Losing the Plot

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Leon de Kock. Losing the Plot

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Losing the Plot

Acknowledgements

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If there is a golden, affirmative thread in postapartheid writing, one might find it in narrative reclamations of identity, the excavation of buried or repressed selves, in unfolding self-expression. Such speaking out satisfies, in spirit at least, Ndebele’s vision of narrative as giving ‘legitimacy and authority to previously silenced voices’, confirming the ‘rewriting of South African history on the basis of validated mass experience’ (‘Memory’ 20). Further, as Ndebele notes, it is the revelation of meaning through the ‘imaginative combination of ... facts’ (21) so that ‘facts will be the building blocks of metaphor’ (21) that is important. Hence the prevalence of memoir-type or confessional/autobiographical writing by a wide range of South African subjects, whether from township streets or prisons – or universities. Indeed, academics are more likely nowadays to write their own variants of memoiristic witnessing or reflection than pen ‘appreciations’ of ‘great writers’, as earlier generations were inclined to do. Notable recent examples of this trend include Stephen Clingman’s Birthmark, Mamphela Ramphele’s A Life, Steven Robins’s Letters of Stone and Leslie Swartz’s Able-Bodied. Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael argue that the ‘flourishing of the autobiographical voice has emerged alongside the powerful informing context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but it is also a symptom of the decompression, relaxation, and cacophony of the post-apartheid moment in general’ (298). They contend that the ‘autobiographical act’ is ‘more than a literary convention’; it ‘has become a cultural activity’. In a multiplicity of forms, including ‘memoir, reminiscence, confession, testament, case history and personal journalism’, such ‘biographical acts or cultural occasions’ see narrators take up ‘models of identity that have become widely available’; these have ‘pervaded the culture of the 1990s and have spread into the new century’ (298). Nuttall and Michael continue:

Particularly since the political transition of 1994, personal disclosure has become a part of a revisionary impulse, part of the pluralizing project of democracy itself. The individual, in this context, emerges as a key, newly legitimized concept. South Africa becomes a ‘recited’ community ... [t]alking about their own lives, confessing, and constructing personal narratives – on the body, on the air, in music, in print – South Africans translate their selves, and their communities, into story. (298)

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