"Growing Scar Tissue around the Memory of That Day": Sites of Gendered Violence and Suffering in Contemporary South African Literature

As a genre, crime fiction is flourishing in contemporary South Africa. Books about murder and rape have formed a large part of the country's literary output since 1994, and their popularity is growing (Titlestad and Polatinsky 270). These fictions speak to the social reality of crime in South Africa, but, as Stone notes, "the distinctive feature of crime in South Africa is not its volume but its violence" (qtd. in Altbeker 48). J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (2000) and Margie Orford's Like Clockwork (2010) are concerned with violent crime, more specifically, violence against women. Despite legislation which promotes the rights of women, the incidence of rape and sexual violence in contemporary South Africa are similar to those in a war zone (Graham, State of Peril 194). Rautenbach notes the irony of such prevalence of crime and corruption within the context of post-apartheid South Africa, which has adopted "such hyperbolic tropes as 'the rainbow nation' and 'the truth will set you free' (one of the slogans for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission)" (154). In Disgrace in particular, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as Barnard notes, "features as a marginal yet activating presence" (659). The texts do not engage with it directly, but the TRC forms part of the contextual framework for the narratives which interrogate issues such as land rights, rights of women, and the importance of being permitted to maintain silence rather than testify about trauma, all of which were contentious issues surrounding the TRC. This piece will address the ways in which crime has been a constitutive narrative in the "new" South Africa from the immediately post-Apartheid era work of Coetzee, to the recent trend in crime fiction, typified by Orford's work. It considers the work of two white authors, who choose to write in English, one of the eleven official languages of South Africa. What draws these works together in this analysis, however, is the violence that women endure in the narratives. Whilst both authors explore the role of race, to varying degrees, (2) this consideration is beyond the scope of this essay, which focuses on the implications of gendered violence. Disgrace opens with David Lurie, a 50-something professor who pursues sexual relationships, initially with a prostitute, and then with one of his students, Melanie Isaacs. This liaison is problematic for its coercive nature: although Lurie denies that it is rape, it is certainly uncomfortable. He is brought before a disciplinary committee, where he refuses to give a public apology, and instead resigns and moves to live with his daughter Lucy on a smallholding in the Eastern Cape. He starts to adjust to farm life, but one day the farm is attacked and he is injured and Lucy is gang-raped by the three assailants. There is no retributive justice, and Lucy chooses to remain silent about the attack, refusing to report it. As a result of the rape, Lucy falls pregnant and the novel ends with the pair living in the Eastern Cape, awaiting the birth of the child. This briefly addresses the key points in the novel's plot, although as Attridge notes, this sort of summary "inevitably gives a false impression of a novel whose most potent effects are achieved by means other than plot developments" (316). Orford's Like Clockwork, published 7 years later, takes up the themes of gendered and sexual violence. Clare Hart, the novel's criminal profiler protagonist, pursues a serial rapist and murderer of young women. The plot culminates in the arrest of the perpetrator, Otis Tohar, a local businessman whose ventures are spreading throughout the Cape Town setting of the novel. The narrative also explores other forms of female subjugation: depicting female victims of human trafficking, and Clare's own sister, Constance, who is brutalised in an attack that took place some 20 years before. The first in a series of novels that follow Clare Hart, Orford's fiction has been seen as part of the wave of crime fiction which is sweeping the South African literary scene. …