Literary non-fiction and the unstable fault line of the imaginative and the reportorial : Antjie Krog's, Country of my skull, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's, A human being died that night and Sindiwe Magona's, Mother to mother

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis explores the representation of personal narrative and nationhood within the genre of literary non-fiction written around the theme of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The texts to be examined are Antjie Krog‟s, Country of My Skull, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela‟s A Human Being Died That Night and Sindiwe Magona‟s Mother to Mother.The texts by Krog and Gobodo-Madikizela tell the story of apartheid‟s legacy from two different viewpoints. Their texts are filled with spatial patches of personal narrative which emphasize the impact apartheid had on two different South African cultures, thereby linking the personal to the national by exploring a subjective truth in their narratives. Both these authors were involved with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in a professional capacity and through their respective ideologies the psyche of the apartheid perpetrator is examined, interrogated and analysed. Within the genre of literary non-fiction these two writers grapple with capturing the real, the objective, but simultaneously insist on doing so from a subjective vantage point.Sindiwe Magona‟s, Mother to Mother also centres on the theme of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and on the psyche of the perpetrator. This time, however, the perpetrator‟s psyche is explored through the lens of a narrator-mother in an address to the victim‟s mother. The most significant difference between this text and the other two is that the Magona text provides a fictional account of the TRC case in question. The ethical implications of a literary text with documentary subject matter, of a text that explores the intersections between fiction and non-fiction, surfaces again, and to a larger extent than in the other two texts, thereby further unsettling the line between the reportorial and the imaginative.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University