Losing the Plot. Leon de Kock
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– in contradistinction to lying and repressing, withholding and twisting – should be seen for what it was in the late 1990s, going into the 2000s, in postapartheid time and space: an urgently revelatory, cleansing process.46 At least, that was the aim, if not always the outcome. Fiction, until the mid-1990s the pre-eminent form for intermediating higher ‘truth’ in South African culture, now had to take a back seat, finding its place in the internal registers of a discourse of ‘healing’, a revelatory brand of truth containing the much-needed ‘real’ content of what had happened, and what was still going on, out there.47 This was a discourse that borrowed from the conventions of storytelling, but which saw its main business as excavating repressed registers of selfhood and community.
Postapartheid, then, becomes a voluminous, many-tiered space of stories, a house with many rooms, one might say. At the TRC, the stories came in the form of testimony and witnessing, often in broken registers of language that seemed inadequate to the task of expressing the trauma at hand. In the process, what Krog would later come to call the country’s new common language of ‘bad English’ came into prominence.48 In the prisons, the ‘foreign language’ that Steinberg talks about, what he calls ‘a language of self’, opening the door to ‘an entirely new universe’ in which ‘one can retrieve the most intimate of one’s memories, work on them, shape them into a single narrative of meaning’, coincided also with the adoption of English. ‘It was foreign,’ Steinberg continues, ‘not only in the sense that the language of self is largely a bourgeois language, a million miles from the way a man of the ghettos thinks about himself. It was quite literally spoken in a different language: the workshops were largely conducted in English.’ So, Wentzel, a mother-tongue Afrikaans-speaker, comes to use English as ‘a significant part of his internal dialogue; many of his most intimate thoughts he could only think in English’ (326).
Exactly the same thing was happening in the public sphere at large, and it is exemplified in the way in which Krog, a formerly Afrikaans poet, was partly transformed into an English writer of creative nonfiction. In ‘Antjie Krog, Self and Society’, Anthea Garman has written suggestively about how overlapping public ‘fields’ such as the media field, the literary field and the political field exerted pressure on Krog to produce Country of My Skull.49 First, in her capacity as a radio reporter on the TRC hearings, Krog was invited to write long-form pieces for the Mail & Guardian by that weekly’s then editor Anton Harber. These harrowing pieces had a strong political impact, and Krog was approached by Random House. She supplemented the pieces, and Country of My Skull has come to rival even Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country in its global reach. Just as Paton’s book stood as a masterpiece that captured the pain of racial conflict for all the world to see and feel, so Country of My Skull spoke to the world of the new drama in postapartheid South Africa – its reckoning with Truth. In the wake of significant international uptake, both works eventually became Hollywood movies. Both, in a sense, inaugurated a certain tradition of writing: Paton set the tone for the liberal novel (and realism in general) as a leading form for relaying apartheid conditions, while Krog’s work stood as a major example of how a new form of nonfiction might mediate postapartheid conditions;50 as life-writing, it is a lyrical blend of the real and its retelling, making free use of fictive devices. Such writing conjoined the perceived need to unveil truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, to reconstruct a viable ‘language of the self’ for traumatised South Africans – a by no means simple task.
The ‘language of the self’ under the spotlight here, conducted mostly in English, amounted to what Steinberg calls the working and shaping of memories into a ‘narrative of meaning’ in the wake of democracy. This specifically narrative capacity was perceived as a revelatory opening, a rupture of enormous significance. Despite the ‘language of self’ being bourgeois, ‘a million miles from the way a man of the ghettos thinks about himself’, it took hold in literate public discourse. Moreover, it stuck, not only in Steinberg’s own remarkable series of memory-shaping true stories – books that came to be seen as the cutting edge of postapartheid writing, winning a slew of prizes – but also in a run of ‘truth’ books displaying the diversity of forms characteristic of postapartheid literature.51
The ‘language of self’ that Steinberg captured in prison discourse was, moreover, also key to the rise of identity politics in public contestations, as witnessed in the heated exchanges about Pippa Skotnes’s Miscast exhibition, soon followed by similarly bruising arguments over Brett Murray’s satirical painting The Spear.52 In academic discourse, too, the politics of identity found strong expression in partisan critical readings of writers like Zoë Wicomb, Gabeba Baderoon and Yvette Christiansë, among others, whose work has been taken as affirming the agency of subject positions marginalised in the past on the basis of gender and race. In a broader sense, life-writing as a genre became a means to self-discovery, self-expression and self-affirmation on the basis of ethnicity/race, gender or sexual orientation. Creative writing programmes in the postapartheid years confirm this trend. ‘Everyone has a story to tell’ was a common refrain in the new culture of bearing witness, the opening up of self and past. Fiction often seemed irrelevant, even meretricious. There were too many stories waiting to be told, and a strong conviction that such stories needed to be given utterance, ‘voiced’ in a wave of speaking out and talking back to decades of power abuse and of silencing; all this for the sake of healing a traumatic and troubled past, of restoring agency to citizens. Who would wish to argue with such virtuous uses of culture, such powerful possibilities of restitution in the aesthetic forms of a scarred country? One only had to attend a poetry reading at Wits University or the Poetry Africa festival, or listen to the InZync poets of the Stellenbosch Literary Project (SLiP), to hear self-making in full flow, talking back sharply, and with verve, to earlier histories of denigration and dehumanisation.53 The works of ‘spoken-word’ poets such as Lebo Mashile, Jitsvinger, Koleka Putuma, and the Botsotso Jesters energetically took up the language of self-making and celebration, bringing into being an assertive new lyricism: We are here; This is who we are; This is how we speak; We will not go away. For many, not forgetting the growing legions of spoken-word poets and their fans, this brand of self-assertive speaking out is the core, the real point, of postapartheid life, whether in ‘bad’ English, ‘Kaaps’, ‘Boland rap’ or any other ‘creolisation’.54 This new performance culture has little to do with rarefied literary fiction. The spoken-word performances almost always conjoin individual experience with hip-hop and rap avowals of gender politics, self-discovery in challenging conditions, and the remaking of identity in the unstable conurbations of twenty-first-century metropolitan living. Whether one likes it or not – and many don’t – these challenging, defiant forms constitute a powerful and insistent force in the locales of cultural reception.
For Magadien Wentzel – alias ‘JR’, ‘William Steenkamp’, ‘Darryl’ – the TRC-style language of self, rooted in reckonings with the real rather than the denials and fabrications of apartheid and its aftermath, gave him something of inestimable value: the ability to consolidate his various, spurious identities. Here was an opportunity to story himself into a new being, for if Mandela’s revolution itself wasn’t able to open the prison gates, then individual subjects could take hold of their memories and experiences and reshape them into something of worth, a story with dignity and purpose. Wentzel switches from Afrikaans to English for this encounter. This is true also for Krog in Country of My Skull, as she embraces the redemption narrative of postapartheid in English, for her a second language. Steinberg writes of Wentzel: ‘And so everything about his new experience smacked of revelation, of a radical rupture, just as certain Christians describe the sudden presence of God in one’s life’ (326). In his conversations with Steinberg, the ‘jargon of psychology’ slips into Wentzel’s language, in his use of phrases such as ‘I need closure’ (327). Steinberg realises he is witnessing something remarkable:
Journeying with him back to his past, I felt we were two outsiders looking into the world of a stranger. The tools he used to think about his history were not available to him when he lived it. There is a sense in which he was re-inventing his past when he spoke to me, using his new knowledge to write a history of himself. (327)
The question, of course, is whether the rewritten history of self can hold up in the face of adverse