University of Venda Discourses on Difference and Oppression

Introduction

International protest against apartheid, especially during the seventies and eighties, was galvanized to a significant degree by the circulation of densely signifying information. This information was represented in photographic, film and written texts that narrated stories about the violence of the apartheid state and about the victimization and resistance of black South Africans in the face of it. One of the main roles of the British Aid and Defence Fund, which had an entire research department, or KAIROS, which operated from the Netherlands, was to function as a production base and archive for visual and written texts like film documentaries, newspaper reports of important events, leaflets and posters used in political meetings and demonstrations, and a range of anti-apartheid biographical projects. The prominence of these texts and the explicit messages they encoded allowed non-South Africans to experience the urgency of South African politics. Thus, a key aim of the Anti-Apartheid Movement was to codify, distribute and in certain cases produce mediating and testimonial texts that could effectively transmit the stories of apartheid to readers who were physically, politically and culturally very far away from it. It was around these narratives that non-South Africans could establish or confirm a stance of vigorous opposition to a repressive order or of solidarity with those who lived under it.

Among these mediating texts, biography can be an especially compelling genre because of its potential to explore collective and political processes through storytelling about individual lives. Biographical productions that dealt specifically with black subjects’ responses to apartheid burgeoned during the late seventies and eighties, a high point in the apartheid state’s clamp-downs as well as in anti-apartheid struggle in the country and protest abroad. Most of these projects had metropolitan audiences, and were often published by British or North American publishers. Focusing mainly on black women, they seemed to offer insight into lives that were marginalized within both racial and gender hierarchies. These texts exhibit diverse approaches, and range from the scholarly projects of well-known academics like Shula Marks or Belinda Bozzoli, through fictional productions like Poppie Nongena, to popularized life stories - exemplified by Carol Hermer’s The Diary of Mari Tholo (1980) or Diana Russell’s Lives of Courage (1989) - that straddle the conventions of journalism and fiction. At face value, these projects are evidently "progressive" and appear to make visible the lives of subjects who have been historically silenced. At the same time, the projects obliquely reinforce dominant images and social hierarchies. In what follows, I consider how two biographical projects, in many ways typical of broader "progressive" trends, indirectly echo the stereotypes about race, agency, power and knowledge that have been clearly associated with apartheid.

In exploring the textual codification of "lives" in certain South African biographical practices, I raise various questions about their uses of the signifier "black South African woman". On one level, the selection of black women as biographical subjects challenges the traditional conservativism of a genre which has customarily valorized white male agency. On another level, however, the turning to black women as signifiers of communal and national processes often reveals writers’ situation within dominant discourses, a situation which may contradict conscious writerly choices. The question raised consistently will be: why certain representations of subjects and not others? As Liz Stanley has argued:

Images of Strength/ Images of Control

In her study of women’s writing and race in America, Diane Roberts (1994) suggests that white women have played a key role in disseminating popular American images of blacks and race relations. Although women have been restricted to cultural spheres, rather than to central political and social arenas, they have engaged with key political. Roberts writes:

Poppie in Joubert’s novel is located within a lineage of strong black women: her grandmother, ouma Hannie, her mother, Lena and her own daughters. The main characteristic of these women is their capacity, in the face of formidable obstacles, to raise their families, support their children and create and conserve their constantly vulnerable homes. The celebration of womanhood starts with the representation of Poppie’s grandmother, the old woman who raises her during early childhood. Described as a matriarchal figure, ouma Hannie seems to exercise independent and authoritative control. The following extract, for example, underscores her imperious authority and independence: "Ouma Hannie was very strict with her children. She wasn’t at rest till they were married with lobola money, as well as in church. Then she setted in the location of Upington and took in the grandchildren …and reared them as she had reared her own" (13).

Celebratory descriptions like these underplay evidence elsewhere that oppressive circumstances usually compel ouma Hannie to play an instrumental role in her extended family. As the narrative proceeds, it becomes evident that her children are either unemployed or unable to take care of their children because they need to search for work. That ouma Hannie often endures an exhausting role as family head is especially evident in references to her relationship with her unemployed son. In many of these, however, she is represented only as an indulgent and compassionate mother: "He’d come home drunk, singing… Then ouma Hannie would say: Pengi, you’re making a noise, my head can’t stand it. Then he’d say: But listen, man listen I’m singing to you"(14).

According to the logic of her life story, Poppie imbibes a sense of duty and selfhood from her grandmother. Yet this learnt altruism is seen to acquire the status of myth, a kind of sacrosanct inevitability, unmarked by contradiction. It is this mythologized notion of women’s customary identity which is lauded in ways like the following: "Ouma Hannie was strict with Poppie…She must be home before sunset. That was the custom of her people…This is what Ouma taught us. It is our duty to go" (55). This extract covertly mythologizes identity: Poppie is first introduced as a subject who is spoken about and acted upon, and then described through first-person narration in which Poppie speaks not only for herself but for an "us" defined as an extension her.

When Poppie grows older, her mother looks after her in Lambert’s Bay. Lena’s status as a self-sacrificing breadwinner and nurturer, is delineated even more emphatically than ouma Hannie’s. She is described mainly in terms of what she does, and how she acts, rather than through how she feels or responds. The over-riding impression of Lena, as of ouma Hannie, is of her constantly managing to find jobs, providing for her family, and eluding the laws which prevent her from securing basic human needs. Like her mother, Lena, Poppie is represented mainly in terms of her everyday actions, her tasks, routines and literal movement. Poppie does things and experiences events, rather than feels or responds psychologically. It is striking that in her fictional reconstruction of an individual’s life, Joubert seems relatively uninterested in textualizing the private and emotional life of her subject, the very realm which novelistic practice usually foregrounds. Where this private and emotional life does surface, it is invoked only to be suppressed: Poppie transcends private reflection through maintaining a stoically self-sacrificing role. Generally, the moments of private agonizing - precisely the moments when Poppie responds ambiguously to prescribed roles - surface in the text as "epiphanies" from which Poppie emerges resolved to immerse herself in altruistic duty.

The identification of turning points is an important means by which biographers transform the flux of their subjects’ lives into coherent narratives. Joubert’s marking of turning points frame Poppie’s life experiences to naturalize her interpretation of her subject’s development. When she is a young child, Poppie is seen to derive pleasure from reading and writing, the realm of discursive power and authority from which she is alienated. Immediately following the reference to Poppie’s pleasure in this activity, however, she stoically submits to prescribed duties:

Another index of Joubert’s use of the structuring principle of strong motherhood revolves on the contrasts established between women and men. Each of the central women figures is explicitly contrasted with a weak and dependent man. Thus, descriptions of oompie Pengi stress his dissipation, irresponsibility and dependency, with these weaknesses foregrounding the virtues of his mother, ouma Hannie. Lena, Poppie’s mother is similarly juxtaposed with two of her sons: Plank and Jakkie. Like oompie Pengi, Plank drinks heavily and is often financially dependent on his mother. There are few references to the interaction between them; instead, descriptions dwell on the way his behaviour differs from his mother’s. When the drunk Plank tries to hide from the police in a fowl-run, for example, the reader is given a detailed report:

The image of the black woman as strong mother has been a prominent one in black South African literature and politics. Certain critics have traced the origins of this image to the imperatives of black women’s peripheral involvement in political activism or the maintenance of families. Less has been made, however, of the origin of this image outside of black communities and in a wider society. Employment opportunities for black South African women have historically restricted many to domestic service. South African domestic servants have often occupied uniquely intimate positions in South African households and in broadly servicing white South African families. With laws restricting their mobility and rights to live in urban areas, black South African live-in domestics have had to forsake their own families and communities to take up pivotal positions in "surrogate families" by whom they are employed. This role demands the suppression of a private and personal self, with duties associated with motherhood and wifehood being shaped entirely by economic and political imperatives.

In July’s People (1981), her novel about master-servant relationships, Nadine Gordimer interrogates the veneer of intimacy which often obscures employer-servant servant-employer relationships in South Africa, and the absurdity of the employer’s stereotypical view of the ever-dutiful, diligent and obliging servant. The following description from the novel, in particular, indicates how easily this figure is fixed as a stereotype:

That these images are inextricably entangled with redefinitions of motherhood by black women themselves cannot be denied. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to trace cultural images to definitive power relationships. Considering one of the more oppressive sources of the black-woman-as-strong-mother image, however, does help to indicate its potentially coercive effects. This is particularly important when the image is such a seductive one, when it seems so explicitly to celebrate an active and empowering identity for a politically subordinate group. As Michelle Wallace cautions, however:

Windows on Black Life

Elsa Joubert has claimed that her novel is based on facts gleaned from interviews with Poppie Nongena and members of her family, that her own role would simply be that of "a tape-recorder, a mouthpiece" (quoted in Lenta, 1984:148). Yet the methodological feature immediately apparent in Joubert’s Poppie is the overtly manipulating role of a fictionalizing story-teller in relation to her subjects’ voices: it is clear that Joubert has taken tremendous license in shaping, connecting and highlighting particular themes, as well as in exploring the details of her informants’ thoughts and interpretations. Although based on interviews with her subject and those close to her, Joubert‘s text is heavily preoccupied with animating and lending narrative vitality to her subject.

This often leads to abrupt and unmarked shifts between, for example, the present and past tenses or different narrative voices. As the writer strives to capture immediacy and realism, Poppie is seen to tell her own story in the first person, or else to reminisce conversationally as though the reader were listening to her actual speech: "Even now when my brothers and I are together, we speak Afrikaans, that’s what we like to speak, that comes naturally, ja"(15). Elsewhere, Joubert deploys an unidentified narrator who uses Poppie’s register and speech style, but also summarizes and dramatizes incidents in her subject’s life - as in the following: "This was the time when Poppie’s mama came from De Aar, where she was in service with white people, to have a rest in ouma’s house. She told ouma that the father of her children was no more. He had died in the war"(33). The abrupt and unacknowledged shifts signal the conflict between the writer’s need to establish structural and interpretive control on the one hand, and to sustain the impression of Poppie’s unmediated life story and perception on the other. Why has Joubert taken such pains to create an impression of her subject’s actual voice, and what are the effects of the narrator’s impersonation?

Joubert wrote the novel at a moment of stark racial polarization in South African politics, a time when white and back South Africans inhabited diametrically opposed worlds. For a writer who admits to having come from "a conservative Afrikaans family" (Joubert, 1984:58), this polarization was particularly extreme. Joubert has claimed that "Her need to talk was as great as my need to listen…It meant much to me to be led into her life, step by step, to be introduced to a world that had been so strange to me" (1984: 61). The idea of being led "step by step" to a world that is "strange" implies that one of her primary concerns is to learn about a world from which she is distanced. Yet does the biographical subject speak to the biographer, or does the biographer confirm her sense of "a world that had been so strange to me"?

One of the patterns to which the narrative returns is Poppie’s perception of traditional Xhosa life. During childhood and early adulthood, Poppie is clearly seen as belonging to a hybrid tradition which combines urban life, Christianity and Xhosa practices. The Xhosa ethos she inhabits is seen to have a culturally distinct nobility, as indicated in descriptions like the following:

In a fascinating index of how the biographer uses her subject as mediator, Poppie is seen, momentarily, to "disappear" into a realm to which she elsewhere bears witness. During a spell in the Ciskei, she joins a group of dancers and is implied to be temporarily immersed in a world of "primitive tradition":

Poppie’s role as a witness who is outside yet appears to be authentically inside "black life" is evidenced also in representations of her perceptions of black political activism. Like many images and events associated with the "people of the land", this world is explicitly marked as demonic. In one central description of black politics, the narrative dwells on the way older people are victimized by fiery young activists:

Throughout the text, Poppie’s vision of black life is ultimately the vision of the biographer, a vision emanating from media reports and official views about the anarchy of political protest, from conventional stereotypes of the exoticism or barbarism of "tribal life and custom". Simply claiming that Joubert problematically speaks for Poppie touches on only part of the problem with the text’s politics of representation. What is crucial is how the biographical subject is used for authentication and becomes transparent, a medium through which the biographer confirms preconceived views of a "strange world".

A similar strategy is manifested in Carol Hermer’s The Diary of Maria Tholo (1980). Like Poppie, Mari Tholo is cast as the outsider within, the experiencing spokesperson who, on the fringes of black life, communicates to an outside world. Compared to Joubert, Hermer appears to play a far less intrusive role: her short commentaries punctuate Tholo’s own narrative. Yet authenticity is achieved with almost as much artifice as is the case with Poppie Nongena. In her preface, Hermer writes: "This book is taken from a series of weekly, tape-recorded interviews conducted over a year starting February 1976" (ix) but later claims "The diary format was chosen to lend immediacy to the events"(x). The implication is that Hermer constructed Tholo’s "diary" around the interviews. The diary, ostensibly a form for directly communicating personal reflections, becomes a fiction which constructs authenticity.

Related methods of constructing "authenticity" coexist with similar roles for the biographical subjects. Like Poppie Nongena, Maria Tholo is ostensibly a speaker from whom the culturally ignorant reader learns about the life of a different world. What the reader often sees, however, are familiar dominant images, as exemplified in the following:

Revealingly, many of the biographical projects produced in the eighties have been multibiographies, studies of the lives and texts of groups of women. On one level, biographers may choose to deal with groups to counter a bourgeois and male-centred bias towards the autonomous and masterful subject. On another level, studies of groups offer more easily allows the silencing of individual idiosyncrasies and agencies. That this effect may well inform the prominence of multibiographies is suggested by the conspicuousness of this form at a particular historical moment.

The casting of women as figures through whom broader social processes can be explored reveals the inevitably autobiographical impulse of biography. It also lays bare a familiar symbolic casting of women in relation to groups. In their influential study of relationships between gender and ethnicity, nation or race, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (1989:7) present a number of ways in which women are involved in constructions of communal identities. Two of these are specifically cultural: as participators in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and transmitters of culture; and as signifiers of ethnic/national differences – as foci and symbols in the construction, reproduction and transformation of ethnic/national discourses. These perceptions of "woman" cohere in the symbolic roles of women in many South African texts, apparently focusing on women, but also about black communal and historical processes. At the same time that biographers appear to challenge the invisibility of black women’s perceptions and interpretations in social science texts, they confirm notions of "woman" as a symbolic figure for constructing various representations of community. In many biographical projects, "black south African woman" becomes a vacant cipher, "real" only in linking the life within the text to the biographer’s textualized world beyond it. The "intimacy" signaled by the presence of the biographical subject is entirely contradicted by the way this subject underwrites "someone else’s experience subject to a seemingly endless process of translation and transference" (duCille, 1994: 622).

A consequence of the symbolic casting of black women is the displacement of the voices of biographical subjects. But we could also speculate about how it constructs gendered notions of black political responses. The eighties, the period at the end of a protracted struggle against an intransigent Afrikaner Nationalist Government, was an important moment of international opposition to apartheid. Much of this solidarity was mobilized through media representations of black South African suffering, endurance and resilience, tropes easily linked to images of women. This cluster of tropes became part of a globalized discourse of opposition to apartheid. Producers of women’s biographical projects like Carol Hermer and Diana Russell, South Africans living abroad, have been close to the sources of this discourse. It would be silly to suggest their self-conscious involvement in global anti-apartheid image-construction. To some extent, however, the global paternal anti-apartheid discourse fixated on images of black South Africans as victims, images reinforced by describing the feminized behaviours and responses of black women.

Giving Voice to the Subject ?

Shula Marks’ Not Either An Experimental Doll was begun when she accidentally discovered a body of correspondence belonging to Mabel Palmer, a prominent educator and organizer of Natal University’s "Non-Eurpean Section". The correspondence chronicles Palmer’s mentoring of a young black woman, known in the text as Lily Moya, between 1949 and 1951, when their relationship broke down. The edited correspondence also includes the letters of Sibusisiwe Makhanya, a black social worker whom Palmer asked to help her in assisting Lily. Although clearly a non-fictional sociological study, Not Either An Experimental Doll captures a powerful sense of the "tragedy" of Lily’s experiences. Divided into the editor’s introduction, the correspondence, and an epilogue, the story spans several years, covering the young Lily’s first exposure to Palmer, and the ensuing correspondence between Lily, Palmer and Makhanya; and then the researcher’s discovery of Lily Moya in the 1980s.

Lily, first appealing to Palmer for assistance to further her education and release her from an arranged marriage, is "taken up" by Palmer, who becomes increasingly involved in her affairs: finding her a position as a student at Adams College, lending her books, and later financing her education. As Lily’s appeals for emotional support increase, Palmer’s sympathy wanes, and she becomes progressively more impatient with Lily’s inability to "stand on [her] own feet" . Writing that she has been betrayed or become the victim of a conspiracy, Lily performs badly at school and demonstrates growing animosity towards her teachers and peers. She eventually leaves Adams, does not follow up Palmer’s plan to move her to another school, Marianhill, and leaves for Johannesburg. From here she writes to Palmer that "You badly handled me back" and that she "is very ill"(186). In the epilogue, the biographer recounts her eventual discovery, three decades after the time of the correspondence, of an aged, heavily drugged Lily, a diagnosed schizophrenic and chronic mental hospital patient. Overall, the text establishes an interpretive frame which privileges Palmer’s point of view and discursive location. It forecloses those of Lily, whose race, age and discursive resources are so radically different from Palmer’s. The reader is persuaded to take up a collaborative position both with the biographer, and with the biographer’s "normative" subject. Thus, the subtitle’s promise of access to "the separate worlds of three South African women" and Marks’remarks that "This was – and is – Lily’s book" (195), are questionable, to say the least.

In "Can the Subaltern Speak" (1985), Gayatri Spivak discusses the representation of third-world women in relation to the practice of sati, showing how their location in colonial and gender hierarchies leads to their being positioned only as objects in intersecting discourses. Spivak concludes: "The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read" (1985:130). Lily’s position in Not Either An Experimental Doll presents theoretical and political concerns that Spivak raises about the silencing of the subaltern subject. In the following discussion, I explore what I shall term Lily’s "autograph" to consider her agency and an interpretive framework which questions her designation as object and inevitable victim. The concept "autograph" is used by Marilyn Brownstein (1996) in her exploration of the life-texts of Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin. "Autograph" registers subjectivity "not as part of the search for an authentic identity, but rather [with] the potential of the life-writer to reproduce a discursive occasion that is open-ended and therefore an occasion on which subjectivity may be restored to history" (1996:186). Autograph is also a term which suggests both authority and the truncation of the subject’s self-representation. Following Bernstein, I see this truncation registering a space where language signifies beyond lexicon or linguistic orders, moments when images elusively imply thoughts, and patterns of idiosyncratic memories in the subject’s self-representation.

In charting Lily’s autograph, I concentrate on how her status as "victim" is constructed in discourses which construct an "other " in the service of dominant subjects’ stories of selfhood. I focus on two sites of interpretation in the text, and the extent to which they reinforce each other. One is established by the testimonies of Mabel Palmer, a woman who apparently selflessly devotes her time, money and energy to "helping" a politically subordinate Lily. The second revolves around the scholarly activity of the text’s producer, whose authority depends on her successful and persuasive representation of a subject about whom there seems so little evidence, yet about whom she is able to write at length.

In her letters to Mabel Palmer, Lily repeatedly speaks as the recipient or potential recipient of Palmer’s attentions. Her references to poverty, orphan-hood and victimization by men define a compound marginality: "I am an orphan with no property, a student, borne on the 31^st August 1933. All along I had been learning as a day scholar student, due to financial embarrassment" (58). Palmer repeats this image of Lily, and in letters to others, echoes Lily’s self-narrative: "She is a little native girl of 16 years of age who lives near Umtata, and who is burningly anxious to continue her education. She is an orphan and her native guardian does not feel he can afford to send her to school"(75). At some point, however, Palmer expects Lily to flourish, in ways similar to Sibusisiwe Makhanya, as a black woman who succeeds in the public domain, and who takes up a position of authority and agency within dominant discourses. At the same time that she positions Lily as the object of her patronage, then, she also expects Lily to act independently. The messages which Lily interprets can, therefore, become impossibly contradictory: on one hand she is instructed to be independent, while on the other she is told that she is irrevocably dependent, inferior. In a letter which Marks identifies as the turning point in Lily’s experience, Palmer responds to Lily’s request by stating:

For both Palmer, and indeed for Marks as biographer, the letters are glaring, indisputable evidence of Lily’s unreasonable diffidence, her inability (and not refusal) to take up the opportunities provided by her benefactor. The evidence of victimization appears to be irrefutable in the face of, for example, the concluding lines of Lily’s first four letters: "I beg for your sincere sympathy" (55); "I should be very glad if you would answer to my humble requests" (56); "I’m sure I’ll please you in any way in my character" (59); "please be sympathetic" (59). Yet can this be read only as evidence of Lily’s victimization, her suffering the circumstances of political oppression and discursive entrapment? One of the most persuasive illusions in Not Either An Experimental Doll is the impression, created by the reproduction of Lily’s letters, that the reader has access to her private thoughts, and that since her private letters so insistently inscribe her abject status, they constitute indisputable evidence of Lily’s self-perception as a victim. Yet the status of the letters as evidence of Lily’s innermost thoughts is far from absolute. In fact, all the reproduced letters can be read as fictive productions - shaped by particular contexts and directed at intended readers - of specific writing personae. Palmer consistently writes in the position of her public persona of educator and patron: she frequently sends her letters to Lily to others; she explicitly situates her exchanges with Lily in the broader pattern of her educational and political work; she is generally aware of the position of her letters in a public domain. In contrast, Lily constructs her letters to Palmer very much within the framework of an inter-personal exchange, an exchange in which she constructs a particular persona for an address to a specific correspondent.

Feminist critics like Judith Butler (1990) have dealt with the way that the persona, a performance of self which exaggerates culturally ascribed positions, can, for marginal subjects, constitute a covert awareness of imposed positions. While the adoption of masks may take the form of overt subversion, as in the case of iconoclasts like Brenda Fassie, it is important to consider how the letter form, with the spaces it provides for performance, may signal a silent but implicit disavowal of an adopted mask. Consequently, Lily "operates out of fragments of the self, out of memory’s echoes of strategies designed to cope with environmental particularities" (Brownstein: 1996, 188). Lily’s letters, far from confirming her complicity, can be seen to register covert resistance. Here it is especially important to consider the young black woman’s use of the English language, for her a second language learnt in authoritarian institutions and underpinned by repressive codes of deference and submission. The idea of the autograph, (what is not directly said but underpins what is said), becomes a crucial way of reading into Lily’s persona. In considering Lily’s letter-writing voice as a fragment of self, it is also important that her life extends to relationships, conflicts and encounters which neither Palmer nor the biographer have access to. This other life is often hinted at, yet is never identified as the context of inaccessible information about Lily. For Marks, it is simply homogenized as the "undoubtedly pathogenic nature of her environment, a frightening amalgam of the cruelties structured by colonialism and individual circumstance" (204).

In the same way that the status of Lily’s letters can be explored as textual productions of a self in relation to her correspondent, so should Palmer’s be seen as evidence of her discursive production of subjectivity. Palmer frequently refers to her sense of duty in relation to Lily, writing, for example: "I would be very much to blame as an older woman who has been fairly successful in the field of education if I neglected your appeal. You can depend upon it that I will not do so if I can find any way of helping you"(68) or "I am a very busy woman with a great deal to do for my own students" (77). In the course of the correspondence, this sense of duty intensifies, with Palmer, despite the growing evidence of Lily’s failure to live up to her expectations, increasing her attentions to Lily.

While she continually expresses impatience and disillusionment, her attentions to Lily appear to increase as the latter shows less evidence of "developing". When Lily performs particularly badly at Adams College, Palmer makes zealous efforts to move her to Marianhill. When Lily eventually disappears, Palmer writes to inquire about her whereabouts; when Lily leaves for Johannesburg, she sends her a gift and concludes her letter with: "I shall always be interested in hearing what happens to you" (191). At a time when Palmer appears to be most exasperated by Lily’s ingratitude, therefore, she seems most compulsive in her attentions towards her. This points to another way of interpreting the relationship of dependency: Lily becomes a crucial means by which Palmer confirms her sense of self as, among other things, socially responsible (in opposition to Lily’s "selfishness"), articulate, in relation to Lily’s inarticulateness, reasonable in relation to Lily’s irrationality, successful, in relation to Lily’s failure. The "positive" self displayed in the behaviour and letters of Palmer, then, can be interpreted politically as effects of a discursive process through which Palmer names herself in relation to Lily’s shortcomings.

In her interpretation, Marks usually echoes the representations of Palmer. Apart from presenting the reader with the "indisputable" evidence of Lily’s letters, this is achieved largely through constructing models of successful self-realization, in particular through the introductory biographical portrait of Mabel Palmer. Before reading her letters, the reader is enjoined to become complicit with the biographer’s perception of her: "As we shall see, a devastating common sense and a lack of sensitivity, coupled with quite extraordinary generosity in both time and money, characterised Mabel Palmer’s relationship with Lily Moya" (7). At other points, Palmer is congratulated in phrases like "One can only sympathize with Mabel’s somewhat harrased reply"(18) or "And Mabel did interest herself in Lily’s case. With accustomed energy she set about enquiring of her friends and acquaintances what the most suitable arrangements for Lily would be"(19).

In an illuminating cross-reference to Sibusisiwe’s Makhanya’s process of "empowerment", Marks describes this black woman’s relationship with her former patron, Mabel Carney. As a student in New York, Makhanya met Carney and regularly visited her home. Following a series of visits, Carney confronted her about her intrusions. Marks recounts her initial response: "Mortified, Sibusiswe rushed home and wept". Shortly afterwards, however, Makhana is described as asking Miss Carney’s forgiveness, and the description that follows recounts Makhanya’s numerous achievements. The test of self-realization which Makhanya faces is seen as the test which Lily fails. Although Lily writes a letter in which she apologizes to Palmer for imposing on her, her work deteriorates, and she continues to appeal to Palmer. Like Palmer, Marks defines Makhanya as a subaltern subject successfully liberated by her patron. That Makhanya’s judgement of Lily ("You gave her a splendid chance and she has abused it"190) endorses Palmer’s, strengthens the model of development for measuring success here. The reader is persuaded that what must be questioned is not the model, but the subject who fails.

The complicity of the reader with the text’s point of view is engineered not only through the emphasis on Palmer’s point of view, but also by marking the authoritative status of the text and its generic "historicity". Where Not Either An Experimental Doll may use methods as controlling as those of Poppie, its authority is inscribed by the numerous and conclusive discursive markers of factual documentation. One of these is the list Marks provides to acknowledge the tradition of scholarship in which she is situated. The text becomes the product not only of an individual researcher, but of a canon of authoritative research. Authority is also established through a meticulous referencing procedure, with the many footnotes that gesture beyond the text assuring the reader that the text is anchored in a real world out there. While maps and photographs serve the same function, at least two photographs expose the gap between a quest for "reality" and the elusiveness of this "reality"’. One is a photograph of a young girl, captioned "Snapshot of an unidentified girl. This picture was found among Mabel Palmer’s papers and may well be the one Lily promised to send her". Here the writer’s desire for evidence gets in the way of conclusiveness, and the reader is reminded that what the text presents can only be what the biographer is able to gain access to. Another is the photograph of a homestead with the caption "The Moya family looked very like this." The homestead may suggest Lily’s, but the photograph does not capture her own home. Again, there is a suggestion of the biographer’s unfulfilled pact with the reader. Visual representation, however, has the power to persuade more compellingly than writing, so that these admissions to approximations of truth are outweighed by the quantity of visual representation.

Marks’ strategy for persuading the reader not only of her authority, but also of her noble intentions convinces the reader of the "neutrality" of her text. The writer goes through the formal motions of self-reflexivity, while in the epilogue, she writes: "For all the joy of discovery, it has proven painful to come to terms with Lily’s subsequent story"(197). Invocation of pain (the sympathetic biographer’s proximity to her subject) sits oddly with the admission of "joy", the triumph of "capturing" her subject. But it is this joy which surfaces clearly in Marks’ story, disclosed only in her epilogue, of Lily’s madness. No clues to this outcome are given in the introduction; the biographer withholds the knowledge to shape a plot that artfully turns life-text into "tragedy". Assured of her power to create suspense and expectations from the reader, Marks poses the question: "What happened to Lily Moya?"’ and recounts the biographer’s triumphant discovery in her quest narrative. This story takes an unexpected turn when Marks reads a letter, published in response to her inquiries about Lily’s whereabouts, in a newspaper. This letter temporarily unsettles the biographer and concludes: "The crowning fatuity of your article comes when you express a desire to talk to [Lily] …By what right? And why assume she wishes to talk to you? In conclusion, forget about it. Sales will be small and you would be well advised to mind your own business" (195-6).

But the displacement of authority is brief, and the biographer reinstates sovereignty when she confirms that the writer of the letter could not have been Lily. At this stage, Marks gives full reign to historicizing zeal, exploring such subjects as the history of Sophiatown, possession by ancestral spirits and psychiatric services available to Africans. Lily’s madness provides the closure which Marks’ quest seems to contradict: it offers the writer’s ending to a story about an elusive subject who, when discovered, is trapped in silence. In a similar way that Palmer persistently writes to and about the figure of a Lily who becomes increasingly weak, powerless and silent, so does the biographer endlessly discover the silence and victimization of her passive subject. Even as Marks sets out to unsettle a conventional tradition of history, her writing remains defined by that history and its assumptions about the interpreter’s rationality and definitive agency.

Within the framework established by asserting Palmer’s straightforwardly well-meaning intentions, the traces of Lily’s overt, although cryptic signs of struggle with ascribed subject positions are ignored or marginalized. One particularly telling example is when Palmer asks Lily to write a short story on "The Life of a Native Girl in a Reserve", or if not wherever else you live"(87). Lily responds briefly, and includes the following provocative commentary: "I’m very sorry for not producing you a good draft to "The Life of an African Girl". I have not been a good traveller or very observant to such a subject, you will see little of my experience only based to what our people say of our girls and what we ought to do" (89). Palmer writes to Lily that "you only write interestingly and amusingly when you are writing about yourself. When I asked you to describe to me the life of a girl on a native reserve, your article was not very satisfactory" (138). This comment, and what it reveals about Palmer’s crudely stereotypical perception of Lily and the black women’s tacit resistance to this, seems a crucial site for inquiry. Yet Lily’s dense, although obscure commentary is paid scant attention, and Marks, almost echoing Palmer’s assumptions about rationality, contents herself with commenting in a footnote that Lily never produced the requested story. By the end of the correspondence then, Lily’s anger towards Palmer, "I was never meant to be a stone but a human being with feelings, not either an experimental doll"(186), becomes a random outburst, confirmation of Lily’s illogical response and of her characteristically erratic behaviour.

Lily has desires and subjectivity that signal agency, even though they do not reveal a "specific endorsement of agency in the traditional sense – with its attributes of both action as well as intention" (Rajan, 1993:12). Where it is possible to read Lily’s behaviour and letters as interrupting a power relationship, the questions constantly posed in the text pivot on Lily’s failure: Why did Lily not take up the opportunities presented for her? Why did Lily never become a successful and powerful black woman like Sibusisiwe Makhanya?

It could be argued that Marks, simply by writing about a subject like Lily, goes a long way towards challenging the idea that only the narratives of socially successful subjects are worth documenting. Yet when agency is relentlessly located within the act of interpreting others, rather than in their responses; or measured against dominant norm of success, positions of authority within dominant structures or platforms, fluency with language, speaking from positions within the dominant discourse, disruptive moments of rebellion can easily be ignored. The life text of a subordinate subject, far from contributing to new knowledges, can simply reinforce the basic assumptions of old ones. While the coding and manipulation in Not Either An Experimental Doll are particularly revealing about problems with speaking for subaltern subjects, they also lay bare many assumptions about life-writing generally. Biography conventionally assumes the neutrality of the biographer: her ability to "capture" a life so that interpretation becomes transparent. The limitations of the biographer are hidden or disguised, and conventions that persuasivel signal accuracy, authenticity and realism conceal the artfulness of the text. The profusion and range of biographical writing about black South African women seems to offer an important intervention into life-writing traditions that have been not only white-centred but also male-centred. Yet disempowering images and hegemonic interpretations persist in the apparently emancipatory practice of "making black women’s lives visible". Thus a commonsensical and traditional feminist principle, the need to write about hitherto unexplored subjects, seems a far less radical imperative than the need to interrogate the biographical method itself. In this way, biographers might develop forms of self-reflexivity in which they make transparent or become alert to the processes through which they construct their subjects’ lives.

Conclusion

Apartheid clearly generated tremendous international concern about a dispensation that, from viewpoints including ethics, religion and politics, was abhorrent. Narratives about lives under apartheid have consequently functioned as discursive sites for readers within the country and especially beyond it to confirm their sense of self, their norms and values. Scholarly productions such as Not Either and Experimental Doll and Belinda Bozzoli’s Women of Phokeng, have been widely circulated abroad and have considerably influenced an international academic community’s sense of what it has meant to be a black South African under apartheid. Other texts, such as Poppie Nongena or Lives of Courage have had general appeal for non-specialist readers in South Africa as well as in Britain and North America. It is important to approach these texts not simply as works that offer information about marginal subjects, but as discursive productions which interpellate readers in specific ways. Thus the telling of stories of apartheid through narratives of individual lives is revealing not so much about these lives or apartheid, as it is about the codification of apartheid as spectacle and about the way this codification has stereotyped black South African subjects.

Biography inevitably involves the reconstruction of an(other). Yet, as Betty Saski has cautioned:

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