Emotions in Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother

Mother to Mother, published in 1998, was written by Sindiwe Magona, a female South African author whose work mainly evokes social and political concerns, particularly apartheid and post-apartheid in South Africa. This novel fictionalizes a real event that took place in South Africa in August 1993: a mob of youths perpetrated the brutal murder of Amy Biehl, a white American Fulbright scholar. This case became internationally controversial not only because of the crime itself but also because of the pardon that all of the murderers were given through the amnesty applied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The novel also imagines the loss of the victim’s mother in an epistolary form, and extends outwards back to the 1850s through the lives of the murderer Mxolisi and his mother Mandisa, instead of primarily narrating the murder. The eager attention Mother to Mother has received for raising certain questions towards the TRC makes it stand out. More importantly, the way in which the novel presents contradictory and messy emotional states during these historical processes engages my analysis of different traumas using the lens offered by affect studies. Through reading multilayered collective and individual traumas in Mother to Mother, this dissertation explores the novel’s affective imagination through focusing on four prominent emotions: pain, doubt, confusion and grief in order to comprehend traumatic experiences for its people. I consider pain as the most recognizable product of traumas prompted by apartheid; therefore, this dissertation observes how apartheid results in physical and psychological traumas in the affective form of pain passing onto black South Africans, particularly through Mandisa’s account of forced removals. Furthermore, my analysis proceeds by contemplation of doubt cast upon South Africa’s politics, especially democracy, mainly through interpreting Mandisa’s virgin conception of Mxolisi. It is followed by a search for the meaning of confusion provoked by temporal restrictions implied in the non-chronological organization of the novel. Lastly, investigating Mandisa’s one-way address to the victim’s mother to read the relationship between these two mothers, the dissertation concludes by comparing Mandisa’s grief attributed to personal losses with the other mother’s grief, which connects the claim of grief Magona makes with inquiries about how the affect studies respond to a possibility of sharing grief between diverse people.