Abstract
Like much white Zimbabwean writing in the aftermath of the land invasions of 2000, Ian Holding’s What Happened to Us concerns itself with the issue of white identity, but does so through its invocation of Zimbabwe’s failed policy of racial reconciliation. In this article, I examine this novel’s meditation on reconciliation and the possibility of attaining a postcolonial condition that breaks with colonial modes of identity predicated on negating forms of racial difference. I trace, in particular, Holding’s use of the confessional mode of writing in his engagement with the idea of reconciliation. Whereas this mode ordinarily focuses on individual guilt, I show that, in Holding’s novel, it expresses the collective shame of whites for their separatism, which is presented as a failure of imagination. Throughout, my focus is Holding’s recalibration of the confessional mode of writing to accommodate a community perspective, and the implications of this reconceptualization for confession’s telos, which is the forgiveness of the individual confessant and, with it, his or her reintegration into community. I argue that the confession of shame, if it is to end with such reintegration or reconciliation, effectively requires the confessant to imagine his or her own death.
Irikidzayi Manase has noted that the post-2000 period in Zimbabwe, which followed the invasion of thousands of white-owned farms by the association of the veterans of the second Chimurenga or war of independence, saw a significant increase in the literary production of white writers (2016: 9). If anything, the farm invasions served as a “prompt” for literary activity, with much of the writing “focusing on the way white Zimbabweans constructed a sense of understanding of self and belonging in the nation” (Manase, 2016: 14, 22–23). So, for instance, the protagonist of Graham Lang’s Place of Birth, which deals with the farm invasions, exists “between identities” and eventually comes to realize how “unAfrican” he is, despite having been “born in Africa” (2006: 5, 149). Similarly, Bobo, in Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, realizes that she is “neither African nor English” (2002: 24). This re-examination of white identity that one finds in white Zimbabwean writing after the year 2000 included an active engagement with the discourses of whiteness, with which white people had constructed themselves as the normatively human (see Tagwirei and de Kock, 2015). Ian Holding’s writing, which evinces a strong concern with racial reconciliation, forms part of this collective, literary endeavour to reimagine white identity. After all, a concern with racial reconciliation cannot but be a concern with identity, which, in the colonial context, is based on the inscription of racial difference.
The emphasis on reconciliation in Holding’s fiction invokes a dramatic shift in the thinking on racial identity of the post-independent Zimbabwean government, led by the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). In 1980, the government had adopted a policy of national reconciliation, which was aimed at resolving the differences and ending the separation between the previously colonized black people and their former white oppressors. Robert Mugabe, for instance, pleaded for “a common interest that knows no race, colour or creed”, while indicating that such reconciliation would require a decolonization of identity: “our new nation requires of every one of us to be a new man, with a new mind, a new heart and a new spirit” — that is, metaphorically to be “born again” (qtd. in Fisher, 2010: 28, 30). By 1996, though, Mugabe declared that whites were “enemies” who should die in a “hail of our bullets” (qtd. in Fisher, 2010: 97). The ZANU-PF government adopted an “indigenisation” policy that sought to empower black Zimbabweans economically and which, as its designation implies, was nativist in orientation (Fisher, 2010: 224).
The policy of reconciliation had failed and, as is implicit in the government’s adoption of indigenization as a programme, the reason for its failure was that it did not encompass economic reform and was consequently unable to deal with the race-based economic inequities of the colonial period. Postcolonial reconciliation, in the absence of economic equity, was always destined to remain simply rhetorical. As Brian Raftopoulos notes, it was nothing but “a formal political hope, […] given the continuing legacy of structural inequality in the sphere of the economy” (2004: xvii). Indigenization and the land reform programme that culminated in the farm invasions of 2000 were a belated response to this “legacy of structural inequality”, which the ZANU-PF-led government had made rather slow progress in addressing in the 1980s. It need hardly be added that these policies consolidated the boundaries between black and white Zimbabweans that reconciliation had endeavoured to overcome.
Nevertheless, the policy of reconciliation also failed because many white Zimbabweans, while still retaining the economic privileges of the colonial period, made little effort to reconcile with their black compatriots. In a letter published in the Zimbabwe Independent in 1998, Tom Holloway suggests that this postcolonial reserve is a continuation of the white separatism of the colonial era: “As Europeans we have been in Africa for plus or minus 250–300 years. But we have persisted in keeping ourselves apart, aloof and separate” (qtd. in Fisher, 2010: 169). What Holloway refers to as aloofness, Robert Muponde terms “spiritual” dissociation (2004: 190–191), and Allison Schute an “etiquette of whiteness”, a “custom of social distance with Blacks” (qtd. in Raftopoulos, 2004: xvi). Such separatism is, of course, merely a symptom of the racialization of identity, which is why Frantz Fanon places the renegotiation of identity at the centre of the decolonization project. It is necessary, he says, to “surgically extract […]” “the colonist inside every one of us” (2004: lvii). For this to happen, though, one would have to imagine one’s own death, and, as Albert Memmi notes, the white settler is unable to do this: “For it is too much to ask one’s imagination to visualize one’s own end, even if it be in order to be reborn another; especially if, like the colonizer, one can hardly evaluate such a rebirth” (2003: 84–85). If viewed in the context of this assertion, the white Zimbabwean community may be said to have suffered a collective failure of imagination in its reluctance to reconcile with black Zimbabweans.
While Holding’s concern with reassessing white identity is part of a trend in white Zimbabwean writing, his meditation on reconciliation, particularly on the possibility of attaining a postcolonial condition that breaks with colonial patterns of identity predicated on negating forms of racial difference, gives his novels a distinctive quality. The same may be said of his self-reflexive implication of his own writing in the issues that it thematizes. Elsewhere, I have shown that the white protagonist of Holding’s Of Beasts and Beings (2010) attempts, through the imagination, to reconcile with his black compatriots, but that the form of reconciliation here involved is dialectical in nature rather than the assimilative process envisaged by Mugabe (Marais, 2019). Thus conceived, reconciliation places the two races in a dialectical relationship, which posits the possibility of overcoming colonial forms of identity premised on race by reconciling blackness and whiteness in a way that terminates both. Importantly, the novel inscribes this dialectic in its very structure by using two narrative strands — that is, a white master narrative and a black slave narrative — which its ending brings together without, however, conclusively synthesizing. The crucial implication, here, is that the post-racial condition that the novel tentatively invokes exceeds its diegesis because it is unimaginable from within a culture whose structures of identification are part of what Timothy Bewes refers to as “an economy of identity and difference” (2011: 188). At best, the text can only gesture toward the possibility of a truly postcolonial relation, which is not containable by it and its modes of representation.
In the present article, I show that Holding’s most recent novel, What Happened to Us (2018) also deals with reconciliation, but does so through its use of the confessional mode of writing and a child narrator. I trace Holding’s management of the confessional mode, paying particular attention to the way in which first-person point of view is used to provide not only an individual but also a community perspective in the novel’s presentation of the guilt of whites for the continued racialization of identity. Rather than being autonomous, individual identity, in this text, is ineluctably relational and intersubjective. I argue that the novel’s emphasis on the situatedness of the individual in community means that it ultimately concerns itself with collective shame as opposed to individual guilt, which is premised on what Kim Worthington 2013: 228) terms the “private interiority” of the confessant, and presupposes the possibility of forgiveness, absolution, and reconciliation (see Brooks, 2000: 2; and Foucault, 1978: 61–62). Throughout, my focus is Holding’s radical renegotiation of the confessional mode to accommodate a community perspective, and how this enables the novel to engage with the idea of reconciliation.
As I proceed, it will become clear that the text’s installation and reworking of the conventions of the confessional mode is highly self-reflexive. Indeed, it is this that distinguishes it from other white Zimbabwean texts that contain elements of this narrative form. In Fuller’s aforementioned memoir, the child focalizer clearly shares the racist values and attitudes of her white community, whereas the adult narrator equally clearly does not. While this disjuncture gives the narrative a confessional aspect, in that it necessarily introduces the issue of guilt, the text is not structured as a confession.
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Like Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, much of What Happened to Us proceeds from the perspective of a child, which in itself raises the question of innocence and guilt, since childhood is conventionally associated with innocence. What the novel’s use of a child focalizer suggests, though, is that innocence is impossible given the individual’s location in a community whose values and attitudes locate him or her. In this regard, it soon becomes clear that the focalizer, Danny Walker, is steeped in his community’s racist values. In fact, the novel’s opening passages, which describe this character playing pranks on a group of black “nannies” (Holding, 2018:13), divorce childhood from innocence. What would seem to pass as mere boyish mischievousness has a clear racial dimension, as is apparent from Danny’s comment that “In the leafy northern suburbs the white kid was king” (Holding, 2018: 15). The child’s unquestioning assumption of racial superiority presupposes not innocence but implication in a community that defines itself in terms of racial difference, or, more specifically, through the discourse of whiteness. Cuthbeth Tagwirei and Leon de Kock’s observation that the “childhood consciousness” of the narrator of Andrea Eames’s The Cry of the Go-Away Bird has been “shaped by a parochial white gaze, deeply rooted in colonial structures, which construes whiteness as civilized, privileged and deservingly superior” (2015: 188) describes equally well the consciousness of the child focalizer of What Happened to Us (and, for that matter, that of the child focalizer of Fuller’s memoir). The reader of this novel becomes increasingly aware that the antecedent of the first-person singular pronoun has a defined communal dimension, that the pronoun “I” conveys not an autonomous perspective, but that of an individual who is irrevocably part of a community that is also part of him. When Danny speaks and acts, the community in which he is located speaks and acts through him.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the description of a school cricket match in which he plays: We knew all this from the field even without hearing a word of it, being Friday afternoon during cricket season. (Holding, 2018: 77; emphasis in original)
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While ostensibly limited to the singular first person, the point of view here is actually third person and plural. The purview of the “I” clearly includes not only the “we” formed by the group of white boys on the field, but also the parents on the sidelines. It follows that the perspective with which the reader is provided is actually that of a community. Along with a number of others in the novel, this passage reveals that the first-person singular pronoun masks the presence of a community perspective.
Holding’s novel’s emphasis on community obviously means that it departs from confession’s reliance on the “private interiority” of the confessant. As I have already intimated, the modern confessant is grounded in a particular understanding of the human subject as a stable, autonomous entity that has access to inner states and outer world. Peter Brooks, for one, argues that this confessant was produced by the heavy emphasis that was placed on individuality in Europe during the modern period owing to, among other matters, the rise of humanism, the secularization of church processes, and capitalism, all of which contributed to the “inward turn” that currently characterizes confession (2000: 5, 111). The modern confessant scrutinizes itself by revisiting the past and telling the truth of its private, former self. 2
By contrast, Danny’s confession, as I have shown, reveals that the self that he scrutinizes is positioned in and by his community’s discourses. Indeed, his narrative performs his implication in these discourses. The corollary is that What Happened to Us, rather than just providing the confession of an individual, is quite self-consciously structured as the confession of a community. As much is implied by the presence of the first-person plural pronoun in its title. The antecedent of this “us” is both the Walker family and the community of which it is part. In fact, then, the narrator’s story is multiple, as emerges when he acknowledges, at the end of the novel, that it intersects with those of others: “
When the narrating “I” turns inward and scrutinizes himself, he thus finds a self that is more public than private, an effect of his community’s discourse of whiteness. To be sure, his confession attests to the normalizing power of whiteness. It provides evidence of the manner in which this discourse serves as a Foucauldian form of self-regulation in which the subject subjects him-or herself to its power and, very importantly, becomes a conduit for its proliferation. This is especially apparent in Danny’s description of the braai or barbeque that his parents host on the evening of the cricket match: [T]here was restored again the sense of comradely unity we all cherished, the inner ties that bound our shrinking community of whites, families coming together, feasting on a fatty braai, a near continuous flow of beer and white wine, loyal lazing dogs, the darkly restful pool beyond us and above a Friday summer night’s distant dotted sprawl over deepest Africa. (84–85)
Far from being innocuous, this account of white life in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s describes exactly the white postcolonial separatism to which Holloway, Muponde and others refer. That is, it describes the failure of the white community to reconcile with its black compatriots after independence in 1980. Crucially, a few pages earlier, the reader is presented with a conversation between Danny and James Sithole, a black boy who is rebuffed for being a “coconut” on trying to join the former’s white circle of friends (38). When James attempts to gain access to their WhatsApp porn group, Danny responds as follows: “I’m not sure. I can ask the others, but they’re pretty strict rules about who belongs. And, you know, it’s kind of exclusive” (74). By the time Danny concludes that James Sithole “just wasn’t one of us” (74), it is clear enough that, in their construction of their friend group, the boys rehearse the race-based differential process through which their parents’ community establishes itself and defines its identity. Indeed, the “us” to which Danny refers is not just his clique of friends but the white community at large. Instead of innocence, the depiction of childhood, here, shows how the child perpetuates the colonial “opposition of identity and difference” in the postcolonial present (Bewes, 2011: 165).
Ultimately, then, the use of a child narrator in this novel questions the very possibility of innocence, which, in turn, raises the question of whether guilt is still guilt when it can no longer define itself against innocence, and when it is endemic in a community, a product of the way in which that community has established itself. And if the notion of guilt has to be reconceived, so too must judgement, absolution, redemption, and reconciliation, on which confession is premised. For J. M. Coetzee, confession, in the absence of grace, is endless (1992). The same may be true of confession in the absence of innocence.
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In attempting to address these questions, it is, of course, first necessary to establish what it is that Danny confesses, and what it is that “happened” to the “us” of the novel’s title. The narrative emanates from his sense that he is somehow responsible for the invasion of his family home and the violation of his sister by a small group of black men. In the scene in which he plays pranks on the black women, he also accidentally urinates on an election poster bearing a portrait of Mugabe. After this, he cycles home and suspects that he is being followed by three men who may have seen him defacing the poster. Since the attack on the Walker home is also carried out by three men, he believes that it may have been a form of retribution for his actions. Whether or not he is right, he, and we, never learn. From this indeterminacy it is evident, however, that Danny’s sense of guilt is not just individual. It is in fact grounded in the tension between the black and white communities, as emerges in his following reflection, before Rebecca is attacked: I wondered whether I had crossed a line this time, breached a tipping point, and if the uneasy begrudging peace we always lived with had now been somehow threatened. […] I was always just aware of this vague, brooding fragility around everything we said and did, the way we lived even. A short but intense feeling of non-specific guilt clouded in on me, just lasting a few seconds, a cold shudder from within. (24)
Danny’s guilt is “non-specific”, which is to say that it is general, and thus transcends the bounds of individual culpability. At some level, it is related to the failure of black and white people to reconcile with each other in the postcolonial period. From this, one may infer that Danny’s confession derives from his sense that both he and his community are somehow complicit in his sister’s assault.
While the novel never directly articulates the exact nature of this complicity, it is nonetheless apparent that the separatism of the economically privileged white community, which is a product of the inscription of racial difference, has enabled it to treat with indifference the black suffering that was produced by the colonial period’s economic inequities, which have continued in the postcolonial period. Very pointedly in this regard, Danny’s attempt to track down his sister’s three attackers eventually takes him from the exclusive suburb of Borrowdale to the high-density township of Highfield, where he finds not the perpetrators of the crime but black penury and destitution. The implication is that Rebecca’s violation is related to white indifference to black suffering. Significantly, the novel ends with the narrating “I” clearly expressing the guilt that he feels for Highfield. The older Danny “visualise[s] a return to Highfield”, feels “compelled to go there and make some unknowable, undefinable gesture” that would enact “some sort of attempt at closure to the whole affair” (228). Most tellingly, he, whose “mind” is haunted by the “decaying legacy of a dead empire”, wants “to somehow reach out, make a connection, lay to rest our bitter entwined pasts”, and “seek atonement” (228, 229). The asymmetry between Borrowdale and Highfield, the novel’s locus of black suffering, forms the context of Rebecca’s assault. Rather than generalizing the specificity of her trauma, the narrator’s reflections relate it to the trauma of colonialism, and the absence of reconciliation between white and black people in the postcolonial present.
Holding’s novel’s preoccupation with the way in which the race-based colonial relation still structures actions in the postcolonial present is also implicit in its allusions to Coetzee’s Disgrace. Like Coetzee’s Lucy, Rebecca is attacked by three black men. And like Coetzee’s Lurie, Danny does not witness the assault. In Disgrace, Lurie tells Lucy that the three men who raped her did so for entirely impersonal reasons, that “It was history speaking through them. […] A history of wrong” (Coetzee, 1999: 156). He is saying that the sexual assault, rather than being directed at her as an individual, is systemic in nature. Her assailants, in attacking her, have been ventriloquized by colonial history. More specifically, their action is determined by the relation of “identity and difference” that has shaped this history, and continues to do so. The rapists, this is to say, do not simply act as autonomous individuals, and neither do they respond to Lucy as an autonomous individual. They rape her because she is a white woman and accordingly complicit in the oppression of black people. In placing Rebecca’s violation in the context of colonial history, Holding’s novel suggests the same. There is nothing personal about the attack. A “history of wrong” speaks through her assailants. To be sure, their sexual attack inscribes the body of the postcolonial white woman with the guilt of this “history of wrong”. The white female body becomes, as it were, a page on which is written not only white privilege but also a discourse of guilt and retribution. Through the interplay of racial and patriarchal power, this body becomes a site of colonial struggle. Rebecca pays with her body for the sins of her white community.
Danny’s confession, which stems from his sense of guilt for his sister’s attack, is an attempt to atone for this “history of wrong”, and the suffering and trauma that it still enables. Hence its odd structure: he confesses to his part in a violation which he was not directly involved in, but in which he nonetheless feels implicated. In this respect, his confession breaks with the conventional form of confession, which the self becomes the object of its own gaze and scrutiny, and comes increasingly to resemble witness testimony. Susannah Radstone explains that in witness testimony, “[t]he witness gives testimony, not about themselves, but about something external to them that they have witnessed and about which they can speak” (2006: 168). Importantly, though, Danny, as I have noted, testifies to a violation that he did not witness. He is not even certain that Rebecca was raped by her assailants. Throughout the novel, his account modulates between confession and testimony. It is both and neither. Although he did not physically participate in the assault, he feels that he was part of it, and hence confesses to his involvement in it. And although he did not witness what happened to his sister, he wishes to identify with her by imagining her “unimaginable violation” (105). As he puts it, “I had already reached a promise with myself to suffer alongside my sister, make right by her, share in her pain” (165).
Danny’s atonement for Rebecca’s violation takes the form of not only confession, but also self-mortification, which involves an attempt at simulating the assault on her by mutilating his own body. He offers the following explanation for this act of imaginative identification: This was the pain I was seeking, a clean pain, at last giving definition to that wrap of numbness, there at the very edge of guilt. I felt I’d acted out of brotherly solidarity, attempting to surrogate the violation on my sister by bearing this intrusion into my own body, somehow brace her from the overpowering force of her tormentors. (170)
Much like Lurie, who, in Coetzee’s Disgrace, must learn “to be the woman” (1999: 160), and so atone for his rape of Melanie Isaacs, Danny must identify with Rebecca, in whose violation he feels complicit. Significantly, Lurie, who is not sure whether he can “be the woman” in the context of a sexual assault, finds that he is able to occupy the position of the rapist (160). Similarly, Danny’s involvement with the WhatsApp porn group associates him with Rebecca’s assailants. Although the scale of his objectification of the female body differs from theirs, his actions nevertheless place him on a continuum with them. At the very least, he is implicated in the patriarchal and racial conditions that have enabled the attack on Rebecca and, with it, the reduction of her body to a locus of white guilt. In part, he is to blame for the burden of guilt that her body has come to bear. Effectively, then, the protagonists of both these novels, in learning “to be the woman”, are learning what it would have been like to have been violated by themselves.
In identifying with Rebecca, however, Danny is also trying to experience what it would be like to suffer as a result of the unequal social and economic conditions that he and his community have assisted in creating. As much is implied by the fact that his wounds are self-inflicted: it is he who administers the “intrusion” into his own body. In other words, he is both victim and perpetrator. On an imaginative level, he suffers under conditions for which he is responsible. The conjunction of individual and communal guilt here at work is foregrounded by his following comment on this exercise in self-mortification: “I had at last actually determined to do something to restore my family’s losses, to act against my guilt, our blame, even if it was all just a vague longshot, a cry in the vast dark” (205).
In this sentence, the first-person singular possessive determiner in “my guilt” is immediately qualified with the plural form in “our blame”, which again indicates that the kind of guilt at issue in the novel is collective rather than just individual, “non-specific” rather than merely specific. In identifying with Rebecca, Danny also identifies with the black victims of colonial oppression and those who experience its “legacy of structural inequality” in the present. He is atoning for the failure of white Zimbabweans to reconcile with their black compatriots, for their inability to restructure their identity in terms of reconciliation rather than racial difference, and for the indifference to black suffering which this has enabled. As Danny’s act of imaginative identification implies, this failure is a failure of white imagination. Through his self-mortification, it follows, he is attempting to surgically extract “the colonist” that is “inside every one of us”. In mortifying himself (and this word derives from the Latin mors, which means death), he is trying to imagine his own death and with it the “opposition of identity and difference” that informs white separatism and which informed the colonial project itself.
Danny’s guilt is thus integrally tied up with his identity, which, in its turn, is inseparable from the separatist white community of Zimbabwe. In fact, this guilt, which questions the autonomy of the individual and defines itself in terms of complicity rather than in opposition to innocence, is actually a form of shame. Shame differs from guilt in that its focus is not just the individual, but the individual as part of a collective. When one feels shame, one is already in a relation with the other, since, as Jean-Paul Sartre notes, this affect is “a unitary apprehension with three dimensions: ‘I am ashamed of myself before the Other’” (2003: 313; emphasis in original). One feels shame when one becomes aware that one is a member of a community whose practices cause suffering, or enable indifference to suffering. This is exactly what Danny’s confession testifies to. It is ultimately inspired by shame. In being ashamed of his community, he is ashamed of himself because he is embedded in it and its discourses mediate his interactions with others. According to Ruth Leys, “guilt concerns your actions, or what you do”, whereas “shame concerns the self, or who you are” (2007: 130; emphasis in original). Perhaps, though, it would be truer to say that shame concerns “who you are” and how this affects your actions, “what you do”. At least, this seems to be the case in Holding’s novel: Danny is ashamed of what he is, of what his community has made him be, and of how this has shaped what he has done and, indeed, seeks still to shape what he does. It is for this reason that his guilt is “non-specific” and, finally, indeterminate. Being related to identity rather than action alone, shame, unlike guilt, is necessarily “non-specific”. It cannot just be quantified, constatively described, and then purged.
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It follows from its emphasis on the communal nature of the individual’s identity, that the confession of shame is qualitatively different to the confession of guilt. When the modern confessional subject, in confessing guilt, turns inward and tells the truth about himself or herself, she or he knows that his or her confession will culminate in forgiveness and absolution. Because it occurs in an economy of exchange, the confession of guilt has a very clear telos. In exchange for telling the truth about himself or herself, the confessant is forgiven and, accordingly, undergoes a transformation of self which brings an end to his or her self-scrutiny. By contrast, the confession of shame is not open to this kind of closure because shame is a function of the impossibility of innocence and so of the endemic nature of guilt in community. Moreover, closure would require absolution, which, in the case of shame, would mean being absolved of that which one is, or being redeemed of oneself, which is, of course, impossible. Importantly, in this regard, the ending of Holding’s novel presents an image of the narrator writing what the reader has just read. The confession, it now becomes clear, is made in the Walker family home in Borrowdale. Despite his confession, the older Danny is therefore still located in the context and community that have shaped him. There is little evidence of a transcendence of self here, which is not to say that the narrating “I” feels no shame. To be sure, this lack of evidence of a transformation of sorts is itself evidence of his shame. While shame signals the self’s estrangement from itself, that estrangement is an estrangement from what it nevertheless still is, from its very being. It is for this reason that one does not encounter much in the way of ironic distance between Danny the narrating “I” and Danny the experiencing “I” in the novel, even though the former is clearly ashamed of his actions in the past. The narrating “I” is not just ashamed of his former self’s actions: he is ashamed of his self.
Consequently, a confession of shame cannot conclude the self’s scrutiny of itself. The reality of the individual’s situatedness in a community premised on racial difference, and hence its implication in the discourses enabled and endorsed by this differentiation, requires it ceaselessly to scrutinize itself and how what it is affects what it does. As much is implied by Danny’s previously cited reference to the “decaying legacy of a dead empire” that “haunts” his “mind” (228). The spectre of the colonial past — with its textures of understanding and modes of identification — constantly attempts to infiltrate the present by mediating his perceptions and actions. To use his words, this legacy “ghosts” his mind, attempts to perpetuate itself by “driv[ing]” his “actions” in the present (228), despite the fact that he strives to act against it and, by extension, himself. He does exactly this when he entertains the possibility that his desire to engage in some gesture of reconciliation by returning to Highfield may simply be a “dreadful conceit”, which is to say shameful (228). Given that his confession is a similar gesture — an attempt to “reach out, make a connection” — the further suggestion, here, is that it is itself implicated in the colonial legacy. In this regard, it is again significant that it emanates from the family home in the affluent suburb of Borrowdale. Rather than bringing closure, the confession may itself form part of the shame that it confesses. Should this be the case, it could hardly culminate in an end to shame.
If Danny’s self-scrutiny is interminable, so too is his confession. It is always yet to be concluded. In fact, its incompletion is foregrounded by the absence from the text of its central event: that is, Rebecca’s traumatic experience. Everything in the novel is structured around this event, which is, however, never described, or only described as being indescribable, as, for instance, in Danny’s aforementioned reference to it as an “unimaginable violation”, and his later observation that “what happened to Becca was never going to be spoken about, given a name, or brought into the light of day” (105, 168). Like the wounds that he inflicts upon himself, his confession is an attempt to present this trauma, to render it visible in “the light of day”. And like the scars which his wounds leave behind, his confession is displaced from its origin. It is merely a trace of an absent origin. So, while Danny resolves to imagine Rebecca’s violation, he never actually does so in his confession, which accordingly requires supplementation. He has to tell the truth of “what happened” to her, which is also the truth of himself and his community, the “us” of the novel’s title. Yet this truth cannot be told because it cannot be “given a name” and thereby made present. Radstone’s assessment of witness testimony holds true for Danny’s confession: it bears witness to an “unrepresentable” trauma (2018: 176). It is a trace of that which exceeds it and which thereby renders it belated and incomplete.
The incompletion of Danny’s confession constructs for the reader a role that is very different to the one found in conventional confession narratives, which usually position him or her as confessor — an agency that judges, punishes, absolves, reconciles, and whose presence therefore suggests that it may be possible to end the confession. By contrast, Holding’s novel blurs the opposition between confessor and confessant by requiring the reader to imagine the event that Danny has failed to imagine. Like Danny, who attempts “to read” his scars as though he “were a blind man reading braille” (226), the reader tries to read the trauma that the novel fails to describe and from which it is displaced. That is, she or he attempts to supplement Danny’s incomplete confession, which means reading more than she or he encounters in the text itself. In the process, she or he engages in an imaginative attempt to complete his confession. Rather than occupying a detached position of authority from which it is possible to judge, forgive, and absolve, the reader is aligned with Danny and his attempt to imagine the unimaginable. She or he participates in his confession, and, in trying to supplement it, his or her reading of the novel becomes part of it. It is itself a confession.
In positioning its reader as a confessant, the novel therefore incriminates him or her in the shameful condition it tries to describe. Like Danny, the implied reader is in need of absolution and forgiveness, and hence must confess and atone. The end of confession, as I have indicated, is reconciliation, the reintegration of the confessant into community. In What Happened to Us, however, the community into which the reader must seek entry is yet to come. If the “closure to the whole affair” for which Danny yearns is to be found it would have to come from a reconciled and so post-racial community. To be sure, it would have to be provided by the judgement of a confessor who is part of such a community and whose identity would thus not be defined by racial difference. It follows that the reader’s reading, in order to supplement and conclude Danny’s confession, must modulate into an attempt at instantiating this futural community in which black and white people are reconciled. Reading, this is to say, must become, like Danny’s imagined visit to Highfield, a way of “reach[ing] out, mak[ing] a connection”. In aligning reading with confession and atonement, the novel effectively tasks the reader with the responsibility of attaining a post-racial condition. Through atonement, she or he must achieve what this word once signified: at-onement, “the condition of being at one (with others)” (Online Etymological Dictionary, 2001–2018). It follows that the novel not only implies a reader who is implicated in the “history of wrong” with which it engages, but also projects one from whom every trace of the colonial relation has been purged. In other words, the text imagines the death of its implied reader.
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Significantly, then, confession, as conceived of in this novel, is not directed at a confessor and at a community that presently exist. It is directed at what has yet to come into being. By extension, the expectation of reciprocity that ordinarily informs confession is rendered indeterminate, in fact deferred, because the kind of confession that is here at stake does not perforce occur in an economy of exchange. And, in deferring it, the novel tacitly acknowledges the shamefulness of this expectation of forgiveness. As Elizabeth Povinelli points out, the confession of shame, in the context of a history of wrong, “allows the liberal subject to feel herself or himself to have been unintentionally causing wrong and to be constantly moving to rectify that wrong” (2002: 162). In Holding’s novel, the confessant is permitted no such consolation because confession is ultimately structured as a gift for which the giver cannot necessarily expect a counter-gift and for which the receiver is not necessarily obliged to reciprocate.
Arguing against Marcel Mauss (1990), who claims that it inevitably forms part of an exchange economy, Jacques Derrida states that a gift “must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure” (1992: 7). If a gift is truly to be a gift, there can be “no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt” (Derrida, 1992: 12). In What Happened to Us, confession is ambivalently placed between these two extremes. Since it is directed at a confessor and community that have yet to come into being, exchange and reciprocity, and hence the expectation of forgiveness, are deferred — perhaps endlessly so. Confession, thus understood, is a potentially interminable form of waiting for what may or may not arrive. And due to the deferral of reciprocity, and with it the expectation of forgiveness, confession also constantly threatens to become a movement without return from the self to an other, who is not present, but may possibly become present in the future. In her insightful reading of confession in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Worthington shows that the “impossible possibility of forgiveness” is kept “alive” only by an “unwritten” other (2013: 166). In Holding’s novel, the confessor is such an unwritten other. Forgiveness, if it were to come, would proceed from the ambivalent position of a confessor who is not yet present and so not yet presentable or writable. To confess, in such a scenario, is to wait for a confessor whom the confessant cannot presume to know with any kind of certitude, and from whom she or he can therefore expect very little, perhaps nothing. Expectation, after all, is simply a form of advance knowledge.
Of course, the irony is that, if forgiveness were to come, reconciliation would already have been achieved and, by extension, the self that confesses would no longer exist. She or he, along with the community that structures itself in terms of racial difference, would — in fact could — no longer be. Accordingly, the confessing self would not be able to receive the gift of forgiveness that had been offered. In confessing, atoning, seeking reconciliation, she or he would all along have been imagining his or her own death. His or her confession would have become a gift of self, without hope of return, to the other. It would have become a sacrifice of self, a gift of death.
