Guilt, shame and the politics of moral change in Antjie Krog’s and Zoë Wicomb’s literary responses to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

This article argues that Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000) attempt to lift feelings of guilt and shame from the victims of apartheid and to instil these feelings in those who ought to feel them: in the perpetrators, but also in the majority of whites and some coloureds who benefited from apartheid in one way or another. Both authors stress the value of moral shame for reforming South Africa’s society and focus on the body in their literary representations of shame. Country of My Skull describes how Krog’s body resonates with the pain of the victims when it shows physical symptoms of shame and guilt. Wicomb’s novel David’s Story, on the other hand, pictures the coloured body as a site of shame concerning the coloureds’ ancestral origins. The majority of coloureds ought to shed this unnecessary shame, Wicomb’s novel suggests, while those who were complicit with apartheid should acknowledge it as moral shame. Both texts complicate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)’s differentiation between legally verified “forensic truth” and “narrative truth” that allowed the victims to privilege the particularities of their individual experience. Country of My Skull suggests that the TRC hearings relied on a dynamic of narrative transference and substitution that made the voicing of shame and guilt possible in the first place. David’s Story suggests that the distinction between “forensic truth” and “narrative truth” obscures the fact that the hearings enabled perpetrators to suppress the truth and avoid legal punishment.