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Yvette Christiansë,
"'Heartsore': The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery"
(page 11 of 12)
And yet, caution is needed when attempting to "read" this word
floating seductively in the archive. For a researcher, the libidinal
frisson derived from archival practice carries within itself the hope
for discovery or surprise, and in that hope lies the danger of a narrow
reading of self-assertion. Confronted by such a figure as Sila, a
researcher must skirt a longing for evidence of agency or escape. Again,
Spivak provides a cautionary paradigm about the fate of feminized
speech. And one must ask, despite this heartrending word, to what extent
Sila's speech is hers at all.[54]
What happens to this word, particularly in the appeal on her behalf
by the advocate Van Ryneveld, is revealing. The document now describes
her in a mode that draws upon the language of sentimentality. Thus, a
scene is literally "drawn" for the Court of Appeals, a scene in which
Sila holds the sleeping Baro:
. . . then meditating as usual, of her fate and that of her
children and concerning that she had no hope, for relief, [Sila] was
overwhelmed with grief and sadness and resolved to kill her child and
then to destroy her own life also, in order that an end may be made to
their miseries, in which moment of utmost desperation, she cut her
child's throat, but on seeing the blood was [struck] with terror, and as
it were rendered unable to commit the intended suicide, and then ran to
the house of the Field Cornet of the ward and reported the occurrence to
them. (CJ49/25:458-459)
Here is a tableau that clearly attempts to negate and redeem Sila's
image as a rebellious monster slave. It works to fit her into a ready
discourse: mother with sleeping boy-child in her lap, a boy-child who is
already dead in such a scene, since the meditative grief of the mother
is what gives to the tableau its poignancy. That this image might also
invoke another tableau of mother and son cannot be overlooked. In that
other tableau, there is a narrative of divine sacrifice that is, also, a
gift of death and freedom. What is necessary for such a messianic
tableau is, however, a father figure that consigns his son to the work
of sacrifice. Such a figure is missing in Sila's tale, since paternity
is nowhere mentioned in the records relating to her. But the former
archetypically Christian tableau can nevertheless be summoned here. Even
now, reading the document, the image invoked is conceptual as much as it
is given a specific form in the names of Sila, slave, and Baro, her
child. This conceptual image of "mother-and-child" works both to beg
Christian sympathy and charity from the court and to risk an awful
contrast. For, between the allegorical tableau and the brutal actuality
of a mother and her dead, murdered child is the problem of agency. If
Mary submitted, then Sila refused. Their sons' deaths incarnate the
difference in form through which their wills sought expression.
The image of "mother-and-child" also resolves a tension that emerges
between the high emotion of the images of "grief and sadness" and the
legalistic formality of such words and phrases as "meditating,"
"concerning that," and "utmost," as well as "rendered unable to commit
the intended" and "reported the occurrence." The appeal has stilled the
strangeness of the word "heartsore" by translating it into something
much more stable. This is the waiting frame of a tableau in which not
only the notion of "mother-and-child" is invoked but also the notion of
"Woman" herself. This is crucial because, in the earlier dispute between
Theron and Hancke, what persuaded the Fiscal that Sila was indeed a
slave was the reference to her as meid or maid. The issue
surfaced again in the rejection of Sila's appeal, wherein it was claimed
that her crime had been prompted by the denial of her own and her
children's freedom as stipulated by the will of Hendrina Jansen. In its
decision against the appeal, the court noted that:
Although the Memorialist has endeavoured to lay some
stress on the wording of the sentence of this 6th March 1827 wherein
Druzilla [sic] has been called der meid Drusilla [sic] I do not
see, but that the Court has therein acted in conformity to a very common
practice, whereby a female slave in this Colony is called meid.
Should this remark not satisfy the author of the memorial, then let him
remember that the worshipful Court by having condemned J. J. Theron to
restore the possession of der meid Drusilla and her children
[emphasis added to original document in the form of an underline] to Mr.
C. Hancke has shown beyond the reach of contradiction that Drusilla
[sic] was considered by the Court to remain in the state of slavery. (GH
49/45:495)
This ruling suggests that Sila herself had attempted to define the
meaning of the word maid as (free) domestic servant, as opposed to the
"very common practice" of referring to a female slave as a junior and
unmarried woman. It opens a further space in which some faint tremor of
voice may resonate.
While meid or maid could be dismissed readily by the Court of
Appeals, the word "hertseer," or "heartsore," apparently could
not. Within the bureaucratic language that demands and promises the
transparency of explanation, the word appears to register among what was
considered the language of a female slave—emotional, irrational, and on
the edge of unpredictability. At this point, an instability is revealed
within the fortress of prerogative that shapes the law to which
Sila is subject. She may speak but only as a slave woman is expected to
speak, and in a manner that makes her speech evidence of her confinement
to that status. In effect, when she is before the courts, Sila can only
answer, and what she says is what has been already said, but not by her.
The archive redoubles this structure and the punitive violence that
inhabits it. But Sila's action, violent as it is, attempts to summon the
law as a full subject might summon it, to question and not merely
answer, to speak and not only confirm what has been heard.
In a profound sense, however, Sila resembles Echo—the one who does
not speak first—in the narrative poem "Echo and Narcissus." As Ovid's
story goes, Echo is the nymph who distracts Juno, while Zeus disengages
himself from the company of other nymphs. Echo is then punished by Juno
and condemned to forever speak the last thing she has heard—and nothing
else. Thus, when Narcissus, calling for his companions, asks, "Is
anybody here?" the single word that ends his speech is both the
beginning and end of hers, with the one caveat being that the speech is
not hers at all. The ability to inquire is closed off in the repetition.
Moreover, prior utterance is detached from its context and set floating
in some dislocated proximity to what it signified. All the signs are
there, but the content shifts. Or so it appears because the context is
left behind. In its repeated form, in the narrative of "Echo and
Narcissus," the utterance is a mistake, inappropriate, and even vulgar.
The reader knows the mistake. Yet something happens to the prior
utterance in the process. It not only loses its priority, but it is
returned in a hollowed-out form, stripped of its context and prior
meaning. It comes back paradoxically altered and the same. It comes back
as more than what it was—it essentially doubles itself, and in this
doubling and redoubling of the echo, something of itself stands forth.
Thus, when Narcissus calls, "Come to me!" Echo's repetition is in fact a
return that has a revelatory content. It foreshadows the full discovery
of Narcissus' nature, the self-absorption that will move him to be
attracted by and to himself.
It is possible to read—and one can only read the
archive—Sila's gesture of surrender as an act that, whatever her
intention, now reveals a smooth mirroring surface. It is that surface in
which the Field Cornet—as the local representative of the law—confronts
the violence of the law that has already condemned Sila and all other
slaves, including Baro, to violence. Sila, however, is not a nymph who
frets and pines away. She does not wait, passively stalking the object
of her desire. She acts. Yet this act remains deeply private, despite
its iteration and re-iteration, citation and recitation in the legal
domain. This domain, the cornerstone of the public sphere, persists, but
it is split in and by history. This history is shaped by the colonial
context and its laws. It is further shaped by apartheid and the laws it
shared with colonialism's practice of assigning the face of slavery to
the face of black people. It is significant that the apartheid
government's control of the archive did not lead to the erasure of
Sila's (or any slave's) existence, and this is mainly because the
context in which she (and other slaves) appear is that of criminality.
Where the paternalistic face of slavery could claim the need to subject
slaves to a "civilizing" code of labor, apartheid could claim that its
own racial stratifications were, literally, the "civilizing" burdens of
whiteness, for which figures like Sila (Hester, Rosalyn, and others)
were historical precedent and proof in that they, as criminalized black
women, could always be on record as the "evidence" of a racialized
inhumanity that, in Judge Truter's 1819 ruling against Hester, could not
be "tolerated in a country where Justice prevails but on the contrary
should be rigorously punished according to the Laws as an Example to
deter others from doing the like.
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