Narrative Empathy in Dr. Goonam’s Coolie Doctor and Zubeida Jaffer’s Our Generation

ABSTRACT

The need for women to tell their stories and cross the threshold between the private and the public has stimulated a great deal of autobiographical work in post-apartheid South Africa. Although writing about the atrocities and human rights violations of the apartheid era cannot fail to stir the indignation of the reader, a truly empathic response is not always achieved, if by empathy we resonate with another person’s feelings. In this article I compare two autobiographies by two former activists in the anti-apartheid movement. I argue that Zubeida Jaffer is more successful in eliciting an empathic response than Dr. Goonam as she reaches out to her readers through her highly intimate discourse, which draws them into a dialogue of complicity. Goonam, on the other hand, despite her frequent amusing anecdotes about her early career as one of the first non-white female doctors in South Africa, fails to stir an aesthetic experience in the reader as she maintains an emotional distance throughout, thus making the cognitive challenge that a true empathic response demands difficult to surmount. Jaffer’s work encourages an ethically appropriate response whereas Goonam’s autobiography remains on the level of ethnography, despite its intrinsic value as testimony of a turbulent era of South African history.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• autobiography
• South African Indians
• anti-apartheid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Felicity Hand is senior lecturer in the English Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She teaches post-colonial literature and history and culture of the British Isles. She has published articles on various Indian and East African writers including M.G.Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah and a full-length study of the Mauritian author Lindsey Collen. She is the head of the research group Ratnakara <http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara> which explores the literatures and cultures of the South West Indian Ocean. At present the group is embarking on a new project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness which focuses on life writing and the aesthetics of remembering. She spent three months as visiting scholar at the Centre of Indian Studies in Africa in Johannesburg in 2016. Felicity is also the editor of the electronic journal Indi@logs. Spanish Journal of India Studies http://revistes.uab.cat/indialogs

Notes

1. According to Sarah Nuttall (1996, 5) the first autobiography to be published in English by a black South African woman was Noni Jabavu’s The Ochre People. Scenes from a South African Life in 1963. See also Coullie and Meyer (2006, 24). For the purpose of this article I am using the terms ‘autobiography’ and ‘memoir’ interchangeably for the two texts under scrutiny. For a more detailed discussion of these terms see Marcus 1994.

2. Goonam took many years to finally conclude her work and had it not been for the intervention of fellow activist Fatima Meer, it may never have seen the light. For reasons unknown, the text is very poorly edited and I acknowledge that many of the criticisms expressed in this article may not be attributable to Goonam herself. According to her daughter, Vanitha Chetty ‘One of my mother’s major complaints with the book was that chunks were left out and hence there was no flow’ (Coullie 2006; 292).

3. Zubeida Jaffer 2003. Our Generation. Cape Town: Kwela Books: 35. All subsequent page numbers will be inserted in the text after the abbreviation OG.

4. Even when she decides at the last minute not to marry her Egyptian suitor in Scotland mentioned below, she merely limits herself to saying that she ‘went over the details in my saner moments’ (Dr. Goonam 1991. Coolie Doctor. An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam. Durban: Madiba Publications: 50. Subsequent page numbers will be inserted in the text after the abbreviation CD).

5. ‘In 1925 [at the age of 19] I moved about almost involuntarily, submerged in this Indian world of high domesticity and profound ritual, internalising, above all, the example set by my mother’ (CD 21).

6. Grey Street has since been renamed Dr. Yusuf Dadoo Street.

7. See Ebr.-Vally 2001 & Freund 1995 for more details on economic divisions among South African Indians.

8. Slovo does allow readers to glimpse a hint of his inner feelings when he reveals that: ‘When Ruth was assassinated by a racist death squad on 17 August 1982, we were 12 days way [sic] from our 33rd wedding anniversary. This is not the time or the place to detail the course of our life together and our relationship with our children […] the basic fabric of our relationship stood up to all this [competitiveness and other personal involvements] and more, including many forced separations connected with our duties in the revolutionary movement’ (1995, 48).

9. During her testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Jaffer recalls bouts of panic and disembodiment: ‘God, I am only at the first detention in 1980. How on earth am I going to describe ten years of ongoing harassment? I cannot stop now’ (OG 130). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission or TRC was instigated in 1995 in order to promote reconciliation and forgiveness among perpetrators and victims of apartheid by the full disclosure of truth and move the country towards unity. The hearings took place in various places around South Africa from 1996 to 1998.

10. Zubeida Jaffer testified at the TRC on May 23, 1997. For her testimony see http://truth.wwl.wits.ac.za/doc_page.php?did=1190&li=

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, project FFI2015-63739-P (MINECO/FEDER), the Ministry of Education mobility grant, PRX15/00102.