Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge
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| Gillian Gane4 -ggane@pan.uzulu.ac.za
Department of English University of Zululand, South Africa The recent work I've done on South African literature has focused on violations of women in post-apartheid novels. In my presentation here today I'm revisiting this work, hoping to open it up and get some feedback and guidance in developing my analyses. Two issues in particular loom large for me: One, in each of the three novels I work with, the violated women I focus on seem to demand to be seen as emblems of the violated land, though I'm profoundly ambivalent about this connection. Two: there is evidently a special connection between "coloured" South Africans and rape. An extreme version of this would hold that the coloured community was constituted by acts of interracial rape, that coloureds are the children of rape. Two of the novels I work with are by coloured authors and about coloured characters, and both attest to a special anxiety about the place of coloureds in the New South Africa. The third is by a white author. (Obviously this selection does not represent the South African population as a whole.) I'll discuss the three violated women I've chosen in turn. The woman I focus on in Disgrace is the daughter of the white protagonist, David Lurie. Lucy is a lesbian who grows flowers and vegetables and boards dogs on a rural smallholding; a black man, Petrus, is her assistant and in the process of becoming a partner in the business. While her father, disgraced and dismissed from his job, is visiting Lucy on her farm, three black men break into the house and lock David up in the lavatory while they rape Lucy. Lucy will not speak to her father about the rape, and she refuses to report it to the police: ". . . As far as I am concerned, what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone." "This place being what?" "This place being South Africa." (112) Rape is in fact an act that ruptures the boundaries between the private and the public, that violates the privacy of a woman's most secret bodily parts and appropriates them for public use. In the hostile stranger rape to which Lucy was subjected, men broke forcibly first into the privacy of her home and then into the privacy of her body. Rape is always a political act, the exertion of male power over a female body; in a rape that crosses racial lines the issues are even more charged. When, as here, it is males of a disempowered race who rape a woman of the dominant race, the rape is likely to be read as a declaration of racial war. However, for whatever reasons—she does not explain—Lucy forestalls the further eruption of the rape into a widening public arena: it is, she insists, "a purely private matter." To her father, moreover, she maintains repeatedly that he cannot know what she has experienced. "You don't know what happened," she tells him, "you don't begin to know" (134: emphasis in the original). When Lucy does eventually break down in tears and talk to her father about the rape, while continuing to insist that he cannot "understand what happened to me that day" (157), she tells him that she thinks the rapists see themselves as "debt collectors, tax collectors," and she wonders whether she shouldn't see them in the same way: "what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on?'" she asks (158). Horrified, David urges Lucy to leave the farm: "You wish to humble yourself before history," he writes in a note to her; "But the road you are following is the wrong one. It will strip you of all honour; you will not be able to live with yourself. . . ." (160). Lucy's anguish is apparent, and yet this does not make her want to flee danger; the honor that David stresses does not matter to her. And then it transpires that Lucy is pregnant as a result of the rape and will not think of having an abortion. Her black business partner and neighbor Petrus, who already has two wives (and who turns out to be related to one of Lucy's rapists), suggests that he marry her. Again, David is outraged and incredulous, while Lucy calmly points out the practical advantages of making a deal with Petrus. "How humiliating," David says. Lucy agrees that it is humiliating: "But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity" (205) Lucy's choices are deeply disturbing. We might approve of her stance as a white South African; humility, the recognition that there is a debt to pay, a willingness to start over with nothing—these would not come amiss for white South Africans. But to feminists her acceptance of rape and her choice to bear the child conceived as a result of rape are dangerous, not least in their implications for all women in a country where violence against women is epidemic. If someone must take on the sins of white South Africa, why should it be Lucy? At the end of the novel, David Lurie appears to become reconciled to the future his daughter has chosen. He drives out to her farm one day, comes upon Lucy unobserved as she works in the flowerbeds, and experiences a moment of transcendence, an epiphany: There is a moment of utter stillness which he would wish prolonged for ever: the gentle sun, the stillness of midafternoon, bees busy in a field of flowers; and at the centre of the picture a young woman, das ewig Weibliche, lightly pregnant, in a straw sunhat. A scene ready-made for a Sargent or a Bonnard. (218) Flushed, Lucy looks moreover "the picture of health" (218), the pastiness and slackness David recently observed miraculously gone. The pregnant woman blending into a landscape of flowers and bees becomes an icon of beauty, fecundity, Goethe's eternal feminine—and a hopeful future for the land.
However, now that the struggle has been won and the new South Africa is about to be born, Dulcie is regularly subjected to torture. In the small hours of the morning men repeatedly enter her bedroom, having defeated "reinforced bolts and locks" and an alarm system (81). They wear black tracksuits and face-obscuring balaclava helmets (179). Their procedures are clinical; they carry a doctor's bag filled with instruments of torture (82). The "one who seems to be in charge" says on their first visit, "Not rape, that will teach her nothing, leave nothing; rape's too good for her kind" (178). Yet some of the torture is clearly sexual in nature: Dulcie's night clothes are removed as the session begins (178), and among the signs left on her body are scars on her buttocks (19) and "bleeding nipples" (115). Dulcie gathers from what her tormentors say that "she cannot be killed; that instead they rely upon her being driven to do it herself" (179). Who are Dulcie's tormentors? She sees hands that are both black and white; the figures in their black tracksuits are familiar, but imagining them as "friends, family, comrades. . . . brings a moment of pure terror, of looking into the abyss" (179). Dulcie is confronted with the devastating possibility that her tormentors are her former comrades in the struggle. In fact, it is strongly hinted that among her tormentors is the man she loves, David Dirkse, another coloured MK veteran, the man whose story constitutes the novel. The understanding the narrator eventually reaches of Dulcie's plight is presented in a story she tells David about . . . Bronwyn the Brown Witch who can do anything at all. Oh, there are tests galore for her, the usual ones of three wishes, three trips into the woods, three impossible tasks. She passes them all. She uses her magical powers to get her friends out of scrapes, to feed the poor, to stave off hurricanes and earthquakes, to drive back the enemy, until one day her friends, the sticks in the forest, come clattering together, lay themselves down on top of each other until they are a mighty woodpile. There is no way out. Bronwyn the Witch must die on the stake. (203) Hearing this, David is visibly shaken. He concedes, "Yes, she's grown too big for her boots and they've had enough of her. She must give up her power, hand over her uniform, make way for the big men" (204). There is no indication that Dulcie ever protests the torments she undergoes or even speaks of them, and her love for David does not change. Her sufferings are the product of a world where "The truth lies in black and white" (116), an extraordinary, ambiguous statement: the world is increasingly divided into two polarized racial groups, where truth oxymoronically lies. It is a world moreover where the military ethos of the struggle is now in tension with the ideals of a nascent democratic society, a world, finally, where women cannot become too powerful. Betrayal and conspiracy are in the air; the enemies that beset both David and Dulcie could be the forces of the apartheid regime—or, more chillingly, they could be their own comrades in the struggle. What cannot be fully confronted or openly said is the terrifying possibility that, first, Dulcie and David's former comrades in arms are now out to get them—the two of them linked because they are both coloured—and, second, that, perhaps in part as a consequence of his own victimization, David is involved in the torture of Dulcie. We do however at the end of the novel see Dulcie once more, or a surreal vision of Dulcie. As the narrator tends the flowers in her walled winter garden, on the penultimate page of the novel, Dulcie appears: Only when I turn to go back to work do I see her sturdy steatopygous form on the central patch of grass, where she has come to sunbathe in private. She is covered with goggas crawling and buzzing all over her syrup sweetness, exploring her orifices, plunging into her wounds; she makes no attempt to wipe the insects away, to shake them off. Instead, she seems grateful for the cover of creatures in the blinding light and under the scorching sun. (212) As in the vision of Lucy at the end of Disgrace, Dulcie blends into a garden scene of flowers and sunlight. The scene of Lucy's flowerbeds in their "season of blooming" included bees, emblems of fertility (216); this garden scene features undifferentiated "goggas" and, revealingly, they cluster not around the flowers but around Dulcie's body, feasting on its "syrup sweetness." Her wounds are "orifices," entrances into her body, like mouths or vaginas. Lucy is transfigured by her pregnancy: the gang rape about which she would not speak has borne fruit, and her violated body is now a sanctified vehicle in which the future takes shape. Dulcie is comparably transformed: the wounds that have penetrated the surface of her body, the violations that she suffered in silence, now yield sweetness; like Lucy's, her body too is offered up as a sacrifice for the nourishment of others. In these final epiphanies, both women are elevated—or reduced, depending on one's point of view—into emblems of the land, the wounded nation that yet endures and carries within it the seeds of the future. I'm relieved to assure you that there's no comparable blending of South African earth and female flesh in the third novel I'll discuss, Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit. This novel starts in 1998 with the revived memory of the rape of Lydia Ali nearly twenty years before: when Lydia's husband Silas Ali sees the white security policeman who raped his wife, wounds reopen and history returns to haunt the present. Mikey, the couple's nineteen-year-old son, learns for the first time that he is the child of the white rapist—and the novel ends with him killing this man and planning to flee South Africa. Lydia's family, the Oliphants, are coloured, their hybrid origins lost in history. Her husband Silas Ali is the son of a Muslim immigrant (actually, a fugitive) from India and a white woman who was the third of his three wives. Lydia's response to being reminded of the rape two decades ago is one that some would see as typically female: she hurts herself. Specifically, she dances barefoot on broken glass, severely injuring her feet, and needs to spend three weeks in hospital. The physical pain of her self-inflicted wounds, we are told, is "Lydia's way of displacing a much deeper, unfathomable agony" (21). And yet something changes in her. On the day that she's released from the hospital, she goes home by herself in a taxi, though Silas is breaking speed limits on the highway to come and pick her up: she's outdistancing her husband and declaring her independence from him. Later, she announces that she's taken a new job and bought her own car. In the few months in late 1998 covered by the novel Lydia has made the transition from being unable to walk to an impressive degree of mobility and autonomy. Lydia's sexuality is central to her recovery process. Since the rape, half her lifetime ago, she has been sexually numb, but desire now reawakens in her. There's an intense incestuous scene between her and her son Mikey. If they had made love, she thinks afterwards, "there would have been terrible repercussions, unimaginable consequences—but there would also have been energy, even if it was a vile energy, filled with self-loathing and hatred" (167). Lydia goes on to imagine her desires more fully: "She wants now to be lowered into an abyss of the flesh, unquestioned and unquestioning, to descend as if she is drowning, she wants the death of her sexual being, and thinks it could only happen dramatically, sinful and sinned against . . ." (248). Lydia's fantasies are fulfilled. At the party his friends organize to celebrate Silas's fiftieth birthday, she dances with a young man called Joao. "I want you," he says, and a short while later Lydia leads him to an empty room, where they make love on a billiard table. One assumes it is purely by accident, unconnected to Lydia's wish for the dramatic, that both her husband Silas and her son Mikey happen into the room and watch the scene. We see the lovers through their eyes; both of them stress above all the contrast between Lydia's olive skin and Joao's "black body," his "skin so black it was almost blue" (Silas, 267, 266). Silas silently reprimands himself for his "racist images" (266): "God, he had to stop going on about 'black this' and 'black that'. He was surprised by this preoccupation with race. Perhaps be had been denying it for too long: who we are is still determined by what color we are" (272). That in the end is the message of the novel: race matters. To heal the wounds of her rape by a white man Lydia has sex with a black man, and to the extent that she is an emblem of the nation, she shows the way to the future. When Silas goes home after the party, Lydia's car has gone and he knows that she's left him. And the novel ends with Lydia, on the road alone, heading for Cape Town in her new car, listening to a song about "last year's man." If Lydia (like Lucy and Dulcie) is the nation violated by history, the conclusion of the novel is hopeful: she is restored and asserts her autonomy in making her way toward the future—not in a context of insects and earthiness, like Lucie and Dulcie, but in a motor car, an icon of modernity and mobility. So of the three violated women, two become some sort of fertility goddesses, their suffering enabling them to nourish the future; Lucy will bear a coloured child, while ironically the other two novels strongly imply that coloureds in South Africa are doomed. The third woman, Lydia, is herself restored through the magical means of casual sex with a black man. Meanwhile, however, the coloured men in the two novels by coloured authors are out of the picture—Wicomb's David is dead, and Lydia's husband and son in Dangor's novel both plan to leave South Africa. Note: Parts of this presentation are drawn from a published article of mine ("Unspeakable Injuries") and parts from a conference presentation ("Rape, Race, and Incest"). Yüklə 2,6 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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