Pain, Resilience, and the Agency Memoir The Year in South Africa

A notable trend in the life narratives in South Africa this year is the individual authors' determination to create a new normal when their will to live seems to be shattered. The three texts of witness—Vanessa Govender's Beaten but not Broken, Helena Kriel's The Year of Facing Fire, and Ilana Gerschlowitz's Saving My Sons—exemplify a range of "survival tools" on how to survive the harsh realities that life sometimes throws on our path. The texts inscribe pain, anxiety, loneliness, coping with illness, and near-death experiences. More crucially, they are testimonies of survival and resilience, of images and scattered memories, and of things that become normalized in our societies when they shouldn't be.

A thread that binds the three memoirs together is agency. Govender's, Kriel's, and Gerschlowitz's visions fundamentally originate in human agency. In the philosophical sense, the utopias produced in the three texts are the product of human resoluteness, extended to the limits of choice. There's that freedom and capacity in all of us to make choices, take action, and have control over our lives, regardless of what others might think of our actions. As Clare Bradford et al. also remind us, if people want to act on something, if they want to have agency, they should be able to answer for their actions. More importantly, they should be responsible (Bradford et al. 33). Vanessa Govender acknowledges in this regard that as human beings we have the choice to go on, or the choice to languish. We have the choice "to choose differently, make a change, accept what you've been given and change what you've been given. The choice to give up and the choice to rise above" (167). Choice, in this sense, becomes power or authority.

Beaten but not Broken is Vanessa Govender's heart-wrenching tale of life in a toxic relationship. Govender, an award-winning former television-news journalist, admits that her relationship of "five years and seven months" (29) with an unnamed boyfriend was not built on love but on use of brute force, as the boyfriend "left scars and bruises" (18) on her body each time they had an argument, or when he felt like punching her. "Violence and making up afterwards was all very much part of our crazy relationship" (28), she confesses. Govender writes that she sincerely believed in her boyfriend's potential and his promise to do and be better and treat her right (63), even when she knew that his love for her was "full of sound and fury—but […] signifying nothing" (101). She accepts that as a journalist she "greedily gathered the affection and adoration of strangers, men and women and children" (24) without letting them into her private life; and that "getting slapped around and being constantly berated became the new norm in our relationship" (62). She further admits to lying about the source of her bruises to the outside world: "A little make-up or clever story, and no one really bothered to delve deeper or question what they were seeing and being told" (18). Govender candidly says that she used to tell these lies not to protect her abuser, but herself. She even thought that this is what most women who are in abusive relationships do:

we lie to protect ourselves. No one must know who we really are. That beneath the smiles and laughs we carefully and calculatingly display, to charm those around us and make them ignore their niggling feeling that something isn't quite right, beneath all of that is just a frightened, defeated, barely existing, pathetic little victim. Like our abusers, we are also masters of deception. We can fool you into thinking we're loved, in love and content. From the very first time we are struck, we just know how to deceive.

(19–20)

The purpose of creating these lies is not hard to figure out for someone of Govender's social standing: she wanted "to portray the image of a strong woman" (24), because as a journalist, she was "the voice of the masses, highlighting their pain and trauma, telling their stories, which would inevitably lead to some kind of action being taken, someone coming to the rescue" (78). Yet when it came to standing up to her tormentor, she was so powerless: "I didn't know how to speak my truth or get help for myself. I simply had no clue how to save myself" (78). And so, she confesses, "for more than 2000 days, I wore my humiliation like a second skin and carried my dark secret, a permanent piece of baggage, heavy and laden with deceit; a piece of baggage that I could never put down" (22). Govender writes frankly that in all the years she was in the relationship with her boyfriend, she never, not once ever, saw remorse or sorrow in his eyes (17).

In penning her memoir, Govender is aware of the backlash she might receive from society, especially from her Indian community. She thinks "it's quite a pickle, being an Indian woman who's been abused, plus someone in the public eye" (57) to open up the way she does. She also knows that by telling her story, she is "breaking the unspoken laws that govern many Indian families," where women "are not supposed to talk about things like this" (56). Yet, she still goes ahead to get her story off her chest. She is emphatic that this is her story; that she wants to heal from her physical and emotional wounds: "I can't reach peace if I don't break my silence […]. I don't want to keep this secret anymore. I don't want to keep this secret anymore […]. It has weighed me down. And every second […] that I have kept it inside me, it has made me complicit in the lies and the abuse. I can't do it anymore" (56). The repetition of the phrase "I don't want to keep this secret anymore" could be interpreted as Govender's way of seeking closure for her abusive past. For her, this closure comes through writing. As she says: "in remembering and writing, I am finally acknowledging what was done to me and what I allowed to happen to me. In doing this I mend myself" (56). Govender's choice to tell her story makes it clear that her past suffering outweighs her concerns about judgment from her Indian community.

Govender's memoir is also about carrying on after going through a bad patch in life. When one has lived through a rough patch, she writes, one finally learns "to love and carry on, because that's what the world forces you to do. It goes on like nothing's happened, even though everything has happened to you" (150). For Govender, however, carrying on after the break-up is not easy. The impact of the abusive relationship she was in is so severe that she suffers from what psychologists call post-traumatic stress disorder: "I lived between the high of my job, the seduction of fame, and the almighty downs of being the one who, despite having walked away, was the one who was left behind" (135). Govender even thinks that this could be the reason why "so many women end up back in the arms of their abusers [because] you are plagued by the thoughts of the terribleness of being alone" (135). Although the bulk of the memoir focuses on Govender's disturbing journey with her deejay boyfriend, the author does come out of the woods. She finally finds true love and becomes a mother of three by the end of the book.

Helena Kriel's The Year of Facing Fire provides another way of thinking through the sufferer's agency. Set in the mid-1990s, the memoir tries to create a new normal for a family that lives through secrecy, pain, and loss. In the narrative present of the text, two family members are diagnosed with chronic illnesses. Evan, Kriel's thirtyyear-old gay brother, is diagnosed with HIV/AIDS at the age of nineteen, while their father is diagnosed with lung cancer the same week the family learns of Evan's terminal condition (16). Their father succumbs to cancer two years later, while Evan becomes paralyzed soon afterwards. He then goes blind, before he finally sinks into the dementia that precedes his own death.

Since Evan survives for ten more years after his diagnosis, the memoir revolves largely around him. Indeed, much of the book focuses on the slow process of Evan's death from HIV/AIDS. During the ten-year death-watch, the reader sees the family beside themselves with panic and stress while Evan's condition deteriorates. His condition seems to unite his surviving family members, who literally do everything in their power to make Evan live longer. Kriel aptly sums up her brother's life (and the family's response to it) in the following terms: "we had shingles, which gave us paralyses and incontinence, then we had CMV [i.e., cytomegalovirus], which caused retinitis and blindness, and now we have dementia complex, as brought about by the microscopic virus" (191). The "we" as used in this passage encircles the family members in that death-knell as we see them squabble, fight and make up, all the while battling to keep Evan alive.

It is Evan who counsels his family members that his diagnosis should be seen as "a time for potency and must not be the end of one's output but the beginning" (124). This is his way of calling on his loved ones not to give up on their dreams and aspirations on his account. Later, as everyone helplessly watches his emaciated frame, he is able to dish out a few words of wisdom to them. He is aware that there is "so much difficulty in being alive" (213), yet he still entreats them to "appreciate the beauty of the world and all the details of the world" (211). He further counsels them that if they understand the goodness of the world, they will always rejoice (212). Evan thinks, quite rightly, that sadness causes so much damage to human beings since "it makes the heart weak, then hard" (212). These words have the power of creating agential beings in his family.

Kriel's memoir also captures the power of illness to turn people into desperate characters. She writes that in fighting to make Evan live, she and other family members decide to seek the services of Vadim, a healer who "guarantees" that "after enough healings, Evan will revert to HIV negative" (51). Kriel also speaks of how her sister, Lexi, would be seen sitting "with her hands on Evan for hours every day trying to heal him" (154). Kriel knows the futility of the exercise, and that under normal circumstances what her sister is doing would have drawn ridicule: "A year ago," Kriel writes, "I would have found all this preposterous. But what are we supposed to do? Just sit here? So my mother and I encourage her efforts; we're looking for a miracle here, what else do we have?" (154; original emphasis). Such desperate measures must be understood in the context of a family in the depth of despair.

Finally, The Year of Facing Fire brings into focus how the dynamics of the gaze are implicated in the relationship between patient and doctor, about the forces that dictate what the doctor sees and does not see when he looks at a patient. According to Michel Foucault, "the strange character of the medical gaze […] is directed upon that which is visible […] on the basis of the patient, who hides this visible element even as he shows it" (9). The point Foucault makes here is that the medical gaze sees its logical extension in the absolute obliteration of the person suffering from the disease, to the extent that the terminally ill person may feel that he is being objectified. This dehumanizing treatment is reflected in Kriel's account of a certain Doctor Molik's wheeling Evan off "to show his students" (151) what he is suffering from, soon after he is diagnosed with cytomegalovirus. Her mother's reaction to the doctor's lack of humanity is telling. She is of the view that Doctor Molik is showing Evan off "like a prize exhibit," especially since half an hour later he "wheels Evan back into the waiting room" and unemotionally deposits him with his family (152).

Molik's behavior elicits a tirade from the mother, who feels that the doctor's actions are "a disgrace to the medical profession" (152). She thinks that the doctor should have been humane: "You tell me in front of my son […] without any compassion for him, without even offering me a seat? You have no right to be a doctor […]. You have no sympathy, no kindness, no ability to speak to patients" (152). Kriel's mother rightly expects the doctor to humanize her son, which would affirm the family's struggle to sustain Evan's life. Needless to say, the rant from Kriel's mother must be understood as her way of saying that Molik does not grant her son this opportunity to survive the illness. For her, the idea of not abandoning Evan becomes a means of sustaining life in the face of death, of reversing the process of the disease so that her son can be well again.

Chronic illness is also the subject of Ilana Gerschlowitz's Saving My Sons, a text of witness about a mother who is determined to access treatment for the illness that had stolen her child, David, after he was diagnosed with autism (14). When Ilana, the mother, is told that her son "will never speak, go to school, be toilet-trained, have friends, get married, or hold down a job" because of his condition (11) she blocks out all feelings of panic and starts to make phone calls (14) to as many specialist doctors as possible, both in South Africa and overseas. Her aim is to save David from the illness. In the assessment of Gerschlowitz, autism can be frightening, confusing and immobilising, particularly to "those who can't afford or don't receive the necessary support from professionals or family" (13). The situation is much grimmer for those who do not have the resources to ensure that their loved ones get necessary treatment. Gerschlowitz reports that at the time David was diagnosed with autism, there was no known place in South Africa where children with the disorder could be treated. She thus decided to seek help from overseas, especially from experts in the US. She writes: "Throughout our journey, we managed to find a way to access people at the top of their organisations. We didn't speak to assistants, and instead made sure to speak directly to the top person" (91–92). Gerschlowitz identifies early intervention as crucial to ensuring the well-being of autistic children. She highlights how her third son, Aaron, "is the proof that early intervention sets the stage for full recovery" from autism (303).

Gerschlowitz counsels that "parenting children with autism is a very different kind of parenting. It demands constant emotional fitness, endurance and superhuman strength" (236). She identifies the problems she encountered when she went out looking for a school for David, as one of the nerve-shredding experiences that befall parents with autistic children. Each time she visited various special needs schools in South Africa, she would come back home in tears after noticing the "care facilities lacking expertise, funding, equipment and staff." What was more horrifying to her is that she would find autistic children being "grouped together with physically disabled children—with neither group's needs being met" (100). To mitigate the challenge of education for autistic children in South Africa, she founded the Little Stars school in Highlands North, Johannesburg. She also embarked on intensive research on autism through conference presentations and inviting international experts to give talks on the subject. She writes: "I was determined to bring South Africa up to speed with the latest developments in autism treatment […]. If I could help other children get better, that might be the answer to helping David get better. I had nothing to lose" (109).

Over the years the Gerschlowitz family has coped with David's propensity to self-harm and his violent outbursts of uncontrollable rage. Gerschlowitz describes their son's seizures as "a never-ending nightmare" (194) for her family. She admits that she and her husband "were only really at peace when David was asleep" (179). She tells of waking up to her son's screams and the sound of him hitting his head against his bedroom wall in the morning (179), which is deeply etched on her mind. She further writes of feeling "robbed of all the normal things parents experience when raising a child" (179). What is perhaps more taxing for her is that her family constantly worries about her son's illness. She discloses that conversations in her kitchen often "revolved around solutions to David's anger instead of soccer or cricket matches or the normal things parents raising a typical child are privileged to discuss. Our pain and anger were deep and mostly we just tried to survive. It felt like there would be no end to the torture we were exposed to every day" (179). While the family's reaction to David's disorder could been seen as a reflection of someone who has reached his or her breaking point, in many ways Saving My Sons advances a tenacious spirit, one that allows us to appreciate that fortitude is all we need to carry on when everything around us is falling apart. This resilience owes in part to the specific forms of willpower, desire, reason, and practice that agency seeks to cultivate in human beings. It is not surprising, therefore, that Saving Our Souls stands out as a text that teaches us the value of not giving up on ourselves and the people we claim to love.

Throughout the three texts, the authors show how difficult it is to figure out how to respond appropriately to a painful, life-shattering situation. The difference between getting trapped and getting out of a situation is in how one responds. The protagonists in these texts not only make concerted efforts to change the situations they find themselves in, they also take responsibility for their actions.