LUCY VALERIE GRAHAM

`A Hidden Side to the Story': Reading Rape in Recent South African Literature

`It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket.' (David Lurie, in Disgrace 110)

Introduction Sexual violence has had an uneasy relationship with literary representation in South Africa. Portrayals of rape have ambivalent potential, and the stakes are high where rape stories have served the interests of colonialism and apartheid. While it cannot be denied that representations of sexual violation have consolidated certain master narratives in South Africa, it is also true that narratives have been suppressed where these challenge power. Beth Goldblatt and Sheila Meintjes, reporting in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, claim that violence against women remains `one of the hidden sides to the story of our past' (Goldblatt and Meintjes 7).¹

Representations of rape have not been uncommon in post-apartheid literature, as Meg Samuelson points out in her contribution to this issue of Kunapipi. South African literary criticism, however, has tended to steer away from analysing rape portrayal, and the topic is under-represented in recent critical anthologies. M.J. Daymond's South African Feminisms (1996) includes one essay about rape in literature, a highly polemical reading, by Josephine Dodd, of J.M. Coetzee's Foe and Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds.² Although Rosemary Jolly has examined `colonisation, rape and the question of pornographic violence' in J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands, her more recent Writing South Africa (1998), co-edited with Derek Attridge, includes nothing on the subject. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (1998), edited by Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, foregrounds the processes of the TRC and sets out to liberate memory by examining `how it happens that certain versions of the past get to be remembered' (Nuttall and Coetzee 1). Neither the editors nor the contributors, however, seem concerned that processes of history have affected the remembering and/or forgetting of rape stories in South Africa.

Editors of the Spring 2000 publication of Modern Fiction Studies, a special issue on `South African Fiction After Apartheid', point out that since 1990, South African literature has confronted `the experiential, ethical, and political ambiguities of transition: the tension between memory and amnesia' (Attwell and Harlow 3).