Healing history, narrating trauma. History and the TRC

By Ann Langwadt

 

 

With the first democratic election in 1994 and the establishment of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission—the TRC—a process was set in motion to negotiate a politics of memory and history in South Africa. The TRC was meant to be a place where untold and silenced stories could be told and listened to. It asked South Africans who had witnessed “gross violations of human rights” to stand up and testify, for their own sake and for the sake of the nation, in order that the truth of past atrocities might be known and acknowledged, and reconciliation made possible. There were many skeletons in the cupboard as well as six feet under the ground, and the hearings fascinated the world with its excavation of these hidden archives of South African history. In the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Preliminary Final Report,[1] it is made clear that the Commission supported a view of South Africas history and people as being traumatised. The Commission also, in its “treatment” of the traumatised witnesses, assumed that it was possible to transfer a psychoanalytical concept that originally belonged in the clinic and was a personal or individual matter to the broader public in a collectivizing translation. The testimonies of individual witnesses were taken to represent the voices of many more traumatised South Africans who had not testified to the Commission.

In the TRC report and Desmond Tutu’s book about the process No Future Without Forgiveness,[2] for example, there is a clear psychopathological view of South Africa’s past or history as something that has been largely hidden or repressed, and that needs to be brought out into the open; needs to be not only narrated but also narrativized, in order to create a time and space for healing to take place. Chairperson Desmond Tutu’s foreword to the TRC report  makes use of the word trauma on the very first page, in saying how the TRC “had to provide the space within which victims could share the story of their trauma with the nation.”[3] In a recent special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on South Africa the editors’ introduction notes how the “pressure is on to find the resources, policies, and vision to ‘bind the nation together’ and to take its people decisively from a traumatized past to a reconstructed future”[4] —trauma seems to have become the catchword in just about every piece of writing on contemporary South Africa. This paper will explore some of the implications of narrativizing South Africa’s past as traumatic history.

The TRC-process marked the beginning of a “new South African past” in which the victims’ history could take centre stage. This formerly silenced or repressed history, the personal stories, would now be added to the public account of “the South African story”:

“By telling their stories, both victims and perpetrators gave meaning to the multi-layered experiences of the South African story.

By providing the environment in which victims could tell their own stories in their own languages, the Commission not only helped to uncover existing facts about past abuses, but also assisted in the creation of a ‘narrative truth’. In so doing, it also sought to contribute to the process of reconciliation by ensuring that the truth about the past included the validation of the individual subjective experiences of people who had previously been silenced or voiceless”.[5]

 

Thus, while rewriting history to include the formerly excluded stories was one of the main aims of the TRC, it was emphasized that the new history had to be a healing history. In establishing the facts around “what actually happened,” the TRC:

“..rejects the popular assumption that there are only two options to be considered when talking about truth—namely factual, objective information or subjective opinions. There is also ‘healing’ truth, the kind of truth that places facts and what they mean within the context of human relationships … This kind of truth was central to the Commission. It is not merely the actual knowledge about past human rights violations that counts … What is critical is that these facts be fully and publically acknowledged. Acknowledgement is an affirmation that a person’s pain is real and worthy of attention. It is thus central to the restoration of the dignity of victims”.[6]

 

With the TRC’s exploration of gross human rights violations and with its purpose of writing a kind of historical document, some have objected that the history produced is too one-sided, that it is all horror and atrocities, and therefore necessarily a very incomplete—and “bad”—history of South Africa’s recent past. One could also argue, however, that this is exactly the kind of history that needs to be written: not the victor’s history, not a history of the winners, a history of progress, but, instead, the history of the victims, of those who suffered.

It is perhaps not so surprising that the subject of history fails to attract the majority of South Africans, for who would want to be reminded of a humiliating past? Maybe some of it needs to be forgotten, or at least distorted, for the whole factual truth—whatever that might be—might be too grim and disempowering to facilitate healing.

The TRC clearly focussed on the exemplarity of the stories, and, in some cases, silenced those stories that resisted this appropriation. But what are the consequences of a perception of the past as traumatic; and how does it affect the possibility of rewriting history?

 

Recovering narrative; recovery by narrativization

“Although truth does not necessarily lead to healing, it is often a first step towards reconciliation.”[7] The TRC staged hearings that were meant to enable the telling of stories that had been silenced or hidden during apartheid, censored and repressed stories that needed now to be heard and included in the national or collective memory of the apartheid past. In the material from the TRC there is the notion that telling one’s story could, or even would lead to healing, that the recovery of the past would lead to the recovery of wholeness, not only for the individual witness, but also for the nation. What is not so clear is how the TRC’s concept of trauma or PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)[8] is used in the individual testimonies. In many cases, a doctor would confirm that the witness (victim or perpetrator) was suffering from PTSD or other mental disorders. But it is for the readers of the TRC Report and the hearing transscripts to apply this information to the testimonies. In a sense, trauma theory, which grew out of individual psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, is used less to understand individual testimonies than to provide a larger framework for the TRC’s nation-building work. That is, the definition is supplied as a general description of the causes and consequences of national oppression—which goes back centuries, to “stressors” such as colonialism, racism, and apartheid itself—but these larger oppressive structures were not the main focus of the hearings.

All stories at the hearings were staged and directed by the staff of the TRC and the published report was edited by the TRC. The TRC was never simply a passive recorder of those stories; the TRC was like a ship that sailed through the South African landscape, its commissioners concerned that their authorship not be wrecked by too many stories that did not carry forward the aims of national unity and reconciliation.

In some cases, the process proved to be traumatic in itself. For example, Gillian Slovo, whose mother was assassinated by one of the famous evil characters in the TRC, and who with some of her relatives made a submission to the TRC, decided to meet with the assassin, Craig Williamson, to try to discover the truth about the mother’s death. She has written about this in her South African memoir Every Secret Thing[9] as a re-traumatizing experience, since Williamson did not show the remorse Slovo craved, and made the murder sound like an everyday, neutral event in the bureaucratic machinery of apartheid—which, of course, it was!

 

I can’t remember whether I have a memory disorder or not: Benzien reconstructed

One of the hearings that most directly deal with the problems around witnessing and trauma is Jeffrey Benzien’s amnesty hearing.[10] It raises questions about how the diagnosis PTSD explains memory-loss and how memory-loss points to PTSD. What can trauma victims remember, and how do they remember? With PTSD diagnosed, can one have any hope of discovering factual truth about events that brought on the disorder?

The hearing is probably best remembered for its demonstration of a torture method known as “the wet bag” by which the victim is taken to the point of death by suffocation again and again by having a wet bag placed over the head and tightened at the neck.[11] One of the victims of this torture was Tony Yengeni (an MP member at the time of the hearing). Yengeni requested that the wet bag method be demonstrated, so he could see how it was done (he had been blindfolded when he was tortured by Benzien). This was one of the many instances where the victims of Benzien’s torture sought knowledge or confirmation of what had happened to them. When the TRC writes that many victims would re-live their traumatic experiences, and that it was necessary to face the past in this way, at the TRC, this was surely one of clearest demonstrations of how that could be done.

Apart from this physical demonstration, the victims generally sought knowledge of the past by asking Benzien to confirm their memories of it. It was as if they were not always sure themselves, but the only memory under interrogation here was Benzien’s.

Jacobs: “But at some point, I think it is about the fourth time, when I thought I am dying, you woke me up and you said, ‘Peter, I will take you to the verge of death as many times as I want to. But you are going to talk and if it means that you will die, that is okay’. Do you remember that?”

Benzien: “I concede I may have said that, Sir.”

Jacobs: “I want you to tell me, because this is important for me. The truth commission can amnesty, but this is important for me. Did you say that?”

Benzien: Yes, I did say that.[12]

 

The phrases “I concede I may have” or “I concede it may have happened” were used again and again by Benzien and seemed to indicate his surrender both to the TRC process and to his own state of memory. But the victims were there to hear the truth and sometimes felt that their suffering was not properly acknowledged because Benzien could not remember and therefore not confirm their stories with certainty.

Thus, the hearing was somewhat at cross-purposes with the TRC aim of restoring human dignity by letting victims tell their stories and have them acknowledged. This shows why it was important that victims usually (in the victim hearings) told their stories to the Commission, rather than the perpetrator, for by telling it to the Commission, acknowledgement was certain. Benzien himself indicated that his memory lapses were caused by the intervening time (most of the incidents had happened about a decade earlier), and that there were so many similar incidents: what was special and unique to the victim, was not necessarily special or unique to Benzien for whom it was part of a work routine.

Benzien himself had been diagnosed as suffering from PTSD. But it was not the events themselves at the time that traumatised Benzien; it was his changed perspective on those events (brought on by the transition in South Africa) that made them, retrospectively, traumatizing to him.

 

The demands of narrative

That trauma appears now to be a new master narrative in South Africa, and the fact that the TRC was supposed to provide a platform where all formerly silenced or untold stories could be told, does not mean that all stories can in fact be told. At the TRC hearings, witnesses often expressed their inability to tell their stories or get to the heart of the pain of their stories.[13]

The traumatic memory, which is wordless, cannot speak itself although it must; yet, as Roberta Culbertson puts it, the “demands of narrative for their part operate in fact as cultural silencers to this sort of [traumatic, deep, or body] memory.”[14] The healing that is made possible by telling what happened through communicating it to others, and by achieving some distance from it by narrativizing it, depends on distortion enabling the listeners’ understanding. The story that heals is a distortion, a kind of autobiographical fiction.[15] The traumatic memory is dissociated (repressed) from the individual’s story of the self because it would destroy that story; at the same time, the traumatic memory is a wound that cries out, that insists on being told, so the survivor has only the choice between letting the traumatic memory destroy the narrator (the self) or the narrative (the story of the self), or killing the traumatic memory, that is, destroying or silencing it by narrativizing it.

 

The purpose of history

The problem with traumatic memory, however, is that it exists only as a “Ding an sich”, in a sense: the victim has no “versions” of it, no contextualizing narrative in which to place it. The traumatic event has not yet been experienced. It has happened, but has not been experienced. How does one write the history of such an event? Such a non-experienced past that exists only in present repetition during which the cognitive self is absent?

Does the notion of South Africa’s history as being traumatic help explain why the history subject is in a state of crisis? As I have mentioned above, the focus on the victims, the history of victimisation, may in itself go some way towards explaining a lack of interest in the subject. At another level, in the politics of nation-building, “historicisation as a form of resistance to the present’s domination of the past” is suppressed in order to move the nation forward in unity.[16] Is the “eternal present” of the traumatic event something that can be understood historically at all? At a deeper and more speculative level, which I have tried to outline here, one might wonder if it—the (history) subject crisis—is also directly linked to the dynamics of traumatic memory (individual or collectivized). One problem that historiography has had to deal with is the notion that there is no objective history, since there is no object of history[17]; but in dealing with trauma the historian (the historical subject) is missing too! The self, the subject, the narrator, the agent—is absent during the traumatic event when it happens and only experiences it in the telling: it is only in the act of writing the story that the event is experienced, and then only as a distortion.

It is maybe now more necessary than ever for an historian to make up her / his mind about the purpose of writing history. Does one want to pursue facts only (“what actually happened”), and to which degree must one accept that this is inaccesible? Or does one want a healing history, which might distort “what actually happened,” in order to save the subject of the story, so as to rescue the agent or narrator of the story? Maybe, as Mary Tjiattas has suggested,  historians will have to accept that the goal of “truth” should not always have highest priority[18]: who wants a truth that destroys one? In the TRC, narrative truth was meant to work—by suggestion or coercion—towards reconciliation, healing and national unity. Telling the truth can be a healing activity, but it can also be the opposite (be disempowering or re-traumatizing). This in itself must be an uncomfortable truth for historians dealing with South Africa’s traumatized past—if they accept the diagnosis which was made by TRC Commissioners and politicians rather than by historians.