Heal the world

This morning as Gogo and I were having coffee on the veranda, we started talking about the different events in each of our histories that challenged our perception of the world. Two of Gogo's children were murdered in the struggle against apartheid in the late 80's and early 90's, and she still carries much anger about their deaths and the impossibility of ever learning the truth about what happened to them. Gogo and her family were invited to participate in Truth and Reconciliation hearings, but she declined because the people who murdered her son Simon and her daughter Malu refused to acknowledge their participation and tell the true story of what happened to them.

Gogo and I have talked about what happened to me in Atlanta, and even though I do not claim to be forgiving about the attack, Gogo finds me to be somehow less angry than she is. We talk a lot about forgiveness, and who can forgive and how and why. Even in casual conversation here, forgiveness is a complex issues. Everyone here has a story of violence in his or her past. And perhaps that is true in the United States as well to some extent, but the difference here is that this violence and suffering is ordinary, and it is on the tip of every tongue. It is not oppressive, this kind of talk, but rather it is a fact of life, and an acceptable point of reference. In a strange, sad way, it is a mode of inclusion. It is a shared identity here, still fresh from the freedom fight that culminated in 1994 with the toppling of the apartheid government and election of Nelson Mandela as the first black president of South Africa. Eighteen years is all. But they are talking, and talking. There is no shame in being a victim. All here are victims, and the stories flow, and the wounds begin slowly to mend themselves. Slowly.

This morning Gogo told me about a story she had read in the newspaper that reminded her of me. She said she had wanted to keep it until the right moment. She ran in the house and came out with a crumpled copy of Friday's Cape Argus, Cape Town's most popular daily newspaper. On the front page, there was a giant picture of a young woman who last week had been attacked and raped walking to her car on the campus of the University of Cape Town, not far from here. The young woman has received a considerable amount of attention due to the fact that her brother is a quite famous rugby player. What was incredible about the article was that it was a front-page spread focused entirely on this woman, not on the details of her assault or her injuries, but on what she has to say right now, one week later, about what happened to her. She is aware that she is receiving extra media attention because of her family connection, and is explicit about using that attention for something good.

The writer reports: "She is one very remarkable young woman. What she has done needs to be saluted. It needs to be remembered that this is not months after the crime, or after the criminal justice process has been concluded, but just over a week. So she has not come forward from a position of strength.

"She said to me soon after the rape: 'To think of young women who do not have what I have, who have to go stand in a clinic, or don't have a supportive family unit who would come and support them with so much love and care.' She said: 'I want to use my family's profile to share a message that I didn't do anything wrong; that it doesn't change how I look at people in general, and especially not men. This is an individual that is very troubled. This is about violence. And this does not change my love for South Africa, my positivity about South Africa. I want to go back to my classes, go back to campus.'"

Of course it doesn't seem unusual for newspapers to report instances of violent crime, but what is unusual in this case is that a 20-year-old woman of some notareity is coming forward so soon after such a devastating event, and in such defiance that the event should silence or shame her. In this culture, that is something major. And if you think about it, it is also something major in American culture. That this woman tells her story, and tells it over and over again, will be the rope that holds her in waters she can manage. And from the front page of the Cape Argus, she tells the millions of other South African women who have been raped and beaten that they do not have to suffer in silence, that violence does not rain shame down on the victims, and that there is power in telling the story, and telling it again.

Sometimes the story is all we have. As I read this story and talked with Gogo, she cried and grabbed my hand. "I will not forgive the ones who killed my children, but I will remember," she said. "And you will always tell your story. You will always tell it. Every time you tell the story, you heal the world. You heal the world."