The Invention of Mourning in Post-Apartheid Literature

Abstract

One of the chief challenges facing post-apartheid writers has been the need to produce literature capable of working through the losses of the apartheid era. While the resistance struggle instrumentalised literary production and politicised funerals, the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided a forum for the expression of personal loss but also tended to subsume individual testimonies within hegemonic national narratives. With particular reference to work by Zakes Mda, John Kani, JM Coetzee and Ingrid de Kok, this paper argues that postapartheid literature invents new forms of both mourning and community, offering alternative times and spaces for the expression of grief.

Notes

See, for example, BA Pauw's ‘Ancestor beliefs and rituals among urban Africans’, African Studies, 33 (2), 1974, pp 99 – 111.

Z Mda, Ways of Dying, Cape Town: Oxford University Press South Africa, 1995.

Mda himself says he was not aware at the time of writing that what one might describe as professional mourners exist in other cultures (informal conversation, The Letters Home Festival, Cambridge University, March 2004).

Mda, 1995, p 15.

Ibid, p 51.

P Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001, p 107. Mpe's text is similarly saturated with death—from suicide, AIDS and random acts of violence—and the laudatory reference to Ways of Dying suggests that while Toloki may not have succeeding in establishing his extraordinary profession, Mda himself has shown the way forward for other South African novelists seeking to confront the omnipresence of death in post-apartheid South Africa.

Mda, 1995, p 134.

Ibid, p 108.

On the politicisation of funerals, see for instance M Tetleman, ‘The burial of Canon JA Calata and the revival of mass-based opposition in Craddock, South Africa, 1983’, African Studies, 58 (1), 1999, pp 5 – 29.

G Farred, ‘Mourning the post-apartheid state already? The poetics of loss in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying’, Modern Fiction Studies, 46 (1), 2000, pp 183 – 206.

Ibid, p 186.

Mda, 1995, p 160.

Ibid, p 109.

Ibid, p 159.

Ibid, p 192.

Ibid, p 199.

Ibid, p 98.

N Ndebele, The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture, Fordsburg: COSAW, 1991; A Sachs, ‘Preparing ourselves for freedom’, Weekly Mail, 2 February 1990.

J Kani, Nothing But the Truth, Johannesberg: Wits University Press, 2003

Ibid, p 2.

Ibid, p 46.

Ibid, p 52.

B Hamber and R Wilson caution that ‘nations are not like individuals in that they do not have collective psyches…nation-building discourses on reconciliation often subordinate individual needs, and…truth commissions and individual processes of healing work on different time lines’: ‘Symbolic closure through memory, reparation and revenge in post-conflict societies’, Journal of Human Rights, 1 (1), 2002, p 35. Also see H Gruneabaum & Y Henri, ‘Remembering bodies, producing histories: holocaust survivor narratives and truth and reconcilaition commission testimony’, in J Bennett & R Kennedy (eds), World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time, Basingstoke & New York: 2003, p 102.

Z Mda, ‘Preface’, in J Kani, Nothing But the Truth, Johannesberg: Wits University Press, 2003.

In ‘JM Coetzee's inconsolable works of mourning’, Contemporary Literature, 40 (3), 1999, pp 430 – 463; Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: JM Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

JM Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, London: Secker & Warburg, 1983, p 109.

JM Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, London: Secker & Warburg, 1980; Disgrace, London: Secker & Warburg, 1999.

JM Coetzee, Age of Iron, London: Secker & Warburg, 1990.

Informal conversation, Letters Home Conference, Cambridge University, March 2004.

P Splendore, of the University di Roma Tre, has written a paper comparing these two novels entitled ‘Vagrants and angels of death in two contemporary South African novels’ (yet to be published).

JM Coetzee, 1990, p 68.

Ibid, p 149.

I offer a fuller reading of Age of Iron in ‘“Father, can't you see I'm burning?” Trauma, ethics and the real in JM Coetzee's Age of Iron’, in M Rustin, C Bainbridge, C Yates & S Radstone (eds), Kill or Cure? Culture and the Unconscious (contract under negotiation with Palgrave).

Mda, 1995, p 188.

JL Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p 15.

W Benjamin, ‘The doctrine of the similar’, Selected Writings, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, c1996 – 1999, p 698.

E Hobsbawm & T Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

JM Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, p 65.

Ibid, p 146.

Ibid, p 117.

See Caroline Rooney's wonderfully provocative study, African Literature, Animism and Politics, London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Rooney focuses on the limitations of a self-conscious scepticism in Coetzee's work and does not explore the possibility of a becoming-animist. Nevertheless, her book shares my concern with the nature of empathy and the process of artistic invention, which she links to mourning by taking as her ethical and artistic model Antigone's insistence on mourning her outlawed dead brother.

Had I space, I would have liked to consider the invention of mourning in works such as D Galgut's The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, London: Scribners, 1991; M Behr's The Smell of Apples, London: Abacus, 1996; A Krog's Country of My Skull, Johannesberg: Random House, 1998; S Magona's Mother to Mother, Cape Town: David Philip, 1998; Z Wicomb's David's Story, New York: The Feminist Press, 2000; E Boehmer's Bloodlines, Cape Town: David Philip, 2001; P Mpe's Welcome To Our Hillbrow, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001; and MW Serote's Scatter the Ashes and Go, Johannesberg: Macmillan, 2002. As the only partially ironic title of Mpe's novel indicates, many of these texts move towards forms of relation and community, while others seem to remain caught in the cycles of anger and guilt that preclude community.

I de Kok, Terrestial Things, Cape Town: Kwela Press & Snailpress, 2002.

Ibid, p 31.

Ibid, p 21.

From ‘Parts of speech’, in I de Kok, 2002, p 21.