Witnessing trauma in post-apartheid South Africa: the question of generational responsibility.

In a 1997 critique of what he presumes to be unperturbed white confidence and arrogance in postapartheid South Africa, South African US-based scholar Grant Farred wrote that

White South Africans are singularly disqualified as nonnatives ad infinitum by their past. They have perpetually rendered themselves as "foreign," "othered" by their history of invasion and illegitimate control of the indigenous peoples and their resources. [The rhetorical political slogan] "One settler, one bullet" is an interrogation and invalidation of the authenticity of whites' identities as South Africans (1997:72).

Through the employment of such terms as "perpetually" and "ad infinitum," Farred seemed to argue that white people can by definition never claim South African identity, not even African-born generations. In this he is raising the issue of generational responsibility, which should be a pressing point in any discussion of post-apartheid white identity and which forms the subject of this article. While taking issue with Farred's binary and reductionist reading of white identity, I intend to interrogate the position and responsibility of whiteness in a new South Africa. Dealing with the past, confronting the past, is something that every white South African--and especially a younger generation desiring to build a better future--is confronted with in contemporary South Africa. Yet what exactly this means in concrete terms is not obvious at all. While it calls for investing time and money in training and rebuilding on a practical and economic level, what does it mean on a cultural level, beyond the sometimes facile multicultural interactions a new South Africa has spawned? What does it mean to confront the past on a personal and psychological level? What is a more productive way to think about South Africa's violent political past than the guilt, denial, or repression of the past that many feel?

This article examines the art of two South African artists, Minnette Vari and Kendell Geers, who have devised productive ways to deal with South Africa's traumatic past. The focus falls specifically on works that were produced in the mid to late 1990s, in the aftermath of apartheid, when white South Africa was forced in various ways to face up to the country it had partly created. Both artists are in their mid-thirties, having grown up during the final years of apartheid, and these works represent an act of witnessing as well as a performative response to the traumatic events that mark South Africa's history. A performative rather than a merely representational or documentary response means that these artists are actively trying to engage with and work through a disgraceful legacy they inherited. In a climate where the horrors of apartheid were revealed and analyzed on a daily basis by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Geers and Vari both found ways to respond to these traumatic times in a productive manner. This, I argue, is through foregrounding whiteness, or by "making whiteness strange" in Richard Dyer's words (see Dyer 1997). In the looped videos and other interventions discussed here, both these artists insistently and repetitively confront the viewer with what lies in the heart of whiteness, in this way actively trying to articulate and negotiate white responsibility in a new dispensation.

This article is then not about the representation of trauma as much as about fitting responses to the trauma of South Africa's past, and consequently my reading of theoretical texts in the field of trauma studies has tended to focus on aspects of testimony and witnessing, especially with reference to the figures of the perpetrators, bystanders, collaborators, and beneficiaries. In the next section I think about this question of witnessing and invoke, however briefly, German intellectual Jurgen Habermas's insightful comments about the contentious issue of generational responsibility in post-Nazi Germany. I specifically choose post-Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as a comparative framework and not other traumatic contexts such as Rwanda or the Atlantic slave trade because I am primarily interested in the role of the perpetrators and their descendants--an issue that has been debated extensively in contemporary Germany. (l) I also draw on the work of historian Dominick LaCapra, whose writings on trauma, memory, and history not only provide insight into the issue of historical responsibility, but also theorize how this responsibility is to be taken up by the witness of trauma and in representation.

I return to LaCapra, specifically to his work on aesthetics, representation, and psychoanalysis, when I discuss the work of Minnette Vari and Kendell Geers in more detail. I argue that it is through an experience of empathic unsettlement, as LaCapra terms it, that Vari's work presents a fitting response to South Africa's traumatic past. Her position as witness to the various traumas of apartheid becomes infected with her own and others' pain and it is this that she tries to negotiate in various ways in her work. Using certain strategies, which I relate to the uncanny, she manages to communicate personal disorientation in a new dispensation. On the other hand, Kendell Geers's work succeeds in a very unnerving way to keep the trauma of South Africa's past alive by capitalizing on the haunting presence of white guilt and by catching viewers in a net of recognition that forces them to confront their deepest fears (Fig. 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Question of Historical Responsibility

In his study on trauma, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (originally published in 1920), Sigmund Freud invokes the classic poetical figures of Tancred and Chlorinda to demonstrate the uncanny repetitive nature of painful experiences. He introduces us to them, respectively the perpetrator and victim of trauma, when he recounts that in the sixteenth century poem by Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata ("Jerusalem Delivered"),

   Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills
   his beloved Chlorinda in a duel
   while she is disguised in the armor
   of an enemy knight. After her burial
   he makes his way into a strange
   magic forest which strikes the
   Crusaders' army with terror. He
   slashes with his sword at a tall
   tree; but blood streams from the
   cut and the voice of Chlorinda,
   whose soul is imprisoned in the
   tree, is heard complaining that he
   has wounded his beloved once
   again (Freud 1961a:24).

Cathy Caruth, in her writings on trauma and history in Unclaimed Experience (1996), invokes this parable to call attention in particular to the voice of the victim, Chlorinda, who can only cry out once her beloved Tancred wounds her a second time, this time with her spirit imprisoned in a tree. But when Freud invokes Tasso's parable, it is also meant to highlight another facet of trauma studies: not simply the plight of the victim, but also that of the perpetrator, Tancred, who is haunted by his own actions. Tancred is both witness to Chlorinda's pain and the one who inflicted the pain in the first place. In this way this myth, and the figure of Tancred specifically, provides an analogy for the position of many, if not most whites in South Africa--a situation defined by being witness to the trauma of apartheid while being intimately complicit in, responsible for that trauma.

Through Tancred, Freud introduces yet another character in what has been called the "grid" of trauma studies. Although this description is used most often in reference to the Holocaust, historian Dominick LaCapra has pointed out that "The grid of the Holocaust is one that you also see elsewhere. It involves the victim, perpetrators, bystanders, collaborators, resisters, those in the gray zone, and those born later" (2001:175). And indeed, this grid is translatable to the South African situation with relative ease even though comparisons between apartheid and the Holocaust have been met by various warnings and reservations. (2) In both contexts there has been much talk about the issue of generational responsibility and the need to confront the past, yet why and how exactly is this to be done? How and why does one "deal" with the past? What questions do we need to ask; which issues need to be addressed, and how?

An ongoing debate in Germany about the complicity of "ordinary" Germans in the Holocaust, (3) and in particular the comments made by intellectual Jurgen Habermas, have been particularly helpful to me to ask probing questions of South Africa's post-apartheid reality. In two articles published in the newspaper Die Zeit in 1986 and republished in New German Critique in 1988, (4) Habermas formulated precisely and concretely how a younger generation of Germans could confront their past and deal with it in a constructive manner. Habermas pleaded for the development of a "post-conventional identity," the signs of which would be

   If among the younger generations
   national symbols have lost their
   power to impress, if the naive identifications
   with their own origins
   have yielded to a rather tentative
   approach to history, if discontinuities
   are felt more strongly and
   continuities are not celebrated at
   any price, if national pride and
   collective self-estimation are forced
   through the filter of value
   orientations ... (1988a:39).

These are helpful and concrete suggestions also for a South African context. Habermas is warning against denial, repression, or disavowal of the past and pleading for a critical reevaluation of history and of inherited traditions. He asks that contemporary generations do not seek totalizing narratives of the past but rather see the discontinuities and contradictions of history. In this way, a "post-conventional" identity can be forged that does not fixate on origins and nationalism.

In the second of the two articles he insists that younger generations are indeed co-responsible for the deeds of their forbears. On this issue it is worth quoting him at length because of the parallels with the South African situation:

   Our form of existence is connected
   with the form of existence of our
   parents and grandparents by a mesh
   of family, local, political, and intellectual
   traditions which is difficult
   to untangle--by an historical milieu
   therefore, which in the first instance
   has made us what we are and how
   we are today. No-one of us can
   escape unnoticed from this milieu,
   because our identity both as individuals
   and as Germans is inextricably
   interwoven with it ... There
   is the obligation we in Germany
   have--even if no one else is prepared
   to take it upon themselves
   any longer--to keep alive the memory
   of the suffering of those murdered
   at the hands of Germans, and
   we must keep this memory alive
   quite openly and not just in our
   own minds (Habermas 1988b:44).

The issues Habermas raised in these two articles are equally pressing for a younger generations of white South Africans, despite the significant differences between the two situations. Habermas verbalizes concretely what co-responsibility of the past means: The past should be worked through in "a manner that accurately and critically engages a traumatic past, assists understanding while simultaneously counteracting prejudice and victimization, and helps lay the basis for a legitimate, self-scrutinizing, and self-critical democratic policy". (LaCapra 2001:123, summarizing Habermas). For Habermas, the issue is not one of collective guilt, of which a current generation must somehow rid itself, but of collective liability--in other words, it is not a matter of dissociating from the past in order to get rid of a paralyzing guilt, but of actively taking part in the shaping of a future through critical and decisive action.

Habermas's reflections on the past, and particularly about collective liability, usefully aid ruminations on that vague notion "confronting the past." Habermas argues, in sum, that the current generation should engage its traumatic past critically and truthfully and should be self-scrutinizing, self-critical, and reflective about the validity and desirability of historical inheritances such as traditions and symbols. It should search for discontinuities and ruptures in history rather than fixate on continuities and should assume co-responsibility and co-liability for past deeds, which should be kept alive in the public memory. The art of Minnette Vari and Kendell Geers is significant in that they "confront the past" in a manner similar to what Habermas advocates. Both of them approach history as nonlinear and discontinuous--borne out by the insistent use of looped videos--in ways that accord with Habermas's suggestions of how the past must be kept alive continuously. But a discussion of their art necessitates first that we think about the responsibility of aesthetics when faced with a traumatic past.

Aesthetics That Confront the Past

Theodor Adorno famously said, "After Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry," a verdict he would later modify by saying:

   I do not want to soften my statement
   that it is barbaric to continue
   to write poetry after Auschwitz ...
   [But] the abundance of real suffering
   permits no forgetting ... [And]
   that suffering ... also demands the
   continued existence of the very art it
   forbids; hardly anywhere else does
   suffering still find its own voice, a
   consolation that does not immediately
   betray it (Adorno 1992: 87-8).

Though his statement is often misunderstood, for Adorno the problem was not with representation as such, but with the possibility of getting aesthetic pleasure out of representation. Art has an indispensable role to remind us of the horrors of this world, but it is a particular kind of representation that has become improper and undesirable for Adorno. When the Holocaust becomes an image,

   The victims are turned into works
   of art, tossed out to be gobbled up
   by the world that did them in. The
   so-called artistic renderings of the
   naked physical pain of those who
   were beaten down with butts contain,
   however distantly, the possibility
   that pleasure can be squeezed
   from it. The morality that forbids
   art to forget this for a second slides
   off into the abyss of its opposite.
   The aesthetic stylistic principle ...
   make[s] the unthinkable appear to
   have had some meaning; it becomes
   transfigured, something of its horror
   removed. By this alone an injustice
   is done to the victims, yet no
   art that avoided the victims could
   stand up to the demands of justice
   (Adorno 1992:88).

While condemning art that provides any kind of aesthetic pleasure (such as lyric poetry) in the aftermath of traumas like Auschwitz, Adorno is nevertheless pleading for a critical and reflexive function of art. Art has the responsibility to keep memory alive, but this should be done in a critical way that engages the viewer and moves her to reflection, and ideally to action.

How, then, should aesthetics achieve this? Dutch art historian Ernst Van Alphen has coined the term "Holocaust effect" (1997:10) to describe certain art works, created in response to the Holocaust, which are performative in the way that they do not seek to tell of that experience, but to show directly. In this way he seeks to set up a contrast between effect and representation. Whereas in the latter case something is made present by making reference to it, the former describes a process wherein the viewer "experience[s] directly" an aspect of the Holocaust or of Nazism. Hence,

   The Holocaust is not made present
   by means of a constative speech
   act--that is, as a mediated account,
   as the truthful or untruthful content
   of the speech act; rather it is made
   present as performative effect. Those
   performative acts "do" the Holocaust,
   or rather they "do" a specific
   aspect of it ... We are there; history
   is present--but not quite ... We will
   not respond to a re-presentation of
   the historical event, but to a presentation
   or performance of it (Van
   Alphen 1997:10-11).

In speaking of constative speech acts versus acts that "do" the event, Van Alphen is drawing on J.L. Austin's speech act theory, which is the source for the notion of performativity and its current popularity (see Austin 1962). Van Alphen finds this kind of performative effect in works that do not represent realistically or documentarily, but rather aim to reenact. According to him, Anselm Kiefer's work, for instance, foregoes the chronology of conventional history for a mixture of imagination and history in works that show the effects--"the ravages"--of history on him (1997:3-10).

I want to argue that Minnette Vari and Kendell Geers create works that similarly show, or rather "do" the effects of a traumatic history on themselves by inserting the personal into that history. My main focus falls on works that were produced during and just after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in 1996-97--a time during which the injustices of apartheid became an inescapable reality for all due to the widespread broadcasting of these hearings and a political climate that seriously questioned white privilege in this country. Both Geers and Vari succeed in foregrounding whiteness as a visual and conceptual element in their works, although in very different ways. In the case of Vari this is an interiorized move, private and intimate, that implicates the self in an ongoing inquiry. Her search for answers charts a discontinuous and uncanny journey in which the self is a witness to others' trauma--a trauma that is experienced through what can be termed "empathic unsettlement." In the case of Geers, the mode is more exterior and open, accusatory even, deliberately pulling the viewer into a trap of intense emotions and questions (Fig. 2). In both cases whiteness is intimately bound up to witnessing the pain of others and keeping the trauma of their pain alive.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Performing Whiteness

In 1997, the second year of the TRC hearings, Minnette Vari (5) produced a small sculpture of a rubber tire, molded in white porcelain. In South Africa rubber tires have become almost emblematic of the struggle against apartheid in their immediate reference to both protest and the practice of so-called necklacing murders, a notorious method employed in the black townships in the 1980s to kill blacks suspected of being police informers. A tire soaked in fuel was placed around the presumed traitor's body or neck and then ignited. In the piece, titled Firestone (Fig. 3), Vari's employment of the name of a popular brand of rubber tires becomes piercingly ironic in the South African context. But it is her decision to mold the tire in white porcelain that makes this work conceptually so compelling. In a South African context, the radical revisualizing of this everyday object by using the color white becomes an icon resonating with racial allusions and implications. Vari has quite literally "made whiteness strange" and the image speaks succinctly of white complicity in what was regarded and publicized as black-on-black violence in the black townships.

I read Firestone as an important point of departure for a series of works thereafter that would engage whiteness (among other things) in more personal ways. In 1998 Vari produced a short, looped, animated video titled Alien (Fig. 4), in which she inserts her naked body into a number of short fragments of television news footage about South Africa broadcast both in South Africa and abroad between 1993 and 1998. (6) These fragments of events include the following images: a delegation of South African politicians at a UN conference in Berlin in 1996; a praise singer at President Mandela's inauguration in 1994; a percussionist and group of dancers at an "African Renaissance" corporate show in Johannesburg in 1997; two women and a girl modeling "authentic" African clothing at a a local African Renaissance expo; a Volkswagen combi carrying Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging members (literally, Afrikaner Resistance Movement, an Afrikaans right-wing movement) to a political rally with a police vehicle following behind it; helicopters flying over a government celebration; voters being body-searched at a polling station; politicians waving their fists in the air; a photographer being escorted by policemen at a riot; a man holding lion cubs on a game farm in an investigative piece about the scandal of "canned" hunting; two South African soldiers in Angola in 1984 with a tame lion that they named "Terrie" (slang for terrorist); someone putting on earphones at the TRC hearings; and a man pushing a trolley bearing evidence at an election fraud inquest, with two members of the press standing by with cameras.

The bodies of the wide range of people in the original footage become avatars for Vari's naked body, which reenacts their movements and gestures. As this reenactment is done from memory in the studio, the resulting images do not quite "fit" the original footage, since her body is different in shape and size and her memory of the original movements is never quite accurate, thereby creating the distorted and alien appearance of her body, which continuously morphs into new forms. All this takes less than a minute (52 seconds) and is accompanied by a two-minute throbbing soundtrack, so that the looped image and the sound never quite intersect in the same way twice. The soundtrack is composed of Vari's own heartbeat fed through the voices in the original footage, accompanied by voices of other characters--the distinctive boom of Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, current president Thabo Mbeki's quiet voice saying "Thank you very much," and so forth. The video is done in shades of black and white, so that Vari's own body appears whiter, set off by a stark black background. Traces from the original contexts are left behind in what is, for the most part, a blank white field: a Perrier water bottle on a conference table, a Puma helicopter, a sangoma's stick, a lion, and a Volkswagen combi--all imparting a distinctive "South African" feeling to the piece.

Vari uses her own body, yet she removes anything that would personalize or particularize her--she is naked, with a shaven head in an effort to become more universal, more anonymous, and strangely androgynous. And yet the piece is also intimate, personal, and specific. She is herself, yet she is also an alien being, very literally out of place, embodying an imperfect fit in a series of foreign and strange encounters. Vari relates that whether abroad or in South Africa, she felt maladjusted and alienated from the abundance of news footage broadcasted about South Africa between 1993 and 1998--a period of intense change in the country that made it a popular news topic worldwide. It was also a time during which the TRC received a lot of media attention, with daily broadcasts in local and international news media. For Vari the news footage about South Africa, though familiar in content, became strangely foreign through this public narrative form and frequent repetition. Her version of the past--how she remembered history--simply did not coincide with the narratives in the news. As she puts it, it became impossible to recognize herself in these stories that were "drawing the contours of a 'home' I felt I was becoming more and more unfamiliar with" (unpublished artist's statement). Alien speaks of this alienation and displacement from a familiar place both in its concept and also, convincingly, in its structural and visual aspects. Even without knowing the background that informed the work, the viewer is struck by Vari's naked, alien figure in an even more alien landscape, which is nonetheless punctuated with familiar fragments. The looped structure intensifies this idea of a directionless and utterly lost being, trying desperately to fit into a once-familiar, now foreign and uncompromising terrain that will not yield into recognition.

But how to interpret this work in the context of contemporary South Africa? Is the alien white body in treacherous surroundings not simply a metaphor for displacement, a visual vehicle to articulate the rants of so many whites who bemoaned the passing of the old South Africa for the new? Is the work an expression of white alienation in the face of the new, democratic South Africa? I want to argue rather that this work is not about the usual withdrawal and flight from politics and social life that a position of estrangement and disillusionment typically assumes, but stages an active engagement, a deliberate confrontation with histories that seem disorienting and alien. By fitting the self into these histories and by embodying the fragments that form an incomplete and discontinuous South African reality, Vari is in effect "trying on" these fragments of various realities. The work powerfully represents the inability to attain closure in the face of histories being revised, rewritten, and sometimes declared inauthentic. The alien being becomes a sign of the inability to integrate memory fully into understanding. Vari writes:

   We see ourselves in this revolving
   mirror of up-to-the-minute news,
   but also expose the world's desires
   with regard to this country and its
   situation. The distortion of the figures
   is the discomfort of an ill-fitting
   interpretation. (7)

One could argue that in the highly charged political context in which the video was produced and exhibited, the discomfort and alienness in this work amount to a fitting response to the trauma of South Africa's past. In response to that traumatic history, Vari registers her own unsettlement and the work becomes an act of witnessing--and further to that, an act in which the muted trauma of the witness registers. Yet in what way may the witness claim trauma in the face of the much greater trauma of the victim-survivor? In what way can we read the endless repetition of disorientation and alienation in this looped work? What is the nature of this trauma, if it is trauma at all?

In his work on trauma and representation, Dominick LaCapra has suggested the concept of "empathic unsettlement" to circumscribe the position of the witness in more precise terms. As he points out, empathic unsettlement does not and should not mean full identification with the victim's position. Instead, empathy is a notion that rather implies an "affective relation, rapport, or bond with the other recognized and respected as other"(2001:212). Hence, it provides for a kind of virtual (rather than vicarious) experience of other positions, through which one "puts oneself in the other's position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other's place" (ibid., 87). When it comes to representation, LaCapra warns of the dangers involved in responding to trauma with narratives that seek "facile uplift, harmonization, or closure" (ibid., 78). Rather, empathic unsettlement should register stylistically and affect the mode of representation. He explains that

   empathic unsettlement poses a
   barrier to closure in discourse and
   places in jeopardy harmonizing or
   spiritually uplifting accounts of extreme
   events from which we attempt
   to derive reassurance or a
   benefit (for example, unearned confidence
   about the ability of the
   human spirit to endure any adversity
   with dignity and nobility)
   (ibid., 41-2).

Empathic unsettlement becomes then a vehicle that makes possible the kind of interaction with the past that Habermas outlined in his discussion of generational responsibility. Both LaCapra and Habermas contend that a response that seeks to harmonize or smooth over a traumatic past by providing a neat narrative will be completely inappropriate and in the end prove futile when the aim is to integrate the past into the present. It is possible, then, to read Vari's disorienting and alienated portrayal of the self as a mode of empathic unsettlement--a performative response to witnessing the trauma of South Africa's past, a past that now seems totally incongruous and puzzling.

Much has been written in trauma studies about the position of the witness. Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst involved in the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, which collects testimonies of Holocaust survivors, has stressed that there is more than one level of witnessing--he distinguishes the level of "being a witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being witness to the testimonies of others, and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself" (1995:61). Shoshana Felman identifies three types of witnessing in her discussion of Claude Lanzmann's movie Shoah (1985): Those who witness as victims of disaster, those who witness as perpetrators, and those who witness as bystanders. What is striking about different witnesses is what Felman has described as their incommensurability (1992:207)--an incompatibility of witnessing born out of dissimilar personal and historical contexts. And it is exactly this incommensurability of witnessing various histories and events that Vari communicates in this work.

The disorientation in Alien is born precisely out of the incommensurability of how Vari remembers history and how it is remembered and presented by others--an incommensurability born out of an experience of history that won't add up. Indeed, one could argue that her disorientation and her alienation are those of a younger white South African generation coming to terms with a biased version of history completely at odds with the one revealed by the TRC, by newscasts, and by the breakdown of a system. Vari has repeatedly spoken of our "helplessness in the face of history"--a statement that communicates the helplessness of a generation that is guilty, by proxy and by implication, of a history which they had no part in formulating, yet of which they are the beneficiaries and the heirs. (8)

One way in which to conceive better the empathic unsettlement this alien being experiences in this video is through the notion of the uncanny (unheimlich). The uncanny, as formulated by Freud in 1925 in his discussion of E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1817 short story "The Sandman," captures the sense of something at once familiar and strange, and thus terrifying or disorienting on account of this ambivalence (Freud 1961b). That which is unheimlich is so precisely because it is always related, through repression, to its apparent inverse, the heimlich--the homely or the known. When Vari talks of an "unfamiliar home" and her inability to recognize herself in once-familiar surroundings, we are in the presence of the uncanny. It permeates this piece: The lost figure that literally tries to "fit into" fragments of a history is repeatedly confronted by an ill-fitting discomfort, an uncanny strangeness.

"To be unhomed is not to be homeless," Homi Bhabha reminds us in his reading of the uncanny. It cannot "be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres," rather it "creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow" (Bhabha 1994:9). The "unhomely" is precisely located "in that displacement [when] the borders between home and world become confused ... the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting" (ibid.). This interconnected quality of the uncanny is crucial in Vari's work (see van der Watt 2004a). The unsettlement and disorientation in Alien occur because of the trauma of that other history. Private and public are revealed to be intimately connected: No longer does the private prove to be a refuge from the public, but it is in fact infected by the public. Alien registers not simply loss and alienation, then, but the disorientation that comes from trying to fit oneself into a history and realizing and accepting that one's reality is intimately tied up with the traumatic reality of South Africa's past.

Alien was first shown as part of Vari's exhibition "Beyond the Pale," which placed identity center stage in various ways. The title invokes notions of displacement, obliquely referencing Vari's ancestry that left Hungary in the 1920s, but it also very literally raises the politics of whiteness, as various texts with this title affirm (see, for example, Ware 1992; Ross 1993). By building these references into her work, Vari explores that which lies "beyond the pale" of whiteness in a South African context: A zone in which the meaning of identities are no longer stable nor fixed nor safe, but dependent on realignment and reinvention for survival. In this work, Vari's alien body literally enacts this displacement, loss, and fragmentation but, importantly, also enacts resilience and survival through the relentless mutation and reinvention of her body.

Her concern with memory--especially the contrast between personal memory and "official" memory or history--becomes an even stronger preoccupation in her next animated work, Oracle (1999; Fig. 5). As one of six artists nominated for the prestigious annual national Vita Art Awards in 1999, Vari produced a looped video, once again of her naked, very white body, this time eating and binging on what seems to be a piece of flesh. This flesh, one soon discovers, is made up of changing news clips that spill out in a pool behind her. The figure, unable to digest everything she takes in, spits out mouthfuls while all the time gorging more. "I become a maniacal golem, (9) cramming all the conflicting histories of present day Africa into my mouth, in a fit of hunger that makes me gag. To reincorporate the disparate truths into one body, to make it whole again, is an excruciating task," writes Vari (1999).

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Vari likens the Oracle figure to that of the cannibal in Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade's Cannibalist Manifesto (1928), wherein cannibalism became a metaphor for postcolonial identity, assimilating disparate elements into a hybrid self. Following this relation with Brazilian anthropophagy, one should remember that this early model of transcultural intertextuality was an "insurgent aesthetic," as Ella Shohat and Robert Stare have put it--it is an aesthetic that devours in order to resist; it turns the elements of domination against itself by corrupting them. This it does by assuming "the inevitability Of cultural interchange between 'center' and 'periphery,' and the consequent impossibility of any nostalgic return to an original purity" (Shohat and Stare 1994:307). Oracle can be read as an attempt to become part of a new nation by interiorizing all the disparate elements of conflicting histories into the self, literally swallowing these realities in order to become part of them. In the process, the original self is changed forever, affected by the internalized material. Read in the context of whiteness, the white naked body again engages, rather than taking flight. It "eats" its context, it devours its history rather than ignoring new and conflicted versions of a shared past. It becomes a witness to a past that affects it in every fiber. Vari writes:

   To acknowledge the gaps in our
   memories and to reconstruct the
   missing part of a history is almost
   as frightening as staring an apparition
   in the face, daring it to show
   itself while knowing that one couldn't
   stand the sight. Often the things
   we can't bear to face are the most
   telling witnesses of our personal and
   ideological origins. My new work
   constitutes a kind of ghost-hunt,
   tilling over the soil of public and
   private recollection to find the
   phantoms that could help to form a
   composite portrait of an itinerant
   "self." My aim is to determine a
   sense of the future by giving a voice
   to the unmentionable and form the
   unimaginable. (10)

In both Oracle and Alien, the mode is performative: Vari is very much "doing," performing, and embodying her struggle to make sense of a new and changed reality. These are works that, in Van Alphen's words, do not seek to tell of an experience but to "show" directly; They rely on effect and not on representation. And indeed, the looped structure of these works emphasizes this performative aspect. Attempts to find closure or to achieve a sense of completion in these narratives are consistently frustrated by the white body's continuous struggle for survival which, in turn, activates the viewer's own sense of disorientation. These are works that respond sensitively and truthfully to a climate of trauma and change; they enact the unsettlement that should affect each and every one who witnesses this traumatic past. (11)

It is this performative response to South Africa's past that also marks the kind of whiteness analyzed and challenged by the work of Vari's contemporary Kendell Geers. (12) am interested in a number of works produced in the mid-1990s that raised the issue of guilt in caustic ways and forced the viewer to confront and react to this guilt. On his Internet homepage, Geers describes feelings of guilt as the "single most pervasive and strongest cultural force [operating] within the 'New South Africa.'" (13) Toward the end of the Johannesburg Biennial in January 1998, he explored this force in a site-specific work titled Guilty.

For Guilty, Geers planned to occupy, "in the name of art," a historic fort outside Pretoria to coincide with a celebration planned by right-wing Afrikaner groups on the centenary of the opening of the fort. The fort, one of four in the area, was built just before the outbreak of the South African War of 1899-1902, to protect the newly established and independent Boer or Afrikaner Republic of Transvaal from invading British forces. As such, Fort Klapperkop, as this one is known, has always been a symbol of Afrikaner resilience and has, in recent years, become a cultural symbol of Afrikaner unity for the small number of right-wingers who still aspire to these ideals. Geers planned to occupy the fort and to appropriate the celebrations-consisting of a church service, traditional dances and food, and the firing of cannons--for his public artwork. He planned to lower both the historical Boer flag, the Vierkleur, and the Union Jack that fly at the Fort and raise his own flags with anarchist slogans and the word "Guilty" in their stead.

Not surprisingly, when right-wing Afrikaners caught wind of Geers' statements that their activities would be part of his art, they were outraged and declared vehemently that they were not "his ball to kick around" (quoted by Blignaut 1998:11). The controversy deepened when the French Embassy, which originally sponsored Geers, received threatening letters and withdrew its support, not wanting to harm "South African political sentiments" (ibid.). In addition, the German ambassador was outraged because Geers used a picture of German police during a visit of President Mandela to Berlin as the invitation to the art intervention, with the word "Guilty" printed across it, referencing the contentious issue of Holocaust guilt in contemporary Germany. The Pretoria City Council's director of museums and the Goodman Gallery, which represents Geers, were also targeted by threatening phone calls and letters. Linda Givon of the Goodman Gallery persisted in her support of Geers, saying that "If Kendell were not an Afrikaner, I would have doubts about lending my name to the show, but he is talking about his own history as an Afrikaner" (Blignaut 1998:11). This struck many as a rather opportunistic revelation, because Geers's Afrikaner roots had not been public knowledge up to that point (Fig. 6).

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Geers's actual occupation of the fort never took place, but in the late afternoon of the proposed day, an airplane circled above Pretoria trailing a banner apparently bearing the word "Guilty" (the banner was too small to see clearly from the ground) in four commonly spoken South African languages--Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, and Zulu--thereby taking guilt outside the white and specifically Afrikaner context where it is most commonly located by outsiders. While the airplane's banner was not clearly visible and Geers's planned appearances at the fort never took place, the issue of guilt was raised and brought into circulation by the extensive coverage and discussion in the media. And while many critics described the event as a flop, Geers nevertheless succeeded in foregrounding a latent issue. He says:

   People have told me not to scratch
   where it doesn't itch, but that's my
   job; I set out to draw attention to
   the unspoken, and not only in relation
   to Afrikaner nationalism. I've
   made a site-specific work that explores
   the mechanisms and depths
   of guilt. (14)

One could counter that Geers's intervention did not do much in terms of political transformation, but Geers fore-grounded traditions and symbols in a way that Habermas identifies as integral to a postconventional identity. Appropriating right-wingers' celebrations as part of his art work denaturalized the kind of traditions and symbols that they hold dear as part of their heritage. In a political landscape where these are seen to be simply anachronistic and harmless cultural rituals, Geers foregrounded them in such a way that the political exclusivity of these rituals became evident. In addition, this public art work cleverly engaged the viewer by interpellating a certain kind of viewer, a strategy often used by Geers: If the work speaks to viewers, it is because the viewers already recognize something about themselves in the work. For instance, in response to Afrikaner right-wing outrage, Geers said,

   The right wing is taking this very
   personally, when actually it's much
   bigger than them. They're not the
   only people in the country who are
   guilty. If you're going to overreact
   to the word "guilty" which I have
   hung up all over town, then you're
   obviously guilty or you are hiding
   something. (15)

This strategy characterizes the interpellative and performative force of much of Geers's art. It is the conceptual strength behind White Man's Burden, a video installation that Geers produced for the national annual Vita Art Awards in 1999. The work invokes Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem that described the colonizing project as "the white man's burden": the moral obligation to civilize, educate, and democratize the rest of the world. In this work, Geers projects a segment from the 1992 film The Bad Lieutenant, set on a loop (16) to show the same image of the lead actor, Harvey Keitel, in front of a church altar, with the sound track screaming phrases like "I am sorry ... I am so sorry ... I did so many bad things ... please forgive me ... I did not know what I was doing, help me, please help me." The voice is slightly distorted and the sound is set at extremely high audio levels, a strategy that Geers often uses in order to force the work into the viewers' space, arguing that sound cannot be "contained or disinfected, leaking out all over the place and infusing the walls and floors and ultimately consuming the viewer" (Geers interviewed in Sans 2000:269). Geers has called this a contaminatory piece, the audio levels making it completely inescapable. Complaints from some of the other nominees in the Vita Art show that Geers's work interfered with and destroyed the effect of their own, merely worked to reinforce his point--it became a work that forced the viewer violently into confrontation with itself and with the issue of guilt. (17) In an ironic reversal of Kipling's title, Geers seems to suggest that the historical consequences of those "civilizing" colonial practices have changed the white man's burden to one of guilt about those very actions, with little chance of unburdening the self.

The work is pervaded with a sense of latent violence and undercurrents of transgression: What exactly is the screaming man so sorry for? What is the source of his anguish and how can he get rid of it? As always, it is difficult and perhaps even undesirable to speculate about the artist's intention in this work. Given Geers's predilection for strong conceptual pieces that always seem to evoke controversy by testing the boundaries of art, it is difficult to read this work as a sincere comment on guilt. Nor do I think the artist wants us to. Unlike Vari, Geers absents himself from this work and instead appropriates a Hollywood actor to play-act feelings of intense guilt. How might we read this work, exhibited in Johannesburg in the aftermath of the TRC? Is it a cynical comment on feelings of guilt? Does it point an accusatory finger at a population of white people that either dismisses the possibility of guilt or wallows passively in its guilt?

I want to suggest that this work once again interpellates a specific kind of viewer: that segment of the white population plagued by guilt. When considered in the social context of post-apartheid South Africa, the work becomes a necessary and clever way to force issues of guilt into the purview of the viewers.

But this work simultaneously points to the futility of guilt that does not lead to action. Through the formal aspects of this work--the endless repetition of the same phrases and the hyperbolic sound levels--the work becomes a metaphor for the inertia of guilt. By choosing to loop these shots endlessly, Geers extracts them from any narrative sequence or possibility of completion and the characters become prisoners of their own anguish. The work becomes completely inescapable, domineering, even terrorizing, and the viewer realizes that it is only through action that this inertia can be overcome. Looking at this work, I was reminded suddenly of what has been described, in another context, as an "animating relationship" to guilt. In the aftermath of Hiroshima, write Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell,

   [The survivors] had found their survivor
   meaning in an animating relationship
   to guilt, a capacity to
   confront the source of that guilt in
   a manner that could lead to positive
   action. In that way self-condemnation
   can be transformed into
   the anxiety of social responsibility
   (1996:249).

While this work might raise the issue of perpetrator rather than survivor guilt, it still manages to communicate the passivity of guilt through its formal elements. The sound haunts one, making it impossible to remain passive--one searches, frantically, for a way out. In this way the work gestures to what the above authors refer to as the "anxiety of social responsibility."

Much of Geers's art operates on this knife's edge between breaking down and holding together. He is interested in visceral, raw emotion where words fail. In Title Withheld (Scream) (1999) the image of a terrified white woman screams piercingly and endlessly, and in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1999) it is once again Harvey Keitel screaming in anguish, this time projected simultaneously on thirteen monitors, while the cables and wires from these monitors are strewn across the floor. This strategy to create an inescapable environment, also used in White Man's Burden, has become a trademark of Geers's video installations, by which he wishes to force viewers to be conscious of their own bodies in space and to negotiate their paths through the jumble of technical equipment. The emotional disorientation of the high-pitched, repetitive sound is echoed in the disorienting physical interaction with the work. Geers has said that he is not interested ha "passive viewers who walk by the beautiful 'invisible spaces' that pretend to be art." Rather, he tries "to create pieces in which viewers have to accept responsibility for their presence in the work of art. Of course, they are always free to walk away or move on, but if they decide to engage with [his] work then the process becomes an active one" (interview in Sans 2000:269).

These works are not simply video works, they are sculptural pieces that create a total immersive environment. His works are about creating a physical presence and about performing a certain effect rather than depicting it. Geers has repeatedly expressed his irritation at being described as a South African artist whose work deals only with that situation and context. (18) He sees his work, rather, as being about "the human condition," about strategies of art, operating in international and contemporary art arenas. It is worth pointing out, then, that my readings of his work are deliberately invested ones, meant to be provocative. I maintain that Geers's art is distinctly informed by a South African context, which becomes especially visible when exhibited in that country. Undercurrents of violence and fear are always present in his art practice, born out of a political climate that was characterized by the subtle and not-so-subtle threat of terror. While these works do not explicitly reveal or address the terrors of the apartheid past, they address the alienation of the self in an altered present.

Concluding Remarks

It is the enunciation of a discontinuous present in which the self finds little comfort that links the work of Vari to that of Geers. It becomes a present in which the past is always present, a way of keeping the past alive so that it can never be repressed or denied, much as Habermas has argued for the necessity for subsequent generations to do--especially the descendants of perpetrators of violence and trauma. This needs to be done not because descendants are guilty of past actions but because they are liable for the consequences of past deeds.

But this "memory work" should not be restricted to documentation or to representation--rather, I want to suggest, it should be performative rather than merely mnemonic; it should lead to change rather than be simply commemorative. Both Vari and Geers, in vastly different ways, pull the viewer into a confrontation with the past by foregrounding whiteness, Vari through performing and embodying the unsettlement of the eyewitness, Geers through performing and challenging the inertia of the guilty bystander.

In closing, it is perhaps possible to say that these works, in responding from a position of situated or acknowledged whiteness, could be seen to "constitute" what Cathy Caruth has described in her book on trauma, history, and narrative as

   a new mode of reading and of listening
   that both the language of
   trauma, and the silence of its mute
   repetition of suffering, profoundly
   and imperatively demand (1996:9).

Transposing this, one could argue that Minnette Vari and Kendell Geers both find a mode to respond to the trauma of South Africa's past by continuously visualizing whiteness and what that position means in the present.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2005.]

This is a revised and substantially expanded version of an article that first appeared in Third Text 56 (Autumn) 2001:63-75.

References cited

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(1.) For a fuller discussion of the question of historical responsibility after the Holocaust, see Fulbrook 1999. See also Friedlander 1993 for an overview of the historiography of the issue of German generational responsibility in the years after the war. Friedlander characterizes the struggle with the past that many Germans still feel today as an Intractable predicament: The Nazi past is too massive to be forgotten and too repellent to be integrated into the "normal" narrative of memory. For the last forty years, Germans of at least two generations have been caught between the impossibility of remembering and the impossibility of forgetting (1993:2).

(2.) As Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph and Oren Stier (1999) outline in an article that discusses the strengths and weaknesses of such a comparative framework, the comparison was first made at the start of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings by Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts in their book Reconciliation Through Truth (1996). While Asmal et al. made it clear that these two historical occurrences were not simplistically the same, especially if one considers the "adept extermination of Jewish people ... which really has no parallel," the authors nevertheless wanted to invoke the Holocaust as a useful historical framework for thinking about the dangers of race hierarchy in another context, that of apartheid. Asmal et al. were criticized by Mahmood Mamdani who, in a review of their book, argued that, through the comparison with the Holocaust, a false parallelism is established that "highlights as key to the injustices of apartheid the relationship between perpetrators and victims, not beneficiaries and victims" (Mamdani quoted in Grunebaum-Ralph and Stier 1999:143). Mamdani also emphasized that whites and blacks in South Africa are not equivalent to Germans and Jews because after the Holocaust the latter two groups did not have to work together to create a common future In one country--"There was Israel" (ibid., 144). Historian Dominick LaCapra made a similar point about the particularity of these two contexts. In reference to a conference at Yale University that brought together scholars working on the Holocaust and the TRC South Africa to discuss the confluence of trauma and recovery In the aftermath of traumatic historical situations, LaCapra warns to take heed of the particularities of these two situations--"not least of which is the total near elimination of Jews in Germany as opposed to the majority status, as well as the rise to power, of blacks in South Africa" (LaCapra 2001:45).

(3.) On this historians' debate or Historikerstreit, see Knowlton and Cares 1993; Baldwin 1990; also New German Critique 1988. The debate flared up again recently with Daniel Goldhagen's (1996) controversial publication, on which see also Habermas 1998.

(4.) These two articles by Habermas were first published in Die Zeit on July 11 and November 7, 1986.

(5.) Minnette Vari was born in 1968 and raised in Pretoria. She completed a masters degree in fine art at the University of Pretoria and is currently based in Johannesburg. She has shown extensively In South Africa and Internationally.

(6.) See http://www.artthrob.co.za/nov98/fr-9811.htm for an extract of this video (accessed February 1, 2005). My thanks to Minnette Vari for sharing the details of the video with me.

(7.) http://www.artthrob.co.za/nov98/fr-9811.htm (accessed February 1, 2005).

(8.) This has been a constant theme in post-apartheid white discourse. For instance, Chris Louw, an Afrikaans journalist in his forties, has recently published a book that expresses his anger at a previous generation that fathered apartheid yet never had to fight physically for its survival. He argues that his generation was used as pawns In this war and is also singled out as the most visible guilty party by the TRC, while the masterminds, a previous generation, walk free.

(9.) It is tempting to read a strong Jewish theme in Vari's work in the reference to the golem, to The Pale and the shaved hair, but Vari disputes this. in an email to me she argues that the golem interested her on more levels than simply its Jewish reference; In addition, the Beyond the Pale reference invokes her personal history rather than a specific Jewish one, and the shaved hair, especially in the case of women, has always gestured historically towards outsider status, to penance and punishment, and not simply to Jewish prisoners.

(10.) Minette Vari, "Oracle: Artists Statement," prepared for the Vita Art Awards; at http://www.mg.co.za/mg/art/vita/artists/ vari.html, December 1999.

(11.) Vari continues this theme of displacement in more recent work that lies beyond the scope of this article with its focus on the context of the TRC. In Chimera (2001), for instance, personal displacement is explored in relation to personal and official history. See van der Watt 2004b.

(12.) Like Minette Vari, Kendell Geers grew up under the apartheid system and came of age during its demise. The son of an Afrikaans policeman, he ran away from home at age fifteen and later studied fine art at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. In 1988 he went to New York in order to evade military conscription, but returned to South Africa in 1989 when conscription became voluntary An outspoken and prolific art critic, Geers has repeatedly asserted his belief in the role and responsibility of art to question and challenge the status quo and to be "of its times." Geers's art is characterized--however broadly--by a strongly conceptual basis that challenges fire status of art, working in a long tradition of modernist avantgardism.

(13.) Now at http://www.kendell-geers.net. Accessed in February 2001 at http://www.icon.co.za/~kendell/home.htm.

(14.) http://www.icon.co.za/~kendell/home.htm.

(15.) Ibid.

(16.) It is interesting that both Vari and Geers, like so many of their contemporaries, choose this repetitive editing technique. In a show curated by Klaus Biesenbach titled "Loop," held at PS 1 in New York in January 2002, it became evident that this trend of the looped video is especially prevalent among artists who came of age during the 1990s. "Loop" examined thematic parallels with other media, such as sculpture and performance, and also explored various affects of the looped art work, ranging from the poetical, to the mundane, to the anguished. In addition, the repetition of the looped art work is often also a way to represent trauma, as in the case of Alfredo Jaar, who put posters with the name "Rwanda" repeated over and over in Maline, Sweden.

(17.) The audio levels have been the center of much controversy in this show. Some of the other artists on the show complained that Geers's soundtrack interfered with their own works and he was asked to turn down the volume on his work. Since Geers saw the soundtrack as central to his piece, he rather removed his works prematurely from the Vita Art show. (18.) In an interview with Jerome Sans, Geers says that describing him only in terms of his South African background "would be like speaking about Damien Hirst's work only In terms of his being British or Matthew Barney as being American. The world today is a small place and as an artist I am influenced by all sorts of things that are not only about being African or having lived most of my life in the Third World" (Sans 2000:267).