592944
research-article2015
JCL0010.1177/0021989415592944The Journal of Commonwealth LiteraturePropst
THE JOURNAL OF
C O M M O N W E A LT H
L I T E R A T U R E
Article
Reconciliation and the
“self-in-community” in
post-transitional South
African fiction
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
1­–15
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0021989415592944
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Lisa Propst
Clarkson University, USA
Abstract
Since the end of apartheid and South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, efforts at
reconciliation have been dramatic, most notably in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), as well as deeply incomplete. In response, a great deal of post-transitional
South African literature and criticism has taken up the question of how to effect reconciliation,
particularly outside institutional forums like the TRC. A prominent strand of South African
literary studies insists that reconciliation rests on a form of ethical responsibility in which the
individual is displaced from him- or herself in order to enact hospitality toward others. This view
draws on a Levinasian conception of ethics whereby responsibility entails radical vulnerability
with no assurance of reciprocation. Yet a growing corpus of fiction complicates this vision of
reconciliation, recognizing that for many South Africans, the violations of apartheid gave rise
to what Annie Coombes refers to as a “dissolution of [the] self”, and any effort at building a
more inclusive society must redress that dissolution. This article argues that Jo-Anne Richards’
My Brother’s Book (2008) and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001) present reconciliation as a
product of two opposing endeavours. On the one hand, it involves the willingness to give up a
sense of self in taking on responsibilities for others. On the other hand, it requires reclaiming
a sense of self by asserting one’s right to make affiliative choices and actively construct new
spaces of belonging.
Keywords
Achmat Dangor, apartheid, fiction, identity, Jo-Anne Richards, reconciliation, South Africa
Corresponding author:
Lisa Propst, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Clarkson University, Box 5750, Potsdam,
NY 13676, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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Introduction
Since South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, efforts at reconciliation have
been dramatic, most notably in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC), as well as deeply incomplete. In response, a great deal of South African literature
and criticism produced after the transitional period of the 1990s has asked how to effect
reconciliation, particularly outside institutional forums like the TRC. A prominent strand
of South African literary studies insists that reconciliation rests on a form of ethical
responsibility in which the individual is displaced from him- or herself in order to enact
hospitality toward others. This view draws on a Levinasian conception of ethics whereby
responsibility entails radical vulnerability with no assurance of reciprocation. It is an
ethics founded on abjection of the self: placed “beside” oneself, as Julia Kristeva (1982:
1) defines abjection, the individual relinquishes all authority and gives up the borders of
identity. Yet a growing corpus of fiction complicates this vision, recognizing that for
many South Africans, the violations of apartheid gave rise to a “dissolution of [the] self”
(Coombes, 2003: 9) and any effort to build a more inclusive society must redress that
dissolution. Apartheid carried out a process of abjection, giving symbolic coherence to
white South African identity, especially Afrikaner identity, through the rejection of black
South Africans. To borrow from Judith Butler’s (1993) account of abjection in Bodies
that Matter, apartheid effectively denied black South Africans the status of subjects.
Hence an ethical vision based on yet another displacement of the self risks overlooking
the need for those who have been rendered abject to rebuild their perceptions of themselves as subjects and agents.
This paper reads Jo-Anne Richards’ 2008 novel My Brother’s Book and Achmat
Dangor’s 2001 novel Bitter Fruit as exemplars of a diverse body of post-transitional fiction in which reconciliation emerges as a product of two opposing endeavours. On the
one hand, it involves the willingness to give up a sense of self in taking on responsibility
for others, including the responsibility to redress wrongs carried out before one’s time
and outside of one’s control. On the other hand, it requires reclaiming a sense of self,
though without returning to liberal Enlightenment assumptions about the unified, selfsufficient individual or subordinating others to one’s identity. In both texts, asserting
one’s right to make affiliative choices and actively construct new spaces of belonging
becomes a necessary foundation for developing inclusive communal bonds.
Ethics and self-displacement in recent South African
literature and criticism
The association between reconciliation and displacement from the self is exemplified in
Mark Sanders’ celebrated analysis of the TRC. In Ambiguities of Witnessing, Sanders
argues that reconciliation involves “an ethics of advocacy, the task of giving the domain
of words over to the other” (2007: 150). He draws this phrase from Antjie Krog’s Country
of My Skull (2000: 312), which muses that to keep from appropriating the stories of those
who have suffered, perhaps writers should “let the domain rather belong to those who
literally paid blood for every faltering word they utter before the Truth Commission”.
Sanders’ argument builds on an earlier assertion in his essay “Reading Lessons”:
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“Response, responsiveness, responsibility — all appear, paradoxically, to require this
apparatus of removal or displacement from self” (1999: 4). This is a Levinasian view of
ethics, in which the individual must be displaced from him- or herself to be “inhabited by”
another person (Sanders, 2007: 9). As Levinas puts it, “Responsibility for the other, for
what has not begun in me is responsibility in the innocence of being a hostage” (1997:
125); in Derridean terms (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000: 53–5), responsibility for the
stranger involves relinquishing the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other.
In this paradigm, the responsibility at the heart of reconciliation leaves a person unhomed
or unmoored, no longer able to assert a sense of subjectivity.
For Sanders, self-displacement helped the TRC respond to the dispossessions caused
by apartheid. Through symbolic substitution, “the Truth Commission generalized responsibility across the body politic by making itself a proxy for the perpetrator vis-à-vis victims whose testimony it solicited” (2007: 9). The commissioners were doubly displaced
from themselves, “inhabited by” the perpetrators whose guilt they assumed and the victims for whom they advocated, and any South African could take on this self-displacement out of “willingness to make good the wrongs” of apartheid (2007: 9). As Sanders
acknowledges, this act of solidarity could only offer symbolic reparation, yet it fostered
“bonds of responsibility-in-complicity” (2007: 145). Of course, many critics take issue
with Sanders’ praise of the TRC. As Dalglish Chew (2012) argues, to theorize the TRC
in terms of hospitality to narrative risks de-emphasizing material accountability, overlooking the inadequacy of reparations and the continued economic inequality in South
Africa. Moreover, Rosemary Jolly (2004), Mahmood Mamdani (2002), and many others
have shown that despite the TRC’s efforts to give the domain of words to those who testified at Human Rights Violations hearings, it limited certain narratives.1 Yet the idea of
self-displacement as a foundation for reconciliation has become a touchstone both for
analyses of the TRC and for studies of South African fiction. In a deft reading of Zoë
Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Minesh Dass draws on Derrida’s distinction between
conditional and unconditional hospitality to argue that for Wicomb, rejecting the divisions caused by white privilege requires an embrace of vulnerability, a willingness to
“respect the other who threatens the safety of her home in being radically strange to her
world” (2013: 7). A focus on self-displacement is especially prominent in Coetzee scholarship. For Mike Marais (2013: 164), Coetzee’s novels promote the impossible ideal of
“forfeiting” oneself in order to transcend one’s cultural subject position and look at those
who are oppressed outside of the identities assigned to them by racist imperial ideologies. Derek Attridge’s landmark study, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004),
consistently returns to the claim that to respond ethically to otherness is to give oneself
up to it, to relinquish control over the limits of one’s identity.2
Indeed, Coetzee’s well-known truth commission novel Disgrace (1999) vividly ties
the possibility of reconciliation to displacements of the self while simultaneously (and
perhaps inadvertently) exposing the limitations of this view.3 The novel features a university professor named David Lurie who is forced to resign after seducing his student
Melanie. He goes to live with his daughter Lucy on a farm in the Eastern Province, where
they are subject to a brutal attack in which Lurie is locked in the bathroom and his daughter is gang-raped. As many readers have pointed out (for example, Attridge, 2000),
Disgrace offers a bleak view of “the new South Africa”. It interrogates the TRC’s ideal
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that public confession can lead to reconciliation as Lurie refuses to apologize to a university disciplinary committee for sleeping with Melanie, his stubbornness a mark of scepticism toward the value of collective narratives as well as resistance toward giving up his
old privileges. What finally encroaches on this resistance is not any simple empathy but
rather a displacement of the self, though only in the barest form. As Mike Marais (2006:
81) observes, Disgrace calls for “the imagination [to] ecstatically divest the self of all
subject positions in language and culture” to assume responsibility for those who are
vulnerable. Lurie’s transformation is symbolized most vividly in his decision to volunteer at the local kennel, where he “does not understand what is happening to him”
(Coetzee, 2000/1999: 143), as, driven by “compulsion” (Attridge, 2004: 186), he undertakes the task of disposing of euthanized dogs. By assuming responsibility for the dogs,
he takes on the dual roles of healer and killer. Though the circumstances are very different, in his self-displacement he mirrors the truth commissioners analysed by Sanders,
who are metaphorically removed from themselves as they become proxies for the perpetrators of atrocity. Lurie’s transformation may be only partial, as Gayatri Spivak (2002)
suggests. Literalizing the image of starting over with nothing, “like a dog” (Coetzee,
2000/1999: 205), he sets out to love dogs, though he remains incapable of imagining the
feelings or needs of people he has harmed, such as Melanie or his daughter Lucy (Spivak,
2002: 22–5). Still, the novel intimates that one must step outside oneself to enact responsibility toward others, even if it only dramatizes the faintest beginnings of this change.
Yet, if as Marais (2006: 81) argues, “divest[ing] the self of all subject positions” emerges
as a precursor for resisting mastery over others, it is difficult to see such divestment as
desirable for those who remain acutely vulnerable, such as Melanie, whom Lurie refuses
to recognize as a subject in her own right, or Lucy, a lesbian woman cast as an object of
violence by gang rape.
In the effort to dismantle the divisions entrenched by apartheid and its legacies, any
vision of what it means to take responsibility for one another must apply not just to the
perpetrators or the privileged but to all South Africans. For reconciliation and community-building to be conceived solely as the purview of the privileged would be to deny
agency once again to those who struggle against oppression. Yet for those who are still
marginalized by intersecting inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, an ethics
founded on self-displacement potentially enacts another form of violence. It calls upon
people already abjected — socially excluded, constructed as bodies that do not matter
— to abject themselves once more. It ignores the need of people whose identities have
been circumscribed by a dominant culture to assert ownership over their surroundings
and their stories. Hence this paper turns to two novels that complicate a vision of reconciliation through self-displacement by insisting that reconciliation must also empower
those dispossessed by the legacies of apartheid to reclaim who they are.
Reconstructing the “self-in-community” in My Brother’s
Book and Bitter Fruit
Jo-Anne Richards’ My Brother’s Book (2008) and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001)
both centre on families divided by the legacy of apartheid violence, illustrating the
challenges of national reconciliation in microcosm while insisting that to forge a “new”
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South Africa requires many different forms of reconciliation and community building.
In both cases, it seems on the surface as though any reconciliation rests on an openness
to one another that “removes the parties from themselves” (Sanders, 1999: 4). Yet
these texts imply that a focus on displacements of the self as a source of reconciliation
overlooks the ways apartheid and continuing inequalities have proscribed individual
and communal self-definition. They intimate that for South Africa to develop ways of
relating that cut across divisive identity categories, it is necessary to reconstruct what
Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni, and Kopano Ratele (2009: 60) label “the self-incommunity”. In other words, to develop new ways of relating involves an embrace of
ubuntu, a philosophy shared by many African cultures which insists, in one common
formulation, that a person is a person through other people. For Richards and Dangor,
recognizing that the self is constituted through others is not merely a matter of acknowledging existing communal ties but rests on opening oneself to new conceptions of
community, embracing connections and responsibilities to people who may seem to be
“others” in terms of race, class, or sexuality. Yet far from a displacement of the self,
this recognition of the self as part of a larger web of connections also requires the
development of what David Medalie (2006) calls a capacious selfhood, a self-directed
generosity that nourishes expansive and agential subjectivity. This is not a form of selfabsorption but rather, in Carol Gilligan’s terms (1982: 39), “an expansion of care”,
one’s “inclusion of herself in an expanding network of connection”. Richards and
Dangor suggest that such generosity toward the self is a means of challenging ongoing
forms of exclusion as well as a precondition for the generosity toward others involved
in imagining new affiliative linkages.4
My Brother’s Book begins with a struggle over self-definition. The novel starts off
narrated retrospectively by Lily, now in her 40s and looking back on her childhood as a
corrective to a memoir recently published by her brother, Tom. Lily’s memories are interspersed with letters to Lily and Tom from Tom’s ex-girlfriend Miranda, who also offers
a counterpoint to Tom’s view of the past. Toward the end of the novel, Tom takes over as
narrator and recounts his reunion with Lily after 30 years apart. Together, these narrative
strands tell the story of Tom and Lily’s childhood with their father Bert, a con man who
loves them but does not always provide for them; Tom’s participation in the anti-apartheid struggle with Miranda; his imprisonment when Lily accidentally discloses his activities to a police informant; and his work as founder of an NGO upon his release. Tom’s
memoir reflects his anger toward Bert, Lily, and Miranda. He blames them all for not
being there for him when he needed them and he has cut off communication with all
three. By foregrounding a battle for control over narrative, Richards links the novel to a
host of other post-apartheid texts, including Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust (2000), Zoë
Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006), Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Dangor’s Bitter Fruit,
that dramatize tensions over how to represent South Africa’s past. She offers a sobering
reminder that 15 years after the end of apartheid, conflicting frameworks for conceptualizing the past continue to underpin divisions.
Richards opens with Lily’s declaration, “I was born on page 23 of my brother’s book.
On page 52, before the whole world, I betrayed him. There was so much in between
though” (2008: 3).5 When Lily proclaims that Tom left out “so much”, she casts his narrative itself as a betrayal, also carried out “before the whole world”. Insisting that there
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was “so much in between” her birth and her testimony, she points toward the ambiguous
spaces between betrayal and innocence, hinting at the inadequacy of Tom’s language —
and her own — to account for the things they did to one another. In this way, much as
Andrew van der Vlies (2010: 589) writes of Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, My Brother’s
Book expresses a “studied disavowal of categorisation” that rejects not just racial labels
but stratified identities that promote “us versus them” thinking.
With this challenge toward existing identity categories, the novel seems to suggest,
much like Coetzee’s Disgrace, that giving up a previous sense of self is a necessary step
toward moving past ongoing divisions. Tom’s moment of reconciliation starts when he
discovers the artifice of the racial identity that shaped his life, a discovery that leads him
to question his deepest assumptions about who he is and the roles his parents played in
his childhood. At the end of the novel, Tom finds out that his mother was “coloured”, a
South African term for people of biracial heritage, and she abandoned him and Lily as
children so that they could be raised as white. Much like Wicomb’s Playing in the Light,
published two years earlier, Richards emphasizes the constructedness of the racial identities that shaped so many South African lives. Moreover, as Tom muses that his discovery
“has changed [his] life utterly, while leaving it wholly unaltered” (239), he starts to redefine himself and his parents. He loses confidence in his parents’ shared role as the villains
of his childhood, and by extension he loses confidence in his role as a martyr. As he
grapples with his newly rewritten past, he goes to a bar and orders a brandy and coke, his
father’s traditional drink. When a fellow drinker tries to draw him into conversation, Tom
claims his name is Bert, which is his father’s name. He is possessed by his father in a way
that strips away the illusion of an unconstrained, freely chosen subjectivity. He is displaced from himself once more when he wakes up hung over in his house the next day
and mistakes his reflection for an intruder, unable to distinguish between what is inside
and outside his body. Tom’s mistake evokes not just the frequency of breaking-andentering in South Africa but also the forcible entry of the police into the homes of black
South Africans and anti-apartheid activists in the 1970s and 80s. Calling to mind the
TRC commissioners analysed by Sanders, and Lurie disposing of the euthanized dogs,
Tom simultaneously assumes the roles of victim and perpetrator, a symbolic acknowledgement of his complicity in the rifts in his family.
As Tom loses hold of the labels that separated him from his father and sister, he begins
to reinterpret his past. His recollections start to echo Lily’s, as if he is “giving the domain
of words” (Sanders, 2000: 17) over to her. Tom recalls his childhood in fragments that
blur the boundaries of past and present: “Pop through the swing doors [...] raising his
empty glass, we kids on the pavement outside. Pop arm-wrestling and tall-taling …”
(233). With their sense of timelessness, these fragments echo Lily’s description of “days
plumped by doves roasted on fires, and fruit straight off the tree. Dusty days, doused in
heat, that we explored breathlessly and well” (3). In a reversal of his earlier efforts to
surround himself with space, once he is turned outside himself, he creates space in his
own narrative for Lily’s memories.
Tom’s dissolving grip on the categories that structured his life calls to mind Norma
Moruzzi’s account of abjection: as the boundaries of his identity are shattered, he is
divested of any “(national or individual) claim to unity and knowledge” (1993: 144). Yet
the novel implies that for Lily to undertake this kind of self-displacement would be to
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replicate an earlier abjection — Tom’s exclusion of Lily from his history. Tom’s account
of his role in the liberation movement positions both Lily and his ex-girlfriend Miranda
at the margins of the struggle and his formative experiences, reflecting the ways apartheid and the anti-apartheid struggle doubly proscribed female self-definition. Tom’s
book echoes a trend within and beyond the liberation movement that presumes “that the
key relations of power are between men” (Daymond, 1996: xix). Richards implies that in
response to this exclusion, what is necessary is not a willingness to give up the self but
an insistence on the capacity for self-making and the value of female voices in accounts
of South Africa’s history and future. As such, Lily’s efforts to reclaim her past offer a
model of reconciliation very different from Tom’s self-displacement, pointing toward the
importance of reclaiming a sense of self in order to construct communities that enable
mutual respect and care.
Rather than relinquish a sense of who she is, Lily insists on her subjectivity. As she
castigates Tom for forgetting the “[d]usty days, doused in heat, that we explored breathlessly and well” (3), she resists a narrative of abjection focused on their repeated exclusions from the communities where they lived. She denies the power of dominant social
norms to circumscribe her identity, whether because of her gender or because she and
Tom were outsiders and “poor whites”. Instead she creates a porous boundary between
alienation and belonging, presenting herself and Tom as adventurers in control of where
they went and what they did. In spite of the many places she and Tom could not enter
during their childhood, in her memories they create new spaces where they can feel at
home, not unlike the characters in more urban novels such as K. Sello Duiker’s The
Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001),
and Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (2006). Yet whereas the communities that take shape
in these novels are predominantly male, Lily’s narrative emphasizes that women must
participate in forging new spaces for self-definition. This does not mean laying claim to
a liberal self “formed prior to social interaction” (Abrams, 1999: 807). Far from it;
Richards rejects the individualist focus of liberalism, as Lily’s efforts to shape her story
encompass her need to locate herself within a wider community. Moreover, this is not a
community based on racial identity, either on her newfound knowledge that she is “coloured” or on a rejection of “colouredness”. Lily’s story points toward a need to actively
choose affiliations that cut across simplified identity categories. Her narrative of her
childhood insists on her connections to people from a wide spectrum of socio-economic
and racial groups.
Lily rejects Tom’s efforts to expel her from his past just as she rejects the marginalizations she and Tom experienced. Far from displacing herself anew, she places herself at
the centre of her story, a position that gives her the power to break down boundaries by
including whomever she chooses within her narrative. With this portrayal of Lily’s selfinvention, Richards tacitly rejects the tendency common in feminist literary and film
criticism to embrace abjection as a subversive or liberating trope, an “alternative, disruptive” force (Covino, 2004: 29) capable of subverting restrictive identity categories.
Instead she presents a struggle against the dissolution of the self as a crucial step in
reinventing more liberating communal identities.
Unlike a Levinasian ethic in which responsibilities are unchosen, existing prior to the
subject, Richards points toward a need to actively assert affiliations that cut across past
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and present exclusions. Whereas Tom tries to cut himself off from emotions, whether
anger or grief, Lily mourns openly for the people she has lost. To a degree, her mourning
offers an example of self-displacement, as Sanders (2007: 73) describes the testimonies
of the women who called for the burial of relatives at the TRC hearings, “responding to
the call of this other — from the place of the deceased”. But Lily’s mourning is equally
an example of self-affirmation. Sanders (2007: 39) explains that “mourning, as the giving up of a loved object, presupposes desire for that object”, and the apartheid regime
prohibited that desire by withholding bodies and preventing burials. Moreover, her
mourning is a form of generosity, an invitation into shared condolence, as she repeatedly
creates opportunities for Tom to share in her memories and grieve with her despite his
resistance. As such, Lily’s narrative illustrates how affirming one’s right to make affiliative choices and emotional connections can underpin hospitality to others.
In contrast to an ethics based on the embrace of vulnerability, Richards’ novel echoes
Leon de Kock’s call for “an opening into greater choices of modality and self-positioning, not to mention re-energized self-assertion” (de Kock, 2005: 78). Lily lays claim to
an identity that is fluid, open to constant recreation, constituted by imagination rather
than biology. Her vision of identity and community forms a stark contrast to what Shaun
Irlam (2004: 699) described, four years before the publication of My Brother’s Book, as
“an era of identity mongering” characterized by “the rise of a certain cultural chauvinism
and sometimes even ethnic nationalism”. By insisting on her right to define herself and
her community, Lily creates space in her life not only for her and Tom, but for people
who might never have claimed the right to be included in her narrative. In this way, she
asserts responsibility for those who have harmed her and those she has harmed.
The reconciliation in My Brother’s Book emerges out of the freedom to decide who
one is, who to mourn, and whose stories to tell. Bitter Fruit, published seven years earlier, offers a similar vision of reconciliation and hospitality but goes further in imagining
what they might involve. Like Richards, Dangor suggests that in the wake of a regime
that “defined who one was in terms of one’s possibilities” (Sanders, 2007: 190), every
South African must reconstitute “her self and her world” (Krog et al., 2009: 58).
Moreover, Dangor implies that this process must include embracing incommensurate
identities within oneself. This is not a naïve adherence to postmodern ideals of fragmentation and instability, but an insistence that if reconciliation involves uncomfortable intimacies and requires complicating the labels of sameness and difference, so too must
post-apartheid reinventions of the individual.
Like My Brother’s Book, Bitter Fruit centres on a family divided by the violence of
apartheid, and the novel unsettles the categories of perpetrator, bystander, and victim as
it explores how efforts to cope with victimization can lead to new forms of violence. Set
in the late 1990s as the TRC prepares to issue the first five volumes of its report, the text
oscillates between the perspectives of three main characters: Silas, his wife Lydia, and
their son Michael. Both Silas and Lydia are haunted by the traumatic memory of Lydia’s
rape by a policeman named Du Boise while Silas was imprisoned in a police van, unable
to intervene. If Richards’ Tom and Lily are kept apart by Tom’s resentment and Lily’s
guilt, Lydia and Silas are alienated from each other by Lydia’s pain and anger and Silas’s
feelings of powerlessness. Though Silas tries to convince Lydia to testify at the TRC, she
argues that the commissioners cannot identify with her experience of rape. As Helene
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Strauss observes, Lydia “resists having her suffering be appropriated by the men in her
life — an appropriation which her participation in the TRC hearings would have facilitated” (2008: 54). In very different ways from Richards’ Lily, Lydia insists on a subjectivity that the TRC’s narratives of nation-building can only partially accommodate, and
her insistence drives her further away from Silas.
On the surface it seems as though this conflict is never resolved, and instead of reconciling, the family is torn apart. Lydia leaves Silas and Michael after having sex with
another man at Silas’s 60th birthday celebration. Michael, for his part, shoots the policeman who raped his mother, takes on a new identity, and runs away. Unlike My Brother’s
Book, which ends with the protagonists eating and drinking together, Bitter Fruit ends
with all three family members moving further away from one another geographically as
well as mentally. However, in the end, the novel subtly depicts Silas and Lydia moving
toward reconciliation with each other and themselves. As in My Brother’s Book, this
move toward reconciliation seems, at least initially, to stem from giving up a sense of self
in a gesture of unconditional hospitality to another person’s needs. It is spurred by an
unlikely event: Silas witnessing Lydia’s adultery at his birthday party. Unable to pass
judgement as he sees Lydia having sex with a guest named João, Silas muses, “His wife
had found release at last from both her captive demons: from Du Boise and from himself.
Now not every man would be a rapist to her” (Dangor, 2003: 267).6 Like Coetzee’s Lurie
and Richards’ Tom, he becomes “a proxy for the perpetrator, who will absorb violence in
his or her place” as well as “the figure of a beloved, for whom one’s story will cohere”
(Sanders, 2007: 163). He transcends the pain of Lydia’s infidelity. More than a grudging
acceptance of her need, he recognizes that there is “something [...] ineluctably beautiful
about Lydia pulling the young man to her” (267). Aligning him with Tom at the end of
My Brother’s Book, his perception puts him outside himself. His words meld with Lydia’s
recurring thoughts of “beautiful João” as he celebrates Lydia’s agency as well as her
sexuality. His forgiveness is very different from scenes of reconciliation at the TRC: it is
a private moment, unverbalized. Yet though it changes Silas, helping him give up anger,
it does not transform Lydia.
The closing chapter emphasizes Lydia’s need to rebuild her sense of self. Lydia struggles to heal from a form of gendered violence that rendered her abject: a violation of the
boundaries of her body that stripped her of subjectivity, as her rapist treated her as an
object of disgust with his taunts and left her beset by self-loathing. Like Lily, she rejects
an abject ethics that would call for yet another dispossession from herself. Driving away
from her family, she reflects, “Mother, wife, lover, lover-mother, lover-wife, unloved
mother. Unloved, in sum, except for those wonderful, unguarded moments, Mikey, Silas,
and, of course, black João, beautiful as jet” (281). Her description, “Unloved, in sum,” is
radically undercut by the expansiveness with which she welcomes Michael, Silas, and
João into her memories of pleasure. Her gesture of invitation calls to mind Lily’s expansive version of her childhood, which resists the exclusions of Tom’s memoir. As Lydia’s
litany of roles dissolves into hyphenated terms, “lover-mother, lover-wife”, she challenges expected paradigms for female self-definition and creates her own vocabulary for
a burgeoning identity. Lydia’s insistence on her right to self-definition enables her to
imagine new spaces of belonging. She simultaneously insists on her own independence
and declares herself part of a community that includes Michael, Silas, and João. She
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realizes that they have helped to constitute her as a subject, and with her recognition of
“those wonderful, unguarded moments”, she actively welcomes them into her narrative
of her life.
Bitter Fruit demonstrates that as Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman (2001) have argued,
both corporeal violations and the day-to-day indignities of structural violence shatter
communal and familial relationships alongside individual subjectivities. Lydia’s resistance to the TRC and insistent need to reinvent herself dramatize the ways many who
have been “the objects of state policies and not their subjects” stop being able to “recognize themselves in the collective projects of the wider political community” (Das and
Kleinman, 2001: 4). It is because of this lack of recognition that both healing and reconciliation rest on “the making of one’s history, the remaking of a world” (Das and
Kleinman, 2001: 6). As Das and Kleinman caution, this reclamation of the self does not
rest on “a pre-given subject to whom experience happens” (2001: 5; emphasis in original), but rather a subjectivity that is constantly being fashioned, as illustrated by Lydia’s
shifting terms for the roles in which she sees herself.
Dangor emphasizes the agency behind Lydia’s syncretic identity by drawing a parallel
between Lydia and Michael. Before running away, Michael embraces the Muslim heritage of his paternal grandfather, despite the knowledge that he is a child of rape and has
no biological connection to Silas’s father. For Henriette Roos, Michael’s exploration of
Islam illustrates how “crucial decisions about identity and association are linked [in
Dangor’s work] to vicissitudes, incorrect assumptions and subjective judgments” (2005:
64). Yet Michael’s turn to Islam is an active choice that underscores Lydia’s own choices.
Both Michael and Lydia refuse to base their identities on “authentic” racial or religious
heritages. All of the characters in this novel struggle to define themselves, influenced by
“the narratives of bastardisation and shame assigned stereotypically to identities labeled
‘coloured’” (Strauss, 2008: 53), and all occasionally imagine racial solidarity as a source
of belonging (e.g. Dangor, 2003/2001: 148). Yet Dangor rejects “the construction of
coloured nationhood” that Wicomb (1998: 105) critiqued in the wake of the 1994 elections. He suggests that more productive for the “new” South Africa, as Ronit Frenkel and
Craig MacKenzie have argued, are notions of “complicities [...] foldedness, conviviality
[…] improvisation […] or hybridity” (2010: 6). This portrayal of hybridity is very different from apartheid discourses on “colouredness” that made hybridity a source of shame
or postcolonial celebrations of a “coloured” hybridity that often essentialize blackness
and whiteness. Dangor envisions a hybridity in which constituent parts are constantly
subject to reinvention and redefinition. Hence, belonging requires the creation of something new, not simply nostalgia or recovery of an existing heritage. This hybridity may
seem like a dissolution of the borders of the self; there is a faint echo of Kristeva’s
description of that which “disturbs identity, system, order […] does not respect, borders,
positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982: 4). But if it is a
rejection of the old borders of the self, it is simultaneously a means of claiming the power
to define the self anew, in multiple ways open to ongoing change.
As Lydia reinvents herself she creates a space of belonging for Silas, much as Lily
enacts hospitality toward Tom by retelling the story of her past. In the closing lines of the
novel, Lydia sings along to Leonard Cohen’s song “Last Year’s Man”:
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Propst
Carry your own burdens,
Mister my friends.
She hums, laughing at her ability to paraphrase the lyrics.
Amen, Amen. (281)
With her improvised version of Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, she stops seeing the men around
her as adversaries, and instead she casts them as potential companions. The final words,
“Amen, Amen”, join the religious to the secular much like the TRC, and suggest that in
spite of Lydia’s refusal to testify before the commission, she is entering a collective narrative that goes beyond her personal history. By saying “Amen”, a term that typically
assents to someone else’s prayer, she presents her narrative as part of a continuum of
voices.
Thus, Lydia’s decision to leave her family emerges as a twofold “pilgrimage of
reconciliation”, as Njabulo Ndebele describes the journey of his fictional Penelope in
The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003: 145). Ndebele tells the story of four “waiting
women”, left behind when their husbands set out for the mines or were exiled or
imprisoned. Toward the end, the women set out on a road trip along with the paradigmatic “waiting woman” Winnie Mandela, and in a magic realist twist, they are joined
by the Ancient Greek Penelope, who remained faithful to Odysseus for 19 years when
he sailed off to fight the Trojan War. Ndebele imagines Penelope leaving after
Odysseus’s return for a “cleansing pilgrimage […] to free [women] from the burden
of unconditional fidelity” promoted by her story (2003: 145). It is clear from this
proclamation that for Ndebele, Penelope’s reconciliation with herself is inseparable
from reconciliation with her husband. Bitter Fruit anticipates Ndebele’s portrayal, as
Lydia refuses the role of the waiting woman. She shows that she will not let Silas or
the national reconciliation project dictate when to address her trauma. Lydia’s journey
to combat her sense of emptiness becomes the first step toward reimagining herself
and her husband as part of a shared community. Lydia’s generosity to herself, which
enables her to accept incommensurate identities, includes an openness to uncertainties and “a willingness not to comprehend”, to borrow a phrase from Sandra Young
(2012: 133). Hence Lydia embraces her own incomprehensibility as she laughs at her
adaptation of the Leonard Cohen song, tacitly insisting that reconciliation must not
subsume disparate identities into the desire for a communal narrative. She insists on
the agency to develop her own narratives of identity and to envision relationships that
cut across traditional boundaries, even if her fledgling narratives are not coherent or
even recognizable.
Still, Lydia’s reconciliation remains painful. The final scene of Bitter Fruit does not
depict the collectivity evident in The Cry of Winnie Mandela; if Lydia opens herself to
new relationships, they do not take shape in any practical way. Far more than My
Brother’s Book, Bitter Fruit points out that reconciling in the present does not necessarily
heal the traumas of the past. Dangor writes, “Time and distance, even this paltry distance,
will help to free her” (281), but the bleak tone of “this paltry distance” intimates that she
can only achieve that freedom gradually.
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The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 
Conclusion
The absence of closure at the end of Bitter Fruit offers a reminder that reconciliation is
not easy and that divisions entrenched by apartheid persist. In the face of these continued
divisions, the question of how to reinvent communal bonds retains its urgency. In My
Brother’s Book and Bitter Fruit, reinventing South African social structures involves giving up exclusionary categories of identity, but equally important is reclaiming the right
to self-definition. When South Africa began the transition from apartheid to democracy,
Albie Sachs wrote:
We South Africans fight against real consciousness, apartheid consciousness, we know what we
struggle against. It is there for all the world to see. But we don’t know who we ourselves are.
What does it mean to be South African? (1990: 126)
Sachs’s question makes the point that this redefinition is a crucial part of laying claim
to freedom. Within a Levinasian worldview, one might argue that the individual is
never entirely free but always a hostage to the needs of the other. Yet in the wake of
apartheid, which curtailed the freedoms of South Africans in concrete and all-pervasive ways, it is crucial to rebuild those freedoms in the name of dignity, psychological
security, and mutual respect. This is even more crucial in the face of present inequities
that carry out their own psychological dispossessions. Richards and Dangor dramatize
this reconstruction through Lily and Lydia, as both women open themselves up to more
expansive versions of who they can be and what kind of communities they can create.
Neither author implies that this process is simple. On the contrary, they intimate that,
as Glenn Odom writes, “If reconciliation is to be achieved, it will have to be achieved
repeatedly — and only partially” (2011: 53). Like Michael Titlestad and Ashlee
Polatinsky (2010: 264), Richards and Dangor warn against the assumption that recovery of the past, of personal identity, or of a shared national narrative can ever be complete. Yet both suggest that for South Africans to transform the frameworks that
underpin continued inequalities and disjunctures, they must affirm the right to narrate
new selves into being.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. Examples include women who testified to the abuses suffered by male family members but
minimized their own experiences, and the TRC’s lack of emphasis on collective oppression
like day-to-day structural violence and forced removals.
2. For example, he argues that David Lurie in Disgrace, among many other Coetzee characters,
finds himself “relinquishing intellectual control in obedience to a dimly perceived demand
that comes from somewhere other than the moral norms he has grown up with” (Attridge,
2004: 176).
3. Sanders devotes considerable space to Disgrace in Ambiguities of Witnessing (2007).
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4.
These two novels are not alone. Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006) points out that any
vision of reconciliation must enable those who have been dispossessed by continued racial
and economic inequalities to combat that dispossession by asserting ownership over their stories (Propst, 2014). K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) suggests the same
thing, as the novel ends with the protagonist, Tshepo, refusing to let anyone else dictate who
he is or what communities he can belong to. All of these texts call to mind Njabulo Ndebele’s
insistence in Rediscovery of the Ordinary (2006/1991: 52; 49), that the social imagination
requires “[t]he growth of consciousness” and “the honesty of the self in confrontation with
itself”.
5. Subsequent references are to this (2008) edition of My Brother’s Book, and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text.
6. Subsequent references are to this (2003) edition of Bitter Fruit, and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text.
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