FINALLY, A NEW POST

I am currently attending a conference on Human Rights in the Arts, Literature and Social Sciences hosted by Central Michigan University. My brain is fizzing with reactions to the panels I’ve attended today – some of that is positive, inspired fizz and some is enraged fizz. I am going to restrain myself for the moment – for fear of aimless ranting – to writing about the former.

Dr Modhumita Roy of Tufts University presented a fascinating paper discussing truth, the TRC and reconciliation through the lens of Gillian Slovo’s Every Secret Thing. Particularly insightful was her analysis about how the telling and narrative of the TRC shaped the often confessional nature of South African literature post-TRC. She also sketched some of the difficulties around the idea of truth and how it was approached in the TRC and how this approach differed from Slovo’s relationship to notions of truth. Brilliant as the paper was (especially from the point of view of literary criticism) it also, I feel, lacked nuance in its appraisal of the TRC. This is, of course understandable as Dr Roy’s aim is more to situate Slovo’s narrative within context rather than to provide an assessment of the TRC.

Still, it got me thinking. It’s really easy to criticise the TRC. There is really good, rigorous stuff out there doing just that. Yet, so many of these criticisms still include the caveat: but it stopped a bloodbath (or some similar claim). So what we essentially do (and I am guilty of this myself) is recognise that it sort-of worked but spend our time showing what the shortcomings were. We spend far less time looking at IF it really ‘worked ‘ in the sense of averting disaster or if that disaster was a fear that would not have occurred regardless of the TRC. Perhaps more importantly, we spend little time analysing HOW and WHY it worked (and here I’m assuming it did). I have begun to think that this is where the real difficult, interesting scholarship should be coming from with regards the TRC. The criticism is there, it is necessary, it is important. We now need to flesh out the other half of the story with some rigour.

That needs to go into my metaphorical “things I will research at some future point” backpack.

For now, I’m going to focus on my phantom curriculum, try to avoid the Michigan cold, and anticipate more fizzing tomorrow.