Conclusions without Closure

Transcription

1 P ART III Conclusions without Closure Framing Notes III: The Politics of Memory, Oral History, and Voice For memory is, by definition, a term which directs our attention not past but to the past present relation. It is because the past has this living active existence in the present that it matters so much politically. 1 Popular Memory Group, Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method The Popular Memory Group s argument about the politics of memory influenced the thinking and naming of the Centre for Popular Memory (CPM) at the University of Cape Town in Since then the CPM (website, za ) has achieved project successes with diverse community structures such as arts centers, schools, museums, radio and television stations, and partnerships with academic and archival institutions across the globe. But recently, my colleagues and I have been reflecting on the intellectual heritage that shaped the CPM. At its outset, the CPM was inspired by Alessandro Portelli, Luisa Passerini, Alistair Thomson, and a generation of socialist and progressive intellectuals who shaped international oral history from the 1960s to the 1990s. These trends also influenced a generation of South African oral historians: Belinda Bozzoli, Philip Bonner, Bill Nasson, and others. However, in the past decade, South African oral historians, including the CPM, have shifted energies towards training, capacity-building, and various post-apartheid research projects. These altered priorities are important, but there are two tensions with political implications that concern me here. First, while popular memories have latent

2 148 / Oral History, Community, and Displacement political value, oral history methodology is not inherently political or radical. As Alexander Freund put it, If we talk about oral history as a method, I think we can agree that it is a neutral tool than can be used for both, subversive tales and master narratives. 2 Second, as William Gumede and Leslie Dikeni note, At issue is the question of how progressive intellectuals who fought in the liberation struggle should relate to a democratic government that has demanded absolute loyalty behind its nation-building project. 3 These two tensions overlap in the post-apartheid context and compel me to argue that South African oral historians need to reconsider their roles as public intellectuals. We need to interrogate how critical voices have become muted; and how this affects the politics of memory, oral history, and voice; and their appropriation by the master narratives of the post-apartheid nation-state. In 2008, when Portelli gave a seminar at the District Six Museum in Cape Town, he was asked from the floor: Has oral history become trendy and lost its critical and subversive edge? He responded by suggesting that it was less that oral history had lost its subversive edge and rather that it has become more respectable. These questions and the discussion led me to write a debate input for the International Oral History Association (IOHA) website ( ), which in turn led to an IOHA conference panel in Prague in I argued that if oral history methodology has become respectable, that is a positive phenomenon insofar as it refers to its growing intellectual legitimacy, but it has negative implications if oral historians are less critical of discrimination and oppression that occurred in the past and is occurring present. If oral history is to do justice to its democratizing and anti-discriminatory ethics, as Verena Alberti put it, we can be intellectual activists. 4 I concluded the IOHA debate input by arguing that reaching a state of respectability is fine. Provided we do not lose sight of the radical or democratic intentions that motivated so many of us to do oral history projects in the first place. Provided we continue to keep the dynamism of oral story-telling alive in how we disseminate stories and memories through multiple mediums. Provided we continually critique ourselves and strive to learn from each other. But most of all we need to remain open to learning from story-tellers, who remain our primary site(s) of inspiration. How we understand and draw from the creativity inherent in dialogues with story-tellers should motivate us to continue the process of conceptual reflection and debate on the stories they tell each other and us. 5 There is also a larger question, given changing global and local contexts, of how oral historians can contribute to new forms of political thinking that move beyond promises of popular emancipation and redemption. Lyn Abrams has argued that the political roles of oral historians have shifted over the past three decades from their activist-orientation with a predominant socialist or feminist vision to the current advocacy and development roles that oral history plays. 6 However, redemptive notions still dominate in South African politics. Oral history advocacy (or intellectual activism) in post-apartheid South Africa has to face squarely the frustrating realities of what I have termed the politics of disappointment (see Chapter 10). In

3 Conclusions without Closure / 149 a similar vein, Gumede and Dikeni argue that the democratic state, even after all the human resources invested in it... has proved a disappointment in its failure to meet the demands of the most vulnerable in society. 7 I now write as a disappointed South African, angered by what the African National Congress (ANC) became during the Thabo Mbeki years. I say that knowing full well that there have been enormous achievements in post-apartheid South Africa in which the ANC has been central. In 2004 I broke allegiance with the ANC. This is no simple matter of changing voting preferences, but, as former United Democratic Front (UDF) and ANC activist, it is a painful act that is akin to disowning one s parents or rather, separating from my political parents. I know that there are many others who feel similarly, some who have broken from the ANC and some who remain in the ANC, despite their disappointments, largely because there is no apparent political alternative. The disappointments of the post-apartheid transition are directly linked to the ANC s morphing from liberation movement to a modern political party, where chauvinism and corruption are endemic. Various corruption revelations since the late 1990s, beginning with the arms scandal and then President Mbeki s mismanagement of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, are major examples. The politics of post-apartheid transition and memory are shaped by a toxic mixture of cultural essentialism and narcissism, which I discuss in Chapter 10. During the Mbeki years , critical debate was stifled and any view that did not fit the ANC s racialized framing of the transformation agenda was dismissed as racist or unpatriotic. Under current president Jacob Zuma, democratic institutions are strong, but criticisms of the ANC (conceived of as identical to the state ) are still interpreted as disloyalty. As Jonathan Jansen puts it, our young democracy still finds it difficult to reconcile criticality and loyalty, South Africa pays a heavy price for such smallmindedness when it could otherwise be enriched by the municipality of voices on any subject. 8 How then might a new politics of memory, oral history, and voice in postapartheid South Africa be imagined? In the period since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), many oral history students have been drawn to oral history less for political reasons than because they wish to use oral history as a means to heal post-apartheid sufferings. In Chapter 9, I express my scepticism about using redemptive TRC approaches to trauma and healing, and I explore the problems with blurring these healing and political motivations within oral history projects. Whatever the political persuasion or style of approach adopted by oral historians, people s suffering has to be approached with acute sensitivity, and there is a central core to oral history practice that remains constant. The methodology provides dialogic spaces, inside and outside the interview, for oral historians to engage on multiple levels with the living agents of history. But to consider these possibilities anew, I think the foundational political myth of oral history, giving voice to the voiceless, needs to be deconstructed. In the contemporary South African context, this rhetorical phrase sounds patronizing. It also does little justice to the significant work oral historians across the

4 150 / Oral History, Community, and Displacement globe have done in interpreting a variety of voices and their constitution, especially the challenges that marginalized people face in expressing themselves. In my view, how civil society voices are silenced or undermined or appropriated should remain fundamental priorities for oral and public historians. That noted, I think that while oral historians do not dialogue with voiceless people, I have frequently encountered people who have come to believe they have no voice. In many instances, this is directly linked to individuals or groups feeling as if they are not worthy of recognition and validation. In other cases, marginalized people might retain the belief that they have a voice, but might be aware that they are not being heard by various powerful audiences. Notions of voice are directly related to senses of self, but not in an atomized way; they are dynamically constructed within intersubjective relationships across family, community, religious institutions, work and other sites. To feel then, as if you are voiceless is a painful emotional state, directly linked to senses of self-image and worth. Moreover, there is a distinction between private and public voice, as well as and links between them. Many marginalized communities have had their public voices silenced, but it is fundamental that oral historians be aware of the latent possibilities of transforming private voices (with their memories, ideas, and knowledge) into stronger public voices with agency and value to themselves and others. For example, for oral historians to elicit stories in the post-apartheid context involves being sensitively aware that the self that speaks is consciously or unconsciously asking to be recognized. As Fiona Ross argues, A sense of instability and unpredictability in the world is echoed in linguistic forms that have the power to destabilize one s sense of self and placement in the world. 9 What oral historians reflect can confirm or alter regarding what people think their value is refers not only to their memories but to the self-articulating voice that speaks and performs itself. There will be both successful and unsuccessful dialogues. In my view, neither curative healing nor automatic empowerment can be achieved in oral history dialogues. To promise either is to set up oral history for failure. When working with vulnerable groups or communities, there is an increased risk that the oral historian or other researchers might disappoint or evoke painful emotions in human research subjects. This requires sharpened attention to research ethics, not for bureaucratic or institutional reasons, but for the sake of both the researched and researchers, with a view to improving how we learn from each other. Oral historians also do not have the authority to give voice. At best, as Michael Frisch argued, we might achieve a shared authority. 10 We can contribute to enabling people s confidence in their articulation of privately held memories and views into publicly voiced expressions. Our capacity for empathic imagination and engagement, as I have signaled in prior chapters, unfolds through sensitive questioning, listening, and mirroring and has the potential to assign value to memories, stories, and voices. Intersubjective dialogues between researchers and storytellers and might change their understandings of past and present lives and might have a regenerative influence on storytellers. But in my view, the power of oral history is not in grand ideas about empowerment, but rather in engaging with people s complex subjective worlds

5 Conclusions without Closure / 151 (without crossing personal or ethical boundaries) in ways that allow them to continue speaking for themselves. Narrators will always be constrained, to some degree, by the oral history dialogue, power relations, language, public myths, and cultural conventions; but through memory and narrative work, possibilities reside where people can articulate their desires, learn new ideas about themselves, and regenerate the motivation to empower themselves within and beyond these structures. When all phases of research are completed, what then? In most cases, the oral historian s challenge is how to disengage respectfully and sensitively, without rupture. This is especially difficult after evocative interviews with people who continue to suffer in the present. Post-interview letters, visits, and gifts of appreciation are important acknowledgments. But as oral and public historians know, what is most important is for interviewees and narrators to see or hear themselves in books, exhibitions, radio, films, and various other public platforms. Even then, for individual researchers, the time to separate and move on to the next project is professionally appropriate but remains an emotionally difficult dimension of oral history work. Oral historians cannot always be there for people. This is one version of a rescue fantasy that many of us, including myself, have fallen prey to during research encounters with people who are suffering. But neither should oral historians dispense with sociopolitical aims, if we have these aims to contribute to developmental change, social justice, and democracy. I think that community institutions are better placed than university-based intellectuals to strive for these goals by utilizing participatory models of oral history and memory work. As discussed in chapters 5 and 9, the District Six Museum in Cape Town remains a shining example of how to provide longer-term support and spaces for social regeneration. The success of the museum, in part, involves regenerating self-worth and community identity, through reconnecting former residents with each other. This also involves placing people their selves and their identities on symbolic and literal maps of Cape Town. The District Six community and museum is a model of hope for many communities across South Africa. As Ciraj Rassool rightly puts it: In arguing that the social reconstruction of District Six needs to be informed by its history, the District Six Museum has created a space of reflection, annunciation and memorial that insists on the possibility of self representation in South African public culture. This will ensure that the process of reconstructing and re-membering District Six will not only occur through the work of experts. 11 Finally, for South African oral historians to rethink potential contributions to postapartheid politics of memory and oral history requires reflecting deeply on what constitutes the relationship and shifts between private voice and public voice for the most vulnerable in our society. This also means constant self-critique of how dialogues with diverse communities and the dissemination and archiving of their stories happen. I believe that oral historians must reengage in public intellectual advocacy and debates about democracy, poverty, and post-apartheid legacies. A withdrawal from

6 152 / Oral History, Community, and Displacement significant public debates into isolated academic or policy work is insufficient. My final chapter is therefore critical of how the ANC has reimagined the nation-state, and talks about its failures and disappointments. These post-apartheid trends compel those oral historians inside and outside universities who have a commitment to anti-discriminatory ethics and democracy, to speak to power, again and again.