REMEMBERING THE NATION, DISMEMBERING WOMEN? STORIES OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN TRANSITION Town Cape M. A. SAMUELSONof Univesity Thesis Presented for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department ofEnglish UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN February 2005 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University LIT ~20 S~Mu 77<o935 ABSTRACT: The thesis explores t~e making of nationhood, and its contestation, in narrative representations of women during the South African transition. This temporal span extends across the first decade of democracy and the first two terms of governance following the historic 1994 elections. The transition is a fertile temporal zone in which new myths and symbols are generated. My interest lies in the new national symbols and myth·s that emerge from this historical moment and the ways in which they have been figured through images and appropriations of women and their bodies. Women's bodies, I argue, are the contested sites upon which nationalism erects its ideological edifices. I engage with the mutually informing productions and performances of gender and nation, and the re-membering of a previously divided and divisive South Africa as a unified 'rainbow' nation. I proceed by tracing narrative acts of memory and repression, with a specific focus on the re-memberings and dismemberings of women's bodies as they are reconstituted as ideal vessels for a national allegory. The study is roughly divided into two halves. In the first part, I analyse current representations of women who have attained mythic status during the transition, and devote a chapter to each: Krotoa-Eva, Nongqawuse and Sarah Bartmann. The contradictory and contested legacies of these women, I argue, have been flattened out as they have been produced as domestic - usually maternal - figures. I grapple with the symbolic work they have been called on to perform during the nation-building transition, and focus on literary texts that exemplify and complicate such nationalist appropriations. A particular focus of this section is the use of these women's stories to express narratives of national belonging, and a dominant national narrative of sacrificial redemption. The second half of the thesis is more loosely configured. Across three chapters, I analyse female characters and autobiographical selves that inhabit the transitional present. The chapter organisation follows three stereotypical roles - victim, mother and wife - in which women have been cast, and the particular inflections lent to these roles by the historical moment of national transition. The emphasis is on literary re-enactments of these roles, and the unstable yet productive space between subjecthood and subjection, subversion and co-option, voice and silence. The fourth chapter engages with representations of sexual violence and traces a path between speech and silence as it explores what is presented as unspeakable. The manifestations of violence presented in the two novels considered here are closely related to the shifting politics of race and gender peculiar to the transition era. In Chapter Five, I return to the subjection of women as domestic subjects and mothers in order to trace the subversions and disruptions that their re-enactments of maternity introduce into the national narrative spun around them. The final chapter focuses on representations of 'political widows,' which provide the lens through which I review ideologies of home and their repercussions in the construction of both nation and gender. These chapters revisit, also, central themes of the first three chapters: sacrificial redemptive narratives and their production through gendered figures, domesticity and the public I private divide and the production of women as speaking subjects. Throughout the thesis, I take issue with sentimental myths of unity: a unified 'rainbow' nation, on the one hand, and a unified cross-racial sisterhood, on the other. At the same time, I remain keenly aware of the necessity of national reconstruction, and of transnational feminist networks. I conclude the final chapter by considering uncanny productions of home as I search for ways of imagining the rebuilding of a post-traumatic society that do not entail the domestication of women, that remain cognisant of continuities between past and present, and that present a model for transnational feminist practices, which are attentive to location. The organising principle of the thesis is thematic. Novels and autobiographies were selected on the basis of their provocative and I or contradictory representations of women and engagements with nationalist rhetoric. Alongside my close analyses of these texts, I draw on a broader range of sources. These include the testimonial practices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, historiography, government rhetoric as presented in speeches and the media, and national spectacles, such as the burial of Bartmann. My theoretical framework places emphasis on the use of postmodernist literary devices, as I seek to open up the closed discursive field of gender and nationalism. Resisting single reductive meanings, I attempt to restore to the historical and fictional women analysed here a contradictory multivocality often ironed out in nationalist representations of women. Thus, the postmodernist approach developed here is not a weightless one; instead, I have applied it to arrive at profoundly political II and historical conclusions. The cloth I weave across the following pages threads located and historicised understandings of gender, race and nation through a loom ' constructed out of post-structuralist, postmodernist and psychoanalytic understandings of textuality, subjectivity and historicity in order to arrive at new interpretations of women in and of a nation-under-construction. 11l ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: My greatest intellectual debts are to Brenda Cooper and Dorothy Driver; Brenda Cooper supervised this thesis and, along with Dorothy Driver, has mentored me since I was an undergraduate student. I owe more to them both than I could ever express. Abdul JanMohamed acted as my adviser during an enriching year at the University of California at Berkeley, and I thank him, along with the Centre for African-American Studies, for showing such warm hospitality. The formative influence of my earlier teachers, particularly Elleke Boehmer, Carli Coetzee, Jack Mapanje and Kelwyn Sole, is still felt and appreciated. Many other friends and colleagues have offered support, advice and discussion during the writing of this thesis. They include: Natasha Distiller, Harry Garuba, Louise Green, John Higgins, Bodhi Kar, the late Phaswane Mpe, Ranka Primorac, Sam Radithlalo, Manas Ray, Tina Steiner, Kylie Thomas, Mary Watson and Maria Wikse. I also wish to thank my examiners - David Attwell, Laura Chrisman and Margaret Dayrnond - for their attentive reading and constructive commentary. Earlier versions of some of the material included here were presented at a range of workshops and conferences. My thanks to the organisers and participants of each for creating the occasion for stimulating debate, which brought fresh and provocative perspectives to bear on this study. The Faculty of Humanities of the University of Cape Town and the A.W. Mellon Foundation provided financial support at both UCT and UC Berkeley, and SEPHIS enabled me to attend two particularly engaging workshops in their South-South exchange program. The most significant form of support during the writing of this thesis came from Robbie Farquhar, to whom I dedicate this work, with love and appreciation. IV CONTENTS: Introduction -Rememberings and Dismemberings: Female Subjects 1 and a Nation in Transition Chapter 1 - Krotoa-Eva: Translation, Traitor, 'Rainbow' Mother l 2 Chapter 2 - Nongqawuse: National Time and (Female) Authorship 42 Chapter 3 - Sarah Bartmann: Re-cast and Re-covered in Post-Apartheid 73 South Africa Chapter 4- Unspeakable Acts (Un)spoken: (Dis)Figured Bodies in 105 David's Storv and Disgrace Chapter 5 - The Mother-Witness: Mother to Mother. Bloodlines and 138 Our Generation Chapter 6 - (Un) homely Women: 'Political Widowhood' in A Life 171 and The Cry of Winnie Mandela Conclusion - Stories ofthe Transition: The Warp and Woof 203 Bibliography 211 INTRODUCTION - REMEMBERINGS AND DISMEMBERINGS: FEMALE SUBJECTS AND A NATION IN TRANSITION Our count1J' is in that period of time which the seTswana-speaking people of Southern Africa graphically describe as "mahube a naka tsa kgomo" - the dawning of the dawn, when only the tips of the horns of the cattle can be seen etched against the morning sky. --- Thabo Mbeki, "Inaugural Address" 4. The morning after is always an ambiguous moment. What just happened? Who benefited? It is not always crystal-clear that today, the day growing out of the morning after, is a fresh, new day. --- Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After 253. For the subaltern, and especially the subaltern woman, 'Empire' and 'Nation' are interchangeable terms, however hard it might be for us to imagine it. --- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine 78. The first decade of democracy in South Africa was a transitional moment, a period in which new myths, symbols and political structures were generated.