On the Ambiguities of Narrative and of History: Writing (about) the Past in Recent South African Literary Criticism

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Notes

¹ N. Ndebele, ‘Memory, Metaphor, and the Triumph of Narrative’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 27 [pp. 19–28].

² See N. Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994).

³ I. de Kok, ‘Cracked Heirlooms: Memory on Exhibition’, in Nuttall and Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past, p. 61 [pp. 57–71].

⁴ Here I am gesturing, of course, to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the archive; see J. Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996). For discussion of Derrida's insights in the context of debates about the archive in South Africa, see S.van Zyl, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Archive: Derrida's Archive Fever’, in C. Hamilton, V. Harris, J. Taylor, M. Pickover, G. Reid and R. Saleh (eds), Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, David Philip; Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2002), pp. 39–59 (odd numbers), and Verne Harris, ‘A Shaft of Darkness: Derrida in the Archive’, in Hamilton et al (eds), Refiguring the Archive, pp. 61–81 (odd numbers). Derrida's response to Van Zyl and Harris at a 1998 colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand is reproduced (with a transcription of the question-and-answer session which followed) in the same collection as ‘Archive Fever’, pp. 38–80 (even numbers).

⁵ A. Brink, ‘Stories of History: Reimagining the Past in Post-apartheid Narrative’, in Nuttall and Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past, p. 30 [pp. 29–42].

⁶ A. Brink, ‘Stories of History: Reimagining the Past in Post-apartheid Narrative’, in Nuttall and Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past, p. 32.

⁷ See Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (Cape Town, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998–2003), Volume 1 (of 7), pp. 111–14.

⁸ M. Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (Stanford, Stanford University Press; Johannesburg, Wits [Witwatersrand] University Press, 2007), p. 3.

⁹ D. Posel, ‘The TRC Report: What Kind of History? What Kind of Truth?’, in D. Posel and G. Simpson (eds), Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 2002), p. 150 [pp. 147–72].

¹⁰ D. Posel, ‘The TRC Report: What Kind of History? What Kind of Truth?’, in D. Posel and G. Simpson (eds), Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 2002), p. 155.

¹¹ Human Rights Violation hearings lasted from April 1996 to August 1997, various special hearings took place until August 1998, while Amnesty hearings only concluded in 2001.

¹² One of the most pointed being Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South African (TRC)’, Diacritics, 32, 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2002), pp. 33–59. The comprehensive bibliography in Sanders’ Ambiguities of Witnessing lists numerous collections which include critiques and assessments of the process.

¹³ Attempting even a representative list would be foolish, but the reader might think, for example, of Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull (1998) and A Change of Tongue (2003), J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006), Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2001), Ivan Vladislavić's The Restless Supermarket (2001) and Portrait with Keys (2006), K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor (2003), Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003), Tony Eprile's The Persistence of Memory (2004), Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2004, trans. Michiel Heyns 2006, published as The Way of the Women in the USA and UK in 2007), and Zakes Mda's Madonna of Excelsior (2004); also, of several of William Kentridge's ‘drawings for projection’, especially Felix in Exile (1994), History of the Main Complaint (1996), Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), and Tide Table (2003).

¹⁴ M. Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007), p. 2.

¹⁵ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 4.

¹⁶ T. Woods, African Pasts: Memory and History in African Literatures (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 9, quoting D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 186.

¹⁷ Woods, African Pasts, p. 10.

¹⁸ Ndebele, ‘Memory, Metaphor’, p. 27.

¹⁹ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 3. Samuelson favours ‘Sarah Bartmann’ (over ‘Saartjie’, ‘Sara’, ‘Saartje’ and ‘Baartman’) as that form was ‘institutionalised by the South African government in August 2002’ (p. 115, n. 1), except where she is citing others’ usage.

²⁰ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 46.

²¹ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 5.

²² Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 15.

²³ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 20; see pp. 18–20. See also C. Coetzee, ‘Krotoä Remembered: A Mother of Unity, a Mother of Sorrows?’, in Nuttall and Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past, pp. 112–19. In addition to the texts discussed by Samuelson, Coetzee mentions Karen Press's Bird Heart Stoning the Sea (1990) and Krotoä (1990), a children's book and poem cycle respectively, and the mid-1990s one-woman show, Krotoä, by Afrikaans singer Antoinette Pienaar, as examples of literary or dramatic reinterpretations of Krotoa/Krotoä (pp. 117–18).

²⁴ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 233.

²⁵ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 26.

²⁶ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 35.

²⁷ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 40.

²⁸ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 41.

²⁹ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 55.

³⁰ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation

³¹ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 79. Nongqawuse's prophecy's supposed derivative nature, Samuelson suggests, effectively denies her an authorship function (p. 79, and see p. 57).

³² Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, pp. 89–90.

³³ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 94.

³⁴ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 97.

³⁵ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 233.

³⁶ Sanders, Ambiguities, pp. 83–4.

³⁷ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 84.

³⁸ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 241.

³⁹ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation

⁴⁰ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 148.

⁴¹ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 148.

⁴² Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 154; see also p. 23.

⁴³ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 154.

⁴⁴ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 157, quoting Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 27.

⁴⁵ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 6, referring to Derrida, Demeure, p. 42. What Derrida suggests here is that the necessary iterability of testimony, its openness to technologies of repetition and replication, allows the ‘possibility of fiction and lie, simulacrum and literature’ in testimony; it is on these grounds that ‘the right to literature insinuates itself’, he argues, ‘at the very origin of truthful testimony, autobiography in good faith, sincere confession’, and constitutes ‘their essential compossibility’. Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 157, quoting Derrida, Demeure, p. 42 (translation Elizabeth Rottenberg's). Sanders – whose book, incidentally, appears in the same series as Derrida's Demeure, ‘Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics’ – is keenly attuned to issues of iterability and technologies of transmission of narrative. In his ‘Preface’, for example, he gestures suggestively, in discussion of Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission, towards the dangers of ‘mistranslation’, ‘ventriloquism’, ‘semic and […] wider cultural violence’ in the voicing of testimony, and its translation and representation (p. x).

⁴⁶ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 6.

⁴⁷ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 4–5.

⁴⁸ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 4.

⁴⁹ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 149.

⁵⁰ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 150.

⁵¹ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 6.

⁵² Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 13.

⁵³ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 33.

⁵⁴ Sanders, Ambiguities Pushing his suggestive gloss on ‘irony’ further, Sanders suggests that we might begin to think of literature, too, as being ‘also parasitic upon forensic practices of reading’, like law. ‘What if irony’, he asks, ‘is not simply a “literary” challenge to the law, or even a challenge at all, but the way in which the law itself negotiates and renegotiates the violence of dispropriation […]?’ (p. 22).

⁵⁵ De Kok, ‘Cracked Heirlooms’, p. 61. See Sanders, Ambiguities, pp. 148, 150. I am not implying a debt, merely a suggestive comparison.

⁵⁶ Sanders, Ambiguities, pp. 24–33 and 96–9.

⁵⁷ Sanders, Ambiguities, pp. 97–9.

⁵⁸ Sanders, Ambiguities, pp. 171–2.

⁵⁹ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 171. Sanders refers to J.M. Coetzee's ‘Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka's The Burrow’ (1981), reproduced in J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, D. Attwell (ed.) (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 210–32 (and especially to pp. 222–3).

⁶⁰ Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 168.

⁶¹ Ndebele, ‘Memory, Metaphor’, p. 27.

⁶² Sanders, Ambiguities, p. 74 (see also pp. 21–3, 187), quoting G.C. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a Critique of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 430. Sanders has written lucidly about Spivak elsewhere – see his Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory (London and New York, Continuum, 2006).

⁶³ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 198.

⁶⁴ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation

⁶⁵ Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, p. 199.

⁶⁶ Woods, African Pasts, p. 6.

⁶⁷ Woods, African Pasts, p. 36, quoting LaCapra, Writing History, p. 21.

⁶⁸ Woods, African Pasts, p. 38.

⁶⁹ Woods, African Pasts, p. 35.

⁷⁰ Woods, African Pasts, p. 38.

⁷¹ Woods, African Pasts, p. 39.

⁷² Woods, African Pasts, p. 10.

⁷³ Woods, African Pasts, p. 13.

⁷⁴ Woods, African Pasts, p. 23.

⁷⁵ Woods, African Pasts, p. 57.

⁷⁶ He might, for example, have considered Gail Low's fascinating ‘The Natural Artist: Publishing Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard in Postwar Britain’, Research in African Literatures, 37, 4 (Winter 2006), pp. 15–33. And the absence of references to anything by Graham Huggan – and especially The Postcolonial Exotic (London and New York, Routledge, 2001) – is unfortunate.

⁷⁷ Woods, African Pasts, p. 92.

⁷⁸ He might, for example, have considered Gail Low's fascinating ‘The Natural Artist: Publishing Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard in Postwar Britain’, Research in African Literatures, 37, 4 (Winter 2006), pp. 15–33. And the absence of references to anything by Graham Huggan – and especially The Postcolonial Exotic (London and New York, Routledge, 2001) – is unfortunate., p. 180, for example.

⁷⁹ Woods might, in discussing Cronin, usefully have cited Rita Barnard, ‘Speaking Places: Prison, Poetry, and the South African Nation’, Research in African Literatures, 32, 3 (Fall 2001), pp. 155–76.

⁸⁰ Again, the discussion would have benefited from reference to David Attwell's essay on ‘The Experimental Turn in Black South African Fiction’, in L. de Kock, L. Bethlehem, S. Laden (eds), South Africa in the Global Imaginary (Pretoria, UNISA Press; Leiden, Brill, 2004), pp. 154–79, later reproduced as Chapter 6 of Attwell's Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005; Athens, Ohio University Press, 2006).

⁸¹ For example: ‘recaptured by Ethiopian hands’ (p. 30); ‘veers between’ for ‘amongst’ (three things) (p. 31); Soyinka's The Interpreters ‘peters out a bit’ towards its end (p. 94); ‘in Léopold Senghor's poetry, in which … are created in such poems by Senghor as…’ (p. 107); ‘“No More Lullabies”, the eponymous title of Gwala's No More Lullabies […]’ (p. 184); Mda's Ways of Dying is ‘punctuated and studded with random murders’ (p. 226). While discussion in the text of Chapter 3 is of ‘Ngugi’, all parenthetical references are to ‘Thiong'o’. Throughout Chapter 5, ‘detainment’ is used, awkwardly, for ‘detention’ (pp. 133, 140, 144, 145, 149), although ‘detention’ is also used (pp. 140, 145, 149, 156, 159).

⁸² Woods, African Pasts, pp. 6, 138.

⁸³ Woods, African Pasts, p. 183.

⁸⁴ Woods, African Pasts, p. 206.

⁸⁵ Woods, African Pasts

⁸⁶ Woods, African Pasts, p. 236.

⁸⁷ Woods, African Pasts, p. 14.

⁸⁸ Woods, African Pasts, p. 140.

⁸⁹ See R. Davenport and C. Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History, 5th edn (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000), p. 508.

⁹⁰ Woods, African Pasts, p. 207.

⁹¹ Woods, African Pasts, p. 227.

⁹² Woods, African Pasts, p. 183.

⁹³ Woods, African Pasts, p. 206.

⁹⁴ Woods, African Pasts, p. 193. Woods’ dating of the ‘advent of majority rule in South Africa’ to 1993 is also puzzling (p. 199). The interim constitution (the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 200 of 1993) was passed in 1993, but the first multiracial elections this facilitated, held in April 1994, are surely the more generally acceptable benchmark date.

⁹⁵ Woods, African Pasts, p. 161.

⁹⁶ Woods, African Pasts, p. 202.

⁹⁷ D. Attridge and R. Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 239. Sachs’ paper, originally titled ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’ (not ‘Preparing Ourselves for Power’, as Woods has it in his bibliography, p. 281), runs from pp. 239–48.

⁹⁸ D. Attridge and R. Jolly (eds), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 239. Sachs’ paper, originally titled ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’ (not ‘Preparing Ourselves for Power’, as Woods has it in his bibliography, p. 248.

⁹⁹ Woods, African Pasts, p. 206.

¹⁰⁰ See Davenport and Saunders, South Africa, p. 454.