Wor(l)ds of grief: Traumatic memory and literary witnessing in cross-cultural perspective

Abstract

Considering the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery can help the debate over the perceived monocultural bias of trauma theory in its ‘classical’, mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which the field prides itself. Insofar as the TRC mapped Euro-American concepts of trauma and recovery onto an apartheid-colonial situation, it was subject to the same problems and limitations faced by trauma theory—problems and limitations which post-apartheid literature has not been slow to confront. Sindiwe Magona’s truth-and-reconciliation novel Mother to Mother, for example, can be seen to supplement the work of the TRC by critically revisiting its limits, exclusions, and elisions—and thus also to suggest a possible way for ‘traditional’ trauma theory to reinvent and renew itself.