Image of Rape: A South African Nightmare, by Pumla Dineo Gqola. Johannesburg: MF Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (PTY) Ltd, 2015

Gender and Sexuality

Rape: A South African Nightmare, by Pumla Dineo Gqola. Johannesburg: MF Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (PTY) Ltd, 2015

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In the two years since the publication of Pumla Gqola’s third book, Rape:
A South African Nightmare, the quotation above is the one most cited in
the myriad reviews of her work and in the conversations that the book has
inspired in public space. The metaphor — rape as language — draws on notions
of the symbolic as communication, and on the idea that a willingness to
accept the terms of a language constitutes a powerful route to the fiction of
a community. So, argues Gqola, the fiction of a South African nation involves
prescribed relationships between sexual violence and citizenship.
At the same time, the questions which intrigue linguists — such as the
ways in which languages obscure as much as they are able to facilitate
communication and the impossibility of representing embodied intensity
(pain, ecstasy) “in” language — are also Gqola’s. She is harassed, puzzled,
and frustrated by the seeming circularity of discussions about rape — the
hopelessness experienced by activists who have been working for decades only
to witness the escalation of incidents and the expansion of the forms “rape”
might take, the misunderstandings (still) about what constitutes rape, the
seeming jocularity about rape from some alleged perpetrators and, perhaps
most poignantly, the wariness and disbelief on the faces of those to whom a
survivor may confide their story. If “rape [is]… a language” for Gqola, then her
book is driven by a passionate conviction that such language tells lies — about
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histories, about those who experience rape, and about the “inevitability” of
rape. Perhaps, for Gqola, the most egregious lie is exposed in the conversation
that she develops across the volume about what it means to live in a country
whose daily vision for itself is enshrined in a Constitution full of commitment
to freedoms and whose “nightmare” hauls a very particular form of genderbased violence up from the unconscious to terrorise any possibility of safety

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: African Journal of Gender and Women Studies.,
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English
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South Africa
Rape
Pumla Gqola
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Article
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