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Review: Dare We Hope? Facing Our Past to Find a New Future by by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

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Dare We HopePumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s collection of articles published between 1995 and 2014 offers a fascinating glimpse into the main issues plaguing contemporary South Africa. A professor in psychology, Gobodo-Madikizela was deeply involved in the proceedings of the TRC and wrote the award-winning A Human Being Died that Night, one of the most relevant and haunting books of recent years. It tells the story of her interaction with Eugene de Kock, the apartheid assassin known as Prime Evil.

Gobodo-Madikizela is a leading authority in research on trauma, memory and forgiveness. Many articles in Dare We Hope? focus on remembrance and reconciliation as relating to race, gender and power. Gobodo-Madikizela puts her finger on the insidious everyday ways we work against a common future by “attacking one another…in private and in public”.

Having recognised the seeds of discontent being sown and germinating in our society, Gobodo-Madikizela warns against the next revolution, “one in which the masses rise against a new breed of beneficiaries of privilege.” The “never-ending cycle of nothingness” that is poverty and lack of aspiration “strips away the humanity of individuals.” Unless we can create opportunities for people to lead meaningful lives, we will have no future as a society.

A large section of the book is devoted to dilemmas of leadership and morality. It is an incisive analysis of the “terrible shame”, the “moral rot” of the Zuma years and the terrifying legacy they are threatening to leave behind: “From the beginning, Zuma’s presidency was destined to corrupt the soul of the country.”

Gobodo-Madikizela identifies what is “missing in our democracy”: “a spirit of human solidarity that transcends the commitment to membership of one’s racial group or political party.” Her plea is for a shared humanity, for the understanding and acceptance of our diverse grievances, traumas and complicities, and, crucially, for the triumph of moral responsibility.

The articles in this book repeatedly call for dialogue: “Listening to one another and acknowledging the experience of loss on both sides would be a start.” It is a call for the employment of that wonderful faculty we all have in common: our imagination. It is also a call for moving beyond denial and revenge into a space where guilt can be articulated and forgiveness becomes a lived reality.

Dare We Hope? is an extremely sobering read. Gobodo-Madikizela is under no illusion that what she is narrating is anything but “a gruesome tale”. However, her voice is one of wisdom and, despite all, deep-seeded hope. To ignore her insights and not to heed her warnings could prove detrimental not only to individuals but to society at large. This collection is a much needed reminder that South Africa is in a dire need of more dissenting voices and, even more importantly, true leaders who can lead by example. Gobodo-Madikizela’s vision is a vital contribution in both respects.

Dare we hope? Perhaps. One thing is for certain; a lot of work needs to be done to rekindle the spark of an earlier promise.

Dare We Hope? Facing Our Past to Find a New Future
by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Tafelberg, 2014

Review: Divided Lives – Dreams of a Mother and Daughter by Lyndall Gordon

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Divided LivesOn 26 November 2012, Time published this tiny obituary: “DIED Valerie Eliot, 86, who married TS Eliot in the last years of the great poet’s life; she edited an edition of his epic The Waste Land that included annotations by Ezra Pound.” Not even three dozen words to sum up the life of a woman who was infinitely more than just an editor of her famous husband’s most famous work. When they married towards the end of his life, “Eliot at last found himself ready for forgiveness. Horror, gloom, and penitence came to an end with his discovery of the unconditional love of a young woman,” writes Lyndall Gordon in TS Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1998).

In her biography of Eliot, Gordon retraces the poet’s insatiable search for perfection and his troubled relationships with the women who accompanied him on his quest: “His passion for immortality was so commanding that it allowed him to reject each of these women with a firmness that shattered their lives.” The exception was his second wife, Valerie, who despite being his junior by nearly four decades was the one who bestowed grace upon the final years of his life. Gordon’s biography emphasises the profound change Valerie’s love brought to Eliot in the light of all his previous precarious commitments.

In her biography Henry James: His Women and His Art (1998, revised edition 2012), Gordon sums up the distinguished writer’s ability to explore “the inward life: the unvoiced exchange and the drama of hidden motives … his skills, as well as a power, beyond that of any other man, to plumb the unknown potentialities of women”. James never openly acknowledged the influence such strong, independent women as the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson had on his writing life and his heroines, but it was immeasurable, as Gordon’s biography shows. While in Venice last year, I was reminded of a striking scene she describes in the book: Henry James helplessly trying to drown Fenimore’s black dresses in one of the lagoons a few weeks after her death. Like balloons the dresses kept surfacing…

Continue reading: Review of Divided Lives: Dreams of a Mother and Daughter by Lyndall Gordon

Published by Virago Press, 2014