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A post-colonial and feminist reading of selected testimonies to trauma in post-liberation South Africa and Zimbabwe

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13696810902986409

1469-9346

Jessica Murray,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

Abstract This article explores the testimonial significance of Antjie Krog and Yvonne Vera's work by considering the extent to which their choice of literary fiction facilitates and enables the urgent political and social intervention that their texts undertake. Their work responds to the violence in the Zimbabwean and South African contexts from and about which they write. This violence, which is a recurring theme in their work, is physical as well as psychic and results in traumatized individual and collective identities that pose particular challenges to representation. The role that the witness to trauma plays is an active one that carries its own responsibility. The onus that rests on the witness is related to the traumatic nature of what is being testified to. The article provides a detailed exploration of the dynamics that are involved in the process of witnessing trauma. Since traumatic events cause an overflow of the cognitive system, it is not comprehensively experienced by the victims at the time when it occurs. It can only be fully 'known' in the aftermath of the event and then when it is being received by an empathetic listener (or reader). Vera and Krog use literature to enable the reader to endure the pain and difficulty that come with being an active participant in the creation of new knowledge when that knowledge concerns a traumatic event. Notes I follow Susan Spearey in arguing that '[l]istening to accounts of trauma…becomes a profoundly ethical and dialogic act, and not merely a means of facilitating the victim's psychic healing. How these stories reshape the listeners' worlds is every bit as important as how they begin to reshape those of the victim and teller, and this is even more urgently the case when the trauma in question is collective' (2000 Spearey, Susan. 2000. Displacement, dispossession and conciliation: The politics and poetics of homecoming in Antjie Krog's 'Country of my Skull'. Scrutiny, 25(1): 64–77. http://www.uwc.ac.za/arts/english/LAMP/spearey.html (accessed 28 March 2007)[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 71, emphasis in original). The influx of immigrants has resulted in rising levels of xenophobia and, as is always the case in situations of political and economic change and instability, women and their bodies are particularly vulnerable when they enter South Africa without legal documentation or recourse to state and social services and protection. There can, of course, be no simple, monolithic definition of either postcolonial or postcolonial literature. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1995 Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen. 1995. "General introduction". In The postcolonial studies reader, Edited by: Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen. 1–4. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], 2) issue the important warning that '[p]ost-colonial critics and theorists should consider the full implications of restricting the meaning of the term to "after-colonialism" or after-Independence. All post-colonial societies are still subject in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo-colonial domination, and independence has not solved this problem'. I follow their point that the 'term "post-colonial" is resonant with all the ambiguity and complexity of the many different cultural experiences it implicates […]'. When referring to South Africa and Zimbabwe as postcolonial societies, I do so with the recognition that, while the formal and legalized 'settlement and control of other people's land, is in the main over' both countries still struggle with 'its structures and relations of power [which] are still in place' (Abrahamsen 2003 Abrahamsen, Rita. 2003. African studies and the postcolonial challenge. African Affairs, 102: 189–210. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 195). For a critique of such a broader use of the term postcolonial to describe South Africa, see Robert Thornton (1996) Thornton, Robert. 1996. "The potential of boundaries in South Africa: Steps towards a theory of the social edge". In Postcolonial identities in Africa, Edited by: Werbner, Richard and Ranger, Terence. 136–61. London: Zed Books. [Google Scholar], who argues that post-Apartheid South Africa is postmodern. He goes on to note that 'it is also after the "colonial" of course, but I [Thornton] would reserve that label "postcolonial" for Apartheid itself' (1996, 136). I follow Benedict Anderson's (1983 Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], 15) theory of the nation as an entity that is constructed as an 'imagined community'. For a summary of the development of Freud's theorization of trauma, see Thierry Bokanowski (2005) Bokanowski, Thierry. 2005. Variations on the concept of traumatism: Traumatism, traumatic, trauma. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86: 251–65. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] especially pages 252–4. Juan Tutté (2004 Tutté, Juan C. 2004. The concept of psychical trauma: a bridge in interdisciplinary space. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85: 897–921. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 897–921) links Freud's discussion of traumatic war neurosis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sigrun Meining, who theorizes trauma in the context of Australia's stolen generation, conceptualizes trauma as 'the epitome of the final inaccessibility of an event in the past and the latency of its interpretation' (2004, 350). The notion that trauma is completely unspeakable and inaccessible is addressed by Isabel Moore (2005 Moore, Isabel A. 2005. 'Speak, you also': Encircling trauma. Journal for Cultural Research, 9(1): 87–99. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 90), who writes that, '[t]o call it unspeakable or unimaginable is to turn one's back on listening to testimony, to betray again, to claim a false (and unethical) inability to listen'. Jenny Edkins (2001 Edkins, Jenny. If No Story is Possible: Trauma, Testimony and Biopolitics after Auschwitz. Paper presented at the 2001 Hong Kong Convention of International Studies. http://isanet.ccit.arizona.edu/archive/edkins2.doc (accessed 27 August 2007) [Google Scholar], 15) echoes this sentiment in her contention that 'those who today assert the "unsayability" of the horrors of Auschwitz risk repeating the Nazi's gesture [of destroying all evidence of their atrocities]. Testimony, on the contrary, refutes it'. The essence of the challenge posed by trauma seems to be to find a way to speak and to listen while recognizing the extent to which what is being spoken or listened to, does remain unspeakable and inaccessible. I follow Edkins here in positing testimony as that which can fill the evidential lacuna left by trauma. Note here the distinction between Holocaust with an upper and lower case h. As a proper noun it emphasizes the 'uniqueness' of the Jews' persecution in WW2 and as an ordinary noun it denotes great loss of life but carries the connotations of the Holocaust's 'uniqueness' and incomprehensibility. In her analysis of Australia's stolen generation testimonies, Gillian Whitlock deals with some of the limitations of using the Holocaust as an intellectual template when dealing with issues of trauma and testimony. She focuses in particular on the 'witness, the addressee, the reader/listener who is required to respond [to the testimony]' (2001, 206). She argues that 'one of the major features of the Holocaust interpretive scenario is that grotesque figure to whom so much of the blame can be attributed: the Nazi, who is not us'. The figure of the 'Nazi as the Other', and the possibility that this figure provides for the readers to 'displace [their] immediate responsibility' is not so simple in the 'geography of cultural memory produced by interracial narratives'. She argues that, in these postcolonial narratives, 'the transits between black labor and dispossession on the one hand and white privilege and pleasure on the other come into view. This is to say that the second person, who is the witness and narratee, is called upon to witness her own complicity and implication in the loss and suffering which is finally being spoken' (Whitlock 2001 Whitlock, Gillian. 2001. In the second person: Narrative transactions in stolen generation testimony. Biography, 24(1): 197–215. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 207). The emphasis on the individual is one of the central examples of this Euro-American tradition that needs to be unpacked before applying it to an African context. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that 'testes' is the Latin word for witness. See also Mary Daly (1978 Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, London: The Women's Press. [Google Scholar], 435n). For a more comprehensive analysis of the confessional mode see Radstone (2001 Radstone, Susannah. 2001. Social bonds and psychical order: Testimonies. Cultural Values, 5(1): 59–78. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 59–60). Ubuntu is a concept and practice that is prevalent in South Africa as well as Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe it is usually referred to by the Shona word unhu or hunhu. See Horace Campbell (2003 Campbell, Horace. 2003. Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The exhaustion of the patriarchal model of liberation, Claremont, , South Africa: David Philips Publishers. [Google Scholar], 7, 84, 276 and 290–2). Also see Barbara Nussbaum's (2003 Nussbaum, Barbara. 2003. Ubuntu. Resurgence, 221 http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/nussbaum221.htm (accessed 1 August 2007) [Google Scholar], 2) explanation of how a common Zimbabwean greeting reflects this concept. In Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not (2006 Dangarembga, Tsitsi. 2006. The book of not, Banbury, Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd. [Google Scholar]) the narrator notes how a different greeting asserts unhu: 'Tiripo, kana makadini wo! I am well if you are all right too! […] Everything was reciprocal and so were we; we all knew it, so said it every day in our greetings' (2006, 65). Dangarembga identifies this way of life with Southern Africans: 'Unhu, that profound knowledge of being, quietly and not flamboyantly; the grasp of life and of how to preserve and accentuate life's eternal interweavings that we southern Africans are famed for, what others now called ubuntu, demanded that I consoled myself, that I be well so that others could be well also' (2006, 102–3). In Krog's poem 'letter-poem lullaby for Ntombizana Atoo' (2006 Krog, Antjie. 2006. Body bereft, South Africa: Umuzi. Roggebaai [Google Scholar], 59) she articulates it as follows: 'we are what we are because we are of each other'. Kyeong Hwangbo (2004 Hwangbo, Kyeong. 2004. Trauma, narrative, and the marginal self in selected contemporary American novels. http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0007302/hwangbo_k.pdf (accessed 27 February 2006) [Google Scholar], 222) makes some important remarks on the collective nature of trauma in an essay that insists that 'traumatic experiences cannot be perceived and examined apart from the social context surrounding them'. In Krog's and Vera's work the characters deal with trauma, as well as attempts at healing, in a way that cannot extricate the victim from the larger community. The texts I am analyzing deal with the Zimbabwean and South African societies and I am not implying that the social and cultural contexts are the same, or that the communal way in which members of these societies deal with trauma are portable to the rest of the African continent. In addition, not all South African and Zimbabwean authors intertwine individual and collective trauma to the same extent as Krog and Vera. In his analysis of J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood (1997 Coetzee, J. M. 1997. Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life, New York: Viking. [Google Scholar]) and Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002 Fuller, Alexandra. 2002. Don't let's go to the dogs tonight: An African childhood, New York: Random House. [Google Scholar]), Tony Da Silva (2005 Da Silva, Tony S. 2005. Narrating a white South Africa: Autobiography, race and history. Third World Quarterly, 26(3): 471–8. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 472), for example, argues that it 'is worth noting that both texts struggle to create a sense of distance between the private and the political, stressing at all times the primacy of the wounded self's trauma'. Despite such lapses into judgement of perpetrators, Echoing Silences does acknowledge the impact of trauma. In his analysis of Echoing Silences and The Stone Virgins Chan (2005 Chan, Stephen. 2005. The memory of violence: Trauma in the writings of Alexander Kanengoni and Yvonne Vera and the idea of unreconciled citizenship in Zimbabwe. Third World Quarterly, 26(2): 369–82. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 380) theorizes the role of trauma in terms of Ricoeur's notion of the 'wounded cogito'. He argues that '[w]hat the novels accomplish best…is the depiction…of what Ricoeur called the "wounded cogito": the knowing that knows, but cannot believe it knows what it knows, because what it knows is too terrible for knowledge to bear. The cogito is not only wounded, it is lacerated. It has had its head sliced off in a tango, its lips removed, its children clubbed to death, its skin melted off its body'. These observations in no way intend to absolve Robert Mugabe of any responsibility. Rather, it is my contention that the West has used him to skirt their share of blame. Mugabe has become a caricature of pure evil and incompetence and, although his actions sometimes make it easy to portray him as such, it is a gross oversimplification of Zimbabwean problems. In addition, it is a self-serving simplification that has been relentlessly played up by the West. Just as one must be wary of conflating the terms trauma and pain, Dennis Foster (2000 Foster, Dennis A. 2000. Trauma and memory. Contemporary Literature, 41(4): 740–7. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 747) reminds us that '[n]ot all catastrophes are traumatic; not all traumas require a terrible cause'. Reychler and Jacobs (2004 Reychler, Luc and Jacobs, Michèle. 2004. Limits to violence: Towards a comprehensive violence audit. Centre for Peace Research and Strategic Studies. http://soc.kuleuven.be/iieb/CPRS/cahiers/Vol%2068.pdf (accessed 21 August 2005) [Google Scholar], 4) use the genocide in Rwanda as an illuminating example of the dangers posed by a narrow definition of violence. Prior to the genocide the country was erroneously considered safe because there were few manifestations of overt violence. Reychler and Jacobs show that, if more attention was paid to 'less visible types of violence', such as structural and psychological violence, the conflict could have been better anticipated. It did not come out of nowhere as a surprise, as the West would now like to contend to mitigate its own sense of responsibility. Rather, the 'genocide was embedded in a less visible but nevertheless violent context'. See for example A Change of Tongue (2003, 148). Linda Craft (1997 Craft, Linda J. 1997. Novels of testimony and resistance from Central America, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. [Google Scholar], 22) makes the following useful comments about the distinctions between testimony and a testimonial novel in her Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America: 'When one discusses testimony, as distinguished from the testimonial novel, one is discussing a matter of degree. Because generic lines are increasingly blurred in postmodernism […] it is easier to consider the matter of testimonial discourse and testimonial function in a text rather than the extent to which it is a "true" novel'. Craft notes that the questions about the point at which a narrative is 'no longer a testimony but a novel' are 'impossible to answer' because she also regards fact and fiction as occupying different nodes on a continuum. When I mention 'the reader' here, I am referring to my own experience as a reader of these texts. I, Rigoberta Menchú is compiled by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, to whom Menchú told her story. Burgos-Debray readily admits to changing certain things in Menchú's recorded speech. For example, she 'decided "to correct the gender mistakes which inevitably occur when someone has just learned to speak a foreign language"'(cited in Beverley 2004 Beverley, John. 2004. Testimonio: On the politics of truth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar], 37). For a critique of Menchú's story as testimony, see David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatamalans (1999 Stoll, David. 1999. Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. [Google Scholar]). While I criticize Beverly's insistence on a largely unmediated relationship between language and experience, I share his belief in the political power of literature. His materialist approach to language and literature places us in the same theoretical terrain, albeit with the sharp difference that my criticism makes clear. For a discussion of how this kind of thinking perpetuates the disempowerment of women, see Felman (1975) Felman, Shoshana. 1975. "Women and madness: the critical phallacy". In Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism, Edited by: Herndl, Diane Price and Warhol, Robin R. 7–20. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] and Hélène Cixous' essay 'Sorties' in The Newly Born Woman (1987 Cixous, Hélène. 1987. The newly born woman, Manchester: U.P. [Google Scholar]). Very often people in these societies are victimized for speaking out. In fiction, it is, at least rhetorically, the narrator's story rather than the author's and this can shield the author from recriminations. Juliet Mitchell (1998 Mitchell, Juliet. 1998. Trauma, recognition, and the place of language. Diacritics, 28(4): 121–33. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 122) reminds us that when 'we have a physical trauma it is common for an immediate aftereffect to be some uncertainty about words; even the ability to spell correctly can temporarily disappear'. This is particularly acute in Zhizha's case, where the rape constituted physical and psychic trauma. In different sections of Under the Tongue Zhizha spells 'd u c k' (1996, 96) and when she manages to say 'a e i o u' (1996, 82) this reclamation of elementary language is met with her triumphant assertion: 'I remember all my letters' (1996, 82). While colonialism resulted in killing on a large scale, its long-term consequences and the wide range of systemic and structural brutalisations that it involved, continue to be felt in countries that have gained formal independence.