Troubling frames: Zapiro’s iconography on Oscar Pistorius as traumics

ABSTRACT

This study aims to examine the comics form in relation to its representation of perpetrator trauma. Specifically, the study considers a selection of Jonathan Shapiro’s iconography on Oscar Pistorius as biograph(y)ics, since the artist ‘commixes’ Pistorius’s life from his rise to athletic fame – through the court trials for his alleged murder of Reeva Steenkamp on 14 February 2013 – to his conviction followed by a thirteen-year jail sentence on 24th November 2017. In my reading of the panels, I draw on Hilary Chute’s notion of the ethics of testimony in illustrative art and Jacques Derrida’s theorising on hauntology and the revenant to argue that wrongdoers can also experience their crimes as trauma. This critical engagement enables me to read Shapiro’s panels as not merely reinforcing dominant interpretations of the fallen hero, but also as a means by which the cartoonist destabilises and reconfigures socially accepted notions of the villain.

KEYWORDS:

• Perpetrator trauma
• Jonathan Shapiro
• Oscar Pistorius
• biograph(y)ics
• Reeva Steenkamp
• ethics of testimony
• traumics
• disability

Acknowledgements

This work is based on the research supported wholly by the A.W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. The fellowship holder acknowledges that opinions, findings and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author, and that the A.W. Mellon Foundation accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard. He also thanks Dr Lynda Gichanda Spencer, project owner and principal coordinator of the Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries, under whose mentorship he produced this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Nick Mdika Tembo is a Senior Lecturer in and Deputy Chair of the English Department at the University of Malawi. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He also held a postdoctoral position in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, South Africa. His research and teaching interests include African life writing, trauma and cultural studies, traumics, African popular culture and literatures, African genocides and conflicts, migration African literatures, Eastern African diasporic fiction, Malawian poetry and prose, South African auto/biographies, and the interface between literature and history, politics, psychology, the environment, and the medical humanities. He has variously published journal articles and chapters in these areas. He is currently working on a book project on traumics in selected Malawian, Zimbabwean, Kenyan and South African cartoons. Outside his academic life, Tembo consults on human rights for women, children and girl child education. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

ORCID

Nick Mdika Tembo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9572-9763

Notes

1 I use the term ‘ambiguity’ in the Freudian sense here, not to suggest vagueness of a term but rather to mean something that generates different interpretations.

2 This is an extension from Hillary Chute’s ideas as articulated in her paper titled ‘Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.’

3 However, I acknowledge that this ‘rush’ for Zapiro’s cartoons is largely limited to an elite class who can afford to buy newspapers and surf on the internet. Whites and a sizeable number of black elites, in this case, are the possible consumers of Zapiro’s artwork.

4 In their introduction to Keywords for Disability Studies (2015), Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin distinguish the ‘medical model’ from the ‘social model’ of disability, observing that the medical model ‘sees disability in terms of individual impairments to be corrected and cured.’ In the social model, on the other hand, ‘one is disabled because of the body’s interaction with the social and physical environment rather than because of individual pathology or “lack.”’ The social model, in their view, ‘asks how certain kinds of bodies are disabled by physical barriers, social stigma, lack of legal recognition, adaptive technologies, and economic resources’ (2015, 21–22).

5 The terms ‘posturing’ and posturing are used here both in the literary sense of someone who behaves in particular way in order to impress or mislead, and in the pejorative sense of someone whose behaviour brings disdain to the larger public. Where the former applies, regular font is used, while I use italics to denote the pejorative sense of the two terms.

6 The set of scales represents the weighing of evidence. The scales are balanced to portray that the evidence should stand on its own, without external influence. The blindfold represents impartiality, the ideal that justice should be applied without regard to wealth, power and other status. Finally, the sword represents authority and conveys the idea that justice can be swift and final.