Studies in the Novel

Textual Haunting

In Skinner’s Drift, the rugged landscape of the Northern Province in South Africa forms the backdrop to an exploration of the ongoing effects of Apartheid and, in particular, the power shift taking place between the white and black populations following years of oppression. Set on the banks of the Limpopo River, the white inhabitants of Skinner’s Drift farm struggle for survival as the region is threatened by drought and unknown “terrorists” who lurk just over the border in Botswana. Alongside them live the blacks in their employ, characters whose lives they unknowingly direct. Born in the latter years of Apartheid, the protagonist Eva feels love, pride, and, alternately, resentment and shame toward her parents, especially her Afrikaans father’s aggressive nature and her English mother’s fragility. Her negative feelings are intensified by her growing awareness of all that her parents represent through their attempts to subdue and control nature as they farm the land and hunt the animals that live upon it and as they oppress those around them.

When Eva is forced to return to South Africa from America to visit her estranged, dying father, she journeys back to the land upon which she was raised. It is now 1997, and the transition to democracy has impacted everyone. Skinner’s Drift, the former locus of her family’s existence, is now deserted, and her father–who once sought to defend his land with the violence and passion of an archetypal Boer hero–is now an old man who lies inert and voiceless in a hospital bed. Alongside him lie other white Afrikaans farmers whose lives, spent struggling to protect and control the land, are also all but over. All illusions of white superiority banished, a black nurse caring for Martin notes how the dramatic national power shift which has taken place is now manifest at a personal level:

“Your nightmare, hey, Mr. van Rensburg, to have me looking after you? You know what my revenge is for all you old white farmers? To do such a good job that I bring you back to health. Maybe I get some muti from the sangoma and mix it into your jelly and custard and make you younger. Mmm hmm, start a conspiracy, all across the country, turn all the dying old boere into young men!.…So you have many, many years to experience the joy and freedom of our new South Africa!”

(24)

While her father appears insensible and lifeless, Eva finds herself deeply conflicted and emotional as she comes to terms with the context of the new South Africa. This, in turn, reveals an identity crisis that stems from a traumatic past she has not addressed: prior to Eva’s departure from South Africa ten years previously, her mother was tragically killed in a hunting accident. Eva blamed her father for her mother’s death–indeed, his violent nature had been a contributing factor, although he was not responsible– and left South Africa soon after the event. However, this incident, and the emotions it conjures up in Eva, evoke another more serious trauma that she had witnessed some time [End Page 113] previously. One night, when Eva and her father were out hunting, her father had shot and killed a small black child he had thought was a jackal. Afterwards, the narrator describes Eva feeling numb and unable to voice what has taken place:

If she’d only nudged her father into speaking then they could have dealt with it. But Eva could barely believe what had happened. Driving back to the farmhouse she’d had the sensation that her ears were blocked, she couldn’t hear anything, not even the growl of the bakkie’s engine.…[Back at the farm] she said, I’m going to bed. A test to see whether she could still speak because she felt so strange. She vomited in the upstairs bathroom, catching the spill of it in her hands so it wouldn’t splash in the toilet and make a noise and wake her mother. Eva knew she had to talk to her father, but she felt like her body was in pieces, like she couldn’t put herself together to walk back downstairs.

(283–84)

For Eva, the trauma of witnessing the shooting is compounded by the fact that it is never spoken of; it becomes a secret that Eva carries and never betrays out of fear and love for her father. Instead, Eva returns in secret to the site the next morning in order to bury the child.

Now living in New York, Eva has all but denounced her past and her national identity; the shame and resentment she feels about being South African belie “some sodden longing for what used to be home” (2). She refuses to engage with South African affairs or vote in the first democratic elections of 1994, and claims to be a New Zealander to all who question her accent. However, Eva’s rejection of the political aspects of her identity causes friction in her personal life. When a boyfriend develops an interest in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and tries to elicit her opinion, she lashes out at him, saying, “Don’t you dare snivel in my apartment over my country, my history, my life!…You’re so in love with that fucking country. Well, guess what? I’m not. I’m never going back” (12). When they break up, Eva keeps herself emotionally distant from people yet attempts connection through a series of meaningless sexual encounters. She is fragmented, isolated, and disenfranchised. She admits that her own reflection reveals a vacancy and a sadness: “She was twenty-eight years old, but with her short haircut–it had been so chic in New York–and the emotional tumult of returning [to South Africa] etched across her face, she looked odd, like a middle-aged teenager” (6). She buries her memories and refuses to think about the past; indeed, “[j]ust thinking about it set something shameful burrowing into her gut. How she wanted to drown it with a few drinks, masturbate it away, crawl into someone’s arms” (35).

One of the central tenets of trauma theory is an acknowledgment of the way in which traumatic experience overwhelms the individual and resists language. As an experience that is not fully understood at the time, but only [End Page 114] belatedly, trauma defies ordinary cognitive processes. It is not fully possessed by the traumatized individual; rather the individual is possessed by it. Its haunting quality disturbs linearity and pushes memory and history into crisis. As Caruth writes, “The traumatized…carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (“Trauma” 5). Thus in her representation of Eva’s trauma, of Eva’s return to South Africa and the site of the past, Fugard attempts to represent an experience that remains elusive to language and form. This becomes even more problematic when we consider that Fugard is using the story of domestic trauma as a microcosm for an examination of the traumatic legacy of Apartheid. Her efforts to surmount these problems compel her to explore the ways in which the fragmentary nature of trauma may be translated into art.

A Fragmented or Dispersed Narrative

One of the primary modes in which Fugard achieves her exploration of trauma in art is through the structure of the narrative itself, which is fragmented and disjointed. In the telling of Skinner’s Drift, Fugard collapses temporal order and rejects a linear approach to plot. Instead, present and past intersect in a manner that echoes the very conditions of traumatic experience. Fugard suggests that the past is not accessed directly but is triggered by memories, sensations, flashbacks, dreams, and other, more “official,” public forms of history. For Eva, returning to events of the past takes the form of an archeological journey as she uncovers fragments of memory, many of which are too painful to excavate fully. Waiting for her father to awaken from his coma, she immerses herself in reading her mother’s recovered diaries. These trigger her own memories and, more importantly, enable her to access the past through a different perspective:

Day after day her childhood spooled out in her memory. Sightings of aardvarks and aardwolves; the purchase of irascible Shylock, Eva’s first pony; the excitement of the early harvests; a flask of afternoon tea beside the Limpopo and a swim when the river was flowing swiftly and crocodiles weren’t a threat. Eva hadn’t wanted to know how sweet the early years on Skinner’s Drift had been, and to have them documented so left her feeling tender.

(30)

It becomes clear that Eva’s reluctance to think about the past is the partial consequence of what Judith Lewis Herman calls “an abnormal form of memory” which encodes the traumatic moment so that “[i]t is as if time stops at the moment of trauma” (37). Reminded in this way of life “before,” Eva begins to recover memories of her childhood recorded in the diaries yet all the while admonishes herself: “You know how this is going to end, stop reading them” (32). Reading the diaries proves somewhat compulsive, however, and once Eva has allowed herself to reflect on the past, she finds herself hooked. [End Page 115]

As she is the protagonist in Skinner’s Drift, it is through Eva’s eyes that much of the story is viewed. However, the use of third-person narration throughout the novel casts the reader in an observational role and diverts sympathy away from Eva and onto some of the other characters. This technique is similar to one used by Toni Morrison, who employs the third-person narrative in order to obtain an “intimacy in which the reader is under the impression that he isn’t really reading this; that he is participating in it as he goes along” (100). Fugard develops this by deftly switching points of view and employing multiple characters as focalizers for the narrative. These characters present different perspectives, which challenge and subvert the isolating effects of trauma. As a narrative strategy, this technique also questions a traditional hierarchy of third-person narration whereby a protagonist dominates the narrative and takes priority over all the other characters. In presenting several of the chapters from different perspectives, Fugard draws attention to those silenced by Apartheid, highlighting the oppressive regime under which relationships are determined as much by what remains unsaid as by what is spoken aloud. Consequently, the events of the narrative are viewed through a variety of individuals’ perspectives, including the van Rensburg family (Eva, Lorraine, and Martin) and their black laborers (Lefu, the chief farm hand; Nkele, the domestic maid and Lefu’s daughter; and Mpho, Nkele’s son).

The effect of this is initially disorientating. The reader is required to deduce which character is the center of consciousness in each chapter, and the emerging perspectives are strikingly different. This is common to literature that addresses traumatic experience, as Laurie Vickroy recognizes in her readings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story. In these texts “many voices, emotions and experiences intermingle to produce individual and collective memory and to counteract silence and forgetting.…[M]ultiple accounts sometimes reinforce and sometimes challenge each other, illustrating both the potential for sharing and healing but also missed connections, as when traumatic reactions isolate individuals with similar experience from one another” (27). The resultant narrative thread of Skinner’s Drift is similarly patchy and full of gaps. For example, Lorraine’s neat diary entries are largely dispassionate as they recount life on the farm; similarly, Martin’s perceptions are often hazy, to imply–we are led to presume–that he has been drinking. Importantly, these gaps are most evident during the key events of the novel, namely the killings, of the black child and Lorraine. The former is presented through the eyes of Martin and does not clarify that it is a child who is shot; in fact, it is not clear exactly what happened until much later in the text. Instead, emphasis is laid upon the immediate emotional impact of the event on Martin’s relationship with Eva: “[Martin] turned to find his daughter’s terrified eyes, terrified and terrifying, as if they’d become unmoored, were floating towards him.…Eva had moved away. She hadn’t brushed past him, but he felt something flowing from himself. A part of him was leaving. It was her” (43). [End Page 116] The latter event, the accidental shooting of Lorraine, is focalized through one of the least established characters, Martin’s friend and fellow-farmer Jannie. The men have been out on a night hunt and have killed a lion. They return to the compound, and Lorraine emerges to greet them:

Standing in front of the bakkie, with a dead lion in the flatbed, Jannie knew how vulgar the scene must look to Lorraine. He wanted to keep the peace, he wanted his friend Martin to have his celebration, and he wanted Lorraine to know that he knew the killing of the lion distressed her. He was about to say something to her when Dolf, who was unloading the rifles, stumbled. The guns fell to the ground, a shot resounded and Lorraine was lifted off her feet and blown backwards. She hit the fence and fell to the ground, head twisted at a funny angle.

(241)

This is the most direct reference ever made to Lorraine’s death, and it is important to note that it reflects Jannie’s perspective rather than that of any of the primary characters’. Thus in her narration of the novel’s two central traumatic events, Fugard circumvents her protagonist in order to help the reader gain a sense of Eva’s detachment from her experience, which means that she can only access it long afterwards.³ In fact, the journey on which Fugard draws the reader brings its own belated shock and sorrow as we finally become aware of what has taken place and begin to grieve for the characters ourselves.⁴

While emphasizing Eva’s isolation, Fugard also shows that the characters in the novel are related by their common experiences. In her use of multiple focalizers, Fugard shows that no single perspective is sufficient to communicate the traumatic significance of what has taken place or its range of effects. Rather, she draws together a collection of individual experiences to communicate collective suffering, consequently engaging in a process of dialogical witnessing whereby different perspectives are brought together to create a collective testimonial. This inevitably gestures towards politics. In her inclusion of oppressed perspectives, Fugard provides agency for the formerly silenced, bringing their stories to public consciousness. In her vivid portrayal of the black characters (the strongest aspect of the text), she allows space for their hopes, fears, and anxieties to emerge within the story, filling in the gaps left by the selective amnesia of collective history. The attention she gives to these characters also breaks down basic stereotypes that are associated with Apartheid and raises fundamental questions such as who or what constitutes a victim, a perpetrator, a bystander, and a protester. For example, not all the black characters are victims, and not all the white characters are perpetrators. Indeed, we come to see that several of the white characters find themselves victimized just as several of the black characters resist oppression in ways that might be considered aggressive and harmful to others. Interestingly, the breakdown of relationships is itself characteristic of traumatic experience as Herman suggests: [End Page 117]

Traumatic experiences call into question basic human relationships. They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love and community. They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experience. They violate the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order and cast the victim into a state of existential crisis.

(51)

As a structural and stylistic literary device, the use of a fragmented narrative highlights Eva’s distress at returning to South Africa to face the past, enabling Fugard to show the intensity with which traumatic memories have come to control her. It also increases the dramatic suspense and disrupts the structural clarity of the novel so that Fugard’s lucid realist prose takes on a force that conveys the significance of what is taking place even if the details themselves are at times somewhat ambiguous. This again evokes trauma. As Herman writes, “[t]raumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context; rather they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images.…The intense focus on fragmentary sensation, on image without context, gives the traumatic memory a heightened reality” (38). Finally, in her reliance upon social ties and a sense of community, Fugard highlights the role of the collective in addressing traumatic experience. Using a trope that recurs throughout much postcolonial writing, she challenges and subverts the grand narrative of history and presents instead a collection of fragments from multiple perspectives, which are all intrinsic to establishing a meaningful connection with the past. This emphasis enables Fugard to use Eva’s story to engage with the wider, collective context of Apartheid.

Repetition

Whitehead writes, “[o]ne of the key literary strategies in trauma fiction is the device of repetition, which can be seen at the levels of language, imagery or plot. Repetition mimics the effects of trauma, for it suggests the insistent return of the event and the disruption of narrative chronology or progression” (86). Fugard’s employment of repetition foregrounds and echoes an underlying trauma so that anxiety and tension pervade the text. The use of repetition as a literary device mirrors the repetition compulsion that Freud recognized in trauma victims as being an obligation “to repeat…repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (602). Whitehead describes the process in the following way: “By continually returning to the traumatic situation, the individual can master the amounts of stimulus which have broken through by binding them together and simultaneously construct a protective shield against trauma after the event” (119).

Both Eva and her father experience flashbacks and nightmares, which are classic trauma symptoms. These intrusions draw them back to the death of the child so that their lives are haunted by the past. In one passage, Martin is [End Page 118] “flung out of sleep, a buffalo of a memory bearing on him, making him gasp, adrenalin shooting into his heart, his gut in spasms” (36). Out hunting at night, he begins to use a machine gun instead of a rifle, obliterating animals so that they can barely be recognized and cannot be eaten. A fellow-black laborer, Mosanku, suggests to Lefu that Martin is “a crazy one”: “Van Rensburg is usually a careful man, those eyes know just where to shoot. A bullet in the neck, one that breaks the spine, or in the heart. But these impala had been shot many times. The skins were torn and the meat was full of pieces of metal” (87–88). Eva, too, appears to suffer from a compulsion to repeat the past. Following her return to the bushveld the following day in order to bury the child, she begins to bury all the animals her father has killed. Traveling around the farm early in the morning, she routinely collects destroyed animals in secret and buries them in the same place that the child is buried. This act suggests an attempt to shield her father’s transgression. It shows her attempt to soothe her conscience and absolve her guilt. It also evokes the Freudian notion that traumatized individuals repeatedly return to the scene of trauma in order to relive the event and master its effect on them.

As well as replicating the effects of trauma, Fugard employs repetition as a literary device, and establishes a set of trauma-signifiers in symbolism and metaphor. Using recurring themes, she refers to resurfacing memories that invoke a personal trauma. These, in turn, signal back to an earlier traumatic experience of colonization. One of the most significant examples of this is in descriptions of the physical landscape, which recur in the text’s negotiations of belonging and (dis)connection. Fugard describes the landscape using violent hunting images that undermine its natural beauty, creating a tension between this and the threat and danger it also represents: “Africa lay stretched beneath [Eva] like the ravaged hide of some ancient beast, and something fierce shuddered inside her; a love that startled her and set off another round of tears” (1); “it would have been so cosmopolitan if it hadn’t been for that light, wild and fierce, as if gleaned from the eyes of animals that kill” (5). Fugard continues to animate the land in this way throughout the text; a wild creature, dangerous and unknowable, it is capable of providing life and of claiming it. Given this, the relationship between people and the land they live upon is fragile. The drought presents a very real danger as Lorraine notes in her diary: “The monkeys are truly desperate. This morning I saw them sucking the corners of the wet sheets that Grace had hung on the washing line” (107).

The image of drought and a land thirsty for water also appears throughout the book as a motif of hopelessness, depression, and a growing fear for survival (particularly of terrorists who may cross the Limpopo from Botswana while the river is low). In contrast, water recurs as a life-source that brings joy and refreshment, simultaneously washing the past away and exposing its secrets. Interestingly, in his search for a water supply on his land, Martin van Rensburg finds he must rely on black water diviners with “another way of knowing” (46). [End Page 119] One explains that “[u]nder every river there was a second river” (46–47) and talks of “the country of water beneath the thirsty land. Underground pools and rivers. Dark water dripping endlessly down slabs of rock” (47). This image of unobtainable water requiring special, mystical knowledge underlines the white farmers’ precarious hold upon the land: they depend upon black farm laborers for survival. As the novel progresses, water comes more and more to represent renewal and hope for the black characters as it promises to wash the land clean and bring all transgressions to light (For example, “Wind, sun and now rain had all subtly changed the features of the land and Lefu felt his heart had been rinsed clean.” [97]). This is enacted in a very literal way when Lefu discovers the child killed by Martin, which has been unearthed by heavy rain: “he peered once again into the water. The silt was sifting and Lefu saw the small skull and the delicate curve of ribs. He drew back, fearful. It can’t be, he thought, then he once again knelt down and stared into the donga. A scrap of blue cloth, caught on a piece of bone, swayed gently in the water” (97–98).

In her emphasis upon the collective nature of postcolonial trauma, Fugard uses familial relationships as a microcosm to show how a single traumatic experience may reverberate in different ways in different lives until ultimately it refers back to an original, colonial trauma. In doing this, Fugard establishes a series of links between her characters, emphasizing the ways in which their lives are interrelated. For example, each white character has a black counterpart, a character whose life is bound to him or her, serving as a parallel, “other,” or “double.” Thus within the text, the chief farm laborer, Lefu/Ezekiel, serves as other to his master, Martin. This parallel is voiced by Mosanku to Lefu: “‘We do not live separate from these white people.…I say to myself that I do what I want with my life, but I am here because Baas Jannie is here. I am like this with Jannie Louw,’ he said, and he entwined his arms. ‘And you, my friend? You are like this with a crazy one’” (88). Lefu acknowledges this link when he reflects that “in riding [horses] with Eva he had trespassed into Martin’s life” (89), thus usurping his position of authority and power. Indeed, Lefu comes to represent something of a father-figure for Eva; it is he whom she enlists to help her as she seeks to bury animals killed by her father, and it is he in whom she seeks solace: “He smelled of earth and fire and she wanted to reach down to touch his face, to believe he’d come to her. She wanted to tell him everything, wanted him to help her” (286).

In a similar way, the maid, Nkele, can be seen as Lorraine’s other in the text. Like Lorraine, she is trapped, unable to stand up to the powerful and passionate men who control her. Both women are more liberal than their male counterparts (Lefu and Martin, respectively); furthermore, they are both rebellious and resist their circumstances in quiet, subversive ways. For example, Lorraine chooses to be cremated, something Eva recognizes as her “final act of rebellion” against her life on the farm (3); Nkele satisfies herself [End Page 120] with executing her domestic tasks with a spirit approaching vengeance (she admits that “[m]urdering the carpet was a deeply satisfying chore” [151]) and, for a short while, smuggles food to a terrorist hiding in the compound.

Finally, their children, Eva and Mpho, who are both born at the latter stages of Apartheid, are alike in their refusal to acquiesce to Apartheid’s oppressive regime. Both struggle to follow the models established for them by their parents and instead strike out independently, attempting to forge new identities in the new society of post-Apartheid South Africa. However, where Eva chooses to escape from her homeland and ignore the traumas of her past by remaining silent, Mpho is empowered by democracy and the arrival of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the region. The novel’s climax finds them meeting at Skinner’s Drift. Mpho appears to have moved into the abandoned farm with all the confidence and assertion of a newly liberated prisoner. He is intent upon bringing Martin’s transgressions to light. He has begun to dig around the farm, hoping to unearth the bones of the child Martin killed and take them to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Eva finds a diary where Mpho has written “Martin Van Rensburg Shot an Afrikan Child on the Farm Called Skinner’s Drift,” underneath which he testifies to the killing of the child as a story carried by his grandfather for many years but now given to him. He writes, “The white people think we are animals and they shoot us. They throw our bodies away. They think they are safe. But I am not afraid. This is my land. I will speak now. I will tell them what happened” (277).

The pairing of these characters enables the reader to perceive the two parallel worlds orbiting Skinner’s Drift. This is exemplified in the way that the black characters each have two names: an English one (Lefu calls this “a white-world name” [60]) and an African one. Nkele often refers to her “white-world” name as another identity: “Grace the quiet maid who was prompt, obedient and well mannered; Grace the cleaning presence, who was almost a non-presence, so much so that the white people would sometimes forget she was even there” (157). She suggests that, while Grace is quiet and submissive, feelings of anger and rebellion are growing inside Nkele that she can scarcely contain: “Downstairs in the kitchen she squeezed the loaves of bread from the bread box. Nkele would have cut four fat slices from the freshest loaf; good girl Grace cut two slices from the stalest loaf” (160). This duality in identity and allegiance echoes the same sense of division and segregation that defined South Africa’s Apartheid regime. Although Apartheid promoted white and black people living separately, Fugard subverts this notion by showing how these groups are intrinsically linked, depending upon each other for survival. Interestingly, while the black characters are allocated white names, so their employers can refer to them easily, giving black names to white people is considered an honor. Indeed, the only white character to have a black name is Eva, whose Sotho name “Naledi,” meaning star, is bestowed on her as a young girl by Lefu as a token of affection (60). In this way, names come to represent [End Page 121] a play for power and an act of resistance; Lefu’s naming of Eva shows how he subverts white oppression and turns it into a black man’s privilege.

This use of repetition and doubleness also further complicates the central traumas of the text because for every white character that is traumatized, a black character has a different experience of the same event and is consequently traumatized in a different way. For example, while Eva is traumatized after witnessing the death of the child and attempts to protect her father by burying it in secret, Lefu is traumatized by his own collusion in the crime when he unwittingly helps to cover the deed by burying animals with Eva afterwards. He feels betrayed by Eva when he realizes that he has been participating in an act that further humiliates and degrades his own people. Of course, it is the traumas themselves that are most clearly paired. For where Lorraine’s death is publicly witnessed, deeply mourned, and remembered, the other death–of the small child that Martin kills–is never named and, apparently, never publicly noted. It takes place in the dark and remains secret. It is repressed; forgotten; and, until Mpho writes his testimony, remains unvoiced. In the moments after the killing, Martin even suggests that he considers the life of a black person to be expendable: “A laugh spiralled inside him and then vanished. If this is what I needed to do to bring rain I would have shot one a long time ago” (43). Lorraine’s death can, then, be viewed as a repetition of an earlier, colonial trauma. Because it is not consciously willed and no life-affirming explanation can be offered for it, her death captures what Freud referred to as the “daemonic” quality of reenactment–“a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle” (605)–or as “death instincts” (618). In turn, the death of the nameless child comes to represent all the countless unspoken wrongs committed against the oppressed peoples of South Africa. As each death represents a reenactment of a previous crime, Fugard establishes the notion of cyclical violence, the thoughtless disposal of life that comes to define the systemic racism and oppression of Apartheid. Her use of repetition, then, at levels of language, imagery, and plot exposes the interrelatedness of traumatic events and reveals how they bind together segregated peoples. She emphasizes the far-reaching impact of traumatic events and their consequences while constantly referring back to an original trauma, which occurred during colonization.

In this way, Fugard uses Skinner’s Drift as a vehicle of resistance against the silencing, shaming effects of her nation’s past. She exposes Eva’s self-centeredness: how she and her family obsess over the darker aspects of their survival (adultery, drought, betrayal, rebellion, violence) while oppressing their workers and exploiting their position of authority. Their neuroses are evident even before the central events of the text take place. In contrast, the black characters existing on the periphery of their world exude self-possession and poise; they engage with the larger questions of Apartheid because they feel its effects so keenly. Eva’s final meeting with Lefu perfectly epitomizes this point. Eva wants to reconcile the past and make amends for her part in the wrongs [End Page 122] committed by her family, so she apologizes to Lefu. His response is startling: “You want me to forgive you, Naledi. For what? For telling me I am black and I cannot speak, I cannot see. They all tell me that, people tell me that every day. You are not the first. And I forgave you a long time ago” (292).

Trauma and Postcolonialism

Fugard’s manipulation of literary devices at levels of plot, style, and structure shows how valuable the novel form is for exploring traumatic experience. Her use of fragmentation and repetition enables her to “translate” traumatic experience so that the reader becomes, in a sense, a witness to trauma, even if the trauma itself is a fiction. Thus the novel achieves a vivid intensity and a lucidity that impress even as it investigates complex theoretical and political questions. However, the strength of the novel lies in its emphasis upon the relationship between trauma and postcolonialism. This is evident in the central focus of the novel, namely Fugard’s reliance upon the black characters to provide context to and alternative perspectives on events. This emphasis shows her privileging of the silenced and oppressed victims of trauma. It also highlights how the postcolonial context collapses conventional boundaries that make up subjectivity (notably the boundary between the individual and the collective and the personal and the political). The resulting narrative insistently focuses upon the interrelatedness of people, especially in their connections to the past. It embodies the African spirit of ubuntu, or “togetherness,” which Antjie Krog identifies as the concept that “a person is a person through other persons” (399). This contrasts with the emphasis upon the individual that has dominated trauma studies, and which Kaplan notes in relation to 9/11.

In light of this relationship between trauma and postcolonialism, a reading of Fugard’s text suggests that the way trauma’s primary theorists (including Freud and Caruth) have configured the experience is problematic. This is shown at the center of Fugard’s narrative, which describes a trauma reminiscent of the original example of traumatic neurosis suggested by Freud yet with a strikingly different emphasis. In Tasso’s romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata, Tancred, the hero, accidentally kills his beloved, Clorinda, whom he mistakes for an enemy knight. Freud writes: “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 Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again” (605). While there is no evidence that might lead us to believe that Fugard is aware of trauma theory and scholarly writings on the subject, there are several similarities between this incident and the traumas she describes. Like Tancred in Tasso’s epic, Fugard’s character Martin van Rensburg accidentally kills someone, having mistaken his identity. Like Tancred, Martin is traumatized and provoked to further violence. He, too, is bound to compulsively repeat what he has done, a repetition that culminates in the death of his wife some time later. [End Page 123]

Interestingly, Freud highlights Tancred’s trauma as the epitome of what it means to be traumatized; yet he does not address the experiences of Clorinda, who is clearly the only truly innocent victim in this incident. Indeed, her experience (perhaps because she is dead) is barely even registered by Freud; it receives little attention in the text save for the further suffering it supposedly inflicts upon Tancred. This point has been well argued by Ruth Leys in her critique of Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience. Leys criticizes Caruth for, like Freud, suggesting that this incident is central to the definition of traumatic experience without acknowledging the problems that such a formulation provokes. Leys writes that “Tancred is a murderer, albeit an involuntary one, and Clorinda is his victim twice over. Caruth knows and admits this.…Yet she is determined to identify Tancred as a victim of trauma, even though that identification creates problems of yet another kind” (295). In contrast, Fugard’s text gestures toward the unnamed child as the primary victim of trauma, thus privileging the silenced and forgotten over the stunned and shame-faced. In her account, Martin and Eva are secondary victims of trauma; Martin suffers for his crime, and Eva is traumatized by what she sees, but neither experience equals that of the child. Thus Skinner’s Drift implies that any theory of trauma that fails to consider those who find themselves victims yet who are silenced is woefully inadequate.

However, despite her clear distinction between the kind of experiences of Eva and her father and the trauma of the dead child, Fugard rejects any suggestion that reserving focus for a single victim is sufficient for understanding what has taken place here. Instead, she draws together different fragments of traumatized experience in order to underline the complex relationship between the individual and the collective and to indicate a wide-scale crisis of identity at a national level. This crisis becomes most clearly apparent at the end of the novel as Mpho’s impending visit to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggests that the events on the farm represent just one episode in a national crisis. Such an emphasis implies that a reconfiguration of traumatic experience–one that acknowledges the complex relationship between trauma and the postcolonial context and its long-term impact on national identity–may be needed.

I have shown how Fugard employs structural and stylistic literary devices in order to explore a specifically postcolonial experience of trauma. In particular, her use of the novelistic form emphasizes the relationship between individual and collective identity. This has its own ramifications for the novel, highlighted in a common criticism that has been made regarding the ending to Skinner’s Drift, which appears somewhat unsatisfactory because it does not provide any clear resolution to the plot. In fact, the ending leaves several key questions open. Will Eva sell the farm? Will she reconcile with her father before he dies? Will Mpho go to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with his claims, and will Eva’s fears of being arrested as an accomplice to her father be realized [End Page 124] as a consequence? Furthermore, Eva’s relationship with the past remains ambiguous. Has she adequately addressed her past experiences? Has she begun to engage in a process of healing and recovery? What, in fact, might it mean to heal or recover from Apartheid in South Africa? Such questions lead us to consider how writing about postcolonial trauma might offer new possibilities and new boundaries for fiction writers; for an authentic, sincere engagement with traumatic memory must, argues Caruth, address the problem of how to help to alleviate suffering and understand its nature “without eliminating the force and truth of the reality” (vii). In Skinner’s Drift, Fugard shows how personal trauma in South Africa becomes embroiled in the greater traumas of Apartheid and its legacies. She exposes the deep-rooted and ongoing impact of postcolonial trauma, which means that recovery and reconciliation cannot be tied up within one character’s renewal but belong to all. Thus there can be no satisfactory conclusion to the text; the resolution falls victim to the messy remnants of its Apartheid context. Despite this, the strengths of the narrative–its voicing of different characters’ experiences, its manipulation of novelistic practices, its process of excavation to explore traumatic experiences–all demonstrate the significance of trauma in the postcolonial context and suggest that fiction is a valid and valuable site for those who wish to draw attention to and explore this aspect of traumatic experience.