Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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been conclusively derailed, leaving indeterminacy and plot loss in its place, then one of the unambiguous success stories emerging from the transition is the restorative value of story itself, or, more broadly speaking, narrative. In postapartheid writing, a great diversity of form and content emerges, constituting a body of work that is itself significantly transformed, despite its subject matter often being about the failures of transformation. This is a key point. For, regardless of the perceived loss of plot in political and social terms, the space of postapartheid is one in which a great many voices have found their pitch in public discourse, in more conventional as well as new media forms. Such speaking out, self-validation and identity reclamation, not to mention public position-taking (or posturing), is surely one of the most notable achievements of postapartheid writing, and of the ‘silent revolution’ in general.
Njabulo Ndebele’s essay ‘Memory, Metaphor, and the Triumph of Narrative’ underlines the regenerative power of story, and the link between testimony, memory and narrative. ‘Time has given the recall of memory the power of reflection associated with narrative’ (‘Memory’ 20), Ndebele argues. This reflective capacity, ‘experienced as a shared social consciousness’, is posited as the ‘lasting legacy of the stories of the TRC’ (20) – one that gives ‘legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices’ (20), and functions as an ‘additional confirmation of the movement of our society from repression to expression’ (20). Whereas the state attempted, in the apartheid era, ‘to compel the oppressed to deny the testimony of their own experience, today that experience is one of the essential conditions for the emergence of a new national consciousness’, Ndebele writes, adding that ‘[t]hese stories may very well be some of the first steps in the rewriting of South African history on the basis of validated mass experience’ (20).
Ndebele here captures one of the core impulses of transitional and post-transitional narrative in general: the restoration of ‘legitimacy and authority’ to previously silenced voices, and the emergence of a ‘new national consciousness’. In concluding his essay, he argues that a ‘major spin-off’ resulting from the ‘stories of the TRC’ is the ‘restoration of narrative’. He sees this event as a rare opportunity to take narrative beyond testimony, towards imaginatively creating what he calls ‘new thoughts and new worlds’ (28). Writing in the year 2000, Ndebele sets a challenging agenda for postapartheid writing as a whole. The criterion, as he sees it, is that the narratives resulting from ‘a search for meanings’ (20) in the wake of apartheid ‘may have less and less to do with the facts themselves and with their recall than with the revelation of meaning through the imaginative combination of those facts’ (21, emphasis added); for, at that point, Ndebele writes, ‘facts will be the building blocks of metaphor’ (21).
It is striking that Ndebele’s sense of the imagination follows an arc that traverses fiction and nonfiction, testimony and invention, fact and fable. Accordingly, postapartheid’s many sources of (formerly muted) self-expression and storytelling condense into metaphor, into an imaginative amalgam, whether the writing is autobiography or poetry, whether it bears witness to or fictionalises a lived reality; the pressing need is an imaginative reconstruction of experience via memory, which has regenerative ‘moral import’. This proves a testing criterion as many works engage in a ‘search for new meanings’.
In particular, the capacity for newfound self-affirmation, the recuperation of formerly repressed and often still-marginalised voices, positions and identities, has been one of the more emphatic, and unambiguously affirmative, yields of postapartheid literary culture. A culture of authentic self-expression in response to centuries of patriarchy and racism has emerged, as evidenced by a work such as Samuelson’s Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition. Andrew van der Vlies argues that ‘Samuelson’s project ... is informed by a desire to “restore” to these historical women [Krotoa-Eva, Nongqawuse and Sarah Baartman] some of their strangeness and challenging heterogeneity, that which does not necessarily serve the purposes of normative, naturalising national discourses’ (954). Similarly, Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What is Slavery to Me? seeks to problematise appropriations of slave heritage in order to reconfigure group identity, just as Gabeba Baderoon’s Regarding Muslims tracks South African cultural expressions of Muslim identity. The reclamation or recuperation of formerly repressed identities and subject positions, coincident with the transition and its aftermath, also involves the politics of appropriation and the dangers of being subsumed into larger, newly repressive, or normalising, narratives. In an important sense, the post-transitional literary-cultural sphere is a locus of contending scripts, characterised by keen vigilance about who speaks for, and about, whom, and under what authority.
If there is a golden, affirmative thread in postapartheid writing, one might find it in narrative reclamations of identity, the excavation of buried or repressed selves, in unfolding self-expression. Such speaking out satisfies, in spirit at least, Ndebele’s vision of narrative as giving ‘legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices’, confirming the ‘rewriting of South African history on the basis of validated mass experience’ (‘Memory’ 20). Further, as Ndebele notes, it is the revelation of meaning through the ‘imaginative combination of ... facts’ (21) so that ‘facts will be the building blocks of metaphor’ (21) that is important. Hence the prevalence of memoir-type or confessional/autobiographical writing by a wide range of South African subjects, whether from township streets or prisons – or universities. Indeed, academics are more likely nowadays to write their own variants of memoiristic witnessing or reflection than pen ‘appreciations’ of ‘great writers’, as earlier generations were inclined to do. Notable recent examples of this trend include Stephen Clingman’s Birthmark, Mamphela Ramphele’s A Life, Steven Robins’s Letters of Stone and Leslie Swartz’s Able-Bodied. Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael argue that the ‘flourishing of the autobiographical voice has emerged alongside the powerful informing context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but it is also a symptom of the decompression, relaxation, and cacophony of the post-apartheid moment in general’ (298). They contend that the ‘autobiographical act’ is ‘more than a literary convention’; it ‘has become a cultural activity’. In a multiplicity of forms, including ‘memoir, reminiscence, confession, testament, case history and personal journalism’, such ‘biographical acts or cultural occasions’ see narrators take up ‘models of identity that have become widely available’; these have ‘pervaded the culture of the 1990s and have spread into the new century’ (298). Nuttall and Michael continue:
Particularly since the political transition of 1994, personal disclosure has become a part of a revisionary impulse, part of the pluralizing project of democracy itself. The individual, in this context, emerges as a key, newly legitimized concept. South Africa becomes a ‘recited’ community ... [t]alking about their own lives, confessing, and constructing personal narratives – on the body, on the air, in music, in print – South Africans translate their selves, and their communities, into story. (298)
These points are well made. However, it is not just that, in the wake of the TRC, everyone has a story to tell, and should tell it, reclaiming selfhood, dignity and difference, or providing still more diverse and variable perspectives on past and present. It is also that the transitional zone – where lines became blurred by different reckonings of value, different invocations of legitimacy – has become a space of contest between individuals and groups via the valence of storytelling. In that sense, the post-liberation era has seen an acceleration in the politics of stories and storytelling, where significant stories generally bear a strong relation to the ‘real’, narrating people’s lived experience. This current of connection to the detail of the actual is not quite the ‘stenographic bent’ that Louise Bethlehem (‘A Primary Need’ 365) identified in pre-1994 literature, with its ‘rhetoric of urgency’. It reveals, rather, an insistence on both the real and the right way of viewing this, as people insistently express their own versions of themselves. Stories of survival, a thriving line of oral rendition, as Jonny Steinberg’s The Number amply illustrates, encode identity in highly particularised ways, contributing to self-and group-validation as perhaps the single biggest symbolic reward of democracy. (The controversies over Steinberg’s own appropriations of his subjects’ stories ironically confirm how keen the contention over stories, their nature and