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Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission
The first book to explore the complex relationship between law and literature in testimony to crimes of apartheid before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ambiguities of Witnessing closely analyzes key individual testimonies. Whereas most existing books on this and other truth commissions are weighed down by abstract legal and philosophical discussion, this book does justice to witnesses' public testimony in a fascinating and theoretically sophisticated investigation of questions of human rights, mourning, forgiveness, and reparation. Framed by the personal, Ambiguities of Witnessing also meditates on what it means for the writer to respond to this epochal event in the history of post-apartheid South Africa.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published September 26, 2007
17 people want to read
About the author
Mark Sanders
98 booksMark Sanders is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the author of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (2002) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory (2006).
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February 1, 2018
Another Mark Sanders. This time as he witnessed before the TRC on the complexeties of law and literature in the context of apartheid, but especially in the grappling with it as witnessed at the TRC. As a professor for comparative literature in NY, adopted son of Jewish parents in Cape Town and having spent time in SA learning Zulu (cf. Learning Zulu 2016), he’s very much involved. He shows that very clearly in the epilogue, but also goes to profound depths as he addresses the issues of “Ambiguities of witnessing” in 5 chapters, although he originally kicked off his notes in his journal with 17.
I like the last chapter §6 best. Perhaps because things come together here nicely. Perhaps it’s the goal of the book. Perhaps it’s because I thought I knew the authors and books he discusses. First Antjie Krog “Country of my skull” (1998) and second J.M. Coetzee “Disgrace” (1999). MS does a marvelous job of unpacking these stories, analyzing, evaluation and then comparing and contextualizing them too. Fascinating insights. Well, worth reading. I never imagined, that Coetzee was actually giving a literary commentary on the TRC with this book. That really makes it all the more relevant and provocative really.
It’s not just about writers and their good ideas, but also about concepts and ideas as they formed South Africans through decades and centuries. In the serious chapters on “reparation” (§5) and “forgiveness” (§4) he delves deeply into the treasures of Christian and Jewish thought and wisdom. It’s not easy reading, but then the matter is weighty too. I find it very helpful, that he, who does not share the Christian faith, writes, that a commission even if it is called “Truth and reconciliation commission” can ask for as much confession, regret and signs of remorse, but it can never dispense forgiveness. But without forgiveness, the only way out is a recalling of the same guilt, perpetrations, evils and ills perpetuating the disgrace and never finding an end. There is no judgement. There is no final verdict. There is no gracious closure. There is only a continuation of calls for something to never happen again, but perhaps even in this process already starting a new cycle of the very same over again. Reparations as such are necessary, but never suffice. The guilt, the disgrace, the hurt continues.
In a long and winding road MS addresses the unique role of woman in this process. He starts off with the observation, that women initially never told their own stories, but rather those of relatives and otherwise connected “others”. He makes a point of going via Hegel and Sophocles (Antigone) that here is an old tradition and culture calling for attention even as the laws try to hide and coverup an old dilemma. It’s not just about was is legal, just and right, but also what is good, meet and salutary – the later in the sense of “responsibility”, “humanness” and “ubuntu”. It is therefore the proper and acceptable thing to do for mothers, aunts and sisters to ask for the bodies of their murdered, assassinated or legally killed kinsmen to finally bury them, bring them to rest and find peace. The very evil of apartheid was, that the humanity of just too many was not taken into account, it was not recognized, it was not allowed and given its rightful place. Their (and our) human connectedness was rejected and all on racial grounds. That’s why it’s good that it was called to stop.
How to address the future? It’s an interesting turn, that the language and literature professor points beyond words to music as he tries to maneuver an escape from our predicament. It’s not just opera, but the music of the “other”, the voices still not recognized, but already heard. Reminds me of the old struggle song, which I quoted years back here in Kramer chapel, and which MS quotes on Pg.144. My bishop afterwards showed me, why it’s so good that brothers live in peace and harmony (Ps.133). The song went like this: Senzeni na? Senzeni na? Senzeni na? iSono sethu, ubumnyama. (What is our wrongdoing? Our sin is our blackness.) The church has answered with the plea to God: Kyrie eleison! And God answered us by sending his own son to be one of us – black & white – a Jew boy to carry the sins of the world.
I like the last chapter §6 best. Perhaps because things come together here nicely. Perhaps it’s the goal of the book. Perhaps it’s because I thought I knew the authors and books he discusses. First Antjie Krog “Country of my skull” (1998) and second J.M. Coetzee “Disgrace” (1999). MS does a marvelous job of unpacking these stories, analyzing, evaluation and then comparing and contextualizing them too. Fascinating insights. Well, worth reading. I never imagined, that Coetzee was actually giving a literary commentary on the TRC with this book. That really makes it all the more relevant and provocative really.
It’s not just about writers and their good ideas, but also about concepts and ideas as they formed South Africans through decades and centuries. In the serious chapters on “reparation” (§5) and “forgiveness” (§4) he delves deeply into the treasures of Christian and Jewish thought and wisdom. It’s not easy reading, but then the matter is weighty too. I find it very helpful, that he, who does not share the Christian faith, writes, that a commission even if it is called “Truth and reconciliation commission” can ask for as much confession, regret and signs of remorse, but it can never dispense forgiveness. But without forgiveness, the only way out is a recalling of the same guilt, perpetrations, evils and ills perpetuating the disgrace and never finding an end. There is no judgement. There is no final verdict. There is no gracious closure. There is only a continuation of calls for something to never happen again, but perhaps even in this process already starting a new cycle of the very same over again. Reparations as such are necessary, but never suffice. The guilt, the disgrace, the hurt continues.
In a long and winding road MS addresses the unique role of woman in this process. He starts off with the observation, that women initially never told their own stories, but rather those of relatives and otherwise connected “others”. He makes a point of going via Hegel and Sophocles (Antigone) that here is an old tradition and culture calling for attention even as the laws try to hide and coverup an old dilemma. It’s not just about was is legal, just and right, but also what is good, meet and salutary – the later in the sense of “responsibility”, “humanness” and “ubuntu”. It is therefore the proper and acceptable thing to do for mothers, aunts and sisters to ask for the bodies of their murdered, assassinated or legally killed kinsmen to finally bury them, bring them to rest and find peace. The very evil of apartheid was, that the humanity of just too many was not taken into account, it was not recognized, it was not allowed and given its rightful place. Their (and our) human connectedness was rejected and all on racial grounds. That’s why it’s good that it was called to stop.
How to address the future? It’s an interesting turn, that the language and literature professor points beyond words to music as he tries to maneuver an escape from our predicament. It’s not just opera, but the music of the “other”, the voices still not recognized, but already heard. Reminds me of the old struggle song, which I quoted years back here in Kramer chapel, and which MS quotes on Pg.144. My bishop afterwards showed me, why it’s so good that brothers live in peace and harmony (Ps.133). The song went like this: Senzeni na? Senzeni na? Senzeni na? iSono sethu, ubumnyama. (What is our wrongdoing? Our sin is our blackness.) The church has answered with the plea to God: Kyrie eleison! And God answered us by sending his own son to be one of us – black & white – a Jew boy to carry the sins of the world.
October 16, 2015
I hate to admit that I didn’t get most of this book. It had some really great stuff in it. But a lot of it just didn’t compute with me. I guess I just don’t understand how to read a “cross-disciplinary” book. One page would be about the Truth Commission, which I understood pretty well. Then the next page would be a very specialized discussion about some literary/philosophical minutiae that a Ph.D. probably understands. Now, I have a reasonable background in both literature and law. So I feel justified in saying that a common failure of “law and literature” scholarship is that neither the law nor literature ends up any better elucidated. A lot of times you get half law, half literature, and 100% academic in-speak. That leaves you with lists of interesting connections, but nothing new. In order to get real insight, you need 100% law and 100% literary analysis together. Then you can get intellectual dynamite. I think this book fell into the half-and-half category. Lots of interesting connections, but half the book was too confusing for most educated humans to understand.
With that being said, there are some brilliant passages in this book and a lot to commend.
Sanders’s discussion of ubuntu was better than most that I have read, and I have read several books about it already. He defines it much like others do, but his explanation is better because he “translate[s] the idiom more slowly than the judges, and more carefully than the Truth Commission, whose rendering, though not useless, is inexact, and whose citation of the phrase . . . is unmotivated when it should be more reserved.” P. 26. He then engages in a linguistic analysis of the phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu that shows “why it has the transformative potential that all these writers sense and seek to appropriate and manage.” P. 27. “The kind of dispropriation figured by ubuntu implies that being human, in an ethico-political sense, means that one does not enter the public sphere with ready-made rights and duties – any rights and duties have to be claimed and exercised. Making the claim to a right transforms the claimant and the one upon whom the claim is made. Both parties are exiled from their “proper” selves. Once on engages in ubuntu, there is no going back to a more “fundamental sense,” which would ground the subject of rights and responsibilities in prescribed duties and responsibilities, let alone do so within a predetermined communal hierarchy.” P. 27.
Sanders made two very incisive observations about ubuntu that ought to be repeated. First, the way that English-speaking scholars and judges use the word “is not a rendering of one language into another but a learning to speak another language, another’s language, without, in any accepted sense, understanding it.” P. 26. Thus, it looks like it is a tool rather than a philosophical foundation. Second, he makes an even more important point that resonated with me. I have been reading quite a bit about ubuntu, including legal cases from the South African Constitutional Court, and I have been troubled by how it can be used as a sword and a shield on both sides of legal arguments. Says Sanders: “Ubuntu takes the place of something absent, something that may never have existed, that lacks a proper name yet is promised by being posited.” P. 28. Brilliant. Ubuntu is Mayberry – a perfect town that we all want to move back to, except that it never existed. No wonder it is so difficult to determine what ubuntu allows and requires.
The most memorable and enlightening parts of this book are the stories Sanders tells from the Truth Commission – Joyce Mtimkhulu holding up part of her murdered son’s scalp; a torturer being questioned by his victims and reenacting his crimes for the commission; the stories of contrition and impenitence, forgiveness and enmity. Sanders does a wonderful job of setting out the problems with forgiveness, especially when perpetrators are evasive or manipulative. Are some crimes unforgivable? And can the living forgive on behalf of the dead? “The hearings of the Truth Commission show that forgiveness is never pure, that it is never even just one thing.” P. 113. He also presents the aporia of reparation very well – there must be reparation, but there can never be adequate reparation. Finally, he examines the importance of testimony in exposing truth (four different notions of which the Commission recognized).
I learned a lot from this book, even with all the parts I had to puzzle over because they were full of academic jargon.
With that being said, there are some brilliant passages in this book and a lot to commend.
Sanders’s discussion of ubuntu was better than most that I have read, and I have read several books about it already. He defines it much like others do, but his explanation is better because he “translate[s] the idiom more slowly than the judges, and more carefully than the Truth Commission, whose rendering, though not useless, is inexact, and whose citation of the phrase . . . is unmotivated when it should be more reserved.” P. 26. He then engages in a linguistic analysis of the phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu that shows “why it has the transformative potential that all these writers sense and seek to appropriate and manage.” P. 27. “The kind of dispropriation figured by ubuntu implies that being human, in an ethico-political sense, means that one does not enter the public sphere with ready-made rights and duties – any rights and duties have to be claimed and exercised. Making the claim to a right transforms the claimant and the one upon whom the claim is made. Both parties are exiled from their “proper” selves. Once on engages in ubuntu, there is no going back to a more “fundamental sense,” which would ground the subject of rights and responsibilities in prescribed duties and responsibilities, let alone do so within a predetermined communal hierarchy.” P. 27.
Sanders made two very incisive observations about ubuntu that ought to be repeated. First, the way that English-speaking scholars and judges use the word “is not a rendering of one language into another but a learning to speak another language, another’s language, without, in any accepted sense, understanding it.” P. 26. Thus, it looks like it is a tool rather than a philosophical foundation. Second, he makes an even more important point that resonated with me. I have been reading quite a bit about ubuntu, including legal cases from the South African Constitutional Court, and I have been troubled by how it can be used as a sword and a shield on both sides of legal arguments. Says Sanders: “Ubuntu takes the place of something absent, something that may never have existed, that lacks a proper name yet is promised by being posited.” P. 28. Brilliant. Ubuntu is Mayberry – a perfect town that we all want to move back to, except that it never existed. No wonder it is so difficult to determine what ubuntu allows and requires.
The most memorable and enlightening parts of this book are the stories Sanders tells from the Truth Commission – Joyce Mtimkhulu holding up part of her murdered son’s scalp; a torturer being questioned by his victims and reenacting his crimes for the commission; the stories of contrition and impenitence, forgiveness and enmity. Sanders does a wonderful job of setting out the problems with forgiveness, especially when perpetrators are evasive or manipulative. Are some crimes unforgivable? And can the living forgive on behalf of the dead? “The hearings of the Truth Commission show that forgiveness is never pure, that it is never even just one thing.” P. 113. He also presents the aporia of reparation very well – there must be reparation, but there can never be adequate reparation. Finally, he examines the importance of testimony in exposing truth (four different notions of which the Commission recognized).
I learned a lot from this book, even with all the parts I had to puzzle over because they were full of academic jargon.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews