From Apartheid to Democracy. Katherine Elizabeth Mack

on her experiences in detention and on her experience testifying before the TRC. These conversations took textual form in Dube’s “The Story of Thandi Shezi.” Despite the lapse in time and the intimate, unofficial nature of these conversations, I show how the TRC’s arguments about voice, agency, and identity influence both Dube’s framing of “Story” and Shezi’s contributions to it. My analysis demonstrates the persistence and continuing power of the TRC’s claims about voice and silence to shape practices of remembrance. At the same time, I demonstrate how in the Women’s Hearings and the conversation with Dube, Shezi complicates those claims by asserting her identity as a survivor, not a silenced or voiceless victim, and by challenging the Commission’s interpretation of the effects of her speech and of the meaning of her silences. While the Commission contoured what participants said within and beyond the hearings, it did not fully control their speech.

      The remainder of this chapter offers insights into why some women would choose not to participate in the TRC process—that is, why they would choose to maintain silence. I argue that these women’s silences do not necessarily or always signify voicelessness or a lack of power. Silence poses a methodological challenge; by its very nature, it eludes analysis. One way to gauge the rhetorical power of silence is by attending to its effects—both institutional, as in the TRC’s Women’s Hearings, and literary, as in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, a novel that explores the complicated origins, evolution, and effects of the silences that the TRC sought to break. Lydia, the main female character in Bitter Fruit, refuses the TRC’s invitation to speak about her apartheid-era rape, and, in so doing, challenges its assumptions about the relationship between speech and selfhood while simultaneously resisting inscription into its nation-building project. This chapter on the topos of speech and silence aims to complicate both the TRC’s idealized notions of “free speech,” as well as its critics’ claims of total foreclosure, in addition to demonstrating the resonance of silence as a “specific rhetorical art” (Glenn 2).

      I Speak, Therefore I Am: The TRC’s Theoretical Assumptions About Voice and Agency

      The TRC’s heady rhetoric about the transformative potential of victims’ stories weaves together diverse discourses that nevertheless all hinge on the assumed relationship between speech and selfhood. From ancient times to the present, Western political theorists have linked speech to action and civilization. The rhetorical philosopher Isocrates (ca. fourth century B.C.E.) boldly asserted, “Of all human capabilities [speech] is responsible for the greatest goods. . . . If one must summarize the power of discourse, we will discover that nothing done prudently occurs without speech (logos), that speech is the leader of all thoughts and actions, and that the most intelligent people use it most of all” (Antidosis, §§ 251–57). Roughly two thousand years later, philosopher Hannah Arendt echoed Isocrates with her claim that speech enables human existence: “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world” (156–57). In the Western tradition, speaking confirms one’s humanity, intelligence, and agency. Civilization itself, it would seem, requires humans who speak.