Abstract
Chapter 5, ‘Repetitive poetics—when crisis defines a nation’s writing’, discusses selected post-2000 South African writings as instances of a reiterative poetics of trauma. This poetics not only compels the reader to relive the traumatic experience along with the speaker or writer, but also draws them into the difficulty of its articulation. Insisting on involvement, trauma writing works actively against the deterministic or agenda-driven strains of postcolonial critique that previous chapters also touch upon. Even so, the focus on shock and trauma as a primary instantiation of postcolonial experience in a range of post-conflict contexts suggests that, in these situations, a certain kind of symptomatic poetics is favoured over others. The discussion also explores the implications of attaching a poetics to a particular national context, that of South Africa, which is seen in exceptional terms, both as exceptionally violent and trauma-ridden, and as exceptionally suited to that poetics. The selected South African writings include, first, short non-fictional pieces by several authors, and then a group of post-2000 South African prose fictions, by Damon Galgut, Imraan Coovadia, and Sifiso Mzobe. These writings, especially their endings, are approached as pressure points that suggest what kind of future might be imaginable beyond the moment of crisis in which the present appears to be imprisoned. The chapter suggests that the ways in which these various texts invite readers to see themselves as part of a South African reality serve to move the narrative on beyond the imprisoning present moment.
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Notes
- 1.
Imraan Coovadia , High Low In-between (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2009), p. 83.
- 2.
Damon Galgut , The Impostor (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2008), p. 169.
- 3.
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 135.
- 4.
Post-1995 Rwanda would offer another indicative case study, as explored in Zoe Norridge, Perceiving Pain in African Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For studies of South African literature as marked by trauma , see, for example: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Chris van der Merwe, Narrating our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008); Ewald Mengel, Michela Borgaza, and Karin Orantes, eds., Trauma, Memory and Narrative in South Africa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).
- 5.
Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, eds., At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2007).
- 6.
Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, eds., Load Shedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2009).
- 7.
Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Afterword’, At Risk, p. 244.
- 8.
Omitted from the discussion, though falling within the period, are Coovadia’s two early works, The Wedding (2001) and Green-Eyed Thieves (2006), which are India- or Indian Ocean-based, as well as Galgut’s tripartite travelogue, In a Strange Room (2010), which is for the greater part set outside the country, and his 2015 bio-fiction about E.M. Forster, Arctic Summer. A contrast between the writers worth noting here is that in his more recent work Galgut has chosen generic pathways to subjects and perspectives relatively far removed from his previous fictional landscapes, such as E.M. Forster, whereas Coovadia’s work from 2009 onwards has drawn ever closer to national material.
- 9.
Njabulo Ndebele , ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa’, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 41–59; Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009). See also Ndebele’s Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2007).
- 10.
Ato Quayson, ‘Symbolization Compulsions’, Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 76–98; Sigmund Freud , Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (London: Hogarth, 1939), pp. 67–8, and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 1917, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1939), pp. 243–58.
- 11.
As 1994 was the year of South Africa’s first democratic elections, and 2014 marks the publication date of the most recently published fiction under discussion, Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System, the two-decade period helpfully delimits this case study. With the emergence of environmentally focused work like Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion ( Cape Town: Umuzi, 2015), or Zakes Mda’s earlier The Whale Caller (London: Viking, 2005), there are signs that the emphases of more recent South African fiction may be shifting in promising new directions. So, too, poetry, as chapter 8 discusses.
- 12.
See Lizzy Attree, Blood on the Page: Interviews with African Authors Writing about HIV/AIDS (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010); Pumla Dineo Gqola, Rape: A South African Nightmare ( Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2015); Shula Marks, ‘An Epidemic Waiting to Happen? The Spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa in Social and Historical Perspective’, African Studies 61.1 (2002): 13–26.
- 13.
Gqola, Rape, pp. 60–1, 168–9, and elsewhere.
- 14.
Margie Orford, unpublished lecture, ‘Sites of Unease: Writing Violence—Ethics and Aesthetics’, Avril Bruten Lecture, St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 1 March 2017. She writes: ‘The outrageous levels of sexual violence, the frequency of gang rape and femicide, the excess of violence during drunken assaults, the torture of victims of armed robberies attest to an unresolved and unarticulated fury that [endures] despite—or perhaps because of—the resolution of South Africa’s conflict in the realm of the law but not in the day-to-dayness of people’s lives and psyches.’ My thanks to Margie Orford for allowing me to quote from her lecture.
- 15.
Achille Mbembe, ‘On the State of South African Political Life’, Africa in Words (15 September 2015), quoted in Andrew van der Vlies, Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 155.
- 16.
J.M. Coetzee , Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999); Phaswane Mpe , Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001); Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit (London: Atlantic Books, 2003); Imraan Coovadia , Tales of the Metric System (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2015).
- 17.
The now classic statement of the question regarding the ‘correct’ subject of art post-apartheid was made by Albie Sachs in an in-house ANC paper on culture: Albie Sachs, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’, Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995, eds. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 239–48; first published in Karen Press, ed., Spring is Rebellious (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990). That Wicomb and Vladislavić offer notable exceptions to my characterization of the post-1994 South African novel as compelled by trauma , may be attributed to the long-term residence in Scotland of Wicomb and Vladislavić’s extensive involvement in other art worlds. See the part-special issue of Journal of Commonwealth Literature on Vladislavić: Katie Reid and James Graham, eds., ‘Symposium: Ivan Vladislavić, Visual Culture and the Globalisation of a South African “artworld”’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52.1 (2017): 3–69.
- 18.
I cite, respectively, from: Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Investigation into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Thomas Laqueur, ‘We Are All Victims Now’, London Review of Books 32.13 (8 July 2010): 22–3.
- 19.
Nadine Gordimer , July’s People (London: Cape, 1981); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 276. See also Nasser Mufti, ‘Reading the Interregnum: Anachronisms in Gordimer’s July’s People’, Journal of Narrative Theory 43.1 (Winter 2013): 64–86.
- 20.
See Michael Titlestad, ‘Future Tense: The Problem of South African Apocalyptic Fiction’, English Studies in Africa 58.1 (2015): 30–41. Titlestad’s ‘dark horizons’ signify in particular the literary projection of political, cultural, and existential anxieties into the future.
- 21.
Dominick LaCapra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Inquiry 25.4 (1999): 696–727.
- 22.
Ato Quayson , Calibrations, p. 95.
- 23.
Sarah Nuttall , Entanglement.
- 24.
Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg: Random House, 1998), republished as Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Times Books, 1999); Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds., Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998); Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of the Truth Commission (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007); J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999). See also Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). For a sample of critical responses to Disgrace, see: Derek Attridge and Peter D. McDonald, eds., Interventions, special issue on Disgrace 4.3 (2002); Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, and Elleke Boehmer, eds., Approaches to Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and Other Works (New York: Modern Languages Association, 2014).
- 25.
The processes Lisa Propst, ‘Reconciliation and “Self-in-Community” in Post-transitional South African Fiction’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52.1 (2017): 84–98, describes as the opposing but interrelated endeavours of giving up, and reconstituting, the self. See also Gqola, Rape, pp. 176–7.
- 26.
Laqueur, ‘We Are All Victims Now’, p. 21.
- 27.
André Brink , ‘Interrogating Silence’, in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, Writing South Africa, 14–28; and Brink , ‘Post-apartheid Literature’, in Elleke Boehmer, Katy Iddiols and Robert Eaglestone, eds., J.M. Coetzee in Literature and Theory (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 11–19. Writing this from the vantage point of 2017, in the aftermath of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Zuma Must Fall’ protests in South Africa (2015–17), I cannot refrain from observing that it remains so.
- 28.
Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Afterword’, At Risk, p. 244.
- 29.
Van der Vlies , Present Imperfect, p. 9. Van der Vlies discusses contemporary South African writing (Winterbach, Coetzee, Van Niekerk, Wicomb, Vladislavić, Mahlangu, Ntshanga) as a literature of disappointment, and makes his case with reference to a range of critics, including Lauren Berlant and Ernest Bloch, as well as to an essay of mine, ‘Permanent Risk: When Crisis Defines a Nation’s Writing’, in Trauma, Memory and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, eds. Michela Borzaga and Ewald Mengel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 29–46, which forms the kernel from which the present chapter grew. But whereas that essay focused on traumatic repetition compulsions expressed thematically, this expanded version is more concerned with structural reiterations and their implications for future South African writing and reading. Van der Vlies’s account of how South African writing draws together temporality and affect in order to express frustration or boredom at the country’s forestalled futurity does not supersede the analysis given in either of these two pieces, as his focus is specifically on the construction of South African ‘bad feelings’, or ‘varieties of disaffection’ (p. 53).
- 30.
Coovadia , High Low In-between, pp. 72, 58, 59, 15.
- 31.
Coovadia , High Low In-between, p. 83. See the fuller version of the quotation in the epigraph.
- 32.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); Achille Mbembe , On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
- 33.
See, for example, John S. Saul and Patrick Bond, South Africa—The Present as History (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), a study that reads post-apartheid society against the background of its early history.
- 34.
Gqola, Rape: A South African Nightmare.
- 35.
K. Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (Johannesburg: Random House, 2001).
- 36.
A complacent form of post-apartheid nationalism that found expression in the mythology of the rainbow nation, perhaps exacerbated this absence of renewal.
- 37.
Quayson, Calibrations, p. 82.
- 38.
Coovadia , High Low In-Between, pp. 13, 95, 239; Imraan Coovadia , The Institute for Taxi Poetry (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2012).
- 39.
See Elleke Boehmer, ‘Endings and New Beginning: Recent South African Fiction’, Writing South Africa, p. 46 (43–56). The essay was first published in the Times Literary Supplement in April 1994 at the time of the first democratic elections.
- 40.
Boehmer , ‘Endings and New Beginning’, Writing South Africa, pp. 51, 44, 48, 46.
- 41.
Nuttall , Entanglement, pp. 20–5.
- 42.
See Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 124: ‘the story owns and directs us’. And Fredric Jameson, Situations of Theory, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–86, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 155, on literature as a ‘process of form-giving’.
- 43.
Franco Moretti , Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 20 and 25 in particular.
- 44.
Boehmer , ‘Endings’, pp. 94–5.
- 45.
McGregor and Nuttall, ‘Foreword’, pp. 11–13.
- 46.
J.M. Coetzee , Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), p. 133. See also: Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (London: Merlin, 2003).
- 47.
Liz McGregor, ‘Who Killed the Rain Queen?’, At Risk, pp. 46–7.
- 48.
Deborah Posel, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, p. 51.
- 49.
J.M. Coetzee , Age of Iron (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990), p. 160. There is a roughly comparable account of the jagged and foreclosed time of empire in Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983).
- 50.
Posel , ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, p. 57.
- 51.
Graeme Reid, ‘Moving In, Moving Out’, p. 87.
- 52.
Justice Malala, ‘Losing My Mind’, pp. 171–86. The quotations are from pp. 184 and 186.
- 53.
Damon Galgut , The Good Doctor (London: Atlantic Books, 2003). Page numbers will be included in the text along with the abbreviation GD.
- 54.
Galgut , The Impostor, pp. 100, 119. Quotations will henceforth be included in the text along with the abbreviation I. On the South African farm novel or plaasroman, see J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
- 55.
Sifiso Mzobe , Young Blood (Cape Town: Kwela, 2010).
- 56.
Niq Mhlongo , Dog Eat Dog (Cape Town: Kwela, 2004); Way Back Home (Cape Town: Kwela, 2013).
- 57.
Coovadia , High Low In-between, p. 76. Page references will henceforth be included in the text with the abbreviation HLI.
- 58.
Coovadia , Tales of the Metric System, pp. 170, 184, 279, 249–50, 259, 276. Page references will henceforth be included in the text with the abbreviation TMS.
- 59.
After 1970, the year South Africa changed from imperial measure to the metric system, the years I have cited are, respectively, the years of the first state of emergency, of Mandela’s walk into freedom, of the Rugby World Cup victory over New Zealand, and of the hosting of the football World Cup.
- 60.
Njabulo Ndebele , South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary, pp. 41–59.
- 61.
Mzobe , Young Blood, p. 149. Page references will henceforth be included in the text with the abbreviation YB.
- 62.
Scott , Conscripts of Modernity, pp. 210, 135. See also David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
- 63.
Scott , Conscripts of Modernity, p. 135.
- 64.
Makhosazana Xaba , ‘Neighbours’, At Risk, pp. 90–103. The inset quotation is from p. 103. Whether significantly or not, Xaba’s contribution to the later Load Shedding is less suggestive, though interesting: a discussion of Zulu-ness in the light of Jacob Zuma’s trial for rape (pp. 53–70).
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Boehmer, E. (2018). Repetitive Poetics—When Crisis Defines a Nation’s Writing. Contemporary South African Novels. In: Postcolonial Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90341-5_5
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