Ordinary Trauma in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother

Considered in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery, the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked shed an interesting light on the debate over the monocultural bias of trauma theory in its “classical,” mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which the field prides itself. In Writing History, Writing Trauma , Dominick LaCapra reflects that the TRC “was in its own way a trauma recovery center” (43). The TRC attempted to uncover the truth about the gross human rights violations committed during apartheid and to promote national unity and reconciliation through a collective process of working through the past. Insofar as the TRC mapped Euro-American concepts of trauma and recovery onto an apartheid-colonial situation, it was subject to the same problems and limitations faced by trauma theory—problems and limitations which post-apartheid literature has not been slow to confront. The novelist André Brink has famously declared that “unless the enquiries of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) are extended, complicated, and intensified in the imaginings of literature, society cannot sufficiently come to terms with its past to face the future” (30). Sindiwe Magona’s truth-and-reconciliation novel Mother to Mother (1999 [1998]) assumes just this task: it can be seen to supplement the work of the TRC by critically revisiting its limits, exclusions, and elisions—and thus also to suggest a possible way for “traditional” trauma theory to reinvent and renew itself. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Colonialism · Commission · Criminology · Economic Justice · Face (sociological concept) · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Law · Psychology · South African History and Culture