The demise of apartheid and the ensuing climate generated by the TRC sparked off a large number of books by white South Africans who tried to come to terms with their country’s shameful past in novels with a strong emphasis on confession, truth telling, and atonement. Titles like The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Innocence of Roast Chicken, Disgrace, etc. are telling in themselves. In more recent years the trend appears largely on the wane, while a significant number of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical works has appeared in which the focus is displaced from the narrating subject (and his/her needs) to the form of the narrative. In fact, the story being narrated, of a family or of an individual, comes through fragments and especially through the juxtaposition of different forms and genres of writing, which range from memoir to literary criticism, from reportage to topography, from testimony to fiction, from photography to poetry. At the heart of all of them lies the necessity of re-thinking questions like belonging and white identity in the new South Africa, confronting the memory of trauma and acquiring a new sense of space and places.
The paper intends to analyze some of such hybrid works, in particular Intricacy by Michael Cope published in 2005, White Scars by Denis Hirson and Portrait with Keys by Ivan Vladislavic, both published in 2006.