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ABSTRACT
Aeschylus’ Oresteia dramatizes the meaning and political deployment of justice, concluding
with the transformation of justice as vengeance into the legal justice of
Athens’s new democracy. In this essay, I examine two dramatic texts that draw on the
Oresteia within another context of transitional justice: post-apartheid South Africa.
In Mark Fleishman’s In the City of Paradise and Yael Farber’s Molora the distorted
family relations within the house of Atreus come to represent the distorted relations
within South Africa, a nation haunted by a similar cycle of vengeance. Drawing on
Aeschylus, both playwrights dramatize the challenges that South Africa faced after
the end of apartheid: how to get beyond vengeance, how to reconcile a nation torn
apart by decades of injustice, and how to change from a system of apartheid to a
non-racial democracy. They make explicit reference to the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 1995 to forestall the bloodshed
that everybody expected after apartheid officially ended and to facilitate the transition
to a new, democratic South Africa. In this chapter, I consider this political transition
from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa in relation to the cultural exchange
between antiquity and the present. This focus directs me to a number of interrelated
topics, ranging from memory to justice, from truth to forgiveness, from storytelling to
theater, from amnesty to reconciliation.
Introduction
Aeschylus based his Oresteia, the only complete trilogy of Greek tragedies known to
us today, on the ancient myth of the house of Atreus, and set it in the aftermath of
Staging Transition: The
Oresteia in Post-Apartheid
South Africa
Astrid van Weyenberg
the Trojan War. Nonetheless, the trilogy held great contemporary relevance when it
was first performed at the Dionysia festival in 458 BC, as it marked the transition of
Athens from a tribal culture ruled by customs to a democratic society governed by
constitutional law (Ziolkowski 1977, 20).1
Throughout the Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatizes
the meaning and political deployment of justice, concluding his trilogy positively,
with the transformation of justice as vengeance into the legal justice of Athens’s new
democracy. In this paper, I discuss two dramatic texts that draw on the Oresteia
within another context of transitional justice: that of post-apartheid South Africa. The
first is Mark Fleishman’s In the City of Paradise, which premiered at the University of
Cape Town in 1998 as a collaborative production with his drama students, who also
formed the cast. The second is Yael Farber’s Molora (Sesotho for “ash”), first
performed in Germany in 2004.2
In both plays, the distorted family relations within
the house of Atreus come to represent the distorted relations within South Africa,
a nation that has been haunted by a similar cycle of vengeance. Because, as Farber
states, the Oresteia “unflinchingly articulates the spirals of violence unleashed in the
pursuit of righteous bloodshed” (Director’s note, personal communication).
Like the other contributions to this volume, my analysis concentrates on the relation
between art and politics. While Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez’s essay on global
art and the politics of mobility describes a general condition, I employ a more casespecific
approach, viewing the political transition from apartheid to post-apartheid
South Africa in relation to the cultural exchange between antiquity and the present.
My focus, then, is on the politics involved in cross-temporal migration, a focus that
directs me to a number of interrelated topics, ranging from memory to justice, from
truth to forgiveness, from storytelling to theater, from amnesty to reconciliation.
Narrating the Past
Both Fleishman and Farber draw on Aeschylus’ Oresteia to dramatize the challenges
that South Africa faced after the end of apartheid: how to get beyond vengeance, how
to reconcile a nation torn apart by decades of injustice, and how to change from a system
of apartheid to a non-racial democracy. They make explicit reference to the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 1995 to forestall
the bloodshed that everybody expected after apartheid officially ended and to
facilitate the transition to a new, democratic South Africa. The TRC was the product of
negotiations between Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and F.W. de
Klerk’s National Party (NP). Its work was divided among three committees: the Human
Rights Violations Committee investigated the human rights violations that occurred
between 1960 and 1994 and organized hearings in which victims and perpetrators
publicly told their stories; the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee was charged
with formulating proposals with regards to victims’ rehabilitation and restoration;
and, finally, the Amnesty Committee considered applications for amnesty.
70 | Astrid van Weyenberg
As its name implies, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was intended to
achieve reconciliation by uncovering the truths about the past and providing the basis
for developing a shared memory. Rosemary Jane Jolly suggests that, in the context
of the TRC, this appeal to a “shared memory” and to “truth” should not be understood
as an attempt to legitimize a master narrative and impose an official history;
rather, the terms refer to a heterogeneous construction that remains open to debate,
primarily because the TRC composed its narrative from the testimonies of a variety
of people, who were allowed to recount their stories in their own words, rather than
being interrogated by committee members (2001, 701). Michael Jackson discusses
how storytelling thus re-empowers victims because it enables them to actively
rework, rather than passively relive, past experiences of suffering (2002, 15). In this
respect, storytelling implies agency, the very agency victims have previously been
denied. It is also a means to relegate traumatic experiences to the realm of memory,
because, as Mieke Bal asserts, only by being made “narratable” can traumatic
events enter memory (Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999, x).
Storytelling is important in both Fleishman’s and Farber’s plays. Their characters
repeatedly insist on telling their stories, in conveying their subjective truths. A good
example from Fleishman is Clytemnestra’s use of the form of a fairy tale to tell
Orestes about Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, starting with “Once upon a time,
in a land far, far away, there lived a weak and wicked king” (28). Clytemnestra can talk
about her suffering only in the form of the fairy tale, a distanced, third-person
account. In Farber’s Molora, the entirety of the action is enclosed within the framework
of a TRC hearing, where Elektra has come to hear the testimony of her mother
Klytemnestra—the only white character in the play—whom she witnessed brutally
murdering her father, Agamemnon, when she was a child. The conflict between
Elektra and Klytemnestra, victim and perpetrator, illustrates an essential difficulty
with the TRC hearings, namely that testimonies describing the same experience
often did not correspond; more generally, that one event may generate a variety of
(possibly contradicting) stories and truths. Elektra confronts her mother with the
power of one who is free to speak, as one who can determine and control what is
told: “With which of your evils shall I begin my recital?” she says, “With which shall
I end it?” (5). Because stories do end and, affirming her play’s relevance beyond the
particular context of South Africa, Farber explains how the “ash” of the title Molora
refers to this finitude:
Our story begins with Orestes returning home with a tin full of ash. It is the state from
which we all come, and—from the concentration camps of Europe; the ruins of Baghdad,
Palestine, Northern Ireland and Rwanda . . . to the ash around the fire after the
storytelling is done . . . it is a state to which we must all humbly return. (Director’s note)
Farber’s poetic transition from ash as a residue of the violence that victims experience
privately, to the ash that remains after the subsequent recounting of this
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violence, when the private experiences of victims are brought into the public realm,
demonstrates how storytelling allows victims to transform their inner monologue into
social discourse (Jackson 2002, 15). Though Farber emphasizes the shared common
humanity that underlies historical and socio-political distinctions, I agree with
Dennis Walder that her indiscriminately yoking together of very different events, peoples
and experiences is sentimental and damagingly blurs history and difference.3
As a narrative form, storytelling inevitably remains distanced from the legal narrative
of the law court. It is remarkable, therefore, that the TRC privileged storytelling
in its quasi-judicial Human Rights Violations hearings. The commission did so for a
number of reasons: because it recognized the healing potential of telling stories,
because it understood that by telling their stories “both victims and perpetrators
gave meaning to the multi-layered experiences of the South African story,” and
because it considered “the process of storytelling [was] particularly important” in the
“(South) African context, where value continues to be attached to oral tradition”
(Final Report I 1998, 112). According to Mark Sanders, this latter statement is problematic,
because the simultaneous joining and disjoining of “South” from “Africa”
suggests that “it is not simply stories of people who have suffered, but the stories of
Africans, African stories, for which the Truth Commission wishes to leave a domain of
telling of which it constantly risks dispossessing them” (2000, 20). In Sanders’s
opinion, the TRC’s characterization of storytelling as “subjective” implicitly sets it in
opposition to the “factual evidence” that will be brought to light:
The commission never attaches itself as agent, as the subject of utterance—not
even subjectively—to the ethnographic datum that “value continues to be attached to
oral tradition.” There is repression in its avowal. Africa, silenced in South Africa, speaks
in the form of “oral tradition,” to which the Truth Commission will accommodate, just as
legal modernity finds a place for “custom.” Yet, just as the Constitution maintains ultimate
authority by reserving the right to overrule, and even define, “customary law,”
the commission draws back from attaching “value,” in its own voice, to storytelling.
(2000, 21)
Sanders’s comment seems valid. Not only did the TRC link storytelling to the notion
of “personal or narrative truth,” it also distinguished this truth from three other
notions of truth: “factual or forensic truth,” which referred to empirical, objective
truth; “social or ‘dialogue’ truth,” established through interaction and debate; and
“healing and restorative truth,” related to the public acknowledgement of suffering
and its beneficial effect on the healing processes of both individuals and the nation
at large.4
By conceptually distancing the “personal, narrative truth” revealed through
victims’ testimonies from the “factual or forensic truth” of the modern law court,
the TRC ultimately consigned people’s experiences to a separate, pre-legal, and premodern
domain. Moreover, while victims were encouraged to tell their stories and
state their personal, narrative truth, the hearings of perpetrators were restricted to
72 | Astrid van Weyenberg
legal, forensic truth, and offered little room for emotional displays or storytelling
(Shore and Klein 2006, 313; 317). It seems problematic that the notions of truth
that were employed in the various hearings were so different from one another, especially
if victim and perpetrator accounts were supposed to together construct “the
South African story.” Still, the coexistence of different types of discourses on truth
does suggest that the commission intended to emphasize multiplicity and diversity,
that it was aware that the story it sought to construct would remain fractured, and
that the singular “Truth” of its title required a more nuanced definition.
Jolly finds that the TRC’s emphasis on storytelling suggests that the commission
ritualized “that which can be counted on to resist closure—narrative,” and that
the capacity of this ritual to resonate on many levels, “its surplus of meaning
beyond the mechanics of secular and legal concepts of violation, testimony, proof,
confession, judgment, punishment, financial compensation, even the truths the
commission itself seeks to verify” held great power, as it “serve[d] its mandate of
contributing substantially to the creation of South Africa’s new democracy” (2001,
709–710). Jolly thus establishes a close relation between storytelling and nationbuilding.
The TRC hearings created a space in which different, sometimes conflicting,
voices could be heard and, in this sense, demonstrated what apartheid had
oppressed: openness and debate, negotiation and contestation. In other words, the
hearings promoted and performed values that were to shape the new democratic
South Africa. Barbara Cassin addresses the specific role of storytelling, relating it
to ancient Greece:
Just as the discourses, deliberations, epideictic and judicial speeches performed in
the Ancient Greek city . . . the act of storytelling performs the as yet unheard history
of the South African community; and this community constitutes itself through this
process, with “history-history” being unraveled from the “story histories.” (2002, 27)
The stories that are told in the testimonies together construct the history of South
Africa, because testimony performs the transition from the personal to the public
domain and thereby, states Paul Ricoeur, “perform[s] the transition between personal
memory and history” (2004, 21). Through testimony, then, storytellers become active
agents of the performance of history; they become history’s subjects rather than its
passive objects.5
Nonetheless, the relation between the role and deployment of narrative within the
TRC and the project of nation-building and historiography is more complex than this,
because though the narrative constructed was indeed heterogeneous, this heterogeneity
was inevitably highly arbitrated and mediated. First of all, the stories of
victims and perpetrators were automatically framed by and incorporated within the
new state discourse, which was concerned with creating a shared point of origin from
which a new nation could be constructed. The hearings were highly mediated events
in other ways as well, ranging from the initial statement-taking prior to the hearings
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and the selection of testimonies that fitted the TRC mandate of politically motivated
human rights abuses, to transcription and translation of testimonies in English
(Driver 2006, 5). It was decided beforehand which stories would be narrated at the
hearings, and which testimonies would also be broadcast and so reach a wider
audience. Since only crimes with a “political objective” were investigated, the countless
people who had been economically exploited and victimized on a daily basis
were not considered “victims” of the apartheid state. The emphasis was on the
political, but of course apartheid terror did not halt at people’s doorsteps. Moreover,
because the TRC restricted itself to the human rights violations committed between
March 1, 1960 and December 5, 1993, the long history of racism and violence
that preceded this period remained unchallenged, as well as the violence that
occurred in the transitional period after apartheid officially ended (Holiday 1998, 46).
It could be argued, as it has been by Benita Parry, that though the TRC did succeed
in recovering fragments from the past, it did not manage to deal with the structural
history of power relations and racism (2004, 120).
Not only was the arrangement and staging of the testimonies highly mediated,
but there was also mediation within the narratives themselves. Drawing on discourse
analysis, Jan Blommaert, Mary Bock, and Kay McCormick examine the TRC as what
they call an “exceptional discourse event” to demonstrate that offering people a
space to tell their stories does not necessarily do away with, and can actually accentuate,
past inequalities. Some people may, for example, lack the communicative
skills to make themselves heard beyond the immediate context of the hearings, or
the interlocution of commissioners may result in the misinterpretation of testimonies
(2006, 41–42; 66).6
While storytelling can confer agency on those who tell the story,
this agency is always conditional and mediated.
In its final report, the TRC acknowledges that the narrative it constructed would
inevitably remain fractured, stating that it “tells only a small part of a much larger
story of human rights abuse in South and southern Africa” (Final Report I 1998, 24).
Nonetheless, it remains important to recognize how mediation and fragmentation
influenced what was to become the narrative, the history, or the public memory of
South Africa, the point of departure from which a new democratic nation would be
constructed. As Moon states, in order to fulfill its intended role in the process of
nation-building, the TRC had to construct a linear narrative in which there was a past
of suffering and inequality; a present of confession, testimony, and mourning; and a
future of reconciliation and democracy (2006, 269). Farber’s Molora restores emphasis
to the personal nature of suffering. Her Elektra and Klytemnestra appear on stage
at a TRC-like hearing, but unlike the testimonies of many people who spoke at the
TRC, their narratives are not pre-structured by a discourse of national reconciliation
or mediated by commissioners’ interruptions or reinterpretations. Moreover, unlike
many women who spoke at TRC hearings, the suffering they narrate is their own.7
74 | Astrid van Weyenberg
Revealing and Healing
Through the confrontation between mother and daughter, perpetrator and victim,
Farber portrays the brutal human rights violations that the various TRC hearings have
brought to light, metaphorically representing how, as Farber says, “like Elektra, countless
South Africans came to live as ‘servants in the Halls of their Father’s house’”
(Director’s note). Farber instructs that the action should be set in “a bare hall or
room—much like the drab and simple venues in which most of the testimonies were
heard during the course of South Africa’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’” (2).
Klytemnestra and Elektra sit behind two tables with microphones. In between the
tables stands a raised stage on which the story will be reenacted. The chorus of
women, Xhosa singers from the Nqoko Cultural Group, sit to the back of the performance
area and the audience is located at the front; both are incorporated as witnesses
to the hearing. During their testimonies, Elektra and Klytemnestra step onto
the raised stage, into the performance space, to reenact fragments from the past.
Farber’s use of the metatheatrical device of the play-within-the-play points to the
theatrical nature of the TRC hearings, hearings that, as Catherine M. Cole observes,
were highly performative events in terms of their “theatrical and dramatic emotional
displays, improvisational storytelling, singing, weeping, and ritualistic lighting of
candles” (2007, 167; 174). They staged confrontations between victims and perpetrators
in front of an audience that reached far beyond those present in the various
venues, since not only were transcripts of the proceedings published in the newspapers,
but many of the hearings could also be witnessed live on radio and television.
The TRC toured South Africa, in Cole’s words, “like a traveling road show,” and
held hearings on raised platforms in churches, town halls, and community centers
throughout the country (2007, 172).
Entering the various venues, victims, perpetrators, and audience members were
greeted by enormous banners that read “Revealing is Healing” and “The Truth Will
Set You Free.” These were powerful slogans that were intended to frame the entire
TRC project, since they legitimized the commission’s name by establishing a direct
connection between “truth” and the sought-after end point of “reconciliation” and
“healing.” The belief that people would be healed by publicly revealing their stories
and that this would in turn result in the healing of the entire nation was idealistically
but also ideologically inclined: without some preliminary sense of national healing
and reconciliation, it was difficult to imagine the transition to a new and democratic
South Africa. By thus referring to personal healing, national healing, and national
reconciliation as if they were exchangeable concepts, the TRC created a language
in which the relatively distinct discourses of psychotherapy and politics became
conflated.
Richard A. Wilson, in a book critical of the politics of truth and reconciliation in
South Africa, argues that, “for all their media coverage, TRC hearings were often
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little more than a symbolic and ritualized performance with a weak impact on
vengeance in urban townships” (2001, 227). Benita Parry similarly questions
whether “the public staging of mourning can truly facilitate national catharsis and
psychotherapeutic healing” (2004, 187). While Wilson and Parry emphasize the theatrical
framing of the hearings, Cole analyses the performative aspect within these
hearings and suggests that the “dramatic, unruly, ephemeral, embodied, and performed
aspects of live hearings potently expressed both the power of the TRC as well
as its severe limits in truly grappling with the magnitude of the violations of human
rights in South Africa’s past” and that it was largely because of their performative
nature that the live Human Rights Violations hearings were so “affective, and consequently,
[they were] effective in facilitating, however imperfectly, a transition from a
racist, totalitarian state to a non-racial democracy” (2007, 179). Cole’s argument is
compelling:
Whatever the victims’ intentions or expectations were of the commission, their
words, gestures, cadence, intonation, and embodied expressions are now in the public
domain, and this material deserves to be closely analyzed. The picture that emerges
from such analysis is complex and contradictory, full of details that both confirm and
resist the dominant narratives of the past and of the TRC’s own mission. We also see
how individuals performed within the commission the particular truths that they were
trying to achieve. In the disjunctions between participants’ performances of truth they
wished to perform and the commission’s public iteration of the truths it wished to perform,
we come closest to perceiving the complexity of the knowledge the TRC brought
into being. (187)
Cole emphasizes, then, that the disjunctions between individual testimonies and the
larger narrative that enclosed them point to the performative power to challenge the
dominancy of this overarching narrative from within. However, even if victims succeeded
(partly or wholly) in performing their truths, the question remains to what
extent this resulted in personal healing. As Grahame Hayes observes, in spite of
what the banners at the entrance of the TRC venues asserted, “just revealing is not
just healing,” because healing depends on “how we reveal, the context of the revealing,
and what it is that we are revealing . . . what people have to reveal might not be
healable, or at least not healable by means of the one-off revelation before the TRC”
(1998, 43; emphasis in text).
That the relation between revealing and healing is not self-evident is clear throughout
Farber’s play. The audience is left to wonder whether Electra will ever be able to
heal from the violence she has been and is still subjected to. Elektra testifies about
the torture she has suffered at the hands of her mother, for example with the “Wet
Bag Method,” which was used by South African security police to torture political
activists.8
The audience also sees torture performed when Klytemnestra stuffs a
cloth into Elektra’s mouth and burns her with cigarettes. During the interrogation,
76 | Astrid van Weyenberg
which (so the stage descriptions instruct) Electra endures “like a political resistance
fighter,” Klytemnestra quotes, from Genesis 9:25, the curse that Ham’s father Noah
places upon Ham’s son Canaan: “Cursed be your children. The servants of servants
shall they be unto their brethren” (11–12). Ellen van Wolde discusses how this
episode was often referred to as a biblical legitimization of apartheid theology, understanding
the Africans as the descendents of Ham and, therefore, a people destined
to be servants (2003, 13–14).
Seeing the suffering Elektra had to endure, the audience is led to understand why
she feels that “if the guilty pay not with blood for blood—then we are nothing but a
history without a future” (6). For Fleishman’s Electra, the future similarly demands
revenge. She, too, is scarred by years of abuse and imprisonment; she, too, believes
that “only violence can save us” (19). Even Orestes, who desperately tries to convince
his sister of the need to break the cycle of revenge, is eventually driven to kill,
first Aegisthus, and then his mother Clytemnestra. Both playwrights show that violence
begets violence and both dramatize Nietzsche’s warning that “Whoever fights
monsters should take care that in the process he does not become a monster”
(1966, 98). Farber’s Klytemnestra understands that danger from her own experience
and warns her children that “Nothing—nothing is written./ Do not choose to be me.
The hounds that avenge all murder will forever hunt you down” (55). But her warning
seems in vain. In what is arguably the most tragic moment of the play, Orestes faces
his mother, ready to strike her, crying in rage and pain: “YOU HAVE MADE ME WHAT
I AM!” (56).
Orestes’ desperation over having turned into a perpetrator articulates one of the
difficulties that arose in the confrontations that the TRC hearings staged, namely that
the distinction between perpetrator and victim was often blurred, and that some
people were both perpetrator and victim at the same time (Sarkin 2004, 82). Claire
Moon discusses how the subject categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” were
central to the TRC’s public performances of national reconciliation (2006, 12). She
explains that the categories of “victim” and “perpetrator” were institutionalized by
means of the discrete committees for which people appeared to give their testimonies,
to the extent that those testifying first had to decide whether their submission
would be a “victim” or a “perpetrator” submission (2006, 267). In their plays,
Fleishman and Farber most effectively underline the possible conflation of these
two positions in their portrayals of Clytemnestra/Klytemnestra as both abuser and
victim. In Fleishman, Clytemnestra talks about the loss of her daughter Iphigenia and
about the shame she felt when Agamemnon, portrayed here not as a noble king who
is torn, but as a brutish tyrant, brought his concubine Cassandra into her house. In
Farber, she tells Elektra how she first met Agamemnon, “the day he opened up my
first husband and ripped out his guts. He tore this—my first born from my breast.
Then holding the child by its new ankles—he smashed its tiny head against a rock.
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Then took me for his wife” (22). Clytemnestra/Klytemnestra has her own stories of
injustice to tell.
Not only do Fleishman and Farber challenge the binary of perpetrator and victim,
they also de-racialize it by showing that these subject positions cannot be distinguished
along racial lines. It is nonetheless important to emphasize that violence in
South Africa was racialized to an extreme extent. Though many white South Africans
suffered from the violence apartheid engendered, non-whites (ethnically categorized
as “blacks,” “coloureds,” and “Indians”) were the objects of systematic oppression.9
Different from Farber, Fleishman gives no instructions with regards to the racial
make-up of his cast, and race remains wholly absent from his text.10
Another important consequence of Fleishman’s and Farber’s focus on
Clytemnestra/Klytemnestra’s history of suffering, a suffering that is absent from
Aeschylus, is that it challenges her traditional representation in Western tradition.
While Clytemnestra could as easily be depicted as a trauma survivor, argues Kathleen
L. Komar, the literature of antiquity usually figures her as the root cause of violence,
“representing several major roles traditionally assigned to women,” namely “the
demonic and vengeful woman, the adulterous wife and the avenging mother” (2003,
1–2; 6). In undermining the traditional representation of Clytemnestra, Fleishman
and Farber address the gender politics this representation embodies. By so doing,
they achieve something else as well. Rather than essentializing tragedy as an
a-temporal, universal myth, they demonstrate that the migration of antiquity to the
present is a complex process that involves change and the raising of new perspectives.
In the specific case of Clytemnestra, Fleishman’s and Farber’s representations
of her underscore her relevance to the present, while simultaneously undermining
the notion of any discreet universal denotation. In other words, through their “variations
on Clytemnestra,” they establish a cross-temporal relation between antiquity
and the present, a relation that both illuminates and challenges Clytemnestra’s
traditional representation.
In Fleishman’s tragedy, like Aeschylus’, Orestes and Electra murder Aegisthus and
Clytemnestra, but Farber’s story has a different outcome. This is another way to show
that the migration of antiquity to the present extends beyond the mere resituating
of universal myths. Early in the play, despite the many accusations and shouts of
hatred, some hope for reconciliation is expressed when Elektra and Klytemnestra
attempt to acknowledge each other’s humanity. Despite her passionate feelings of
revenge, Elektra acknowledges her mother’s hurt: “I see your heart mama/ I know it
hurts” (19). Klytemnestra, though hesitantly and euphemistically, expresses a
murmur of remorse: “I am not so exceedingly glad at the deeds I have done . . .” (20).
Aegisthus (here Ayesthus, represented by a large worker’s uniform hanging on a
washing line) is killed, but when Orestes is ready to murder Klytemnestra, the chorus’
singing makes him change his mind, after which he urges Elektra to “walk away.
78 | Astrid van Weyenberg
Rewrite this ancient end!” (57). When Elektra, not yet ready to relinquish her
vengeance, grabs the axe and runs towards Klytemnestra, the chorus overpowers her
and comforts her as she weeps. The ancient end has been rewritten: Farber’s
Klytemnestra lives.
Not only is Aeschylus’ trilogy rewritten, but also South Africa’s (his)story of
violence, though residues of revenge remain:
It falls softly the residue of revenge . . . like rain.
And we who made the sons and daughters of this
Land . . . Servants in the halls of their forefathers . . .
We know.
We are still only here by grace alone.
Look now—dawn is coming.
Great chains on the home are falling off.
This house rises up.
For too long it has lain in ash on the ground. (59)
No family resolve, no love can be regained here; no forgiveness can be articulated.
But the fact that the children help their mother to her feet and let her walk away
signals the beginning of a process of forgiveness, a difficult process because, as
Farber writes, “notions of a Rainbow Nation gliding effortlessly into forgiveness are
absurd” (Director’s note). Farber has her reasons for making the chorus the main
agent in breaking the cycle of revenge, because according to her: “it was not the
gods or deus ex machina that delivered us from ourselves in the years following
democracy, but the common everyman and woman . . . who lit the way for us all”
(Director’s note).
Though both Fleishman and Farber end their plays on an optimistic note, with
revenge giving way to new beginnings and possibilities, none of their characters
explicitly articulate forgiveness. This is especially striking since forgiveness came to
occupy a prominent position in the TRC’s political narrative of reconciliation. Indeed,
as Wilson states, the TRC hearings were structured in such a way that any expression
of a desire for revenge would seem out of place, so that it is questionable to what
extent victims were given the choice to not forgive (2001, 17).11
The emphasis on a
Christian understanding of forgiveness had much to do with the influence of Church
leaders, in particular the chairman of the commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Still, the TRC was never intended to be a religious institution, so that there is something
unsettling about the way in which the narrative of the TRC, a secular governmental
institution, displayed tensions between a legal-political and a religious-redemptive
understanding of truth and reconciliation (Shore and Kline 2006, 312).12
Though the
Christian message appealed to Christian South Africans, it excluded people of other
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religious persuasions, and the absence of a Christian message in Farber’s and
Fleishman’s plays may be seen as a comment on this shortcoming.13
To refer to forgiveness in the context of political reconciliation seems essentially
flawed, as it relocates a moral and personal discourse into the political realm. The
essence of forgiveness, after all, is that one can only forgive on behalf of oneself, not
somebody else, let alone groups of people. Still, there may be a place for forgiveness
in politics, perhaps because it is located at the threshold between the private and the
public. For Hannah Arendt, although some things are unforgivable, forgiveness is a
necessity of (political) life, because without being forgiven, “our capacity to act would,
as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we
would remain the victims of its consequences forever” (1958, 237). Arendt seems to
view forgiveness in a rather pragmatic way, as an act that frees us from the past.
Jacques Derrida also deals with the relation between forgiveness and politics.
His essay “On Forgiveness” centers on the dual nature of forgiveness, the tension
between what he describes as an “unconditional forgiveness” and a “conditional
forgiveness proportionate to the recognition of the fault” (2001, 34–35). In his view,
forgiveness “is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain
exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the
ordinary course of historical temporality”; consequently, forgiveness “does not, it
should never amount to a therapy of reconciliation,” because this implies the intervention
of a third party within what should essentially be a one-to-one relationship
between victim and perpetrator (2001, 31–32; 41). Michael Janover finds Derrida’s
idea of a pure forgiveness “charming and persuasive” in a world in which “forgiveness
can be traded and reduced to a mechanism for winning votes or allies in a world
in which amnesty for former mass murderers and tyrants can be decided by political
ideals” (2007, 228). However, Janover does not take into account that even when
forgiveness is subsumed within the personal and moral realm, it remains difficult
to conceive of its unconditional form. Even in the most private context, forgiveness is
never delimited to the confines of a one-to-one relationship between perpetrator and
victim, as it is always informed by a complex mixture of personal, social, and political
factors. In Farber, the important role of the community in putting an end to the cycle
of vengeance illustrates this well.
Perhaps the problem with the TRC was not so much that the commission drew on
a personal and moral concept of forgiveness within a political sphere, but rather that
forgiveness was given such a dominant position that it left victims little room to avoid
or renounce it. Moreover, there appears to have been little awareness of the fact that
to state forgiveness, because one wishes or because one feels forced to, does not
automatically mean that the act of forgiveness actually takes place. For there is
always that other mediating institution that Derrida mentions in passing: language
(2001, 42).
80 | Astrid van Weyenberg
The Politics of Reconciliation
While forgiveness occupied a prominent position within the TRC, amnesty, often
understood as the institutionalization and collectivization of forgiveness, was never
directly linked to forgiveness, but instead to truth. Truth (“full disclosure”) would
pave the way towards reconciliation.14
The TRC was the first truth commission that
linked amnesty to the uncovering of the truth and the first to be given the mandate
to free perpetrators from civil and criminal prosecution for the rest of their lives
(Cole 2007, 174). Traditionally, amnesty suggests a collective forgetting of past
wrongs and a wish to break clean from the past; indeed, in ancient Greek, amnesty
and amnesia are two meanings of same word. The TRC, however, associated
amnesty with anamnesis rather than amnesia (Schaap 2005, 113). It emphasized
the importance of recollecting the past so that through “truth” it would become
possible to achieve reconciliation. In other words, it attempted to settle between
what Parry describes as the competing claims of reconciliation and remembrance
(2004, 183).
The emphasis on truth meant that applicants for amnesty were not asked to publicly
apologize and ask for forgiveness, but solely to state their crimes and to show
how these crimes were political in nature. As Willie Henderson explains, granting
freedom in exchange for truth involves the danger that truth may become a mere
commodity and, as such, be stripped of its ethical impact (2000, 459). Indeed,
it makes it impossible to separate applicants’ motivation to tell the truth from the
coercive lure of exoneration. For Wole Soyinka, the main problem with South Africa’s
choice for amnesty is its “implicit, a priori exclusion of criminality and, thus, responsibility”
(1999, 31). His concern is understandable, though probably the imperative
that they subscribe to the position of “perpetrator” in order to apply for amnesty, and
the requirement that they admit their crimes in public, did force many perpetrators to
take responsibility. But taking responsibility implies sincerity and sincerity is difficult
to judge. Moon discusses, for instance, how former security policeman Jeffrey
Benzien (referred to earlier as the inventor of the “Wet Bag” torture method) wittingly
manipulated the TRC narrative of reconciliation.15
Ingrid de Kok’s doubt as to whether
structures dedicated to reconciliation and unity might not still “unwittingly encourage
social and cultural amnesia” is certainly legitimate (qtd. in Parry 2004, 109).
Fleishman dramatizes part of the amnesty debate in the final scene of his In the
City of Paradise. The question is asked whether Orestes and Electra should be convicted
for their matricide or granted amnesty instead. Among the furies in gas masks
that begin to hound them are Tyndareus and Leda, Clytemnestra’s parents, two characters
that do not figure in Aeschylus. Fleishman introduces another generation of
people who have been involved in and affected by the violence.16
Despite his grief
and anger about his daughter’s death, Tyndareus stops the mob from stoning Orestes
and Electra, persuading them that “we seek not private vengeance here, but public
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retribution/ Justice will win out/ Our time will come” (37). He urges them to replace
vengeance with legal action, but his call is not answered. Instead, the court herald
announces, speaking lines that are almost identical to those of the 1995 Truth and
Reconciliation Act,
. . . we stand today upon an historic bridge
Between a past of deep division and discord,
And a brighter future of peace and prosperity for all.
There is a need for understanding, not for vengeance,
For forgiveness not retaliation,
For humanity not for victimization.
Our learned judges, seek to reconcile all differences,
To set aside all enmity and hatred,
To build anew our fragile lives in Argos.
They decree, therefore, that amnesty shall be granted
In respect of acts, omissions and offences
Committed in the cause of conflicts of the past,
Where a full disclosure of the facts are made,
Lest we forget our brutal heritage. (38)
Despite Tyndareus’ outrage at the decision to grant amnesty to his daughter’s
murderers, the final image presents the TRC’s amnesty arrangement as an imperfect
but necessary tool for democracy. This move away from Tyndareus’ personal pain
illustrates how, in the process of the TRC, the attention moved away from the personal
towards the national. But Tyndareus’ complaint that “this amnesty pollutes our law”
and that it is a “travesty of justice” remains important and echoes the opinion of
many victims of apartheid, who felt that the amnesty provisions denied them the right
to seek judicial redress (39).17
Indeed, victims were given no opportunity to opt for a
kind of closure other than the reconciliatory one promoted by the TRC.
The rhetoric of the TRC linked amnesty to an idea of transitional or restorative justice,
a justice that did not imply vengeance or retribution. The opposition between a
restorative and a retributive justice came to be identified as the opposition between
Africa and the West.18
Wilson argues that the creation of a polarity between a romanticized
“African” idea of reconciliation (founded on the notion of ubuntu, the Nguni
word referring to “humaneness”) and a Western notion of retributive justice (implying
vengeance) closed down space for discussing legal punishment as a possible route
to reconciliation (2001, 11). According to him, ubuntu thus became an “ideological
concept with multiple meanings which conjoins human rights, restorative justice,
reconciliation and nation-building within the populist language of pan-Africanism,” the
“Africanist wrapping used to sell a reconciliatory version of human rights talk to black
82 | Astrid van Weyenberg
South Africans. Ubuntu belies the claim that human rights would have no culturalist
or ethnic dimensions” (2001, 13). In other words, it was implied that if you were truly
African, there had to be forgiveness in your heart.19
The debate about the TRC’s amnesty arrangement points to the inevitable clash
in post-conflict societies between different understandings of and different demands
on justice. Aeschylus’ Oresteia dramatizes this. Throughout the trilogy, Agamemnon,
Clytemnestra, Apollo, Orestes, and the Erinyes (the Furies, spirits of wrath) all claim
justice on their side, but their different understandings and rhetorical appropriations
of justice differ and compete violently. At Orestes’ trial, a confrontation takes place
mainly between his defender Apollo, who has instructed Orestes to kill his mother to
avenge his father’s death because justice so demands, and the Erinyes, who want
Orestes to pay with his blood for the matricide he has committed. Aeschylus demonstrates
not only that justice lacks a fixed meaning but also that its possible meanings
depend on the political interests at stake. The Eumenides, the tragedy that
concludes the Oresteia, dramatizes a reconciliatory process between the different
demands of different ideas of justice, culminating in the celebration of Athena’s
judicial court that puts an end to vengeance and instead installs a judicial system
based on evidence and trial.
The reconciliation Athena achieves depends primarily on her power to convince
the Erinyes to take their place within the new Athens as the Eumenides, the Kindly
Ones. They are not banished, nor are their passions for vengeance denied. Rather,
in their new function, they will embody “that ultimate sanction of fear which underlies
the new order, as it dominated the old” (Vellacott, Aeschylus 1956, 20). By transforming
“murderous begetting into blessed fecundity,” to use Nicole Loraux’s words,
Athena attempts to compromise between the demands of the past and those of the
future (2006, 38). The Furies, once transformed into the Kindly Ones and officially
incorporated within the new order, will protect the city rather than endanger its inner
stability. Athena’s mediation signifies the inauguration of a new social and political
order; one in which the old is not simply discarded, but reconciled with the new. At
least, that would be the official story.
Traditionally, the Oresteia is seen as a celebration of democracy and the expression
of a progressive movement from chaos to order. Christopher Rocco lists a number
of such interpretations, among them the one by the renowned classicist John H.
Finley who, in Rocco’s words, saw the trilogy as “nothing less than a founding document
of Western civilization” (1997, 144).20
In Froma Zeitlin’s feminist reading of
the Oresteia, what is actually founded is a tradition of misogynistic exclusion, since the
“solution” or reconciliation of the Eumenides entails the hierarchization of values:
the subordination of the Furies to the Olympians, of barbarian to Greek and, most
important for Zeitlin, of female to male (Rocco 1997, 144). When the judges of her
court fail to cast a final vote, Athena’s mediation indeed displays a great amount of
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gender politics. She votes in favor of Orestes because the murder of Clytemnestra
(woman/mother) is less important than that of Agamemnon (man/father):
No mother gave me birth. Therefore the father’s claim
And male supremacy in all things, save to give
Myself in marriage, wins my whole heart’s loyalty.
Therefore a woman’s death, who killed her husband, is,
I judge, outweighed in grievousness by his. (Aeschylus 1956, 172)21
Just before her vote, Apollo has similarly argued for the supremacy of fatherhood over
motherhood, stating that the mother is “not the true parent of the child” but only “the
nurse who tends the growth/ Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male”
(Aeschylus 1956, 169). Athena’s final judgment, then, is far from impartial and Zeitlin
is right that, as Rocco rephrases it, “through the democratic rhetoric of equality,
reason and consent legitimate the institutionalization of exclusionary polarities into
systematized hierarchies, rather than creating a truly democratic order” (1997, 144).
The problem of justice is not solved; rather, one version of justice is privileged over
other possible versions.22
In South Africa, a similar thing happened. Here, too, the new democracy that was
created did not, and still does not, correspond with the reality of the majority of the
people. Here, too, one understanding of justice, as reconciliation, was privileged, leaving
little room for a retributionist discourse. Maybe justice as reconciliation did best
serve the nation-building project; after all, in the new South Africa, people had to find
ways to live together and move beyond sentiments that might jeopardize their joint
future. At the same time, while the “re” in “reconciliation” assumes that there was
something in common that can be reconciled, as journalist Antjie Krog writes in her
book about the TRC, “in this country, there is nothing to go back to, no previous state
or relationship one would wish to restore. In these stark circumstances, ‘reconciliation’
does not even seem like the right word, but rather ‘conciliation’” (2000, 143).
Maybe Wilson is right that the TRC’s effort to “forge a new moral vision of the nation,”
centering on forgiveness and reconciliation, ultimately “destroys the most important
promise of human rights; that is, its possible contribution to a thoroughgoing transformation
of an authoritarian criminal justice system and the construction of real and
lasting democratic legitimacy” (2001, 230). At this time in history, it is difficult to
assess the advantages and disadvantages of the TRC’s project of reconciliation.
And so, just as Athena’s mediation is imperfect and ambiguous, so the TRC’s
mediation inevitably entailed sacrifice and loss. Just as the new order that Athena
establishes remains precarious, so post-apartheid, democratic South Africa finds
itself in a similarly precarious and fragile state. The Oresteia dramatizes this complexity.
In Rocco’s reading, the trilogy, despite its triumphant ending, “constructs the
84 | Astrid van Weyenberg
meaning of the democratic founding, and so of democracy itself, as open to further
contest, struggle, and renegotiation” (1997, 169). Similarly, J.G. Finlayson states
that, rather than simply instructing how reconciliation can and should be achieved,
It is as if Aeschylus is telling us that justice, reason, and lawfulness are not established
facts that need merely be recognized for what they are by an act of theoretical
contemplation but ongoing practical tasks within the new social order, and reconciliation
between the different ethical powers, between citizens and their new institutions
is not a state already attained but an ongoing process. (1999, 516)
Democracy will forever have to be critically reexamined and renegotiated. Reconciliation,
despite the finality that the word suggests, can never really achieve a point of closure.
The TRC did realize this, which is evident from the recommendations it gave to
the new government on how to recompense victims (Final Report VI 1998, 726–732).
The commission was aware that its years of active practice were to be only the beginning
of a long and difficult process, and the failure of the government to adequately
proceed with this process greatly discredits its intention of instigating long-lasting
societal change.23
Epilogue
Importantly, the Furies not only represent the spirit of revenge, but also the imperative
to remember evil. As Booth states, in societies undergoing the transition to
democracy this “weight of the claims of the past and their clash with those of the
present and future, are most visible” (2001, 777–778). By accepting Athena’s offer
to be institutionalized within the new order, the Furies—now the Kindly Ones—not
only become the protectors of the city but of memory as well. If we understand
memory as a cultural phenomenon, as Bal suggests, the Kindly Ones could be seen
as agents of “cultural memorization,” an activity “occurring in the present, in which
the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the
future” (Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999, vii). As the embodiment of memory, then, they
have to fulfill the demands of both past and future within the present, a difficult and
dangerous task, because the line between keeping alive the past and paralyzing the
present is thin. It is on this thin line that the Kindly Ones perform their balancing act.
One may wonder what has happened to the Furies in post-apartheid South Africa.
Though the dominant discourse of forgiveness denied them an official place within
what was to be the new democratic “rainbow” nation of South Africa, they undoubtedly
still roam beneath the surface, fighting their fight against forgetting. After all,
memories cannot simply be relegated to the past but, instead, must actively be
acknowledged and sustained within the present and, more specifically, within the
ongoing process of reconciliation.
Fleishman and Farber dramatize the start of what will be a long process and
emphasize the demands of the future, but their most important contribution is that
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they restore focus to the personal, the private realm of personal suffering, by inviting
their audience to continue considering the individual stories that are involved. Both
playwrights seem intent on helping the Furies in their fight to remember. Farber brings
the TRC back to life, not the national narrative it helped to construct, but the specificity
of the personal stories that it originally revealed; stories that now, almost a
decade after the TRC’s final report was published, have acquired an almost archival
status. By returning to the performative aspect of the hearings, she reverses the transition
from oral testimony to written narrative, from performance to text. Fleishman’s
most important contribution is that he reactivates the debate about what transitional
justice actually entails, the advantages but also the losses. He too calls attention
to the individual people involved, inviting his audience to consider those for whom
forgiveness remains impossible and for whom the amnesty arrangement remains an
unacceptable sacrifice. Both playwrights demonstrate that, in post-apartheid South
Africa, theater is an important complementary practice. Because, as Fleishman says,
theater is able to make absences present again, to keep the past alive within the
present, and to connect the past to the yet unfulfilled future (2007b).
But in South Africa, this future is difficult to imagine, and Parry may be right in
stating that it has been jeopardized by an inadequate dealing with the past. The TRC’s
intention to create a shared point of origin in history from which the entire nation
could depart as one has not succeeded; how could it in a country where the former
apartheid government had done everything in its power to divide rather than unite?
In this light, it is both interesting and discouraging to view Tutu’s and Mandela’s
emphasis on reconciling the nation and on establishing a non-racial democracy in
relation to the racialized discourse that has become more and more predominant
under Thabo Mbeki’s and Jacob Zuma’s presidencies. The main challenge for South
African artists today is to create new sites where the battle over the past can be
fought free from the impediment of nationalist, racist, or nativist ideologies. A space
where people can really come to terms with history, not as the objects of historical
representation, but as the subjects of their histories. A space where the competing
claims of remembrance and reconciliation can be involved in a continuously productive
struggle.
86 | Astrid van Weyenberg
1. The trilogy’s first two parts dramatize a
Homeric understanding of justice as
vengeance: in Agamemnon, the king of Argos
returns from Troy and is murdered by his wife
Clytemnestra in revenge for the sacrifice of
their daughter Iphigenia; in the Libation
Bearers, their children Electra and Orestes
avenge Agamemnon’s death by killing
Clytemnestra. In the final part, the Eumenides,
however, Athena establishes a judicial court so
that Orestes can be legally tried for matricide.
2. Both plays are unpublished. I thank Mark
Fleishman and Yael Farber for making the
scripts available to me.
3. Personal correspondence, 9 January 2008.
4. Final Report I (1998, 110); Mistry (2001,
3–4); Sanders (2001, 18). As Megan Shore and
Scott Kline note, it is remarkable that it was not
until the final report was published that the TRC
publicly acknowledged that it had been working
with these four definitions of truth (2006, 313).
5. Ricoeur further explains that this process
is reciprocal, because only through their
inscription into history do people’s testimonies
become accepted and validated (2004, 184).
6. Brent Harris illustrates how the interruption
of commissioners sometimes restricted the
narrative of the past. He refers, for instance, to
a hearing in which a testifier recounted the
sexual abuse of female recruits by ANC camp
commanders in Angola but was asked to
“confine yourself to the things that have
happened to you and what you did” (2000,
129). This shows that often little or no room
was given to unexpected and additional
narratives that exceeded the ones pre-set for
the particular hearings.
7. Fiona C. Ross explains that most women
who testified at the hearings mainly spoke of
men’s suffering and only addressed their own
experiences indirectly (2003, 5).
8. The wet bag method consisted of tying a
man down and placing a wet bag over his face
to suffocate him. It was developed by former
security policeman Jeffrey Benzien, who
explained its workings at a TRC amnesty
hearing (see Moon 2006, 271).
9. Farber’s presentation of Klytemnestra as the
only white character highlights this. When the
audience members see her abuse Elektra,
they are invited to understand her as the
representative of apartheid ideology. The
portrayal of Klytemnestra as the object of
abuse herself may do more than complicate the
perpetrator/victim opposition; it brings up the
danger of implying that mitigating circumstances
reduce the extent to which Klytemnestra can be
held accountable for her acts.
10. This does not automatically mean race
was absent from performances of this text.
11. Some victims later complained they had
felt expected to forgive their perpetrators. See
the report on survivors’ perceptions of the TRC
by the Centre for the Study of Violence and
Reconciliation between August 7, 1997 and
February 1, 1998: www.csvr.org.za/papers/
papkhul.htm
12. “It is interesting,” Tutu himself admits in
his memoir No Future Without Forgiveness, “that
the President appointed an Archbishop as
Chairperson of the Commission and not, for
instance, a judge, since we were to some
extent a quasi-judicial body” (1999, 71).
13. Fleishman’s title In the City of Paradise
does contain a religious reference, but its effect
seems mostly ironic: this city is far from
paradise, nor is paradise presented as an
achievable goal.
14. As discussed previously, the TRC defined
this truth pluralistically.
15. For an analysis of Benzien’s testimony, see
Moon (2006, 271–272) and Krog (2000,
93–99).
16. Tyndareus does play a prominent role in
Euripides’ Orestes.
Thamyris/Intersecting No. 23 (2011) 69–90
Staging Transition: The Oresteia in Post-Apartheid South Africa | 87
Notes
17. Family members of the murdered antiapartheid
activist Steve Biko, for example,
together with other survivors of murdered
activists, filed a lawsuit against the TRC,
claiming that the amnesty arrangement was
unconstitutional, as it denied them the
individual right to judicial redress. The
Constitutional Court rejected the claim and
ruled that amnesty in exchange for truth neither
violated the constitution nor the Geneva
Convention (Minow 1998, 56).
18. Tutu argued, for example, that the notion of
a retributive justice is largely Western and that
the African understanding is “far more
restorative, not so much to punish as to
redress or restore a balance that has been
knocked askew” (qtd. in Minow 1998, 81).
19. Wilson claims that this rhetoric of
reconciliation forms a great discrepancy with
the judicial practice in township courts, where
people “look back at the past and still feel the
burden of a crime that has not been cancelled
by punishment,” an adherence to a continuity
with the past that is “dangerous to the new
and fragile nation-building project: the new
historicity of a reconciling political elite”
(2001, 209).
20. For other such progressivist readings of
the Oresteia, see E.R. Dodds (1960) and
H.D.F. Kitto (1956).
21. The first line refers to Athena’s birth from
Zeus’s thigh.
22. As Simon Goldhill states, the great variety
of interpretations of the Oresteia in itself
demonstrates that the problem of justice is not
solved: the language of justice (dike), “twisted
and turned by the rhetoric of appropriation in
the Oresteia, can be read only by a further act
of appropriation—the critic’s own rhetoric”
(1986, 55–56).
23. Thabo Mbeki (president from 1999–2008)
did not follow up on the TRC’s
recommendations to start a long-term
reparations program for victims of apartheid,
and to install a corporate tax (directed at
corporations that benefited from apartheid)
to help fund this program. Nor have the
successive post-apartheid governments
managed to instigate significant societal
change and properly address South Africa’s
most pressing problems: poverty,
unemployment, and AIDS.
88 | Astrid van Weyenberg
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