Yvette Christiansë,
"'Heartsore': The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery"
(page 10 of 12)
In a Word
It is tempting to imagine the effects that women such as Sila,
Hester, or Rosalyn might have had on the law. It is tempting to imagine
that Sila's actions might have caused the law to respond, even if this
response was simply a (re)consolidation. But this would suggest that the
law recognized her or its susceptibility to such a figure. It would
suggest, too, that there was, in the law, a discursive space in which a
slave woman—or maid or slave man—could achieve legibility, and hence a
future presence.
Yet Sila, like Hester, is present as a vanishing figure. Sila is not
in the present moment of this, my project. To claim that she is present
in the moment that one accesses documents in the archive would be to
create fiction that, in fact, makes a lie of her single and irrefutably
other reality. Spivak's caution against imbuing the written word with
the aura of absent presence is a salutary reminder of the risk of
wanting to rewrite history, not only nostalgically but also
sentimentally (Spivak 1999: 321). We cannot "recover" Sila (or Hester).
What remains is that which was and still is in excess of the law and,
indeed, in excess of her. This excess is suggested in the utterance that
echoes in a single word, the word that comes to us as a transliteration
of the Dutch "hartzeer."
The word was first cited (as "hertseer" and "hartzeer")
in the depositions of Field Cornet Van Huisteen and his guest Carel
Schaffen, who was present when Sila arrived. According to Van Huisteen,
Sila is said to have claimed that she acted "uit hartzeer [en]
verdriet," (CJ 626:790 and CJ 817:240). These testimonies preceded
Sila's own appearance in court, but their use of the phrase "hartzeer
[en] verdriet" has the status of a verbatim citation. In the English
translation made for the Cape Town Court of Justice, the phrase is
"heartsore and grief," though it might also have been rendered
"heartache and despair." In March 1823, the Cape Town Court of Justice's
affirmation of the original judgment by the Court in the District of
George is in English, and the phrase is set down as "grief and
affliction" (CJ 626:465).
In Van Huisteen and Schaffen's testimonies, the phrase is not
surprising, as both have some immediate proximity to the emotion of her
arrival and disclosure of what she had done. Van Huisteen states that
Sila handed over a knife:
[en] het storten van tranend te kennen gegeven, dat zy
haar kind, Baro, genaamd uit hartzeer & verdriet hem [Baro] met een mes,
het welk by ziy had, de keel had afgesneeden. (CJ
626:790)
The official English translation reads:
. . . and shedding some tears [acquainted the Field Cornet
with the news] she, through heartsore & grief, had cut the throat of her
child named Baro with [the clasp] knife. (CO 189 and
190)
The word heartsore also appears in Sila's interrogation.[51]
The transcripts of that interrogation reveal only three questions from the
prosecutor and three brief answers from Sila. In response to the
prosecutor's question as to whether she admitted to the crime of cutting
her son's throat, Sila allegedly answered [the translation is mine]:
"Yes, because I was heartsore [hartseer] when I cut the throat of
my son Baro."[52]
Asked if she knew that this was a crime for which she
would have to answer, her reply was, "Yes, because I was heartsore, that
is why I did it."[53]
Here, in response to the law's demand for corroboration of what it
already claims to know, are her answers, and they are both the same. Yet
they exceed the straight confirmation expected of her. The word
hartzeer, or its transliterated form, "heartsore," appears to
come directly from Sila; it is strange and, especially its
transliteration, doubly foreign. The word seeps out across the official
documents. It will not be contained. It echoes within the
archive—excessive, dangerous, and struggling to rationalize a theft of
the law's prerogative over life and death and the monopoly over the
definition of crime and gift, crime and accusation. By contrast with the
affective urgency and immediacy of this term, the law is exposed as
sluggish, dogged, and belated because it is unable to hear her the first
time she answers.
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