Shouting against Silence: André Brink's Voices of Truth

This thesis investigates the notion of 'Truth' upheld by the South African writer André Brink and discusses his deconstruction of the processes of truth-making. I argue that Brink understands fixed narratives, or received 'truth', as constructed to the detriment of alternative narratives, resulting in their subjugation and eventual loss. In response to authoritative discourses, Brink advocates an ongoing and evolving series of challenging narratives which refuse the closure of narrative possibilities. He urges a constant process of un-forgetting and remembering, a contestational activity that undermines the truth-claims of any oppressive group. Three central texts have been chosen as exemplary of Brink's directive to contest fixed truth claims. The first of these, Devil's Valley, offers an opportunity to examine the novelistic (and often postmodernist) blurring of distinctions between binary oppositions such as 'fact' and 'fiction', 'past' and 'present', 'real' and 'unreal'. In undermining the ostensibly dichotomous nature of these pairings, Brink challenges the bases upon which prejudicial systems such as the Apartheid regime rely. In doing so, he reveals the constructions behind both prejudice and hegemonic discourses, and ultimately undermines these foundations. Similarly, Imaginings of Sand provides a means by which to further explore Brink's engagement with prejudice, and most specifically, with the patriarchal oppression of women. I suggest that Brink's female narratives, in which multiplicity and endless possibility are foregrounded, again contest the constraints imposed by a dominant discourse, offering alternative versions. My final textual examination focuses on A Chain of Voices, in which both the polyphonic narration and the thematic content exemplify the concerns discussed previously Brink's usage of various imagery related to oppressive relationships, I claim, provides metaphors for the manner in which binary relationships are co-dependent, rather than dichotomous, undercutting the justifications associated with privileging certain narratives over others. Brink's Truth, I argue, involves an ongoing contestational process of narratorial imagining, a revisionary project central to both the prejudicial environment of Apartheid South Africa, in which much of Brink's work was written, and also to the larger context of prejudice in all its forms and geographical locations.