Re-signing History and Opening Up an Ethical Space of Disclosure: Yvette Christiansë’s Wyschogrodian Ethics in Unconfessed

Abstract

In and through her neo-slave narrative Unconfessed (2006), Yvette Christiansë not only salvages Sila van den Kaap from the archive but she also re-signs her history. Instead of simply filling in all the gaps left in the archival material, Christiansë crafts an elliptical, fragmented novel that speaks as much through what it reveals as through what it conceals. While the untellable excess of slavery bleeds, in absentia, from every page, the author eschews the graphic depiction of the pivotal event of violence as such, instead letting it resonate from the expressionistic emphasis on sensory images.

Keywords:

• Cape Colony slavery
• archive
• Unconfessed
• hertseer
• (non)speech
• ethics of disclosure

Notes on Contributor

Alexandra Negri is currently a PhD student at the Institute of American Studies, University of Stuttgart. Her thesis is entitled The Forgotten Wretched of South Africa: A Comparative Study of Coloured and Indian South African Narratives. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, gender and sexuality, the ethics of writing violence, and theories of space and place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of the genre of neo-slave narratives in South Africa compare Johnson, David 2010:

“Representing Cape Slavery.”

2. Wiederholung is used here in the Heideggerian double-sense, which draws on the ambiguity of the German verb “wiederholen”, i.e. as 1) an inseparable verb meaning “to repeat” or “to reiterate”, and 2) as a separable verb which can be split into the constituents “wieder” (again) and “holen” (to get, to retrieve), with other words or phrases intervening, as in “wieder nach Hause holen” (to bring back home). While the first sense is that of repetition, the latter also conveys the idea that the problem or issue which is to be wieder-ge-holt, can disclose its “far hidden possibilities; by working these out we transform it and the substance of the problem is first preserved” (Heidegger [1929] 1990: 139).

3. On the concept of temporal becoming, see Wyschogrod 1998:

Time’s passing has been construed in the analytical tradition in two ways, […] one as reflecting temporal becoming – I shall call this mode “stretched time” – and the other, the static relations of before and after – I shall call this mode time’s punctiformity [… .] [I]f succession is rightly understood [in the sense of “stretched time”], it accords with phenomenological experience: an event E “is past, was present, and was (still earlier) future; E is future, will be present, and will still later be past; or E is present, was future, and will be past.” (160–1)

In other words:

That which was always already determines what will be, the future itself is nachträglich. [retroactive] […] Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, like the time traveller who journeys to the future, sees not a straight line ahead but a curve such that the past is always already ahead of him. (160–1, italics in the original).

4. Heidegger’s concept of Gewesenheit seems to better convey Sila’s traumatic experiences than the usual term Vergangenheit. He distinguishes two senses of the past, namely Vergangenheit and Gewesenheit, of which he rejects the former. While Gewesenheit (literally: “been-ness”) suggests a range of experience as conveyed in the perfect form “ge-wesen”/“having-been,” the usual term Vergangenheit suggests that which has transpired; the bygone which is finished, fixed, and (allegedly) factual. Where Vergangenheit is best expressed by the simple past, Gewesenheit is accordingly better expressed by the imperfect tense. The latter is not finished and over, but it still works itself out in the present and will do so in the future.

5. As Samuelson points out in her discussion of post-apartheid rape narratives, to speak the traumatic (non)event may in fact reproduce (discursively) the original violation it claims to undo, and therefore turns out to be just as problematic as the failure to speak of it. “It is therefore necessary,” she insists, “to deconstruct the binary of voice and silence (or visibility and invisibility), which proposes that the movement from silence to voice is a liberatory one” (2007: 122). Motsemme comes to a similar conclusion when he asserts that “when we reject dominant western oppositional hierarchies of silence and speech, and instead adopt frameworks where words, silence, dreams, gestures, tears all exist interdependently and within the same interpretive field, we find that the mute always speak” (2004: 910).

6. In The Ethics of Remembering, Wyschogrod uses the postmodernist concept of “heterology,” or the study of Otherness, to engage with the writing of history. She argues that the past is not only an unrecoverable presence as conveyed in the Derridaean concept of the “trace,” but that it is exactly the responsibility of the “heterological historian” to bring to the fore and name the “artefact and images of the past, [which] are and are not signifiers” (2000: n.p., italics in the original). While she admits to the inscrutability of the past, which is “always already an unsurpassable negation … that can never be brought back materially” (2000: n.p.) – its discursive transmission through image and language demands of the “heterological historian” that she become involved “in the pain and pleasure of history” (2000: n.p.) while simultaneously deconstructing the spectacularisation of narratives of history. As Carl Raschke contends, the “heterological historian” in the Wyschogrodian sense “opens up what we might call an ontology of the never-before-spoken, a speaking not of the ‘unspoken’ in the more general, Heideggerian sense, but of that which prior to its historicization was not deemed (perhaps because it signifies what was hitherto the ‘unre-deemed’ of history) but of the unspeakable and speechless” (2000, n.p.)

7. Cf. Jacques Derrida De la Grammatologie (1967). See Ramón Saldívar on “sous rature”:

A strategic philosophical device originally defined and developed by Martin Heidegger and later elaborated by Jacques Derrida. [It] involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. Particularly in De la Grammatologie (1967), Jacques Derrida uses the process of placing a word sous rature in order to signify that the word is ‘inadequate yet necessary,’ that is, a particular signifier that is not wholly suitable for the concept it represents, but nevertheless must be used to represent it, since the constraints of our language offer nothing better. (2011: 527)

8. Note that Wyschogrod’s description of the cataclysmic disaster as a “non-event” is not meant to suggest its denial, but rather its temporal and experiential incommensurability as well as its discursive irretrievability:

The disaster recurs in perpetuity not as something positive but as a “nonevent” that never did and never will happen in any straightforward sense. The time of the disaster is a time that always already was and a time that will be in the mode of not being it. Beyond facts and states of affairs, the disaster is always behind itself, “always takes place after having taken place,” so that it lies outside experience. (1998: 28)

9. These passages are rendered in italics throughout the novel.

10. The implicit comparison of Sila’s white tormentors to animals contained in the passage’s allusion to Ecclesiastes can also be positioned within the novel’s more general contestation of the racially encoded colonial ideology of smells and of animal-like behaviour, alluding back to the novel’s opening scene: After Sila has been raped and impregnated by the guards themselves, she is left to rot in a room which, without sanitation, is more like a pigsty than a prison cell. In the opening scene, the new superintendent is overwhelmed and revolted by what he witnesses, and his shock and disbelief determine our, the reader’s, reactions to this abyss of inhumanity. The violence of the onslaught on our senses can only be compared to the initial scene of Richard Wright’s protest novel Native Son, while actually surpassing it in atrocity. In both cases the white masters are responsible for the dereliction and dehumanisation observed. We can hardly imagine the stench and degradation Sila and her daughter live in and the most shocking part is that the white masters intend them to be debased in this way: “This was how they liked it, filthy and stinking. He should know that, superintendent of cleanliness and order” (Christiansë 2006a: 2). Apparently the superior race can only confirm its superiority by debasing their slaves and prison inmates, not understanding the dialectics of dehumanisation as set forth, for example, by Frantz Fanon. So, while the white slave owners want their prisoners to live in smelly, disgusting conditions, implicitly justifying their treatment as animals, it is actually, in the novel’s most revolting scenes, the whites themselves who force their sweating, smelly and often inebriated bodies on their slaves. Sila’s disparaging reminiscence about Van der Wat’s going to mass are indicative in this context:

Sometimes she imagined that swine Van der Wat and his family pronking off […] with their pious stout faces served up on the platter of their holy words like vet piglets snorting in the Lord’s trough. Sometimes she imagined them sitting before a visiting minister […] “There is a valley far, far away,” they sang, swaying and swaying away with the rest of the congregation, while secretly trying to shift against their clothing […] (Christiansë 2006a: 4).

The racially encoded ideology of beast-like behaviour is thus inverted by the author.

11. The right hand of God generally refers to both a position of divine power that exceeds all other powers as well as to a place of proximity to God. In many Scriptures, it is associated with God’s wrath upon the enemy, such as in Exodus 15:6 (“Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy”) or Exodus 15:12 (“You stretched out your right hand; the earth swallowed them.”). The Roman Catholic (and Orthodox) tradition where the Pope or bishop knocks three times on the Holy Gate of a basilica in Rome symbolises the entry into God’s temple through the Gate of Heaven and thus a petitioning of God the Father.

12. Ironically, the only time Oumiesies’ female slaves are instructed in boekevat is before the former urges them to tell her if they have “lain with [her] son” (Christiansë 2006a: 161). Shortly after, the old lady decides to organise the baptism of some of her female slaves and their children – possibly because of the newly acquired knowledge that the latter are in all probability her own grandchildren. However, after Theron threatens his mother that he will “tell anyone that she [is] a madwoman,” she eventually dismisses the idea and, as Sila recalls, “[t]here was no boekevat that night. Or the next. And never again” (Christiansë 2006a: 162).

13. See Christiansë 2006a: 104: “Theron looked at me [Sila]. He said, you baboons talk to me? You gam talk about me?”

14. For a discussion of the significance and legacy of the Hamitic myth for the Coloured South African population see Mohamed Adhikari:

This biblically derived justification for the enslavement of African and the racial oppression of blacks is based on the curse that Noah is supposed to have placed on the descendant of his son, Ham, for having observed him naked. According to the myth, Noah’s curse damned Ham’s descendant to be the servants of the offspring of his other sons, Shem and Japheth. In their dispersal over the earth after the flood Ham’s descendant, as a consequence, were believed to have degenerated into barbarism and savagery and to have lost their awareness of God. (1992: 95, footnote 2)

15. See Christiansë:

[S]ome say she left the island … Some say it was on the centre of a piece of paper that she rode like a bier … Some say, it was nothing fanciful, all the women left the island for a house of correction on the mainland. Some say … that a boat came, rowed by men whose faces were wrapped in cloths cut from each dress she had worn when first she landed on that Cape of Good Hope. Some say it was nothing like that, but a long and narrow box, plain and simple. (2006a: 241)