Magazine Article

National Reconciliation and its Performative Limitations

Maron, Jeremy

2008

Overview

[...]the TRCs performative articulation of a \"unified South Africa\" cannot accommodate conflicting interpretations that exist within the fully heterogeneous \"national subject\" that question the practical and ethical viability of a nation established through the TRCs specific articulation. Since the \"performative necessity\" of the TRC invariably conceives of the nation as a Subject to identified (or constituted as a Subject specifically articulated by the TRC) through a process of truth and reconciliation, it fails to acknowledge that the nation, and consequently, any ideal of what the nation should be, only comes into existence via the articulation of heterogeneous individuals and thus exists as a subject to those individuals (and not vice versa). [...]it is the TRCs willingness to accept this \"justification\" as fulfilling the necessary conditions for amnesty that ultimately drives Langston to the home of De Jager (Brendan Gleeson), a former Afrikaner colonel whose \"bosses\" have \"thrown [him] to the wolves\" by calling him \"a psychopath who murdered and tortured for the fun of it.\" [...]the sexualized reconciliation between Anna and Langston, accompanied in the film by soft music and romantic lighting, has very explicit, practical consequences on Anna's marriage. [...]Night of Truth appropriates the concept of lieux de mémoires by establishing a site that conforms to the three senses that Nora argues are essential for such a site: it is material (a grave), symbolic (standing in for unification), and functional (acting as a reminder).39 As the Nayaks and Bonandés gather around the joint burial of Edna and Théo, Soulu stresses the importance of this monumental reminder that simultaneously embodies the divisiveness and violence of the past by containing the bodies of two murder victims whose deaths were consequent in some way of tribal divisions, and the hopes of unification in the future by placing the bodies of the murderer and the murdered side by side for \"eternity.\" Because suspicion both between and within the Nayaks and the Bonandés suggests that there is no a priori unified state that a gesture of reconciliation can appeal to, the deaths of Théo and Edna can be thought of as sacrifices that afford the establishment of a site of memory that is a necessary condition for reconciliation.

• Publisher: Cineaction
• Subject: Apartheid / Genocide / Human rights / Ideology / Judaic studies / Trauma / White supremacy