Spectrality and inter-generational black narratives in South Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper is a consideration of a limited number of social and creative imaginaries and their pivotal and difficult implications for trans-generational reflections, narratives and cultural memory in South Africa. The first part of the paper centres around the role-played by narrative. In black communities, the attempts to envision and elaborate alternative understandings of history were acts of knowledge production that negated imperial and colonial modernity and especially their politics of racial subjection and exclusion. The section concludes with a brief consideration of the hermeneutical challenges that are presented by conventional interpretive approaches to narrative and its political imperatives. Following the underscoring of why narrative matters, the second part of the paper maps out the persistent ways in which alienation is foregrounded as an important constituent of black-senses-of-being, especially in relation to the land, the means of life, kin, space and the social-formation. The discussion concludes with a consideration of some key challenges that the calls for transformation and decolonisation present for the processes of knowledge production, narration and interpretation.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative
• alienation
• melancholia
• memory
• trans-generational conversations
• decolonisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is evoked in the title of Mamphela Ramphele’s Laying Ghosts to Rest: Dilemmas of the Transformation in South Africa (2008). Robert Mugabe, reflecting on the debates on public culture provoked by the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town and the internment of Rhodes in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe remarked: “[s]o we are looking after the corpse and you have the statue. I don’t know what you think we should do. Dig him up? Perhaps his spirit might rise up again, what shall we do?” (Mugabe 2015).

2. Memory, as another visionary writer, Don Mattera, has averred, is a weapon because there is “[n]othing that memory cannot reach or touch or call back.” Echoing Dhlomo, Mattera promised that “I knew deep down inside of me, in that place where laws and guns cannot reach nor jackboots trample, that there has been no defeat. In another day, another time, we would emerge to reclaim our dignity and our land” (Materra 1987, 151).

3. See also Edward W. Said Freud and the Non-European (2003).

4. See Harriet Ngubane Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (1977).

5. A telling dilemma is the continuing search for the disappeared by groups such as Khulumani (which is made up of the apartheid victims, survivors and families of those abducted, tortured, assassinated and disappeared) and families such as the Simelanes (who in 2016, instituted criminal charges against four security officers of the Soweto special branch relating to the disappearance 24 years ago of their daughter/sister, Nokuthula Simelane). Nokuthula Simelane was an operative of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, and her sister, Thembi, explained that “we believe in closure and closure is accompanied by rituals, which we undertake and perform when we lose a beloved one and that is what we want to do” (Simelane 2016).

6. Eva Tettenborn cautions that we must resist “creating a celebratory discourse on melancholia since its roots are often deeply traumatic” even if melancholia is not always “exclusively disabling” and can be “a productive and effective affective form of resistance to racist oppression” (Tettenborn 2006, 107).

7. While Ngcobo’s depiction of Durban as a city in And They Didn’t Die is consistent with representations of Johannesburg, her foregrounding of women and rural people’s experiences – particularly their navigation of the rural-urban spacial, gendered socio-political divides and the confluence between customary and colonial laws – offers a profound expansion, critique and re-imagining of black subjectivities and lives beyond the usual urban-centric and masculinist templates.

8. Indian historian Ranajit Guha wrote that “[w]henever I read or heard the phrase colonial India, it hurts me. It hurts like an injury that has healed and yet I retained a trace of the original pain, linked to many different things – memories, values, sentiments” (Guha 1998).

9. The problematics of public and material culture present formidable predicaments. While statues can be removed what approaches are necessary for, say, public buildings? For instance, theatre buildings, with the exception of the Soweto Theatre, were built as commemorations of the historical milestones achieved in the history of Afrikaner nationalism and white racial capitalism (see Peterson 2014, 198–206). Can they be recast (narrativised differently) as was done with the The Old Fort Prison that now houses the Constitutional Court? Is it enough to rename them or erect “more appropriate” statues and monuments that, it can be argued, are western rather than African modes of commemoration.

10. Rancière argues that dissensus “informs an aesthetics of politics that operates at a complete remove from the forms of the staging of power and mass mobilization which Benjamin referred to as the ‘aestheticisation of politics’” (Rancière 2009, 25). Similarly, Martin Jay, while mindful of the dangers that inhere in the possible “victory of the spectacle over the public sphere” or “a more rational discourse,” remains open to the “subversive potential” of the aesthetic if it is grasped as not “the opposite of reason, but rather as its completion, not as the expression of irrational will, but as the sensual version of a higher, more comprehensive notion of rationality, not as the wordless spectacle of images, but the realisation of a literary absolute” (Jay 1992, 41–61).

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Bhekizizwe Peterson

Bhekizizwe Peterson is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published on African Literature, Performance and Cultural Studies as well as Black Intellectual Traditions in South Africa. He is also the writer and/or producer of internationally acclaimed films.