ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to this single work which received much critical acclaim when first published and which continues to resonate with audiences today. It starts by explaining the novel’s context of great unrest in the townships and the killing of Amy Biehl in 1993—an event that challenges the “rainbow nation” idealism found in mainstream discourse—and investigates three methods she uses to deconstruct the national discourse: the positionality of the narrative voice, the use of multiple genres (epistolary, journalistic writing, personal memoir, and epic), and the layering of narrative time. Providing a review of the many critical responses to this novel throughout, this chapter also advances its own reading: that Mother to Mother straddles the polarities between guilt/innocence, condemnation/exoneration, and apology/apologia and calls for multilayered thinking instead of the sloganeering that was mobilized during the resistance struggle. This chapter concludes by looking at the novel’s response to the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), both its endorsement of narrative as a means of healing and its criticism of the TRC’s eclipsing of women’s everyday traumas and its push for reconciliation which precluded the commission from acknowledging the deep resentment being carried in the hearts of South Africans into the new dispensation.
