Chapter
3: Truth, Reconciliation, and the Traumatic Past of South Africa.
from Human
Rights and Narrated Lives: the Ethics of Recognition
(Palgrave,
2004)
by
Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith
In
this chapter, Schaffer and Smith look at the impact of storytelling
and narratives in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
in South Africa. They give an overview of works published during and
after apartheid.
One
of the more fascinating discussions in this chapter is the focus on
the TRC mandate. Schaffer and Smith observe that the TRC focused on a
truth "based on people's 'perceptions, stories, myths and
memories'" (66). This really struck me as an exceptional feature
of the South African TRC. The role that the TRC saw for itself was
building a "consensus about what version of the past will be
credited" (66). The focus on subjective truths and the testimony
of "ordinary people" in building a national morality, as
Krog mentions, differs from a South Africa defined by single figures,
like Mandela and Tutu.
I
can't help but wonder how these ideas compare to the TRC on the
Residential Schools in Canada. In some ways, the Canadian TRC doesn't
treat the testimonies as those of "ordinary people," but
rather a people of the past. The difference is also connected to the
power dynamics in Canada as opposed to South Africa. Perhaps, here,
the oppressed people are not looked as reclaiming their land or their
culture.
I
think this chapter was quite successful in exploring the many kinds
of narratives that can arise from national struggles. Schaffer and
Smith's analysis sheds a lot of light on Antjie Krog's Country of
My Skull. I saw the two works as good complimentary pieces
because they deal with essentially the same issues in an academic and
creative way, respectively.
The
presentation posed a lot of difficulties for me because of the book's
length, and I've since been able to give more thought to Krog's work.
One topic that I've found very compelling is "grief and
narrative."
In
the book, Dead But Not Lost:
Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions, Robert Goss and
Dennis Klass have a chapter about politics, policing grief, and
individual and cultural narrative. One interesting thing they say is
that "narration is always political because individuals make
meaning of their lives within a power structure" (189). This is
an idea I'd like to further explore in terms of genre and how genre
might work against this power structure (or support it).
Questions
(follow-up from presentation):
- When Krog talks about being a journalist during the TRC, she says that the South African journalists asked “fewer and fewer critical questions” as time went on, while the international journalists questioned the lack of judicial proceeding and objectivity during the TRC (45).How does the response from the international community impact the way that national myths might be read?I have been thinking a lot about the international responses to South African issues in particular and postcolonial issues at large. This is especially true after the most recent readings on feminism. But I also realised that I haven't been thinking about the South African, or postcolonial, response to the international community. This is something that I would really like to explore more because I think it would provide an important perspective on how international sharing of ideas flows.
- In Schaffer and Smith's article, they discuss some critiques of Krog's work concerning the re-framing of the testimonies. Some people didn't respond positively to their testimony being used. Mark Libin suggests that Krog's “guilt and sorrow, as well as self-loathing... overflows, engulfs and finally overwhelms the testimony of witnesses she endeavours to record” (qtd. in Schaffer and Smith, 78).
Do you think Libin is right? Is preservation of testimony Krog's main goal? Is this type of text useful for a myth-making/nation-building project?I don't agree with Libin at all. I think that Krog's goal was not to preserve the narratives. The archival function of the TRC has done something closer to an objective preservation than narrative ever could. At the end of they day, every telling of a story is a re-framing and it is not something that is necessarily the goal or even the point of a certain narrative. Of course, I'm not saying to ignore the framing or the context -- that would be dangerous and unproductive. What I'm saying is that it is important to look at why and how a person decided to frame a story. Krog's choice of framing is what is important. This is something that I would like to follow up on in the final essay: how does grief enter the narrative and what is the relationship between grief and narrative in Krog's work? What about in the work of the TRC more broadly? What is the effect of PTSD on narrative? How does genre present these issues and how is Krog using genres to portray different forms of grief or suffering?