Ruined time and post-revolutionary allegory in Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Things

Abstract

This paper reads Nthikeng Mohlele's 2013 novel Small Things with a view to understanding a qualitative shift in South Africa's postapartheid historical consciousness: an emergent sense of being in "exile from history." This is not simply a relationship to history of being "post," but rather a melancholic attachment that cannot be fully relinquished. I use this lens to understand the dark satire of Mohlele's novel of Johannesburg flânerie and unrequited yearning, a narrative which seems to foreclose the forms of generative encounter so central to urban aesthetics in post-apartheid South Africa. My aim in this article is to distinguish the political desires in this novel both from the revolutionary energies and imaginaries of the liberation struggle, as well as from more recent and optimistic work on urbanism or the energies of the various fallist movements. By contrast to these, Mohlele's novel suggests that liberation might take traumatic and melancholic forms. I argue that this is not post-or anti-political literature, nor a literature of disillusionment, but rather the negotiation of a new relationship with political time that allows the post-apartheid subject to maintain an increasingly tenuous relationship with what David Scott calls the "allegory of emancipationist redemption." KEYWORDS Post-apartheid literature; temporality; Johannesburg There is a striking moment of uncanny political recognition in the 2015 art film Necktie Youth. The camera, which has tracked the lives of a group of wealthy "born frees" as they aimlessly navigate the northern suburbs of Johannesburg in a narcotic haze, partying, idling, musing on existential questions, alights for a brief moment on a portrait of Nelson Mandela adorning the plush walls of one of the suburban Johannesburg mansions that serve as their playground. This is not Mandela the fiery young political freedom fighter, but Mandela the old, triumphal sage, burnished into an icon. There is something unsettling about this portrait: it does not represent struggle but rather the end of struggle. One could go further: in the context of this film, whose margins are haunted by a stark and impoverished urban underclass, this Mandela signals a utopian promise betrayed. In Conscripts of Modernity, his magisterial study of The Black Jacobins, David Scott argues that C.L.R. James's study gave to the events of the Haitian revolution "the shape of an allegory of emancipationist redemption that embodies in a compelling way the CONTACT Timothy Wright

Remembering Transition in Contemporary South African and Russian Literatures: Between Melancholia and Repair

“…"And to say that 'transition' is pivotal," she continues, "is to say that postapartheid literature is fundamentally animated by temporal concerns and questions" with the problem of how to represent the relationship between past (pre-1994), present, and future occupying center stage (2019,11). Timothy Wright (2019) stresses, more specifically, the shift in such temporal constructions during the 2010s: "If the South Africa of 1994 to 2012 was haunted by the spectre of apartheid, most visibly in its obsession with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa post-2012 can broadly be said to be haunted by a new ghost: the ghost of 1994 itself" (200). Indeed, when it seemed that South African social imagination has moved beyond the 'post-transitional' (Frenkel and McKenzie 2010), notable works of literature, film, and art along with broader public discourses started returning to the time of transition or the practices of the Left during the 1980s (Robbe 2018, Wright 2019.…”

“…Timothy Wright (2019) stresses, more specifically, the shift in such temporal constructions during the 2010s: "If the South Africa of 1994 to 2012 was haunted by the spectre of apartheid, most visibly in its obsession with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa post-2012 can broadly be said to be haunted by a new ghost: the ghost of 1994 itself" (200). Indeed, when it seemed that South African social imagination has moved beyond the 'post-transitional' (Frenkel and McKenzie 2010), notable works of literature, film, and art along with broader public discourses started returning to the time of transition or the practices of the Left during the 1980s (Robbe 2018, Wright 2019. In Russia, similarly, the late 2000s suggested a shift beyond the dominant 'post-Soviet' temporality (as in assessing everything in the present via comparison to the Soviet) towards a multiplicity of co-existing times (Platt 2009).…”

“…The differences between the authors' use of a critical melancholic mode of memory relates to the contexts against which they write. Mohlele's novel counters the largely hopeful narratives of transition and in particular the narratives of 'Black' aspiration in an Afropolitan Johannesburg (Nuttall 2004, Wright 2019. In so doing, it participates in voicing the contemporary disillusionment with transition (Robbe 2018, Van der Vlies 2017, Worby and Ally 2014) in an ambiguous mode: while accentuating the pathology of Che's melancholic attachment to revolutionary desire (often with the use of irony), it also stresses the critical force of those 'futures past' in reorienting social imaginaries in the neoliberal present.…”