the listener understands as a story. So, perhaps writers in dealing with history are also responding to such misconceptions.

One of the authors who suffered greatly under the injustices of apartheid is Sindiwe Magona. In her interview, she passionately explains the irreplaceable role of (auto)biographies in the reconstruction of history: “Biographies give face, flesh, blood and heart and soul to whatever period of history you are studying.” She points out that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (T R C ) spurred and encouraged people to write, especially about their own lives, since autobiography can play an important role in the examination and the healing of psychic wounds: “There is something soothing about taking an ache and bringing it under the light, holding it to the light, and seeing it for what it is. In a way, it’s a form of letting go.” At the same time, however, she reminds us of the potential danger of (re)traumatization of painful stories of trauma and violence. The author Susan Mann was interviewed on her novels One Tongue Singing and Quarter Tones. She explains that in her first novel she consciously used “traumatic” versus “narrative” memory in alternating chapters about the past and the present, which in the end resolve and meet “like an arrow.” The female protagonist of One Tongue Singing, Zara, is a controversial and enigmatic character, who speaks through silences and powerful paintings, but who, until the very end, remains mysterious and cryptic. Mann seems to suggest that new modes of reading and listening are implicated if stories of traumatized and wounded characters are to be fully grasped. The interview with Maxine Case deals with her first – very successful – novel, All We Have Left Unsaid. The particularity of this book is that it is fictional while it reads like a memoir, because of the first-person narration and its confessional tone. Maxine Case explains that it is precisely this interplay between concealment and disclosure allowed in fiction that enabled

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her to break the silences and taboos of her childhood years, but also to unmask the patriarchy and hypocrisy of contemporary South African society. In order to deal with trauma literature, trauma theory and its psychological implications are of great importance. Therefore interviews with various South African psychologists are included in this book. Miriam Fredericks and her team at the Trauma Centre in Cape Town, for example, work with the theories and practicalities of trauma, memory, and narrative in South Africa on a daily basis. Besides offering counselling to ex-combatants, ex-prisoners, and victims of torture, the psychologists at the Centre stress the importance of their preventative work. They cooperate with schools and communities in order to raise awareness of the damaging and traumatic effects of violence. Another section of the Centre, specialized in crisis intervention, is still active in supporting communities that were victims of the xenophobic attacks in May 2008. So, more often than not, the question is how to contain the latent explosive violence in South Africa, but also how to cope with the feelings of anger, hatred, resentment, and helplessness that are so intrinsic to the lived experience of trauma. Conscious of our ‘Western lens’, the interviews seek to critically examine the way trauma is traditionally conceptualized in the West. All the psychologists who were interviewed, however, agreed that, although the D S M 4 description of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (P T S D ) is a construction with limitations, it would be inappropriate to dismiss it, since its symptoms – avoidance, hyper-arousal, and intrusive thoughts – are very much part of the South African syndrome. What most of the experts contest is the Western diachronic model of time in which an overwhelming event (mostly conceived as particular and singular), retrospectively seen as traumatic, seems to interrupt a temporality still perceived as linear. The psychologists interviewed speak of “continuous traumatic stress syndrome” and of multiple events that constantly entrench themselves in the lives of the more disadvantaged. So trauma in South Africa requires an analysis of complex notions of time, of collectivity, and of material conditions: racial inequality, abject poverty, and unemployment are ‘violent’ social structures that are doomed to produce and perpetuate trauma instead of interrupting it. 4 The acronym D S M stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders designed by the American Psychiatric Association (see American Psychiatric Association).

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Introduction

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Another issue emerging from the interviews with psychologists is a critical and more revisionist stance with regard to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (T R C ). All interviewees argue that the process did not last long enough and that only a very small percentage of the affected testified. Ashraf Kagee, professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University, argues that the T R C could not be cathartic and therapeutic, since “there wasn’t any kind of on-going, systematic re-visiting of these traumatic events, prolonged exposure, imaginal exposure […]. It was, rather, an official administrative event, a bureaucratic exercise.” The T R C is one of the issues that link the interviews with psychologists to those with other academics and people from the public sphere. Neville Alexander, for example, remarks that the T R C failed to put the apartheid system as such on trial. It follows that in South Africa trauma cannot be conceptualized as a simple disorder of memory, but it has to be seen as an historical problem, linked to the violent history of colonization and apartheid. Alexander’s critique resonates with the words of the Marxist postcolonial critic Benita Parry, who argues that new psychic dispositions and new modes of consciousness can only develop on the basis of a “radical restructuring” of economic and social circumstances.5 Alex Boraine, now chairperson of the International Centre for Transitional Justice in Cape Town, re-visits his experience as deputy chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and in his interview he talks about the psychological and emotional impact that the stories of victims and perpetrators had and still have on his daily life. He also discusses the initial feelings of enthusiasm and idealism that animated the T R C . Now he stresses the importance of seeing the Commission as the point of departure for a long reconciliatory process which has to take place throughout public domains in the still deeply divided South African society. He explains why something like the Nuremberg Trials was not an option for South Africa, and he speaks about his firm belief in a holistic approach to justice that entails accountability, truth-telling, acknowledgement of the victims’ suffering, reparation, and coming to terms with the past in a systematic way, in the attempt to eradicate the deep divisions that were often imposed by religion, history, or various ideologies. 5

Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (New York: Routledge,

2004): 183.

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The interview with psychologist and University of Cape Town professor Don Foster is particularly interesting if read in conjunction with what scholars like Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela and Chris van der Merwe have to say. In both interviews, the importance of expanding the borders of their field in order to think in multiple directions is stressed, because trauma is about a complicated process of transformation and translation. It is seminal to transform traumatic memory into narrative memory so that it can be externalized, articulated, named, and thus controlled. But narrative should not be seen as a “quick fix” – as Chris van der Merwe points out – but as an attempt to progress down that long path towards healing in which closure can only be approached but never really achieved. And then there is the complicated issue of the body, that conflicted site where trauma resides, which forges its own language and narrative, with its rhythms and confusing signs, not free of ideology. Trauma is thus best accessed through a multiplicity of narratives – confessional, testimonial, literary – but also through what could be called ‘body stories’, which, as Don Foster argues, should be deconstructed exactly like actual stories and which must not be mistaken for ‘authentic’, ‘true’ tales, because “bodies don’t speak pure languages, either.” According to Annie Gagiano, Emeritus Professor at the English Department of Stellenbosch University, the term ‘trauma’ – unless it is used in a superficial and ‘mannerist’ way – can open new horizons in literary criticism. Gagiano’s precise and profound reading of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power shows the connection between trauma and power, and literature’s potential for explaining the effects of trauma, in entering the labyrinth of the human psyche and body–soul. In this interview, she goes beyond the reductive approach of searching for P T S D symptoms on a narratological level and explores traumatic memory in its different manifestations. ‘Memory as reincarnation’, ‘memory as contamination’, the ‘internalized perpetrator’, ‘psychological placelessness’, notions of ‘homecoming’ and ‘belonging’ – these are only some of the terms emerging from this interview which show how careful, perceptive reading can enrich trauma discourse and its related issues of memory and narrative in a deep and meaningful way. Associate Professor Sam Tlhalo Raditlhalo teaches in the Department of English Languages and Literature at the University of Cape Town. He has dedicated an extensive part of his work to autobiographical literature in South Africa, and in his interview he talks about the role which this specific genre plays with regard to coming to terms with the South African past.

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Finally, Helen Moffett’s sobering and lucid comments make the reader alert to the trauma–gender nexus. There is no way of talking about trauma or violence in South Africa without mentioning this issue. Her major critique is that many stories of trauma are constructed as stories of race whereas, in reality, they are stories of gender. She argues that the power-imbalance between men and women in conjunction with the H I V pandemic is handing out a death sentence to many black women. She makes the point that apartheid alone cannot be blamed for the high rate of rape in the country but that poverty, joblessness, and drug addiction are certainly exacerbating factors. Rather than claiming final answers to such a complex and controversial issue, this volume of interviews aims at opening up a debate and making a contribution to the already existing discussion about trauma in the South African context. Part of our claim is that these interviews should best be read critically, and sometimes even between the lines. We would like to thank all our interviewees who agreed to talk to us. In particular, we thank Chris van der Merwe, who made our access to the University of Cape Town Library possible, Edwin Hees, for organizing accessibility to the Gericke Library at Stellenbosch, and the Science Fund, which supported us financially throughout the trip and beyond.

EWALD MENGEL, MICHELA BORZAGA, KARIN ORANTES VIENNA, NOVEMBER 2009

WORKS CITED American Psychiatric Association. “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,” American Psychiatric Association, http://www.psych.org/MainMenu/Research/DSMIV.aspx (accessed 29 May 2009). Head, Bessie. A Question of Power (Johannesburg: Heinemann, 1974). Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008). Parry, Benita, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (New York: Routledge, 2004).

—Œ—

I NTERVIEWS WITH S OUTH A FRICAN A UTHORS

Articulating the Inarticulate

— An Interview with André Brink

E W A L D M E N G E L : There is an almost inflationary use of notions such as ‘trauma’ and ‘healing’ in contemporary South Africa. How do you feel about this, not only as a writer, but also as a critic? A N D R É B R I N K : It seems to me that it’s almost impossible to avoid that. It is so much in the centre of our preoccupations in literature, in the social sciences generally, that one just cannot get away from that. And I find it a particularly fertile field to try to explore at the moment of crisis, because it seems that when a society is placed under pressure of some kind of trauma which has either just passed, or one finds oneself in the middle of it, or there is a feeling that it is still going to happen, it is as if things which are normally, in a more relaxed society, under the surface start boiling up and become much more visible, much more tangible, and manifest themselves in a variety of strange forms. Nadine Gordimer has a famous quote from Gramsci, I think it’s in July’s People, about all the strange phenomena that are released in a state of tension and emergency, and I think we are living right in the middle of that now. So it is a fascinating moment, sometimes almost too fascinating to keep up with. EM: July’s People is an almost apocalyptic novel, isn’t it? A B: Very much so. E M: The last phase of history seems to have come for the whites. A B: Well, that is one of the fascinating aspects of apocalyptic fiction. We lived through a very strong period of that, where it was illuminating to see how white fiction focused on one aspect of apocalypse and that is the end of © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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an era, whereas the black fiction that came out of it at the time – especially plays – focused on the beginning of a new period that is born out of the upheaval. So the dual nature of apocalypse was very well illustrated by that. E M: In contemporary South African fiction there are many traumatized characters around, and sometimes it seems as if the authors themselves were sharing the nation’s trauma. Is there something personal in this for a writer, or should we see it from a more objective or distanced point of view? A B: I think that that is something that characterizes the South African experience in recent years: everybody is so much part of this whole experience, and certainly it goes very strongly for authors and other artists, painters, actors, and musicians. They are caught in the heart of the whirlwind and that makes it sometimes very difficult to stand back and have a clear vision of what is happening. But I think that is part of what makes it so remarkable, that in the midst of things, while they are happening, it is almost a matter of reporting from the war zone, reporting from the battlefield, and that lends it a certain urgency. E M: Would you say that the fact that we as outsiders in this country try to pry into the secrets of your wounded nation leads to a rejection on the side of South Africans? Or is it positive for South Africa to get this sort of international attention? A B: I think there is something of both, and it could vary from one author to the next. Some would see it as meddling: “This is our anguish. We have got to sort it out. We want to sort it out.” But I think most authors feel that it brings a healthy possibility of equilibrium to the situation, and that certainly will go for myself. It’s as if you were talking to a psychologist: you are explaining your trauma, what you’ve gone through, what you are still going through maybe, to somebody who, hopefully, can see a little bit more clearly, because she or he is just outside of that. That is something that I find very fascinating in Karina’s1 approach, because she is the outsider, coming from Poland, coming from Austria, but at the same time she has been very deeply involved in everything that has been going on here over the last few years. And so far she has managed to have a view from the inside and the outside at the same time, and reconcile the two. 1 Karina M. Brink, André Brink’s wife, who writes under her maiden name of Karina M. Szczurek, was born in Poland and is an Austrian national.

Œ André Brink

5

E M: Considering the fact that so many writers have picked up this theme of trauma – what exactly is literature’s potential for dealing with it? A B: On the one hand it is enormous, almost endless, because over so many centuries literature has done so much, has probed so deeply into all kinds of human situations, and has developed so many different forms that it seems almost uniquely able to cope with the anxiety, with the anger, with uncertainty, with all these aspects thrown up by the turmoil. And it has the tradition of trying to evaluate, trying to explain what was happening, trying to understand what was happening. I remember the poet Ingrid Jonker, a number of years ago, long before the situation was as dire as it is now, saying that she found it a kind of curse that the writer can be so deeply involved in something, maybe in the middle of a personal tragedy, and at the same time almost looking over her or his own shoulder to evaluate what is happening. E M: So involvement and distance at one and the same time would be the description? A B: Yes, I think that is part of the dilemma but also part of the tremendous excitement of being a writer in a situation like this. E M: Rape, murder and torture are also not alien to your novels. Do these atrocities come in because they are part of reality and it is the novel’s task to depict it, or is there also another reason behind this? A B: I think the first answer that you suggested is very close to it: it is part of our reality and one cannot pretend that it is not happening – even though I remain wary about talking too glibly about “the writer’s task”. So, while one is writing and looking at the scene these things are actually happening, which can be very productive: it can be tremendously stimulating; but of course it can sometimes have a numbing effect, which I felt very strongly when I worked on the novel A Dry White Season, and I have written about that several times before. I had started working on this novel and I had been writing for a few months already, dealing with two deaths in detention of a black boy and his father and the attempts of a white man to find out what had happened. Initially he does it with a sort of naive assurance: he is white, he belongs to the establishment, he thinks it will be easy just to ask the security police: “What happened? I want to know.” And then he gets dragged into the situation, and it becomes a terrifying experience. So I was working on this, and then Steve Biko was murdered by the security police. He had been arrested in the small town of Grahamstown where I lived. They had arrested him

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perhaps a kilometre away from where I lived. It was so traumatic, I stopped writing that book. I thought this was obscene: “I write about a fictional character to whom these things are happening, and here is a real man, an incredibly important man in our present situation, and he is arrested and very soon after that he is murdered.” So that was just too much, I thought I could not go on writing, and it took several months and speaking to a variety of people before I was persuaded that for that very reason I could not be silent. However terrible and atrocious the experience was, I had to try to bear witness to it almost from the inside, because I felt so close to it. In a way, it became even closer when not long after that the very security policemen who had killed him came to visit me and searched my house and confiscated my manuscripts. It was almost too shocking to believe. So again, the temptation was very strong to put aside my work and say: “No, this is not right. It is an obscene way of prying into the most atrocious and private sides of other people’s lives.” It took quite a while until I accepted what friends had told me: “That is what writing is for. You’ve got to tell us the story!” I remember an episode from one of the great Russian writers who wrote about some of the atrocities committed by the Stalin regime, but I think in fact she also witnessed some of the things that Hitler did: Anna Akhmatova. She stood there while a long line of prisoners was being moved to a camp, and one of the women in the line recognized her and motioned to her. Akhmatova went to her and the woman said: “Will you write about this?” She said yes, and there was an incredible expression of relief on this imprisoned woman’s face saying: “Then I can go.” So, I really believe more and more strongly that that is one of the functions of a writer: to try and bear witness, to try and do this sort of schizophrenic thing, being there and reporting on the being there, especially in a time of terror, in a time of atrocities, in a time of trauma. I have always felt that being there is so tremendously important. That is where a good friend like Breyten Breytenbach and I have strongly differed over the years: he moved out of the country – for very good reasons – I stayed here – perhaps not always for good reasons, but simply because I didn’t want to leave. For him it was different, but in the long run I find that for me it was absolutely necessary to be here. And while I could see things happening and experience things happening, I had to bear witness to them.

Œ André Brink

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E M: I’m especially interested in the relation of trauma and narrative structure. Can trauma have an inspiring effect for a writer, for example with regard to plot structure or time? A B: I’m afraid it can, because it links up with what I have described as a sort of obscenity, like prying into something so private and so terrible that no one else has the right to look into it. But when, historically, you are “blessed” in a situation where it’s not you who are the curious bystander wanting to probe, it floods over you, it washes over you, you find yourself there, and then I think that if you are conscious of what you are as a writer, then that is what you must do. I remember a Canadian friend of mine once telling me about an encounter he had in South Africa with an old black woman. I think there was a death in her family. It could have been related to the apartheid atrocities, or simply the death of a very dear member of her family, and she was crying when he met her. He went up to her and asked her what the matter was, whether he could help, and they started talking for a while. He found out what had happened, and he asked her about her feelings and whether there was anything he could do to help her, or whether there was anything she felt she could do, and she said: “There is nothing I can do, except to be here.” And that, to me, has always been one of the most eloquent expressions that I have encountered through all the years of apartheid: just be there; and then try to assume the responsibility of your being there. I think sometimes it is almost all you can do. Now that apartheid is more or less dismantled, although so much of the mentalities are still there, and long afterwards, a hundred years from now, many of these eyewitness accounts may have lost their immediacy, even their validity as writing. They may come to seem too trite or too melodramatic, but it is immensely important for them to have been written. To a certain extent one could compare it to Holocaust accounts of people who were in the camps. Many of those writings are almost embarrassing in their – one hates using words like melodrama or sentimentality – but then another wave of writing comes from it, from people who are further away and who need those eyewitness accounts in order to start imagining the real. To me, this has always been the clue to writing: it doesn’t help you just writing the real of what you see, you must bring yourself to a point where you can imagine that. I found that very specifically while I was writing a novel about a slave revolt at the Cape in 1830, A Chain of Voices. There I had more

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than two thousand pages from archive documents about the trial in which these slaves had been involved. Every word that was said in court was written down in those notes. So I thought: “Well, this is going to be an easy novel to write” and it wasn’t. It was one of the most difficult, even though I had the testimonies of all the slaves, of all the witnesses involved in this terrible event, and even though I’d gone to the farm where this rebellion had taken place. The house is still standing and I could visit that, and I thought: “Well, now I have a mass of information, but I still don’t know the inside of why it happened. What did a particular individual feel at a particular moment when this or that happened?” And in order to be able to understand that, I had to make the leap of the imagination into the reality which was there, but the reality is never enough, and I think that is ultimately what art means: the power of the imagination to make it real on the page, or on the stage or on the canvas, or whatever your medium is. E M : The Other Side of Silence is mainly set in Namibia occupied by the Germans. I noticed when people discuss trauma they tend to spread out and globalize the issue, and of course the Holocaust comes in here, and you have already mentioned it. Is it important for you to discuss trauma in a globalized context? A B: I think it helps to understand that it is not an isolated experience. I think there is a sense for the writer but also for the victim of this kind of trauma to realize: “What I am going through is not unique. There are other people who have experienced this and are experiencing this.” In a way, that alleviates the terrible burden of your experience by being able to relate it to the experience of other people. That is what writing so often does: it is a way of reaching out and touching somebody and helping somebody in the story to reach out and be understood by people outside. It happened so often during the worst years of apartheid when there were so many people, like that woman who spoke to Anna Akhmatova, who felt an enormous comfort just in knowing somebody will report this, somewhere it will find a place and people will be able to read about this, or see it on the screen, or see it on a canvas, or see it on the stage. Literature is a medium of sharing, of articulating the inarticulate, sometimes the inarticulable. I believe very strongly in what Italo Calvino said: “I write by virtue of that which cannot be written.” Sometimes one writes on behalf of other people. So

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many times during the apartheid years I had to tell a certain terrible story, because the person to whom it happened could not tell it herself or himself. There is, of course, a very real danger there. If you start trying to speak on behalf of other people it can so easily become a sort of paternalistic appropriation of somebody’s story, and that – to use that word again – is also obscene. But if there is somebody who really wants to articulate and cannot, for whatever reason, then the writer has that sort of function of opening up a channel into the darkness of this person’s life. But there is a very fine line between appropriating and articulating. E M: Exile and homecoming structure the rhythm of some of your novels, for example Imaginings of Sand or The Wall of the Plague, and there is a strong sense of place or – let me use the German word – ‘Heimat’ in these novels. How important is ‘Heimat’ for you, and what will happen if this ‘Heimat’ should be lost forever, imaginatively or really? A B: This sense of being rooted in a place, of being shaped by a place, and of bearing responsibility towards that place simply because you come from there, has been with me from the moment I started writing. I know that as a child I grew up rather lonely, although I lived in a very loving family, but I always had the sense of being a solitary person, and my only comfort was walking in the veld and literally talking out loud to the thorn trees, to the stones, to the lizards, and to the tortoises. I think that was where my writing started: the process of communication with the creatures and the things of nature, some of them alive, like the tortoises, some of them not alive, anyway not in a normal sense, like a stone for instance. – There may be many people who absolutely believe in the secret life of stones, but it is different from that of human beings. – All of that contributed to my awareness of a whole network of existence of which I felt a part, and which surrounded me, and without which I felt bewildered. I have travelled a lot in my life, and I love travelling, and the years that I spent in France, for instance, are among the most precious experiences that I’ve ever had, but the feeling of real homecoming – this ‘Heimat’-feeling about which you spoke – is overwhelming and absolutely indispensable to me. I did think about this very often during the apartheid years, because then there were moments when I came very close to deciding to leave for the sake of survival. But every time I thought: “Well, I have to give it a little more time, because I can’t face it now, perhaps a bit later.” And so it went on and

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on, and in the end I did not leave. I can’t say things are significantly easier now, but it is a different country, it is changing, a lot of things have become easier, more manageable. So in some respects it may be a bit easier to leave now, also because I have absorbed so much of the country inside me that not being here physically may not be quite as terrible as it would have been twenty years ago. But I still really need this sense of place, and that prompts so much of what I write. E M: Besides the political issues and allusions that are part of your novels, there is one thing which I believe is very dominant and this is your penchant for storytelling. Storytelling in your version also amounts to myth making, in a positive sense. Myth in my interpretation ranges from ‘tall tales’ – like those in Imaginings of Sand – to the myths of the KhoiSan in Praying Mantis. In this, you are very much like Zakes Mda and his imaginative transformations of reality. Is this myth making part of an African art of storytelling, and can you as a white writer participate in it? A B: I think so. Yes – to both those questions. I think it is very much part of storytelling in Africa, and in that respect I was perhaps very fortunate in that during the first few years of my life my mother was not very healthy. She had to stay in bed for much of the time, so much of her mothering role was taken over by my old black nanny. It was in the Free State, she was a Sotho woman, and she told me the stories of her people in her language. In the process I also learned her language, and many of those stories she didn’t really tell, she sang them. Now I can no longer speak Sotho, for many years I haven’t been able to, but some of the rhythms of the stories that she sang to me have remained with me. I find that, as I grow older, I somehow grow closer and closer to them, so that very often in my writing I feel that I need only to close my eyes and I can imagine myself once again on the back of my nanny, who tied me to her back and then carried me when she was working. And the communication just between my little child’s body and her big comforting motherly body and the stories that went with that – perhaps that was where the urge in me started which compelled me to read and read and read as I grew up and in later years especially. I am still absolutely enthralled by the myths of African peoples. It is interesting to look at the way in which so many of these myths from people who live geographically very far apart have certain parallels over time, certain basic images and structures that keep on coming back. So, that has been one

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of my preoccupations over my life, and I think that is for me almost as strong, if not even stronger sometimes, than the sense of place, the geographical locality which prompts so many of these stories. EM: In Imaginings of Sand you populate the South African landscape with ‘tall tales’ of colonizing Afrikaners. Populating this landscape with white myths could be construed as an act of narrative re-appropriation or recolonization. Or do you think it’s absolutely necessary for a writer to do this? Do all writers do this in a way? A B: I think, in a way, we all do. We don’t even have much choice in that, because you, as an individual and as an individual writer, are indebted to all the people of your life who have brought you their stories, either literally by sitting down and telling you the stories or simply by communicating their life experience to you, by living together. That is what writing is fabricated from, that is the starting point of so many real or imagined stories; so, one cannot exist without that. I think the danger is there, as I said earlier and as you implied. It can so easily become a matter of appropriation, a new form of colonization, and that would be despicable. That danger is so real and so close, because the line between the original thought – if one can use the word, because nothing is original, it all comes from somewhere else – the original imagining and the lives of others surrounding you is so thin, that it is so easy to appropriate. And ever since postcolonialism really started becoming a force to reckon with, one is so conscious of how easily you can appropriate and misappropriate that you have to be on the lookout all the time, and you have to be very, very careful to interrogate yourself on every point: “Am I stealing here?” There is Picasso’s great word that small painters borrow, great painters steal. And I think there is a certain glorious way of stealing, and, being quite open about it, it is a way of acknowledging our indebtedness to the world around us. But it is different from just appropriating and parading somebody else’s experience as your own. So, I think as long as one is conscious of that danger and tries not to fall into the pitfall, but also as long as one can remain grateful to the generosity of the people that you live with and that you share your experience of the world with, it is inevitable that you have to express your debt, your indebtedness, in this form.

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E M: And many other writers do this from their point of view, like Zoë Wicomb writing about her Griqua forefathers,2 Mandla Langa in The Memory of Stones writing about the Zulus and their relation to the land, and Zakes Mda in The Heart of Redness writing about Nongqawuse. In a way, it’s like a contest of narratives set against each other. A B: Southern Africa is so incredibly rich in these things, in that sense of layer upon layer of stories that ultimately constitute the continent. I think simply by opening your eyes, your awareness to the immense richness of the continent feeds into your writing. E M: You have been writing in Afrikaans as well as in English and sometimes you mix the two languages. How does it feel for a writer to write in the one or the other language? Is there a difference? A B: Oh, there is a difference, but the problem is, it’s not always so easy to be totally logical and rational about it. I usually try deliberately not to rationalize about it too much. I think it is pretty well-known that initially I wrote only in Afrikaans until the novel Looking on Darkness was banned, and there was this discovery that suddenly I was a non-person; suddenly as a writer I did not exist because I could write only in my tiny little language in this remote corner of the earth. So, in order to survive as a writer I had to find an audience, and the only obvious solution was to start writing in English, knowing that then at least, if something was banned in Afrikaans, I could publish abroad and some copies would filter back into the country. But now for many, many years this particular danger of censorship has not existed for me. It is no longer necessary, strictly speaking, to write in English, but now the experience of writing in the two has become so much part of my process of writing. If I write a particular chapter in Afrikaans, and I then write that chapter again in English – I never just translate it, I write it again – simply because of the use of another language I discover things which I’d missed in Afrikaans. So those things I can then work into the original – if one can use the word original – Afrikaans, and in the process of doing that, again simply because it’s another language, I discover things which I’d actually missed in the English writing, and so it can go on and on forever, until at a certain moment I just say: “Stop, otherwise I’ll never be finished.”

2

See David’s Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2001).

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I don’t know how I can formulate the differences between these two languages. I think English is simply a much older language, in Western civilization terms; it has Chaucer behind it, it has Shakespeare behind it, it has the whole array of incredible writers behind it who have all helped to shape this language. Afrikaans is still relatively young, although we are discovering more and more that some of its roots are really ancient, but in a different way. Perhaps Afrikaans tends to be slightly more concrete in its patterns of thinking, because for so long it existed in a close, immediate communication and communion with the realities of the landscape in Africa, and then started assimilating more and more of the thought patterns and the grammatical patterns of some of the indigenous languages like Xhosa or Zulu, or some of the KhoiSan languages, whereas because of its particular history English may be better or more fluent in expressing abstract thought, like philosophy or psychology. And each language in the world has certain little areas which only it can express and no other language can say that in the same way. A simple, obvious example in German would be a word like ‘Schadenfreude’ – I don’t think you could really find that exact nuance in any other language. And in Afrikaans in response to a question you are not obliged to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, you can also say ‘yes–no’. It has nuances which are just impossible to communicate in any other language. So every language has its areas of private possession, and that means that for every new language that you learn your world expands. I believe very strongly in that famous Wittgenstein saying, that the limits of my language are the limits of my world.3 Especially as a writer you really live in terms of language, you discover the world through language. I discovered one silly, naive little example of this when my daughter was very small. She was just about a year old and we were walking to a building site to watch a big bulldozer digging trenches. She was scared of the terrible noise and clung to me, until I pointed at the bulldozer and I said “brumbrum,” and she smiled and said “brumbrum.” She found a word to capture that piece of terrifying reality, and that is, as I say, a very crude example of how much of language actually works. E M: Chris Van der Merwe has told us that there is a trauma literature in Afrikaans; there certainly is a trauma literature in English. You know both

3

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).

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languages and literatures. Would you say that there is a characteristic difference between them, or are the parallels more numerous? A B: That’s a tough question. I think there are many, many parallels, because so much of these literatures of trauma in the two languages have roughly the same origins in recent history. I don’t think those apprehensions of trauma would differ very much since we were both involved in roughly the same turbulent recent history. I think there would be many, many similarities, but then of course, our interpretation of these traumas, originally at least, would have been shaped by completely different experiences: the Afrikaner having largely been shaped over the last almost four hundred years of living here, the English South African having shared a lot of that but also bringing – consciously or subconsciously – a long, long history of imperialism, of living with other European nations, of being shaped itself in the beginning from the interaction between the Angles, and the Saxons, and the Celts, and what have you. So our perceptions would inevitably be different. But how to pinpoint that? How to give a specific name to that? This is really speculating, but I should think that the larger weight of more recent sophisticated European experience should bring a certain perspective, a certain broader perception of the local scene than the Afrikaans perception which would have been forged from being the underdog too very often in the past, from having been the victim of colonization. The Afrikaner is now emerging and seeing somebody else, the black people, becoming the new victims for a long time, and yet finding strange, sometimes very disconcerting parallels between the two experiences, which will remind the Afrikaner of the large extent to which, as a person, he has shared the colonial experience with black people. I don’t want to branch off from this too far, but it is fascinating to go into the nineteenth century, for instance, and to see how on several occasions Afrikaners and black Africans in this country stood together against the English. And I think that is very significant. Not many Afrikaners and not many blacks today are very conscious of that, but I think it’s a very important part of our shared past which is being brought to light again: that kind of experience of colonialism, of arriving at a consciousness determined and shaped to a large extent by colonialism and the ferocious struggle for liberation from it. That would bring other nuances to the Afrikaner’s sense of trauma than the English South African would have. But really to pinpoint that more precisely would lead us into a world of conjecture.

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E M: Can you identify any new trends or tendencies of writing in your country in the last five to ten years? AB: I think one of the bewildering aspects of our literature at the moment is precisely that political emancipation has brought with it such an opening-up in so many directions that it’s very difficult to pinpoint specific lines or patterns. E M: But diversification would already be a trend. A B: Diversification itself is certainly one; diversification which is not completely rooted or mired in the narrow political situation evolving in this country. I should think that some shades of magic realism still seem to be very fertile with Zakes Mda and several others in that vein, although in much of the world it is a bit passé already, and even in South Africa it’s beginning to go out of fashion. I’m not talking about the kind of magic realism which the world came to know through the South Americans, and not in this wild flash of imagination that we find in some aspects of German literature after Günter Grass, or in Dutch literature, slightly less in English, but a magic realism rooted in Africa, in the intense interaction between the ancestors and the living, in the world of the imagination and the world of the real, and the difficulty of distinguishing between these two. In this sense I think the South African and the African experience of magic realism – unfortunate word, really – is still potentially very fertile and still works, and one can see it as a very definite strand in our writing. I think taking stock of the postcolonial situation, trying to find out where it started, where it may be going, where it has gone wrong, would certainly be quite a segment of the writing that is being done here. As far as re-visiting apartheid itself is concerned, I think most writers are sick and tired of it for the moment; they don’t want to be reminded of it. But just as Americans really started going back to Vietnam only about ten years ago, we have to be patient and see what comes in the next generation, when apartheid is really far enough away to try and analyze and probe it more intensely than now. But signs of that are there, and one of the strands of writing that is still pretty strong is writing about these recent past experiences – including the apartheid experience – from the point of view of children: How did they see apartheid? Of course they are the generation who grew up under it and now can look back on how it appeared from the point of view of a child. There is a small novel by an Afrikaans writer, Jeanne Goosen, which I translated into English as Not All of Us, and then it came out in a second edition which is

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called We Are Not All Like That. She is an incredibly sensitive writer and I think she is one of the best in giving the child’s view of what that meant. So I think there is a lot of re-telling the story of apartheid from different perspectives, obviously re-writing it from the point of view of black writers, which in so many respects had to be totally different from the white; but there are also nuances of difference between the Xhosa writer and the Zulu writer, and Zoë Wicomb writing from the Griqua point of view. So recent history is another strand, and from there we can move on to the re-imagination of Southern African history as such, and the history of the continent, going far back, going back to the first peoples who inhabited Southern Africa, and their exposure to the realities and rhythms of the country, a thousand years or more ago. So reimagining and re-viewing history, the large tracts of history that were silenced by the small white male interpretation of it during apartheid, that is an incredibly fertile aspect of writing at the moment, and I think that can probably still burgeon further. K A R I N O R A N T E S : Do you think in this context autobiographical writing has a special role to fulfil? A B: Oh, I think it has started already, yes. From Pamela Jooste to Niq Mhlongo to Fred Khumalo; so much of that writing is rooted in the autobiographical experience and starts giving what Shakespeare would have called a ‘local habitation and a name’ to the experience of apartheid, not as something which happened out there, a grand ideology, but as the intensely lived personal experience of specific individuals. So there certainly is quite a lot happening and threatening to continue happening. K O: Do you think that the autobiographical genre as such has developed in a different direction after the fall of apartheid? A B: Oh yes. I think it became much more dominated by the extremely personal, private experience. It is as if writers want to withdraw more and more from the public domain, and they really started delving into their most private experiences, looking for what is truly authentic about that, what makes it authentic, where it comes from, what makes the experience – which in many respects relates to that of millions of other people – different, what makes it unique, how can the individual root herself or himself in individuality. I think it is that move into the extremely private which characterizes this trend very much.

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K O: You are about to launch your memoirs A Fork in the Road. Congratulations! Was this also one of your motivations behind writing your personal memoirs? A B: Oh yes, certainly. In a sense it may just have been curiosity, the urge to find out. This came from certain discussions that I had with my sister over the last two years. We are very close and we started discussing the fact that whenever somebody else brought up our childhood or we started talking about it, our first reaction would be: “Oh it was such a happy childhood.” And then we started thinking: “But – to put it very crudely – why did we turn out such fuck-ups, then? What went wrong? There must have been something very wrong with our childhood. It could not have been as happy, and pleasant, and smiling, and sunshiny as we always thought.” So that was an incentive to start digging and find out where this came from. And for me much of it lay in the discovery – discovery is too big a word, because it’s a process that’s still continuing – of just how dark and violent and traumatic – to use your word – our childhood was. What were the things that were happening in those days that characterized our childhood? The domestic violence, the violence perpetrated by white masters on black servants, the incredible level of violence against women – black women, yes, but also white women in their homes – things that I started remembering. I grew up in a very, very religious house, but our pastor beat his wife. All these things that were glossed over by the community, and the things that you were not supposed to talk about – I remembered them. And suddenly, when I started writing about some of these things, it was as if a whole layer of awareness came to the fore again, and that was where I really started discovering that this was a really twisted and tortured childhood, not the happy one that I had always thought I remembered. K O: So you see your past differently now that you have written about it? A B: Oh certainly. Yes. K O: Is it harder to write about characters who are real people and your potential readers? A B: I don’t know. It’s too early to say, because I haven’t had much feedback of any kind about it yet, since the book is not really officially out yet, it is just on the point of coming out, but I will need some time to find out whether people are very angry or very tickled. But it’s too early to say it. At the time of writing it was not particularly difficult, because it was a battle that I was

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trying to fight out on paper with myself, trying to force myself to be as open as I possibly could about my memories. And I may start thinking differently about that if there are either positive or negative reactions. K O: But it was not a preoccupation for you during the writing process? A B: No, it was a necessary writing. It made it very difficult in many respects. It was really like sitting with a psychologist, with a therapist, and digging into yourself, finding sometimes that even when I wrote about happy or funny episodes in the past, there would be a resistance building up in me, and then I had to wonder: “But why? What is it here that doesn’t want to be told?” So I deliberately went through those things, and that made it quite agonizing in many respects, but I tended to feel then that if it was so agonizing, then there had to be something there that was worthwhile for me to dig up and to explain to myself. It was a very therapeutic and very, very unsettling exercise in many respects, and I am just glad to be able to return to fiction now. K O/ E M: Thank you very much.

WORKS CITED Brink, André. A Chain of Voices (London: Faber & Faber, 1981). ——. A Dry White Season (London: W.H.Allen, 1979). ——. A Fork in the Road (London: Vintage, 2009). ——. Imaginings of Sand (London: Secker & Warburg, 1996). ——. Looking on Darkness (London: W.H.Allen, 1974). ——. The Other Side of Silence (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001). ——. Praying Mantis (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005). ——. The Wall of the Plague (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). Goosen, Jeanne. Not All of Us, tr. André Brink (Cape Town: Queillerie, 1992). ——. Ons Is Nie Almal So Nie (Cape Town: Queillerie, 1990). ——. We Are Not All Like That, tr. André Brink (Cape Town: Kwela, 2nd ed. 2007). Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). Langa, Mandla. The Memory of Stones (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000). Mda, Zakes. The Heart of Redness (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002). Wicomb, Zoë. David’s Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2001). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method; London: Kegan Paul, 1922).

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Washing Dirty Linen in Public

— An Interview with Zoë Wicomb

E W A L D M E N G E L : What do you associate with ‘trauma, memory, and narrative’ a) in the South African context, and b) with regard to literature in general? Z O Ë W I C O M B : Trauma, memory and narrative of course resonates most clearly with representations of slavery and also the holocaust. Toni Morrison has spoken about the specific ways in which memory is used in narrating trauma, but her most elegant representation also shows a relationship between memory and forgetting. In Beloved, a novel about slavery, and killing, resurrection, reburial, the very mode of narration demonstrates the operation of memory. ‘Re-memory’, as she calls it, is an act of translation, a story about killing for love told many times from different perspectives, and in different voices. It records the tragic event and the struggle to represent it, but whilst it is an act of remembering, the novel is also about the importance of forgetting; whilst the story is about healing, it negates at the same time the possibility of healing. “This is not,” says Morrison’s narrator, “a story to pass on” (275). In other words she problematizes our received view of memory and narrative; memory is also bound up with forgetting. In the case of South Africa it is of course the T R C that springs to mind, the public, institutionalized remembering and narration of trauma. Then there is that nice European boy, Hamlet, maddened, paralyzed and ‘de-sexed’ – or is it sexed-up – by the patriarchal injunction: “Remember me! Remember me!” And not being content with simply being remembered, the dead old bearded king in full war regalia prescribes precisely how he should be remembered – by killing the uncle, something the poor boy just can’t manage. Now, the imperatives – and in the voice of the king, Father Culture – that the barbarism © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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of apartheid must be remembered in our writing in order to ensure a civilized future, or in political rhetoric, to bring about healing – well, it makes one feel a bit like Hamlet: paralyzed. Besides, in South Africa where so many can’t read and write, what impact does such writing make on society as a whole? And finally, is it not the case that all novels at least find their origins in traumas – little, personal traumas, but trauma all the same. And memory is such a problematic thing – the possibility of misremembering. In a recent Irish novel, The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry’s character has a great image: if memory is neglected, she says, it becomes like an old box room, jumbled and messy not only from neglect, but also from too much scrambling about, searching haphazardly and throwing in things that don’t belong there. In that novel memory is bound up with the trauma of the Troubles. E M: Would you agree with Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s view that the South Africans are a traumatized people?1 Has the fact that the fall of apartheid happened almost twenty years ago changed anything about the situation? Z W: To speak of South Africans is a confusing business because South Africans have always been, and still are made up of separate racial constituencies, and trauma itself would be manifested in different ways. There is the ‘trauma’, for instance, of having been brought up in a situation of privilege by virtue of apartheid’s exploitation of the black majority. That surely must, at some level, (since we adopt the language of psychoanalysis) have made its mark even on those who feel that they had nothing to do with apartheid. What about the legacy of that kind of repression? That seemed to me the problem with the T R C , one that shows up clearly now, twenty years later: It was so very one-sided in its notion of trauma and the healing that remembering would bring. The individual black people bearing personal witness were also, it seemed, the only bearers of truth. The truth, then, was only the memorializing of black victims who were prepared to witness in public. Why had there been so little for the perpetrators to remember? Also, the model could not deal with the institutional violence of apartheid that shaped whole communities in a variety of ways, and that for the purposes of 1 “Every South African has to some extent or other been traumatized. We are a wounded people.” (See “Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Address to the First Gathering of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” The Official Truth and Reconciliation Commission Website).

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public memorializing remained an unmanageable subject. Or the listless cooperation with apartheid by virtue of keeping quiet, doing nothing, whilst enjoying the benefits that the system brought. So the perpetrator became an iconic Afrikaner, a scapegoat other to the ordinary liberal South African. As for the category of revolutionaries: what did they want to remember about the methods of the revolution? What in the name of liberation, or disciplinary codes was necessary to suppress? Twenty years later the label of a traumatized people is as meaningless as it was then. Now there is a whole generation of dispossessed people who barely know the history of apartheid. The origins of violence in the then legitimate revolutionary call to make the country ungovernable have been forgotten. The legacy of Mandela’s negotiated settlement that left economic inequities virtually intact (what else could they do) is with us in the form of poverty and violence, but also in the unreconstructed sensibilities of those of us who imagined that there wouldn’t be a price to pay; those of us who didn’t lift a finger, did not have to get our hands bloodied, and were not called to account, so that now we are outraged by the rapists and killers, the have-nots, the ahistorical monsters whom we fail to recognize as the people produced by our very own history. Let’s take the example of luminaries who refer to the new Zuma-led culture as the rule of illiterates: Zuma (regardless of the reasons we may deem him to be unsuitable for political leadership) is indeed not university educated, but to allude to the lack of learning in a man of that generation which enabled the expensive European education of the white elite is grotesque. Amnesia or what? You know, perhaps we should now, twenty years later, lay it to rest and turn our attention to say Zimbabwe where people are still daily being traumatized. I have just read a young Zimbabwean writer, Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (which means London; Harare South is Johannesburg), which deals with trauma through a humorous representation of the anti-hero, a Mugabe supporter. In London he carries with him a battered suitcase, poignant image for memory: it smells of mother. EM: In your novel David’s Story, the hero is unable or unwilling to talk about what happened to his comrade Dulcie. Dulcie’s untold story, however, becomes the structural centre, the ‘black hole’ around which the events of the novel are circling. In this way, you have invented an ingenious narrative structure by which an untold – or even untellable – tale is nevertheless told. Would you agree with this view?

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Z W: The narrative structure was really dictated by the subject-matter, and I hoped that a measure of the equivocal nature of that subject, a sense of its untellableness would remain. Yes, the tale is told, but it is one which foregrounds the difficulty of telling that story. The story took off in its present emphasis as a result of the British press on the I R A – it was at the time of decommissioning – the ludicrous liberal conception of violence as something that is embraced by unnatural demons as if it were not produced by colonization, as if colonization were not itself responsible for the excesses into which a liberation movement slips. From idealism to corruption – necessarily so, as it comes to resemble the very thing it is fighting against. And that, of course, is to do with the fact that violence is generative. In that sense, it’s like narration where the act of telling produces more story. Violence, too, reproduces itself. And that really was the great sacrifice that revolutionaries had made. It was Nadine Gordimer who saw it so clearly at the time. In her essay “Living in the Interregnum” she speaks of violence as a terrible threshold none of us is willing to cross, but that what it means is that it will be left to blacks to do so. In other words, she acknowledged that dissident writing could not do the trick; that it would be the actual military wing of the A N C that would accomplish it. E M: There was a great apathy and reluctance among German writers after the Second World War to turn to Hitler’s atrocities and the holocaust and come to terms with the past. Adorno claimed it would be indecent to continue writing poetry. Paul Celan, however, said that he felt it was important to reappropriate the language distorted by the Nazis. Is there a comparable situation in South Africa after the fall of apartheid? Z W: Adorno, of course, later explained more clearly what he meant by that injunction. But remembering and ‘coming to terms’ with the past – it all sounds so commonsensical. Actually I don’t know much of German writing and how it records that past, but perhaps Schlink’s The Reader is an interesting example where you have a second generation character appalled by the silence of the fathers who didn’t in any way feel responsible for Nazism. In that novel the concepts of knowledge (also carnal), shame, guilt, and atonement are gathered into the theme of literacy which in turn is woven into the theme of the law and legitimacy. And we are left with a sense of indeterminacy; the task the protagonist wants to pose to himself – both understanding and condemnation – is well nigh impossible. His trauma has been dramatized

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through carnal seduction and the history of Nazism for which illiteracy is in a sense a metonym. Although the German example is instructive for us, I don’t think, however, that the situation in South Africa is comparable. Throughout apartheid we had a vigorous movement of resistance writing by whites in the country – both Afrikaner and ‘English’ – who had the cultural and linguistic capital, as well as educated blacks at home and in exile. And the Afrikaans language of oppression was reclaimed by coloured poets who wrote in a demotic non-standard variety that came to be known as Kaaps. E M: The second (female) first person narrator is acting as David’s helpmate or amanuensis. She tries to write down, to piece together the fragments of David’s life. In this way she becomes a writer-persona. Could we see in this structure a metafictional comment on the task of the South African author? Z W: Heavens, I don’t know if I can comment on my own work in this way. Or for that matter on the task of the South African author. We do what we can with the given material; we struggle to find a way of arranging, inventing, moulding, until we arrive at what seems to be a suitable structure. I don’t know. In the case of my narrator, she is necessary to overcome some of the silences that David as a revolutionary must adhere to, but she doesn’t know the full story that remains elusive, cannot be known. Perhaps because writing is so hard, because high level literacy is so unattainable in underdeveloped cultures, the figure of the writer-persona is a favourite of mine. For me one of the keys to a civilized, democratic society is the ability to read, write and interpret, and the freedoms as well as the perils linked to that, hence also my interest in Schlink’s ingenious use of literacy. But as for the task of the South African author, that is not my place to comment on. E M: The postmodern narrative structure which underlies David’s Story seems to me, on the one hand, paradoxical to a certain degree, but on the other hand, quite logical. With regard to the many atrocities which happened in the South African past, straightforward narration and coherence-building seem to have become impossible because it would be obscene to turn untold (unheard of) suffering into an entertaining story. Is the ’brokenness’ of the structure of your novel a reflection of this situation? Z W: The holocaust of course produced a raft of postmodern theories about the perils of representation – for instance, about certain genres being unsuitable for dealing with horror; about the ethical dangers of aestheticizing; an

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appeal to Mosaic law and the ‘Bildverbot’ and so on. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the story is cobbled together from a variety of sources, including the bits that the narrator makes up, in other words to show that there is not one definitive story or truth about that history. What do I know about these things? Who am I to comment on or represent the terrible choices made by people like David and Dulcie? Nevertheless, I wanted to look at the condition of revolution that is never discussed, the suspension – in the service of freedom – of certain values and beliefs during the period of political struggle, and the topsy-turviness of that world means that the truth about that period is problematic and has to be nuanced in its representation. How then was I to write about a Liberation Movement that like any other is prone to corruption? There is the horror of taking up arms and the irony of adopting military values, leading to a skewed world that in part comes to resemble the very excesses of the regime it wants to overthrow. My task was also to avoid liberal humanism’s pieties about bloodshed, or racist assumptions about black liberation politics, whilst at the same time discussing unflinchingly that inevitable slippage from idealism to corruption – which is the price of opting for an armed struggle. Not that I think the choice is between an ‘entertaining story’ and a fragmented narrative. And there are other ways of doing it. Look how the warnings against certain genres were overturned by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, where he used the medium of the comic strip to write about the holocaust. Mind you, there too he uses a meta-narrative; the story is of a young man extracting the history of the holocaust from his father, the survivor. Now, there’s a project: is the successful or ethical representation dependent on such a distancing strategy? I don’t know, but it’s worth investigating. E M: In Barbara Adair’s novel End we can never be sure whether the protagonist is male or female, is hetero- or homosexual. ‘Willing suspension of disbelief’ becomes very difficult under these circumstances. How far can you go as a writer of novels with regard to the deconstruction of narrative coherence? Z W: I don’t know this novel, but as a general rule I’d say that there can be no rule about degrees of fragmentation. Given that form and content are inseparable, it is not a question of taking a coherent story and breaking it up for, say, aesthetic purposes. A story itself develops in the process of writing and that process, of course, is in turn produced by the developing story, so that the

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form that evolves is in a sense the only available one for the writer in question. E M: What readers do you have in mind when you write a novel such as David’s Story? Do you think of your readers at all when you are planning a new work of fiction and writing it? Z W: Not in the slightest. I have absolutely no specific reader or constituency in mind. All I know is that writing is an act of communication and that the language, our shared code, has to be deployed in such a way as to be clear and to say what I want it to say and so as to be understood as far as is possible in ways that I want it to be understood. I have been accused of elitism, but there you are, there’s nothing I can do about it; obviously I can’t write for those who can’t read literary fiction. You just do what you can and as best you can and without patronizing a hypothetical reader of any description. E M: Having lived abroad for quite a while, was ’exile’ in this sense for you an obstacle or a continual source of inspiration writing about South Africa? Z W: Neither, I think. I live abroad because after some years of being away I acquired my own family in Europe and in spite of my efforts to return permanently, the ties here make that impossible. In a sense, writing about South Africa could be a form of protesting about being stuck here, a perverse unwillingness to accept that I don’t live there. In a fundamental sense I don’t feel part of this culture and have no desire to write about it. But having said that, my last book2 tries to break away from that, and the stories are set in both Cape Town and Glasgow, with characters moving between the cities, partly because I explore the cultural and historical links as result of mainly Scottish colonization of South Africa. But then again, my Glasgow is invariably viewed through the eyes of the African character. E M: Traumatizing events such as abortion (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town) or rape and torture (David’s Story) are important plot elements in your fiction. Are you using them because they are an inevitable part of the reality you are depicting, or is there another explanation for this? Z W: Again, I’m not sure that I can answer this. Where do stories come from? You have, of course, selected from the many events that I’ve represented the ones related to physical trauma. But a novel constructs lives in order to re2

The One That Got Away (Roggebaai: Umuzi, 2008).

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present the world, so I see no reason to evade the traumatic. Don’t all novels deal to some extent with trauma? Is that not the human condition – the inevitable part of reality? On the other hand I’m also dealing specifically with female experience, and as one interested in the ways that gender inequality is manifested in rape and abortion. E M: Trauma also has to do with the loss of identity and the difficulty of reconstructing it. How important is the aspect of identity construction (individual, cultural, national) for your writing process? Z W: I discovered from critics that You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town is about coloured identity. I didn’t consciously set out to write about that, but they are, of course, right, although in another era in which identity isn’t a fashionable topic, one might well have settled on other aspects of the work. But setting fictions in apartheid South Africa and its obsession with classifications would on the other hand necessarily involve characters grappling with cultural identity, of coming to terms with the world on their own terms so to speak. I’m not sure that there is such a thing as individual identity – is identity not by definition relational? As for national identity, well, perhaps it’s my distaste that prevails; Zulus and Scots alike as one of my newer characters says. That tribal stuff has its value in mobilizing people against oppression, freeing them from the disabling effects of cultural and political hegemonies, but really it rarely stops there. Its blinding toxicity takes over, and then there’s no stopping the pathology of exclusion, intolerance, xenophobia, the irrational suspicion of the other, all that well after the reason for nationalism has become irrelevant. But to return to trauma and loss of identity: reconstruction is dependent not only on remembering, but also forgetting, moving on as they say, and so the concept of memory has to encompass forgetting. Narrative which is crucially bound up with the passage of time – situation A has to turn into situation B otherwise there is no story – necessarily includes death, which throws light on the euphemism of ’passing away’ – no longer recoverable. E M : Playing in the Light is the story of the protagonist’s coming to terms with the fact that her parents have been ‘play-whites’. In what way is colour, ethnicity, still important for you nowadays? What experiences did you have in Great Britain with regard to your ethnic origin? Z W: There are several ways in which to answer this question. On the one hand I could say that colour is of no importance to me, but then racism is

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endemic and so you have to keep on your toes. Being middle-class means that I don’t personally suffer the indignities of racial discrimination, but I come across perfectly respectable, educated people making disparaging remarks about black people. Which means that you make sure that everything you do is above reproach; that in the workplace you can never afford to slip up – selfimposed yes, but nevertheless not without reason. Having said that though, I also feel that privileged people like myself should try to rise above the condition of victimhood and stop addressing the white world, and there is some evidence that this is happening. There is the recent bestseller in South Africa, Sihle Khumalo’s book of travels from Cape to Cairo. But then its title is interesting: Dark Continent, My Black Arse? The European epithet for Africa, ‘dark continent’, is quoted, then dismissed, recast as question, and ‘my black arse’ the vulgar, scornful refutation is the author’s reply: but to none other than – Europe. It’s difficult. Our writing can’t avoid being a matter of washing our dirty linen in public. And in the bright light of Africa the linen seems grubbier, and far from the subtle shades of over-development, we live in the chiaroscuro of corrupt excess and abject poverty. So Jacob Zuma’s or Thabo Mbeki’s corruption charges always shine brighter than say, Berlusconi’s; they more readily become a sign of African corruption, of an entire society lacking in moral fibre, in ways that Italian or German societies do not become tarred by their leaders. This has led to the unspoken injunction: protect our own society; don’t give the West further fodder to despise us. The negative reception in South Africa of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is evidence of this. Further evidence is from Khumalo’s travel book which for all its silly masculinism ends with the memory of people living in dismal conditions. “How could our so-called liberators neglect their people and ignore their plight so completely?” he asks. E M: History, especially Griqua history, comes up in almost all of your writings. You share this preoccupation with quite a number of South African authors. Why, do you think, has history become so important? Z W: I don’t think it is a purely South African phenomenon. The ways in which the world has changed so fundamentally perhaps produce a nostalgia for the past – and nostalgia need not necessarily be the discredited thing it is known to be. In taking on such nostalgia, the act of writing necessarily opens it up, shows it to be other to what we thought it was. But more pertinently, the changed world views, new perceptions of history itself, mean that we are

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driven to review the ways in which we perceived the world. In the case of, say, South Africa there are discredited histories or local histories that impacted on people which I wanted to recover. In David’s Story I used Griqua history also in an analogical way, to show from the similarities the dangers of ethnic absolutism. Yes, history has become important as we look back at the bad old days. And Memory, the mother of the muses, is also the mother of History, and has since antiquity been conceptualized as an art. Perhaps one of the more naive assumptions of public memorializing was that the recounting of the past is about the ‘natural’ flow of memory, akin to the natural flow of tears that will accompany the telling of atrocities. What is lost in that assumption is the remembering subject’s organization of information into that which the listener understands as a story. So, perhaps writers in dealing with history are also responding to such misconceptions. E M: Must history not turn into a bone of contention because all of this history happens on one and the same ground, South Africa’s soil? Will there be a contest of re-writing history from the point of view of the various ethnicities? Z W: I don’t suppose everybody has the stomach for this groping back into the past, but no, the point surely is that in rewriting history you don’t come up with definitive, authoritative assertions; rather, you too are also producing a text from a particular point of view. It is for this reason that the realist mode becomes inadequate. We have had to find ways for showing that our new representations are themselves contingent, open to revision. E M: Would you say that storytelling (narrating) in this sense is necessarily an act of narrative re-colonization (Afrikaner point of view), or resistance against it (coloured, indigenous point of view)? Z W: Oh dear, this notion of an ‘Afrikaner point of view’ is one that has to be put to rest. And when I look at Afrikaans writers I’m not even sure what that means. Marlene van Niekerk or Van Heerden could hardly be accused of narrative re-colonization in their recuperation of history. I can find no examples of narrative jostling for positions. As for resistance: nowadays the dominant culture is black so that blackness does not remain the position of resistance. There are also a variety of positions that people write from. I’m thinking for instance of Sindiwe Magona’s book, Mother to Mother

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– an attempt to bring people together, to heal the wounds of the past, local wounds. I think I’m running out of steam... E M: Do you have any new plans with regard to novel writing? If so, will you deal again with a South African theme? Z W: I’m not prepared to speak about my current writing – a matter of superstition, I suppose. E M: Thank you for this interview.

WORKS CITED Adair, Barbara. End (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2007). Barry, Sebastian. The Secret Scripture: A Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). Chikwava, Brian. Harare North (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999). Gordimer, Nadine. “Living in the Interregnum,” in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988): 26184. Khumalo, Sihle. Dark Continent, My Black Arse: By Bus, Boksie, Matola – from Cape to Cairo (Roggebaai: Umuzi, 2007). Magona, Sindiwe. Mother to Mother (Cape Town: David Philip,1998). Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader, tr. Carol Brown Janeway (Zürich: Diogenes; London: Phoenix, 1998). Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1986). Tutu, Desmond. “Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Address to the First Gathering of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” The Official Truth and Reconciliation Commission Website (16 December 1995), http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/pr/1995 /p951216a.htm (accessed 6 March 2009). Wicomb, Zoë. David’s Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2001). ——. The One That Got Away (Roggebaai: Umuzi, 2008). ——. Playing in the Light (Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2006). ——. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (London: Virago, 1987).

—Œ—

The Magic of Writing

— An Interview with Sindiwe Magona

K A R I N O R A N T E S : It seems that autobiographical writing is very much in fashion in South Africa these days. I think it is also a field of interest to you. I have read that you are working on your parents’ biography. Is that correct? S I N D I W E M A G O N A : Yes, I am working on my parents’ biography in verse form, but I’m also the official biographer of the recently retired archbishop of the Anglican Church, the one who came after Archbishop Tutu,1 Archbishop Ndungane.2 He asked me if I’d do his biography, and how could you say no to His Grace? So I agreed. It is an honour. He’s a feminist; I think he made a conscious decision to have his book done by a woman. I don’t know whether he specifically wanted a black woman, but I know he feels strongly about women and the fact that more often than not they are left out, they are secondclass – if not third-class – citizens. K O: So you are working a lot with the (auto)biographical genre? SM: Well, I have two autobiographies of my own.3 K O: What do you think of the autobiographical genre in the South African context? Do you think it has a special role to fulfil? 1 Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu served as Archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 to 1996 (see Tutu). 2 The Rt. Revd. Njongonkulu Winston Hugh Ndungane served as Archbishop of Cape Town from 1996 to 2007; see Lisle Brown, “Mayor Hosts Farewell Dinner for Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane,” City of Cape Town (12 December 2007): online. 3 To My Children’s Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992).

© Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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SM: Very much so, because to this day – almost fifteen years after the fall of apartheid – in the post-apartheid era I dare say by and large the ordinary, the average South African doesn’t really know anybody who doesn’t look like them. I’m not an apologist for white South Africa, don’t get me wrong, but it came to me rather as a shock to realize just how many white South Africans didn’t know about lives such as mine. I grew up in this country as a child understanding that whites were powerful, whites were clever, knew everything, whites were this big mass of beings above everybody else; they were the people who made the laws on behalf of everybody else. I was in my early thirties before I discovered that they didn’t always know what those laws actually translated to, and it was a shock to me, because I thought they knew. And now I know that they didn’t and don’t always know everything. Biography will flesh out the bare bones of history. History books and the study of history are fantastic, but they don’t go into detail. Whole classes of people are put together as: “This happened to these people,” and you don’t ever get to know what that meant to these people, who they were in their ordinary lives. I think biographies then give face, give flesh, give blood and heart and soul to whatever period of history you are studying. And in terms of South Africans beginning to understand who they are in their totality it also helps. Because of the total segregation, the lack of knowledge about each other helps to perpetuate myths. One of the big questions now is: “Who owes whom what for the past grievances?” And white South Africans still do not understand what it meant to live under apartheid on the receiving end of that stick. I was somewhere recently and met somebody – a South African, but he wasn’t born here – really an earnest person, not a racist. We established a rapport so he trusted me enough to say: “But why is what happened here special? People suffered; Jews suffered in Europe, Jews suffered elsewhere. There is suffering everywhere.” And for a split second I didn’t know how to answer him. Then we got talking, and I told him about the fact that we were never citizens, and he didn’t even know that. He has lived in South Africa for more than thirty years, but he didn’t understand that apartheid meant we were denied citizenship and all that goes with it. If you’re not a citizen of a country, you don’t enjoy the protection of the government. As a single parent in my early twenties I couldn’t go to the welfare department, I couldn’t go to the children’s society to ask for aid. When we had no food, we had no food. I couldn’t go anywhere.

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I’m not minimizing the plight of refugees in South Africa today, but they actually enjoy more privileges than I did as a non-South African South African during apartheid. If people could understand that, maybe even the lack of empathy among black people for the people who come as refugees would be better understood. Because honestly, we had nothing; we were here only as hands to work in the cities, and that was our life. K O: And you think that autobiography will help people to understand? SM: Yes, because if they read autobiographies, they will begin to understand who we are, how we’ve been scarred, I mean the psychic wounding of people who grow up knowing that there is no hope in hell of ever escaping their plight. Today the government tries to say to young black people: “There is an opportunity there,” but they don’t know what that means; their parents don’t know what that means. And systems perpetuate themselves: if your parents don’t know what it means to go to college, who the hell is going to encourage you to go to college? Who is going to shepherd you through, steer you through grade school so that you are prepared for college? Who knows how to do that? And so the children lack proper nurturing in terms of guidance towards tertiary education. They come back from school and they do what their parents did before them: sit there, chat, play, watch TV and that’s it. That’s what they know. And their parents don’t know that you ought to say to a child: “During the school week – Monday to Friday – only half an hour of television”. Who has said that to them? And even if they were to be told to say that, the other child from another community has that room called ‘their room’; and, as Virginia Woolf said a long time ago, what one needs is a room of one’s own and £500.4 Every child, every young person in school needs at least a corner and quiet, their own space. Where do you think the children do all this marvellous homework that you give them? Anyway, biographies help for those willing to see, willing to hear, and willing to understand. K O: What influence do you think have the fall of apartheid and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (T R C ) had on the development of the autobiographical genre?

4

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929).

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SM: I think after the T R C more and more people began to realize that there is value in their hitherto worthless lives. These lives that were supposed to be nothing have value. They are, after all, human beings. Suddenly the whole world recognizes our humanness and we are beginning to believe in it too, enough to think: “Actually, if that came out during the T R C … what I know is just as bad or as good” – depending on how you evaluate it. And so, to see history happening, to bear witness to that, is not only enlightening, it makes one re-evaluate one’s own life and rediscover, re-envision what it means to be you, that it was not all your fault, you were not that dumb. Yes, you made mistakes, but you were also encouraged to be a little person, to count for nothing. K O: So, the T R C encouraged people to start telling their stories? SM: Yes. The T R C was nothing if not storytelling. K O: And that also helped the development of the autobiographical genre? SM: Yes, yes, yes. Some of those people who were in the T R C will write books of their own, because the T R C , of course, was limited to only those people who were invited there for whatever reason. There are lots of other people who could have told equally horrendous stories and didn’t make it there. They may now feel compelled to write their stories. And there are people who witnessed the T R C and that resonated with them, reminded them of their own lives or other lives they know, and they want to write about it. People now want to write their grandmothers’ stories, their mothers’ stories, because the T R C told them there is value. Our history is beginning to matter to us in ways that were not possible before the end of apartheid and the T R C . K O: When you write about your family and friends, they are also your potential readers. Is it difficult for you to write about real people in your autobiographies? Does it influence your writing at all? SM: It does and it doesn’t. It doesn’t, because I decided that I want to tell my story, and I want to tell it as truthfully as possible, for myself. So, where I feel I might embarrass somebody or they might be offended in being portrayed in that light, I might change a name, but the story remains true. I just figured instead of making the story false, because I want to put a name, I will make my story true and then change the name. KO: I noticed that you sometimes use only initials for your characters.

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SM: Yes, and that has freed me, because then I don’t have to be apologizing to people or be embarrassed or fight with people. Just change the name and it doesn’t embarrass you. I am talking about what happened to me, what was once true in my life. If it was true in my life, then I want to tell it like that. K O: The last chapter of To My Children’s Children has the same title as the second volume of your autobiography, Forced to Grow. Have you always planned on publishing your autobiography in two volumes? SM: No, it happened accidentally. I wrote that whole big thing in one volume. I just wrote the story of my life, from beginning to end. And then the publisher fell in love with the book. My publisher advised me: “Nobody reads a big book by an unknown author.” The truth is, I don’t read big books myself unless they are really compelling books by well known authors. So we split the book into two, which then led to my writing short stories, because once the book came out in 1990 I was eager. Now the publishing buck had bitten me, and I wanted the next book, and so my publisher, Marie Philip, said: “No, I want this first book to have a full life.” I didn’t know books had lives. “What do you mean? I’m not going to publish a book next year?” – “Well, if you write short stories, I’ll publish them.” – “I don’t know how to write short stories.” – “Try! If they are any good, I will publish them.” I wrote Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night and that came out in 1991. And so Forced to Grow came out in 1992. K O: In an interview in 1997 you stated that you were not quite done with the autobiographical genre.5 Do you have any plans to go more into that direction again? S M : Well, Forced to Grow ends when I leave South Africa in 1984. I keep thinking I’m going to go back to autobiography but other things intervene: I’ve written another book of short stories,6 a novel,7 and late last year I had my second novel, Beauty’s Gift, come out. And in another month or two I have a book of poetry coming out. K O: What’s the title? 5 Siphokazi Koyana, “A Conversation with Sindiwe Magona in New York,” in Sindiwe Magona: The First Decade, ed. Siphokazi Koyana (Scottville: U P of KwaZulu–Natal, 2004): 158. 6 Push-Push! and Other Stories (1996). 7 Mother to Mother (1998).

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SM: Please, Take Photographs. It’s going to be published by Modjaji Books. K O: But given the time, you would be interested in going further into that direction? SM: Oh, certainly. It’s just that I haven’t got the time or the handle on that, but I guess it will come, maybe after my third or fourth novel. I need to write about my stay in the United States, my return, etc. K O: In the same interview you also mention that you are thinking about writing a memoir about your time as a student.8 I’m interested in the terminology: the scholars don’t quite agree about the difference between a memoir and an autobiography. Is there a difference for you? SM: Not really. I am an unlearned writer, I didn’t study writing at all, but my understanding is that a memoir focuses on a certain aspect of a life, whereas an autobiography covers a wider period and encompasses various themes. A memoir could be about losing a child or a year in a place. That, to me, rings more like a memoir. K O: Do you believe that traumatized people can experience healing through writing about their trauma or even through reading about it? SM: Oh, definitely. I have a poem about writing that has the two following lines: Writing is not therapy, but it can be therapeutic.

K O: That’s in one of your poems? SM: Yes. “It is not therapy, but it can be therapeutic.” There is something soothing about taking an ache and bringing it out under the light, holding it to the light, and seeing it for what it is. In a way it’s a form of letting go; it’s part of the process. You can look at it, you can talk about it, you can change it around, you can shape it, you can address it, and you can let go. There is value in putting it out there and seeing the words you feel on paper, and seeing your pain on paper. You may even cry doing it, you may even get angry doing it, you may re-experience all the emotions that you walked through, but in putting it out, in sharing it with others, in getting reactions of other people

8

Siphokazi Koyana, “A Conversation with Sindiwe Magona in New York,” 158.

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who underwent similar experiences, you might find solace and even a better understanding. You might grow away from the pain. K O: Do you think it might sometimes also have the opposite effect, that is, re-traumatize someone? SM: I’m sure. You cannot foretell people’s reaction. And my hope in writing, really, is that for me it lightens the burden I carry. I often say: “I don’t see that I should be inflicted alone,” so I inflict my pain on others. But then they have the right to close the book and not read it; they have the right to not buy the book, not borrow the book, not read the book, and they can take time off when it gets to be tough, which, when you are undergoing the experience you cannot. But a burden shared is a burden halved. I believe the more people know about it, the easier it gets. And sometimes you draw strength from other people who affirm: “Something like that happened to me, too,” or “I know somebody who had a similar experience and this is how she dealt with it.” Human nature is strange: just the very realization that you are not alone is also something that helps you overcome trauma. You get a better perspective by writing through the pain. When you think about your own life, suddenly you stop and you think: “I wasn’t alone.” And you walk around, and you see other women, other human beings, who are still where you were, and you can only say: “Thank you, universe.” KO: Throughout both your autobiographies you stress the tension between the oral tradition on the one hand, and your writing on the other hand. How important is oral tradition to you? SM: Without it I don’t think I could have written. The realization that stories are important is because I grew up in stories, with stories, enjoying stories, listening to stories and believing in stories. So I know that stories can make you laugh, stories can be cruel, people in stories can be cruel. All the nuances of storytelling, the techniques of storytelling and the fact that we are heir to all these emotions – these things you learn as a very young child. You know sometimes people do cruel things to others, and sometimes people are noble, and do big things, and are of tremendous help. You get all of that from storytelling. And so when you come back later as a storyteller or as a writer, when you build your characters you don’t shun or shy away from people who are gruesome, because you understand that this is also part of human nature. It’s

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ordinary – it may not be pleasant, it may not be commendable – but it does exist, unfortunately. K O: As far as narrative tense is concerned, you tend to switch between the present and the past tense. Does this technique help you to convey meaning or does it have more to do with your perception of the past? SM: I wish I knew. In telling a story, the story ends up getting a hold of you and driving you; and of its own will the story will tell you: “No, no, no. I’m present tense now.” Sometimes you are aware of it and you want to change it to another tense, but it doesn’t work: it gets to feel right in this tense. When I look at it, I think some things get to be present tense when they are still very much with me. It may have happened twenty years, forty years ago, but it is now the way I feel about the proximity. The time factor just dissolves and disappears. There is something that I didn’t learn from a book, but I just became aware of it: Several books into my writing – I think I was doing book four – it dawned on me that if these books disappeared, if there wasn’t one To My Children’s Children left and somebody said: “Write it over again,” I couldn’t. It was such a frightening realization that much as I am the author of To My Children’s Children, I am not really. I was not alone in creating that book. Even if you gave me the chapter headings I might remember and put down what happened in that chapter, but it wouldn’t come, it wouldn’t flow the same way; I wouldn’t use the same sentence after sentence. And that was for me like: “No, no, but it’s my book. I should be able to do it.” It’s not like that. That’s part of the mystery of writing, the magic of writing. K O: It has a life of its own? SM: It does have a life of its own. We kid ourselves that we are in control. The control you as a writer, as an artist have, is the dedication, the discipline you subject yourself to, that you will be at this place at a set time and you will allow yourself to be used as a vehicle through which this book will come to light. That’s all you can do. You may even know the first line you are going to write, and it might stay the first line. Sometimes you write only to find your opening on page eight. And when it comes you just know that that’s the opening. If you hadn’t gone through all this other garbage that makes seven pages you would never have arrived, it wouldn’t have found you. It finds you because you are there, waiting and willing. That’s all we have to be: waiting and willing. And that’s why conscientious writers, disciplined writers write

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every day, because another frightening thing I have discovered, and know for a fact, is that if I say I write four hours a day and Monday I skip the four hours and Tuesday I write eight hours – that’s fine, but I shouldn’t fool myself I’m doing Monday’s writing. The writing I didn’t do on Monday will never get done. I’m a different person on Tuesday. Whatever I write on Tuesday has very little to do with what I would have written on Monday. It’s an amazing thing to think every day we spin out this magic. And to think we waste our time doing silly, stupid things like scrubbing floors. My floor can go to Honolulu, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if I scrub the floor today or tomorrow, it’s the same thing. But the writing I miss is writing I have missed, and I’ll never know what didn’t come into being because I was not there waiting. Milton in On his Blindness said: “They also serve who only stand and waite [sic!]” (14). Writers serve hugely when they only sit there and subject themselves to the muse, and say: “I am here. I am your willing servant, and I am waiting.” That’s it. The page is blank, the computer is staring at you and saying: “Kiddo, why are you here?” You’re bleary eyed, it’s four o’clock in the morning, you think: “Yeah, why am I here?” – You start. You go in faith. You have an idea. When I wrote Beauty’s Gift I had an idea what I wanted to write about. I made notes, copious notes, some of which served me very well, some of which went out the window. But I was waiting and I was willing. And the book began. Writing is revision, and revision, and revision. You write, you go to the end, you start in the beginning. And in the end you beat it into shape. You stretch it, you pull it, you are going to beat it. And it will cooperate. K O: I think your mother tongue also plays an important role for you, doesn’t it? SM: Oh, very much so. I don’t kid myself one minute that I’m Englishspeaking. K O: What role does it play in your everyday life now? SM: I write in my mother tongue, too, especially for children. I have about forty children’s books. K O: I think you also work on language instruction books, don’t you? SM: Yes. I work with two people. One is a South African woman of German origin, the other, a Jewish woman. We work on books that will help people who want to learn Xhosa to do it in an easier way. They have studied Xhosa

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at the University of Cape Town, and they bring their expertise in language and in grammar. It is because of their experiences, that painfulness of their learning experiences and the unsatisfactory nature of them, that they said: “We must do something about it.” And they do. I come in as the mothertongue person – they would say ‘expert’. I’m the mother tongue component of the trio. K O: So Xhosa is the language you also speak with family and friends? SM: Yes. K O: Has your perception of yourself and your past changed after having written your autobiographies? SM: No. K O: Not at all? You don’t see your past any differently now? SM: No. – A little, in that I’m just amazed at people like my parents and what they achieved with so little. I think I gained more appreciation for that generation, and I am just eternally grateful that they were so earnest in their parenting, in their belief that it was a God-given duty to raise their children. We should be like our parents and our children should be like their grandparents. The nation would be so much better served if people put that much care into the raising of their children. Now you find people leaving their children with grandparents – not in the traditional sense, but in a manner of abandoning them, and burdening people who should really be resting and taking it easy. And the financial burden, the reckless breeding I talk about in Beauty’s Gift just drives me crazy. It wasn’t like that even during my youth, definitely not like that during my parents’ youth, that a young man by the time he’s in his mid-forties has several children all over the place: eight children from eight women. I’m not a moralist, but what drives me crazy is what we are doing to the children, the implications for the children. There is no such thing as part-time fatherhood. You are either there as a father or you aren’t. And, of course, it doesn’t help that we have leaders who believe they can be the bull in this village of all cows. I mean: “How dare you have eight wives?” Leaders, national leaders: every year the Swazi king takes a new wife, a new girl, a new child – as a wife. It is not right. And a lot of scummy things saunter under this umbrella of tradition. For crying out loud: “So it was tradition for your great-grandfather. You went to Oxford, your grandfather didn’t.

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You’ve had advantages your ancestors didn’t. You know better, or should know better.” As for playboys during the times of A I D S – I don’t know what to say. What is a playboy today except a murderer? K O: And in Beauty’s Gift you speak out about that. SM: Yes, because I’m fed up. We keep tip-toeing all around the issue. There is no excuse now for new infections. How do you get yourself infected today? What are you thinking having unprotected sex? I’m just fed up, but I also feel as writers we need to address the issues that face the nation – honestly, bravely, boldly, even stupidly. Boldly in that sense that wise people probably will not touch this. But how will we be judged by history? I feel the government will be judged harshly that during this president’s watch, these things happened. I just do not understand Mbeki9 and his stance on A I D S and his stance on Zimbabwe. And this is a man, again, who went to university, who is supposed to be a big brain, an intellectual. It hasn’t saved lives in South Africa, unfortunately. I don’t know what happened there. How will history judge him? – That’s one thing. But how will history judge us, who said nothing, who did nothing? I look back on my childhood and, as I say in To My Children’s Children, I had a happy childhood. Now I look back and I find that it was not only happy, it was magical. The men of that time, the bigger boys and young men, the fathers of that time, they allowed me to be a little girl. I didn’t live under threat as today’s little children do. I went to a youth gathering where a health worker addressed the young women. She was a decent woman in her late forties, early fifties, and she said – and these are her words: If you’ve already seen your moon time – your periods – it doesn’t matter if you’re twelve or thirteen, ask your mother to bring you to the clinic on Wednesdays. Wednesday is for the children; all the other days are for aunties and mamas. Wednesday is for school children, the mamas and the aunties don’t come. But the first time you come, your mother must bring you so we can give you an injection, so that when you are raped you will not get pregnant –

not ‘if’, ‘when’.

9

Thabo Mbeki was South African President from 1999 to 2008.

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So our little girls grow up with the certainty that at some point they are going to be raped. That is how rife rape is. And it’s not white men sauntering there under the cover of dark and raping our kids – I wish I could say that. It’s our own men. I’m very angry at black men, very angry. And it’s mostly people these children know, people they trust. “God, you’re grown up! What do you think you’re doing?” How does a grown man take off the napkin from a baby? And how does he see sex in that? What are we doing to our children? And yet, when you look at South Africans, we go about as if nothing is happening. I look at my nation and I can’t believe we are living under siege as women and you see these men strutting about. These are ordinary men who play sport, who go to pubs, who go to shebeens, who have friends. And then I think to myself: How come we don’t smoke them out? How come we don’t know who they are? And even when we do, they are not branded. It’s like this thing of having twenty-five children from twenty-five women. It’s nothing. People in high positions do it. So what? Yes, we’re very good role models for the upcoming generation. “If the president does it, if this one does it, why shouldn’t I?” It’s a sad state, the state of this nation. K O: Can we come back to Forced to Grow for a moment? You state that in the 1970s “[you] trusted that the truth would set [you] free [but that] it’s been a long wait” (173). Has the truth set you free, or are you still waiting? SM: I am waiting, but the wait has been halved, because at least now there has been an acknowledgement that apartheid was wrong; there has been an acknowledgement that a lot of injustice was done, people suffered, people were killed. I am happy in my own skin. Yes. K O: Do you think that the truth will also set South Africa free? Do you think the T R C helped to achieve that goal? SM: Well, the T R C did a lot of good. What it did not do is be universal. It was for a small pocket of people, the ‘stars of apartheid’ as I call them. For the ordinary men in the street it did absolutely nothing. It may have shown what was possible, but it has not reached the people yet. Like freedom: freedom was a big thing in 1994. Everybody was optimistic and eyes were glowing, but for a lot of people it is still not there; not quite or not yet, because things, as I said earlier, have a way of perpetuating themselves. If you were twenty in 1994 and you had only three years of school, how is your life going to change? It won’t.

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And the way we have gone about it as a nation is doing a little patchwork here, patchwork there instead of systematic mending of the brokenness with which we came to our freedom. We came to freedom in brokenness, and there has been no real going back and patching of the things that were broken, mending them, examining them. And I haven’t even gone to the money that goes down other people’s pockets. I’m not even going there. Even the policies that are made and pronounced don’t really address what is radically wrong; they don’t go to the root cause. And putting salve on cancer is never going to cure the cancer; you need to go to the root causes. Look at the state of our education system: every December we go through the same fuss: the national examinations and then the results come out, and then there’s a whole song and dance: “Why? Why? Why?” Then the minister of education has to say the same thing: “But it’s not as if this government hasn’t done anything. We inherited it.” – Fifteen years later you still inherited it? These are kids who grew up in the new system: twelfth grade is twelve years. These are brand new; they are children of the new era. K O: So, the past is still used as an excuse? SM: The minister said that now, end of December: “We inherited it.” These children were not even born when apartheid ended. You didn’t inherit them, but you didn’t go to the root causes. If you go and intervene at grade ten, it’s too late. They’ve been there ten years, accumulating deficits. Ten years later you have to do a lot of work that is not necessary. Go there when the child is born, when the mother is pregnant, and then monitor. But we are failing. You know why? – We have no resources. But we just bought war ships or war – whatever. And all that money could have been better used in education. I’ve heard in the news this week about the state of our roads. You know what? – We don’t have money for that, because we redid all the signs at the airport in Johannesburg, at the airport in Cape Town. These are not new airports; they are airports that you inherited. And all you’re going to do is spend millions or billions changing names? Who cares about the name? Really, whose life is impacted because you call it another name now? I think it’s a way of conning people into thinking you are doing something for them. You really do nothing. It’s a symbol of exceeding stupidity. That airport was Jan Smuts Airport. – Not good enough? You changed it to Johannesburg International Airport. – Not good enough? Well, when will it end? Two name changes for one airport? Each time you paid through the

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nose. Meanwhile the education of the children is neglected, the health of the people is neglected, and the transport system is neglected. It’s a question of priorities. You can go for the symbols, it’s easier to do. That’s fine. But what have you done for me as an ordinary South African? How many of the formerly disadvantaged people go to the airports anyway? Not that many. So you’re not doing it for them. If there are two or four street names that are really offensive, like if there was a street called ‘Apartheid is Great’ I would also say: “Change it.” Anything else – unless it was ‘Verwoerd this’ and ‘Verwoerd that,’10 maybe – can stay. Not everything should be replaced; it is part of the history of this nation. You didn’t build those streets; you found them there with those names. And all you can do is change them? Build new towns and new streets and name them whatever you want to: “Peace Street”, “Horse Street” – I don’t care. But build, don’t tear down. It’s easier to tear down than to build, and we’re very good at tearing down. K O: At the end of Forced to Grow you said that “if [you] would ever heal, [you’d need…] to put distance between home and [yourself]” (230). Do you think healing is possible? What needs to be done for it to happen? SM: Healing is possible. It is the only way. What needs to be done first is to go back and re-examine what happened really, and what it meant for people, and what it has done to them. It is only when that is thoroughly understood and acknowledged that other issues can be addressed. K O: So the T R C did not finish that job? SM: No, unfortunately not. It’s good to say: “Your husband died, your child died in this way.” But before these people died, there is a reason they were in that position of jeopardy. People didn’t start suffering when they were on Robben Island. There is a reason they landed on Robben Island: their lives before Robben Island were lives of suffering, and that is the suffering of all black people, and that is the suffering that hasn’t really been addressed. It’s as if people started suffering once they were arrested. They would not have been arrested if their lives had been cosy outside. They were arrested because they were protesting, fighting against an untenable situation, an inhuman situation: the way we lived. The way we lived, it’s a miracle that so many of us survived. 10

Hendrik F. Verwoerd was South African Prime Minister from 1958 to 1966.

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K O: How important do you think the role of literature is in the healing process, given that the majority of the people have so limited access to this medium? SM: Well, it is important that the stories be written, if not for the present, for posterity. It shouldn’t always happen that when our offspring tries to understand why we were who we were, they only hear from the other side; they should hear from us, too. So people who were oppressed need to write, and write, and write, even though the majority of our people don’t read. It is important to write and there is a hope in my heart that some of our stories will make it into popular things such as music, such as musicals, such as stage plays, such as film, and that they will capture the imagination of the people, so that they can go and see themselves on stage, and hear themselves, and hear their story. K O: I’ve heard that there is a film project for Mother to Mother? SM: No, there’s a stage play at the Baxter11 in September. I have done a screenplay, but I haven’t sold it yet; I haven’t sent it out yet. I should be giving it to people to read and help me with the editing. I’ve finished Mother to Mother, and as soon as Beauty’s Gift was published I did the screenplay. I have the first draft. K O: Yes, I can see that on stage. SM: Yes, I can see it on stage, too. People say that. I thought: “Okay. Why not?” K O: I have a few more questions about Mother to Mother. You stress that Mother to Mother is a novel, thus fictional. Yet, it’s strongly based on the murder of Amy Biehl, it reads like a memoir, and in an interview you once stated that it might end up being a novella.12 It almost seems more like a mixture of different genres, a hybrid. Why is it important to you that it is seen as a novel? SM: I wrote it as a novel because I hadn’t asked the people for consent, I hadn’t interviewed them. I didn’t want it to be a non-fiction book. I can’t do non-fiction books: the endless interviewing of people, and then what is it? It’s better for me to write it as fiction because then I can do what I want to do. 11 12

The Baxter Theatre is in Cape Town. Siphokazi Koyana, “A Conversation with Sindiwe Magona in New York,” 155.

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The black mother I portrayed is somebody I knew when we were children. Her story is the story of the people, the majority of us that I call perfect products of apartheid: someone who became what the apartheid government wanted all of us to become. Her potential was just never anywhere near being realized; it couldn’t be, it was lost to apartheid. And she is like so many, the walking dead. She’s alive still, but except those things that are biological – and you cannot escape bearing children – what achievements has she made? How has she used her life? I’m not saying she’s been unhappy. People are happy with whatever their condition is. They believe they are happy, but we are not put on this earth, I believe, just for ourselves, just so we can get by. We’re supposed to contribute towards the overall well-being of humanity. And the tragedy of such wasted lives is not what she lost, it is what we lost. We don’t know what her contribution might have been, had she been given the opportunity. When I think of the dreadful scourges of cancer, of A I D S , of Alzheimer and things like that, then I think if the universe put the gifts to cure them in the tiny fists of a black little girl, we are in trouble. Our children come to the world like that in all cultures: we all come bearing gifts to the world. If those gifts were entrusted in the tiny little hands of a female black child, given what we do to our little girls, the world is still going to suffer for much longer. Can you imagine if Chris Barnard13 had been born black and female? That would have taken medical advancement back a century. We don’t know what we do, how we destroy ourselves and how we do ourselves a disservice when we fail to nurture the littlest of our children. Children should be ours in community, and each nation should make sure that all its children are shepherded safely through childhood to adulthood, so that they emerge from the house of childhood fully functioning, self-respecting, law-abiding members of society, so that they can make the contributions they were meant to make. K O: I’ve read that while you were writing Mother to Mother you never contacted the Biehl family. Did you ever try to talk to them afterwards? SM: Afterwards I talked to both families, yes. K O: What did the Biehl family think about your book? How did they feel about it? 13 Dr Christiaan Barnard was the first surgeon to perform a heart transplant on a human being (in 1967, at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town).

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SM: Well, they loved it. I met the late Peter Biehl when I was here in July for final editing. The book was going to come out in September, and after I’d done my spiel he asked for three things: Could I talk to the publisher? Could the publisher bring the book out on August 9th to coincide with the anniversary of Amy’s death? I said I was sure the publisher would have no problems doing that. The next question was: Could they get a copy? I said: “Give me your card.” – “Could we have coffee?” At that time I was already late for my next appointment and I needed to get around as fast as possible. Then, several months later, I got a phone call at the office at the United Nations: “This is Peter Biehl.” I sat down, I stood up again, my knees gave in. “We got the book.” I was almost weeping. I was sure they would hate it, because I had a great fear of their reaction. “We read the book. We love the book. We bought thirty copies. We distributed it to our friends. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has a copy.” We subsequently met and became very good friends, I must say. When he died I was one of three people to eulogize him at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., and I’ve shared platforms with Peter and Linda Biehl when they were in the United States and even at the United Nations. K O: What do you think of the Amy Biehl Foundation and the work they do in South Africa? SM: I think they are an amazing family and that South Africans and other people have a lot to learn about dealing with trauma, dealing with loss, and forgiveness. Two of the young men who were implicated in Amy’s murder work for the Amy Biehl Foundation, and Linda has a wonderful relationship with them. K O: Have you talked to their families about the book? SM: I talked to the one mother whom I knew from childhood, whose plight compelled me to write the book. I gave it to her, but given who she is, I doubt that she herself read the book. She may have looked through the book, but she only had four or five years of schooling and left school early. So, I don’t know. Maybe somebody in her family did read the book. K O: Thank you very much for the interview.

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WORKS CITED Brown, Lisle. “Mayor Hosts Farewell Dinner for Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane,” City of Cape Town (12 December 2007), http://web1.capetown.gov .za/press/Newpress.asp?itemcode=2453 (accessed 18 February 2009). “Desmond Tutu,” The Elders (2007), http://www.theelders.org/elders/desmond-tutu (accessed 6 December 2009). Koyana, Siphokazi. “A Conversation with Sindiwe Magona in New York,” in Sindiwe Magona: The First Decade, ed. Siphokazi Koyana (Scottville: U P of KwaZulu– Natal, 2004): 147–65. Magona, Sindiwe. Beauty’s Gift (Cape Town: Kwela, 2008). ——. Forced To Grow (Cape Town: David Philip, 1992). ——. Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991). ——. Mother to Mother (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998). ——. Please, Take Photographs. (Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2009). ——. Push-Push! and Other Stories. (Cape Town: David Philip, 1996). ——. To My Children’s Children. (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990). Milton, John. “On His Blindness” (1652), in The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250—1900, ed. Arthur Quiller–Couch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919). Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth, 1929).

—Œ—

Speaking Through Silences

— An Interview with Susan Mann

M I C H E L A B O R Z A G A : I am familiar with Anne Michaels’ work, the Canadian novelist and poet. There are two epigraphs at the beginning of your novels that you have taken from her poems. Do you know Fugitive Pieces? S U S A N M A N N : I do know Fugitive Pieces. M B: It’s notably about loss and the traumatic experience of witnessing the death of one’s parents in an extremely violent way. My first question concerns the sort of dialogue that I sense between your writing and Michaels’ work. Is One Tongue Singing a kind of answer to Fugitive Pieces? SM: I would love to say yes, because that would imply another level of meaning for myself, but if it is, it was not done consciously. I did read Fugitive Pieces and it remains one of my favourite books. I am sure that – as with everything that we read and see – it is lodged somewhere in my subconscious. Perhaps that did have some influence, but if it did, I am not consciously aware of it. M B: I am thinking of Quarter Tones particularly and its very poetic language. I could sense that connection to Fugitive Pieces, which I loved, because it’s also one of my favourite books. SM: I think Fugitive Pieces is a wonderful book, but I also really like Anne Michaels’ poetry. I know that not everybody does, but I think that her poetry is exquisite. There are a few lines in her poetry that have carried great meaning for me, and that’s why I have lifted them; both epigraphs come from her poetry, yes.

© Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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M B: I’ll stick to One Tongue Singing now. The book’s chapters alternate between Zara’s past and present but, of course, Zara’s past is present and presence. How can you translate trauma into fiction, given that trauma is something that can re-occur and seems to be almost beyond or outside of time, and that fiction requires a kind of linearity? SM: I am not sure about the linearity because, as you correctly pointed out, her present is also her past. I wanted to weave the two plots together, almost like an arrow: the two paths always working together towards a point, a combination, a climax at the end. I like to think that the two time frames supported one another in that way. And doing that enabled me to use flashbacks. It also allowed me to create a sense of foreboding, like a flashback forward, if you like. Using two different time frames in that way, you can create a sense of impending trauma. M B: For me Zara is one of the most challenging characters that I have encountered in my reading. In a way she challenges the category of the flat character. In fact, readers could argue that she is a flat character; that she doesn’t really develop throughout the narrative. However, my reading about trauma and the effects of violence, numbing, dissociation, the sense of living under a bell jar and amnesia, explain for me Zara’s paralysis. How do other readers read Zara? SM: Zara, I think, is quite controversial. There was somebody who said that she was a flat character. And that she was always dirty, and why on earth would anybody be remotely sexually attracted to her? And then there have been other people who commented much in the way that you just have, acknowledging the potential effects of trauma. If a highly sensitive individual witnesses something as traumatic as her mother being murdered, the weight of that shock could silence you. M B: When the police want to get information from Zara about her mother’s barbaric murder, the grandfather refers to her eyes as “the emptied-out eyes of the living dead” (225). Now ‘the living dead’ seems to me an appropriate way of describing the inner landscape of a person that has been literally shattered by a traumatic event. Could you comment on this, and what would this imply within the South African context? SM: It’s difficult. As you know, many have suffered all kinds of trauma in our country. Unfortunately, we are a violent nation. Racism too is obviously a

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form of violence. But people react differently to violence and trauma. Some even accept it as a way of life. M B: So people are developing a sort of resilience? SM: Yes. We are a peculiarly resilient nation. I’m not sure if one should be resilient in the face of perpetual violence, but we are anyway. We also have a weird tolerance towards crime and violence. When we’re mugged or hijacked, one almost normalizes it, and when we aren’t raped or killed in the process, we use the word ‘lucky’. It’s a bit warped really. But trauma can and often does also have a paralysing or ‘stunning’ effect. It can stun you into silence and that often goes underground; into one’s psyche in a negative, dark way. M B: And you start to live in between life and death, in a sort of third state? SM: Well, depending on the nature of the trauma, I think one could become a bit preoccupied with death. Death could become a far more real part of one’s focus in life than living itself. It could easily become an obsession, as it did with Zara. M B: In Coetzee’s Foe, Friday’s tongue has been cut out. You are also very much concerned with the issue of language. Is your endeavour similar to Coetzee’s: in a way, symbolically trying not to speak for the other, for the pain of the other, but nevertheless conveying its suffering? SM: You mean with Zara not speaking? No, her pain and her silence were her own. E W A L D M E N G E L : What you said before was that silences can speak, and I think it’s the same in Coetzee’s Foe and also, of course, in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story, where David can’t tell the story of Dulcie, but nevertheless the whole book seems to be circling around that silence, that impossibility to speak. SM: It becomes ‘the elephant in the room’ – something that you speak about through absences. So yes, I think silence has a huge role to play. I also think verbal communication is only one way of communicating. In some ways Zara does this through her paintings. She may appear almost autistic, yet in her own way she still manages to communicate with the world, she just doesn’t do it verbally.

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MB: Quoting Coetzee, “pain is truth”1 and “truth is related to silence.”2 I was wondering whether South Africa needs more a theory of silence than a theory of narrative, if the country is to heal. SM: Perhaps there is a time for both: a time for silence and a time for narrative. If I think in terms of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I believe that it was very important to stand up and say what happened. Although the T R C itself was very flawed and has come under strong attack, I still think that when people stood up to tell their story, it became an important launch pad for healing. But if you had the T R C every week, if that’s all it ever was, if South African literature was only ever about apartheid and the pain and the suffering, by repetition we would lose any real power for change. So I think there is a time also for withdrawal and for time out, to change themes, to move past victimhood. MB: In both One Tongue Singing and Quarter Tones memory is, of course, a central theme. However, from the structure of these texts and from the different points of view you’ve chosen, it is clear that the former deals more with what psychology calls traumatic memory, and the latter with narrative memory. Would you agree with that? SM: Yes, I would agree with that. In One Tongue Singing Zara is dealing with traumatic memory and that forms part of the plot and structure. In Quarter Tones it’s more a question of coming to terms with memory, processing her memory in a way that makes sense, so that she can move on. M B: This memory is there in a narrative form, in a way. SM: Yes, memory is the key to that. MB: Of course, the role of the reader is also very important: In One Tongue Singing the incipit is detached from the narrative and the reader is not only introduced into the leitmotif of this text, but also needs to do a constant repiecing and remembering for the story to work. Could you comment on this device and on the role of the reader in this structure? SM: The reader does need to take a fairly active role in making sense of the two plots and working it out. As a writer one hopes not to be too cryptic. 1 J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1992): 248. 2 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 65.

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M B: I would like to turn to Zara’s paintings and Zara’s art now. Zara’s paintings are intense and powerful; however, they don’t seem to liberate her, on the contrary, Zara seems to be possessed. Do you think ‘possession’ would be an appropriate term for Zara’s state? SM: I think ‘possessed’ implies that she is taken over by a force that is not hers. If that were true, then I would suggest that that force is her memory. If she is possessed by anything, it is the memory of the trauma that she witnessed, which led to her obsession with death and her perpetual attempt to engage with it, to try and find some redemption, some kind of understanding, so that she can do what she will never be able to do, which is to make sense of it, because there isn’t any sense to make. M B: To what extent can Zara indirectly get re-traumatized by her paintings? SM: I never thought of that, that she traumatizes herself again and again by the drama of her work. E M: The paintings are very cruel, aren’t they? M B: The theme and the topic – these animals, the attack – don’t seem to change in her work. SM: No they don’t. In that way she could also perpetuate the pain. M B: Yes. So, could that be re-traumatizing? SM: I think it probably could be re-traumatizing, but, as I said, I think it’s primarily her attempt to try and make sense of something that has no sense. So it would be perpetual and obsessive; she would need to keep on revisiting it in the same way, without any results, I think. EM: Both your novels, One Tongue Singing and Quarter Tones, deal with art. Music and art in general, seem to be very important for you. Why is that so? Do you have a special relation to art outside writing? SM: You mean art as in painting – fine art? E M: Painting, sculpting, etc. SM: I have a keen interest in it, but I am not any good at it. Perhaps even deeper than that fascination, though, is an interest in the artistic temperament. E M: Art seems to be a way of dealing with trauma, coping with trauma, like Zara does in One Tongue Singing. Would you agree with Tutu’s view that

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South Africa’s people are a traumatized people,3 and if so, in which way does trauma still manifest itself in contemporary South Africa? SM: I think I would definitely agree with Tutu’s view on that, and it manifests itself on so many levels and I think most of them are very subtle. As I mentioned before, I think the way that South Africans accept violence is unusual, and perhaps that in itself could be a symptom of a traumatized nation, that it’s normal for us. If somebody gets murdered here, it’s no longer even considered a ‘story’. It doesn’t even make the newspapers, unless it has some bizarreness to it. It has to be a mass murder or something like that. We normalize crime and we normalize violence here in a way that I don’t think is normal at all. So from that point of view, I think that we are a little bit peculiar. E M: Would you say that there are different types of traumatization with regard to the different ethnicities? SM: What do you mean? Do you mean that certain ethnicities are particularly subject or particularly prone to certain kinds of violence? E M: That was an idea that just crossed my mind, but when Tutu says that South Africans are a traumatized people, there is no cultural identity so far. Maybe the black population experiences trauma in a completely different way from the white population. The whites may be suffering from guilt, the blacks suffering from violence or from deprivation. So, I am wondering if we can speak about one trauma as far as South Africa is concerned. SM: I think that much of the black population suffers from far more violence than white people do, but that’s not to say that white people don’t endure an enormous amount of violence as well. There is still a great deal of white guilt. There is nobody more politically correct than most white South Africans. E M: Painting in One Tongue Singing is Zara’s way of expressing herself. It is a non-discursive art, like music in Quarter Tones. You are a novelist, however, depending on words and verbal discourse. Is this a contradiction to or even a depreciation of the belles-lettres, or a productive juxtaposition?

3 “Every South African has to some extent or other been traumatised. We are a wounded people.” (See Desmond. Tutu, “Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Address to the First Gathering of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (1995), The Official Truth and Reconciliation Commission Website).

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SM: I would prefer to see it as a collaboration with other forms of artistic expression. I think that any genre of art can only go so far. Just as there are words in certain languages that you can never quite translate, so there are expressions and nuances of feeling that can’t be named, that perhaps can be expressed through one artistic form, and not so much through another. So, I have full faith in the power of words, but I think that it can only go so far. At some point something like music or a painting or a sculpture can take over, can take meaning to another, almost visceral, level. So, I prefer to see it as collaborative belief in art as a bridge to meaning, rather than a lack of faith in words alone. E M: It could also be a creative sort of conflict, I guess, in the way Coetzee uses silence or Zoë Wicomb uses silence in order to become creative. Silence in the sense of being non-discursive, not using too many words. SM: I think that knowing the right number of words to use is a writer’s challenge. And definitely in silence there is a huge creative possibility, because it engages the readers a lot more than if they are bombarded with words. E M: It makes them imaginative. SM: Yes. Something I stumbled across in my research, is that the more one must intellectually or imaginatively engage with something, the more apt one is to be affected by whatever that was, and the greater the possibilities for changes of perception. E M: And leaving these blanks is a means of engaging the fantasy of the reader? SM: I don’t know. I don’t know what John Coetzee’s or Zoë Wicomb’s intentions were with the blanks, I can’t speak for them. But I can say that leaving the blanks would have a lot of creative potential. It’s like the void: the void is full of potential. E M: It also concerns your character Zara: there are a lot of blanks as far as that character is concerned, but this makes her mysterious, this makes her attractive for the reader, because the reader wants to find out what’s going on with that girl, what’s happening. SM: Yes. Although some readers find her frustratingly opaque, as Michela touched on earlier.

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E M: At the end of the novel Zara falls into the hands of a collector, let me express it that way, a patron who seems to be willing to provide for her and enable her to live from her art. Do you see this as a positive or as a negative ending of the novel? Or is it deliberately ambiguous, since we do not know anything about Zara’s future? SM: I saw that as something positive. I don’t think she needed or even wanted recognition. But I did want her to have food and shelter. I wanted her to be able to sustain her reality, to live with dignity. E M: Do you go further in your imagination once you have ended a novel? Do you imagine a future for your characters, or do you stop at that point? SM: I stop, actually. I’ve been asked to write sequels, especially for One Tongue Singing, but I don’t think I could. Other strange things happen: you come across people, and you feel like you know them, and suddenly you realize, but wait a minute, this is somebody I have written about. There is a little girl – she is eleven – who comes to my house now every Monday afternoon, who sits and draws the most unbelievably violent, exquisitely beautiful drawings, just while she’s talking to you. She’ll sit and sketch dogs with fangs at each other’s throats. She’s extraordinarily talented. She doesn’t say much about anything. She likes to hang out with me for some reason. But she’s got this long hair that she never brushes, and she refuses to wear shoes, and I look at her and I think: “Where did you come from? Did you step straight off the page?” E M: This is reality imitating art in the Oscar Wildean manner of style. SM: Yes, that happens, exactly. EM: In Quarter Tones the rhythm of exile and homecoming seems to structure the novel. Quarter Tones shares this with quite a number of South African novels, for example Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift, Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, André Brink’s The Wall of the Plague, or Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness. Exile and homecoming are prominent themes in the contemporary South African novel. Do you have to experience exile personally as a writer in order to be able to appreciate home? Or why, do you believe, is this structure so prominent? SM: One of the reasons might be that South Africans had sanctions placed on them for quite a long time up until our transformation, and that meant that people had to go abroad and stay abroad; it meant that people who were

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fighting in the struggle were thrown out of the country. So many were forced to live in exile. And exile brings with it questions of identity. I read somewhere that when you live in exile, like when you emigrate, you are a stranger in two countries. As soon as you move to a different country, your identity is challenged on so many levels, and if you are a writer you immediately turn to what you do to make sense of it. That said, I don’t think you need to be in exile to appreciate or understand the depth of what ‘home’ can mean. When I wrote Quarter Tones I hadn’t lived abroad for a long time. E M: The picture of South Africa one gets in Quarter Tones is a bleak one: rape, murder, assault, A I D S . The two main characters, however, Ana Luisa and Daniel, are convincing because of their humanity. This seems to open up a horizon for South Africa’s future also in your novel. Is this something you consciously reflect as a writer, or does this just happen in the course of writing a story of two individuals? SM: I think that you do find many people here who are working towards the good of humanity. I don’t know whether this is particularly peculiar to South Africa or not. In many aspects of life there is a sense of a shared humanity, of ‘ubuntu’ (a person is a person because of other people). People are using their skills and qualifications to rebuild South Africa on many levels. And foreigners come here to do so too. E M: And both your novels are hopeful in a way, although they also portray the darker side of life, certainly. There is this wonderful scene in Quarter Tones when Ana improvises on her flute and Daniel falls in with his drums. The two communicate throughout the night – a union of two souls, so it seems, a communication without words – we had that before. As far as these two people are concerned, language paradoxically seems to prevent communication. Would you agree with this view as far as Ana and Daniel are concerned, and why is this so? SM: Yes, I think so. Truth is often communicated non-verbally. It has its own frequency or rhythm that exists beneath what can be said through words. And I don’t think everybody is a natural communicator. That’s where I think something like the rhythm of the drums or the rhythm of a flute might say something different or something non-verbal, and especially working together they might develop a kind of conversation that transcends words.

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E M : Reading Quarter Tones, one gets the impression that place is very important. The sense of place is very dominant: the home of the father, for example, the room of the father; ‘a room with a view’, however, which allows communication with Daniel and which allows joint mourning; mourning in the sense of this dialogue in music. How important is this sense of place or space for you in writing fiction? SM: Rooms and houses are hugely important to me. It can be the smallest space, but the way in which the character relates to that space can be crucial. I can’t imagine writing without situating my characters somewhere, and that somewhere would need to reflect how they felt about and engaged with life. That room in particular not only spoke so much about the father’s character, but it reflected her feeling about that; it was a very important room. Similarly, the cottage where Zara grew up in One Tongue Singing was a powerful image for me. It wasn’t a cottage I’d ever seen, but I saw it very clearly in my mind’s eye. E M: Would you say that you could set a novel outside South Africa, as well? Or does South Africa somehow come in here? SM: I am hoping to. E M: My last question: in Quarter Tones, memory and forgetting seem to be competing with each other, striving against each other. She trying to forget what was before, also partly forgets about her father, but then also remembering, of course, all these things. Do you see this as a necessary and creative conflict? Do you see the act of mourning as a bridge? SM: I think that’s a very beautiful way of putting it. I think that mourning would require a bridge between remembering and forgetting, and then reremembering. If you even look at the word ‘remember’, it splits into ‘re’ and ‘member’ – which suggests making sense of and filing things in yourself in a way that creates integrity instead of fragmentation. E M/ M B: Thank you very much for this interview.

WORKS CITED Brink, André. The Wall of the Plague (London: Vintage, 2000). Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1992). ——. Foe (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986).

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Fugard, Lisa. Skinner’s Drift (London: Viking, 2005). Mann, Susan. One Tongue Singing (London: Vintage, 2005). ——. Quarter Tones (London: Secker & Warburg, 2007). Mda, Zakes. The Heart of Redness (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002). Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). Tutu, Desmond. “Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Address to the First Gathering of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (1995), The Official Truth and Reconciliation Commission Website, http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/pr/1995/p951216a.htm (accessed 6 March 2009). Wicomb, Zoë. David’s Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2001). Zadok, Rachel. Gem Squash Tokoloshe (London: Pan, 2005).

—Œ—

The Things We Still Don’t Say

— An Interview with Maxine Case

K A R I N O R A N T E S : Critics have stated that your book All We Have Left Unsaid reads like a well-crafted memoir. Do you consider it a novel in the strict sense, or is it more of a mixture or hybrid between a novel and a memoir? M A X I N E C A S E : It is a novel, because it’s not my life I’ve written about. Obviously, I drew on my own childhood experiences because I wanted it to be authentic, but it’s definitely not my life story. K O: Why did you choose the memoir style and the confessional mode for your narrative? MC: The inspiration for the book came from a ‘what-if’ thought. One day I thought: “What if your mother dies and you no longer have that connection to yourself and your history?” It was almost historical, a kind of memory search; I think that history and memory are quite intertwined. So it started from there, not from the idea to write a book in the confessional mode. I wanted it to be in first person narration, because I didn’t want to be removed from the subject, and that, probably, gives it that kind of memoir feeling. As I wrote, I felt everything my protagonist felt, which is quite unpleasant actually. K O: The reader feels with the protagonist as well. You have just mentioned something that surprised me: many authors avoid first-person narration even in their autobiographical writings. Why did you choose to go into the other direction by using a first-person narrator in fiction? MC: I definitely don’t want to do it again all that soon; I don’t want to say never, but I don’t have that space now. You really get into your characters, and I currently lead such a busy life that I haven’t been able to commit as © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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much to a character and to telling that character’s story. I was thinking about this the other day: to me narration is very character-driven. I almost allow the plot to develop around the character and let the characters lead me to their stories. I really started to feel as if I was Danika, and to go through her emotions. I remember one day just being so miserable, and I am the type of person that can get stressed and can be angry, but I’m not really a miserable person, so I could not understand why I was miserable. So I started reviewing my life and I realized that I wasn’t miserable but that I was feeling Danika’s misery while I was writing about it. K O: How long did the writing process of All We Have Left Unsaid take? MC: It didn’t take me very long. I think that we have the reality in South Africa that writing is struggle. Or you compromise and have a day job and try to write at the same time. I was able to take about three months off in order to write. And now that I’m trying to finish another book while working a day job I feel almost uncommitted or at least not as committed. It’s almost superficial, and I hate to be that way. But at the same time the reality is: I don’t want to lead a lifestyle of sacrifice. (Which probably makes me sound very middleclass.) KO: Can you tell me more about the book you’re writing now? MC: I’m writing a book because my publisher wants a novel, which is the worst reason to write. I think that as my first book did quite well in South Africa, there’s been this pressure from publishers to get me to turn out another book, and I hate that. I don’t know how artists can work on commission, because I need my own pace to actually feel the characters and to do them justice. I’m really struggling with that consideration. I worked in publishing myself, and I had this weird analogy where I thought books were orphans until they were published. So I’ll never leave the book, but the longer it’s taking me, the more other characters want to be heard in my mind. Things happen to me and I think: “Wow, I’d really like to investigate that or take that further.” This book that I’ve started writing is more of a youth novel and it deals with death again, which is unfortunate. I don’t want to be typecast. K O: So the topic chooses you more than you chose the topic? MC: Yes, definitely. I’m young and I’m not really deep. Lots of people think I’m much deeper than I really am; they are almost disappointed. Some people

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say: “But you are not what I expected. You don’t seem so serious, and you don’t seem to have that many issues.” I mean, who doesn’t have issues? K O: Authors start writing because of a variety of reasons. Why did you decide to go into that field? MC: There are quite a few writers in my family, which is why it was the furthest thing from my mind. It’s a weird story and my older sister gets very upset when I tell it. She’s three years older than me and she did ballet when we were children. K O: That sounds like the older sister, Lilly, in All We Have Left Unsaid. MC: Yes. When I think about my sister, I do think about her twirling everywhere. I think the sister character in the book is a more obnoxious version of her. We actually get on very well now, although I don’t think that we did when we were children. She did ballet, and when I was about five or six years old everyone said: “Don’t you want to do ballet too?” and I said “No,” because that was taken. And the same way she did netball and everyone assumed that I would be a good netball player and follow in her footsteps, but I did not. It’s not that I didn’t want the parallels or the comparison, but I just wanted my own things. Maybe that’s a second-child syndrome; I have a younger sister who also wants her own things. I think we’re all quite strong women, we three sisters, so we all protect our things. With my mum being a writer my older sister said that she was going to be a writer, too. So she studied literature, I studied marketing. She wrote her first book at twenty, and then she wrote this opus that hasn’t been published, unfortunately. So writing was taken; it wasn’t for me. But yet I was editing and rewriting a lot. I got very frustrated when I was asked to edit things and I found myself rewriting. Because I’m a perfectionist I want things to flow. My own voice actually came from editing someone else’s work and being really frustrated. I was editing a story about an author’s childhood memories, and it was very generic, no heart or depth, just observations and surface. I was busy working on it, and bored, and stressed because I had to meet a deadline, and in the midst of all this I made myself a pot of tea – I have lots of pretty tea pots. Everything was laid out, I had a chocolate cake that I had baked, and I was thinking about my granny and her tea. That day I started writing about my granny’s tea ritual and parts of it became Danika’s granny’s tea ritual a

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few months later. Like the granny in the book my granny doesn’t have a full set of matching crockery and isn’t house-proud. During the weeks and months that followed, I started to think of all these little things, like the ballet dancer sister, but also the bewilderment that I felt as a child: South Africa was going through this thing that no one spoke about, and I remember walking into a room and suddenly the conversation stopped. I was talking to my cousin and some friends over the weekend. My cousin’s child was in the room and we were talking around him, which reminded us of how as children we had always been trying to find out adult stuff, and to listen in, and to get bits of conversation, bits of information. But when we were children our parents really protected us from the reality as much as they could, because it was an ugly thing; I can understand why our parents didn’t want us to see it. So we were really as protected as lots of other people. Lots of people of my generation say: “But we didn’t know what was happening. We didn’t know it was so bad.” In South African society you don’t discuss unpleasant things; you put your best face forward. I read on the news today about a mother, who had strangled her nine-year-old child, and the neighbours had heard, but they didn’t intervene. They had heard the child screaming for help, but there is a lot of the “not our business” attitude. In my book, therefore, I wanted to look at things that weren’t said, weren’t looked at. I think that’s why I wanted the mother to try to commit suicide. I didn’t know I was going to lead there; again, as I said, it was the character who led me to think of it. In some way I was looking at South African society, the taboos, the things we don’t say. That’s also where the title comes from, because there are so many things we still don’t say. We’ve had the T R C , but for many people there is still no closure. Nevertheless, I think the T R C was necessary; we needed that, but I wish it had been resolved better. As a nation we are so polite, but it’s not an empowering politeness; it’s obviously a very disempowering thing. I think that people can take it to a level where it becomes a serious negative in your life. I know I’m polite; sometimes I wish I could just tell people exactly how I feel, but I don’t. K O: As far as narrative tense is concerned, you use present tense to narrate Danika’s past as well as her present. Why is this helpful in narrating her story? What is the role of the different levels of time?

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MC: I wanted to show that Danika was a different person: the adult Danika was totally distorted from the child Danika, and I hope I was successful in portraying that. I thought that they needed separate voices, and one way of making their voices separate were the different levels of time. I did experiment with the past tense, and at some stage I must have experimented with second person, but first person – present tense just seemed to work for me and for that story. K O: It makes the narrative more urgent. MC: I wanted that urgency. I so much wanted Danika to find some peace, because she was really so unhappy. She wasn’t miserable-slit-her-wrists unhappy, but she was not living, she was just on this level of functioning. I think so many of us just go through the motions of life without living it. K O: At one point Danika says that “South Africa is in [her] blood” (140), and that she could never leave the country. Would you say that this is also true for yourself? MC: I think that I felt it much more before. Now I can actually contemplate leaving, but not for ever. I’m the only one of my siblings who lives in Cape Town still. My sister lives in London now. She lived in Durban at the time I was writing the book, but what’s really weird is that I wrote that Lilly, the older sister, lived in London, and then I somehow got the idea that she should be pregnant. The same thing happened later to my sister: when she was three months pregnant she came back to South Africa. K O: You wrote her story before it happened? MC: Yes, it was weird. She lives in London, and I can see how she struggles with not having the support system of an extended family in the same country. My mum goes there for months a year when my niece’s nanny goes on leave. And I see how my niece loves being in South Africa. My sister phoned me two days ago to say that she’d been headhunted to an amazing job, but she can’t make the interview. She doesn’t want to phone the person who contacted her because her husband is overseas and the nanny is on leave. She can’t get a babysitter for her daughter, and she doesn’t want to say it’s ‘mummy issues’. If I need someone to go feed my dog, I can pick up the phone and someone will do it. If I need someone to check in, I have that, and so I’m very much aware of the realities of leaving.

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I always try to avoid politics, especially in my day job, because I work in a non-governmental organization, but I’ve become very disillusioned with what’s happening. I think that the hope of fifteen years ago has – not faded, but the reality is that I can’t imagine who I would vote for, and I can’t imagine not voting, because we couldn’t vote for so long. My friends and I discuss this, and some people say: “Oh, you must spoil your ballot, because at least that will be a statement.” I think there is this vacuum of leadership. K O: At one point in the book Danika says that “South Africa […] is for the brave” (140). Do you think this still holds true today, or is it even truer nowadays? MC: It is definitely truer. I don’t want to say that I was more naive when I wrote the book, but certain things have happened; nothing traumatic, for which I’m grateful, but being burgled, for example. And until you’re burgled you always think it can’t be as bad as people say, but when it affects you, then it’s personal. I don’t want to diminish the scale of the problem. Look at America’s election1 and at this hope that came about. We don’t have that here. A few months ago we went out for dinner and everyone was talking about Obama. There’s not that kind of debate about South Africa’s politics. K O: Men play only a minor role in your book, and when they appear they are usually portrayed a little negatively. Do you consider yourself a feminist writer? MC: Well, my mum is a feminist, so we were raised very much on feminist issues. My mum may be a bit too much of a feminist in that sense. She always says: “Women don’t need men.” I know that the mother in the book is not at all a feminist, but Danika’s history would suggest that she had bad experiences with men, which were a result of her upbringing and this very female environment she grew up in. I did grow up in quite a female environment myself I must say. It’s very odd: we are all sisters, my mum has three sisters and a brother, and in my father’s family there were lots of girls as well. I think that in many ways South Africa is a patriarchal society in the sense that women are very subservient and lots of women know their place. Men have good lives in South Africa, and as a result of that, men often leave their families – they can leave. Then the mothers raise the children on their own, or 1

The 2008 US presidential elections.

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the grandmothers do, which is often the case. All these families were raised by grannies. So, I wanted to look at the birth of that phenomenon of the disgruntled female. My granny, for example, was very bitter, because my grandfather had died. K O: And yet, I’ve met many very strong women in South Africa. MC: Yes. In my book I write about women being strong because they have to be. I think that lots of women also appear to be strong, but they are not really. Once you get to know a lot of these women who you think are strong, you realize that they aren’t that strong. It’s scary. I think there’s a lot of bitterness, too. K O: Earlier you were talking about coming to terms with the past, talking about the things that are still not being talked about. That seems to be a very important theme in South African literature nowadays. How important is the topic for you personally, and how important do you think it is for South Africa as a country? MC: This is something I strongly believe in: talking about the past, the apartheid story, the struggle story, victimhood, etc. To forget the past is the worst thing that any nation can do. We learn from our mistakes, so we just can’t afford to bury things under the title “the past” and move on, especially not now. I think that we need to continually interrogate the past. I’d like to look even further back than apartheid. I work for this agency that promotes Cape Town, and one of our projects is a cultural project specifically on Cape Town and how our slave narratives were never clearly told and how all these stories just remain rumours. K O: Do you think that literature plays a role in dealing with the past, given that the majority of the South African population has very limited access to the medium of literature? MC: That is a huge problem. Obviously for me to survive as a writer I need to have a reading public. I try to help in my small way by being a consumer myself, being a reader, buying books. But I think that a lot needs to be done with literacy campaigns on the national and the local level. We’ve committed lots of money to libraries, but reading needs to become more fashionable. Too many people can get by with saying things like: “I haven’t read.” And often our sports people are asked the question: “What’s your favourite book?” and they say: “I don’t read.” It’s almost cool to not read, but I think that writing

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about our past is very important. It doesn’t matter whether audio books, or printed books, or websites – I think in whatever form, it needs to be put out there. It could even be a movie or a TV programme, but we need to look at ways of telling these stories. K O: At the end of All We Have Left Unsaid, Danika buries her mother’s diaries. This is in stark contrast to many other South African novels that concentrate more on the ‘digging out’ than the ‘digging in’. How should we interpret this regarding Danika’s life and her past? Does this have any implications for South Africa? MC: No, I am not saying that we should bury the past. I thought of burning the diaries also, but there was a lot of synchronicity in the book. The designer kept the spade symbol, and I only realized it when the book was about to be printed. I think I wanted to show that Danika had made her own peace and had taken responsibility for her own life and for what had happened. Many people blame their parents, their circumstances, and I think that Danika was going to change for the better and be more connected. If there ever were a sequel, she would be more in touch with the world, because in the beginning she was very separate from the world. The fact that she wasn’t looking for an excuse or an answer in her mother’s life, showed that she had realized that she was going to forge her own identity instead of looking into her mother’s diaries. She no longer needed to know. And that’s what I mean by characterdriven: I just thought that growth was more important than reading about her mother’s past. I think we all have to be responsible for our own lives and our own mistakes and move on. K O: What do you think about the genre of autobiographical writing in the South African context? MC: I read the genre and I think that there is a place for it, but I think there is also a place for fictionalizing autobiography and making it more digestible, more personal. I think if it’s a character’s story and not a personality story but you can relate to it, then you can internalize it more. It’s also quite levelling in a way; if somebody has gone through something and you read about it, and they are telling their story, it’s empowering for someone who has gone

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through something similar. I’m thinking of Alison’s story,2 for example. So there is a definite place for autobiography. K O: Do you agree then that writing about a traumatic event or even just reading about it helps the healing process? MC: Yes. I guess writing your own story can be therapeutic. In many ways I felt this affinity for my childhood self by writing All We Have Left Unsaid, even though the issues that Danika went through were not my own. I was this kind of nerdy, quirky girl with the glamorous older sister. I was bad at sports and wearing funny clothes, always with my nose in a book. Danika didn’t quite look like me, but I pictured this young girl, and I just felt acceptance and even love for that girl I was, and I wanted that. I think we should all be in touch with who we were, who we are, and who we will be. I tend not to be very retrospective or introspective. If anything I’m always running – “What’s next? What’s next?” – and not even living in the present. But I think being forced to look back is almost a privilege in a way. KO: Do you think the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (T R C ) played a role in the development of autobiographical literature by encouraging people to tell their stories? MC: Although a few stories have come from the T R C , I don’t think that it specifically played a role because not that many stories have directly stemmed from the T R C . The fact that we could tell our stories, that it was no longer illegal – no more banned writers and censorship – more than anything freed people to tell their stories. I think that telling the stories from various backgrounds and cultures in South Africa can help us to understand each other, because we don’t understand each other. Cape Town is still very segregated. We live in this wonderful city that’s on a par with anywhere in the world, but we tend not to really explore it; we stay with the familiar. So, whether you go to places you’ve never been before or you read about them, those are both ways of beginning to understand the background. K O: Do you personally have any interest in the autobiographical genre? Have you thought about publishing any kind of life-writing?

2 Marianne Thamm’s I Have Life: Alison’s Journey as Told to Marianne Thamm (2002).

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MC: I think my life would have to be more interesting for that. Someone set up a blog for me, and it’s just so indulgent. I feel people who write about themselves are a little self-important. That’s one of the funny things about All We Have Left Unsaid: In the book I made some kind of flippant comment about families who send out newsletters to their friends. I have a distant relative who lives in Canada, who read the book and immediately took umbrage, and there now is this intercontinental family drama. But maybe one day, when I win the Nobel Prize or cure cancer, I’ll think about writing my autobiography. K O: In recent South African literature many novels are written in the style of a memoir, foregrounding a confessional discourse, while many memoirs read more like works of fiction. How important has the notion of hybridity become in South African literature in general and in the autobiographical genre in particular? MC: I think that if I had studied literature and writing, maybe I would not have had that freedom I have now, because I would have felt like I was breaking rules. But I don’t have that background, and so I was able to just write and not think about it, and I hope that writing is moving in a direction where we can break the rules. I’ve just read a quite well-received book which I don’t want to name, but I will say that it was one of the Booker finalists of this year. I could sense that the writer was breaking rules, and I think if you are aware that the rules have been broken and if it’s that in your face it is not worth it. I hope that the rules which I was breaking didn’t distract from the story. K O: No, I felt it added to the story. MC: I think it’s one thing to be in a box, but also trying to get out of the box, to explode the box, could maybe be too much. Sometimes you are so aware of the rules that breaking them almost becomes the topic of your narrative. K O: Do you have a specific readership in mind when you write? MC: Well, to be honest, it changed, which is awful for me, because with All We Have Left Unsaid I didn’t know it would be a book. It really was in my desk drawer for over a year, because I didn’t write it for anyone, I wrote it for me. Then I was mortified, I thought: “Oh my God, who am I to think I can be a writer.” Only by working for the company which ended up publishing the book did it even come up in conversations that I had this book. And then,

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because of my closeness to the company they outsourced the reading and evaluation. It was a very formal evaluation process and I was really uncomfortable for their part, thinking: “Shame! How are they going to break it to me, if it really is bad? And how are they going to feel having to work with me?” So I was really astounded that the book had a readership and that somebody in Vienna could read it and like it. Now that my publisher is asking me (rather gently) about when she can expect me to deliver my next manuscript, or others ask when they can expect my next book, it’s rather terrifying. Now all these people are hovering over my shoulder as I write – or try to write. It’s terrifying. Of course rationally I know that I’m projecting my own insecurities and over-thinking the process, but there are expectations and it’s natural to have them at the back of my mind. K O: Thank you very much for the interview. MC: My pleasure.

WORKS CITED Case, Maxine. All We Have Left Unsaid (Cape Town: Kwela, 2006). Thamm, Marianne. I Have Life: Alison’s Journey as Told to Marianne Thamm (Cape Town: Penguin, 2002).

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I NTERVIEWS WITH S OUTH A FRICAN P SYCHOLOGISTS

Political Violence, Children, and Trauma Response

— An Interview with Miriam Fredericks, Ntombi Mcoyi, Gugu Shabalala, Nicole Paulsen, and Carmen Low–Shang (Trauma Centre, Cape Town)

M I C H E L A B O R Z A G A : Could you introduce yourself and tell us something about the Trauma Centre, very generally? M I R I A M F R E D E R I C K S : My name is Miriam Fredericks and I am a qualified social worker. I have close to thirty years experience. Originally, for about ten years, I worked for an organization that dealt with prisoners, and then I worked at a mental health organization for thirteen years. There I dealt with psychiatric patients, and that’s where I got a lot of my mental health training and experience. And now I’ve been at the Trauma Centre since 2003. What’s very interesting in my role is that our work is very diverse: I don’t only do counselling of individual clients, but I also do group work and a lot of networking. We’ve established a network in South Africa for five organizations that deal with rehabilitation of torture survivors, but we also have a regional network with the sub-Saharan African states. Apart from that, I also serve on the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture. We also do commemorations of certain days: we commemorate the World Refugee Day on the 20th of June and we commemorate the International Torture Day on the 26th of June. In addition, we do a lot of media outreach. Just now somebody was here from a newspaper to interview me, but we also do radio programmes, so that we can put the word out, and then we can raise the profile of torture in our country. We also do advocacy work; we work closely with the South African Human Rights Commission and other organizations, because

© Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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our country has still not ratified the Optional Protocol to the Campaign against Torture. So all those things need to be put in place. And then many of our people also feel that they haven’t had good enough reparations for the perpetration of apartheid and the human rights perpetration against them, so they’ve taken a class action to the American courts against the big corporations in the world. Unfortunately our own government doesn’t support that, because there was a deal with those corporations, obviously to keep them investing in the country. Their lawyer is the same lawyer – I think his name is Fagan – who submitted the case for the Holocaust survivors to court, and he actually won that case for them. So these people say that if they win the case, every South African should receive reparation if they were disenfranchised or discriminated against because of race during the apartheid era. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was needed at the time and it was very valuable, but we know there were flaws. For example, it wasn’t held long enough; not enough people testified. There were 22,000 people who testified, and we are 44 million people in our country at the moment. I would say millions of people were affected by apartheid. Every one of us can tell you a story of how our lives were affected in this way. And many of us still sit with the impact of that on our lives, although we pick ourselves up, and we pick up the pieces and we move on, that’s important. But not everybody has that strength. So that’s something that needs to be dealt with. MB: The Trauma Centre has three programmes: the Political Violence Programme, the Children and Violence Programme, and the Trauma Response Programme. Could you say a bit more about the structure of the Centre, about how many people work here, and about how these three programmes are organized? MF: We are about twenty people here. I think fourteen are psychologists or social workers. Most of us work on a full time basis. The Political Violence Programme is the biggest programme at the moment, because we’ve got fantastic funding, especially from the E U , for which we are very, very grateful. And then for the first time last year our own government came on board, which is very, very heartening for us. We really appreciate that. The Children and Violence Programme is a very unique programme. They do preventative work in a few schools. It’s a lovely programme, but if only we had funding and capacity to replicate it in many more schools. It’s a

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programme where they deal with children to prevent violence from actually occurring, to prevent them from becoming criminals or delinquents. They deal with things like the impact of trauma, making them aware of trauma, making them aware of conflict resolution, but also working with the educators in the schools, because unfortunately we still have corporal punishment. It’s outlawed in our country, but it still occurs quite often. If you don’t bring a certain book to school or you’ve left your homework at home, you get punished. And then, at the same time, they work with the parents as well. So it’s a threepronged approach: they work with the pupils, they work with the educators, and they work with the parents, because we feel it’s very important: you can’t heal the child or change the child, and the child goes back to the same environment. So the workshops often have to happen after hours, so they can reach the parents. But it’s a very worthwhile programme. And then the Trauma Response Programme is our intake, actually, our crisis intervention when the first call comes through, when somebody has been exposed to criminal violence, abusive incidents, accidents, or assault. And this is very common in South Africa. As you know, sadly our crime rate is really very, very high. And so people are dealt with on an individual basis. We also get lots of calls from corporations, because there are many armed robberies. So we deal with them in a sort of group trauma counselling session. And sometimes that’s income-generating for us, because we can charge for those sessions. Then from there they can also filter clients through to us. That’s where they will pick up that this person was displaced due to apartheid, or this person was in prison because of apartheid, or the person was abused or tortured. And then they get referred to us. We also work with refugees: our work picked up a lot last year, because of the attacks on the refugees in the city. We were very fortunate to get money from Amnesty International and U N I C E F so we could actually work in the camps, and we are very, very grateful to them. We still work with some of those people, because we try to re-integrate them into communities. We work in the safety sites with them but also in the communities. And we’ve established a support group for women, because we found fifteen women – well, those are the fifteen we identified, there probably are many more – but fifteen women who had witnessed or been exposed to multiple rapes: they were raped in their country of origin, they were raped on the journey to South Africa, and they were raped as a xenophobic attack or even in the camps now. .

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So, these are the problems that we’re sitting with, and these are the issues we are dealing with. M B: Do you get any feedback from these people? MF: Well, I think yesterday was only the third group session that they’ve had. We also train some of the people from the camps, and there were lots of volunteers who helped us, and we are very grateful to the South Africans who really came on board. We train volunteers on trauma, so that we can place a resource back in the communities. We’ve been training some of the refugees who identified themselves as leaders on the effects of torture, the effects of trauma, and on the fact that violence perpetrates violence. So we’ve educated them on psycho-education around the effects of trauma just to place a resource in the community, so that they know they can recognize symptoms and then refer people to us for professional help. M B: And, may I ask you, does the government also support you financially in any way? MF: The Children and Violence Programme is specifically supported by the government, which is wonderful. And then, as I said, the Political Violence Programme got money from the state for the first time in 2008. M B: That’s good news. MF: Absolutely. Wherever I get the opportunity I thank them, and I say that we are really, really thrilled that they’ve finally come on board. It was very disheartening for us before. Let me share with you that some of the people that are in power today, and some of the people that have been enriched by the black empowerment system we have in our country, are multi-billionaires now – not millionaires, billionaires. They walked through our doors fourteen, fifteen years ago, when they were released from prison, and they were counselled at the Trauma Centre. These very people have not put a penny back. And so, now for the first time the government has given us money, and this has really encouraged us, inspired us to go further. M B: I am very glad and I hope the new government will also support you. Could you please also introduce yourself? N T O M B I M C O Y I : My name is Ntombi, and I’m a social worker here. At the moment I’m the acting coordinator for the political violence programme. Much of my work here at the Trauma Centre has to do with working with foreign nationals who have been displaced because of the xenophobic attacks

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that happened in May 2008. They are living in camps and safety sites now, and the Political Violence Team is responsible for social counselling and things like that. M B: When did you start working for the Trauma Centre? NM: In October last year. M B: What kind of symptoms do these people experience? What kind of psychological or physical disorders do they have? NM: They’ve been experiencing this since May last year: they are living in tents, and since last year in November they don’t have any food. They have running water, but no electricity. There are a lot of children, mothers, single parents in the camps, and at the moment their condition is bitter. They are very traumatized in terms of feeling helpless within themselves. They are looking for options outside, but no one comes with solutions. And then they also feel very angry; there’s a lot of anger and resentment. Lately people have reported having deep hatred towards South Africans in general, because of their experiences: maybe people experienced rape and abuse and witnessed murders and beatings and things like that. I think, from what they’ve reported the hatred is now coming from the fact that things haven’t changed. People say they would have been able to forgive, if the circumstances had changed, had gotten better, but because they are still going through this pain, they constantly keep thinking: “But why? Who’s responsible?” And the people we have spoken to feel that the South Africans attacked them – not only the individual South Africans who really attacked them, but South Africans as a whole. They feel that the South African people don’t like foreign people, and that the government is responsible. So, there’s a lot of pointing fingers and blaming. People have spoken about wanting to commit suicide, and there’s also a lot of depression that has come across through that. The men who are there don’t usually come forward much with their feelings, but their feelings come across more as anger. They feel helpless, because they are not able to protect their families, and they don’t know what to do. And they don’t work, therefore the breadwinner cannot bring food on the table; there is no money. Apart from them being displaced and them feeling really sad and down, there are also family issues now: women do not feel very sexual towards their husbands, and their husbands’ egos feel diminished and crashed.

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M B: Where do these people mainly come from? N M: In terms of their countries of origin many people at the camps at the moment come from Somalia, Burundi, Congo, and Rwanda. That is the majority of the people. There were also people from Zimbabwe and Mozambique, but most of those people have actually left and re-integrated back into their communities. Most of these people have been here, in South Africa, for about seven years, others for fifteen or twelve years. Others have just been here for three years. M B: What do you do about the anger and how does it manifest itself? Is there also violence between them? N M: My experience with the people at the camps is that there have been tensions and outbreaks of violence, but since they’ve been at the camps for so long, there is less violent behaviour amongst each other. That’s why now they feel so isolated within the boundaries of the safety sites, because they’ve really integrated into themselves. So they’ve now also built relationships amongst each other with the different ethnic groups. Beyond these boundaries is where the danger is. I found out just yesterday that the police inflict abuse on them now, within their safety zone. So that is now also changing their perspective of the safety of their site. M B: Why do the police do that? NM: The police are there to protect the people, supposedly. And I’m not saying this is all the police who are doing this. But there has just been a report of an incident with the police abusing people which still needs to be investigated and verified. This is something that the Trauma Centre will take up and look into, but their space seems to be getting smaller and smaller, because now, what they’ve perceived as their safety zone is no longer a safety zone for them. MB: And I think that for traumatized people space – the inner space and the outer space – is fundamental. When we went on a township tour I realized that here there is such an intimacy between victims and perpetrators, if you want. How do you deal with that? N M: Coming back to your previous question: Why do the police do that? – I cannot really answer you, but it may be a kind of dynamic, there are many reasons why. At the moment a few incidents have been reported, but we also have to consider that the police have been there since May last year, and we

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don’t know what they have internalized, we don’t know how their state of psychological well-being is, how they are feeling. At one of our meetings we discussed that we speak as service providers in terms of what should happen, how we should feel, but not necessarily everyone who gives a service or works for a service-providing organization or department feels the same way about what the service provision should be like. And the police also come as individuals who have their own perspectives and their own history as well. So, those are the dynamics at the moment. M B: Could you just help me draw a picture in my mind of how your daily routine works? Do you go there and just talk to these people, or do you also do physical exercises? N M: Well, previously, before last year, I know one of our psychologists went there. He and his team engaged with the people, communicated, talked to them, but there was no space for individual counselling, because they live in tents. So, a way to engage with them was playing soccer with the children and doing little exercises with the children, like drawing. Most of their communication was really just containing the environment, talking to people, talking to the camp managers. At the moment we have stopped going to the safety sites, for the purpose of not creating dependency, because all the service providers used to go there. So, service providers have taken a step back by not going to the safety sites, and the people who seek assistance from services like the Trauma Centre come here to our offices, where they get individual counselling from the team. We’ve also then started a support group for women survivors of rape. M B: In those camps? N M: No. We have the support group at Sarah Apartment Centre; it’s closer to their camp. So the women go there, and we had a session yesterday, where we engaged in a lot of group work, art therapy, also communicating individually amongst each other, and doing drawings, more active things, because the other complication is language. And so, we also try to find other ways for people to express themselves. Sometimes people can’t find words to express how they are feeling. So that’s why we do a lot of drawing exercises, and building, and illustrating, rather than just talking in those groups.

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M B: We know that rape is a big issue in South Africa. What are the symptoms that these women tend to have? Words like dissociation or numbing come to mind. N M: The interesting things with the group are the different symptoms that people show. Most of the women report that their main trauma and pain is not necessarily the rape. They haven’t even gotten to the rape yet. Their stories now come out of multiple traumas. The xenophobic attacks were to such a great extent of trauma to them, that it reminded them of traumas that they’d been through in their own countries. These are women who ran away from wars in their own countries, who crossed other countries to be here, and they perceived South Africa as a safe place. And so now with the xenophobic attacks all this erupted and there’s great disappointment. A lot of the women showed symptoms of numbing; numbing in terms of rape. It’s almost as if they want to say: “Well, rape is not really the issue here. The issue here is the xenophobic attack which has led to my situation of being displaced, of not having a home, of not being able to provide for my children and for my family.” They’ve brought the rape across almost as a secondary trauma. And maybe it’s also because the group sessions are still in their early stage, this was only our fourth session that we had yesterday, and so much of it has been about: “What have been the results of me being displaced? What has been happening in the family? What are the graphic stories of the trauma that I experienced during those attacks?” But our sessions have not been about the actual rape, because there is continued abuse that is still happening to their husbands, at the moment. They have a fear of being outside of the camp. There is still some violence that they have reported when their husbands have tried to go outside the camp to find jobs and reintegrate; then they have experienced situations of physical violence. The women have reported more discrimination: mainly they’d walk up to someone and ask for directions, and they’d get a bad answer, and they’d feel rejected by that. But focusing more on the symptoms that the women present: depression is a main thing. They feel helpless. People often cannot report anything good or positive or beautiful that they can see. I, on the other hand, work very much from a strengths perspective. I try to help them focus on their strengths, and to actually see their strengths. I may see them, but it doesn’t help if they don’t see their own strengths. But they are getting deeper and deeper into depression, because they were waiting for U N H C R , or something to happen, but nothing has happened; they

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are still in the same position. And now that one of the ladies got attacked by a police official in the camp that has created tremendous trauma to everyone else. So, what happened in the camp this past weekend had such an impact on that support group, and I can already see that it had a great impact on everyone in the camp, because I could feel in the group we’ve moved ten steps back. What happened was that the space that people considered as safe became unsafe. Other symptoms are great depression, great anger; anger that is now deepening to hatred, because there hasn’t been any kind of apologies, the situation hasn’t gotten better. MB: I’m interested in this idea of anger, because I think it is important. Suppressed anger, for me, is where a lot of violence comes from. What is your team’s approach to dealing with this anger? And then another question is: do they also suffer from hyper-vigilance? They are in a place where they are constantly at risk. Do they suffer from hyper-vigilance or sleep disorders? N M: Yes, I would say they do. They definitely have sleep disorders and problems with eating habits. People have reported not having any appetite and that can be fundamental. Not wanting to eat has to do with different things – for example, the fact that there is no food anywhere, so they don’t have many choices in terms of what to eat. Sleep disorders also occur: not being able to sleep because of the fear, because of the constant worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow. Women are mainly worried about the future of their children. Their children are not in school. What’s going to happen to their children? As far as hyper-vigilance is concerned, one lady expressed that in the group yesterday. She no longer stays in the safety zone, but she stays in a shelter. She was so confined within herself that she was afraid to go just across the road to the shop. So she literally closed her eyes when she stood by the road, and then she ran across the road and went into the shop, and she really had to build herself up to just go to the shop. So then she got to a point where she was able to go to the shop, but what happened in terms of hypervigilance: she asked a lady security guard in the shop a question, and the security guard looked at her from head to toe and passed a bad comment and walked away. So that took her five steps back: she needed to leave, dropped everything and ran across the road through the traffic, and went back and closed herself up in her room. That lady’s reaction could have come from

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anything, but her perception was: “Because I am foreign, she responded to me that way.” M B: What is your experience at the Trauma Centre? C A R M E N L O W – S H A N G : My name is Carmen. I’m a counselor in the Political Violence Programme. I’ve been at the Trauma Centre since 2007. I completed my internship here in 2006, and then I started as a staff member in 2007. And the kind of work that I’m mainly engaged in – even though we share a lot of projects amongst the staff – is working with clients who’ve been affected by the apartheid struggle in South Africa; so, clients who’ve experienced some form of political violence in that sense, people who were detained or come from prison. For the past one and a half years we’ve been working with former combatants, people who fought for liberation in South Africa. They weren’t part of the South African army, but there were groupings in different communities that fought for liberation in the country. M B: Are they mainly men or are there also women? C L: We started out with male clients, but we also do realize that there were females. We found that there were many males who had some kind of military training in terms of fighting for liberation, but females as well. We find that females don’t come out as much as males do, obviously, but there are females. N I C O L E P A U L S E N : It’s not a proud thing for a woman to have taken arms, in contrast to the women in the South African National Defence Force now. But for these women who took part in the armed struggle it’s not a proud thing. Men were soldiers and this is a good thing, they have shown their manly power, but for women it’s totally the opposite, because women are supposed to be nurturers, they are supposed to look after people, not kill people, regardless of which side they fall under. So the women would mostly not share their experiences with their family, or with people in the community that they live in, or with their kids, or their husbands. For them, there is no way that their wives were part of the armed struggle. M B: Did these people testify before the T R C ? C L: We’ve had a few clients, but no one that I’ve seen actually went to the T R C . There are hundreds and thousands of people who have not come forward, partly because they didn’t even know about it; they weren’t informed about it. And the T R C closed after such a short period of time, it wasn’t pos-

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sible for everyone to go there. And obviously the people in communities haven’t come out and spoken about it. We often find the work that we do is the first chance they’ve ever had of speaking about their experiences. M B: What are the reasons that people come to you? Do they come here asking for counselling? What are their disorders, problems, and symptoms? What are they suffering from? C L: A few people come to the Centre for counselling, but we also realized that we need to go out into those communities, because people aren’t coming forward. They think that thirty years down the line they should be over it, and so they try to carry on with their lives, but they do not manage. So we’ve done more reaching out to those people in those communities. We offer workshops on trauma and educate them on these issues. M B: Could you describe one of these workshops? G U G U S H A B A L A L A : It’s a seven-day workshop, but some are even longer. Our first workshop went over three months, but because of the commitments that our clients have we’ve cut it shorter to about seven days. We take them around town, around their own areas where they live, to memorable sights where there were killings of people or where something big happened, and that area has been commemorated as a special historical area. So we take them to Gugulethu Seven1 and areas like that. We are not historians and we don’t know much about the communities that the people live in, so we ask one of the community members or somebody who was involved in the struggle, who knows more about the history of that community, to act as our tour guide for the day. The most significant thing about those tours is that people didn’t know about these things. They live in that community and they go past those areas every day, but they’ve never really taken notice. C L: They haven’t acknowledged what has happened to the community. M B: Is there an official sign that it has been acknowledged? G S: It’s been acknowledged outside, but they as community members who live there haven’t acknowledged this site as part of their history. M B: And what happens when they realize that? How do they react? 1 The Gugulethu Seven Memorial is dedicated to seven young political activists who were killed by the police.

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G S: The last time we took people to District Six it turned out that one of our clients was a woman who had been forcefully removed from the area with her family. The total change in her was amazing, because when she started she was a happy-go-lucky woman, but when she went there, she told the story about how she and her husband had a little baby at the time, and they were forcefully removed. And that heartache killed her husband. For her, to actually acknowledge that, that was very important. She had never been to that area ever since that happened. And this was for her the first time going back there and actually taking something with her. We took stones from District Six, and for her that was taking something from her past and acknowledging that this is what happened to her; it did happen, even though she may have suppressed it over a long time, because this is how they lived. Apartheid affected everyone and that’s how they lived. And everyone said: “Oh well, it happened, and that’s how life was then. Now life is different.” M B: It’s like untying a knot, re-integrating the trauma that is there. G S: Yes. So, we’ll do that on the first day, and then we’ll look at pictures of your identity as a woman, your identity as a female soldier or as an activist. N P: We’ll look at parenting roles: your role as a mother, your perception of your role as a father. That all ties in with identity as well. C L: That also takes us back to some other work that we do on the transgenerational transmission of trauma. So we’re working with the second generation as well. We like bringing that in, because it’s been so many years ago now. We look at parenting styles and at how the symptoms of trauma pass on to the next generation. Trauma is a big part of the workshops and the work we are doing with former combatants, because they sometimes gain some insight into the symptoms that they are experiencing, or the things that they have suppressed, because they seem to just carry on with life as normal, but they never ever stop to realize that this has happened and this is the effect that it has had on them, and it is actually carried over onto their children. And so we look specifically at all the trauma symptoms and help them to identify them for themselves. M B: Is post-traumatic stress disorder, the way it is understood in Europe, a helpful category here in South Africa? C L : No. It’s difficult to do it that way. I think, sometimes you could categorize some of our clients as post-traumatic stress disorder, but a lot of them

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have additional trauma, and it becomes more complex because of the types of communities they live in. The symptoms would not just be hyper-arousal or numbing. G S: Or avoidance or things like that. C L: Yes, there’s a lot of avoidance. I think a lot of it is moved onto substance abuse. MF: Low self-esteem. GS: Family breakdown; relationship breakdown. C L: Domestic violence. M B: Lack of trust? Helplessness? MF: We call it work-shy: because people feel so disempowered, they won’t access employment. A study found that the former combatants are some of the most skilled people and more highly educated than your ordinary South African, but they have the highest amount of unemployment in that group of people. It’s because they just don’t trust themselves, they don’t believe in themselves. And those are the issues that we are working with, because we look at cycles of self-defeat, for instance. “Why is it you’re not moving on? Why is it you’re not acquiring things that are available to you?” M B: How long does a project usually take? C L: After the seven-day workshops, there is continuous follow-up with the clients, and if we find that certain clients are particularly in need of further intervention in the form of therapy or counselling, we’ll continue having this discussion and they are encouraged to continue the counselling. M B: What is your experience with narrative forms of therapy? Does telling your own story help you heal, as the T R C claims, or is that a big myth? C L: I think storytelling is a very important part of the healing process, but I think our clients aren’t really inclined to continue individual therapy. M B: Why? What do you think are their reasons? MF: Over years and years of experience I found that there’s a certain category of clients that can’t share easily, even though you build up a relationship of trust and you create a safe space for them. It’s almost still part of the disempowerment, and a lot of people find this very difficult to believe. I’ve

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shared this with a physician one day, I said: “You can’t imagine how oppressive our government was, and how we had to watch over our shoulders, and how stilled we were, how silenced we were. So it’s very difficult to break that silence and to break that disempowerment.” And he said to me: “I can’t believe that.” And many people then supported what I said, that people feel totally disempowered. It takes a long time to actually recognize: “My opinions are of value and I have the right to express them.” M B: There seems to be a kind of inner censorship or self-censorship. MF: That’s right. Since people were liberated and they put the first cross next to the voters’ role, it’s like they have relinquished power, they have given power over to the state. And I think slowly people start to realize: “But I have the right to talk about my civil rights. I have the right to talk about services that are owed to me, services that need to be rendered to me.” And slowly people begin to get to that point again. I think that is part of our clients’ difficulties, where they are not able to share those issues. M B: That sounds like a long, second struggle. MF: Yes. You also must look at the circumstances: now often the grandparents look after the children, because we had the migratory system in our country where people had to look for work in the mines, for instance, and so people were separated from their families. So grandmothers or women perhaps have put their own needs and their own problems aside just to deal with the day to day questions: “Where do I find bread for today? Where am I going to get a uniform for the child?” And in South Africa many of our people were shocked when our democracy came into being and people had to pay for public schools. We never had this kind of system before, but it had to do with the huge loan the previous government took from the I M F and the World Bank, and because we have to pay that back. They dictated to us our health policies and our education policies. And so our people on the grassroots level were shocked that they now have to pay for education. That’s such a huge struggle for them. One of our slogans in the struggle was: ‘Liberation before Education’. So people put their education aside, but now for the older people education is so important, yet the youth are losing that, and that’s another frustration for the older people. It would be so important for us, if you put the word out there about the conditions in South Africa, because we feel that our history must not be lost, and our history must be told in the correct way: how our people struggled, and

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what the struggles are today, and what we still have to deal with, and what the mountain is we still have to climb. Many people think our country is the land of milk and honey. We’re seen as the miracle land, because we had this bloodless change, but actually we’re paying with our lives now: people feel entrenched in their homes, there’s hyper-vigilance, and hyper-arousal, because you are scared daily: Are you going to be attacked in your car? Are you going to be attacked in your home? So we live through a mini-war in a way. You spoke of continuous trauma before, and this is what many of our townships are living through. The children listen to gunshots every day; they witness accidents, abuse, physical fights, stabbings and killings. And what does this do to our next generation? It’s scary. It’s really, really scary. N M: I think many of our clients and even people outside in the community have internalized what maybe psychologically perceived as post-traumatic stress disorder, but it has become a way of life, of surviving. They would not see themselves as being traumatized at all. They have to deal with their basic needs: being able to provide for the family, being able to pay school fees, being able to get a job. People are more focused on the practical survival of their families, of their community, so that when you raise topics like emotions and connecting with emotions, people find it difficult: “How must I be looking to survive and improve myself if I’m going to dwell so deeply in my emotions when I know my emotions are originating from pain that has not been dealt with?” And so people suppress them and continue to just survive. MF: I think there is perhaps also the issue of people having held themselves together for so long that the pain is so deep and so hidden and unspoken. We talk of the living dead, where people just cannot find words to express what they feel. And now they are too scared to unravel that, so they’d rather move on and ask you: Do you have a pension for them or some practical thing? Is there financial gain for them? They would rather deal with those superficial issues, but they are not going to touch their real pain, because they are just afraid of what will happen if that is unravelled. M B: Is there a difference in how men and women react? MF: I think generally women talk easier, not only in South Africa. I think women do deal better with their emotions, and they may be getting support from each other. But when we talk about men, we immediately face the

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stereotypes: big boys don’t cry, and that kind of thing. That’s why this is an important part of our workshops: we look at roles and the father figure and how men learn from their fathers, and in that way we teach people to be more expressive. That’s why we perhaps do not do traditional psychotherapy – that’s only part of our work, but we also use other mediums, like aroma therapy, or message therapy, art therapy, clay work, and body mapping, all these kinds of therapy. M B: What is body mapping? MF: Body mapping is a beautiful process. We have a timeline with a certain time of their lives, say the past twenty years, and people look at where they were twenty years ago and what has happened in that time. And in many people you see this light going on in their eyes, because in the homes where they live there is no personal space for them. There isn’t a place to write, so this is the first time they reflect upon their lives and upon twenty years of their lives. Then they have to depict that lifeline on huge pieces of paper, which are the same size as their bodies, and there they depict their wounds and their history, and then they paint that on. This is a way for them to connect with the deep memory and the pain and externalizing that. Then eventually they can deal with that externalized memory or pain. I’ll give you an example: one young man painted the whole of his chest and his arms in blood red. We asked him why and he said: “That’s my anger.” And later on we did another ritual – we use rituals also, because we like to be culturally sensitive, so we look at what our clients’ backgrounds and their cultures are – so we did a ritual in the garden where people were to take a symbol from the garden and bury that, and he again took red berries from the garden, and he said: “I’m burying these, because the anger is a little bit smaller, but it’s still there, and I need to deal with it.” So it’s tremendous stuff. I mean a simple thing like just walking in the garden and using things that we do have, that we do not have to pay for, that are not going to cost us anything. But it can be so powerful in working with our clients. M B: I’m interested in that notion of anger, and I’d like to hear your personal opinion. I believe that we are not violent by nature. We have the potential for violence, but especially in South Africa violence seems to be a form of perpetration that has been internalized. Would you agree?

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MF: I think you’re absolutely right. We have a paper somewhere that discusses the racial attacks, for instance, where your inner being is invaded by the first attack on your being and your psyche is destroyed. M B: In trauma therapy in Europe we immediately separate the perpetrator from the victim, and the victim shouldn’t even talk about her/his story and tell her/his story, because he/she could get re-traumatized by that. First you have to put yourself into a safe place – it can be an imaginary space as well – and then slowly you get to learn to integrate the experience, with all sorts of psychological methods. That is in stark contrast to what the T R C did. I’m not trying to undermine the T R C project, but wasn’t that a kind of re-traumatization for people? MF: We do realize there were a lot of flaws in the T R C , but there was also a necessity for it at the time: it did help some nation building. But that was some of the criticism: there was catharsis, but there was nobody to hold the victims, there were no therapists involved at the time when they were telling their stories. The commissioners, for instance, weren’t psychologists or social workers or people that could support them. A lot of people came to the Trauma Centre afterwards, because they were referred to us by the T R C . But people just felt that that wasn’t enough; that in that open gallery, when they were actually revealing their all, there wasn’t that kind of safe space that you are talking about. But yes, you’re correct; we also do that kind of work where we create a safe space. We also do the trauma counselling where you do not ask people to repeat that particular story, you look more at: “What is your life at the moment? What’s happening? Have you had similar incidents before? What helped you then? Can we look at what your strengths were? Who was your support? And what support do you have now?” We try to re-evoke those kinds of strengths in people and work on those, and I think that’s an important part of what we’re doing. MB: Were you active during the T R C process? MF: None of us here were at the Trauma Centre at that time, but our organization was active, and we still have the documentation. M B: Could you say something about that? Did you provide emergency relief or was it also a long term project?

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MF: I think that went on over the process of two years or so. The commissioners were also helped; and all the other people helping there also came for therapy and for counselling, because it did have an impact on the people. There are visual recordings where you see even Bishop Tutu breaking down in tears. He is one of our patrons, and we still get lots of support from him. But I also wanted to just touch on what you said about separating the person from the perpetrator. As was already mentioned before, last year we had a very sad case of xenophobic attacks in our country and sixty-five people were killed. In South Africa we have a really unique policy in that we do not have refugee camps. Our government expects refugees to re-integrate into communities as soon as they arrive. There is no actual economic support or housing support or anything in that form for refugees who land in the country. They need to stand on their own two feet. But when this happened the local government established safe sites for people, and that was their way of separating them, to put people in a safe place in the meanwhile. It has its own problems and it had its own advantages, but it was a very difficult situation to deal with. All of us were caught unaware: the state wasn’t ready for this, N G O s weren’t ready for this, but it was amazing how the people of South Africa did stand together and how people contributed. We ourselves have only about ten therapists here, but we could call on something like seventyfive volunteer psychologists and social workers that rendered their services, which was amazing. And lots of other help was given. M B: When we went to the townships we saw the problems of space, which is also an issue in the books we’ve read. Borders seem to be a huge problem, particularly in black communities. What can you do about that? MF: That’s a very difficult issue. As far as domestic violence is concerned, women attempt nine times before they actually leave their abusive husbands, because there are very few safe houses. There are now quite a few; compared to about five years ago there are a lot more. But still, in your culture perhaps it might be frowned upon if you do, first of all, reveal that you are abused, and then secondly that you’re actually taking a stance, thirdly that you’re actually prepared to leave your husband or leave the perpetrator. So those become the issue. And the fourth thing is the economic factor: many of our women aren’t economically independent, and there isn’t that kind of state support. We do not have a good pension system where there would be state support for a woman with children, if she was supposed to leave her spouse. So, all those

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issues play a major role. I think in South Africa every three days a woman is killed by her lover or partner. So the rate is very high. M B: And, of course, these people were probably people who had been treated badly during apartheid, who have their own history. So it’s a vicious circle. C L: We do have another programme that deals more specifically with recent traumatic events, in terms of the more European idea of trauma as an event, where clients come in if they’ve experienced some form of criminal violence, so hijacking, robberies, assault, whatever. In that programme there’s a lot of one-on-one counselling, and that’s when they do psycho-education: not necessarily re-telling of the story, but working more individually with clients. And then another therapist also offers E M D R .2 Just to give you an idea of other things that happen at the Centre, besides the political violence issues that all of us work with. G S: You’ve said earlier that most people don’t want to talk about their stories. We find that our clients want to talk about what happened, because they’ve never shared their trauma with anyone. They’ve never gotten that opportunity to actually tell the story of what happened to them, and that’s what we offer. They may try and take the chance and talk about feelings, but most of the time they concentrate more on facts: this is what happened. And when you actually let them tell the story they are relieved. Then afterwards you may still feel these clients need therapy or they need further counselling, but they’ve been able to actually share this traumatic event with somebody else. It’s no longer a burden just for them. You’re taught to do therapy in a certain way: don’t take the person back, but if the person wants to go there, then you let them, and sometimes that’s all they need; they just need to have somebody hear them out and listen to what happened to them, the way they want to explain it, and the way that thing had created a meaning for them. N M: There is also so much value in how the community deals with things, and in how people have dealt with things in South Africa previously. Often in my work with clients I try to tap back into that, and that’s why my preferred 2 Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a therapy that was developed by Dr Francine Shapiro for the treatment of trauma patients (see Arne Hofmann, EMDR Institut Deutschland, http://www.emdr-institut.de).

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method of working is in groups, because most of the clients that I’ve seen feel more comfortable in groups and discussing with groups. M B: That’s something that for a European would be quite uncomfortable. We also have group therapy, particularly with alcoholics, but generally it would be strange to share our trauma with a group. MF: But that has possibly also to do with the fact that your people have the resources to do that. In our country the resources are so limited. But as she’s said the client prefers group therapy. And what we also like about that is that you then establish a support link between those people, so that when you’re removed from the situation, they still have that resource within the community, which is really valuable. N M: Communities already have their own systems that they’ve been using for dealing with things. So, we as service providers go there and recognize the systems that they’ve been using and then add to them. It’s more of a sharing of learnings: we really seek to learn from the community and use whatever their strengths are to then accommodate whatever healing process we initiate there. And most often cultural factors like the traditional storytelling, the meetings of women, play a huge role. I’ve done group work and realized that in those support groups the women themselves actually empower each other. I am there just to facilitate the process, and they actually go through the healing themselves and heal through the sharing of their stories and their words of wisdom to each other. They actually help the whole group to get through. Once you have a group of that level, you know that there’s also a lot that’s going to happen in the community, because that same group of women is going to go back to the community and initiate something there as well. MB: We’ve noticed that in our readings. Sindiwe Magona is such a good example for it: she puts all her faith in groups of women, because there seems to be hopelessness with black men. We’ve experienced that also in the shebeen, very early in the morning, when we met many nice young black guys who were completely drunk. And it was not just a matter of getting drunk; you could see the history behind that. There seems to be a huge passivity. They seem to say: ‘I can’t do anything about it and am completely helpless’. NM: We call that ‘learned self-helplessness’. It’s a huge problem.

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M B: Do you only work in black communities or do you also have white clients? MF: No, we work across the board. We are open to everybody. MB: I don’t want to think in terms of apartheid categories, but there are so many cultural differences in South Africa. Do you also see different symptoms with different cultural groups? N M: Definitely. I have witnessed different approaches working with different racial, religious and ethnic groups. Therefore I like to get a sense of what is comfortable for the clients. Maybe white people are more inclined to do individual work – that is what I’ve experienced myself – individual work, because the perception is: a lot happens behind closed doors; people have high fences, they live a very private, secluded life. People don’t act out their problems or display their problems outside, whereas in the black communities everything happens in the open. The neighbour knows exactly what’s happening next door. And so, that’s where the community perspective has come from. People like to share and therefore problems will be resolved as a community. Whereas in the more, maybe, suburban areas, and with white clients it’s been more of individual work and a lot of talking; talking about what has happened and more the mainstream of psychotherapy. That is what I have experienced; maybe others have experienced things differently. MF: No, I would support what Ntombi is saying, because with the clients in my previous work – and I always make light of it – we did a lot of outreach, so you actually visited the people at their homes. With the white clients you opened the door, you were just about sitting down, and they spewed everything; they were ready to talk, you didn’t have to ask. But with what we call non-white clients it’s like pulling teeth, really. You have to set the scenes, you have to tell them what your role is and really take some time before they actually share what has happened. M B: Lately I have heard a lot about multiple personality disorder: it affects particularly women who have experienced repeated sexual abuse. Have you come across this phenomenon in your work? MF: I haven’t. C L: No, but if we do have clients who experience symptoms that are more psychopathological, we often refer them to a psychiatric assistance, which is not what we do at the Centre.

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MF: Yes, if we suspect there is a psychiatric illness, then we immediately contact our local community health centre, or we have an emergency psychiatric ward at the nearby hospital, and we refer them for assessment and for treatment. Then our role is actually just to monitor compliance with the medication and whether the person attends a clinic or not. But we also do some psychotherapy with the person, because at the hospital there is often no time for that. It’s a matter of five minutes in the door and out: “How do you sleep? How do you eat? Here is your medication. See you next time”. So we still hold the client and do a combination of that. MB: What kind of psychiatric illnesses do you have in mind? MF: Depression is a major issue, but then a lot of doctors today say sometimes it’s more what they call ‘social distress’. Often they say no matter what medication they’re going to give them, it’s not going to help relieve that. MB: But what are the symptoms? MF: The person probably would manifest with sadness, with weeping, with sleeplessness, with weight loss, not finding joy in anything, wanting to die. M B: And you call it ‘psychiatric’, because it gets to an extent where you need medication. MF: Yes. We don’t have the ability to prescribe that. But then we also have some people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. The problem there is that you don’t know what the pre-morbid condition was. Is the psychosis a result of the torture or the human rights abuse, or was that going to happen in any case? So it’s difficult to know that. M B: And sometimes the symptoms of highly traumatized people and of schizophrenic people are so similar, and you don’t want to re-traumatize someone by giving a wrong diagnosis. MF: That’s why we are rather on the side of caution and send these clients to a psychiatrist for assessment, so that we can be sure, because we feel we are not qualified enough to make that decision. M B: You’ve mentioned torture and it’s such a delicate issue, can you say more about that? MF: We must look at the intention of torture: it is to break the person down irrevocably, it is to destroy your personality. Just look at how the U S A actually changed their laws so they could open Guantánamo Bay. They actually

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used – and this is such a shame for us as therapists – they used medical doctors and psychologists to collude with the government, to interview people, get to know what their strengths were, get to know their personality, get to know their relationships, and then pass that on to the officials, who then used that to break them down. They used psychologists to get to know their cultural background and then used that to break them down. In Iraq, for instance, that’s why a woman was used to abuse those men, because they knew that in the Arab countries that was the worst shame that a man could endure. And with trauma and torture, shame is a major issue. Shaming people is so traumatic and has such a bad and long-standing effect on people. And often this is not understood. If you look at a lot of our politicians today: they were tortured; they were imprisoned; they were isolated for long periods of time. They also sit with those issues, but they have moved on in a way. But actually there still are those underlying problems. That’s why I say that there are longstanding effects of torture, and that’s what we need to come to terms with. M B: Do you have a lot of torture victims who come to the Centre? MF: That’s the majority of people who we deal with in our programme, but it’s often difficult to access them, because, first of all it’s difficult to publicize that this is what we’re doing. We do it when there is the commemoration on the 26th of June every year, the United Nation commemoration of International Torture Day. Then we do radio programmes, we do some media coverage, putting the word out there and raising awareness around those issues. But it’s also like Ntombi said, to a lot of our people in our communities it has become a way of life. The fact that they don’t sleep at night, the fact that they abuse alcohol, the fact that they abuse their wives, the fact that they don’t work – it’s normal to them. Only when we’re in our workshops, and we start saying: “This is possibly an effect of the trauma,” their eyes open, and they realize: “But this is not normal, and people don’t live like this. Other people don’t function like this.” But we don’t want to use that as a justification for everything, but still, there are these underlying problems, and there is so much still that needs to be dealt with in South Africa. We are just a small group of people dealing with this. But another part of our work – and we often don’t have funding for that, even though it would be an important point – are stakeholders meetings. I think, about two years ago was the last time we did something like that, where we train people, prison wardens, people in drug rehabilitation centres, local

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clinics. Psychologists or medical staff will train them and say: “Have you ever looked at the effects of torture? These are the effects of torture.” We then discuss this in workshops, and their eyes open up and they say: “Oh my God! I never thought this person could be abusing drugs because of the past.” A lot of our people in rural areas still sit with shrapnel in their bodies that haven’t been removed, and some doctors today still say: “Oh, but it obviously shows you were an activist during that time, and I’m not going to remove this. You go ahead and suffer,” because they are still from the past regime. So these are issues that we deal with, and these are issues that our clients deal with. We still have very, very great sadness and hurt in our country. C L: There is one specific client who’s been treated for depression, but the doctor at the state hospital never understands that it’s because of his history. The psychologist never ever deals with that. He deals with everyday problems, and avoids the client’s history. M B: There is a lot of South African literature on healing. Do you think it is possible for a person who was tortured barbarically to ever heal? MF: I come from the stance that we are all individuals, that is a major issue for me, and so it would be very difficult for me to generalize on something like that. It depends on the person’s strengths and on their support. Family support, for instance, is a major factor, but also the kind of support that comes from religious bodies, the person’s faith base. There’s research that shows that the best thing to overcome trauma for people in a natural disaster and people who are aging is to have a strong faith base. And fortunately in South Africa most of our communities still have that. I know that in Europe people have become more secular, but here in South Africa the faith base still exists. It does even in northern Africa – because I’ve dealt with other countries in northern Africa – those people are even more religious than our people. M B: So religion plays a major role when it comes to healing and support? C L: Yes, absolutely. MF: So, as I said, it’s a very individual thing, and it depends on quite a few factors: What are your social contacts? What is your social support? Are you educated? Because there is evidence that people with a university degree, for instance, are more able to reason and are more compassionate. M B: They can name things.

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MF: Yes, exactly. So, all those things can play a role, I think. N M: To add to what Miriam has said: it has very much to do with both internal and external factors. We also need to put it into the context that South Africa as a whole is a wounded society. We come from traumatic backgrounds and so we still deal with a lot of trauma. And regarding a person’s capacity to heal from trauma and torture, it depends on both their internal capacity and on their environment. Many people here live with a lot of trauma and torture. It is still happening, but it has been internalized as normal. People don’t know that they are traumatized. And so, in their perception they may be getting along fine, until someone comes and makes them aware of different symptoms that they were not aware of. K A R I N O R A N T E S : My research has more to do with writing memoirs and autobiographies about traumatic events. Do you think that this can have a healing effect on the writers? And does such an effect exist also for readers of somebody else’s trauma? MF: I can’t speak from personal experience, but I’ve often heard clients say that reading of other people’s trauma re-evokes their trauma in them. K O: So, does it re-traumatize them? MF: Yes. Whereas the writing can have very positive effects. Unfortunately many of our clients come from really poverty-stricken homes: they live in shanties perhaps, or they live with three or four families in a brick house, and there is no real personal space for them. So, in our workshops we try to encourage people to journal; but even in our one-on-one therapy and one-on-one counselling we also tell people about journaling. It’s the first time they even hear about that concept. And we use that as part of the therapy, we say: “This will help you heal. This will help you reflect. This will help you actually express things that you didn’t even think about. It just gives you a space to actually touch those memories and revoke those memories and write about those things.” So I’m a great believer in journaling and in writing. M B: This is very interesting, because I think in Europe we have a different notion of reading. I think people here need to be active, because there is a lot of numbing and a lot of helplessness. Sometimes reading can be very passive: you sit there and you re-traumatize yourself. Whereas writing is much more active and it can be empowering, reading can be disempowering.

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MF: Yes, that’s true. There is a project that I thought of last year. As I said, we connect so much with other centres, and there’s a centre in Cairo, called Bernardin Centre, that also deals with torture. One of their psychologists visited us for three weeks, and he and I are trying to do a project together: we will get some of the torture survivors to write a one-page story which we then want to publish together with their photograph in a book called Cape to Cairo. We want to look at the similarities between our clients. And we’ll do the same thing with the refugees, because we found that people who come to South Africa and to Cairo as refugees come from similar areas of origin. So if we reach thirty people, it will help those thirty people to document or to put pen to paper about the issues. And maybe that’s also another lesson for people, that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that it can help people to overcome the effects of violence and prevent them from perpetrating violence again. K O: Do you think it makes a difference for people if their story is published or not? These stories are very personal and I’m wondering if it is more healing to say it out loud, to publish it for the whole world to read? MF: I think it will be really lovely. I tell you why: we’ve experienced something totally different, which goes in the same direction. In one of our workshops we use art therapy, and we brought in an artist. She helped people depict their experiences, their thoughts, or their dreams on a small canvas that she framed. And they were so enthralled by that, they want to sell it now, and they want to do more, and reproduce more of these works. But just the thought of sharing that with others, and the thought of putting that out there, was so uplifting and empowering for them. So, I think publishing your story goes even further than that, they will be reaching stars, they will be reaching another level of functioning, because something they wrote will actually be published. That will be amazing. K O: So, in the sense of: “My story is important – I am important.” MF: That’s right, yes. M B: This will also be important regarding the self-censorship that we were talking about earlier, because this notion of silence is such a huge issue here. MF: Sometimes our work becomes very difficult. When we meet with people from other centres around the world we realize the danger of our work. We live in a democracy now, we went through a very euphoric stage, and now

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there’s a bit of disillusionment, the honeymoon is over, but we, as the Trauma Centre have always seen ourselves as activists, and still do so. Yes, we support our government, but when there are gaps we need to indicate that, and we need to say: “Let’s work together, let’s overcome this.” We cannot be silenced. M B: What do you think about the fact that so much money is put into the World Cup,3 when that money could go into other things? MF: Well, I am not so sure. I think the World Cup needs to happen, because we had the Rugby World Cup here before, and that was a wonderful nation building exercise. It really worked wonders. And I think that possibly some small businesses will be a little bit empowered, and it’s maybe an exercise that we need to go through. Sometimes lessons in life can be difficult. Some of the objections to the World Cup came from the press in South Africa, which is still very white-orientated and still white-owned. Our country might be free and all areas might be accessible to everybody in theory, but black people and non-white people don’t have the riches to acquire that land that the white people acquired at a very low, minimal fee. Now they want to charge us millions for it. So some of the stadiums are built in white areas, but soccer is very much a black sport in South Africa, and they don’t want black people to come into those areas. So objections came from white people: “Oh, the building is too big! Oh, the building is going to be a white elephant. Oh, there’s going to be a lot of traffic!” But then, actually it is a question of mixing and letting go. They are afraid; their rights were so entrenched and they still want to hold on to that, but we need to let go. We need to know that South Africa is for all: it’s a place for whites and it’s a place for blacks, and we can share. There is so much in our land, we are such a rich country, and we must stop succumbing to the demands of Europe. We must take our own right, and we must take our land back, and we must take back what is ours. We still haven’t done that, and that’s important. M B: And at the same time it’s really true that what happened here is something very unique and magical. That needs to be acknowledged and your work goes into that direction. MF: Absolutely. Thank you.

3

The 2010 Football World Cup in South Africa.

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M B: Thank you, Miriam. Thank you very much. MF: I’m sorry. I get really passionate about my work. K O: No, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much.

WORKS CITED Hofmann, Arne. E M D R Institut Deutschland, http://www.emdr-institut.de (accessed 26 February 2009).

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But Even Bodies Never Speak Pure Languages — An Interview with Don Foster

M I C H E L A B O R Z A G A : I have read your books Detention & Torture in South Africa and The Theatre of Violence: Narratives of Protagonists in the South African Conflict. The former book was published in 1987 and the latter in 2005. There are almost twenty years in between these two very different endeavours. The other day I was talking to a friend and I mentioned the fact that I was reading Detention & Torture and he said that David Philip, the publisher, was particularly proud of this book. It is a very important document, historically and politically. Would you like to say more to our European and international readers about its genealogy, the time in which it was conceived and what it meant to work on such a topic at that time in South Africa? D O N F O S T E R : It started when I did a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, England, on group processes. I returned to South Africa when I finished that doctorate in 1981 – way before the book came out. Around that time there was a series of deaths, actual deaths in detention, particularly at John Vorster Square1 in Johannesburg, and it simply infuriated me. For some time the international doctorate seemed rather meaningless: the fact that psychologists did all these elaborate experiments seemed completely insignificant, when there were real people dying in an abhorrent political situation in South Africa. I had become much more politically active, activist orientated, while I was studying, first at London School of Economics, and then at Cambridge University. I had become something of a self-proclaimed minor Marxist; Marxist was the work we were reading outside my psychology. But here 1

Nowadays called Johannesburg Central Police Station.

© Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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was an issue taking place that was actually in a sense on the terrain of psychology because these security policemen were clearly using psychology in some sense for lengthy interrogation. And whether people committed suicide or whether they were actually murdered made little difference, because their death was caused by long periods of solitary confinement, long periods of detention, long periods of abusing psychological techniques, and so on. I began early with others, the members of the Psychology Department, and we wrote angry letters to the press, so we started a kind of small resistance. But I realized that in some sense I would actually have to do research to expose the iniquity of this phenomenon. So we collected some money; the Institute of Criminology kindly said that they would house this research project, and I began a very large research project to simply interview those who’d been detained and collect their stories – no more, no less. M B: To what extent were you affected by censorship? D F: At that time there was a huge state crackdown of course, there was massive censorship throughout the South African state. But not only that, I mean, it turned out that people who I was working with were assassinated: David Webster2 was one of the people that I had been working with in anti-detention politics, and he was shot at point-blank range. So this was dangerous terrain. But I don’t think that we even thought about it at that stage. The work actually began as early as 1981. By 1983 we were doing research, by 1985 the results were actually out, because they came out in about an eighty-page report, and it hit headlines all over the world. And they simply said: “Study conducted by U C T 3 affirms that torture is standard in the South African regime.” Of course, that hurt the South African government very badly, which was our intention. M B: Did you experience difficulties because of this book? D F: This was just the first paper, just the long chapter; the book took two further years to come out. Thereafter the police were of course after me: my house was attacked on numerous occasions, the day before my son was born the police attacked the house, and there were repeated death threats, photographs; they would raid the house to make it look like a burglary, they would 2 3

David Webster (1945–89) was a South African anthropologist. University of Cape Town (U C T ).

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take photographs and pin them to a white piece of paper, writing “D E A T H ” on it; the wheel nuts of my car were completely loosened, there were gunshots at my house, things were thrown through the window, frequently late at night there was shouting outside, when I looked out there were four big policemen. So there was a campaign of terror against me and there was a campaign of terror in the newspapers. When we finished dragging all these things out, they said that I was one of the worst enemies of the South African state, and so on. Of course, these were badges of honour but you also didn’t know if you were literally going to get shot. I was, indeed, not very popular in government circles for many years. When I went abroad in 1986 on sabbatical, wherever I went the phone calls would follow me: “We know exactly where you are. We are coming to kill you.” The point was that the book did expose South Africa to an international world. It actually contributed to the literature on torture, funnily enough, because it was a report of what types of torture they did, and how they worked this old indictment of racism into torture, because black people were tortured in completely different ways from white people. With white people they played much more mental games, black people they simply brutalized. So you got racism actually on the level of torture, and the book draws a clear picture of that: in South Africa you have a racialized form of torture. M B: It was also particularly courageous of David Philip to publish this book at that time. DF: It was extremely courageous. Everybody else ran for the hills; they said: “No, you’re crazy!” That’s what David Philip stood for and he died just a few weeks ago.4 M B: Yes. So let’s pay tribute to him. D F: Exactly, this is a tribute to him: “Thank you, David” – I will put it on record – “Thank you, David, very much for having had the courage.” There is a slightly less courageous story that lies behind it however. David Philip had all these things in other books already, but he’d made me actually sign an indemnity clause, saying that I will cover all responsibility financially if they seize those books in a security raid. That was the less courageous part, 4 David Philip died in Cape Town on 16 February 2009 (see Randolph Vigne, “David Philip: Publisher Who Resisted Apartheid,” The Independent [29 May 2009]).

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and you may not want to put all that on record. But, in fact, I was very unhappy about that, when he suddenly said: “We are very courageous, but actually you bear the total financial burden if this goes down the tube.” So, that’s a little footnote to history, I’m afraid. But still he did publish that book. M B: Let’s turn to the psychological aspects, because I am interested in trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. In Torture and Detention you write that “the D S M -III5 category of post-traumatic stress disorder is an important heuristic device in describing the symptomatology of torture victims.” In particular you mention the re-experience of trauma, numbing, and excessive autonomous arousal. As a psychologist and as a South African citizen, how visible is this disorder? How does it manifest itself in daily life, how appropriate is this notion of post-traumatic stress disorder? Is it a useful category? D F: There are two aspects, and here is the first one: If you say as a psychologist that these people suffer nothing, then what do we say? That they’ve got thick heads; that they don’t suffer like other people? Or do we expect them, like everybody else, to show their symptoms here? That’s what I mean by saying it’s a useful heuristic device to draw to the world’s attention that these people are suffering. At the same time, there are different kinds of survival tactics, but this is the big issue that we confront in South Africa. For everywhere else, the D S M -IV revised6 – or whatever we have now – labels this as an event. So the picture in one’s mind is a car crash, an aeroplane crash, a day of war, or something. The point that we experience here is these people, including myself, living with the knowledge that the security police are after them every day. And when you are in detention you are in detention indefinitely; you are permanently in the hands of your oppressors and they are there to hurt you, or to collect evidence to be used in a court case against you, one way or another. So myself and other psychologists at the time used the term ‘continuous traumatic stress syndrome’, just to differentiate it from the European notion. It was very interesting because we were invited to Denmark at an earlier point to participate in the work of the Torture Centre there. And it’s very interesting that every place 5 D S M is the acronym for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders designed by the American Psychiatric Association. 6 DSM-IV-TR: D S M , Fourth Edition, Text Revision.

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in the world that was experiencing repression had a different experience. The trouble with these Swedes and the Danes and the Europeans was that somehow they medicalized everything. For us it was always political, and they wanted to medicalize it. They wanted to have neat doctors in their neat uniforms treating these symptoms. And we said: “In this situation here, the very people that are indeed being brutalized by gangs in jails, when they come out they are political creatures that carry on with political work. The issue is totally political; you cannot reduce it to medicalized disorders, to neat packages, to torture syndromes, etc.” I’m personally even more critical in that book than I wanted to be. I wanted the book to convey to the international world that using this is important, but locally. And here I will resort to an anecdote: I was part of O A S S S A , the Organization for the Appropriate Social Services in South Africa, where we were fighting of course anti-apartheid firstly, but also for proper kinds of services for all kinds of people. And again, we didn’t want to over-medicalize these things. We set up a clinic – we called it a clinic, even though we knew the difficulties – for detainees to come there, for people who had been detained. And here is the issue: almost nobody turned up. Why? – Number one: The cops, the security police, were watching our offices, and so if exdetainees came to our office, they would be there to arrest them. So it was actually dangerous. Secondly, people actually had to carry on with the political work, they had to actually be strong. There are many people now who are falling apart because they didn’t get adequate treatment then, because they wouldn’t allow themselves to be treated. M B: And what kind of symptoms do they show? D F: Across the board: massive anxiety, huge anger issues, fury at the government. Some of them actually went into the government for a short period but very quickly felt betrayed because now they were walking around in a suit and a tie, and it’s not what they were – they were struggle activists – and they kept feeling that things have not changed much for people. So many of them glued themselves together during those years and came out as quite resilient. We saw resilience in these people: they would be at the next rally, they would be at the next political meeting – we saw physical resilience in these people. Much later some of them have literally fallen apart: high anxiety, huge anger issues, fury, feeling of betrayal – and actually the other kinds of symptoms of

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intrusive thoughts going back to those times when they were in the hands of the security police, being overwhelmed with feelings of semi-failure, and of hopelessness for the future, and helplessness. These are classical symptoms – now, years afterwards. That’s because they had to be fiercely resilient at that time. And yet, other people have come out of an amazing number of hardships, like Mandela, being large, forgiving, open, reasonable, apparently not damaged at all. So in the light of that, we have to re-think some of the theories. One outcome is that in the light of diversity like that, some people stand up very strongly, and we always name Mandela, but it is not only Mandela, it is hundreds of people. M B: Well, the country I see is full of young people, working, studying, being creative. But at the same time when you go to the Trauma Centre you hear horrendous, shocking stories and people suffering from all sorts of symptoms. D F: That’s right. Two things are happening at once. That Trauma Centre came out of our detainees’ clinic and it evolved gradually. Yet at the beginning I was quite critical because when apartheid was suddenly cleared away, only then could people involved suddenly go to the Trauma Centre. In other words, it mirrored that European thing: when the political struggle is over, then you open the Trauma Centre. But some people are still traumatized through what we have now. We now have a need for a Trauma Centre for all kinds of other reasons, not least the fact that we have the highest rape rate, we have the highest child rape rate, we have – dreadful – the highest murder rate, the highest assault rate, we have a very, very violent society in South Africa. And that’s my next book: violence. M B: I’ve got a few other questions concerning trauma: How much do we as Western people consider the whole history of colonialism in connection to trauma? And another thing I noticed on a township tour is that the problem seems to be also a question of space. In Europe, if a woman gets raped the first thing that happens is that the survivor/the victim gets separated from the aggressor, but here this is a huge problem. We hear a lot about healing and reconciliation but if a black woman that has been raped repeatedly has to go back to her husband every day, because she doesn’t have the money to go to another house, to another shack even, how can we talk about healing?

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D F: Yes, that’s quite right. That’s the current situation. The situation then was exactly the same. Under apartheid the police came in, they detained you, members of your family – where did you go to? You didn’t go to a doctor; you didn’t go to a shrink; you went back to the life that you knew. You were in the townships; you were sentenced to these townships. Of course, some people eventually did flee, but they fled in order to join the African National Congress and its military wing Umkhonto We Sizwe. So, some people got away from South Africa, but it was more white people who actually fled to London, and sat there and kind of lived out the years. But for 99% of ordinary black people in South Africa under apartheid there was no escape, and now we have much the same situation: there is nowhere to go. The clinics are inadequate, the resources are inadequate, the number of psychologists is inadequate. So we have a long way to go just to build better resources and to build better medical systems in South Africa. At the moment, particularly with the degree of brutality, it’s a huge problem and this is one of the outcomes of our history. Frantz Fanon writes about colonialism as this force of violence. That’s the point. The point of contact for colonialism is the police station, are the military barracks, it is violence, a violence imposed on these native people. That tragically is the visceral point; it is the legacy we have to carry now. M B: Violence leads to violence and internalized perpetration also turns into violence. D F: Yes, tragically. So in a sense we had to take up arms to liberate ourselves from apartheid, but that created soldiers who think that it is very big and manly to carry arms, to carry guns, to carry weapons. But that went through to the townships, that means that gangsterism is alive and well, particularly in the Cape; alive and well because that’s the way to show your machismo. This way is also the only way out of the gutter since the violence and the impoverishment of the legacy of apartheid mean we still have massive, massive, massive poverty. The one thing that I have to put on tape simply because people keep on failing to mention it about South Africa is that, despite all the good things, despite the Mandelas and the Sizulus in the world, we remain the most unequal society in the world, and that inequality is deeply racialized. There remain the poor, the rural, poor black women living

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in rural areas without resources, without education. These things have to be said, they have to be put on tape. M B: The material conditions in South Africa are traumatic, traumatizing in themselves. D F: Absolutely. So it’s no longer the apartheid police but for those who were at the hands of the apartheid police violence was their everyday lot, they knew that they’d get in their hands. Physical and symbolic violence have been deeply rooted in the colonial condition for hundreds of years, and of course we are only a tiny bit out of that. I speak as a middle-class white who is relatively comfortably off, and most middle-class whites don’t see these things and they even refuse to see these things, and that kind of neo-apartheid system is still in place: violence and trauma through inequality. M B: I would like to turn to The Theatre of Violence now. Detention and Torture is quite a conventional book in comparison with The Theatre of Violence in the sense that you introduce the topic, you work with empirical data, and, in the end, you present the results of your study. Now, twenty years later The Theatre of Violence uses a completely different approach, and you use another method and you reflect on language and on narrative. May I ask you what made you go for this new approach? Because there is a visible difference there and I appreciate this reflection on discourse, on stories, on language very much. But my first question is, how did you get to that point? DF: It’s a fascinating story, so let me address it straight away. In fact, I was already thinking that way earlier. I now teach a course called ‘Critical Psychology’ – that’s literally what I was teaching ten minutes ago to this new generation, who are a completely different generation, of course, to us and our apartheid. They say: “Apartheid? What is this?” because they weren’t even born yet. But, indeed, I was already thinking far more critically and, in a way, that earlier book was written the way it was to protect the book. It was actually written with the statistics, and the tables, and so on, partly to protect it from the possibility of simply being banned outright. It was written in a more positivistic way to convince a more conservative audience that this was proper good science, and that the study was properly sampled, and yes, the sampling netted, and all this kind of stuff. So the head of Criminology stood up and said

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to the world out there – and I was actually a bit angry with him – he said: “You see, this is an impeccable work, because of the scientific social science in it. Look at the numbers, statistics and so on.” So, already I was thinking in another way in some sense. And the PhDs that I supervised literally from that time onwards have all been much more discursive. There’d been much more of a discourse kind of psychology, which I’ve been actively teaching since those times right through to the present. So I was a kind of, if you like, a pioneer of what we call ‘critical psychology’ in South Africa, bringing in the notions of my earlier students from those years – that’s 1986 and 1987 – who were writing on Foucault’s theory of discourse. M B: Almost a deconstructive kind of approach. D F: It was a mixture, because they got a hefty dose of Marxism alongside with it, there were some substantial doses of poststructuralism, postmodernism and this sort of stuff. So, increasingly, when we had the space to think about this, then the only kind of study I wanted to do was a narrative kind of study. So I have shifted more towards being interested in people’s stories. I teach much more on narrative. I have strings of doctorates that have come out using narrative methodology, like there was one working on women telling birth stories, another one on the search of the discursive construction of change. We had very much a kind of alternative approach. M B: That’s very interesting. It’s the first time that I have read a book dealing with violence in South Africa in this way. And, for instance, Professor Kagee, whom I interviewed a few days ago, was on a more empirical kind of track. But I thought that, to say that a person is traumatized doesn’t really tell anything about that person; we have to put it together with another predicate: What does this mean, what is the story, the narrative behind that? D F: Right. So, you see, it’s a kind of fusion of all kinds of things. That’s the paper I have literally just been teaching earlier this morning: ‘Racism, Marxism, Psychology’. Racism and the structural issues have been in South Africa for a long time but Marxism has always been a powerful resource for some of us theoretically to try and think through the structural situation; of course so does feminism, which is still coming, that’s an added tool. But here you get this kind of juxtapositioning: it takes mainstream psychology, and it subjects it to a very careful critique and then argues where it is weak, what the problems are, and then says that we need to add to it a discursive angle, a Marxist

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angle, and so on. So, that’s the big theory which I am not very explicit on in the book because I am more explicit on the issue of political violence itself. M B: Yes. If I may analyze the title very briefly: we get a dramaturgical language, the notions of ‘arena’ and ‘theatre’, we speak of ‘protagonists’ and not ‘perpetrators’ any longer, and also – something I found very interesting – we don’t speak of ‘the struggle’, but of ‘the South African conflict’. Could you please comment on this shift of terminology? D F: First of all, you see, the normal way to have done this book is to have only interviewed people from the A N C strand. That would have been the conventional way. But, in fact, we interviewed people from the P A C (Pan Africanist Congress), the A N C , but also from the security police. Then you cannot talk of a ‘struggle’, because the term ‘struggle’ is in a sense owned by the A N C . So there are places in the book where we allow those protagonists to talk of ‘the struggle’, of course, and A N C people and P A C people will talk about this ‘struggle’, but for white South Africans to talk about ‘the struggle’ makes no sense – it was a conflict. So, we had to go for a complicated, different language. In fact, it was rather a stupid book to write, to be honest, because of us trying to mix people that come from this side and that side in the same book. And that’s what pushed the issue of ‘perpetrators’, because we interviewed, among others, Shirley Gunn, who was a woman, but she was a soldier of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and she just about knocked my head off when I suggested it. “Me? I am a perpetrator? You’re calling me a perpetrator? I am a liberation fighter!” So we had to go into a lot of complicated semantics which was probably good for the intellectuals but makes it an awkward book when you are actually trying to look at violence from different sides. I got quite a lot out of it because it forced me to think out of difficult places. It would have been a much safer book to write, had I simply interviewed the people that I am sympathetic to, that is, people from the freedom struggle. So what there is intellectually in the book, is because we tried to do something from a difficult space, that is to interview perpetrators from different sides, and there are dangers attached to that, there are very considerable dangers. There is every likelihood, that people from outside the country, but also people inside the A N C , will say: “This is a book about betrayal. You put me into a book alongside the Commissioner of Police? And

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then you try to analyze this in a kind of big pool?” So there is a big danger in there. But, in fact, at the end I think the analysis was the hardest part for me. It’s the densest part of the book and therefore the most unsatisfactory part, but it was the most interesting part for me because I really had to now think through not only violence from different sides, but also the fact that people indeed have completely different reasons. So all their different reasons are there, and we allowed them to tell their own stories in their own ways. But it means that when we actually try to theorize violence, we’ve got to look at it from a variety of different ways. And this is one thing I say, because I became aware of the fact that most of the psychological theories think from one side only: they talk about top-down violence. The phrase I love the most comes from Ronnie Kasrils,7 one of the A N C people. He uses the phrase: “I took to it” – that is violence – “I took to [violence] like a duck to water. I liked it.” Now, most people don’t go around the world saying: “I love doing violence.” In fact, he didn’t kill anybody, but he blew up pylons and he put explosives all over the place, and he said: “I took to this. I loved doing this. I loved it.” And now, mostly we do not entertain that notion. So it has forced me to think in all kinds of different ways around the very genesis of violence itself which is where I am now, trying now to beat the international literature, which is impossibly huge, and re-thinking violence in all its manifestations, that is from domestic violence to murder, to criminal violence, to this political violence. M B: I can see why you want to get away from the binary opposition between ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. This dichotomy between the passive, innocent victim and the bad perpetrator doesn’t work for me either. But why not use ‘survivor’ and ‘aggressor’, for instance? DF: Now, the term ‘survivor’ has been done to death in some sense, both in the detention literature and in the feminist literature – I am thinking of ‘rape survivors’ and so on. So, I have just been saturated with the term ‘survivor’ and I don’t much like the term, that’s all I can say. What is interesting is to play with the number of people who are both victims and perpetrators: Winnie [Mandela] and others, but throughout the history of the world. The 7 Ronnie Kasrils was South Africa’s Minister for Intelligence Services from 2004 until 2008 (see Ministry for Intelligence Services).

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Afrikaans people would say that they were only responding to British violence, in other words, they are not the perpetrators, but the next thing is that they are the next perpetrators in line. If you ask any perpetrator – not only Shirley Gunn and the A N C , but the other ones – and you allow them to tell their stories in their own terms, the term ‘perpetrator’ will never come to their minds. This is the interesting thing about language, in fact, astonishingly, even in ordinary kinds of criminal violence, when it’s clear that they are perpetrators in our minds. So, for me, the term ‘perpetrator’ has come from this position of apparent innocence, and therefore I think a kind of critical look at it like this is interesting for people both in literature and in social science, because just for that moment it jolts us out of our complacency, and that’s what this book does in a way even for me: it jolted me out of my own complacency of having taken sides in this struggle. Indeed, I took sides in this struggle many years earlier, and that would have been a much easier work to write, just to go and collect the stories of people involved in the liberation struggle. I think it would then simply re-perpetuate the old-fashioned story of people aggrandizing and telling wonderfully smooth, half-stories, you know: “We were right, and we were wonderful people in this struggle.” This book creates awkward spaces in this way, which will not satisfy everybody – and it should not. I am now happier, ironically, out of it. Let me say that this book was actually born out of some errors and mistakes. Initially I wanted the person who did all the interviewing, Paul Haupt, only to deal with people who had actually committed violent deeds, which means killing somebody. And for obvious reasons we found it difficult to recruit such people, particularly from the state side, and so we ended up with people who, in fact, were involved in intelligence services, even Shirley Gunn – adamantly too – told us she never, in fact, killed people at all. She told us other incredible stories of how she had wanted to plant bombs at Newland’s rugby ground, that she had phantasized planting bombs at Groote Schuur Hospital and various places, but in the end she didn’t. So, part of this was also a reason why we had to move away from the term ‘perpetrator’, because there were people inside these samples who were very much involved in the conflict of the struggle, but who had not necessarily been doing particularly bad things at the end of the day. So some part of the study just came out of mistakes, accidents. That forced me into a place where I had to rethink it,

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because I did all of the writing; Paul and Maresa8 helped mainly with the stories, and when blame is due, I am the one who initiated this project, ran the project, got the funds for the project, and put this project under the auspices of the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation, which is another unusual move. It was off-campus, it is not associated in any way with the University of Cape Town, it is associated with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Some of that is just born out of silly mistakes that made the project actually less worthy than it could have been, but later forced me to think in a different way, which is probably the best thing that can happen to any academic person: to collect stories that don’t make sense and now you’re going to sit down and do something with it. So, for countless months I virtually, metaphorically, chained this right leg to a chair and sat there and suffered, suffered writing. And then I started to see things of all kinds of sorts: that psychological literature is exceptionally partial. This is standard stuff, but it all talks about topdown; it doesn’t talk about violence from the sides, it doesn’t talk about violence from below. Very few people have written convincingly of violence from below, of violence from oppressed people. Frantz Fanon is really the only one who does, and he writes in a far too forgiving fashion about it. For him violence is a cleansing spirit – the flames will consume the anger – it’s a very good thing. I’m not so convinced that violence is a cleansing spirit, in effect. No, no. M B: The main problem I see with the notion of ‘protagonist’ is that, for me, there is an initial point where a clear naming is required for the purpose of recovery and healing which acknowledges the pain and the suffering of survivors instead of saying: “You are just different protagonists.” D F: You’re absolutely right. I have felt this acutely, and the way I argued to myself is that the previous book dealt with victims, this now tries to deal with perpetrators – not adequately. That is one of the weak points of all social science that if you knock around too long with certain kinds of people, like perpetrators, you get too light with them. It’s a problem of human empathy that if your eyes are too much on the perpetrators here, you lose the pain of the victims. It’s a terribly difficult balance to keep in your head.

8

Paul Haupt and Maresa de Beer.

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M B: Yes, but that’s what literature also does: it is interested in both, the perpetrator and the victim, the aggressor and the survivor. So, I read your book as an important reflection on the limits of language, and maybe as a sort of provocation. D F: Indeed. What is very interesting about this is: my own teaching is going exactly in this direction, that is, away from language. So for some years I have been saying: “This is the problem with the discursive psychology: we have lost bodies, we have lost pain, we have lost the ugliness of the world.” If you turn the social constructionist lever too far this way, we completely lose what is exactly embodied. Where victims feel it is in the body, it’s not in language, they feel it acutely in their bodies. M B: So how can we theorize this through language? D F: It is very tricky, it is exceptionally difficult, and this is where, theoretically, it has become spectacularly awkward. Let me say that the most provocative stuff that I have encountered yet is this PhD that was dealing with women trying to tell birth stories. Now what can be more bodily than this? But how do women tell birth stories? – They tell them through a set of massive ideological lenses, because the medical profession has been teaching them how to tell stories. And who is the medical profession, very largely? – White men. So somehow every woman is capable of telling a story from the body, but has actually loaned so much that she tells this story via medics full of practicing medicine. I found this thesis absolutely astonishing because here is the story that some women – in fact, most women – eventually cannot tell the story of the body anymore, because they have lost it. They can only talk about ideological things as refracted through other images. And so what she found was that there are dozens of ways that people tell them, but – and I just didn’t know this – even the alternative stories: for example, the Natural Birth Movement – that’s an alternative way to telling a medicalized story of birth – were invented by men. American men founded the Natural Birth Movement. I didn’t know that. Almost all the alternative stories of birth are also actually told by men. The Leboyer Method in France – men, once again. So she had to, in effect, listen very hard and eventually theoretically discover Kristeva,9 and through discovering Kristeva she could then 9

Julia Kristeva is a feminist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher.

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begin to hear some women’s stories about birth. And then she heard not the content of it, but the rhythm of it, and suddenly she started concentrating on a completely different aspect of language, that some parts of these women, as they were telling the stories of their birth the voice – became – like – the body: “H-h-h-ha – and this became too much for me, I could not stand it, I could not stand it, I was shouting, I was screaming.” M B: When the body starts speaking... D F: Exactly, the body starts speaking. And there I learned my first huge lesson: that the body might speak in altogether different ways, totally different ways. This is a long way from the book, but that’s where many of my interests have shifted to, and that is this question of bodiliness, the question of what bodies know that cannot be put into words, and the fact that words are so often ideological, because the powerful people, the racists, the sexists and all the others, have appropriated language. In many ways it’s the feminist problem of language that it is a man’s thing. M B: I think this is wonderful, because this is also the link to trauma. There is a whole wave, particularly in America, of people that were working with Paul De Man and Derrida: there is a very poststructuralist approach to trauma: It’s seen as a disorder of memory, as a gap. I think ‘gap’ in the Derridean sense is very fashionable, but where is the body? This reminds me of Coetzee’s Foe, where in the end of the book the body of Friday starts speaking. D F: Yes, and in another one of his books he’s got this chap who is mute, he does not speak at all. M B : Life and Times of Michael K., yes. He’s very concerned with silence and language, trauma and violence. D F: Indeed, certainly he is. But you are right: they have complicated issues that are in some sense in the cracks, but they are not in either of my books, they are not there. They are in the cracks of what I kind of experienced and therefore have changed my teaching. I teach a postgraduate course that is specifically against poststructuralism or against social constructionism and is attempting to go back to bodies, but saying frequently that bodies cannot speak properly, because bodies are conflicted things, and they often speak

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with the voice of the oppressor, funnily enough. In racist talk they are often talking with the voice of the oppressor. So the question is: Who is speaking? M B: But the rhythm is also very interesting: What kind of rhythm might trauma have? D F: Exactly. And that we have hardly begun to analyze. That is exactly what I am talking about when I say that there are people now whose bodies are speaking twenty years after they were traumatized. In fact, they are speaking through heart attacks. They may have happened in any case, but they are speaking through particular kinds of anxieties, the bodies are speaking in later years. But bodies, again, never speak pure languages, they speak languages that get mixed up with the languages of oppressors, they’re never pure languages either. So there is complexity there. That’s what partly I wish to convey with the term ‘protagonist’. The term isn’t adequate but what I partly wish to convey is that people simply are more active than we make them out to be. Human beings, as victims and as violent perpetrators, are more active. And in the most provocative part of the book, which, I think, some people just don’t look at, I say that people commit these acts because they feel entitled to it. And one would have to work more on this notion of entitlement because it becomes a kind of bodiliness. Now, the best and the easiest way to explain it is with the body of the rapist, who simply says: “I’m so entitled that I can’t even see my victim.” This is one of the issues of entitlement: you cannot see the victim as a human being. And that entitlement is there also with people who are underlings, in other words, who are from the side of the A N C . By the time you join the army, by the time you have heard the propaganda, you are entitled to shoot white people; you are entitled to shoot the enemy. Not only that: you feel that you should. So now the question is: How does this entitlement work through the bodies? And I think there is much more even to explain criminal violence, and I think that once again it’s a mixture of bodily and other kinds of things. Most recently we have interviewed young, coloured men from the Cape Flats who were all standing trial for rape, murder, assault by the age of eighteen. And what kind of stories do they tell? – They also tell much more bodyrelated stories, but they’d speak in the local Afrikaans patois, and when they speak it’s almost this bodily kind of stuff that’s coming up, because they speak enormously repetitively, over and over again, of having to be strong.

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They have to be strong, they have to be strong – but it’s the way that it’s spoken in the patois, it’s almost as if the body is speaking. And of course this is fundamentally the body of a victim, again, because they have been brought up in dreadful disadvantage. These victims do terribly bad things by the age of seventeen. What do they speak about obsessively? – “I have to be strong. I have to be strong.” And they talk obsessively about guns, weapons, and their masculinity, a kind of bad masculinity, a gang masculinity. In the gang it’s all about success, it’s all about seizing hold. But these are bodies of victims, they are speaking a dreadful language of violence and it’s difficult to put it all together. M B: It almost sounds like a possession. I think that there is, again, a degree of fragmentation, like in multiple personality disorders, and if there is a host who can in a way recognize all the parts, he or she can slowly try to get in touch with all these people that they carry with them. I don’t think that we should just speak of one person, there are more, and, again, not in a poststructuralist, Derridean sense. For me, fragmentation is not fashionable, fragmentation comes out of violence. And it seems to me that there is one part which is probably the victim that has turned into the oppressor that takes over the whole body and just cancels, and erases, and annihilates all the other parts. And that’s when these people feel entitled, and they speak almost in a compulsive, possessed way. And there the damage is too big. How can you reintegrate the other parts? D F: Correct. You see, the one case we have in the book, the case of John Deegan, speaks to me exactly of this kind of case, because he’s a perfectly nice boy. But in my theory I want to say that there is a whole range of identities. So this boy gets mixed up with Afrikaner nationalist identity. The police have their own identity, militarization squads carry their own identity; the multiple forms of masculinity are operating in these particular environments. This is when you get a picture of all of these kinds of things, and they are all ideological, they are all about power situations, and he’s got to put himself in there, very often initially as the victim, as the recruit, he’s training. He is a boy who says his main interest in life is to be an artist, so he is a rather more delicate boy, but out of this they manufactured a killer. So I agree with you: there is no fragmentation, it is the compounding of multiple identities, and the articulation with, if you like, the additional hardware that they add up. But

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these sorts of things eventually created in this kind of body, a body that is capable of murder, capable of torture, and so on. And he, indeed, tortures and murders, until eventually he suddenly looks at himself and says: “My God, what have I done? What have I done?” And actually it’s the one story in the book where his life goes downhill from that moment, when he says: “What have you done?” And he is speaking of himself in the third person, and he becomes classically dissociated, and he says: “I looked down at myself and I said: ‘My God, what have I done? I have become a murderer, I have become a killer!’” And with that self-realization, in fact, his life everlastingly goes downhill: his relationships fall apart, he eventually ends up with nothing, he’s a wastrel, he is virtually dead. He cannot forgive himself. MB: And I think that if you carry this discourse further, you come to the point where people either believe in God’s forgiveness and carry on with their lives, or they don’t have that, but then who has the authority to forgive them really? D F: Yes. Whereas the others who have done much worse things, who are probably responsible for the death of countless people, like the Commissioner of Police, they tell a different story. He looks back and his story takes the form of a series of travelogues: “I was in Bloemfontein. It was very interesting there. And then I was in South West Africa, and I was in charge of a whole security operation. We had a wonderful time there. Now I remember going to this meeting, and that meeting…” It’s the most relaxed, casual narrative. He probably is responsible for thousands of deaths, but his story is a casual travelogue. He is not the one who is now destroyed. He admits to nothing. He actually has the old distancing bias of: “They started it. They were full of shit. They were full of nonsense. I just had to keep law and order.” It’s an extraordinary narrative method of making peace with yourself, and actually, then becoming completely untouched by anything. What I am trying to say is the point that much of white South Africa is completely untouched by any of this. M B: Or they are all dissociated? D F: That’s it. You see, all of them managed to tell their story as a kind of travelogue: “I had a very interesting life.” And, again, it’s somewhat dangerous to do that. But in some sense, I perhaps learned more from that, that there are some mad people who are bad people, and just have no capacity

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whatsoever to see that they are mad. They have no conscience whatsoever. And it is the John Deegans of the world who become dissociated from that moment on, and they become actually a little bit mad, and they say: “Look what I have become.” There is self-recognition: “I am a murderer.” And his life goes down, he becomes a bit mad. Whereas I think Europe is still working through all these things, and half of the German/Austrian nations still say: “We did nothing.” – “What did you do?” – “Hitler did. We did nothing, we did nothing.” So, I think these difficulties are very big in Europe, the problem of staring into the face of violence, of hatred. And we haven’t done it too well here, you see. It’s been too much of the trauma stories, too much of the forgiveness stories. We have also got to stare in the face of some of those perpetrators who just sit there. MB: Some of our European readers will say: “How is this possible? What about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? What was that? What were the achievements and the shortcomings of this Commission?” D F: And I will say: “Here it is.” First of all I think it has been properly lauded, I think it has been properly praised. But consider this: that act was passed at the end of 1995, so they began; they didn’t even have offices in 1996, and in 1997 they gave a five-volume report to Mandela. In other words, that Truth Commission must be a ten-year Truth Commission. They managed to interview as many as twenty-two thousand victims – that’s astonishing. But in fact in some sense you need this ongoing process, and in fact it worked quite well in the South African society, because the T R C was also pulling the South African society apart. Whites were digging in their heels and saying: “We don’t want to remember,” and so on, and if it had carried on it might have been more divisive than it was. But the inadequacy is allegedly that you got two years to do this – the amnesty would carry on for much longer – but two years to do this, totally inadequately funded. The African National Congress now in power has to fund this damn thing, where they should actually be taking those funds and sorting out poverty in South Africa. They shouldn’t be having to bother with the Truth Commission. So it’s a very paradoxical tool. And here are the other paradoxes: The world looks on as South Africa continues to pay apartheid debt. And where do we pay it? – To European banks. There was no consortium from Europe at a government level that said: “That

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is the end, the A N C will not be paying apartheid debts.” But these things are all carrying on silently alongside this very strange body of the T R C . I, in fact, wrote the chapter on perpetrators. And even then it was a peculiar chapter to write, because I had to do it in a terrible great hurry, and I had to try and write as if I was seventeen commissioners. And I would only meet with a few of them, and they would read this and add a few dumb words in, so it was very inadequate. It is a very odd book, but the Gibson book is the best single book on what the T R C did.10 And it’s a survey work; it’s not the work that was closest to my heart. He did a survey of 3,000 South Africans, but he said this: “What is the truth of the T R C ?” And he said one thing: that all sides committed violence. In effect, that’s the only real truth of the T R C , and those who believe the truth of the T R C are far more reconciled than anybody else. It’s not what the truth was, but those who believe the truth of the T R C , and the T R C said: “Everybody committed violence.” M B: This is interesting, because I have read a paper by Ashraf Kagee where he took two groups, and some testified in front of the Commission and some didn’t, but the symptoms were exactly the same, the same degree, same measure.11 We heard that at the Trauma Centre as well: some people did go to the T R C , but many didn’t, particularly women. There are a lot of people who just didn’t testify in front of the T R C . But this idea of healing through telling your story – how could that work? D F: It couldn’t. It cannot. It’s too simplistic. If one considers psychoanalysis, here is the measure: In telling your story in psychoanalysis you never stop. You can be analyzed for fifteen years, three times a week, five times a week. M B: That can also be re-traumatizing because people re-experience the trauma through talking about it. D F: It can re-traumatize, of course. It can be very re-traumatizing, and more than that. Here’s a hidden statistic: in the initial detention book it’s a very 10 James L. Gibson, Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? (Washington D C : Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). 11 Ashraf Kagee, “The Relationship between Statement Giving at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Psychological Distress among Former Political Detainees,” South African Journal of Psychology 36.1 (2006): 10–24.

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tiny, little statistic of our computing asking a simple question: “Did you actually tell things that you shouldn’t have told?” And about seventy-five percent of people admitted this. Now the point is that it’s a terrible weakness; it’s something that you wouldn’t want to give away. So there are lots of things that victims don’t want to actually talk about, depending on what kind of victimization you have. If you can lose your husband, your wife, your kids – that’s one kind of victimization; another kind of victimization is in the situation of torture where you’ve actually betrayed comrades. And some of the bitterest stories in the T R C are events like that, where they actually have betrayed their other comrades. And so what story do you want to get out there? Are you still the victim, or are you now some bad person because you betrayed someone? I think we have to be much more careful with this trauma stuff, and the simplistic tales of “I told my story. – I’m healed.” If psychoanalysis taught us only one thing it would be that you can keep telling your story for the rest of your life. Certain people will get better, a hell of a lot won’t get any better; they will remain absolutely unchanged. That is, after fifteen years of therapy they will not change. M B: And the soul. I haven’t come across this word in a long time, even in literature or criticism. There is a sort of dissociation there. We have lost a lot of concepts. And I think we have to go back; we are stuck. D F: Exactly. We’ve lost a lot of concepts here. The book Governing the Soul by Nikolas Rose is a very Foucauldian take on the psych-complex. Nikolas Rose writes beautifully about the psych-complex, psychology and how much of psychology is of course implicated in a form of regulation of people. But I think we agree on a lot of things that are not yet in my full writing. M B: I think that many people write about trauma without knowing what it really is. It’s not really knowing about the symptoms. It’s a whole landscape, it’s a whole system. It’s not an aspect. So it’s like a new skin that you’re wearing. D F: Yes. The good thing about post-traumatic stress disorder (P T S D ) is that it puts trauma back into the psychological literature, and it must be there. It’s been there from Freud onwards, the concept of trauma is very deep and very complex. I must say that that itself is an area that should be re-written. My first PhD student began the Rape Crisis Centre here, so that kind of work was crucial, but her thesis actually re-read all the original psychoanalytic work on

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trauma. And it is very different from the way it has come out now in this P T S D . So that’s the danger: that P T S D seizes the whole ground. Everybody kind of starts with this P T S D thing, which is a highly individualized notion, and it also turns trauma into an event. I look around the world today and I say that three quarters of the world in the current climate – if not more of the world – live permanently in traumatic circumstances. The world of Africa is still paying debts, there’s almost no hope. So, for great many people this Western construct of P T S D as an event that comes out of the blue doesn’t make sense; I think that’s the point: it cripples souls in a way that we’ve forgotten to talk about. It completely cripples souls in all kinds of not-fashionable ways, not-pretty ways. It turns them into drunkards, into alcoholics, into just nasty people who lie around street corners and do what these people do: they victimize others. M B: May I ask a last question? DF: As many as you like. MB: At a certain point in your book you refer to Jann Turner’s novel Southern Cross, to show that spies were also perpetrators during the conflict. As a literary critic I found it interesting that you took an example from a novel – the example of the spy that turns out to be the perpetrator – as possible evidence for your argument. What is the role that literature plays in your life as a psychologist, academic and in your personal life? D F: Yes, exactly. The horrible narrowness of mainstream psychology is just too boring to contemplate. And so, for a very long time I initially majored in English literature. I’ve read very widely and I’ve mainly read novels. Of course, I’m pretty widely read in all the South African novels: Gordimer, Coetzee, all of this tradition. I didn’t cite a lot of that stuff. I’ve always thought that I will wait till I retire one day, and then I’ll write on South African literature, which I think is something that should be written on, because trauma, and the landscape, and all kinds of things will come in, and Coetzee is the master of that, of course. But Gordimer writes more feelingly about black people than Coetzee’s ever capable of doing, I think. I think that’s why Coetzee’s not living here at the moment. I don’t think he was ever able to deal with black people, understand them. So, yes, and that’s the point, that literature makes things quite complicated, that writers can stitch stories in complicated ways. And Jann Turner’s book is

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a wonderful book, where the very person that you think turns out to be somebody else entirely, who actually betrayed someone. See, it’s part of this notion that actually what you’re looking at could suddenly appear to be something else, and I had my own experiences with this business of consistently working anti-apartheid, and finding that some of the people on our research project were almost certainly security police agents. Suddenly like a curtain opens this little bit and I look through and I say: “My God!” Again: you don’t know who these people are. I mean, I suddenly got a glimpse: one day I was giving evidence in a Pretoria court on behalf of activists in the liberation movement who had been detained and tortured, and I was there to talk about what their testimony was. For days I was under cross-examination, and they gave me a copy of my book, and they said: “Read from it. Read from this book.” And I did, I read from my book, and at the end of that three days in the witness stand I was let go, and there was a tea break and the accused said: “Come and stand with us in the dock.” – There were nine accused – “Welcome! You are accused number ten.” I enjoyed the solidarity, but then I looked at this book that I was holding, and I saw I had signed it right there, and I had only signed a handful of copies. And it was stamped with a mark of the security police. So the securiy police had got this book, and it was clearly a book that I had signed for one of the people who’d been working on the project. But I had a number of moments of betrayal like that. And it’s like in Jann Turner’s book. And of course her father, as you know, was brutally slain,12 and that was probably my first anti-apartheid experience: his death, because he was an academic at that time, and his murder was probably an early catalyst for me in getting involved in the anti-apartheid movement. M B: Thank you very much for this interview. D F: Such a pleasure.

12

Jann Turner’s father, Richard Turner, was an influential political philosopher who taught at the University of Natal in Durban. He was the author of The Eye of the Needle. Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa, first published in 1972. He was assassinated on 8 January 1978.

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WORKS CITED American Psychiatric Association. “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,” American Psychiatric Association (2009), http://www.psych.org/MainMenu/Research/DSMIV .aspx (accessed 29 May 2009). Coetzee, J.M. Foe (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986). ——. Life and Times of Michael K. (New York: Viking, 1984). Foster, Don, Dennis Davis & Diane Sandler. Detention and Torture in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1987). Foster, Don, Paul Haupt & Maresa de Beer. The Theatre of Violence: Narratives of Protagonists in the South African Conflict (Oxford: James Currey, 2005). Gibson, James L. Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? (Washington D C : Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). Kagee, Ashraf. “The Relationship between Statement Giving at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Psychological Distress among Former Political Detainees,” South African Journal of Psychology 36.1 (2006): 10–24. Ministry for Intelligence Services. “Ronnie Kasrils: Biography,” Ministry for Intelligence Services – Republic of South Africa, http://www.intelligence.gov.za/Biography .htm (accessed 2 June 2009). Rose, Nikolas. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990). Turner, Jann. Southern Cross (London: Orion, 2004). Vigne, Randolph. “David Philip: Publisher Who Resisted Apartheid,” The Independent: Obituaries, The Independent (29 May 2009), http://www.independent .co.uk/news/obituaries/david-philip-publisher-who-resisted-partheid-1641047.html (accessed 10 March 2009).

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Testing the DSM Model in South Africa: — An Interview with Ashraf Kagee

M I C H E L A B O R Z A G A : We come from a Western world, we see the world with Western eyes, and we are wondering whether our category of trauma – the way it is used in the Western world – is problematic in the South African context? What do you think about our concept of trauma, and what does it mean to talk about trauma in this country? A S H R A F K A G E E : Well, to start off with, I don’t necessarily see a big dichotomy between West and non-West. In the present context the boundary between West and non-West is semi-permeable. Sometimes I think to create this idea of the West and what is not the West is a little bit artificial. South African society has many, many of the features of a Western society, also many of the features of what might be seen as not a Western society. And so, for example, a lot of people in South Africa speak English, a Western language; people wear Western clothes, they don’t wear straw dresses or skirts, or what you might think about; they live in houses made of concrete and bricks; they drive motorcars, or they take a bus. So, to a large extent I don’t think it’s a fair depiction of South African society – or any society, really – to portray it as Western or non-Western. That’s the first thing. As far as the question of trauma is concerned, in a lot of the work that I’ve done I’ve looked at the D S M 1 model and the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. The D S M says that there needs to be a traumatic event and the person needs to respond with shock as in horror. Then you get three different kinds of responses: avoidant behaviour, intrusive thoughts, and hyper-arousal. 1 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association.

© Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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There has been a critique of this: Derek Summerfield and Patrick Bracken have written extensively about this, and Allan Young has written about that notion of a Western trauma discourse. Are you familiar with their work? M B: Is this the book called The Harmony of Illusions? A K: Yes. But Derek Summerfield has written quite a bit on this as well. My work has been influenced by his work, and so I set about the task of trying to solve the problem of whether the D S M can be appropriately applied in a developing world context such as South Africa. So, on the one hand you’ve got the D S M model, where the lens is very much based on the useology and diagnosis, on the other hand you’ve got the critique of that, saying that post-traumatic stress is a construction, it’s a pseudo-condition, that’s what Summerfield writes. In the work that I’ve done, I’ve shown that it’s midway in between: it’s to some extent a construction, but a lot of people indeed do experience some terms of avoidance, and intrusion, and hyper-arousal. So, I don’t think it’s appropriate to discount the D S M useology in the context of traumatization in South African society. M B: What I’m interested in, and what I criticize about the Western way of putting it, is this emphasis on memory, particularly when it comes to literature. I would like the emphasis to be more on what it means to re-experience something again and again. I’m also interested in the body and the notions of dissociation and numbing. Are these strong symptoms here? A K: You see, the D S M notion of traumatization is one of a disorder of memory. M B: Do you agree with that? A K: Yes, I do. For example I’ve written an article on why A I D S is not traumatic. I believe that being diagnosed with H I V is not traumatic, because what is the traumatic event? There needs to be an event in order for someone to experience symptoms of traumatization. With H I V for example, the possible event would be the nurse or the doctor informing the patient that he or she has H I V . Now, that means that all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress need to be anchored to that event of being informed; symptoms of intrusion of being informed; symptoms of avoidance: you have to avoid doctors and hospitals, and when you see them you have to get scared; and the startled shock response is only to be anchored to being informed.

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Now, the truth is that what a lot of H I V patients are truly concerned about is the future: impending death, physical decline. Who’s going to look after their children when they are gone? How are they going to access medication and care? Their concern is future-oriented. So I don’t believe that H I V is a traumatic phenomenon. It’s highly distressing, to be sure, but it’s not a traumatic thing in the sense that the D S M needs it to be. We are dealing with the issue that the notion of trauma is very much a disorder of memory. M B: You wouldn’t classify that as dissociation, but as a memory disorder? A K: Yes. In the absence of an event you can’t be traumatized. If you don’t have an event that provokes these symptoms, then it cannot be post-traumatic stress. Certainly people might be distressed for something, they might be concerned, they might be worrying, but it’s not a clinical phenomenon in the way that people might experience post-traumatic stress following the Holocaust, or following an explosion, or a hurricane, or whatever else. M B: In the West there is this idea about trauma: you have a normal life, then this event happens, and you develop a post-traumatic stress disorder, and if you do the right trauma therapy you can re-integrate that and go on with your life. But what about the history of this country, the traumatizing effects of colonialism and the material conditions? There doesn’t seem to be just one single traumatizing event. AK: Right. There’s been some work written on continuous traumatic stress disorder by Gill Straker, who now lives in Australia. I think that’s an area that needs to be explored, and certainly in our context it is not post-traumatic: many people live in communities where the traumatic events continue all the time. So I think it’s something that requires exploration. And there might be future things that will also be traumatic, so we need to be able to conceptualize this. I think the D S M diagnostic category of post-traumatic stress disorder is probably limited in capturing the experience of people who live under conditions of continuous trauma. However, there is no such category, so under these circumstances we need to work with what we have. M B: It’s a limit of language itself, in a way? AK: Right. When a patient comes to see you in a clinical context, you have to go by the diagnostic criteria that have been agreed upon by the community of scientists. I don’t think there are enough discussions, and conversations,

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and development, and research on continuous traumatic stress disorder, and we need that kind of research. M B: I’ve read your paper on ex-detainees that testified at the Commission and those that didn’t and the fact that, in a way, there was no difference: they all had the same symptoms.2 What does that say about the T R C ? In our literary studies we also try to find out whether a narrative and telling one’s story can bring healing. A K: ... or it cannot! Well, firstly I should call your attention to the limitations of my study, because I didn’t have previous data. I didn’t know if the groups were equivalent to start off with, that’s a severe limitation of the study. However, there was a lot of excitement at the time of the T R C . People were saying: “This is cathartic! You must talk through the problems! When you talk through them, when you share them with somebody, then your symptoms go away and you feel better.” So I tried to test it with some level of success given the limitation. I don’t think talking about it to a statement taker is helpful, and I gave the reasons for that in the paper: these people haven’t been trained, there wasn’t any kind of on-going, systematic re-visiting of these traumatic events, prolonged exposure, imaginal exposure. It wasn’t a therapeutic encounter, it was an official, administrative event, a bureaucratic exercise, rather than a therapeutic encounter. M B: A political one. A K: Yes. I think I made that point in the paper. All these analysts were excited at the idea that testifying in front of the T R C was going to help us all out. It might have possibly done something for nation-building, I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was psychologically healing in the way that it was envisaged. M B: You’ve mentioned the word ‘healing’, and I’ve seen a lot of books about trauma and healing in South Africa. There seems to be a kind of inflationary use of this word. What is ‘healing’ from your point of view as a psychologist?

2 Ashraf Kagee, “The Relationship Between Statement Giving at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Psychological Distress Among Former Political Detainees” (2006).

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A K: If you want a really reductionist definition, we’re talking about the decrease of symptoms: people reporting fewer symptoms after they’ve received treatment than before they received treatment. We can go to the DSM to look for the symptoms: flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, hyper-arousal, shortness of breath, avoiding cues that remind people of the event, etc. I’ve used Edna Foa’s3 scale, I think it’s called the post-traumatic stress scale, to count up the number of symptoms that people report and their severity. If you have a high score it means people are severely symptomatic, if you have a low score than they are not severely symptomatic. So, if you can achieve a reduction in scores on such an instrument, then the patient has recovered. I typically don’t like to use the word ‘healing’ myself, but I think for the purpose of this conversation we can operationalize the idea of people recovering from posttraumatic stress disorder as a reduction in scores on a particular measure that we might use. Another way of making determinations is to see if people meet the criteria for ‘case-ness’ at the beginning of treatment, and fail to meet the criteria for ‘case-ness’ at the end of treatment. So, when they start treatment they meet all the criteria to be labelled as having post-traumatic stress disorder, and in the end of treatment they don’t. They got better. M B: In Austria and in Germany trauma therapy is of course different from Freudian analysis. Is there something like trauma therapy in South Africa? How is it structured? A K: Yes. It depends on whom you ask. A lot of clinicians do different kinds of things: some use person-centred skills, Person-Centred Treatment; others use Prolonged Exposure, which is the empirically supported treatment for post-traumatic stress; others use Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (E M D R ). M B: We do E M D R in Austria as well. AK: Yes, but there is very little evidence that shows that it achieves any kind of benefit beyond Prolonged Exposure. M B: Could you say more about this idea of Prolonged Exposure? 3 Edna Foa, Ph.D., is a professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.

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A K: The idea is to assist the person in remembering the event in the context of the therapeutic setting and have them experience the emotions, and affect, and cognitions that they had when the event was occurring, so that they can re-live the thing in the context of a safe space and re-integrate that. M B: Which is the most successful therapy here in South Africa? A K: We don’t have trials in South Africa. There have been no trials, but judging from the international literature the Prolonged Exposure therapy is more helpful than everything else. M B: We also interviewed people at the Trauma Centre. What is your relationship to the Centre? A K: I’m a member of the Board of Trustees. M B: Do they also help you with your research? A K: No. We did some interviews with people who were victims of the xenophobic violence last year, but that’s about it really, no other research. M B: We heard horrible stories there. One thing that struck me particularly is the issue of space: In Europe when you are raped the first thing they do is they separate you from the perpetrator; that’s the first premise for any possible healing. What happens here is that many women just don’t have the possibility of getting separated from their husbands, they have to go back, and there is this kind of intimacy between perpetrator and victim: they are always too close. A K: When the xenophobic attacks happened last year, there was no formula for addressing this issue. We have no experience with refugees in this country, except for what happened last year, and nobody knew what to do. It was a new thing. We have no refugee camps, there’s no long tradition of having refugees in South Africa. And so I don’t think anybody knew what to do. They certainly didn’t consult any kind of literature helping to deal with the issue of what to do with people who were traumatized by xenophobic violence. M B: But also in more general terms: a black woman who lives in a township and is raped can go to the Trauma Centre, but in the end she has to go back to her husband and to that township, and live next to him. That seems to be a

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structural problem. If victims are constantly in contact with the perpetrator how can they ever heal? A K: I don’t think there’s an easy solution to that. We’re dealing with a resource-constrained context, and there is only a limited range of options available to people. I think it is problematic, and it is a structural problem, given the fact that resources are scarce. One would need to house the survivor of such an event in a different environment, and that, of course, requires money; someone has to pay for it. And in the absence of any source of funds it’s difficult to make that happen. M B: As we all know, there’s a high rate of criminality and violence in South Africa, and I tend to see that as a kind of perpetration that has been internalized. How do you read this kind of violence and criminality? A K: It’s a very complicated story. Certainly apartheid has played a huge role in shaping and scaring South African society. Young men grow up without proper role-models and without proper rituals of entering adulthood. There’s a fracturing of communities that has occurred, and poverty is degrading. All of that still doesn’t explain why, if you get robbed, you also get your throat slit. We need to figure that out in a much more systematic way. South African society is different from other poor societies. M B: It doesn’t happen in the same way in India. A K: Yes, that’s right. Well, other horrible things happen in India, too. I don’t have a good answer for you, quite honestly. MB: What is your hypothesis from a psychological point of view? A K: Well, who are the perpetrators of violence predominantly? They are young men; they are not older women or older men, they are young men; not even young women, for that matter. And so, there are notions of masculinity: when people feel emasculated because of poverty, because of unemployment, because of the absence of role-models, because of fractured families, I think that plays some role in it. And then there is the sense that there’s no real hope of getting out of the trap of poverty. M B: What about anger? A K: I think anger probably plays a role in it, although if you look at a lot of the violent events, the perpetrators are more anxious than angry when they are

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actually committing the crime. I think when they are busy slitting somebody’s throat it is driven by anxiety more than anger in that event. Anger might probably play a role at an over-arching level. The other thing is that drugs are playing an important role now, like tick, for example. M B: I’ve heard about that, but I haven’t read about it anywhere. It seems to play a huge role. A K: It does play a big role, especially in communities on the Cape Flats, where tick-addicts terrorize their families because they want more money to buy this drug. M B: What kind of drug is it and what are its effects? A K: It’s a crystal meth4 that produces euphoria and is instantly addictive. It’s very cheap, and so it’s also accessible to school kids. M B: Where does this come from? Is it a South African product? A K: Well, it probably comes from Columbia at its source, but it becomes mixed with everything else. I think substance abuse plays an important role, although it doesn’t quite explain everything, for example the high rate of rape in South Africa, the way in which women have been viewed as objects. It is also a patriarchal society in that sense. I think the issues are very complicated. There’s no one single thing that makes South Africa unique. We have a long history of legal racial discrimination, and the social engineering forced people into poverty and forced men to be emasculated: they weren’t able to take care of their families, or to work, or to become proud citizens, and I think there is a generational effect of that. M B: That sounds like a gender problem, because women didn’t have an easy life either. A K: Well, if you look at violent crime everywhere in the world, who are most of the perpetrators? It’s usually young men between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Young men in that age group commit the most violent crimes. Certainly older men commit violent crimes, and women commit violent crimes, but overwhelmingly they are committed by young men. So we’re talking about things that go on at a physiological level, at a hormonal level, at a personal level, at a psychological level, at a social level, and we’re talking about 4

Methamphetamine.

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role-models, the need to belong; people form gangs because of the need to belong and the need for protection. I’m afraid I don’t have a single coherent answer for you about how to sort this matter out, how to solve the problem. We need many minds, we need criminologists, and sociologists, and psychologists, and employment agencies, and job-creation, and education to train people for work, etc. And we need the drug peddlers to be caught. M B: I have a question concerning the terminology: ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’, what do you prefer and why? A K: Generally I prefer ‘survivor’, because ‘victim’ can have labelled someone as being forever trapped by whatever event might have occurred, and ‘survivor’ is a more empowering term, generally. It suggests that human beings can achieve mastery over what has happened in the past, and can survive what has happened in the past, and can continue to go on to other things in their lives, whereas if you’re a ‘victim’, then this horrible event is always the thing that oppresses you in your life. M B: My last question concerns literature: How do you think literature is important for traumatized people? Can writing or reading help them overcome their trauma? A K: Writing is fine, but I think writing on its own can have a negative effect sometimes. If the writing is engaged with by another person, then that’s a good thing, but if you just write, and write, and write, then it’s so recursive and internal. People internalize what they write, and so you need a corrective intervention in addition to writing, you need someone else to read your writing and comment on it, and talk about it. M B: That’s interesting. What we also heard at the Trauma Centre was that many women experience reading as disempowering or re-traumatizing. A K: There’s been some work done on children who’ve committed suicide. A lot of them kept their diaries before they killed themselves, so it was possible to conduct a psychological autopsy to see what actually happened. That was in Indiana, U S A , at a school for gifted children about ten years ago. I think the data was published. What they learned there was that if you’re depressed and you write, and you write, and you write, it’s not helpful, because you’re reading the same depressive things that stimulate your depressive thoughts all

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the time, unless there’s a person that intervenes and does some corrective kind of intervention. But if you’re writing and reading what you’re writing, and you write some more, and you read what you write, and you write some more, there’s a cyclical effect that takes you even further down. And so, certainly writing is a good thing if it is done under proper circumstances in the context of a therapeutic relationship. M B: And what about the reading of potentially traumatic, violent scenes, for example? A K: Again, I think reading should be prescriptive: the therapist should give the person something to read, if that is going to be helpful: Bibliotherapy. And one should always test the effect of whatever intervention one uses. Bibliotherapy: giving someone something to read. M B: Thank you very much for this interview.

WORKS CITED American Psychiatric Association. “A P A Diagnostic Classification: D S M - I V - T R ” (2000), BehaveNet: Clinical Capsule, http://www.behavenet.com/capsules /disorders /dsm4TRclassification.htm (accessed 26 March 2009). Kagee, Ashraf. “The Relationship Between Statement Giving at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Psychological Distress Among Former Political Detainees,” South African Journal of Psychology 36.1 (2006): 10–24. Young, Allan. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997).

—Œ—

I NTERVIEWS WITH S OUTH A FRICAN A CADEMICS

The Commissioner of Transitional Justice — An Interview with Alex Boraine

E W A L D M E N G E L : In your book A Country Unmasked, you repeatedly use the terms ‘trauma’ and ‘traumatization’. Was the writing of this book also a personal attempt to come to terms with the past, to get it off your chest, to cope with what happened? A L E X B O R A I N E : That was certainly part of it, because I felt it was all contained in my mind, my imagination, and also emotionally. I was very involved in the start up of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (T R C ), so it was a long process for me. But the actual confrontation between victim and commissioner, between those who had caused the suffering – the perpetrators – and the commission, was very traumatic. I didn’t go for any counselling throughout the life of the commission. Only later did I realize that there were all sorts of unresolved emotions; they would come back when I saw something on television. So, dealing with that was part of the book but part of it was also an attempt to document the experience from inside the Commission. I actually left South Africa to write the book. I was at New York University, and I wrote it there, to give me distance. It didn’t take too much distance away from me personally, but it did help enormously. But the emotional impact is still there: I can still be very deeply moved by an image; very often I have flashbacks when I watch something on television or when somebody asks me to speak at a particular workshop or conference. E M: How is the bodily feeling when it all comes back? Can you describe the symptoms you have? A B: It’s as though I want to weep. I could not weep during the hearings, because we wanted the attention to be away from ourselves. It’s a deep sort of © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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sadness, I suppose, but I try and rise beyond that. I try to understand and manage it, and then move on. I don’t feel as though I’m permanently in some sort of trough that I can’t get out of, it’s rather a few minutes or moments at a time. It is such an amazing thing, because you really think you are over it, you are beyond it, and then something happens to show you that you aren’t. I was part of a group visiting Morocco, where we tried to help with their plans for a truth commission. I listened to some of the people there, and all the images of my own country came rushing back. I guess one will never get over it entirely, but it’s not something which depresses me. E M: How did you cope with the experience of having to listen, day by day, to the reports of victims and their stories of rape, torture, murder, and otherwise atrocious things? You said that you didn’t undergo psychological help? A B: No. I probably was stupid, I probably should have. A number of the commissioners did, but none of our staff. Believe it or not, a lot of journalists who were covering the work of the commission needed counselling. But I have a background which led me to think I could cope. I was a theologian, I was in the church, ministering to many people, counselling them, and, therefore, perhaps I unconsciously felt: “Well …” E M: A doctor doesn’t see a doctor. A B: That’s right. You put it well. That was wrong, but Desmond Tutu did exactly the same. I don’t think it has left huge scars, but I think it would have helped. I have a remarkable wife. The commissioners were away from home a lot, but when I did get home, she was amazing. I had a very traumatic personal experience at that time: my own daughter had been viciously attacked and left for dead. She had her seven month old baby with her, who, thank heavens, was unharmed. We had to take that little baby into our care at almost the same time that I went into the Commission. When I went home, somehow just being with this new life, this new child who had survived this awful attack, gave me strength. My daughter and sons had to come and live with us, because my wife had to take over the mothering of this child, and that was somehow a great help to me. I’m eternally grateful for a horrible experience that actually gave me access to a beautiful little girl. I could roll on the floor with her, or talk to her, play with her. And the occasional whisky helped quite a lot, as well!

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E M: From the vantage point of the present, what do you think were the most critical moments of the Commission? And what are the most important results which the Commission achieved? AB: I’m going to give you a copy of a book that I published a few months ago, where I actually devote two chapters to reviewing the Commission a few years after it concluded its work.1 Some people say I’m too harsh on the Commission, whereas perhaps I was too generous when I first wrote about it. I don’t know. This is a much more critical approach. E M: Does that mean that time has changed your point of view? AB: Yes. I think in some ways the hope and the idealism that I had, and in particular, the disappointment with the state, has made me realize that one has to re-visit the impact of the Commission. At that time we were caught up with the work of the Commission. There were so many victims who talked about how hopeful it was, that I think I under-estimated the depth of the divisions in this country, which are very, very deep-seated on all sides. I’ve had to come to terms with that intellectually. I’ve said in addresses I’ve given all over the world that unless the experience of the Commission is taken into every area of life in South Africa, into our universities, our colleges, our schools, and our public life, its impact will not be nearly as great as it could or should have been. You have a commission, it concludes its work and everybody leaves: the date is defined by an act of Parliament. That date arrives, the report is handed in, and really and truly it is out of your hands. You can still write statements, you can deliver speeches, but as a commissioner you are no longer there; you don’t have the authority or the power. What I tried to say then, and still believe now, is that the Commission was the starting point, not the end, of something which needs to be taken up through every institution in the country. As far as your first question about the most critical moments is concerned, I think that one of them strangely enough had nothing to do with the victims; it was the day when five top policemen contacted us and said they wanted to appear before the Commission. Now our Commission was unique in the sense that no other commission has had perpetrators appearing before it, and 1

Alex Boraine, A Life in Transition (Cape Town: Struik, 2008).

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amnesty was not part of any other commission. There were many critics in this country who said: “You’re crazy. No one is going to come and tell you what terrible things they have done. Why should they?” They forgot of course that there was both the possibility of legal action or punishment, as well as the possibility of amnesty. I admit that deep down I also had a great insecurity. Some people appeared before the Commission, but when those who were part and parcel of assassination squads came, I realized that this was a huge breakthrough. The victims were asking questions: “Where are the bodies? Why did you do this? Who did this to us? What’s going to happen?” Suddenly here were the people who could answer those questions, and we got more information from the perpetrators than we did from the victims – obviously, because they were responsible. I’m not suggesting that we had as many perpetrators before us as we ought to have had, but seven thousand is quite a large number. Where we failed was to get the top, top people. There was no paper trail; with a nod and a wink and a nudge the politicians at the very top gave instructions for people to be taken out, to be killed. They were smart, as politicians often are; they drew up policies which encouraged you to regard black people as ‘non-human’, and if you regarded them as ‘non-human’, their lives were not worth anything. The politicians claimed: “No, no, no! We knew nothing about this. It’s just a few bad apples.” Some of the top, top policemen and military people were very smart and very devious. Some came to the Commission, some didn’t. Another critical moment was when a woman who appeared at one of the first hearings of the Commission threw herself back in her chair and cried out in anguish. This deep cry from the very soul of a woman whose husband had been killed was very, very significant. Apart from that, the Winnie Mandela issue2 was obviously a very significant moment, in many ways very disappointing towards the end. This was one of the very few times that Desmond Tutu and I had a disagreement.

2

Winnie Mandela’s appearance before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on

25 September 1997. See South African Press Association, “The Nine Lives of Winnie Mandela” (23 September 1997), South African Press Association, http://www .doj .gov.za/trc/media/1997 /9709/s970923d.htm (accessed 13 March 2009).

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E M: You are now the chairperson of the board of directors of the International Centre for Transitional Justice. The term ‘transitional justice’ sounds very unusual to my ears, as a Central European. What are its implications and what are the goals of your institution? AB: The Centre was founded in New York, its head office is still in New York and the board of directors meets in New York. We have offices throughout the world, including in Cape Town. To go back a bit: we were the first Commission to have its hearings in the open, which meant that radio and television journalists were there all the time, including international media teams. This meant that people were watching us in many capitals of the world – and I mean the world. I started receiving invitations from countries like Northern Ireland, Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Latin America, Africa saying: “We have been watching, or we have heard of your Commission. We think it may be of use to us. Will you come to our country?” I was tied up in the work of the Commission at that time but I managed one or two visits and realized then that when a society is in transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, or from dictatorship and deep-seated violence to a form of democracy, it is a very serious, delicate, difficult time, and you can’t come with a solution from the outside and impose it. However, there may be some lessons one can learn. I went to Northern Ireland three or four times, but felt that there was very little I could contribute. They seemed to find our discussions helpful, but I was not convinced. I felt the same in Eastern Europe. So when I went to New York to write my book, I obviously talked to many people about the impact of the Commission outside of South Africa. I was asked to give a lecture in New York, which I did, and the president of the Ford Foundation was there. She contacted me, saying: “Let’s have breakfast. What you describe suggests that there needs to be some institution that can assist countries that are in transition, that have perhaps been blocked off from the rest of the world, that know very little of the various options available to them. Nobody seems to help them. It’s usually just accountability: we must punish the offenders. So we have the The Hague Tribunal, and tribunals in Rwanda, or Sierra Leone or Cambodia, and so on – absolutely correct, but more is needed, in my view anyway. Why aren’t you starting such an institution?” I said: “Well, I’m teaching at N Y U , I’m writing a book, I want to go home.” And she answered: “You have given enough to your country. What

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about other countries in need?” So I thought about it, discussed it, and with two other colleagues I started the International Centre for Transitional Justice. We now have about 135 full-time employees all over the world. We have offices or a presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Colombia, Geneva, Brussels, Cape Town. The Centre has grown far too fast, and we have all the problems of rapid growth. But what we aim at is what I call a holistic approach to justice, which incorporates accountability, certainly, but also truth-telling. It includes coming to terms with the past, not merely in terms of one individual who gave the orders to slaughter, or to massacre, or to kill, or to assault, or to steal. It is much wider and broader than that: systematic, systemic reasons for violence and deep-seated division. It may be religion, it may be culture, it may be history, it may be all of these things and more. Reconciliation is also important: How do you help a country that has been torn apart, to live together? They can’t all leave, they occupy a common place, a state. How do you help them to believe enough in the new democracy to invest themselves in it and not go right back to violence or to anarchy? There is also the need for institutions to be transformed, whether it is the police, or the army, or the economic system, or the education system. So justice, in my understanding, is not only retributive, but an emphasis on a holistic approach, which helps a country to go forward and not get stuck in the past. And finally: reparations for those who have suffered so much. It may only be a token. A country may be so poor that it can’t afford to help very much, but at least it can give recognition, an acknowledgement of what victims have gone through, the restoration of their dignity. This may involve some small sums of money, it may be scholarships, it may be a house, it will differ from country to country. So that’s our fundamental approach, which seems to be quite different from most human rights organizations, which focus almost entirely on advocacy, saying: “What is happening is wrong; accountability is very important.” Nobody seems to want to take into account these other alternatives. If you want to deal with a failed state, if you want to deal with a deeply divided state, if you want to deal with the aftermath of violence, then I think you have to have a multifaceted approach. We only go where we are invited, and we tell people very clearly: “This is who we are; this is what our mission is.” And it seems to be working. In fact, we can’t deal with all the requests that come in!

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E M: There is a lot of talk about South Africans being a traumatized people – Archbishop Tutu’s statement.3 – Is there such a thing as ‘collective’ trauma? And wouldn’t we have to historicize the term in the sense of a differentiation between types of trauma suffered by different groups of people? Is that also a direction which your institute is following? A B: I would find it difficult to describe South Africa as a traumatized society. I don’t think it’s like that at all – thank goodness. I speak at universities and I encounter young vibrant minds. If you visit the University of Cape Town or any major institution there is a commitment, there is hope. They don’t know what you’re talking about when you talk about the horror of apartheid – they’re too young to remember. I go through the laws that were enacted by the apartheid government with them, and they look at me and say: “That’s a long time ago.” These kids are twenty, twenty-one; fifteen years ago, when the A N C came to power, they were five; some were about to be born when Mandela was released. On the other hand there are areas where there’s a deep sense of loss amongst older people who lost a husband or a wife, or whose children were killed. Black people, mainly, but there are others too who have very mixed feelings about the future. Perhaps not so much for themselves any longer, because they feel they are too old now to move, or they are too settled to move, too comfortable, but for their children. The trauma of worrying about whether there is a place for white people in Africa is not always expressed coherently or intellectually, but when you push a little harder, which I obviously do in my work, you find that it’s there; it’s very, very real. You can well understand some of the statements by Africans, where the subtext is: “You’re not really South African unless you are black.” It doesn’t worry me, because I know I’m an African, but even that isn’t simple. I mean, you’re an African if your family has been here for twohundred-odd years, but there are a lot of other people who take this quite literally and think: “Oh my God! There is no place for us.” Also, there are in3 “Every South African has to some extent or other been traumatized. We are a wounded people.” See Desmond Tutu, “Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Address to the First Gathering of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (16 December 1995), The Official Truth and Reconciliation Commission Website, http://www.doj.gov .za/trc/pr/1995 /p951216a .htm (accessed 6 March 2009).

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efficiencies, there’s bad management, there’s crime, there’s arrogance, there’s a government which is divided. So people feel insecure and it becomes almost a trauma for them. E M: And the Coloureds have their special problems as well. A B: Yes, they are in a no-man’s-land. Indians are in a slightly better or different position, perhaps because of their culture or their religion. I don’t know what it is. Many of them may feel insecure and worry that the African hordes are going to descend on them, but they move on, and they are good at getting on: in education, in business, in work, and in life. I think the Coloured people are a most abused people. They were abused by what we call the tot-system on the farms, where people were paid in alcohol. Alcoholism amongst Coloureds is very high, higher than in any other group in this country. Frankly, I feel very deeply that they have been abused in the past and are being abused now. Even though many of them are doing well and have escaped that awful past, many in the younger generation who have aspirations still feel that to be really black you have to be African, and you can’t aspire to be white, so you are Cinderella. I hasten to say that this doesn’t apply to all of them – a lot of them are very confident, very able and fantastic, but if you go into the townships and sit and talk with groups of people, you will quickly realize that gangsterism, the crime level, the hopelessness are all still very evident. E M: You’ve mentioned that there is a generation growing up here in South Africa of young people who seem to have almost forgotten what happened, and of course it’s the same in Germany. How important is the remembering of the past also for the younger generation? Would it be better to close the doors to the past, as Archbishop Tutu claims in his conclusion to the address to the first gathering of the T R C ?4 Or is it important to keep up this remembering for almost all times? A B: I think that there is almost no choice in the matter. When something happens, memories come crowding back, and even these young people sud4 “We have the privilege of helping to heal the hurts of the past [...] so that we can close the door on that past and concentrate in the present and our glorious future.” Tutu, “Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Address to the First Gathering of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”

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denly find that they are very disturbed by this. I think it’s far better to have a conscious act of remembrance, wherever possible: maybe in the family, maybe in society, maybe in the classroom, anywhere. But it’s important not to be stuck in the past, not to be paralyzed by it. I sometimes think that memory can be a great handicap, particularly when it’s mythologized. Let me give you an example outside of South Africa: When I first visited Kosovo, they didn’t want to talk about the current war or the awful mess across the borders, they wanted to discuss what had happened back in the fourteenth century. They wanted to say: “First let’s deal with that.” And, sometimes people think that the task of memory is to consciously forget: not to address it but to pretend that it never happened, not to read the page before you turn it. I think that is a mistake. It’s unhealthy, apart from anything else. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t, you can’t, just close the door and forget the past; remembrance, provided it’s not preferential and paralysing, can be very instructive. E M: In the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War those responsible for the murder of six million Jews were taken to court, sentenced, and put to death consecutively. The concept of justice underlying this was a retributive one. In A Country Unmasked you explain why this was not an option for South Africa at that time. Do you still hold this opinion and could you comment on this? A B: I think in a perfect world or in a world where you have victor’s justice, you can go the Nuremburg route. But if the A N C had decided to pursue victor’s justice, I think there would still be no peace in this country even today. The reaction of the whites, of the Afrikaners – many of whom were armed, many of whom were well trained in the military – would have perpetuated the violence, and each side would have continued to insist that the faults were on the other side. I’ve always queried the whole question of the bombing of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima – Where were the courts then? Where were the culprits? Who should have been charged? I think justice can sometimes be very unequal. I’m not condoning anything that happened in Germany or in Europe during that period, but I think there were other people who ought to

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have been brought to justice. If you’re going to be consistent, then justice must be for all. E M: You mean the big shots behind it: not the bomber pilot but the president who gave the order? A B: Yes, absolutely. It’s a very unpopular position to take, especially when you are giving a public address in America, but I think one has to be consistent. I think some form of accountability must take place. When we were involved in negotiations here in this country and F.W. de Klerk and company were demanding blanket amnesty with no accountability whatsoever, I think the A N C ’s reaction was absolutely right. They had to bow to the pressure, because the threats of rebellion were very real. I talked with Nelson Mandela personally about this. He made it clear that there wouldn’t have been a peaceful election if he hadn’t introduced a clause in the country’s Constitution which allowed for the possibility of conditional amnesty. Those of us who drafted the Act deliberately made this amnesty quite demanding: there had to be full disclosure, there had to be a public acknowledgement, they had to appear before the Commission, it had to be individual. I think there is a place for conditional amnesty, I really do. If you look at the history of the world you’ll find that amnesty does appear. If you don’t go for conditional amnesty, then you have the very real possibility of what happened in Spain, in Algeria, in France, what happened in southern African countries where human rights violations have never been addressed: it’s never been resolved and it will come back to haunt them, as is happening in Spain right now. So I don’t think we had much choice; I think we had to go that route. As I say, if it had been a different world, a different time, in a different place, then perhaps there ought to have been trials for many people. But we would have been conducting trials for fifty years at an enormous cost. E M: A nation torn apart. A B: I think we made the right decision. E M: You have repeatedly pointed out that it was not the task of the T R C to achieve reconciliation but to contribute to it. I think you are right in holding this opinion. How important is literature with regard to this process of reconciliation? Is it important at all?

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A B: Very important. I would broaden that a little and say that what I find so interesting and helpful is that as a consequence of the Commission a number of books and poems have been written, documentaries, novels, films, the list is endless. In the last couple of years there’s been a play called Truth in Translation5 where they look at the work of the Commission through the eyes of the interpreters. It has now appeared all over Eastern Europe, at the Edinburgh Festival, in Sweden, in South Africa, in some parts of America, in Rwanda. It’s a consequence of the Commission; it arose out of the Commission. I would say film, art, literature, painting – they are all vitally important. It’s not just the commissioners and the staff who did the job, it’s the writers, the painters, the artists, the film makers, and I think that really does contribute. Many people are moved more by reading a book or watching a film than by a Commission’s report. E M: There are some novels which are very critical of the T R C and its reconciliatory concept of justice. What do you think about the critical literature that has been written on the T R C ? A B: I would be surprised if it wasn’t there. I think that different people will have different views and ideas and they should all be listened to. I don’t think they have all the answers, nor do I think the T R C or its supporters have all the answers. It’s a dialogue which must be pursued. What has astonished me is that it’s more than ten years since that Commission ended, and honestly – no exaggeration – hardly a week or a month goes by that I don’t get a request from somebody around the world – either a professor leading a workshop, or a PhD student writing a thesis – asking: “Could you please answer the following fourteen questions?” I’ve really tried my best, but I’m almost at the point now where I must say: “Hey, come on, read the books that I’ve written and just work it out.” But they want a quote that they can use, and as a teacher I can understand that. On Tuesday I got a request to go to a two-day workshop in Burundi and talk about the South African experience and my understanding of it. I can’t tell you the number of times that still happens. Even its detractors have to admit that there was something unique about the South African experience, 5 Truth in Translation (2006), collaboratively created by Michael Lessac, Paavo TomTammi, Hugh Masekela and the company of Colonnades Theatre Lab, South Africa.

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because other commissions come and go. For instance, the Peruvian Commission. I think it was a worthwhile attempt, but hardly anybody from Peru gets asked to go all over the world to talk about it. Perhaps it’s Mandela, perhaps people thought that South Africa would just plunge into bloody chaos and were amazed when it didn’t. Perhaps our Commission was very ambitious, I don’t know. I’m staggered at the continued interest. E M: How long will this process of reconciliation have to continue? How long will this phase of transition last? What are the most important political tasks to be resolved with regard to reconciliation? A B: I think it will take generations, not years. You can’t have three hundred years of colonialism and deep-seated racism and then expect the Commission to resolve all those problems. I believe that we’re making good progress. I’m very critical of the A N C . Although I voted for them in the past, I won’t do so in the 2009 election. I used to know many of the key actors, but I feel that they have lost the moral compass. There is a sense of arrogance and entitlement. Reconciliation could be achieved much more quickly if we had a government that listened carefully, cared more deeply, but they are not going to change. The current leadership is suspect, to say the least, so it’s going to be a long, hard struggle. I think if we really want to see sustainable peace in South Africa, we’ve got to find a way of delivering. I acknowledge what the A N C has done: I know there are millions of people who have access to clean water now; I know there are hundreds of thousands of formerly deprived students who are now at university. But I also know of so many schools that are just unworkable, and the quality of the teaching staff is awful. What do you do about that? There is a lack of ability, training, expertise, commitment, which is largely the fault of white South Africa. We have denied people access for so long and now we are reaping the bitter results. But where I argued with Mbeki6 was when he determined that he was going to show that black Africans could govern. I thought: great, I have no doubt that they can. There’s no question in my mind that they are good people. But there is a lack of skills and a lack of exposure at local level, at provincial level, and at national level. There are a lot of white, Coloured, and 6

Thabo Mbeki was South Africa’s president from 1999 to 2008.

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Indian people who want to offer their help, and I’m talking about expertise, I’m talking about engineering, about scientists. You’ve got a whole community of older men and women who had retired from university but who still have keen minds, a wealth of experience, who could have been seconded. That was the suggestion I tried to make to various local governments. These people would not be the bosses, they would be servants. I offered to assist, but Thabo changed so much over the last few years; he was going to show that they could do it alone. I said: “Some white people think you guys are useless – if it’s black it’s not going to work – but a lot of us don’t believe that. We believe that, like anyone else, if you are given the chance to do something, you can do it. But we’re a big country, there are a lot of white people in this country who had enormous privileges, and some of us would like to re-pay that.” So, I am very encouraged by the start-up of C O P E .7 I had been arguing for a while that you’ve got to break down this huge monolithic A N C structure that has about seventy percent of the vote, almost a two-thirds majority at every level. The ordinary opposition parties, good as some of them are – couldn’t do it. Now, C O P E has many, many disadvantages and many weaknesses, but I think it’s helped to make the A N C sit up and think, and I believe that will hasten reconciliation. I’ve tried to talk to the leaders of C O P E saying: “Go out of your way to reassure to white, Indian, Coloured people that this is their home, that they have a place here. Encourage them, whilst, of course, realizing that your biggest constituency is African and black.” I know Terror8 and others in C O P E ; they come and ask me: “What do you think? What should we do about this?” I had a call last night from a senior C O P E official and we talked for about an hour about what they ought to be doing. I try not to give gratuitous advice, but if people ask I’m happy to share ideas. So, it’s going to be a long haul politically, but the economy is the main problem. I think the A N C has belatedly recognized that there are a lot of trouble spots brewing: a lot of people taking to the streets, a lot of burning of tyres, of rebellion amongst their own ranks, because these people haven’t experienced any change in their lives since the advent of democracy. In 1994 it was: “South Africa belongs to all its people.” But the whites still dominate 7 8

The Congress of the People (C O P E ) was launched in December 2008. Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota is C O P E ’s first chairperson.

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the economy, they still have beautiful homes, and you see the contrast between these and the awful shacks and dwellings where the majority of South Africans live. For many of them there is little hope of their children doing any better. But we are in the midst of a very serious world economic crisis, and whilst it has not hit us as hard as it has in the U K , in Europe, in America, as sure as God has made apple seeds, we will not be untouched. The South African Rand is constantly under siege, and this will continue for a long time. So, when the A N C comes to its senses and thinks: “Oh my God! The wheel has changed,” they may not be able to do anything about it any more. E M: I should like to come to my last question, maybe that’s the easiest one: What are your expectations with regard to the Soccer World Cup 2010? A B: Well, I’m very thrilled for South Africa, for Africa, because soccer is so important. It’s going to be totally impossible to follow Germany, which did such a brilliant job, but in our own kind of funny African way we are probably going to bring some new force, new experiences. I hope the economic problems will ease a bit and allow people to travel. I hope the fear of crime will not keep people away, but if I know soccer fans, nothing will keep them away, not even the lions in Kruger Park. I think we’ll be ready: the stadia and everything else are more or less on course. It will be a struggle: transport is going to be tricky, but huge amounts have been invested, which is good for South Africa as well as for 2010. I’m sad that South Africa is not part of the World Cup, because obviously we will be the host nation, but our team isn’t playing well at the moment. E M: They are doing better and better as a team. A B: The real test still lies ahead of us, but it’s certainly better than it was. The South African cricket team is flourishing and rugby is doing well, but the most popular game in South Africa is soccer. So, I’m looking forward to the 2010 World Cup. I think it will inject something into this country which we need. It has created jobs for people in the building industry, and there are a lot of spin-offs. I know something about what is being planned for Cape Town in particular: routes are being planned marking the walk from the station to the stadium; a lot of entrepreneurs will be selling food from kiosks on the side of the road. It will be nice and informal. I’m very positive about it.

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E M: That is a positive final note. I should like to thank you very much for this interview. A B: It was my pleasure.

WORKS CITED Boraine, Alex. A Life in Transition (Cape Town: Struik, 2008). The Colonnades Theatre Lab. “Truth in Translation” (2006), http://www .truthintranslation.org (accessed 13 March 2009). South African Press Association. “The Nine Lives of Winnie Mandela” (23 September 1997), South African Press Association, http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/media/1997 /9709/s970923d.htm (accessed 13 March 2009). Tutu, Desmond. “Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Address to the First Gathering of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (16 December 1995), The Official Truth and Reconciliation Commission Website, http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/pr/1995 /p951216a.htm (accessed 6 March 2009).

—Œ—

Vanitas Vanitatum

— An Interview with Neville Alexander

E W A L D M E N G E L : You are an eminent South African historian, and the book you wrote, An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa, came to my attention about four years ago. I had heard your name before, and I know that you studied at Tübingen University and that you can speak German fluently. Do you still have close relations to Germany? And what made you go to Germany in the first place? N E V I L L E A L E X A N D E R : It started with my matriculation school years, the last two years of school: In those days – I’m talking about 1951–52 – we had to do either what they called a third language, which used to mean a third European language, not an African language, or mathematics. Since the Roman Catholic mission school I attended didn’t have mathematics as a matric subject, I did German as my so-called third language. It was fairly easy, because virtually all the nuns in the Catholic school were German-speaking, so I got a very good grounding in the grammar, and I came to love various German authors before I came to university. I came to this university in 1953. I started my academic career in this very building where we are sitting: the arts block. I did German as a subject, and then, because I did so well, I made it in German and history. I was really torn between history and German, and then, coming from a poor family, I also based my decision on bursaries. Coming from a poor family it was easy for me to make a choice for German. So I did my masters in German here, and then I got the Humboldt Scholarship to go to Germany and did my doctorate in Tübingen. I went to Germany, came back in 1961, and then in 1963 I was arrested. In 1974 I came from prison, and after 1979, when my house arrest order expired, © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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I was able to travel relatively freely altogether. In fact, I was detained once or twice afterwards again. But since 1978–79 I have had regular contact with Germany. In fact, I go to Germany at least once a year, sometimes twice, thrice a year, and recently I’ve also been going to Austria quite a bit, because of connections with the Austrian Ministry of Education and Culture. So, because of our work on language in this country, I work a lot with German universities that are doing particularly bilingual education and language planning, so Hamburg, Hannover, quite a bit with Frankfurt already in the eighties and early nineties, recently mainly Hamburg, sometimes Oldenburg, and then the Universities of Vienna and Klagenfurt. I attend conferences and do the usual academic stuff. I go to Germany very often. And even if I say so myself: I’m one of Humboldt’s favourite sons, with the result that whenever there is something to do with Africa I get invited. Sometimes it is not really relevant and then I refuse, but generally I go. E M: You are a South African historian who comes forward with opinions which go against the views of the ruling party of the A N C – sometimes at least. This is why I believe you are an important voice in contemporary South Africa. Sometimes you get the impression that the large majority of the governing party (almost seventy percent) has not always been so good for the country? Would you agree with that? N A: It’s a very profound issue: it’s a cultural, historical issue. If we look at the rest of Africa and the anticolonial struggles as well as the postcolonial practice of the elites, it’s very clear that a sort of amalgam or combination of traditionalism and modernism is in some fundamental sense responsible for some of the corruption, nepotism, one could almost say opportunism of the leadership of these political as well as cultural elites. If you read the postcolonial novels about African liberation, the one thing that always stands out is that every single one of the individual members of these elites has got responsibility for an extended family. So they earn a lot of money – possession, status in a modern sense – but they have this entire extended family that is in some way dependent on them. And from there it’s a very short step to corruption, to nepotism, and so on. I think what makes the South African case so tragic is the fact that we never expected it to happen here. I think all of us, regardless of what party we came from – left, right, centre – we had the illusion that we were much more

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‘modern’ than we actually are. To find out after a few years – not even very long – that we are subject to exactly the same vulnerabilities as other African countries was quite an awakening, an eye-opener for most of us. When I was in prison with Mandela – we shared the same section for ten years – we had many discussions and, in fact, I owe him a great debt of gratitude for opening my eyes to the significance of African history, because all the history that we were taught at this university and elsewhere was eurocentric. Basically even the history of Africa that we were taught was the history of Europeans in Africa, not the history of Africa; that came much later. So, in those discussions, I got the impression that the leadership of the ANC had a very modernistic perspective, although they were rooted in African culture, African tradition. It was very seldom that we spoke about the land question, for example, or about the language question. It was very seldom that there was a focus on, let us say, the traditional dimensions of African culture or even African languages and how those would influence our modernistic practices, though there was a very clear commitment to heritage in that sense of admiring the past, knowing the important significance of the past. But heritage is a very different thing from development; it was more like a rupture between heritage and development. So, whenever we spoke about the future, we had very little bridging between the past and the present or the future. It always struck me, but I never really appreciated it until I began to study African history much more carefully myself when I was out of prison. You must remember that my study of history, both in South Africa as well as in Germany and later on in prison, had to do, basically, with German history: I studied Bismarck,1 I studied the philosophers of history, Ranke,2 all the German historians, and so my knowledge of African history was very limited until I came out of prison and made a special study for my own sake. I’m giving you this much background information because I think in order to understand why this leadership has turned out to be so vulnerable and in fact so opportunistic – in the worst sense of the term – one has to understand this objective reality; it’s an objective thing. At the same time, of course, you can’t condone it, and Mandela himself is a very good example. The late Walter Sisulu was another very good example of somebody who not only 1 2

Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), German historian.

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understood the vulnerability, but also overcame it. That was easier for Mandela, he is a very rich man; it’s easier for him than it was for people like Sisulu, who continued to be very principled, very simple people, and very committed to the future development. So, our critique from the left on the African National Congress leadership and their behaviour is a modernistic critique. But – and I want to stress this, certainly in my own case – I have a very clear understanding of the need for us to establish a continuity between tradition and modernity. I think it’s the fact that there is no continuity, that modernity is seen as something alien, as something that you acquire in English – not in Xhosa or in Zulu or whatever, but in English – that’s part of the problem. It’s not appropriated as ours, it’s always theirs in a sense, and I think that’s part of the problem in a mindset sense – if you make use of the term ‘habitus’ – that mindset, the disposition is to see Africa and Europe as two very different, almost mutually exclusive entities. Whereas what you need to do is to have that continuity between tradition and modernity. In Europe you don’t realize it, because most of the recent inventions took place in Europe or in North America, to some extent in Asia and North Africa, but there’s a natural continuity: first the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, etc., and there’s a continued flow. We don’t have that; here modernity was imposed during imperialism and colonialism, it was imposed on Africa. E M: A critical point you make in your book, An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa, concerns the fact that South Africa in 1994 doesn’t seem to have taken the chance to really make a new start. Would such a start have been at all possible under the prevailing conditions at the beginning of the nineties? Wouldn’t it have torn the nation apart if more extreme political measures – the erection of a government based on Marxist principles, for example – had been applied? N A: My real critique is that the leadership, including even Mandela, didn’t really understand that they were taking control of a bourgeois democratic system; they didn’t really understand that. I think that they had the illusion that you could run a bourgeois democratic system and at the same time somehow give the impression that you are creating a socialist, or even a social-democratic system. I think that’s the real problem, that’s the real critique. We’ve never supported Stalin or Stalinism, we’ve always been critical of that kind of

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so-called ‘socialism’, but quite apart from that, the fact is that in the minds of people across the world socialism was what was taking place in the Soviet Union. So, with the collapse of the Soviet Union there was no workable alternative in the minds of people. The A N C leadership, rightly or wrongly, made a decision long ago, really in 1986 – in the case of Mandela I indicate in the book already in the seventies – that they wanted to negotiate a settlement, and not only was that their right, but as Louis Pasteur says, “Chance favours those who are prepared,” and their strategy of negotiations fitted in very well with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. That is why the moderate centre became dominant in the A N C , as opposed to the so-called left-wing in the A N C . Now, that having happened, you would have expected these people to have understood that “Look, what we must try to do is to democratize the system as much as we can.” And, I think, certainly Mbeki had that idea, perhaps even Mandela, but he was much more amorphous in his political thought; whereas a chap like Mbeki had very clear-sighted perspectives, and I think he certainly set out in the second term to democratize the South African situation; and to some extent he succeeded, of course. The problem is that the real inequality between the poor and the rich couldn’t be addressed in those terms. All you could address was the racial monopoly of whites over the capitalist dimension of the economy. It was a fact that most of the rich people – virtually all the rich people – were white: the people who had the capital, who had the skills and the knowledge, and so on. So, all that the democratization actually meant at that material level was that a few blacks were sort of sucked into the upper class as well, but the rest really didn’t get much out of the deal, except for very small houses perhaps, some running water, and electricity which they can’t pay for. And that is why we are having the situation we’ve got, both in terms of crime and hopelessness. This election will show lots of things, I think. People feel hopeless, because the A N C , which they honestly – in a way almost religiously – believed in, has failed them. But very few people are willing to say that openly as of yet. C O P E ,3 this break-away party, is an example of dissatisfaction.

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Congress of the People (C O P E ).

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So, what I’m getting at is that a lot of the ordinary people have become dependent on the government: I think the last number is nine million; nine million individuals are dependent on government hand-outs. Now, that’s a lot of people. And to that extent, therefore, the A N C keeps on giving the impression of having a mass following, and it still has a mass following. But I think with the emergence of C O P E – not that I support them politically – you’re going to find that we are going to have a much more normal democratic system, where there is real competition for power, for office and so on. I think that’s my real critique – that that particular issue of the rich and the poor wasn’t actually addressed, couldn’t really be addressed seriously. And the other thing, which I also hint at – perhaps I even mention it openly in the book – is the fact that the role-model effect of the middle class was never understood by the A N C . Even Mandela himself: if you look at his life-style, he’s like a feudal prince: he’s got a house here, in another province, in Mozambique, and so on, moving around like from one court to the other. Of course, he’s an exceptional person, but if you look at the rest of them: I always make the point that there was a commission in 1993 when they accepted the same level of salaries as the white parliamentarians had got before them. That’s already where the whole rot started. Compare that with Evo Morales in Bolivia, who reduced his own salary, his own presidential salary by fifty-seven percent as the first act to send out a signal of the kind of society that he wants to build. I think that is the big difference. It’s just disgraceful, to put it simply; it’s disgraceful. It’s a poor country, and the fact that you have a whole lot of very wealthy white people doesn’t make this into a rich country. I think those are the real criticisms. E M: So is the fact that we now have C O P E a positive signal with regard to the stabilization of democracy? Is the pluralization of opinions accepted within this young democracy? N A: I think so. I think at a political level we are very fortunate; compare us with other African countries and you know how fortunate we are. At a political level there is no question about the fact that we can speak our minds freely, we can meet and move freely, and so on. The real problem is, first of all, at the economic level: the fact that this gap between rich and poor continues to be so large, and they don’t seem to be able to make it smaller. And,

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secondly, on the cultural level there is this sort of cavity of wealth and ostentatious living of this elite that I’ve just referred to. Those are the problems, but at a political level I think we are very, very fortunate, and somehow we have to try to keep that going. Now, the police and the army, the repressive arms of the state have to be absolutely objectively independent. That’s difficult; in any African country it’s very difficult. I think in South Africa we will succeed for a while to keep that independence. Of course, the judiciary is another issue. And there are certainly attempts to undermine that independence, but I think they are being pushed back. The social pluralism of South Africa is our biggest asset, the fact that there are so many crisscrossing views and interests. It makes it very difficult for any particular group to gain complete control. It’s not impossible, of course. E M: Another major point of your book is the role of the T R C . You analyze its role with regard to the reconciliation process, and you seem to be very critical of the T R C – for various reasons. You concede that it made an effort, but you also come forward with major points of critique: What you point out is that the T R C somehow or other failed to take the system to account. Those in high positions and responsible for apartheid – politicians, church leaders, international company directors, all those who profited from the system – were not summoned, failed to appear like Botha, or, if they appeared, like de Klerk, brusquely denied any guilt whatsoever. Instead, only a few lowerranking individuals had to bear the brunt. Is this your major point of critique, and would the T R C , as an institution, have been able to indict the apartheid system? N A: From that point of view the T R C is an exceptionally interesting institution. I think the two main points of critique you have actually mentioned: one is that they didn’t look at apartheid as a whole; they looked at gross violations of human rights. Of course in the report they concede that they didn’t do that and that that was not their brief, that they couldn’t do it, certainly in the time at their disposal. That’s fine, up to a point. But the impression was given that it was apartheid that was being examined. In fact, it wasn’t; it was the criminals, the low-level dogs, running dogs of apartheid that were put on trial – number one.

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Number two: the other major fraud in the T R C was the impression that was given that somehow social ‘Ausgleich’,4 social harmony could be brought about through what is basically an individualistic, Christian religious experience, where individuals who’ve had a quarrel, or who’ve been in conflict can forgive one another, can have open confession, etc. But in a society you can’t do that, it doesn’t work that way. So, I think the impression that this was possible, and that everybody would somehow start hugging one another and being friends instead of enemies and so on. E M: ‘Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen’5 – that’s what we say. N A: Exactly. That’s just simply not true. And that impression was originally given, there’s no doubt about it. To that extent it was a failure. To the extent that it tried to establish the truth from a historical, historiographical point of view it was a failure, because, as we know, only very few people actually got summoned; whole interest groups simply didn’t appear. So, from those points of view I think the process was flawed. It was still a very impressive process, and to see especially some of these Afrikaans-speaking – but also some English-speaking – mainly white men coming and weeping or admitting that they now realize that they’ve done wrong, that’s quite impressive. It is symbolically interesting, but as a social act it couldn’t have much resonance, it couldn’t have much significance. In my view there are two really positive things about the T R C : The one is the fact that it gave African languages a major boost; ordinary people were given a voice in their own language; they could speak in their own language. It also demonstrated a technical exercise, that technically you can have major national and international events that can be interpreted in many different languages without much difficulty. Of course, there were difficulties, and I happen to know some of the interpreters who were involved, and they explained some of the real difficulties that there were – lack of terminology and that kind of thing – but most of those were overcome fairly easily. As a language person for me that was a major plus point of the T R C . That’s the first time it happened in South Africa.

4 5

German for ‘equilibrium’, ‘balance’. German saying, literally ‘peace, joy, pancakes’, meaning ‘everything’s rosy’.

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The second point is one which I find interesting: most people a) don’t pick it up and b) even when you explain it to them, they don’t seem to realize how significant it is. In my view the T R C as it was done in South Africa was the first major attempt in the modern world where the elite looked back on fortyfive years of contemporary history and asked very pertinent questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What went wrong? Could it have been otherwise?” These are very pertinent questions of contemporary history. It seems to me that this particular practice should become a criterion of democratic systems, that every democratic system should adopt this method of looking back every generation or so, every twenty-five, thirty years. You stand still, look back, you ask: “What did we do? What was wrong about it? Why did we do it wrong? Could it have been done better?” In my way of thinking, that should be part and parcel of democratic constitutions. And the T R C showed – inadvertently, certainly not by intention – that this is possible, and that every system should do that. E M: I think that’s a very important point you are making. N A: I think so. And yet, whenever I raise this, I think people are afraid of looking at it. E M: Well, even within our democracies the political periods are four or five years, and then another party comes, another government, and so on. It would be a good idea, I think, to take stock of a longer period of time in order to make sure how one developed, up to which point one developed, which developments were good, which were bad, that sort of thing, so that the next government is in a way bound to these insights of this overarching sort of view. N A: Yes. And I think it was not intended, it was quite unintentional, because people were focused on the evil of apartheid, but they looked at the society, and they asked very serious questions, and I think that’s one of the main plus points, in my view. Other than that: when you look at what’s actually happened, of course the fact is that the T R C in its original conception didn’t work. And the fact of the matter is that I think a lot of actually very interesting things were triggered by the T R C , especially when it comes to things like literature, films, music, etc. The arts have been very strongly influenced by the T R C , by the conception of the T R C , by the practice of the T R C . I don’t think enough satire has come

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out of it, because I think that’s quite an important point. Except for one or two cartoonists, there has been very little satire, certainly in music and in theatre and in films. It’s almost like South Africans – not just the ruling party, but South Africans generally – can’t laugh at themselves, can’t really see not so much the funny side as the ironical side. E M: There is one satirical novel, though, by Tom Eaton, which is, I remember, called The De Villiers Code. N A: That, of course, plays on The Da Vinci Code.6 E M: Yes. It’s a satirical novel on the T R C . Okay, another major focus of your book is cultural identity, and here especially the role of languages or language, and the politics of language. There are eleven official languages recognized in contemporary South Africa. Archbishop Tutu has coined the phrase of the ‘rainbow nation’. How can you ever hope that out of this Babylon of voices arises something like cultural identity? Is cultural – and national – identity not something which relies very much on a common language? NA: Let me just say very simply that it’s a myth that nations are necessarily monolingual. National unity, the sense of national consciousness, can be promoted through multilingualism, one sees that for example in Switzerland, to state one example in Europe. National identity can be promoted through multilingualism, firstly. Secondly, it’s very important that our children learn one another’s languages in school. We’ve actually got a formulation in terms of a three-language formula, where they know their mother-tongue, and if they are not English-speaking they know English, because of its international status, and they learn another important South African language, so they can communicate with one another fairly easily. The present generation, with some exceptions of course, have lost out in that sense, because of apartheid. They have never learned to speak each other’s languages: most Afrikaans-speaking people or English-speaking people don’t know an African language; most African-language-speaking people don’t know enough Afrikaans and English, with many exceptions. But in the future our children are taught those languages in all our schools, and, of course, they mix in sport and religion and

6

See Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (London: Bantam, 2003).

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culture and then that will become a natural thing where you switch from language to language as the need arises. The real basis of national unity is economic interaction, the interdependence of people on one another for their livelihood, for their subsistence, that’s where the real basis of national unity comes from. The borders may be artificial – they are artificial for all states – but no matter how artificial they are, as long as a nation state, or the national state – that’s a better term actually – remains the major political entity in the modern world, so long you will have national identities. People will be South Africans, or Zambians, or Namibians, or Mozambicans regardless of how artificial our borders are, because the economic interests are in a sense circumscribed by those borders. To get the particular view of culture as something that flows, not something that is static, we say: ‘Culture is a verb, not a noun’. Via languages, via knowledge of languages, you can actually find another window on the world; you look at the world from a different angle. That’s what makes the so-called ‘rainbow nation’ so interesting; it makes it unique, too. I don’t like the term ‘rainbow’, because I think, first of all, it’s American, which is problematic; secondly, the rainbow in a physical sense is actually an optical illusion; and thirdly and mainly its emphasis is on colour, on race, and coexisting racial groups, and I think that’s a huge mistake in South Africa, which is why I’ve suggested another metaphor, and more and more people are beginning to use it. I suggested the metaphor of the Gariep, the Great River, which is a name for the Orange River, which flows right across the country, so it’s an indigenous metaphor: The Gariep with its tributaries: African, European, Asian, and even Northern American, with all the other aspects of that metaphor: flowing together to constitute one main stream culture, one main stream way of seeing life, of seeing people. To take a simple example: everybody in South Africa, with some exceptions for their own individual interests and reasons, loves the music of Miriam Makeba.7 Most people can even sing it in the language in which she sings it. I’m taking that example, but I could take many others. That’s an example of the flowing together of these tributaries. In the recent past the European tributary has been dominant so that the main stream has been very eurocentric, whereas now you’ve got an African 7 Miriam Makeba (1932–2008), also known as “Mama Afrika,” was a singer and anti-apartheid activist (see B B C News).

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Renaissance rhetoric, and more and more the African element is being stressed, correctly I think, as long as it’s not superficial and stupid. More people should learn African languages, for example; people should learn more about African culture, African history, not just the European history that we were always taught. So, the African tributary is becoming more significant in the present period. The modern American tributary has always been very significant, the Coca-Cola stream, as I call it. I think that is a dynamic metaphor. In a geographical sense it’s a very appropriate metaphor, and, of course, the Gariep flows into the ocean, and in that sense becomes part of humanity; so you are not bounded by it in some sort of artificial way. What I am really getting at is a much more dynamic sense of identity, quite apart from the fact that we have multiple identities, and the national identity does not preclude sub-national identities. Sub-national identities are based on language: “I’m an Afrikaans-speaking South African,” “I’m a Xhosa-speaking South African,” “I’m an English-speaking South African”; or religion: “I’m Jewish,” “I’m Islamic, Christian, Catholic, or whatever”; or “I come from this part of the country, that part of the country.” You have several subnational identities, and as long as they don’t undermine the sense of national unity – in some right-wing cases there is a very definite danger of that, where they undermine that sense of national unity through racist practices and beliefs – as long as the sub-national identities don’t undermine national unity, there is no reason why they shouldn’t exist. In fact, they should encourage them: the more diverse we are the better, in a sense. E M: What about the tensions between the Zulus and the Xhosa within the A N C ? Couldn’t that be a danger for national unity? NA: First of all I think there are no real tensions based on language. E M: What about ethnicity? NA: Because of the salience, the importance of race in South Africa, ethnic identity has never been a big issue, certainly not in the modern world. We’ve never had real inter-tribal tensions and conflicts. Sometimes on a very local level you do have outbursts, but especially now with the xenophobic violence8 of course you saw how dangerous it can be. 8 The reference is to the xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals in South Africa which took place in the spring of 2008.

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E M: And in the period of transition of course there was inter-tribal violence instigated by the security police. N A: That sort of thing, yes. It can be opportunistically used, there’s no doubt about it. But a progressive, modern government would know how to prevent that from happening, and so far the A N C has been successful. The whole history of the A N C is linked to doing away with tribalism, bringing African people together, and since 1969 also bringing other people in South Africa together with African people. So, I don’t think there’s a real conflict if you look at the actual people and where they come from. In the A N C leadership they come from all over: now Mbeki was Xhosa-speaking originally – he’s actually more English-speaking than Xhosa-speaking – but the fact that he is now out, and Zuma is A N C president with a Zulu background, and some of the people around Zuma are Zulu-speaking, doesn’t mean that this applies for all of the A N C leaders, on the contrary, most of them are not Zulu-speaking; they remain Xhosa-speaking, or Tswana-, or Sotho-speaking. There are even other people from Venda and Tsonga backgrounds right now. So, I don’t think that’s a real danger at the moment. The danger comes when ethnic consciousness intersects with economic interest. That’s the danger we must prevent, and so far the government has instinctively, intuitively prevented that from happening. Even the Afrikaners have realized that that’s the real danger, and they are not allowing it: they are bringing black people onto their boards of directors, they are making it possible for black people through black economic empowerment to become part of the economic system, and they are not facilitating economic interests intersecting with ethnic consciousness. If you’re black there’s nothing that stops you except for access to money. There’s nothing that stops you from becoming rich, from being in a company like Sanlam, or whatever. Nothing stops you. In the past the Afrikaners did that as a deliberate strategy, but they’ve got beyond that now. E M: How hard does the present global economic crisis hit South Africa? Couldn’t there be a problem because of the economic situation and the change of power within the A N C ? NA: Well, yesterday we had the budget, and of course we had the State of the Nation Address a few days earlier, last Friday. Both the Finance Minister and the President were at the Davos Conference, the World Economic Forum.

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I think they are very aware of the fact that in purely bourgeois financial terms the South African economy has very fortunately been insulated to a very large extent, and is therefore not as vulnerable as other economies. This is true of most developing countries. However, the fall in demand for primary commodities – especially, of course, agricultural but also mineral exports – that fall in demand will have an impact on employment opportunities. The government is trying to offset that by having large-scale infrastructural development which is linked to the Soccer World Cup in 2010. But there are already other problems with that, like the taxi strike, because they oppose this rapid bus transport system which is linked to 2010 and linked to infrastructural development, and so on. So, what the Minister of Finance has said, and I agree, is: “Look, there’s going to be a slow-down. We don’t have to have a recession. There’s no negative growth, but it’s going to slow-down and we’re going to have to make sure that we can last for the next so many years. And the infrastructural development, public works and so on are the ways in which this is going to have to be dealt with.” I think what’s going to happen, and it’s really ironic, is that they’ve pushed out Mbeki with his macro-economic policy on the grounds that he wasn’t doing enough for the poor; now they’ve got a pro-poor A N C leadership which is going to be coming in the next government, and that pro-poor leadership is going to have to persuade the working class to tighten their belts, not to make too much demands within wages and so on. And they will succeed, because the workers trust them. They don’t trust Mbeki, but they trust – not so much Zuma as the C O S A T U 9 and the Communist Party. That’s the irony of the situation; it’s almost as though it was scripted by some playwright, but I don’t think we’ll have serious problems in the near future. E M: South Africa is the politically and economically dominant nation in the southern sphere of the continent. Why did South Africa do so little to prevent what is happening in Zimbabwe? N A: I think the Zimbabwe question is a very difficult one for all kinds of reasons. The main reason is that South Africa was and is very afraid that if Zimbabwe imploded or exploded, we would have a similar situation to what you have in Congo. All the neighbouring countries will be overrun with re9

Acronym of the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

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fugees, like you had with Rwanda and Congo; you’d have that kind of situation. As it is, there are more than three million so-called ‘illegal’ Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa, asylum seekers and refugees, and so on, and that is without the implosion. So, the South African government, I think, was very careful not to make the situation worse in Zimbabwe for example, by instituting sanctions, even in the short run. That’s the one reason, politically. But I think economically the fact is that what has kept Mugabe in power, from my point of view, is South African capital: the people who own the mines, who own large tracts of farmland – that’s where the revenue for the Zimbabwe state has come from; they’ve kept him in power. And Mugabe has known that, and of course he’s playing on that. So they could not run down their plant, their mines, their farms, etc. They didn’t want to run those down, which would have happened if you had had to apply sanctions, and that is the main reason why South Africa has had to hold back. The political theatre, the dramaturgy of this whole thing is very interesting, because Mbeki says: “You have to get people talking. Look what we did in South Africa,” and so on and so forth. But, what happened before they started doing exactly that in South Africa? We were on the verge of a revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid state. The point is, it’s not just talking; it’s about the conditions under which we talk. So, you get this whole dramaturgical, stage-managed notion that you have to get people into dialogue and so on. That’s not untrue, but it’s not true by itself; there’s a whole lot of other stuff that has to happen. I think the cholera epidemic, this haemorrhage of people out of the country to Botswana, to South Africa, to Mozambique and so on, has forced Mugabe’s hand, and I think it’s all to the good actually. It doesn’t mean that things are going to be easy. I think South Africa and Zimbabwe, Southern Africa in general – we have years of really serious, difficult struggle ahead of us: poverty and these kinds of diseases that are spreading all over the place are really going to make life miserable, for poor people especially. To put it differently, I think what’s happening if you look at Southern Africa as a whole is that the racial element in the struggle, which is what apartheid was about, is becoming less important, and more and more the importance shifts to the class element. Now, I’m not using the term in a sort of classical Marxist sense, but more and more the issue of wealth and poverty, distribution of resources, skills, knowledge – those are the issues; not whether

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you are black or white or green, but whether you have enough to eat, whether your children go to school, whether you’ve got health care, and so on. So, it’s a normalization, but it’s taking place in a situation that can only really be compared to the Thirty Years War in Europe, to that early period of capitalist development when you also had people like Gryphius.10 Life was so meaningless and worthless: “Vanitas vanitatum”11 – that’s the type of mood that’s taken all of Southern Africa at the moment, and of Central Africa, of course. People really are desperate, and you are going to need a new leadership, new vision. Then one can quote the old Roman saying ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ – ‘There is always something new coming out of Africa’. We need a new vision, and we’ve got to re-energize people. African Renaissance must become something real. How is it going to happen? It’s going to have to happen from below. It’s very difficult. My personal view is that through cooperative economic enterprise and through the use of African languages in powerful ways, we are going to shift the mindset, shift the way people see things. We are going to appropriate modernity, like the Chinese have done, appropriate modernity and make it ours, and I think once that happens, then Africa has a real chance, Southern Africa has a real chance. At the moment when you see this sort of Possenspiel,12 when you see the sort of farce that’s going on from a political point of view: the youngsters like this Malema13 character, this whole nonsense that he talks, or Zuma – with all the respect I have for him as a fellow prisoner – when you listen to people like that, you just know these guys haven’t got a vision. There’s no way they are going to pull people out of this mess. So, you need a new leadership, that’s what’s going to emerge. E M: Where do you get it from? N A: It’s difficult, as I say, and I think it’s going to come in ways that nobody can foresee. In the apartheid struggle with the Soweto-uprising, Black Consciousness leadership and so on, nobody knew that that’s where the leadership of the anti-apartheid struggle would come from. But today we need to look in the townships, we need to look in the rural areas, and you find the beginnings 10

Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) was a German poet and dramatist. Translates as ‘vanity of vanities’. 12 German for ‘farce’. 13 Julius Malema is the president of the A N C Youth League. 11

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of young people who think differently and have different aspirations from this crowd in charge at the moment. E M: How long will it take South Africa to really make it, in the sense of being on the safe side? N A: In a sort of contradictory sense I think we are safe. It’s about changing the system in such a way that there is a more equitable distribution of knowledge, of skills, of wealth. South Africa is a poor country, but it’s also a very rich country in other ways, and I think South Africa, in a sense, has got a much easier perspective than most other countries, even in Southern Africa: Angola because of oil, even Namibia because of gas, Mozambique, and so on. I think, if we could do what the Europeans did to the European Union and really get all these strengths together, then we can make it – even within the confines of the bourgeois system. I’m not talking socialism and revolution, not at all. Even within those confines you can make it, but then you have to address certain issues like education, like health, like agriculture, especially food security and so on. You have to address those things seriously. And either the political leadership has been too ignorant, or too self-serving, or too pressurized by other priorities to really address those issues in the long term. I don’t know if you know how many proper white Afrikaners have offered to help black people become farmers, for example, and how stupidly the South Africa government has behaved in that regard. E M: They’ve declined the offer. N A: Yes. They haven’t taken advantage of it in a proper way. Now that is, to my mind, almost like criminal behaviour. But it’s an illusion that people have that because you’re black you live on the land, you can farm. It’s not true. It’s a modern world; farming is an industry, it’s no hobby. Those are the kinds of things. Today, in my own field, one of the most important organizations, for example, for the creation of dictionaries and on teaching people how to make dictionaries is in Stellenbosch: ‘The Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal’, that’s what it’s called. It’s a lexicographic unit which is training lots and lots of people from other African countries, including South Africans, of course. Those are Afrikaners who have understood that apartheid was an affirmative action programme for whites, especially Afrikaans-speaking whites, and that the skills, the knowledge that they’ve acquired, can now be used to help black

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people. And that’s the asset, the resource that we must use among other things; there are many other things. That’s what we must use, and getting away from this racial thinking: ‘Because they are white, they are useless. We can’t trust them’ – that’s nonsense. E M: Thank you very much for this interview. N A: Thank you. It was a great pleasure.

WORKS CITED Alexander, Neville. An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa (Oxford & New York: Berghahn, 2003). B B C News. “S African Icon Miriam Makeba Dies,” BBC News (10 November 2008), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7719056.stm (accessed 20 March 2009). Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code (London: Bantam, 2003). Eaton, Tom. The De Villiers Code (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2005).

—Œ—

A Better Past

— An Interview with Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela and Chris van der Merwe

E W A L D M E N G E L : Pumla, you have done two major publications in the field of trauma, memory and narrative with Chris. One is called Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma, and the other one is the conference volume Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Unfinished Journeys of the Past, which came out this year. My first question is to both of you: How did your cooperation in this field begin? What was it that brought you together? P U M L A G O B O D O – M A D I K I Z E L A : It’s a long story which we have to cut short, unfortunately. When I joined the psychology department of the University of Cape Town (U C T ) I met Chris, who had already been thinking about linking his work with a psychologist; I was the one. It came, in a way, almost like a blessing, because I was looking for someone to enrich the psychological understanding as well, because my entry into trauma work had begun not with the Truth Commission, but with reading memoirs of Holocaust survivors very early on, when I was still at school. These works were banned in South Africa; you couldn’t read about trauma and stories of oppression, but I attended a private school for African girls in Durban, and they had a private library where the Holocaust stories were available. So I poured over all this stuff, and by the time I started studying psychology I had already been exposed to trauma through literature. But also my own life, my family life, my parents dealing with the oppression and the humiliation of apartheid sharpened my interest in the field of trauma. My work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission deepened this interest and it made the world of © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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trauma so much more palpable for me, not only from my personal experience, but also from the readings when I was younger, and from now actually witnessing victims of trauma. When I came to U C T I was very frustrated with the regular, strict, rigid kind of teaching trauma theoretically, because I’d seen that literature offers so much more. There is so much more in terms of the story telling; the narrative makes it so much more interesting for me. So, when Chris came upon my path as someone who had actually been looking for a psychologist that he could work with to bridge this false divide between the literary world and the oral world of trauma, we matched very easily. And for me there was also a consciousness of working with a person of Chris’s background: an Afrikaner, a white person who shared a very similar social consciousness about our past. So, there was the academic interest, but there was also a kind of personal interest for me in connecting with a white person who was thinking about these issues, about the impact of our past in our own individual lives, in the lives of others. And because of my interest in reconciliation and forgiveness, which was based mostly on my book A Human Being Died That Night, it was very refreshing to connect with Chris and to hear about the connections of our interests in our work. So the intention really went far beyond the personal agenda of working with someone like Chris. It was like working through some of the complexities of my own past under apartheid rule; working through this relation through the dialogue that Chris and I have had, which is both academic and very deeply personal. C H R I S V A N D E R M E R W E : I want to add one or two things. Pumla was talking about the personal level, and maybe I can tell you about my personal interest without going into detail. When I went through divorce in the late 1980s I saw a film, and I can’t remember what the title of the film was, but I know it was based on two novels by Evelyn Waugh. And I had this feeling of being confronted and upset by the film, but that it was a way of working through my emotions, and it really felt like a load off my chest after that. So, this little seed was lying there. And a colleague of mine, Rolf Wolfswinkel, was also very interested in working through trauma.

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E M: He’s the one you edited the book on trauma with.1 C V D M: That’s right. We came to trauma through war literature, because I was working on Afrikaans war literature, and he was doing research on Dutch war literature, and that brought us to trauma. And then Pumla and I joined hands, which broadened my realization of the fact that in many ways we live in a traumatized country. E M: The title of your book Narrating Our Healing already suggests a) that South Africa is a wounded nation, and b) that narrating can do something about this. How important is narrating for you Pumla, as a psychologist, with regard to trauma, and what exactly is happening when a traumatized person starts to narrate her story? How do you go about making him or her speak at all? PGM: It’s very important in terms of what I call the transformation of trauma narratives from traumatic memory to narrative memory. The understanding within psychology is that trauma affects us and our memories in the manner that trauma recurs and repeats itself. Cathy Caruth talks about how this kind of presence of a traumatic experience remains unknown until we can actually grasp it.2 For as long as it continues to be unarticulated, not grasped, it continues to affect us in different ways. It affects our behaviour, the way we think, the way we relate to one another. Trauma is a very relational experience: somebody does something to me, and so any kind of relationship that resembles the one I had with the person who originally caused trauma in me will be difficult. The trauma seems to define subsequent relationships of that kind, or even relations that distantly resemble that kind of relationship. The story that I tell – in inverted commas – is not a story that is within my control. It’s a story that rages out of control internally and manifests itself in different ways in my behaviour and in the way I relate to other people as a result of the trauma. So, in order to bring back control, to restore my sense of control over this trauma, I need to retell the story in order to reclaim my sense of control. I need to firstly grasp the experience, and then my understanding of the trauma will be better, so that I can know it, in the sense of being aware 1 De Helende Kracht van Literatuur (2002) translates into English as ‘The Healing Power of Literature’. 2 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (1996).

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of the trauma, fully knowing it. And therefore articulating the experience, both in words as well as understanding the emotional component of the trauma – that is, narrating trauma – unravels the complex emotions or the complex actions that a victim of trauma has as a result of the trauma. It unravels this response, so that by naming the deed and understanding it fully, I gain control over it. There is clarity: it’s here in front of me; I can name it, I can name all of its elements, and therefore I have control. Of course there are nuances, but essentially the process is about articulating this, and naming all the components of the trauma, and therefore having control over it. And so the trauma has been transformed from this traumatic memory that rages out of control to a level of narrative memory where I have control over the story, I can almost create it myself. I’m naming the elements, and interpreting the elements. That’s why this process is important. C V D M: I would like to quote what you wrote in our book, Pumla, which was very illuminating to me: You said that the natural reaction of a traumatized person is to repeat the traumatic event with reversed roles. The victim has lost control, but next time, s/he wants to be in control. I think that that is the big danger, individually and socially, because that is the typical pattern. Someone once said: “Beware of being the victim of a victim,” because the natural response, when you’ve been a victim, is to do exactly the same to someone else. So what Pumla is saying is that there is also an alternative way of working through the past, but the almost automatic one is the bad one: to keep on repeating the cycle. M I C H E L A B O R Z A G A : The body has its own language of articulating trauma, which can range from numbing to hyper-vigilance. How does the language of the body relate to the language of the narrative? What do they do to each other? P G M: Obviously students of this field have a tendency to put a lot of reliance on the diagnostic labels – like numbing – which are important, because they obviously tell us something. But it’s also very important to expand the borders of the language of trauma in order to open up this field, to really look for something that we don’t often think about. I say this in part because of the teacher in me: the diagnostic language is important, but it can sometimes limit us, because we are looking for the numbing, for all of these symptoms.

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The central point that you make, is a very important one, and one that has not been explored meaningfully, or at least substantially, in the field of trauma; and that is the question: What is the role of the body? This is my subject, of course, so I want to contain myself and not say too much, but you’ve reminded me of the reason I’m interested in exactly this question: How does the body speak? When I was working on my PhD in 1996, I was doing research on collective violence based on the so-called necklace murders: young black activists who burnt people. For a month I was conducting interviews in this township, speaking to people and hearing all of these awful, awful stories, and I was almost numbed, not feeling these stories, just hearing them. Because I was interested in hearing the stories, in taking it all in, I did not allow myself to feel the stories. So that’s one thing: the importance of the word numbing, but I think we need to understand what exactly that means in terms of the body: you protect yourself, you don’t want to feel. But when I went back to my parents’ home, which is an hour from this place where I was doing research, there was no one at home, so I just slumped in the couch, and I had the most awful dreams, one of which was a nightmare to which I awoke: I was shot, I was being fired at, with guns all over my body. And waking up from the dream, I actually could not get up off the couch, because of the pain of the gunshot wounds in the dream. So, there is something about body memory that is very important in understanding trauma. Now, that is a dream, but I think that body memory works in very similar ways, especially because there it’s real. In my language ‘depression’, for example, and some of these diagnostic terms, cannot be translated; they don’t have equivalent terms in my language. Some of the words that describe depression are very bodily expressions; they are expressed in very bodily terms. Someone will say: “I have this deep wound inside,” and people express it like there is a real, physical wound. Or even in English we say: “When he or she said that, I felt a stab.” And we should pay attention to that, because we don’t always ask people: “How does it feel?” But we should, and I’m beginning to do that in my work now. Since I’m on sabbatical I have begun to ask people about these things. And even when people talk about forgiveness, for example, they talk about how something moves inside of them. Then I ask them to explain more about this movement, because that’s how people remember, and they say that when they forgive, it’s an awakening of a trauma inside;

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when someone expresses remorse, it reminds them of an old pain that they’d forgotten. And so they say: “The words of the perpetrator awaken a deep pain that’s in my stomach, and when that pain is awakened, that’s what opens up the ground for me to forgive this person.” So, the diagnostic language is very important, but we need to move beyond the diagnostic nomenclature, which will really enable us to say new things about this embodiment of trauma. M B: Does writing about wounds and traumatic stories, or even telling such stories, do something to this bodily memory? Does it un-knot something? PGM: Well, first of all it re-awakens it, the un-knotting comes later, I think. It re-awakens it, which is what we sometimes call re-traumatization. It reawakens all these complex emotions, including the bodily expressions of trauma. The working through trauma then involves articulating even that bodily feeling so that people become aware of it. Now, if we focus on words only, we may miss that level of expression of trauma, or of re-expression of trauma, because we’re too interested in the words. We don’t ask people: “How do you feel about this? What is the feeling?” Sometimes we can sense these feelings. When someone tells his or her story we can watch the movement of the body, maybe someone crouches. People sit on my couch, and while they talk they go deep into the couch. It’s almost like the memory of the trauma makes them recoil, and I see them sinking into the couch. That gives us an idea already of what the memory of trauma is doing to the person’s body. Sitting here, watching them is almost like witnessing the affects of trauma. You see the person sinking into the couch, and it’s not because of the sponge, it’s because of something that calls them to remember what this did to them. They slump, and then they cry in the process. But even the tears are a way for the body to speak; they are a kind of bodily expression. C V D M : In E M D R 3 there is also a focus on the body’s remembrance. The important thing is that the body remembers even if you don’t remember intellectually. And part of the narrative treatment is to literally move the traumatic experience from one part of the brain’s memory to another part 3 Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a therapy that was developed by Dr Francine Shapiro for the treatment of trauma patients (see Hofmann).

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where it becomes narrative memory. Trauma is so overwhelming that you cannot express it, so you push it down and your body remembers it all over. The narrative is not a quick fix, Pumla and I have often said that, but it’s a way of making a few steps towards working through that overwhelming experience, which left its marks on the body as well. P G M: Chris is raising a very important point, which in our work we don’t really deal with: the neurological component. We need a partner to articulate that very important aspect of it; it’s something that should be remembered as well. E M: I should like to go from the more bodily phenomena related to trauma to a more theoretical point. A bit earlier you mentioned the name Cathy Caruth. She has come up with a postmodern theory of trauma and she has related that to the postmodern concept of meaning based on Derrida’s concept of ’différance’, which is ‘deferment’, ‘postponement’ and ‘difference’ at one and the same time. Do you, Pumla, as a practicing psychologist, find the theories of Caruth helpful, or wouldn’t you prefer people such as Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk? Because Caruth seems to refuse closure, in a way, and you as a practicing psychologist are going for closure and for healing, I assume. P G M: No, not at all. The first thing that occurred to me, when you mentioned Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman is the possibility to integrate these perspectives, and in a way, what Chris and I are doing is the work of integrating. What is the value of literary theory to psychology? We integrate it, because then we can’t understand it in only one way. In the same way the perspectives of Bessel van der Kolk, who comes from the neurological field, and Judith Herman, who works more on the importance of telling the narratives for purpose of recovery, can be integrated. And then, of course, there is Cathy Caruth, who says: “We are constantly moving in that direction. This work and this experience constantly beckon us to work towards a goal, which, in a way, is a goal that is unachievable, because the memory is constantly there. But we are working towards the goal.” By integrating the lessons from the important work of Judith Herman of narrating trauma and recovery, we can understand that it’s possible to engage in this exploration by asking the question: How do narratives help people on the journey of recovery? Then we also accept Caruth’s point that this remains

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a goal, constantly. And Judith Herman says: “Well, we approach the goal empowered, because of the narrative elements of dealing with the trauma.” Caruth doesn’t really deny the fact that the goal is going towards articulation. It implies that this is part of the process. The point is, even though I have been traumatized, I lead a normal life: I go to work, I’m gainfully employed, I bring up my children. But, as Caruth says, there are moments when the beast is going to cloud my lifestyle, or emerge, or invade my lifestyle, but because I have learned the truth from narrative, I can fall back on that. But I cannot ever hope that the beast will be completely obliterated in my life. It will not, and we emphasize this point; there is no closure. There is no closure to the degree that a new story of trauma – in inverted commas – is told. That, perhaps, can be considered to be a kind of recovery. But to suggest that the book is ever going to be closed is not correct. C V D M: Tongue-in-cheek, we quoted Charlie Brown, who said: “What I’m hoping for is a better past,” because the past is never over. It keeps on continuing and keeps on acquiring new meanings. And it keeps on being linked to the present. At a conference on trauma that Rolf Wolfswinkel and I organized before Pumla came to U C T , somebody who’d gone through terrible suffering in the apartheid era said: “You Western people, you talk about trauma as if it’s one single event, but I return from one trauma and then I’m traumatized all over again and again, it’s the structure of my life.” So, one is still working through one trauma when the next one arrives, and that is what we find a lot, especially in African lives. P G M: Yes, it’s a daily struggle. In my book A Human Being Died That Night I talk about the lived memory of trauma. It’s lived, it’s there. That concept echoes in a way Caruth’s perspectives that it’s a lived experience that is constantly there, as Chris said, because there are all these things. There’s something in the past, but then, I’m poor, I am unemployed, I was raped last night, I have a daughter who is raped by my partner, and I live in a squalor, in squatter camps. So it’s lived, it is every day you wake up, and then you have to face it, people have to balance it. E M: I understand that you as a psychologist profit from narratology, but does that mean that you also profit from postmodern narratology?

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PGM: Well, that’s the direction into which things are going. The reason that this field of interdisciplinarity, particularly linking literary theory and psychoanalytic studies, has been enriched, and is a growing field, is because scholars have seen that there is a lot of profiting to be made from it. It’s important, because single theory perspectives do not enrich our understanding of what goes on in the world of people who are traumatized. C V D M : That’s one good thing about getting slightly older: you become sceptical about one school of thought containing the absolute truth. I would say there is a paradox in the way we approach matters. We feel there is something to be dealt with, but there is never finality; our approach is somewhere in between structuralism and poststructuralism. M B: I think this notion of the paradox that you’ve mentioned is very interesting, because the word ‘healing’, for instance, also seems to imply a sort of closure. And people are very religious in a way, and religion also seems to imply a sort of closure. On the other hand we deal with people like Cathy Caruth and poststructuralists, and we try to integrate their approach. How do you understand this paradox? Can you say more about that? C V D M: The way I see the role of religion is not one of finding total closure and having it all. There’s a Christian woman who likes saying to me: “I’m always on top of the world. Praise the Lord!” That is not my idea of religion. I often say to one of my daughters who desires a carefree life: “There is the prospect of a carefree life, but unfortunately it’s six feet under the ground.” I see it from, shall we say, a Christian point of view, and Afrikaners and African people have a strong religious base. At the heart of Christianity is the idea of new life through death, and it’s a continual process, like in the seasons: there’s always a process of death and new life coming from that; it’s not all over. It is similar in Hinduism: the Goddess Shiva is one of destruction and renewal. And talking about paradoxes, these seem to be opposites but they are closely linked: destruction and renewal. What I, as a Westerner, would like to learn from African people, is the sense of community. There’s a very strong idea of community and of sharing, and that to me is crucial in working through trauma: the realization that you’re not on your own. Trauma tends to isolate you, but the African spirit of

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religion is one of experiencing as a community and sharing with each other, and that’s the way I would see the role of religion. K A R I N O R A N T E S : To what extent can readers be traumatized by reading about somebody else’s trauma? P G M: That’s a very important theme that has to do with the notion of empathy. I’m not changing the subject, but I think it’s very critical, because that’s the whole idea. You tell your story in order for the audience to receive it and to affirm your experience. You want to touch through your story. There are all sorts of labels and conceptions within the psychology field, frameworks that explain this idea that people are touched or are affected by reading another person’s story. People tell their stories so that they touch others. Dori Laub, for example, talks about the importance of the audience: a narrative on its own has little significance; the deep significance of the narrative is in the participation of the audience; and that participation really is about how the audience responds to the narrative. Because the narrator says: “This is my story,” and often the story is being told for the first time. He or she says: “It’s complex. I don’t understand, but this is my story,” and the audience says: “Gosh! You’ve gone through so much pain, it makes me feel pain!” And then the person feels acknowledged. That is the most important part of it, and Judith Herman talks about this, we talk about it in terms of the Truth Commission experience: acknowledgement is so important when people have been traumatized. Your question speaks to that notion of the importance of being acknowledged when the other person reading or hearing the story is moved or touched in some ways, because it validates the story, which is the key element: it validates the victim’s experience, because the other person has been touched. K O: But doesn’t a writer in a way take a bigger risk than somebody who has an audience in front of him or her? Because he or she doesn’t get immediate feedback, he or she doesn’t know if the reader is empathic, he or she doesn’t get a reaction right way. P G M: The primary goal is to get it out, and the rest are benefits, they are consequences of narrating the story. When someone stands up in front of the Truth Commission, they go up those stairs to the stage because they need to tell the story, and of course they trust that the audience will receive the story.

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C V D M: It’s an act of trust. P G M: Exactly, it’s an act of trust. You write a story, whether it’s fictionalized or it’s memoirized, you trust that someone out there will receive it. And first of all the fact that there’s a publisher who says: “Yes, this story is worth hearing” – that in itself is the first step of acknowledgement. So, the response is out there, it’s just based on the trust that, because the publisher said: “Yes, I will publish it,” there is hope and trust that there is an audience out there, who will listen. C V D M: We all have our thresholds of how much we can take. You need somebody who is willing to take over a bit of your trauma. It’s something quite mysterious to me, that there seem to be links by which we are all fundamentally interconnected. When a listener opens up and becomes willing to share part of the sorrow, it brings relief to the traumatized person. But we must also acknowledge that there is a limit to what one can take. We all have to decide where our limits lie. To my mind, the two unacceptable extremes are, on the one hand, being totally shattered by the traumas of the world and, on the other hand, cutting oneself off completely from the world of sorrow; somewhere in between these opposites the ideal position lies. K O: Talking before the T R C and talking to a counsellor – that all happens in a very limited setting. But going out and publishing a trauma story makes it available to everybody. Does that imply a different kind of healing than writing the narrative down privately or talking to a counsellor? C V D M: There’s an Afrikaans story, Dis Ek, Anna – It’s me, Anna – which the author initially wrote under a pseudonym, because she felt exactly that way: “This is too close to me, it’s too personal.” But the book sold very well, and she got so many reactions that she got courage and revealed her identity. E M: Elbie Lötter. C V D M: Exactly. Now we know her name. I would see it as a process: at first you reveal partly, but you conceal partly, and as you increase in confidence, you reveal more and more. P G M: It’s a risk. It’s always a risk. Lawrence Lenhart talks about the risk, because the hearers, so to speak, want to protect themselves. We often say: “This is too much, I can’t take this anymore,” and people try to stop the nar-

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rator, or they close the book, or they turn the TV off, as happened during the TRC. So, the risk is: will they take the story? C V D M: Can I add something that’s very important from my part of our collaboration? All people who have been traumatized have this paradoxical desire to reveal and to conceal. That is the wonderful thing about literature, music, and the arts in general. Artistic works – literature, film, theatre, music, sculptures, painting – are indirect forms of expression. The artists do not say explicitly: “It’s me”; instead they fictionalize, but at the same time they reveal, and that is the wonderful thing about art: it can contain the paradox of revealing and concealing. And something similar happens to the receivers of the artist’s message – the activity of interpreting and appropriating a work of art is a paradoxical process of distancing and identification. K O: That probably also explains the amount of hybrid forms between novels that read like memoirs and memoirs that read like novels. C V D M: Yes, absolutely. P G M: Exactly. E M: Well, thank you, for your precious time and for this very interesting conversation. P G M: No, thank you! We like doing this, actually, because it helps sharpen our own ideas. C V D M: It charges our batteries again. P G M: Yes, it recharges them. And then, it helps us think about the things that we take for granted. We thank you.

WORKS CITED Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1995). ——. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1996). Gobodo–Madikizela, Pumla. A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness (Opladen: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

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——, & Chris van der Merwe, ed. Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009). ——, & Chris van der Merwe. Narrating Our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). Hofmann, Arne. EMDR Institut Deutschland, http://www.emdr-institut.de (accessed 26 February 2009). Lötter, Elbie. It’s Me, Anna (Cape Town: Kwela, 2005). Van der Merwe, Chris, & Rolf Wolfswinkel, ed. De Helende Kracht van Literatuur: Over Nederlands en Suid-Afrikaans Oorlogsproza (Haarlem & Cape Town: In De Knipscheer, 2002).

—Œ—

‘De-Othering’ the Perpetrator

— An Interview with Annie Gagiano

M I C H E L A B O R Z A G A : South African literature has been particularly flourishing in the last decades; some critics even talk of a kind of South African Literary Renaissance of the last fifteen years. What is your view and which are the voices that should absolutely not be missed? A N N I E G A G I A N O : I agree that there is almost a South African Literary Renaissance: there’s an absolute outpouring of novels and of tremendously interesting texts, many of which, of course, engage with the issues of memory and of trauma. Some also take on seemingly new directions, but usually in some way what people nowadays sometimes call “the old South Africa creeps in.” One of my most recent contributions to the study of South African literature was in fact published in a European journal. It is an English issue of a German academic journal called Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht and it was edited by Geoffrey Davis. I endorse what he says in the last paragraph of his introduction, that South African English literature, and certainly the texts discussed in that collection, continues […] to pose vital questions about the legacy of the past, about memory and about the imaginative conceptualisation of a future social order: What does one remember and what forget? How does one move beyond the wounds of the past? How does one forgive? How does one achieve reconciliation? How does the past interact with the present? How can South African culture and specifically South African literature confront the past? What constitutes a post-apartheid South African identity? What role does cultural diversity play in overcoming the legacy of the past? What is the potential for a new transcultural dialogue? Where indeed does the future of South Africa lie? (91) © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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M B: And not just: What do we remember but how do we remember it? And that is where literature seems to come in. A G: Exactly. And how do you use the memory to make sense of the present and the future? But to go back to your question again – concerning the voices one absolutely cannot miss – my interest is selective, but books that I have especially noticed and that I would want to draw your attention to are the following: The Lost Colours of the Chameleon by Mandla Langa, Dancing in the Dust by Kagiso Lesego Molope which is one of the few struggle narratives from a young black woman’s perspective. In fact, she’s a school girl for most of this narrative. I think it’s a tremendously important text for that reason. And, of course, trauma is very much the topic here. Then, another very important book you will know about is The Cry of Winnie Mandela.1 This book is wonderful. I also recommend Beauty’s Gift by Sindiwe Magona. MB: I noticed a large, almost inflationary use of the word ‘trauma’ in South Africa, and in bookshops I have encountered a lot of books on trauma and healing from self-help guides to more academic, clinical studies. How do you feel about this discourse? A G: I agree completely with you; sometimes trauma is almost used like a stamp and people want to exhibit this stamp. Incidentally I was looking at Hershini Bhana Young’s Haunting Capital since I’m going to be reviewing it. Bessie Head and especially A Question of Power keeps coming up in the book, but what I do find problematic about Hershini Bhana Young’s book is the delineation of trauma in terms of a racial identity. If I read her argument correctly, she suggests that all people who are black or of African descent or origin are in some way traumatized; the trauma is theirs. M B: Almost like a marker or bearer of identity? A G: Yes, and I do find that problematic, because I do not think that all black people have suffered equally. I think that some people are privileged but it’s not as though I dismiss the notion of any person being affected by a collective identity or image as invalid. Clearly that is so; and there are texts in which that is very convincingly indicated, even if the individual person has perhaps not been attacked or harmed personally, but the person is in some way 1

Ndebele, The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003).

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affected. But I do find it problematic to claim it as a blanket moral right, which is how it works for every single person who has a connection to Africanness, and specifically black Africanness, it seems, in this text. MB: Theoretically one could claim the same for white people, just in a different measure, in a different way. Does that bring us very far? A G: The problem with it would be, of course, that you then sit with huge collective identities, and that whiteness is automatically the condition of the perpetrator, which is grotesquely unfair to many people. In some cases I would recognize a traumatized collectivity or collective, but not invariably. So, I’m wary about that point. In trying to sharpen up the notion of trauma I thought about my own circumstances: I lost my second child, a little boy, when he was just two years old. It was an incredibly anguishing experience, and yet, I would not call it traumatic, which is not to minimize the sorrow and the loss, and how extremely terrible that is, and how difficult to come to terms with, all of which it is. But if I contrast that kind of loss with a recent case where the grandson of friends of mine was abducted, raped, and murdered – that is trauma; that traumatized the parents, the grandparents, the surviving sibling in a way that my child’s death did not traumatize me. So I thought, what is the difference? And, it seems to me, that I would be inclined to reserve the term trauma for when there is some sense of malice and evil involved. To me, not all kinds of terrible sorrows would be traumatic in that kind of way. To come back to Hershini Bhana Young’s point, I thought of the text that to my mind is the most compelling and the most adequate fictional rendition of the apartheid experience to date, and to me that is Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood. For the greater part of that novel the main character has some really awful experiences of, for instance, being humiliated by police, unfairly arrested on two occasions, but there’s not really a huge infliction. There is some violence, but there is no life-threatening violence, or life-threatening pain infliction. And yet, he is clearly a traumatized individual, because he has a very sensitive personality, and the humiliation that he reads on his father’s face and in his bearing, the humiliation and exclusion that he feels – there to me again is a trauma, and again there to me the common factor is the sense of malice, malicious exclusion and humiliation. The main character

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keeps walking aimlessly and there the sense of homelessness also comes in. He calls himself lost. M B: Lost – I think that is often the way traumatized people or people with post-traumatic stress disorder describe themselves. A G: It is very painful, and it doesn’t seem possible to get out of this closed circle. There is a sense of continuity, and one has to reposition oneself. Sometimes, as in the case here, the trauma is caused by a system, therefore, getting out of the traumatizing circle, requires getting out of the society. In the novel the protagonist, like Bessie Head, goes to Botswana and also initially finds that he isn’t out – although he would have imagined so. On the other hand, Bessie Head warns of politicians jumping on the bandwagon of past suffering: claims to trauma becoming really a ticket to power. And Head senses the inappropriateness of that, the exploitation, the vulgarizations, the cheapening of trauma in that way, using trauma or trauma reference for personal advancement or for other forms of greed. I also came across a reminder of a Nietzsche quotation, and this is now talking about issues of not only trauma but also forgiveness, the question whether one can speak of the trauma of the perpetrator. It is something that I think Antjie Krog to some extent addresses in her book.2 Nietzsche speaks of the goal of the confession to be punitively absolved from responsibility, and then that, as the Nietzsche quotation goes: “as a human being ‘communicates himself’ he gets rid of himself; and when one ‘has confessed’ one forgets” (351). So, in some way there’s also a danger of rituals, of abnegation of guilt, and pleas for forgiveness: “Been there – done that. Now we can move on. Now, stop reminding me of apartheid and of what the whites did,” and that kind of glibness. I think there are novels that do, for instance, address white guilt, like Behr’s novel The Smell of Apples, and I think in my assessment, that novel does not do that glib-thing. It goes deeper into an acknowledgement of responsibility. The transgressor or perpetrator was socialized into the system as a child. There you would have some recognition of the guilt and responsibility. It’s not an absolution, but we have a degree of recognition of how it can come about. The point is made that the perpetrator was seduced by love into evil, a familial love, that’s one of the most powerful levers. 2

See Krog, Country of My Skull (1998).

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MB: Trauma has entered the literary discourse in Europe and America as well, very much so with Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub trying to read trauma through a poststructuralist approach, emphasizing trauma as the gap, the crisis of history, and as a truth that needs to be spoken out and cannot be. Through academics like Chris van der Merwe and Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela, who regularly organize conferences on trauma, narrative and reconciliation in South Africa, the emphasis is more on the reconciliatory role of literature and narrative. As an academic are you familiar with this discourse? How useful do you find the nexus between trauma and literature? A G: I happened to write a review of Narrating our Healing. Subsequently I received a very nice email from Chris van der Merwe in which he actually said that he appreciated the fact that even though we differed about Disgrace,3 he felt that it was so good when academics could disagree as adults and without pettiness. I appreciated that so much from him. But my point of criticism was that, although I appreciated so much in their text, I did not approve of the choice of Disgrace of all books as a kind of demonstration of the ideal way of overcoming trauma, because there is not sufficient imaginative work done and presented in the text as far as the two young women who have been raped are concerned. And so, to me it comes across as facile to some extent. My perspective is purely literary; I don’t know anything really about how people work in trauma studies and with traumatized people; I’m not sure that I would even go the literary route with people who have been traumatized. I can only look at how trauma is represented, how adequately, how profoundly, or how shallowly, and so on. But to me it seemed that Disgrace was one of the least likely examples I would have chosen as a literary evocation of a traumatic experience and its aftermaths. I’m absolutely uneducated in psychology and in psychiatric practice, and I’d only have the merest popular sort of glimpses of those areas of learning and practice. In literary terms I think that the literary text can educate those who do not understand trauma because they’ve not experienced it. So, it can serve that educative purpose, perhaps also for therapists. I think there is the kind of text written by authors who have profoundly understood traumatic experiences from within, either because they were personal or because the author is imaginatively able to re-imagine, to evoke what it is like to be in 3

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999).

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trauma. I think Bessie Head is a writer of the first kind, Yvonne Vera of the second. Because the issue is so crucial, I think they are very important writers, and to me their books are very important in the literary canon for those reasons, because contending with suffering, contending with evil is something that human beings need to learn and re-learn constantly. M B: You are notably a postcolonial critic and I would emphasize the word ‘critic’, because you always use theory and especially postcolonial theory ‘critically’. It seems to me that postcolonial theory in the strict sense has not had much to say about the effects of violence on people, the effects of power on the human psyche in Africa, except for Frantz Fanon, of course. Could you comment on this? A G: On the one hand my focus isn’t primarily on theory; I read theory in stricto sensu as they say, incidentally, as it comes by, and as it seems to be useful or to matter in order to help explain or to help access texts. But if I think of the famous theoreticians, say Homi Bhabha or Gayatri Spivak, then I think it is true. On the other hand, if I think of feminist postcolonial academics or writers who write on the borderline between criticism and theory, like for instance, Hershini Bhana Young, also someone like Sadie Hartman, and a slightly earlier writer Françoise Lionnet – they are all feminist postcolonial theorists and critics, and they certainly address violence. If I think about critics and commentators who write about texts concerning, for instance, wars in Africa, or the partition between India and Pakistan, in other words the large postcolonial sphere and the many, many hugely violent events packed with individual traumatic losses and hardships – genocide, diaspora, apartheid, and postcolonial gender violence – then the critics who write about these texts cannot but address the violence which the authors again cannot but depict and address. So, in that sense there is, I think, an important body of writing that is not so much literary as critical and even theoretical, that does engage with issues of violence and of trauma. M B: What we find so intriguing about the relationship between trauma and narrative in our project is the way in which trauma is used by writers on a very narratological, technical level to create all possible effects in terms of plot and suspense. Traumatic memory versus narrative memory seems to play a huge role on a literary level. It seems that trauma triggers new narrative structures. What is your impression?

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A G: Right, yes, the blocking mechanism would itself create then the shape and sequence of the narrative, and the delayed revelations also serve as complications. Yes, I think that’s a very good point. In fact, Toni Morrison made that point about Beloved, for instance, and other texts by AfricanAmerican writers. She said it’s not a postmodernist construction, but the fragmentation is in fact a perfectly realistic recording of a fragmented life and a disrupted social order. At the same time that contributes to the achievement of a text, because it brings in such resonance and the ramifications of the references that come in that manner. It also means that it’s not cleverness; it’s not game playing, it’s terribly serious. M B: Something that has not been talked about enough is the degree to which writers make use of violence in their novels, how violence is represented in literature, and the potential re-traumatizing effect of some passages. Here Country of My Skull could be a good example. At the Trauma Centre we were told that some women often find reading disempowering and re-traumatizing, since they passively re-live past experiences of rape or violence. Given the degree of traumatization in South Africa, how do you think writers treat their readers in this respect? A G: As I say, I have no knowledge of the practice, but I myself would be extremely wary of giving someone who has been traumatized a text in which an equivalent or similar experience is described in a book. I would be horrified and terrified of doing so and of the damage that one might in fact reinflict rather than healing. So, as I say, to my mind writing of trauma is not meant for the traumatized, but for those who need to understand trauma because they haven’t undergone it. Sometimes the writer is someone who writes out of and beyond trauma, as Bessie Head does, but that’s not the same as being given a text of someone else’s experience, even if it’s an imaginary character. M B: The point for me is: to what extent should writers take care of this? A G: I do not think that writers can avoid addressing it. Now we are coming back to the issue that not everything bad that happens to you, even if it causes intense pain or great suffering, would be the same as traumatic. So there are many, many people who do not have an understanding of it and who need to gain understanding so as to recognize those who have been traumatized and why they are acting as they do, and to be educated into compassion, to put it

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that way. The understanding that people like therapists can gain is also very, very important. And of course anybody might be in a situation where they have to almost act the role of a therapist, like a parent, a spouse, perhaps a child of a traumatized parent. Sometimes you can’t afford therapy, and you have to gain understanding of this condition in some way. It makes me think of a phrase by Malika Ndlovu from one of her poems. She speaks of ‘an anthem of grieving’ which is still surging within this society. I think that’s such a wonderful image, because an anthem is dignified and also often fairly mournful, but at the same time it suggests a kind of solidarity in suffering. ‘An anthem of grieving’ also implies that being traumatized seems to generate a strange kind of energy, which I can only judge from the people I’ve read about and from the glimpses that I’ve had of traumatized people. But I also think that it’s not only about understanding, but it seems to me that the great authors who write really compellingly about trauma also are honouring the traumatized; they are commemorating and paying tribute, because to be traumatized is to be denied your human dignity. So, in that sense I think there is also something of a restitution process occurring in texts that address trauma. I’m thinking, for example, of Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins, about the Matabeleland massacre in postcolonial Zimbabwe, or Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent, which addresses the murder of little children, particularly in this case a little girl, for witchcraft purposes. These are terribly important texts, but they commemorate as well as educate. William Blake has a wonderful expression; he says “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.”4 Some of these horrors need an indignation at that level, because the wrong is so great, and I think that’s what texts like these do. And then there is Magona’s Beauty’s Gift, full of outrage, which is right in that book. Other books that I can think of are a Zimbabwean book by Alexander Kanengoni, Echoing Silences, about a man who has gone through the war as an officer and is traumatized, Serote’s book, To Every Birth Its Blood, which I’ve mentioned before, Soyinka wrote a wonderful book called Season of Anomy, which is indirectly about the Biafran war, and then Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns, about the Zimbabwe liberation war. Magona also wrote an amazing short story long ago. It appeared in her 1991 4

“A Memorable Fancy” in William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

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collection Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night and is called “Two Little Girls and a City”. It’s about the rape of two little girls, a white girl from a privileged family and a black girl from a poor township family, and she based the story on actual cases; she brought them together in this story. It is brilliant. M B: In your book Achebe, Head, Marechera you look at the forms power and change take in various African novels by the above quoted writers. Now, what I would like to attempt in this interview is to proceed by introducing the notion of ‘trauma’ in a sort of triangle in relation to power and change in Southern Africa and to transpose it then onto literature. In particular, I would like to concentrate on Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. My first question concerns power as a “traumatizing force” which seems to circulate and reproduce itself in individuals that have suffered various forms of violence, from dislocation and poverty to physical and psychological violence. Elizabeth, in Head’s novel A Question of Power, seems to inhabit a kind of ‘third space’ in which internalized power and a desire for change seem to struggle in an endless dialectical conflict. To what extent do you think does this image reflect the contemporary condition of black – and white – South Africans? A G: I think that there is an obviously mistaken notion that post-apartheid can be narrowly conceived as the triumph of black power. The alternative is to think of post-apartheid more liberatingly, to envision it as an opportunity to establish a just society, in other words, not merely a power inversion. And that is also to break out of that closed circle and to become future-orientated, to turn the society into a dynamic one. I think that there is a conflict in our public life at the moment with those who want to crow and proclaim power, privilege, possession. I use the expression ‘nouveau pouvoir’ like ‘nouveau riche’, which is a vulgarization of what liberation was meant to be. Because you cannot liberate a society by sections, you can only liberate a society in its entirety. Many of us understand that whites – even if privileged – were absolutely as much in need of liberation as everybody else, having lived as they did and as many still do in closed circuits of privilege and isolation, and a lack of sensitivity to the actual conditions of the majority of South Africans around them, and culturally so impoverished also, even beyond the obvious moral blankness and lack of comprehension. But I think both those impulses of the dynamic future liberatory intention and

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the power proclamation, both of those are present across the racial and social spectrum in this country. MB: In Bessie Head’s novel trauma seems to be very much linked to physical and psychological displacement. You also use the term ‘placelessness’,5 and, in a way, it exemplifies how painful and arduous the path can be to a sort of homecoming. In this book it is almost a journey through hell. Is this a very personal, almost autobiographical narrative, or should we see this as a larger condition and, if so, would you see a relation to other texts? A G: The book certainly is a journey through hell, and I think every time you read it – and I’ve read it many, many times – you do not get used to the terrible ideas and feelings that come at you from the book and through reading it as an imaginative participant in Elizabeth’s condition. Clearly, it is a personal and almost autobiographical narrative, but Bessie Head herself has been conscious that it was written for a future self, herself in a future life being able to turn to the novel for help. I also see the book as something to guide and to assist those going through this shattering of the mind and of comprehension that trauma inflicts. People talk so glibly about it. I think one of the scariest things that she shows you, is just when at the end of the first section she writes in a tone of relief, escape, it’s now over, she’s now safe, and immediately there is the unpredictable re-assertion of horror and disruption. I think that is so powerfully done and that it’s one of the most important books ever written, because it goes where no other book that I know of has gone. It goes dangerously deep into what it is to be traumatized. I think the commentators who actually refer to Head as insane completely miss the point, because throughout the text there is such a sanity in the accuracy of the recording, of the observation of herself, of a self that is screaming, lost, experiencing unendurable pain. The most telling image is the one where Dan opens her skull and roars into it, which is rape, which is brain-washing, and which is also like being hit with an axe to split the skull open. It is vicious violence that she captures. As you read it you can viscerally imagine having that done to you as Elizabeth did, and you can feel that she is not merely imagining it, but that she experiences it, she feels it happening to her. 5

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I think there would be many other novels in South Africa that one could relate, for instance Magona’s Mother to Mother. I would also think of Gordimer’s The House Gun, Mda’s Ways of Dying and The Madonna of Excelsior in particular, and also some of the other writers I’ve mentioned before. Then there is Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs about a white boy who’s been in the war and has been traumatized, and later texts by him: The Good Doctor, and very recently now The Impostor. I’m also thinking of Mandla Langa’s The Memory of Stones, which addresses the murder of his own brother, who was an M K officer, by fellow M K members, and it also addresses forced removals. And then there is an earlier text by him, A Rainbow on the Paper Sky, where there is a community besieged by – it isn’t mentioned by name, but it’s clearly the Inkatha6 type movement on the one hand, and the South African police and army on the other. Those are some of the books that I would think of as moving in something of the same territory. MB: In your book you make the point that the extreme effort to which Head refers can be thought of as an ongoing or continuing suffering incurred in the arduous process of somehow accommodating the supposedly past, yet insistently ‘selfpresenting’ suffering, which persists by means of ineradicable memories.7

Isn’t this a much more realistic way of depicting the difficult way of ‘overcoming’ the past? What about the notion of healing, so popular in current public discourses? A G: I think that the traumatized condition is more like a chronic illness. In the review of Van der Merwe and Gobodo–Madikizela I call it an ‘un-healing wound’. Not all wounds can heal. So that would be the difference. You cannot go back to the pre-traumatic state. You can, in a sense, recover but as another person, you do not recover as the previous self. There’s a fundamental dislocation that occurs. I think the word ‘healing’ is cheapened; it has become very cheap. I think again of that Nietzsche quote because along with healing comes the facile use 6 7

Inkatha Freedom Party. Dealing with Evils, 175.

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of the forgiveness notion and in some of my essays I critique that notion. I also think of what the Winnie Mandela character says towards the end of The Cry of Winnie Mandela: “There’s one thing I will not do, it is my only defence of the future: I will not be an instrument for validating the politics of reconciliation.” She says that because, of course, reconciliation can also be vulgarized as a political place-claiming situation from various perspectives. So, I think that’s really astute and necessary. M B: Bessie Head depicts the complex ways in which victims of violence and traumatized individuals internalize perpetration and realize at a certain point how they are no longer only victims but potential perpetrators as well. South Africa is a highly violent society. To what extent do you see violence as a sort of internalized perpetration? Re-using Bhabha’s notion of hybridity in a very physical sense, couldn’t we see traumatized people as ‘hybrids’ in the sense of ‘extraordinary’ creatures living very much near death but also as carriers of multiple selves, of victims and perpetrators? A G: It is a scary thought, but one might see traumatized people as ‘mutants’. I would rather use that kind of science-fiction term to express the scariness. M B: Roger Luckhurst comes to mind, with The Trauma Question. It seems that the books that are really apt for this kind of trauma discourse are in fact science-fiction books or gothic narratives. Or are we maybe also misreading it? Should we re-read it through another framework? A G: I think, for me, one of the texts that most brilliantly addresses that is The Stone Virgins and the figure of the murderer and rapist Sibaso. The way Vera describes the scene where you begin with that image with him bursting onto the scene beheading one of the twin sisters is amazing. The grotesqueness of that scene and of him taking the body as if dancing with it, and then moving from the corpse to the surviving sister, raping her is incredible. And then later on you go back to the question: How did he get there? He hasn’t always been like this, he wasn’t born like this, and he didn’t grow up like this. So, she does that really brilliant thing of how the man became a mutant, how this human being became someone who is non-human; he is a creature, he’s not a human being. That’s why I call that one paper “Entering the Oppressor’s Mind”, because to me that’s also what some writers do by looking not only at victims, but at perpetrators, and so often the victims of previous trauma are perpetrators.

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There is a self-perpetuating pattern. I call it the ‘crazed-hitting-out reaction’ that has to do with the maddening pain of humiliation, and hurt, and anger at pain, and anger at injustice. Sometimes those victims who become perpetrators cannot access the real perpetrators, or perhaps the perpetrators are conditions, so they victimize those who are accessible. But those are the ones that are weaker, and so often the wives, the women, the children. At the same time, as Head shows, women can also experience the same kind of thing. It’s that crazed desire, that longing to be at the other end of the stick, wielding the stick, not just being hit by it. So, it unleashes violence in victims. People tend to talk about victims so sentimentally, saying: “Oh, you must forgive, and forget, and overcome, be Christian.” But it doesn’t work like that, because that desire is insatiable to wield, rather than simply to be assaulted by power. And that’s the problem of power abuse constantly perpetuating itself. I coined the expression ‘de-othering’, because I think, so often when we think of perpetrators, we other them: we are moral people and perpetrators are monsters. And that is what is so startling about what Vera does, she says: “Look at this man. Even as he rapes this woman, there is a yearning.” She makes you see that within that moment of rape there is a yearning for what we think of as the normal pattern of wooing, wedding, fathering. All those emerge in that process of rape, even as you read with horror and shuddering of the rapist’s activities. At the same time she forces you to see his human yearnings that are being expressed in this perverted form and in that terrible moment. So, I went on to ask myself a further question: Does it help to ‘de-monster’ abusers? And in a sense I’ve been implying that it does, but then I had to rethink: it certainly won’t necessarily help, but I think it is perhaps a reminder that the anger and fury felt at being victimized by someone like that are both valid or natural and dangerous. The reminder is to keep focus: Why do you want to punish? How do you want to punish? Whom would you want to punish? And perhaps most importantly: For whose sake do you want to punish? Of course this came out most crucially over the past decade or so, when people had to try and rehabilitate child soldiers: you get the child soldier who is a perpetrator, murderer, rapist, violator, and a child. Some of these books are in fact addressing this issue; some are witness writing, and some are novels. But that’s a really important and crucial and difficult point: What do you do with the perpetrator? And for whom? For whose sake?

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MB: Trauma seems really to be linked to a piercing of borders. Could we see the traumatized condition as a confusion of borders, as a problem of containment if we want? And from here how do we proceed to repair these borders? A G: Should we repair the previous borders? It seems to me that what I would call a kind of transcendent understanding of the communality of humanity between victim and perpetrator – given a hell of a lot of luck and strength and so on – can free one from hatred and from abjection, which seem to me to be the typical pendulum responses. I wonder if the danger is not so much loss of borders as loss of focus because one reads about that so often. I have just been looking at an account of a raped child in one of Unity Dow’s books again. There is a little girl who is mute, and immediately becomes fearful of all males, so it’s the loss of focus: the one evil man overflows all male human beings. The child gets completely hysterical when she’s taken to the male doctor to be examined. And of course that is very typical also: it’s all whites or all blacks. There was a very interesting newspaper piece on Sunday. I think it was in the Sunday Independent by Jonathan Jansen. He was Vice-Rector and Dean of Education at Pretoria, and he is coloured, so he has apartheid experiences from the ‘wrong side’. He wrote about how very recently he was addressing a group of young white Afrikaans school girls, and he was talking to them about un-learning the racist reactions they’ve been taught. One girl came with a question that floored him, because he didn’t know how to answer it. She said: “How can I trust people who look exactly like those who hijacked my family two weeks ago and killed my cousin?” He said he had to go back; he didn’t know how to answer. What he then came back to tell was his own experience of being traumatically treated by whites under apartheid and how he had to overcome it. Here he was, talking to her and her friend, and many of these girls started crying, he was also in tears. He said: “I can only say: here’s the bridge. Each of us has to go over it.” It was a very moving story, because I think that’s one of the post-traumatic stress reactions: the expansion of perpetrator vision. M B: Definitely. I think it is also a question of reality. One loses the contact to what is real.

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A G: Yes. Every creak of the floor becomes the murderous intruder. And in another sense, of course, the world is a perpetually dangerous place; there is no safety. Evil, and danger, and death can erupt at any moment. I think this is so often how the everyday expressions on people’s faces, the way a white person would maybe just look at a black person passing in the street, could trigger so much. These triggers are all around. M B: It seems to me that a mere analytical, rational mode won’t make people overcome their traumas and integrate them. Trauma seems to address almost a spiritual element. In this, Bessie Head is one of the most important examples. Could you say more on this aspect? A G: This question moves along the same lines, doesn’t it? M B: Yes, because I think traumatized people have experienced huge damage to their emotions, so that, because of safety reasons, they stop relating to the world and to people, in order not to make themselves vulnerable. The price they pay for that is that they also push away love, not only danger. A G: Yes, because love is risk. Love makes vulnerable, it extends your area of vulnerability. Before I had children, for instance, I never understood how it would extend my areas of vulnerability. Every second day something difficult or bad happens to one or more of my children, and I cannot ignore it, I cannot. So, if any of them were to be traumatized – a traumatized person is, again, also not alone. It impinges on all those linked or related to the person, and you also then hear and fear the triggers which other people around might not. They might, for instance, say thoughtless things, because they don’t know the full story. I think bringing in the concept of the soul is a good leap. Toni Morrison uses the expression ‘re-memory,’ which I think is a good way of distinguishing between memory as remembering one’s past, which is a safe and healthy mechanism, and this kind of thing which jumps at you like a predator and grabs you and takes over. But to me this is why the kind of very detached analytical perspective is not as useful as literature. To me this is the big thing about literature: that it is a way of studying, learning about, depicting an experiential or a witnessing perspective, and that is why it is so much more important, so much more powerful, and so much more necessary, because it’s a re-individualizing contrasted with the generalizing perspective of abstraction.

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I often talk to my students about how, for instance, even a short poem – and I use the example of war poetry – can make one realize what so many war-films cannot, because film tends to spectacularize, because it is a primarily visual medium. I give them a poem in which Wilfred Owen writes only five lines or so about seeing a young man dying. He doesn’t mention his name or anything, but he makes that death like the destruction of a whole solar system. Reports about wars give you so many wounded, so many dead, so many displaced, films do this as well. It’s that kind of evocation that enables you to imbibe an understanding. I think that’s why maybe the soul is an appropriate term for the mechanism that operates to allow us that access. M B: Reason and rationality are anonymous. A G: Exactly. I noticed that I do not use the term ‘feelings’ very often, because we grow up being taught that the intellect, reason, the logos, all of that is superior to the feelings. I think absolutely the opposite is true: the logos, logic – those are mechanisms; they operate at the mechanical level. It’s our feelings, our thoughts that matter. Every feeling is a judgement, it’s an assessment, a highly complex process. If I feel: “That guy is a bastard,” or “Isn’t this beautiful” – those feelings are tremendously complex thoughts that get summarized maybe in a fairly blunt verbal expression, but they have fairly fine ramifications, and intertwinements, and balancings that go on; reason can’t do that. The reasoning self is the robot self. In your terms maybe what literature does is through vicarious experiences it gives ‘soul education’. M B: I haven’t encountered the word ‘feelings’ in criticism for ages. You encounter ‘subjects’, you encounter ‘positions’, you encounter that kind of language. AG: Yes. And I think as intellectuals it’s our task to look at what are the good guides and what are the bad guides, the ones to distrust. M B: You write that The notion of memory [...] might be associated with the notion of contamination or complicity. Having been subjected to power as its victim, and having consequently apparently escaped from its clutches, only to find that it is living (on) within her own mind, Elizabeth has been forced through experiencing this lingering after-effect of power

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to acknowledge that it cannot be safely parcelled away in the South African past, labelled apartheid.8

I am very intrigued by this notion of memory – complicity – contamination and trauma. Could you elaborate more on this, reflecting also on the public use of memory in South African politics and society? A G: I follow the lead of Bessie Head; I just articulate what she demonstrates. That’s where it comes from; it comes from what is demonstrated as happening within Elizabeth. And Head has said that that’s what she has observed in herself. If one looks at the terms ‘complicity’ and ‘contamination’ it sounds as if one is warning against picking up some kind of disease, but that’s not what I intended to convey. On the one hand one could say that being traumatized is being diseased, but I felt that the amazing thing, the most striking thing for me in her text is the way she reinvents the idea of victimhood. Because victimhood has always been construed as innocent; people use the expressions ‘innocent civilians being caught in the cross-fire’ or ‘the innocent victim of this, that or the other crime’, which makes a complete dichotomy between perpetrator and victim, which whitewashes the victim. But victims are normal human beings, full of shit, as all human beings are. They are not innocent, even though they might by no stretch of imagination have deserved the traumatic infliction of whatever violence or violation. But what I would like to add is the acknowledgement of complicity and contamination. When Elizabeth in A Question of Power recognizes how harshly and unjustly she was acting when she yelled at that guy in the shop, and when she attacked poor old Mrs. Brown, who’s a very irritating specimen but didn’t deserve to be violently attacked and sworn at, she keeps talking about the lava that erupts. Now the lava can be thought of as the puss, because if you think of an infected place, infections go towards eruption, and eruption can be the cleansing, the opening of the wound, but it can also be the spreading of contamination. It can be as dangerous as it can be healing. That’s very interesting to me, but what I find very striking is what I would call the anti-self-righteous implications of the victims’ acknowledging that they too are or could be capable of that violence. There the notion of ‘de-othering’ the perpetrator figure comes back. Then the perpetration becomes less alien, less inexpli8

Dealing with Evils, 184.

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cable. And the example that I think of is a sentence in either Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, or Black Skin, White Masks, I’m now uncertain, where he says: “We must harry the insult to humanity in ourselves.” One thinks of Fanon as the great moral conscience of the anticolonial struggle and the powerful intellectual investigator of racism and the sickness of racism, but there he says the “insult to humanity in [yourself].” We all have it, we all violate our own humanity and the humanity of others and it is a constant temptation. Another example: I came across a poem by Dennis Brutus, and it’s one of those that he wrote while imprisoned on Robben Island. I can’t put my finger on which one, because it’s been a long time since I read it, I have to pinpoint it again. This is one of the poems in which he actually says that we should acknowledge to ourselves that in certain moments it is possible to understand why apartheid’s perpetrators did to us what they did. And that’s amazing, that transcendence of the victimhood circle. You get out of the victimhood circle, and you actually draw your perpetrator and yourself, the victim, into the same human sphere again. M B: This is why also maybe ‘survivor’ rather than ‘victim’ could be a much more appropriate term. AG: Yes. M B: In your book you write that in A Question of Power “memories are masked as actual recurrences or reincarnations.”9 I find this image important, and I am just mesmerized by the way you depict the inner life of a traumatized person or character without ever using the trauma discourse. But that also suggest that South Africa can no longer speak of memory as ‘process’ or as ‘remembering’, but that trauma has literally blown up people, and a person carries within other more ungovernable selves that are always on the surface of action. Would you comment on this? AG: This comes back to the idea of trauma victims as aliens, as hybrids. It makes me think of how dangerous this society is, because there are so many people ready to explode; there are terrible energies. It would be so important not to curl back in on yourself or on those you want to blame, whether they are actually to blame or whether they are merely accessible for attack of some 9

Dealing with Evils, 182.

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kind, because there is so much valid hatred, and bitterness, and anger, and there’s too much facile forgiveness rhetoric. Again I think of the Winnie Mandela refusal of the politics of reconciliation. M B : In A Woman Alone, Bessie Head writes “literature is very functional in Southern Africa and bound inextricably to human suffering” (67). This is a quotation dating back to the 1980s. In which way is this statement still true? AG: That makes me think of the title of my second book Dealing with Evils, and I think it expresses something of my belief that writers are thinkers, addressing the complex ills of our circumstances, who probe the causes and the sources of suffering, who pay attention to those who perpetrate and to those who are harmed, and to the fact that they are sometimes the same. I think authors are social diagnosticians and they are educators through their art, because you can’t get it glibly, you can get it through complex writing, like the texts we have mentioned. So, they can contribute to their own and others’ – and then I found myself using the word ‘healing’ after all – but then I thought alternatively maybe not so much healing as seeing what has happened to one in a clearer way. So they are ‘soul educators’ – to come back to that kind of notion. Literature does not only contribute to our digesting the past and its harms, it should and does alert us to the newer dangers and harms. This is a big thing: you have to realize the other dangers now as well as the old ones still persisting. Literature helps orientate us towards challenges, opportunities and necessary changes, old habits which we need to discard, and arduous new learning, new skill, new compassion, new insight which we must acquire. Life never allows just standing still and just going back; you’re not allowed. Life is constantly a forward struggling, and the old saying holds true: how easily yesterday’s victims become today’s perpetrators. All over the world there are so many obvious illustrations of that fact, so I thought again of the inclusivity of a literary vision: if it is truly a visionary text it doesn’t give us system, it gives us vision. M B: That’s a beautiful way of putting it. As you write about the ending of A Question of Power: The word ‘belonging’ is crucial. It indicates an achieved dedication that avoids both the arrogance of possessiveness and the humiliation of

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homelessness. It also points the way out of the memory trap in which victims are caught, for to belong is to be future-projected, like the enduring ‘land’ itself, the soil on which Elizabeth lives among plants, creatures and other ‘ordinary’ people.10

What about healing as a sort of ‘homecoming’ understood in a double way, physically but also inwardly? A G: This is striking, because I’ve never come across anyone actually noticing how important and how careful the choice of that word is, because ‘belonging’ isn’t ownership, it’s not an ownership claim. Belonging is like dedication, but it also means you are accepted and accommodated. So, it’s brilliant, it’s your duty and the fact that others accept a duty towards you, that it’s not the static condition, this is a wonderful word. If to be traumatized is to be dislocated, disrupted, ruptured, it can be understood as a desolate sense of exclusion from human community, because it’s a terrible loneliness. And speaking now primarily of the ‘inner’ which you contrast with the physical sense of ‘homecoming’, the person who feels a sense of homecoming is not merely accommodated as if suffered to stay, or exactly as a guest, but actually is ‘at home’ in their society. And the one who is ‘at home’ can in fact invite others as guests, and also send others away. So, it’s a position that has a strength, which I always prefer to distinguish from ‘power’, because ‘power’ has a bad name and a bad meaning. The gracious host is generous and flexible. A home is not a hotel, and not a prison, and not a school. It’s where you invite your friends to visit, and to talk, and to eat, and to stay, and to share. MB: ‘Ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ are terms used by Njabulo Ndebele in his essays The Rediscovery of the Ordinary. When looking through the lens of trauma one realizes that we still have to deal with extraordinary events, from multiple selves, hidden ghosts to reincarnations of memory. Should we reinsert the notion of the extraordinary in South African literary criticism? A G: I like your suggestion very much. Geoffrey Davis, in his article in Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, uses Zakes Mda as an epigraph, saying: “We [South Africans] have become normal. It’s very painful to become normal.” (85) But I disagree with his statement, because not only have we not yet become ‘normal’ – it’s premature – but so many abuses that were 10

Dealing with Evils, 188.

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previously, not that they were non-existent, but they were less visible, or less frequent, or not yet seen, and now they come to the fore. The litany I would mention contains rape, especially, but not exclusively of women, of children, of gays, even of babies, xenophobic persecution, strikes erupting into violent and indiscriminate attacks. These recent events were profoundly disquieting, and they are extraordinarily ugly and awful, and they must not be naturalized. We have to keep reminding ourselves of their extremity, because people often say that South Africans are getting too used to violence and traumatic things being done to them. Everybody knows someone who has a family member murdered, or who’s been hijacked, or who’s been raped, or attacked, that’s terribly dangerous. We have to keep reminding ourselves of the extremity of such deeds, and of the abused, under-equipped, malformed and malforming conditions and life’s stance out of which these actions erupt. The older I get the more I realize how easy it is to be moral if you’re comfortably housed and well-fed, employed and educated, and how easy to rant about crime and violence from these positions of safety, and how wrong it is to do so, how inadequate and useless. M B: Thank you very much for this interview.

WORKS CITED Behr, Mark. The Smell of Apples (London: Abacus, 1996). Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ed. Michael Philipps (1793; London: Oxford U P , 1975). Chinodya, Shimmer. Harvest of Thorns (Harare: Baobab, 1989). Coetzee. J.M. Disgrace (1999; London: Vintage, 2000). Davis, Geoffrey V., ed. Theme Issue: South Africa (special issue of Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 39.2–3, 2006). Dow, Unity. The Screaming of the Innocent (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2003). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952; New York: Grove, 1967). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, intro. Jean–Paul Sartre (Les damnés de la terre, 1961; New York: Grove, 1965). Fugard, Lisa. Skinner’s Drift (London: Viking, 2005). Gagiano, Annie. Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa (Boulder C O : Lynne Rienner, 2000). ——. Dealing with Evils: Essays on Writing from Africa (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2008).

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——. “Entering the Oppressor‘s Mind: A Strategy of Writing in Head’s A Question of Power, Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41.2 (2006): 43–60. ——. “Narrating Our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma – A Profoundly Admirable Achievement,” LitNet (10 October 2007), http://www.litnet .co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&news_id=25330&cause_id =1270 (accessed 1 April 2009). Galgut, Damon. The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2005). ——. The Good Doctor (New York: Grove, 2003). ——. The Impostor (London: Atlantic, 2008). Gordimer, Nadine. The House Gun (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). Head, Bessie. A Question of Power (London: Davis–Poynter, 1974). ——. A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Craig MacKenzie (Oxford: Heinemann International, 1990). Ibinga, Stéphane. “The Representation of Women in the Works of Three South African Novelists of the Transition” (diss., U of Stellenbosch, 2007). Jansen, Jonathan. “’For the Sake of our Country, We Must Try’: Struggling to Cross the Bridges of Bitterness Dividing People of Different Races and Backgrounds is South Africans’ Toughest Hurdle,” Sunday Independent (1 March 2009). Kanengoni, Alexander. Echoing Silences (Oxford: Heinemann, 1998). Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull (London: Vintage, 1999). Langa, Mandla. The Lost Colours of the Chameleon (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2008). ——. The Memory of Stones (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000). ——. A Rainbow on the Paper Sky (London: Kliptown, 1989). Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008). Magona, Sindiwe. Beauty’s Gift (Cape Town: Kwela, 2008). ——. Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991). ——. Mother to Mother (Boston M A : Beacon, 1998). Mda, Zakes. The Madonna of Excelsior (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). ——. Ways of Dying (New York: Picador, 1995). Molebatsi, Natalia. We Are ...: A Poetry Anthology (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2008). Molope, Kagiso Lesego. Dancing in the Dust (Cape Town: O U P , 2004). Ndebele, Njabulo. The Cry of Winnie Mandela: A Novel (Claremont: David Philip, 2003). ——. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (Johannesburg: C O S A W , 1991). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Joyful Wisdom (“La Gaya Scienza”), tr. Thomas Common (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1910). Serote, Mongane. To Every Birth Its Blood: A Novel (New York: Avalon, 1989). Soyinka, Wole. Season of Anomy (London: Arena, 1988). Van der Merwe, Chris, & Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela. Narrating Our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

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Vera, Yvonne. The Stone Virgins (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). Young, Hershini Bhana. Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body (Hanover N H : U P of New England, 2005). Zadok, Rachel. Gem Squash Tokoloshe (London: Pan, 2005).

—Œ—

The Grand Narrative of Life

— An Interview with Tlhalo Raditlhalo

K A R I N O R A N T E S : Part of your research concentrates on the autobiographical genre. Memoirs seem to have become very popular, especially in South Africa. How do you explain the enormous rise in numbers with regard to the genre? T L H A L O R A D I T L H A L O : There are strands of an answer to this in my dissertation “ǥWho Am I?’ The Construction of Identity in Twentieth-Century South African Autobiographical Writings in English.” Let me put it in a proper context: Memoirs are important in the sense that they give voice; people who would not have been writers in the stricter sense declare in their memoirs: “But I have a narrative, too. I have a particular story that is important, that gives a different perspective to the greater narrative of South African liberation.” A memoir like Mandela’s1 overwhelms all other memoirs precisely because he is this gigantic figure, but there are subsidiary figures that have come out of the Island2 and also wrote their memoirs. This is one of the things that I have noticed quite recently: Every person who’s been on the Island has tried, in one way or another, to write about their own experiences, especially since 2000. Take Ahmed Kathrada for instance: his book3 is actually more, shall we say, innovative because he uses letters, it’s epistolary. Patrick Lekota’s book4 is more like a letter to his daughter. So, to some degree you could cate1

Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom (1995). “The Island” here and subsequently refers to Robben Island. Kathrada and Vassen, Letters from Robben Island (1999). 4 Lekota, Prison Letters to a Daughter (1991). 2 3

© Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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gorize the memoirs, form subcategories of them, but essentially that’s what they are all about, saying: “Our story is just as important as any other of how this liberation came about.” Depending on the publishers some of them are very well written, some are not that well written, but essentially they add a strand to the greater story of South African memorialization. KO: If you compare the memoir genre fifty years ago to the genre today, how did it develop? T R : Yes, there is a development. If one were to look at the 1957 publication of Es’kia Mphahlele’s memoir,5 the conditions in the fifties were very different. Why would I say they were different? Because everyone knew that there was this thing called apartheid, but no one had lived to the end of it; they didn’t actually visualize it; they didn’t know how it would come about. So the memoirs were expressing: “This is a very oppressive state. What are we going to do about it?” Exile became one of the options for the more educated and the more mobile among us. A memoir after Sharpeville, for instance, by Mosibudi Mangena,6 the current Minister of Science and Technology, is a memoir of imprisonment. He was in prison, he has faced detention – this is living through apartheid, going through the pain of it: practically being detained; practically having to drink water from the toilet; being deprived of all sorts of things. A memoir written in the 1980s is a narrative of living through apartheid. Caesarina Makhoere’s book, for instance, No Child’s Play (1988), also deals with detention, with the very, very crucial aspect of: “I can be assassinated at any one time.” So the aspect of fear is also important, as opposed to the anger of Mphahlele’s memoir. And a memoir written now might take two directions: it might be very reflective and magnanimous, or it might be very triumphant or defensive, depending on where the person was within the larger narrative. I’m thinking here, for instance, of the De Klerk memoir:7 it’s very defensive for obvious reasons. He would have to commit the ultimate in saying sorry and in declaring everything that he had grown up with, the very things that made his life meaningful, to be nullified. So instead he has to defend the indefensible. 5

Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue. Mangena, On Our Own (1989). 7 De Klerk, The Last Trek (1998). 6

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Therefore his book takes on this defensive stance. But a memoir written by someone who’s been on the Island, who has had time to reflect over the years, might take on a different tag. They might say: “Okay, these were the conditions, these were the larger narratives, but we have achieved what we had sought out to do.” Then that sense of closure is important now. KO: Do you think the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (T R C ) has had an effect on the memoir genre? Or do you attribute the changes in the genre more to the change of the political system? T R : I would say the T R C doesn’t feature much in terms of the memoirs themselves, and I will tell you why I say this: The T R C was an event in which people – relatives, prisoners, victims and people of that sort – may, in a way, have had an occasion to speak up about their trauma. The processes of an oral narrative and of a written narrative are two different things. I don’t think that someone who has narrated his/her trauma in a T R C situation might necessarily wish to commit that to paper, because it has already been committed as testimony. The testifiers were speaking about a very specific event, i.e. “I was tortured” or “My son was killed or poisoned” – and here I’m thinking about Mrs. Mtimkulu: Her son was poisoned over a number of years, he lost weight, his hair was falling out, etc. She still held the hair in her hand even when she was testifying. But to commit that to paper is something else, because it would be as if they were devaluing the oral aspect of it. They have already committed it to paper, it’s in the public record. So I would say, in a grand sense, the T R C report itself remains the larger narrative. But it is a composite narrative rather than that of individual people. Somebody saying: “Now that I’ve testified to the T R C , now I want to write my memoirs” seems unlikely. The testifiers felt such a large stress on themselves that perhaps they also wish for closure. But if they were committing it to paper, then they would have to go through every aspect of that again. In the paper that I wrote, I wrote about structural trauma. It would take a very brave person to try and commit the T R C memory itself onto an autobiographical or a memoir kind of narrative. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t happen, but we haven’t seen any of the people who testified really publishing memoirs. KO: Do you think testifying before the T R C did give people some kind of relief? Do you think they did achieve some kind of closure through it?

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T R : Some did. Some people felt validated for the first time. After these three or four decades of oppression it was in many ways a moment of recognition for many, many of the people who were activists, who were underground, and for their families, too. But we must also be aware that there are about two hundred people whose remains no one knows anything about, and there is still a search for them. Where are they now? – This is part and parcel of living with that trauma which you might have thought you might have gotten rid of by way of someone saying: “Okay, the remains of your brother, your sister, are here.” For a number of people nothing of that sort has happened and therefore they live with their trauma. You might see two groupings, or rather three: those who finally reached closure and acceptance, and that idea of moving on in their own way; those who still live with their trauma, particularly because they have not actually done what they would see as a culturally viable thing: to bury the remains, or to actually know the truth – because not all of the truth emerged; and those who are still outside of the process, who did not partake in it, and these are the people who are now taking civil action against companies who supported apartheid. So there are three groupings in that sense, and one hesitates to call them victims, but clearly they are survivors of something quite serious. KO: Do you think that people who did not appear before the T R C but listened to the proceedings on the radio and read the reports were inspired to write about their own stories? Do you think that people who did not have this oral narrative were motivated to start writing their own stories down? T R : I think in many ways what happened is that those who stayed outside of the process were not consulted. Remember it was a very strict kind of categorization: human rights violations, from year x to year y. And therefore there are thousands upon thousands of people who were outside of the process. So we are talking about a strictly delineated group. What happened to those who were not given the opportunity? That is something that one cannot actually begin to even put into a proper context. What I would say, however, is that it remains part and parcel of the T R C ’s own outcomes that it forced national reconciliation at an individualized level. It substituted the individual for the nation and forced the nation to see itself through the prism of those who testified. The very question that you ask – “What happens to those who are outside of the process? Are they accepting of

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this or not?” – is still something that has not really been well documented. Some people would say: “We are not represented because we are not of this particular political organization,” or other people would say: “Some of these people who were internally our own enemies refused to testify.” So there is a lot of unevenness about it, and I think unevenness could be reflected also in those who participated as well as those who did not participate. I’ve not heard of individuals who were outside of the T R C who have started writing their own memoirs in any way. I suppose people who might have had something to do with it are those people, I suppose, who took the artistic dimension to it. There was a play on the T R C by Lesego Rampolokeng called The Story I Am about to Tell, but I don’t know if they actually did publish it. It represented those who stayed outside of the T R C , and if it were committed to book form or if you had a script, then I suppose those are some of the areas by which you might want to tease out people who have a story to tell but who were not part and parcel of the T R C process. But that is merely an artistic rendition of the aftermath of the T R C , and a large part of those people are the people who are in civil action against multinational companies. They are taking action against a lot of companies who had supported the apartheid regime throughout its many reincarnations. Thabo Mbeki and the South African government refused to be part of that; therefore these people challenged that, and they took it to New York. So it actually started in New York; they got some high-ranking lawyers there who have taken up the case. I don’t know whether they are taking it pro bono or not, but it is still going on.8 KO: From my outside point of view I have not noticed a development away from the 1950s and 1960s memoirs that were leaning more towards autobiography in the stricter sense, and in the direction of a preference for hybridity. An example of this is Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, where many different genres are mixed together. What is your explanation for this development? T R : Well, it depends mainly on developments within the field of literature, and publishers might have a hand in it by saying: “Write it this way.” I tell you why I’m saying this: I wrote a very critical analysis of one memoir which 8

See Khulumani.

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I found very, very irritating, J.C. Mbatha’s Within Loving Memory of a Century (2007). I was given this to review, and I was very critical of it precisely because these are people who, for one reason or the other, are influenced by postmodernist ways of doing things. There really is no need for that. Sometimes people find a reviewer as if to say: “I’ve written a memoir, I need me to validate it.” I don’t do validation for the sake of it. This kind of mixing and overlapping and fusioning: I personally feel that when you deal with something as traumatic as the T R C , you need to keep it simple, keep it factual, don’t keep it dry, obviously, but don’t invent. In my case the publisher of that memoir agreed with me, and told me that the author had been advised not to use this postmodern style, but he still chose to do it that way. So you can’t always say the publishers are the ones who influence the writers. I think the writers themselves believe that certain levels of inventiveness or stretching the truth are important factors. It’s not always the way to go about it. I think memoirs are set in a particular way; autobiography is set in a particular way. Whether you want to disagree or not, it’s important to realize that once you tamper – if you like – with the genre, then you will run across either disapprobation, or people might say: “Well it’s innovative”. It depends on the reader. K O: So you don’t think traumatization automatically leads to a more hybrid structure of the narrative? T R: It depends on what the author would want, because the purpose of writing, especially about something traumatic, is to try to convince the reader that it actually happened: “This is why I am where I am.” If we take And Night Fell: Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in South Africa9 from 1983 for example: there is no hybridization here, there is nothing. It is simple; it tries to convince you as much as possible that this is actually what happened. It’s the same as Frank Chikane’s memoir:10 the kind of traumatization that they underwent wants to be placed on fore: “This is what happened.” Why? Because it becomes really difficult to deny the brutalization of people under those circumstances, and it clearly negates it, if you hybridize this and try to smarten it. 9

By Molefe Pheto. Frank Chikane, No Life of My Own: An Autobiography of Frank Chikane. (Braamfontein: Skotaville, 1988). 10

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KO: I’ve also observed the other tendency – that nowadays there are a lot of novels which use the confessional mode and read almost like memoirs. It seems that hybridity is in fashion in South African literature in general? T R : Yes, of course. Although it’s not strictly part of what you are talking about, but both of K. Sello Duiker’s texts Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams are in that sense trying to contain the traumatic experiences fictionally. And in fiction there is space for hybridity, because there you are creatively free to make certain choices that lift the text artistically. If you are looking at the artistry to it, then yes, you are quite free to do that, and Thirteen Cents plays a lot on hallucinations and a person being in two places. Even the reader is discomforted as to know: “Where am I at this point? What am I reading?” So it needs a second or even a third reading in order to make clear just how traumatic the experience can be. The narrator and the reader have to try and see the trauma from an artistic point of view, and that’s where hybridity comes in. I would agree with you on that score. KO: In your dissertation you discuss Nicki Hitchott’s approach to the difficult question of defining and differentiating between the genres of autobiography and memoir. How would you define these two genres and what are the major differences between them? T R : Well, the difference for me would be that an autobiography tries to cover as broad a representation of the narrator as is humanly possible, basing itself on memory of course, from childhood up to old age. That, in a way then, is life writing: you have written about a life. On the other hand, memoir would have to do with a slice of that life, a particular slice that, in this instance, perhaps is traumatic. In some instances you’d want to make sure that people remember this; that it becomes part of public memory. Some autobiographies may be split up, but Mandela’s autobiography doesn’t need that. It starts in 1918, it ends in 1994. What else is there to add? Perhaps then, this is where he would write his memoirs as president. But autobiography really has to do with that grand narrative of a life in most instances. Some of the narratives I looked at in my thesis straddle the two. One would start out purely as autobiography, all the strands of innocence and so forth, but then delineate at a point where a traumatic experience – imprisonment, etc. – comes into play. Frank Chikane’s memoir No Life of My Own starts only with his imprisonment. There he is: he is imprisoned, and then he describes the

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aftermath of that imprisonment. So that’s a memoir in the strict sense of the word. K O: A lot of books have been written on the theory of autobiography but there is hardly any literature on the theoretical aspects of the memoir genre. Do you think most or all of the theories on autobiography also apply to the genre of memoirs, or do we have to differentiate? T R : I think they straddle, they divide. And for me, while the theory may be there and while the categories may be there, what I would like to see is how they match rather than remain distinctly separate categories. So yes, the theory is good, but what is important is also to take the theory forward, and this is where the matching of them would necessary bring in a newer perspective. And add another dimension to the theorizing, say: “But we could look at it from this perspective. Why can’t we do that? What stops us from doing it?” Those neat categories themselves have room now to expand, to be expanded, and obviously theory must take into account developments into how the life writers themselves practice some of their own – shall we say – chosen genre. KO: In your thesis you state that “Self-realisation, self-definition, and transcendence are only allowed to become possible when the self is outside the dehumanizing environment” (47). Is this one of the reasons for the abundance of South African exile- and post-apartheid autobiographies? T R: Yes, in most instances that would be how self-realization is reflected upon. The more successful autobiographies of the apartheid era were written outside of South Africa, for obvious reasons, because even if they had been written here they would not have been published. So, the authors began to actually reflect on what had happened. They were writing about the displayed self in a condition of dehumanization, but the writing process took place afterwards. It was only then that they reflected very carefully on what it was that had been happening to them as living organisms, the biological part of it, but also as thinking people, the psychological part of it. So, they were writing this body into existence, but they had to think about it, quite clearly. The Mosibudi Mangena autobiography I found traumatic to read myself. In most instances these were banned books, so I was fortunate enough to read it in the Netherlands. The first time I came across it was in Leiden. Mangena himself had moved to Botswana under very, very tough conditions, because it was after his detention and imprisonment. He was house-arrested, so he

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couldn’t do anything, thus: exile – even if it was forced exile. And this is when he began to speak very clearly, asking himself: “What has happened to me as a person, and how then do I move from this position of psychological imprisonment to a more enlightened person?” And the self in that instance then went through all those aspects of adjustment, of reliving the trauma, but always with the position to say: “It shouldn’t be an entrapment. It shouldn’t trap me into something.” I don’t think it’s always easy. Mphahlele mentions it very clearly that exile destroyed people. It destroyed families, turned people into alcoholics and what have you. In those instances the self seemed to have taken the entrapment with it and didn’t find its own way out of its confinement. So the confinement was no longer just physical, it was part and parcel of the self, and that was the tragedy of it. But those who could, made sure that they fully realized their selves when they were outside of the dehumanizing environment. I haven’t read enough Holocaust memoirs, but I would say it’s only after it, that people actually sit down and reflect and decide to grasp the nature of evil. Because you are now seeing yourself not only as a victim, but you are trying to say: “How did this happen? What is the nature of evil?” You begin to try and unpack all of these things. As the Gobodo–Madikizela book11 acknowledges, when you try to verbalize it, words fail. The book gives you the distinct impression that people can’t fully grasp through language what happened to them. How do you put it into words? But when you write, it’s a different story. Hence I’m saying oral and written narratives are two different things. Once the trauma has passed and you reflect on it, and then you want to commit it to paper, I think it’s much easier to live through it that way rather than having to talk about it. KO: What about prison writing then? How do you explain the wealth of prison-life writing, even though South African prisons during apartheid clearly were ‘dehumanizing environments’? T R : That for me is where we differ as human beings. Some people have the capacity, even within that process, to lift themselves out. Now this is important: the first draft of Mandela’s autobiography was written in the physical exile of Robben Island and was smuggled out when Mac Maharaj was re11 Van der Merwe & Gobodo-Madikizela, Narrating Our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma (2007).

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leased, but no one knows what happened to it, and I’m sure it’s a collector’s item wherever it is. But he must have reflected a long time in prison, and as you can see in his autobiography his first understanding even when he moved to prison was: “It’s not going to break me.” And he had a lawyer’s training. A lot of the people who were there were not properly educated, let’s put it mildly. So he could threaten them with his legal mind, by saying: “If you do this to me, this is what will happen to you.” Some people did not have this kind of defence mechanism, so they didn’t have the chance to say: “This will not break me.” That is part and parcel of his strength. Later on, seeing the years go by, he simply said: “Okay, let me commit some of this to memory while we are all incarcerated together.” Which is one thing that, on hindsight, I suppose was a failure of the apartheid state: they grouped these people together; they brought all their memories together, so they could see a multiple facetted dimension of what was happening to them. So Mandela could actually use them also as consultants while he was writing. He’s clearly one of the few who would have done that. But a lot of prison writing happened once the person was outside. K O: There seems to be an almost inflationary use of terms such as ‘trauma’ and ‘healing’ in contemporary South Africa. How do you feel about that? T R : I think if one were to be crass, one would say there has been a cashing in, particularly by ex-South African scholars living abroad. You will notice that not a lot of South African professional scholars here have written a lot about this. That in itself will tell you something. Then there are those who are outside, who seem to see an opportunity and come in. For me, I think it cheapens the entire memory of the trauma. At the same time you then have to put yourself in a position where you have to say: “If they didn’t write it, who would?” So we are placed in a double bind. I would have loved to see more collaborative efforts rather than people who want to garnish their academic credentials abroad with this kind of thing. The words that you use are in vogue. One doesn’t have to be defensive about that. Maybe they will pass, I don’t know. Some processes are already under way, obviously: quite serious corruption, for example. It will pass. It will have to, now that we are heading for the elections. Maybe we are writing another chapter rather than the chapter on truth.

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KO: You have already mentioned this briefly, but maybe you can elaborate a little more on this point: Do you believe that traumatized individuals can experience healing through writing about their trauma or even just by reading about somebody else’s trauma? T R : I really think healing is possible. I really, really do believe it is possible. And I think it can be channelled into memory by writing to heal the person in ways that they might not have thought about. They may use various genres: they may use poetry, they may go into the lecture sector, they may write novels, fictionalize exactly what they went through. And I think it does two things: it allows you to think this matter through carefully, but it also allows you to take the bitterness out of it. Albie Sachs’s classic autobiography, or memoir in this instance, comes to mind: The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. And he is not the only one. There is this lady who was incarcerated by the Argentinian regime. She has now become a very, very successful Argentinian poet.12 I think she lives somewhere in the United States. When I met her I was taken aback by this graceful, wonderful person who writes these passionate poems about trauma and seems not to shy away from all the evils that have happened to her when she was incarcerated. But for some reason she comes across as – if not really healed then well on the way to being a whole person once more. And having seen that example I would answer your question in the affirmative. K O: How about reading about somebody else’s trauma, then? Can somebody experience at least some kind of healing through reading? T R: Of course. Of course you would have to reflect; obviously as you read someone else’s narrative you place yourself in that situation. You can’t avoid it, there is no clinical way by which you can be objective and have the subjectivity not collapse into the objective reading. It’s the same sometimes when I read something vicariously – and this is what I’m saying about the TRC, that the translators were listening to these things, and it really drove them mad, because they were in one way or the other the victims. They could actually sometimes feel the physical pain, the anger, the bitterness. So listening is dangerous, but reading, too, can actually traumatize you. 12 Alicia Partnoy, a survivor from the secret detention camps where about 30,000 Argentinians disappeared. She is the author of The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina (1987).

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KO: I was going to ask you about that: so, you do believe that writing or reading about trauma can have the opposite effect – that is, traumatize or retraumatize someone? T R: Through reading about all these things all the time something really stays in your psyche. It cannot be just a neat clinical kind of objective reading. It will stay somehow in the person who interacts with this material, which goes to show that we are all human. At some level we can’t uncouple ourselves scholastically from the emotional aspect of who we are. So yes, you read these traumatic things and sometimes even without having physically experienced them, you just feel traumatized yourself. But also to then give that narrative closure you want to know what happened. And perhaps once that kind of self-realization comes to the person, then it goes on and is reflected onto you as the reader. Hence the autobiography of Mphahlele now is a classic. One reflects on the trauma of having to grow up in that kind of dysfunctional family, the sheer poverty of it, experiencing regressive modernity, but then rising to become one of the best intellectuals that South Africa has produced in itself shows a certain level of catharsis at the end. K O: How important is the role of literature in South Africa’s dealings with its past, given that the majority of the population still have only very limited access to this medium? T R: That’s a very good question, and I am not being facetious, I really mean that. We have a population of readers that may be fifteen, twenty percent of the overall population. Just starting there you have a problem. We have a school leaving population – well, you start with one million entering school for the first time and end up with about 300,000 graduating, just in high school. So, quite clearly education remains an important part of how a nation begins to see itself. And there is a disproportionate distribution of readers even by race. Obviously the well-educated still happen to be those who are from well-run schools with decent library facilities who are then told: “Look at literature, literature is important. It is the repository of a nation, making itself, re-making itself.” It’s not by chance that the Nobel prizes are awarded to people within particular nationalities. They are not awarded to a world citizen; they capture the finer intangibles of a nation’s self. If on the South African side you still have a large group of the population who are not reading about themselves, it

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creates a particular schizophrenia. Then also you throw in the idea of literature in indigenous languages. It’s a long kind of process. It will definitely have its moments of conflict. I would say quite clearly – and I’ve been known to be very outspoken – if someone sits in London as an ex-South African and writes literature, for me that is not South African literature. You cannot expect someone who sits in a shack just out there to read about that Londoner as someone who has problems: i.e. regarding birth control, who has menopausal problems, who dreams of his childhood upbringing on a farm – or whatever – and expect identification. But can your shack dweller read? That’s another story. So the study of South African literature itself must take into account all these contradictions. Someone asked me this question recently: “What would be the way by which you could break this kind of thing?” Well, one of the things that you need to do is simply to incorporate a lot of the literature that we are studying now at university into the high school curriculum. Stop with the O B E 13 kind of nonsense, because you water down everything. When these O B E graduates come here, they are so blank, because the only thing that you might have taught them would be the ever perennial Shakespeare. But they don’t see themselves reflected in it. If you assign them Down Second Avenue at matric, have them start reading about how this country was before, then you begin to have more questions. Because that’s what teachers ought to do to young minds: prompt them to think things through so that by the time they arrive at university, they are so curious that for them studying becomes not a chore or something to do for marks, but it becomes an adventure: “I am at this great seat of learning and I’m going to take as much of this learning as I possibly can.” Literature can become part and parcel of that journey. Unless we do it that way, I think we might just be working around in circles. I’ve just finished compiling a collection of short stories. It was commissioned by Oxford University Press, and this is the brief I had: “Find us stories that show Africa not in the usual stereotypes. Find us stories that show young people coming to terms with struggles. Find us stories that show as wide a variety of human stories as this diverse continent produces.” I did twenty of those stories and I put in a number of discussions: pre-reading, post-reading, essays for each story. But I want to say we must actually be in a position to 13

Outcome-based education.

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uplift the literature rather than allow it to remain at a level where students read maybe a quarter of something and they are ready for the examinations. They should actually be able to read these things on their own, and I hope that they look at the book from that perspective. As you prepare these students, they are in a better position to see literature actually as part and parcel of this nation’s fabric. K O: What’s the title of this book? T R : Short Stories from Southern Africa and Beyond. They told me that it’s already in book production. But it is another way by which I’m saying even us academics can’t always complain about the poor quality of students. What are we doing about it? But then the interface becomes us and the publishers and the educational department. How do we then ourselves begin to say: “Come here, study this”? You’d be surprised to look at the number of students who actually fail because they are under-prepared. It’s not as if they didn’t have the money or even then that they are from poorly served schools. Some of them are actually from very well-to-do middle-class families, but they have not been taught to look at literature in a particular way. So they come here, they simply think: “I’m going to do English: read a few books and get out.” But they actually fail, because they have not been prepared. So this is part and parcel of this great challenge that we face. The visual aspect of our lives is also important: television. People are so visual these days that the (written) word is no longer something that they pick up and go along with them. So perhaps we need to also re-energize that centre, have people actually read in order to develop a love for reading rather than wanting to see something visual. You know how over-reliant even literary students are on films about a book? If you start there, you know you have lost them. The point about me is that I am in life writing, but I’m not necessarily teaching it. I’d love to develop an entire course on life writing. KO: Do you yourself write fiction? T R: No, I don’t. I think I should, but I never bring myself around to doing it. But I think maybe, God willing, it might happen, it will happen. I don’t know, but I hope I will be able to. I just sometimes feel perennially critical, which is what we have become: perennial critics of ourselves, but I would love to write something.

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WORKS CITED Chikane, Frank. No Life of My Own: An Autobiography of Frank Chikane (Braamfontein: Skotaville, 1988). De Klerk, Frederik Willem. The Last Trek – A New Beginning: The Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1998). Duiker, K. Sello. The Quiet Violence of Dreams (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001). ——. Thirteen Cents (Cape Town: David Phillip, 2000). Kathrada, Ahmed, & Robert D. Vassen. Letters from Robben Island: A Selection of Ahmed Kathrada’s Prison Correspondence, 1964–1989 (East Lansing: Michigan State U P , 1999). Khulumani Support Group. Khulumani (2009), http://www.khulumani.net (accessed February 2009). Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull (London: Vintage, 1999). Lekota, Patrick. Prison Letters to a Daughter (Bramley: Taurus, 1991). Makhoere, Caesarina Kona. No Child’s Play: In Prison Under Apartheid (London: Women’s Press, 1988). Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk To Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1995). Mangena, Mosibudi. On Our Own: Evolution of Black Consciousness in South Africa/ Azania (Braamfontein: Skotaville, 1989). Mbatha, JC. In Loving Memory of a Century (Scottville: KwaZulu–Natal U P , 2007). Mphahlele, Ezekiel. Down Second Avenue (London: Faber & Faber, 1959). Partnoy, Alicia. The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina (London: Virago, 1987). Pheto, Molefe. And Night Fell: Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in South Africa (London: Heinemann, 1983). Raditlhalo, Samuel Ishmael. “‘Who Am I?’ The Construction of Identity in TwentiethCentury South African Autobiographical Writings in English” (doctoral dissertation, University of Groningen, 2003), http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/arts /2003/s.i.raditlhalo/ (accessed 12 February 2009). Raditlhalo, Samuel Ishmael, ed. Short Stories from Southern Africa and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2008). Sachs, Albie. The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (Cape Town: David Phillip, 1990). Van der Merwe, Chris N., & Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela. Narrating Our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar, 2007).

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Gender Is a Matter of Life and Death — An Interview with Helen Moffett

M I C H E L A B O R Z A G A : I really enjoyed reading your work. ‘Enjoy’ is probably not the right word, given the fact that the articles you gave me deal with rape and rape narratives, but I can say that your keen analysis, the way you make deconstruction of patriarchal structures and ideologies accessible, made me re-consider the concepts of violence, rape, and gender in a very different way. In the book New South African Keywords, you write that the bad news is that post-apartheid South Africa remains a country at war with itself. Only this time it is nothing less than gender civil war. (110)

Could you comment on this? H E L E N M O F F E T T : I wanted to use a very strong statement. I wanted to say something that reflected just how pervasively violent our society is, and not just externally, in terms of being a village waiting for a militia to come galloping over the horizon, but internally, how in our families, in our neighbourhoods, in our streets, in our cars, even in our places of work, we live permanently on red alert. A great deal of the violence that we face every day does not come from anonymous criminals out there, although that’s also a factor, but from members of our own families, people we know, sometimes people we trust, sometimes people we love. The other thing that bothered me tremendously was that we made the transition, almost seamlessly, from a country of institutionalized, infrastructural violence of apartheid – of legislated racism – to a country of institutionalized, almost structurally shaped patriarchal violence. It seemed that the country had switched codes, if you like: instead of © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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pitting black against white, it now seemed that men were pitted against women and children; basically, that the stronger once again terrified over the weak – the apparently weak – needing to practice violence to keep them in their proper place. M B: You even go so far as to say that in this country “gender is a matter of life and death” (114). H M: Absolutely. There are very obvious reasons why I say that, because we are dealing with an H I V /A I D S pandemic, and there are a whole lot of reasons why we have failed so abjectly. One of them is the unforgivable footdragging on the part of the government. I think of Sindiwe Magona saying that if the A I D S pandemic had hit under apartheid and the apartheid government had done what this government had done, the whole world would have stood up and cried: “Genocide!” I’m quoting Sindiwe Magona when I say that; that’s actually in her latest book, Beauty’s Gift, which was short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize for Africa, so I hope that that message is going out there. So yes, there were all of these structural problems, but at the same time a lot of commentators have been wondering why it is that there is a solution to the spread of A I D S – there are fairly simple steps that one can take, and yet the situation does not improve. There is the A B C approach – Abstain, Be Faithful, Use a Condom – but we haven’t even come close to putting it into effect. People like myself immediately say: “Well, something like ‘Abstain, Be Faithful, Use a Condom’ only works in a society where gender relations are fairly equal, even if they are not completely equal.” If it’s accepted that a woman has a right to her own bodily integrity, if it’s accepted that a woman can demand fidelity in a relationship, if that’s even accepted as a norm or an ideal, even if not everybody lives up to that ideal, or not everybody follows the norm, then you can start imposing something like ‘A B C ’. But if women cannot even negotiate consent within their own families, within their own primary relationships, then using concepts like ‘Abstain, Be Faithful, and Use a Condom’ are absolutely meaningless, because you’re preaching to a completely broken model. If women have no power in their intimate family structures, if they cannot possibly ask their husbands either to abstain or use a condom – and they certainly can’t force them to be faithful – then the A B C approach is absolutely pointless. So, that gender power-imbalance is literally

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handing out a death sentence to hundreds of thousands of women on the southern African subcontinent as we are speaking. So that’s the very obvious reason why I say that gender is a matter of life and death, but I feel it’s even deeper than that; that if we accept a model whereby sheer muscle power and any crumb of access to power entitles you to use physical brutality, physical violence against anybody who is subordinate to you, we are never going to survive as a society; we are going to descend into anarchy and chaos. We are not going to have a healthy democracy, we are not going to have a healthy society. We are going to have a criminal justice system that’s going to collapse completely under the weight of the job it’s tackling. If you think about it, a criminal justice system is supposed to protect us from anonymous criminals, the housebreakers and the hijackers, whereas at the moment, what the police are doing is what Margie Orford1 calls “armed social work” (2008), because families are imploding, children are robbing their parents to service their drug addictions, and women are four times more likely to be killed by their boyfriends or husbands than anybody else. If the criminal justice system is trying to monitor that kind of implosion of social gender relations, then we are not going to survive. So it really is a matter of life and death, and that’s why I get so passionate about it. M B: One of the most important points that you make in your writing is that narratives about rape continue to be rewritten as stories about race, rather than gender. Could you comment on this? How did you get to this argument? H M: I got to that point because the models about race didn’t work, they couldn’t explain it, they did not address these absolutely horrendous figures satisfactorily. One in three women can expect to be raped in her lifetime; one in four women can be expected to be beaten by a partner, a boyfriend, or a husband. But it’s not just that, we have the most appalling rates of sexual assault of small children and even infants, to an extent that makes us ashamed to be in the international community. Here we are all over again in the international eye because of these horrendous rates of sexual violence against children, which is particularly sickening. There are questions and answers of course, but the questions asked were: “Why is this happening?” and the answer was always a story about race, and 1

Margie Orford is a South African journalist and author.

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that didn’t answer the question for me satisfactorily. That was why I thought that, no, that cannot possibly be the explanation. Of course, these are exacerbating factors. The argument that I always make in my writing is that poverty, drug addiction, systematic degradation under apartheid, hopelessness, joblessness – all of these are going to exacerbate rates of crime, all have the potential to do that. It’s not inevitable, because you find far poorer communities in which there are no comparable levels of sexual violence, especially not against children and infants. But all of these factors can exacerbate any kind of criminal activity, including sexual criminal activity, but none of them explained what caused it, none of them for me were convincing as a root cause. Because if you say that for instance that the migrant labour system broke down the black family unit – which it did – or that black men were emasculated under apartheid – and yes, they were – it doesn’t explain why, for instance, a white man would rape. And I came to this as a white middle-class woman, as a hotline counsellor in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of the people in South Africa who phoned a hotline then, I would say half of them were white and middle-class. We had very few black African callers, and we had a lot of so-called coloured and “Cape Muslim”2 callers from the outlying Cape Flats. I think that was also a language thing, I was as fluent in Afrikaans as in English, so I could speak to somebody who called and spoke in Afrikaans. I found I was having absolutely identical conversations with women from Bishopscourt, which is the poshest, wealthiest suburb in Cape Town, and women from Bishop Lavis, which is a poor, coloured township, ridden by gangs. So the theories about the degradation of black men under apartheid just didn’t make sense to me. And I also thought: “Well, it’s such a gendered response, because surely black women were also degraded, surely they were also affected, they also suffered the breakdown of family life. Why didn’t they become sexually abhorrent?” So, although there is a grain of truth in it, these theories just didn’t answer the questions. And I thought the reason they are not answering the questions is because they are about race, and that’s because the immediate reaction to every problem in South Africa is to look for a racially based explanatory narrative. So, I was suspicious of that in the 2 ‘Coloured’ and ‘Cape Muslim’ are terms that were used in the era of racial classification to indicate people of mixed race and Muslim descent.

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first place for a whole lot of reasons. I think partly because I came to adulthood under apartheid, and I was sick and tired of hearing: “Well, they behaved like this, because they ...” I was sick and tired of hearing arguments about: “But it’s my culture!” I remember an episode from when I was young and foolish, and we were still trying to develop a sexual harassment code at university. When I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s there was no such thing, there were no codes of conduct for the students at the University of Cape Town. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, we started trying to develop them, and I still remember a young black man in the law faculty standing up and saying: “But what if it’s my culture to beat my woman?” And I said to him: “Well, it’s in my culture to slap you in leg irons and sell you to the nearest slaving ship,” which did not go down very well. But the point I was making was that the minute you talk about race, it gets dressed up as a justification: “Oh well, it’s my culture,” and lots of appalling things are done in the name of culture, and I think that they rarely are truly cultural. You can take female genital mutilation/cutting for example: that’s actually about keeping patriarchal systems of power in place, and that was where all roads led back, to grossly unequal systems of power that kept power in the hands of a selected few who were extremely anxious to hang on to that power. And that meant that we had to look at class and gender. And I have to admit, I don’t look much at class; I leave that analysis to others. I simply thought that the obvious place to start looking for a root cause of sexual violence, an aetiology, was in the construction of gender, because sexual violence is considered a gender issue. Until a few years ago, it was considered a “women’s issue”, and now of course, you find that the field of masculinity studies is starting to investigate this. So, this is clearly where it belongs. But I was just sick and tired of the arguments about race. They let white men off the hook, they can unwittingly reinforce racist narratives, and they’re deeply gendered without problematizing or questioning that gender basis at all, because it collapses black men and women into the same category, and it invisibilizes the women, because: “Oh, that is the way the men behave,” but nobody looks at why women behave differently when subject to the same pressures.

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M B: You coined an interesting expression, “the breast cancer model of rape.” I think this metaphor is so apt, not just in South Africa but also in Europe, where this discourse is very much present as well. H M: I remember being aware of this when I lived in London for two years, and in the United States for several years. M B: How does this model work? H M: I should maybe go back a bit and explain something about the theoretical tools that I work with. This project began as a study of rape narratives and everybody immediately thought, like you, that I was looking into fiction. And I said, no, I’m not interested in looking at fiction. I’m interested in looking at narratives found in the public sphere and in the public discourse. I wasn’t so much interested in videogames, or movies, or Hollywood, or television, or ads; I wanted to look at apparently neutral civil society spaces. I was interested in what government initiatives had to say about sexual violence and rape, I was interested in what N G O s and the crisis organizations themselves had to say in their own narratives, and I was very interested in media representations that followed a language of neutrality, even if they weren’t really neutral. I was thinking, what is the accepted discourse? And as a result, I was looking at patterns of language and I was doing grammatical deconstruction. One of the first things I noticed in public talk about sexual violence is the passive voice is used, with the subject missing, and the minute that happens, the perpetrator is erased. And when the perpetrator is erased, you are immediately left with an act of fate construction. If you say: “I was raped,” it’s exactly the same narrative and grammatical and linguistic construction as saying: “I was hit by a bus,” “I was struck by lightning,” “I got breast cancer.” Well, first I just used it as the “act of fate construction,” and then I realized that if you look more closely, it’s not the same as “I got hit by a bus” or “I got hit by lightning,” because that really is “I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.” If you look more closely at public discourses, especially the ones that we grew up with, and that’s in very recent memory, they were more like: “Make sure you’re always aware of your surroundings. Don’t ever go out alone at night. Drive with your car doors locked.” And now, this is exactly the same sort of crime preventative language you will find in Europe and in the U S : “Always be aware. Carry your car keys in your hand like a weapon. Don’t go out and get drunk in a public

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place.” And I find myself giving the same instructions, for instance, to foreign students who come here. I say: “Whatever you do, don’t go to a party, get completely drunk, and then try to catch public transport home.” But the problem about using that kind of language is that I found it echoed exactly: “Check your breasts for lumps once a month. Go and see the gynaecologist every six months.” There was this slight echo of: “This could happen through your own carelessness.” And that’s why the breast cancer model metaphor works for me in a whole number of levels. First of all, it implies that it’s an act of fate construction. This is something nasty and possibly lethal that happens to women’s bodies. There is no perpetrator, he – and it’s always a he – is completely wiped off the scene. So, it’s just like a raw cancer cell: it just suddenly starts, it comes from nowhere. So, number one: it’s an act of fate construction. Number two: there is a slight aura of blame. I don’t know if you remember the Sex and the City episode where Samantha wants to have a breast enlargement and they find she has a breast lump and she’s told by her doctor that she has breast cancer. She asks: “How did I get it?” And they say: “Well, you know, it’s more common in women who don’t have children.” And she replied: “Are you implying that this is my fault?” However subtle, there is the slight message that if you had been paying attention, if you hadn’t gone out and had a couple of drinks in a public place, if you hadn’t decided to take a shortcut home across a field on your way back to your shack, or your township home or whatever, if you had just been more careful, this wouldn’t have happened. Thirdly, it works because of the message that you can actually take all of those precautions, and it can still happen to you. You can take all of these precautions, but you’re still not safe. So there is this uneasiness, this fear: by having a woman’s body, you are a target. And fourthly, it works because there is something squeamish and embarrassing about it. It’s something that only women speak about; it’s something that men look away from, or they’re uncomfortable with, unless it happens to their wife, or their girlfriend, or their daughter, or their sister, or their mother. But the point is that as we know, men get breast cancer too, but you don’t hear them being told to check their breasts once a month for lumps or to visit a gynaecologist every six months, or to make sure they eat enough broccoli. So, the model worked for me on all of those levels. It made rape squarely a woman’s problem and something men are uncomfortable talking about. It’s

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something bad that happens to a woman’s body; sometimes it is her fault, and sometimes even if she took all the precautions, it was going to happen anyway. And I think that you are quite correct, I saw exactly the same thing in the U K and the U S as well. M B: This is also true for the process of recovery where ironically the victim, not the perpetrator, feels ashamed and guilty. H M: Exactly, because she knows that people will blame her. It does immediately trigger that narrative. You often see breast cancer survivor models or narratives that fit models and narratives about rape: “I did everything right: I never smoked, I checked my breasts every single month. It only showed up on a routine mammogram. I’d lived a healthy life.” And I’m thinking, “Why are you telling us that you lived a healthy life?” Well, I suppose in the case of breast cancer perhaps it has relevance, but you get exactly the same discourse around rape, and there is the sense that if you chain-smoke and never let a green vegetable pass your lips, you’re asking for breast cancer, and if you go to parties in a short skirts and drink and dance on the table tops, you’re asking to get raped. It’s quite similar. M B: In your writing you speak of the threat of sexual violence as a form of social control. What does this mean then for a woman living in South Africa today, especially in view of your wonderful constitution and the fact that you have a lot of women in parliament? H M: I know, on paper we have these extraordinarily optimistic gender-equity figures, and this wonderful constitution. We have a higher percentage of women in parliament than just about anywhere in the world, and so on. I’m glad you ask that question because it’s actually a question about class. I feel that I don’t have time to look properly at class, because I am quite rhetorical in my strategies and my argument. I’m trying to make a point, I’m trying to make people shift paradigms. I don’t sit back and do a detached analysis. So, that’s partly why I leave class out of it. But the meanings of that social control are different; they are mediated by all sorts of things. They are mediated by a woman’s class status, her educational level, her financial and marital status, her family standing, her race, her religion, her language, her age; all of those things will come into play in terms of how it affects them. I remember an English lecturer of mine years ago giving one of the first feminist lectures I ever heard at university. She said:

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“I’m white and middle-class. I don’t have to risk public transport. If I get raped I have all sorts of resources available to me that my working-class black female counterpart doesn’t have: not least education to process it, a language with which to discuss it, telephones, access to doctors, counsellors, comfort, I can even take myself away for a little holiday.” So, that form of social control operates very differently for very different women, but it’s largely mediated, I think, through more class than anything else. And of course, as for our woman in parliament, I’ve written some very bitter commentary elsewhere about the fact that a pair of ovaries does not translate into a concern for women’s standing or their equality in society. And, in fact, I think of many of those women as ovaries in a pair of trousers; these women have bought into patriarchal systems of power, because it gives them the same access to power, the same access to systems of patronage, systems of enrichment, and systems of prestige, that their male counterparts get. But the form of social control operates for them as well, which is why my principal theory is about the fact that social control exists for a lot of middleclass women in the private dimension only. For a lot of working-class women it exists from the moment they wake up in the morning till their last thought at night, and no amount of equality in the constitution can change that. They are maybe rape survivors who are HIV-positive and agonized about what to do about their four children who are about to be orphans, their father having long since pushed off, and they are in a rural village somewhere in Limpopo, and they are trying to grow food, and the constitution is just a piece of paper for them. But I think for middle-class women there is the sense that you can go out and have a role in public life as long as you maintain your subordinate status. And there are very, very few female parliamentarians who are actually feminists or who insist on equality in the private sphere. That, of course, is very hard to prove and my impression of that is largely anecdotal and based on the parliamentarians that I actually know, or know of, or have some knowledge of their private family life. But the point is that this experience of social control breaks down in a lot of very complicated ways, it’s not one blanket sense of “Big brother is watching you.” But if you want to see it in action, you need to see a group of students who are all middle-class and educated, some of whom are South African and some of whom are American and European, and then immediately you see the difference: the young American

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women come out here and truly behave like equal citizens, and, as a result, they take the most appalling risks, which have me clutching my head in horror. I see that my South African students are far more guarded in the life choices they make. They are far more careful, they are far more defensive – even though they have freedom. It’s a very interesting question, and it’s something that I could write another entire paper on. M B: Particularly in your article “The Rhetoric of Rape and Racial Borrowings: Narratives of Coercion and Co-option in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” you talk about this whole myth that is linked to rape, from body illiteracy to the construction of the rapist, you deconstruct and you destroy that myth in a way. H M: Yes. Unfortunately it’s just about impossible to put it in terms that are anything but very, very blunt. That’s what I call ‘the myth of the rampant penis’ and ‘the myth of the perpetually receptive vagina’. The point that I make is that, if you had to look at a whole group of men and women all mixed up together, you wouldn’t find the same body types. You’d find tall women, strong women, fat women, small women, thin women, weak women, and you’d find tall men, strong men, fat men, thin men, small men, and weak men. The point is that there is a myth that men are always stronger and can always overpower women – to start with. So, we’re designated victims because of our biological sex, which does render us more vulnerable up to a point. I make the point that there is one more way to rape us, that we have one more intimate orifice that men don’t have. So we can be violated in a way that men can’t be violated, but it doesn’t mean that men can’t be violated. Men are portrayed as inviolate, unless they are feminized – which is fascinating. If they are pretty or they are young and in prison, they are feminized, and to avoid attracting unwanted sexual attention in an all-male environment, a man has to be macho. It’s all about a display of gender; it’s not about the biological reality at all. And then, on the other hand, a lot of my research is about the fact that women’s bodies are not necessarily receptive to sexual violence: raping somebody is hard, difficult work. In my research, I sort of blame the fact that we have this body illiteracy. We think that men always have these rampant erections, and we assume that the rapist has a rampant erection, and that he successfully performs a complete sexual act, whereas any trauma doctor, any

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international researcher would tell you that the majority of rapists do not ejaculate, which means that, clearly, this is not a very satisfactory physiological release mechanism. At the same time, women are seen as these pliable, vulnerable, quite literally open victims, whereas that’s not necessarily the reality, either. And the point that I make is that you can switch the choreography around: all you need is a blunt instrument and an orifice to commit rape. The orifice doesn’t have to belong to any particular gender and neither does the blunt instrument. So, any woman with a gun or a stick can presumably rape any man who has a mouth or an anus. And you can see why people get so very upset when I talk about this. So, I said, “Okay, why then do only men rape? And why is it, that only women are raped, unless you are in an all-male environment? And then why, if you are going to rape a man in an all-male environment, would you feminize him?” And it’s not just about weakness, they are actually feminized. In Pollsmoor Prison “the wifies” – that’s what they call men or young boys who are designated for rape – these “little wives” are made to put on aprons. Why would you do that if it is not profoundly about the need to gender the role play? So, this is probably the most controversial part of my research; it makes people very upset. And, I have to say, I’m not encouraging this behaviour at all; I’m pointing out that we’re tied to this notion of the sexual choreography, the sexual performance of rape, in a way that’s completely unrealistic – especially if you look at rape victims’ or rape survivors’ narratives. You immediately see that rape is not about just a particularly violent act of sexual intercourse. I had great fun when I was presenting this to journalists in Florida, because I was explaining to men what happened in a gynaecological exam. And they didn’t know what happened; they had no idea what a speculum was, or what it was used for. And I said that if you want to look at the cervix, you can’t just bend down and take a look down the tunnel, because it’s closed for business, and you can’t open it voluntarily. You have to be cranked open with this horrible metal or plastic device. And all of the women were wincing and crossing their legs. And I asked: “Women tell me, is this ever a comfortable experience?” And they all said: “No.” And the men were all looking absolutely hor-

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rified, and these were married men, men who’d often been present when their wives had had babies. They had absolutely no idea. So, that’s what I mean when I talk about body illiteracy – culminating in my famous line that you need to explain to teenage boys what rape feels like: “Now, imagine having your legs held apart and being repeatedly kicked in the balls. And that’s what it feels like.” But they are not told, which is why eighty percent of boys in one particular Medical Research Council study truly thought that if the woman would just relax during rape, she would start to feel pleasure. That’s what I mean when I talk about complete body illiteracy, which is why it is important to find teenage boys and say: “Okay, I know your friends all say that this is a lot of fun and it’s fun for the women too, but this is what it actually feels like!” That would stop it, I think. M B: By looking at the way rape is constructed in public discourse, it seems that only some narratives come to the surface and are actually told. Only some rapes are constructed as ‘real’ rapes and there are others that are ‘not so real’. H M: Yes, that bothers me enormously. MB: Mostly only when the act is accompanied by extreme collateral violence, or when a woman whose body is taboo for social reasons is affected, is the rape perceived as ‘real’, while there are other narratives of rape that just cannot be told. H M: What has bothered me in South Africa for years, and this is a history of our legislation as well, is that rape is increasingly not seen, or understood, or recognized as rape. This comes from my own history of listening to women describe what they thought was just really, really bad, non-consensual sex. And I would say: “Non-consensual sex is rape.” And they would answer: “No, he didn’t use a gun, he didn’t beat me up.” And I’d say: “Wait a minute: but he forced you.” – “Yes, but he was very sorry afterwards. And I’m on the pill anyway.” I would ask: “Well, have you thought about going to the police?” – “Good heavens, no!” Meanwhile these women would be very, very distressed and upset, but they wouldn’t see their experience as criminal behaviour. The question is: what kind of rape is seen as rape? For one, it had to be a stranger. It’s been very, very difficult to get a narrative of acquaintance rape or date rape accepted in this country. Almost impossible. When you have con-

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sented to be in the company of somebody socially, it seems you have already consented to everything. And that seems to be true for much of Anglophone Africa: when I was in Uganda for a F E M R I T E 3 workshop, a Tanzanian woman wrote a very moving short story based on the true tale of a woman who is chased through the streets of a village by a rapist. She hides in a house and he comes to the house, and says: “Send out the woman,” and the people in the house enter into a debate as to whether or not they must hand her over to him, even though she is begging them, terrified and pleading. And some are saying: “No. Maybe he means to do her evil.” And the other half are saying: “Well, maybe she has made promises to him, and now she must fulfil them.” And the implication is very clearly that if she had made any sort of promise, she couldn’t be raped. The fact that she was begging and pleading and fleeing and hiding didn’t count. The idea is that you enter into some sort of social contract with somebody, whereafter they no longer need to seek your consent to have sex with you. If you think about it, if you were married or in a relationship and your boyfriend said to you every single time: “May I have your consent?” you would think he was crazy. So there is that sort of understanding, but the result is that you get a narrative where only a stranger can rape you. You can only prove that you’ve been raped, that it was a rape as opposed to non-consensual sex, if you have injuries. Twenty years ago, a South African police sergeant was asked: “How do you know if a woman is telling the truth when she comes with a complaint of rape?” And he said: “Oh, if her face has been half bashed in with a brick, I’ll believe her.” And nothing has much changed since then. You have to come with blood, and the perpetrator needs to be a stranger, and preferably you need to have been threatened with a weapon. And then, as I said, the other thing is social taboo: just about the only form of rape that was ever reported under apartheid were the very rare cases when a black man was stupid enough to rape a white woman, which outside of criminal gang activity is still extremely rare, and even then it’s largely a classdriven behaviour, and it’s linked very explicitly to other forms of criminal behaviour. But the notion is that if a white woman gets raped by a black man, then of course it’s a major social taboo, and, of course, that’s what led to lynchings in the Deep South. But you would be a more credible witness if you 3

Ugandan N G O that supports women writers.

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went to the police as an Indian woman having been raped by a Zulu man, or as a white woman having been raped by a so-called coloured man, and so on. And where this leaves poor black women is, of course, right at the bottom of the pile. M B: You mention Charlene Smith4 and Alison5 as examples of accepted rape narratives. H M: Yes, exactly. These are both women who became famous in South Africa for speaking out about and surviving a particularly brutal rape and murder attempt in Alison’s case, and rape by a housebreaker in Charlene’s case. In Alison’s case, there was no way she could have hidden what had happened, because she made headlines for being the most injured person ever to survive. She made history for coming back from the murder attempt. When she arrived at the hospital she had no blood pressure whatsoever. They thought she was dead, but for some extraordinary reason her heart was still beating. They’d never ever seen anybody who had their throat cut that badly, live. So she was already sort of marked out as extraordinary, because she should have died and she didn’t. And then, interestingly enough, she was attacked by two white men and she was a white woman, but they came from completely different class strata. The men who attacked her were already petty criminals, they had a long list of previous convictions, they were on drugs at the time, there was a great deal of speculation that they had to be Satanists, because they didn’t just cut her throat, they stabbed her numerous times. It was this rare, gory story that made the headlines for all of these reasons. So this poor woman had more or less no choice but to come out and be this public model of a survivor. And she was, she became a very good spokesperson, but she fitted the model perfectly: she was a former head girl, she was well-spoken in English, she was beautiful, she was young, she was heroic, she’d survived this extraordinary crime and they said it could only have been an effort of will, and she told this heroic story, which ended in her marrying, and now of course she’s had a baby, even though the stab wounds to her abdomen were so bad that first they had told her she would never have a child. 4 5

See Smith, Proud of Me. Thamm, I Have Life.

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Everything about this story is ‘attractive’. It was a ‘monster’ that raped her, it was not your average woman landing up at the police station in the township saying: “My husband raped me,” or “My ex-boyfriend raped me,” or “My uncle raped me,” or “My teacher raped me.” She would have got a very different response, she would have been perceived differently. And then in Charlene Smith’s case, she had a more ordinary experience in that she was raped by a housebreaker who was black (she was white). But she decided to go public about it immediately. She was a journalist for the Mail and Guardian, and she started writing a weekly column on how she was coping and how she was doing with everything: the struggle to get A R V s,6 the suicidal thoughts, the fact that the police lost the evidence and lost the documents and sent her from pillar to post, the fact that her medical aid refused to pay for the A R V s – she put it all out there, and she did valuable work for rape survivors. She talked about how sick the prophylactic A R V s she had to take made her feel; she talked about the incredible expense of having to increase home security on a freelance journalist salary. She basically took a very common story in South Africa, and she put it all out there in the public, and she turned it into a book. And it was very brave, but once again: she was articulate, she was a journalist, people were used to her telling the truth; she’d been reporting in the Mail and Guardian for twenty years, she’d been raped by a black stranger. And I said over and over again that if Alison had been raped on a date, or if Charlene had met this handsome black man in a bar, and invited him to her place for coffee, and then he’d raped her, would it have been accepted or tolerated as a public rape narrative? You just have to compare these stories to the Zuma-rape narrative, where there was a prior relationship, where the alleged rape took place in the family home, where she stayed the night – all of those things counted against her. Now he was found “not guilty”, so legally one must say that no rape took place, but the point is that it’s almost impossible to prove rape in a case of a narrative like that; as well as all of the other odds we have stacked up against you, it’s not an acceptable rape narrative. And that was how my work started, with the question: What is accepted as a rape narrative in this country and

6

Antiretroviral Drugs.

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what isn’t? And I found out that what is accepted excludes eighty-five percent of the rapes that take place. M B: In general, psychologists seem to prefer the word ‘survivor’ to the word ‘victim’ in connection with rape. In your writing, you’ve made the point that you are not always happy with that word, either. How come? H M: No. I’m very glad you ask that question, because I used to be terribly politically correct and use the word ‘survivor’. Interestingly enough, the people in South Africa who have shown by far the most interest in my work have been the medical fraternity. I’ve worked with a lot of trauma surgeons, paediatricians, gynaecologists, community health workers – those are the sorts of people who are interested in my research. For several months, I met with a wonderful woman about once a fortnight. She was at Groote Schuur Hospital in the community health department. She lectured in public health, and her name was Sine Duma, and she said to me: “Look, I see these women who come in. They are not survivors, they are victims. We help them become survivors.” She said: “If a woman comes in who has been gang-raped, who’s been so badly damaged, that she won’t, for example, be able to have children, or she has to wear a colostomy bag, or she has to have bladder surgery, or she’s going to carry scars for the rest of her life, and she’s perhaps missed the window period, and she’s H I V positive, and she’s going to die a horrible death” – because remember when we started on this project, A R V s were not generally available – “how can I possibly call that woman a survivor? She’s not a survivor, she’s a victim. However, I don’t see the labels of a victim as permanent. My job is to make sure that a potential victim becomes an actual survivor.” I found that helpful and she also pointed out to me that some women generally are victims: all of the millions of women who are victims of rape homicides, they don’t survive. And every woman who actually just physically lives through the process may have survived in some ways, but she need not have survived in others. I immediately thought of two rape survivors that I’d known for years, and this is something that is recognized in the literature in Europe: sometimes rape survivors become exceptionally obese, and I know two women like that. They are both relatively young women, one already has congestive heart failure, the other one developed diabetes at the age of thirty. They have both shaved at least twenty years off their life spans, and neither of

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them had ever gone back to their normal lives. You get women like this; they never regain their confidence, they never regain their health. They live, but their lives are never the same again. And I think to call them ‘survivors’ is just too glib. They are not necessarily ‘victims’, but I think that the minute you are raped you are a victim, even though I’ve had rape survivors disagree with me. They say: “Oh, no. From the minute of being raped, I decided I was going to survive this,” but the point is that you have to make a decision to be a survivor, and then you need a whole lot of help from a whole lot of systems: health, social, criminal, legal, to become a survivor. So, I see it as a plastic process, whereby a lot of rape victims are unfortunately exactly that. The ideal is hopefully to get all women who are raped – and men, and children – to become survivors. M B: Let’s turn to the Black Consciousness Movement. You write that “Black Consciousness is a vital way-station for post-apartheid South Africans” (New South African Keywords, 107). It is also a point that Mamphela Ramphele makes in her recent book Laying Ghosts to Rest. What was the influence Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like had on you as a feminist? H M: Let me start with Steve Biko. How old was I when I read I Write What I Like? I was in my very early twenties, and it just set my mind on fire. It was the first time I realized that you did not have to change to fit into society, society needed to change to fit you. Because, of course, Biko argued against the liberal trajectory, which is that you join the white man’s world on his terms. And I realized that all my life I’d been working to join a man’s world on his terms, that I wanted to be equal to men, and it was like that old little button: ‘Women who want to be equal to men lack ambition’. That wasn’t going to change anything. If I simply wanted the same access to power and privilege that men had, I wasn’t changing anything about the social structure of society. And that is exactly the point that Steve Biko made: if you just had a whole lot of black people aping white people, aspiring to a certain standard of dress, behaviour, education, business principles, and family structures, you wouldn’t really change the basic underlying contempt for blackness at all, you would only ever be trying to evolve away from it. I thought that that’s exactly how I feel about being a woman. It’s not enough for women to get equal pay, and equal education, and equal, decent healthcare, and decent nurseries at work – sort of the Scandinavian model – that’s not nearly enough. You ac-

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tually need to turn the whole model on its head and say: “No, we need a society that actually flattens out hierarchies in the first place.” And for that you have to start from a position of profound self-love. You have to say: “I am fine as I am. I do not have to aspire to be anything I am not. I do not have to aspire to the trappings of whiteness if I am black.” I was reading all of this, and I was just simply replacing biological terms, ‘male’ and ‘female’, every time he wrote about ‘black’ and ‘white’. I was completely convinced by his argument about race, but I thought it worked for everybody. It was such a liberating document. It literally freed my mind. But the sadness I feel is that most liberation movements in this country didn’t stop there long enough and I am convinced that that is at the root of an enormous amount of the problems we have at the moment. If you have deep intrinsic self-love, and a deep intrinsic belief that you can do anything as you are, then you don’t need to wear designer suits, and drive a four-by-four, and make sure that your wife drives the latest B M W model, and that your mistress drives the latest Polo Playa, and that your children each drive the latest little hatchback car. You don’t need to aspire to the membership of the golf club, or to be a celebrity, or any of the false gods we seem to have been sold. I think Nelson Mandela was referring to this in a statement he made in 1994 as part of the celebrations. He referred to the notion: “Just as I am I can change the world. I don’t necessarily have to become anything; that broken as I am, just with what I have, liberation can come.” I’ve got it wrong, but it is something like that. And I thought that that was going back to Steve Biko and Black Consciousness: the notion that you are never ever going to deal with an underlying sense of inferiority, which must have been left behind, whether it’s after millennia of patriarchy, or centuries of racism, or centuries of homophobia. I don’t care what it was, but unless you go back and you say: “This is who I am, and I am proud. Say it out loud, I’m black and I’m proud” – or whichever it is, if you don’t go back and say: “I’m fine as I am, and if the society outside has a problem with my race, or my gender, or my religion, or my culture, or my language, it must change, not me. And I’ll put my energy into changing society, not changing myself.” It is a crude model and it does reverse the binary, but it seems to have been tossed out the window; I think it’s been replaced with the degraded systems,

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like B E E , 7 an affirmative action that doesn’t actually understand it, that underlines a sense of inferiority, as in: “You couldn’t do it, unless you played the race card, or unless you played the ‘previously disadvantaged’ card.” I think Steve Biko is spinning in his grave. M B: Helen, my last question concerns literature: At the moment the literature that is coming out of South Africa is very much concerned with trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and memory, but it also looks at violence in very different ways. How can literature really be counter-discourse to the kinds of narratives that you looked at? And what can literature do in these terms? H M: What can literature do? Literature can do everything, and literature can do nothing. But that’s not very helpful. If you think about it, we’ve always had a tradition of political literature in South Africa. Black Consciousness, which we’ve just been talking about, led to the rise of overtly political poetry in the 1970s. The problem with overtly political literature is that it’s often very bad for the plain and simple reason that it’s a polemic, and readers, listeners, and audiences don’t like being lectured to. But, nonetheless, we have a history of political literature. And once again it depends on the quality of the actual literature. Beautiful writing, even if it is overtly political, can be incredibly powerful. If you are a feminist, you say that the personal is political and the political is personal. Personal stories do convey political messages, and that’s exactly what Sindiwe Magona has done in her latest book Beauty’s Gift. It starts out like a typical “chick lit” story: these five middle-class black women friends argue and gossip about their husbands and their children, they meet in middleclass restaurants, they wear middle-class clothing, they have middle-class jobs, and they exchange expensive presents on each other’s birthdays. It could be Sex and the City but set in Gugulethu and Muizenberg until one of them dies of A I D S . And then Sindiwe just launches into a polemic, but because it’s also a strong story, it works. So, a lot depends on the skill of the writer, and some writers don’t write because they have a political agenda. Sindiwe did, and she does, and she was overt about it. Some people combine the two. Margie Orford, for example, 7

Black Economic Empowerment.

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writes crime novels, because she says, it’s an act of resistance against the violence in her society that she can no longer stand. Margie was a political activist, she was detained under apartheid, she is a patron of the organization Rape Crisis, but she also writes crime novels featuring a strong woman detective. Sarah Lotz has just written a book, Exhibit A, about a true case of rape: a woman who was raped in police cells, but she’s chosen to frame it as quite a humorous legal drama. It is very thrilling and it is very moving, but it’s a piece of commercial fiction. So, you get all of these numerous treatments, numerous genres, and personally I think the more commercial the story is, and the stronger the story, the more likely it is to have an impact on public consciousness. But what I do know is that all sorts of stories are being told, that couldn’t have been told ten years ago, sometimes not even five years ago. And the other thing that I’m finding, and it’s a very small trend, but it is happening, is that when people tackle sexual violence at the heart of a story, they quite often consult an expert. So, for example, when Andrew Brown wrote Coldsleep Lullaby, a thriller which turns on rape-homicide throughout – rape is the central motif in that entire novel, there are several rapes that take place – he specifically wanted somebody to make sure that he was not reinforcing negative or stereotypical myths about rape. He wanted to challenge damaging, or stereotypical, or unhelpful myths. That was also a reason Sarah Lotz wanted me to look at her manuscript. So, there is a trend, and for example, P O W A , People Opposed to Women Abuse, brings out an annual anthology, where they encourage submissions of short stories and poetry from people who have survived violence. They often have themes, and very often it’s very specifically women who’ve survived sexual violence; one year I think it was women who were H I V positive. So, we don’t flinch away from violence anymore. It used to be so swept under the carpet, whereas now we write about so many more things, and we write about all kinds of trauma, all kinds of post-traumatic stress syndrome, whether it’s what happened to gay white men in the army during conscription, or to young black rent boys in Green Point – think of K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams. All of these lids have been lifted. There are now novels like When A Man Cries,8 and there are stories like Father Michael’s Lottery,9 8

See Mahala, When A Man Cries.

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which is specifically about A I D S and A R V s. So, there are multiple fictional narratives about trauma, and some of them are worth a dozen academic papers that I could write. I don’t have to say anything about A I D S and gender any more to black middle-class women – I would just give them Sindiwe’s book [smiles]. M B: I think that’s a wonderful way to conclude this interview. Thank you very much.

WORKS CITED Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings, ed. Aelred Stubbs (London: Heinemann, 1987). Brown, Andrew. Coldsleep Lullaby (Cape Town: Zebra, 2005). Duiker, K. Sello. The Quiet Violence of Dreams (Cape Town: Kwela, 2001). Lotz, Sarah. Exhibit A (Cape Town: Penguin, 2009). Mahala, Siphiwo. When A Man Cries (Scottville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2008). Magona, Sindiwe. Beauty’s Gift (Cape Town: Kwela, 2008). Moffett, Helen. “Gender,” in New South African Keywords, ed. Nick Shepherd & Steven Robins (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008): 104–15. ——. “The Rhetoric of Rape and Racial Borrowings: Narratives of Coercion and Cooption in Post-Apartheid South Africa” (work in progress; do not cite without permission). Ramphele, Mamphela. Laying Ghosts to Rest: Dilemmas of the Transformation in South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2008). Shepherd, Nick, & Steven Robins, ed. New South African Keywords (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008). Smith, Charlene. Proud of Me: Speaking Out Against Sexual Violence and H I V (London: Sandton, 2001). Steyn, Johan. Father Michael’s Lottery (Scottville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2005). Thamm, Marianne. I Have Life: Alison’s Journey as Told to Marianne Thamm (Cape Town: Penguin, 2002). Zebra. “Andrew Brown Opens Up at the Launch of Street Blues,” Zebra: Book Southern Africa (8 August 2008), http://zebra.book.co.za/blog/2008/08/08 /andrew-brown-opens-up-at-the-launch-of-street-blues (accessed 13 April 2009).

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See Steyn, Father Michael’s Lottery.

Biographical Notes

N E V I L L E A L E X A N D E R is the Director of P R A E S A (Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa). He has done much pioneering work in the field of language policy and planning in South Africa since the early 1980s via organizations such as the National Language Project, P R A E S A , as well as the Language Plan Task Group ( L A N G T A G ) process. He has been influential with respect to language-policy development with various government departments, including Education. His most recent work has focused on the tension between multilingualism and the hegemony of English in the public sphere. He is currently a member of the Interim Governing Board of the African Academy of Languages. A N D R É B R I N K is a poet, novelist, essayist and teacher. His novel, A Dry White Season (1979), was made into a film, while An Instant in the Wind (1976) and Rumours of Rain (1978) were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The Other Side of Silence (2002) won a Commonwealth Writers regional award for Best Book in 2003. André Brink has been made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters and awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. His latest novels are Praying Mantis (2005) and The Blue Door (2007). In 2009 he published a memoir: A Fork in the Road. A L E X B O R A I N E founded the International Centre for Transitional Justice and served as its president and chairperson. From 1998 until 2001 he served as professor of law at New York University. In 1995 Dr Boraine was ap-

pointed deputy chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was a member of the South African Parliament from 1974 to 1986, and served as president of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa from © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

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1970 to 1972. Dr Boraine holds degrees from Rhodes University, Oxford Uni-

versity, and Drew University, as well as six honorary doctorates from universities around the world. His widely-known book, A Country Unmasked was published in November 2000. In October 2000, he was awarded the President’s Medal for Human Rights in Italy. His biography A Life in Transition came out in 2008. M A X I N E C A S E ’s first published work, a short story called “Homing Pigeons,” was included in African Compass: New Writing from Southern Africa 2005.

This book was the result of a short story competition adjudicated by J.M. Coetzee, and she was one of the finalists in the competition. All We Have Left Unsaid, her debut novel, won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book in Africa in 2007. It was also the joint winner of the Herman Charles Bosman Award in the same year. Maxine Case has written for several newspapers and magazines including Real Simple, Reader’s Digest, O, The Oprah Magazine, True Love and others. She works as the Senior Writer for a nonprofit organization focused on urban regeneration, but will be leaving shortly to take up two writing residencies in the U S A . D O N F O S T E R is a professor at the University of Cape Town’s Department of Psychology. He has published widely on issues of mental health and violence, e.g., Detention and Torture in South Africa in 1987 and The Theatre of Violence: Narratives of Protagonists in the South African Conflict in 2005. His research interests include social psychology, collective action and political violence, as well as intergroup relations and racism. M I R I A M F R E D E R I C K S is the coordinator of the Political Violence Programme at the Trauma Centre in Cape Town, where she has been working as a qualified social worker since 2003. In addition, she serves on the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture. A N N I E G A G I A N O is the author of essays and books on English literature. She is Emeritus Professor at the English Department of the Stellenbosch University, where she has been lecturing since 1969. Her areas of specialization (in teaching) are Shakespeare studies, African prose fiction in English, and twentieth-century English poetry. She is the editor of the African Library at LitNet.

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P U M L A G O B O D O – M A D I K I Z E L A is associate professor of psychology at

the University of Cape Town. She served as a Human Rights Violations Committee Member of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Between 1998 and 2001 she was on an extended research fellowship at Harvard University. Dr Gobodo–Madikizela has been the recipient of many grants and awards, including an honorary Doctor of Law from Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts. She has been nominated for social responsibility awards, such as the 2004 Reconciliation Award in South Africa, and 2004 Best Woman of the Year in the Education category in South Africa. She is the author of A Human Being Died That Night: A Story of Forgiveness, which was awarded the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction and the Christopher Award for adult nonfiction. A S H R A F K A G E E is professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University. He

has recently completed the Master of Public Health (M P H ) degree at the University of Cape Town. He has published several articles on H I V /A I D S as well as on torture and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. S I N D I W E M A G O N A is an author, poet, playwright, actor, and inspirational speaker. For twenty years she worked for the United Nations’ Department of Public Information in New York. She has received numerous awards in recognition of her work in women’s issues, the plight of children, and the fight against apartheid and racism, including an honorary doctorate from Hartwick College. In 1997 she was a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow in the non-fiction category. Her novels Mother to Mother (1998) and Beauty’s Gift (2008) attracted international attention. S U S A N M A N N is the author of One Tongue Singing (2004) and Quarter Tones (2007). Her first novel was translated into French and Swedish and

was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Awards. It also won a University of Cape Town Merit Award. Her second novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. She has taught in Paris and in Cape Town.

H E L E N M O F F E T T is a freelance academic, writer, editor and trainer, specializing in conducting writing support workshops for academics and researchers. She received her PhD from the English Department at the University of Cape Town, and was an Honorary Research Fellow at U C T ’s African Gender In-

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stitute for five years. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, Mount Holyoke College and Emory University. She is the author of five books and numerous articles and essays. She is currently finishing a book on the scourge of rape that haunts the young South African nation, in which she explores the complex links between intimately enforced hierarchies of apartheid, and the devastating tide of sexual violence against women, children and even men. T L H A L O R A D I T L H A L O teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He has published in and outside of South Africa and his academic interests are African, South African, and African-American literatures, with an abiding interest in postcolonial and cultural studies. He will join the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s Department of English shortly. V A N D E R M E R W E teaches Afrikaans and Dutch Literature at the University of Cape Town and is the author of various articles and books on literature. His current research focuses on narrative and trauma, and he is the co-author, with Pumla Gobodo–Madikizela, of Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma (2007). He has lectured at various universities in Western and Central Europe and in the United States. For his radio talks on South African Literature he received the Book Journalist of the Year award in 1994, and for his contribution to Afrikaans literary criticism the Gustav Preller Prize in 2009.

CHRIS

Z O Ë W I C O M B ’ S first book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, gained her an international reputation. David’s Story (1987) received the 2002 M-Net

Literary Award. Her work has been translated into Dutch, Swedish, French, Italian and German. She has also written short stories published in numerous anthologies, as well as critical articles on South African writing and postcolonial theory and writing. She now lives in Glasgow where she is Professor in the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde University. She is also Visiting Professor Extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University.

THE TRAUMA CENTRE

FOR SURVIVORS OF VIOLENCE AND TORwas launched in July 1993. Its initial focus was to provide for the mental health needs of ex-political prisoners, returned exiles and other victims of political violence and repression. In recent years, its services have changed TURE

ΠBiographical Notes

253

to accommodate the changing nature of violence in South Africa: i.e. from mainly political to mainly criminal violence.

—Œ—

N OTES FOR C ONTRIBUTORS  ]

G ORDON C OLLIER , Im Wiesgarten 9, 35463 Fernwald, G ERMANY Email: [email protected] G EOFFREY V. D AVIS , Johanniterstraße 13, 52064 Aachen, G ERMANY Email: [email protected] C HRISTINE M ATZKE , Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Seminar für Afrikawissenschaften, Afrikanische Literaturen und Kulturen, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, G ERMANY Email: [email protected] A DEREMI R AJI –O YELADE [pen-name R EMI R AJI ], Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, N IGERIA Email: [email protected] F RANK S CHULZE –E NGLER , de Ridder Weg 2, 65929 Frankfurt, G ERMANY Email: [email protected] C HANTAL Z ABUS , Université de Paris, F R A N C E Email: [email protected] ]

S UBMISSIONS . All prospective contributions primarily as EMAIL ATTACH MENTS sent to G ORDON C OLLIER . Preference is for Word for Windows;

Rich Text Format is recommended; IMPORTANT – remove all automatic formatting). Contributions in HARD COPY should be sent to G EOFFREY D AVIS ; two print copies, double-spaced, must be submitted.

B ASIC GUIDELINES FOR INITIAL SUBMISSIONS . Use underlining, not italics. All texts cited or quoted from must be footnoted – include all relevant data (full first and last name of author or editor, title and subtitle, place of publication and publisher; date of first publication and date of edition used). © Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2010).

256

TRAUMA, MEMORY, AND NARRATIVE

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With essays in periodicals and books, include full page-span; with periodicals, include volume and issue number; with translations, include name of translator, the title in the original language, and the date of publication of the original. Use any previous Matatu as a model for Works Cited, following all the in-house conventions indicated there.

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EDITED BY KWAKU LARBI KORANG Research in African Literatures is the premier journal of African literary studies worldwide and provides a forum in English for research on the oral and written literatures of Africa. Reviews of current scholarly books appear in every issue, often presented as critical essays, and a forum offers readers the opportunity to respond to issues raised in articles and book reviews. SPECIAL ISSUE: Research in African Literatures, Volume 41 Number 1 Aimé Césaire, 1913-2008: Poet, Politician, Cultural Statesman H. Adlai Murdoch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Guest Editor

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This special commemorative issue of Research in African Literatures focuses on the life and work of Aimé Césaire. It traces the triumphs, paradoxes, and contradictions that marked the double trajectory of his near half-century in public life, beginning not with the publication of the Cahier in 1939 but with his campaign in 1944-45 on the French Communist Party ticket for mayor of Fort-de-France and for the new French National Assembly. Césaire won by a landslide in the May 27, 1945 election, and would remain mayor of Fort-de-France for nearly 56 years, until 2001, and represent Martinique as a deputy in France’s National Assembly until 1956 and again from 1958 until 1993. A man truly of many parts, Césaire was at once poet, dramatist, essayist, and politician – with the dual role of mayor and député embodied in the last of these. Clearly, he lived and acted by and through the word, and he saw language as both tool and weapon. As a result, exploring the boundaries of Céaire’s multivalent life and work provides fertile ground for literary and cultural exegesis.

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r odopi [email protected]–www.rodopi.nl Amsterdam/New York, NY 2010. XII, 299 pp. (DQR Studies in Literature 44) Bound € 62,-/ US$ 87,E-Book € 62,-/ US$ 87,ISBN: 978-90-420-2828-9 ISBN: 978-90-420-2829-6

Sub-Versions Trans-National Readings of Modern Irish Literature Edited by Ciaran Ross Foreword by Declan Kiberd

From Swift’s repulsive shit-flinging Yahoos to Beckett’s dying but never quite dead moribunds, Irish literature has long been perceived as being synonymous with subversion and all forms of subversiveness. But what constitutes a subversive text or a subversive writer in twenty-first-century Ireland? The essays in this volume set out to redefine and rethink the subversive potential of contemporary Irish literature. Crossing three central genres, one common denominator running through these essays whether dealing with canonical writers like Yeats, Beckett and Flann O’Brien, or lesser known contemporary writers like Sebastian Barry or Robert McLiam Wilson, is the continual questioning of Irish identity – Irishness – going from its colonial paradigm and stereotype of the subaltern in MacGill, to its uneasy implications for gender representation in the contemporary novel and the contemporary drama. A subsidiary theme inextricably linked to the identity problematic is that of exile and its radical heritage for all Irish writing irrespective of its different genres. Sub-Versions offers a cross-cultural and trans-national response to the expanding interest in Irish and postcolonial studies by bringing together specialists from different national cultures and scholarly contexts – Ireland, Britain, France and Central Europe. The order of the essays is by genre. This study is aimed both at the general literary reader and anyone particularly interested in Irish Studies.

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Local Natures, Global Resposibilities Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures ASNEL Papers 15 Edited by Laurenz Volkmann, Nancy Grimm, Ines Detmers, and Katrin Thomson In the New Literatures in English, nature has long been a paramount issue: the environmental devastation caused by colonialism has left its legacy, with particularly disastrous consequences for the most vulnerable parts of the world. At the same time, social and cultural transformations have altered representations of nature in postcolonial cultures and literatures. It is this shift of emphasis towards the ecological that is addressed by this volume. A fast-expanding field, ecocriticism covers a wide range of theories and areas of interest, particularly the relationship between literature and other ‘texts’ and the environment. Rather than adopting a rigid agenda, the interpretations presented involve ecocritical perspectives that can be applied most fruitfully to literary and nonliterary texts. Some are more general, ‘holistic’ approaches: literature and other cultural forms are a ‘living organism’, part of an intellectual ecosystem, implemented and sustained by the interactions between the natural world, both human and non-human, and its cultural representations. ‘Nature’ itself is a new interpretative category in line with other paradigms such as race, class, gender, and identity.

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2010. XVII, 370 pp. (Cross/Cultures 121) Bound € 78,-/ US$ 109,E-Book € 78,-/ US$ 109,ISBN: 978-90-420-2812-8 ISBN: 978-90-420-2813-5

A wide range of genres are covered, from novels or films in which nature features as the main topic or ‘protagonist’ to those with an ecocritical agenda, as in dystopian literature. Other concerns are: nature as a cultural construct; ‘gendered’ natures; and the city/country dichotomy. The texts treated challenge traditional Western dualisms (human/animal, man/nature, woman/man). While such global phenomena as media (‘old’ or ‘new’), tourism, and catastrophes permeate many of these texts, there is also a dual focus on nature as the inexplicable, elusive ‘Other’ and the need for human agency and global responsibility.

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The Rose and the Lotus Partnership Studies in the Works of Raja Rao Stefano Mercanti

Raja Rao, one of the founding figures of Indian English literature, is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers a fresh critical investigation into both his short stories and his novels. Powerfully contradicting the long-held perception of Raja Rao as a mere metaphysical writer and the true bard of quintessential Indianness, projected by many critics of the first Commonwealth generation over three decades, Stefano Mercanti posits Rao’s fiction in terms of its dialogic interaction – the ‘partnership’ – between Western and Eastern cultural traditions and demonstrates how it evolves during the course of his oeuvre on both the philosophical and the political level. The title, The Rose and the Lotus, signals the discursive terrain for a multicultural and interwoven evolution among different cultures, and points to the need for valuing relations of reciprocity rather than those of domination. Far from conveying univocal configurations and nationalistic stereotypes, Rao’s idea of India is seen as the epicentre of many echoes and dynamic resonances, both Western and Eastern, through which a distinct blend of Indian and European influences is more clearly unravelled.

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2009. LVII, 221 pp. (Cross/Cultures 122) Bound € 56,-/ US$ 78,E-Book € 56,-/ US$ 78,ISBN: 978-90-420-2833-3 ISBN: 978-90-420-2834-0

In this new critical re-appraisal, Mercanti draws on non-binary and inter/multi-disciplinary paradigms, thus signalling the complex transformations and multiple negotiations of a polyglot India caught between the cultural twilight of the modern and the traditional. The study also offers an invaluable linguistic analysis of Rao’s experiment with the English language, supplemented by a detailed glossary.

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Cultural Transfer through Translation The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation Edited by Stefanie Stockhorst Given that the dissemination of enlightened thought in Europe was mostly effected through translations, the present collection of essays focuses on how its cultural adaptation took place in various national contexts. For the first time, the theoretical model of ‘cultural transfer’ (Espagne/Werner) is applied to the eighteenth century: The intercultural dynamics of the Enlightenment become manifest in the transformation process between the original and target cultures, be it by way of acculturation, creative enhancement, or misunderstanding. Resulting in shifts of meaning, translations offer a key not just to contemporary translation practice but to the discursive network of the European Enlightenment in general. The case studies united here explore both how translations contributed to the transnational standardisation of certain key concepts, values and texts, and how they reflect national specifications of enlightened discourses. Hence, the volume contributes to Enlightenment studies, at least as much as to historical translation studies.

Amsterdam/New York NY, 2010. 343 pp. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 131) Paper € 69,-/ US$ 97,E-Book € 69,-/ US$ 97,ISBN: 978-90-420-2950-7 ISBN: 978-90-420-2951-4 USA/Canada: 248 East 44th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10017, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations

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Theology in intercultural Design / Theologie im Zeichen der Interkulturalität Interdisciplinary Challenges – Positions – Perspectives / Interdisziplinäre Herausforderungen – Positionen – Perspektiven Edited by Claude Ozankom and Chibueze Udeani Among the consequences of the all engulfing process of globalisation is the experience that not only it promotes interdependence among peoples, folks, cultures and religions, but it also creates problems and tensions. The assignment of a thoughtful and practice-oriented accompanying of this development poses itself subsequently. From this background different lectures are being conducted in different places; research initiatives as well as projects are started and executed while several publications are featuring. Visible here is the fact that although there abound rich reservoirs of knowledge, there is still no clarity as to the contents and the theoretical and methodical contrasts that are yet to be examined.

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2010. XII, 258 pp. (Intercultural Theology and Study of Religions 3) Paper €54,-/US$76,E-Book €54,-/US$76,ISBN: 978-90-420-2969-9 ISBN: 978-90-420-2970-5

Zu den Folgen des um sich greifenden Globalisierungsprozesses, zählt die Erfahrung, dass er nicht nur die Interpendenz unter Menschen, Völkern, Kulturen und Religionen vorantreibt, sondern auch Probleme und Spannungen auslöst. Diese Situation ist denkerisch und praxisorientiert aufzuschließen. Es wurden an verschiedenen Standorten Lehrveranstaltungen durchgeführt, Forschungsprojekte in Angriff genommen und Publikationen vorgelegt. Auffällig hierbei ist: Obwohl der erreichte Wissensstand bereits reichhaltig ist, besteht keine Klarheit hinsichtlich der zu untersuchenden Inhalte und der theoretischen und methodischen Gegensätze.

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Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing Edited by Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Gina Wisker

This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modern and contemporary women’s writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA, and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women’s writing and women’s experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HIV/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider. The three opening essays explore the work of the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, whose groundbreaking work explored taboo subjects such as infanticide and incest. A wide range of other essays focus on writers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including Jean Rhys, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Jean Arasanayagam, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and Eva Sallis.

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2010. XVI, 307 pp. (Cross/Cultures 123) Bound €64,-/US$90,E-Book €64,-/ US$90,ISBN: 978-90-420-2935-4 ISBN: 978-90-420-2936-1

Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and modern and contemporary women’s writing, and to students on literature and women’s studies courses who want to study women’s writing from a cross-cultural perspective and from different theoretical positions.

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Becoming Visible Women’s Presence in Late Nineteenth-Century America Edited by Janet Floyd, Alison Easton, R. J. Ellis and Lindsey Traub

This exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays explores the later decades of the nineteenth century in America – the immediate postbellum period, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era – as a time of critical change in the cultural visibility of women, as they made new kinds of appearances throughout American society. The essays show how, across the USA, it was fundamentally women who drove changes in their visibility forward, in groups and as individuals. Their motivations, activities and understandings were essential to shaping the character of their present society and the nation’s future. The book establishes that these women’s engagement with American society and culture cannot be simply understood in terms of the traditional polarities of inside/outside and private/public, since these frames do not fit the complexities of what was happening, be it women’s occupation of geographic space, their new patterns of employment, their advocacy of working-class or ethnic rights, or their literary or cultural engagement with their milieux. Such women as Ida B. Wells, Mother Jones, Jane Addams, Rebecca Harding Davis, Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, Louisa May Alcott and Kate Douglas Wiggin all come under consideration in the light of these radical changes.

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2010. XI, 370 pp. (DQR Studies in Literature 45) Bound €76,-/US$106,E-Book €76,-/US$106,ISBN: 978-90-420-2977-4 ISBN: 978-90-420-2978-1 USA/Canada: 248 East 44th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10017, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations