Affecting Politics: Post-Apartheid Fiction and the Limits of Trauma

Abstract

APARTHEID'S REGIME OF STATE-SANCTIONED VIOLENCE has often been formulated as a traumatic history, meaning a history marked by (l) its shattering effects on individual psyches, group identities, and public and private forms of sociality; (2) repeated experience of those effects in moment of their instantiation and again in their ghosting of post-apartheid present; and (3) collectivization of those effects, such that individual states of trauma become trauma of state. What are implications of this making of national community through traumatic memory for national narratives, specifically post-apartheid novel? In some versions of post-apartheid national story, plots of trauma and history have so entwined that history has seemed to be trauma and trauma has seemed to be history. This chiastic crossing yields contagious catching of one history to another, subterranean connection of their narrative logics, and ultimate correlation of their forms. All stories of post-apartheid South Africa thus become realizable within a model that has trauma as its core, history as its content, narrative as its melancholic modality, and mourning as its cure.In Freudian plot, traumatic event's unbidden return installs a loop of repetitive time, whose laying to rest involves both revisiting past and resequencing it, from originary event to repression to symptomatic return and finally back to a retelling designed to make sense of past's violent grip and so loosen its hold.1 As various psychoanalytic critics explain, time in this plot is repeated melancholically and then, in mourning's end, time is set in place, ordered, and rendered into essentially narrative structure of a plot with all comforts of closure.2 Extrapolated to national scene, trauma of apartheid, linked to microscopic story of individual subject of state, operates as generative event or historical origin point for still coalescing category of post-apartheid narrative. Yet this beginning point is also an ending. In a sense, this is fiction over before it begins, given formulaic regularity with which it stages a certain ordering of certain emblematic events (the loss of a loved one, violence done against one's person or that of a loved one, grief for what has been, unbidden return of memory that will not settle, ultimate coming to terms with past so that future, uncertain and unfinished, may unfold).In decade and a half since end of apartheid, historical truth has often seemed major referent of many South African novels, and juridicopolitical discourses of truth-telling major mode. As is well known, TRC 1 attempted to fill in gaps in official record and collective memory. Using testimonial memory as, in Andre Brink's words, a means of excavating silence, TRC sought not to complete missing history of apartheid-era violence but, rather, to recapitulate it.3 By re-encountering partially hidden truths of individual national actors in a national analytic scene of witnessing, architects of TRC hoped, nation would move on. In words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the purpose of finding out truth is not in order for people to be prosecuted. It is so that we can use truth as part of process of healing our nation.4 With Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an embedded narrative event, much post-apartheid literature returns to buried events of past so as to produce testimonial scenes of crime, confession, witnessing, catharsis, forgiveness, and healing. For example, Gillian Slovo's Red Dust: A Novel (2000) eschews memoir, that other most significant genre of truth-telling in post-apartheid white South African literature (and one that Slovo herself has authored).5 Instead, Red Dust presents facsimiles of testimony embedded in a diegetic rendering of process of criminal investigation, culminating in recognition of an 'intimate bond' between white Afrikaner torturer and black African victim. …