Journal of African Cultural Studies Vol. 21, No.

1, June 2009, 121

A post-colonial and feminist reading of selected testimonies to trauma in post-liberation South Africa and Zimbabwe
Jessica Murray
Centre for Culture and Languages in Africa, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa This article explores the testimonial signicance of Antjie Krog and Yvonne Veras work by considering the extent to which their choice of literary ction facilitates and enables the urgent political and social intervention that their texts undertake. Their work responds to the violence in the Zimbabwean and South African contexts from and about which they write. This violence, which is a recurring theme in their work, is physical as well as psychic and results in traumatized individual and collective identities that pose particular challenges to representation. The role that the witness to trauma plays is an active one that carries its own responsibility. The onus that rests on the witness is related to the traumatic nature of what is being testied to. The article provides a detailed exploration of the dynamics that are involved in the process of witnessing trauma. Since traumatic events cause an overow of the cognitive system, it is not comprehensively experienced by the victims at the time when it occurs. It can only be fully known in the aftermath of the event and then when it is being received by an empathetic listener (or reader). Vera and Krog use literature to enable the reader to endure the pain and difculty that come with being an active participant in the creation of new knowledge when that knowledge concerns a traumatic event.

This paper considers how the works of Antjie Krog and Yvonne Vera testify to the traumatic histories of the South African and Zimbabwean societies from which and about which they write. I will show how the work of these authors compels the reader, who functions as the witness to the trauma to which the characters are testifying, to move beyond a simple Manichean identication with the innocence of the victim and to acknowledge the possibility of identication with the perpetrators of atrocities. It also prompts readers to confront their complicity in the creation of a socio-political environment that is conducive to such abuses.1 While Krog and Vera have both been the subjects of much critical attention, they have not been analysed together in terms of the political signicance of their work. They both harness literary ction to intervene in the violent socio-political realities of their respective countries and the similarities in their concerns and approaches, despite pronounced stylistic differences, emerge when their works are read together. The following quotation from the Ivorian writer Veronique Tadjo is useful here to help demonstrate the importance of drawing parallels between womens writing and their representation of womens lives in different African countries: It doesnt matter where I live, whatever happens in Africa profoundly affects me (cited in Krog 2003, 145). This signals the way in which a sense of connection with other Africans constitutes a crucial part of individual and collective identity. Between South Africa and Zimbabwe, however, this connection is also a material one as large numbers of Zimbabweans continue making their way into South Africa and living there either legally or illegally to escape the escalating violence and poverty in their own country.2

Email: jmurray@uj.ac.za

ISSN 1369-6815 print/ISSN 1469-9346 online # 2009 Journal of African Cultural Studies DOI: 10.1080/13696810902986409 http://www.informaworld.com

Jessica Murray

By tracking the ways in which Krog and Vera engage with violence and trauma by means of ctionalized testimony, I hope to show that, regardless of signicant differences in location and context, these two authors work has a great deal in common. Both are speaking to the realities of South African and Zimbabwean womens lives as contemporaries from contiguous countries with long histories of settler colonialism and the violence that this involves.3 Krog and Vera have entered a discursive eld where literature attempts to respond to the crisis of culture (Ndebele 1994, 3) in which both Zimbabwe and South Africa nd themselves after liberation from minority rule. After the demise of apartheid in South Africa and the Smith regime in Zimbabwe, nations were constructed4 with people divided by a chasm of engineered ignorance, misunderstanding, division, illusion, and hostility (Ndebele 1994, 3). Njabulo Ndebele goes on to argue that the crisis of culture is a crisis of transition, a process which should culminate in the emergence of something new. But seldom does the new in human history emerge so clearly as the emergence of the sun. Rather, the new is experienced as a process of becoming (1994, 8). In this space of becoming, classications and boundaries, such as those between ction and testimony, self and other, personal and political become more difcult to maintain, and the work of Krog and Vera exhibits a constant tension between aesthetics and politics as these authors use literature to come to terms with the place of individuals in a public sphere that is in a constant state of ux. The testimonial thrust of their work can help to explain the highly self-reexive nature of their writing since [t]estimony records a movement from individual experience to the collective archive, from personal trauma to public memory (Miller and Tougaw 2002, 13). The study of trauma and its articulation in the form of testimony have been consistent topics of research since Sigmund Freuds seminal work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.5 Interest in the elds of trauma and testimony intensied after the Second World War, and the Holocaust continues to epitomize trauma and the imperative to understand this unspeakable trauma that must never be forgotten yet can never be completely spoken (Bennett and Kennedy 2003, 1).6 The inuence of the Holocaust on contemporary studies of trauma and testimony is so pervasive that Kal Tal (1996, 6) regards the Holocaust as a metonym, not for the violence directed against the Jews during World War 2, but for a set of symbols that reect the formal codication of that experience. As such, the word holocaust has become the central signier for acts of violence perpetrated by human beings where the horror of the act is so great that it dees comprehension.7 James Young (1988, 99) explains the inevitability of this cognitive association by arguing that, since humans make sense of new experiences by integrating them into existing frames of reference, incomparable experiences like the Holocaust will always be made at least rhetorically comparable. I make this point to emphasise the extent to which atrocities such as those committed in apartheid South Africa and in the Matabeleland area of Zimbabwe continue to be theorized with either explicit or implicit reference to the Holocaust. The question thus arises whether trauma studies, with its distinctly Western origins, can provide an adequate theoretical structure for understanding trauma caused by factors such as colonialism, political violence and racism in South African and Zimbabwean contexts.8 The adequacy of existing intellectual rubrics in trauma studies will be explored later in this paper. Sufce at this stage to acknowledge the pervasive inuence of Euro-American traditions on theorizing trauma and testimony in Africa, and the potentially problematic implications of this inuence.9 In terms of the origins of testimony studies, it also needs to be noted that the term testimony can be traced back to the Latin root testes.10 Nancy Saporta Sternbach (1991, 92) argues that this etymological root reects the extent to which the language of the genre itself manifests womens exclusion from it and from power.11 She goes on to draw some parallels between the testimonies to the oppression of women as well as other oppressed groups in Latin

Journal of African Cultural Studies

America. While she bases her arguments on a Latin American context, the similarities that she identies in feminist theorys reconstruction and retrieval of womens histories and the testimonial genres articulation of the histories of other oppressed groups can also be applied to the Southern African situation:
Even the characteristic traits of the two sound familiar: both include theory based on and grounded in the reality of a people who are breaking silences; both include theory for those who envision a future distinct from their past of oppression; both use discourse which gives voice to many others in their same situation; and both inuence and are inuenced by people who, with their new consciousness as a political subject, make evident the relationship between the personal and the political in an historic moment when the subject sees herself/themselves as an integral part of the collective process.

As the rest of this paper will show, these qualities that are shared by testimonial literature and feminist writing are characteristic of both Krogs and Veras work as they break silences in search of a new future in narratives that repeatedly reveal the co-implication of the personal and the political in the attempt to articulate their own stories as well as those of larger groups. Testimony is a process that involves both a speaker and a listener. Laub (1992a, 57) reminds us that [m]assive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction. All testimonies thus begin with a victim attempting to articulate something that has not yet come into being or, in other words, something that has, due to the ooding of the mind, not been fully experienced. This is in no way to deny that the event that caused the trauma has in fact taken place. Rather, the point being made is that the event is available to the victim only as an overwhelming shock (1992a, 57) or something that exceeds her frame of reference. It is not yet what Laub refers to as a known event. He explains the crucial role of the listener as follows:
The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to and heard is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the knowing of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo (Laub 1992a, 57).

Susannah Radstone (2001, 60) attempts to demonstrate the particularity of testimony by comparing it to confession which, she argues, played a dominant role in Western society prior to the 1980s.12 While confession inevitably contains at least a measure of self-scrutiny and self-implication (2001, 60), testimony tends to elide this inward turning and demands primarily of the listener to hear the pain of someone else. This focus on listening to the exclusion of selfscrutiny has resulted in a gross oversimplication of the position of listener. It is my contention that, even when listening to testimonies to the most gruesome of atrocities, this avoidance of self-scrutiny by the witness constitutes a denial of the complexity of the witness as a subject and enables the witness to maintain some level of comfort, albeit highly compromised and precarious. This then means that the witness reneges on his part of the reciprocal relation between the victim and the witness. The reciprocity of this relation is implied by Laubs contention that the testier and the listener both play a part in the creation of knowledge of the traumatic event. The result is that, even when the victim gets to articulate his pain to a listener, the broader context within which that pain was inicted stays in the shadows and thus understanding remains elusive. A further characteristic of trauma and testimony studies that needs to be addressed is what Radstone (2001, 61) refers to as the Manichean tendency in contemporary work in the humanities. Manicheanism refers to the tendency to see the world in terms of dualistic and conicting binary opposites. The Manichean tendency in the study of trauma and testimony involves the way in which the victim of trauma and the witness (in the form of the listener to or the reader of testimony) are conceptualized. In these conceptualizations a dichotomy is set up

Jessica Murray

wherein the victim comes to represent pure innocence and the perpetrator is associated with pure evil. The witness, in providing an empathetic reception for the articulation of the victims trauma, locates himself within the space of innocent victimhood (Radstone 2001, 61). Radstone explains the problem with such a simplication of the position of the witness:
The position of witness is a complex one that can exceed an empathic identication with victimhood to include identications with other positions available within any given scenario, including, especially, those of perpetration. If history is not to repeat itself, the task of witnessing and remembering the sufferings of others ought not to be separated from the difcult acknowledgment of testimonial witnessings darker side (2001, 61).

Radstone (2001, 65) suggests that the tendency towards identication with pure victimhood can be countered by undermining the sense of an absolute distinction between good and evil and by proffering, or even foregrounding potential identications with perpetration as well as with victimhood. It is important to note here that such an expansion and complication of the role of the witness is in no way meant to obfuscate the very real difference between the victim and the perpetrator. Primo Levi (1989, 32) has argued passionately against any confusion between murderers and victims by referring to it as a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity. It is my contention that the work of Krog and Vera forces the reader, who plays the role of the witness, to acknowledge and deal with their potential identications with perpetration as well as with victimhood (Radstone 2001, 65). Since Krog and Vera are writing about Southern African societies, it is necessary at this stage to return to the European origins of contemporary trauma theory. The genesis of trauma theory in Freudian analysis means that these theories have, from their very beginning, been framed in psychoanalytic terms and psychoanalysis is a necessarily individualizing practice. Edkins (2003, 33) reminds us that cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and social psychology all adopt the same basic framework and that this framework is one that sees the individual as distinct and distinguishable in the rst place. This is a problematic intellectual rubric to apply to African environments where the concept of ubuntu13 plays a crucial part in the constitution of the human subject. The term is derived from the Zulu proverb ubuntu ungamntu abantu which can be translated as a person depends on other people to be a person (Battle 1997, 39). The philosophy of ubuntu holds that community is essential to subjectivity: a person is incomplete unless he or she maintains an active connection with the society or culture of which he or she is a part (Libin 2003, 126).14 This philosophy of humaneness and interpersonal generosity is evident in many South African cultures and in other African countries, ranging from Rwanda and Burundi to Uganda and Tanzania. Ubuntu is referred to differently in different African languages. For example, it is umunthu in Chewa, umundu in Yao, bunhu in Tsonga, unhu in Shona, botho in Sotho or Tswana, vhutu in Venda and ubuntu in Xhosa and Ndebele (Tambulasi and Kayuni 2005, 148). It is no coincidence that the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, arguably Africas best known engagement with trauma and testimony, were peppered with references to ubuntu. My reading of Krogs and Veras work, while drawing on existing trauma and testimony theories with their concomitant individualising tendencies, will also emphasise the extent to which the expression and understanding of trauma is a cultural and social phenomenon.15 The overwhelming of the senses that occurs when trauma is experienced means that the event is not fully integrated into the cognitive frames of reference of the victim. When the victim attempts to articulate the traumatic event the problem is only compounded. Not only is the victim trying to speak something that was not comprehensively experienced in the rst place, but when the experience is codied in language, there is the very real danger that both the precision and the force that characterises traumatic recall (Caruth 1995, 153) may be lost. The profound incomprehensibility of trauma is an essential part of what makes the experience

Journal of African Cultural Studies

traumatic. In its articulation, the force of its affront to understanding (1995, 154, emphasis in original) may be mitigated. Testifying to trauma thus poses a unique challenge in that it cannot entail recording that which has been: rather, it must bring to life that which already has failed to be (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 2). This is a challenge that Krog and Vera take up, and in so doing they attempt to carve a space for victims of violence in the historical narratives of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The temporal elusiveness and the overow of cognitive structures that characterize trauma mean that trauma presents a radical challenge to both history as happening and narrative as telling. According to Felman (1992b, 101), this challenge can only be overcome by a dialogic interaction between the two and the resulting synthesis between history and narrative is testimony. In dealing with these difculties, Felman and Laub (1992, xviii) suggest that literature can become a crucial vehicle by functioning as a witness, and perhaps the only witness, to the crisis within history which precisely cannot be articulated, witnessed in the given categories of history itself. The failure to imagine trauma can only be remedied by an imaginative medium such as literature which can gain an insight into [the] historical reality, as well as into the attested historicity of [the] unimaginability [of trauma] (1992, 105). The contention that literary ction may be uniquely able to articulate and bear witness to trauma is a controversial one. Rosanne Kennedy and Tikka Jan Wilson (2003, 122) trace Felmans objection to a documentary or referential narrative back to her questioning of the writers (and readers) assumption of a direct, transparent relationship between language and traumatic event. Furthermore, the descriptive narrative mode is one that is so conventional that, when the trauma is articulated within the familiar connes of this form, the testimony loses some of the incomprehensibility that constitutes it. This narrative form does, in other words, mitigate the affective shock (2003, 122) of the trauma. In this regard I would argue that the rejection of the requirements of a realist narrative, with its humanist notions of character, plot and event in, for example, Under the Tongue plays a critical role in retaining the shock of what happened to Zhizha as she attempts to testify to something that continues to escape [her], a truth that is, essentially, not available to its own speaker (Felman 1992a, 15). Trauma, with its temporal elusiveness, is not something that is available to the victim as a coherent, linear narrative. The text that is best able to articulate trauma is thus one that should register, in the form of its language, the gaps in memory and logic that thwart narrative coherence and linear chronology (Kennedy and Jan Wilson 2003, 125). I contend that Country of My Skull and A Change of Tongue with their fusion of poetry, epistolary fragments and segments of autobiographical narrative also constitute a literary attempt to come to terms with these gaps in memory and logic that characterize trauma. In an analysis of Felmans and Caruths advocacy of literature as a uniquely suitable vehicle for the transmission of trauma, Jill Bennett (2003, 181) articulates a number of objections to this view. One criticism points to the simultaneous specication of traumatic experience in terms of a range of symptoms and the effective decoupling [of] this experience from any specied subject so that trauma becomes a free-oating condition, accessible to all through the literary text (2003, 181). This is a critique that has been levelled against Krogs Country of My Skull in which she integrates testimonies from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) with her own story of attempting to come to terms with her identity as an Afrikaner woman. The same critique can be applied to A Change of Tongue, which also contains TRC testimonies, albeit to a much lesser extent. Yazir Henri, a former ANC guerrilla ghter whose TRC testimony was incorporated into Country of My Skull, objects to the way in which his testimony was duly edited to t the narrative (2000, 167) of Krogs own story. Bennett (2003, 181) argues that this kind of use of Henris testimony tend[s] to treat his testimony as affective spectacle, creating out of his story, an image

Jessica Murray

that represents not the pain of the witness himself but rather the degree to which watching his testimony was moving. The problem is that the trauma becomes accessible to both the victim of the actual atrocity and to non-victims. Ruth Leys (2000, 305) is concerned that such a broad accessibility of trauma can dilute and generalise the suffering of the victim. Fiona Rosss (2003, 151) criticism is even harsher. In her view Krogs work has the effect that [s]uffering is diffused, making a mockery of the distinctions between victims and perpetrators, and absolute truth and lies. These objections are, in my view, misreadings both of what Krog is trying to do in these texts and of the importance of the project. In Country of My Skull as well as A Change of Tongue she creates texts in which she layers the testimonies of victims of the apartheid state, perpetrators of human rights abuses, the broader South African society through whose actions and non actions this environment was sustained and also her own testimony. In doing so, she is rejecting the dominance of Manichean testimony (Radstone 2001, 61) and embracing the testimony of the grey zone. She makes it extremely difcult for anyone reading her work to maintain a simplied witness position of pure association with innocent victimhood. A similar dynamic is at work in Veras texts, although the techniques that she uses differ from those employed by Krog. In all her work Vera avoids slotting her characters into an unambiguous position in a rigid perpetrator/victim binary. The incestuous rapist Muroyiwa in Under the Tongue and the rapist, murderer and mutilator Sibaso in The Stone Virgins are never portrayed as perpetrators in a simplistic or unproblematic way. They are traumatized subjects themselves and there is no attempt by Vera to deny or minimize their suffering. The perpetrators are very explicitly shaped by the discourses of colonialism and the nationalism that fuelled the liberation wars. The reader of her novels would be hard pressed to attribute pure evil to these men who commit deeds that bafe the mind with their horror. Although many Zimbabwean authors writing in the two decades after independence do focus on the dehumanizing effect of war on all those affected by it, the level of empathy Vera allows for the perpetrators of human rights abuses remains rare. In Kanengonis Echoing Silences (1997, 129), for example, a man who has been brutalised by his involvement in war is described by his wife as someone who had become. . .a monster.16 Veras approach does, once again, allow for a more complex positioning of the reader who acts as the witness to these atrocities. The greater demands that Veras works place on the reader become even more signicant when one considers the extent to which her work is marketed to a Western audience. Though Veras mother tongue is Shona, she writes in English. It would thus be reasonable to assume that she is aware that at least a segment of her readership is Western. The current social, political and economic problems in Zimbabwe, and the violence that accompanies them, make it particularly important that Western readers are nudged out of their positions of comfort. There has been an alarming tendency of self-righteous Western condemnation of the Mugabe government as the central cause of the violence engulng Zimbabwe.17 This attitude has very real consequences for the Zimbabwean people as it shapes the Wests policies regarding political intervention as well as the crucial issue of aid contributions. A work of literature that testies to the complexity of the forces that shape the Zimbabwean people, including people who perpetrate acts of violence, can thus have far reaching material consequences for the future of the country. At this stage it is also necessary to remember that my analysis of Veras work regards her texts as the testimonies of the characters that people her ction. When one recalls the earlier characterization of testimony as the synthesis between history and narrative, the extent of Veras intervention becomes even clearer. In her telling of, for example Zhizhas, story, Vera, as the agent of telling, enters into an interaction with the narrative of history and the resultant testimony casts a new light on that history. Both Krogs and Veras texts constitute testimonies that facilitate a rereading of the historical

Journal of African Cultural Studies

narratives of their respective countries. The nature of trauma, as discussed earlier, makes it difcult for testimonies to traumatic events to be incorporated fully into historical narratives. A fuller discussion of the challenges confronting authors who attempt to articulate trauma will clarify this difculty. The referential opacity that problematizes the attempt at testifying to trauma is also something that complicates the articulation of physical pain. In the case of pain, this referential opacity results from a different dynamic than in the case of trauma, although the experience of pain and trauma does overlap at certain places. In both cases there is a profound ooding of the physical senses. Temporality, however, works in a different way in the case of pain. While temporality is slippery in the case of trauma, pain is a phenomenon that is characterized by the ultimate form of immediacy since the most crucial fact about pain is its presentness (Scarry 1985, 9). When a person experiences pain, that pain overrides all other senses to such a degree that the person can only be absolutely sure of the undeniable presence of the pain. Elaine Scarry explains the difculty of articulating pain by pointing out that the states of consciousness that humans experience within the interiority of the body and mind tend to be linked to particular objects in the external world (1985, 5). In the case of physical pain, however, there is no linkage to any concrete reference in the outer world. It is due to this lack of referential object that pain resists objectication in language. Through its connection to an external object of reference, feelings and emotions such as love and fear afrm the human beings capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, sharable world (Scarry 1985, 5). Pain, on the other hand, sunders this connection and stays trapped within the body itself. Pain, like other forms of trauma, thus becomes a profoundly isolating and solitary experience. The creation of linguistic structures with the capacity to articulate pain and trauma is of crucial importance since it works against the dehumanizing isolation of victims and strives to re-establish the connection between the body of the victim and the external world populated by other human beings. At this point it is necessary to make some conceptual clarications in order to avoid a conation of the terms trauma and pain. While pain is often traumatic, trauma is not necessarily physically painful.18 In Krogs and Veras work, the characters are dealing with trauma caused by violence, whether this is the violence of physical assault or the violence of political persecution and loss. Violence itself is a nebulous term that tends to be dened with such a lack of rigour that its use as a precise term of description or as a clear concept is severely limited (Mizen 2003, 285). Dustin Ells Howes (2003, 3) notes that, in the Western tradition, and in ordinary parlance for that matter, violence seems to be rst and foremost associated with the physical destruction of bodies. The problem with such a denition is that it obscures or ignores other forms of violence that may be no less acute or damaging for its lack of visibility. This limited ` type of denition can, in the words of Luc Reychler and Michele Jacobs (2004, 4), lead to illusions of peace and in turn to surprises.19 Vittorio Bufacchi (2005, 193) draws a useful distinction between what he refers to as the Minimalist Conception of Violence (MCV) and the Comprehensive Conception of Violence (CCV). The MCV, which can be regarded as a narrow denition, views violence as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force. Aside from the problems with a narrow denition of violence that have already been mentioned, this conception sees violence from the perspective of the perpetrator, since the intention to do harm is integral to the denition. The CCV takes the point of view of the victim as a starting point and associates violence with the violation of rights. This conception spans (but may not necessarily include) both the physical and the psychic by means of its appeal to subjective experience (Mizen 2003, 288). In order to incorporate the reality of structural violence in the South African and Zimbabwean societies in my analysis, I will be working with this second, broader denition of violence.

Jessica Murray

In many instances the characters in Krogs and Veras work are struggling to speak in a space where trauma and physical pain intersect. These characters are thus bearing a double burden of silencing and isolation, which makes their efforts at speech and testimony all the more difcult as well as all the more important. The authors titular emphasis on the tongue signals their intention of moving the experience of pain and trauma beyond the connes of the body without disavowing the body. What both of them achieve, with varying levels of success, is the development of an embodied language of trauma. In his analysis of trauma, Laub (1992a, 69) argues that a traumatic event, although real, [takes] place outside the parameters of normal reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time. The trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after. In Under the Tongue, Zhizha speaks of the trauma of being raped by her father in a language that is very much in process and in trial (Felman 1992a, 5). Testimony does not, according to Felman, provide a completed statement, a totalizable account of traumatic events. The unintelligibility of Veras text reects Zhizhas location at the space where pain and trauma intersect and render the victim unable to articulate her experience in a way that offers a clear external image of the feelings she is experiencing within her body. This is particularly clear in the opening chapter of the novel where the rst time reader, unaware of the violation that is responsible for Zhizhas traumatization, has no idea what she is trying to say. The voice [that] scrambles (Vera 1996, 2) on the second page is the voice of trauma: chaotic, confused, contradictory, incoherent and unintelligible. The reader cannot know whether Zhizha is trying to articulate a dream, a memory, a fantasy or an actual experience. We cannot know whether this section is being narrated before, during or after the paternal rape because a traumatic event does not adhere to such structures of normal experience. Even as Zhizha is trying to move beyond the boundaries of the body to articulate what she is feeling in a way that is accessible to the external world, the repeated references to parts of the body and to bodily senses continue to ensure the centrality of the body. Zhizha is thus attempting to develop her own embodied language of violation. Zhizha is, at this stage, trapped in what Leigh Gilmore (2001, 7) refers to as the unconscious language of repetition through which trauma initially speaks and which is characterized by ashbacks, nightmares [and] emotional ooding. The obstacles Zhizha is facing in her attempt to articulate her trauma are myriad. While language tends to crumble when confronted with the task of articulating trauma, it continues to be pressed forward as that which can heal the survivor of trauma (2001, 6). At the moment when language seems to be at its most inadequate, it is also saddled with its greatest responsibility. Language is, in the words of Gilmore, asserted as that which can realize trauma even as it is theorized as that which fails in the face of trauma (2001, 7). A subject speaking in a formerly colonized context also faces additional challenges when it comes to language. Marlene Nourbese Philip argues that, in such an environment, the bridge that language creates, the crossover from image to expression [has been] destroyed, if only temporarily (1989, 15). When a person in a formerly colonised society attempts to speak in English, she is doing so in a language that is etymologically hostile and expressive of the non-being of the African (1989, 15). In the later exploration of Krogs work, this problem crops up again, albeit in a slightly different way. While Veras mother tongue is Shona, Krog is an Afrikaans woman writing of trauma in English. Though she is further removed from colonialism in time, it is clear throughout Krogs text that the legacy of British rule as well as that of the Anglo Boer war continues to constitute a lingering presence in her life. In articulating womens experiences of violence and trauma, Krog and Vera are acting on an external world that is all too ready to forget the stories of women like Zhizha and Deborah Matshoba, whose story Krog tells in A Change of Tongue. The intensity of their trauma and

Journal of African Cultural Studies

pain places them beyond the structures of normal reality and it falls to writers like Krog and Vera to reclaim those stories and assimilate them into frames of reference that are accessible to people who, excluded from these violated bodies, cannot know their pain. Felman (1992b, 103) explains why the stories of victims of trauma are so vulnerable to elision: Because our perception of reality is molded by frames of reference, what is outside them, however imminent and otherwise conspicuous, remains historically invisible, unreal, and can only be encountered by a systematic disbelief. In telling these stories of trauma, Krog and Vera can thus be said to be engaged in a project of enactment the capacity of the voice to shape the physical matter of history (Scarry 1988, xi). Before they can use language to act on the world however, they need to act on language itself. In her discussion of the challenges confronting the subject in a formerly colonized environment when that subject attempts to speak, Nourbese Philip contends that language as we know it has to be dislocated and acted upon even destroyed so that it begins to serve our purposes (1989, 19). While Krogs and Veras writing styles are very different, they are both involved in an attempt to testify about particular violent realities in their countries. Vera uses ctional characters to claim a place for female victims of violence in the historical and aesthetic narrative of Zimbabwe. Krog on the other hand, employs a mode that bears a much closer resemblance to autobiography to make sense of her place in a South African society that is saturated with violence and trauma. The following passage provides an example of the way in which Krog acts upon the English language as she tries to make it serve her particular purposes:
AAAAaaaAAAAaa. . .@ When I look around, %Imarvel e at how we battle to be normal and no one knows how shattered we are inside.AAAAaaaAAAAaa This is mine! Or rather, these are the words of Deborah Matshoba, whose story I documented in Country of My Skull (Krog 2003, 143).

In this section of A Change of Tongue, the narrator is receiving fragments of data from her damaged computer hard drive from a technician who is working to retrieve the missing information. In the short rst paragraph a literal shattering of language has taken place and one needs to read through the gibberish of symbols that has corrupted the data on the narrators computer. This shattered language conveys the psychic shattering that has been caused by the detention and torture of Deborah Matshoba by the apartheid regime. The rst paragraph is followed by the main narrators appropriation of the text. Her exclamation This is mine! is caused by her excitement that some of the data on her hard drive has been saved. Yet at the same time it signals the ethical and theoretical issues that come into play when authors write a literature of trauma and testimony. Throughout the novel, different bits of testimony, like that of Matshoba, are interwoven with the narrators own story of trying to come to terms with her identity as an Afrikaner woman in Africa. In many sections of Krogs novel, she uses terminology that explicitly situates the writing within a discourse of testimony. The words testimony, survivor, perpetrator, memory and witness appear throughout the text.20 The testimony that the narrator describes as mine is, in the rst instance, part of Matshobas Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony. At the same time, however, the narrator of this novel is also testifying and Matshobas text is embedded in her own testimony. The narrator thus occupies a complex position, simultaneously witnessing Matshobas testimony and also testifying in her own capacity as a white South African woman. The concept of testimony that I am working with here is a broad one that sees the desire to testify as being driven by the imperative to speak out and to tell ones story (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 1). The sense in which Krogs novel as a whole can be read as testimony might

10

Jessica Murray

become clearer when comparing it to the testimonial work done by Nieves Ayress. After the military coup in Chile in September 1973, Ayress was arrested and tortured by the Pinochet regime. Drawing on a series of conversations with Ayress, Temma Kaplan makes the following observations:
By witnessing both in the sense of giving testimony and in the sense of bearing moral witness Ayress has crafted a story of sexual and political identity and maintained a memory of the past that acknowledges what she and others have withstood through solidarity. In an effort to preserve a historical account in which she does not merely provide a chronicle of atrocities but explains the signicance of events, Ayress has repeatedly told her story. . .(2002, 195).

The differences between the testimonies of Ayress and Krog are clear. The former is speaking from a Chilean context and providing rst-hand, non-ction accounts of physical abuse that she suffered. Krog, on the other hand, is in the South African environment and tells a semictionalized story of trauma resulting from the psychic pain of feeling responsible for the horrors of apartheid. Like Ayress testimony, Krog is, in A Change of Tongue, acknowledging the atrocities committed by the apartheid regime by embedding those atrocities not only in a specic historical context, but also interweaving it with the story of her own sexual and political identity as a white, liberal South African woman. In this regard Krogs testimony takes an intersectional approach (Naples 2003, 1152) to identity by recognizing the extent to which her story, as well as the stories she is witnessing, are constituted at the nexus of gender, race, class, ethnic and sexual difference. The reading of Krogs text becomes even more problematic when one considers the position of Antjie Krog the writer. In the Acknowledgments, she states that the I is seldom me (2003, 369). She uses the qualifying term seldom rather than never to describe her association with the rst person narrator of the novel. She is, in other words, keeping open the possibility that she and the I in the novel are the same person, thus exposing herself to the potential criticism that she is somehow attempting to testify without taking substantive responsibility for that testimony, or for her use of the testimonies of others. She is thus locating herself in a space where autobiography and ction intersect. Her attempt to tell her story involves an incorporation of poetry, prose, letters, emails, ction, non-ction, rst and third person narrators. The breaking up of language that is reected in the fragmented, coded faxes she receives reects the unmaking of the world of the person in pain (Scarry 1985, title). It is my contention that, as the technician tries to decode the corrupted data on the narrators hard-drive, the reader needs to decode the mixed, multi-layered testimony in A Change of Tongue. I hope to show that a rubric of testimony and trauma theory, read with a materialist feminist sensitivity to the complexity and locational specicity in which individuals exist and produce their stories, is uniquely suitable for teasing out the myriad levels and implications of this text. While I argue that Krog explicitly appeals to her readers to read this work as testimony, I read it alongside the texts of Yvonne Vera, whose work is unambiguously classied as ction. Veras Under the Tongue in no way implies a shared identity between the author and the I of the central character Zhizha. Yet I hope to show that, rather than denying testimonial status to Veras work, her use of ction works to complicate and expand the readers notions of the real. I thus wish to read Under the Tongue as a layered form of testimony.21 Even though it is ction and the voice of Vera the author does not come through as explicitly as Krogs does in A Change of Tongue, I argue that Under the Tongue is composed of the testimonies of the characters in the novel, but also by the much more subtle and implicit testimony of Vera. The central character around whose testimony the novel is structured is Zhizha, and the following section reveals the fear and vulnerability she is experiencing:

Journal of African Cultural Studies

I hide under my tongue. I hide deep in the dark inside of myself where no one has visited where it is warm like blood. Night waits for my cry but I can only think of my knee bending slowly, painfully, touching the something, the nothing rising above my head, rising from my arms. I know this nothing is something, someone. I hear the door close (Vera 1996, 21).

11

As in other parts of the novel, the reader cannot know whether this passage is articulating Zhizhas thoughts as her father enters her darkened bedroom, whether she is remembering a previous incident, dreaming, or even imagining things. The novel never follows a linear time line and the temporal uncertainty marking this passage is typical of the text. The confusion as to whether she is describing something that is taking place in reality or in the space of dream or imagination draws the reader into the traumatised world of the child. While Veras work is explicitly categorized and marketed as ction, the imaginary and the real ow into each other in the testimony of the characters in her novels. The earlier quotation of one of Zhizhas interior monologues is just one example of Veras exploration of the way in which ction and non-ction intersect. The reader does not know whether Zhizha is telling of something that happened in reality or only in her mind and, more importantly for this discussion, this distinction does not matter to the reader in the sense that it does not cause the reader to doubt that this child has been profoundly hurt. The visceral force with which Zhizhas pain confronts the reader is not lessened by not knowing in what temporal-spatial realm it took place.22 This inability to demarcate ction and non-ction clearly is particularly acute in the case of a traumatized person. The ooding of the senses that occurs when a person is exposed to trauma precludes any neat classication of the experience into specic categories. Veras work acknowledges and attempts to write through the resistance of conventional language and narrative forms to testifying about trauma. Rather than undermining the power and veracity of testimony, the form of ctionalized testimony can enable the articulation of experiences that, through the dynamics of traumatization, resist clear, coherent, temporally and spatially conventional telling. In addition, ctionalized testimony gives a voice to the experiences of people who are not in a position to speak. Children who are victims of incest often remain captive in the private sphere of the home where the abuse is taking place. This is one of the reasons why incest continues to be one of the most underreported of crimes. In an interview with Jane Bryce (2002, 225) Vera discusses the atrocities that occurred in Matabeleland and the temptation of saying that it is too ugly, messy, bloody to write about. She goes on to reect that, if there were witnesses, then [they] heard what had occurred, but otherwise it just happened. Veras ctional account of Zhizhas testimony provides a voice to the many children who are never able to testify about their abuse. Through the writing of Zhizhas story, Vera is bearing witness to the conditions in a society where the abuse of women and children is rife. The testimony of Vera the writer is driven by her refusal to let these abuses happen without comment. The reality of rape is in no way lessened by providing a ctional account of one girls violation. Rather, her story manages to testify about the very real violence that so many victims are never able to talk about. John Beverley argues that testimony must above all be a story that needs to be told, that involves some pressing and immediate problem of communication (2004, 61). In this regard Under the Tongue certainly fulls the criteria for qualifying as testimony. If no ctionalised accounts of Zhizhas story were ideologically permissible to be classied as testimony, who would be left to witness Zhizhas pain? If only rst-hand factual accounts of violation qualied as testimony, who could bear witness to Zhizhas experience? When children are raped by their fathers, the only witnesses to the event are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the perpetrator and the victim. The victim is usually, as is the case with Zhizha, a traumatized child. Even if one assumes that such a child nds the courage to speak, the trauma complicates that articulation

12

Jessica Murray

to such an extent that the victims narration will most likely not resemble the clear, coherent form that conventionally marks a realist narrative. Even though Beverley acknowledges that the imperative to speak is a crucial component of testimony, he would deny testimonial status to Veras work on the ground that hers is a ctional text. He uses the Spanish word testimonio which translates literally as testimony(Beverley 2004, 32) and denes it as a story told in the rst person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist of the events he or she recounts (2004, 31, emphasis added). The adjective real is used here to exclude ction from qualifying as testimony. Although Beverley insists on this denition, he recognizes the potential problems in his discussion of I, Rigoberta Menchu, which he regards as a text that is representative of the form of testimonio and vigorously defends against critics who point to factual inaccuracies in Menchus testimony.23 Here it is useful to recall that testimony and witness are concepts that are, in the rst place, associated with a legal discourse where a judge or jury will evaluate the veracity of the story. The way in which they listen to the story will depend on the reliability and believability of the teller, if there is not another way to verify the accuracy of the testimony. Statements like I hide under my tongue and the something, the nothing rising above my head (2004, 21) are most likely to be seen as distortions of what happened and, if spoken by a victim, would radically undermine her credibility. Laub argues that [t]he absence of an empathic listener. . .an other who can hear the anguish of ones memories and thus afrm and recognize their realness, annihilates the story (1992a, 69). I would argue that, precisely because these horrors are represented as ction, the reader is able to provide the empathic audience the victim needs. This ctionalized narrative enables Zhizhas testimony to be received by an audience far removed in space and time from the atrocities being testied to. Since readers are allowed into the stories of Zhizha and Veras other characters without being asked to believe that these characters really exist, they are able, and often more willing, to hear the testimonies in a much profounder way. Beverley expresses concern that allowing ction to classify as testimony will lead to relativizing its [testimonys] moral and political urgency (2004, 40). I disagree.24 The reality is that thousands of women and children in Zimbabwe and South Africa continue to be silent, whether this is for reasons of fear, the physical danger involved in exposing perpetrators, or the lack of empathic listeners. Very often, the work of courageous writers like Vera is the closest that victims can come to having their stories heard. To dismiss it as merely ctional is to do a great disservice to the many victims whose stories are articulated, very likely for the rst time, through Zhizhas words. It is interesting to note what increasingly evasive and apparently contradictory theoretical manoeuvres Beverley makes to hold on to the idea that testimony must be something completely real and uncontaminated by the ctional and imaginary. When he includes, in the preface of his latest work, the admission that there is a creative or storytelling element involved in the construction of testimonial narratives (2004, xv), the reader might be forgiven for assuming that he is conceding that ction does have a part to play in testimony. It is disappointing then to see him qualifying this by insisting that, since the discrepancies in Menchus testimony are relatively minor (2004, 5), he feels able to continue reading her account as non-ction. He seems to be caught in the pattern of thinking in terms of rigid, hierarchized binaries such as ction/non-ction, real/imaginary, important/trivial and political/personal. Value and political signicance seem to be attached only to the privileged terms in these dichotomies, while the subordinated term is denigrated and dismissed. Thinking in such polar opposites does not serve women.25 It is a mode of conceptualizing the world that Krog and Vera subvert in their work, and the reader and literary critic should be similarly wary of this in their encounters with the text.

Journal of African Cultural Studies

13

Zimbabwe and South Africa both made the transition to democracy within the past twenty-ve years with the result that many of the rights people have gained remain theoretical rather than substantive. The continuing vulnerability of people in these societies makes ction a particularly useful genre in which to work through individual and collective trauma.26 To take these ctional articulations of suffering seriously is certainly not to diminish the very real pain inicted on victims. J.M. Coetzee is another South African writer who deals with his countrys traumatic past and present within the genre of ction. One of his characters in Foe observes that [o]ne of the souls was weeping. Do not suppose, mortal said this soul addressing him, that because I am not substantial these tears you behold are not the tears of a true grief (1986, 98). On the contrary, writers like Coetzee, Krog and Vera are dealing with real suffering and their choice of ction as a genre in no way lessens the validity of the pain they are attempting to articulate. While Krogs and Veras work contains their own testimonies and the testimonies of the characters in their novels, it is also an expression of the collective testimonies of the societies they are part of. Their work thus constitutes an articulation of both individual and collective trauma. Sam Durrant (2004, 3) draws a comparison between the holocaust and colonialism in terms of the difculties of memorialization that both produce. He argues that the impact of both events exceeds the moment of their historical occurrence, acquiring the disturbed, belated chronology of trauma. When reading the work of Vera and Krog, one needs to keep in mind that, even before dealing with the specicities of the characters suffering, both authors write from the location of traumatized societies. Durrant (2004, 4) explores the implications of this by utilizing Lyotards conception of the sublime as an irrevocable violence done to the imagination. Trauma resists its own representation since it exceeds the cognitive framework of its victims. The shattering that results from trauma disrupts or even threatens to destroy experience in the sense of an integrated or at least viably articulated life (LaCapra 2004, 117). Similarly, the sublime also constitutes a breach or rupture in the subjects powers of presentation. Durrant argues that both the holocaust and colonialism, and I would add, apartheid, constitute
collective or cultural trauma not simply by aggregating the traumatic experiences of individual victims, but because they disrupt the consciousness of the entire community, destroying the possibility of a common frame of reference and calling into question our sense of being-in-common (2004, 4).

This destruction of the sense of being-in-common is aggravated in the case of victims who have also been exposed to physical brutality, as many of the characters in Krogs and Veras novels have been. When considering these layered forces of alienation, the disintegration of language on the hard drive of the narrator in A Change of Tongue, and Zhizhas loss of language in Under the Tongue come to symbolize the extent to which these characters lose their worlds in general and their position in a socio-linguistic network in particular.27 Laub (1992b, 85) argues that the traumatic event is, when someone listens to it, constituted through a process of historical retroaction. The trauma of colonialism can be said to work in a similar way. As individual trauma overows the individual victims frame of reference, the trauma of colonialism disrupts the colonised cultures frame of reference (Durrant 2004, 69). In this view, the trauma of colonialism is not so much an historical occurrence as a collapsing of history, a process in which the tribes own world-historical view is displaced. When Vera and Krog articulate the trauma in their societies, they come to play the role of Laubs belated witness that hears the testimony of victims. Laub insists on the importance of such retroactive listening as a way of claiming the trauma that could not be comprehensively experienced in the past. According to him, such traumatic events must be reclaimed [,] because even if

14

Jessica Murray

successfully repressed, it nevertheless invariably plays a decisive formative role in who one comes to be, and in how one comes to live ones life (Laub 1992b, 86). This is no less true of a society than of an individual. Krogs and Veras reclamation of past suffering works to ensure the survival of individual victims as well as the liberation of victimized societies. In addition to these functions of Krogs and Veras work, I would also argue for its importance for the Western audiences amongst whom their work is widely disseminated. The process of dealing with trauma that Vera and Krog are part of, is crucial for the future of the Zimbabwean and South African societies. The disproportionate levels of violence against women and children in these societies cannot be understood without considering the trauma that people in both countries have been exposed to. The idea I am working with here is that those who refuse to deal with and claim history are doomed to repeat it. The temporal and spatial distance between colonised Africa and twentieth-century Europe has facilitated a European denial of the extent of the trauma caused by colonialism. The fascist violence that has been raging in Europe during the last century can also be read as a repetition of the trauma of colonialism that Africa is still struggling to deal with and that Europe has never comprehensively claimed. Aime Cesaire (1994, 172 80) questions the status of the Holocaust as the ultimate signier of mans inhumanity to man. He makes the point that, when considering the colonizing actions of Europe, the descent into barbarism that was the Holocaust cannot with honesty be seen as a shocking aberration. The point I am making is in no way meant to deny or diminish the horror of the Holocaust. I agree with Durrant (2004, 3) who, in his linking of the Holocaust and colonialism, is careful to acknowledge the differences between the extermination of the Jews and the many different forms of colonialism few of which were genocidal in intention. Yet the application of trauma theory, with its strong institutional roots in holocaust studies, to an African context, demands my recognition of colonialism as a holocaust preceding the Holocaust and greatly exceeding it in terms of the number of people killed28 and in terms of its time span. My exploration of Krogs and Veras work as testimonies to trauma also requires a focus on the reader, who comes to play the crucial role of listener to their testimonies and to the testimonies of the characters in their novels. I have already pointed out that both these authors enjoy some measure of Western acclaim and readership and that their work is, at least to some extent, aimed at such a Western audience. An African reader, who is located in the same traumatized society of which and from which these authors write, is reading from a very different space than a reader in Europe. I want to argue that, for such Western readers, recognition of the role played by the trauma of colonialism in their own subject formation will facilitate a richer reading of Krogs and Veras texts. They are, in short, not as far removed from the effects caused by the trauma of colonialism as they might think. Cesaire makes this point when challenging the Western reaction of shock to the Holocaust:
And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated the Nazism before it was inicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimated it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it and that before engulng the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack (1994, 174).

It seems to me that the Wests attempts to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust will be undermined if the originary trauma of colonialism is not addressed rst. Since the readers of these works become witnesses to the trauma being testied to, and since my own engagement with the texts starts as a reading and also places me in a position of witness, the concepts of reading and witnessing need to be unpacked. Following Ross (2003, 3) I have, up

Journal of African Cultural Studies

15

to this point, been using the term witnessing in the general sense of recognising and acknowledging suffering. One does, however, need to be aware of the historical connotations of the word and I want to incorporate a subversion of these connotations in my further use of witnessing. In this regard Diana Taylor makes the following important observations:
The term witnessing is highly problematic, both in the sense of the Western scientic ideal of the objective observer and in the tradition of Greek tragic drama. The rst erroneously suggests that the viewer is ideologically and physically positioned outside the frame of the given-to-be-known/onlookers. And Greek tragedy . . .casts viewers as passive onlookers, thus discouraging them/us from active involvement (1997, 25).

I have already mentioned the intersectional conception of the witness as constituted by the racial, gendered, class and locational space from where she is situated. The ideal of the objective observer is thus, in the rst instance a myth. In the second instance, it is not an ideal. The ideal cannot be to insist on some non-existent neutral observer. Rather, a recognition and analysis of unavoidable elements of subjectivity can lead to what Sandra Harding (1993, 18) refers to as a stronger, more adequate notion of objectivity. According to her, such [s]trong objectivity requires that scientists give the same kind of critical descriptions and explanations of the subject of scientic knowledge. . .that social scientists at their best give to the objects of their research (1993, 19). The same principles are applicable to the reader who witnesses the testimony presented by Krog and Vera. Our best chance for fruitful engagement with these texts is one that acknowledges our own subjectivity. The second identication Taylor makes with witnessing, namely that of passivity, is obviously not sufcient, since I am working with Laubs notion that witnessing requires careful listening (1992a, 70). According to Laub, [b]earing witness to trauma is. . .a process that includes the listener (1992a, 70, emphasis added). Passive hearing thus needs to be replaced by active listening. The mode of witnessing I am advocating, and which Krogs and Veras texts demand, is what Taylor describes as an involved, informed, caring, yet critical form of spectatorship (1997, 124). Anne Whitehead (2004, 7) describes the interaction that trauma ction requires as a highly collaborative relationship between speaker and listener. Another concept that bears closer scrutiny is reading. This additional attention is all the more necessary when what is being dealt with is a reading of violence, pain or trauma. Krogs and Veras texts pose challenges to reading because of the style in which they are written, and they are written in a particular style because the authors are attempting to overcome the difculties of writing about violence, pain and trauma. Laura Tanner says about the reading process:
While torture [and physical pain] reduces its victims to mere bodies, the act of reading reduces the reader to sheer consciousness. Regardless of the degree of his or her sympathy for the victim, the reader approaches the novel of violence not as a body without consciousness but as a consciousness without body. . ..The readers disembodiment, however, implicitly contradicts the experience of violence, an experience dened by the increasingly urgent and overwhelming presence of the body (1994, 37, emphasis in original).

It is necessary to register the problems of assuming that there is such a thing as a consciousness without a body. This signals a slippage back into the Cartesian mind/body duality and a pattern of thinking in terms of binary oppositions. Consciousness is always embodied and shaped by the material realities of the body. These realities include the colour, gender and location of the body. What needs to be acknowledged, however, is Tanners point that the body of the reader is not in the same space or in the same position of vulnerability as that of the victim of physical pain. The reader is, according to Tanner, able to stop reading at any time, while the victim has no control over the act of violence. Krogs and Veras work is, I would argue, particularly effective in their attempt to write about pain and trauma because of their refusal to let the reader forget the body.

16

Jessica Murray

Their emphasis on the body is signalled from the titles of their novels to the ways in which their characters articulate the experience of the pain that the reader can never be completely privy to. I have already addressed the issue of the different spaces that the reader and the victim occupy. Yet, I argue, while their relation to the pain being expressed is very different, they both deal with this pain as embodied subjects. The recognition of the differences in location between the reader and the victimized character is crucial in fostering an honest engagement with these texts. What one should be wary of in reading these works is what Brecht termed crude empathy a feeling for another based on the assimilation of the others experience to the self (Bennett 2005, 10). It is the visceral, affective impact of these authors work on readers that enables a reading of the pain and trauma without the concomitant sense of numbing or alienation that often accompanies the representation of atrocities. A work of art is a representation that cannot provide the reader with a direct experience of that which is being represented. The meaning of the text is always constituted in the interaction between the reader and the text. The forgoing discussion has highlighted the particular challenges posed in representing pain and trauma. The choice of trauma theory as a particularly useful rubric for the reading of these texts is further justied by the use of repetition in Under the Tongue and, on a meta level, in the greater corpus of both Veras and Krogs work. Whitehead argues that [o]ne of the key literary strategies in trauma ction is the device of repetition, which can act at the levels of language, imagery or plot. Repetition mimics the effects of trauma, for it suggests the insistent return of the event and the disruption of narrative chronology or progression (2004, 86). At the level of plot, Krog and Vera continue to return to versions of the same scenes of violence and suffering. These choices of subject matter warrant closer scrutiny, particularly if one keeps in mind Veras statement about the impetus for her writing: I would not write if I werent in search of beauty. . . (cited in Bryce 2002, 224). Yet the violence her characters are subjected to only becomes more gruesome and culminates with the horric scenes of decapitation and facial mutilation in her last work The Stone Virgins. Krogs work displays a similar search for beauty since, as in the case of Vera, her descriptions of violence and brutality are intermingled with a profound appreciation of the beauty of the landscapes in which these atrocities occur. Freuds repetition compulsion may help to explain why both authors repeatedly write about atrocities. These returns to scenes of trauma are driven by the need to assimilate the traumatic experience that has shattered the inner schemata of the self and the world (Herman 1992, 41). Zhizhas repetition of the same words and phrases as well as Krogs and Veras repeated return to violence as subject matter, can all be read as instances of the repetition compulsion caused by trauma. A further complication of reading that is presented by these texts is that different dialogic relations intersect. The rst of these relations is between the reader, writer and text and the second relation is between the testier and the witness. In addition, the reader and the author occupy various spaces during the course of the reading process. Both the reader and the author are sometimes witnesses. Yet the author also functions as testier. The reader thus becomes the witness to different layers of testimony, namely that of the author as well as the testimonies of the characters in the novels. It is an intellectual framework of trauma and testimony that is particularly useful in teasing out the multiple, layered meanings of these texts.

Notes
1. I follow Susan Spearey in arguing that [l]istening to accounts of trauma. . .becomes a profoundly ethical and dialogic act, and not merely a means of facilitating the victims psychic healing. How these stories reshape the listeners worlds is every bit as important as how they begin to reshape

Journal of African Cultural Studies

17

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

those of the victim and teller, and this is even more urgently the case when the trauma in question is collective (2000, 71, emphasis in original). The inux of immigrants has resulted in rising levels of xenophobia and, as is always the case in situations of political and economic change and instability, women and their bodies are particularly vulnerable when they enter South Africa without legal documentation or recourse to state and social services and protection. There can, of course, be no simple, monolithic denition of either postcolonial or postcolonial literature. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifths and Helen Tifn (1995, 2) issue the important warning that [p]ost-colonial critics and theorists should consider the full implications of restricting the meaning of the term to after-colonialism or after-Independence. All post-colonial societies are still subject in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo-colonial domination, and independence has not solved this problem. I follow their point that the term post-colonial is resonant with all the ambiguity and complexity of the many different cultural experiences it implicates [. . .]. When referring to South Africa and Zimbabwe as postcolonial societies, I do so with the recognition that, while the formal and legalized settlement and control of other peoples land, is in the main over both countries still struggle with its structures and relations of power [which] are still in place (Abrahamsen 2003, 195). For a critique of such a broader use of the term postcolonial to describe South Africa, see Robert Thornton (1996), who argues that post-Apartheid South Africa is postmodern. He goes on to note that it is also after the colonial of course, but I [Thornton] would reserve that label postcolonial for Apartheid itself (1996, 136). I follow Benedict Andersons (1983, 15) theory of the nation as an entity that is constructed as an imagined community. For a summary of the development of Freuds theorization of trauma, see Thierry Bokanowski (2005) especially pages 252 4. Juan Tutte (2004, 897 921) links Freuds discussion of traumatic war neurosis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sigrun Meining, who theorizes trauma in the context of Australias stolen generation, conceptualizes trauma as the epitome of the nal inaccessibility of an event in the past and the latency of its interpretation (2004, 350). The notion that trauma is completely unspeakable and inaccessible is addressed by Isabel Moore (2005, 90), who writes that, [t]o call it unspeakable or unimaginable is to turn ones back on listening to testimony, to betray again, to claim a false (and unethical) inability to listen. Jenny Edkins (2001, 15) echoes this sentiment in her contention that those who today assert the unsayability of the horrors of Auschwitz risk repeating the Nazis gesture [of destroying all evidence of their atrocities]. Testimony, on the contrary, refutes it. The essence of the challenge posed by trauma seems to be to nd a way to speak and to listen while recognizing the extent to which what is being spoken or listened to, does remain unspeakable and inaccessible. I follow Edkins here in positing testimony as that which can ll the evidential lacuna left by trauma. Note here the distinction between Holocaust with an upper and lower case h. As a proper noun it emphasizes the uniqueness of the Jews persecution in WW2 and as an ordinary noun it denotes great loss of life but carries the connotations of the Holocausts uniqueness and incomprehensibility. In her analysis of Australias stolen generation testimonies, Gillian Whitlock deals with some of the limitations of using the Holocaust as an intellectual template when dealing with issues of trauma and testimony. She focuses in particular on the witness, the addressee, the reader/listener who is required to respond [to the testimony] (2001, 206). She argues that one of the major features of the Holocaust interpretive scenario is that grotesque gure to whom so much of the blame can be attributed: the Nazi, who is not us. The gure of the Nazi as the Other, and the possibility that this gure provides for the readers to displace [their] immediate responsibility is not so simple in the geography of cultural memory produced by interracial narratives. She argues that, in these postcolonial narratives, the transits between black labor and dispossession on the one hand and white privilege and pleasure on the other come into view. This is to say that the second person, who is the witness and narratee, is called upon to witness her own complicity and implication in the loss and suffering which is nally being spoken (Whitlock 2001, 207). The emphasis on the individual is one of the central examples of this Euro-American tradition that needs to be unpacked before applying it to an African context. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that testes is the Latin word for witness. See also Mary Daly (1978, 435n). For a more comprehensive analysis of the confessional mode see Radstone (2001, 5960). Ubuntu is a concept and practice that is prevalent in South Africa as well as Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe it is usually referred to by the Shona word unhu or hunhu. See Horace Campbell (2003, 7, 84, 276 and

18

Jessica Murray
290 2). Also see Barbara Nussbaums (2003, 2) explanation of how a common Zimbabwean greeting reects this concept. In Tsitsi Dangarembgas The Book of Not (2006) the narrator notes how a different greeting asserts unhu: Tiripo, kana makadini wo! I am well if you are all right too! [. . .] Everything was reciprocal and so were we; we all knew it, so said it every day in our greetings (2006, 65). Dangarembga identies this way of life with Southern Africans: Unhu, that profound knowledge of being, quietly and not amboyantly; the grasp of life and of how to preserve and accentuate lifes eternal interweavings that we southern Africans are famed for, what others now called ubuntu, demanded that I consoled myself, that I be well so that others could be well also (2006, 1023). In Krogs poem letter-poem lullaby for Ntombizana Atoo (2006, 59) she articulates it as follows: we are what we are because we are of each other. Kyeong Hwangbo (2004, 222) makes some important remarks on the collective nature of trauma in an essay that insists that traumatic experiences cannot be perceived and examined apart from the social context surrounding them. In Krogs and Veras work the characters deal with trauma, as well as attempts at healing, in a way that cannot extricate the victim from the larger community. The texts I am analyzing deal with the Zimbabwean and South African societies and I am not implying that the social and cultural contexts are the same, or that the communal way in which members of these societies deal with trauma are portable to the rest of the African continent. In addition, not all South African and Zimbabwean authors intertwine individual and collective trauma to the same extent as Krog and Vera. In his analysis of J.M. Coetzees Boyhood (1997) and Alexandra Fullers Dont Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), Tony Da Silva (2005, 472), for example, argues that it is worth noting that both texts struggle to create a sense of distance between the private and the political, stressing at all times the primacy of the wounded selfs trauma. Despite such lapses into judgement of perpetrators, Echoing Silences does acknowledge the impact of trauma. In his analysis of Echoing Silences and The Stone Virgins Chan (2005, 380) theorizes the role of trauma in terms of Ricoeurs notion of the wounded cogito. He argues that [w]hat the novels accomplish best. . .is the depiction. . .of what Ricoeur called the wounded cogito: the knowing that knows, but cannot believe it knows what it knows, because what it knows is too terrible for knowledge to bear. The cogito is not only wounded, it is lacerated. It has had its head sliced off in a tango, its lips removed, its children clubbed to death, its skin melted off its body. These observations in no way intend to absolve Robert Mugabe of any responsibility. Rather, it is my contention that the West has used him to skirt their share of blame. Mugabe has become a caricature of pure evil and incompetence and, although his actions sometimes make it easy to portray him as such, it is a gross oversimplication of Zimbabwean problems. In addition, it is a self-serving simplication that has been relentlessly played up by the West. Just as one must be wary of conating the terms trauma and pain, Dennis Foster (2000, 747) reminds us that [n]ot all catastrophes are traumatic; not all traumas require a terrible cause. Reychler and Jacobs (2004, 4) use the genocide in Rwanda as an illuminating example of the dangers posed by a narrow denition of violence. Prior to the genocide the country was erroneously considered safe because there were few manifestations of overt violence. Reychler and Jacobs show that, if more attention was paid to less visible types of violence, such as structural and psychological violence, the conict could have been better anticipated. It did not come out of nowhere as a surprise, as the West would now like to contend to mitigate its own sense of responsibility. Rather, the genocide was embedded in a less visible but nevertheless violent context. See for example A Change of Tongue (2003, 148). Linda Craft (1997, 22) makes the following useful comments about the distinctions between testimony and a testimonial novel in her Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America: When one discusses testimony, as distinguished from the testimonial novel, one is discussing a matter of degree. Because generic lines are increasingly blurred in postmodernism [. . .] it is easier to consider the matter of testimonial discourse and testimonial function in a text rather than the extent to which it is a true novel. Craft notes that the questions about the point at which a narrative is no longer a testimony but a novel are impossible to answer because she also regards fact and ction as occupying different nodes on a continuum. When I mention the reader here, I am referring to my own experience as a reader of these texts. I, Rigoberta Menchu is compiled by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, to whom Menchu told her story. Burgos-Debray readily admits to changing certain things in Menchus recorded speech. For example, she decided to correct the gender mistakes which inevitably occur when someone has just learned to speak a foreign language(cited in Beverley 2004, 37). For a critique of Menchus

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

Journal of African Cultural Studies

19

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

story as testimony, see David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatamalans (1999). While I criticize Beverlys insistence on a largely unmediated relationship between language and experience, I share his belief in the political power of literature. His materialist approach to language and literature places us in the same theoretical terrain, albeit with the sharp difference that my criticism makes clear. For a discussion of how this kind of thinking perpetuates the disempowerment of women, see Felman ` (1975) and Helene Cixous essay Sorties in The Newly Born Woman (1987). Very often people in these societies are victimized for speaking out. In ction, it is, at least rhetorically, the narrators story rather than the authors and this can shield the author from recriminations. Juliet Mitchell (1998, 122) reminds us that when we have a physical trauma it is common for an immediate aftereffect to be some uncertainty about words; even the ability to spell correctly can temporarily disappear. This is particularly acute in Zhizhas case, where the rape constituted physical and psychic trauma. In different sections of Under the Tongue Zhizha spells d u c k (1996, 96) and when she manages to say a e i o u (1996, 82) this reclamation of elementary language is met with her triumphant assertion: I remember all my letters (1996, 82). While colonialism resulted in killing on a large scale, its long-term consequences and the wide range of systemic and structural brutalisations that it involved, continue to be felt in countries that have gained formal independence.

References
Abrahamsen, Rita. 2003. African studies and the postcolonial challenge. African Affairs 102: 189 210. Ahmed, Sara, and Jackie Stacey. 2001. Testimonial cultures: An introduction. Cultural Values 5, no. 1: 16. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities: Reections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Grifths, and Helen Tifn. 1995. General introduction. In The postcolonial studies reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifths and Helen Tifn, 1 4. London: Routledge. Battle, Michael. 1997. Reconciliation: The ubuntu theology of Desmond Tutu. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press. Bennett, Jill. 2003. Tenebrae after September 11: Art, empathy and the global politics of belonging. In World memory: Personal trajectories in global time, ed. Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, 17794. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic vision: Affect, trauma and contemporary art. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bennett, Jill, and Rosanne Kennedy. 2003. Introduction. In World memory: Personal trajectories in global time, ed. Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, 115. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Beverley, John. 2004. Testimonio: On the politics of truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bokanowski, Thierry. 2005. Variations on the concept of traumatism: Traumatism, traumatic, trauma. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86: 25165. Bryce, Jane. 2002. Interview with Yvonne Vera, 1 August 2000, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe: Survival is in the mouth. In Sign and taboo: Perspectives on the poetic ction of Yvonne Vera, ed. Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga, 217 26. Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press. Bufacchi, Vittorio. 2005. Two concepts of violence. Political Studies Review 3: 193204. Campbell, Horace. 2003. Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The exhaustion of the patriarchal model of liberation. Claremont, South Africa: David Philips Publishers. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Recapturing the past: Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 151 7. London: John Hopkins University Press. Cesaire, Aime. 1994. From Discourse on colonialism. In Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: A reader, ed. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, 17280. New York: Columbia University Press. Chan, Stephen. 2005. The memory of violence: Trauma in the writings of Alexander Kanengoni and Yvonne Vera and the idea of unreconciled citizenship in Zimbabwe. Third World Quarterly 26, no. 2: 369 82. ` Cixous, Helene. 1987. The newly born woman. Manchester: U.P. Coetzee, J.M. 1986. Foe. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. . 1997. Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life. New York: Viking. Craft, Linda J. 1997. Novels of testimony and resistance from Central America. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

20

Jessica Murray

Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. London: The Womens Press. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. 2006. The book of not. Banbury, Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd. Da Silva, Tony S. 2005. Narrating a white South Africa: Autobiography, race and history. Third World Quarterly 26, no. 3: 471 8. Durrant, Sam. 2004. Postcolonial narrative and the work of mourning: J.M.Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison. Albany: State University of New York. Edkins, Jenny. 2001. If No Story is Possible: Trauma, Testimony and Biopolitics after Auschwitz. Paper presented at the 2001 Hong Kong Convention of International Studies. http://isanet.ccit.arizona. edu/archive/edkins2.doc (accessed 27 August 2007). . 2003. Trauma and the memory of politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ells Howes, Dustin. 2003. The challenge of violence for political theory. Paper prepared for delivery at the 2003 Annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. http://www.allacademic.com/ meta/p63628_index.html (accessed 21 August 2005). Felman, Shoshana. 1975. Women and madness: the critical phallacy. In Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism, ed. Diane Price Herndl and Robin R. Warhol, 720. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. . 1992a. Education and crisis, or the vicissitudes of teaching. In Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 1 56. London: Routledge. . 1992b. Camus The Plague, or a monument to witnessing. In Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 93 119. London: Routledge. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Foreword. In Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, xiiixx. London: Routledge. Foster, Dennis A. 2000. Trauma and memory. Contemporary Literature 41, no. 4: 7407. Freud, Sigmund. 1989. Beyond the pleasure principle. In The Freud reader, ed. Peter Gay, 594 7. London: Vintage. Fuller, Alexandra. 2002. Dont lets go to the dogs tonight: An African childhood. New York: Random House. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The limits of autobiography: Trauma and testimony. London: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra. 1993. The racial economy of science: Toward a democratic future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Henri, Yazir. 2000. Where healing begins. In Looking back, reaching forward: Reections on the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa, ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, 166 73. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Herman, Judith L. 1992. Trauma and recovery: Domestic abuse to political terror. London: Basic Books. Hwangbo, Kyeong. 2004. Trauma, narrative, and the marginal self in selected contemporary American novels. http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0007302/hwangbo_k.pdf (accessed 27 February 2006). Kanengoni, Alexander. 1997. Echoing silences. Johannesburg: Heinemann. Kaplan, Temma. 2002. Reversing the shame and gendering the memory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1: 17999. Kennedy, Rosanne, and Jan T. Wilson. 2003. Constructing shared histories: Stolen generation testimony, narrative therapy and address. In World memory: Personal trajectories in global time, ed. Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, 119 39. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Krog, Antjie. 2003. A change of tongue. Johannesburg: Random House. . 2006. Body bereft, Roggebaai, South Africa: Umuzi. LaCapra, Dominick. 2004. History in transit: Experience, identity, critical theory. London: Cornell University Press. Laub, Dori. 1992a. Bearing witness or the vicissitudes of listening. In Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis and history, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 5774. London: Routledge. . 1992b. An event without a witness: Truth, testimony and survival. In Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis and history, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75 92. London: Routledge. Levi, Primo. 1989. The drowned and the saved. London: Abacus. Libin, Mark. 2003. Can the subaltern be heard? Response and responsibility in South Africas human spirit. Textual Practice 17, no. 1: 119 40.

Journal of African Cultural Studies

21

Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A genealogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meinig, Sigrun. 2004. Witnessing the past: History and post-colonialism in Australian historical novels. Tubingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag. Menchu, Rigoberta. 1984. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth BurgosDebray. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso. Miller, Nancy K., and Jason D. Tougaw. 2002. Introduction. In Extremities: Trauma, testimony and community, ed. Nancy K. Miller and Jason D. Tougaw, 125. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mitchell, Juliet. 1998. Trauma, recognition, and the place of language. Diacritics 28, no. 4: 12133. Mizen, Richard. 2003. A contribution to an analytic theory of violence. Journal of Analytical Psychology 48: 285 305. Moore, Isabel A. 2005. Speak, you also: Encircling trauma. Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. 1: 8799. Nancy, Naples A. 2003. Deconstructing and locating survivor discourse: Dynamics of narrative, empowerment, and resistance for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 4: 115185. Ndebele, Njabulo. 1994. Liberation and the crisis of culture. In Altered state? Writing and South Africa, ed. Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman and Kenneth Parker, 1 11. Sydney: Dangaroo Press. Nourbese Philip, Marlene. 1989. She tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks. Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada: Ragweed Press. Nussbaum, Barbara. 2003. Ubuntu. Resurgence 221. http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/ nussbaum221.htm (accessed 1 August 2007). Radstone, Susannah. 2001. Social bonds and psychical order: Testimonies. Cultural Values 5, no. 1: 5978. ` Reychler, Luc, and Michele Jacobs. 2004. Limits to violence: Towards a comprehensive violence audit. Centre for Peace Research and Strategic Studies. http://soc.kuleuven.be/iieb/CPRS/cahiers/ Vol%2068.pdf (accessed 21 August 2005). Ross, Fiona C. 2003. Bearing witness to ripples of pa. In World memory: Personal trajectories in global time, ed. Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, 14359. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Saporta Sternbach, Nancy. 1991. Re-membering the dead: Latin American womens testimonial discourse. Latin American Perspective 18, no. 3: 91102. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1988. Introduction. In Literature and the body: Essays on populations and persons, ed. Elaine Scarry, xi xxii. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spearey, Susan. 2000. Displacement, dispossession and conciliation: The politics and poetics of homecoming in Antjie Krogs Country of my Skull. Scrutiny 25, no. 1: 6477. http://www.uwc.ac.za/arts/ english/LAMP/spearey.html (accessed 28 March 2007). Stoll, David. 1999. Rigoberta Menchu and the story of all poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tal, Kal. 1996. Worlds of hurt: Reading the literature of trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tambulasi, Richard, and Happy Kayuni. 2005. Can African feet divorce Western shoes? The case of ubuntu and democratic good governance in Malawi. Nordic Journal of African Studies 14, no. 2: 14761. Tanner, Laura E. 1994. Intimate violence: Reading rape and torture in twentieth-century ction. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing acts: Spectacles of gender and nationalism in Argentinas dirty war. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Thornton, Robert. 1996. The potential of boundaries in South Africa: Steps towards a theory of the social edge. In Postcolonial identities in Africa, ed. Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger, 13661. London: Zed Books. Tutte, Juan C. 2004. The concept of psychical trauma: a bridge in interdisciplinary space. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 85: 897 921. Vera, Yvonne. 1996. Under the tongue. Harare, Zimbabwe: Baobab Books. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma ction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Whitlock, Gillian. 2001. In the second person: Narrative transactions in stolen generation testimony. Biography 24, no. 1: 197 215. Young, James E. 1988. Writing and rewriting the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.