In Parenthesis

ABSTRACT

IN PARENTHESIS is a practice-based essay which takes shape, parasitically, amidst the “found text” of an existing book, British author Thomas Pakenham's The Boer War (1979, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball). The “author-reader” interjects into the found text of this authoritative history book, inserting her words amongst those of Pakenham's. What becomes apparent, however, is that the text into which she interjects is not The Boer War verbatim, but a dramatically abridged version. The book's primary content has been edited out. What remains is The Boer War whittled down to a litany of Pakenham's parentheses (the history book distilled into an essence of the seemingly non-essential). Into this stream of bracketed matter, the author-reader writes, ruminating on the parenthesis as ethos (as prison and portal, barricade and breach, enclave and embrace). In turn, her ruminations invite reflection on the conundrum of writing history, of writing this history (and, indeed, of writing per se).

KEYWORDS:

• South African War
• historiography
• hauntology
• knowledge and truth in parenthesis
• decolonial history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These and other indented passages of text in parentheses are excerpts from Pakenham's The Boer War, pages xv–90 and plate 2.

2 This was my initial “solution” to the project. It will be resolved as an artist's book, comprising prints of the modified scans of the “actual” pages from The Boer War. The version presented here—where Pakenham's parentheses have been extracted and integrated into the flow of a typed document—is conceptualised as an addendum. It is intended, partly, to contextualise and elucidate the book-work.

3 Here, Ballif is referencing Jacques Derrida's critique, in Aporias, of “the so-called historian of death, who ‘knows, thinks he knows, or grants to himself the unquestioned knowledge of what death is, of what being-dead means’” (Ballif 2013, 146).