Can the testimonies of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) victims and perpetrators be used in art?, Angie Kapelianis, TRC journalist, recently asked. She was referring to the presentation, closing the Spier Festival at the end of March, of the TRC Cantata. She could have been referring also to the panel on art and media, coordinated and chaired by Antjie Krog, poet, at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s [IJR] TRC: Ten Years On conference in Cape Town two weeks ago.
The question intimates Theodor Adorno’s dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.
The cantata is due to premier at Spier on Reconciliation Day in December. Philip Miller, composer, is writing the score; Krog is textual advisor; and Janice Honeyman will direct. “This is the question confronting Miller,” said Kapelianis.
“Before [the TRC], literature was dominated by strong white voices,” Krog said. “In 1996 you saw a huge injection of more than 2 000 black narratives into the sound space of South Africa. Every writer worth his salt had to react to that.”
This was an opportunity to engage survivors at the conference on this reaction. Is it possible or apt to produce beauty and order from pain and breakdown? Is it ethically appropriate to produce art from these narratives? Essentially, how are survivors and victims remembered and honoured in the process?
While Emma Bedford, curator, was more thoughtful than Jonathan Shapiro, cartoonist, the panel failed to explore how artists and journalists deal with the still traumatising past. It didn’t reflect on the media’s shaping of either the TRC story then, or debates about truth, forgiveness and reconciliation now. It is not surprising, perhaps, that echoes of Adorno were nowhere to be heard on Krog’s panel. In writing Country of My Skull, Krog consciously resolved Adorno’s dilemma to write, to write poetry and to write in her mother tongue which was also the language in which brutalities were ordered and perpetrated (the book is dedicated “to every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips”). The dilemma resolved for her, the aesthetic and ethical questions now appear more widely forgotten.
Krog approached Miller after she heard his music for the film Forgiveness. “[She] talked about the necessity of making art from the extraordinariness in our country,” an initially hesitant Miller told Kapelianis. “There was a lot of soul searching how one does this, given the sensitivity of the voices one was using and the sensitivity of the country now in a fragile democracy. Those conversations [with Krog] allowed me to know we have to keep this stuff alive [so that] it doesn’t end up in libraries and dusty archives, but is part of public memory, of a sound memory.”
The TRC Cantata‘s most important resonance is voice, Miller told Kapelianis. “The TRC established a process where people could use their voices again. What we hear are voices telling their stories.”
Miller has also resolved Adorno’s dilemma. “Adorno said there can be no poetry after the Holocaust. How can I deal with this depth of evil?” he said describing his choice of a perpetrator’s voice. “I won’t shy away from this, as difficult as it is. I chose a testimony — Jeff Benzien, using the wet bag [torture] technique.”
The word ‘apartheid’ was not used during the Spier discussion. I asked why. “It’s about spiritual upliftment,” said Honeyman. “We want to credit the TRC with the upliftment of our society, rather than harping back to apartheid.”
In remembering the past, Honeyman’s Cantata substitutes the TRC for the apartheid past. Rather than confronting the reality of the past, it runs the risk of evasively defending against its impact.
Miller and Krog, and other artists and journalists working with the narratives, should make every effort to collaborate respectfully with survivors, to honour the lives and experience of victims who didn’t survive, and to avoid the dangers of denigrating them by using them in ways that do not speak to the ongoing pain.
“A major contribution to reparation is the act of recognition,” Marjorie Jobson, acting director, Khulumani support group, told the conference. Repairing damage is not just narrowly handing out financial packages but is doing things in more collaborative ways, putting victims at the centre of what we do,” she said.