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On the Ambiguities of Narrative and of History: Writing (about) the Past in Recent South African Literary Criticism

As South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was in the midst of conducting Human Rights Violation hearings across the country in 1997, leading intellectual and writer Njabulo Ndebele suggested in an essay in Negotiating the Past (1998) – one of the first significant collections to examine memory and trauma in the transition – that the experiences of ordinary people, victims who had been made to feature in narratives hitherto authored by the apartheid state, were being recuperated by the TRC in what amounted to a ‘restoration of narrative’. Ndebele had, of course, famously argued at the turn of the 1990s that the daily experience of the majority of the country’s population – the ‘ordinary’, the exigencies of the quotidian – should inform an aesthetics not beholden to the spectacular narratives authored by the white government. The TRC, it seemed to him, was a forum to reveal both the extraordinary in the ordinary, and restore the possibility of a future ‘ordinary’ becoming the proper stuff of narrative in a more humane society. Poet and educationist Ingrid de Kok cautioned against expecting closure or coherence from the narrativising so occasioned by the Commission, however. In another contribution to Negotiating the Past, she suggested that the TRC could not be expected to elicit or ‘produce’ the ‘truth’; it was, rather, ‘in the multiplicity of partial versions and experiences, composed and recomposed within sight of each other, that truth “as a thing of this world”, in Foucault’s phrase, [would] emerge’. The archive, in other words, was necessarily – and inevitably – open to the future. André P. Brink, in his contribution to Negotiating the Past, suggested that the ‘silent places’ left un-examined by the TRC invited exploration, and that creative writers were perhaps the best placed to reach ‘beyond facts’ and to take up this challenge. The ‘real’, he argued, was not only merely that which is able to be excavated and represented, but actively