In which many kinds of truth and reconciliation, are investigated. Sometimes only a deep pychic process can effect healing. Where does the personal end and the political begin?
Red Dust by Gillian Slovo
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Gillian Slovos Red Dust dramatises an emblematic case of amnesty for the murder of a prisoner, heard before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in a small, imaginary town in the dusty wilderness of the South African interior. Clearly and cleverly plotted, Red Dust dramatises several characters in a small town twisting and shifting around the act of owning up.
In 1985, two policemen tortured a suspected African National Congress fighter, the local schoolmasters son, Steve Sizela, and killed him; one of them, Dirk Hendricks, quite early in the book, admits, Ja In hindsight: it was wrong. I am truly sorry for the hurt I caused . This is the only unmistakeable apology in the story; and it proves hollow. His fellow torturer, Muller, on the other hand, is not inclined to recant or repent; he even engineers his own death in order to avoid appearing before the Commission to give evidence and admit his guilt.
The novel plays with many different permutations on honesty and dishonesty, on deception and self-deception, on loyalty and disloyalty, on lies and conflict, in the public quest for truth and reconciliation. Its a cynical, ironical fiction in the spy thriller mode, but filled with a fervour of hope that arises from its unique historical origins.
The TRC did not require apology as such from those who appeared before it. If the crime were committed for political ends, full disclosure was deemed sufficient. Above all, it did not follow up any crime, however heinous, with penalties if the perpetrator cooperated. By implication, the witnesses combined the two opposing historical discourses of apologia as vindication and apology as we know it. By explaining what and how they had done what they did, they were somehow divested of it; by fully acknowledging their guilty participation in evils, they contributed to the purification of the nations memory.
Gillian Slovo Red Dust
Of course. Now Peter knew why hed awakened so suddenly. It was this damned Truth Commission that was heading into town, stirring it all up, stoking Sizelas rage. (p.6)
The philosophy of the Commission, developed under the sign of Christian penance, was also inspired by a Zulu concept of peacemaking called ubuntu, meaning compassion, empathy, the recognition of the humanity of the other. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the principal architects of the Commission, calls his autobiography, No Truth without Forgiveness.
Very many women appeared to testify to the disappearance and sufferings of victims they were the widows, orphans, mothers of those who had been killed. They had to do plenty of the work of forgiving; and were thereby cast in the Countess role. They stood most to lose by the terms of the Commission, which amnestied murderers Gillian Slovo and her sister attended the hearing of the man who killed their mother, Ruth First, and they have both written, in different ways, about this ordeal. Of the 7,128 applications for amnesty, only 56 came from females who had committed crimes themselves.
From the point of view of personal storytelling, the TRC in South Africa worked with a radical form of relativism in respect of historical narrative. As Anthea Jeffery points out in her book on the TRC, The Truth about the Truth Commission, the Commission actually invoked four different types of truth as basic principles, partly conceived by the formerly imprisoned activist, now judge, Albie Sachs.
- Factual and objective truth - what actually took place. This is the equivalent of Freuds material truth.
- Social or dialogue truth, which, according to the document, was established through interaction, discussion and debate.
- The devisers then added something we can recognise very strongly from todays world, narrative truth, which was victims recitations, including perceptions, stories and myths: witnesses or participants talking of their own perceptions how they saw events, both subjectively and in accordance with the collective memory of the group. This corresponds to Freudian psychoanalytic confession. These truths were seen not in synthesis but in apposition.
- Most interestingly of all, I think, in terms of what the work of repair or work of words can achieve, how the work of reconstituting the self through speech and storytelling can develop, was the fourth kind of truth, healing truth. The kind that places facts and what they mean within the context of human relationships. This implies that healing truth might even diverge from narrative truth, testimony and objective truth that these things might actually be in conflict or in opposition.
R.W. Johnson, a severe critic of the TRCs procedures, commented on the indifference shown by the pursuit of healing truth to establishing the actual sequence and character of events as they had occurred, and pointed to the Commissions equal disregard of rules of evidence in a court of law. Another political commentator, Ian Buruma, more anxious than angry, commented, the steady substitutions of political argument in public life with the soothing rhetoric of healing is disturbing Memory is not the same as history, and memorialising is different from writing history .
These critics might agree with Isabel Hiltons description of what she found in Chile, which she reported to the other participants in the openDemocracy discussion of the process against General Pinochet. There was a truth commission in Chile. But now the truth has come out in the case against Pinochet to a degree that simply didnt happen before. And it was the impetus of justice the impetus of the judge who has called for the stories to be told and the evidence to be collected which has enabled the people to say, That was how history was Until the record is straightened by an act of justice of a fundamental kind, which acknowledges the history and the rights of the people who died and their survivors language remains corrupted. To restore such values as justice, a real act must take place. Pinochet has to be called a criminal. He has to be indicted and tried.
But the model followed in South Africa wasnt primarily a legal tribunal; however much it may have resembled one in formalities, it was ritualistic and therapeutic. Jacqueline Rose uses the language of psychoanalysis to indicate the problem in relation to justice: that justice belongs in the realm of the superego, whereas apologetics speaking bitterness, narratives of wrongdoing, personal cries of anguish arise from the unconscious. And these utterances can be fantasies. As we know, in the Freudian perspective, while they may be truth to self, this is irrespective of whether they took place in actuality.
The two discourses are incommensurate, though the TRC attempted to hyphenate them, by eliminating the retributive character of justice, that is the meting out of penalties.
Gillian Slovo reported elsewhere that attending the amnesty hearing for her mothers murderer enraged her with fury that there would be no justice in the form of punishment. But she feels a deep distinction between the personal impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on herself and her family and its political effects, contingent upon many exceedingly tricky circumstances. She also regrets that reparations for victims have been very slow or non-existent: they are the TRCs most signal failure.
The experience gave her deep qualms over the elusive nature of restorative justice, the granting of amnesty and finally truth and reconciliation, even as she conceded that this process of re-writing a nations history is in many ways as mesmerising as the creators of the TRC so ardently intended. She feels deeply divided, but believes that through the hearing she learned the truth about her mothers death, not because [the] murderers told the truth I am convinced they lied throughout but because the process forced me to understand their mind-set and who they were I do in the end believe that it is better to know the truth, no matter how painful. In that, I think the hearing did bring me some kind of peace.
Her own novel Red Dust continues to feel out a way towards healing, which only takes place ultimately deep down in the inner psyches of those who have suffered from the crimes of the past, beneath the layers and layers of deception and intrigue, political bargaining and expediency, egotistical jockeying for survival and reputation that constitute the hearing in the small town at the centre of her book. Red Dust ironises the TRCs good intentions and undermines the sincerity of apology. It dramatises a theatre of male simulation, contest and performance but, and its an important but, it shows that forgiveness the Countesss mercy helps the victims, even while the perpetrators remain unredeemed.
It is one of the principal ironies of the TRC that womens voices, telling the story of violence done to themselves, rather than speaking of crimes they witnessed, were few. A special Gender Commission was convened to encourage women to come forward, with mixed results. Antjie Krog, the poet and rapporteur for the TRC, and author of the remarkable report, Country of My Skull, diagnoses the problem in a chapter actually called Truth is a Woman. The problem is circular; rape did not fall under the amnesty provision because it wasnt considered political. So rapists could not confess with impunity. But, as the harrowing stories she reports reveal, political crimes committed against activist women almost invariably involved rape or other sexualised brutality. And the victims of these crimes did not want to speak of them; this particular atrocity escaped the bounds of language of the talking cure, of the healing truth and fell outside the remit of apology, in the form of it practised by the TRC.
Even the limited speech of the poor cow, Io, was withdrawn with the best possible intentions from the range of possibilities of women in the South African conflict. Cynthia Ngewu, one of the mothers who testified before the TRC, called for the real-real story nobody knows.
So, a kind of discourse patterned on the exclusion and humility of the suffering subject, coded feminine, was not ultimately, available to women themselves. Or rather, it was available, but when they adopted it, they did not command the same possibilities of release or authority or reparation as the men. Gillian Slovo has written herself out of this impasse by refusing, in Red Dust, emotive language, lament, confession and autobiographical modes in general, and created an alter ego who is a smart, shrewd, unattached and childless Manhattan-based human rights lawyer.
As Bob Marley says, No woman no cry.
Read the Conclusion.
