Michael Eric Dyson, My Hip Hop Role Model

Michael Eric Dyson, My Hip Hop Role Model
by Ronald B. Neal, Ph.D.

A few years ago the young and tumultuous life of Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson was depicted in a motion picture titled after his 2002 debut album, Get Rich or Die Trying. The film was accompanied by a soundtrack and a book length autobiography, From Pieces to Weight. His music, film, and autobiography tell a rags to riches story of a poor black kid from Jamaica Queens, New York who hustles his way out of chronic poverty, rising from a nihilistic drug dealer to a hip hop superstar and businessman. His story of struggle and hustle is the mythological stuff that consumers of hip hop love and what is typically called the American Dream. Hip hop artists thrive off of this mythology and without it hip hop would not be hip hop. In fact, no hip hop artist is credible and authentic apart from this myth. The tale of Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson is the tale of a rootless American soul, a soul that would have been lost were it not for rootless ambition and an American entertainment industry known for making millions of dollars off of stories of people who have near death experiences and live unconventional lives. There is a need to make sense of and engage Americans like “50 Cent” who have come of age and are coming of age in unconventional circumstances. Many of these Americans have not been as fortunate as “50 Cent” in escaping the circumstances that produced them.

Apart from music journalists and professional sociologists, the muddy subject matter that drives hip hop, especially the topical matter in the lyrics of “50 Cent,” is largely taboo among writers and intellectuals. This is especially true for those professional thinkers who are nestled comfortably in American colleges and universities. A good number of intellectuals have produced scholarly works on the origins and history of hip hop. And not a few intellectuals, mainly female thinkers, have written scathing critiques of sexism and misogyny in hip hop. However, when it comes to the gritty realities of drug dealing, homicide, life sentences, and parentless children, college and university intellectuals, especially those in the humanities, are largely missing in action. Less than a few daring souls devote energy and ink to the unconventional subject matter and human circumstances this is hip hop. However, there is one unconventional American writer and intellectual among this daring lot who does.

Since his 1993 debut, Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism, Michael Eric Dyson has trotted through the American cultural imagination. With more than a dozen books to his name, Dyson has interpreted the lives and circumstances of Americans who have come of age and are coming of age with the Reagan era and hip hop as the historical and cultural backdrop of their lives. Dyson is a member of a rare breed of late 20th century intellectuals, many of whom are minorities (some are not), whose intellectual interests, style of writing, and irreverence address a misunderstood human condition that is now a prominent feature of American civilization. These intellectuals, whose roots are on the cinder blocks and asphalt of the American city, take human conditions as they exist under street lights, train stations, bus terminals, stop signs, and between beer cans, seriously. They speak to a terrain that is informed by the so-called vices and virtues that so color American civilization. Yet the so-called vices the so-called vice which are condemned by conventional Americans take center stage in their work. Asphalt/urban intellectuals such as cinema scholar, Todd Boyd, historians, Tricia Rose and Robin D.G. Kelly, and gender theorist, Mark Anthony Neal, are at home talking about the perplexing lives and challenges of people who live in invisible cities. Their work engages the lives of different sorts of people; people who drop out of high school; people who are the first in their families to go to college; people who listen to rap music as well as go to church and to the mosque on Sunday.

What is more, these intellectuals make no attempt, at least in their work, to perfect their subject matter, that is, to perfect black and brown people, even white people. Unlike their intellectual predecessors, who possessed a messianic zeal and mission, there is no great burden to “save the race” or to promote a universal ideal of blackness, masculinity, class, femininity, community, family or sexuality, to be universally consumed by all minorities and white people. To be sure, concerns about empowerment and equality are among the concerns of these asphalt/urban intellectuals. However, such empowerment is not circumscribed by a call for ethnic cleansing. No one is asked to eschew their origins or deny the circumstances which they have survived, and become puritans, in order to be accepted by mainstream white America. For this reason, popular culture, black popular culture in particular, is central to what they do as intellectuals, asphalt/urban intellectuals. They are fundamentally concerned with a dimension of American civilization that is easily ignored and denied.

Michael Eric Dyson has devoted hundreds of pages and thousands of words to the hip hop dimensions of American life. He has devoted a tremendous amount of intellectual energy to it because he knows it all too well. He knows intimately the circumstances from which hip hop emerged and for this reason it is unconscionable for him to exclude it from his intellectual vision. These circumstances, which are colored by race and class, are not too far from his personal experience. It is an experience that is colored by a working class condition, the blue collar world, and its demise, and by countless people whose lives have been unsettled in American life. Since his emergence during the early 1990s as a public intellectual, Dyson has made no effort to conceal his class origins and lack of pedigree. In fact, he has made the fact that he grew up in a struggling family in one of toughest urban centers, Detroit, Michigan, a badge of honor and a source of moral and intellectual authority. In fact, his impoverished origins as a child of blue-collar Detroit, is the springboard for his empathy for chronically poor and working poor black people and his criticisms of middle to upper-class black people, (and middle America for that matter). Similar to southern blacks like Clarence Thomas, whose origins as a Georgia born child of sharecroppers is the primary source of his conservatism, and Hip Hop artists like Curtis Jackson “50 Cent,” whose origins in the Reagan era streets of Queens, New York fuel his brand of Hip Hop music, Dyson’s “homeboy” from Detroit roots fuel his intellectual work. The fact that he was once a struggling- young- parent on welfare, who improved his life through religion and education, authenticates his vocation as an irreverent intellectual. In his writings, preaching, and rapping he has been relentless in letting his audiences know that he will never forget where he came from, and given his class mobility and academic and professional accomplishments this is commendable. For some American elites who have ascended from the bottom to the top such an affirmation of one’s unaristocratic social origins is tantamount to class suicide.

As far the content of his work is concerned and his commitment to his chosen subject matter, Dyson has no peer. If there is single American intellectual who represents a genealogical predecessor it would have to be Richard Wright. Dyson is an heir to Richard Wright in the same way that Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin were the compare him to any American intellectual, African American, white, and otherwise, past or present. Apart from Wright, Dyson is in his own league.

Michael Eric Dyson is an extraordinarily gifted man. He reads lots of books; he is a prolific writer; and he is a very entertaining and provocative public speaker. Dyson is a hustler. His passion, oratory, and unconventional moralism have their origins in the Afro-Baptist Christian tradition and the Western literary and philosophical canon. His thoughts, language, and life are very mobile, very fluid. He is an intellectual who is hard to pin down. His moral preoccupations and intellectual commitments take him very far from the African American traditions which he matriculated through. The presence of those traditions in his work is very different and far removed from the conventional ways they are used in African American communities. Dyson is a Christian preacher in the black Baptist tradition yet the content of his preaching is light years away from traditional preaching in that tradition. Among American scholars he is an anomaly. He does more lecturing outside of the classroom, in different venues across America, in one year than most scholars (including white male scholars) do in a career. He is a radio and television personality and an aspiring rapper. He is an unusual man who is not bound to a single playground. Michael Eric Dyson is unplugged.

For more than a decade, Dyson has written, lectured, and rapped about the most maligned, despised, demonized, loved, and misunderstood cultural enterprise to vex American in its short history. Before becoming the celebrity that he is today, he chose a literary and academic path that can lead to literary and academic death. He pursued an “unrespectable” path by aligning himself with the creativity and energy of American’s least wanted populations. Today, there are few rewards from the high brow academic and literary establishment for books and philosophical arguments that affirm the creative productions of America’s peasantry. The traditional path of respect and prestige demands that one devote his or her energies to subject matter that is traditional and elite, i.e. conventional. Writing about the unconventional lives and art of poor people, especially if you are not knee deep in the social sciences, does not led to promotion and tenure. Even a high brow intellectual such as Cornel West, an intellectual whose body of work is cluttered with the bodies of dead elite white men, cannot get away with pop art. In the early 2000s, West was forced to leave Harvard University for Princeton University after then Harvard president Larry Summers questioned and rebuked his forays into low brow culture, especially its hip hop manifestations. Respectable intellectuals at respectable and prestigious colleges and universities simply do not dirty their reputations by engaging the unconventional lives and circumstances of poor people, especially poor people with black and brown faces. In fact, Black Studies, one of the most creative, adventurous, and boundary crossing fields in academia, is treated, in many parts of academia, like an unplanned and unwanted child, precisely because the divergent experiences of African Americans in America do not conform to the strictures of American purity and virtue.

Through an outpouring of books on contemporary African American culture Dyson has unsettled the high brow rules and demands of American colleges and universities, especially the most elite among them. In Dyson’s work, the demand for academic respectability is eclipsed by a demand for immediacy, relevance, and social engagement. He has accomplished this through deliberate acts of intellectual irreverence. Before his dissertation for the Ph.D. was completed he chose the path of most resistance, an unconventional path of intellectual engagement. A cursory look at his work in Cultural Studies, particularly African American popular culture, reveals an outlook, style of writing and subject matter, which has been less than conventional, very post modern, and irreverent. He is perhaps the only humanistic intellectual, especially among black intellectuals, that would accord black youth culture the same esteem as the aristocratic southern traditions that were the backdrop for the civil rights movement. He is perhaps the only humanistic intellectual to criticize the family of Martin Luther King, Jr. for turning King’s legacy into a franchise. He is the only religious intellectual to equate the religious musings of the late rap legend Tupac Shakur with natural theology. Perhaps his most outlandish act of irreverence to date, is his analysis of the family woes of Bill Cosby in his book on the legendary comedian, Is Bill Cosby Right?(Or, Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind).

Given his deviation from the path of academic respectability, Dyson’s unconventional chosen path has afforded him no real home in the American academy. In a career that spans less than twenty years (seventeen to be exact) he has taught full time at least six academic institutions. Beyond the world of academia, Dyson’s commitment to unconventional lives, has not afforded him a stable home in the black culture from which he sprang, especially those elements in black American culture that are traditional and institutional. Where the former is concerned, his status as a racial and intellectual minority has kept him on the edge of the American academy. Where the latter is concerned, his unconventional outlook on religion, politics, culture, and especially sexuality casts him as a heretic and a mad man. He exists on the corners of black culture.

Despite his marginal status, Dyson is a hugely popular American author. His books have mass appeal, and are very popular among Americans (young and seasoned, black and non-black) who recognize understand, relate to, and are concerned with the conditions which he devotes to ink and paper. Amazingly, his influence has even reached the most iconic figures in hip hop. Dyson’s name has been “dropped” in the lyrics of hip hop elites such Nasir “Nas” Jones and the foreword to one of his books (Know What I Mean?) was penned by Nas and Shawn “Jay Z” Carter. Amazingly, Dyson has done what no American intellectual has done, that is, take the Western canon to the most neglected and despised populations and geographical landscapes such as inner cities and rural areas, and make dead white men and women dance to the unconventional music of America’s least wanted. There are social workers, secondary teachers, college professors, Sunday school teachers, and pastors who can only imagine doing what does with relative ease with Americans who live unconventional lives. Not bad for a Ph.D. from the ruins of the Detroit auto industry.

Dyson’s intellectual irreverence has been the key to his success as an intellectual and it is this intellectual style that has allowed him to succeed in ways that many intellectuals, particularly black intellectuals have not. This is significant given the powerful appeal of non intellectual celebrities in American culture in general and black culture in particular. And for a black intellectual such as Dyson this holds even greater weight. In general, American intellectuals are a marginal class of citizens. This is true across the chasms of race, class, gender, and sexuality. However, for black intellectuals intellectual marginality is amplified. As a population, African Americans are less than fifteen percent of the American population. Due to America’s history of race only a small fraction have been allowed to grow, develop, and rise. For this reason the late Harold Cruse, Cornel West, and others have observed and lamented the crisis of black intellectuals, that black intellectuals are a marginal group within black America, a minority within a minority. And for this reason, due to historical circumstances, preachers, entertainers, and athletes have more access to the imaginations of blacks in America than intellectuals. In general, black intellectuals typically do not have the charismatic appeal of preachers and other celebrities among black Americans. However, Dyson has transcended this dilemma and has done so in a way that is unprecedented and difficult to replicate. Dyson’s success as an intellectual may be attributed to the fact that he shares the attributes of popular preachers and other celebrities loved and admired by black people.

Personally, I have seen Dyson’s influence at the historically black university where I teach, Claflin University, in Orangeburg, South Carolina. One day while walking the “yard” between classes, I was struck by a former student who was holding a copy of the Michael Eric Dyson Reader or what I call, Dyson’s “greatest hits.” “I see your reading Dyson,” I said to the student. “Yeah, he’s a deep brother,” he replied. I paused for a moment and thought to myself, what makes him deep? I continued, “We’ll have to talk about what you’ve read real soon,” and I went on to my office. Not long after this encounter Dyson spoke at Claflin, and in a venue that was standing room only, he worked his magic, preaching, rapping, and inflaming the administration with fiery oratory.

Dyson spoke during Claflin’s annual week-long celebration of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Without giving a theme or title for his address he informed the audience that he would speak to three things: Hurricane Katrina, the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bill Cosby. In an irreverent fashion, he criticized the Bush administration and New Orleans’ mayor, Ray Nagin, for their slack response to Hurricane Katrina. He talked about the moral courage and moral failures of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the moral failures and cowardice of black ministers. And he railed against the class elitism of Bill Cosby. His address was interspersed with humor and lyrics from popular rap songs and soul music from the 1970s. The address lasted for more than an hour, and he masterfully held the attention of 18-21 year olds, a demographic whose attention span can run dry after 20 minutes. Dyson was applauded and cheered on and received a standing ovation when he finished his address. After the lecture, I ran into the same student whom I chatted with on the “yard.” He had his tattered copy of the Dyson Reader, whom Dyson had signed. I recounted our previous conversation. “I told you, Dyson is a deep brother,” he said. Again, he was impressed.

Unlike black elites born before and during the Eisenhower era, Dyson has in significant respects broken through to many within the Hip Hop generation. This is not a bad thing for a forty-something thinker, writer, and speaker who has documented the struggles and talents of millions young people whom America has written off, including black America. As one of the few American intellectuals and black public voices to openly embrace and take seriously, a misunderstood, maligned, and conflicted generation, Dyson is to be commended. However, his work and popularity beg to be understood in relation to the America that we live in.

Dyson’s appeal as an interpreter of America, especially its hip hop population, is connected to where it is located in contemporary American history. His work interprets the generational soundtrack of countless Americans who came of age in, and were born at the end of the 20th century, the Reagan era to be exact. Next to the explosive sixties, the Reagan era altered the course of American history. If the 1960s gave America peace, love, and radical equality, the Reagan era did the exact opposite. It gave America nuclear weapons, the Second Amendment, and corporate religion. More than any era in American history, the Reagan era gave American individualism an extreme makeover. Radical equality fell off and relentless and unbound self-interest became an article of faith. Those who benefited the most from this tenet of faith were those who stood atop of America’s mountain of privilege. Those who benefited the least were those who stood at the very bottom of the mountain. Hip hop emerged from the very bottom of America’s mountain of privilege and gave voice to the deleterious effects of Reaganite religion. Hip hop gave voice to a Third World condition amidst a so-called First World civilization. And these Third World conditions have worsened and continue to worsen as time goes by. The most explicit manifestation of this condition are reflected in the language, the broken English, of its most visible and rebellious spokespersons, rappers. The rappers articulate a significant disconnect between the so-called mainstream or the First World of American society and America’s least wanted, the invisible people of our land. At its most visceral level, rap music represents a rootless condition in America. In its raw and edgy form, it is the most rootless American in America. Michael Eric Dyson is one of the few American intellectuals and writers to recognize this. He is also among a few who understand that the presence and popularity of rap music stands as a critic of American civilization. It is a critic of the dominant values and practices that only benefit those who stand while looking down at and down up those at the very bottom.

For this reason, rap music is contested and despised in many parts of America. Though it has mass appeal it is not universally loved. Rap music fails to garner universal love in its unbound, unplugged and uncut form. Its raw, gritty, and uncensored expression of life stands as its critique of mainstream of American. It is an existential bulldozer which has unsettled American purity and virtue. Refusing to conform to American tradition, it is bound by no single morality. In a word, rap music is that parentless child who was forced to fend for itself. It struggled to make its way out of the nitty gritty streets of North America, into corporate boardrooms, and found its way into mainstream/traditional America and the world. During its early days it was said that it would have a short lifespan, that it would die young, that it did not have the wherewithal, the resilience, and the creativity that would insure its longevity. It has survived and is still standing. Like a young rootless black male who lives on the edge and survives, rap music has survived and thrives, in America. And as long as Third World conditions persist, it will continue to challenge America.

The author of Between God and Gangster Rap understands that rap music stems from a world, that is quite neglected and the American public ignores this world to its peril. Even as Americans work hard at and are often quite successful in pretending that a Third World does not exist within America, Dyson understands that America can never be what it could be as long as it continues to neglect entire populations of people. Such populations, if not attended to, can produce disastrous consequences for America. And this disastrous outcome is not just a matter of improving race relations, it demands a general improvement in our relations as human beings.

Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson was fortunate. He was able to escape the streets of Queens, New York through music. Unfortunately, there are thousands who are not so fortunate. There are thousands who are the products of the same America which for the last three decades has ignored its most desperate and circumstantially distressed populations. The future Presidents of the United States will have to address this American condition. And as long as this condition persists, America will continue produce rappers like “50 Cent” who articulate and revel in an uprooted America. As long as this condition persists, there will be a need for voices and American elites, like Michael Eric Dyson, who take up and engage the challenges of this condition. If America is to be as great as it aspires to be, we all must have a chance to live out our American dreams.

***

Ronald B. Neal holds a Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Culture from Vanderbilt University. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. He can be reached at rneal@claflin.edu or madprof1973@yahoo.com.

faithsonshyne — April 07, 2010 — KRS1 speaks on behalf of the Hip Hop Pioneers the reason why they are boycotting the National Museum of Hip Hop. It sure changed the direction of the night.

Trading Truth for Justice: Ten years, and one murder, later

Category: Uncategorized — <ADMINNICENAME> @ 5:43 PM

The slaying last week of the South African racist reactionary, Eugene Terreblanche, provides an opportunity for another examination of the persistent and peculiar divide between some whites and some blacks in the “new” South Africa of black-majority rule. The Terreblanche murder, which may have had nothing to do with politics, also reminds that the task of reconciliation with the apartheid past — and so much else — is not over in South Africa. In a country with a super-high murder rate, where even a national (black) hero such as Lucky Dube can be massacred for the value of his car, and where hundreds and possibly thousands of white farmers have been murdered in the 15+ years since the end of apartheid, there’s no telling what caused the slaying of Terreblanche since, in South Africa, killing appears to have its own logic, to be its own twisted affirmation of human ambition. But if Terreblanche’s death cannot be analyzed easily, the efforts at reconciliation can indeed be further analyzed, starting with the justly famous if famously  flawed Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A good place to begin a review is with Susie Linfield’s superb article, published some 10 years ago, “Trading Truth for Justice.”

Much of the energy spent on reflecting about the TRC experience has looked at the relative merits of punishing whites who did really bad things under apartheid, and of compensation blacks who suffered really really badly under the same regime and especially during its dying days. No doubt, the decision by the Mbeki government to issue scant monetary awards to bone fide victims who stood before the TRC was wrong. The awards should have been larger. Some whites meanwhile escaped without any punishment except public rebuke; so did some blacks. To be sure, these people of all colors could have received more negatives than social shame and stigma. Yet I think of the main debate over the TRC as essentially a sideshow. The main show ought to be what to do about racial tension — and worse — in today’s South Africa. That Terreblanche could publicly and openly reconstitute a racist political party says much about the confusion in South Africa between dissent and the impossibility of reclaiming the old forbidden segregationist ideology. Just as in Germany today, any neo-Nazi party is essentially inconceivable (and illegal), so too should be a white supremacist party in South Africa.

Terreblanche did not deserve to die, but he didn’t deserve to lead a political movement either.

===================

Trading Truth for Justice?
 

Reflections on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Susie Linfield

"Let us dream with alert reason." --Christa Wolf (five days before the fall of the Berlin Wall)

"Justice has been the preoccupation of revolutionaries. It is also the dilemma of revolutionaries." --Mahmood Mamdani, Reconciliation Without Justice

"The [families of the] victims ask the hardest of ... questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?" --Antjie Krog,Country of My Skull

I.

"Did it work?". This is the question many people asked when they heard I was writing about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The question--and the inchoate suppositions behind and beneath it--began to be of interest on its own. What does it mean for a truth commission--or, for that matter, the truth--to "work"? How do we know when it has worked? Whose work is it meant to do? When, if ever, is that work completed? In short, what is the usefulness (if any) of memory, of history, of truth itself? And if the truth fails, what is the alternative to it?

The TRC was certainly not the first such body; it had been preceded, most notably, by truth commissions in Chile, El Salvador, Argentina, Uganda. But "none have had the impact of the South African one--not for better, not for worse," as lawyer Albie Sachs, a longtime anti-apartheid activist and now a judge on South Africa’s highest court, has noted.¹ Established in December 1995 after combative debates, the TRC--with its seventeen commissioners appointed by a recently-elected Nelson Mandela--swept the country for 244 days and, much to its own surprise, received over 21,000 victim statements and more than 7,000 applications for amnesty.² Since then, a vast and contentious literature--which lauds and lambastes the commission from legal, historical, anthropological, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and political viewpoints--has grown within and outside South Africa.

The TRC has captured international attention for a number of reasons. These include the decades-long, multinational campaign against apartheid; the so-called "miracle" of the South African transition to democracy that transfixed a weary, disillusioned, but not entirely hopeless world in the last decade of the twentieth century; and the commission’s own far-reaching ambitions. South Africa’s was the only such commission that explicitly connected truth with the reconciliation of lifelong enemies. Perhaps more important, and certainly more troubling, it was the only commission that linked truth and exoneration so intimately: the TRC promised amnesty to any individual guilty of "gross violations of human rights" who offered full and truthful disclosure of his acts, and whose offenses were deemed politically motivated. This linkage immediately, inevitably, and indeed furiously raised the immensely thorny question of the relationship between--or, alternately, the severing of--truth and justice.

The TRC’s own report--a five-volume, 3,500-page document released in late 1998--explicitly invites dialogue and criticism. (The commission’s Amnesty Committee continues to hold hearings; many decisions are pending, and it has not yet published its conclusions.) If the widely trumpeted but still fledgling "culture of human rights" does in fact exist, the TRC report surely epitomizes some of its essential features. Unlike most government documents, it is clear about its methods, its political convictions, its conclusions; it combines analysis, reportage, and stark emotion; and it expressly refuses to anoint itself the arbiter of official, definitive, final truth, arguing instead that it is incumbent upon others to search "for the clues that lead, endlessly, to a truth that will, in the very nature of things, never be fully revealed." The report is available, free, to the whole world on the Internet (see www.truth.org.za). With an almost startling modesty, it apologizes to readers for any potential misspellings of proper names (South Africa has eleven official languages, and hearings were conducted in, or translated into, all of them). Whatever misgivings one may have about the TRC, its report is a model of humility, transparency, and respect. It analyzes the barbarities of the past for the very purpose of intervening in the future. It is the praxis of human rights.

II.

Apartheid was a complex, indeed byzantine system. But it rested ultimately on a very simple premise--that white people are inherently superior to blacks--which is to say that it rested on a very simple lie. Though the "post-totalitarian" society Vaclav Havel has described differed in some important ways from apartheid, his analysis of the power of the lie is apt: "Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future…. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."

When a society is founded on a lie, the truth assumes particular importance. (It is thus not surprising that truth, or its absence, was an obsession of anti-apartheid writers for decades. Nadine Gordimer’s first novel was called, surely not by chance, The Lying Days;its epigraph by Yeats captures the ways in which lying can be a privilege, indeed a joy, and the truth a bitter discipline.³) And when such a political system crumbles, the establishment of a truth commission immediately attains a certain significance; its very existence signals, if not quite the dawning of an entirely new day, certainly a repudiation of the old.

The particularly public style of the TRC--whose hearings were broadcast daily on television and radio, reported on the front page of every newspaper, debated in a variety of public forums and, presumably, in a number of private ones too--has been criticized, indeed mocked (some in the Afrikaner press dubbed the TRC the "Crying and Lying Commission"). And it may be that black suffering became a form of spectacle. But it is also true that the TRC was probing crimes--especially torture--that are particularly private in the most nefarious sense of the word. As Elaine Scarry, Lawrence Weschler, and others have noted, the essence of torture is the reduction of a person--often, even usually, a person whose life is intimately tied to a wider community and to capacious ideals of justice--to a body in pain. Torture is an obscene paring-down, a grotesque diminution, a radical way of isolating its victim--from herself, from her beliefs, from the moral world that gives her sustenance.⁴"[H]ere lies the dilemma: for those who live for others and for social ideas, the body defeats them with its pain," Kate Millett wrote. "The lesson of torture is … silence." The staunchly public nature of the South African truth commission, which some have found so disturbingly exhibitionistic, may be among its most salient features: a way of restoring--or, more precisely, beginning to restore--the crushed body and damaged soul to the social realm, to the community, to the world of connected voices and shared ideals that the torturer smashed. Thus Mzukisi Mdidimba, who testified before the TRC about the severe beatings he received while held in solitary confinement at the age of fifteen, subsequently observed, "When I have told stories of my life before, afterward I am crying, crying, crying.… This time, … I know [that] what they’ve done to me will … be all over the country. I still have some sort of crying, but also joy inside."

III.

The TRC report insists that the reality of apartheid was complex, multi-layered, and multi-dimensional. But if there is more than one form of truth, surely there are many modes of lying. Amnesia and denial are prime forms of mendacity, and of control. Legal scholar Martha Minow has argued that the effort to destroy memory--which is also, by extension, an attempt to eradicate identity--is the crucial link in the chain of our modern-day horrors, from the Armenian genocide and the Rape of Nanking to the Gulag and apartheid. Yet the battle between knowledge and amnesia is not necessarily new; long before the short, terrible twentieth-century, Goethe’s devil reveled in his power to assassinate memory. Mephisto proclaims:

"There it’s over!"--what does it tell us?
It’s as good as if it never happened . . . 
Thus do I love the eternal emptiness.⁵

Truth commissions are a refusal of this emptiness. But truth and memory, like most things in this world, can be used in different ways, and for different purposes. Journalists who covered the Bosnian war have written of the drowning in mythologized memory that characterizes the Balkan antagonists--their vicious yet narcotized relationship to history, their failure to establish a sane dialogue with the past, their self-imposed imprisonment in unquenchable fantasies of revenge. Conversely, the historian Charles S. Maier has observed how the "memory industry" that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century, particularly in regard to the Holocaust, degenerated into a form of neurasthenia and narcissism. This use of memory is so intimately connected to a diminished belief in the possibility of transformative politics that it substitutes for ideals, for action, for the making of history. The South African experience is fundamentally different from that of Eastern and Western Europe, and it is unlikely that South Africa will self-destruct through either vengeance or impotence. On the contrary, it is more likely to suffer from the TRC’s mandating of an all-too-speedy reconciliation, and its privileging of forgiveness as the highest form of ethical behavior.

Betrayal, too, can be a form of forgetting. The critic Eve Bertelsen has observed that as the African National Congress (ANC) abandons--whether from necessity or choice--its decades-old commitment to socialism⁶, the language of political struggle has been seized by South African advertisers. A dairy company asks, "Why cry over spilt milk … The past is just that … past." A credit-card company helpfully suggests, "You’ve won your freedom. Now use it." Revlon promises that its products will deliver a "revolutionary" feeling; a competing hair-care company offers "freedom of choice," while a third urges, "Seize the day!" As the familiar words of collective struggle are increasingly linked to the privatized world of consumption, what Bertelsen calls a "selective amnesia" sets in. Lost memories of this kind, however, exist well beyond the reach of truth commissions.

IV.

Betrayal of a different sort is among the most difficult, and least discussed, problems that a South Africa struggling for reconciliation and renewal faces. Much of the most-publicized TRC testimony focused, quite rightly, on the criminal--indeed inconceivably sadistic--actions of the white security forces against black activists. But a closer reading of the testimony--and even the most cursory look at the Amnesty Committee hearings (posted and regularly updated on the TRC’s site)--reveals the ugly web of black-against-black violence and collaboration on which apartheid rested. (The large majority of amnesty applications have been filed by blacks who committed crimes against other blacks; most amnesty applicants are already imprisoned.) Two of the state’s major aims--and it had a wide variety of inducements at its disposal, from financial incentives to torture--were to absorb blacks into the security apparatus and to "turn" activists against each other; in both it was terribly successful.

Though apartheid was not genocide and South Africa was not a giant concentration camp, the "gray zone" of collaboration that Primo Levi identified as the greatest evil of the camps operated in South Africa too. Levi observed the terrible, indeed tragic, paradox at the heart of all repressive regimes: where oppression is harshest, collaboration is most widespread. Motivations, Levi noted, include everything from cowardice and servility to ideology and "lucid calculation"; thus are the victims "deprived of even the solace of innocence." Apartheid created its own, particular version of this phenomenon, with its askaris (turncoats), impimpis (spies), and the paranoia and fury (broadcast to the world as "necklacings") they inspired. In the latter years of the regime, the security forces--in a grotesque parody of multi-racialism--were at least partly integrated; as Michael Ignatieff reported, "Black hands were nearly always holding you when the police forced a wet towel over your nose and mouth until you choked and lost consciousness. Black hands were nearly always holding you when the police plunged your head into a bath until you choked and nearly drowned."

It is generally acknowledged that the ANC and other opposition groups were riddled with informers--or, more precisely, activist-informers--of all races. A scene in Country of My Skull, a 1998 account of the TRC written by Afrikaner poet and journalist Antjie Krog, captures the bewildered humiliation, the moral wreckage, of collaboration. Jeffrey Benzien was a police captain who became famous throughout the country for demonstrating to the TRC a particularly effective form of torture he had ingeniously perfected. (To the incredulous question posed at his hearing--"What kind of man are you?"--Benzien fails to offer an illuminating, or even adequate, reply, which is perhaps not surprising: self-awareness may not be his strong suit. Krog reports, though, that Benzien had a nervous breakdown in 1994--the year of Nelson Mandela’s election--and has been in psychological treatment since.) Krog recounts how, at the TRC, Benzien is confronted by--or confronts--several of his victims, including Tony Yengeni, an ANC member who had since been elected to Parliament. But the hearing almost immediately belongs to Benzien who--rather than show repentance--slyly, cruelly reminds his victims of how easily, under his guidance, they cracked. "Benzien is a connoisseur," Krog writes. "Within the first few minutes, he manages to manipulate most of his victims back into the roles of their previous relationship--where he has the power and they the fragility…. Behind Benzien sit the victims of his torture--in a row chained by friendship and betrayal. Yengeni betrayed Jonas; Jonas pointed out people in albums; Peter Jacobs betrayed Forbes; Forbes pointed out caches; Yassir Henry betrayed Anton Fransch. During the tea break, they stand together in the passages with their painful truths of triumph and shame."

To the extent that this story has an ending, it is not an uplifting one. Last year, Benzien received amnesty for his crimes--including the murder of ANC activist Ashley Kriel and the torture of Yengeni, Bongani Jonas, and Ashley Forbes--from the TRC. A leading Johannesburg newspaper reported that Benzien, whom the apartheid government had honored as "best interrogator" in the Western Cape, was currently a captain in the police air wing.

V.

The TRC hearings flooded the country with information, some of which--such as the exact number of hours it takes to barbecue a human body--was perhaps unwanted. But many of the facts--who killed who, and how, and where and when--were desired. Mysteries remain; thousands of murders are unsolved. But corpses were literally (and figuratively) exhumed. Many organizations are forming in South Africa, but as a result of the TRC, an African version of the "mothers of the disappeared" will probably not be among them.

Yet the broad contours of horror that the TRC revealed--the bombings, the assassinations, the tortures, the kidnappings, the mutilations, the necklacings--were widely known by all South Africans (the shocked insistence on innocence by some whites can be met, at best, only with deep skepticism). The hearings did not inform an ignorant country but, rather, transferred awareness from the realm of repression and secrecy to that of expression and debate. Thus do truth commissions, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel has postulated, transform knowledge into acknowledgement.

Or do they?

Acknowledgement does not automatically occur once people reveal their experiences. Acknowledgement is a process--one that requires critical self-consciousness, openness, fluidity, and a capacity for surprise, remorse, guilt, awe, grief, and shame. This is the "working through" of the past that Theodor Adorno urged (so unsuccessfully) on his fellow Germans. It is a process that rejects both amnesia about the past and the grandiose, futile ambition to "master" it, and that requires the assumption not of collective guilt but, rather, of individual responsibility. Such acknowledgement--which clearly is no kin to the showmanship of self-flagellation--is nurtured simultaneously in political and psychic realms; it demands moral and systemic change; it can be accomplished only by individuals, yet only within a collective. "Essentially," Adorno argued, "it is a matter of the way in which the past is called up and made present: whether one stops at sheer reproach, or whether one endures the horror through a certain strength that comprehends even the incomprehensible." Because this process is political, it requires the establishment of an open, truthful public space--of which the TRC is surely an example. Because it is existential, it demands a rigorous self-scrutiny of the soul.

Yet the TRC hearings were almost entirely boycotted by whites, and there is scant evidence that the fortresses of denial were shaken on any widespread basis. Many of the torturers applying for amnesty exhibited not just an absence of remorse, but actual pride in their accomplishments. (Amnesty-seeker Jacques Hechter, a police captain whom journalist David Goodman has described as "a particularly prolific assassin," was not unusual in his boast: "I did a good job…. And I’d do it again…. I’m not really fuckin’ sorry for what I did.") Perhaps most important, by focusing on human-rights violations, which were by their very nature extreme (and, even in South Africa, illegal), the TRC neglected the more banal evils that sustained apartheid--the myriad ways in which everyday life itself was an insult to, indeed a negation of, human rights and human dignity. The hearings may, paradoxically, have thus enabled a majority of whites--who, after all, were not criminals or sadists themselves, merely beneficiaries of a criminal, sadistic system--to wall themselves off from responsibility.

And just as knowledge, even public knowledge, is not necessarily transformed into acknowledgement, so the mere voicing of experience does not, in itself, either enlighten perpetrators or heal their victims. "Witnessing … must be preceded and followed by listening," the anthropologist John Borneman, who has studied societies recovering from systemic violence (especially ethnic cleansing), observes. "To listen … differs from hearing for it always involves listening for…. [T]o listen for truth entails a complex … process that goes beyond documenting experience per se. Listening as a practice, an art, is … not passive but interactive, involving soliciting and questioning, weighing competing accounts, as well as hearing." While such listening is a precondition for fundamental change, it must be purposefully and consciously connected to accountability and justice if a sturdy democracy is to emerge.

If listening is an art, confronting the past is a discipline, one that Jürgen Habermas argues "is as essential and desired as it is wearisome and difficult." Jane Kramer, writing of post-1989 Germany (which is, of course, also post-1945 and post-1933 Germany), went further, calling the process "excruciating" in that it required East and West Germans to connect "the kind of people they thought they were to the people they had been and the people they wanted to be." Antjie Krog states bluntly: "[I]t is almost impossible to acknowledge that the central truth around which your life has been built is a lie." Who among us can confront the brutal fact that the moral narrative of our lives--not just what we do, but who we are--is a fraud, that our goodness was simply obedience, that our normality was perverse, that our respectability was purchased with cowardice? And who among us can confront the fact that this fraudulence, which is closer to a moral fracture than to a moral lapse, has caused unimaginable suffering to others?

And yet perhaps, just perhaps, this undertaking--which in any event cannot really be evaded--is not only a burden but an opportunity too, albeit a terrifying one. The Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach, who spent seven years in prison for anti-apartheid activities, has insisted that South Africa’s liberation movement was always a quest not just for political power, but also for a kind of existential breakthrough. "For me," Breytenbach said recently, "all those years of struggle and exile and activism were part of the process of transformation, of metamorphosis: of creating, or imagining, or constructing a South African identity … of imagining oneself different, of bonding, of going beyond, of transgression, of transcendence."

VI.

Yet the question emerges: Did the TRC foster or hinder that transcendence? For the transformative moment on which the TRC was premised--which in its pop-psyche incarnation takes the form of catharsis, and whose religious mode is sin, confession, repentance, and absolution--is essentially false, and mitigates against a profound, relentless working through of the past. The transformative moment--precisely because it is a moment, albeit sometimes a drawn-out one--mistakes a one-time event for a process. It evades the hard work of constructing meaning out of horror; it seeks a short cut to deep and lasting change; it suggests that truth is a thing one tells rather than a way one lives. The TRC’s motto, proclaimed in large banners, was "Revealing is Healing." But as any historian can attest--or indeed, as most of us know from our daily lives--this is usually not so.

The very drama, the extraordinary nature, of the TRC hearings allowed its truths to be compartmentalized and contained, and suggested that apartheid was a "chapter of the past" that could be closed with a satisfying thump. And yet the harder questions--wearisome and difficult indeed!--remain: What comes after the moments of revelation? How does one transform information into knowledge, emotion into insight, events into experience, experience into meaning? How is the truth not merely recognized, but integrated into a new sense of self, into new social relationships, into new political structures, into the building of a future that is fundamentally different from (rather than an erasure of) the past? For while societies can, and sometimes must, rupture with the past--the new South African constitution, for instance, explicitly rejects apartheid--people cannot do so. When it comes to individuals, the language of the "new man," of "year zero," of the "fresh start," is always the language of denial.

So, too, is the incessantly optimistic notion of "closure." Apartheid was not the equivalent of an unhappy childhood or a painful divorce. To speak of closure in the context of systemic terror and degradation verges on obscenity. It isnot clear, for instance, how NasonNdwandwe, who learned through the TRC hearings how his daughter Phila died--alone, naked, tortured, holding a plastic bag around her genitals--will "get over" her death. It is doubtful that Charity Kondile, whose son Sizwe’s body was barbecued ("we frequently had to turn the buttocks and thighs," one of his executioners helpfully told the commission), will "move on." It would be hard to say what kind of restitution should be offered to Nomatise Evelyn Tsobileyo; in 1985, a white policeman shot bullets into her vagina, which were still lodged in her body at the time of her hearing. Or of what healing would mean for Zahrah Narkedien, who testified about her solitary confinement: "I will never recover … [T]he more I struggled to be normal, the more disturbed I became. I had to accept that I was damaged. A part of my soul was eaten away as if by maggots, … and I will never get it back again."

Souls can sometimes be reconstituted--though not easily, not in isolation, and with no guarantees.⁷ But this process has no connection to that of "getting over"; it demands, on the contrary, the recognition that what is gone can not be retrieved, that what is done can not be undone, that there are losses in this world that can never be redeemed. To know this is to enter into tragedy.

While the tragic realm is one of inconsolability, it need not be a void. The fight against apartheid, though riddled with ambiguities and compromises, has a clear moral thread running through it; one cannot say, as Eva Hoffman recently wrote of the Holocaust, that it lacked a "satisfactory ethical struggle" by depriving victims not just of their lives, but of the "chance to die for a cause." But while meaning can illuminate tragic losses, it does not ever erase them.

VII.

The TRC itself admits that its amnesty provisions--commonly known as "trading truth for justice"--presented South Africans with agonizing moral choices and agonizing moral compromises. The amnesty provision has been defended on a variety of grounds, from a theological belief in forgiveness to the practical need to prevent a bloody white backlash. (Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the TRC’s chair, has used both lines of argument.) Even a cursory look through South Africa’s lively press, black and white, radical and conservative, will reveal that the amnesty guidelines (and specific amnesty decisions, some of which shocked and outraged large sectors of the country) were the TRC’s most hotly contested aspect.

The political situation in South Africa in the early-1990s may have been miraculous⁸, but it was also perversely difficult. On the one hand, revolutionary changes--the dismantling of the apartheid apparatus--had been set in motion with the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the opposition parties in February 1990. Yet there had been no revolution: the ANC had not exactly won and the pro-apartheid National Party had not exactly lost. Instead, there was a negotiated settlement, which demanded, oddly, revolutionary change within a framework of compromise. The new South African constitution, for instance, is not an ANC document, but was co-written by the ANC and the Nationalists (imagine Tom Paine sitting down with King George to hash things out). The Nationalists--who still controlled the army and the police--made it clear that Nuremberg-type trials were out of the question. Lustration, too, was rejected, which meant that apartheid-era civil servants, prosecutors, judges, policemen and soldiers would retain their jobs.⁹

And though the Armageddon that many had predicted for so long was avoided, to speak of a peaceful transition is grossly misleading. It ignores the thousands who had died fighting apartheid; equally important, it neglects the phenomenal increase in political violence after Mandela’s release from prison. In the years 1984-94, there were an estimated 20,500 political deaths; fully 72 percent of those occurred between February 1990 and the first democratic elections of April 1994.¹⁰

In this context, there were many fears, all realistic: of a Nationalist refusal to relinquish the reins; of a far-right white coup; of a civil war. And it was in this context that the TRC--with its forsaking of trials and its offer of individual amnesties--was born. This does not, indeed cannot, lessen the extraordinary spiritual achievement of those who, like Mandela and Tutu, put their bodies on the line for peaceful reconciliation, and who have courageously tried to chart a new path--the "third way" between amnesia and vengeance--for their broken society, and for the world.¹¹Who can remain unmoved by the stark contrast between the multi-racial elections in South Africa and the genocide in Rwanda--events that occurred simultaneously?

Yet while South Africa may have avoided the Pyrrhic victory of "justice with ashes" through the forswearing of trials, it relinquished something valuable too. "Amnesty," Archbishop Tutu has pithily observed, "is not meant for nice people." But a democracy that cannot hold its un-nice people--its murderers and torturers--accountable is fearful, wobbly, dangerously frail. In a democratic society, the law is a crucial arena in which we define ourselves, our collective values, our shared moral precepts. Trials restore a sense of ethical order; though they cannot undo damage, they enable a wronged collectivity to right itself. Trials affirm and condemn, and thereby negate impunity; to sidestep this process fosters unease, imbalance, even fury.¹² Paradoxically, the absence of trials may therefore make reconciliation more difficult.

Justice, then, is not the alternative to truth commissions, but rather their necessary corollary. Truth commissions are wonderful because they are victim-centered. Justice is not victim-centered, and therein lies its power. We do not prosecute X for the murder of Y because Y suffered, or because Y was a good man, or because Y’s family is grieving and cannot forgive X. (And this holds true--indeed more true--for crimes against humanity than for common crimes.) We prosecute X because murder tears into our moral fabric, negates our values, creates a world in which we do not want and cannot afford to live. We prosecute X because an injury to one really is an injury to all; because in killing Y, X harmed us too. And in prosecuting X, we recognize his humanity, for only human beings are endowed with conscience and capable of choice, and can therefore be accountable for their actions.

Justice, however, neither heals nor deters. To demand that it do so is to fall prey to a dangerous illusion--and to a subsequent, inevitable cynicism. While justice may be a form of faith, it is not a form of magic; it can no more transform the past than it can reliably safeguard the future. Justice affirms both the collective’s standards and each individual’s worth, but it can never be measured by any directly utilitarian--and certainly not by any short-term--effect. Justice must be sought and honored for its own sake; and if it is not, there is no way, and perhaps no reason, to seek or honor it at all. Paradoxically, justice is its own end, albeit one upon which civilization depends. Thus, to that oft-voiced question of 1961--"What good will trying Eichmann do?"--Hannah Arendt answered simply: "[T]here is but one possible answer: It will do justice."

VIII.

Yet just as truth must be understood as an ongoing process rather than a recitation of bare facts, so justice cannot be confined to the courtroom. Justice is not simply a matter of punishing crimes, or even of achieving reconciliation; it is not just a reckoning with the ugliness of the past, but must also be judged by the kind of future that is or is not built.

Apartheid South Africa was the richest country on its continent, and one of the most unequal societies on earth. Under apartheid, mass removals of millions of blacks made room for white cities, white suburbs, white farms. (Property was literally, and even unabashedly, theft.) Under apartheid, the average black rural woman had to walk eight miles each day for water and firewood. In the building of modern South Africa, black labor was utterly indispensable and black lives utterly expendable: 69,000 workers were killed, and over a million injured, in South African mines from 1900-1994. Though the TRC hearings did not focus on economic exploitation, details of the crushing destitution created by apartheid could not help but emerge: Alwinus Mhlatsi’s testimony incidentally revealed that his wife, who worked for a white farmer in the late 1960s, earned a monthly salary of four rand--the equivalent of 65 cents. The relationship between political repression and relentless poverty is perhaps best illustrated by a detail--small, unimportant--that came to light during the 1994 elections, when voters were fingerprinted for identification purposes. It turned out that some first-time voters--some black women--had no fingerprints at all; theirs had been worn to a terrible smoothness through long years of manual labor.

In this context, justice must surely require a radical redistribution of resources--of land, housing, electricity, water, education, jobs. This is the crucible of reconciliation. "[W]hat is the political basis of reconciliation in contemporary South Africa, and what is needed to build on it, and make it durable?" the Ugandan political theorist Mahmood Mamdani asks. "Reconciliation may be a moral imperative, but it will not happen unless it is also nurtured as a political possibility. This is why if truth is to be the basis of reconciliation, it will have to sum up not only the evil that was apartheid but the promise that was the resistance to it." Some have assumed that reconciliation will lead to justice, but the process is more likely to be reversed. Charity Kondile, mother of the murdered Sizwe, explained after testifying to the TRC: "It is easy for Mandela and Tutu to forgive…. [T]hey lead vindicated lives.In my life, nothing, not a single thing, has changed since my son was burnt by barbarians…. Therefore I cannot forgive."

Unfortunately, Charity Kondile’s life must be vindicated in a South Africa--and a world--dominated by Maastricht targets, International Monetary Fund dictates and World Bank redevelopment programs. At the same time, South Africa must restructure itself internally, converting its domestic economy, in the words of Allister Sparks, from one that was "shaped to provide a First World lifestyle for five million whites to one supplying 40 million South Africans with the basic necessities of life." To call this task daunting is a vast understatement.

I know of no country that has successfully worked through its past while reinventing its economy and political life; it is not clear that South Africa can do so. On the other hand, I know of no sane person who wants the new century to be a repeat of the last one, or who refuses to consider that new possibilities and new solutions--ones we could not previously imagine--are presenting themselves. Surely there are some times when hope and history rhyme, when the bottomless bleakness of J. M. Coetzee’sDisgrace is not the only rational stance.¹³

Post-apartheid South Africa--with its infinite sorrow, its cruelties, its sturdy resistance, its fragile democracy, its wealth for a chosen few and its poverty for so many--threatens to break our hearts, and its own. But failure is not a foregone conclusion. And if the experiment does fail, it will do no good to run back to the lying days, complaining that the truth betrayed us yet again.

Truth does not liberate people. Only people liberate people--and only when such people are engaged in an arduous, dynamic dialogue with the truth. Alternately, truth does not betray us. It is we who sometimes--often--betray the truths we have learned, or should have.

Susie Linfield teaches in the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University and is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times.

1 Sachs’s elevation to the Constitutional Court has not dimmed the sense of understated irony in the face of disaster that permeated his 1966 memoir The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. Of the apartheid government’s almost-successful attempt to kill him (Sachs lost his right arm and was blinded in one eye by a car-bomb, planted by government agents, in 1988), he has said, "Every intellectual dreams of being taken seriously by someone, but not that seriously. "

2 With a population of over 43 million, South Africa is an extraordinarily diverse country--racially, ethnically, linguistically and politically--and it would be impossible to summarize the extremely wide range of opinions that the TRC evoked. The right-wing, Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party, for instance, virtually boycotted the TRC, but it was the families of murdered anti-apartheid activists Steve Biko and Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge who challenged the TRC in court (and lost). The relationship of the African National Congress (ANC) to the TRC is tangled. On the one hand the ANC, angered by the TRC’s criticisms of ANC human-rights abuses committed in the course of its long guerrilla war, tried to prevent the release of the commission’s report. On the other, in what must surely be an act of singular humility by a ruling party, prominent members of the ANC (including now-President Thabo Mbeki) sought amnesty, as a group, from the TRC for those very abuses. And in a courageous show of independence, the TRC--a quasi-governmental body--eventually denied many of the ANC applications (including Mbeki’s), for the commission is predicated on the idea that neither collective guilt nor collective innocence exists.

3 Yeats wrote:

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

4 The most notable exception to this reduction through torture is Jesus, who was spiritually enlarged through his agony on the cross.

5 Thanks to Michael Manske for this translation.

6 The ANC government’s economic policies must be among the most closely scrutinized and fiercely criticized in the world. Not atypical is the Johannesburg-based journalist R. W. Johnson who, writing in the London Review of Books in 1996, charged, "[T]he ANC, many of whose members thought they were coming to power to bring about the socialist revolution, is now being used to carry through a capitalist counter-revolution." Controversy over the government’s direction shows no sign of abating, and may well heat up; in May, the Congress of South African Trade Unions--which, along with the South African Communist Party, constitutes the ANC’s main ally--staged a massive general strike, involving an estimated four million workers, to protest the government’s economic plans.

7 An astonishing account of this astonishing process is Lawrence Weschler’s A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (Pantheon, 1990), which focuses on Brazil and Uruguay.

8 Albie Sachs recently wrote, "It wasn’t a miracle.... Our transition had been the most willed, thought-about, planned-for event of the late twentieth century.... That was the irony--the relationship between history and miracle had been reversed; for the total doubters, it had been a miracle, while for those of intense belief, it had been entirely rational."

9 Of course, even "real" revolutions are not always revolutionary. Of the 1959 Hutu Revolution in Rwanda, Mahmood Mamdani aptly observes, "[The] revolutionaries turned the world they knew upside down, but they failed to change it."

10 These figures come from Anthea Jeffery’s book The Truth About the Truth Commission (1999), published by the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg. Though Jeffery’s political analysis has fomented much controversy, her figures, so far as I know, have not.

11 Michael Ignatieff has speculated that, had Croatian president Franjo Tudjman publicly repented for the crimes of the fascist Ustashe, he might have prevented the 1991 war.

12 There are many explanations for South Africa’s horrendous post-apartheid crime wave, including poverty; crime can also be seen as the blowback from the ANC’s call of the 1980s to "make the townships ungovernable," which they apparently are. But perhaps, too, the cult of impunity fostered by the TRC’s amnesty process is indirectly linked to the rise of street crime.

13 Coetzee’s novel, which paints an unrelievedly dismal portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, is obviously a fine literary achievement. But the peculiar source of the adulation it has received in the West--especially the United States and Britain, where it won the Booker Prize--is striking, if not suspect: many reviewers laud its despair with an enthusiasm bordering on gusto. To refuse Coetzee’s unmitigated harshness--which is closer to nihilism than realism--is to be guilty of naivete, lack of irony or, worst of all, utopianism.

=================

Les Amazones De Guinée Wamato (Stern's) Les Amazones de Guinée are a unique and quite amazing institution within African music. Since the early 60s they have criss-crossed the continent, with only occasional forays beyond, to help bring their particular brand of joy to the cause of women’s emancipation. Yet this is only their 2nd album, tight yet fluid, with the loping rhythms so particular to Guinea, bitter-sweet harmonies and vocals full of conviction. As the cry of “Retour en force des Amazones!” at the beginning of this album attests, these women demand to be heard. The Amazones are back with a vengeance. This is the gold-standard for female (or any other) bands in Africa and an enduring symbol of African women’s emancipation. Highly recommended

Terry McMillan Reads from Getting to Happy

You've probably already heard some buzz about Terry McMillan's follow-up book to Waiting to Exhale called Getting to Happy (September 7, 2010). Bernadine, Savannah, Gloria and Robin will all make an appearance in the new novel. I'm excited to see where each lady is in their respective lives. I recently came across a reading that Terry gave in February 2009 at Lenoir-Rhyne University. Check the video out below. She starts reading at the 2:58 mark.

Terry McMillan reads from her newest novel "Getting to Happy" from Gary Bartholomew on Vimeo.

X International Poetry competition

AWARDS sponsored by ALESSI

closing 15th May 2010

 

Three Categories: Silver Wyvern (max.60 lines), Formal Verse (max 40 lines), Short poems (max. 10 lines)

Suggested (but not obligatory) theme for all categories: "Mediterranean"

adjudicators:

James Harpur (Silver Wyvern), Carole Baldock (Short), Kevin Bailey (Formal)

The adjudicators will read all the entries

 

Prizes - to be awarded at the Celebration 1-3  October 2010

  

Silver Wyvern + €500;    €100 each x 3 runners-up

Formal Verse   : €100            Short Poems    :  €100 

and Alessi designer bowl to all winners present at awards.  

New 2010:

First prizewinners in each category will also receive a year's subscription to ORBIS ,

offered by Carole Baldock, editor of Orbis and Kudos

www.kudoswritingcompetitions.com

and their winning poems be published therein.  

 

POETRY ON THE LAKE X International Poetry Competition Guidelines

 

Closing Date: 15th MAY 2010.

 

Categories:

Silver Wyvern :, max. 60 lines

Formal verse: max. 40 lines.

Short poems: max. 10 lines

suggested (not obligatory) theme all categories ‘Mediterranean', Interpret as wishe  

  

Fees: 

UK: £8 first poem, 2nd & 3rd £6; then £5 per poem. 

Euro: €20 for 2 poems ; then €10 per poem

 

We accept: UK cheques or postal orders payable to G.Griffin-Hall and CROSSED. Italian cheques payable as above, marked Non trasferibile. Or euro notes (see below).

USA & Rest of World

US & CA dollars: count fees in dollars as for euro. Send notes only, safer wrapped in metallic foil.

 

No entry form required. Send 2 copies of each poem (poems should be unpublished and not  have been awarded a prize previously), mark category top right; one copy anonymous, other  with contact details, email address.

 

EMAIL ENTRIES

are accepted from outside Europe and may be paid through PAYPAL. There is an additional charge of ten euro for your entry. Preferably send as Word (doc but not docx) attachments, with cover details of name, address etc.

To pay through Paypal, calculate competition fees in euros according to number of poems entered, add ten euro, then email poetryonthelake(at)yahoo.co.uk. We will ask Paypal to send you a request form for this sum.

 

The same poem may be entered in two or more categories but will count  each time as a separate entry. An entrant may win two or three prizes if poems have been entered in different categories but only one prize in each category. Results will be published on site, winners contacted. Poems will not be returned.

 

At the adjudicators' discretion, a prize may not be awarded if there is no poem of required standard.

 

Possible publication with Italian translation facing for selected poems (we try to contact all authors first for permission and proof correction, although entry to the competition implies automatic permission to publish). Copyright remains with the author. 

 

Entering the competition implies acceptance of the rules.

 

Results July. Autumn awards with winners/commended reading at Lake Orta 1-3 October 2010. 

 

SEND TO: Poetry on the Lake, Isola San Giulio, 28016 Orta NO, Italy. 

n.b. please use correct postage for Italy and seal envelopes securely.

Enquiries- contact: email: poetryonthelake(at)yahoo.co.uk       tel. mobile (+39)  347 8464227                             

If you have an unpublished children's story, you can submit it here.
We are offering US$1,500 worth of prize money for the 5 best stories submitted each month.
The current competition closes 30 April 2010.
You can submit from anywhere in the world.
Submission is free.

50 SHORTLISTED, 5 WILL WIN

A shortlist of the 50 stories we like best will be announced on 05 May.
These 50 stories will then get narrated by kids, which we film.
The 50 films will then appear on smories.com on 01 June.
To remove bias, film positioning on the channel will be randomised every time the page is opened.
Viewers will be able to rate the stories .
After a month, 5 winners will be announced based on the number of views they receive.
This cycle will be repeated every month. Yay!

PRIZES

First Prize: US$500
Second Prize: US$400
Third Prize: US$300
Fourth Prize: US$200
Fifth Prize: US$100

We are receiving submissions from all over the world.
If you are a winner outside the US, the prize money will be converted into your local currency.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Not be longer than 750 (seven hundred and fifty) words.
Text only, in English.
Must be fiction for children from 3 to 8 years old.
Poetry & rhyming stories may also be submitted.
You must be the writer or owner of the copyright.
A maximum of two stories per writer per month can be submitted.
Typos, syntax and grammatical errors will prejudice your chances of selection.
No redrafts accepted. Final versions only.

SELECTION PROCESS & KEY DATES

05 May 2010: Shortlist of the 50 stories announced.
01 June 2010: The completed films will simultaneously appear on the smories online channel.
30 June 2010: The 5 stories receiving the highest traffic & ratings over the preceding 30 days will win the prizes.

RIGHTS AND COPYRIGHT

Stories will appear online on the smories channel only (www.smories.com).
Full credit and copyright will be attributed to the writer.
All rights will remain with the writer.
Stories can be removed from the smories channel at any time at the behest of the writer.
Smories.com will hold no claim to the story in any form.

See our FAQ page (accessed via the menu bar above) for more detailed explanation of Rights.

CLICK HERE TO BEGIN SUBMISSION PROCESS

Winning Contest Entry will be displayed here

Enter your Experimental Short Story to the FlameFlower Contest

Your story will be featured here, with your photo and bio, and a link to your information on Experimental Writing.

It will also be displayed prominently on the Experimental Writing site, with commentary by Tantra Bensko, bio and photo and your notes on the story and list of future honors, publications, or news, any time you want to send them in. The winner receives a certificate of award suitable for framing, an image to include on your website that links to the award, and 50 dollars.

Entry costs 8.00 per short story. You may also pay by check or money order; just ask in your email for the address.

Send your short story in the body of an email, and also as an attachment, including your name, and Pen name, address, and email address. You may also enter through the Experimental Writing Site, or Lucid Fiction.

                                                                        Contest Guidelines

Please send your short stories to Tantra Bensko at flameflower@runbox.com with the subject line including the word "Contest," the name of the piece, and your last name. The entry fee is 8 dollars and can be paid through Paypal with the button below, by check or money order. If paying by check or money order, simply request the address in the email with your submission, and write the name of your submission on the check.

Stories previously published online on your website, or writing sites, online magazines, or in print in magazines, anthologies, or your own collection are fine, as long as you have the rights to display them by this summer.

The only requirement for the stories is that they be at least somewhat experimental in nature, avant-garde, innovative, subversive, post-modernist, or whichever word you prefer for fine cutting edge literature that goes beyond the traditions of mainstream fiction. Tantra will be judging it personally.  Students are not allowed to enter stories she has seen, Her partner, and family members are excluded from entering.  Stories submitted to classes are not allowed entry. Unknown writers who have published nothing are considered just as fully as well known writers. The quality of the story counts, and of course, contests are always simply a reflection of the judge's personal taste.

Copy and paste into the body of the email as well as including the attachment of the story. You may enter as many stories as you like each with its own fee. Include your name, email, and address, and your pen name if applicable. Do not include a bio or link to site.

The submission must be entered by July 4th, 2010. You will be contacted through email to let you know if you have won or not and a certificate of award suitable for framing will be mailed to you along with a check or payment by Paypal if you prefer. Please understand that if you don't win, that doesn't mean Tantra doesn't love and adore your story. She may think it is one of the best things in the world, but she will only pick one winner. However, if she feels she can make useful comments on the work, or suggest places to publish unpublished pieces, or promote it herself, she'll do so. There will be other contests, so please consider entering again with new work later.

The winning piece will remain on this site. The winner is welcome to submit details of new publications, awards, etc. at any time in the future to be displayed along with the short story.  You retain rights to your story.

This site retains exclusive rights to your commentary about it, which should be a few paragraphs long, as well as my own comments on it.

The FlameFlower site is integrated with this one. The FlameFlower contest winners' writings will be featured in full there. This way, you will be able to point to your pieces easily and show off their URLs.

Kidnapped. Raped. Married. The extraordinary rebellion of Ethiopia's abducted wives

Johann Hari on Ethiopia's forced marriages

Wednesday, 17 March 2010

DES WILLIE

Gender warfare: women outside the offices of Kembatti Mentti Gezzima-Tope, or KMG,which means Kembatta Women Standing Together

• in pictures: Ethiopia's forced marriages