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.1
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.
- One has to ask in what sense a slave might possess language. The answer to this deserves and requires a sustained consideration, which I am addressing in the larger project of which this present essay is part. [↩]
