eJournals Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 39/1

Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik
0171-5410
2941-0762
Narr Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
2014
391 Kettemann

Ewald Mengel & Michela Borzaga (eds.), Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel. (Cross Cultures 153). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012.

2014
Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 1 93 Ewald Mengel & Michela Borzaga (eds.), Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel. (Cross Cultures 153). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012. Rebecca Fasselt The book arises from a research project, under the auspices of the English Department at the University of Vienna, Austria, dedicated to the study of the complex relationship between trauma, memory and narrative in the contemporary South African novel. Most articles in the volume expand on papers the contributors presented at an international conference at the University of Vienna in April 2010. The collection of essays complements the volume Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews edited by Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga and Karin Orantes (2010), which compiles in three sections a number of interviews with South African authors, psychologists and academics. In conjunction, the two volumes make a valuable, cross-disciplinary contribution to the growing field of South African trauma studies. Mengel’s and Borzaga’s book gathers a number of prominent scholars in the field of South African literature to discuss the ubiquitous engagement with trauma in South African writing in the era after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In the introduction, the editors present some of the central parameters underlying their conceptualisation of trauma. Briefly reflecting on seminal trauma scholars such as Bessel Caruth, Cathy van der Kolk and Judith Herman, Mengel and Borzaga conclude that their theories are “insufficient instruments with which to analyze the more complex situation in a postcolony such as South Africa” (xi). Whereas “Western” trauma theories mainly focus on the traumatisation of an individual through a single, identifiable event in the past, traumatic stress in South Africa is intricately connected to the historical conditions of colonialism and apartheid, which led to the collective traumatisation of generations. The “decolonization” of Eurocentric trauma theories and their adaptation to specific local, non-Western contexts would be an inadequate theoretical approach according to the editors. Rather, they call for the inclusion of francophone theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe and Albert Memmi who “are much more adapted to the situation in a postcolonial country” (xiii) and have thus far largely been neglected in the field of trauma studies. Sarah Nuttall’s notion of “entanglement”, Mengel and Borzaga posit, seems particularly useful for exploring the multifarious facets of trauma in the context of South Africa, where both oppressor and oppressed can be described as traumatised. The editors note that “white trauma - which is certainly different from black trauma - is nevertheless and unavoidably ‘entangled’ with black trauma” (xi). Yet although suggesting that Manichean oppositions cannot account for the complex realities of the postcolony, the editors nonetheless seem to advocate a clear-cut line, rather than entanglement, between “Western” and postcolonial theories and experiences of trauma. What furthermore distinguishes the postcolonial (South African) context Rezensionen 94 from trauma studies in the West in the eyes of the editors is the role played by the categories of the “body” and the “sacred.” Referring again to Mbembe’s work, the authors stress that the body should be restored to a central category of theoretical analysis as it first feels the effects of poverty, racialisation and death. The sacred in the postcolony has not only become “the imaginative resource par excellence” (xiv) but also plays a powerful role in the healing of trauma. This emphasis on the possibility of rehabilitation, implying that traumatic experiences can be reclaimed and resisted, stands in stark contrast to Caruth’s view of trauma as an “unclaimed experience.” While the revaluation of the body and the sacred according to Mengel and Borzaga is crucial to the conception of postcolonial trauma studies, the book itself seems to give evidence to the untenability of the editors’ overt rejection of “Western” trauma theories. The majority of the articles do not engage with any of the francophone thinkers whose works Mengel and Borzaga aim to recuperate for postcolonial trauma studies. In fact, it is only Borzaga’s article “Trauma in the Postcolony: Towards a New Theoretical Approach” that extensively draws on Mbembe’s work. The chapters following the introduction are divided into three parts: “Trauma: Theories and Experiences”, “Trauma and Literary Representations” and “Trauma, Memory, and History.” The first part gathers six essays that address trauma from a theoretical as well as personal angle, emphasising the diverse experiences and interpretations of trauma in South Africa. The only article that does not refer to the South African context is Ruth Leys’s theoretical piece “Trauma and the Turn to Affect” with which the collection opens. The prominent critic of Caruth’s deconstructive trauma theory argues that recent works in cultural studies that stress the primacy of affect in a person’s experience of trauma share the “anti-intentionalism” of Caruth’s approach. Examining the consequences of the “affective turn” for the interpretation of art works, Leys, drawing on Walter Benn Michaels, posits that the danger of the affective approach lies in its production of an “indifference to political or ethical dispute” (24). The essay indubitably presents a concise overview of recent developments in trauma studies. It points towards the diversification of the field since Caruth’s seminal Unclaimed Experience (1996), yet its inclusion in a volume that vocally highlights its focus on trauma in a specific geographical setting appears somewhat debatable. Elleke Boehmer, in the following essay, discusses the omnipresence of trauma and a new range of crises (HIV/ AIDS, crime, xenophobia) in post-TRC literature. Drawing on an impressive range of texts such as J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001), Damon Gulgut’s The Good Doctor (2003) and the non-fiction volume At Risk (2007) edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, Boehmer argues that current South African writing resembles “a traumatized subject prone to experiencing systemic disorders as repeated negative affect” (34). Inclined to suffer from Freud’s “repetition compulsion”, this literature, as the essay contends, is unable to write into being a new national imaginary. Although painting a predominantly dark picture of the post-TRC literary landscape, the author does not fail to draw attention to Rezensionen 95 works rejecting to be bowed down by the pervasive language of crisis. One such example is Makhosazana Xaba’s contribution to At Risk, which abstains from presenting an effusively hopeful vision, but displays an openness to slow, yet determined progression. The phenomenon of affect is again the focus in Vilashini Cooppan’s insightful reading of Dangor’s Bitter Fruit as a counter-narrative to “mimetic TRC literature”, which all too often tends to paper over distinctive past injustices in favour of writing into being a cohesive national “we.” Contrasting with Leys’ critique of the affective, Bitter Fruit, as Cooppan contends, with its meticulous portrayal of distinct modes of “post-apartheid feeling” mimics as well as deconstructs the TRC and thus offers a welcome alternative to the “traumatic narrative of moving on that organizes its plot” (60). Borzaga, in the next essay, draws on Antjie Krog’s There Was This Goat (2009) in order to corroborate her point that “Western” theories of trauma fail to grasp the complexities of a postcolonial country like South Africa. While advocating a re-theorisation of trauma along the lines of Nuttall’s notion of entanglement, Borzaga’s insistence on the West-Rest dichotomy, however, seems to contradict her focus on entangled rather than inherently different identities. Sindiwe Magona turns her attention to the visceral dimension of trauma, deploying the isiXhosa expression “isegazini” (“it is in the blood”), and provides a psychoanalytic reading of André Brink’s novel A Dry White Season (1979) and her own Mother to Mother. Yazir Henry’s essay demonstrates how public analysis and dissemination of an individual’s trauma can lead to re-traumatisation or the prolongation of trauma. He criticises Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) for editing and misinterpreting his testimony as well as those of other activists before the TRC. Like Cooppan, Henry succinctly points out the dangers underlying all attempts to forge a post-apartheid national “we”, contending that “her [Krog’s] story is not mine” and that the “manner in which she uses the words ‘my’, ‘we’, and ‘ours’ in her book is contentious” (111). While he has already put forward this argument elsewhere, the inclusion of his piece in the volume is invaluable as it draws attention to the shortcomings of a text that still remains a seminal work on the TRC. The second section of the book examines in detail literary representations of trauma, focussing for the most part on historical trauma. The first essay by Ewald Mengel explores thirteen (fictional and non-fictional) subgenres of the contemporary South African novel that have emerged as being particularly suitable for the representation of trauma. He argues that the various narrative forms and techniques employed in the novels reflect an openness that resists a simple rhetoric of closure and reconciliation. Thereafter, Derek Attridge engages with the ethics of representation by exploring narrative portrayals of township violence in Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990), Brink’s An Act of Terror (1993) and Elsa Joubert’s The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (1980). He praises Coetzee’s novel for thematising the problematics of representing otherness by means of using a witness narrator who attempts not to speak for the people living in the township, while deploring that Brink’s novel intends to persuade the reader into becoming politically active. Joubert’s work, by contrast, due to its (controversial) inclusion of direct eye-witness accounts as Rezensionen 96 Attridge notes “gains force from our willingness to believe that it records not an imagined reality but reality itself” (192). Sorely absent from his analysis are accounts by black writers. The following essay by Chris N. van der Merwe discusses the role religion plays in a time of trauma, examining a range of contemporary South African novels dealing with the Christian and Muslim tradition. Bridging the chasms induced by trauma, religion, as Van der Merwe suggests, “provides continuity as well as possibilities of renewal” (214) and thus offers the possibility for “post-traumatic growth.” Next, Annie Gagiano provides an overdue re-reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s 1981 novel To Every Birth Its Blood, arguing that it has previously been misjudged by prominent critics. Instead of depicting its characters in a spectacular mode, an accusation made by Njabulo Ndebele, the novel’s worth, according to Gagiano, lies in its portrayal of apartheid “as an invasive, traumatizing presence in people’s everyday lives” (232). Again, this is achieved through the novel’s emphasis of the “affective dimensions” rather than on actual “‘physical’ violence and violation” (232). Perhaps the most interesting and provocative essay in this section is Tlhalo Sam Raditlhalo’s discussion of trauma in Coetzee’s Disgrace. Contrary to many critics who have defended the novel against charges of re-inscribing colonial discourse, he accuses Coetzee of unwittingly centralising whiteness and failing to situate rape within the context of the historical trauma experienced by the various population groups in the country. The final contribution to this section by Carmen Concilio looks at “forced removals as sites/ sights of historical trauma in South African writings of the 1980s and 1990s.” Deploying Roberto Beneduce’s work on trauma that takes issue with a mere clinical approach which tends to sideline the “specific historical, geographical, and cultural contexts” (265) of what we usually describe with the “single medical category” of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, Concilio analyses Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Miriam Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan (1979) and Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi (2006). For her, the study of literary representations of trauma is not about “clinical investigation, diagnoses or cures” (278) but constitutes an invaluable endeavour to understand the conditions that gave rise to and supported apartheid in order to prevent its recurrence. Like the two previous sections, the final part of the volume, “Trauma, Memory, and History”, includes six essays. The focus here is on novels whose plots echo the model of the TRC. It opens with David Attwell’s analysis of trauma in Coetzee’s Summertime (2009). The author argues that the novel contains various levels of “refracted” trauma, which is underscored by the experimental structure of the novel. Thereafter, Geoffrey V. Davis, in perhaps one of the most optimistic essays of the collection regarding the healing potential of narrative, examines Red Dust (2000) by Gillian Slovo and Southern Cross (2002) by Jann Turner. The protagonists of both works, he argues, are able to work through their individual traumas, mainly bound to feelings of white complicity, and begin a journey towards healing. Jochen Petzold in his thought-provoking contribution explores “trauma-narrative and the politics of self-accusation” in Jo-Anne Richards’s The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1999). Although Richards attempts to deal with white complicity, Petzold criticises Rezensionen 97 the novel for turning the white girl narrator/ protagonist, who witnesses the rape of a white neighbour by a black farm worker, into the “true victim of apartheid” (332). The narrator’s self-fashioning as both guilty party and victim encourages an empathetic reading of her character and eschews any engagement with the lives of the text’s black characters. In the next essay, Susan Mann turns to the voices of children in contemporary South African literature. She suggests that, while the child has lost its innocence, which in itself constitutes a traumatic experience, this enables her/ his voice to even more powerfully draw attention to social injustices. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s monologic and dialogic principles, Michael Meyer maintains that Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story (2001) employs a dialogic aesthetic that the author juxtaposes to the monologic discourse of colonialism and apartheid to “bring us closer” (357) to the characters’ trauma. In the final essay of the volume, Sue Kossew examines trauma, memory and history in Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women (2006). She refers to Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub as well as Renate Lachmann to explore the changing dynamics in the relationship between “madam” and “maid.” On the whole, then, the essays in this edited volume do not present a view of trauma that is aligned to a single, coherent theoretical school, but rather offer a multiplicity of, and at times even contradictory, interpretive models, pointing towards the complexity of trauma in the South African context. The book persuasively demonstrates that there is no denying of the historical particularity of trauma in the South African setting. The focus on the body, affect and the sacred in many of the essays extends the traditional categories and concepts of trauma scholarship. In this way, the book follows in the footsteps of earlier re-writings of trauma studies in South Africa. As the accompanying interview volume highlights, it was mainly due to the work of South African therapists that traditional conceptualisations of post-traumatic stress were put into question. Working with anti-apartheid activists who had frequently been detained and abused by the police and were living in constant fear of further violence and arrest, a group of South African therapists coined the term “continuous traumatic stress” in the 1980s. Notwithstanding these specific local inflections of trauma, the editors’ insistence on the fundamental difference of South African trauma to the West, a tendency that has recently emerged in much postcolonial scholarship on trauma, seems problematic as pointed out above. While Mengel, Borzaga and Orantes present the same argument in the interview volume, some of the interviewees hold a more differentiated view. In an interview with Borzaga, Ashraf Kagee notes that “I don’t necessarily see a big dichotomy between West and non-West. In the present context the boundary [...] is semi-permeable” (2010: 127). For him, South African society displays some while lacking other features of a Western society. Michael Rothberg already noted in a 2008 special issue of Studies in the Novel on trauma in southern African and North American contexts that the “West/ non- West binary cannot explain the situation in South Africa” (2008: 228). Studies of trauma that pit the West against the postcolonial world according to Rothberg furthermore will not do justice to Fanon’s work on colonial trauma Rezensionen 98 as he built his theories among other sources on phenomenology, Marxism and psychoanalysis. What is required, then, it seems, is a more relational model that engages with the complex workings of trauma by eschewing simple oppositions between the West and the Rest, the particular and the universal, the individual and the collective. The authors brought together in the book draw on a wider range of postapartheid texts. Coetzee’s work, however, appears slightly overrepresented as the contributions by Attridge, Raditlhalo, Concilio, Attwell and Mann look at his novels. In contrast to the volume of interviews, the focus in this book is mostly on historical trauma, its legacy and the work of the TRC. Apart from Boehmer’s article, there is little engagement with other forms of trauma in the post-transition era such as those resulting from the pervasive violence against women and children, HIV/ AIDS and xenophobia. While the interview volume engages with the trauma experienced by African immigrants who, since the transition to democracy, have increasingly sought refuge in South Africa, the body of literary works dealing with post-apartheid immigration and xenophobia is absent from the book 1 . Such work would be central to gaining a better understanding of the increasing diversification of trauma in the country that no longer merely has its origin in the violent oppression of apartheid. Notwithstanding its shortcomings, Mengel’s and Borzaga’s book presents a carefully contextualised study of literary engagements with trauma from which such future scholarship can take its lead. References Beukes, Lauren (2010). Zoo City. Auckland Park: Jacana. Borzaga, Michela (2010). “Testing the DSM Model in South Africa: An Interview with Ashraf Kagee.” In: Ewald Mengel/ Michela Borzaga/ Karin Orantes (eds.). Trauma, Memory, and Narrative: Interviews. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. 127-136. Duiker, K. Sello (2001). The Quiet Violence of Dreams. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Mpe, Pashwane (2001). Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Rothberg, Michael (2008). “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response.” Studies in the Novel 40. 224-234. Schonstein Pinnock, Patricia (2000). Skyline. Cape Town: David Philip. Rebecca Fasselt Department of English University of Johannesburg South Africa 1 These works include, among others, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline (2000), K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) and Lauren Beuke’s Zoo City (2010).