Introduction: Mapping Loss

Abstract

“There are a lot of things that I may tell you, but I don’t know where to start. I think I would stop there” (D. Khumalo). With this curiously circular statement, Duma Kumalo1 ends his testimony to the Special Hearing on Prisons held by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. Kumalo had been wrongfully convicted as one of the “Sharpeville Six” for a high-profile murder in 1984; he spent four years on death row before his execution was stayed, mere hours before his scheduled death. As we can see in those closing words, the experiences of facing his own demise and hearing fellow death row inmates being executed have played havoc with his sense of a self located in time and space. Cathy Caruth says that the traumatic ordeal is “a break in the mind’s experience of time” (61); that fits Kumalo’s situation, but his disorientation is simultaneously a more literal, spatial feeling of being lost, as well. Indeed, one source of his trauma is his former confinement within the enclosed space of the prison cell. As he tells a commissioner during his hearing, “I dream that I am still in prison, those are my dreams. Most of my dreams pertain to life in prison.”