Question:

Assignment

Pick any one text from our unit on South Africa and any one text from our unit on Sri Lanka. Write an essay in which you compare and contrast a specific aspect of the two texts in order to advance a claim about them. You might focus on something to do with form (eg genre, narrative structure, patterns) or with content (eg themes, figurative language, tone), or with some combination of the two.

As always, a successful thesis will be specific, debatable, and text-based. For compare/ contrast essays, we also expect that it will:

• Make the point of comparison clear. For example, you might be addressing the idea of passion as illustrated by two different authors in two different texts.
• Go beyond the obvious (eg “The poem paints a picture that we can easily imagine,” “the Constitution is written the way it is because the law needs to be stated clearly,” or “Because these texts were written in two very different times and places, they treat the idea of passion differently”).
• Explain the significance of the comparison rather than merely place the two texts side by side and point out similarities and differences between them. Your thesis should synthesize the texts to give us a new understanding of both. For example, “Whereas Chekhov’s character makes meaning of his life by passionately pursuing wide knowledge, James’ narrator allows his passion to evolve into an unhealthy obsession.”

How to compare and contrast

Keep asking yourself “so what?” The question will help you explain why your reader should be interested in these two works together to begin with, and specifically why the comparison matters (as opposed to just noting what’s the same and what’s different). The reader should not have to ask “so what?” at the end of your essay.

Think about organization. While you can organize your comparison/ contrast essay in several ways, you should avoid discussing one text in full and then turning to the other, because that way you end up putting all the comparison and contrast in the second half of the paper. Instead, you could structure the first part of the body around similarities, moving from one text to the other, and the second part around differences, discussing each text in turn. Or you could focus each paragraph on one similarity or difference, discussing examples from both.

Pay attention to word choice. Incorporating a hinge word (like whereas, however, or despite) into your thesis will help you establish an analytical connection between the things you’re comparing (see the example above). The verbs you use to shape your thesis can also be very helpful. For eg, we could make the thesis above even more interesting by writing, “Whereas Chekhov’s character makes meaning of his life by passionately pursuing wide knowledge, James has his narrator allow his passion to evolve into an unhealthy obsession, thereby extending our idea of passion.” Useful verbs include debate, converge, extend, complicate, contradict, confirm, and correct.

Link your ideas. It’s vital that you continuously establish the links between ideas for your reader. Never assume that the connection that seems obvious to you is obvious to anyone else.

Questions you can ask to get started include:

• What are your grounds for comparison—ie, what is it about the two texts that allows you to bring them together?
• Is your point of comparison something the texts do similarly, differently, or some combination of the two?
• What overall pattern is operating in the similarities and why does it matter? How does the comparison enhance our understanding of the texts?
• What is the cause of the differences and why does it matter? What unique and new insight comes from contrasting the texts?
• How does similar subject matter get transformed by different genres?
• How do different narrative voices, points of view, or tones change similar subject matter?
• What is it about the text’s form or genre that works with the content and how?
• How do the different geographical and historical contexts specifically shape the choices in the texts?

Answer;

Violence is a kind of behavior, which involves physical force and hurting to kill or damage something or someone. It is related to brutality, ferocity and barbarity. Violence is a recurring phenomenon that happened on earth to exert power or force. It could be the result of colonial force or war. Throughout the history, the violence has occurred due to intervention of the colonial power or war. During 15^th century, the Europeans started to show interest for land of Africa. The Europeans entered into the land by sailing. They first established a trading relationship with the people of the continent. However, after many years of Christian missionaries’ acquisition in the land to spread their religion, the colonizers finally settled down in the land and started to exploit the indigenous people of Africa. As the power rest in the hand of the colonizers in the African land, they were able to do whatever they want. To maintain their power in continuum, the colonizers took many strategies. Violence is one of their strategies to maintain their power relation with the colonized.

Violence is the result of war. It could be a tool for creating damage and sometimes winning the war. The Sri Lankan Civil War was an armed struggle occurred in the island of the Sri Lanka. It has begun on 1983. In the war total 23, 327 people were killed and more than 60,000 people were wounded. The war occurred between the Sri Lankan army and LTTE or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In 19 May 2009, then president of the Sri Lanka has declared the end of the civil war by defeat of the LTTE.

The aim of this essay is to show the contrast and comparison between two texts, one is from Sri Lanka and another is from South Africa. The common thread in these two texts is violence. The essay will show how violence has been portrayed, which occurred on the territories. The chosen texts are Into the Dark Chamber: The Ovelist and South Africa by J.M Coetzee and Noontide Toll by Romesh Gunesekera.

The South African text into the dark Chamber: The Ovelist and South Africa has portrayed the violence in the context of colonialism. J.M Coetzee who has won Nobel Prize for literature writes it. The author has illustrated violence by showing different author’s texts who have worked on the violence in the colonial era of Africa. For example, the Lead of the text has started with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work “The Scarlet Letter” in which Nathaniel has stated that the colony is established with necessity of lands for cemetery and prison. The cemetery is important for burial and prison for political imprisonment in the colony.

The South African text is the illustration of strategies that had been taken by the colonial power to build resistance against revolution. The colonial empire had banned photography or visual claiming that illustrated the violence act of the ruler. The cruelest action of the ‘white electorate’ was place the violence out of the site of the public. For example, ‘If people are starving, let them starve far away in the bush, where their thin bodies will not be a reproach’ (Coetzee). However, in the poem named ‘In Detention’, which was mentioned in the text, the poet Christopher van Wyk had accumulated rumors against a death of a political prisoner in the land where documentation with photography is banned. The rumors were in the air, thus, the poet had told three lines about the cause of the death in several ways.

On the other hand, the Noontide Toll is set in Sri Lanka after twenty-six years of civil war between the Sri Lankan army and Tamil Tigers. Here the narrator Vasantha is a van driver who believes in constant movement from darkness to hope. The reader hears a voice of hope even after the war. Vasantha commented, “You don’t have to feel trapped. If you are on the move, there is always hope’ (Gunesekera). Thus, the violence here illustrated completely in different manner. This episodic novel is obviously a product of violence. However, the protagonist is optimistic about life and the author has shown him in very different way than the other text. The text has shown some postwar devastation through the chronicles of Vasantha, which is the violent portrait of the war. The van driver, the seeker Vasantha who transported tourists, aid workers, soldiers and entrepreneurs, his thought was the soul of this text, which endorsed retention of humanity even after the war. The author Romesh Gunesekera examined the central debate of the text through Vasantha, which was how did the country address its past related to war? Did it dig it up continuously after the post-war situation or bury it in the soil of humanity? The text had dealt the war-violence and post war situation in a more sensible manner as it was mentioned on the Vasantha’s comment that the past had to leave while forwarding, the past is what one leaves while going forward.

Thus, the treatment of violence is completely different in two different texts. The South African text approaches violence in the manner of documentation where the author has portrayed it gathering different testimony about violence. The other text has approached it in optimistic manner and the author wants to leave the past memories and go forward in the cycle of life. The protagonist is playing a role of an observer. He observes the post-war situation of the country and takes care of his job.

However, the ending of these two texts carries a significant similarity. Both the texts are n favor of humanity and want to bring it back. The South African Text has ended with longing of Rosa, a character of Miss Gordimer’s novel. She hopes for restoration of humanity and morality in the South African society. However, this mere imagination and future hope, not the reality of South Africa. However, the hope has capacity to draw the entire human civilization into better future. The author claimed a ray of hope about the future, he commented, “In such a society it will once again be meaningful for the gaze of the author, the gaze of authority and authoritative judgment, to be turned upon scenes of torture. When the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall or turning one’s eyes away, then the novel can once again take as its province the whole of life, and even the torture chamber can be accorded a place in the design’’ (Gunesekera).

The other novel shares same view of hope and optimism at the finishing domain. The van of Vasantha is approaching forward as if it left the past and living in hopeful present. Someone is cleaning the road and sweeping the war debris, burned-out buses and oil barrels. However, the irony is that the scars of war remain silently in the mind of the victims who has internalized the trauma of the war.

It can be concluded by stating that though violence is some recurring incident on the face of the earth and civilization of humanity, it could be removed with hope for betterment and then the society could be transformed. The illustration of violence occurred due to colonial forces and civil war in Africa and Sri Lanka respectively was excellent and as real as morning light. The two authors have explained violence in completely different manner. Their treatment, tone and process of illustration are completely different. The African author is impulsively responded to the colonial violence and through his words; the author has explicitly explained the nature of the violence in the colonial era of Africa. He has shown the politics of the colonizers behind maintaining the continuous force of the violence. However, the author has seen alight of hope at the very end of his text. The author has dreamt for the new society, which are free of exploitation or violence. On the other hand, the Sri Lankan author is much hopeful in his attitude in the text. The protagonist’s approach is optimistic in the text. He is hoping for the best though a long war happened in the land and the land has carried the essence of the war. However, only the hope could be tool in forwarding positively in the future. The two authors have anticipated for it.

References

Coetzee, J.M. “The New York Times: Book Review Search Article.” Nytimes.com. N.p., 2017. Web. 31 Oct. 2017.

Gunesekera, Romesh. Noontide toll. Granta Books, 2014.

WHEN a colony is founded, wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in ”The Scarlet Letter,” ”among [ the ] earliest practical necessities [ is ] to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” Prisons – Hawthorne called them the black flowers of civilized society – burgeon all over the face of South Africa. They may not be sketched or photographed, under threat of severe penalty. I have no idea whether laws against visual representations of prisons exist in other countries. Very likely they do. But in South Africa such laws have a particular symbolic appropriateness, as though it were decreed that the camera lens must shatter at the moment it is trained on certain sites; as though the passer-by shall have no means of confirming that what he saw – those buildings rising out of the sands in all their sprawl of gray monotony – was not a mirage or a bad dream.

Text:

The true explanation is, of course, simpler. The response of South Africa’s legislators to what disturbs their white electorate is usually to order it out of sight. If people are starving, let them starve far away in the bush, where their thin bodies will not be a reproach. If they have no work, if they migrate to the cities, let there be roadblocks, let there be curfews, let there be laws against vagrancy, begging, squatting, and let offenders be locked away so that no one has to hear or see them. If the black townships are in flames, let cameras be banned from them. (At which the great white electorate heaves a sigh of relief – how much more bearable the newscasts have become!) The headquarters of the security police in Johannesburg, in a square fittingly named after Balthazar Johannes Vorster (1915-1983), a former Prime Minister of the republic and the patron under whom the security police grew to their present bad eminence, is another site that may not be photographed. Into this building untold scores of political prisoners have been taken for interrogation. Not all have returned alive. In a poem titled ”In Detention,”* Christopher van Wyk has written as follows: He fell from the ninth floor He hanged himself He slipped on a piece of soap while washing He hanged himself He slipped on a piece of soap while washing He fell from the ninth floor He hanged himself while washing He slipped from the ninth floor He hung from the ninth floor He slipped on the ninth floor while washing He fell from a piece of soap while slipping He hung from the ninth floor He washed from the ninth floor while slipping He hung from a piece of soap while washing.

Behind the so-called suicides and accidental deaths to which Mr. van Wyk alludes here, behind the cursory post-mortems by Government functionaries, the bland, unlikely inquest findings, lie the realities of fear, exhaustion, pain, cruelty. Mr. van Wyk’s poem plays with fire, tap-dances at the portals of hell. It comes off because it is not a poem about death but a parody of the barely serious stock of explanations that the security police keep on hand for the news media.

Some years ago I wrote a novel, ”Waiting for the Barbarians,” about the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience. Torture has exerted a dark fascination on many other South African writers. Why should this be so? There are, it seems to me, two reasons. The first is that relations in the torture room provide a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims. In the torture room, unlimited force is exerted upon the physical being of an individual in a twilight of legal illegality, with the purpose, if not of destroying him, then at least of destroying the kernel of resistance within him.

Let us be clear about the situation of the prisoner who falls under suspicion of a crime against the state. What happens in Vorster Square is nominally illegal. Articles of the law forbid the police from exercising violence upon the bodies of detainees except in self-defense. But other articles of the law, invoking reasons of state, place a protective ring around the activities of the security police. The rigmarole of due process, which requires the prisoner to accuse his torturers and produce witnesses, makes it futile to proceed against the police unless the latter have been exceptionally careless. What the prisoner knows, what the police know he knows, is that he is helpless against whatever they choose to do to him. The torture room thus becomes like the bedchamber of the pornographer’s fantasy where, insulated from moral or physical restraint, one human being is free to exercise his imagination to the limits in the performance of vileness upon the body of another.

The fact that the torture room is a site of extreme human experience, accessible to no one save the participants, is a second reason why the novelist in particular should be fascinated by it. Of the character of the novelist, John T. Irwin writes in ”Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner”: ”It is precisely because [ he ] stands outside the dark door, wanting to enter the dark room but unable to, that he is a novelist, that he must imagine what takes place beyond the door. Indeed, it is just that tension toward the dark room that he cannot enter that makes that room the source of all his imaginings – the womb of art.”

To Mr. Irwin (following Freud but also Henry James), the novelist is a person who, camped before a closed door, facing an insufferable ban, creates, in place of the scene he is forbidden to see, a representation of that scene and a story of the actors in it and how they come to be there. Therefore my question should not have been phrased, Why are writers in South Africa drawn to the torture room? The dark, forbidden chamber is the origin of novelistic fantasy per se; in creating an obscenity, in enveloping it in mystery, the state creates the preconditions for the novel to set about its work of representation.

Yet there is something tawdry about following the state in this way, making its vile mysteries the occasion of fantasy. For the writer the deeper problem is not to allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma proposed by the state, namely, either to ignore its obscenities or else to produce representations of them. The true challenge is how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms.

The writer faces a second dilemma, of a no less subtle nature, concerning the person of the torturer. The Nuremberg trials, and later the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, presented us with a paradox in morality. There was a stupefying disproportion between the pygmy stature of the men on trial and the enormity of the crimes they had committed.

Hints of the same paradox surfaced at two inquests in South Africa – the one on Steve Biko, the black activist who died while in police custody in 1977, and the one on Neil Aggett, a white officer of a black trade union who committed suicide in detention in 1982. During these proceedings the security policemen briefly emerged from their native darkness into the public gaze.

How is the writer to represent the torturer? If he intends to avoid the cliches of spy fiction – to make the torturer neither a figure of satanic evil, nor an actor in a black comedy, nor a faceless functionary, nor a tragically divided man doing a job he does not believe in – what openings are left?

The approaches to the torture chamber are thus riddled with pitfalls, and more than one writer has fallen into them. Let me give an example. In ”A Ride on the Whirlwind” (1981), a novel dealing with the 1976 uprisings, Sipho Sepamla writes: ”Bongi’s frayed bodice was ripped off exposing the fullness of her turgid breasts and pointed teats to the beastliness of the two cops. . . . Cold-bloodedly, the cop undid the pliers on the one nipple and placed it on the other. Bongi screamed, tears pouring down her soft brown skin.” Mr. Sepamla succumbs here to erotic fascination. He also makes his torturers both all too satanic (”demonic” is his word) and all too easily human: ”The young cop was sick. . . . He lived with subterranean streams in his makeup. . . . He suffered from dual personality. The nature of his work was such that to survive he developed a split personality.”

A considerably stronger book about the same historical events is Mongane Serote’s ”To Every Birth Its Blood” (1981). Mr. Serote declines the false issue of whether the torturer is man or devil. He limits himself to the physical experience of torture, and, more important, takes on the challenge of finding words adequate to represent the terrible space of the torture chamber itself: ”A mixture of deodorant smells and paper, tobacco, old furniture, turned into a single smell, which characterizes all the places whose functions are proclaimed by notices, where warnings burden walls, counters and filing cabinets, where the sweat, tears, vomit and blood of many many people, who came and went, who never made it out of the doors, leave their spirits hanging in the air, which can never be cleaned.”

There is a certain dark lyricism to this writing, a lyricism even more strongly evident in Alex La Guma’s ”In the Fog of the Season’s End” (1972), another novel about resistance and torture. Since the time of Flaubert, the novel of realism has been vulnerable to criticism of the motives behind its preoccupation with the mean, the low, the ugly. If the novelist finds in squalor the occasion for his most soaring poetic eloquence, might he not be guilty of seeking out his squalid subject matter for perversely literary reasons? From the beginning of his career, La Guma – a neglected writer who died recently in exile in Cuba – ran the risk of immortalizing a Cape Town of seedy slums and dripping rain in a prose of somewhat lugubrious grandeur. In his presentation of the world of the security police, no matter how much he insists on its banality, its lack of depth, there is a tendency to lyrical inflation. It is as though, in avoiding the trap of ascribing an evil grandeur to the police, La Guma displaces that grandeur, in an equivalent but negative form, onto their surroundings, lending to the very flatness of their world hints of a metaphysical depth: ”Behind the polished windows, the gratings and the Government paintwork, was another dimension of terror. . . . Behind the picture of normality the cobwebs and grime of a spider reality lay hidden.”

Presenting the world of the interrogator with a false portentousness, a questionable dark lyricism, is not a fault limited to South African novelists. The torture scenes in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film ”The Battle of Algiers” are subject to the same criticism. I

* AM not arguing that the world of the torturer should be ignored or minimized. I would not wish away Breyten Breytenbach’s ”True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist” (1985), which contains some searching explorations, based on personal experience, of the spiritual sphere in which the police live. They are human beings who find it possible to leave the breakfast table in the morning, kiss their children goodbye and drive off to the office to commit obscenities. But the book is a memoir. It does not matter if at one moment Mr. Breytenbach exhibits a canny suspiciousness about the wish to get behind the security police (get behind the walls, get behind the dark glasses, find out their innermost secrets), yet at other times lets his poetic imagination go, to fly deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of the security system, toward ”the inner sanctum . . . where the altar of the State [ the scaffold ] is erected [ in ] the final heart of loneliness.” Because it is an interim report, a partial biography of a phase of Mr. Breytenbach’s life, ”True Confessions” does not have to solve the problem that troubles the novelist – how to justify a concern with morally dubious people involved in a contemptible activity; how to find an appropriately minor place for the petty secrets of the security system; how to treat something that, in truth, because it is offered like the Gorgon’s head to terrorize the populace and paralyze resistance, deserves to be ignored.

Although the work of Nadine Gordimer is never without a political dimension, it contains no direct treatment of the secret world of security. But there is one episode in particular that, in an indirect way, addresses the same moral problems I have been trying to put my finger on. I refer to the episode of the flogging in ”Burger’s Daughter” (1979), which harks back to the flogging of the horse in Dostoyevsky’s ”Crime and Punishment.”

Rosa Burger is driving around, half lost, on the outskirts of the black townships of Johannesburg when she comes upon a family of three in a donkey cart, the man flogging the donkey in a drunken fury. In a frozen instant she beholds ”the infliction of pain broken away from the will that creates it; broken loose, a force existing of itself, ravishment without the ravisher, torture without the torturer, rampage, pure cruelty gone beyond the control of the humans who have spent thousands of years devising it. The entire ingenuity from thumbscrew and rack to electric shock, the infinite variety and gradation of suffering, by lash, by fear, by hunger, by solitary confinement – the camps, concentration, labour, resettlement, the Siberias of snow or sun, the lives of Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada, Kgosana, gull-picked on the Island.”

How is Rosa Burger to react? She can put a halt to the beating, bring her authority to bear on the driver, even have him arrested and prosecuted. But does this man – ”black, poor, brutalized” – know how to live other than by brutality, doing unto others as has been done unto him? On the other hand she can drive past, allowing the torture to continue. But then she may have to live with the suspicion that she passed by out of no better motive than a self-regarding reluctance to be thought ”one of those whites who care more for animals than people.” She drives on. And a few days later leaves South Africa, unable to live in a country that poses such impossible problems in day-to-day living. I T is important not to read the episode in a narrowly symbolic way. The driver and the donkey do not respectively stand for torturer and tortured. ”Torture without the torturer” is the key phrase. Forever and ever in Rosa’s memory the blows will rain down and the beast shudder in pain. The spectacle comes from the inner reaches of Dante’s hell, beyond the scope of morality. For morality is human, whereas the two figures locked to the cart belong to a damned, dehumanized world. They put Rosa Burger in her place: they define her as within the sphere of humanity. What she flees from in fleeing South Africa is the negative illumination that there exists another world parallel to hers, no farther away than a half-hour’s drive, a world of blind force and mute suffering, debased, beneath good and evil.

How to proceed beyond this dark moment of the soul is the question Miss Gordimer tackles in the second half of her novel. Rosa Burger returns to the land of her birth to join in its suffering and await the day of liberation. There is no false optimism, on her part or on Miss Gordimer’s. Revolution will put an end neither to cruelty and suffering, nor perhaps even to torture. What Rosa suffers and waits for is a time when humanity will be restored across the face of society, and therefore when all human acts, including the flogging of an animal, will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment. In such a society it will once again be meaningful for the gaze of the author, the gaze of authority and authoritative judgment, to be turned upon scenes of torture. When the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall or turning one’s eyes away, then the novel can once again take as its province the whole of life, and even the torture chamber can be accorded a place in the design. *”In Detention” c Christopher van Wyk. Quoted with the author’s permission.