Abstract
Dobrota Pucherova
“Articulating the Ethical through Manipulating Histories in Dusklands and Nehanda ”
My paper compares and contrasts Coetzee's debut, Dusklands (1974) with that of Yvonne Vera, Nehanda (1993). It is taken from the first chapter of my DPhil thesis which compares the writing of Coetzee and Vera. Through a comparative approach, it attempts to shed light on the nature of both authors' involvement with the “extreme other”. Often written from contrasting points of view, Coetzee and Vera's experimental texts can be seen as engaging in a dialogue with each other. My thesis explores whether such dialogue can add new meanings to their projects of relating ethically to alterity.
Both Dusklands and Nehanda are concerned to subversively revise the histories of the first colonization of the southern African subcontinent. They are also written from contrasting points of view – the “colonizer's” in Coetzee and the “colonized woman's” in Vera. In their revision projects, both authors manipulate their purported “historical sources”. While Coetzee inserts inter-textual ironies to subvert the meaning of an invented “historical document”, Vera shifts the meaning of an oral myth to achieve a distinctly feminist interpretation of colonial history that subverts both colonial and patriarchal world views. Their different strategies reflect their different concerns, artistic and theoretical allegiances, and the responsibilities they choose to face. Such radical differences imply the questions: What is the way to write about the other? Can manipulation of history be ethical? Can postmodernism offer an ethical model?