Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission Book

I hate to admit that I didn't get most of this book. It had some really great stuff in it. But a lot of it just didn't compute with me. I guess I just don't understand how to read a "cross-disciplinary" book. One page would be about the Truth Commission, which I understood pretty well. Then the next page would be a very specialized discussion about some literary/philosophical minutiae that a Ph.D. probably understands. Now, I have a reasonable background in both literature and law. So I feel justified in saying that a common failure of "law and literature" scholarship is that neither the law nor literature ends up any better elucidated. A lot of times you get half law, half literature, and 100% academic in-speak. That leaves you with lists of interesting connections, but nothing new. In order to get real insight, you need 100% law and 100% literary analysis together. Then you can get intellectual dynamite. I think this book fell into the half-and-half category. Lots of interesting connections, but half the book was too confusing for most educated humans to understand.

With that being said, there are some brilliant passages in this book and a lot to commend.

Sanders's discussion of ubuntu was better than most that I have read, and I have read several books about it already. He defines it much like others do, but his explanation is better because he "translate[s] the idiom more slowly than the judges, and more carefully than the Truth Commission, whose rendering, though not useless, is inexact, and whose citation of the phrase . . . is unmotivated when it should be more reserved." P. 26. He then engages in a linguistic analysis of the phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu that shows "why it has the transformative potential that all these writers sense and seek to appropriate and manage." P. 27. "The kind of dispropriation figured by ubuntu implies that being human, in an ethico-political sense, means that one does not enter the public sphere with ready-made rights and duties - any rights and duties have to be claimed and exercised. Making the claim to a right transforms the claimant and the one upon whom the claim is made. Both parties are exiled from their "proper" selves. Once on engages in ubuntu, there is no going back to a more "fundamental sense," which would ground the subject of rights and responsibilities in prescribed duties and responsibilities, let alone do so within a predetermined communal hierarchy." P. 27.

Sanders made two very incisive observations about ubuntu that ought to be repeated. First, the way that English-speaking scholars and judges use the word "is not a rendering of one language into another but a learning to speak another language, another's language, without, in any accepted sense, understanding it." P. 26. Thus, it looks like it is a tool rather than a philosophical foundation. Second, he makes an even more important point that resonated with me. I have been reading quite a bit about ubuntu, including legal cases from the South African Constitutional Court, and I have been troubled by how it can be used as a sword and a shield on both sides of legal arguments. Says Sanders: "Ubuntu takes the place of something absent, something that may never have existed, that lacks a proper name yet is promised by being posited." P. 28. Brilliant. Ubuntu is Mayberry - a perfect town that we all want to move back to, except that it never existed. No wonder it is so difficult to determine what ubuntu allows and requires.

The most memorable and enlightening parts of this book are the stories Sanders tells from the Truth Commission - Joyce Mtimkhulu holding up part of her murdered son's scalp; a torturer being questioned by his victims and reenacting his crimes for the commission; the stories of contrition and impenitence, forgiveness and enmity. Sanders does a wonderful job of setting out the problems with forgiveness, especially when perpetrators are evasive or manipulative. Are some crimes unforgivable? And can the living forgive on behalf of the dead? "The hearings of the Truth Commission show that forgiveness is never pure, that it is never even just one thing." P. 113. He also presents the aporia of reparation very well - there must be reparation, but there can never be adequate reparation. Finally, he examines the importance of testimony in exposing truth (four different notions of which the Commission recognized).

I learned a lot from this book, even with all the parts I had to puzzle over because they were full of academic jargon.