Rita Barnard

Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
University of Pennsylvania
rbarnard@dept.english.upenn.edu

 

Jeremy Cronin, Even the Dead: Poems, Parables, and a Jeremiad.Cape Town: David Philip, 1997.

 

Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Oxford UP, 1998.

 

In 1995, American Vogue published a fashion article cum travelogue under the rubric “South Africa Now.” Offered as a celebration of the country’s recent democratic elections, it featured the Somali supermodel Iman and her husband David Bowie visiting sites in and around Cape Town–dressed, of course, in fabulously expensive designer clothes. The article opens impressively, with a picture of Iman shaking hands with Nelson Mandela (“an historic meeting,” we are told). This dignified image is followed by a series of joyous fashion pics: Iman dancing on the streets of Guguletu township in a Jil Sander suit and Mandela T-shirt, posing at a Cape Town high school in a Gucci skirt, kissing on the beach in a Chanel ballgown, and striding past bright graffiti in a Gaultier frock. Facing this last image, we encounter–and perhaps we should have seen something like this coming–a shot of Archbishop Tutu working out on his treadmill, looking both sporty and meditative in a Duke University sweatsuit. The article ends with a black-and-white photograph of a zebra running along a deserted roadway towards a mountainous horizon: an emblem, clearly, of the multiracial nation, moving towards what Vogue calls “an exciting future.”

 

The article displays (with considerable panache) a mythic and newly consumable South Africa. The “now” announced in its title effects, as it were, an erasure of the whole history of violence and injustice. In these images the Cape becomes an austral playground, where the past is redeemed by the click of a fashion photographer’s shutter. The sites, the icons and the grass-roots agents of the anti-apartheid struggle–so often a war waged by school children–all become colorfully exotic, chic, even cute: suitable background for the antics of multicultural celebrities. The differences in the experiences and achievements of the photos’ various subjects–president, cleric, fashion model, and rock star–are visually irrelevant: Mandela, Tutu, Iman, and Bowie are all equated as Beautiful People in a world of pure appearances. The nation itself is magically transformed–figured as an elegant thing of nature, instantly unified in its coat of harmonious black-and-white stripes.¹

 

Vogue‘s visual indulgence in the “South African miracle” is neither unique nor really reprehensible: there was, after all, much reason to celebrate in 1994 and to take considerable aesthetic pleasure, after years of seeing the Old Crocodile and his cronies in office, in a president who was not only a man of moral stature, but of a certain physical grace. Four years down the line, however, a fixation on “Madiba magic” and an exclusive concern with “now” and the “future” seem somewhat more problematic. With the ANC’s apparent adoption of all the orthodoxies of globalization, it has come to seem as though the hard-fought liberation struggle was only about winning a larger share of the pie (for some) and achieving a redeemed visibility in the global public sphere. The past and its lessons too often appear to have been forgotten. Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s task of exhuming the grim secrets of the apartheid régime has occasionally generated what the poet Ingrid de Kok terms “a rhetoric of amnesia”: its work has been associated, even by the commissioners themselves, with “a clean break,” a “new chapter,” “getting the past out of the way,” and so forth.²

 

It is against this rhetoric of amnesia that Jeremy Cronin’s long-awaited second collection of poetry, Even the Dead: Poems, Parables, and a Jeremiad, is pitched. The collection is offered as wake-up call (“Art is the struggle to stay awake” [40] is one of its memorable lines). In the “jeremiad” of the title, Cronin mercilessly and sometimes wittily diagnoses the nation’s pervasive amnesia; he laments the country’s entry into the postmodern world:

 

It's amnesia when the SATV launches itself into  
  the new South 
Africa and lands
     In Las Vegas
          (Ongoing, chronic, paradigmatic 
             amnesia)
...............................................

CNN is globalized amnesia

The Gulf War--lobotomised amnesia

Santa Barbara, the Bold and the Beautiful, 
  Restless Years--the 
milk of amnesia
...............................................

There is upwardly mobile amnesia
     Affirmative action amnesia
          Black economic empowerment, the world 
	    owes 
me one, Dr Motlana, give a slice of it amnesia
     (syntagmatic amnesia--an elite for the 
       whole)

There is winning-nation amnesia
     It puts in Olympic bids

     It summits Everest and forgets to name all 
       but one
     Of the sherpas who carried us up. (42-43)

 

But in other poems, Cronin recalls the ideals, the language, the anxieties, and even the dramatis personaeof the liberation struggle. The stalwart Slovo is paid humorous homage in “Joe Slovo’s Favorite Joke”; and in “Poem for Mandela” the “crunched-up / One-time boxer’s knuckles” (30)–the great man’s hands, marked by personal history and experience–are brought to mind, rather than his all-too-photogenic media icon’s face.

 

The title of this collection is taken from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

 

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a form of Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. (39)

 

Benjamin here dramatically infuses what one might think of as the dusty task of the historian with a peculiar, messianic revolutionary mysticism: a sentiment that might surprise some, coming from a Communist Party official like Cronin. But in this case it should not. Cronin’s celebrated first collection, Inside (written while he was a political prisoner from 1976-1983), was animated by a revolutionary nationalism rather a revolutionary messianism; but it nevertheless contained many poems in which the poet reaches out to find a “secret agreement” with figures from the past, with his father, with his grandparents, with the novelist Olive Schreiner, and with more distant and imagined ancestors: KhoiSan warriors and cave painters–aboriginal figures of resistance and creativity. Traces of such poetic commerce between the “past generations and the present one” still remain in Even the Dead; but, in some instances, these negotiations are satirically transformed. In a series of ironic epitaphs, Cronin salutes the recently deceased: various contemporary political types who have lost their sense of community and connection with their compatriots. One of the sharpest epitaphs reads:

 

For a recently Departed Soul from the new Patriotic Bourgeoisie
Hey, man, don't weep
I can't take your call presently
As I'm upwardly mobile

Please leave your prayer
After the beep (35)

 

This is obviously a poem about forgetting; but it is also a poem that remembers a revolutionary ancestor: Franz Fanon, whose cautionary chapter on the problem of the patriotic bourgeoisie, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” is alluded to in the poem’s title.

 

Another reminder of the claims of the past is offered in the disturbing and impressive poem “Running Towards Us.” Dated 1986-1997, the poem strives to bridge the temporal gap between the anti-apartheid struggle and the present. It recalls an incident witnessed in the aftermath of the brutal fighting at the Crossroads squatter camp in 1986: a failed execution, viewed from a distance across a strip of empty veld. The poet and his companions look on in horror as people pour gasoline over an apparently dead or wounded man, and as they unhurriedly bring sticks and tires to fuel the flames. All of a sudden, the man gets up and, still soaked in fuel, runs towards the watchers. In the poem’s final lines, this figure is transformed into a troubling emblem of the recent past:

 

He is running towards us. Into our exile. Into the return of exiles. Running towards the negotiated settlement. Towards the democratic elections. He is running, sore, into the new South Africa. Into our rainbow nation, in desperation, one shoe on, one shoe off. Into our midst. Running. (4)

 

This image of this nightmarish compatriot–a victim, betrayer, who knows?–may be set against Vogue‘s reassuring image of the zebra running towards the scenic horizon. It raises profound and unsettling questions about how the “rainbow nation” will accomodate the memories of the traumatized and often morally dubious citizens. The costly claims of the past, Cronin suggests, will not be dodged.

 

 

Even the Dead will inevitably be compared to Inside (perhaps the most celebrated collection of poetry to come out of South Africa in the last two decades), and many will find the slim new volume lacking–lacking, at least, in the quality of stirring lyricism which marked the most celebrated of Cronin’s prison poems. Compared to poems like “Plato’s Cave” or “To learn how to speak,” or even the more narrative “Walking on Air,” the new work sounds distinctly prosy, as in the following lines from “Running Towards Us”:

 

In those three days the apartheid police and army have destroyed an entire shanty-town, unleasing black vigilates (witdoeke), victims themselves turned perpetrators, to perform much of the dirty work. (2)

 

It is as though the contextualizing information (which in Insidewas provided in effective mini-essays interspersed among the various sets of poems) has now moved into the bodies of the poems themselves. Cronin (who is, among other things, an excellent literary critic) offers a justification of sorts for this change in one of the opening poems:

 

Between, let's say, May 1984 and May 1986
(Speaking from my own limited, personal 
  experience of course)
There was a shift out there
From lyric to epic. (1)

 

But one cannot help wondering whether the reportorial and pedagogical quality of the lines I cited may not in some measure derive from Cronin’s work as the public spokesman for a political party. Poems like “Running Towards Us” seem to be projected beyond the circle of committed comrades–beyond the solidarity of “our people’s unbreakable resolve,” that is invoked in Inside–to what Lewis Nkosi has called the “cross-border” reader: the reader outside the group, for whom things have to be explained and defined.³

 

This is not to say that Even the Dead is without power or integrity. On the contrary: the volume introduces fresh poetic modes (fragment, aphorism, collage, parable, and mock epitaphs) suitable for a complicated time–a historical moment in which the earlier poems’ proleptic invocations of revolutionary nationalism might well seem dated, in which such poems would serve an official, rather than their former performative and incantatory function. Yet it is clear that for Cronin the revolutionary struggle is not won, and cannot be equated with the victories of the patriotic bourgeoisie. The last word in the volume is therefore again Walter Benjamin’s:

 

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overwhelm it.... Only that historian will have the gift of fanning some sparks of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. (44, Cronin's emphasis)

 

This quotation would make an appropriate epigraph for Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee. This new collection of essays on the problematic politics of national remembrance includes contributions from an array of South African academics, three of whom are also acclaimed creative writers (Njabulo Ndebele, Andre Brink, and the younger poet, Ingrid de Kok). In their introduction the editors present their collection of essays in dramatic fashion as standing at an important threshold in South African history: a moment defined equally by the adoption of a new constitution (a forward-looking document, concerned to ensure a future of freedom and equality) and by the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (a backward-looking project, concerned with the excavation of apartheid’s most heinous crimes). The contents are arranged under four headings: the first section (“Truth, Memory, and Narrative”) includes essays on the meaning and practice of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (the TRC); the second section (“The Remembered Self”) explores personal narrative in contemporary South Africa: it highlights the tension between individual memories and the shapes imposed on such recollections by various genres, ranging from autobiography to oral history. The third section (“Museums, Memorials, and Public Memory”) considers various projects and institutions that have attempted to intervene in the reshaping of public recollection and national history. The final section (“Inscribing the Past”) explores a set of documents and discursive forms (advertising, linguistics and language policy, and the new constitution itself) that are likely to have an ongoing and determining effect on the nation’s sense of its past.

 

The timeliness and political importance of the issues raised in Negotiating the Past seems particularly apparent when one sets the volume in dialogue with Cronin’s Even the Dead. Most closely akin in spirit to Cronin’s satiric diagnosis of South African society is Eve Bertelsen’s essay, “Ads and amnesia: black advertising in the new South Africa.” Bertelsen notes the disappointment felt by many South Africans at the ANC’s rapid embrace of the late-capitalist free market and an official policy of privatization. This volte face, she argues, requires from the population an equally rapid “unremembering” of the ideals and values that animated the anti-apartheid struggle.⁴ Her essay suggests that the ideological work required to induce this amnesia–to effect a redeployment of the promises and ideals of the mass democratic movement–is essentially being performed for the government by the institution of advertising, especially advertising directed at black South Africans. Her point is well made by a number of outrageous examples. A 1994 ad for Bonnita milk, for instance, depicted an opened milk carton, spilling a white cross against a black background. The slogan, worthy of inclusion in Cronin’s jeremiad, read as follows: “Why cry over spilt milk, when we can build a healthy nation? The past is just that… past. It’s the future that’s important” (226-27). Thus apartheid’s history, as Bertelsen notes, is written off with a reassuring cliché: consumer goods will effectively mop up such insignificant slips and spills as have occurred. This strategic unremembering allows for revolutionary concepts like “freedom” to be redefined in the interests of the market. The point is readily made in a slogan for the clothing company Foschini: “You’ve won your freedom. Now use it. Get a Foschini’s credit card today” (233).

 

Most of the essays in Negotiating the Past, however, are concerned not so much with what Bertelson calls the “key dynamic of forgetting” as with the complicated dynamics of memory, the ongoing process of making tradition to which Cronin draws our attention. In her essay on recent South African autobiography, Sarah Nuttall describes two modes of remembering, especially remembering in the wake of trauma. The first is a traditional mode, in which memory brings consolation: it operates by imposing a narrative continuity and redemptive interpretation on catastrophic experience in order to provide a sense of wholeness and healing. The second is a modernist mode, which she associates with Walter Benjamin: it operates by eschewing consolation, by insisting that the shattering effects of trauma can only be respected by preserving–in their fragmentary state–the irredeemable shards of historical catastophe. It is fair to say that the entire collection oscillates between the two modes of memory outlined here. There is, it seems to me, a divide of sorts between the fiction writers writers Ndebele and Brink (who tend to validate the work of the imagination and narrative as well as the revelatory work of the TRC) and the academics of various stripes (who tend, on the whole, to be suspicious of totalizing narratives and to worry about the erasures that the dominant modes of truth-telling might impose). The split is not a radical one, for neither Brink nor Ndebele believe naively that the Truth Commission will reveal a whole truth or that narratives are necessarily seamless. But still, one senses a certain faith in narration in Ndebele’s call for the “revelation of meaning through the imaginative combination of [the] facts” (21) and Brink’s insistence that the inquiries of the TRC be “extended… in the imaginings of literature” (30) that seems to be lacking, say, in the reflections of Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, who fret over the way in which South African oral historians have folded the personal memories of their interviewees into narratives of national liberation.

 

The anthropologist Steven Robins’s essay, “The Silence in my Father’s House: Memory, Nationalism, and Narratives of the Body,” though somewhat experimental in its use of personal materials, may serve here as representative, in that it reflects in some detail on both of the modes of memory described above. Like Rassool and Minkley, Robins is suspicious of master narratives. A descendent of Holocaust victims, he is well aware of the danger of nationalist reclamations of victimization, such as the Zionist reading of the history of the Holocaust and the Afrikaner’s reading of the history of the concentration camps in the Boer War. The work of the TRC, he points out, has not yet settled into a coherent narrative of any sort. The dirty secrets, the memories of dismembered and abused bodies, were experienced by the nation in a fragmentary way: the victims’ “rivers of tears” were relayed night after night in grisly installments and soundbites. But Robins wonders, as do several of the other contributors, whether the spectacular sufferings revealed in this testimony might not in the end serve to displace the memory of the more banal sufferings of ordinary folks. A vivid anecdote suggests that this kind of displacement may already be taking place. Robins describes the way in which the gruesome testimony of Evelyn Maloko before the TRC–an account of how her sister, Maki Skosana, was necklaced and tortured as an informer by an angry mob–was presented to the nation. In the televised report of the testimony, Maloko’s description of her sister’s mutilated remains was cut short by the call of one of the commissioners for a minute of silence to salute Maki’s heroism and martyrdom.⁵ In this version of the event, Robins argues, the individual’s painful and choking recollection is cut short and the complicated circumstances and motivations surrounding the death of a possible betrayer are subsumed into a seamless and consoling narrative of national sacrifice and eventual triumph. The troubling figure of Maki Skosana calls to mind the ambiguous figure of the petrol-soaked runner in the scruffy veld at Crossroads. The violent past, as both Cronin and Robins suggest, will not–without distortion–settle into a triumphalist, “winning-nation” narrative.

 

At the end of his essay Robins remains unsettled about whether an “abused memory” is better than no memory at all; and the only solution he offers is the personal testimony (the dominant genre, perhaps, of this moment in South African culture) of how he learnt to live with the fragments of his family’s traumatic Holocaust experience: by recognizing its very fragmentary character, the silences of his father, as an authentic mode of memory. But this “insoluble solution,” as he calls it, may finally be no solution at all–at least not one that South African politicians or museum curators will find easy to live with. A telling case in point here is the controversial exhibition entitled “Miscast: Negotiating KhoiSan History and Material Culture,” held at the South African National Gallery in April 1996 (an event to which several essays, including two fine pieces by Martin Hall and Patricia Davison, refer). The intention of the show was precisely to raise questions about the representation of these aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape (as timeless though sadly extinct examples of the primitive or as objects of disinterested scientific curiosity) and to bring the actual history of genocide to which they were subjected back into view. The exhibition, Davison notes, contained “harrowing images and artefacts of human suffering” (158). At its center, for instance, was a ring of scattered body casts–severed heads, fragmented body parts, and naked torsos–around a grim brick cenotaph and a pyramid of rifles. It was one, might say, a ruinous, Benjaminian memorial.⁶ But while whites, as Robins notes, experienced “Miscast” as similar in its emotional effect to the work of the TRC, KhoiSan activists missed the exhibition’s ironic intent: they read the dismembered bodies not as a ironic allegory–as authentically mournful fragments–but literally, as an continuation of colonial violence (159). Needless to say, the fact that the curator, Pippa Skotnes, was a white woman, was not lost on these protestors. The whole exhibition thus raised questions about how memory is constructed, and by whom.

 

If Negotiating the Past offers any resolution of the tension between the two modes of memory it describes–both problematic, as we have seen–it is only a metaphorical one: Ingrid de Kok’s image of the “cracked heirloom,” painstakingly glued together, an image of unity, certainly, but a unity that does not hide away the broken shards of grief and loss. But while De Kok’s essay does attempt to offer examples of this kind of memorial (most notably the District Six Museum in Cape Town, which commemorates the old mixed-race township, razed under the Groups Areas Act), it still remains to be seen how often and how readily her complicated metaphor will prove translatable into practice. Coetzee and Nuttall’s volume, for its part, is perhaps less of a unity than one might like to see. While it does include some discussion of the importance of coherent narratives of consolation and healing, its form leans towards the fragmentary and the discontinuous. This is perhaps inevitably the case with an essay collection, but the sense of discontinuity is here increased by the fact that the essays are drawn from an unsually wide range of disciplines and are highly uneven in quality (several are quite unmemorable as academic performances). The introductory essay (probably deliberately) offers no strong synthetic argument; but it (probably inadvertently) points to one of the collection’s signal weaknesses. Emphasizing the importance of landscape and place in the construction of memory, the editors mention mining as the practice which most signally destroyed people’s connection to their ancestors, their mnemonic connection to the land. This collection of essays, unfortunately, never goes near South Africa’s mines: in all the articles concerned with the sites of memory, the key examples are without exception located in the former Cape Province.⁷ (Moreover, with the exception of Ndebele, all the contributors are Cape Town-based.) This distinct regional bias is regrettable and occasionally raises uncomfortable questions. E.g., was it really because of “almost incredible political amnesia” (12), as the editors claim, that the Cape “Coloureds” voted for the National Party in the 1994 election–or was the vote, at least in part, based on a regionalism unseen by these commentators, because shared?

 

Negotiating the Past is then in certain respects disappointing; yet it is saved by its compelling subject matter and timeliness, by its frank admission that the processes of memory are complex and ongoing, and by its generous sense of the multiple forms in which memory may reside: histories, stories, testimony, films, exhibitions, objects, bodies, places, etc. In this last respect it opens up possibilities for interdisciplinary work and suggests something of the richness of contemporary South Africa as a site for critical cultural studies.

 

Notes

 

1. The use of the zebra as an emblem for the South African nation in fact dates back to the early 1970s, when it was invented by the apartheid government’s combative foreign minister, R. W. (Pik) Botha; it was frequently recycled thereafter, especially in the government’s anti-sanctions campaign in the mid-1980s. The Vogue photograph, insofar as it works iconically, is thus a visual updating (or, more positively, a reappropriation) of an apartheid era cliché. For a discussion of another instance of the zebra image, see my essay, “The Final Safari: On Nature, Myth and the Literature of the Emergency,” in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa: Literature Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998): 123.

 

2. “Getting the past out of the way” was the phrase used by Danie Schutte, the leader of the National Party’s justice committee (qtd. in De Kok, “Cracked Heirlooms = Memory on Exhibition,” in Nutall and Coetze 59).

 

3. Cronin, “To learn how to speak…,” Inside (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 64; Nkosi, “Constructing the ‘Cross-Border’ Reader,” in Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, and Kenneth Parker, eds., Altered State? Writing and South Africa (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1994).

 

4. The term “unremembering”–emphasizing the fact that we are dealing here with an active process–is favored by the linguist Sinfree Makoni, another contributor to Negotiating the Past (244).

 

5. Robins does not mention the fact that the apartheid government put Maki Skosana’s story to much more sinister uses than the Truth Commissioner could possibly be said to have done. The brutal circumstances of her death were televised both at home and abroad, causing considerable damage to the image of the liberation movement. Subsequent testimony at the TRC indicated the involvement of Eugene de Kock and the Vlakplaas assassins in the events leading up to this outburst of collective fury, thus complicating questions of guilt even further.

 

6. At one point visitors were even forced to walk over images of KhoiSan people: an installation reminiscent of Benjamin’s notion of the culture as a triumphal parade in which victors of history trample over the vanquished.

 

7. Davison mentions in passing the site museum at Tswaing north of Pretoria and the restoration of the stone-walled capital at Thulamela in the northern part of the Kruger National Park.

Works Cited

 

• Barnard, Rita. “The Final Safari: On Nature, Myth and the Literature of the Emergency,” in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa: Literature Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 123-140.
• Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253-264.
• Cronin, Jeremy. Inside. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.
• Nkosi, Lewis. “Constructing the `Cross-Border’ Reader.” Eds. Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, and Kenneth Parker, Altered State? Writing and South Africa. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1994.
• “South Africa Now.” Vogue June 1995. 159-179.