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Sample Essay:
Ingrid de Kok as Author-Writer of the Non-Language of Trauma: An Investigation of Selected
Poems from Terrestrial Things
Writing is the record keeping of the masses. From personal diaries to institutionalized
literary theory, all writing has blazed a trail of the human desire for meaning in life. We are
uncomfortable with ambiguity, fragmentation and the visible holes in unsustainable solutions to
life crises. We need to be able to satisfactorily explain the human capacity for love and hatred
as well as kindness and violence. Moreover, we crave the ability to verbalize these binaries
in a flawless and concise printed language. We have established the power of language, of
words, and of sounds—of elevated and educated language; of the masculinized, colonized or
re-appropriated language. We have equated understanding with the ability to express the self
in words that are accessible by the audience. In so far as we construct the binaries of love and
hatred, black and white or night and day as opposites with which we can define ourselves, our
language—and our literature—fails us in the liminal spaces between and around these pairs.
Ambiguity resides in these spaces. It is where the word and the image no longer correlate. The
particular example of this discrepancy between the experience of the body and the accuracy of its
description in words is the narration of trauma.
In Barthes’ essay, “Authors and Writers”, language is a power owned and used, up until
the 19th century, by authors. He distinguishes this group of people from a second group which
develops into the 20th century, that he calls writers: “a new custodian of the public language”
(Howard 143-144). For Barthes, the author and the writer share the commonality of language but
do not use it in the same way, and, furthermore, perform different functions within society.
The author is the man who labours under “two kinds of norms: the technical
(composition, genre, style) and artisanal (patience, corrections, perfection)” (Howard 144). The
author encloses himself in the “how to write” to discover the question, “why the world? What
is the meaning of things?” (Howard 145). Here, the unreality of literature is exactly what allows
the author to question the world; however, here is where his use of language differs from that of
the writer: whereas the author “loses all claim to truth” because language “neutralize[s] the true
and the false”, the writer “performs no essential technical action upon language” and “considers
that his work resolves an ambiguity” (Howard 145, 147). The author is aware of the ambiguity
that he creates while language for the writer functions as “an instrument of communication, a
vehicle of ‘thought’” (Howard 147). The writer performs an activity as opposed to a function.
His responsibility is to “say at once and on every occasion what he thinks” while the author’s is
to “support literature as a failed commitment” (Howard 147-148).
The author and the writer, however, do not exist as a binary. Barthes does distinguish
the two based on their different interactions with language as a power to construct reality, but he
also melds them together as part of a third category of the author-writer—in so far as the author
sometimes has “the impulses, the impatience of the writers” and the writer can sometimes “gain
access to the theater of language” (Howard 149). The author-writer is one that he describes as
someone who “provokes and exorcises at the same time; formally, his language is free […]
and yet, enclosed in this very freedom, it secretes its own rules in the form of a common style”
(Howard 149).
This author-writer position is what Barthes labels as the position of the
Intelligentsia: “the intellectual’s style functions as the paradoxical sign of a non-language, it
permits society to experience the dream of a communication without system” (Howard 149).
It is from this author-writer position that I purpose to look at the possibility of the narration of
trauma. Specifically, the literature of the post-apartheid era is of interest since it coincides with
the advent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose goal was to grant amnesty based
on the excavation and revelation of the truth about the war crimes committed from the 50s to the
90s in South Africa. The literary projects that emerged post-apartheid do not aim to resolve this
history but revisit it in order to rewrite these stories, if possible, into the narrative of the present
(de Kok 5). These stories resist the compilation and transcription of a conclusive ‘truth’ about the
crimes of the apartheid. Born in the gold mining town of Stilfontein in 1951, Ingrid de Kok has
become a known voice in contemporary South African English poetry. Her third collection of
poems, Terrestrial Things, presents the difficulties of wrestling with the power of language as it
pertains to voicing, transcribing and writing trauma. Divided into five parts, the second part, “A
Room Full of Questions”, directly addresses the powerlessness of the language of trauma
while presenting its communication through the non-language of the fragmented body. For the
purposes of this paper, three of these poems will be examined: “Tongue-tied”, “The transcriber
speaks” and “The sound engineer”.
To begin, the poem, “Tongue-tied” opens with the standard swearing in of a witness
in court before the given testimony: “Do you promise to tell the truth, /the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth?” (1-2). The question is not followed by a yes or no answer, but rather an
ambiguous third-party observation of the witness’ inability to voice the truth: “Someone has
been hurt. / But she can’t speak. / They say she’s tongue-tied” (3-5). Here, we have the image
of the powerlessness of language failing in the responsibility of voicing truth. It is established
that physical harm has come to someone and this action must be voiced as having happened,
but the witness, herself, is physically handicapped from speaking as described by the image of
being “tongue-tied”.
When the witness in the poem does speak, it is still initially through the de Kok as
author: “Now she’s speaking underwater, / to herself, to drowning, / to her son, her lost
daughter” (10-12). A small step in the process of voicing the truth has been made here, but
still through a filter—through the author. Furthermore, what she is saying is still inaudible—
still ambiguous—because she is not addressing the court but rather herself and her children. As
well, we have the muffled sound of her voice speaking underwater, which functions as another
reference to a physical inhibition—we cannot speak underwater without drowning, without
forever silencing ourselves.
In the second last stanza, the witness speaks in first person, saying “‘They came for
the children, took, then me, / and then, then afterwards / the bucket bled. My ears went still. /
I’m older than my mother when…” (16-19). Here we finally get the voicing of the truth, of the
firsthand account of a witness but it remains fragmented and ambiguous to detail. The witness
concludes, “That’s the truth. So help. Whole. To tell” (21). To the witness, she has voiced
the truth and told what she has never before communicated through language. As the authorwriter, de Kok presents the fragments as they are to demonstrate their inaccuracy and their gross
inability to account for the trauma experienced by the witness.
The descriptions of the witness’ testimony as a “[v]oice in a bottle” as she sounds as if
speaking underwater functions on two levels: first, her production of sound and language reflects
that of an atmosphere (water) completely mismatched to the one is actually participating in, the
courtroom; and second, this mismatching is reflected in the disconnect between the images she
is attempting to describe and the fragments of words she uses. There is also another difficulty
in the fluidity of pronouns used in reference to the witness. As described by Shane Graham in
his article, “The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa” a common
characteristic of traumatic testimony includes the fluidity of pronouns where the victim lacks
agency in telling his story and, therefore, must step outside himself in order to narrate the events
(18). In “Tongue-tied”, the witness is first addressed as “you” by the court, then as “she” by de
Kok and finally appropriates the pronoun “I” at the end of the poem. The question of agency in
the project of the author-writer as the bearer of a non-language is an interesting one when de Kok
is the one privileged with the ability to publish these stories first filtered through her position as
the creator of the poems. The mismatching of words and images, then, continues as de Kok’s
vocabulary cannot describe what she has not experienced directly but only through research of
fragmented testimony. Again, language has failed to accurately re-present life.
In his 2005 article, “The Invention of Mourning in Post-Apartheid Literature”,
Sam Durrant discusses the need to create a space for grieving (Durrant 443). He suggests
literature as a viable site for the recovery of traumatic experiences because of its tendency
towards mimesis and reinvention: “one might say that we are bound together by our recognition
of our own death in the death of others: their death performs, enacts, or even mimes our own
death” (Durrant 446). In his discussion of the connection of language and the body, Durrant
emphasizes in de Kok’s poetry, the refusal of an easy catharsis and reconciliation (448). In his
analysis of the first poem in the second part of Terrestrial Things, which this paper
addresses, “Parts of Speech”, he underlines how de Kok suggests “the way in which language
itself fragments under the pressure of telling of the numerous ways in which the body was
broken, separated both from others and from itself, under apartheid” (Durrant 448). Here he is
speaking to her use of the parts of speech which “[…] walk away, carrying their suitcases” in
stories that remain untold (“Parts of Speech” 2). In this poem, de Kok introduces the second
section of “A Room Full of Questions”, undoubtedly referring to the TRCs courtrooms, with the
question of the ability of stories—the voicing in words of trauma—to demonstrate a truth which
reveals any coherent conclusion: “Why still believe stories can rise / with wings, on currents, as
silver flares, / levitate unweighted by stones, / begin in pain and move towards grace, / aerating
history with recovered breath?” (16-20). She disassembles the linguistic sentence to demonstrate
the connection between words and the body: “Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds: /
the flame sputter of consonants, / deep sea anemone vowels, / birth-cable syntax, rhymes that
start in the heart, / and verbs, verbs that move mountains?” (20-25).
“The transcriber speaks” presents to the reader a new difficulty of the writing of trauma,
and another filter through which the images of trauma are processed, as it describes the function
of the stenographers of the testimonies of the TRC. Told in first person, the poem opens with a
statement that demonstrates the ability of the speaker to fit together language and image: “I was
the commission’s own captive, / It’s anonymous after-hours scribe, / […] word by word by word,
/ […] From sign to sign, I listened and wrote” (1-2, 4, 6). The repetition of “word” suggests to
the reader that this type of “writer” performs his/her function of resolving ambiguities in the
recording of testimony. He/she is supposedly accurately transcribing and translating emotion,
tone, and expression. Line 6 connotes a connection between the process of producing sound,
hearing the sound, interpreting the sound and transcribing these sounds. Here, the transcriber
hears the voicing of sounds, of words—of signs—and between the listening and writing there is
the assumption of the interpretation of these signs as accurately represented by the words chosen.
The impossibility of this action is described next in the poem as the ‘transcriber’ says:
But how to transcribe silence from tape?
Is weeping a pause or a word?
What written sign for a strangled throat?
And a witness pointing? That I described,
When officials identified direction and name.
(13-17).
The admission here is that the written record cannot capture in words, or in a string of descriptive
words, the narration of the victim’s trauma. What is interesting in these lines is that the speaker
automatically discounts the language he/she uses to describe the action of the witness. In line 14,
he/she identifies the witness as “weeping” but rejects this choice at the same time the question of
whether that exists as a pause or as a word—that is to say, the question is whether the action of
weeping is accurately described by language or by a non-language. Again, in line 15, the speaker
questions the validity of the phrase “strangled throat” as the appropriate descriptor for the images
he/she sees. This series of questions echoes the above repetition of “word by word by word”
(stated again in line 10 as “[w]ord upon word upon word), demonstrating the endless cycle of
the mismatching of image to language—the discrepancy between experience and the system of
written signs to describe them.
The conclusion of the poem, “The transcriber speaks” presents the difficulty of
transcribing silence. The question purposed here, is whether silence carries finality and if it does,
whether it can be written:
But what if she stared?
And if the silence seemed to stretch
Past the police guard, into the street,
Away to a door or a grave or a child,
Was it my job to conclude:
‘The witness was silent. There was nothing left to say.’?
(18-23).
This passage recalls the process of listening and transcribing but on a different level or listening
to the silence of a non-language—hearing that the witness is left without a language to accurately
re-present the image of her experience. The transcriber, or the writer’s, job is now complicated
by the transcription of his silence onto a printed document. As he/she questions in the poem, to
write that the witness was silent is inaccurate for two reasons: firstly, because to equate her stare
to silence is inappropriate; and second because it cannot be inferred that there is nothing left to
say but rather no other accurate words to use. In addition, line 21, “[a]way to a door or a grave
or a child” reflects the same repetition of “word by word by word” as it lists the possibilities
of what this witness, and many others, could be denoting by their stares, but which still remain
inaccurate at the level of known language.
In her own article written for World Literature Today, “Standing in a Doorway: A
Preface”, de Kok describes the TRC as “an instrument of a negotiated settlement” whose
purpose “is social re-composition, and closure: the bringing of the process of transition to a
conclusion” (5). Here, we are presented with the exact conflict between Barthes’ author and
writer: the testimonies of the TRC cannot be written in a way that complies a conclusive truth to
close the past and open a new narrative for the future. De Kok as author, and the transcriber as
writer meld together as author-writer left without an accurate system of language in a country
that is trying to flawlessly punctuate its history. Graham also speaks to this impossibility in his
description of the TRC:
This formulation was perhaps overly optimistic, as the task of determining
the “Truth” about the past based on thousands of conflicting testimonies is a
hopelessly muddled enterprise that nevertheless requires the commissioners to
make absolute determinations of guilt and responsibility.
(Graham 11).
We can connect Graham’s comment of the requirement of the TRC to determine truths based
on ambiguities to the opening lines of the poem in which the transcriber feels held hostage by
the TRC as their “after-hours scribe” implying this method of editing and cutting of already
fragmented testimony in order to create a linear narrative of the past. Graham also comments on
the destruction of human experience by narrative as he reflects that “the psychological truth of
the event cannot be captured by the convention of narrative, which reduce the traumatic events
to language and present them in a linear sequence” (16). Similarly, in the poem, the transcriber is
uncomfortable with the conclusion that the witness’ silence is interpreted as “nothing left to say”,
when the past can never be finalized or categorized as finished but only reinterpreted into the
present.
“The transcriber speaks” is a poem that has a double authoritative voice. The speaker of
the poem is the transcriber, who cannot accurately put into words what he/she is hearing and
processing. As the author of the poem, de Kok is the transcriber of the transcription, or the
experience of transcribing and is, therefore, also jarred by the ambiguities and unaccounted
silences in the transcribed testimonies of the TRC. She too is a captive of the commission, who
struggles, “word by word by word” to capture what is indescribable through language. In her
position as author-writer, she presents the fragments in order to maintain a non-language of
trauma which refuses the conventions of linear and conclusive narration. As Graham describes,
“to shape the stories […], however, would be to impose a structure on them that
would supress or exclude the very elements that renders the event traumatic.
[…] For more naïve […] is an unquestioning faith in the ability of language and
narrative to fully and accurately represent the traumatic past” (27).
The final poem to be analyzed in this paper is “The sound engineer”, which refers to
the reporters editing sound for radio during the Truth Commission’s collection of testimonies.
This poem emphasizes the processes of listening and interpreting sound as signs in language
underlining the effects of ‘interpretation’ in an editing room. The poem begins, “From the
speaker’s mouth / through the engineer’s ear, / sound waves of drought and flood / are edited
for us to hear” (1-4). At the outset of this poem we are confronted by the inaccuracy of editing
and filtering as the sounds of the testimony from the “speaker’s mouth” do not reach our ears but
the ears of the engineer first. Therefore, what the speaker of the poem hears is already doubly
filtered: first through the inaccuracy of language assumed to be mismatched by the testimony;
and second, through the consequent filtering of the engineer who further edits what is described
by the transcriber in the previous poem as unintelligible through language.
The following stanza further demonstrates the ambiguities of editing and the
impossibility of knowing what we were spared from hearing or the structure being imposed upon
the sequence of sounds:
Listen, cut; comma, cut;
stammer, cut;
edit, pain; connect, pain; broadcast, pain;
listen, cut; comma, cut.
Bind grammar to horror,
blood heating the earphones,
beating the airwaves’ wings.
(8-14).
Here, we are left without any description at all which reiterates the power of language at the
hands of the engineer. We are only exposed to what the engineer has edited, connected and
broadcasted. It is also possible to read this stanza as the process undergone by the engineer in his
attempt to interpret the fragments of testimony. Lines 8 to 11 present this process as the engineer
first listens to the commas, or pauses, and the stammers of the testimony and then edits them into
a cohesive structure that can be broadcast. Line 10 here, assumes that as he edits, connects and
broadcasts pain, the engineer is imposing a narrative structure onto the similarities of the stories.
As discussed by Graham, part of the narration of trauma is the lack of agency of the speaker,
which leads to a tendency to amalgamate these stories together in a grand trauma narrative.
Graham cautions that “[i]f their stories are all alike, because they lack agency, then the survivors
themselves appear equally devoid of substance, and any puppet can speak any victim’s faceless
tale of suffering” (20). This warning in tandem with “The sound engineer” reminds us that the
editing of what are already fragments into a structured narrative gleans over the ambiguities of
each individual story and assumes an inaccurate conclusion.
In the following stanza of the poem we are presented again with the connection of
language and the body as editing is depicted as a dissection of the body that removes agency and
accuracy, once again rendering language useless:
For truth’s sound bite
tape the teeth, mouth, jaw,
put hesitation in, take it out:
maybe the breath too.
Take away the lips.
Even the tongue.
Leave just sound’s throat.
(15-21).
Here, truth becomes a “sound bite”, another fragment of speech. The mutilation of the face—the
teeth, mouth, jaw, lips and tongue—reiterates the difficulties of voicing trauma and the traumatic
effect editing has on the testimony of a victim. Effectively, the sound engineer removes the
tongue and the lips of the victim, leaving them unable to tell their stories without the filter of the
engineer. This stanza is also a representation of the inability for a victim to tell the same story
twice, once it has been filtered through another authority, like the transcriber of the previous
poem.
“The sound engineer” invokes the image of the ear as the instrument through which this
process begins, as we have seen thus far in the collection of de Kok’s poems:
[…]
The instrumental ear
records the lesions of eroded land
while blood drums the vellum of the brain.
A stain hovers like a small red butterfly
over the studio recording table
where the wall is listening,
so the ear dares to rest.
Then nothing.
Nothing but static,
insects invading air.
The sound engineer hears
his own tympanic membrane tear.
(26-37).
In this imagery of the ear, we have the sensation of the eardrum being inundated with sounds—
so many that the sounds of testimony become too much, because the engineer cannot edit these
testimonies out of his own mind as he does for the radio. The last part of this poem is difficult
to interpret conclusively, which only cleverly adds to the current discussion of the ambiguity
and inconsistency of language. I suggest that the engineer becomes overwhelmed by the amount
of sounds—not words—but sounds of testimony that can no longer be edited or connected to
one another to such an extent that this overload is manifested physically in the tearing of his/
her eardrum. The nothingness left by the static recalls the (mis)interpretation of silence. Again,
it is not that there is “nothing left to say” but no words, or process of editing, with which to say
them. In this poem, as in the previous two, de Kok is both the speaker and the author. She is
both a transcriber and a sound engineer as the choice to write poetry lends itself to the musicality
of sounds. She is charged with the same responsibility of telling “the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth”.
In her article, de Kok also discusses the idea of inheritance, the “unmaking, refusing,
restoring, or remaking [of] it, after a censored, exiled, broken history” signals a “process of
retrieval and or refusal [that] oscillates in the face of an ambiguous future” (7). For this reason,
the editing of the sound engineer and the finality of the punctuation of the transcriber as it affects
the testimony of a tongue-tied victim reduces the traumatic to an inaccurate language system that
cannot hold the past.
In Barthes’ “Discourse of History” he discusses the way in which historians
organize the past in order to narrate it in a cohesive manner. He includes a brief discussion of
the “referential illusion” which denotes the lack of an imposition of organization by the historian
onto the narration of past events. Here, he makes note of the “past-tense actor and present-tense
narrator” as the special case of the historian who may have once participated in the events he or
she now narrates (Howard 129-131). De Kok can be included as the author-writer in a literary
context and as the actor-narrator in the historical context, being educated in South Africa and
living through the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.
Before concluding, a few comments on the use of poetry within the context of narrating
trauma: As discussed above, the fragments of testimony and lack of agency of victims in voicing
their stories refuses the imposition of conventional narrative structures and accurate language
systems. In Graham’s conclusion to his article, he states that, “[p]resenting the testimony as
poetry adds suspense and emphasis to the […] already very moving words” (26). The overly
fragmented structure that poetry can hold allows de Kok to get as close to a linguistic true-telling
of trauma as is possible within the established language system. According to Graham, “the use
of poetic enjambment also privileges the speaker’s poetic ability” which gives the subject “a gift
of eloquence and storytelling worthy of being called poetry” (26). In this way, de Kok, privileges
her subjects, the speakers who are nameless victims throughout her poetry so that they may be
reborn in the new narrative of the future. The fragmentation of testimony and questioning of the
validity of language and editing in the excavation of truth as depicted by her poetry demonstrate
to us the tolerance we must concede for ambiguity and contradiction when desiring to discover
overall patterns of truth.
Bibliography:
Barthes, Roland. “The Discourse of History”. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard.
Hill and Wang, New York: 1986, 127-140.
Barthes, Roland. “Authors and Writers”. Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Northwestern
University Press, USA: 1972, 143-150.
Durrant, Sam. “The Invention of Mourning in Apartheid Literature”. Third World Quarterly.
26.3(2005): 441-450.
Graham, Shane. “The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa”.
Research in African Literatures. 34.1(2003): 11-30.
de Kok, Ingrid. “Standing in a Doorway: A Preface”. World Literature Today. 70.1(1996): 4-8.
de Kok, Ingrid. “Parts of Speech”. Terrestrial Things. KWELA, South Africa: 2002, 21.
de Kok, Ingrid. “Tongue-tied”. Terrestrial Things. KWELA, South Africa: 2002, 24.
de Kok, Ingrid. “The transcriber speaks”. Terrestrial Things. KWELA, South Africa: 2002, 32.
de Kok, Ingrid. “The sound engineer”. Terrestrial Things. KWELA, South Africa: 2002, 33-34.