| Abstract: | This essay explores the ethical murkiness of interpersonal reconciliation in the post-liberation era, focusing on the problem of material, and specifically territorial, restitution—an aspect of justice which critics say was the missing component of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace alongside Bessie Head’s A Question of Power offers a window into the knotty relationship between reconciliation and redistribution, a relationship which, these novels insist, must be accounted for in reassessing directions for the future and defining new political horizons. Theories of post-apartheid interpersonal ethics, this essay argues, are incomplete and unachievable without a territorial dimension. While Coetzee shows territorial demarcations to be the silent shaper of human interaction and a constant snag in the fabric of the “new” South Africa, Head goes outside the boundaries of the apartheid state to envision the ethical restructuring of human relations through transformative practices of cooperative farming. While ethics is fundamentally about a relation to the other, these novels suggest that land distribution must be factored into the interpersonal equation. |
