The Secularization of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Mike Nicol's The Ibis Tapestry

In this article we read Mike Nicol's The Ibis Tapestry (1998) as an intertextual novel that brings a postmodern inflection to its interrogation of the principles and practices of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Using the distant mirror of the life, work, and death of Christopher Marlowe, the novel unravels aspects of the ethical ideology and epistemological framing of the Commission in a way that, we argue, amounts to its secularization. This does not mean that Nicol presents a conservative subversion of attempts to accomplish postapartheid nation building. Rather, his novel is one of those literary works that deepens, extends, complicates, and intensifies the work of the TRC by casting doubt on its ecclesiastical framing and its foundational teleology. Further, this article is an attempt to redress the degree to which The Ibis Tapestry has been ignored in the study of South African literature. We argue that its unsettling dynamic needs to be considered if we are to do justice to the literary imprint of the Commission.