“Heartsore”: The Melancholy Archive of Cape Colony Slavery

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.¹ 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.”² 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.”³

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.

1. The section in which Sila took the stand has been collated out of sequence in the bound volume held at the Cape Archive. In another convention of the time, questions and answers are numbered. In the bound volume CJ 626 held at the Cape archive, Sila’s interrogation begins with a question numbered one on page 844. The answer, also numbered one, follows. Yet the second and third questions and answers appear on page 853. [↩]
2. I have kept to the transliteration since this is the word (“heartsore”) that appears in many of the English translations of her trial. [↩]
3. The Dutch reads, “Ja het is van hartseer dat ek dat gedann heb.”  [↩]