There was this Goat: to Understand and Live with Mrs. Konile

1. When I read Mrs. Konile’s testimony before TRC, it reminded me of Cassandra in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, who prophesies her and Agamemnon’s death in a language full of broken flashes and metaphors to an extent that the chorus she is addressing don’t understand what she means. Surely, the tragedian Aeschylus is a genius of using such techniques to increase the intensity and pathos of his play. But I think his genius did not come from nothing and it is not unlikely that Aeschylus had met people in his society who talked in a way similar to Cassandra does. And neither Cassandra nor Konile is a psychopath, though both were in a very sad and tragic situation when they were narrating. The moral of this comparison is that it is definitely not typical of African blacks to relate a story in a, seemingly, incoherent and incomprehensible way—Ancient Greeks did this as well! Only after we lift such prejudice based on culture and race, does real understanding begin. Here I empathize with the reasoning on pages 98-99 of the book:

“We often assume that a story by someone who looks or speaks like ourselves will be easier to understand than a story by someone from a completely different culture…I suggest that history holds only a small part of “salvation”, and that culture on its own, too, does not imply understanding. We need to find other ways to examine the truth of testimonies. What ways could they be? Given our history, any attempt to analyze the past or the present by anybody who values intercultural understanding, must assume that a subject from another culture is both familiar and strange. More significantly, though, I want to argue that even subjects from our own cultural group are both familiar and strange.”

 

2. The effort of the authors (Antjie, Nosisi, and Kopano) is basically to understand the truth and coherence of Mrs. Konile’s testimony in the context of her socio-cultural background and personal life condition, taking into account interpretation issues, an effort echoing what the German philosopher Gadamer said in his Truth and Method­, that is, understanding a text is very much about understanding it in such a way that it can be true.

Of course, understanding is not interpreting arbitrarily or over-interpreting which would be misunderstanding. I believe it is the fear of misunderstanding that finally motivated the authors to go for a face-to-face interview with Mrs. Konile. But when can we say that we have properly understood Konile’s testimony and her self? Is it her own inner thoughts or her own clarifying remarks that have the final say? Probably not, for even Mrs. Konile herself was in an active and continuous process of interpreting and living with her miserable self and in this sense might not be closer to herself than the authors.

I think understanding another’s narration and self is not so much interpreting his or her inner thoughts as an act of living with him or her, together. The authors are well aware of this in the end:

“Our interaction made us calibrate our lives towards each other-not to become one another, but to enhance our awareness of our living-together-ness with her.” (page 207)

This entry was posted in Krog, Narrative. Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to There was this Goat: to Understand and Live with Mrs. Konile

  1. Justin: Your experience as an interpreter sounds fascinating. You describe it eloquently: “I now have a very strong belief that the interpreter is not merely a channel or conduit between the speaker and the listener, but an active participant in the communication.” I hope you’ll talk more about this in class tonight.

  2. V.Andrews says:

    The entire process of SI is truly an exercise in discipline. There feeling expressed by the translators was that the testimonies they were involved in were emotionally and mentally exhaustive. The effort to be accurate and use the correct term to convey the depth of emotion or distain is tremendous. I can’t imagine being about to compartmentalize my mind like that.

  3. V.Andrews says:

    Justin,
    the passage that you allude to on pages 98-99. I completely connected with. The idea of sameness and strangeness. In our reading by Karen Miller, she continuously alluded to connections between her life and the lives of the protagonists in the autobiographies she read. How that element of sameness and the need to relate draws people to particular texts. Then reflects thier understanding of the autobiographers story. Their stance and the autobiographers understanding of themselves and what they want to convey.
    Here Mrs. Konile’s sameness( being an African ),was superseded by her uniqueness. This was all apparent in the final translation of her testimony and it’s inability to fit in with the other mothers and their testimony. As well as the people of Capetown. Her mode of relaying her story didn’t fit the mold.

  4. Jen, I entirely share your feeling about SI. Last year I worked in the UN as an inter. Occasionally I would do SI or consecutive interpreting (the speakers stop) for my colleagues and clients, between Chinese and English. That is when I found it is almost a mission impossible to pull off an interpretation of an accuracy close to 100%: every time you need to UNDERSTAND and EXPECT what the speaker said and would say and then interpret it. Of course, my frustration then might be largely due to the fact that I was not a SI professional and only occasionally did it in informal meetings , but from such experience I learned how your familiarity of the background of the speaker and the issue beforehand could incredibly facilitate your interpretation!
    More importantly, I now have a very strong belief that the interpreter is not merely a channel or conduit between the speaker and the listener, but an active participant in the communication. Sometimes I even felt that the listener is not understanding the speaker through the interpreter but understanding what the interpreter understands and thus understanding the interpreter himself!

  5. Telling of experience through words… this narrativizing we do to communicate with one another… is in essence what your last quote exemplifies, I think. When reading Mrs. Konile’s “official” testimony, I was immediately disappointed in the words not being clearer so I could understand what happened to her. I don’t think I immediately thought it was her fault, though. I think I could tell that the language was not “right”; that something was “off.” These notions you discuss in #2 of your post, Justin, are interesting to me because I was really struck by chapter 7’s discussion of the simultaneous interpretation (SI) method that was used in the TC testimonies. In chapter 7, an observer at the workshop that the authors are showcasing describes SI as: “an interpretation written down and not a translation” (p. 106). Translation is fascinating and fraught with complication in itself, and I think adding that layer of interpretation onto it just seems precarious, if not dangerous, given the traumatic circumstances.

    The “translators” are described as conduits here. We ultimately know Mrs. Konile through this transcribed interpretation we are reading, and the whole book is like an exercise in attempting to get closer to Mrs. Konile’s original, intended meaning by getting closer to all of the parts that make up the whole story (including the various analyses in the past and present, and up through her final telling at the face-to-face meeting).

    Chapter 7’s discussion of the challenges of real-time interpreting, especially given that both interpreting and translating each “cut across cultural boundaries” in their own ways, is salient. The workshop members discuss the issues inherent to SI; how interpreters don’t have dictionaries, let alone the time to consult them; that they are not offered workshops to discuss concepts or difficult words, etc., etc. They just sit and listen and re-talk for long periods of time. Hearing their descriptions of the mental exhaustion they feel from producing transcribed interpretations (which, by nature, are inaccurate), especially in terms of their relaying distraught testimonies, was powerful.

    I think this chapter really put Mrs. Konile’s testimony into perspective for me and made me appreciate the efforts of the book’s story even more. In this sense, I identify with the notion you present in paraphrasing Gadamer.

Comments are closed.