Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte

Michiel Van Ryckeghem

Perfect Memory in a Time of “National Dysmnesia”

Trauma and Identity in Tony Eprile’s The Persistence

of Memory

Masterpaper voorgedragen tot het bekomen van de graad van Master in de Taal- en letterkunde

(Engels - Spaans)

2011 Promotor Prof. dr. Stef Craps Vakgroep Letterkunde

Acknowledgements

Foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. dr. Stef Craps for proposing this interesting

field of study, and for sharing his knowledge of the topic. He has also helped considerably in the

process of writing this Master Dissertation by repeatedly editing the text and suggesting what I

could do to improve my work. Further, I would like to thank my second and third readers for

taking an interest in the topic, and in my dissertation in particular. Lastly, I would like to thank

my family for their constant support throughout the long writing process.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1

Part 1 – Historical Outline ................................................................................................. 9

Chapter 1. The South African Border War ...................................................................... 10

Chapter 2. Apartheid ........................................................................................................ 14

Chapter 3. Truth and Reconciliation ................................................................................ 20

Part 2 – Trauma Theory and Memory ........................................................................... 25

Chapter 4. Trauma Studies: A Genealogy ....................................................................... 26

Chapter 5. Traumatic Memory vs. Narrative Memory .................................................... 31

Chapter 6. Collective Memory......................................................................................... 36

Chapter 7. Testimony ....................................................................................................... 39

Part 3 – The Persistence of Memory ................................................................................ 42

Chapter 8. Paul’s Traumatic Experiences ........................................................................ 43

Chapter 9. Perfect Memory vs. “National Dysmnesia, the Art of Rose-Colored Recall”56

Chapter 10. “Ja, ja, ja. All you Jews are Englishmen.” ..................................................... 66

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 75

Appendix ............................................................................................................................ 79

List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................ 80

Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 81

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Introduction

With his first novel, The Persistence of Memory (2004), Tony Eprile, a Jewish South

African writer living in the U.S. joins other young South African writers in their common

cause of shaping the national memory and, thus, the development of the New South

Africa. As Eprile himself stated in an interview, the occurrence that prompted the idea for

his book was that, when he went back to South Africa in 1990 after a long absence, he

noticed that white South African people had changed their memories to fit the political

changes of the time. A small favour to a neighbour during apartheid years was easily

distorted into “a gesture of support for those in opposition to Apartheid” (Eprile,

“Interview”). Moreover, the apartheid government had succeeded in creating a mythology

for explaining the present and imposing its own version of the past. Around that time,

Eprile was reading a nonfictional account about a person with an almost perfect memory,

The Mind of a Mnemonist by A.R. Luria, which made him contemplate what would

happen to someone with a perfect memory living in a repressive society prone to

distorting the reality of past and present (Eprile, “Interview”). Thus, Paul Sweetbread, the

narrator with a perfect memory, came into existence. He tells the story of his growing up

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in apartheid South Africa, a country where amnesia is widespread, while he himself is

unable to forget anything.

Eprile explicitly mentions in an interview for the University of California radio station

that it was a conscious choice not to give his main character the “good-fortuned, liberal,

anti-apartheid background” he himself had when growing up in South Africa (Eprile,

“Interview”). His parents were white, Jewish immigrants and were strongly anti-apartheid.

They repeatedly “pointed out the inequities of the racially stratified society [they] lived

in” (Eprile, “Interview”). Moreover, his father edited a black newspaper. This way, he had

“the unusual privilege of seeing the other side at an early age” (Eprile, “Interview”). In

contrast, Paul Sweetbread’s story is a first-person narrative presenting the coming-of-age

story of a decent, middle-class Jewish boy trying to become a good South African, trying

to find “his own sense of self largely through observation” (Eprile, “Interview”). Thus, the

novel explores how it is like to grow up without an outspoken anti-apartheid background

in the oppressive society of South Africa, and having to determine right from wrong

through one’s own experience.

The novel is divided into three parts. In each part, Paul gives an account of a particular

period in his life. Book One spans the years from his early childhood to the end of his

school-days in the all Jewish “Little Green School” (Eprile, Persistence 15), from 1968

until 1987. It is the account of a troubled childhood which shows Sweetbread growing up

as a clever, but lonely person. A particularly telling event in this part of the novel occurs

when Paul is about nine years old: the death of his father, with whom he had a very close

relationship, under unclear circumstances. He obviously suffers from this loss and is

seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Vishinski, for guidance. At the end of Book One he starts

attending university, but is conscripted into the army and has to give up his studies.

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In Book Two, 1987 until 1989, we first get an account of the short period just before

Paul gets his basic training. He decides to house-sit for the family of a friend when they

go on a holiday. This job turns out to be not as easy as he had expected, because he has

some awkward experiences with the black servants. After this episode, Paul does not go

on narrating his basic training, but he immediately skips to his life in an army camp on the

Angolan border. There, Paul proves incapable to fit in like a regular conscript, just as he

was incapable to blend in at school. According to Eprile, his anxiety, separateness, and

sense of being a freak are reflected by his being very large (Eprile, “Interview”). His

bulkiness also makes him unfit for the army, and he gets assigned to the kitchen by his

superior, Captain Lyddie. This gets the sergeant and the other soldiers of his back.

Because he proves to be a good cook, this job even brings him some respect in the camp.

However, one day, Lyddie invites Sweetbread to accompany him to gather some

information from a nearby tribe. When the tribal elder denies the presence of terrorists in

the area, a violent scene develops in which Lyddie tortures the chief’s child. Although

Sweetbread is carrying a rifle, he does nothing to prevent the violence, and Lyddie

confronts him with his own cowardice on the way back. Despite the confrontation,

Sweetbread cannot help feeling admiration for the Captain. However, when he gets the

chance, Paul leaves the camp to enrol in a training programme to become a filmmaker in

the army’s propaganda campaign. Book Two cuts off at the moment when Sweetbread and

Captain Lyddie meet again in the bush during a period of official cease-fire.

Book three covers the years 1990 to 2000, after Sweetbread’s military duty, which are

also transitional years for South Africa, and the era of the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission. In the first scene of Book Three we see Paul in a military hospital,

apparently traumatized. After a short period of psychological treatment he gets a

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temporary discharge from the army so he can sit out the rest of his National Service at

home. However, the main event in Book Three is when Paul needs to testify before the

Truth and Reconciliation Commission about Lyddie’s war excesses, the same events that

left him traumatized, and which were not narrated at the end of Book Two. In his

testimony, Paul narrates, for the first time, the atrocities that left him traumatized. Paul has

to record the activities of Lyddie’s unit during the official cease-fire, but gets caught up in

the unnecessary killing of Swapo-soldiers returning from Angola. Although Paul remains

sceptic about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his testimony seems to help him

to get on with his life, and to find a place in South African Society at the end of the novel.

The Persistence of Memory is not a traditional Bildungsroman, but can be defined as

what Ogaga Okuyade calls an “extension of the paradigm,[…] the Postcolonial African

Bildungsroman” (3). This relatively recent variant of the genre is characterized by the

dramatization of “the arduous journey from childhood to maturity”, and emphasis on

“continuous negotiation of individual and national identity as a process without definite

endpoint” (7). The intertwining of individual and national identity means that the African

identity is never fixed: it is shaped by the postcolonial condition with its difficult relation

between past, present and future. By rewriting the genre, the authors try to “address post-

independence concerns […] which are encapsulated in the burden of history –

decolonization, sovereignty, trauma, war, gender disparity and identity conflict” (7). The

concerns that are central to The Persistence of Memory are trauma and its consequences

for the functioning of memory, war, and identity conflict. Moreover, their interrelatedness

is emphasized throughout the novel. In my analysis, I will focus on how potentially

traumatic events in Paul’s life, and specific aspects of life in South Africa such as the

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consequences of apartheid, the Border War, and relations between the Jewish population

and other ethnic groups, influence his Bildung and how this is reflected in the narration.

In the first part of my dissertation I will provide a historical outline of South Africa,

concentrating on those aspects of South African history that are relevant for the

understanding of The Persistence of Memory. Chapter One will deal with the South

African Border War, the secret war that Sweetbread gets caught up in. The brief account

will present the different parties and alliances at work in this war, as well as the roots of

the conflict, and give an overview of the most important events that took place during

wartime. Subsequently, in Chapter Two, I will describe the period of apartheid which

lasted for almost half a century and had its roots in the nineteenth century. In the third

chapter, I will discuss the most important institution at work in the transition to a

nonviolent democracy after apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In Part Two, I will establish a theoretical framework for the analysis of the novel. The

framework that I thought most fitting to approach The Persistence of Memory is trauma

studies. Since the 1990s, the study of the psychological trauma and its consequences has

gained prominence outside the medical field, and has become an interdisciplinary research

interest. In literary studies as well it has become an important paradigm, and many literary

works are now approached from this angle. The research done in this area is assembled

under the header of trauma theory or trauma studies. I have adopted the paradigm of

trauma theory and the closely related notion of memory as a theoretical framework

because at the core of the narrative is an event that the reader only gets to know about

indirectly, a traumatic event. Sweetbread supposedly suffers from various personal

traumas, and the novel is set in South Africa, a country that even in the present day is still

suffering from the “national trauma” of the apartheid era. Moreover, traumatic events

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have a considerable impact on the functioning of memory. Consequently, trauma studies

are particularly concerned with the mechanisms of memory, just as the author of the

novel, who scrutinizes the workings of memory through the narrative of his protagonist.

After establishing the historical background against which the novel is set in Part One

and, in Part Two, briefly outlining the theoretical framework that will be appropriated, I

will turn to the actual analysis of the novel. When Paul was about nine years old, his

father appears to have committed suicide after his affair with the maid, who is of mixed

race, had been exposed. The death of Paul’s father and the ensuing trauma shape our

understanding of the novel but are never explicitly dealt with. Moreover, this is not the

only instance of trauma. Throughout the novel, Sweetbread is exposed to three potentially

traumatizing events: apart from his father’s suicide, there is a violent scene in which his

superior in the army tortures a native child, and the killing of guerrillas that had already

surrendered. I will discuss the various traumatic experiences that Paul goes through, how

these connect to the emphasis on memory and forgetting, and how this affects his

reliability as a narrator.

However, in the novel, the emphasis is not only on the memory and forgetting of the

protagonist, but also on collective memory and national amnesia. The strong connection

between the individual and the nation that Okuyade observes in the postcolonial African

Bildungsroman (7) has been particularly true in the South African context and is certainly

present in The Persistence of Memory. Although the narrator is describing the

mechanisms of his own “poisoned gift” (Eprile, Persistence 14) most of the time, at

certain moments in the novel he also muses about the memories of his compatriots, the

memories of the nation. In his assessment of the South African condition after apartheid,

he identifies a “national dysmnesia, the art of rose-colored recall” (Eprile, Persistence 63).

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With its lonely protagonist who, partly because of historical circumstances, partly because

of his own inability to participate in South African life, is at the margins of society, The

Persistence of Memory provides us with an indirect but critical account of South African

history and the national memory. Sometimes resulting in social satire, the novel uncovers

the attempts by the government to instil its own version of the past in the South African

people through the educational system and propaganda. I will link the individual memory

of the protagonist to manifestations of collective memory and the structures that shape it.

The author is, for example, aware of the role of narrative in the shaping of history and the

fallacies behind these narratives. Moreover, I will discuss the role of the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission and its representation in The Persistence of Memory: Paul has

to testify before the Amnesty Committee in the final chapter of the novel.

A last important factor in Paul’s Bildung and his relation with the South African nation

is his particular place in society, determined by his Jewishness. In the identity conflict(s)

in South Africa, the Jewish South African occupied a difficult position: “[I]mmigrant

Jews found themselves ambivalent parts of a social formation that left them marginalised

by the white ruling class, but social and politically privileged over black workers”

(Sherman 505). In an era of racial segregation, this ambivalent position consequently

leads to moral ambiguity, and Sweetbread cannot escape the feeling of historical

complicity. Moreover, he is a descendent of Lithuanian Jews that came to South Africa

via Great Britain. Thus, he is frequently associated with the former colonial power. In a

country where everything is black and white, he tries to maintain his liberal conscience

while at the same time trying to become a loyal, good South African. He suffers from anti-

Semitism and condemns the narrow-minded racism in his fellow South Africans but, from

time to time, he catches himself thinking in the same racist way. Being Jewish locates

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Paul in a privileged position to observe the absurdity of racism in South Africa, but it is

also a major factor in his identity crisis. I will go into some specific scenes where Paul’s

problematic identity and his confrontation with racism are notable.

With my analysis I aim to open academic debate about this award winning novel.

Although it has won the Koret Jewish Book Award for fiction, and was a New York

times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post notable book of the year, the book has not

been the subject of much literary criticism. Moreover, the bulk of this criticism does not

go further than to label it as a clever fable or social satire about a troubled country, and

ignores the presence of subtler dimensions such as the personal traumas of the narrator.

This novel deserves more profound attention from literary critics and scholars as it is an

interesting contribution to recent South African literature, and, moreover, is an appealing

object of study for trauma theorists working towards a less Eurocentric definition of

trauma and trauma literature.

Part 1 – Historical Outline

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Chapter 1. The South African Border War

The military situation in which Paul Sweetbread, the main character of Eprile’s novel,

finds himself upon giving up his studies and enlisting in the South African Defence Force

(SADF) is part of the South African Border War. The Angolan Bush War, as the South

Africans commonly refer to it, lasted for twenty-three years but was mostly a secret war.

Given this secretive character, some background needs to be given about the conflict

which involved many parties, including the two world powers of the Cold War era.

The roots of the conflict are to be found, as is the case for most conflicts on the

continent, in colonial history. In 1884, the area of South-West Africa was colonized by

the Germans as one of the last parts of Africa (Eprile, “Afterword” 287). During the First

World War, however, the Allied Forces called on South Africa to invade the German

colony, and the territory was conquered in 1915 (Steenkamp 3). From then on, the area

was under South Africa’s military rule, and “in 1919 the League of Nations mandated that

South West Africa should fall under the control of South Africa” (Hamann 63). However,

after the Second World War, the League of Nations dissolved and South Africa was

requested to put the territory “under U.N. trusteeship with a view to eventual

independence” (Eprile, “Afterword” 288). South Africa refused, and this was the

beginning of a long legal battle with the U.N. in the International Court of Justice

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(Steenkamp 4). From the 1960s onwards, the population itself also began to oppose South

African rule.

First, the opposition was minor and could be controlled by the South African Police

(SAP). However, after South Africa’s refusal to pass the territory to the U.N. and the

implementation of some of the apartheid laws, the struggle became more violent. The

SAP could not handle the situation anymore and the SADF got involved in the control of

South-West Africa. In 1966, the official beginning of the Border War, South-West

African People’s Organization (SWAPO) and its military wing, People’s Liberation Army

of Namibia (PLAN), started to perform raids on South-West Africa from bases in

neighbouring Zambia.

As Eprile says in his afterword to The Persistence of Memory, in 1974 another major

development took place that would get South Africa involved in a conventional war. After

the fall of dictator Marcello Cautello and the institution of a new government, the

Portuguese announced their withdrawal from Angola and the start of the transition to

independence. However, this transition became a struggle between the Popular Movement

for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of

Angola (UNITA), and South Africa, afraid of the socialist threat, covertly supported

UNITA. With Soviet volunteers and Cubans backing up MPLA and the CIA supporting

South Africa and UNITA, the Angolan civil war turned into a proxy war between the

Soviet bloc and the U.S. (288).

Because of the Angolan civil war and the presence of SWAPO fighters in Angola, the

military presence of the SADF in South-West Africa grew drastically, despite the fact that

this was an illegal occupation. Operations across the Angolan border by the SADF against

SWAPO were frequent and lasted until 1987, when South Africa suffered many casualties

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in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale and opted for peace negotiations led by the U.N., leading

to the independence of Angola and South-West Africa, which took on the name of

Namibia (Eprile, “Afterword” 289).

However, the period of the official cease-fire at the end of the Border War was the

bloodiest period of the twenty-three years of war. Despite Namibia being under the

monitoring of U.N. peacekeeping troops, the SADF used its forces that remained to

confront returning SWAPO soldiers who were still bearing their arms. Typically, both

sides had different versions of the story. The SADF stated that SWAPO was deliberately

making use of the cease-fire to invade the territory and gain control of the northern part of

Namibia, while on the SWAPO side the guerrillas assured they would abide by the cease-

fire and return unarmed (289-90).

Although it is considered one of the most telling events of the Border War, because of

its absolute inhumanity, this killing of returning guerrillas was far from the only atrocity

committed during the struggle. Like in every war, the soldiers had to face very cruel and

traumatizing events. Moreover, war crimes were frequently committed by both sides. In

addition to the physical war this was also a propaganda war. The strategic use of

propaganda was not only to misinform SWAPO leaders but also to keep the war hidden

for the South African public and the international community. Thus, soldiers were lured

into an unnecessary war started on the basis of the typical paranoia of the Cold War era.

Moreover, when they returned, they were left with their physical and psychological

traumas because they were only poorly treated by military psychiatrists and because many

South Africans never knew about SADF’s involvement in fights in Namibia and Angola.

As Eprile notes, only recently have veterans of this secret war begun to tell and write

down their stories, forming the collective memory of the events that took place between

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1966 and 1989. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission also played a

considerable role in this development, as it did in the formation of South Africa’s total

collective memory. In Angola and Namibia similar actions are undertaken to shape their

national memory of the period (290).

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Chapter 2. Apartheid

Present-day South Africa and South African literature cannot be understood without

having at least had a short introduction to the period of apartheid. The Persistence of

Memory is the story of a Jewish boy whose life, like the life of all South Africans, is

strongly determined by this period: his father’s relationship with a mixed-race

housekeeper might be at the basis of the latter’s early death, he gets caught up in an

absurd war, and is scorned repeatedly for his Jewish background. Although great progress

has been made since the 1994 democratic elections, every aspect of life in South Africa is

still pervaded by the legacy of this cruel era. Apartheid, sometimes ironically pronounced

apart-hate, was the official policy of the National Party from 1948 until 1994. It was a

system based on the so called Apartheid laws that sought to institutionalize racial

segregation. Thus, during forty-six years, power in South Africa was in the hands of a

white minority, mostly Afrikaner, and rights of blacks and coloured1 people were severely

restricted.

1 "Coloured" South Africans (the label is contentious) are a [sic] people of mixed lineage descended from slaves brought to the country from east and central Africa, the indigenous Khoisan who lived in the Cape at the time, indigenous Africans and whites. The majority speak Afrikaans. (“South Africa’s Population”)

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Apartheid, however, was not the questionable invention of one political party; it was a

policy with roots in colonial times:

[I]t is evident that it was not the National Party government that introduced racially

discriminatory practices to this part of the world. Nor is it likely that the National

Party government was the first to perpetrate some or most of the types of gross

violations of human rights recorded in this report (Truth and Reconciliation

Commission 1:25).

The “racially discriminatory practices” had started from the moment that the region

was settled by Europeans in the seventeenth century and, when, in 1910, the Union

of South Africa was set up, there was no significant change. The Act of Union gave

political control to the white minority as “only white South Africans [...] were truly

citizens” (Beck 101). Given complete political control, the Union government,

mostly British, passed the Native Land Act three years later, prohibiting people of

other races, except those living in the Cape area, to buy land outside certain

reserves. “Africans lost their rights to 90 percent of South Africa’s land, and South

Africa would forever be a racially divided country” (Beck 116). Another act, with

major consequences for the social situation in South Africa, was the Urban Areas

Act:

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Legislation, which was consolidated in the Natives (Urban Areas) Act, 1923,

entrenched urban segregation and controlled African mobility by means of pass

laws. The pass laws were designed to force Africans into labour and to keep them

there under conditions and at wage levels that suited white employers, and to deny

them any bargaining power (South Africa, Government Communication and

Information System2 26).

In 1936, “white supremacy was further entrenched by the United Party with the

removal of the Africans of the Cape Province who qualified [to vote] from the

common voters’ roll” (South Africa, GCIS 27).

The introduction of these restrictive laws fostered protest among the targeted groups.

However, this protest was relatively mild. It was the economic difficulties during the

Second World War and the post-war period that enhanced discontent. Hence, according to

the history outline in the South African government’s yearbook, the “primary appeal” of

the National Party for its supporters “lay in its determination to maintain white

domination in the face of rising mass resistance; uplift poor Afrikaners; challenge the pre-

eminence of English-speaking whites in public life, the professions and business; and

abolish the remaining imperial ties” (South Africa, GCIS 33). In the run-up to the 1948

general elections, the Herenigde Nasionale Party already campaigned openly on apartheid

policy and, “[a]s used and developed in the course of election campaigning, apartheid

came to stand for support of the physical separation of black and white, this separation to

be achieved by legislative policies and state action” (Clark and Worger 4).When the new

government, led by D. F. Malan, implemented its policies, they were, in most aspects, a

2 Subsequently abbreviated to GCIS

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continuation of the segregationist policies which were already in place in South Africa

(South Africa, GCIS 27).

One of the first apartheid laws was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949,

which prohibited marriage between members of different racial backgrounds. However,

the act brought about some difficulties in asserting which racial category one belonged to.

This problem was tackled by the Population Registration Act, which was passed in 1950,

and was “the very bedrock of the apartheid state in that it provided for the classification of

every South African into one of four racial categories” (Truth and Reconciliation

Commission 1:33). Moreover, adding to the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the

Immorality Act of 1950 made interracial sexual relations illegal.

Apartheid legislation not only sought to prevent people from having interracial

relations, but also aimed to limit all contact by separating the population in space. As was

already mentioned in the discussion of the roots of apartheid, this process had started with

the Native Land Act of 1913 and the amendment of 1936. However, many people were

still living side by side in the settlements, and the authorities put an end to this with the

Group Areas Act (1950), by which “the entire country was demarcated into zones for

exclusive occupation by designated groups” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1:34).

The act that gave apartheid society its questionable iconic character was the

Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953). After the institution of this act, signboards

such as “whites only” appeared in different public areas on benches or public toilets, for

instance. The Act “[a]llowed for public facilities and transport to be reserved for particular

race groups” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1: 458). In addition, the Bantu

Education Act separated the education system, African schools preparing black students

for lives as servants or labourers (1:458).

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However repressive these laws were, opposition from inside South Africa was weak

and the National Party did not have many problems suppressing it (Truth and

Reconciliation Commission 1:38). In the 1950s, the apartheid legislation engendered

“considerable political activity and campaigning” that went by a non-violence policy

(1:38). However, “[t]ime and again in the 1950s, non-violence as a vehicle of struggle was

shown to be an impotent and ineffective counter to state action” (1:38). However, even

armed struggle did not have much impact on the apartheid government. It was only in the

1980s that the government began to experience difficulties in suppressing the opposition.

By the 1980s black townships became as good as ungovernable because actions by

liberation organizations and popular protest began to form a unity (South Africa, GCIS

29). Not only did the African people unite, there was also contact between the opposing

parties:

The demonising of opponents was giving way to dialogue. There was talking,

listening and searching for ways forward. The drastic problems that needed urgent

attention were beginning to be faced within a new social context - a new kind of

relationship (Villa-Vicencio and Ngesi 270).

In addition, South Africa’s systematic and brutal segregation found itself more and

more opposed to global public opinion as “[d]evelopments in neighbouring states,

[…] left South Africa exposed as the last bastion of white supremacy” (South

Africa, GCIS 29).

After P. W. Botha’s resignation as president for the National Party, F. W. de Klerk,

who became president in 1989, unbanned liberation movements and released political

prisoners, although South Africa was still doing well economically and militarily. This

progressive action by de Klerk, considered to be a conservative pro-apartheid politician,

19

came as a surprise to many (Villa-Vicencio and Ngesi 287). The reason for this change in

policy were the international sanctions against South Africa, such as the trade embargo,

the continuous organized popular resistance, and the contact between adversaries that

began under Botha.

Following the release of Nelson Mandela, formal negotiations were started between de

Klerk and the ANC. Towards the end of apartheid, many believed in the possibility for

Mandela’s liberation movement to form the new government. Although there had already

been contact while Mandela was still in prison, the basis for negotiations was laid at a

meeting in Grote Schuur, the president’s official residence. The purpose of this

preparatory meeting was to ensure a peaceful transition of power (287). In 1991, at the

Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) talks “produced both steady

progress and bitter debate” (289). However, the ANC and the government could not reach

a compromise, and there had never been so much violence.

CODESA broke down as the ANC pulled out, holding the government responsible for

not bringing an end to the bloodshed, notably during the Boipatong massacre of June 1992

(289). However, as violence persisted, Mandela and de Klerk started negotiations again,

and in 1993 they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because of their continuing

talks, which would lead to the 1994 peaceful democratic elections with universal suffrage.

The ANC won the elections and the National Party became the official opposition party.

A government of national unity was established, led by Mandela as president. Moreover,

during the period of 1990 to 1996, all apartheid laws were abolished, and in 1996 South

Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission took up its mission.

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Chapter 3. Truth and Reconciliation

Apartheid ended in negotiations about how the transition would be made from the state as

it was under apartheid to a peaceful and stable democracy. The major concern during this

period was to negotiate a peaceful transition and prevent a civil war or the emergence of

more violence. Although public and international opinion were sceptical about the

outcome, South Africa’s transition did not bring about any such violence and the 1994

elections were commonly referred to as “the miracle of South Africa”. However, this

“miracle” was only the beginning of a long process of nation-building and the search for a

new, multicultural South Africa. A particularly important and unique phenomenon

established in the aftermath of the democratic elections was the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission (TRC). This institution also plays a great role in Sweetbread’s life because,

at the end of the novel he has to testify before the Amnesty Committee, and it seems that

this enables him to finally come to terms with himself and the South African society.

It was indeed a unique phenomenon because it was the first time in history that a truth

commission had such a wide mandate; it was, for instance, empowered to grant amnesty

and even to subpoena the current government. In this respect, the TRC’s mandate also

differed greatly from that of the Nuremberg trials after WWII, which was based on the

21

principle of victor’s justice. Another unique feature of the South African Commission, as

Desmond Tutu puts it in his introduction to the final report, was “its open and transparent

nature. Similar commissions elsewhere in the world have met behind closed doors. Ours

has operated in the full glare of publicity” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1: 1).

As a result of the negotiations between politicians about the interim constitution, the

legal basis for the TRC was laid in the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation

Act 34 (1995). According to this act, the Commission’s main goal was

[t]o provide for the investigation and the establishment of as complete a picture as

possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights

committed during the period from 1 March 1960 to the cut-off date contemplated in

the Constitution, within or outside the Republic, emanating from the conflicts of the

past, and the fate or whereabouts of the victims of such violations.

Moreover, the Commission was given the task of “the granting of amnesty to persons who

make full disclosure of all the relevant facts relating to acts associated with a political

objective committed in the course of the conflicts of the past during the said

period”(Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34). This twofold task was

taken up by two different committees, the Human Rights Violations Committee and the

Amnesty Committee. The Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee, a third committee,

was established to restore the victims’ dignity and make proposals to assist with the

rehabilitation.

Thus, the nature of the Commission is very different from war tribunals like the ones in

Nuremberg or the Hague. These war tribunals seek justice by prosecuting and convicting

war criminals. South Africa’s Commission, on the other hand, sought “a restorative justice

which is concerned not so much with punishment as with correcting imbalances, restoring

22

broken relationships – with healing, harmony and reconciliation” (Truth and

Reconciliation Commission 1: 9).

Consequently, South Africa’s concern is how to deal with the past in order to

understand the present and provide the country with a better future. However, as Charles

Villa-Vicencio and S’Fiso Ngesi affirm, “[i]n South Africa today, there are perhaps as

many views on the TRC as there are people” (292). They distinguish three general

opinions. There are those who think that the past should be laid to rest and remain in the

past; according to this group, to meddle with the past would only hinder nation-building.

The second opinion they distinguish is the one held by the Truth Commission itself, which

thinks it is important to open up old wounds and start a process of proper healing. The

third line of thought is one which opposes restorative justice and argues for the

punishment of perpetrators and the release of freedom fighters (292).

The particularity of the TRC lies exactly in its way of engaging with the past and its

determination to uncover as much of the “ugly truths” as possible. What Shane Graham

explicitly lauds is its

use of conditional amnesty as a “carrot” to coax information out of perpetrators, the

balancing of the amnesty proceedings with a process sensitive to the needs of

victims, and the very public nature of the truth-finding process [which] have all

contributed to the unearthing of more information (of an admittedly narrow and

particular kind) about the past than might otherwise have been possible. (32)

According to Graham, the information obtained, however restrictive, made it very difficult

for perpetrators and white Afrikaners, directly or indirectly complicit, to deny apartheid as

such and prevented the country from going into a state of amnesia after the trauma of

apartheid (32).

23

Moreover, by collecting these different versions of the gruesome past, the TRC helped

form a national history even before the first narratives about the period were beginning to

get published. The TRC gave South Africans a chance to participate actively in the

process of democratic nation-building. Nonetheless, Graham also states that the TRC,

however valuable, was only the first step in a long process “of forging new social

memories of the past” (33).

Part of its contribution to shaping South African collective memory was possible

because of the broad media attention. The public hearings that started on 15 April 1996

were covered almost daily in newspapers and on radio and television. The TRC itself was

aware of the crucial role of the mediatization of the Commission. Gratitude can be heard

in the words of Deputy Chairman Alex Boraine:

the TRC owes a huge debt to the media of South Africa. Without coverage in

newspapers and magazines and without the account of proceedings on TV screens

and without the voice of the TRC being beamed through radio across the land, its

work would be disadvantaged and immeasurably poorer (qtd in Garman 12).

Boraine could have been right in stating that the media had a considerable influence; it

was especially welcome for the realisation of the Commission’s objective of national

reconciliation. For instance, Annelies Verdoolaege analysed Special Report, one of the

most influential TV programmes covering the Commission, and argues that the media

tried to be even-handed but were not able to maintain their objectivity throughout the long

period of public hearings. Although generally media coverage was diversified, Special

Report was so influential that it unwittingly staged its commitment towards reconciliation,

which “could have helped the TRC to achieve its main objectives” (Verdoolaege 196).

24

From this short introduction to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it

becomes clear that, however contested it might have been, the TRC’s work at least paved

part of the way towards reconciliation. By opting for an open approach, it brought the

creation of a national history to the public sphere and gave the South African people the

chance to participate in the negotiation of their collective past and the building of a new

democratic nation. With its strong resolution not to seek retributive justice but restorative

justice, by attempting to disclose as much of the truth as possible, and by granting

conditional amnesty, it probably helped to consolidate the “miracle” of 1994. However,

one must be aware that it could have turned out differently had certain factors, like

positive media coverage, not played to the advantage of the commission. Moreover, the

commission presented its final report in 1998, with its addenda in 2003, but the

continuation of the task of reconciliation was taken up by organizations such as the

Institute for Justice and Reconciliation and the Institute for Healing of Memories.

Part 2 – Trauma Theory and Memory

26

Chapter 4. Trauma Studies: A Genealogy

I half expected our friend to raise his voice and begin a melodramatic scene. Except however for the fact that he had grown a little more high-strung and more voluble his behavior was not markedly different from before. But his tone had altered. He spoke now in jerky phrases punctuated with the most blasphemous oaths and accompanied by grimaces which were frightening to behold. The demon in him seemed to be coming out. Or rather, the mutilated being who had been wounded and humiliated beyond all human endurance.

Henry Miller, The Alcoholic Veteran with the Washboard Cranium

Although theories about trauma had already been around since the end of the 19th century,

they have only recently gained prominence outside the field of psychiatry. Since the

middle of the 1990s, trauma theory has become one of the most influential analytical

models in literary studies, and many western novels have been analysed or reanalysed in

light of this paradigm. This reappearance of trauma on the map of academia can best be

understood in view of its emblematic character “at the end of a century saturated with

unprecedented wounding events” (Hernandez 134). Two major theorists have helped

bring about this paradigm shift: Cathy Caruth, who wrote introductions to some of the key

27

works in trauma theory and helped Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub to acquire their

canonical position in the field, and Dominick LaCapra, one of the very few historians

interested in opening up the field of history to the study of experiences instead of facts,

more particularly, the experience of limit events. He calls the paradigm shift of the 1990s

“the turn to experience” (History 4).

However, these two authors and other theorists are not completely innovative. They

draw on the work of the late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century pioneer of trauma

studies Sigmund Freud. He was one of the first researchers to link the symptoms of what

we now call trauma to a psychological cause. Until the end of the 19th century, the word,

derived from Greek, only referred to a physical injury. In his work with Joseph Breuer,

Studies on Hysteria (1895), and in his essay “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), Freud

explained the symptoms of “hysteria” mostly in sexual terms. According to him, women

that had been abused in their childhood were not traumatized by that experience because

they did not yet have the cognitive framework of sexual relations. A second experience

later in life, not necessarily sexual in nature, triggered the memory of the first and caused

hysteria because the adult woman by then had established the cognitive framework.

However, he had to revise his theory because of increasing social pressure. Most women

that presented symptoms of hysteria were of the middle class and, thus, Freud’s

“seduction theory” seemed to imply that the middle-class was frequently abusing its

children. Freud adapted his theory in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), linking

hysteria to the sexual cravings of middle class women in Victorian society. However, with

the advent of WWI, Freud saw his theory of ‘the pleasure principle’ collapse because

returning soldiers manifested the same symptoms. He could not explain the nightmares of

28

these soldiers as pleasure seeking, and in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud

introduced the “death drive” as another explanatory principle:

It is impossible to classify as wish-fulfilments the dreams we have been discussing

which occur in traumatic neuroses, or the dreams during psychoanalyses which

bring to memory the psychical traumas of childhood. They arise, rather, in

obedience to the compulsion to repeat, though it is true that in analysis that

compulsion is supported by the wish (which is encouraged by “suggestion”) to

conjure up what has been forgotten and repressed. ... If there is a “beyond the

pleasure principle,” it is only consistent to grant that there was also a time before the

purpose of dreams was the fulfilment of wishes (32-33).

He explains the death drive as the compulsion to repeat by the traumatized person in order

to bind the trauma, and, this way, return to an earlier time of total rest before birth.

However, apart from Freud’s ground-breaking study of hysteria and subsequent

publications, the interest in trauma did not quite catch on. Nonetheless, during and after

WWI, “the virtual epidemic of war neuroses made is impossible to deny the existence in

the male of traumatic symptoms which, although gathered together under the rubric of

‘shell shock’, were recognized as not different in kind from those observed in the

hysterical female” (Leys 4). Physicians and psychiatrists saw the same characteristics with

soldiers of the Second World War, but the connection with previous cases was not

generally made, and soldiers were said to be suffering from “combat fatigue” or, in the

case of holocaust survivors, “survivor syndrome” (5). Only after the Vietnam war the link

was made, and the American Psychiatric Association came up with the term Post-

Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “[I]t was largely as the result of an essentially political

struggle by psychiatrists, social workers, activists and others to acknowledge the post-war

29

sufferings of the Vietnam War veteran” (5). The interest in trauma was aroused again and

work on a more unified theory of trauma was continued. From the 1990s onwards

psychological trauma was also seen as a cultural phenomenon, thus emerging in the field

of literary studies and other more culturally oriented disciplines.

However, the definition of trauma and PTSD remains a contested one, each researcher

adding his or her own emphasis. Caruth mentions this contested nature and establishes a

working definition:

While the precise definition of post-traumatic stress disorder is contested, most

descriptions generally agree that there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an

overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive

hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with

numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also

increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event. (Caruth,

“Introduction” 4)

She points out that the traumatizing feature does not lie in the event itself, nor in the

“distorting personal significances attached to it” (4). What causes the trauma to happen is

the belatedness of the experience, the failure to completely and consciously experience the

event at the time. The limit event starts to haunt the victim in its absent presence, thus

preventing simple knowledge and memory (7).

In her discussion of the belated quality of trauma, Caruth draws on Freud’s train crash

model which Freud uses to explain how a victim can leave the sight of the accident, a train

crash, without manifesting signs of any psychological disturbance, but later start to suffer

from the consequences of the shock. However, Caruth’s interpretation of latency is

slightly different:

30

Yet what is truly striking about the accident victim’s experience of the event, and

what in fact constitutes the central enigma revealed Freud’s example, is not so much

the period of forgetting that occurs after the accident, but rather the fact that the

victim of the crash was never fully conscious during the accident itself [...] The

experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the

forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known but in an inherent latency

within the experience itself” (Unclaimed 17).

Caruth is more explicit about the fact that the latency happens at the moment of the

traumatizing event itself; the event gets registered at the moment of impact but is not

experienced because the brain cannot cope with it. The latency, for Caruth, is inherent to

traumatization, and there is a temporary dissociation. Often, victims feel like they are

witnessing but not experiencing the event. This dissociation can lead to Multiple

Personality Disorder, which is nowadays called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID):

The essential feature of Dissociative Identity Disorder is the presence of two or

more distinct identities or personality states (Criterion A) that recurrently take

control of behavior (Criterion B). There is an inability to recall important personal

information, the extent of which is too great to be explained by ordinary

forgetfulness (Criterion C). The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological

effects of a substance or a general medical condition (Criterion D). In children, the

symptoms cannot be attributed to imaginary playmates or other fantasy play

(American Psychiatric Association).

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Chapter 5. Traumatic Memory vs. Narrative Memory

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a lustre obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

Lord Byron, Detached Thoughts The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

Lord Byron and with him many others were strongly aware of it: memory is a tricky thing

and, contrary to what we would want to believe, our control over it is limited. Over the

ages, the very nature of memory has been an important topic of discussion in intellectual

circles. It intrigues us because with the capacity of remembering also comes forgetting,

sometimes even the capacity to forget. Moreover, as Dalí suggests, humankind is prone to

fill the gaps in its memory with the brilliance of the imagination. Such pondering on the

mechanisms and, in particular, the troubled nature of memory became even more

prevalent in the realm of trauma studies.

32

The distinction between traumatic memory and narrative memory, introduced by Pierre

Janet, is of great value for trauma and memory studies. Janet was an early-twentieth-

century psychiatrist who like some of his contemporaries was “struck by the observation

that some memories could become the nucleus of later psychopathology [...]. They

recognized , on the one hand, the flexibility of the mind and, on the other, how certain

memories became obstacles that kept people from going on with their lives” (van der Kolk

and van der Hart 158). The group of early psychologists that Janet belonged to “developed

a comprehensive formulation about the effects of traumatic memories on consciousness”

(159).

Next to traumatic memories, caused, according to Janet, by “certain happenings,” (qtd

in van der Kolk and van der Hart 158) and narrative memories, Janet also distinguished

habit memory. This is the “automatic integration of new information without much

conscious attention to what is happening” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 160). This is

what humankind has in common with animals. What is unique for mankind is our

ordinary memory (160). Our everyday experiences are stored in the form of a narrative,

that is why they are so easily accessible if we want to talk about them. Moreover, we can

tell the story in a different form depending on the situation. “Narrative memory consists of

mental constructs, which people use to make sense out of experience” (160). Traumatic

memories, on the other hand, are stored in a different manner; they are primarily visual in

nature and are not easily accessible. Moreover, they are characterized by their circularity

and a-temporality; the past keeps haunting the victim in the present, the same images keep

coming back because the traumatized person was unable to integrate the an extreme

experience: “fragments of these unintegrated experiences may later manifest recollections

of behavioral re-enactments” (160) Consequently, Janet concludes that part of the healing

33

process is to make traumatic memories accessible by turning them into narrative

memories:

It consisted of a stepwise process of reexperiencing and verbalizing traumatic

memories, starting with the least threatening, and working toward assimilation of

the most traumatic events. For many tramatized [sic] patients, however, it was too

painful and demanding to actually relive and verbalize the trauma. They simply

could not manage to transform the traumatic event into a neutral narrative (van der

Hart, Brown and van der kolk 85).

Although Janet’s theories were forgotten for a large part of the twentieth century,

contemporary trauma theorists are gratefully making use of Janet’s distinction of the

different sorts of memory, and his view of the healing process, to posit their own theories.

However, the healing process and the way trauma is dealt with in historical discourse is

contested. LaCapra, for example, based on Freudian psychoanalysis, distinguishes three

different ways of dealing with trauma: denial, acting-out, and working-through which he

also observes in historiography. For LaCapra, turning traumatic memory into a narrative

memory does not necessarily imply successful healing, because “narrative memory is

capable of improvising on the past so that the account of an event varies from telling to

telling” (Whitehead 87). This possibility to come to narrating the traumatic memory, but

at the same time changing it can be linked to what Eric Santner calls narrative fetishism:

34

[T]he construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously

designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into

being in the first place […]; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for

mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and

origin of loss elsewhere. Narrative fetishism releases one from the burden of having

to reconstitute one’s self-identity under ‘posttraumatic’ conditions (144).

Narrative fetishism is a form of denial. Many victims of trauma deny, for instance, the

loss of a beloved person. In historical discourse this can take the form of flat-out denial or

“subtle modes of evasion” (LaCapra, Representing 48). For most trauma theorists this is

not an appropriate response, and it is this kind of response that is attacked in Adorno’s

famous saying that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Prisms 34).

When we return to Caruth’s definition of PTSD we can see that she talks about

“repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the

event” (Caruth, “ Introduction” 4). This is similar to Freud’s melancholia and what

LaCapra, following Freud, calls acting-out: a repetitive pathological behaviour where you

keep returning to the moment of the trauma. As is clear from Caruth’s description, this

acting-out can both be mental and physical. LaCapra argues that acting-out is an essential

part of the healing process. The trauma victim always has to pass through a period of

acting-out, but when one gets stuck in the compulsive behaviour there is no chance of

renewal or regeneration.

According to LaCapra, in dealing with trauma it is essential to reach a stage of

working-through; this stage is similar to what Freud called mourning. In the process of

working-through, the trauma victim or the historian/trauma theorist gains a critical

distance on the event. By working-through, one comes to acknowledge the trauma and

35

enables oneself to overcome the compulsive fixation on it. The trauma is not denied, but is

given a place in the memories of the victim or the traumatized society.

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Chapter 6. Collective Memory

The term collective memory is more widespread than traumatic or narrative memory, it is

even frequently heard in everyday conversation. It was coined in the 1950s, later than

Janet’s contribution to the field of memory, by the French philosopher and sociologist

Maurice Halbwachs in his seminal work On Collective Memory (1952).

Halbwachs and his teacher Émile Durkheim were the first to launch the idea that, in

addition to the individual memory, there also exists a collective memory. This memory,

however, is not an objective record of everything that happens within a society but a

memory shared by one particular group in society. According to Halbwachs, “every

collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time” (22), and

it is constructed by that group according to the social framework it belongs to in society.

Halbwachs further argues that there is a two-way relationship between the individual and

the social framework of his group. On the one hand, the individual remembers by placing

him- or herself in the context of the group; on the other, the group memory manifests

itself and gives shape to the individual’s recollections (40).

Thus, the collective memory is not the sum of the memories of all individuals

belonging to the group. Halbwachs comments on the nature of the social frameworks:

37

It is necessary to show, besides, that the collective frameworks of memory are not

constructed after the fact by the combination of individual recollections; nor are

they empty forms where recollections coming from elsewhere would insert

themselves. Collective frameworks are, to the contrary, precisely the instruments

used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in

accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society. (40)

Hence, one might say that all individual memories are rooted in a social context and

structure, and that it is impossible for individuals to remember independently from their

social context. However, there is one area in which the individual memory escapes the

social structuring: the realm of dreams. In his introduction to Halbwachs’s work, Lewis A.

Coser comments that “dreams lack structure, continuity, orderly progression, and

regularity. The dream, Halbwachs argues , differs fundamentally from all other human

memories because, in contradistinction to them, it lacks organization” (Halbwachs 23).

This is the “result of the absence of other human actors”(23).

In other works on the subject, Halbwachs also discusses the relationship between past

and present by opposing history to collective memory. In Olick’s account of Halbwachs’

theory this opposition between history and collective memory is described as follows:

Autobiographical memory is memory of those events that we ourselves experience

(though those experiences are shaped by group memberships), while historical

memory is memory that reaches us only through historical records. History is the

remembered past to which we no longer have an “organic” relation—the past that is

no longer an important part of our lives—while collective memory is the active past

that forms our identities. (Olick 7)

38

It is precisely on this part of his theory that later scholars have worked to expand it and

make it more comprehensible. Principally, Jan Assmann has added much to the

development of these concepts. Within the collective memory, Assmann distinguishes

two forms, communicative and cultural memory (kulturelles Gedächtnis). The former is “

‘biographical’ and ‘factual’ and is located within a generation of contemporaries who

witness an event as adults and who can pass on their bodily and affective connection to

that event to their descendants” (Hirsch 110). The latter comes into being when the

communicative memory is institutionalized, when it becomes “archival memory” (110).

The communicative memory can be institutionalized by its direct bearers in “traditional

archives or books or through ritual, commemoration, or performance” (110).

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Chapter 7. Testimony

The role of testimony in the context of trauma theory has been the specific focus of the

work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Laub underscores the importance of the witness

and testimonies for the understanding of specific events, even for the understanding of

history. For historiographers, the testimonies of witnesses are relevant only if they can be

backed up with substantial empirical proof. Historiography is only concerned with the

facts, while trauma theory, by analysing witness testimonies, seeks to get access to

experiences. What trauma theory tries to do is to write the “felt – history”, how it felt to be

a witness to a potentially traumatizing event. Felman and Laub’s work originated in a

concern with the most horrifying event of the last century, namely the Holocaust.

What is curious about Laub’s account of the Holocaust is that, while he values

testimony more than historical facts, he calls the Holocaust “an event without a witness,”

stating that “what precisely made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which,

during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses” (Laub, “Truth and

Testimony” 65). For Laub, witnessing an event is witnessing the truth of what is

happening and recording it in perception and memory (65). Thus, many people from

within or outside the event could have witnessed what was happening. However, Laub’s

40

reasoning is that “most actual or potential witnesses failed one-by-one to occupy their

position as a witness, and at a certain point it seemed as if there was no one left to witness

what was taking place” (66). The perpetrators themselves were aware of the atrociousness

of their project and tried to cover it up by imposing their ideology on their victims. The

witnessing of victims themselves was unreliable because of its being “inside the event”

(66); they could not grasp what was happening to them and never had a full picture of it.

Moreover, the Nazi ideology gradually convinced victims of their otherness and

inhumanity, thus creating a situation in which the victim could not even bear witness to

him- or herself. Even outsider witnesses were unreliable because they did not have a full

picture of it either or they did not want to know what was happening.

However, what Laub observes is that after a period of silence, testimonies that could

not be uttered during the event were beginning to be transmitted and to get heard .

According to Laub, it has “taken a new generation […] removed enough from the

experience, to be in a position to ask questions” (68). What he observes is a period of

latency during which the delusional Nazi ideology still has not lost its power and what

was missing in order to be able to testify was “the human cognitive capacity to perceive

and to assimilate the totality of what was really happening at the time” (69). Nevertheless,

it is important that the stories of survivors are heard, because they all feel the need to

restore their humanity by bearing witness. It is in the process of testifying that the survivor

finally takes up his or her position as a witness. In order for a testimony to come about,

however, the scene must be set for a reliving, and a listener is needed. According to Laub,

this listener or interviewer then actually becomes a witness before the narrator does. The

listener becomes the “blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first

41

time” (Felman and Laub 57). Thus, the listener is the first true witness through whom the

survivor can be a witness to himself.

However, the act of listening or bearing witness to a testimony is a delicate one

because instead of just listening to the story, the listener becomes a participant in the

testimony. In order for the testimony to be successful, the listener has to display a certain

degree of empathy. This “desirable empathy involves not full identification but what

might be termed empathic unsettlement in the face of traumatic limit events, their

perpetrators, and their victims” (LaCapra, Writing 102). The listener has come to feel the

same feelings as the trauma victim and has to address them in order to arrive at successful

witnessing. However, he or she must maintain his own position separate from the listener

so that he or she can keep looking at the event from his or her own perspective and he or

she has to take on the difficulties that the witnessing provokes in him- or herself (Felman

and Laub 58).

Part 3 – The Persistence of Memory

43

Chapter 8. Paul’s Traumatic Experiences

Most of the existing criticism of The Persistence of Memory sees it as a social satire, and

thinks of the emphasis on memory as a clever way of the writer to analyse the South

African condition. Indeed, Eprile thoughtfully explores the mechanisms of memory and

forgetting to uncover white South Africa’s way of distorting history and shaping the

present to its own benefit. However, literary critics fail to comment on the connection

between the various traumas Paul goes through, his father’s suicide in particular, and his

unusual memory. In this chapter, I will analyse this connection, specifically with respect

to its consequences for the reliability of Paul as a narrator. This aspect of the novel as well

is ignored by the critics. Theo Tait, in his review for the New York Times, mentions the

presence of an unreliable narrator, but does not bother to explain why this literary

technique is an important feature of the novel. What I want to argue is that the disclosing

of Sweetbread’s unreliable nature puts the whole novel into a new perspective, and makes

the reader reconsider everything that he has read before. The death of his father seems to

be only a very unfortunate event in Paul’s life story which is half-heartedly dealt with by

the author, and without major consequences. During a subsequent reading, however, it

becomes the central event of the novel which determines every aspect of Paul’s narration.

44

Sweetbread is only exposed as an unreliable narrator toward the end of the novel, when

he is called upon to testify in the amnesty case of Captain Lyddie. In order to undercut

Sweetbread’s testimony, Lyddie’s lawyer confronts Paul with his former psychiatrist

which he started attending after the death of his father. In the witness box, after a long

struggle between the lawyers whether it is morally right to utter a patient’s diagnosis in

public, Dr. Vishinski confesses that Sweetbread suffers from PTSD after having witnessed

the discovery of his father’s body:

What I came to conclude was that Mr. Sweetbread suffers from delusions of

memory. The human mind does funny things in response to overwhelming trauma –

sometimes we blot the bad event out completely, so it never happened. Other times,

we re-create it over and over in our minds, adding new details each time. Paul was

one of the haunted ones, replaying his father’s suicide continually; remember, he

witnessed the discovery of his father’s body. He essentially split his psyche into two

entities: one, the everyday ‘normal’ person; the other, a hypertrophied, prodigious

recording device that was beyond his control, what he so eloquently called his

‘poisoned gift.’ [...] This dissociation is a form of PTSD, albeit an unusual one, and

I have to say that it did predate his military service. (Eprile, Persistence 259)

This diagnosis does not only undercut Paul’s testimony , but it also undermines the image

we have of Sweetbread as a person with a perfect memory who remembers everything

exactly the way it was.

As Theo Tait points out, “Paul’s narration proceeds by ‘looping digression’, warily

circling the horrors at the center of the story, following his elephantlike memory along

various intriguing detours, for instance, into South African history or insect life” (Tait 1).

It seems as if he is reticent to narrate the story of his father’s death, but, at the same time,

45

he is giving the reader some clues about his anxieties that have come forth from this

unfortunate event. For example, he already mentions Dr. Vishinski early on in the novel

saying that, by telling the story of Miss Tompkins, he is “chasing the butterflies of

memory, as the good Dr. Vish would say” (Eprile, Persistence 16). Here he is already

presenting us his extraordinary gift, his perfect memory which the reader will only be able

to expose at the end of the novel as an invention by the traumatized mind.

In fact, he is constantly recreating knowledge and memories of his childhood in the

minutest detail, but when he comes to narrate the discovery of his father’s body he deals

with it in one short passage:

“Is there a particular pair of shoes you would like to talk about?” Dr. Vishinski

inquires in a friendly, neutral voice. Damn him. He has, I find out in the course of

successive sessions like this one, an uncanny knack of focusing on just what I want

obliterated. For there, hovering like foxfire at the outermost corners of my vision,

are the pale leather soles of an expensive pair of hand-stitched brogans glimpsed

dangling luminously in the crepuscular recesses of the maid’s quarters by a

frightened child who is doing his best to hide behind his mother’s ample hips. There

are suddenly men in uniform everywhere, and I am swept away by strong arms to

the comforting familiarity of the kitchen chair, while somewhere a woman’s voice

screeches horribly without cease. Conspicuous by its abrupt cessation is the

mechanical thumping of one of Dad’s company’s power compressors. That was

why the van was backed up in the driveway in place of the Mercedes. I should have

immediately recognized the choking-termite logo, the peppery odor of industrial-

grade pesticide (Eprile, Persistence 34)

In the passage as well, he focuses on details such as the logo, the smell, a pair of shoes,

but he seems unable to narrate what the real tragedy was that he witnessed. The scene cuts

46

off, and the following scene starts with Paul mentioning that his father has died, but no

connection is made with the previous scene.

It is clear that Sweetbread wants to tell the story of his suffering, but he can only do so

indirectly through the encounters with his psychiatrist, and his father’s interest in insect

life. In a comment on a literary blog called The Page 99 Test, Eprile explains his use of

South African insect life as “representing the wildness of its [South Africa’s] indigenous

inhabitants, a bit of anthropology thrown in, and the absurdity of the events leavening the

pain and brutality that lies always under the surface of this world” (Eprile, Online

Posting). However, the references to insect life do not only serve as anthropological

comments, but play an important role in Sweetbread’s narrative. The memory of his

father’s profession as exterminator together with his books are the things that trigger some

more direct insights into Paul’s own anxieties. One scene that is particularly interesting in

this respect is a scene where Paul is reading a book by one of his father’s favourite

authors, and thinks he recognizes his father in a praying mantis:

“Dad?” I say, my voice croaking in the stillness. The praying mantis turns its

triangular head in my direction, eyes me inquisitively. Well, it sounds stupid now,

but it could have been him. It had the same angular face and elongated limbs, the

same skeptical expression, though Dad always wore glasses. I had never seen a

mantis like this one, and have not seen one like it since. About twelve inches long,

pale yellow instead of the usual green, it moved with deliberation up the lamp stem,

only turning occasionally to nod in my direction in that familiar vaguely friendly

way. [...]

47

The mantis turns back in my direction, raises the burring, protesting snack to its

mouth in a friendly toast, and begins to feed with a loud rustling. I break of more pie

and watch him eat. Crumbs drop onto my lap; a detached brown wing spirals

downward. Why, Dad? Why did you do it? I want to ask, but self-consciousness

stops me. What am I doing here, the voice of reason asks, talking to an insect in the

middle of the night? (Eprile, Persistence 21-2)

From this scene it is obvious that Paul was left with some unresolved questions as to the

reason for his father’s demise. However, the “Why did you do it?” (22) implies that, even

if he was still a young child at the moment he already suspected, or even knew that it was

not an accident. Moreover, he has the idea that the desperate act of his father was the

consequence of an affair he had with the family’s maid, who was of mixed race. At a

certain point, even before the scene with the praying mantis, Paul comments that

“[a]lthough she remained with us for six years, Corinthia invariably treated me with polite

distance spilling, when her guard was down, into open contempt, and I developed no love

for her. My feelings were not the issue here” (Eprile, Persistence 18). With the emphasis

on “my”, he indicates that there were feelings that were the issue, but it were rather his

dad’s feelings toward the maid, not his that were important.

Based on these scenes we can derive that Paul has problems dealing with the death of

his father, because, however accurate he claims his memories to be, he can never be sure

about the circumstances under which his father died. He can only rely on tensions in the

family that he supposedly noticed as a child, things that he sensed, but could not

understand. Moreover, there is a scene in which Paul narrates how it was Miss Tompkins

who advised his mother to send him to Dr. Vishinski from which he concludes that it must

48

have something to do with his marks. From his further explanation for the state he is in it

becomes obvious that Paul is not just shook up by the event, but is traumatized by it:

I should say here that my poor performance in class had nothing to do with my

being overcome with grief, as preferably romantic as that would appear. No, the real

difficulty was not that my memory was getting worse or being blocked by emotion,

but that it was getting better... to the point that I could let nothing go and every word

in the present suggested something from before, time melting into a series of

continually running screens in which the present moment was indistinguishable

from recollections of the past (Eprile, Persistence 52).

The same feelings are present when Paul describes how he lives just before going into the

army. He “lived from minute to minute, from day to day – a state some young people

foolishly associate with nirvana but that is really the apathy of despair” (Eprile,

Persistence 85). This account of what he is experiencing is very close to LaCapra’s

description, based on Freud, of traumatic memory:

“Traumatic memory (at least in Freud’s account) may involve belated temporality

and a period of latency between a real or fantasized early event and a later one that

somehow recalls it and triggers renewed repression, dissociation, or foreclosure and

intrusive behavior. But when the past is uncontrollably relived, it is as if there were

no difference between it and the present” (LaCapra, History 119).

The state of “timelessness” in which Sweetbread finds himself is also represented by

Eprile in the titles of the different parts of his novel. Book One, for example, is called The

Present, while it covers the years of Sweetbread’s youth. Moreover, the narrative voice is

that of an older Sweetbread telling the story of his childhood and puberty in the past tense.

In addition, the title of Book Three is Time Gone Awry, again indicating that Paul lost all

49

sense of temporal progression which is common in trauma victims. I will return to the

structure of the novel at the end of this chapter, after discussing two more events in Paul’s

life that were potentially traumatizing.

The second event I will discuss is the confrontation between Lyddie and the native

chief, where Lyddie tortures the chief’s son to get some information out of him with

regard to terrorist movement in the area:

“I see. With a single smooth movement, Lyddie grabs the child around the waist and

hoists him into the air. The half-chewed gum drops into the dirt, a wad of mastic

and white sugar. Lyddie marches over to the rain barrel and dumps the child

headfirst into the water. The child’s legs kick frantically and we can hear a bubbling

rush of air coming out of the barrel. The chief stamps up and down, crying in

frustrated horror, aghast, not daring to touch this white man who has so suddenly

injected terror into this quiet morning.

“Please, baas,” he says. “Please. He is my only son.”

Why does he look at me when he says this? It is Lyddie who is pressing the child’s

body deeper into the rain barrel. Then I realize that it is because I am the one

holding the rifle, gripped at the ready in both my hands (Eprile, Persistence 135).

Sweetbread is the only one on the side of the SADF to witness the excessive cruelty by

his superior, and does nothing to prevent it. Afterwards, on the way back to the camp,

Lyddie confronts Paul with his own cowardice. At first sight, the scene does not seem to

be traumatizing for Sweetbread, however horrible it might be. He is able to narrate the

event without hesitations, without circling around it, and leaving out the essence.

However, the fact that he does not react to Lyddie’s actions which he clearly disapproves

of does indicate that he is overwhelmed by them, and that he cannot cope at the moment

50

when they are happening. Moreover, further in the narration Paul mentions images of

laughing kids that get juxtaposed with Lyddie’s “clinical expression at the bubbles rising

in the rain barrel” (Eprile, Persistence 176). The images that haunt him are an indication

that he is traumatized for the second time by witnessing this violent scene.

Seeing Captain Lyddie torture a native child, and not being able to react also indicates

the ambiguous feelings Sweetbread has towards Lyddie. On the one hand, he loathes

many of Lyddie’s actions, the one described here in particular, but on the other hand, he

cannot help to feel a certain admiration for this “perfect specimen of South African

manhood: tall, muscular, with well-shaped thoroughbred muscles” (Eprile, Persistence

116). This admiration does not lessen after the scene in the natives’ village, because

during his time spent in the camp Paul has come to feel attached to the Captain who is

almost like a substitute father to him.

Lyddie seems to notice this admiration, and keeps approaching Sweetbread even

though he cannot stand Paul’s laziness and liberal beliefs. From Paul’s narration we can

conclude that Lyddie took a specific interest in him, because he hoped to change him.

Dini Van Vuuren, Paul’s representative at the TRC, comes to the same conclusion at the

end of the novel:

“You know, I thought about it too. I read all the records, obviously, and after a

while I could see he wanted to convert you somehow. I think he could see you

weren’t like the others, that you wouldn’t just go home and remember some rose-

colored dream of ‘lekker days in the army’ (Eprile, Persistence 266).

Eventually, it is because of this peculiar relationship that Paul gets caught up in a third

traumatizing event. Some time after the visit to the Himba village, Paul hears about a

training programme to become a war photographer and participate in the army’s

51

propaganda. He soon transfers out of the infantry division to join the programme. After

his photography training in Pretoria, Paul gets sent back to Namibia, and is stationed for a

few weeks in the remote camp Ondangwa. At the end of Book Two, he gets called up for

an assignment. The last thing that is narrated is how he hears about the cease-fire from the

truck driver, and meets Captain Lyddie again in the bush. According to Paul’s

representative at the TRC hearing, Lyddie had “personally requested you [Paul] be sent to

join the unit of disbanded Koevoet members and Special Forces personnel at the time of

the April cease-fire” (Eprile, Persistence 236).

At the moment they meet again, Book Two cuts off, and, without any indication of how

much time there is between this scene and the next, Sweetbread is seen in the mental ward

at the beginning of Book Three. The use of this narrative technique by Eprile is meant to

heighten tension, and to give the novel a faster pace. However, in the light of trauma

theory, this might also indicate that Sweetbread’s mind has blanked from that moment

because of a traumatizing event that followed the encounter. During therapy, he only talks

about his visits to Dr. Vishinski, and about a golf trip he did with his father, but he never

comes to telling the army psychologist what has happened to him before being sent to the

hospital. When he gets a discharge from the army, Paul still has not narrated the last

episode of his army days, even though that must be what the psychologists have been

trying get a grip on.

Sweetbread is experiencing at the beginning of Book Three what LaCapra called, in his

definition of traumatic memory, a “belated temporality and a period of latency between a

real or fantasized early event and a later one that somehow recalls it” (LaCapra, History

119). The events that did not get narrated at the end of Book Two are recalled at the

52

amnesty hearing, where Sweetbread is asked to give an explanation for his mental

breakdown:

Although I have known this question would be coming, the lead-in for me to open

up a box and pull out the stacked bodies of murdered black men Lyddie is

responsible for, I am not ready despite all my preparation. I begin to sweat, to

shuffle from foot to foot, to wring my hands.

Finally I blurt out: “I couldn’t get rid of the feel of those dead people. I just

couldn’t. I couldn’t sleep. I smelled them on my hands and I couldn’t eat” (Eprile,

Persistence 237).

What follows is a very detailed account of the unnecessary killing of Swapo soldiers

returning to their homes under the protection of the official cease-fire, and the supervision

of U. N. soldiers. However, the latter are not aware of Lyddie’s disbanded unit taking

matters into their own hands at the border. Captain Lyddie leads his men into a senseless

attack on Swapo soldiers that have already surrendered. When the unit sets off heavily

armed in the direction of the guerrillas, Paul starts to feel that something is not right, but

he cannot escape the catastrophe. At the beginning of the fire fight he concentrates on

filming, but as the guerrillas fight back he is urged by Lyddie to take a gun and participate

in the fight: “With the camera lens no longer between me and the death that is everywhere

below, I am terrified, kak-scared, ready to jump up and run away screaming for my

mother” (Eprile, Persistence 244). During the fight Paul kills two guerrillas. Afterwards,

Lyddie orders to bury the dead so that U. N. troops would not find out about the massacre.

Sweetbread focuses on filming the whole event, but again gets bullied into helping to

transport the dead bodies. All this violence is too much for Sweetbread and “[t]here is no

relieving [his] burden of consciousness” (Eprile, Persistence 247).

53

From the discussion of these three events it can be concluded that Paul has a troubled

personality. He is confronted with three limit events in his life, and even though the last

event seems to have the worst impact on his life and conscience because of its sheer

cruelty, it is the suicide of his beloved father at an early age that should be the focus of

attention. Given the traumatized personality of the first-person narrator, one cannot be

sure about the nature of the memories which the narrator has of things that happened

either before or after the traumatizing event. As Dr. Vishinski discloses in the witness

box, “Mr. Sweetbread suffers from delusions of memory” (Eprile, Persistence 259). He

even states that Sweetbread “split his psyche into two entities: one, the everyday ‘normal’

person; the other, a hypertrophied, prodigious recording device that was beyond his

control” (259). This dissociation renders him extremely unreliable as a narrator, because

the reader can never be sure as to whether he or she is dealing with an authentic memory

or a memory that sprouted from the vivid imagination of a trauma victim.

As I have argued earlier, Sweetbread is stuck in the past, which is represented by the

title of Book One. Although he is narrating his childhood and puberty, he experiences

these moments as the present. Moreover, even when he already lives alone he still needs

to make use of a trick that he learned from Dr. Vishinski. He has to hold “to a handy set of

memories, keeping the magic number five” (Eprile, Persistence 212). This way he can

avoid being overwhelmed by memory. Nonetheless, when he finds a tape of himself

reading poetry from when he was participating in a poetry competition, he starts

digressing again about South African literature. Moreover, when he hears the creaking of

his dad’s chair on the tape he gets the feeling that his dad is with him in his flat:

54

Now and then, Father pushes back with his feet and the chair creaks back and forth

for a few seconds, clearly audible at first, then slowing to diminuendo. Tick! Tock!

A rhythm like a heart starting and stopping. I close my eyes and listen intently to

that gentle creaking of floorboards, the audible silence of Dad’s listening, and here

he is, though dead these past eleven years seven months and fourteen days as vivid a

presence as ever he was in life. My reasoning mind tediously notes that these are

sounds made by a pattern of negatively and positively charged ions on a metal-

impregnated celluloid tape, but my own heart tells me that he is here with me in my

Hillbrow flat ... a visitation helped along by technology. I am physically stunned by

how palpable he is, though so quiet (Eprile, Persistence 215).

In this passage the reader again gets the impression that, although he is trying to use the

methods handed to him by Dr. Vishinski and the army psychologist, Paul still cannot

control his memories, and more importantly, his imagination.

A last indication that Paul is not able to control his narration are the short passages in

the novel where he recalls moments in his puberty. Most of them are about his

uncomfortable experiences with girls. Immediately before the first of those passages, Paul

comments: “and so I dissociate myself from that foolish he whose interludes – like Prince

Albert intruding on Mr. Dick’s memoirs – elbow their way into my narrative” (Eprile,

Persistence 94).

Based on the information that I have presented above I want to conclude that the whole

novel is designed to represent the narration of a traumatized person trying to turn his

traumatic memories into narrative memories by telling his life story. Paul mentions that he

is actually writing down the story that he is telling, saying “[e]ven when I write this”

(Eprile, Persistence 16). However, it seems to me that this is a case of narrative fetishism,

as he is circling the central traumatizing event in his narration, but never explicitly dealing

55

with it. At the end of the novel he does not seem to have overcome his traumas as he is

still haunted by images of his period in the army in his dreams: “Still, I lie in bed at night

and a host of images comes to me, a second-by-second replay of my army days, which

were quite long in the original, thank you" (273). Moreover, he is aware of the

possibilities to manipulate his recall: “It is just as well that I now know how to interrupt

the process by envisioning Dr. Vishinski’s magic slate erasing each horrific picture.

Thank you my analyst and friend” (Eprile, Persistence 16).

56

Chapter 9. Perfect Memory vs. “National Dysmnesia, the Art of Rose-Colored Recall”

History, memory, is plastic here in the R.S.A. You remember it the way you would have wanted it to be, not the way it was.

Eprile, The Persistence of Memory

As I have argued in the previous chapter, Sweetbread suffers from various traumas caused

by limit events, sudden events “in an environment utterly unlike the normal experience of

reality, and these have produced emotions of such intensity and force that they appear

impossible to assimilate into the daily experience of living” (Eprile, Persistence 203).

This is the classical understanding of trauma, as it was defined by the earliest trauma

theorists. However, trauma theory is a field in expansion, and scholars are arguing to open

up the field, to move away from the Western hegemony from which this definition comes

forth. After all, this “normal experience of reality” in the original definition is that of, as

Laura Brown states, “what is normal and usual in the lives of men of the dominant class;

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white, young, able-bodied, educated, Christian men” (qtd in Craps 55) 3. The alternative

for the Western definition of trauma as caused by a limit event is what Maria Root calls

insidious trauma: “the traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly

violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the

soul and spirit” (qtd in Brown 100). Stef Craps adds to this definition that “such traumas,

moreover, tend to be collective experiences,” and “[f]or the psychological plight of the

socially disempowered to be fully accounted for, the object of trauma research must shift

from the individual to larger social entities, such as communities or nations” (Craps 55).

South Africa, with its recent past as an oppressive society under apartheid legislation,

forms a particularly interesting case for trauma research to explore the impact of such an

oppressive society on both the oppressed and the oppressor, and the nation as a whole. I

have included the oppressor here, because, as LaCapra argues in Writing History, Writing

Trauma (2001), the existence of perpetrator trauma should also be acknowledged:

[N]ot everyone traumatized by events is a victim. There is the possibility of

perpetrator trauma which must itself be acknowledged and in some sense worked

through if perpetrators are to distance themselves from an earlier implication in

deadly ideologies and practices (79).

In The Persistence of Memory, Paul is troubled very much by his personal traumas

from which his obsession with memory originates. This obsession, however, exceeds his

own traumatic memories, and through the various digressions in his narration he also

analyzes the collective memory of his tormented country about an era of unprecedented

cruelty. Thus, the novel engages in its own way with the notion of insidious trauma

3 I base my short overview of this development on Stef Craps’ article “Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-cultural perspective.”

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manifesting itself at a personal and national level. Paul is painfully aware of the effects of

an oppressive society on its inhabitants, because, as a Jew with a British background, he

belongs to no particular category, not the oppressed nor the oppressors. His in-between

state in a country where everything is black and white offers him a unique perspective on

the apartheid system which leaves no one unaffected.

Paul knows very well what the consequences of an oppressive society are on its

inhabitants, because the main traumatic event in his life, the suicide of his father was a

consequence of the pressures of apartheid legislation. The guilt that befell his father after

his wife found out about his affair with the mixed-race maid, and the subsequent

separation from his mistress are probably the reason for his desperate act. Paul remembers

overhearing his mother’s reaction from which it seems that the worst was not what he did,

but with whom he did it: “How could you? And with a bloody kaffir4...” (Eprile,

Persistence 50). Moreover, in his search for an explanation, Paul also muses about his

father trying to get rid of the memories of the affair that now threatens his “white man’s

world”:

Perhaps I have misinterpreted things and he was merely trying to get rid of the

haunting odor of his mistress, to shake off the succubus that had slipped through the

door of his orderly white man’s world hidden in her invisible magic cloak of

sandalwood and musk (Eprile, Persistence 51).

Another moment in the novel from which it becomes clear that Paul’s father suffers

from living under apartheid rules, even though they are not meant to oppress him as a

white man, is when Sweetbread talks about the day he went golfing with his dad. His

4 Disparaging and Offensive . (in South Africa) a black person: originally used of the Xhosa people only. (“Kaffir”)

59

father had bought a new set of golf clubs , and took Paul to play on the golf course. They

are followed around the whole day by African caddies of Paul’s age, but his father insists

on carrying the golf clubs himself. At the end of the day “[u]ncharacteristically, Dad asks

if they would like a lift” (Eprile, Persistence 201). The African caddies eagerly accept the

ride given by this white man. Sweetbread’s conclusion indicates his insight in the divided

conscience of his father:

The children tumble out of three open doors, shouting “Goodbye, baas. Thank you,

baas.” The leader is the last to go, nodding briefly at first Dad, then me, before

disappearing into the crowd to find his charges. He is the only one not to use that

word. It is clear that he is pleased at what we have done – it has saved them a long

and wearying walk – but he is not grateful, nor need he be. I think it is this ride, so

generously and unthinkingly given, that keeps Dad from returning to play golf again

(202).

Paul does not only have a perfect memory, but he is also an excellent observer. Just

like he sees the tensions that weigh on his father’s conscience, he also notices the impact

of South Africa’s apartheid system, with its constant resorting to brutal force, on the

mental health of the black population. When he is watching after the house of the

Capelands, the family of an old friend, he gradually seems to win the trust of Alini, the

servant who acts as a sort of mother for the other servants. However, one night, after an

incident with one of the domestics earlier that day, Paul hears shouting from the servant’s

quarters and feels obliged to check out what the trouble is. First he shouts that the noise

must stop, and that they have to stop fighting, but they keep arguing until he shouts he is

going to call the police:

60

I shout, and the words have a magic effect, silencing the stream of mellifluous

Sotho immediately. A few minutes later, Alini appears. [...] “No police, young baas.

I will get them to behave. Sorry to disturb.” “Thank you Alini.” She turns her back

and disappears into the ombrage, and I feel ashamed of myself. She has never called

me baas before, but in this moment of crisis I’ve reverted to type by invoking the

hated apartheid authorities. No doubt the police would soon sort out this problem,

arresting whatever family and friends are living in the back rooms without properly

signed passes. I hear Alini’s voice, soft but commanding, and then there is quiet

again (Eprile, Persistence 88).

This passage demonstrates how conditioned relationships are for the black workers, and

how quickly they return to being submissive when they are reminded of the authorities.

There has been a short period of relief for the servants, because their masters are on a

holiday, and they are under the supervision of a young, inexperienced man. However, the

night of the incident, Alini immediately regrets having let Sweetbread get too close to her,

maybe even making her believe that she could, for once, have a more friendly relationship

with a white man. Merely by mentioning the police, Paul inspires the domestics with

terror. Clearly, the threat of being confronted with the police is ever-present in their life,

and the only means they have for preventing such a confrontation is to keep a polite

distance, and not being noticed. This threat is an instance of what Laura Brown denotes as

“[a] continuing background noise rather than an unusual event” (qtd in Craps 55).

Furthermore, apart from observing the effects of the oppressive South African society

on the black population, Sweetbread also analyzes the white South Africans’ sense of

history. According to the narrator, South Africans tend to distort their memories. As the

quote at the beginning of this chapter states: they remember their past “the way [they]

would have wanted it to be, not the way it was” (Eprile, Persistence 19). Moreover, they

61

do not only distort their memories, but they also manifest a particularly bad case of

amnesia. Sweetbread even goes so far as to call it a phobia:

One of the techniques for getting rid of phobias is “flooding” [...]. The trick is to

overexpose the sufferer to the very stimuli that create anxiety so he will simply shut

down that mechanism and not feel the symptoms. Perhaps white South Africans’

dysmnesia is a kind of phobia – a horror at the thought of remembering – and the

ultimate effect of all the daily broadcasts on radio and television and the newspaper

stories of the Commission’s hearings has been to flood that phobic response, to shut

down memory once and for all in promise of a cure (Eprile, Persistence 232).

What I want to argue is that this phobia is actually a form of traumatic response to the

atrocities committed in the recent South African past. White South Africans are not

victims, but they exhibit symptoms of PTSD. In other words, they suffer from what

LaCapra identifies as perpetrator trauma. They deny having been part of such a cruel

system by distorting their memories, and, as a consequence, the official history.

Sweetbread already detects this distortion of official history during his schooldays,

finding out that “our schoolbook’s numbers are haphazard at best” (Eprile, Persistence

32). Moreover, one of the new teachers, Mr. Brenner, tries to make his pupils aware of the

real history of their country, he tries to make them take a more critical perspective towards

their textbooks. When he is talking about the forced removals of the Grand Apartheid Mr.

Brenner does not tell the romantic tale of a black South African woman seeing all her

dreams come true that they find in their textbooks, but he points out the devastating

consequences of those removals for the woman. Later, when thinking about the TRC, Paul

is critical of one of his teachers who was not determined to do real history or did not have

the ability to see through the government’s imaginative version of the past:

62

Anything is preferable to the old amnesia that led to Rooibos Sanders telling us

sincerely that the Voortrekkers found the country’s interior empty of people, not

that masses of the Bantu had moved away after being devastated by white people’s

diseases (Eprile, Persistence 223-24).

The apartheid government’s efforts to instil its own, rose-colored version of history in

the South African people did go much further than determining what young

schoolchildren can know and what not by altering their schoolbooks. For instance,

Sweetbread describes how they watched banned or uncensored films from the collection

of his friend’s father whereas in cinemas, films were judiciously censored. The most

important of the government’s concerns in manipulating the official history was their own

“hearts and minds campaign” for which propaganda was the bedrock. Just like the U.S.

military tried to win the trust of the Vietnamese people, and show their own population

that what they were doing in Vietnam was righteous, the apartheid government tried to do

the same during the years of the Border War, and the numerous violent confrontations

within the South African borders. With their propaganda, they not only tried to make the

troubles inside South Africa look minor, and present the army in a good light, they also

tried to cover up their presence in Angola. Although Sweetbread is participating in this

questionable practice by joining the video unit, he is very critical of it:

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What is harder to take is how seriously the army treats the hearts and minds

campaign. Daily, we are exposed to hours of film of patriotic content: smiling,

handsome soldiers waving from astride Hippos; heartrending military funerals ...

usually filmed with the sun behind the sorrowful comrade standing with his hand

over his own heart in silent memory of his brave friend. The calm, manly tones of

the voice-over do not tell us what killed the soldier lying in the flag-covered bier,

for that would be too awkward. We are officially not in Angola, so he couldn’t have

died there (Eprile, Persistence 175).

With regard to the Border War, moreover, “the press was not allowed to write anything

about the army without prior approval” (Eprile, Persistence 175). From these very

accurate and critical observations by Sweetbread, it can be concluded that the South

African apartheid ministers were very conscious about managing what information the

South African people, and, by extension, the rest of the world could get access to. They

were aware that the key to the hearts of the people is controlling the memories that will

form the collective memory of the nation. While working for the photography unit, Paul is

experiencing a certain pleasure in “making a permanent record (mind you, a selective one)

of the world around [him]” (174). He may not approve of the government’s methods, but

he does get some pleasure out of the power to decide what will be recorded to be watched

again later, and what not. Paul knows what the potential of written memories, or other

sorts of permanent records, is for shaping the collective memory, and knows that this is

exactly what apartheid ministers are trying to exploit so as to “control what the future

thinks” (Eprile, Persistence 68):

64

The one use for a simple tool that no other animal has conceived of is to write things

down. [...] We have found a way to transcend the limitations of our individual

minds and brief life spans through our scribbles and inscriptions, our runes and

hieroglyphs, our palimpsests, holographs, and multiple printings, our furor

scribendi. The greatest of human inventions is the library, a vast repository of

collective memory far larger than any single mind can hold. Written memory

becomes fixed in time, regardless of the distortions it contains, and the adventures

we recount on paper are there to be reexperienced by those who are not oneself, the

writer. So long as one’s narrative survives, one’s ideas and versions of history are

passed along, like genetic code, to ensuing generations. Control what goes into the

library, what becomes the available record, and you control what the future thinks

(68).

Sweetbread’s negative assessment of the practices of the Afrikaners running the

country during apartheid might be relentless, but his opinions about the TRC, the

institution that has to bring hope for a better future, are not completely positive either. At

the end of the novel, when the apartheid days are over, and the TRC has taken hold of the

whole country’s attention, he presents the reader with some of his ideas about the TRC. In

the first place, he identifies the same tendency to record everything, as if the TRC is trying

to counter the amnesia, that originates from the apartheid government’s distortions of the

past, by using the same method, and, thus, change the collective memory again:

And this theatre is recorded in the papers, on radio, video, and television, seared

into the very souls of South Africans so no future generation can disbelieve in

apartheid or the wars that have riven this land (Eprile, Persistence 223).

65

As I have indicated earlier with a quote from the novel, according to Sweetbread, the

TRC, and its search for the truth by recording every testimony, is actually an attempt to

overcome the amnesia which white South Africans suffer from. The way Sweetbread sees

the TRC, it is an instance of a whole nation searching to work through what could be

called a collective trauma by talking about it as much as possible. Sweetbread is “glad that

the white South African should be forced to recognize what was done on his behalf,”

(223). But, from his assessment can be concluded that he sees the overexposure, the

constant talking, as a sort of narrative fetishism performed by a nation. The TRC hearings

are searching “to shut down memory once and for all in promise of a cure” (Eprile,

Persistence 232), but in reality they are like the narration of a traumatized person who is

still in denial and circling the reality he cannot yet deal with. The post-apartheid society is

looking for premature closure, and hopes to find it in the search for Truth and

Reconciliation.

66

Chapter 10. “Ja, ja, ja. All you Jews are Englishmen.”

The utterance which serves as the title for this chapter comes from Roelof DeWet, an

Afrikaner who comes to cook with Sweetbread in the army camp after having insulted too

many army officials with his liberal views and atheism. Despite his liberal views, even he

cannot grasp the complicated identity of Jews in South Africa, considering them all

Englishmen, because most of the Lithuanian Jews living in South Africa came via Great

Britain. For Sweetbread , being Jewish, speaking English, and, moreover, having a liberal

conscience makes it very hard to find his place in South Africa’s divided society where a

unified South African identity is not imaginable. Just like his father, and many other Jews,

he has difficulties forming an identity for himself that will help him to get accepted in the

country he was born in. At a certain point he recalls a joke his dad used to tell that nicely

captures the sentiment of many South African Jews:

67

One of Dad’s most beloved jokes, dating back to the Second World War:

Troubled by the division between Afrikaners and English, an army colonel decided

to try a little experiment. Going into the mess hall one day, he barked: “All right, I

want all the Afrikaners on the left-hand side of the room, all the Englishmen on the

right.” There was a little shifting of places – most of the splitting up had already

been done before he got there – and soon there were two groups of men in the mess

... Except for one lone man still standing in the middle. “And what are you?” the

colonel demanded. “A South African, sir.” “Very good. That’s the answer I’ve been

waiting for. What is your name, soldier?” “Yossi Greenbaum, sir.”

This joke demonstrates how, even within the white part of the South African population,

there is a strict division between English-speaking South Africans, and the “real”

Afrikaners. English-speaking Jews are left in the middle. As Joseph Sherman argues,

“ [a]ll whites and all blacks were undergoing a forced negotiation of identity. ‘Black’ and

‘white’ identities in South Africa were not pre-determined categories; those very labels

were negotiated by all who were interpellated by them.” (507). Moreover, the outspoken

racist society “continually demanded ethical compromise as a precondition for social

acceptance and economic success” (505-6). It is that ethical compromise that leads to

moral ambiguity, and which makes Sweetbread become aware of his historical complicity.

On the one hand, he has anti-apartheid feelings, but, on the other hand, he enlists for

military service knowing that he will face guerrillas fighting for the black cause.

Moreover, many Jews in his environment have taken up a racist attitude while he tries to

maintain his liberal conscience. Throughout the novel, Paul is in search of an identity that

will get him accepted in the South African society, and which is acceptable to himself.

The problematic position of the Jewish people in South African society dates back to

earliest presence of Jews in the country. When Sweetbread is telling the story of his

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grandparents, he describes how his grandfather fitted the cliché image of the “smous, the

itinerant Jewish salesmen of the nineteenth century” (Eprile, Persistence 38). His

grandfather’s business only became profitable after finding a way to be of use to the

apartheid regime, whereas before, he was not able to sell much to the Afrikaners.

However, despite being ridiculed by the Afrikaners, and struggling financially, he would

not accept it if he knew that his wife was doing a job reserved for the black population:

They struggled financially for years, living in a one-room cinderblock house only a

little bigger than our maid’s quarters now. Grandmother was thought snooty by her

neighbors – at first Litvak Jews, then Afrikaners, then Indians. She did washing (da

voss) on occasion for her Indian neighbors but did not tell her husband, lest he be

ashamed that she was doing kaffir work to make ends meet” (39).

Many years later, their grandchild, Paul Sweetbread is still in this in-between position. He

accepts a temporary job that only a Jew would accept. He decides to house-sit for the

Capelands, and to become “a servant of the servants, doomed to hurry home before nine

in the evening and to rise long before my usual waking time to prepare their [the

Capelands’ domestics] handouts” (75).

There is a particular passage in the last chapter of the novel where Paul is considering

to change his name. He is musing about returning to his roots by Hebraicizing his name or

even changing it to a real African name, “[t]his being the new New South Africa” (Eprile,

Persistence 218). In this passage he reveals very clearly his troubled identity as an

accumulation of contradictions: “But who is Paul Sweetbread? A nice Jewish Christian

boy, a liberal soldier in the army, a lousy good South African, a ware Zuid-Afrikaner

Englishman? Can such a person even exist” (219)? Sweetbread clearly suffers from an

identity crisis. He is Jewish, but his family is non-observant. Moreover, he is named after

69

the Apostle Paul, who was a Pharisee, a Judaic leader in charge of persecuting Christ’s

earliest followers, but later converted from Judaism to Christianity. He is determined to

uphold his liberal ideals, but also enlists in the army, the most anti liberal environment

imaginable. Lastly, as the joke I have quoted earlier indicates, it is impossible to be a real

Afrikaner if you speak English.

Although Paul is very to himself, and cannot help describing his own self-

consciousness, he is also a good observer. On various occasions in his narration, he is

quick to point out the hypocritical behaviour of his fellow Jews. When he starts preparing

his bar mitzvah, for instance, he realizes that the texts he is studying do not mean anything

to him, so he decides not to have a bar mitzvah. His friend cannot understand this

decision, but after his own bar mitzvah it appears not to have meant much to him either,

except for the presents he got:

“Very impressive,” said Dr. Simchah, unimpressed. “You have your portion

memorized. But what does it mean to you?” This was not a question I could answer

then, or even now, so I told Mother it would be hypocritical of me to have a bar

mitzvah I didn’t believe in. She didn’t press me on the point ... although Nigel

Capeland expressed shock when I informed a group of my school friends about my

decision. “But then you’ll never be a man!” he said. “Not in the Jewish sense.”

After his own bar mitzvah [...] he informed me in great detail as to the presents he’d

gotten: the fat cheques from his uncles, the stocks in mining companies, the fancy

pens, books, and gift certificates (Eprile, Persistence 208).

At an earlier point in his narration, Paul already gives a critical remark about Nigel

Capeland. He casually mentions Nigel’s original Jewish surname: “Nigel Capeland

(Kaplan in the original)” (71). Thus, he indirectly criticizes the name changing that is

70

common among the Jewish population in South Africa, even with his own parents who

called him Paul Sweetbread, an English name derived from the Jewish original Saul

Schwartzbart.

Another factor that influences Paul’s identity, and, consequently, his narration, is his

confrontation with anti-Semitism and racism. A first element in Sweetbread’s narration

that I would like to indicate is an image that Sweetbread uses when describing his house-

sitting experience. As I have said before, he feels like a servant of the servants, and this

makes him think of the anti-Semitism which Jews suffered doing jobs that no other white

person would do. This thought elicits a literary reference: “house-sitting (“The Jew squats

on the windowsill”)” (Eprile, Persistence 75). The line between brackets is a line from the

poem Gerontion by T.S. Eliot, whom is frequently said to have been anti-Semitic, just as

the poem is said to be anti-Semitic: “This poem, which articulates a loathing of Jews, has

as its subject a man who loathes Jews. It is an anti-Semitic dramatisation of an anti-

Semite” (Julius 73). A second instance of anti-Semitism enters the novel when Paul is

narrating how, prior to meeting Roelof DeWet, “the only Afrikaners I [Paul] had met had

been people I was afraid of. They were the shaven-headed, hard-eyed teenagers standing

outside cafés on the street corners, tough kids who liked to fight.” (Eprile, Persistence

123). He recalls a moment from his youth when he was bullied by some Afrikaner kids,

because he was a Jew:

71

Once, at one of our away games that the rugby coach insisted I go to, although – as

he said himself – there wasn’t a chance in hell I would be sent out with the team, I

was followed into the bathroom by two such youths. They had probably planned to

beat up this “sissy Jew,” but they found it much funnier to give me a hard push as I

Was standing at the urinal so that I wet My socks and shoes and spent a humiliating

afternoon with my own fellow Jews laughing at me” (123-4).

Furthermore, apart from these instances where Sweetbread is musing about anti-Semitism

or where he is directly confronted with it, there are some points in the novel where he has

to undergo the association with the English liberalism which I have commented on.

Especially Captain Lyddie cannot stand Paul’s liberal ideas which he considers as

cowardice.

In addition to the anti-Semitism he experiences, Paul is frequently confronted with the

racism that is manifest in every layer of the South African society. At an early age he

already notices the racist way of thinking of his schoolmates. Mr. Brenner teaches them

about how Sophiatown, a suburb of Johannesburg with a vibrant black African

community, was razed to the ground after forcefully removing all black inhabitants, and

was later renamed to Triomf. He introduces the children to the music of some of the most

renowned black musicians that had grown up in this energetic black African community.

Sweetbread perceives that “[s]ome of the students nod delightedly, a few furrow their

eyebrows. (Sure, we know the kaffirs can sing. Doesn’t mean we have to live next door to

them)” (Eprile, Persistence 58).

Another episode in his life where Sweetbread is confronted with racism, and,

moreover, with the absurdity of some of his countrymen’s thinking is when he meets the

Capelands. In the scene I have selected, Mrs. Capeland is explaining Paul’s tasks. She

72

explains how he is supposed to leave the servants their meals. When Sweetbread asks if

the maid cannot take her rations with her when she leaves, Mrs. Capeland answers the

following:

No, no, no. Routine is very important to them. And we can’t just let her take her

own food. Do you know, scientists have shown that Africans will eat their own

weight in meat in ten days if left to themselves?”

This remark is the product of many years of apartheid rule that has done everything within

its power to convince its people that black Africans are not like white people, that they are

basically another species. Sweetbread himself is seemingly intelligent and open-minded

enough to rise above the ignorance of many of his fellow South Africans, and he

recognizes in this remark what his beloved Mr. Brenner called “intimate tyranny” (75).

However, very soon after this passage it becomes clear that Sweetbread himself does not

have the right to judge the Capelands as he confesses that “[i]it is the first time I have

really conversed with a domestic servant – I have not had reason or opportunity to in the

past – and I find myself asking questions as if I were an interviewer on Radio 702” (78).

Moreover, he catches himself thinking in the same ignorant way:

He is sullen now and avoids my glance, like a child who has done something wrong

and resents your pointing it out. (How quickly one falls into the thinking habits of

paternalism!) (84)

This moral ambiguity he experiences, because of his being on the white side of a

racially divided society, and not being able to avoid falling into the pitfalls of racism,

evolves into a feeling of historical complicity when he participates in various missions for

the SADF. Upon getting promoted for making a propaganda movie that completely

73

misrepresents violence in the townships, he cannot help feeling proud, but at the same

time he is ashamed for participating in such a practice:

I see the eyes again, hatred deep as a vein of ore in stone. It bothers me that, in spite

of myself, I feel a touch of pride in my promotion. No matter how much I would

like to deny it, I am closer to those men in the Casspir than to those people in the

township. So now I know where I get my marks” (Eprile, Persistence 188).

Eventually, when being called upon to testify in the amnesty hearing for Captain Lyddie,

Paul decides to “testify against” him. Lyddie’s answer when Sweetbread says he “will just

tell what happened” (228) is striking:

As you remember it, you mean? You’ll be saying what you remember, I say what I

remember, and then we all go home and live happily ever after. That’s what this is

about, is it? Did you ever notice how in their public commentaries the Commission

only ever mentions the ‘oppressor’ and the ‘oppressed?’ You’re a student of

humankind; do you really think that you can separate us so simply into two different

species? Man the victim goes into Box A; Man the victimizer goes into Box B. Is

that the sort of rubbish you’ve stuffed your mind with at the university (228-29)?

In this last quote, Lyddie expresses exactly how a fragmented society can never be just

black-and-white. There are always members of that society whose loyalties are divided,

and who enter into a less determined category of people that struggle with the feeling of

moral ambiguity, because they are, in many cases, pressured into collaboration with the

oppressive side. Sweetbread is aware of this “grey zone”, in Primo Levi’s sense, that

South Africa has turned into. He condemns Lyddie’s actions, but realizes that nobody has

the right to judge, because all are implicated in the atrocities. In spite of his critical stance

74

towards the impossible quest for the truth by the TRC, after his testimony, Paul seems

finally to be able to come to himself:

SO, YES, MINE IS a bildungsroman after all. It’s taken time to get here, but what is

time when you think about it? For me it is ever-present ... nothing that has happened

is gone, though it might be changed. (Whether into the ghosts of tortured beings

howling through the galleries where the Commission sits or, as the scientists have it,

transformed into an information-bearing protein in the brain, I cannot say.) We have

all become experts on the past, here in the New South Africa. Among all that is new

here, the past is the newest thing yet.

Nonetheless, this is only an impression. He later narrates how he is still troubled at night

by a series of images of his time in the army, and that he has difficulties facing the

uncertainty of what the future will bring for him and the nation.

75

Conclusion

This dissertation set out to contribute to the new direction in trauma theory which aims to

surpass the Western hegemony, discerned in its seminal texts, by broadening the field of

study to the cultural output of non-Western societies. In literary studies, trauma theory is

now particularly interested in postcolonial trauma novels. Therefore, South Africa’s post-

apartheid literature is an appealing new research topic for academics adopting this angle.

With my analysis of The Persistence of Memory I wanted to initiate academic debate

about this interesting first novel by Tony Eprile, a promising author who seeks to add his

voice to those of more established South African writers such as Nadine Gordimer and

André Brink.

First off, Eprile is appreciably aware of the implications of personal trauma for the

identity of the traumatized person. I have discussed the multiple traumatic events in Paul

Sweetbread’s life, and how these influence his relationship with the South African society.

Moreover, I have indicated how Eprile uses postmodernist techniques such as the

unreliable narrator, and the disrupted chronology, to reflect the traumatized nature of the

protagonist. By opting for a first-person narrative, Eprile makes the reader doubt about the

reliability of the narrator until the last chapter where Paul himself hears for the first time

76

that he is diagnosed with PTSD. Thus, Eprile makes his reader reconsider the whole

novel. If one does so, certain elements of the narration become more transparent. For

instance, the emphasis on memory and the many digressions are recognized as symptoms

of the PTSD Paul suffers from. Moreover, Paul’s distorted sense of time, as I have

asserted, is an indication that Paul is in the phase of acting-out the central trauma in his

life without really acknowledging it. This, in my opinion, makes of Paul’s story an

instance of narrative fetishism.

However, in spite of his digressive way of narrating, Sweetbread’s voice is that of a

critical observer. In the second part of my analysis, I argue how Eprile uses his narrator’s

accurate observations to analyse the South African society. Again, the emphasis is on

memory. Sweetbread sees how his compatriots distort their memories, and how the

apartheid government does everything within its power to control the collective memory

of the nation by censoring the cultural production and manipulating official history. This

linking of the individual dimension to a collective dimension, in this case, the nation, is

typical for the postcolonial novel, but in The Persistence of Memory it is also linked with

trauma. This makes the novel extremely interesting for the adoption of a cross-cultural

perspective, because scholars such as Maria Root and Stef Craps have indicated that

trauma in an oppressive society need not necessarily be caused by a limit event, but can

come forth out of the constant pressure on disempowered groups, and, moreover, these

traumatic experiences tend to be collective. I have focused on how the suicide of Paul’s

father is the result of the “insidious trauma” of apartheid, and how the life of the black

population, as it is represented in the novel, is also determined by this constant

oppression. Moreover, I have argued that even the white population manifests trauma

symptoms, especially with regard to memory. They are haunted by the gruesome

77

traumatic memories of the apartheid era, and try to deny their trauma by distorting their

memories. Through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission they hope to find closure,

but, according to Sweetbread, it can only be a premature closure.

A last important element in the novel is Paul Sweetbread’s Jewishness. This aspect

adds an interesting dimension to this postcolonial trauma novel. In the postcolonial racist

society of South Africa, the inhabitants constantly have to negotiate an identity for

themselves. For the Jewish population, this is exceptionally difficult since Jews in South

Africa do not belong to the side of the oppressed nor the oppressors, they find themselves

in an ambivalent position that leads to moral ambiguity. Eprile, himself of Jewish descent,

explores throughout the novel the impact of Paul’s Jewishness on his identity. He analyses

Paul’s relationship with his fellow South Africans, and his stance towards anti-Semitism

and racism. Together with the traumatic experience of his father’s death, this other aspect

of his problematic identity leads him to enlist in the army, which gets him involved in two

more traumatic experiences.

With my study of The Persistence of Memory I hope to have aroused interest for this

novel, as it is a novel that unites many features that contemporary trauma theorists are

engaging with. Moreover, given the limited length of this dissertation I have not gone into

some elements of the novel that are well worth exploring. Future research might, for

instance, look into the applicability of Michael Rothberg’s relatively new notion of

multidirectional memory for this novel. After all, Paul Sweetbread is of Jewish descent,

and at various points in the novel the holocaust is implicitly dealt with. Another avenue

for future research that this dissertation might have opened up is the investigation of the

impact of religion and ethnicity on trauma victims’ relationship with the outer world.

Lastly, future research could trace two motifs that I have discerned in the novel; the motif

78

of food and the motif of insects. Sweetbread is obsessed with food and the cooking

thereof. I would suggest that this could be linked to the anxiety that he feels. Moreover, he

considers food as a form of memory which could be connected to the topic of collective

memory. The motif of insects is subtler, but appears frequently in relation to thoughts of

his father.

79

Appendix

Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No 34 (1995): To provide for the investigation and the establishment of as complete a picture as possible of the

nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights committed during the period from 1

March 1960 to the cut-off date contemplated in the Constitution, within or outside the Republic,

emanating from the conflicts of the past, and the fate or whereabouts of the victims of such

violations; the granting of amnesty to persons who make full disclosure of all the relevant facts

relating to acts associated with a political objective committed in the course of the conflicts of the

past during the said period; affording victims an opportunity to relate the violations they suffered;

the taking of measures aimed at the granting of reparation to, and the rehabilitation and the

restoration of the human and civil dignity of, victims of violations of human rights; reporting to

the Nation about such violations and victims; the making of recommendations aimed at the

prevention of the commission of gross violations of human rights; and for the said purposes to

provide for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, comprising a Committee

on Human Rights Violations, a Committee on Amnesty and a Committee on Reparation and

Rehabilitation; and to confer certain powers on, assign certain functions to and impose certain

duties upon that Commission and those Committees; and to provide for matters connected

therewith.

80

List of Abbreviations

SADF South African Defence Force SAP South African Police SWAPO South-West African People’s Organization PLAN People’s Liberation Army of Namibia MPLA Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola UNITA National Union for the Total Independence of Angola CODESA Convention for a Democratic South Africa TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission PTSD Post-traumatic Stress Disorder MPD Multiple Personality Disorder DID Dissociative Identity Disorder

81

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