Narrating an Other and Each Other: Collaborative Constructions of Selfhood in There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to examine the textual constructions of selfhood in the South African narrative There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (2009), co-authored by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele. There Was This Goat is dedicated to understanding Mrs Konile and her Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony given in Xhosa, a testimony which many found incomprehensible. I trace and read Mrs Konile through the lens of Judith Butler and her ideas about self-narration and through Sarah Nuttall’s concept of entanglement. These two approaches underline the social aspects of both self-narration and identity formation through narration, and therefore assist me in approaching the authors as simultaneous characters in the text, recipients of Mrs Konile’s narrative, and creators of the textually represented Mrs Konile. The authors’ dual function as writers of and characters within the narrative is an important factor which has been only briefly considered in much of the previous scholarly research on this multivoiced life writing text. This article argues that Mrs Konile is disempowered by the structure of the narrative, which positions her as a passive object of study rather than an active subject of her own life narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Notrose Nobomvu Konile
• There Was This Goat
• collaborative life writing
• South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jenny Siméus is a PhD student in literatures in English at the Department of Languages, Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her thesis explores South African multivoiced and collaborative life writing. Previous publications include papers on Elsa Joubert, Zoë Wicomb and Margaret McCord in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature and Research in African Literatures.

ORCID

Jenny Siméus http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6726-9990

Notes

1 The Gugulethu Seven Memorial monument was erected in 2005 to honour their lives.

2 Krog's inclusion of a fictitious extramarital affair is one several elements of fiction in Country of My Skull. Readers interested in Krog's thoughts on intertwining fictional elements in her life narrative texts may want to consult Krog's text ‘Last Time, This Time’, which was published in LitNet in 2006, as well as Elaine Dubourdieu's interview with Antjie Krog conducted in 2005 and included in Dubourdieu's book chapter ‘Country of My Skull: A New Genre for Writing South Africa's History?’ (2009).

3 Krog's choice to include actual testimonies from any victims at all in Country of My Skull has received sharp criticism, e.g. Sarah Ruden's article ‘Country of My Skull: Guilt and Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa’ (1999) which questions Krog's appropriation of victim testimonies and the large quantity of them that are included in the book without any monetary compensation offered to the testifiers. Another critic, Laura Moss, referred to Krog's choice to include TRC testimonies as ‘privileging the narrator's responses over the stories told in the testimonies themselves’ in her article ‘“Nice Audible Crying”: Editions, Testimonies, and Country of My Skull’ (2006: 99). Other scholars such as Okla Elliott (2010) and Shane Graham (2009) have been less critical or even supportive of Krog's prolific inclusion of victim testimonies. For example, Graham argues that the ‘larger project of making [the asymmetry of victim vis-à-vis perpetrator subject positions during apartheid] visible outweighs the immediate monetary issues Ruden raises’ (56). See also Ashleigh Harris (2006) or Rory Carroll's summary in The Guardian (2006) of the plagiarism accusations against Krog made by Stephen Watson.

4 The original transcript of Mrs Konile's testimony can be found online on the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission website.

5 See Carli Coetzee's excellent article ‘To Refuse Containment, to Resist Translation: Two South African Examples’ (2013) which explores the problematic language aspect of There Was This Goat in the light of the privileged and hegemonic position of English in South Africa.

6 In her article ‘Hospitality in a Postapartheid Archive: Reflections on There Was This Goat and the Challenge of Alterity’ (2012), Sandra Young notes how the familiarity between the researchers and Mrs Konile in There Was This Goat progresses from her using words like ‘Prof’ (129), to ‘Mama’ and ‘Sisi’ and, towards the end of the conversation, ‘my children’ and ‘son’ (137). See Young p. 130 ff.