Ordinary Secrets and the Bounds of Memory: Traversing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds

Abstract

This article investigates South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a form of cultural articulation in dialogue with Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds. I situate the TRC as an opening device that is inherently limited in terms of being only one (polemical) narrative of the past—literature is another. Narrative in post-Apartheid South Africa therefore forms a dialogue with both the silences of Apartheid and those of the TRC, by occupying seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously. The opening of narrative space and the eschewal of certain oppositions are central in terms of the theoretical shifts that the TRC has engendered—shifts that can be seen in contemporary post-Apartheid narratives such as Other Secrets and Out of Bounds. In crossing and erasing thresholds of meaning between public and private, insider and outsider, history and fiction, memory and story, silence and articulation, through a freeing of narrative form, Karodia and Naidoo are re-narrating the cultural boundaries of the nation.