ABSTRACT
If traumatic storytelling had become so burdensome for some Khulumani members, if its particular “grammar of harm” (Ross 2003b) so constrained the imagination and its modes of subjectivity so narrowed the range of motion for victim subjectivity, we might ask why things weren’t different. If the reworking of traumatic memory is—as we are often told—such a necessary and useful exercise for individuals, community, and nation, why weren’t victims able to invent forms of memorial expression that were more responsive to individual needs and local contexts? Though the chapters so far have charted numerous ways traumatic storytelling changed in the years after the TRC, these changes were also remarkably circumscribed and tentative. When introduced to a new visitor to the group, for example, Khulumani members were as likely at the end of my fieldwork as they were at the beginning to launch into the self-reflexive and reductive kind of traumatic storytelling they had complained so bitterly about when I first met them.
