Unmournable bodies, embodied monuments and bodily truths: rethinking reconciliation in Zulu Love Letter

Zulu Love Letter is a South African classic and a paragon of exceptional filmmaking in Africa. It is not surprising that it has attracted (and is still attracting) the attention of scholars, critics, and students, as they continuously attempt to unpack, deconstruct, and even understand its goldmine of meanings. For me, the film is mainly about bodies – (un) mournable bodies, missing bodies, bodies in pain, broken bodies, fragile bodies, docile bodies, and so on. The film is full of black bodies acquainted with traumatic grief. The film is, in and of itself, a textual body – a cinematic body – that serves to funeralize the dead and memorialize the past. It also serves as a portable monument for the dead and a gesture to the living not to forget the horrors of apartheid. The recurrent trope of women dressed in black in the film typifies physical, social, and gendered bodies in mourning; it represents how the living literally bears the grave of the dead on their bodies. As Bhekizizwe Peterson has noted, these women are embodied monuments to the missing dead bodies that are yet to be found after the end of apartheid. Although there are numerous accounts of post-traumatic growth in South Africa, especially on a national scale, many bodies are still missing, many deaths are yet to be accounted for, many people are still grieving and the socio-economic conditions of many have not changed. Legacies of the past still influence the emotions of the present. There is a pervading disappointment with democracy and a general disillusionment in the present. The specters of apartheid hover in the air. This unresolved relationship with the past produces some sort of post-apartheid melancholia as conversations about recognition, reparation, and reconciliation are still ongoing in the country. Many victims – and their descendants – still feel that their pain were not given adequate recognition and that they were pressured into terminating their griefs precipitously. The film suggests that the word “reconciliation” – at least within the framing of the TRC – is limited in capturing and negotiating the complexities of issues and layers of contentions in post-apartheid South Africa. In this regard, Thandeka tells her daughter: “nothing can compensate me for what I went through. And there is no talk of either arresting them or paying the abused families.” Also, Bouda’D tells Thandeka that “reparations are a must, or else we look like fools in front of the reconciliation commission”. What this seemingly knotty situation tells us, in a Derridean sense, is that true