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PREFACE

And why does it always have to be people like me who have to sacrifice, why are we always the ones who have to make concessions when something has to be conceded, why always me who has to bite her tongue, why?

—PAULINA IN ARIEL DORFMAN’S Death and the Maiden

It might seem odd to begin a book about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) with a discussion of a play set in “a country that is probably Chile” by a Chilean playwright (ix). Allow me to explain why I do so. Death and the Maiden’s clear articulation of the challenges inherent to any truth-seeking process has made references to it almost clichéd in scholarship on transitional justice. In the epigraph above, Paulina asks why she should not take revenge against the man who raped and tortured her. She ventriloquizes the frustration of survivors of human rights violations who reject the “justice” a truth commission offers: justice in the form of a truthful account and acknowledgment of the abuse that victims suffered rather than punishment of those who did or supported that abuse. Ironically, perhaps, Paulina also expresses the resentment of some perpetrators, who claim that they acted in good faith and for a righteous cause and should therefore not be required to disclose the details of their actions before a commission. Suffice it to say, truth commissions never satisfy all parties.

Death and the Maiden is relevant to my project in other ways as well. The Chilean truth commission influenced the form and ideology of the South African commission, a transnational circulation of ideas that I discuss in detail in chapter 1. More importantly, Dorfman’s motivations for writing Death and the Maiden, and the play’s circulation, underscore this project’s argument about the tight braid of cultural and political projects. Dorfman hoped that Death, like Aristotelian drama, would be “a work of art that might help a collective to purge itself, through pity and terror, in other words to force the spectators to confront those predicaments that, if not brought into the light of day, could lead to their ruin” (74). The “uptake” of Death and the Maiden testifies to its rhetorical force (Warner 87). In his foreword to the TRC Report, written in part to address the Commission’s detractors, Chairperson Desmond Tutu writes, “In Ariel Dorfmann’s [sic] play, Death and the Maiden, a woman ties up the man who has injured her. She is ready to kill him when he repeats his lie that he did not rape or torture her. It is only when he admits his violations that she lets him go. His admission restores her dignity and her identity. Her experience is confirmed as real and not illusory and her sense of self is affirmed” (1: 7). Here Tutu seeks to persuade critics of the TRC’s argument that truth constitutes a satisfying alternative to retributive justice. In so doing, he seriously misinterprets Paulina’s response. Roberto’s forced confession does not restore her dignity and identity. She appears as angry and vulnerable at the end of the play as she does at the beginning. While she is persuaded to release Roberto unharmed, Paulina’s desire for vengeance remains unquenched. In her final lines of the play, she asks, “What do we lose? What do we lose by killing one of them? What do we lose? What do we lose?” (66). For my purposes here, Tutu’s misreading of the play matters less than his use of it to legitimate the TRC’s approach to victims and perpetrators. His citation exemplifies the interplay of political and cultural processes to which From Apartheid to Democracy draws attention.

In the following pages, I demonstrate how rhetoricians can, and why they should, read diverse texts—legal, testimonial, fictional, and visual—as equal participants in political projects. Victims and amnesty applicants, as well as the artists who represent and respond to the TRC in their creative work, share a commitment to its project of imagining a new South Africa. By including these generically varied receptions of the TRC process, From Apartheid to Democracy offers what Jeffrey Walker calls a “sophistic history of ‘rhetoric’ [in that it] includes ‘poetry’ and ‘poetics’ as essential, central parts of ‘rhetoric’s domain” (ix). As Walker demonstrates, epideictic discourse, like the more practical civic oratory traditionally associated with rhetoric, also “calls its audience to acts of judgment and response” (viii).

I characterize TRC participants’ and respondents’ arguments about the past as public memory. This term foregrounds their (paradoxical) orientation toward the present, communalism, and dynamism. Memories tell as much about the present as about the past, if not more: “[they are] a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present” (Nora 8). Memories are born of individual perceptions but also of shared social processes. Uptake of the past, be it contentious or harmonious, unifying or divisive, constitutes those who remember as a contingent public. While communal remembrance is “a crucial aspect of our togetherness” (Phillips 4), it is also always open to “contest, revision, and rejection” (2). The “public” of public memory thus indexes the inherently communal nature as well as the ongoing contestation that characterize remembrance, while “memory” calls attention to the presentist orientation and personal stakes of any engagement with the past.

I conceive of public memory as a process rather than an object. Instead of seeking memories’ essential meaning, form, or beginning, I track their uptake and evolution across time and genre. Rhetorical hermeneutics, a form of cultural rhetoric studies “that takes as its topic specific historical acts of interpretation within their cultural contexts,” provides one way of doing so (Mailloux 56). Rhetorical hermeneutics examines interpreters’ relationship to a text as well as the relationships among interpreters. Indeed, “for rhetorical hermeneutics, these two problems are ultimately inseparable” (50). The metaphor of “conversation” captures the dialogism of public memory (Mailloux, Bruffee). When possible, I comment on the social locations and political orientations of TRC participants and respondents to illuminate the various sources of their arguments.