What is Disappearing, What is Appearing
For Derrida, there can be “no private archive” (Derrida 1998:48).1 But this does not mean that the public and iterable differences in the archive exhaust the particular knowledge and private experience to which such utterances attest. There is something that can never be made public in the case of Sila and Baro. And this insistent secret cautions contemporary historians against appropriating Sila for the cause of resistance and the history of Western subjects-in-the-making. Deeply private, Baro’s death is the factor that will not permit Sila’s act to translate itself into resistance, even though this act transgresses the law. Sila and Baro alone have intimate knowledge of the act. And Baro has a knowledge that exceeds even Sila’s. This, we can never read. There is no discursive space in the archive for what Baro knew, not even through the law that would speak on behalf of his body, for, in this case, it is not the fact of Baro’s fate that offends the law but of Sila’s challenge to that law. The certainty of Sila’s act may transform her by extending her beyond her delegated position, but the fact that Baro bears the full burden of this violence puts the brakes on any runaway “triumphalism” of late twentieth-century readerly practice.
But, we may ask, are there not other silences that might be measured from elsewhere, in other discourses? What silencing is testified to by a bruise so many inches long and so many inches wide on a woman’s back, or a scab on a boy’s buttock?
Sila’s appeal, clearly penned by her advocate Van Ryneveld, provides quotidian detail about Baro’s death, detail that is, in fact, precisely in keeping with what Francus observes to be a trope in English defense strategies in cases of infanticide. This is the appearance of linens (Francus 134). Ironically, Francus’ observation relates to the fact that mothers brought their (dead) baby’s linens to court to “establish her good character and let them speak for her.” In Sila’s appeal, there are no linens for Baro, for he was too old for linens—and a slave child, to boot. Rather, what are present are the linens of slavery. In setting up the immediately relevant details of the day of Baro’s death, the defense shows Sila obeying her mistress’s order that she wash stained household linens. Sila’s request that Baro fetch lemons for the purpose of bleaching the linens should also support this image of obedience, an obedience that passes itself on to her child. The account then goes on to say that:
. . . he [Baro] complied therewith, and on his return, complained that he felt much pain all over his body , in consequence of the aforesaid ill treatment, wherefore Memorialist took the little grease she had on a piece of bread and applied it on his body, soon after which he fell asleep on her
knees . . ..
In its shaping of sentiment, this language of the appeal has shifted from the accusatory tone of the Court’s record. Moreover, the rhetoric of emotional duress draws into itself that improbably cerebral word, “meditating.” Here is a polite but daring insistence upon an interiority and responsivity that refused any dismissal of Sila’s act as merely “willful,” as the court’s sentencing document decreed it to be. That the court would go on to do just this, to dismiss any such humanity in Sila, is evident. What is not so evident is that Sila’s claim to interiority is being staged by her advocate in a way that removes the impact of her actions upon Baro. The strategy is, to all intents and purposes, understandable. The idea is to focus the court upon Sila’s plight, not upon her crime. Yet the appeal does not succeed. The decision against it remained firmly ensconced within the language of the original trial and sentence.
In the first trial, there was no discussion of slavery itself. There was no discussion of Sila’s history and the thwarted will of Hendrina Jansen, Theron, or Hancke. Nothing was said about the sale of Carolina or Camies, of the predicament of the young Pieter, Sila’s youngest child, still on Van der Wat’s farm. If Sila did speak of this, it could only have been said outside of the court’s mandate—to focus upon the crime and finding the punishment for it. Since slavery was not a crime, it had no place as an object of interrogation in these proceedings. This is also suggested by the trial documents’ designation of the Van der Wats as Sila’s “master” and “mistress.” Here, ironically, Sila’s position as slave dictates or, at least, shapes the court’s language insofar as the Van der Wats, as colonial subjects, are named in terms of their relation to their slaves. Such naming materializes the complicity between slavery’s rule and the colonial rule of law.2 Further, the legislative convention of placing individuals into the allotted speaking or silenced positions shaped by the nouns “witness,” “defendant,” “victim,” or “appellant” is, here, brought into line with slavery’s fundamental insistence that the single noun “slave” exists before and after all (slave) names. Although slaves could be called to give testimony in court, they remained outside or beyond the categories of witness or appellant.
In her analyses of the predicament of another woman “criminalized” by colonial law, Gayatri Spivak writes of “women outside of the mode of production narrative,” women whose outsider status “mark the points of fadeout in the writing of disciplinary history even as they mine ‘writing as such,’ footprints of the trace . . . that efface as they disclose,” (Spivak 1999:244). Spivak’s choice of phrase resonates fortuitously with the legal position in which Sila’s name appears: “We can docket them, but we cannot grasp them at all.” Something disappears. In Sila’s case, there can only be the incomplete disappearance that being consigned to the archive ensures.
What is dis-appearing then? A name that is one of many versions of itself skirting the vicinity of a woman I have been calling Sila, because that is the name she answers to in the court of law. What is dis-appearing? A word, affectively charged, caught between translation, pointing to an opacity behind which something moves—lives of people, lives moving against each other, away from each other, a woman washing linen, a boy running to fetch lemons, complaining of pain, some bread, some grease, a knife. And the presence of a woman called mistress of a house some three hundred paces away. And, behind her, ox straps close at hand, a man who is called master. A boy, dead. A woman consigned to death. A history of living death. The archive is haunted by them all.
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- Speaking specifically to the impact of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Derrida equated the gathering of victim’s testimonies with archiving or, more specifically, “the problem of the archive.” For him, the Commission was itself “a place of archive” that would, through mass mediation, be public. Commenting upon the archive’s future, Derrida used the predictive verbal clause, “It’s going to be a public archive.” [↩]
- One is reminded here that one of the judges who presided over Sila’s (and Hester’s) trial, Sir John Truter, was the same judge who penned a series of objections to the amelioration acts of 1822 onwards, particularly to the creation of the office of the Protector of Slaves on the grounds that this would interfere with the jurisdiction of judges and magistrates. CO 414/A, 107. [↩]
