Suspect Reconciliation

• Posted on July 27, 2010

The Remembrancer, was invited by Njabulo Ndebele to attend a conversation with the Chilean/American author Ariel Dorfman (he of Death and the Maiden fame most notably), and four new-generation South African writers Henrietta Rose-Innes (author of Homing and other works), Kevin Bloom (erstwhile editor of Maverick and most recently author of Ways of Staying), Niq Mhlongo (think of his Dog Eat Dog) and Thando Mgqolozana (the wrenching A Man Who Is Not A Man.)

In an upstairs chamber of the restored Fugard theatre in Cape Town, a room etched with a history poignantly revealed in its restoration, the Remembrancer joined a hundred other participants, under the conductor’s baton of Victor Dlamini in an attempt to “reckon” reconciliation. The proposed topic, titled (doubly) Suspect Reconciliation, was rapidly left behind, not so much by what was said as by what was performed that night.

The panelists showed us a contemporary South Africa wracked by matters of the post-1994, matters themselves burdened by the accumulating legacy of reconciliation itself. Mgqolozana challenged us to be outraged by death and injustice perpetrated in the name of culture. Was the powerful discourse of reconciliation (in the version “let us recognise and value that which was distorted under apartheid”) an impetus in allowing some of us to take refuge in the idea that botched initiation is only a problem for those who own the cultural practice? Bloom shared his agonised recognition that his own unsettledness, seemingly a white dis-ease, was a shockingly shared South African condition. “I’m threatened. I’m not settled.”. The extent of the unsettledness, acknowledged by the murmuring audience, needs much more than reconcilation between former apartheid beneficiaries and victims in order to be dispelled. Then Rose-Innes read her recently penned piece that revealed the complexity of the inheritances -“a whiff of shame that was undeniably not his, but ours. The house had been keeping a secret” - handed down by apartheid beneficiaries to their children. Niq Mhlongo read from his book a gritty dialogue, a for and against reconciliation scene. Each one conjured forth the challenge of living in a world laden with archive. The issue they presented was how to live while trying to make sense of the complicated legacies of the past, rather than how to achieve reconciliation.

And Dorfman, well, he was, as he always is, an optimist, who underscored the difference between a Revolution, as in Chile, and the South African transition with its fundamental condition of uncertainty and possibility.

If the idea of ‘reconciliation” felt overburdened before the event, by the end it was clearly inadequate to the challenges of the complex matters of the now conjured forth by the writers. But not all present shared my sense of its inadequacy. A number of my comrades from anti-apartheid struggle days hold fast to the old discourses, older angers and veteran ideas about resolution. Ours was not a shared score although all who were there seemed to have been invited because their concerns about the role of the past in the future. There were distinct differences in how the younger ones and the older ones spoke, though neither category was united within its generation. Your correspondent came away with a clear sense that while the new generation by no means wishes to forget the past, they are less ready to deploy the vocabulary of strong moral force that the older generation hefts. Their concern seems to be to try and work out how to live with the possibility that moral satisfaction eludes our grasp and that life must nonetheless be lived.

The final scenes of Death and the Maiden - in which both the victim and the possible torturer attend a Schubert concert, their eyes meeting as the glorious music washes over them, living life as it is, unresolved and haunted, always moving on - resonated in that upstairs chamber.

The Remembrancer is an Archival Platform correspondent.