Description
The author is discussing how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has shaped the way people think about time and how it impacts their lives. The author also discusses how the commission has been implicated in the politics of memory. The author argues that the commission has not only been struggling with the aftermath of state-sponsored violence, but also the way that the everyday shapings of silences, the emptiness of reconciliation, and the fracturing of hope are still embedded in political life.
This work is mediation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is an examination of the ways that the institutionalization of memory has managed perceptions of time and "transition," of events and happenings, of sense and emotion, of violence and recovery, of the "past" and the "new." Through this process a public language of "memory" has been carved into collective modes of meaning. It is a language that seems deprived of the hopes, dreams, and possibilities for the promise of a just and redemptive future it once nurtured. Truth commission are profoundly implicated in the social politics of memorialisation. Memory, as a conceptual, historical, and experiential discourse about "the past," relates to the ways in which cruelty is integrated into societal understandings, which include cognitive and philosophic frameworks and constructions of social meaning. The politics of historical truth, of memory and of justice, play out in unintended ways. There is not only the ongoing struggle for survivors of state terror, but also the ways that the everyday shapings of silences, the emptiness of reconciliation and the fracturing of hope remain embedded in political life.
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