Unusable pasts; scandalous lives; political betrayal, confession and
collaboration: reading narrative non-fiction across South Africa's
unfinished transition.
Over the last decades, South Africa has seen an outpouring of life
writing and narrative non-fiction. Authors like Panashe Chigumadzi,
Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog,
Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavic;
have produced a compelling and often controversial body of work,
exploring the country's ongoing political and social transition with
great ambition, texture and risk.
Experiments with Truth is the first book-length account of non-fiction
in South African literature. It reads the country's transition as
refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously
refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism
and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival
reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the essay. It traces the
strange and ethically complex process by which real people, places and
events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative.
While holding in mind the imperatives of testimony and witness so
important to the struggle for liberation and the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, the case studies here are increasingly drawn
to a post-TRC aesthetic: works that engage with difficult, inappropriate
or unusable elements of the past, and the unfinished project of social
reconstruction in SouthAfrica. The author examines non-fictions that are
speculative, formally innovative and sometimes experimental, rather than
informational or narrowly journalistic; that explore difficult subjects
like collaboration, complicity, confession - and have embedded within
them their own reflections on the problems of narrating within a scene
of unresolved difference. In this way, southern African materials are
placed in a global context, and in dialogue with otherimportant
non-fictional traditions that have emerged at moments of social rupture
and transition.
Hedley Twidle is a writer, teacher and researcher based in the English
Department at the University of Cape Town. He specialises in
twentieth-century, southern African and world literatures, as well as
creative non-fiction and the environmental humanities. His essay
collection, Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World, was published in
2017.
