South Africa, the USA, and the Globalization of Truth and Reconciliation: Itinerant Mourning in Zakes Mda's Cion

This essay juxtaposes two different visions of “itinerant mourning,” a term I borrow from the South African playwright and fiction writer, Zakes Mda. The first version of this practice that I would like to address can be found in the model of transitional justice that went into global circulation almost as soon as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 1996–8) began work in 1996, but particularly in the years following the publication of its 1998 Report.1 The second version of “itinerant mourning” is represented in Mda's latest novel, Cion (2007). As I will detail below, Cion transports the protagonist of Ways of Dying (1995)—Mda's novel about the South African transition to democracy—from South Africa to the United States, specifically to the area surrounding Ohio University, Athens, where Mda currently works as Professor of Creative Writing. This protagonist is the inimitable Toloki, whose occupation as “professional mourner” is, of course, key to this essay's project of mapping out new areas of transnational connection between the US and South Africa, and exploring the openings for social transformation that appear as forms of politics and works of art move across localities within the broader context of twenty-first century globalization.

Truth commissions were not invented in South Africa. As Priscilla Hayner documents, the first truth commission to make international headlines was Argentina's Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, 1983–4). This was followed most notably by Chile's Comisión Nacional para la Verdad y Reconciliación (National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, 1990–1), which appended reconciliation to truth.2 However, the South African TRC made important modifications to these Southern Cone experiments, including the addition of public hearings for victims of human rights abuses, the creation of a system of qualified amnesty aimed at facilitating “restorative” justice, and the mounting of a blitz media campaign.3 Through the activity of its Human Rights Violations (HRV) Committee in particular, the South African TRC came to be associated with what Richard A. Wilson calls a “religious-redemptive” narrative aimed at achieving forgiveness and reconciliation.4 Here, truth telling has an explicitly therapeutic as well as a spiritual dimension. According to its advocates, it would lead to both individual and social catharsis, allowing repressed traumatic memories to escape and thus ensuring a move from trauma to health for the “new” post-apartheid nation.5 This “miracle” would be accomplished in large part through a hegemonic emplotment of personal testimony in the Commission's report and in national and international media coverage. Victims of human rights abuses were seen to face a traumatic past and to achieve mastery over this past by telling their stories. In this process, the struggle of victims to successfully “mourn” the past became a site for curing and unifying the listeners of their testimony.6 Such an emplotment, which Allen Feldman has described from a critical perspective as “the trauma-aesthetic,” promotes and institutionalizes the oft-cited slogan that “Revealing is Healing”—both for the individual and for the national community.7

The actual TRC hearings in South Africa may have been more complex than the “religious-redemptive” narrative generally allows.8 However, this narrative does seem to be what circulates on the international level—where, for better or worse, and whether we wish to focus on what gets lost as things get transported or on what is gained in processes of productive transposition, South Africa has become the poster child for truth commissions. Claire Moon posits the existence of a specifically South African “therapeutic moral order” that she claims has “become one of the most powerful frameworks of understanding within which an increasing number of new states have attempted to deal with a legacy of violent conflict.”9 Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar describes the way South Africa has become a dominant “reference point” in “the circuits of transnational justice theory,” where “the TRC and its discourse on social and individual reconciliation always come up as models.”10 This finds concrete expression in the repeated mobilization of the story of the Gugulethu Seven mothers forgiving the murderers of their sons—posed in the 1998 TRC Report as a “beacon for hope” for South Africa—at international conferences on transitional justice through an almost obligatory screening of Frances Reed and Deborah Hoffman's documentary Long Night's Journey Into Day (2000), a work that Castillejo-Cuéllar argues subsumes the dilemmas of transitional justice within a reconciliation framework.11 This model of individual mourning that leads to societal healing, bound up as it is with the rhetoric of forgiveness and reconciliation, is often understood as the desired trajectory for post-South Africa truth commissions, which have been set up in places such as Peru, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Morocco, and East Timor.12

Cion presents a rather different story, and one that starts from dissatisfaction with certain aspects of South Africa's democratic transition. Having learned that he was not the first person to mourn professionally and lamenting the lack of “interesting” deaths in South Africa, which now all stem from HIV and the African National Congress (ANC) government's AIDS denialism, Toloki, the professional mourner, comes from South Africa to the USA.13 Here he puts a new twist on his chosen occupation: “If I could not invent the profession of mourning for remuneration then I could surely invent itinerant mourning” (3–4). Toloki the itinerant mourner is a decidedly curious figure. His debut appearance in Ways of Dying was inspired by Vercueil in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron—a character distinguished by his marginality to mainstream society, his deathly smell, and his undecidable position as an angel or a devil.14 As Sam Durrant argues in relation to Ways of Dying, it is not clear “how seriously we are to take Toloki's activities” and to what extent he is meant as a guide.15 Grant Farred contends that Toloki in Ways of Dying prematurely (and counter-productively) mourns the death of political struggle in South Africa.16 Against this view, Rita Barnard persuasively suggests that the character should be read not as a figure for national politics but rather as a figure for imagining new spaces and forms of political articulation and for the imagination itself.17 While the Toloki of Cion may not be precisely the same as the Toloki of the earlier text, his affinity with imagination and artistic representation clearly carries over and is even thematized in Cion, where he is specifically introduced as a fictional character from the earlier novel brought to Ohio on the whim of his author—a black South African writer who is also briefly represented in the text (9)—and set loose in the novel's “real” world.

Toloki's marginality within South Africa, his oblique relationship to elite and national politics, suggests that aligning his style of mourning with the “therapeutic mourning” of the South African TRC is problematic.18 Yet, both Toloki and Cion seem invested in transporting or translating a paradigm of cathartic mourning and a restorative justice grounded in forgiveness and reconciliation to the United States. This is apparent in a plot sequence initiated in the opening scenes of the novel. Toloki no sooner befriends Obed Quigley, a member of an isolated community of mixed African American, Native American, and white heritage based in a town called Kilvert, than Obed is hauled to jail for sexually harassing a white sorority sister from the nearby Ohio University, Athens. This charge stems from Obed's attempt to personify a character of legend. Having heard the rumor that his ancestor Nicodemus, a fugitive slave shot dead in the basement of what used to be underground railroad station and is now a sorority house, paid erotic ghostly visits to the sorority sisters, Obed decides to capitalize on Nicodemus's demise by dressing up as his ancestor and “touching” the women. As Obed is dragged off by the police complaining that “for centuries his people have suffered indignities” (16), Toloki asks himself: “who am I to right American wrongs?” (17). But he does exactly this when he convinces Beth Eddy, the woman in question, to drop her charges and settle for a community mediation that sounds suspiciously like a TRC amnesty hearing.19 The mediation itself becomes a scene of reconciliation, as Beth and Obed's respective narratives of gender and racial victimization find synthesis in a meta-narrative of forgiveness.

How, then, do we parse the relationship between the two forms of itinerant mourning described above? What are the overlaps and disjunctures between Toloki's profession and the South African model of transitional justice described by Moon and Castillejo-Cuéllar, and what do they say about the prospects of translating this model to the US and to other parts of the globe? What are the benefits and what are the risks? Given the fact that Toloki is self-consciously designated as a figure of artistic representation, these questions cannot be disentangled from questions about the relationship between art and politics set out by Mda in this text. Is the work of art the work of mourning, as Durrant has suggested; the work of reconciliation, as Mda himself has suggested; both at once; or something different altogether?20

In the remainder of this essay, I will approach these questions in a roundabout fashion: first, through an analysis of the novel's representation of Toloki's attempts to help Obed, his family, and his “people” mourn the history of slavery and its afterlife in Jim Crow segregation; and second, by exploring the connection that the novel points its readers to between this project and the task of ending the current human rights abuses linked to the war in Iraq and the so-called “new humanitarianism” of the Bush administration. Scholars have frequently commented on the resonances between America's history of racism and that of apartheid South Africa—resonances that the “War on Terror” has re-evoked and amplified.21 Racism and the “War on Terror” are also two areas where the possibility of holding a US truth commission has been raised. Commentators from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to American political scientist Andrew Valls have specifically suggested creating a South African-style TRC to deal with the history of racial oppression in the United States. According to Tutu, “the US probably needs to go through a process akin to [the South African] TRC process ….This country has not really faced up to the legacy of slavery or the dispossession of Native Americans.”22 Indeed, the TRC format was used in the municipal Greensboro, North Carolina Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2005–6), set up to investigate a 1979 massacre of civil rights activists and union leaders perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan. The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)—a non-governmental organization formed in the wake of South Africa's TRC and involved in setting up the truth and reconciliation commissions in sites such as Peru and Morocco—helped to organize the Greensboro TRC and is now sponsoring another truth commission process in the United States. Currently called the “US Accountability Project,” the new initiative is meant to investigate the breakdown of the rule of law during the “War on Terror.” The ICTJ has been joined by powerful voices, such as that of Senator Patrick Leahy, who recently called for a truth commission dealing with torture and other human rights violations carried out by the Bush administration.23

The Art of Quilting and the Art of Mourning

Life in Kilvert, Ohio, where Obed Quigley and his family reside, has been patterned by the historical geography of freedom of the United States. In the years leading up to the US Civil War, Ohio—as a state just above the Mason-Dixon line—was both an idealized destination for those seeking liberty and (especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850) a space where slave owners continued their reign of terror.24 The historic “indignities” to which Obed refers are first and foremost the abuses suffered by many of Kilvert's original members as a result of slavery. Kilvert was founded by escaped slaves seeking freedom in the North, who settled down and intermarried with the Native American inhabitants of the region, as well as with Irish and other whites who had been forced into wage slavery and were seeking refuge in a corner of the country where no one Indian nation has a clear ownership claim. As represented in the novel, the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Powhatan all have ancestral ties to this area. If the residents of Kilvert have no pure ethnic ancestry, neither were their ancestors purely innocent victims of slavery. The narrative of the text alternates between Toloki's commentary on contemporary life in this locale and historical tales involving the first families of Kilvert. One of the most powerful of these historical stories is that of an enslaved woman known as the Abyssinian Queen, who sent her two sons Abednego and Nicodemus to find freedom with only a quilt as a guide. The Abyssinian Queen experiences not only physical abuse but also what Nancy Bentley calls the cruelty of “kinlessness” that goes hand in hand with the “social death” of enslaved people.25 This pattern is repeated when Nicodemus is shot dead in front of his brother's eyes by slave hunters in the Athens basement where Obed would later impersonate his ghost. Yet the founders of Kilvert also both supported the slave system and engaged in what are coded as counterproductive acts of violence against it. The community's tangled genealogy is engraved on the headstone of Niall Quigley, uncovered by Toloki and Obed. The grave reads: “Slave Owner, Slave Trader, Slave, Slave Stealer, Professional Witness” (165). The Irishman Niall Quigley, after escaping from a slavery he was sold into by his own African slave, not only serves as a witness to the “free” status of runaway slaves but also plans the revenge murder of the former slave trader turned abolitionist responsible for the death of Nicodemus.

What is perhaps most striking about Kilvert are the multi-layered silences both about and within it. The community, cut off geographically from surrounding areas by frequent floods, was largely ignored in other ways by the rest of the United States in the years after the Civil War. Virulent racism, perhaps particularly directed at this site of racial mixture, positioned Kilvert beyond the pale of respectable society in the landscape of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century segregation. As Obed's mother Ruth Quigley puts it, “the white folks [were] dead scared of being bred out” by the people of Kilvert, who “are harbingers of a new human race” (223). The rejection of both Kilvert and its threatening hybridity can be glimpsed in the story of Obed Quigley's paternal grandmother, a white woman who married into the multi-racial Quigley family. Because she fell in love with and bore a child to Obed's grandfather, her white family rejected her. The inhabitants of Kilvert then doubled this rejection on account of their built-up frustration with attitudes of white superiority. Ultimately she had a mental breakdown and was committed to an asylum called The Ridges. She left this mental institution only in a coffin, and was buried on the property in an unmarked grave.

Greater America's rejection of Kilvert and the community's response to it has left many gaps in the stories told within the community itself, having warped people's ability to come to terms with their history. Some segments of the community, like Ruth, have adopted a reactive stance that reproduces prejudicial views even as it reverses them. The past becomes a sacred site of veneration that cannot brook change. Ruth's policing of heritage can be seen in her strict control over the art of quilting, posed in the text as a grassroots community art form that both symbolizes the struggle for freedom and embodies the trauma of slavery and segregation. For Ruth, “old quilts embody the life of the family” (33). She feels that quilting, which served as the key to her ancestors’ freedom since quilts were used as maps out of the South and symbols for the Underground Railroad, must replicate the past in a strict manner.26 Her view that honoring the past means that traditional patterns must be scrupulously maintained, with the same arrangement of stitches set out again and again, calls to mind aspects of Cathy Caruth's formulation of traumatic memory. Here, trauma's structure is that of fragmented, belated, and frozen or static memory that returns to haunt subjects in repetitive patterns.27 Individuals like Ruth's husband, Mahlon, exhibit a different kind of repetition compulsion. Mahlon hides behind a façade of quietness and complacency, only to reveal his total immersion in the past to his daughter Orpah in the form of midnight storytelling performances, resembling a kind of possession, that take place in her bedroom and are closed to outsiders.

The conflict between these various forms of silencing—and the psychic damage that they can do—is registered in Obed and his sister Orpah. Obed has no real way of accessing his heritage, and chooses to invoke his ancestry only when there is some practical gain to be had. He sets up a business as a Navajo Hand-Trembler, in spite of his complete lack of connection to Navajo identity; he attempts to trade in his Cherokee ancestors for Shawnees, in the hopes of attaining a stake in a potential casino; and, not to forget, he impersonates a fugitive slave in order to paw at sorority girls. Orpah, on the other hand, has discovered a way to translate her father's nighttime performances into a testament to the wider community when she converts his stories into drawings. These drawings allow history to seep out of the tiny chamber where Mahlon has enclosed it. Ruth, however, remains adamantly opposed both to the story-telling sessions and to the artwork that emerges from them. To her, Orpah's creative reconfiguration of the past—which psychiatrists such as Onno van der Hart and Bessel van der Kolk argue is key to successful mourning—amounts to nothing more than betrayal.28 She insists on ripping the drawings to shreds. Ruth's destruction of art and obsession with the purity of the past, for which she earns the nicknames “Taliban in Da House” and “Ayatollah Ruth,” leaves no space for a constructive engagement with the past to open space for a different future. Static repetition of isolation reigns. Orpah is driven away from the family, locking herself in her room for days on end.

Toloki, as it turns out, is able to solve Obed's problems through the process of mediation. This mediation process eventually enables Obed to form a romantic attachment with his victim, Beth Eddy, and to dismiss his previous schemes for self-aggrandizement in favor of practical service to the Kilvert community. The South African mourner also manages to liberate Orpah and the rest of the family from the burden of unspoken memories. He does this largely through a re-signification of quilting and the familial and communal relationships bound together through this art form. At the invitation of Obed, Toloki comes to lodge in the Quigley family home. After spying on the story sessions taking place between Mahlon and Orpah, which he initially interprets as incest, he comes to harbor Orpah's drawings and eventually to reconfigure them as what he calls “art quilts.” These quilts result from an intense collaboration between Toloki and Orpah, where Toloki sews and Orpah helps in his “reinterpretation” of her drawn designs; they are in essence a fabric collage made from “bits of discarded cloth,” “found objects,” and “stylized human figures” made by Toloki (294–5). The process of making these quilts allows Toloki to weave together various stories of the past and its continuation in the present, bringing into dialogue Mahlon, Ruth, Orpah, and Obed as well as the women at the Kilvert Community Center who teach Toloki to quilt, and who have had a falling out with the Quigleys over Ruth's refusal to let Orpah quilt in non-traditional ways. The “creative partnership” between Toloki and Orpah morphs into a graphically represented sexual relationship, which can be theorized usefully via Stéphane Robolin's concept of “loose memory.” Here, the opening up of repressive versions of communal history to include proliferating counter-memories can be aligned with the opening of possibilities for female sexuality. Using Robolin's term, I would argue that Toloki can be seen to “loosen” traditional quilting patterns and to nurture a kind of productive promiscuity of memory at odds with the hegemonies of the past.29 Further, while Toloki's representations of Orpah's drawings clearly depart from tradition, and are not what Ruth or the community center women would consider to be serious quilting, they may recapture the incorporative and improvisational spirit that originally animated the quilts.30

Toloki's work translating Orpah's drawings into quilts, and thus weaving together the community, is tied to a specific act of mourning. This is the process of finding the gravesite of and paying respects to Mahlon Quigley's mother at the mental asylum where she ended her days. The adequate mourning of this grave presents a chance to transform the silences of the past. Toloki's performance of grief as professional mourner allows the family to expose previously hidden stories of abuse through and complicity in the violence of slavery and segregation. He does this by incorporating Mahlon's actions during his storytelling sessions with Orpah into the funeral rites. This process of returning to, validating and reinventing their strange performance brings Mahlon's stories out of the privacy of Orpah's room and into public view. If we juxtapose the hegemonic image of victims testifying to the HRV Committee in South Africa and Toloki's act of replaying Mahlon's storytelling in front of the Quigleys, what seems crucial is that Toloki's performance—while one that reveals the profound grief of a family that needs to be recognized and attended to—is not primarily a public spectacle of pain and suffering like that set out in Feldman's “trauma aesthetic.” Instead, pain becomes radically reversible with laughter, and it is the family's laughter at Toloki's comic mourning rituals that provides the catharsis of the scene and thus the opening to the future (287). Laughter here retains what Barnard calls “something of its ancient liberating power.”31 Toloki's performance then transforms the Aristotelian model of tragedy that underlies the retrospective and media constructions of the TRC hearings, in which the actor creates an empathetic connection through pity and fear to purge the spectator's anxieties.32 By sidestepping the demand to produce narratives of victimization in order to produce pity, Toloki may open more flexible and perhaps locally responsive spaces and forms of articulating memory. In this process, he may help us conceptualize how, as David L. Eng and David Kazanjian suggest, the melancholic repetition and ultimate unknowability of trauma explored by Caruth could be transformed into “a politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic.”33

War, Humanitarianism, Estrangement

Toloki, then, knits together a family by releasing the haunting of the past in the form of stories, in order to mourn them—a mourning that is also a form of laughter. This reconciliation with the past becomes a way to reconstitute the community. However, Cion is not just a story of revealing or performing the injustices of the past so they can heal in the present. It is also the story of injustices in the present that continue into the future, and that chart a much wider geography of freedom than that of North versus South in the United States. The tracing of global entanglements is done through the designation of Kilvert as a site of domestic politics and US foreign relations, the confluence of Global North and Global South, in the period in which the book is set: from October 2004 to October 2005. This year was a fraught one in the domestic and international political arenas, with the re-election of George W. Bush as President of the United States, the Asian tsunami (December/January), the hearings of Lynndie England regarding the Abu Ghraib photographs (April/May), and Hurricane Katrina (August/Sept). It was also a time of severe drought in the particular region of Ohio where the novel is set.

The continuity between domestic politics and foreign relations—or rather, the deconstruction of the idea that domestic politics can be separated from international affairs—is telescoped at the moment that Toloki, Obed, and Beth Eddy successfully conclude their mediation, when they step out into a political demonstration against the abuses taking place in the Iraq War. On the street protesters hold placards reading: “Vengeance is not justice,” “Humane Treatment for all Detainees,” “How did our oil get under their sand?” (73–4). Yet, in the wake of Republican victory, “their gait is that of mourners” (73). In contrast to Toloki's performance described above, the protestors are engaged in an ineffectual or at least an unfinished work of mourning—it has not yet brought a community together to confront a past that patterns the present and the future. This is what Toloki attempts to do for Kilvert and for (at least the American) readers of Cion through a very different performative mechanism than that of catharsis. Here I imply a Brechtian alienation effect meant in theory at least to help readers break out of the confines of dominant ideologies and to recognize structural truths about their material world that may be necessary to put an end to the current violations. This alienation effect can be understood as Toloki's narrative perspective itself.

As Toloki describes current events from his faux-naïve South African perspective, he points to and attempts to disrupt the structures of vision that insulate American audiences from the rest of the globe. Generally, and fittingly—as it creates a mise-en-abime of spectatorship—this happens in response to spectacles seen on television. Just as he reproduces for the reader the activism of Athens, Toloki creates a running commentary on the war in Iraq and its media coverage. Through his South African gaze, the war as seen on the TV screen in the Quigley's living room is a Hollywood film or a video game. Toloki describes

watching a beautiful war lighting up the screen, depicted like a series of video games … It is fine, for no one sees any death. There is no human element. Just the sound effects and the flare of fireworks … Just like in the movies. Only here real people die. Mothers and children. Young beautiful soldiers who are only children themselves. Although we never see them. We shall never see them. We are therefore able to sleep in peace at night and dream beautiful dreams. (86–7)

His meditation concludes with the words: “Again and again we cheer” (87). Rather than belaboring the critique offered here, which presents a common frustration with current news media even as it perhaps misleadingly implies that merely “seeing” the death of people on the screen would lead to change, I would like to focus on the strange use of “we” that carries through this passage.34 The “we” certainly encompasses all of the members of the Quigley family. Even Obed, quick to criticize Ruth in her support of George W. Bush, watches with interest and feels nostalgia for “the good old days of bombings and live military action” as it fades from the TV screen after the battle of Fallujah (229). Though at other times, such as during the coverage of the Lynndie England trial, Toloki's distance from the Americans is marked (Mda tells us that it is only to avoid upsetting Ruth does he chooses not to “voice a contrary opinion” [133]), he seems here to be implicated in these suspect voyeuristic pleasures. The use of “we” in this passage alerts us to the text's consistent probing of the nature and formation of collective identities (a matter to which I will return again shortly).

These spectacles of US power in Iraq can be seen as indistinguishable from the US attempt to provide humanitarian relief to victims of the tsunami, which also appears on the Quigley's television screen. Toloki's descriptions of the media representations of both the Iraq War and the tsunami reveal how the Bush administration's “humanitarianism” and its militarism are effectively merged, and the targets of both vengeance and aid are objectified to the point of dehumanization:

A real tsunami had hits parts of Asia a few days after Christmas. It became part of the exciting family viewing, with every television network showing live pictures of the devastation and the helpless victims and helicopters flying about rescuing people from the treetops. (225)

Mda's point here corresponds with Makau Mutua's criticism of the “Savages-Victims-Saviors” formula that underwrites Western human rights discourse, where Western aid workers are represented as the rescuers of innocent victims from barbaric (non-Western) governments (or, in this case, savage Mother Nature).35 Ruth, along with Kilvert more generally, imbibes this formula and sees herself as separate from and more empowered than those abject victims of culture or nature out there in the “third world.”

The power of such stereotypes to shape US visions of inhabitants of the “third world” is played up throughout Cion. When people from Kilvert find out that Toloki comes from Africa they attempt to make him into an object of charity. At one point, the manager of the Kilvert Community Center invites him to the Christmas dinner by saying: “you being from Africa and all, you’ll really like it when you see all that food” (227). (Toloki's wry response: “I don’t have the heart to destroy her delusion that the sight of food is an orgasmic experience for an African.”) Ruth refuses to sell Toloki one of her quilts, insisting instead that he “give the money to some starving kids in Ethiopia” (263). Even in her recognition of the neediness of her own community, she reinforces the difference between herself and Africans or Asians in need of humanitarian relief. When she hears that Bush is willing to spend 350 million dollars for victims of the tsunami, she complains, “the people of the world think we Americans are one level below God” (225) and suggests that: “There's many poor counties in Ohio … like ours. If they gave some of that money to us … it would make all the difference” (226).36 Yet Ruth's very articulation of her abandonment by the government serves to entrench rather than undercut visions of US superiority, since the problem as she sees it is that the God-like Americans are expected to spend so much solving the problems of the world that there is nothing left to fix problems at home.

The irony is that, despite this ideological barrier, the Quigleys’ situation is not so very different from that of the Africans or Asians they feel obliged to rescue, given their poverty and their isolation from channels of power and influence in the United States. Toloki observes that:

Television is the family's lifeblood. The family interacts with the rest of America through television …. In this way they are no different from third world people who have never set foot on American soil yet live on a daily diet of these programs and American food aid. The Quigleys depend for their survival on food rations from the Kilvert Community Center. (142)

This observation is confirmed not only by the irruption of Hurricane Katrina, but also when he learns that the people of southeastern Ohio have recently had their own television appearance on a special documenting local poverty, which in some sense converts the Kilvert inhabitants into the very victims they saw while watching the tsunami.37 Kilvert's poverty is compounded when drought conditions wreck the area and the country is declared a “disaster area,” forcing people to rely even more heavily on food handouts from the Community Center. This female-run NGO, which used to but no longer receives federal funding, runs on volunteer work and local donations and is presented as a model of what grassroots activism can accomplish. In hard times, people from Kilvert to Athens (including Obed and Beth Eddy) come together to glean food and to assemble baskets for needy families.

Much contemporary critique of what Richard A. Wilson and Richard Brown call the “ethos of humanitarianism” can be categorized along two interconnected lines. The first is the idea that humanitarianism rests on a Eurocentric and counterproductive hierarchical model of charity—in effect, that it is based on and perpetuates a colonial mission model of “the white man's burden.” The second is it is based on “emotion” rather than reason or respect for the agency of others, which carries the risk of degenerating into an unthinking politics of pity.38 While conflating humanitarianism and human rights is not always helpful, questions about the denial of agency to “victims” and the spectacularization of suffering are raised by scholars ranging from Mutua to Alisa Solomon in relation to the representation of human rights abuses as well.39 Here we return to the discussion above regarding mourning, pity, and catharsis. What Mda's novel asks us to consider is not a politics of pity dependent on sentimental responses to images of “distant strangers” in need, and which may actually serve more to reassure the spectator than transform the ground situation “out there.”40 Rather, Cion seeks to reconfigure the response to people in need by reconfiguring a sense of relation on a local and a global scale. American readers of the novel are given a chance—one that will not necessarily be seized—to see aid work as something other than giving relief to distant strangers. Through the mediating, estranging, and laughter-provoking narration of Toloki, as much as by his physical appearance in the American “heartland,” readers of Cion may come to recognize our implication in global economic and political patterns that seamlessly weave together the “foreign” and the “domestic,” as well as the concomitant need to participate in collective projects of redistribution at the local and global levels. Such a vision of restoration can only be achieved by a full reckoning with the past—the uncovering of buried people and stories—and its integration in the present; as well as through the integration of the stories of Kilvert with Athens, with the rest of America, and with the rest of the world. This, perhaps, is the reconfiguration of the “we” demanded by the novel.

Cion suggests not only that America treats its minorities like “third world” citizens, but also that the treatment of “third world citizens” through war and sometimes through charity is patterned on the treatment of African and Native Americans. Without addressing this connection, which is to say without proper contextualization and historicization, internal and external abuses will continue to proliferate—ameliorated only by local grassroots activism. These abuses pointedly include those of the “War on Terror.” The novel links Bush's rhetoric and action to that of apartheid-era politicians. Toloki meditates on the placards held at a political demonstration in Athens:

Charge or Release Detainees. The slogan sounds very familiar. It takes me back to years ago. Protesters used to chant it during the apartheid years of detention-without-trial in South Africa. During those sad times in the history of that country politicians said their normal laws of due process could not deal with terrorism. It was therefore necessary to do away with the niceties of habeas corpus …. Until they woke up one day and found that they had been living a lie. Even their own liberties as citizens had been eroded. Not only the enemy's. I have gone back in time. Things have come full cycle. Lessons have been learned well. (290)

As with the “we” discussed above, there is significant ambiguity in the wording here: what “lessons” are learned? If the US learned something from apartheid South Africa, should it learn a lesson from the “new” South Africa as well? In its manner of raising these questions, Cion works to shift the “Revealing is Healing” motto from therapeutic to the structural register, even as it returns attention back to South Africa as a model of race-based oppression and as a model of potential social repair.

Of Catalysts and Catharsis

Mda's novel does not explicitly call for a directly political—still less a top-down—solution to the historical and contemporary problems outlined above. Rather, its central concern is with the role that art can play in communal restoration at the grassroots level. We might recall at this juncture that, though Toloki is treated as a “real” person by the inhabitants of Kilvert and Athens, he is self-consciously designated as a literary character, and hence as an artistic representation at work in the material world of the novel. Mda thus uses him as a figure for the social work of art, a topic that is discussed at various points in the novel. When describing the role of quilts, for instance, Toloki claims that these “carriers of memory” are both sites of communal remembrance and spurs to struggle. While they may not have served as literal maps to freedom or markers of Underground Railroad stations by the time Obed's ancestors Nicodemus and Abednego made their way to Ohio (as they believe on account of their mother the Abyssinian Queen), their helper, the Birdman, explains that the quilts

still served an important function. They bound the individuals into a cohesive force, and reminded them of their duty to freedom … they were effective in jolting the people's memory and in recording the values of the community for present and future generations. (117–8)

These comments reflect back on Toloki as storyteller and performer, since, in a complicated formal play, they are spoken by the omniscient narrator of the historical scenes represented in the novel and stitched as chapters into the expanding present of the text like blocks of fabric. We later discover that these scenes are most likely representations of the stories that Mahlon tells to Orpah. The vision of a book as a quilt made up of blocks of stories brings to mind the metaphors of text as weaving, society as text, and that of repairing the social fabric so commonly used to describe post-conflict situations.

If art objects such as quilts and books are important, artistic performances—or performance in general—are singled out in the novel for particular attention. While, as Barnard points out, Mda's novels often have a dramaturgical quality to them, the centrality of performance in processes of mourning is what Toloki claims that he learns from his time in Ohio (296).41 Bringing questions of performance into this novel about communal restoration is important, as it suggests that Mda's conception of the role of art in relation to politics—and for Mda art is always a communal or popular artistic collaboration rather then the reification of the work of a singular creative genius—remains profoundly tied to his Theater for Development roots. Mda was after all a playwright and scholar of theater before he became a novelist and indeed took his master's in drama from Ohio University, Athens. In his scholarly text on development communication theory, When People Play People (1993), Mda stresses the importance of the “catalyst,” a specialized figure from outside of a community who comes to help the community make theater. He or she works to break down the distinction between actor and spectator, with the goal of giving local people a forum in which to articulate their problems and to develop solutions to them in the world of theater that may be transferred back into real life.42 This model, which Mda attempted to put into place when he worked in Lesotho in the 1980s with the Marotholi Travelling Theater, grows from theories by radical educators such as Paolo Freire and Augusto Boal. Boal's concluding admonition—“Spectator, a bad word!”—is one that Mda seems to have taken to heart.43 Boal is famously opposed to the Aristotelian model of dramatic tragedy, which he labels a “coercive system of tragedy” with a “purgative” mission to “bridle the individual, to adjust him to what pre-exists.”44 Building on the work of Bertolt Brecht, Boal reads catharsis as a manipulation of emotion that takes away the spectator's ability to act and therefore maintains the status quo, when what is needed is abstraction that allows for a historical understanding of the conditions of the status-quo that may then produce change.45 Mda seems to evince support for this view when he argues that “theatre-for-development must, first and foremost, help people to identify the sources of poverty and underdevelopment, and secondly, explore ways and means of how such causes may be eradicated.”46

I get the sense that Toloki (and might we say Cion the novel as well?) is intended as a kind of catalyst, who effects conceptual and material change in a far-off place. Such change is the desired goal of artistic intervention. At the same time, as we have seen, Mda's novel also shows a profound investment in the discourses of mourning, catharsis, forgiveness, and reconciliation, the promotion of which also seems to be the proper work of performance. This is a curious juxtaposition, given the Theater for Development paradigm described above. One way to think through the uneasy fit between these visions of the social work of art might be to view the novel as staging multiple experiments in which Mda attempts to cultivate an emotion that produces political solidarity rather than pity (which only confirms a distance between the character represented and the reader or spectator). This project is articulated in When People Play People when Mda claims that emotion is “essential for effective communication,” since emotion in the moment is what generates an engagement that will lead to critical reflection later on.47 The mechanics of this movement are unclear in his theoretical writing, however, and this lacuna remains visible in Cion. I have argued that Mda's novel works to construct a model of catharsis that does not lead to a mere reinforcement of the status quo, by replacing pity with laughter and showing how sadness can be linked to joy. But, to what extent is a catharsis provoked by laughter different from one provoked by pity? Without foreclosing the possibilities opened by this reconfiguration, one might refer to another scene of spectatorship in post-apartheid South African literature, where the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace ironically describes a comedic play where “[c]atharsis seems to be the presiding principle” and the injuries of apartheid are “washed away in gales of laughter.”48 The suspicion lurking behind these lines, themselves so pertinent to the overlapping, playful, and abundant visions of artistic representation set out in Cion, at the very least demands our consideration.

Itineraries of Mourning

As the above discussions may suggest, Mda's Cion is not the novelistic equivalent of a “well-made play.” It is an optimistic, even exuberant text that seems to pulse in multiple and sometimes contradictory directions. If, on a formal level, the text cannot be contained—even by its author—then this note of proliferation and openness provides its literal ending as well. At the end of the novel, Toloki claims his freedom from his author (whom he terms the “sciolist”) and, hoping to learn from and to teach new communities about his mourning practices, begins a new journey of itinerant mourning with Orpah as lover and co-performer:

Before I came to Kilvert I lived only in the past and in the future. I therefore found the present a very lonely place to be. A very boring place. Orpah is a kindred spirit in this respect. Hopefully together we’ll discover how to live in the present. And we’ll do so without the aid of the sciolist. We have left him and his rambling narratives in Athens … I need my independence from him. (312)

Toloki's mobility brings me back to the initial question about the globalization of the South African transitional justice model, which also seems to be in continued circulation. As Hamber and Wilson forcefully argue, attending to the trauma and mourning processes of individual victims of abuse is a critically important ethical task; however, the model of national trauma and recovery, particularly when put in the service of the goal of short-term reconciliation, leaves much to be desired.49 Hamber and Wilson, Wilson, and more recently Moon have suggested that the therapeutic model of truth and reconciliation may be counter-productive for social repair and the institution of the rule of law. It may psychologize structural damage and pathologize normal responses to victimization, such as the desire for retributive justice. Further, as Allen Feldman, James Dawes, Joseph R. Slaughter, and others suggest, the (over)emphasis on the story of an individual's “mourning” and “healing” may imply to the wider community that the work of repair is done, thus forcing a social catharsis that endangers on-going struggles for justice.50

Bringing these comments specifically to the US context, we might question the extent to which truth or reconciliation uncoupled from judicial processes could work to restore the “rule of law” in the wake of the “War on Terror.” Further, one might ask whether “mourning” slavery and segregation and “reconciling” the nation is really an appropriate response in an America that is still largely based on the structural inequalities determined by these systems. How would a TRC process inflect the fitful debates surrounding reparations for slavery, more commonly invoked as a response to historical racism than the South African model? If a TRC would go some way to helping the African-American community and its supporters “mak[e] the case for reparations,”—a project that (as Randall Robinson has argued) would be an important first step in rehabilitating black America—might it not also undercut a sense of legal recognition that winning a lawsuit for reparations could provide?51 Might it not channel people into emplotted narratives for dealing with the past that may not correspond to their personal feelings? Or, from another angle, might not a TRC—and this is a danger shared by reparations as well—suggest to mainstream America that racism is “over” and that nothing more needs to be done?

In Cion, Zakes Mda does not seem to be interested in such radical questioning of truth and reconciliation in the therapeutic register as a global model, since the novel fundamentally re-affirms the rhetoric of forgiveness and reconciliation and points to the positive role that mourning can play in rebuilding the lives of individuals as well as communities in very different locales. At the same time, the novel's attention to the needs of local communities and to the importance of addressing these needs in a collaborative fashion can be seen as a valuable and constructive criticism of elite-imposed models of transitional justice. Equally valuable is the novel's insistence on the analysis of the structures of thought that perpetuate systems of oppression worldwide, combined with its effort to re-formulate the politics of emotion underpinning the TRC trajectory. It might not be such a bad thing, in sum, if Toloki were to mysteriously materialize on a truth commission near you.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Rita Barnard and Jennifer Wenzel for organizing the seminar at the 2009 American Comparative Literature Association Conference where this paper received its first hearing, along with the other participants in this seminar for their inspirational comments. The author would also like to thank Rita Barnard, Florian Becker, Eleni Coundouriotis, Kathryn Lachman, and Richard A. Wilson for their thoughtful input on draft versions of this essay.

Notes

¹ The work of the TRC was divided into three separate committees: the Human Rights Violations Committee, the Amnesty Committee, and the Rehabilitation and Reparations Committee. The Amnesty Committee did not finish its work until 2003, and for this reason the final report was not published until this time. The 2003 Report is available online at http://www.info.gov.za/otherdocs/2003/trc/ (accessed March 15, 2009). The 1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, however, was immediately influential and will serve as the central reference in this article.

² Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 16, 33–8. For a detailed looked at the pre-1996 Latin American commissions (Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador) in relation to South Africa, see Phelps, Shattered Voices.

³ Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 54–5.

⁴ Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation, 109–11.

⁵ Hamber and Wilson, “Symbolic closure,” 35–6; Moon, “Healing Past Violations.” For a lucid overview of the rhetoric of “purgative” catharsis in and surrounding the TRC, see Liatsos, “Historical Catharsis and the South African Truth Commission,” 172–4.

⁶ I use the term “mourning” here in the classical Freudian sense, i.e., as opposed to “melancholia,” where a subject is unable to detach from a lost person or object. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian elaborate on Freud's definition of mourning in “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” (3–4). Hamber and Wilson argue that the inability to mourn leaves the subject in a state of “uncertainty and liminality” (“Symbolic closure,” 42). Mourning the dead in some sense parallels widely-held psychoanalytic schemas in which the cure for trauma is seen to be the act of putting a previously inexpressible experience into words, and thus restoring a narrative coherence that allows a traumatized subject to achieve closure on the past and to “move on.” This overlay of mourning with the recovery from trauma is further naturalized by the fact that the iconic trauma victim testifying before the HRV was a mother mourning a lost child or a widow mourning a lost husband.

⁷ Feldman describes the hegemonic “emplotment” of human rights testimony in which victim narratives follow a “medicalized syllogistic structure” of “identify[ing] a pathogenic situation,” giving an “inventory…of the aberrant situation, usually in the form of critical life incidents,” and obtaining “a set of prescriptions to effect redress, cure and historical completion, a component of which is the very recitation of biographical narrative and its public dissemination for a forum of witnessing” (“Memory Theaters,” 170). Importantly, he points to the violence inherent in the gaze of the audience of this testimony, which demands that testimony be configured in this way to address its own (rather than the victim's) needs (191–3).

⁸ On the one hand, scholars such as Wilson argue that the TRC did not succeed in “healing” the nation, and further left out large pockets of the population who demanded retributive rather than restorative justice. On the other, scholars suggest that the working of the TRC, especially in the public hearings, may not be reducible to the work of nationalist legitimization described by Wilson. For instance, Feldman describes the validation of black communal experience through “antiphonic witnessing” at the HRV hearings (“Memory Theaters,” 174–9). Mark Sanders beautifully argues not only that the TRC was central in creating a space where victims could claim “the right to mourn” that was proscribed by the apartheid state, but also that the “dispropriation” rendered through the TRC's use of simultaneous translation in its public hearings may allow it to become an iterating ethical model—one, I might add, that is more complex than the “itinerant mourning” referred to in this paragraph (Ambiguities of Witnessing, 10 and 15–33).

⁹ Moon, “Healing Past Violations,” 71.

¹⁰ Castillejo-Cuéllar, “Knowledge,” 13.

¹¹ Ibid., 14. Indeed, Castillejo-Cuéllar describes how the film can be read as a kind of “reconciliation propaganda” (14, 29). The influence of the Gugulethu Seven story seems to extend beyond the walls of the conference venue; Castillejo-Cuéllar (at 14) points to a television special made from only the Amy Biehl and Gugulethu Seven segments of A Long Night's Journey Into Day that was broadcast by a Colombian network under the title “Can South Africa be an Example to Follow?”

¹² Hamber and Wilson, “Symbolic closure,” 35.

¹³ Mda, Cion, 3. Subsequent references to Cion will be made parenthetically.

¹⁴ Mda, “Justify the Enemy,” 44. Durrant also makes this point (“The Invention of Mourning,” 445).

¹⁵ Durrant, “The Invention of Mourning,” 442.

¹⁶ Farred, “Mourning the Post-Apartheid State Already?,” 195–6.

¹⁷ Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 155. Barnard's criticism of Farred is also expressed in “On Laughter,” 280 and 282.

¹⁸ Ways of Dying precedes the TRC, having been published in the same year as the 1995 National Unity and Reconciliation Act that set out the legal mandate for this institution. Toloki can be read to prefigure some of its nationalist mythologies in his valorization of storytelling as a form of personal healing and communal catharsis. At the same time, Ways of Dying evinces skepticism about the elite politics of the ANC during the transition and the ways in which personal stories can get subsumed in the pursuit of larger political ends. Elsewhere, Mda has criticized hegemonic conceptions of reconciliation for not being sufficiently concerned with patterns of healing within the black community, and suggests that reconciliation might be rethought along these lines (Zakes Mda, “The Fiction of Reconciliation,” Gladstein lecture at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, October 29, 2008).

¹⁹ The mediation scene is reminiscent of the university hearing in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which is often read as a metaphor for the TRC. See, for instance, Coundouriotis, “The Dignity of the ‘Unfittest,’” 860–1; Anker, “Human Rights,” 237.

²⁰ On the first point, see Durrant, “The Invention of Mourning,” 441–2. On the second point, I refer to Mda's lecture “The Fiction of Reconciliation,” and I speak here of both national and, crucially, intra-group reconciliation. See note 18.

²¹ For comparative work on American slavery and segregation and South African apartheid, see Frederickson, White Supremacy, and Marx, Making Race and Nation. For cultural responses to these forms of racism see Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood, and more recently Robolin, “Loose Memory.” For works linking state terrorism during Apartheid with the Bush administration's “War on Terror,” see the contributions by Gilroy and Verges to the special edition of Interventions edited by Achille Mbembe and Deborah Posel, as well as Stanley Ridge, “Discursive Dynamics.”

²² Tutu made this statement in a radio interview with NPR on January 29, 2009. The “Interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu” is available online at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5177023 (accessed May 1, 2009). Ortiz also cites this statement in “Behind the Veil” (110). Valls makes an extended case for holding a truth and reconciliation commission to address the historical oppression of African Americans in his article “A Truth Commission for the United States?”

²³ For information about the work of the ICTJ, see the website http://www.ictj.org. For a first-hand depiction of the Greensboro TRC, see Behrmanzohn, “A Massacre Survivor.” Representative John Conyers has added his voice to those calling for truth commission for the “War on Terror”; see also Scott Horton's “Pursuing an Outlaw Administration: Justice after Bush” in Harper's (December 2008). Horton suggests beginning from the South African TRC model but then moving on to prosecutions depending on the evidence gathered by the commission.

²⁴ Toni Morrison's Beloved—a favorite intertext of South African writers—shows how unfree “freedom” in Ohio can be. Robolin points out the importance of Morrison's work in contemporary South African writing (“Loose Memory,” 298–9). Thanks also to Christian Crouch for her helpful comments on the significance of Ohio in nineteenth-century America

²⁵ Bentley, “The Fourth Dimesnion.” Bentley refers to the concept of “social death” developed by Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death. While it is beyond the scope of this essay, I would argue that Bentley's conception of “kinlessness” could be profitably expanded to explore the situation facing black families in South Africa during apartheid.

²⁶ As Mda points out in his “Acknowledgements” to Cion, much of the information regarding the historical use of quilts comes from Keith P. Griffler, Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004; and Jacqueline I. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, New York: Anchor Books, 2001.

²⁷ In the two introductory sections to her influential edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth builds on the work of Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub to describe the trauma as a “split within immediate experience” (9) such that the traumatic event is experienced only belatedly, after the fact, and appears to the victim within a repetitive flashback structure of “traumatic reenactment” (153) that haunts him or her precisely because the event cannot be integrated into a linear narrative of lived experience. See especially pp. 4–9 and 149–54.

²⁸ Van der Hart and Van der Kolk, “The Intrusive Past,” 178.

²⁹ In his study of Toni Morrison's Paradise and Zoë Wicomb's David's Story, Robolin theorizes “loose memory” as a way to conceptualize a form of patriarchal and nationalist control that treats women and memory as “promiscuous” objects that must be disciplined, demanding purity of both. Conversely, uncontrolled and decentralized women's storytelling is posed as a “strategic narrative practice that disrupts—indeed loosens—the positivist foundations of certain nationalist discourses” (“Loose Memory,” 301). “Creative partnership” is a term used to describe Toloki's relationship with Noria in Ways of Dying.

³⁰ Elsa Barkley Brown talks about the “polyrhythmic” nature of African-American quilts, which bring together many patterns and conversations at once, rather than maintaining one controlled pattern (“African American Women's Quilting,” 923–4). Nancy Scheper-Hughes describes Native American geometric patterns as one such integrated rhythm or conversation (“Anatomy of a Quilt,” 18).

³¹ Barnard, “On Laughter,” 297.

³² Liatsos points out that the Aristotelian tragic model, with its vision of catharsis, was cited by George Bizos to explain the social usefulness of the TRC hearings in (perhaps predictably?) the film Long Night's Journey Into Day (“Historical Catharsis,” 172–3).

³³ Eng and Kazanjian, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” 2. Eng and Kazanjian add a fourth and final term to this sequence—a mourning that is “militant rather than reactionary” (2)—but militance does not seem a relevant term for Mda.

³⁴ Alisa Solomon points to the tendency of coverage that does get broadcast on the major commercial news stations to dehumanize its objects of attention (“Who gets to be human on the evening news?”). Thomas Keenan constructs a devastating critique of the idea that “knowing” about abuses leads to doing something useful to stop them in his reflections on media coverage of Bosnia (“Publicity and Indifference”).

³⁵ Mutua, “Savages, Victims, Saviors.” Since his focus is on human rights (violated by government/culture) rather than humanitarianism, Mutua does not discuss natural disasters but I would argue that his analysis can be profitably extended to this area. I might further note that while Mutua's characterization is problematic when posed as the central discursive strategy of human rights, it can legitimately be considered as one important discursive strategy.

³⁶ And this when humanitarian groups responding to the tsunami had received more money than they could possibly use. See Rony Brauman, “Global Media and the Myths of Humanitarian Relief,” 110.

³⁷ This was a real program that aired on CBS's 60 Minutes II in 2003.

³⁸ Wilson and Brown, “Introduction,” 2–4.

³⁹ Wilson and Brown argue that what distinguishes humanitarianism from human rights activism is its overwhelming reliance on emotion rather than its basis in law (“Introduction,” 7–8 and 10–2).

⁴⁰ The term “distant strangers” is Luc Boltanski's. In Distant Suffering, Boltanski explores the idea of a “politics of pity” from a dramaturgical angle.

⁴¹ As Barnard aptly describes Ways of Dying, “the temporality here is the present tense of the stage direction, and the characters, much like actors on a bare stage, create a new, if ephemeral, experiential space through their improvisations” (Apartheid and Beyond, 149).

⁴² Mda, When People Play People, 19–20.

⁴³ Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 154.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 46–7.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 102–6. In a different context but in what seems to me to be a related observation, Joseph R. Slaughter suggests provocatively that what may be needed for responsible humanitarian action is “indifference” rather than sympathy or empathy (“Humanitarian Reading,” 95 and 101–3).

⁴⁶ Mda, When People Play People, 23.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 97.

⁴⁸ Coetzee, Disgrace, 23.

⁴⁹ As Hamber and Wilson put it, “[n]ations do not have collective psyches that can be healed, nor do whole nations suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and to assert otherwise is to psychologize an abstract entity that exists primarily in the minds of nation-building politicians” (“Symbolic Closure,” 36). Durrant also cites this sentence (“The Invention of Mourning,” 449).

⁵⁰ Dawes describes it in his finely crafted book That the World May Know as follows: “Such narrative closure, along with the ethical closure it entails, leaves us comfortable rather than unsettled; it delivers an energy-releasing catharsis, a feeling that the world is indeed just and that such atrocities do not require our continued moral fury” (194–5). Slaughter makes a similar point in Human Rights, Inc., 269.

⁵¹ Robinson, The Debt, 232.