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Torture Narratives and the Ethics of Reciprocity in Apartheid South Africa and Its Aftermath

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Torture Narratives and the Ethics of Reciprocity in Apartheid South Africa and Its Aftermath A Difficult Equilibrium: Torture Narratives and the Ethics of Reciprocity in Apartheid South Africa and its Aftermath A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS of RHODES UNIVERSITY by Sarah Pett June 2009 ii Abstract This thesis takes the form of an enquiry into the development of the ―generic contours‖ (Bakhtin 4) for the narration of torture in South Africa during apartheid and its aftermath. The enquiry focusses on the ethical determinations that underlie the conventions of this genre. My theoretical framework uses Adam Zachary Newton‘s conceptualization of narrative ethics to supplement Paul Ricoeur‘s writings on narrative identity and the ethical intention, thus facilitating the transfer of Ricoeur‘s abstract philosophy to the realm of literary criticism. Part I presents torture as a disruption of narrative identity and a defamiliarization of the intersubjective encounter. The existence of torture narratives thus attests to the critical role of narration in the reconstruction of the tortured person‘s identity and the re-establishment of benign frameworks of intersubjective communication. Literature‘s potential to act as a laboratory for the testing of the limitations of narrative identity and the resilience of ethical mores suggests that the fictional representation of torture also has an important role to play in this attempt at rehabilitation. Part II takes the form of a comparative analysis of non-fictional and fictional accounts of torture originating from apartheid South Africa. This shows that the ethical determinations underlying the narration of torture in South Africa range from intersubjective estrangement to a ―solicitude of reciprocity‖ (Bourgeois 109). However, because the majority of these texts used the presentation of human rights abuses to galvanize international opposition to apartheid, the scope for experimentation was limited by the political exigencies of the time. Part III examines the stylistic and generic shifts in the narration of torture that accompanied South Africa‘s transition to democracy. It suggests that the discursive dominance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission replaced the fruitful—in literary terms—dialogue between authoritarianism and resistance that characterized the apartheid era with a monologic grand narrative of emotional catharsis, reconciliation and nation building. It also suggests that the ―truth-and- reconciliation genre of writing‖ (Quayson 754) that shaped the literary milieu of the post-TRC period be seen in terms of a resurgence of the apartheid–era paradigms for the narration of human rights abuses that were repressed during the initial phase of democratic transition. By framing the TRC as a catalyst for individual journeys of self-discovery, these novels raise important questions about what it means to be a part of the ―new South Africa‖. In contrast to the majority of apartheid era literature, the novels of the post-TRC period privilege the literary prerogative over the political, iii and thus bring to fruition the experimental potential of the previous paradigm. In doing so, they not only go beyond solicitude to achieve an ―authentic reciprocity in exchange‖ (Ricoeur, Oneself 191), but also initiate a process of long-awaited literary expansion, in which authors look beyond the limits of apartheid and begin to critically engage with the region‘s pre-apartheid history and its post- apartheid present. iv Table of Contents Introduction . .1 PART I. Theoretical Considerations 1 Human Torture and Cosmic Terror: The Disintegration of Narrative Identity . 27 2 The Supreme Test of Solicitude: Torture and the Ethical Summons . 45 PART II. Apartheid 3 The Self Story in Extremis: Human Rights, Risks and Reciprocity in Apartheid South Africa . 60 4 Testimonio; or, the Weight of Witnessing: Non-fiction Accounts of Torture from Apartheid South Africa . 66 5 Terribilitá; or, the Taint of Artistry: Fictional Representations of Torture from Apartheid South Africa . 105 PART III. Aftermath 6 In the Fog of Apartheid's End: Grand Narratives and the Literature of the First Transition . 164 7 Remembering the Dismembered: The Literature of the Second Transition . 180 Conclusion: Towards a Narrative Mengelmoes . 217 Works Cited . 223 v Acknowledgements First and foremost, my thanks go to The Leverhulme Trust, without whose generous financial support and personal encouragement the research and writing of this thesis would not have been possible. The receipt, tenure and completion of a Study Abroad Studentship has been a truly formative experience, both personally and academically, and one that I will not forget. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Professor Gareth Cornwell, for his patience during the more oblique phases of my research, and for his ability to guide me back to the middle way. For their excellent research assistance, I am grateful to the staff at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, particularly Tom Jeffery; the archives of Amnesty International and the United Nations; the Rhodes University Dictionary Unit and the Inter-Library Loans Service. And I will miss the staff and students of the Department of English at Rhodes University for their endless encouragement, intellectual sustenance, good humour, pastoral care and cherished tea breaks. Finally, to my family, friends and beloved verlobster, I am indebted for their invaluable contributions to making life good. Introduction: Torture, Narrative and Ethics ―I hope you have listened to the truth in my story, because I do not want to tell it again.‖ At this, Berhane‘s1 friend and interpreter visibly relaxed, signalling the end of the interview. I put aside my pen and paper, and, for the first time since we‘d met that morning, Berhane shifted his gaze from the floor and looked me straight in the eye. As the tension dissipated and I became aware, once again, of the flickering sunlight and street sounds filtering through the high barred window, I felt the seed of moral discomfort lodge in my mind. The claustrophobic, subterranean environment, the documentation of somatic symptoms and scars, the official rigmarole of psychological interrogation, and—most disturbingly—the task to determine truth: as I reflected upon what had just happened, the parallels between this alleged aid and the experience of torture that it sought to record became startlingly clear. Insofar as Berhane was concerned, this moment of realisation came too late. As the reader of the ―scar text‖2 of his body and the recipient of his traumatic testimony, I became aware of my responsibility to Berhane‘s torture narrative only after the fact. This event was one of the most memorable in my short-lived career as a medical student, staying with me long after I swapped the white coat and dissection kit for Shakespeare and post-Saussurean linguistics. I had already spent several weeks assisting my mother—a midwife—in the antenatal clinic of the faith-based non-governmental organization (NGO) at which she volunteered while living in Cairo, and as a result was familiar with many of the issues with which the refugee community had to deal on a daily basis: poverty, racism, familial and cultural dislocation, as well as the residual trauma of the circumstances that forced them to leave their homeland. At the time—2001—Cairo hosted one of the five largest urban refugee and asylum seeker populations in the world (Sperl 1), the majority of whom were waiting—often interminably—for resettlement elsewhere. The procedure of refugee status determination necessary for this resettlement was, unlike many Western countries, carried out not by the local authorities, but by the Regional Office of the 1 Not his real name. 2 Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, qtd. in Benthien 9. 2 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Unfortunately, however, the dramatic increase in the influx of asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa during the late 1990s and early 2000s coincided with the UNHCR‘s descent into what has been described as a ―severe financial crisis‖ (Sperl 13), forcing the organization to delegate many components of its work to local NGOs. One such project, the assessment of alleged torture victims for admittance to the fast-track RSD program, fell into the hands of the organisation my mother worked for, and so it happened that I was asked to assist an experienced medical doctor with the examination and interview of Berhane. Unlike the voluble, heavily pregnant and colourfully dressed Sudanese women I had met at my mother‘s clinic, Berhane cut a pathetic figure. Just over five foot tall and of indeterminate age, he was gaunt and sombrely dressed, his body language a curious combination of extreme introversion and visible agitation, all of which stood in stark contrast to the fashionable clothes and easygoing demeanour of the friend he had brought as a translator. After the initial introductions, however, he settled into what was now a familiar role. Having had his initial application for refugee status rejected on the grounds of what the UNHCR officially termed ―questionable credibility‖, he was now embarking on the lengthy process of appeal. His appeal was based upon a perceived ―breach in procedural fairness‖ (UNHCR 7-3), at the root of which was an apparent failure of attention to his narrative. To cut a long and elaborate story short, Berhane was an Eritrean national who, at the age of 11, had been kidnapped by the Tigrayan Peoples‘ Liberation Front and subjected to a series of human rights abuses. Several years after his initial abduction, he had managed to escape from the camp in which he was being held along with two friends, one of whom died in the attempt. The two remaining young men were then separated as they tried to make their way through war-torn Eritrea back to their families and homes. Upon reaching his village, Berhane found it deserted, and so embarked on an arduous overland journey through Sudan and Upper Egypt to Cairo, whose relative political stability and high density of refugee- related aid organisations had made it into a regional Mecca for refugees.
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