Abstract
This dissertation examines tropes of unspeakability in the narration and representation of trauma in three post-apartheid novels: Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995), Niq Mhlogo’s Way Back Home (2013), and Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust (2000). In particular, I argue that the trope of unspeakability in these three novels shows how the trauma of black characters both intentionally and unintentionally resists representation and, thus, renders said trauma incommunicable. When discussing black characters in the three novels, I refer to characters representing a racialized identity in South Africa’s past and present context. Therefore, I use frameworks of trauma, anti-blackness, liminality, power, and hegemony to show how they all substantiate the nuances I make about the unspeakabilities of the trauma of black characters. In Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995), I focus on the positionality of blackness and the aporetic structure of the novel and how it reveals unspeakable tropes associated with Toloki, Noria, Noria’s two sons Vutha and Vutha the second. Then I follow with Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013), in which I focus on how liminal spaces obscure Kimathi’s trauma, thereby making it unrepresentable. The last novel, Red Dust (2000) by Gillian Slovo, is read in conjunction with notions of power and hegemony. I look at how Alex Mpondo’s trauma is mystified by positions of power and hegemonic structures that favour Alex’s torturer, Dirk Hendricks, a white man, which ultimately demonstrates the invalidity of Alex’s trauma. Significantly, I explore each novel’s conclusions to prove that the trope of unspeakability works differently. Nevertheless, effectively, my research shows how the trauma of black characters is invalidated, emphasizing strongly how the invalidation of trauma is perpetually reproduced by structures of anti-blackness.
Key Concepts: Unspeakability, Trauma, Blackness, Anti-blackness, Post-apartheid literature