What Memory Resists Indenture, Apartheid, and the ‘Memory-Work’ of Reconstruction in Ronnie Govender’S Black Chin, White Chin

Chapter 8 What Memory Resists Indenture, Apartheid, and the ‘Memory-Work’ of Reconstruction in Ronnie Govender’s Black Chin, White Chin

Modhumita Roy

As Devarakshanam Betty Govinden observes, “a feature of the post-apartheid literary scene is the way the history of earlier times and of groups which were previously silent is being recalled and recounted.”1 South Africa, she concludes, is “living through a time of memory.”2 What Govinden terms the “time of memory,” inaugurated by the formal dismantling of apartheid in 1994, has en- gendered a flood of new writing, often inspired by the Truth and R econciliation Commission’s catchphrase ‘Revealing is Healing.’ The process of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, with emphasis on ‘telling’ in both its confessional and its testifying variant, opened up a space which Njabulo Ndebele hailed as “the restoration of narrative.”3 Victims and perpetrators came forward to record their stories, which collectively “lifted the veil of secrecy and state-induced blindness” and facilitated the movement from “repression to expression.”4 For Indian South African writing,5 a second, perhaps more compelling, inspira- tion was the 150th celebration of the arrival on 16 November 1860 of SS Truro, carrying the first wave of indentured Indians to South Africa.6 The 2010 celebration of this momentous anniversary stimulated writing, much of it focussed

1 Devarakshanam Betty Govinden, “Healing the Wounds of History: South African Indian Writ- ing,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in South Africa 21.1–2 (2009): 286. 2 This is the title of one of Govinden’s books: A Time of Memory: Reflections on Recent South African Writing (Pretoria: U of South Africa P, 2008). 3 Njabulo Ndebele, “Memory, Metaphor, and the Triumph of Narrative,” in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Carli Coetzee (Cape Town: Oxford UP, 1998): 20. 4 Ndebele, “Memory, Metaphor, and the Triumph of Narrative,” 20. 5 I have opted to use ‘Indian South African’ over other variants to emphasize Indian descent as qualifying South African identity, citizenship, and belonging. 6 For the history of Indians in South Africa, see, for example: Ashwin Desai & Goolam Vahed, Indian Indenture: A South African Story 1860–1914 (Durban: Madiba, 2007); Surendra Bhana & Joy Brain, Setting Down Roots: Indian Migration in South Africa 1860–1911 (Johannesburg: Wits UP, 1990).

What Memory Resists 123 on indentureship.7 Indeed, a cursory count of the number of relevant publica- tions shows, according to Lindy Stiebel, that for Indian South Africans this has been an “exceptionally busy” time of memory.8 In what follows, I look at Ronnie Govender’s Black Chin, White Chin as an instantiation of the historical conjuncture produced, on the one hand, by the trc’s “restoration of narrative” and, on the other, the expected 150th anniversary celebration’s “time of memory.” Black Chin, White Chin anticipates the commemorative outpourings of 2010, and like them posits indenture as the “original historical indignity” for Indian South Africans.9 “Indenture,” as Govinden rightly argued, “may be seen as a template for memory among the descendants of immigrants—a memory of suffering, endurance, struggle, and survival.”10 If the “overriding tone is one of pride at the achievements […and] celebration of their resilience,”11 in much of this writing the tonal resonance of the “massive communal confessional narrative” of the trc was melancholia.12 This dual genealogy of reconstructing the past—apartheid and indenture, melancholia and resilience—I will argue, produce in Govender’s novel a cer- tain instability, even an evasiveness, and this instability is evident in the very form of the novel.

Family Saga

Originally titled Song of the Atman, Ronnie Govender’s Black Chin, White Chin is described on the back cover as a “majestic saga that encompasses […] a family ’s epic struggle.” John Galsworthy, whose three-volume Forsyte Saga (1922) remains the most canonical version of the sub-genre of the prose-fiction saga, commented in the Preface, “the word Saga might be objected to on the grounds that it connotes the heroic and that there is little heroic in these pages.”13 He is surely right to express reservations about heroism, as his trilogy emphasizes, with obvious delight, the pettiness, greed, and moral failings of

7 See Lindy Stiebel, “Crossing the kala pani: Cause for ‘Celebration’ or ‘Commemoration’ 150 Years On? Portrayals of Indenture in Recent South African Indian Writing,” Journal of Literary Studies 27.2 (2011): 77–90. 8 Stiebel, “Crossing the kala pani,” 78. 9 Govinden, “Healing the Wounds of History,” 290. 10 “Healing the Wounds of History,” 288. 11 Stiebel, “Crossing the kala pani,” 83. 12 Susan VanZanten Gallagher, Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South Af- rican Literature (Portsmouth nh: Heinemann, 2002): 132. 13 John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1922; Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 1995): 5.