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In this article, I explore manifestations of (inter)subjectivity in relation to racial trauma and grief as portrayed through the child protagonist of K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents, Azure. This discussion is informed by the representation of the black body in light of post-transitional politics, paying specific attention to Azure's connection to the historically maligned figure of Saartjie, a connection that reflects the reenactment of racial trauma in the contemporary moment. Azure's encounters with violence and loss, I posit, result in a psychic break that forms an index to the failure of recognition inherent in intersubjective relations grounded on racism. I argue that we can understand Azure's subjectivity by paying attention to the ways in which his subjectivity is mitigated by psychosocial directives on racialized existence, the symbolic potential of his repressed rage, and the transformative potential of filial connections. I contend that Azure stands as an individualized meditation on the shortcomings of the reconciliation narrative of the post-transitional period that tends to erase the more immediate consequences of South Africa's violent past for those who are most vulnerable. Ultimately, this child protagonist exemplifies the ways in which trauma and violence interfere with the most human of impulses, grief.

In this article, I explore manifestations of (inter)subjectivity in relation to racial trauma and grief as portrayed through the child protagonist of K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, azure. This discussion is informed by the representation of the black body in light of post-transitional politics, paying specific attention to azure’s connection to the historically maligned figure of Saartjie, a connection that reflects the reenactment of racial trauma in the contemporary moment. azure’s encounters with violence and loss, I posit, result in a psychic break that forms an index to the failure of recognition inherent in intersubjective relations grounded on racism. I argue that we can understand azure’s subjectivity by paying attention to the ways in which his subjectivity is mitigated by psychosocial directives on racialized existence, the symbolic potential of his repressed rage, and the transformative potential of filial connections. I contend that azure stands as an individualized meditation on the shortcomings of the reconciliation narrative of the post-transitional period that tends to erase the more immediate consequences of South africa’s violent past for those who are most vulnerable. Ultimately, this child protagonist exemplifies the ways in which trauma and violence interfere with the most human of impulses, grief.

Home and dislocation … Home and exile. Building and demolition. Roots and rootlessness. No wonder we are given to extremes of behaviour. In between is a void. They have a long history, these extremes of behaviour. Is a country of so much dislocation a home? Winnie, there were many who hoped that the sight of you and Nelson walking hand-in-hand down the street would represent the beginning of the reconciliation of extremes; the end of dislocation.— Marara Joyce Baloyi in Njabulo Ndebele, The Cry of Winnie MandelaIn seeking to account for the complexity of identity, Stuart Hall observes that ‘identities are about using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are” or “where we come from”, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves’. Hall and Du Gay are, of course, referring to the necessity of considering ‘roots’ as ‘routes’ to identity formation; that is, of thinking of identity not so much as static, but as evolving. The latter bears notable significance for (auto)biographical writing as a narrative mode that, for the most part, traces the evolution of a singular subject and concerns itself with the ways in which that subject becomes who they are. Moreover, this notion of identity as bearing the imprint of both how one is interpreted and how one might choose to represent oneself provides a useful lens for considering the (auto)biographies of Es’kia Mphahlele: Down Second Avenue (1959), Afrika, My Music (1986) and Chabani Manganyi’s Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele (1983). These texts are implicated in the long-reaching tradition of life writing in South Africa – which dates as far back as the nineteenth century – and inasmuch as they present us with the subjective memories of Mphahlele, these memories are forged in the crucible of the country’s divisive history in ways that invite scrutiny for several reasons. Amongst these reasons is, first, the fact that Mphahlele would, in his adult life, be forced to endure the pain of displacement caused by exile, where exile is easily legible as a form of displacement or, as I refer to it here, unhoming.

Drawing on both psychological and sociological definitions of trauma, the essay collection The Splintered Glass engages with the intersection between individual and cultural trauma, while simultaneously warning against the blurring of the distinction between the two. In line with this, trauma is defined not only as a \"wound of the mind\" of an individual, but also as a \"link between cultures\" (x). While bearing a remarkable resemblance to the Freudian haunting inherent in most definitions of historical trauma (see also Erikson, Tal and Caruth), the concept of cultural trauma, as utilised in this collection, is situated in the present and seeks to transcend this haunting by gesturing towards a \"safe post-traumatic space\" (6). A traumatic history \"established and sustained by power structures, social agents and contending groups\" in a \"constant, recurrent struggle that stirs up a troubling memory\" (xii) is shared by many, if not all, postcolonial societies.

Chesca Long-Innes argues that Mia Couto's installation of the fantastic in his short story collection, Voices Made Night, may best be understood \"not so much as a product of any 'magical realist' poetics, but as 'naturalised,' or motivated as a function of the collective neurosis of a [Mozambican] society traumatised by its continuing history of poverty and extreme violence\". Couto's use of the fantastic, she adds, encompasses both empirical and psychic reality, and both are characterised by instability and elusiveness. The collection, she then maintains, constitutes a reinvention or reimagining of subjective realities constructed and perpetuated by the social trauma underpinning what she terms the \"psycho-pathology of post-colonial Mozambique, in which the society as a whole is [. . .] caught in the grip of a profound depression or melancholia\".

The essays in this collection were crafted in celebration of the centenaries, in 2019, of Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Cyril Lincoln Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele, all of whom were born in 1919. All four centenarians lived rich and diverse lives across several continents. In the years following the Second World War they produced more than half a century of foundational creative writing and literary criticism, and made stellar contributions to institutions and repertoires of African and black arts and letters in South Africa and internationally. The range of the centenarians' imaginations, critical analyses and social interventions spanned disciplinary divides. This volume, in the same spirit, draws on approaches that are equally transdisciplinary. Two aims thread through the contributors' reflections on the complexities of black existence and of intellectual and cultural life in the twentieth century. The first is the exploration of some of the centenarians' key texts and cultural projects that shaped their legacies. In doing so, the volume contributors trace a number of divergent intellectual and aesthetic lineages in their works and organisational activities. The second aim is a consideration of the ways in which these foundational writers' legacies continue to resonate today, confirming their status as crucial contributors to modern African and diasporic black arts and letters.