one might call projects of reoriented selfhood. The late justice minister Dullah Omar regarded the Commission as ‘a necessary exercise to enable South Africans to come to terms with their past on a morally accepted basis and to advance the cause of reconciliation’.43 For Omar, healing the ‘wounds of the past’ (a common phrase in public discourse at the time) and avoiding further conflict meant building ‘a human rights culture’, for which ‘disclosure of the truth and its acknowledgement are essential’. Omar went further, declaring ‘truth’ the fulcrum of the public healing process: ‘The fundamental issue for all South Africans is therefore to come to terms with our past on the only moral basis possible, namely that the truth be told, and that the truth be acknowledged.’44 This publicly enshrined, redemptive understanding of ‘truth’ struck home forcefully as the TRC hearings and their media reverberations echoed in the public imagination. This was the secular redemption45 of postapartheid at work, and it paralleled the remarkable literary event of Krog’s Country of My Skull, published in 1998. As suggested earlier, Krog’s amalgam of reporting and lyrical writing, drawing on testimony and, to a lesser extent, memoir – some of it fabricated for effect – established ‘creative nonfiction’ as an ascendant form of literary intermediation in postapartheid writing. ‘Truth’ – the real thing, wheat that had been sifted and gleaned from the chaff of lies and ‘fictions’ – became a discursive imperative in both the more general public sphere and in the delimited literary realm. It ushered in a widespread public emphasis on embracing an unadulterated brand of scrupulous, ethical communication after decades of official prevarication and private denial. Such utterance of bare truth, such painful unearthing of repressed psychic material, is clearly of a different category to the notion of a reified ‘real’ – a category that literary scholars correctly dismiss as simplistic or banal, citing the interpenetration of fictional and real elements in both fictional and nonfictional utterances. Certainly, even TRC testimony is likely to contain storytelling elements that are constructed after the fact, ingredients that might be seen as ‘fictive’, but the categorical insistence on the primacy of a discourse of truth and truth-telling – in contradistinction to lying and repressing, withholding and twisting – should be seen for what it was in the late 1990s, going into the 2000s, in postapartheid time and space: an urgently revelatory, cleansing process.46 At least, that was the aim, if not always the outcome. Fiction, until the mid-1990s the pre-eminent form for intermediating higher ‘truth’ in South African culture, now had to take a back seat, finding its place in the internal registers of a discourse of ‘healing’, a revelatory brand of truth containing the much-needed ‘real’ content of what had happened, and what was still going on, out there.47 This was a discourse that borrowed from the conventions of storytelling, but which saw its main business as excavating repressed registers of selfhood and community.
Postapartheid, then, becomes a voluminous, many-tiered space of stories, a house with many rooms, one might say. At the TRC, the stories came in the form of testimony and witnessing, often in broken registers of language that seemed inadequate to the task of expressing the trauma at hand. In the process, what Krog would later come to call the country’s new common language of ‘bad English’ came into prominence.48 In the prisons, the ‘foreign language’ that Steinberg talks about, what he calls ‘a language of self’, opening the door to ‘an entirely new universe’ in which ‘one can retrieve the most intimate of one’s memories, work on them, shape them into a single narrative of meaning’, coincided also with the adoption of English. ‘It was foreign,’ Steinberg continues, ‘not only in the sense that the language of self is largely a bourgeois language, a million miles from the way a man of the ghettos thinks about himself. It was quite literally spoken in a different language: the workshops were largely conducted in English.’ So, Wentzel, a mother-tongue Afrikaans-speaker, comes to use English as ‘a significant part of his internal dialogue; many of his most intimate thoughts he could only think in English’ (326).
Exactly the same thing was happening in the public sphere at large, and it is exemplified in the way in which Krog, a formerly Afrikaans poet, was partly transformed into an English writer of creative nonfiction. In ‘Antjie Krog, Self and Society’, Anthea Garman has written suggestively about how overlapping public ‘fields’ such as the media field, the literary field and the political field exerted pressure on Krog to produce Country of My Skull.49 First, in her capacity as a radio reporter on the TRC hearings, Krog was invited to write long-form pieces for the Mail & Guardian by that weekly’s then editor Anton Harber. These harrowing pieces had a strong political impact, and Krog was approached by Random House. She supplemented the pieces, and Country of My Skull has come to rival even Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country in its global reach. Just as Paton’s book stood as a masterpiece that captured the pain of racial conflict for all the world to see and feel, so Country of My Skull spoke to the world of the new drama in postapartheid South Africa – its reckoning with Truth. In the wake of significant international uptake, both works eventually became Hollywood movies. Both, in a sense, inaugurated a certain tradition of writing: Paton set the tone for the liberal novel (and realism in general) as a leading form for relaying apartheid conditions, while Krog’s work stood as a major example of how a new form of nonfiction might mediate postapartheid conditions;50 as life-writing, it is a lyrical blend of the real and its retelling, making free use of fictive devices. Such writing conjoined the perceived need to unveil truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, to reconstruct a viable ‘language of the self’ for traumatised South Africans – a by no means simple task.
The ‘language of the self’ under the spotlight here, conducted mostly in English, amounted to what Steinberg calls the working and shaping of memories into a ‘narrative of meaning’ in the wake of democracy. This specifically narrative capacity was perceived as a revelatory opening, a rupture of enormous significance. Despite the ‘language of self’ being bourgeois, ‘a million miles from the way a man of the ghettos thinks about himself’, it took hold in literate public discourse. Moreover, it stuck, not only in Steinberg’s own remarkable series of memory-shaping true stories – books that came to be seen as the cutting edge of postapartheid writing, winning a slew of prizes – but also in a run of ‘truth’ books displaying the diversity of forms characteristic of postapartheid literature.51
The ‘language of self’ that Steinberg captured in prison discourse was, moreover, also key to the rise of identity politics in public contestations, as witnessed in the heated exchanges about Pippa Skotnes’s Miscast exhibition, soon followed by similarly bruising arguments over Brett Murray’s satirical painting The Spear.52 In academic discourse, too, the politics of identity found strong expression in partisan critical readings of writers like Zoë Wicomb, Gabeba Baderoon and Yvette Christiansë, among others, whose work has been taken as affirming the agency of subject positions marginalised in the past on the basis of gender and race. In a broader sense, life-writing as a genre became a means to self-discovery, self-expression and self-affirmation on the basis of ethnicity/race, gender or sexual orientation. Creative writing programmes in the postapartheid years confirm this trend. ‘Everyone has a story to tell’ was a common refrain in the new culture of bearing witness, the opening up of self and past. Fiction often seemed irrelevant, even meretricious. There were too many stories waiting to be told, and a strong conviction that such stories needed to be given utterance, ‘voiced’ in a wave of speaking out and talking back to decades of power abuse and of silencing; all this for the sake of healing a traumatic and troubled past, of restoring agency to citizens. Who would wish to argue with such virtuous uses of culture, such powerful possibilities of restitution in the aesthetic forms of a scarred country? One only had to attend a poetry reading at Wits University or the Poetry Africa festival, or listen to the InZync poets of the Stellenbosch Literary Project (SLiP), to hear self-making in full flow, talking back sharply, and with verve, to earlier histories of denigration and dehumanisation.53 The works of ‘spoken-word’ poets such as Lebo Mashile, Jitsvinger, Koleka Putuma, and the Botsotso Jesters energetically took up the language of self-making and celebration, bringing into being an assertive new lyricism: We are here; This is who we are; This is how we speak; We will not go away. For many, not forgetting the growing legions of spoken-word poets and their
