COMPLICITY LITERATURE: 
MATERIALITY AND AFFECT IN HEBREW AND SOUTH-AFRICAN LITERATURES 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A Dissertation 
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School 
of Cornell University 
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by 
Nitzan Tal 
May 2022
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© 2022 Nitzan Tal
 
 
COMPLICITY LITERATURE: 
MATERIALITY AND AFFECT IN HEBREW AND SOUTH-AFRICAN LITERATURES 
 
Nitzan Tal, Ph. D.  
Cornell University 2022 
Abstract: 
In the first two decades of the 21st century, debates comparing the history of South Africa to Israel’s 
relationship with the Palestinians have intensified. Simultaneously, the ways authors in both locales 
engage with the violence and injustice of their surroundings has changed. Instead of producing stories 
about direct perpetration, authors increasingly focus on the nebulous daily experience of complicity: 
indirect involvement in wrongdoing produced vis-a-vis membership in a social body. 
To consolidate these literary shifts, I propose that authors working in the last twenty years in South Africa 
and Israel/Palestine produce complicity literature. I argue that complicity literature is characterized by the 
following: environments that bear races of violence that the texts don’t directly address, the ethical 
insufficiency of the first-person “I” as a reliable producer of knowledge or truth, and finally, the 
projection of epistemological and ethical uncertainty in first-person narratives on to readers.  Drawing on 
scholarship from both the South African and Hebrew corpora, this dissertation trains the sensitive lens of 
affect studies to augment post/decolonial theory and responsibility theory. 
“Barbecue, Coffee, and the Wave of History: Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative” argues that a 
negotiation of claims of indigeneity on the one hand, and ties to European whiteness and a global middle-
class on the other, animate white South African identity. “Cemeteries, Factories, and Forests: Unsettled 
Settlers in Picnic Grounds and An Almost Olympic Size Pool” analyzes the triangulated unsettlement of 
space, affect, and genre in Israeli authors Oz Shelach and Roni Brodetzky’s writing. “Checkpoints, 
Bedrooms, and Boomerangs: Choc en Retour in Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever are Not Afraid” 
draws on Aimé Césaire’s work to show how violence enacted towards the other determines which 
 
emotional responses are available for the self and who or what might be an object of those emotions. 
Finally, “Tunnels, Animals, and Lost Things: The Lacuna of Collective Responsibility in Lauren Beukes’ 
Zoo City” establishes public culpability and complicity as unaddressed lacunae in both law and 
philosophy. 
Taken together, the chapters show that Jewish-Israelis’ and white South Africans’ complicity 
circumscribes their sensory and intellectual perception. The project thus opens new possibilities for 
addressing the resonance of colonial violence in our time. 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
Nitzan Tal’s work interrogates contemporary Hebrew and South-African novels as sites for 
the adjudication of settler-colonial complicity and of theories of social responsibility. She has 
published in Middle Eastern Literatures and in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. Her 
Hebrew translation of Sara Ahmed’s “Feminist Killjoys” is available as part of her co-edited 
feminist theory translation series.  
v 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
To my Saftot, 
Hanna Elman (Gluz) 
And Hanni Petzal (Bernhard)
vi 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
For their invaluable assistance in composing this work, I thank my advisor, Prof. Debra 
Castillo, and my committee members, Profs. Deborah Starr and Naminata Diabate.  
I thank Dr. Tamar Rozette, Adi Shiran, and The Witches’ Circle: Krithika Vachali, Dr. Najva 
Akbari, and Dr. Molly MacVeagh, for the intellectual exchanges that made it into this 
dissertation and for keeping me in compos mentis. 
Finally, I could not have completed this dissertation without the steadfast support of Guy 
Yadin Evron. This is as much a testament of your persistence as it is mine.  
vii 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 
Abstract ...................................................................................................................... iii 
Introduction: Complicity Literature ............................................................................... 9 
Barbercue, Coffee, and the Wave of History: Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative .... 42 
Cemeteries, Factories, and Forests: Unsettled Settlers in Picnic Grounds and An 
Almost Olympic Size Pool ............................................................................................ 74 
Checkpoints, Bedrooms, and Boomerangs: choc en retour In Shani Boianjiu’s The 
People of Forever Are Not Afraid .............................................................................. 111 
Tunnels, Animals, and Lost Things: The Lacuna of Collective Responsibility in 
Lauren Beukes’ s Zoo City ......................................................................................... 141 
Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 170 
  
viii 
 
INTRODUCTION: COMPLICITY LITERATURE 
On June 22, 2021, the Knesset housed a special conference. It was titled “Between 
Occupation and Apartheid: After 54 Years”, and marked the first consideration of the apartheid 
paradigm within the walls of Israel’s parliament. In their oft-interfered with opening remarks, 
organizers M.Ks Aida Touma-Suleiman and Mossi Raz addressed apartheid and its conceptual 
counterpart in Palestine/Israel, occupation. While Raz welcomed the introduction of apartheid as 
a framework mainly as a strategic tool legitimizing the less-radical naming of “occupation” by 
those who rejected the term not long ago, Touma-Suleiman asserted that “anyone who wishes to 
preserve the occupation, annex [the west bank], or talks of Greater Israel, is in fact building a 
regime of creeping apartheid”1 (Special Knesset Conference: After 54 Years, pt.17:15; 11:30). As 
might be expected, the conference soon devolved into a shouting match, with some speakers 
unable to communicate through the ruckus.  
The conference is indicative of the state of political discourse around Israel/Palestine in 
recent years. Despite Israeli politicians claims2, apartheid – both as an analogy to National Party 
rule in South Africa and as an independent legal category – has quickly gained traction as a 
descriptive of Israel’s governing system. A substantial catalyst for the Knesset conference was 
the Human Rights Watch report of April 2021, which attempted to detach apartheid from its 
original historical context in South Africa and return to the U.N’s definition of it as a crime 
against humanity (Human Rights Watch). Around the same time, several other NGOs, including 
Israeli ones, adopted the apartheid paradigm (B’tselem; Liel and Baruch). Since the Knesset 
 
1 M.K Touma-Suleiman is using a term coined by geographer Oren Yiftachel to describe a political order under 
which “a hierarchy of rights is gradually institutionalized and legalized based on ethnicity and location”, though it is 
not declared outright in the manner of South Africa’s National Party (Yiftachel 128)  
2 Right wing M.K Amichai Shikli protested the conference and claimed that the “last time there was an attempt to 
compare Israel and apartheid it was 1975, and the people comparing were the PLO” (Fux). His claim is factually 
incorrect, though it is indicative of how preposterous the label feels to large swaths of the Israeli public.    
9 
 
 
conference, a statement by Amnesty International has added to the trend (Amnesty 
International). Palestinian legal organizations Adalah and al-Haq indorsed the South African-
Israeli analogy as part of a South African study as early as 2009, and Palestinian politicians and 
activists have been deliberating use of the term even earlier (HSRC; Maryam Barghouti)3. This 
mounting pressure convinced the U.N.’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination 
to commence a review of the Palestinian appeal that Israel's policies in the West Bank amount to 
apartheid (December 2019). The political developments above have a long-standing scholarly 
literature to back them, particularly in law and political science (see (Zreik, “Palestine, 
Apartheid, and the Rights Discourse”; Badran; Ghanim; Grunebaum; Rapanyane; Greenstein). 
Yet, the political advancement of what used to be known as “the apartheid analogy” is 
dependent on apartheid’s successful detachment from the South African context, to become a 
universal legal term (Alsheh, “The Apartheid Paradigm: History, Politics and Strategy”). The 
reports and discussions listed above increasingly make a point to deemphasize South Africa and 
highlight instead U.N and International Criminal Court definitions (1973 and 2002, respectively). 
The earlier 2009 HSRC report, for instance, relied on comparisons to South African legal 
realities under apartheid, while the more recent Human Rights Watch specifically states that the 
term is detached from its original context (Human Rights Watch). I understand, of course, the 
practical need to move from ‘analogy’ to ‘paradigm’; yet I suggest that there is room for 
comparative studies which attend to present-day reality in both states. Letting go of the 
 
3 I list these reports to give a sense of the discursive atmosphere in which this study was written, one of 
intensifying acceptance of apartheid as category. It is outside my scope, though material to the legal-political aims 
of the reporting organizations, to distinguish those reports which limit the apartheid category to the West Bank 
and Gaza from those which insist that the entire state of Israel practices a single regime with gradated levels of 
citizenship. 
10 
 
 
comparative aspect entirely might mean missing how the states of affairs in both locales resonate 
with each other experientially, rather than historically or legally.          
Readers might fear that I am depoliticizing apartheid, making it “just” about feelings and 
experience. That is not my intention. This dissertation argues that Jewish Israeli and white South 
African authors working under conditions of colonial complicity are producing fictional texts 
which are observably similar in thematic emphasis, in narrative structure, and in affective 
texture. They are charting a sub-genre with implications for studies of South Africa and 
Israel/Palestine: complicity literature. My interpretation of the five texts analyzed in this 
dissertation assumes that sensations, feelings, and moods are political, and that experience is the 
smallest building block of even the most formalist political analysis. Put differently, systems 
work as emotional infrastructure, giving rise to specific horizons of possibility – what we feel 
and for whom, what we apprehend and what we ignore, what we can imagine and what – even in 
fiction – is simply beyond our mind’s scope. 
The fictions of South African authors Ivan Vladislavić and Lauren Beukes, and Israeli 
authors Ronnie Brodetzky, Oz Shelach and Shani Boianjiu, are marked with a resonance 
between material environment and complicity. Land dumps and coffee cups, broken cars and 
computer monitors become pores through which past and present violence comes to permeate the 
texts. Narratologically, the works are preoccupied with the ethical insufficiency of the novelistic 
“I”, interfering with it or expanding it through communal narration. They also move away from 
cohesive, linear narrative into fragmented, unreliable accounts which cast doubt on ways of 
knowing and telling truth. Rounding out the narratological characteristics is a specific texture of 
the reader’s implication in which the uncertainty of knowledge and the skepticism of first-person 
ethics is extended to include the reader. Every one of these themes and narrative structures builds 
11 
 
 
up the discomfort of the affective cluster typifying complicity literature. Unease between 
characters, within generic conventions, with the figure of the reader and within geographical 
spaces mark these works of settler colonial fiction with unsettlement. 
The works I study in this project also speak to complicity writ large, in that I question the 
assumption that participation in and responsibility for sustained violence occur either in a wholly 
discursive linguistic field or exclusively in the material arrangement of concrete walls and 
roadside checkpoints (Freud and Strachey 153; Pineda). Affect – the ways we are affected by 
those things that affect us – encapsulates both. As anyone whose pulse started racing at the sound 
of an uttered word will know, materiality and language do not come in order but are co-
constitutive.  Thus, complicity is experienced somatically, in the interplay between ourselves and 
our surroundings. Literary fiction which shows marks of the non-discursive aspect of complicity 
is striking, but perhaps not surprising: fiction is a form of compilation, of selecting truths and 
ordering them. This process of selection is what renders things apprehensible, from minute shifts 
in mood and atmosphere to mighty social structures too big and too inhabited to be fathomed. 
Ivan Vladislavic’s narrator in Double Negative tells us that “people are constitutionally unmade 
for the truth”: when it is truth we need, it must be invented.   
Complicity 
Complicity is all about connective tissue. Mutual responsibility exists not only for positive 
relational goals, but for violent and destructive ones, as well – hence the negative valence of 
complicity. Yet numerous scholars have looked at this theoretical complex with varying balances 
and emphases. Arendt emphasizes responsibility, Mamdani and Meister center the beneficiary, 
and Schwab points to a generational model by investigating the heritage of violence. While these 
are all cognates of complicity as abetment, my framing of the concept also includes complicity’s 
12 
 
 
theoretical cousins ‘on the other side’, that of understanding of the social as a web. Among these 
key terms are solidarity (Durkheim, Kolers); obligation (Buber, Levinas); and relationality 
(Glissant, North-Whitehead), as well as the ancient communal philosophies of the Jewish arvut 
(mutual responsibility) and the Bantu ubuntu (humanity towards others). If Hanna Arendt, 
Walter Benjamin, and Aimé Césaire have proved most useful for this project, I believe it is 
because while they analyze human interconnection in the context of large-scale violence, they 
also remain committed to the centrality of the social fabric and to the impossibility of an 
existence which is not shared.  
Hanna Arendt and Complicity  
Hanna Arendt’s contributions to a theory of complicity is rife with contradictions. In Life of the 
Mind, she concludes that thinking and moral judgement can act as a shield against evil (defined 
by her as ‘absolute and inhuman’ in 1951 but then memorably as ‘terrifyingly normal’ in 1963). 
But, subverting this claim, The Origins of Totalitarianism showed that thinking could not have 
served as a moral safeguard in the history of Nazism (Arendt, Origins). Furthermore, it is unclear 
whether judgement as Arendt describes it is even possible under widespread organized violence: 
“the model of judgment that she sketched in her philosophy of mind denied the survival of 
judgment under the historical conditions of Nazism, transforming its existence into a mysterious 
puzzle" (Jissov 2). As a final complication, Arendt is incredibly inconsistent in the categories of 
human difference she manages to traverse and think in solidarity with. On the one hand, she 
advances a “community of interest with the oppressed and exploited” and insightfully locates the 
seeds of European fascism in the globalized racism of imperial expansion4 (Arendt and Schell 
 
4 The scramble for Africa, Arendt determines, “became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to 
become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and 
how… one might put one’s own people into the position of the master race” (Origins 206) 
13 
 
 
84; Arendt, Origins 206). On the other, she unabashedly expressed racist opinions on Eastern 
European and Middle-Eastern Jews, African people, and black Americans both in private 
correspondence and in academic writings (see Owens). And yet, she remains crucial to studies of 
collective responsibility – and this one, with its focus on mundane violence and political affect, 
in particular. 
 Arendt’s influence on the idea of complicity presented here can be described in three 
areas: her insistence on the important place of emotion in political order (though she tries to 
cordon the political off from it); her understanding of social ties as imperative for life and 
thinking (though she at times bases entire analyses on the sufficiency of the individual); and her 
attentiveness to gradual, mundane forms of violence (though her writing focuses on large-scale 
political upheavals). 
   Though it appears strange to base an affect-oriented analysis on Arendt, who argued that 
emotions wreak havoc in the public sphere, her work nevertheless stands as a horizon for 
acknowledging the constitutive role of emotions in political agency. Crucially, Arendt discusses 
the difference between a political stance towards the other which appropriates that other’s 
suffering and what she terms solidarity, which maintains the indispensable distance between self 
and others. To relate, one must separate (Arendt and Schell 90). This deceptively simple 
statement is imperative to the reading of cultural production of Jewish Israelis and white South 
Africans, as appropriative mirroring of the self in the image of the other has been characteristic 
of both literary traditions (Perry; Toppings Bazin see section on victimhood rhetoric in this 
introduction). 
 Relating, then, and relating without committing violence, is of primary concern to 
Arendt. Yet in all her writing on responsibility, on political crisis, and on evil, the time of 
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political crisis remains a locus void of individual morality (Jissov 12). The void occurs, in part, 
because individual thinking, willing and judging, which are the basis for Arendtian ethics, 
require access to a coherent collective, a “presence of others” without which it cannot operate 
and which are unavailable to the individual in times when the social fabric is in upheaval 
(Benhabib 193). Furthermore, Arendt presents ethics and affect as mutually exclusive: her 
thinking-willing-judging trifecta is incongruous with sensory data and the materiality of specific 
place and time (Arendt, Life 199, 204–210). Arising from the contradictions in her writing as 
much as from their coherence, this lacuna of complicity – the evident insufficiency of an 
individual ethics which does not yet give rise to a theory of collective responsibility – motivates 
this dissertation.  
Walter Benjamin and Complicity 
    Like Arendt, Walter Benjamin’s work raises the question of complicity without 
answering it. Benjamin was deeply troubled by the linear and coherent vision of progress which 
European philosophy and historiography sketched out. In its place he offered a fragmentary body 
of work in which past and future, everyday objects and classical works of art, European history 
and Jewish mysticism receive equal consideration. Writing his theses on history from his exile in 
Paris in 1940, shortly before fleeing Nazism, being caught and ending his life on the border with 
Spain, Benjamin insists that his political present is not an aberration: “[t]he tradition of the 
oppressed teaches us”, he writes, “that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the 
exception but the rule” (Benjamin, History VIII). The way ethno-violence becomes the rule of 
life, the way it inflects the ruler’s pastime and her literary production: that is the focus of this 
dissertation. This study matters not because Israeli and South African complicity are exceptional, 
but because complicity is the norm for life, informing social bonds and relations of enmity in 
myriad intricate ways. 
15 
 
 
 My focus on minor themes and fleeting allusions as loci of political importance also 
draws from Benjamin’s sensibilities. In modernity, he writes, with its “total secularization of the 
historical in the state of creation…History passes into the setting” (Benjamin, Trauerspiel 81). It 
becomes “natural history”, both in that its potential violence is silenced, and in that its artistic 
location becomes what in my novelistic subject matter is called description, contra to 
description’s association with pause, stasis, and political apathy.5 Attention to description, to 
minor characters and to casual actions becomes especially important in a corpus which 
constantly renegotiates its ownership of and relationship to land as territory (see Hever, 
Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon for Hebrew literature, Henshaw for South African).  
 Benjamin’s characterization of the modernist, progressive chronotope as advancement 
through “homogeneous, empty time” famously comes up in Benedict Anderson’s account of 
nationalism. The newspaper and the novel both represent, for Anderson, a simultaneity new to 
17th century Europe, simultaneity which enables the nation to be imagined as a unified organism 
moving through homogeneous, empty time (Anderson 26). South Africa and Israel are both new 
nations, the contemporary iterations of which rest precisely on narratives of such progress: the 
New South Africa/Rainbow Nation narrative of the former, the ‘from holocaust to revival’ 
(mi'Shoah le'Tekumah) teleology of the latter. In my analyses of the literary production of 
authors who react to these national narratives, Benjamin aids in reading narratological choices 
like fragmentariness, recursivity, and stalling as markers of unease with – if not outright rejection 
of – a hegemonic, seamless story of a history resolved (Raz-Krakotzkin 173; Rothberg, The 
Implicated Subject 95) 
 
5 Realist description, especially, has been dismissed as politically quietist, risking "metaphysical complicity with 
things as they are" (Levine 4). 
16 
 
 
  
Aimé Césaire and Complicity 
Aimé Césaire joins Arendt and Benjamin in building the basis for understanding hegemonic 
political violence not as an exception but as a rule. His Discourse on Colonialism argues that 
Fascism is not an aberration of European history but an ultimate effect of a civilization that 
justifies colonization; and that colonialism and racism in turn are inherent vectors of capitalism 
and Western modernity (Césaire). In my reading of this seminal text, however, I focus on the 
way Césaire typifies complicity not as something a social group does – an event which is 
external to the existence of the people in the group – but as an enfolding of the complicit group 
with the violence, a determinant of their existence. “No one colonizes with impunity”, Césaire 
writes, and the ‘punishment’ is in a change to the social body of the colonizer (39).  
 Césaire speaks not of complicity but of responsibility and ‘accomplicity’. The counterpart 
to responsibility seems to be faux passivity: before Europeans were victims of Nazism they were 
its accomplices, tolerating, absolving, shutting eyes, legitimizing it until its arrival on their 
doorstep (36). That these inactive verbs are listed, taking up space in his essay, emphasizes their 
importance. The works analyzed in this dissertation show marks of this un-sensing, reinscribing 
it as a primary characteristic of complicity literature: a literature which emphasizes the limits of 
what is sensible and knowable, the circumscribed horizons of possibility which are the affective 
elements of Césaire’s “boomerang effect” (41).  
While the horizon of my arguments in this project lies with Arendt, Benjamin, and 
Césaire, two more recent interventions by Mark Sanders and Michael Rothberg help me define 
and order the phenomenon of complicity. Mark Sanders’ 2002 Complicities: The Intellectual and 
Apartheid sought to locate the responses and responsibilities of South African thinkers during to 
17 
 
 
the segregationist and violent rule of the National Party between 1948 and 1995. Sanders shows 
how support for or opposition to apartheid demanded that intellectuals articulate their stance 
regarding apartheid’s central tenet of separateness and, through it, regarding a more general 
“affirmation or denial of a basic human foldedness” (Sanders 15). He reminds his reader that 
com-plic-ity is, etymologically, ‘folded-together-ness’; the state of being embroiled or caught up 
in some specific injustice already carries with it a more existential enmeshing, “the being of 
being human” (Sanders 5).  
Importantly, Sanders explicates that the joinedness inherent in complicity applies to 
‘external’ institutional contexts as well as to ‘internal’ psychosocial ones. He emphasizes that 
each of his subjects, even those who vehemently opposed apartheid, are inescapably enmeshed in 
institutions and policies from which they derive their status as intellectuals (8); and he alludes to 
what I term affective complicity in naming “the intimacy of mental colonization and the 
psychosocial inscription of [complicity on] the body” as processes worth tracing (15). It is in 
these latter processes that the failures of regimes of separation are revealed to those who benefit 
from them. In Sanders’ psychoanalytical terms, the complicit self is always occupied by the 
other, the same other from which the violent regime “produces separation but cannot realize any 
essential apartness”, necessitating daily negotiation of self-other relation at the same time that the 
other, and the self’s dependence on her, is disavowed (Sanders 209).    
In the introduction to his recent book, The Implicated Subject, Michael Rothberg supplies 
readers with a thorough overview of some of the most important contributions to the theorization 
of indirect responsibility in structured and organized violence. He does so in order to proffer a 
new umbrella term, the titular ‘implicated subject’, to tie together these contributions. He counts 
the complicit among the “figures of implication” he wishes to include under this category (The 
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Implicated Subject 12–13). Shying away from complicity’s criminal connotations (one may be 
an accomplice to a crime), he yet concedes interventions such as Sanders’, which follow 
complicity’s sense of being complex or involved (Rothberg, The Implicated Subject 13). While 
complicity in violence does not imply fault in the legal sense, it does imply a responsibility. This 
responsibility stems from the folded-together-ness, the impact of humans on each other, which 
violence tries to sever but can only reinstate. This is true of the texts I examine here, all ones 
whose characters and language were forged by violence. As Tessa Morris Suzuki puts it, while 
we may not have caused ongoing states of violence, we are enmeshed – complicit – in them “in 
the sense that they cause us” (Morris-Suzuki 26–27).   
While Rothberg’s “implication” is more temporally capacious – he uses it to chart the 
ways slavery, for instance, demands responsibility from those whose families immigrated to 
north America long after its abolition – complicity requires relative immediacy of time and 
place. Thus in Rothberg’s terms, I, as a Jewish Israeli, am complicit in the expulsion and 
occupation of Palestinian people, but younger white South Africans are not complicit in 
European colonialism or in apartheid, both of which occurred and supposedly ended before they 
were born. What they are is implicated in the former, while being complicit with the ongoing 
injustices which keep them in their advantaged position in the present. Mahmood Mamdani 
asserts the need for this kind of temporal distinction when he separates the perpetrators of 
organized violence and its beneficiaries: if perpetrator-victim relations have a past to overcome, 
he claims, beneficiary-victim relations must come to terms with an unjust present (Mamdani, 
“Reconciliation without Justice” 5).  
These temporal distinctions are useful, but they are in no way clear-cut. Mamdani’s claim 
plainly sees perpetration – and with it, violence – as a time-bound, instantaneously apprehensible 
19 
 
 
action. In our contemporary moment, that is increasingly not the case. In neocolonial organized 
violence, in global corporate actions, and in the violence of ecological degradation which 
disproportionally affects those which are already subjected to other forms of violence, we see 
more of what Rob Nixon calls slow violence: “a violence that is neither spectacular nor 
instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive”, occurring attritionally across time and 
space, and not always palpable as violence at all (Nixon 2). As I will show in chapter 2, ethno-
national violence can unfold, and be narrated with, the extended duration of growing trees and 
decaying toxic substances. Not only is violence diffuse and non-eventful; remediation, such as 
the move from apartheid to democracy, itself demands a softening of the boundary between past 
and present and an attention to the pace in which we move between them. “[T]he death of 
apartheid”, says South African scholar Njabulu Ndebele, “is a social process, not an event” 
(Ndebele 93). In the humanities at least, the scholarly community has been adamant that the term 
‘postapartheid’ in no way denotes a clear departure with the past, and I join them in emphasizing 
the foldedness, rather than the break, between South Africa before and after 1994 (see 
Bethlehem, Skin Tight; Barnard and Van der Vlies; Nixon).  
I first encountered white South African fiction as a late teen. Even though I read Mark 
Behr’s novel in English, having taken it out of the Foreign Literature shelf in the library, it did 
not feel foreign. What I had sensed was not linguistic or thematic similarity, but a structure of 
feeling: a confessional mode belied by a demand for my sympathy as a reader; a complex of 
victimhood and perpetration that felt eerily familiar. It is that encounter, and additional ones 
since, which made me conceive of complicity as an experience, and perhaps ironically, to seek 
that experience in the affects captured in and generated by fiction. In studying hegemonic 
20 
 
 
societies, being attuned to disavowed violence necessitates the attention to shifting scales and 
intensities, giving affect theory superior interpretative value. 
Affect Theory 
Responding to and balancing the ‘linguistic turn’ of the mid 20th century in the humanities, 
affect theory emerged (or re-emerged) in 1995 with the publication of two essays: Eve 
Sedgwick’s "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold" (coauthored with Adam Frank) and Brian 
Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect”. While taking different approaches and subject-matters, 
these texts sought to bring the material and the bodily back into the picture. At the base of this 
‘affective turn’ was the biological understanding that bodies sense their environment, and that 
these sensory data move us in ways that are forceful. The effects of sensory data on our mind-
bodies stand in complex relation to both intentionality – the way affect moves us may be prior to 
intention or elude the processes we see as intention altogether – and subjectivity, as bodies are 
experienced and defined “not by an outer skin-envelope or other surface boundary but by their 
potential to reciprocate or co-participate”, to act and be acted upon (Gregg and Seigworth 2). 
I say that affect theory ‘re-emerged’, as most scholars of affect will mark their own 
origins in previous literature that sought to theorize the way living is embedded in bodily 
existence before and alongside being vested in conscious knowing. Baruch Spinoza, Silvan 
Tomkins, Raymond Williams, Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze are some of these ‘proto-affect’ 
foundational theorists. The contemporary practice of their intellectual descendants was usefully 
divided into eight ‘orientations’ by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (6–8). I will 
enumerate three of these orientations which this research draws on, giving them provisional titles 
in the name of convenience: affect in historicized emotions, affect in experience, and affect in 
collectives. 
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Though affect and emotion are not synonymous terms and are indeed used in the social 
and exact sciences to differentiate two distinct phenomena, an interest in the historical and 
material contingency of emotions deemed natural or self-evident is a constitutive part of the last 
decades’ turn to affect. This is true for historians ‘proper’, examining the terminology and 
intellectual history of how humans understand their affective experience or the particular 
emotions animating the social movements in the past, but also outside history departments, with 
postcolonial scholars interested in the particular anxieties engendered by the formations of 
empire, or cultural critics interrogating the affective structures of late capitalism. What unites 
this affective orientation is not only the understanding that emotions have a history, but that 
affects make history – that they have a significant place, bundled with reason and sensation, in 
how we got to where we are today. This work follows in this vein, focusing on the affects 
engendered by complex coloniality, and in turn positing that this contemporary settler coloniality 
is a phenomenon of affect, among other things.    
Contributions to affect theory which are oriented towards affect-in-experience parse the 
operation of power and norms in everyday, often fleeting, material and social conditions. Often 
beginning with experiences of subalternity, feminist, queer theorists, and decolonial scholars 
have been essential to this avenue of thought. This study is somewhat unique in that I attempt to 
train the affect-in-experience lens on hegemonic societies, those on which power supposedly 
does not operate (an impossible statement, but one which nevertheless dictates scholarly 
attention). This research, like many studies in this category, attends to durations and rhythms: the 
ways persistent and repetitive practices of power draw boundaries for our existence, and the way 
the fleeting and the permanent can unexpectedly converge in their elusive apprehensibility 
(Gregg and Seigworth 13; also Ahern 9). My analyses of the works under discussion here often 
22 
 
 
center minor themes, small fragments of text, and secondary characters in an attempt to track the 
affective intensities negotiated in social scripts, to ‘eff’ the ineffable.     
The result of paying attention to affect in experience is often that “experience” comes to 
be understood in ways far more collective and material than individual or ‘interior’. This brings 
me to the third affective orientation this work follows, that of affect in collectives. If the 
experience attended to by affect studies is one sensed between and throughout social groups 
rather than individuals, then it is not only the social or the political which need to be expanded, 
but also the ‘subject’, or at least the subject of analysis. Affect-in-collectives scholars might 
research specific phenomena, such as atmospheres of sociality, crowd behaviors, and affective 
contagions. They might also insist more generally on the “relational rather than atomistic basis of 
all things” (Ahern 9). I address the convergence of complicity and affect in this turning towards 
the collective below, and will only state here that rather than a theoretical lens or preference 
through which to view social processes, this study reveals the insufficiency of the single 
individual as an ethical and narrative unit as already written into novels by Jewish Israelis and 
white South Africans.  
 Affect theory is politically generative. In fact, the concepts of affect and complicity are 
remarkably similar in both their relationship with boundaries and their skepticism of the liberal 
narrative of progress. Like complicity, affect negates the possibility of complete separation 
between self and other, outside and inside (Sedgwick and Frank 116). And affect, again like 
complicity, understands the world in ways that make apparent the violence embedded in 
narratives of progress. Social narratives reliant on bounded subjects animated by ‘internal’ 
motivations and each comprising independent parcels of emotions become suspect. Through the 
lens of affect, belonging and non-belonging, ease and unease become staged at levels greater (or 
23 
 
 
smaller) than the individual. Events and encounters stretch out from their customary places as 
irregular occurrences to mean something ongoing and ever-present, such that the focus of time is 
not the instance but the duration (Rowner 153).  
Thus, affect theory and the idea of complicity share a sense of porosity and malleability 
of the subject; an attention to everyday, minor processes where power operates in less obvious 
ways (Natanel 11); and an understanding of time as fissured and nonlinear. All three of these 
hermeneutic leanings are also distinctly narrative moves (see Nuttall 11; Duncan 65–66; 
Rothberg, The Implicated Subject 90–91). It is this constellation of material things, narrated time, 
affect, and complicity that this research project seeks to formulate as central to the literary 
production of dominant social groups in Israel/Palestine and South Africa. 
There are two methodological caveats for my intervention in affect theory. The first is 
that the founding texts of affect theory tend to be separate from texts which model affect-
informed literary analysis. Tracking para-verbal elements which flow in nonlinear ways within 
what are essentially verbal objects with concrete beginnings, middles and ends can seem 
counterintuitive, and indeed many affect scholars working with fictional texts focus on them as 
they are encountered and experienced within a social context (see Breger; Wetherell). Andrew 
van der Vlies’ Present Imperfect has been useful in modeling this kind of close reading with a 
view to the affective politics of the present (2017). While published near the end of my own 
research work, Mark Libin’s Reading Affect in Post-Apartheid Literature affirmed some of my 
intuitions of the implication of word, affect, and violence in the South African context (Libin).  
In the Israeli/Palestinian context, there is a dearth of attention to affect in general as well 
as in literary study. Indeed, neither Hebrew nor Arabic has a comparable term. Kfir Cohen-
Lustig comes close to considering affect when he approaches Hebrew and Palestinian fiction as 
24 
 
 
sets of responses to “social limits” (Cohen Lustig). I am conscious of the fact that Cohen-Lustig, 
like myself, worked on his research within an Anglophone academic context, and that readers 
might be suspicious of a theoretical lens imported from a culturally imperial North America. I 
hope to provide evidence that while the term is indeed translated, the analysis still holds. 
The second caveat is that while I draw on affect theory in the ways enumerated above, I 
do not adopt its vocabulary. Writing to sustain and practice their scholarly commitment to the 
diffuse and evanescent flows of non-conscious powers, affect scholars tend to write of "supple", 
"shuttling", "miniscule", things, of "in-between-ness" and "beside-ness", "interstices" and 
“tendrils”, metaphorical and physical "sinew" and "tissue" (see Gregg and Seigworth 2). Much of 
this language comes from the rejection of structuralism with its contrasts of oppositional pairs. I 
appreciate this rejection, especially when it is itself already conscious that while many instruct to 
“think nondualistically”, very few are able to “transmit how to go about it” (Sedgwick and Frank 
1). I do, however, find structural language – from the idea of structures of feeling (Williams) to 
the strategic use of oppositional pairs – useful. Louise Bethlehem argued that under apartheid, 
authors and critics subjected themselves to a “rhetoric of urgency” in which realism was 
prescribed in order to safeguard the ethical claims of fiction (Bethlehem, Skin Tight). It might be 
this same kind of urgency which prompts me to write of power relations as structures and to shy 
away from the more diffuse language characteristic of affect theory. A historical introduction to 
the contexts of which I write might explain this sense of urgency.           
25 
 
 
Historical Context 
South Africa 
Inhabited by the still-present Khoi Khoi and San peoples, the area known today as South 
Africa experienced a relatively quick succession of changes between the 14th and 18th centuries.6 
Most of these had nothing to do with European people, and it is unfortunate that in recounting 
the area’s story of colonization I am repeating a story often thought of as the only tellable 
version of African History. The Bantu conquests between the 11th and 17th centuries, the 
Mahlatule famine of 1799-1803, and the Mfecane (Nguni, “crushing”) which followed it were 
major sociopolitical forces which continue to operate alongside colonization to form South 
Africa’s past and present. Nevertheless, I will start with the first time the Southern tip of Africa 
became strategic in European eyes, and proceed from there. 
The area of South Africa’s cape and KwaZulu-Natal became an imperative point in 
European trade following Vasco da Gama’s 1497 opening of the Cape Route between Europe 
and Asia. It wasn’t until 1652, however, that a significant European permanent settlement 
occurred. Motivated at first only to secure a base camp for operations, The Dutch East India 
Company nevertheless began settling Dutch farmers on the land to grow the supplies needed for 
its ships. These in turn imported large quantities of enslaved peoples from East Africa, India, 
Indonesia, and elsewhere. Much of the racial mixing that British colonization will frown upon 
and from which the separatist racial imaginary of apartheid stems, occurred at this point, creating 
a marked racial group, the ‘Cape Coloureds’.  
 
6 For fuller accounts of the separate histories of Israel/Palestine and South Africa, see Giliomee and Mbenga, 2007; 
Clark and Worger 2016; Benny Morris, 1999; Bunton 2013; Khalidi 2020. For accounts of their intersecting 
histories, see: Clarno 2017, Badran 2010, Jacobs and Soske 2015.  
26 
 
 
Following troubles in Europe, the British invaded the Cape in 1795 and ended up 
controlling it by 1805. The gradual slide from administrative trade port to settler community 
repeated itself as Britain settled increasing numbers of tradespeople in and around the cape. 
British-Dutch tensions centered most notably around the British ‘language rule’, which 
attempted to force the European population to adopt British culture; and the attempted abolition 
of slavery, which was the basis of the Dutch colonial economic practice. These interventions 
forced the Dutch farmers – now known as boers – further inland, a process which peaked in the 
1830s and is known as the Great Trek. Founding a succession of independent nation-states, the 
Afrikaners fought two wars with the British and countless conflicts with the Zulu kingdom and 
other African social groups. The British too kept fighting their way to an expanded settler 
colony, achieving increasing independence from the metropole as they alternately fought the 
Zulu, Basotho, Ndebele, and Bapedi kingdoms.  
The stakes of both Dutch and British colonization rose significantly with the discovery of 
diamonds and then gold in the late 19th century. These occasioned the immigration of new 
populations to South Africa, such as the mostly-Lithuanian Jewish traders and thousands of 
indentured Chinese workers. The strong ties between corporate interests and South Africa’s 
colonization continued, with privately owned British and Afrikaner companies spurring the 
conflict between the two settler populations. The two Anglo-Boer wars cemented the animosity. 
Commenting on Kitchener’s forced relocation of Afrikaner families, a British member of 
parliament referred to the technology used as “concentration camps”, a term coined from 
reconcentrado camps that Spain had set up in Cuba (Ellis; Mühlhahn). During the period 
following the Afrikaner defeat, under the newly formed country Union of South Africa (1910–
1948), Afrikaner nationalist sentiments continued to boil. Starting in 1924, the Afrikaner-
27 
 
 
dominated National Party represented these interests. It is thus that in the 1948 elections – open 
only to South Africans of European origin – the party came into power as the primary ruling 
party. 
Apartheid was evidently not an aberration, but a continuation of discriminatory and 
segregationist laws and attitudes established under the colonial complex in South Africa 
beginning in the 17th century. Afrikaner subjugation under British rule, with its linguistic, class-
based, and religious elements, was an important contributor to the viciousness of apartheid rule. 
Many of these historical processes, including the brotherhood of capitalism and racism; the 
merging of perpetration with narratives of victimhood; and the complex relationship between 
local tensions and participation in a global political economy, continue to work in and under 
today’s postapartheid democratic South Africa.  
Writing about South African “whiteness” is not about ignoring the tensions between 
Anglos and Afrikaners, the complex whitening processes of South African Jews, or the class 
distinctions which historically made some groups’ whiteness more suspect than others.7 Aspects 
of South African whiteness resist the Euro-American definitions of racial privilege. As Jonathan 
Cane puts it, 
The first concept that seems questionable is the un-markedness, the invisibility, even the 
unconsciousness of whiteness. The argument is that white people are just white, that 
white is not a race; it just is “the way things are”. The reality is that whiteness was 
marked in South Africa, legislated for in a number of Acts, and very much visible. The 
second is the idea of entitlement, or “unearned” privilege, the argument being that 
benefits (economic, cultural capital) just accrue to whites by virtue of their race… In 
South Africa, where earning credentials by correct living as a white was necessarily a 
process, whiteness was not something one could just presume to benefit from, always, for 
 
7 In her study of attitudes towards contraception in the South African Union, Susanne M. Klausen shows that a 
large share of racist Union laws was put in place to protect what was perceived to be a fragile, vulnerable white 
population, mainly rural Afrikaners (believed to be prone to miscegenation) and low-class urban dwellers 
susceptible to “sinking” culturally to the level of other races (Klausen 20, 22; see also Stoler). 
28 
 
 
all “white” people. One should avoid even the slightest sense that pointing out the 
unfinishedness of some white people’s racialisation lends any sympathy to the notion of 
whiteness in crisis during or after apartheid. What this line of argument implies, however, 
is that whiteness always needed to be affirmed, even created (Cane 77–78). 
Indeed, reading 19th century British texts on South African Boers, or Apartheid-era Afrikaner 
depictions of frail, un-African English speakers, one is tempted to conclude that “for the first 
third of the twentieth century the dominant form of racial antipathy in South Africa was between 
the two white ethnic groups” (Dubow 4).  
Yet, as early as 1885, public calls were made for Afrikaners and Brits to “toe one line in 
the struggle for existence against the natives” (qtd in Klausen 40). It seems that the primacy of 
the visual as a mode of racial control and surveillance does away with this hypothesis (see 
Foucault 195–210; Stoler 112). In other words, whites look white; Afrikaners look as white as 
Brits; therefor, the tensions between these groups were not racial per-se. In Mbembe’s terms, 
Afrikaners still occupied the place of a European enemy, an enmity which occurs inside the rules 
of civilized society (On the Postcolony 25)8. The fact remains, though, that complicity in South 
Africa is more complex than an epidermal, melanin-based schema. I will come to address how 
this makes the South African and Israeli cases similar, but will first give an overview of 
settlement in Israel/Palestine.  
Palestine/Israel 
Situated strategically at the crossroads of three continents, the area known as Palestine 
saw many an early empire. The story of its modern conquest may as well begin with the 1516 
Ottoman capture of the region, which stayed under Turkish rule - a brief eight years of Egyptian 
 
8 As indicated above, the question of whether Afrikaners were racialized Others in Colonial and Union S.A remains. 
A supporting factor to this claim made by Klausen is that during the 1930s, there appeared a growing conviction 
that poor whites might well be biologically inferior (52). Though this argument was later discarded, it was taken so 
seriously as to mobilize British eugenists to advocate accessible contraceptive services (53). 
29 
 
 
conquest notwithstanding – until it was taken by the British in 1919.9 This military victory turned 
into an official mandate from the League of Nations in 1922. During the latter part of Ottoman 
rule and into the British one, European Jewish intellectuals were coalescing around the marriage 
of European nationalism with the Jewish tradition of pining for the land of Israel, or Zion. In 
1897, the first Zionist congress was held in Basel, Switzerland, in the presence of 208 delegates. 
Most of these came from Russia and Eastern Europe, plagued by antisemitic violence and 
seeking a solution in the idea of Jewish nationalism.  
Between 1881 and 1948, thousands of Jewish people immigrated to Ottoman and then 
mandatory Palestine, in what are historiographically known as five discreet immigration waves 
(or Aliyot, “ascensions”, Hebrew). Each of these immigration waves were motivated by a 
different amalgam of national ideology, religious leanings, threats of violence in Europe, and 
later the first and second World Wars. They were also differentially received by the current 
authorities in the land. All of them, however, were part of a colonial project – in that they were 
immigrating not to integrate into Palestinian society but to establish their own political structures 
in a land that was formally imagined as empty and open for settlement (Mamdani, When Does a 
Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and 
South Africa). Tellingly, the catchphrase “a land without a people for a people without a land”, 
ascribed to late 19th-century Zionists, did not stop the earlier settlers from relying on Palestinian 
labor.  
Martin Bunton claims that the origins of the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” are not so much 
Middle-Eastern but European, in that “just as European Jews were responding to the nationalist 
 
9 The case could be made to start with the crusades, which while disconnected completely from Zionism do figure 
strongly in the Arab, and specifically Palestinian, imaginary of the region’s military/political history. 
30 
 
 
spirit spawned by the conditions in 19th-century Europe, so too was the identity of the 
indigenous Arab population about to be reshaped by the sharpening of a specifically Palestinian 
consciousness that formed around the inhabitants' resistance to the threat that Zionism posed to 
their own patrimony” (Bunton 2). Zionism was also, from its inception, beholden to European 
imperial forces for material assistance and legitimacy. Finally, as noted above, Zionism as an 
ideology was formulated by and for European Jews or Ashkenazim. The existence of a 19th 
century immigration wave from Yemen notwithstanding, “Zionism is a doctrine that had no 
appeal to Oriental Jewries,” while Zionists “had nothing but contempt” for the Mizrahi Jews on 
which they demographically relied (Kedourie and Pryce-Jones 309, 3011). 
In the wake of the Second World War and under conditions of increased destabilization 
both in Palestine and in Britain, a series of papers and treaties resulted in the passing of a UN 
partition plan for Palestine in 1947. Once again, the fate of the land between the Jordan river and 
the sea was yoked to that of Europe: the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine sought 
to solve the problem of Palestine and the European postwar problem of Jewish refugees with one 
fell swoop. While the Jewish proto-state rejoiced, Palestinian and then other Arab national forces 
resisted. The resulting armed conflict, which Israel won, is known to Israelis as the War of 
Independence, to Palestinians as the nakba (Arabic, catastrophe), and generally as the war of 
1948. At its end, the victorious and newly official Jewish state mourned its dead and then shifted 
focus to the absorption of Jewish immigration that would double its population, and the 
consolidation of this population into a coherent ethno-national body. Palestinians who survived 
the war were made refugees, unable to return to homes from which they were expelled or fled, 
their property seized by the state. 
31 
 
 
Though the British withdrawal from Palestine and the subsequent establishing of the state 
of Israel were certainly historical changes, there is continuity in the history of settlement in 
Palestine too. The 160,000 Palestinians who remained in the area that became Israel received 
citizenship, but were placed under a military government that dated back to Britain’s mandatory 
emergency regulations (Bunton 54). European Zionists’ promise to act as Europe’s delegates in 
‘civilizing’ the Middle East came to fruition in that (some) Jews were indeed “whitened”, while 
Palestinians remained racial and cultural others. Israel’s exceptional Europeanness is crucial to 
its national rhetoric, with former defense minister Ehud Barak labelling the country “a villa in 
the jungle”.  
However, complicity in Israel’s settler coloniality is irreducible to a racial identity, let 
alone to whiteness. Firstly, more than half of today’s Israelis are Mizrahim, meaning they are 
ethnically Middle Eastern or North African. Indeed, recent outbursts of heinous street violence 
aimed at Palestinians revealed that no epidermal schema exists that would separate Arab from 
Jew as Jewish Israelis were mistakenly targeted by the mobs (Kann News May 12 2021). 
Secondly, it is not a blanket whiteness which grants Israelis their privileged position, but a 
specific ethnic identity (any Jew is eligible for Israeli citizenship; a white Finn has no more 
access to it than a Han Chinese). Complicity in the occupation and subjugation of Palestinian 
people is therefore a complex colonial position, as is postapartheid complicity. I will turn to 
examine the ways in which South Africa’s and Israel’s histories converge. 
South Africa and Israel/Palestine 
Placed on opposite edges of the African continent, the states of Israel and South Africa 
nevertheless share a complex colonial history. In this section, I detail some of the ways that the 
two ethno-national, settler-colonial projects converge and intersect: historically, rhetorically, in 
32 
 
 
the global arena, and in the ways they preserve shared histories as 19th century colonies through 
what Ann Laura Stoler calls imperial durabilities.  
Of the various simultaneities between South Africa and Israel, 1948 emerges as a point of 
origin. In Palestine, the year marked a war between the new Israel Defense Forces and 
Palestinians backed by some surrounding states’ armies. It also marks the victory of that war, 
and the following declaration of independence and the formal founding of the state. In South 
Africa, the National Party won the elections, forming a new government elected – by the white 
South Africans who had the vote – under the promise of racial separation or apartheid.  
In 1994, both nations seemed to stand on the brink of political progress: as Israeli and 
Palestinian leaders met in Oslo to discuss what was touted as a preliminary peace agreement, 
South Africa was gearing for its first democratic election, in which the African National 
Congress was to win a landslide under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, newly released from 
prison. Seeking politically egalitarian negotiations, both countries took economic steps which 
belied these plans – though to a different extent. Concurrently, both states responded to 
economic pressures, and to the political changes discussed above, by adopting a neoliberal ethos 
of privatization, deregulation, and an opening up of markets to intense international involvement. 
In both cases, “the combination of neoliberalization and (de)colonization has produced extreme 
inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies of securitization” (Clarno 2, 24). These 
bring into the present moment an economy of affirmation and forgetting that “structures… 
liberal ways of understanding”, an economy which is often assumed to have passed from the 
world with the sealing of 19th century colonial archives (Lowe 2).  
 Israel and South Africa have also orbited and converged on the global stage. The very 
scope of the U.N.’s activity was solidified, some claim, through the separate examinations into 
33 
 
 
both countries in the late 1940’s (Schifter 362–63; Adelman 8). From the 1960’s until the 1994 
elections, South Africa was the prime object of international mobilization through the U.N., 
UNESCO, and international civil society (more on the latter below). Since 1973, Israel stands as 
a similar (though, for now, in no way identical) object of international attention and 
condemnations. The U.N.’s ratification of Israel’s statehood, which coincided with that body’s 
earliest renunciation of apartheid South Africa, propelled South African Prime Minister Henrik 
Verwoerd, apartheid architect and renowned anti-Semite, to draw a comparison himself: “Israel”, 
he wrote, “like South Africa, is an apartheid state." (“Premier Lashes Israel”). What this 
statement shows us, beyond the simple comparison, is how international attention creates the 
sense of being observed. Indeed, in both Israel and South Africa one finds political spheres 
which are hyperaware of the world’s censure and approval.   
 The incredible energy invested by the international community in both locales is not 
reserved for the formal spheres. In the U.S.A for instance, college-campus activism mobilized 
from the 1960’s onwards to the anti-apartheid struggle in ways similar to its current turmoil 
around calls for Palestinian liberation. The international boycott, divestment, and sanctions 
movement working to pressure Israel to end its oppression of Palestinian people, is modeled after 
the anti-apartheid BDS movement of the 1960’s-1980’s. On a near-global scale, the injustices of 
both ethno-national regimes – together with a certain isolation which made them convenient 
proxies for liberal politics away from ‘home’ – have marshaled public engagement. As with the 
case of more formal legal scrutiny, these are not only historical facts regarding global interest, 
but external pressures affecting the structures of feeling within South African and Israeli 
societies. 
34 
 
 
One of the ways Jewish Israeli and white South African societies have dealt with the 
outsized global attention they receive is to double down on their respective narratives of 
victimhood. The horizon of the concentration camp plays part in both these narratives: the 
experience and cultural memory of the holocaust, in Israel, and of the war with the British, in 
South Africa, have animated both ethno-national projects and are a key rhetoric of the new South 
African right wing and of Israel’s hawkish government10. The role of victimhood in national 
identity is not particular to these locales: for Wendy Brown, “woundedness” can become the 
basis for collective identity in a process endemic to the mechanisms of statehood in our time (W. 
Brown 52–56). If I was to state at this early point in this dissertation the single most consistent 
thematic element in complicity literature, it would be the negotiation of material power and 
privilege on the one hand and a legacy of victimhood constitutive of one’s identity on the other. 
This is to say: while it is true that memories of anti-Semitic pogroms, extermination, and 
destitution (Israel) and of physical hardship of frontier life, concentration, and colonial war 
(South Africa) are used rhetorically to strengthen hegemonic society’s claims, these are not 
solely discursive elements: they are true to people’s lived experience and animate their physical-
mental reactions11. 
The unlikely convergence of Afrikaner and Jewish concentration camp memory takes us 
to a broader conjunction of Israel and South Africa as spaces of “imperial durability” (Stoler). As 
technology, concentration camps arose out of the travel of ideas of population management 
which was both decidedly modern and decidedly imperial. Césaire’s assertion that fascism is 
 
10 On South Africa’s white victim narrative, see (Du Toit; Alsheh, “The New White Right-Wing in South Africa” 118); 
on Israel’s, see (Morris, Righteous Victims; Massad; Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon; Peleg). 
11 In his real-politic manner, Raef Zreik touches on the fear which this cycle of victimhood and perpetration creates. 
Having turned their own prosecution into a narrative of ethno-superiority, Israelis fear the logic of the prosecuted 
who wants to become the prosecutor will extend to Palestinians as well, motivating a reluctance to grant 
Palestinians any power (Zreik, “When Does a Settler Become a Native?” 358). 
35 
 
 
colonialism returned home to Europe is ratified if we consider the inherently itinerant nature of 
colonial practices and technologies. The term concentration camp had its origin in the 1898 
decision by Spanish General Valeriano Weyler to remove civilian populations so as to prevent 
them from supporting insurgents in the Cuban war of independence.  The results were 
predictably disastrous, with a death rate of over 30%.  By 1901 the United States had adopted the 
practice for its use in the Philippines; and South Africa’s British government officials repeatedly 
visited Canada’s first nations reservations to learn about this practice as early as the Boer War.  
The road led from there to German-controlled South West Africa, now Namibia, where the 
Germans first used the strategy (Saul 136; Pitzer). If colonial forces were so efficient in their 
adoption of ideas, attitudes and technologies across continents, as is evident from this swift 
dissemination of the concentration camp, is it not logical that the cycles of violence and 
coloniality that these technologies help put in place can also be traced across multiple points on 
the globe? 
 It is no coincidence that in her bid to alter historiographic methodologies to account for 
“colonial durabilities in our time”, Ann Laura Stoler highlights both South Africa and 
Israel/Palestine. Administrative structures, economic institutions, and attitudes towards “the 
native” in both regions are “lined”, in Stoler’s formulation, with their respective colonial 
histories (Stoler 170). I do not suggest that these durabilities determine the current, complex 
coloniality of the two locales. I do believe that these colonial legacies impact today’s occluded 
histories, gradated sovereignties, and affective security regimes, by giving them direct or oblique 
historical depth as well as by complicating the naming and analysis of coloniality as it occurs in 
these supposedly postcolonial times. 
36 
 
 
 One of these durabilities to which Stoler gives less attention, but which is crucial to this 
research, is language. In Israel/Palestine and South Africa, the English language enjoys a 
multivalent existence: one of ten official languages in South Africa, it is by far the country’s 
foremost publishing language, and is almost divorced from its connotations of racial-cultural 
domination, a place now occupied in cultural memory by Afrikaans (Möller). In Israel/Palestine, 
English is seen as a tool for socio-economic mobility, but it also serves in contact zones between 
Hebrew and Arabic speakers: both in shared spaces of resistance and, sporadically, in the 
violence-inflected communication between soldiers and Palestinian populations. My point is that 
while English’s use as a global language is derivative of the English empire, which various 
groups in both locales fought bitterly, that colonial past has been set aside, leaving English as the 
language of international orientation. When Vladislavić and Beukes write in English, they are 
writing in what has become a default literary language in the “new South Africa” – though 
Beukes makes a point of hybridizing and localizing her English, a point which I pick up in 
chapter four. When the Israeli writers Shelach and Boianjiu turn to English, they are 
acknowledging the economic constraints of the Hebrew literary market as well as delineating an 
audience for their works that is not, or not necessarily, local. All of this is to say that this 
dissertation’s focus on fiction in English and Hebrew itself foregrounds some trenchant imperial 
durabilities; without, I hope, occluding others, which would be revealed by a project of different 
linguistic scope.  
 I have outlined how Israel and South Africa orbit each other through converging 
historical timelines, parallel affective and discursive victimhood and victory, in the international 
mobilization around them, and in their preservation and reconfiguration of colonial histories. 
While the complex material and diplomatic relations between the two states are beyond the scope 
37 
 
 
of this dissertation, neither the diffuse analogies I enumerate nor the concrete interstate ties go 
unnoticed by the respective literary communities. As early as 1948, Hebrew translations of South 
African works have occasioned a palimpsestic reading of local politics (see Tal and Bethlehem). 
More recently, Orly Castel Bloom’s intifada novel Human Parts involves an entrepreneurial 
young capitalist who travels to South Africa to disconnect from his past and becomes obsessed 
with Nelson Mandela and his promise of moving forward (Castel-Bloom 218–19). In a short 
story by Anat Einhar, a young model plans to avenge herself on a photographer who published 
nude pictures he took of her, pictures which she fears might reach her absent father who was last 
heard from in Johannesburg (Einhar 67). In a short story to which I return in my conclusion, a 
mizrahi divorcée in central Israel finds strength in the vicious image of Winnie Mandela she sees 
in the newspaper (Rabikowitz).  
On the South African side, Vladislavić’s novel, analyzed in chapter one below, 
fleetingly mentions the Afrikaners “in bed with the Israelis” (Vladislavić 73), while Mark Behr 
casts a relationship with a Palestinian man as potential redemption for a white South African 
who used to only have relations with black people (Behr). Most of the above are brief mentions, 
often uttered by minor characters – nothing approaching full-fledged thematic involvement of the 
kind Israeli authors have with the abstract idea of “Africa” (Bar-Yosef). Yet these minor 
characters define the environment of complicity that is the web of interaction for the major 
characters and plots, demonstrating that Jewish Israeli and white South African authors share the 
sub-genre of complicity literature.                   
Chapter Breakdown             
In order to chart the thematic emphases, narrative structures, and affective textures 
characteristic of complicity literature, I begin by reading Ivan Vladislavić along with Walter 
38 
 
 
Benjamin and works by artist William Kentridge. “Double Negative and Complicity’s Structures 
of Feeling” argues that a negotiation of claims of indigeneity on the one hand, and ties to 
European whiteness and a global middle-class on the other, animates white South African 
identity. With this tension, and through the charging of everyday objects with historical and 
moral qualities, the novel explores the unsettlement engendered by complicity which leaves the 
protagonist in a paradoxical willing for- and dreading of- a reckoning to come.  
Chapter 2, “Unsettled Settlers: Picnic Grounds and An Almost Olympic Size Pool” 
analyzes the triangulation of space, affect, and genre in Israeli authors Oz Shelach and Ronnie 
Brodetzky’s writing. Outlining some of complicity literature’s narratological characteristics, the 
chapter argues firstly that complicity produces stories about collectives, in which the primary 
unit of signification is not the individual but the social. Secondly, complicity literature stands in 
oblique contrast to the mainstream culture of disavowal by re-telling or reminding the reader of 
what she already knows. In the works analyzed, this takes shape through a cyclical affective 
movement from not sensing the violence of spacial arrangement, through seeing and feeling 
space as unsettled and violent, to unseeing and unfeeling – and back again. Lastly, complicity 
literature problematizes the act of narration, emphasizing the fault-lines in the stories the 
narrating society tells itself while challenging generic conventions. Drawing on Rob Nixon and 
Hannan Hever’s work, the chapter interrogates how buried objects and drawn-out timescales can 
be narrativized in ways that make disavowed violence palpable – in ways which unsettle the 
settlers.  
The third chapter, “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid and the Affective Logic of 
Violence” reads Shani Boianjiu’s ‘Anglophone Hebrew’ novel which, like the former works 
analyzed, sits uneasily within linguistic and generic conventions, thus unsettling the reader. 
39 
 
 
Reading Boianjiu’s work allows that for Israelis, encounters with oneself and with one’s peers 
are circumscribed by the intimacy of complicity in the violence of the settler colonial project. 
This project demands on the one hand, continued participation in a colonial present which 
degrades and distorts one’s encounters with the world; while on the other, it demands a mirage of 
normalcy, claiming for its participants a role as citizens of the world. Through a reading of Aimé  
Césaire’s idea of the return of violence, I show that the logic of violence becomes the only route 
through which both characters’ and readers’ emotions are allowed to flow. That violence enacted 
towards the other nevertheless determines which emotional responses are possible for the self 
and who or what might be an object of those emotions is what I term the affective logic of 
violence.  
My final chapter, “The Lacuna of Collective Responsibility in Zoo City”, expands the 
bounds of complicity literature to include Lauren Beukes’ speculative fiction detective novel. I 
show how the novel interrogates Foucauldian ideas of discipline and responsibility, drawn from a 
tradition which posits the individual as the subject of the law. Contra this tradition, the novel 
superimposes multiple justice systems to establish public culpability and complicity as 
unaddressed lacunae in law, in human understanding, and in philosophy. The novel then gestures 
towards the alternative ethical possibilities of communitarian personhood and of care ethics, 
while problematizing their sufficiency for encompassing complicity as an affect and ethic which 
circulates among social groups.   
40 
 
 
  
41 
 
 
CHAPTER 1 
BARBERCUE, COFFEE, AND THE WAVE OF HISTORY: IVAN VLADISLAVIĆ’S 
DOUBLE NEGATIVE 
 
Double Negative (2011) is famed South-African author Ivan Vladislavić’s second novel. The 
novel is narrated by Neville Lister, an anglophone Johannesburgian, in three ‘snapshots’ that 
follow his and the nation’s life: from 19 year-old university dropout avoiding mandatory army 
service, to London expat, to his married life and work as photographer after his return to 
Johannesburg. Critics have read the novel’s focus on collapse, decay, and uncertain becoming as 
descriptive of the temporal liminality of the South African transition to democracy (Helgesson; 
Manià). Rather than a product of its broadly post-transition moment, I read the novel as specific 
to the condition of existence in complicity for white liberal South Africans under apartheid and 
in its aftermath. Vladislavić uses metacommentary and ironic gaps to problematize cohesive, 
linear narrative, referencing Walter Benjamin’s aphorismic writing and William Kentridge’s 
tracing techniques to foreground a commitment to uncertainty. Together with the gap or 
threshold, contradiction is the constitutive form of the novel as externality and internality, 
stillness and turmoil, order and upheaval operate in paradoxical relation to each other. Through 
these gaps and paradoxes, the reliability of the narrator, the ethics of the story told, and the 
society portrayed all come under questioning.  
Images of thresholds and intimations of being on a threshold function in Double Negative 
not (only) as metonymic of South Africa’s transitional period, but also as a manifestation of the 
social place of the complicit white South African. Two paradoxes are integral to proving the 
complicity in this kind of South African whiteness: firstly, the tension at the heart of South-
African settler-colonialism has individuals negotiating their own claims of indigeneity on the one 
42 
 
 
hand, and their ties to European whiteness and a global middle-class on the other. Secondly, 
while Neville feels constricted by his social position and does his best to avoid being “crushed” 
by history, he also longs for a reckoning – imagined as a crashing wave – that might give him a 
place in the world. Ultimately, the novel suggests that complicity’s structure of feeling is a blend 
of comfort and guilt, engendering a paradoxical willing for and dreading of a reckoning to come.     
The thresholds in the novel encapsulate this affective, internal conflict between the fear 
of retribution and the need for penance. Therefore, an analysis of these thresholds and the 
“threshold ontology” in South African literary theory enables a better understanding of the 
working of complicity in the novel. I focus particularly on the characters’ eating habits and on 
the novel’s recourse to aquatic metaphors, elements which serve as key vectors for complicity as 
a historical position and as structure of feeling.     
Thresholds 
Double Negative is rife with thresholds. The most overt are ekphrastic descriptions of 
Neville’s photo-series of people outside their houses’ walls, which he nicknames “thresholders”: 
he is touched, he says, by the way these subjects stand between him and their privacy “like 
amiable security guard[s]” (184). Neville stumbled on the theme while photographing the 
proliferating defense walls of Johannesburg. There too, he was attracted to debris, to the cracks 
in between things, to faded signs and peeling fences. Never seeking entrance, he keeps to the 
space just shy of private domains (193). This spacial positioning opens up to a whole range of 
gaps, voids, and discrepancies in the novel: temporal, political, and artistic ‘in-betweens’. 
Neville’s attraction to such threshold positions contradicts the deterministic division of social 
roles under Apartheid’s racial capitalism, in which distribution of wealth and labor depends on 
43 
 
 
racial categories perceived as rigid12. To his chagrin, his Anglo-South African identity dictates 
how he moves in the world.  
A scene from the first part of the novel exemplifies how this positioning is experienced. 
During a day spent following a famous photographer in search of portraits – Neville’s 
“initiation” – he is confronted by the effect he, as a white man, has in the streets of 
Johannesburg. While Auerbach, the older photographer, is driving, Neville spots a man resting 
on a bus-stop bench; but he cannot look at the man without being himself emplaced in the city’s 
social structure:  
The second I gazed at him… he lurched forward, pulled something from his sock and 
threw it into a rubbish bin. The lights changed and we took off. Looking back, I saw the 
man walking swiftly in the other direction (53) 
 Neville is well aware of the corporeal schema he inhabits. The discerning eye he adopts 
from the master-photographer reveals that his face, gazing out of the car window, interpellates 
another person in the oppressive apparatus of Apartheid. It is this sensed interpellation which 
informs his threshold stance when he refuses to enter the first portrait-subject’s house.  
The first portrait of the day is to be Veronica’s. She is a young bereaved mother, who 
lives in a ‘back house’ behind a students’ commune. Veronica’s first impulse at their approach is 
to jerk her door shut (66). When after speaking with Auerbach she opens the gate to her life and 
lets the three strange men in, Neville considers that she might think them city officials; but “then 
again, it hardly mattered whether she grasped what we were up to. Who we were was clear. We 
were white men. We would do as we pleased” (67). If Neville understands the destruction of 
black privacy as an effect of apartheid, his refusal to enter Veronica’s shack, and his later choice 
 
12 On apartheid as capitalism along racial lines, see (Moodley and Adam).  
44 
 
 
to photograph people outside their homes, may be read as “ethical impersonality” (Hartley). But 
Neville’s narration does in fact enter Veronica’s house. The novel’s beautiful, evocative prose 
takes the reader inside, and lays bare the tiny room and its inhabitants. It is only after we have 
been ‘shown’ the dilapidated interior that Neville acknowledges: “I know this because I have 
seen Auerbach’s photograph” (69). A further narration of said (fictional) photograph follows, 
cementing Neville’s and the reader’s stance neither in the room, nor ignorant of it (71). Not so 
much ethical impersonality, though the novel does delineate it as an option; rather, a firm stand 
at the threshold.  
The same inclination for the in-between characterizes Neville’s political proclivities. 
“[M]y own position was always wavering. I was too easily drawn to the other person’s side”, he 
narrates himself in hindsight (33). On the one hand, Neville despises apartheid and its 
proponents, seeing with clarity the self-victimization that makes Afrikaner nationalism 
affectively salient (28). On the other, meaningful resistance would require him to relinquish his 
self, which he loathes to do: “Be sand, not oil in the workings of the world. Sand? Must I be 
ground down to nothing? Should I let myself be milled? It was abject”, he says (29).  
Apartheid is despicable; “The [resistance] Movement” demands abjection. Rounding out 
the bind which keeps Neville on the threshold is History: he reads the “radical tradition” in the 
banned books library, but cannot quite bring together the stereoscopic images of Bolsheviks with 
those of Soweto, Trotzky with the “Top Star Drive-in” (50). Nevertheless, these texts “dump” 
him into history, and he can “never be out of it again” (51). So he waits, “looking on, standing 
by” (68), with Benjamin’s Angel of History besides him, for History to “break over [him] like a 
wave that had already swept through the manor house and bear [him] off in a jumble of picture 
45 
 
 
frames and paper plates” (51). The shoreline of history becomes another threshold – not ready to 
dive in, Neville nevertheless senses the current.13 
The recursion to images of rubble, debris and fragments in the passages discussed above 
are themselves part of the threshold stance. Extensive scholarship on transition and ‘post-
transition’ writing in South Africa has identified a “fixation with going somewhere" tampered by 
the lingering disappointment of an in-between (de Kock 58 after Jamal). Referred to variably as 
an interregnum; a “standing in the doorway”; and a “mezzanine ontology”, these frameworks 
prioritize continued unfolding of a long historical sequence rather than a punctual transition that 
trivialize the reckoning with the past (Bethlehem, “Continuity and Change in Postapartheid 
Fiction”; Gordimer; de Kock 5; Titlestad 188). Thematically characterized by a measure of 
wandering, debris, and fascination with the obscure and illegible, this experience of the threshold 
of historical change seems to map onto Double Negative’s in-betweens perfectly. If the zeitgeist 
urges for a fiction of cultural transparency, where what people say and what they mean, what is 
visible and what exists are one and the same, Neville Lister's attempts at disengagement may be 
poetic re-inscriptions of the gap between world and language (Hartley 4–5). Yet rather than an 
abstract in-between-ness, Double Negative plots out Neville Lister’s relationship to the country 
he grew up in and to apartheid through extensive attention to the material and culinary culture of 
upper-middle class Johannesburg. 
 
13 The gaps and discrepancies can be enumerated further – the failed stereoscopic image returns as trope 
throughout the text; a “gap” opens up between Neville and the world which he cannot bridge but learns to live 
with; the novel weighs the inadequacies of memory, narrative, and photograph as mimetic devices, all leaving gaps 
between representation and reality. This abundance of gaps has lead to the novel being read as a “project of 
impersonality” (Hartley).  
46 
 
 
A Manly amount of Wreckage 
The novel’s particular attention to food and dining begins with an all-important ritual of South 
African whiteness, the barbecue or braai. In the braai scene which sets up Neville’s memory of 
himself as a teenager in Johannesburg, physical comfort and opulence merge imperceptibly with 
latent violence. The young Neville must locate himself vis-à-vis this doubling, in which the 
family; masculinity; sustenance; beauty; and leisure offered to him are products of exploitation 
and deprivation. While his activist friends burn to “be sand, not oil in the workings of the world”, 
Neville recoils at the choice to be “ground to nothing” (29).14 Plot-wise, these pages depict an 
evening gathering which turns into a brawl; thematically, they are an early memory of the same 
negotiation Neville still makes as a grown man faced with the obligations of South-African 
whiteness; and poetically, the text here establishes the role of the built environment – private 
(patios, pools, hedges) and public (jails, mines) – in the privilege and violence of apartheid.  
What should enable the comfortable life Neville grows into is the sensory schism which 
would allow him to feel the sun’s warmth; see the sunset; smell his mother’s roses – but not see 
his neighbor’s “racial obsession” and the new car his job as a prosecutor of petty offenses affords 
him; not recognize that his mother exchanges a recipe with the neighbor while leaving out the 
name of the “houseboy” who devised it; not know that the very city’s existence depends on the 
mine shafts dug underneath it, in which black bodies toil (28;29;30). His inability to ignore the 
stakes and price of ‘simple’ physical comfort in 1980’s Johannesburg creates a rift within Neville 
 
14 As Daniel Hartley points out, the quote Neville’s idealist friend uses is from German writer Gunther Eich, who 
himself served in the German army in World War 2 – casting doubt on the veracity of even the most declarative 
political statements.  
47 
 
 
and between him and his surroundings, a rift which will run him away from South Africa – only 
to find that leaving in no way lessens his complicity in the country’s violence (93).    
It is so that a braai hosted in honor of the newly-arrived van Huysteen family serves as 
the source memory propelling Neville’s story – a vanishing-point from which the rest of the 
novel emanates. The Listers’ new neighbors, particularly Mr. van Huyssteen, since braaing is a 
masculine affair, are incredibly fond of this pastime (24;27). Virility, masculinity and South-
Africanness are measured by the braai, in Neville’s memory, as he witnesses Mr. van Huyssteen 
squeezing sausages on the grill then sliding his hands between his wife’s thighs. Neville’s 
recollection betrays his teenage self’s need to excuse his own family’s seeming ‘Anglo’ timidity 
in comparison: “when it came to outdoor living we were not in the same league, but we had the 
patio and the pool, and my dad could char a lamb chop as well as the next man” (25). This 
challenge of masculine consumption echoes throughout the novel. Sitting in a fish restaurant 
with famed photographer Auerbach and a haughty journalist, Neville bemoans his order as he 
watches his compatriots devour their messy heaps of prawns. “I should have had prawns too,” he 
thinks, “it would have given me reason to splash butter and lemon juice, to suck at my teeth and 
burn the hell out of my mouth and leave a manly amount of wreckage on the plate” (74). Certain 
kinds of food, in certain settings, are cemented as masculine; and they are gendered so on 
account of the remains they leave behind, that “manly amount of wreckage”. In the braai as well 
as prawn scenes, the novel casts these forms of eating as nonchalant and aggressive at the same 
time. Importantly, the “wreckage” left behind takes up space – the eaters occupy the land even 
after the feasting is over.     
On that first night of the braai, Neville returns home late. The braai, and the garden of 
which it is the centre, are characterized by abundance. Neville pauses “to feel the heat of the 
48 
 
 
slasto on [his] soles… perfect” (26). In the respite provided by his late entrance to the event, 
young Neville’s senses relish the idyll of an emplaced, specific suburban life: the slasto patio 
emitting warmth, the planted roses scenting the air, and the setting sun which lights the sky “a 
rare pink” (26). The pool water, seemingly sensing the opulence, “shifted in its sleep like a well-
fed animal, breathing out chlorine” (26). Indeed, the food piles high – there was no need to put 
aside a plate for him, “there was so much left over”; and by the time the dessert is on the grill its 
sweet scent melts into “overburdened air” (27).            
Yet, an ominous undertone runs through Vladislavić’s text, an aggression emplaced 
within the idyll of the suburban environment. As Mr. van Huyssteen tells of his childhood 
escapades torturing his parents’ black servants, Neville can no longer enjoy the evening:  
The shift was imperceptible, as if someone had put on a record in the background, turned 
down low, and by the time you became aware of it your mood had already altered. An 
odourless poison leaked out of [van Huyssteen] (Vladislavić 28) 
The same can be said for the text: reading back, the unease of it started before this point, like a 
barely audible affective soundtrack. Explaining why his father chose parquet floors for the house 
– perhaps the most bourgeois of internal debates – young Neville recalls his father thinks carpets 
turn any room into “a padded cell” (26). The neighbor whose children lie on the parquet floor is, 
the reader knows, in the business of actual cells (28). And is not the “odourless poison” leaking 
out of Mr. Huyssteen the same chlorine which the pool, a “well fed animal”, breathed out? The 
laden paper plates become “debris… bloody juices” (29), and Mr. Huuysteen’s new car suddenly 
seems “an enormous piece of evidence”, implying, of course, a crime (30). They had all eaten 
themselves sick, the riled-up Neville thinks, on “the fat of the land” – echoing the tainted 
comfort of Egypt’s opulence as promised by Pharaoh (The English Bible Gen 45:18) . 
Throughout the pages depicting the scene, this double character of comfort and latent violence 
49 
 
 
seems contagious, emanating from the built environment and the bodies to fill the very air. This 
is perhaps a mood, rather than a feeling: moods lack the intensity and object-centeredness 
characteristic of affect, seeming instead to attend to the world as a whole. Sara Ahmed invites us 
to think of the kind of mood contagion Vladislavić describes without resulting to a model of an 
interiority. “It is not that a person is in a mood that is then simply spread to others”, she says; “if 
there is a spreading it does not begin with an ‘in’” (Ahmed). Becoming attuned to a mood or 
failing to do so is not then an issue of interpersonal behavior but of belonging, of citizenship and 
of the creation of strangers (Ahmed).     
In the scene that follows, the mood encoded in the text becomes overt action, putting 
Neville’s belonging on the line. Neville shouts accusations at the neighbor, for which he receives 
a slap from his father – the first and last the father ever doles out. The stakes of physical comfort 
are further explicated – “just imagine (…) that you’ve worked all your life down a bloody 
goldmine and you still can’t afford to put food on the table”, Neville implores the guest (30). In 
the process, the text distills two characteristics of the emotional structure it describes. Firstly, the 
“poisonous” Mr. Huyssteen sees himself as a victim (29). Reacting to the boy’s plea for 
mineworkers, the man retorts: “if your black brothers ever get hold of this country they’ll run it 
into the ground” (30, my emphasis). The mine shaft is a material reality under the surface; being 
“run into the ground” is the mirroring anxiety which replaces and displaces that reality, 
formulated as it is along the same downward-vertical axis15. The second part of the emotional 
structure is put in place when the paternal slap across the face “knock[s] the world back into 
 
15 What this text pins down is how earnest this victimhood can be: Louis Huysteen’s complexion is all suffering, 
“even his crispy hair looked hurt” (29). The “mirror” ‘reversed perspective’ of Louis’ stories is echoed down the 
page when Neville imagines his neighbor “gazing mournfully at his face in the shaving mirror”, seeing a wronged 
man reflected back (29).   
50 
 
 
order” for Neville (31). This “order” is both familial (“The family motto had always been: ‘Don’t 
rock the boat.’”, 33), and political – white men should get to gorge peacefully; white boys should 
enjoy it. An apology is extended; hands are shaken. The social, taking shape through the 
constellation of beer; braai; mild-to-extreme racism; and cordial hospitality at any cost, has 
collected its entry-price. Yet if the novel establishes this hegemonic white mood as a baseline, its 
emphasis is on the liberal whiteness exemplified in Neville’s material choices and in his ethical 
threshold stance. To these, the novel relates with an irony which serves to highlight the 
incongruities of liberal complicity and, in the process, ropes the reader into that complicity. 
Double Negative, like other Vladislavić creations, has a tendency to stick its tongue out to 
its academic readers. When a young journalist visits Neville’s home, they leaf through his 
mother’s cookbook and he explains that “[i]t’s a bit of social anthropology too. The eating habits 
of the white middle class… under apartheid” (170, ellipsis in original). This is a double poke, 
since “under apartheid” is a term used with some irony in the novel, Neville’s college history 
teacher, nicknamed “hegemony cricket,” having “published five books with ‘under apartheid’ in 
their titles” (143). The critic is left in a bind: is the entire endeavor laughable? And yet, there is 
much to be gained from studying the way food and its rituals are treated in Double Negative, 
including this ironic distance itself. Settler colonialism in its different iterations rests on the 
hegemonic group adopting a paradoxical identity: self-styled Europeanness on the one hand, 
self-styled nativeness on the other (Hever, Narrative and Nation 206; Zreik, “When Does a 
Settler Become a Native?” 358). The colonizing logic is predicated on the colonizing population 
being better suited to governance of the land than its native. This advantage hinges on 
Europeanness, whiteness, or other such identities. However, this supremacy is challenged by the 
defining temporality of settler colonialism: a structure and not an event, wherein settlers “come 
51 
 
 
to stay” (Wolfe 388). Settler identity, then, depends – in its dominant articulation – on an 
unresolved tension between its justification via European-ness and its justification via native-
ness. The braai and, later, the cafetière, I propose, stand as the material markers of these two 
identity functions in the novel, ultimately suggesting that genres of material comfort are endemic 
to being- and becoming-sovereign in the South African context.    
After ten years away, Neville returns to Johannesburg following the democratic elections. 
Now a photographer, Neville sees behind the scenes of the manufacturing of this ‘new South 
Africa’. He is moved by the images he helps create:  
I remember shooting stills on one of those rainbow nation commercials where a cheerful 
circle of friends, representing all the major population groups, gathered around the braai 
to drink beer and braai chops (but not yet to hold hands). These nation-building epics 
brought a lump to my throat, even if the easy companionship among the cast did not 
extend to the crew. When I left the studio and went back into the street, the present felt 
like the past. (112) 
Temporally, narrating Neville is in the future, foreshadowing for the reader that the age of 
handholding will yet come. Neville’s photography mirrors the novel’s temporal elasticity: the 
image he produces creates a future, but Neville remains in the present, which feels like the past. 
The images lure their creator, generating a distance between expectation and experience, and 
thus, disappointment. I refer here to Andrew van der Vlies’ claim that disappointment 
characterizes life in the postapartheid nation, as members find themselves “trapped in an 
imperfect present that is not as the future was imagined” (van der Vlies viii). The temporal 
disjunction is also reflected textually, in parenthetical metacommentary that I address further 
below. The transition years were “parenthetical”, says Neville, “the old versions of things trailed 
behind the new ones in brackets” – the rainbow nation may braai together, but only in a frozen 
image, and without touching (111). 
52 
 
 
For the reader, this scene mirrors the first braai, the one which almost made Neville a 
dissenter and which instead clarified his obligations to the political order. But, importantly, ceci 
n’est pas un braai. The multiethnic cheer is staged, and the chops are for show, not sustenance. 
Compared with the sensory abundance of the first braai scene, its smells and textures, its “thick 
chops” (29) and “overburdened air” (27), this scene of “shooting stills” seems sterile (112).  
The premises underlying Vladislavić’s focus on built environment and material culture 
are that a. the material world is a tangible expression of social relationships; and b. that our 
relationship to our material surrounding is active and creative rather than passive – and this is 
true for fences and cutting-boards, fruit bowls as well as signposts (Beaudry et al. 272). In the 
case of the South African white middle-class, both food culture and urban architecture are 
continuously created vis-à-vis common understandings of non-white South Africans: images of 
hunger and malnutrition influence the first, while threats of violent burglary inform the second 
(Wylie; Nixon 20–22). But masculinist, wreckage-producing feasts which refer obliquely to the 
engineered nutritional precarity of the native population are not the sole form of consumption in 
the novel. Equally as important are depictions of diminutive, elegant foodstuffs.  
Individual Ramekins, If You Don’t Mind  
The braai and prawn scenes were indicative of a specific, masculinist kind of material comfort 
which the novel tells us is an integral part of white South African-ness. But the novel describes 
another kind of sustenance which nourishes a complementary part of this bourgeois culture. If 
the braai, beer, and piri-piri sauce locate their consumers as local and at ease – complementing 
perfectly “the sated murmur of conversation, the outstretched legs and tilted head” that connote 
an informal and familiar locality – there exists a grammar of flavours, practices and bodily 
gestures which do the obverse. These locate their purveyors as cosmopolitan, refined, and 
53 
 
 
fastidious (26). Contrast Neville’s wife Leora’s preparations of fennel salad and soufflé with the 
shopping list his mother finds in the supermarket – “mealie meal, pilchards, sticky tape, Doom” 
(maize flour, small fish, tape, and insecticide – p.107).  
An early introduction to this other-than-local aspiration of white middle-classness is 
described when Neville approaches Saul Auerbach’s house for the first time, in the novel’s first 
part. 
The house was low-lying and roughly plastered, set in a garden full of old trees. There 
was something Mediterranean about the dappled pergolas, the walls as creamy as feta, the 
succulent shadows of fig leaves and thick-tongued aloes cast by the late-summer sun. 
Years later, I read in Chipkin’s book that it was House Something-or-Other, named for 
the original owner, and that the architect was quite famous for his Hellas on the Highveld 
mannerisms (43-4) 
The house is emplaced, low-lying, as though anchored to its Craighall Park location – a 
neighbourhood associated with white English-speaking South Africans; but it is marked by an 
elsewhere-ness which strikes young Neville in a visceral way, and which he later learns was a 
deliberate architectural reference16. The house seems edible with its tongues and feta, its 
succulence and its figs. While he recognizes it as foreign, it is clearly to Neville’s taste. 
Importantly, the house is not referential of the colonial histories of South African architecture – 
Dutch gables or Victorian bricks. Rather, it seeks an elsewhere which is historically detached, 
perhaps even a manifestation of myth more than material history: ‘Hellas on the highveld’. The 
braai which is the centre of the Lister’s back yard manufactures an endemic culture of comfort, 
while Auerbach’s house radiates comfort manufactures to be decidedly from elsewhere. 
 
16 “Chipkin’s book” is most likely Clive M. Chipkin’s 1993 book, Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society 1880s-
1960s. This was followed by a 2008 study of the city after 1950. Chipkin is an architect, historian, and critic based 
in Johannesburg. He was a co-founder of Architects Against Apartheid. His work situates the city in an international 
context which defies models of centre-periphery, and demands architects take an engaged position towards their 
society (Lagae 2013)  
54 
 
 
Following Auerbach into his home, Neville watches the man go about a well-rehearsed 
breakfast routine. Coffee and toast become, in Neville’s retrospective narrative, a drama of 
socialization. Neville is drawn to the way of life on offer but is also resistant, “off balance” (45).    
A still life on the kitchen counter: apples in a wooden bowl shaped like a dhow, two 
quarters of lemon on a ceramic tile decorated with a spiral, salt in a finger bowl. Ritual 
objects, I thought.17  
Auerbach’s home is at once a still-life image and a shrine; Neville knows enough of it to 
recognize its promise for someone like himself, but feels estranged enough to be fascinated. 
Fascination is compounded by unease as he observes Auerbach’s coffee ritual: 
I had never seen a cafetière before. He leaned on the plunger and gazed out of the 
window. It seemed to me that he was doing it in slow motion, building up tension in the 
room along with the mass of grounds in the bottom of the pot, drawing attention to the 
device. (44-5) 
Vladislavić’s description of the cafetière which does more than make coffee is cinematic: the 
mind’s eye zooms in from Auerbach at the counter, to the device’s plunger, to the pressure 
squeezing the coffee ground to extract their essence. The moment’s description is intertextual: an 
earlier cinematic figuring of the cafetière can be found in the work of artist William Kentridge, 
himself a member of the white, liberal, South African middle class. 
 
 
 
 
17 The ritual continues: “A slice of toast sprang up on the counter. While he was buttering it, I had time to glance 
into the lounge, a cool cavern of honeyed slate floors and paper-white walls that set off dark linocuts and African 
masks in smoky wood, rough-hewn creatures with horns, apparently bootblacked, a beaded doll. Kilims, leather, a 
bit of chrome. A dated modern style that suited him” (44) 
55 
 
 
Figure 1: : Still from Mine, by William Kentridge. 1991. 16 mm animated film, 
transferred to video 
 
William Kentridge’s 1991 Mine (see Figure 1) is part of a series of hand-drawn animated 
films in the artist’s signature style. Mine develops an analogy between Kentridge’s mining mogul 
alter-ego, Soho Eckstein’s, breakfast ritual and the underground domain of the mining 
compound. Kentridge makes overt the relationship between Eckstein’s comfort and the misery of 
the black miners, set quite literally beneath him. The black bodies bathe in the mine’s communal 
showers, and the liquid fills Soho’s cafetière; as he presses the plunger, its movement is 
transformed into a rapid descent through the tray, through the bed and into the mine-shaft. The 
squalor of the mine, source of Johannesburg’s wealth, is shown intimately connected to – in bed 
with – the mogul. Vladislavić is thus drawing on the tie established by Kentridge between the 
European-oriented comfort of the cafetière and the material conditions which produced its users 
as a racialized class in South Africa. As a result of this intertext, Double Negative’s attention to 
fissures and thresholds too come to echo Kentridge’s work.  
56 
 
 
  Kentridge’s technique of drawing, erasing, and re-drawing to create his ‘images for 
projection’ creates what Maltz-Leca terms an “epistemology of doubt” (Maltz-Leca). Rendering 
his own process visible in the faint, erased lines of past images (see fig. 1), Kentridge resists the 
surety of colonialism and apartheid by shunning the “exaggerated quietude” of the art that serves 
them (Maltz-Leca 120). Tying us back to Johannesburg’s built environment, Kentridge said of 
his present moment: 
One of the ways things are false is when they get locked into being seen as fact, as 
opposed to moments of a process […]. Looking out of the window now, I can see the 
leafy, wooded suburbs of the north part of Johannesburg [... But] this current, factual 
view is oblivious to how that wooded suburb was created (in Maltz-Leca 115) 
Kentridge staring intently out of his window colors the scene in which Auerbach does the same. 
Auerbach’s kitchen is no still-life, no shrine. It is alive, its walls of feta purposefully built to 
replace something else that was once there, now cast to oblivion by the fact-ness of the building. 
The kitchen is populated by objects whose owner put them there to serve a living purpose, at 
least part of which is pleasure. This pleasure – what we find aesthetic, pleasant, even useful – is 
also alive, communicating our social placement to others, through subtle messaging of inclusion 
and exclusion (Bourdieu 6; Laden 127). Under late capitalism, consumption is no longer part of 
social communication but is constitutive of it: “consumption goods are not mere messages; they 
constitute the system itself” (Douglas and Isherwood 50).  
It follows that together with his coffee, Neville is being offered inclusion into a social 
group. The tension building up in the room along with the mass of grounds in the bottom of the 
pot and the hailing of Kentridge’s Soho Eckstein emphasize the complex settler-colonial, late-
capitalist structure wherein the exclusion of some (of most) from the ‘ritual’ of the cafetière is 
synonymous with the growing gap between those who partake in the consumption (of coffee, for 
57 
 
 
instance) and those who shoulder the burden of production, and who in their bodies pay its price 
(Vladislavić 44–45). Soho Eckstein’s cafetière is a mine-shaft filled with black bodies; 
Auerbach’s cafetière holds no such immediate ties to oppression, and yet, its tension-building 
returns to the frame a hint of the hardship of people in coffee plantations and domestic workers’ 
quarters. Older-Neville’s ironic recollection of Auerbach’s home is joined by a second gap, 
between the home’s comforts, derived from its placement within an abstract, global social idiom 
of class, and its material reality, derived from place-specific structures of labor.18  
After his return to South Africa following the democratic elections, Neville settles into 
the social placement offered by Auerbach. He never fully commits to it, with the characteristic 
threshold-lover’s distrust for any such commitment; but his material choices tell the reader 
something his words qualify. A young reporter interviews him in his home following a small 
photography exhibition. In the kitchen, she asks about his artistic influences: 
‘Saul Auerbach,’ she said, ‘he was the reason you became a photographer.’ 
‘No, we can’t blame him for that.’ 
‘But he influenced you.’ 
I let the statement settle while I drove the plunger down to the bottom of the cafetière. 
(182) 
The out-of-place teenager has become a full-grown Anglo-South-African – in action, if not in 
mind. Before Neville can wax poetic about Auerbach’s photography, all the while making snarky 
mental comments regarding said waxing, his material environment confirms the young 
journalist’s question. The workings of capitalism had changed in the years between the events; a 
 
18 African countries and their people are, of course, an integral part the global network of consumption that the 
term “global middle class” connotes. My claim here is that Vladislavić’s text gestures towards an attitude prevalent 
in certain South-African circles, which perceive being “worldly” and being “African” as antithetical (see Mbembe, 
“Blacks from Elsewhere and the Right to Abode”). 
58 
 
 
concern for the invisible labor behind a cup of coffee has sported further class-classifications, the 
offer of the beverage now followed by “It’s Ethiopian, I believe” (168). The conversation paused 
while “[Neville] ground the beans and [the reporter] read about the Ethiopian coffee-drinking 
ceremony on the package” (179). It’s in to care about production processes and indigenous 
practices, so these too are packaged, sold, and utilized in interpersonal social signaling19.  
This signaling becomes part of Neville’s storytelling, with multiple second-person 
addresses ironically highlighting his or others’ social markers: a corner establishment is “not a 
barbershop, mind you, but a salon”; Mozambique’s capital’s colonial name is pronounced “Not 
[Lourenco] Marx, mind you, Markesh” (73); and Leora, Neville’s wife, makes “her famous 
salmon soufflé – in individual ramekins, if you don’t mind” (215). These parenthetical remarks 
highlight multiple gaps: between the “new South Africa” and the inevitable continuation of 
colonial labor structures, as well as between the physical comfort encoded in orientations 
towards Europe and the effort it takes to maintain this orientation from the Southern tip of 
Africa. Ever self-aware of his own social positioning, the narrator emphasizes the way in which 
that position is made up of thousands of small, material details. 
Crucially, the ironic discrepancy between the material realities and the meanings they are 
supposed to signify only works if the reader knows enough to fill the gap. If we are in on the 
joke, though, we are roped into the unsettling sphere of complicity. Reading the delectable 
description of Auerbach’s kitchen, I found myself glancing uneasily at the Moroccan tiles I use 
as coasters. On my coaster was a mug; in the mug was some French-press coffee (oat milk, if 
 
19 See also the description of Neville and Leora Lister’s dinner preparation, with its telling parenthetical irony: 
“[w]hile she mixed the dressing, I opened some wine (it was a compensatory Springfield Life from Stone, nursed to 
maturity in the rocky soils of the Robertson valley)” (215). 
59 
 
 
you don’t mind). If, as South African philosopher Marthinus Versfeld claims, kitchen pots are 
the material world’s point of entry into our bodies, the meticulous attention to coffee pots and 
salt cellars is Vladislavić’s potentially unsettling point of entry into his readers’ homes, the 
collapse of their impunity (Versfeld 27). Together with his coffee, Neville is being offered 
inclusion into a social group which may include the reader, especially if she is sitting with her 
book in a place where colonial settlers came to stay. And so, Neville’s inculcation into White 
Anglophone South African-ness is, potentially, the reader’s implication in one or more colonial 
histories of her own.  
To that end, it is no coincidence that this Anglo-South-African atmosphere is marked by 
nouns neither English nor Afrikaans. Like Auerbach’s Mediterranean abode, the cafetière, the 
espresso and the soufflé point outwards from the local and present, underscoring the paradoxical 
social placement of colonial settlers in the late-capitalist moment. In order to take their place in 
South Africa, they must at once prove their native-ness and their links to a foreign, global 
bourgeoisie, two elements experienced as contradictory20.  
History’s Debris 
Double Negative’s attention to, and staging of, two antonymous aspects of White South 
Africans’ food culture corresponds to a constitutive tension of settler-colonialism. While claims 
of Europeanness justify the minority’s control over indigenous peoples through the paternalist 
logic of colonialism, claims of indigeneity and locality are crucial for a social group who intends 
to stay. White South-Africans are, after all, African – they have no other homeland. This is not a 
 
20 While the urge to prove the contradictory group identity is seen throughout, the identity of this proof’s arbiter 
remains vague. At the very least, settlers must prove it to themselves; at most, it is to a real or imagined 
international community, understood to be centered in Euro-America. This complex of settler identity is different 
from, for instance, the plight of the aborigines of Australia as described in Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of 
Recognition (2002). 
60 
 
 
theoretical paradox but one which underlies lived experience. Apartheid South Africa’s complex 
identity-naming system under apartheid reflected this tension. “African”, as a category, belonged 
to none other than white Afrikaners: “The problem [with “African” as category] was it translated 
back in the Boer language into the word Afrikaner, which was the very name the white Dutch 
descendants called themselves” (Verwey and Quayle 555). It was this assignation of locality to 
the Afrikaners themselves which necessitated the invention of Bantu as a term for brown-skinned 
South Africans (Ibid.). After apartheid “sat down”, as Vladislavić ingeniously describes it, 
millions of White South Africans found themselves renegotiating both Europeanness and 
locality21. But this is not the negotiation with which Neville is preoccupied. For much of Double 
Negative, he is perturbed by History. It is this construct of History, and the affective trail that 
follows it in the novel, that I will now address. 
 “History will have to get by without me”, Neville exclaims when he moves to London 
(107); “I couldn’t help feeling I had squandered the chance to make my small bit of history”, he 
laments when the 1994 elections finally come (94); and when he goes to vote in London with the 
other expats, he is forced to admit: “It’s not often history steps down from its pedestal and comes 
to meet you in the street. Yes, we were making history too, I could see it that way if I squinted” 
(94)22. This is the new, exciting history, of the New South Africa to which Neville returns. Under 
apartheid, and again when the novelty of democracy wears off, History seems to him far more 
 
21 Breyten Breytenbach, poet and activist mentioned in Double Negative, argued that he both belongs and does 
not belong in Africa; while Max Du Preez writes: “Just as I cannot change the colour of my skin, I cannot become an 
American, European or Australian. I would be an alien forever, like a polar bear in the Pretoria zoo. My soul is 
African. My skin colour is the only European thing about me…African/Afrikaner. I am both. I call myself after the 
continent twice…I am a native of this land” (Breytenbach and du Preez, qtd in Verwey and Quayle 555).  
22 Likening himself to a stubborn price-sticker stuck to a new glass, Neville ruminates: “History has played a flame 
over me. I’ve come unstuck, but I’m joined to the world by a few gluey strands of saliva” (241) 
61 
 
 
ominous. At nineteen Neville feared that “History would break over [him] like a wave” (51). I 
return to this passage now, an image of history as a tsunami: 
You could not see Benjamin’s Angel – Klee’s Angel, strictly speaking, memorably 
captioned – leaning beside me with his wings folded across the bonnet. I was troubled. 
For all my uncertainty about the sacred texts, they had dumped me into history and I had 
a suspicion that I would never be out of it again. Looking back over the brief span of my 
life, I felt like some object left on the shoreline, toyed with by a rising tide. If you had a 
sense of historical destiny, if you were sufficiently drunk with it, you might expect to ride 
out any storm. But I did not imagine I would be carried in one piece to a classless shore. 
History would break over me like a wave that had already swept through the manor house 
and bear me off in a jumble of picture frames and paper plates (51). 
Klee’s Angelus Novus as described by Benjamin makes several appearances in the novel. The 
“memorably captioned” drawing sees history not sequentially, but as catastrophe: “[w]here we 
perceive a chain of events, [the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage 
upon wreckage… the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (Benjamin, History). 
Vladislavić’s protagonist gives watery shape to Benjamin’s catastrophe, while sharing in the 
angel’s sense of helplessness: not watching history but being “toyed” by it.  
Analyzing this passage, Kirby Manià (2017) joins it to another appearance of the Angel, a 
photograph Neville takes of one of his thresholders, Antoine K. For Manià, Benjamin’s Angel 
functions as commentary on the present-imperfect temporality of South Africa’s interregnum.23 
The two men together, he claims, stand in opposition to a dialectical progression of events, 
instead suspended in a transitional moment described by Helgesson as “frozen yet continuing” 
(Manià 54).  
 
23 “Present Imperfect” is Andrew van der Vlies’s term for the stalled temporality characteristic of South African 
culture after 1994 (van der Vlies). 
62 
 
 
Yet, Neville and Antoine K occupy markedly different positions within Johannesburg's 
social fabric. One is a beneficiary, even after the ‘sitting down’ of apartheid, roaming the city in 
his Mercedes and starting an artist's career in his late 30's. The other is an immigrant in a 
xenophobic society, driven out of his first Johannesburg home by a mob looking to lynch him 
(194). And indeed, Neville is not likened to the angel, but to someone who the angel 
accompanies, perhaps haunts: “You could not see Benjamin’s Angel... leaning beside me with 
his wings folded across the bonnet” (51). Antoine K, with his anticipating averted gaze, is the 
Angel himself – arms stretched out to his sides like wings, supposedly looking on Benjamin's 
history-as-piling-wreckage. Neville senses he is destined to be that wreckage – “History would... 
bear me off in a jumble of picture frames and paper plates” (51). Neville tries to get Antoine to 
look at the camera – “I wanted him to look at the camera, to look at me” (192), but Antoine 
insists. Neville senses that the object of Antoine's gaze is dangerous. He has the “feeling that 
someone was creeping up on us” (Ibid.). What danger awaits this middle-class white man? 
 As I have stated above, complicity in the novel is drawn out through material culture and 
culinary preferences. Neville’s fears of being carried off by History are composed in relation to 
the same material culture. The “jumble of picture frames and paper plates” (51), the wreckage of 
history, harkens back to the beginning of the novel. In the hypermasculine braai (barbecue) 
scene, an enraged young Neville punched his parents' racist guest, disgusted with the privilege 
implied by the remains of the event: “the debris, paper plates full of bones and peels, crumpled 
serviettes and balls of foil, bloody juices” (29). If African immigrant Antoine K is gazing at the 
debris of the past, this past may very well be a braaivleis. The History which is ‘creeping up’, 
‘breaking’, and ‘playing a flame over’ Neville toys with him so because of his immutable 
complicity, his privileged life in the “manor house” (Vladislavić 51). His attempts at distancing, 
63 
 
 
encapsulated in the threshold stance, were all in vain, and his en-foldedness in the function and 
consumption of the fruits of violence will – he fears – catch up to him. 
 It is not a coincidence that Vladislavić, like Kentridge before him, adopts Walter 
Benjamin’s work as intertext. Describing his project One Way Street in a letter, Benjamin spelled 
out his intent “to grasp topicality as the reverse of the eternal in history” (Benjamin et al. 325). 
The concrete is more important than the abstract; experience – specifically, urban experience, 
particularly the experience of neglected buildings and strewn objects – serves as a gateway to 
understand being. The focus on ruined and dilapidated objects in One Way Street is echoed in the 
text’s aphoristic genre, also present in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of 
Angelus Novus fame. Together, the disjointed nature of debris and aphorism serve to discourage 
linear explanation and suggest paying attention to how things, feelings and ideas are collected – 
or haphazardly strewn – beside each other, taking Sedgewick’s term. It is thus that prawns and 
ramekins, guilt and fear, photographs and signposts find place in Double Negative’s theory of 
complicity. 
To Knock the World Back into Order 
 I have demonstrated that Neville Lister fears history, which he views in light of 
Benjamin’s ninth thesis as a duration of catastrophe rather than a sequence of events. This may 
explain Neville’s love of thresholds, of frozen images, and of faded walls. If Neville is complicit; 
and if he senses that History might seek retribution, the urge to stop time is only appropriate. I 
argue, however, that the affective structure which the novel mounts is complicated by a lingering 
desire for the crashing of this wave precisely. Once again, the braai scene acts as exposition and 
model for the text.     
64 
 
 
 After Neville drunkenly punched his parents’ house guest, his father slapped him – the 
first and only time threats of such punishment materialize (31). Neville’s outburst and its 
consequence, the crime and its punishment, are decisive and swift. “One blow was all it took to 
knock the world back into order”: Neville apologizes (31). Shocked and rattled, a red welt on his 
jaw, Neville goes to the bathroom, and finds that instead of foreclosing a future, his father’s slap 
opened up something new: “I found the shapes of his fingers on my cheek like the map of a new 
country” (31). This is, then, the rehearsed narrative of justice: Transgression; punishment, violent 
but brief; return to social order, a new place in the world – a new country. There is no alternative 
model in the novel (the plight of alternative models of justice is the subject of Chapter Four in 
this dissertation).24 But South Africa, everywhere heralded as a 'new country', disappoints this 
narrative (van der Vlies viii; Manià 49; Hallemeier 77). In fact, the novel suggests that 
complicity in contemporary state violence will always frustrate such hopes. Complicity is not 
perpetration, it has no international courts, and its affective economies of blame and guilt are 
illusive. Neville, scared to be 'ground to dust' or 'washed over' by history, also hopes for such a 
violent break. It would be swift; it would annihilate him, or render him new, give him a place in 
the world. He does everything he can to forestall the crashing of this wave: avoids the army, 
moves to London, refuses entry to people's homes, and always, always maintains ironic distance. 
Yet the text itself supplies glimpses of this washed-over world to come – of the debris among 
which, presumably, Neville and his cafetière may be excused from guilt. It is this threshold, this 
forestalling of a hoped-for catastrophe, which the novel tells us is the affect of complicity.     
 
24 As if to cement the foreclosure of this paternal model, Neville’s father – the arbiter of justice and the person 
who connected him with Auerbach and photography – dies, the scent of his aftershave lingering in the car Neville 
drives around Johannesburg in the latter parts of the novel. 
65 
 
 
 The desire for the wave of history to come crashing echoes throughout the novel in the 
form of sea-imagery. Set in landlocked Johannesburg, Double Negative nevertheless 
communicates the world as if every object holds aquatic potential. News coverage of the 
elections in South Africa shows jubilant people “wav[ing] like flood victims hoping to be 
rescued” (96). Veronica swayed gently like a sea creature, “three wooden clothes pegs with their 
teeth in the fabric of her dress (…) moved with her like a shoal of fish” (68). A garden in which 
some of the novel’s most profound moments occur seems like a marine environment: “a table top 
appeared to be floating on [the grass] like a raft. Shrubbery frothed up on one side” (123). All 
these and more point to the seductive nature of the feared breaking of the waves. Perhaps the 
most striking moment of this fearful eagerness comes during Neville’s day of initiation. I have 
mentioned the fish-restaurant scene, as it includes Neville’s telling remark on prawn 
consumption leaving “a manly amount of wreckage”; I will now read parts of it more closely.     
 Having photographed Veronica and her two infants, Neville, master-photographer 
Auerbach, and British journalist Brookes settle down for lunch. The atmosphere in the restaurant 
is “oily and submarine”, dominated by a fish-tank where a “little deep-sea diver, lead-soled boots 
sunk in drifts of gravel, opened and shut a treasure chest, over and over, spilling… an SOS in air 
bubbles” (72-3). The little figurine becomes, in Neville’s narration, an emblem of distress: lead-
soled boots and an SOS connote drowning rather than an exciting deep-sea expedition. Neville’s 
own source of distress is Brookes. The journalist is as self-assured as the worst of Neville’s 
student-politician friends, and is boisterously sharing his opinion that Veronica’s living 
conditions – which lead to the tragic death of one of her three babies – would not have been 
possible “in a normal society” (76). Brookes’ actions belie his righteous anger: he “ate and talked 
and ate”, stuffing himself with a double platter of oily prawns while shooting accusations at the 
66 
 
 
two locals “between mouthfuls” (73;74). An extension of the braai’s superfluous juices, 
Brookes’ eating is tantamount to claiming an excess which in his eyes is rightfully his. His 
indictment of the students living in the house in front of Veronica’s shack, “a bunch of overfed 
students living like lords”, is contrapunted by more ravenous eating and a casual flinging of his 
credit card to the waiter (76;75).  
Through the mediation of Neville’s memory, Brookes himself becomes a prawn of sorts:  
While we were waiting for the food [Brookes] moulted the jacket… He kept working the 
food into the pouches of his cheeks (…). While he was speaking, [he] peeled his prawns 
and licked his fingers, and scratched in his notebook (73-4) 
Brookes the sea-creature poked and prodded, scratched and moulted; while “on the ocean floor, 
the diver went on opening and shutting the treasure chest” (75). Neville’s distress at the 
outsider’s comments – comments which he himself agrees with, would have possibly made, in a 
different setting – joins him to the diver miniature in his underwater agony, stuck in the same 
motions, never advancing anywhere. Neville’s affect is of recoiling from Brookes, of defending 
his stance vis-à-vis the water threatening to swallow him. His food feels ‘bristly’, and a “slurry 
of sociology” rises in him, “more feeling than thought, a thickening of the blood” (76). But as it 
turns out, if the journalist represents unremitting insistence on the impossibility of things 
continuing as they are, Neville is perfectly capable of out-Brooking Brookes. The following 
paragraph is worth quoting in full: 
Brookes had hold of the table as if he meant to turn it over. Any moment now. Now. I 
saw the wicker basket in a swarm of breadcrumbs, the dirty roses of the serviettes, a wine 
glass and the fat speech bubble of grand cru spilling from it, fishbone thatch, a fried egg 
moored to the bloodshot eye of a plate by a crimson thread of chilli, all of it afloat 
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between heaven and earth, every single thing thrown irrevocably out of order, beyond 
retrieval but not quite ruined, yet. Suspended. (76-7) 
The rhythm of the scene, punctuated as it is by Brookes’ rapid question-marks and the diver’s 
monotonous motions, converges in the single word: “Now”. What follows is a Homeric simile, a 
paragraph in the course of which it is easy to forget that the action is diegetically fictitious – we 
are reading figments of Neville’s imagination. As in the braai scene, food becomes an emblem of 
excess, the table a “fat” and “bloodshot” “swarm”, insulting in its colourful, unwanted 
abundance. If in that earlier scene a father’s slap sufficed to “knock the world back into order”, 
now “every single thing” is “thrown irrevocably out of order” by Brookes’ moral outrage. The 
toppling table is frozen in the air like the still-frames Neville – “Mr. Frosty” – will become 
known for as a photographer (31;77;176). But the scene is at once “suspended” and, as its run-on 
syntax suggests, deterministic:   
Surprising though it was, the scene seemed familiar to me, as if we had rehearsed the 
conversation before and could only push on now to a foregone conclusion. ‘What sort of 
people are they?’ Brookes would say with his leaded boots in the debris. ‘Are they empty 
inside, are they dead?’ The dead white interior resounded. But the plates were still on the 
table top, the food was still on the plates. Brookes was still on the other side of the table, 
which was still unturned, with a maggot of rice on his chin, waiting for my reply (77). 
Neville’s mind places his own nagging question in Brookes’ mouth. What sort of a person is he? 
Is he dead inside? The rehearsed scene is playing out a reaction to injustice comprised of two 
questions: whose fault is it? And why did no-one do anything? For the complicit, these questions 
are a double-edged sword. Put in the first tense – ‘is it my fault? Why didn’t I do anything?’ – 
the answer exempts Neville. He didn’t know of Veronica until that day, he could not have done 
anything for her and her triplets. But that self-exemption only redirects the question: whose fault 
is apartheid? Why am I not doing anything? The nature of structural violence is such that the 
68 
 
 
second set of questions, which pertains to the system, tends to lead to an impasse. Neville pushes 
“to a forgone conclusion”: the resounding echo of the “dead white interior” (77). That Neville’s 
imagination overturns the table, displaces everything “irrevocably”, is a fantasy of things being 
so upturned that they will finally have to be put right; or at least, that the question of 
responsibility will no longer be relevant. 
 Neville’s paradoxical fear and desire for the same object must be read in light of the hints 
given to us throughout the novel regarding its narrator’s fallibility. The table-flipping Homeric 
simile itself unsettles the relationship between reality and representation as the vivid language of 
the imagined drama overshadows the scene ‘as it truly was’, and reifies the fictitious nature of 
the novel as a whole. Though Double Negative is in some ways a traditionally narrated, first-
person account of a life lived, it demonstrates an unease with this kind of account which is 
characteristic of complicity literature. Instances in which Neville doubts his own memory and 
judgement bolster the sense that individual narration is insufficient to address the ethics of 
benefitting from structural violence. Neville wishes he could remember more clearly, but his 
own memories are “mere snapshots with the heads cut off and the hands out of focus”, displacing 
events as they occurred (53-4). His interpretation of reality is a mere suggestion, which he often 
backpedals with reminders of his own unreliability.25  
Neville’s wife points out that his recourse to irony, meant to maintain a gap between 
Neville and the world, is so habitual that perhaps the ironies “cancel each other out… like a 
 
25 See for instance the way things happen “then, or perhaps it was later” (56). Neville’s assertion about the 
difference between photographic and painterly portraiture, which he follows with “Or so I imagined. Perhaps it 
was the other way round?... what did I know?” (48-9); Auerbach’s photos “hang down like screens I cannot reach 
behind. I’ve read a dozen interviews with Auerbach since then, I can imagine what he might have said, but I’ve 
done enough ventriloquism as it is” (53-4); Neville’s description of a photograph is “redundant, or worse, 
inadequate” (69); and when a friend prompts him about the state of emergency in South Africa, he admits – in 
narration if not in diegesis – “actually, I didn’t know and I didn’t remember” (101) 
69 
 
 
double negative” (218). The remove which was supposed to put space between Neville and 
complicity cannot be maintained – by moving through the material world, Neville is making 
choices. One recalls here Hannah Arendt’s adage, that “most evil is done by people who never 
made up their minds to… do either evil or good” (Arendt, Responsibility 180).26 Though Arendt 
claimed that thought and judgement can help people abstain from evildoing, Vladislavić’s text 
casts doubt on the sufficiency of individual reckoning with complicity. The table is not, after all, 
overturned, and its stillness returns us to the paradoxes of complicity’s experience.          
In the above scene, the dynamic thrust of an overturned table is halted by the “still” 
tabletop, with Brookes stationary on its other side: “the plates were still on the table … the food 
was still on the plates. Brookes was still on the other side of the table, which was still unturned”. 
This structure of upheaval juxtaposed with utter stillness is internal as well as external. 
Veronica’s story is horrendous: her baby suffocated to death in a shack, while in the big house 
students – Neville’s peers – knew nothing (76). But Brookes’ solution, hinging on the 
commercial potential of “human interest” which might attract the sponsorship of a nappy 
supplier and the common “human decency” which would compel the students to help the 
struggling family also seem to him outrageous (75-6). Neville is living two kinds of constant 
clashes. The first is between ongoing, structural violence, and a comfortable material reality 
which cushions his outrage at that violence. The second is between his experience that nothing 
changes, that everything is stuck; and his sense that things can only end one way, that the wave 
of history will surely come, and that it will annihilate him. Things are at once “irrevocably out of 
order, beyond retrieval” and completely, utterly still.   
 
26 It has been pointed out that Arendt’s own opinions on the matter contradict (see Jissov; Rothberg, The 
Implicated Subject 18). 
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 The last significant aspect of the restaurant scene is the flip in the little diver’s 
designation. I have read the fish-tank ornament’s distress as mirroring Neville’s, a reading 
supported by the first part of the text. Yet in the imagined commotion of Brookes’ outburst, it is 
the journalist who becomes the diver. As their lunch becomes (history’s) debris, Brookes’ leaded 
boots would be found planted firmly in it – the same boots which plant the miniature’s in “drifts 
of gravel” (76). Brookes’ unbearable presence somehow merges here with Neville’s sense of 
himself, through the figure of the diver and his ambiguous position in this underwater 
atmosphere – the horizon of which is the tsunami of history. Is he drowning in it? Or is he 
delighted at the flooding and enjoying the marine view? The answer seems to be both, a 
conflicted, oxymoronic affect, evidenced in the multifarious self-contradictions in the novel. 
Neville’s commitment to non-committing, his threshold stance, and the text’s recourse to images 
of debris, ruin and flooding even as it thwarts moments of dramatic upheaval – the depiction of 
History as a deferred destructive wave in a text which is, as shown above, fixated on the 
submarine.     
Conclusion 
In examining Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative, the novel’s dense attention to material 
environment – namely culinary culture and architectural dilapidation – and textual mediation 
come together to illustrate a particular structure of feeling. This affect arises from complicity and 
embeddedness in apartheid South Africa as well as in late capitalism. It is a paradoxical 
eagerness for a redemptive catastrophe, coexistent with anxiety about actual, physical retribution 
for wrongdoing. It manifests in a preoccupation with material comfort which braids together 
indulgence and guilt; and in constant anticipation of variably-imagined redemptive violence 
concurrent with more or less active attempts to thwart such retribution. 
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Taking a cue from Vladislavić and Kentridge, Walter Benjamin’s work has served as 
intertext for this chapter. I interrogated Neville’s – and Double Negative’s – commitment to 
uncertainty in light of Benjamin’s focus on fissures and discrepancies. The threshold stance, 
which I have claimed echoes the self-contradictory position of the complicit liberal settler, can 
certainly be read as an extension of the Benjaminian belief in the political potential of mundane 
and haphazard objects. The novel, however, casts this option aside when it critiques its narrator’s 
inability to make up his mind. Neville’s criticism of apartheid from his threshold stance does not 
do enough to exculpate him, nor is his position bad enough to warrant the kind of retribution 
which would bring cathartic justice.  
 Complicity, then, seems irredeemable. Yet, Double Negative is not a disparaging or bleak 
work – neither in tone nor plot. How comes? One solution might be found in Neville’s 
unreliable, yet exclusive, narration of the novel. The text is centered on one character’s voice, 
while at the same time providing constant commentary on the insufficiency of its narrator’s 
memory and wording. Perhaps the novel’s hopeful tone is rooted in questioning the premise of 
most debates on complicity: that responsibility, and thus complicity, exist in the scale of the 
individual. This is a claim I interrogate in the following chapter, by reading two works of 
complicity literature from Israel/Palestine which employ plural narration. 
 
         
  
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CHAPTER 2 
CEMETERIES, FACTORIES, AND FORESTS: UNSETTLED SETTLERS IN PICNIC 
GROUNDS AND AN ALMOST OLYMPIC SIZE POOL 
 
Introduction 
Alike in their emphasis of a collective structure of feeling as well as in their fragmentary nature, 
Ronnie Brodetzky’s An Almost Olympic Size Pool (2016, Hebrew), and Oz Shelach’s Picnic 
Grounds (2003, English) both take the 1948 nakba as the central historical trauma not for 
Palestinian, but for Israeli collective consciousness. In scholarly discourse, Israeli disavowal of 
the nakba has translated to comparative projects which draw lines of comparison between 1948 
and the holocaust, claiming these violent events as founding traumas of the Palestinian and 
Israeli nations respectively (Bashir and Goldberg; Rothberg, The Implicated Subject 119–45). 
Reading Brodetzky’s and Shelach’s interventions, one might revise the terms of this comparison: 
the nakba is fundamental to Jewish-Israeli existence, not because it is seen as a source of identity 
but because it is the vehemently disavowed fountainhead moment of a denied complicity.    
 Disavowal is, then, the central action these texts revolve around. In different ways, they 
attempt the tricky work of narrating an absence. In doing so they turn readers’ attentions to the 
myths and denials that animate Israel’s state ideology, as well as to the way these myths and 
denials mark Israelis’ collective consciousness with spasm-like gaps and repetitions. The two 
texts differ markedly in the relationship they establish between the reader and this fundamental 
disavowal: Almost Olympic Size Pool situates the reader alongside its characters, haunted by but 
not quite recognizing past and present violence; while Picnic Grounds overtly names and 
renames that violence, emphasizing a gap between the characters’ denial and the readers’ 
constant wrestling with the facts reported. In both texts however, the result is an emphasis on the 
act of telling itself, and on the difficulty of narrating incremental, accretive, non-eventful 
74 
 
 
violence (Nixon 2). In turning attention to the way violence plays out across multiple temporal 
and physical scales, Brodetzky and Shelach amend Nixon’s definition of slow violence. The 
violence in Palestine/Israel is, after all, not ‘slow’ in the environmental sense. For decades, it has 
given the world many a sensational media moment – from bombings to refugee camp riots, from 
war to operation to Intifada. And yet, this violence is generational – for a few million people, it 
is as lived-in as a worn blanket. These people are products of, as well as actants in, the violence. 
Slow violence and ‘spectacular’ violence are not always separate instances, then; sometimes, the 
scale of brutality is determined by the point from which it is observed.  
It is this disparity between being “within” and “without” the atmosphere of violence that 
is replicated in both texts’ manipulation of their readers. Brodetzky’s and Shelach’s works 
disclose a violence that is very often denied. That disclosure should, the reader expects, engender 
a radical reaction, in the characters’ affect and actions or at the plot level. But the texts do not 
supply that reaction; the plot, and the characters’ affects portrayed, do not shift at all. Similarly, 
neither text sets out to engender shock or outrage in the reader. When Brodetzky’s character 
narrates the longing caused by displacement, her longing is repeated verbatim, losing affective 
integrity in the process. Repetition dulls any sense of dramatic disclosure in Shelach as well – in 
every microfiction the reader gets a report on some mundane violence. Denial is, after all, 
predicated on knowledge. The aim of the texts is not to relay some new information to the 
reader, but to re-relay it: to reinstate vehigadeta, to make the reader remember. 
Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that one might turn to the past in order to wrest from it 
possibilities for resistance in the present echoes in this poetics of reminding, modified to account 
for the complicit subject position of the authors and characters (Benjamin, Understanding Brecht 
255; Raz-Krakotzkin 178). The modification is affective: in contrast to Brodetzky’s and 
75 
 
 
Shelach’s mundane absurd, texts like Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Mourid 
Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (1997) relate stories of the Israeli occupation with a plea to pathos 
that directly correlates with the communicative role these texts assume. To these witness 
narratives from Palestinian victims of the nakba we can add some Israeli perpetrator narratives 
which also evoke a range of powerful emotions (Morag 130; SASSON-LEVY et al. 753–57; 
Helman 386). In other words, depiction- and engendering of affective range seems to correlate 
with a commitment to narrative accessibility demanded by witnessing or confessing, whereas 
stunted affective reactions often appear in fictions of complicity, many of which are not telling 
but re-telling. 
Ronnie Brodetzky’s An Almost Olympic Size Pool (hereafter Almost Olympic) was 
published as a short story collection, comprised of fifteen purportedly independent stories. It 
depicts the lives of one small town in the Western Galilee, an area which was a site of armed 
Palestinian resistance before 1948 and which was forcefully taken by Israel during the 1948 war, 
its surviving inhabitants expelled. The first-person plural narrators of the text refer to the town 
simply as “our town” (‘irenu), and to its neighboring Palestinian town as “the town to the East”. 
They relate the trials and tribulations of a consistent cast of characters, binding the disparate 
plots with the persistence of a prattling, chorus-like communal voice. While describing loves and 
losses, jealousies and curiosities, the text unfolds the town’s slow poisoning by a local asbestos 
factory. Doing so, the fragmentary text relates the townspeople’s entanglement in each other’s 
lives and in the foundational violence which created the conditions for the town’s existence.  
The consistency of setting and characters, as well as the temporal progression of events 
from the first to the last ‘story’, bely the short story form and suggest the text be read as a 
76 
 
 
fragmentary novel.27 The generic discomfort – between the continuity and complexity of a novel 
and the expectation set up by the short story genre – is the first of a set of formal elements which 
create a sense of unease in the text. In my analysis of the first and last of Brodetzky’s 
chapters/stories, I show how a cyclical rhythm of accelerations and obstruction is evident within 
each of the chapters as well as between them. The occlusions highlight the sensory regime which 
stands in the way of apprehending and narrativizing complicity in past violence and present 
injustice. 
 Oz Shelach (born 1968) had a career as a journalist and editor for Israeli radio and 
magazines, before leaving the country – and the Hebrew language – for New York. Picnic 
Grounds, a diminutive pamphlet of a book, is subtitled “a novel in fragments” and is comprised 
of 57 short-shorts, set mostly in and around Jerusalem and featuring nameless characters typified 
by their professions. The two-dimensional characters only appear once, in snapshots of little 
narrative action which bear no temporal continuity. In other words, the text bears more generic 
characteristics of a microfiction cycle than those of a novel.  
 Like Almost Olympic then, Picnic Grounds sits uneasily within its own generic 
exclamations. Like the former too, its short snippets are narrated by a communal voice, though 
Shelach’s collective narrator is less gossipy and more journalistic in character. The ongoing 
history of contested colonial efforts in and around Jerusalem features centrally in the cycle: 
among their descriptions of coffee shop meetings and suburban picnics, the microfictions specify 
battle names, dates, and toponyms past and present. In fact, marketing material describes the 
 
27 The fact that a final story of the collection bears entirely different characteristics strengthens this claim rather 
than weakening it, as it appears behind a separate cover page unlike the fourteen stories that came before it and 
which constitute the novelistic bulk of the work. Indeed, in a recent edit to the author’s website the book is 
described as “a novel of stories” (https://en.ronnie-brodetzky.com/blank-11) 
77 
 
 
cycle as “part reportage, part parable, part excavation of history” (cover copy). Shelach’s 
language too is unsettling, mediating Hebrew public discourse in English while emphasizing the 
points in which both source and target languages whitewash violent events. Analyzing the 
cycle’s thematization of knowledge production and dissemination and its formal cyclical 
recursions, I build on the characteristics outlined with Brodetzky’s novel, extending complicity 
literature’s model of apprehending and narrativizing to less folksy, more authoritative spaces of 
expertise.         
 In the previous chapter, I outlined Ivan Vladislavić’s critique of the novelistic “I” and the 
failures of individual knowledge and memory (Vladislavić). In Brodetzky and Shelach, one finds 
first-person plural narration which bears the distinct voice not of one person but of an imaginary 
community. Rather than granting the narration greater access to a factual or ethical truth, 
however, the ‘we’ narration adds to the unsettlement which is both texts’ leading affect. Parting 
ways with more traditional forms of storytelling, both texts highlight, rather than naturalize, the 
act of narration – the telling or disclosing of past and present violence, charting a form of 
communicating and commenting on complicity. In analyzing these narrative moves, this chapter 
considers their contributions to the study of slow violence (Nixon) on the one hand, and the 
history of Hebrew literature’s representation of Palestinian erasure on the other (Hever, “Map of 
Sand”). 
“We narratives” are used to mark “multidirectional inclusions and demarcations”, 
positing a collective ‘we’ at the same time that they highlight its internal fragmentation (Fasselt 
156). The texts thus center ‘the social’ not as analytical category, but as a kind of compound 
living organism, with its own habits and wants, consciousness and an unconscious. In Almost 
Olympic as in Picnic Grounds, the communal idiom which narrates the events is formulated over 
78 
 
 
against a Palestinian collective other. While Shelach’s protagonists occupy a mainstream, 
metropolitan Israeliness and Brodetzky’s a provincial one, these communities are first and 
foremost ethno-national. The two texts essentially argue that the central tenant of the Israeli 
social fabric is the erasure of the violence done to Palestinians – the nakba of 1948 and the 
ongoing settler-colonial project. The mental and affective structures of the social entity which is 
the subject of narration in these books are put in place largely to disavow past and present 
violence, and the complicity that violence engenders. I say that structures of feeling are put ‘in 
place’ because space and place play a major role in the way complicity is depicted in the texts. 
Just as Double Negative revealed traces of settler colonial apology embedded in foodways, 
Almost Olympic and Picnic Grounds thematize the relationship between Israeli daily life and its 
Palestinian Other on a vertical axis: Palestinian remains are buried under the surface of everyday 
Israeli existence. That communal structure of feeling is ever occupied with fortifying normalcy; 
Palestinian ruination, which remains buried and disavowed, nevertheless dictates a life built on 
shaky foundations in need of constant shoring-up.  
 As already mentioned, while the books are both ‘we narratives’, they depict different 
collectives within Israeli society. Brodetzky’s novel is set in a provincial town in the Western 
Galilee. This means both that the townspeople are less segregated from Palestinians in their daily 
lives, and that the collective which narrates the novel is set up against ‘central’ or ‘mainstream’ 
Israelis as well as Palestinian others. Shelach’s microfiction cycle presents a social body which is 
centrally-located in Jerusalem and its environs, with nameless characters often represented by 
their occupation – professors, journalists, authors, bar owners. These characters, unlike those in 
Almost Olympic, occupy positions of authority within the nation. The positional differences in 
social setting influence the two texts’ approach to disclosing the buried Palestinian past: 
79 
 
 
Brodetzky lays clues to that past throughout the text, the reader scavenging between lines of 
community gossip and squabble. She leaves the facts of the nakba half-hidden, at the edge of the 
narrative and at the edge of readers’ consciousness. Shelach, conversely, describes the contested 
history and present as matters of fact. His narrating ‘we’ reports on these facts, implying 
knowledge on part of his characters as well as the authority to determine an official narrative.    
 Read together, Brodetzky and Shelach describe a vertical landscape of tensions between 
surface and depth. This vertical axis produces and expresses the workings of apprehension and 
knowing under complicity – a regime of knowing and not knowing, telling and not telling which 
fortifies a society predicated on separative ethno-violence. 
Ronnie Brodetzky’s An Almost Olympic-Size Pool 
Analyzing Almost Olympic’s fragmented form requires collecting traces of meaning scattered 
throughout its chapters/stories and their subsections. This gathering of traces enacts the text’s 
thematic focus on the difficulty of apprehending non-eventful violence and acknowledging 
complicity. Put differently, the text’s demand that a reader collect traces and hold them together 
mirrors the curation work the text itself performs. To illustrate, I quote a passage describing the 
burial of the beloved ex-wife of a town dignitary following her death from cancer:  
Many attended the funeral. they say the Jebesiya cemetery was not seen that crowded 
since the murder of the Arab teacher from the town to the East. It’s not that Ge’ula 
Levtov had many close friends… But her ex-husband Tzvi had many. After all, he holds 
the reins to one of the two factories that support us all, an entire town held by two 
factories (…). Tzvi observed the ground, wet from yesterday’s rain, and observed the 
beautiful view of the beach and the limestone cliff and the northern border and thought, 
the ground is a beautiful and pleasant place and his Ge’ula will be happy in the depths of 
nature. He touched the sand with his hand and looked at his palm with the tiny grains of 
sand stuck to it (191-2) 
This paragraph brings in proximity the two processes which Brodetzky deems analogous. In “our 
town”, small-town life is carried out on a beach below which lie twin residues: asbestos residue 
from a factory, and the remnants of a razed Palestinian village. Indeed, Jebesiya of “the Jebesiya 
80 
 
 
cemetery” in the quote above was a real Palestinian village, al-Ghabasiyya,28 in the Acre 
subdistrict of Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. During the 1948 war, the village was occupied 
by Israeli forces and its inhabitants expelled. And, as in the book, the current cemetery of nearby 
Jewish town Nahariya was inaugurated on the village’s land in 2002. The seaside town depicted 
in Almost Olympic shares many other similarities to Nahariya (with some distinct aberrations, 
which will be discussed shortly). Just like “our town”, Nahariya is home to a large sausage 
manufacturer; and until 1999, it was also the site of “Eitanit”, Israel’s only asbestos factory. 
Though the factory closed, Nahariya’s inhabitants are still 11 times more likely to contract 
Mesothelioma than people in central Israel; and the town was ranked second in the world at 
morbidity rates for the disease in 2009 (Linder). Thus, in the fictionalized version of a real 
Western Galilee locale, a slow violence – barely acknowledged by the characters and yet 
powerfully registered in the text – emanates from the remnants of the village and of the asbestos 
alike, permeating its inhabitants. 
Though the historical violence of the nakba and the toxic asbestos coalesce underground 
at the cemetery site, the reader will notice that the quote above mentions neither. Ge’ula’s illness 
is not named, and the asbestos factory is referenced only as the town’s economic lifeline. The 
bereaved lover “observed the ground… and observed the… beach and the limestone cliff and the 
northern [Israel-Lebanon] border”, but rather than bringing to mind political conflict (which the 
border might), violent ruination (which the Hebraized name Jebesiya suggests), or dangerous 
pollution (which permeates the sand), he is comforted: “the ground is a beautiful and pleasant 
place and his Ge’ula will be happy in the depths of nature” (192). Even the term “the depths of 
 
28 The standard transliteration of the village’s Arabic name is al-Ghabasiyya. The Arabic الغابسية was Anglicized 
“Jebesiya” by British mandatory authorities, and it is a Hebraized version of this Anglicization which is used in 
Brodetzky’s novel.   
81 
 
 
nature” (ma’amakei ha-teva’) is aberrant: nature, usually thought of laterally as an expanse or 
stretch, is here harnessed to the surface/depth model occasioned by the text. Ironic distance takes 
centre stage when Zvi watches the tiny grains of sand stuck to his hand. “Such small things can 
give such comfort”, he says – while the reader, perhaps, has the impulse to shake her hand at the 
thought of asbestos-imbued soil (192). Thus, apprehension and its failings are emphasized 
through a modulation of dramatic irony, a divide of information created between the characters 
and reader. 
The problem of complicity is that its indeterminacy plays into the hands of its 
disavowers. None of us want to be implicated in injustice, and unlike in the case of perpetrators 
directly responsible for crimes, beneficiaries are unlikely to be held accountable. While a 
majority of scholarship on subject positions vis-a-vis violence addresses the Holocaust as a 
formative event (see Eaglestone; LaCapra), it is in environmental studies that I find the issues of 
non-perception and non-awareness addressed most fruitfully. In his 2011 Slow Violence, Rob 
Nixon lays out the problem of apprehension thus: 
Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, 
explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We 
need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither 
spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous 
repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales (Nixon 2). 
Nixon claims that the need to rethink our definitions of violence is twofold: first so we can 
identify longue-durée events as violence; and secondly, so that we can represent them, “devise 
arresting stories… adequate to [this] pervasive but evasive violence” (3). It is precisely the 
problem of narrating the non-event of Israeli complicity which, I believe, occasions its coupling 
with asbestos pollution in Almost Olympic.  
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The Fatal Act: “Junction” 
The opening story of An Almost Olympic-Size Pool is called “Junction”. In it, the reader is 
introduced to two main characters – 17-year-old Orniya and 51 year old Yusuf – as well as a host 
of others who will play their part throughout the book. The first sub-chapter details a crucial, 
instantaneous decision: Yusuf stops at the roadside to pick up a young hitchhiker, while Orniya, 
said hitchhiker, decides to board his car despite the driver’s Arab accent. The action devolves 
from there: the car heats up and stops and Orniya, increasingly nervous, misreads Yusuf’s 
anxiety as a threat. Yusuf, who is anxious not to be late to his niece’s theatre production, makes a 
sudden U-turn. In response Orniya hits him with a crowbar and flees, leaving Yusuf’s cigarette 
to ignite the car and kill him. The rest of the 25-page chapter/story tells of the aftereffects of this 
fatal act after it is announced in the news. For Orniya’s mother, an overcautious security officer, 
the news of the murder strengthen her racist fears. Yusuf’s niece’s production of Brecht’s 
Caucasian Chalk Circle is cut short by news of Yusuf’s death, and his community reacts to the 
tragic event through its own chorus-like narration. As for Orniya, she attempts penance by 
instructing the youth-scouts which she leads on the dangers of racism. Fragmented and dense 
with plural points of view, the story serves as a tragic frame which helps narrativize a complicity 
otherwise not tied to overt actions. “Junction” also sets the tone for the novel by zooming in on 
the miniscule operation of somatic and social apprehension; and by establishing the rhythm of 
the text, which escalates around significant events only to turn away from them or leave ellipses 
in their place.  
How can the senseless killing of one man stand in for the expulsion of thousands of the 
region’s inhabitants decades earlier? This violent death is connected to the nakba not through 
symbolism but through proximity: Yusuf was the son of al-Ghabasiyya refugees, and is buried 
on its land (24;33). Yusuf’s murder goes unsolved, and the girl, Orniya, suffers no consequences. 
83 
 
 
Yet the violence of the act – immediate in time, spectacular and erupting in space, to borrow 
Nixon’s words – reverberates throughout the collections’ stories, amplifying the reader’s unrest 
at their absurdity and oblique logic. In Greek tragedy, the “fatal” or “horrific act” (to deinon) is 
an unforgivable action which propels the plot and from which there is no return. Orniya’s 
horrific act drives the incremental flaws, betrayals and acts of violence throughout the rest of the 
book. In “The Asbestos Beach”, the text’s final chapter, this to deinon will be resolved in the 
tragic tradition: a catharsis – cleansing – as the town is washed away by a giant wave (232).  
If the Aristotelian tragic framing of a text marked by fragmentation and incongruity 
sounds artificial, that is because it is. The manufacturing of these plot structures sits uneasily 
with the modulated, minute focus of the rest of the text. Indeed, the world of Olympic Pool does 
not abide by any Aristotelian code: actions and reactions, events and emotions rarely seem 
logical or appropriate. This incongruity of events in the novel, as well as the perversion of the 
progression from crime (murder, and by extension the nakba) to punishment (tsunami), 
interrogate the slippery nature of complicity and the entanglements of violence, beneficiarity, 
and victimhood in Israeli society today.  
Throughout, Brodetzky focuses on the social mediation of perception. I turn to the parallel 
dramas of the two people in the car, Yusuf and Orniya, internal yet socially determined as they 
are: 
[Yusuf] drove and thought, but I’m going straight, and thought, these ones never get in, 
and thought, I can’t be late to Nijmi’s play, and still the leg stepped on the breaks. 
[Orniya] came up to the car and asked “where to”, and began the ten critical seconds in 
which she decides whether she hops on the ride or not … and she thought, me not getting 
in an Arab man’s car means I’m racist, and thought, what’s all the nice talk worth if I’m 
scared to get on a car, and thought, I’ll put the pepper spray on easy-draw, and got in the 
car. (9-10, translation and emphases mine)  
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Both characters deliberate their encounter: Yusuf whether he should pull over for the young 
hitchhiker, Orniya whether she should get into the car. Their internal monologues, narrated by a 
first-person plural collectivity, take identical form of serial conjunctions. This repetition does 
more than communicate the weight of the national-ethnic divide on the psyches of those who live 
it; it creates a rhythm, a staccato of conjunctions that builds tension which resolves in a tonica - 
its own cadence, a phrase which “solves” the tension created by the repetitions which precede it. 
The encounter is permeated by social construction in a way that overdetermines it in one fatal 
direction. It is this resolution which propels the plot – Yusuf’s leg stepping on the break, 
Orniya’s climbing into his car – yet the resolution is uneasy, here including a can of pepper-
spray. The tension built by the staccato of internal deliberation continues strumming in the 
background. This is a story, then, about the minute affects which determine our actions, and 
about the collective consciousness from which these affects are drawn.    
 Why collective consciousness? Apart from the chorus-like narrating voice, Orniya and 
Yusuf have anxieties around their own, and the other’s, performative expectations. An internal 
voice tells Orniya that she should start a conversation, but nothing seems appropriate to the 
strange balance of power unearthing itself in the car: “Where do you work – sounds dangerous, 
how many children – sounds too decisive, are you from here originally – sounds too political, too 
volatile, so she says nothing” (11). Yusuf, on the other hand, wishes to explain his choice of 
formal dress – “’It’s because I’m a teacher’, he would explain, if she had asked, ‘for us it’s very 
important, status’” (10); and when the radio glitches he fears being associated with low-prestige 
habits: “don’t let her think that he’s an Arab that listens to Arab pop” (11). While their actions 
are governed by this performance of self, each also experiences negative affect learned through 
social conditioning. Orniya finds it hard to breath, her eyes dart for an escape route, and she has 
85 
 
 
a sense that “she, Yusuf and the crowbar are running like molten mercury” in the heat of the car 
(10;12;14). Yusuf sweats profusely, impatiently grabs a cigarette, and feels regret – for taking 
the ungrateful hitchhiker, for not listening to his brother and getting a newer car, and for letting 
his niece down (11-14). 
It is important to note that Orniya’s fear is culturally emplaced. While we would perhaps 
expect a young female hitchhiker to be wary of unsolicited sexual advances, the idiom of her 
distress is terrorism, not gender-based violence. Yusuf’s body, clad in the woolen vest he wears 
for status’ sake, looks “too square”, and she cannot but think of the diaries of a girl her age who 
had died in a terror attack which were published in the paper (13,14; 14). The allusions to a 
square shape come from the fear of an Arab man’s clothes harboring a bomb. This is a social 
idiom of fear, which makes no sense in the current moment: suicide bombers do not generally 
strap on explosives and go cruising for solitary victims. But Orniya’s concern, it seems, can only 
be channeled through the publicly sanctioned, ideologically driven dread of Palestinian violence.  
The fact that the two inhabitants of the car operate in markedly different epistemologies 
surfaces, fittingly, around the mixed signals of the radio: 
A voice in Arabic takes over the station. Radio Jordan, he thinks. Hezbollah took over the 
station again, thinks Orniya. He tries to dial around for the correct wavelength, don’t let 
her think that he’s an Arab that listens to Arab pop, but the station is jammed and won’t 
budge. (11) 
He fears being perceived as uneducated or gauche; she is convinced Arabic voices must be those 
of a militant group. Yusuf’s interpretation stems from the schema of a racialized Palestinian 
self29. Orniya’s interpretation is the fruit of an education in the kinds of vulnerabilities allowed 
 
29 I am adapting Fanon’s framework to fit the fact that in Palestine/Israel the main ethnic divide of Arab and Jew 
does not map onto a strict epidermal divide. This is particularly true of Orniya and Yusuf, as Orniya is of Mizrahi 
descent (Brodetzky 30). For an account of Palestinian intellectuals’ engagement with race, see Maha Nassar 2020 
(Nassar). 
86 
 
 
(national, public, political) and the ones which are disregarded (personal and complex, like the 
unreported sexual assault depicted in the following chapter). For Orniya, daughter of the town’s 
formidable Security Officer, precautions are the crux of her education: “My girl… creates entire 
scenarios out of everything”, [her mother] would say proudly, as though the ability to worry and 
foresee the worst is a genetic source of motherly pride” (14). The legitimized public fear masks 
the facts of constant violence enacted on Palestinian bodies. The fear of the mythologized hostile 
Arab, familiar to any Israeli, is a fear of retribution framed without recognition of complicity. Put 
differently, if one is to remain oblivious to the ongoing violence from which one benefits and to 
which Palestinian violent actions generally respond, one is left with a general anxiety (Even-
Tzur; Raz-Krakotzkin 172). Neither Yusuf nor Orniya mentalize the other with any kind of 
accuracy; yet, in keeping with political power relations, this misinterpretation will only prove 
lethal to one of them.  
The doomsday scenarios Orniya is adept at creating overpower any attempt at 
communication with the man next to her. Since the car broke down, she has been planning her 
escape – debating whether to scream first and pepper-spray second, or the other way around (12). 
A staccato of dialogue ensues, and then silence: 
before Yusuf can say, “I’ll drop you off after”, or, “it’ll be fine, we’ll have tea and 
crackers”, or even, “Nijmi has a play today”, the steering-wheel lock crowbar hits him 
straight in his chest, then he feels it hit his head and smells pepper spray and hears keys 
jangling, a car opening and a great scream until his eyes close. (15) 
The cadence of the section – the ‘solution’ of the rhythmic tension built throughout the text – is 
in the modulation from dialogue to somatic experience, and from the double focalization of 
Orniya and Yusuf to Yusuf’s internal reality. It seems important that we remain with him here, 
giving his absurd death the dignity of attention and of a gentler pace. This moment and its textual 
87 
 
 
silence (a scream, but no words30) are at the heart of Brodetzky’s text. Yusuf’s murder goes 
unsolved, and Orniya suffers no consequences. Yet the violence of the act, delivered in a passive 
voice, reverberates throughout the novel and amplifies the reader’s unrest at its absurdity and 
oblique logic. It becomes the single violent act which renders legible the continuous injustices of 
Israel/Palestine. 
Yusuf’s death is first tied to the nakba through his burial in the then-new cemetery of the Jewish 
“our town”31. A second link between Orniya’s active violence and her passive complicity in an 
ethnocratic regime is the story’s allusion to Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. When he 
picks Orniya up Yusuf is in a hurry to get to his niece Nijmi’s performance as Brecht’s Grusha. 
Nijmi, the reader learns, is a high school student with a gift for the stage, though her father 
reminds her that nobody is looking for Arab actors (23). Her one chance at showing her craft to 
her father is cut short by the news of Yusuf’s violent death. Just prior, Nijmi has a moment of 
artistic revelation in which she feels one with Grusha’s character: 
She feels how her heart opens, how love flows through her and how Brecht’s words seem 
very plausible, as if he is speaking directly to Nijmi, and though she knows the play by 
heart she is surprised by the text, surprised by the words coming out of her throat as if 
they were born there, surprised at the tears running from her eyes and flooding the words 
(24) 
When Nijmi is asked to think of a conflict in her life for drama class, all she can come up with is 
her wish to be an actress and her father’s wish for her to choose a practical profession (18). But a 
larger conflict, one so protracted it is often referred to simply as the conflict, is constitutive of her 
place in the world. Brecht’s Circle, with its frame narrative of land dispute following a war, has 
 
30 It is hard, given the Brechtian connection, not to think about Mother Courage’s famous silent scream (see 
Revermann).  
31 This burial is contested: the news reports that it was the government that had “allowed” to bury him there, 
while his own community debates whether Yusuf’s body has been repatriated to al-Ghabasiyya or committed a 
betrayal by being interred at a Jewish site (24; 33).  
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direct bearing on her life. Nijmi’s sense that Brecht is speaking directly to her is therefore more 
than a thespian’s epiphany. Earlier in the text, Nijmi’s Grandmother – Yusuf’s mother – told the 
family about the village she was forced to abandon. Her pining for al-Ghabasiyya entertained the 
reader with its vibrant description, but left her son exasperated: the houses were big in Jebesiya, 
she says, “the roof touching the treetops… the roaming chickens laid swollen eggs” (13;33). 
With the summoning of Brecht, the language suddenly rings familiar: 
[W]hy does a man love his home country? Because the bread tastes better, the sky is 
higher, the air is spicier, voices ring out more clearly, the ground is softer to walk on 
(Brecht and Bentley act 1 scene 1) 
Land dispute, expulsion, and the aftermath of war are all thematized in the 1944 Circle – a play 
which adjudicates questions of justice, land ownership, and indigeneity. As the Georgian 
peasant’s words resonate in Iman’s, so does her son’s death tie itself to the old woman’s fact of 
life as an internal refugee. Her longing words – and through them, Brecht’s – come to echo in the 
unnamed Arab town’s narrativization of Yusuf’s murder: “we’ll erect a monument for him in 
Jebesiya, where the houses were tall, their ceiling in the stars, their roof grazing the treetops… 
there will be our Yusuf” (33). Thus, through the choice of an intra-diegetic play which never sees 
the stage, “Junction” insists on the memory of the nakba as the primal scene of Zionism, just as 
Yusuf’s death is the primal scene of the book; and as an absent presence,32 a story that does not 
get to be told.  
The Brechtian intertext situates Brodetzky’s choices in relation to a tradition of a poetics 
of the absurd (this, beyond the biographical fact of her work as a theatre director). The tone of 
Brodetzky’s prose, an unlikely pairing of compassion and alienation, as well as her use of the 
chorus-like voice of the townspeople, likely draw on Brecht. She directs the reader’s attention 
 
32 For the ubiquity and potency of the term “present absentees” with regard to Palestinians in general and the 
nakba in particular, see (Masalha, The Politics of Denial 142–77; Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Ihmoud f.n. 2)  
89 
 
 
throughout the text to minute affective and environmental shifts, only to manipulate the text in a 
way that stops short of any complete emotional response. No sooner does Nijmi’s revelatory 
oneness with Grusha’s character crash abruptly into reality with news of Yusuf’s death, than the 
dramatic effect of the news is undercut with the pompous director’s comment: “our play is 
screwed” (24). In this inaugural story/chapter, the text’s Brechtian aversion to catharsis reveals 
itself and the reader learns what they can expect: a text which leads her to scenes of tragic 
violence only to undermine her reaction to that violence by averting its gaze elsewhere.  
Catharsis Denied: “The Asbestos Beach” 
By the time Olympic Pool’s reader reaches the last story of the collection, she has witnessed the 
destruction of one mall and the rise of its newer, shinier replacement; has seen a generation of 
“our town”’s inhabitants graduate and move away, fail and return to town; and has registered the 
intensifying occurrence of cancer deaths. This final story is Esty-Pesty’s story: at its start, her 
husband leaves her; at its end, she leaves him – and the town, of which we come to understand 
she will be the lone survivor. The story tells, then, of the last few years of “our town”’s 
existence, of the slow cellular decline of its inhabitants’ bodies, and of how the pathetic woman 
who they came to consider jinxed, escapes their collective fate. 
In “The Asbestos Beach,” collective perception has caught on to what the reader 
suspected all along – that the asbestos factory which shut down left a lingering presence in the 
town’s soil and bodies. There is a momentary sense of relief as the ironic gap of knowledge – 
and the affective reaction to that knowledge – is closed: 
A lot of things happen in our town. Everyone has their own story. For instance, Vengeful 
Etty caught the cancer, she has two daughter, they heard them saying …their mom is 
slowly waning in the hospital and that in Tel Aviv they would have cut her up and cut it 
out and fixed her up no problem, and it’s just here on the Lebanon border that they let 
you die slowly of asbestos. Khamoudi the lifeguard also has it, they say, straight to the 
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liver. It’s the cancer beach, they say, it’s the asbestos, it’s the toxins from the factory 
(224) 
Public opinion seems to be able to grasp the slow danger of pollution now that the damage has 
accumulated and shown itself. Indeed, the collective voice is almost overdetermined, repeating 
the conclusion three times. Yet this unity of reader’s and narrators’ response is short lived. The 
narrating public turn their attention to Pesty, a long-legged divorcee who, her life in shambles, 
has taken to roaming the streets in search of her no-good ex-husband. At first, the narrators pity 
Pesty – the poor thing will always pick the wrong option, they have come to believe – but as time 
goes by their pity turns into a belief that Pesty is a bad omen (224). They start begging her not to 
walk by their homes and businesses (226). Suddenly, there is a contender for the reason bad 
things happen: when Etty finally dies, the narrators suspect it was because “Pesty walked by the 
house… when Etty ran out of breath” (225). This is the same Etty whose illness was thrice 
attributed to asbestos just one page earlier; and over the next few pages, Pesty’s unluckiness 
displaces the townspeople’s perception of why things are as bad as they are (see 228-231). The 
collective voice narrating the events – gossipy, argumentative, and colloquial – ventriloquizes 
the social nature of perception and its ties to narrative. Soon, the town’s inhabitants forget that a 
reality existed in which Pesty did not walk the streets as a menace (224). Their pity for her turns 
to scolding, and a few years later she has nowhere to walk except back and forth on the strip of 
carcinogenic sand which gives this chapter its name (229). 
 In the last page of the fragmented novel, however, Pesty turns from a passive, pathetic-
seeming walking shadow into an active protagonist. She finds Asher, the husband who left her, 
who was useless and violent but with whom she was in love, standing on the sedimented rocks of 
the asbestos beach (230). His fourth wife kicked him out and he is miserable, lamenting his fate 
while insulting Pesty. He does not apologize, yet she is moved to forgive him. At once, Pesty 
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takes what she had wanted all along: she undresses him and herself, “lays on her back and feels 
how the poisonous soil stings her skin” (232). She “trembles” five or six times – the chapter’s 
habitual reference to an orgasm – out in the open, as the collective narrator reminds us that 
“everybody knows” (232). Forgiving the man who slapped and deserted her seems to break 
Pesty’s walking spell. She returns home, packs a bag, and heads out towards the train station, 
giving the reader a last depiction of the town as landmarks she passes are enumerated in the text. 
The abrupt, arresting end of the book is rendered thus: 
Esty holds her suitcase tight and boards the train and sits in the southernmost car, with 
her face away from town, and she doesn’t look back. 
On the news she hears about a huge wave that came from the sea and, without warning, 
washed our town. Until it was no more33.   
Throughout the book, and specifically in this chapter, two patterns were established: first, 
the town was shutting down slowly, its people dying of cancer. Second, Esty-Pesty was walking, 
leaving – the narrators believed – ruin in her wake. Both these patterns create an inactive, 
attritional timescale. The first sign of change is in Pesty’s verb-filled sexual initiative (she leans, 
kisses, licks, removes, undresses, lies, feels – all in two short sentences, 232). The oppressive 
slowness of time, the decay of the chapter, is met with her new resolute actions: she is getting 
out. But the timescale shortens even further: the last two lines comprise their own momentous 
story, squeezed into few words and told from the distance of hearsay. Pesty does not see the 
wave, she hears about it on the radio; and we do not learn about it from her, as the narration is 
still, we presume, the voice of some disembodied townspeople. What are we to make of this 
sudden ‘cleansing’, a biblical flood-cum-catharsis?  
 
33 The original ‘ad klot is a biblical phrase, translated as “unto the end” or “until the work was ended” (The English 
Bible). 
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 The first problem the reader faces is a question of the town’s endurance. If it “was no 
more”, who is telling the story? Additionally, Pesty seems to have been spared the town’s fate, 
but she was depicted not only walking “the cancer beach” back and forth for years but 
undressing and lying on its carcinogenic rock. Is she a survivor, then, or simply a belated victim? 
And, lastly, what has become of the “town to the east” and of the ruins of Jebesiya? Were they 
washed away too, and if not, do Iman Dkuar and the rest of the al-Ghabasiyya refugees have 
anywhere to return? The book does not answer any of these questions. All it offers is a giant 
wave, the culmination of the coupling of asbestos and ruined Palestinian village. Returning to 
this braiding-together will help explain the abrupt ending. 
 When one reads for them, the sinews tying al-Ghabasiyya and the asbestos – usually 
through the figure of the underground seashore – are numerous. First, the beach and cemetery are 
geographically coupled from the outset: in the short drive before it overheats, Yusuf’s car passes 
local landmarks that are enumerated in order, including “the beach, the cemetery” (10). 
Asbestos, nakba, and the great wave continue haunting the same seaside stretch of sand and 
rocks throughout the book: cancer-death burials are mentioned repeatedly, always in the 
“Jebesiya cemetery”, as the townspeople refer to the fictional graveyard built on the land of the 
historical al-Ghabasiyya (one such burial was quoted at the beginning of this chapter). The 
narrating collective bemoans “our town” and its slow decline, evocatively stating that “the cancer 
rises [to the town] from the beach, from the sea, and eats it all up” (229). The wave, as the reader 
will recall, also “came from the sea” (232).  
A second connection between the two ‘polluting’ elements is less geographical and more 
thematic. Perceived political threat, as well as asbestos fibers, are located underground. The 
town’s security officer, some think, is overdoing it: “the frequent drills, the vigorous erecting of 
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bomb shelters, the digging of safety trenches at the sides of the roads and so on, sow panic in the 
public, serving as a daily reminder of the security situation and of the ground shaking under us 
all” (26). Thus, the ground offers safety in the form of underground bomb shelters and trenches, 
even as it features metaphorically to express a sense of existential danger (“shaking”).34 The 
communal narrating voice recalls – yet never admits – the buried Palestinian existence.  
 Yet another coupling appears in the scenarios the above-mentioned security officer –
Orniya’s mother – concocts. In the threat-wary mind of officer Levi’a, the Arab dentist which 
“our town”’s inhabitants seem to love may well be infecting his patients with pernicious forms of 
cancer: “they say our chances of catching cancer are especially high. What if during his cutting-
edge treatments he injects materials that disappear immediately in the body and leave no trace 
but nevertheless destroy it, simply exterminate it, from the inside?”, she muses (29). As with 
Pesty’s walks, conspiracy theories which are easy to apprehend displace truths which are 
difficult to capture and narrativize. This time, high cancer morbidity rates intertwine with 
ethnophobia to create a chimera of displaced causation: while a factory continues to produce 
asbestos nearby, it is the Palestinian doctor’s syringe which might produce undetectable, dormant 
danger.  
 By “undetectable” I do not mean that the existence and effects of the nakba or of asbestos 
are unknowable in any ontological sense. What Almost Olympic thematizes is precisely how 
these elements go unknown or unnoticed while they are right there, affecting the very fabric of 
characters’ mind-bodies. Levi’a’s displacement of the roots of cancer repeats in the collective 
 
34 In chapter 1 I discussed the role reversal which seems constitutive of settler societies when an Afrikaner 
policeman claimed that black South African would run their white compatriots “into the ground”. I read this 
statement in the context of Johannesburg’s mine economy. Brodetzky’s text, then, duplicates the same habitual 
casting of self as victim. 
94 
 
 
narration of “Asbestos Beach”. While the carcinogens are recognized; while more and more 
spaces in the town are declared dangerous; and while the narrators themselves diagnose 
calamities as asbestos-related, they nevertheless turn on Esty-Pesty, creating a second, more 
compelling possible cause for their ailments (224-5;227). The denser this displacement, the 
wider the gap between reader and townspeople. Yet if the dramatic irony creates a sense of 
privileged knowledge in the reader (she knows more and earlier than the characters and is not 
distracted by urban legend), she is also shown how prone collectives are to mental and affective 
displacements. No surety is given: rather, the text may unsettle the reader’s own ways of 
knowing.  
In a similar case of mixed signals, the “arab town to the east” is not once connected to 
“the Jebesiya cemetery”. Indeed, the survival of the Palestinian village’s name on the lips of 
town inhabitants is an aberration of realism: Palestinian place names have been methodically 
erased in Israel/Palestine, and certainly the names of villages which were destroyed are not part 
of Hebrew public discourse (Masalha, “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous 
Toponymic Memory”). It is likewise improbable that a newscaster would repeat nakba 
testimony, yet in the novel the news declares that Yusuf will be buried “where according to his 
mother… their village of Jebesiya stood” (24). Perhaps the repeated (mis)naming of al-
Ghabasiyya is a tribute Brodetzky pays the refugees of the historical village. Despite the use of 
the name, in a now-familiar manipulation of dramatic irony, the awareness of the village’s 
ruination remains a burden the Palestinian characters and the reader bear.   
What Brodetzky’s text suggests is that the construction of superiority and its antonymic 
otherness is premised on the inadmissibility of certain sensory experiences. To participate in the 
majority’s ethnocratic violence, the individual mind-body must be inculcated in this indexing: 
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some things can be seen but not perceived, known but not accounted for. Allen Feldman has 
suggested the term ‘cultural anesthesia’ to describe this “banishment of disconcerting, 
discordant, and anarchic sensory presences” which might “undermine the normalizing and often 
silent premises of everyday life” (Feldman 405). For complicity to be claimed, it must be 
narrativized; yet its narrativization is faced not only with the difficulty of a non-event but also 
with a sensory regime of cultural anesthesia. In Brodetzky, this habitual erasure is figured in the 
text through the idiom “no one says”. Strewn throughout like crumbs, the phrase alerts to a story 
that cannot be told: there’s an Arab at the beach, but “what precisely the Arab does and why he is 
dangerous, no one says” (31); the mall’s security officer warns about “events”, but “which 
events, he never says” (54). No one tells the story of al-Ghabasiyya and the asbestos – that story 
is left between the lines, in the abrupt starts and stops of the chapters/stories, and in the clues left 
for the reader. For the people populating the text itself, things as they are always seem just out of 
range, though they affect the characters deeply.         
 This complex of unrecognized or under-determined history is “washed away” by a giant 
wave. I have shown above how this wave is connected both to the injustice of the nakba and to 
the asbestos-riddled beach. Yet, rather than ridding us – the readers – of the unsettling quality 
which asbestos and settler colonialism create and which permeated the pages of the novel, the 
‘solution’ of washing away “our town” is a poor remedy for both. I had described Yusuf’s 
murder as a fatal act à la Greek tragedy, a structure which would be completed by a cathartic 
cleansing (“washing away”) of a wave. The wave would then seem a final act of justice, a 
payment for the double original sin of the nakba and Yusuf’s murder. But the wave does not 
restore the social order as in a classic tragedy. Indeed, it is Brechtian absurd which seems a better 
intertext here. Like Brecht, Brodetzky avoids releasing her readers back into a renewed peace 
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with the current state of affairs.35 She does so, again like the Marxist playwright, by giving us a 
cathartic structure, then emptying it of any emotional resolution. 
 Unlike Brecht, however, Brodetzky does not point directly to a satisfactory solution. 
Brecht’s Circle ends in self-described “almost justice”, with the edict that land be given to “those 
who water it, that it may bear fruit” (Brecht and Bentley 229). Certainly, the poisoning of land by 
the Jewish-owned factory in Almost Olympic seems especially poignant given this intertext. 
Rather than stewards of the land, the town’s inhabitants have been corrupting it. Yet the 
questions raised by the flood (what became of Pesty? And the “town to the east”?) and its jarring 
incoherence with the rest of the text imbue the novel’s end with a distinct sense of unsettlement. 
I would like to insist nonetheless, that a regressive reading is hard to justify: the townspeople, 
though victims to asbestos poisoning, so often declare self-pity that the reader is not likely to 
grant it to them. The reader, perhaps, is left the true lone survivor of this sudden flood. 
 In chapter 1, I have shown an anxious anticipation of a reckoning to come to be a central 
postapartheid structure of feeling. There too, said reckoning was figured as a kind of tsunami: 
“history would break over me”, Neville suspects, “like a wave that had already swept through the 
manor house and bear me off in a jumble of picture frames and paper plates” (Vladislavić 51). 
The convergence of two novels which deal with complicity around the figure of a flood is telling. 
It is important to point out, however, that Vladislavić’s glossing of white South African 
complicity is entirely premised on a recognition of that complicity. In Brodetzky’s novel, 
complicity is recognized by the text, but not by its characters. What the transition to democracy 
 
35 “The art of epic theatre consists in arousing astonishment rather than empathy… instead of identifying itself with 
the hero the audience is called upon to learn to be astonished at the circumstances within which he has his being” 
(Benjamin, Understanding Brecht 18) 
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made evident in South Africa – the naming of some, if not all, of the injustices carried out under 
apartheid to the benefit of white citizens – remains elusive and disavowed in Israel today.          
Oz Shelach’s Picnic Grounds and the Poetics of Re-Reminding 
 
If Brodetzky’s novel demanded the reader cull traces of the Western Galilee’s disavowed past, 
Oz Shelach takes a more metropolitan setting, and a much more explicit approach. He sets his 
cycle’s first scene in the metropole to Brodetzky’s periphery, both geographically and regarding 
the Israeli discourse on the nakba. In this first microfiction, a professor of History takes his 
family for a picnic “in a quiet pinewood… formerly known as Deir Yassin” (Shelach 1). Deir 
Yassin was a Palestinian village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. In April 1948 Jewish-Israeli 
forces attacked the village, killing between 107 and 254 villagers including women and children 
(Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 113; Khalidi 292). The attack 
is etched in both Israeli and Palestinian memories, and is widely known as the “Deir Yassin 
massacre” in both Hebrew and Arabic. Thus, Shelach’s setting is not only a centrally located 
capital city, but also the site of a highly contested event which is, despite attempts at 
renunciation, part of Israeli public consciousness. Conversely, the village of al-Ghabasiyya has 
been completely erased from Jewish-Israeli memory; in fact, as I pointed out above, Brodetzky 
had to recall its name from Hebrew oblivion to comment on its erasure.  
Deir Yassin’s (and Jerusalem’s) centrality to the Zionist historical narrative mean 
Shelach’s text positions itself differently regarding the question of knowing, of perception under 
complicity. To begin with, the reader herself occupies a different epistemological standpoint: 
rather than struggling with the perception of complicity alongside the characters, as in Almost 
Olympic, Shelach’s reader is given facts which the characters disavow yet she cannot. Disavowal 
is not an option for several reasons: firstly, because the narration takes on a journalistic tone, 
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reporting, for instance, “the village school [is] now a psychiatric hospital” (Shelach 1). 
Moreover, the microfiction form means that such reportage, though brief, takes up a considerable 
amount of the text (about 7 lines out of a total of 19, in the opening story). Lastly, though the text 
was intended for an Anglophone audience, readers have likely heard of Jerusalem and might 
have heard of Deir Yassin, giving context and import to the facts relayed.   
Picnic Grounds’ commentary on knowledge is exemplified in this first microtext. The 
characters are a professor of History and his son; the village of which the professor does not tell 
his son is contrasted with idyllic camping skills, themselves attached to the father’s army service: 
“the professor passed on to his son camping skills he had acquired in the army… [he] did not talk 
of the village… he did not talk of the village school” (Shelach 1). If “Our Town”’s inhabitants 
were aware of al-Ghabasiyya only by a kind of local osmosis, the protagonist here is a professor 
of history: he knows about the violent foundations of the idyllic picnic scene, but chooses not to 
bequeath this knowledge to his son. He imagines, in fact, “that he and his family were having a 
picnic, unrelated to the village, enjoying its grounds outside history” (1). One of Judaism’s 
strongest precepts is the Passover edict vehigadeta, or “tell thy son” – the yearly relating of the 
biblical exodus from Egypt, which makes certain to place each generation of Jews within their 
history. Walter Benjamin calls upon this edict in his “On the Concept of History”, where he 
seeks to wrest history from the triumphant believers in progress through a politicized practice of 
remembrance (eingedenken - Benjamin, Understanding Brecht 255). However, Benjamin is 
writing as a prosecuted Jewish intellectual in Europe, and the remembering subject of his text is 
likewise history’s victim. The narrative edict set up in Shelach’s scene of complicity, and 
maintained throughout the microfiction cycle, is then an obverse of vehigadeta: a cyclical un-
telling. If Vladislavić’s Neville knew that “history would wash over” him and leave him in ruins, 
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the network of individuals represented in Picnic Grounds toil to keep ‘history’, and its derivative 
complicity, at bay.  
A final sense in which Picnic Grounds’ centrality feeds into complicity literature’s 
commentary on knowledge production lies in what we may call the cycle’s social capital. The 
microfictions introduce us to characters through their professions: journalists, professors, 
authors, and botanists. The characters thus have access to relative material comforts as well as to 
information, and take part in defining and producing knowledge. However, as we saw, the 
professor in the opening story does not teach his son about Deir Yassin. In another microfiction, 
a journalist instructs his junior peers that suicide deaths are not to be reported (43). A naturalist 
denies that fireflies have gone extinct on the logic that no one had ever counted them (39), and so 
on. Thus, the precept of disavowal is repeatedly showcased through the people ordinarily tasked 
with producing and maintaining knowledge.  
While nameless characters are a mainstay of microfiction (Nelles 92), it is important to 
note that the effect created in this text’s case is an indictment of the social system rather than of 
specific individuals. Seemingly interchangeable nameless characters join the plural narration in 
focusing attention away from individual knowledge or action and onto the systemic shoring-up 
of the social. Occasionally, the text’s narration itself, succinct and overt as it is, does the un-
telling.36 Yet more often than not, the bluntness of Picnic Grounds’ narrating ‘we’ stands in 
contrast to these occlusions. The resulting effect is a curious one: the text relentlessly speaks 
otherwise-denied truths, but at the same time casts doubt on anyone who purports to report the 
 
36 One story tells of a senior surgeon who owns four houses which look out on four views: the pine forests of 
Jerusalem, the lake in the Galilee, an oak wood in the Carmel, “and another view” (41). The baffling aposiopesis 
suggests that the affluent surgeon’s last house looks over something which he or the communal narrators deem 
off putting, unworthy, or unethical, perhaps a refugee camp or a Palestinian neighborhood – but the text occludes 
this information. 
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truth. The resolve to report reality seems to bring with it, for the ‘we’ narrators, the bind of 
having to filter and choose which information to relate. The project of erasure, then, is 
epistemologically powerful enough that it sweeps up the narrators. Another way to look at this 
bind is by identifying the narrating ‘we’ as part of the same social strata as the characters: mainly 
male, always Jewish, and well-positioned within the national system. At times the ‘we’ is media-
related, as in “a senior editor who instructed us in the craft of news production” and “the 
guidebooks… which we publish” (43; 40, emphases added); other times, it seems to be the voice 
of a general mainstream Israeliness, as in “we made the mountains evergreen – like Switzerland, 
we liked to say” (57). Taken thus, the ‘we’ share in the characters’ claim to knowledge 
dissemination, and with it, presumably, the burden of ideological forgetting. The cycle’s 
characterization as well as its narration, then, points to disavowal as the hallmark of Israeli 
epistemology. 
 One is tempted to say that, like Brodetzky, Shelach figures this denied complicity of his 
characters through a vertical axis: the same surface-depth dynamic of buried things rules the 
cycle’s geography. Yet in Picnic Grounds these spacial parameters are stated matter-of-factly in 
a way that belies any figuration, as in the case of “The Road to Jerusalem”: “all along the road to 
Jerusalem we planted over the past” (57). Similarly, the interrogation chambers in which 
Palestinian detainees are questioned lie “deep under” a bar (49). Once more, the condensed form 
of microfiction works to emphasize the centrality of the few details given in each brief story. 
While the form usually demands that descriptions of setting be culled in favor of generalized or 
interchangeable settings, Picnic Grounds’ insistent repetition of the same spatial reality – 
villages buried under forests, Hebrew place names displacing Palestinian ones – means these 
realities are treated as rudimentary facts (Nelles 93). Which begs the question: if the vertical 
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axis, and all other political commentary the text makes, seem to be handed to the reader, what 
narrative work does the text have left to do? 
Representing Erasure 
 To answer this question, I turn to a second form prevalent in Shelach’s text. While 
maintaining Brodetzky’s vertical axis – a surface/depth model wherein Palestinian sovereign life 
is buried under the surface bustle of Israeli existence – Shelach’s collection introduces the cycle 
as a second form. And whether the vertical axis is presented as a physical reality ‘reported on’ in 
the journalistic microfictions, the cyclical form animates the narrative and affective levels of the 
story. The plot of single microfictions in the book operates cyclically; taken as a whole, the 
microfiction cycle thematizes disavowal as a cyclical process; and finally, cyclicality determines 
Picnic Grounds’ relationship with the microfiction form itself. The following will be an 
exploration of the cycle on these three levels: the individual stories, the accumulative collection-
level, and the generic manipulation created by this accumulation.  
 Many of the microfictions in Picnic Grounds return the reader to their opening sentence 
upon reading the concluding one. Take “The Night Sky”: it opens with a picnic ground – 
specifically, “the night sky over a picnic ground near Kibbutz Qiryat-‘Anavim, where our uncle 
took us”. The rest of the story, six sentences in total, tell us that the uncle was part of the force 
that conquered the area, and that he laments the visibility which could once be had, when the sky 
was clear from pollution. The story ends: “the sky under which a village was bombed out and 
later razed was not the same sky, over the ground, which was the same, where we had a picnic 
one dusty day” (Shelach 67). Thus, the story begins in the present on a picnic ground; ventures 
into the past through the memories of a veteran, the narrators’ uncle; and then, defying the 
uncle’s nostalgic gaze, overlays past war horrors – the bombing and razing of an agricultural 
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village – directly on top of the present moment of narration. The picnic occurs in a “dusty day”, 
which reveals that the changed night sky of the opening sentence is that of the uncle’s memory. 
Yet the narrators’ insistence is not on the changed sky, but on the identical earth: the ground is 
the same (67).  
 If “The Night Sky” circles from present, to past, back to the present, “Children of the 
World” traces a cyclical relationship between the ‘real’ and the represented. This two-sentence 
snapshot is one of Picnic Grounds’ many stories of children and education. It relates the 
memories of the we-narrators from a visit to the national museum, in which they were shown 
children’s paintings of Jerusalem from all over the world (45). The paintings seem biblical, 
“African even… so much so that they had no connection to anything we ever painted, and that – 
we knew from our experience – is the real Jerusalem, where we lived and went to school, and 
from school to the said exhibition at the Israel Museum” (45). The words “at the Israel Museum” 
bracket the text, repeating at its closing and sending the reader back to their mirror at its start, 
like a prosaic epanalepsis. Between the two appearances of the national museum, children of the 
world imagine Israel’s capital as an agricultural land laden with camels and “blacks in straw 
hats” (45). The narrating collective’s insistence that their experience in fact gives them 
knowledge of “the real Jerusalem” becomes debatable by the sheer force of their argument, 
combined with the cyclicality of the prose. Look again, the repeating clause seems to say: things 
are not as they seem. Perhaps these children’s experience is not quite all-encompassing; perhaps 
“the real Jerusalem” is not as accessible to them as they believe. 
 Repeatedly, then, Shelach’s prose takes a cyclical form. The diminutive size of the texts 
represents not singular events, but single instances in different repetitive cycles. In “‘Ayn Lavan” 
(a toponym, “Lavan Spring”), the narrators are staying with family friends, and their hosts take 
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them to a nearby swimming hole. “[W]e discovered it and named it after ourselves”, their hosts 
tell them (55). Later the narrators take their own friends to see the reservoir, making the same 
claim: “we had discovered it, and named it, appropriately, after ourselves” (56). As this example 
shows however, the cyclicality is never without connection to the complicity thematized in the 
book. The host family’s and subsequently the narrators’ willingness to “discover” a place that 
has been shown to them and to rename it after themselves invite the reader to meditate on 
forgetting and its central place in discourses of ownership and nation. Serializing the snapshot 
form leads us to imagine, or assume, a serialized narrative: if the narrators adopted the place of 
conquistadors to the swimming-hole, forgetting their host family and thus erasing the family’s 
claims, perhaps the family had also been shown to the site by someone else. The presentist, 
journalistic stories thus draw continuous links between past and present violence, referencing the 
nakba while avoiding its ossification as a singular past event. Palestinian scholars have, of course 
repeatedly demonstrated that the nakba is an ongoing process rather than an exceptional event 
relegated to the past (Sabbagh-Khoury 15). Complicity literature’s potential is in its ability to 
communicate these disavowed temporalities experientially to a reader who may be disinclined to 
accept them through argumentation.    
 Despite its centering of disavowal and erasure, Picnic Grounds maintains the constant 
textual presence of Palestinian people and the material remains of villages. Throughout the 
microfictions, Jewish children’s sense of adventure, accomplishment, and discovery – of a grove 
of pine nuts; of a swimming hole; of images of the city they live in – are haunted by traces of 
Palestinian life (21; 55; 45). A form of this (non)representation has been a staple of Hebrew 
literature since the 1940’s. In a poignant critical essay on the inability to establish “Israeli 
literature” as a national category – with “Hebrew literature” as a replacement – Hannan Hever 
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observed that the need to overcome the Palestinian other has, paradoxically, necessitated the 
presence of Palestinians in canonical Zionist Hebrew literature (Hever, “Map of Sand” 167). 
Time and again, Palestinian characters are invented in order to be erased. Total absence of 
representation, Hever claims, would entertain the possibility of an independent Palestinian 
existence off the page, so to speak. Thus, while the violence towards Palestinian characters had 
been disavowed, the characters themselves were habitually represented in ways that served the 
continuous, never-ending process of their erasure (Hever, “Map of Sand” 167–68). I build on this 
argument to assert that self-narration built on erasure cannot afford that erasure’s completion, a 
fact which is evident in Brodetzky’s, Shelach’s, and other contemporary Israeli authors’ 
insistence on highlighting rather than naturalizing the fault lines of narration. The collective 
depicted in Shelach’s book is cyclically erasing and calling forth the Palestinian life that they are 
complicit in disallowing. Complicity itself, the text suggests, creates a structure of feeling of 
cyclical erasure and obsession.     
 Picnic Grounds is cyclical on the single story level; on the level of represented affect; 
and, finally, in the way it manipulates readers’ expectations of narration and of microfiction as 
genre. William Nelles’ characterizes this new genre (widely believed to be a product of the last 
30 years) along six categories, including action, characters, setting, temporality, and closure. 
Contrary to the expectation that very short stories would center around equally diminutive 
events, Nelles found that the actions and consequences depicted in microfiction were palpable 
and extreme (91). The genre seems to lend itself to depiction of violence and death in particular 
(88;90). Nelles also suggests that microfiction reformulates the reader-text relationship: their 
compressed duration means that many microfictions take as long to read as the events depicted 
take to happen. Rather than creating expectation and anticipation, the limited amount of text on a 
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page thwarts questions of the past or speculation on the future, making microfiction a genre 
focused on the present (Nelles 95). But what happens to readers’ expectations when microfiction 
is aggregated? Picnic Grounds was, after all, published with the subtitle “a Novel in Fragments”. 
Its parts are not simply collected, but make a whole – what I have been calling a “microfiction 
cycle”.  
 Where, in “Picnic Grounds” or “’Ain Lavan”, is the grand event? In many of the cycle’s 
stories, no major action takes place. In addition, rather than being present-focused tales of major 
decisions and dire consequences, in Shelach’s snapshots catastrophe has always already 
happened. The crux of the action is in the past or in a present-continuous. That past event seeps 
into the present through traces in rubble, place names, and sounds, and – like Brodetzky’s 
asbestos – encroach on bodies, on relationships and on emotions. When microfiction reaches past 
the present moment, the result is a “looping” – compressed durations which allow past or future 
to arrive at the sliver of narrated time (Nelles 94). Picnic Grounds’ ominous staging of idyllic 
settings do not surprise the reader: rather, the relentless repetition engenders a rather more stable, 
sustained unsettlement. 
Language Matters 
In analyzing the way complicity literature engenders readers’ responses it is important to 
note that publication histories play a determining role. Brodetzky’s portrayal of the slow 
poisoning of a northern town is more likely to be read by Israelis, not only because its radical 
notes are as indiscernible as asbestos fibers but mostly because it was written in Hebrew and 
published in Israel. Shelach’s text steps out of bounds of the Hebrew national-linguistic project. 
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It does so with ideological reasoning, which it then satirizes in one of the cycle’s microfictions.37 
The different acts of address – Brodetzky’s local one, Shelach’s Anglophone one – come with 
their own affordances and limitations. Rendered in Hebrew, Shelach’s journalistic reportage on 
the facts of the occupation would simply be the news. Linguistic distance creates the 
defamiliarization his text depends on. It also allows him to clearly and unequivocally state facts 
which are very much contested in Israeli public opinion. Brodetzky’s covert commentary is a 
choice, but it is one at least partly guided by that which her readership is willing to hear.  
In a 2004 discussion with Ammiel Alcalay published under the title “Moving out of 
Hebrew”, Shelach describes the decision to write in American English as a move from inside to 
outside, from a “small violent area” designated as his to the “lure of the empire, a large violent 
area” (Shelach and Alcalay 246). Addressing an extremely local structure of feeling in a 
language foreign to it was, he says, a gesture of solidarity, with Palestinian author Anton 
Shammas serving as imagined audience. Yet Shelach also recognizes the bind English put him 
in. Paraphrasing a disgruntled critic, he points out that the scenes in the book are “entirely trivial 
to insiders and yet not communicable to foreigners” (Shelach and Alcalay 247).  
 The growing body of work of Israeli Anglophone authors will be discussed further in 
relation to Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever are Not Afraid, in chapter 3. I focus for the 
moment only on the question of narrative aim. Brodetzky and Shelach both place themselves on 
the outskirts of Hebrew literature – she in her geographic setting and choice of Brechtian 
intertext, he in his Hebrew-flavored English (Gordon)38. Yet they both make powerful claims 
 
37 In “Infected”, a mediocre journalist from Jerusalem stops writing in Hebrew because he sees it as “an immoral 
language constructed to serve imperialist powers and promote murder” (Shelach 37). However, finding all other 
languages similarly afflicted, the journalist stops writing altogether (ibid.). 
38 Gordon writes: “Shelach’s collection of short stories is much more Israeli than most Hebrew books which are 
translated into English. There is something about the sound, tempo, and rhythm of these stories that gives them a 
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about that society, claims whose effect, it seems to me, will depend entirely on the readership 
each text demarcates for itself. In her study of perpetrator confessions in Israeli cinema, Raya 
Morag argues that the outcome of such a confession is defined by the receiving society’s 
willingness to accept the perpetrator as its envoy, and thus to assume responsibility (Morag 6, 
19). While Shelach’s English affords him cutting frankness, Brodetzky’s familiar Hebrew 
affords her the chance to interpellate her readers as complicitous.      
Conclusion 
A shared narrative of the past and a shared sense of time are often quoted as Benedict 
Anderson’s conditions for the founding of a nation. Yet Anderson also emphasizes that 
forgetting is a crucial tenet of nation-building. He quotes Ernest Renan on the subject: 
Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a 
nation... Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place 
at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent 
in their consequences. Unity is always brutally established  (Renan 3)  
Just as Renan’s French citizens had to forget the massacre of the Huguenots in order to be 
French, Israelis have had to forget the nakba in order to be Israelis. The “nakba law”, a 2014 bill, 
authorized the Minister of Finance to reduce state funding or support to an institution if it 
commemorates “Israel’s Independence Day or the day on which the state was established as a 
day of mourning” (Knesset). It is not the existence of Palestinian people that this law attempts to 
erase; in fact, the same political parties which authored the bill also emphasize Palestinians as a 
constant threat to Israel’s existence. The law is remarkable in attempting to govern emotion, or at 
the very least, its public display. The potency of reminders of violence is also encapsulated by 
left-wing NGO Zochrot (“We Remember”), which seeks "To commemorate, witness, 
 
uniquely Israeli flavor… ‘Home’ and the ‘well-known’, he appears to sense, can also come to mean… the existential 
condition of becoming comfortably numb” 
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acknowledge, and repair" (Zochrot). National memory and national forgetting are cyclically 
intertwined: to become a nation we have to remember to forget, forget to remember. 
 Returning to the question of this dissertation – what kind of fictions does complicity 
produce? – Brodetzky and Shelach’s texts supply a tripartite answer. Firstly, it produces stories 
about collectives, stories in which the primary unit of signification is not the individual but the 
social; secondly, complicity narratives stand in oblique contrast to the mainstream culture of 
disavowal by re-telling or reminding the reader of what she should already knows; and lastly, 
complicity narratives problematize the act of narration, emphasizing the fault-lines in the stories 
the narrating society tells itself.   
In reading Picnic Grounds, I have called on Hannan Hever’s notion of the always-present 
Palestinian in Hebrew literature. The “native,” Hever says, is not so much erased but subjected to 
a continuous process of erasure (Hever, “Map of Sand” 167). Settler-colonial Hebrew fiction 
does not seek to forget the native, but to contain her, erasing instead the violence done to her 
(contra Patrick Wolfe’s formulation of settler colonialism, see Wolfe). In claiming that Shelach’s 
and Brodetzky’s texts employ a poetics of reminding I do not mean that they recall the 
Palestinian people “absent” from the landscape. Rather, they recall the violence which causes 
this absence, and evoke its determinative role in all that is seen and is known. The act of 
ruination itself is recalled through the texts’ invocation of rubble, toponyms, and longing.  
 
  
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CHAPTER 3 
CHECKPOINTS, BEDROOMS, AND BOOMERANGS: CHOC EN RETOUR IN SHANI 
BOIANJIU’S THE PEOPLE OF FOREVER ARE NOT AFRAID 
Three young women grow up in a dusty village in northern Israel. They finish school and enlist, 
playing the parts laid out for them in the Israeli military with varying degrees of willingness. 
They stand in a checkpoint, watch over border monitors, teach young men to shoot. They are not 
particularly bright and certainly not pleasant; their narration is abrasive, disjointed, and 
unsettling. When the men come back from another war, they torture the girls who had waited for 
them. The girls live. This story, told in Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid 
(The People of Forever Are Not Afraid2012), is an unflinching account of the impoverishing 
effects of violence on those complicit in it. It does not beg for – indeed, it does not allow – pity 
or identification with its protagonists. This attention to, and manipulation of, fellow-feeling: 
identification and empathy, criticism and disgust, ignoring and projecting, on the part of 
characters as well as the reader – allows Boianjiu to bring the corrupting nature of complicity in 
violence into stark relief. 
 My argument in the following chapter is that within the affective landscape of Boianjiu’s 
novel, characters’ encounters with themselves and with each other are circumscribed by the 
intimacy of complicity in the violence of settler colonialism. Situating the reader within this 
affective matrix demands she grapple with the implications of such impoverished relational 
register as a condition of reading through the novel. If Boianjiu’s novel can be read as a fictional 
account of perpetration, sifting through the emotional actions it demands of its readers can help 
elucidate the relationship between perpetration and complicity in violence, in a time when this 
relationship is becoming ever more confounded by the realities of 21st century warscape. 
Furthermore, Boianjiu’s Hebrew-inflected English writing allows her to turn on their head 
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conventions entrenched in Hebrew literature while raising questions about the imagined audience 
who would be able to decode this commentary while reading this New-York published, 
millennial-pink clad volume. I first address what I see as Boianjiu’s invocation of Aimé 
Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire) and the idea of colonial violence’s corrupting 
effect on its perpetrators. This strand of inquiry, reflected in Césaire and Hanna Arendt in the 
1950’s and later taken up by Michel Foucault and others in the 1970s, is echoed and updated by 
The People of Forever. This chapter’s second part addresses this expansion through the novel’s 
treatment of security culture and technologies of surveillance, so critical to the material reality in 
Israel/Palestine. To do this I recall Alan Feldman’s work on the role of filming in the arbitration 
of police brutality in the U.S.A. Finally, Hannan Hever’s seminal work in analyzing the modern 
Hebrew canon from a postcolonial studies perspective clarifies Boianjiu’s nimble upending of 
the conventions of representation of Palestinians as Others.         
 In reading Boianjiu’s intimate indictment of Israeli society, I draw perhaps-unexpected 
insight from Aimé Césaire. The Martinican poet, politician and scholar argued that colonial 
processes implicate everyone involved in them. In his Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire argues 
that the metropolis is defined by and permeated with the violence of the colonies (see Rothberg, 
Multidirectional Memory 69). Césaire points out that the technologies of violence developed in 
the colonies find their way back to Europe, and adds that the act of colonization brutalizes the 
colonizer by changing European people and rendering them brutes in a process he likens to 
gangrenous infection (35-6). The physical evidence of colonial brutality, Césaire declares, haunts 
every person in the metropole and alters her fundamentally:    
[T]hese heads of men, these collections of ears (...) are not to be so easily disposed of. 
They prove that colonization… dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial 
activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native 
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and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the 
colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man 
as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to 
transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization 
that I wanted to point out (Césaire 41, italics added) 
I enlist Césaire’s insistence, not that Nazism was somehow a due punishment for the violence of 
colonization – and whichever parallel might be drawn between such a reading of Césaire and the 
current state of Israeli occupation in Palestine/Israel – but that, before Nazism and Fascism as 
well as after the war they wrought, what it means to be human is defined and determined by the 
violence which undergirds one’s existence. A careful reading of Boianjiu’s work allows that for 
Israelis, encounters with oneself and with one’s peers are circumscribed by the intimacy of 
complicity in the violence of settler colonialism.  
 Of course, to express a narrowing of emotional possibilities, one must provide an original 
uncircumscribed baseline. This is the reason much discourse on the boomerang effect which is 
the central mechanism of complicity is touched with either nostalgia – which denies that all pasts 
are already marked with violence – or an essentialist view of a state from which an individual or 
society were degraded. The latter is the case with Césaire, who adopts the European ideal of 
humanism in order to prove how far Europeans have fallen from it (Césaire, 73). In People of 
Forever, the protagonists have a sense of an emotional relationship to themselves and to the 
world to which they have no access. This fantasy of some normative way of being and feeling is 
encapsulated in a global economy personified by markers of American cultural imperialism: 
McDonald’s restaurants, Dawson’s Creek reruns, and Hollywood movies (69). It is settler-
colonial complicity which creates this tension: on the one hand, it demands continued 
participation in a colonial present which degrades and distorts one’s encounters with the world; 
while on the other, it demands a mirage of normalcy, claiming for its participants a role as 
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citizens of the world. In Zionist discourse, this aspiration for normalcy was coined in the phrase 
‘am ke-chol ha‘amim, “a nation like all nations.” It is this tension – a world of promise on the 
one hand, and a highly limited existence on the other – that Boianjiu’s novel explores.  
Identification as Violence in “Checkpoint” 
 
In Vladislavić’s Double Negative, a father’s slap knocks the world back into order. In one of 
Boianjiu’s chapters, protagonist Lea is in desperate need of a similar kind of jolt – something to 
align her sense of self with her role as a checkpoint soldier, to restore her integrity as a subject. 
The act which knocks Lea’s world into order comes not from a father figure but from a 
Palestinian worker subordinate to her will. Fadi, this man, becomes integral to Lea’s life: for 
three days she nurses a sense of connection with him, and on the fourth, he stabs one of her 
fellow soldiers and kills him, putting to rights Lea’s sense of purpose and sending her off to 
become an officer (81). In a chapter near the end of the novel, we learn that Fadi returns to haunt 
Lea – or rather, Lea summons Fadi in order to haunt him – well after she is discharged.  
At the chapter’s outset, Lea seems to notice too much. “We were there to notice what the 
government wanted us to, dangers, but I would still only notice what I happened to notice. This 
was because I couldn’t realize I was a soldier. I thought I was still a person”, she says (60). She 
cannot look at herself in the mirror and hates how her breasts feel under the bulletproof vest (63). 
After Fadi’s violent act of resistance, Lea strips, looks at herself in the grimy mirror, and accepts 
her role: “I knew I was a soldier then… and I was not afraid” (84). Unlike in a bildungsromaan, 
this self-realization is not cathartic. What is better, the reader asks herself, a self-loathing 
reluctant agent of the occupation or a willing participant with a coherent sense of self?     
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 Lea hates Yaniv, a fellow soldier. In the checkpoint, he monitors Palestinians passing 
through in cars, while she stands behind the cement barricade and inspects the workers who 
come on foot. She hates him because she thinks he is dumb and she is smart; because he is 
Mizrahi and acts like it (Lea, we learn from her narration, is a bit of a racist); and she specifically 
hates his neck, which he is prone to sticking into cars to chat up the drivers and accept minor 
bribes from them (72). This is strange: this narrator, an Israeli soldier, forms an attachment to a 
Palestinian worker but hates someone ‘on her side’ with a passion. The stakes of this chapter, it 
seems, are played out not through actions but through emotional allegiances and their 
implications.  
Of course, Lea’s hatred for Yaniv is an extension of her own self-loathing. She says: “I 
hated that he… always talked jokingly about how he hated our officers and his blue beret” (72), 
but the reader knows that Lea is miserable because of the same blue beret, the symbol of her 
assignment to military police which she feels is beneath her: “If I could I would burn the blue 
beret on my head”, she explains (63). Her hatred for Yaniv is modulated self-hatred. The 
hallmark of Lea’s narration is projection: her sense of self is at once precarious and voracious, 
subsuming other people and events.  
 The epitome of this subsumption is her relation to Fadi. Even in the first mention of him, 
subject and object are already conflated in Lea's narrative: 
Fadi, the person I first noticed that day, was very close to the front of the line of workers. 
I noticed him because even though I could not see his face, even though they were all too 
far away to have faces, I could tell he was looking at me… From that distance I must not 
have had much of a face for him to see, but I swear I knew he had already chosen me 
then. (60) 
In one paragraph, Lea goes from perceiving the workers as a faceless line to be managed and 
guarded against, to endowing Fadi with features, name, and will. But whose will is this? She 
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interprets her own agency – “I first noticed” – as his agency: "I knew he had already chosen me" 
(60;60). The relationship she conjures in her mind with this man toys with the erotic, as she notes 
the minute details of his face and scent, as she ‘chooses’ him from the endless line of Palestinian 
men, and as she mentally summons him to her bed: “I knew, I decided, that I would sleep that 
night and think of him. There was something about him, and that something would help me 
sleep” (66). But Lea, it seems, does not need an object of desire so much as she needs an avatar. 
She lifts Fadi off reality and invents a life for him, a wife and children, wants and fears. Her 
actions at the checkpoint and her imaginary invocations are both pre-determined by violence: the 
structure of the occupation which enables her control over Fadi’s ‘real’ life, as well as the 
epistemic violence under which Lea and her mental possibilities develop. That is to say, Lea’s 
approach to the Palestinian workers as a whole and to Fadi in particular is circumscribed by her 
current control over their movement, and also by the upbringing – described in earlier chapters of 
the novel – which conditioned her to the role she now occupies.  
 Lea indeed thinks of Fadi that night, in her bunk bed. She escapes the hostile military 
environment by way of his imagined Hebron home, his wife, and their quarrels over Fadi's job 
with an Israeli contractor. She draws with perfect clarity the indignity of Palestinian employment 
in Israel, as well as the pressures of everyday life which result in daily acquiescence to this 
indignity:  
He did not want to take money from the Israelis. He did not want to be torn from his 
dreams only to stand in line for hours and wait for a girl half his age to bark orders at 
him. He did not want to go. He wouldn’t. 
“I won’t go,” Fadi said. 
“But we have five children,” Nur said. “We need money for Nadia’s university. We need 
better formula for the baby.” 
“I won’t go.” 
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“But you haven’t worked in months. You won’t find a job in Hebron.” 
“I won’t go.” 
“But I will leave you if you don’t. I will leave you and no one in the family would blame 
me for it and you will die alone.” 
“I won’t go.” 
“Oh, but you will,” his wife said. (69-70) 
This passage summons all the liberal affective conventions encapsulated in the novel form: 
difference and its bridging; circumstances overcome; creativity as a vessel for humanity under 
hardship. Yet the conflation of self and other which guides Lea’s imaginary makes a mockery of 
these ambitions. In one of the chapter’s analeptical fragments, Lea recalls her meeting with the 
sorting officer who assigned her to the commonly despised position of Military Police soldier 
(64-5). In light of Lea's confrontation with the officer, Fadi's quarrel with his wife appears 
familiar to the reader:  
 “I won’t go. I won’t go.” 
“There is more to military police than the proper appearance write ups. It is actually a 
really important role. Different soldiers do different things. You’ll like it, I swear. ” 
“But I won’t go,” I said. I believed it when I said it. 
“Oh, but you will” (p. 65) 
This ‘Fadi’, his utterances, and his emotions are all figments of Lea's imagination. He is using 
her words not because the author is suggesting a parallel between his situation and hers, but 
because Lea as narrator is unable to see outside the gravity of her own emotions. As he is turned 
into Lea’s inert double, Fadi is essentially erased from the narrative. Humanity reduced to a 
monologue: “No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the 
colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and 
the indigenous man into an instrument of production” (Césaire 74; 42). The significance of this 
narration is that it gives Palestinian suffering a central place in this novel of three Israelis’ 
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coming of age, while simultaneously maintaining that human encounter is impossible under 
colonial violence. 
 Israeli texts representing Palestinian characters as ‘useful’ doubles for Jewish-Israeli 
selves are, as I have mentioned in previous chapters, nothing new. The narration of Jewish-
Israeli identity has been typified by a mechanism of identification with the Other (“kamonnu 
kamohem, “כמונו-כמוהם”), erasing the asymmetrical power relations between dispossessed and 
dispossessor (Hever, “Map of Sand” 173). The writing and reading public are, after all, classed – 
the trope of identification thus makes room for a kind of liberal piety which might be compelling 
for specific social strata. These are description of the Other’s suffering as somehow mirroring the 
Jewish Israeli’s own suffering, which serve as a function of the latter’s humanistic sensibilities. 
This identificatory imagination operates either as an alibi within a liberal narrative (the 
protagonist sees the suffering or protest of the Palestinian as evidence of the injustice she herself 
has suffered, therefor allowing her to be both politically aware and entirely helpless); or as 
violence itself (with the collapsing and depletion of Palestinian identity exemplifying 
Palestinians’ erasure and asserting control over Palestinian characters). Palestinian authors 
writing in Hebrew have spoken to this mirror role granted them: in Arabesques, author Anton 
Shammas’ namesake travels to the Iowa writing workshop where he meets a Jewish-Israeli 
author writing a novel with an Arab protagonist (Arabeskot, Shammas and Eden). The novel 
reflects and refracts the identities of Palestinian and Israeli through each other and through the 
embattled act of creative writing. In Second Person Singular a Palestinian university student 
inherits the identity of a paraplegic Jewish-Israeli, wearing it and thriving until events at the end 
of the novel question the success of his self-subsumption (Qashu and Ginsburg). Boianjiu’s 
writing in People of Forever indicts the poverty of this identificatory imagination while also 
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recognizing the harsh limits of narration under complicity: Lea may be a racist, narrow-minded, 
emotionally-stunted narrator, but how different would a story told by any other Israeli – told by 
Boianjiu herself, perhaps – truly be? how would breaking the pattern of identification-as-
violence look? In other words, how can we read and write outside the liberal-colonial narrative?    
 I locate these questions not in Lea’s narrating voice, but in the authority directing  the 
dark humor that is created when she uses the material of her life to imagine Fadi’s. Astutely 
recognizing the humiliations of the checkpoint, Lea’s Fadi initially refuses to “stand in line for 
hours and wait for a girl half his age to bark orders at him” (70). Lea is well aware that her age 
and gender communicate a lack of authority – she looks like a child drowning in a too-large 
uniform, and when she takes a bathroom break, a disgruntled contractor complains that he 
“didn’t need to be subjected to the mercy of the bladder of a teenager” (62). She doesn’t want to 
be there, she repeats. When imagined-Fadi breaks down crying because he does not want to go to 
the checkpoint either, imagined-wife Nur scolds him: “You are not a teenage girl” (76). Except, 
of course, Fadi is precisely a teenage girl – he is Lea; and if she won’t cry, she can make him do 
it for her. She can also make him punch his wife, make his wife kick him out of the house, make 
him sleep on the porch, and make him wake up to a three-legged dog peeing on his face (79-80). 
Lea’s imagination turns so perverse that the reader is forced to face both its fictitiousness and its 
cruelty.  
The next day, Fadi does not appear in the pedestrian line at the checkpoint. When he 
arrives in a car, Yaniv – Lea’s nemesis – sticks his head in the window, as he always does, but 
this time Fadi slashes his neck open with a knife. Lea sees this as evidence that Fadi’s nightly 
escapades were indeed only in her head – she has no real power over him, or her thoughts might 
actually have been kind (81). Nevertheless, the matter remains undecided. Was Yaniv’s death a 
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break in the identificatory narrative, the appearance of a Palestinian character with its own 
volition? Or the culmination of that narrative – severing the same neck Lea hated so much and 
giving her a place in the order of things – “I knew I was a soldier then” (84). Fadi’s killing of 
Yaniv is both traumatic and cathartic: violence sculpted Lea such that the logic of violence is the 
only one that makes sense to her. 
 Césaire’s Europe reduced encounters with its Others to a monologue, creating a void 
around itself in which it is destined to perish (74-5). It was this impoverishment which was to be 
Europe’s punishment (“no one colonizes with impunity”). Yaniv warns Lea: “a dick is like a 
boomerang. You throw it at someone, and it comes right back at you” (72). Allen Feldman 
describes a mechanism by which systemic violence erases its subject, rendering visible only 
duplications of the agents of violence. “When the agent of the state speaks”, Feldman argues, 
“what is expected to answer is his creation, his violence, and his body, doubled by the logos and 
submission of the subaltern” (Feldman 410). A terrific boomerang effect, a choc en retour. Lea 
discounts Yaniv’s crass idiom’s veracity, being so much smarter than Yaniv and his “Moroccan” 
expressions.     
People that Don’t Exist 
Lea’s friend Avishag, the second of the three young women, is stationed at the Israeli-Egyptian 
border. Her posting has her looking at a section of the border fence through a monitor in 
agonizing 12-hour shifts. Where “Checkpoint”’s narration subsumed the encounter with an Other 
to a single character’s narration, this chapter’s narration is divided between Avishag, billed as 
“Person A”, and an eighteen-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker who makes her way by truck and 
foot from a camp ravaged by militiamen to a field hospital in Israel. She is called only “Person 
B”, and her narration is as stilted, oblique and jarring as Avishag’s. Like Avishag, she too is 
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complexly informed by violence: to access the money she would need to pay to be smuggled 
across borders, she killed her mother and stepfather. Both characters battle internal struggles. 
Avishag goes through an abortion and is confronted with her self-centeredness, which she does 
not deny but seems to find perplexing. “Person B” is haunted by her mother’s disapproving 
voice, which objects not to her matricide but to the factual inadequacies of her existence: she will 
never be a man; she will never have light skin.   
 The “Person A/Person B” dyad creates a structure of parity which the chapter’s 
circumstances belies. Firstly, Avishag has a name and a persistent story, while the Sudanese girl 
remains nameless and appears in this chapter only. More prominently, the border fence 
separating the two women, as well as their respective national allegiances and their stances 
within the global economy, remain in the forefront. Like Lea and Fadi’s encounter, the encounter 
which is the vanishing point of this chapter is conducted over a fence, described by Kali Rubaii 
as a machine for the unequal dispersal of harm (Rubaii). One body – Lea’s, Avishag’s – is 
protected behind concrete walls, the other one – Fadi’s, Person B’s – is exposed to bullets. 
Finally, in shifting the location from the Palestinian occupied territories to the Egyptian border, 
the novel expands its range to other Others and invites consideration of webs of complicity 
which are transnational. If moods are traces which travel and accumulate, the African “Person B” 
and the Israeli “Person A” seem to inhabit the same mood – young women who are unhappy and 
self-centered, who inflict violence and foresee it inflicted upon them, who feel they are measured 
by the world and found lacking. I will examine this chapter through three inanimate figures 
which the text uses to speak to aspects of its local warscape. A tree speaks to the culture of 
surveillance that enforces the technology of the border fence; a screen speaks to mediation and 
distance, and their role in the design of violence and the makings of structures of feeling; and 
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finally, the figure of tiny made up people, the titular people that don’t exist, open up questions of 
limited emotional possibilities as well as of readers’ implication in the novel’s violent emotional 
landscape. 
The Tree 
Between 2018 and 2020, a group of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative 
journalists and other professionals – known as Forensic Architecture, and headed by Professor 
Eyal Weitzman – were asked to help settle a diplomatic conflict on the Turkey/Greece border. 
Forensic Architecture’s work has helped ratify the claims of communities exposed to persecution 
the world over. With its practices of modeling and cross-referencing media evidence, FA’s work 
duplicates, and thus reveals, the conditions under which much state violence is perpetrated today: 
a media-rich environment where accountability is nevertheless evasive. The border between 
Turkey and Greece runs along the Evros/Meriç river, and is the main overland point of arrival 
into Europe for refugees and migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. For years, 
human rights organizations as well as Turkish officials had been claiming that Greek forces 
engage in ‘Pushbacks’, or informal forcible removals, of asylum-seekers. The refugees would 
cross the river into Europe, only to be seized by Greek forces – allegedly – and returned to the 
Turkish bank. While video evidence of these ‘pushbacks’ existed, Greece vehemently denied its 
veracity. Forensic Architecture analyzed the footage and built 3D models of the terrain. A single, 
distinctively-shaped tree was instrumental in proving that the images had indeed been taken from 
the same spot, supporting the implication of Greek forces in the forced removal39.  
 
39 See Forensic Architecture, “Joint Statement on the Ongoing Violence at the Greece-Turkey Border”, 
March 5 2020 (Forensic Architecture).  
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 Avishag is stationed right at the Israeli-Egyptian border. Yet, her view of the border is 
mediated by a screen. In this arbitrarily framed image, a single tree stands out. Together with the 
edges of the monitor, the tree is the only reference point in the picture, such that Avishag 
references “the pixels below the broken willow tree”. As the chapter follows Person A and 
Person B, the reader charts their paths, modeling and visualizing. When Person B narrates her 
walk in the dark after the smuggler leaves the group and says “[a]head there was a willow tree; it 
was broken, but its top half was still green, lying on the ground”, forensic architecture is at play. 
In the reader’s simulation, the two imaginary geographies – geographies that don’t exist – 
converge.  
 Like Person A ,who sees the willow through a monitor, Person B uses it as a reference 
point: “I tried to convince my legs to just reach the tree, and then we’ll see” (99). A gunshot 
sends her to the ground under that tree, her limbs entwined in its branches. It becomes the site for 
the chapter’s climax, a magical touch between Person A and Person B, the moment in which they 
both transcend their solitary and limited bodies. On Person A’s monitor “there is only that 
broken tree, but also, next to it, a person on the ground” (102). She reaches to touch it. “Lying 
there on the sand by the broken tree”, Person B narrates, “I could feel someone touching me” 
(102).  
The Screen 
The screen Avishag stares at records just a fraction of the fence, arbitrating center and periphery 
(in the frame of the monitor, things can be in the middle or at the edges). It also allows Avishag 
herself to be closely monitored – “they’ll yell if I take my eyes off the monitor” (Boianjiu, The 
People of Forever Are Not Afraid 94). Césaire’s claimed that colonial technology will inevitably, 
with time, be trained on the colonizer herself; Boianjiu puts these events in proximity to each 
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other, suggesting the boomerang effect begins at the moment new technology is introduced 
(Césaire 35). With its pixelated surface and forced attention, the screen seems to distort vision 
rather than sharpen it, as when a Sudanese man’s body hanging from the fence can be seen 
“skewered there, right at the edge, smudged on the bends of the monitor” (98). What does it 
mean when a body is made small, smudged, and at the edge?  
Armies have been thinking of mediation as an enabler of violence at least since World 
War II. S.L.A Marshall’s now infamous Men Against Fire (1947) was concerned with alleged 
soldiers’ inability to fire their weapons in order to kill. From the cross on a rifle-sight to the 
omnivoyant fantasy of drone warfare, new military technologies are animated by illusions of 
perfect vision leading to perfect knowledge, which leads to perfect decision-making. Human 
understanding, vision, and law, in contrast, remain severely limited (Liljefors 4–6, 75–78). 
Avishag’s screen, with its night-vision greenish tinge, increases Israel’s sovereignty of the 
border. Her role as a “watch girl” and her screen are both technologies devised in service of this 
cause: distance the human from the place of violence, get better results (‘better’ meaning the 
right kind of violence, towards the right bodies, in the correct time). Indeed, the relative 
prevalence of female combat soldiers such as Avishag in the Israeli Defense Force is owed in 
part to such distancing mechanisms. It is no wonder that a system in use since 2008 which allows 
“watch girls” to shoot at the ‘targets’ they identify is named in the feminine: ro’a-yora, “she 
sees- she shoots” (Pfeffer). Thus, in the Israeli context as well as elsewhere, visuality is 
increasingly inseparable from virtuality, and this dyad in turn is embroiled with the enactment of 
state violence (Bronfeld-Stein 186–94).  
The demands of the “watch girl” role are few but exacting: she must stare directly at the 
screen without averting her gaze for twelve hours. She gets a ten-minute bathroom break every 
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six hours (Boianjiu, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid 100). If anything happens on her 
sliver of the fence, she must radio an officer (98). Her memories of the past dissolve, an 
occupational hazard (97-8). On her first day at the monitor, Avishag was certain that she could 
not survive. Her solace comes when she is able to see the screen not as a mediator of outside 
reality but as an object in itself. Rather than looking at the image, Avishag focuses on individual 
pixels and the spaces between them: 
The green pixels swam inside each other. I’d gone cross-eyed… Then I decided to die… 
that’s when I saw them. Between the pixels, static white streaks formed the shapes of 
people, hundreds of miniature people, my people, the people that don’t exist” (94). 
The made-up people have followed Avishag from her childhood home, where they appeared in 
the specks of the bathroom tile, to the military base where she imagines them in the grainy 
monitor screen (97). They are less companions, more minions: “I am their ruler” (Ibid.). As such 
she gets to reveal to one of them (“always a girl”) that she is remarkable in some way. The pixel-
person is ecstatic: “she thinks that she is a nobody… she can taste her heart in her mouth, she 
could never imagine” (97). Then Avishag moves to another group of pixel-people, anointing one 
of them, and so on.  
Is she being empathetic, then, in imagining a nonexistent person’s emotions so vividly? 
Or is she self-centered, imagining herself out of oppressive boredom and into a position of 
power? The reader is hard-pressed to see Avishag as a benevolent empath – the Sudanese people 
that jump across the fence, she says, “only distract me from the games with the made-up 
people… and when they get shot, even if they don’t die, that can be very distracting” (98). The 
latticed narration of the chapter insures that “Person B” – a Sudanese asylum-seeker – indeed 
disrupts Avishag’s narrative. Yet ‘distraction’ is not the affective response that the double-
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narration elicits. And anyway, the very first assertion in the chapter is that Avishag only thinks 
about herself, and that thinking about her made up people is “the opposite of thinking about 
another person” (88). What is it in the screen, in mediated images, that makes the world both 
more and less than real for Avishag? When she finally reaches out to touch the monitor – a 
forbidden touch – she finds it “cold and far and real”. Far, despite her touch, and real despite its 
fickle role as object and mediator. The screen makes people appear small – first the dead 
Sudanese man’s body, then the made-up people, and finally Person B. 
The person is much larger than the made-up people usually appear to be on the screen; it 
is as large as the Sudanese people usually appear on the screen. It is the size of a 
fingernail and cute, curled up like an alien. I can see it breathing on the bed of sand (….). 
Through the monitor, Person B seems both large (compared to the made up people) and small 
(compared to life-scale), and her shape is reminiscent both of Avishag’s own body part (the 
fingernail) and of her aborted fetus. She did not see her fetus through a screen, as many mothers 
do via ultrasound imaging. Instead, she pulls from public imagination: “I imagine the baby like 
you see in pictures of fetuses on the abortion pamphlets, as small as a fingernail and cute like a 
curled-up alien” (100). Cuteness is an aesthetic category anchored in an asymmetry of power: the 
fetus, and Person B, are cute because they are unthreatening in a material, bodily sense (Ngai 
54). But, as Lori Merish insists, the power differential of cuteness is not static: the cute object 
makes affective demands on the subject, demands for care that its defenseless nature compels the 
subject to fulfill (Merish 188).    
 The screen enables a moment of magically unmediated touch. It is the primary object of 
the text. At the moment of magical contact, Person B is comforted not only by a touch, the 
presence of a mother-figure larger than her. She also delights in what seem to be the 
shortcomings of the situation – not seeing who it is that touches her, feeling distance and magical 
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mediation, being unconscious or inanimate. “Being touched like that, from such a distance, it 
was like being the grape I could never be—I could see it, but it couldn’t see me.”40 The distance 
and the unknowing are boons. For Person B, this unknowing allows escape or respite from 
implication, from the weight of having committed violence, from having survived thanks to that 
violent act. When she is first assaulted by the magical reproach in her mind, she cries for hours. 
No matter if she reaches Israel, the facts would remain: “My mom and her husband would still be 
dead, and it would be me who had killed them. Worse than that, I would still be me” (…). Person 
B is very clear: being herself is unbearable. 
The Affective Logic of Violence 
Person A and Person B are not completely unfeeling, apathetic subjects. Person A tries to think 
of people other than herself; Person B feels a fractured, projected kind of guilt for killing her 
parents. It seems that both have a fantasy of some normative way of feeling, of an emotional 
relationship to themselves and to the world that they are ‘supposed’ to inhabit. They cannot seem 
to participate in this emotional landscape. Instead, the logic of violence – mediation, 
depersonalization, bodily harm – become the routes through which emotions flow41. Through the 
figure of the single broken tree, Boianjiu’s storytelling takes on the surveilling gaze of the army 
monitor. That monitor in turn seems to enable, rather than disable, feeling towards an other. 
Magically, it enables feeling – touching – that other, and for Person A/Avishag, it enables 
fathoming the fact of her abortion. The moment of touch occurs at the height of bodily 
vulnerability, when Person A’s aching uterus cuts her off from the people that don’t exist, and 
 
40 Person B sees a grape for the first time along the journey in Egypt, finding the berry achingly perfect and finding 
herself envious of it: “I could never, ever, even in a million years, become a grape” (97). 
41 “Transforming a person into an abstraction makes the subject not-human, so that the idea of shooting someone 
becomes more acceptable,” writes designer Milton Glaser in his entry on Shooting range targets in the MOMA’s 
Design and Violence archive.   
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Person B is shot at the fence, allowing her dead mother’s voice access. The logic of violence 
determines both characters’ available responses. This episode reveals that violence affects the 
possible object of emotion, too. Feeling is directed towards those objects groomed for violence: 
nameless people, viewed through a screen; things that are “cold and far and real”.  
Césaire’s boomerang effect dictates that the society complicit in violence awakens to find 
its designated perpetrators busy. “[T]he torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, 
discuss” (Césaire 35). Violence is inventive, it fashions screens and figures out night-vision, it 
necessitates cleverness (Person B kills her mother and stepfather cleverly: “I had to use fire and 
not a rock… I had to be fast, and I was” – 94). Reading Boianjiu, it seems that violence envelops 
and incorporates those complicit in it: they are taught about it in school, learn to think through it, 
are destined to labor for it as young soldiers and as adult workers in a factory that “makes parts 
that go into machines that help make machines that can make airplanes” (7). Its choc en retour is 
less an event of awakening (Césaire’s “one fine day”), less a sudden appearance of the 
technocrats who invent and refine, and more an ever-permeating process which creates those 
complicit in it as much as it assigns them roles. The text describes the militaristic pathos of 
Israeli society, as well as the violence of refugee camps and human smuggling operations, as 
non-event continuums. Consider the way single moments of violent injury – stabbing, matricide, 
abortion, shooting – are described as distracting, easy, exciting, and quiet, respectively. Incessant 
violence etches deep grooves in which all affect has no choice but to flow. This argument which 
the novel makes does not excuse perpetration or complicity. It avoids such absolution, in part, by 
extending the affective logic of violence to the management of readerly affect. 
Above, I have read the insistent appearance of a single broken willow-tree from two 
different angles as the text’s nod to the omniscopic aspirations of surveillance technology. This 
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allusion only works, however, by positioning the reader as an intelligence analyst: the reader 
must first take seriously the appearance of the seemingly unimportant tree on Person A’s screen; 
she must then remember this detail, and cross-reference it when a broken tree appears in Person 
B’s line of sight. And this is not the only way the reader finds herself implicated in the text. 
Several second-person addresses pull her into the plot as an addressee of the two women’s 
narration. First she is addressed in Person B’s voice: “You’d want to think I don’t exist, but I do” 
(88). Defiant and direct, the young Sudanese narrator clarifies that it is the murders she had 
committed that her addressee would allegedly prefer to deny. Person A explains her game with 
the made-up people directly to the reader. When she tells the chosen pixel-person that she is 
chosen she describes her reaction: “let me tell you, she gets so excited she can taste her heart in 
her mouth” (95). The reader is implicated in Avishag’s media landscape: she imagines her baby 
“like you see in pictures of fetuses on the abortion pamphlets” (100). It follows that Person B is 
speaking to us defiantly, across a divide of disbelief, whereas Person A’s address is easier and 
assumes commonality. This forced alliance with Avishag is not flattering. “You have to 
understand”, she tells me, “it is hard to feel bad for [the dead asylum-seekers] because in all truth 
they look African” (101). I do not get to reply – that is not how novels work – but I also do not 
get to hate Avishag. In People of Forever, no one gets to feel straightforward, neat feelings – 
least of all, the reader.  
The reader’s implication in the violent emotional logic of the text goes further than these 
occasional second-person addresses. The titular “people that don’t exist” are Avishag’s minion-
playmates, imagined between the pixels of her monitor; but they are also Person A and Person B, 
whose fictionality is constantly reinforced by namelessness. If thinking about made-up people is, 
as the text declares, “the opposite of thinking about another person”, then the reader is thinking 
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only about herself – just like Avishag (87). Thus, on multiple levels, we are not allowed the 
stance of remotely judging the actions in the text. Rather, as readers, we contend with piecing 
together a disjointed plot – and thus engaging in military-like surveillance analysis; contend with 
the absurd overtones of a girl murdering her parents as militiamen raid the camp around her, but 
with the same character’s direct challenge to believe her story; contends with Avishag’s 
callousness as well as the implicit charge that we, the readers, share it. It is this complex 
implication that steers the text away from casually absolving either character or the cultures that 
surround them. We can think about this kind of absolution through the South African case of 
Mark Behr, who famously claimed he wrote his novel The Smell of Apples to “show how one is 
born into, loved into, violated into discrimination” (in Borain). After Behr’s confession that he 
had acted as a spy for the apartheid police, his lamentation of inheriting apartheid’s violence 
drew the ire of many: “an orgy of self-pity and self-promotion”, one critic called it (Borain). The 
challenge which Behr’s meteoric rise-and-fall crystallizes is this: how can an author interrogate 
those social aspects, invisible because they are taken for granted, which are the conditions of 
widespread complicity in violence – without, at the same time, exculpating the individuals who 
are complicit as such? A perpetrator’s confessions are only ‘successful’ if they end in the self-
implication of “the society at whose behest s/he was sent” (Morag 4). With its layered, 
unrelenting grip on the reader, People that Don’t Exist produces enough unsettlement to, 
perhaps, engender such self-evaluation. 
 
Compulsive Perpetration: “1.5 Bedrooms in Tel Aviv” 
Boianjiu’s People of Forever (2012) inculcates the reader in the structure of feeling of Israeli 
complicity. The chapter “1.5 Bedrooms in Tel Aviv” reunites us with Lea, who we had left as 
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she came into her role as checkpoint soldier and decided to become an officer. In many ways a 
continuation of “Checkpoint”, the chapter takes place some time after Lea finishes her army 
service. She has moved to Tel Aviv and works at a successful sandwich kiosk, where she makes 
Tel Aviv’s bourgeoisie sandwiches to their exact specifications. The chapter is heavily focalized 
through Ron, Lea’s boss-turned-boyfriend.  
The relationship between Lea’s army role and her service job at the kiosk is first 
illuminated by the correspondence of the spatial layout in "1.5 Bedrooms” with that of 
"Checkpoint". The geography of the boulevard kiosk in which Ron and Lea "give people what 
they want", no questions asked, suggests a spatial parallelism with the checkpoint in which Lea 
stood endlessly turning people away: both are small buildings along a single, straight path (271). 
The insides of Lea's apartment, particularly its mysterious half-bedroom, echo Lea's 
phantasmatic intrusion into Fadi's Hebron home. If her first transgression had constituted 
identification as a form of violence and denied Fadi a place in the narrative, in "1.5 Bedrooms" 
Lea chains him up and uses part of her own apartment as a torture chamber, completing a 
gruesome escalation from a narrative nullification to a bodily one. 
Ron's focalization positions him as the reader's proxy. The reader and Ron are exposed to 
Lea's violent actions, past and present, at the same time. Through Ron's eyes, the reader sees 
Lea's empathetic capacities, as the chapter opens to her "cut[ting] open the wheat bread with 
delicate twists of her wrist, as if she [feels] each jag of the knife as it cut through the dough" 
(253). Together with Ron, the reader is warned by Lea that, despite her idealization throughout 
the narration, she is "not a good person. [She] ha[s] done disgusting things"; and with him the 
reader discovers that a sound of sobbing, initially ascribed to another one of Lea's checkpoint-
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related nightmares, in fact comes from the locked half-bedroom in which lies "[a] middle-aged 
Arab man … with his hands and legs cuffed ... naked, and the skin on his back … burned" (275). 
With Ron, the reader is once again positioned as the audience to a perpetrator’s 
confession. As mentioned above, perpetrator confessions make demands on their audience which 
are markedly different than other forms of speech, certainly different than victim testimony. The 
audience is challenged to recognize their complicity in precipitating the violence at hand (Morag 
4). "[T]he perpetrator's ethical insight [is] tested against society's willingness to accept 
responsibility, rather than its willingness to accept the perpetrator" (19).  
When Ron finds Lea on the bathroom floor, sobbing, after their first night together, it 
seems for a minute that he hears her silence as a confession. As he realizes the source of her 
guilt, he places the blame on society at large: 
“You don’t want to be with me,” she said and smiled. “I told you, I am not a good person. 
I have done disgusting things.” 
“You mean to the people at the checkpoints?” he asked. She nodded. 
“That’s everyone who has been there. It’s not you. It’s this fucked-up army; it fucks you 
up,” he said. (267) 
Ron falls in love with Lea, decisively determining his reaction to her confession. Without 
hearing the full account of the actions by which she is haunted, he cuts short her confession and 
overwrites it with his devotion to her and his anger towards an abstract notion of society in 
which Ron does not feel implicated himself: 
‘Whatever it is,’ he said, ‘it won’t change a thing. Tell me you had to kick a grandpa in 
the balls and I wouldn’t care.’ Ron felt angry, sickened, at the city, at the country—at 
whatever circumstances had made Lea cry like that. It wasn’t right. It had never been 
right, this whole seventy-year-long war. He had never realized that before now. (267) 
Ron privileges Lea’s intact image in his eyes over the ethical position of an audience to 
confession. He replaces what could be an ethical stance of becoming-audience, of “reading” 
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Lea’s confession, with romantic idealization. Congruently, the scene ends with a firm decision 
on Ron’s part – not a decision to challenge the unjust and futile systemic violence of Israeli 
society, but a resolution to rescue Lea.42 He then proceeds into the chamber where Lea keeps the 
man she calls Fadi. In this strange reversal, the damsel in distress is in fact the gruesome captor, 
beauty and beast are one and the same. 
 As Ron finds Fadi, the physical conditions of the chamber overwhelm him: "Nothing 
made sense; nothing seemed to match" (275). He does nothing, certainly not rushing to release 
Fadi; this can be attributed to the same state of shock in which he finds himself willing but 
unable to speak ("Ron opened his mouth but no words came out" - 275). Even his technical 
questions – how had Lea carried the heavy man up the stairs, hadn't anyone noticed – may be 
expected to introduce the adoption of an ethical stance. But it soon becomes clear that once 
again, Ron does not hold Lea accountable for her actions. Moreover, he slips from complacency 
about her past into serving as an accomplice in her present atrocity: "He landed a blow on the 
back of the man’s neck. The man crumpled; his face smacked the floor" (276). As before, Ron's 
infatuation with Lea comes at the expense of recognizing her responsibility and the extent of his 
own implication in it. 
A question of language resurfaces with would-be-Fadi’s utterance: “’Help me’, the man 
said to Ron in Arabic” (276). Ron understands the man thanks to his service as a military 
translator. The specification of the use of Arabic and the explanation the text gives for Ron’s 
proficiency insert the reality of language barriers, which was absent in “Checkpoint”. 
Throughout the novel, the English narration opens up theoretical possibilities of communication 
 
42 This is in keeping with the chapter's underlying ironic structuring as a fairy-tale, pointed out by Dr. Tsafi Sebba 
Elran in a conference held in Haifa University (December 10th 2014). 
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by casting Israeli border encounters in English. Yet, as I have shown, Fadi’s speech in 
“Checkpoint” did not enjoy this potential liberation from linguistic barriers because it was not 
Fadi’s, but Lea’s; she could hardly imagine him into being in Arabic, a language she does not 
speak. This cry for help is Fadi's first direct speech narrated by an extradiegetic narrator. Lea is 
exasperated by Fadi’s communication efforts: “He keeps on talking to me. On and on and on. 
You’d think he’d gather by this point I don’t understand a word of Arabic. I thought he’d stop 
talking after I knocked his teeth out, but he won’t” (276). “When the agent of the state speaks 
what is expected to answer is his creation, his violence, and his body” – the man tied to the chair 
does not follow this logic. Perhaps he does not realize that the woman who holds a torch to his 
back has been reduced to an agent of the state (Feldman 410).   
Which brings us to the question – who is this man, who has spent the last weeks in a hell 
of a 21-year-old woman’s making? Lea says he is Fadi, but Fadi had killed a soldier, and 
Palestinians who have done that are not found walking about in Tel Aviv. Nothing makes sense, 
nothing seems to match – this statement by the narrator describes the reading experience of this 
chapter and the novel at large. Fadi’s ontological status was unclear in his first appearance in the 
novel due to Lea’s ravenous, projective narration. Here it is once again brought into question, as 
the events described support a reading in which Lea simply repeated her previous trick – she 
chose a man from the crowd – and continued to use him to satiate her needs. When she was a 
soldier at the checkpoint, that need was sleep; now it seems to be compulsive repetition. 
Would-be-Fadi's linguistic otherness disrupts the bond of immersive identification which 
had arguably made him into Lea’s target in the first place. Boianjiu seems to assign the full scope 
of Hebrew literature’s relation to its Others to Lea’s character. The Hebrew novels written 
between the 1967 and 1973 wars have been shown to conjure the Arabic other as animalistic, 
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pre-linguistic beings, in opposition to which the Israeli Jew can construct his/her identity as 
sovereign (Peled 3). This is a trope Boianjiu seems to adopt ironically, asking through Lea what 
scenarios can unfold when instead of pre-linguistic silence, the language of the sovereign is 
projected to create an Other who speaks in the voice of the self. Yet this step itself references a 
second trope of Hebrew literature: Hebrew national literature excessively presented and 
represented its Others through representations of the process of their erasure. The result is not the 
disappearance of the Other from the corpus, but a visibility of acts of his/her eradication (Hever, 
“Map of Sand” 167). This visibility of the acts of erasure is a form of control, as it ensures that 
the Other will have no possibility of existing in some “other place” (ibid.).  
Accordingly, Lea’s need to control Fadi forces her to insert him into the narrative, into 
her home. Even the violent act of stabbing a soldier, which is Lea’s pretense for torturing would-
be Fadi, is his own only arguably. Was it Fadi under Lea’s narrative who killed Yaniv, the 
soldier she despised, as is suggested by her sense of guilt (272)? Or did Fadi’s violent outburst 
constitute a breach of her control and an assertion of his own political agency? Having unsettled 
the order of history by blurring the lines between herself and an-Other, Lea seeks to rehabilitate 
that order: to inscribe and reinscribe, on a Palestinian man’s body, "a memory of who ’won’ and 
who ’lost’" (Feldman 211). Abducting and torturing Fadi in Tel Aviv, then, constitutes a violent 
duality of reification and erasure performative of Israeli representations of Others. Lea brings 
Fadi close, thus not allowing the possibility of his existence elsewhere. Identifying with the 
other’s pain via a projection of the protagonist’s (Jewish) identity onto them stands at the basis of 
Hebrew literature’s mechanisms of justification of Israeli violence (Hever, “Map of Sand” 175). 
Thus, Boianjiu places at the hands of her heroines (Lea, Avishag) well-known, established 
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tropes, tracing their end result: a girl aiming a lit butane torch at the exposed back of an Other 
whom she identifies with herself. 
A straightforward interpretation might read Lea as simply importing the perverse power 
allotted to her over Palestinian bodies back to the metropole, meaning Tel Aviv. But I would like 
to point out the intimacy at play in the novel. When Ron and Lea first slept together, “all he 
could remember was falling asleep to the sound of his own moaning, but he woke to the sound of 
someone else’s” (275). That is when he finds Lea sobbing, declaring her own defectiveness and 
the horrible thing she had done. Pages later, Ron is finally allowed into Lea’s apartment, and 
they fall asleep together. Once again Ron is awoken by “A sob. A moan”, this time would-be-
Fadi’s. In the auditory world of this text sex, an Israeli’s compulsive cruelty, and a Palestinian 
man’s pain all sound more or less the same. 
 Césaire’s choc en retour happens in the public sphere. The European bourgeoisie wakes 
up, presumably in their appropriately private homes, while the spaces invaded by the ‘rot’ of 
Europeans’ savagery in the colonies are the social (if clandestine) spaces of policing, 
interrogation chambers, and prisons (Césaire 36). Lea’s character encapsulates the “torturers at 
the racks” and the awakening bourgeoisie. There is no mistaking the agency by which she brings 
about her own haunting of “Fadi” – “I took him”, she tells Ron. The extra half bedroom of her 
apartment, which features up to this point as a linguistic oddity of Tel Aviv’s real-estate market, 
becomes Césaire’s prison and torture chamber. Lea exerts total control over the Palestinian 
man’s body. We gather, however, that she is not in complete control over herself: “I can’t stop 
either; I can’t let him go”, she tells Ron (276). Césaire’s script of the boomerang effect takes 
place in the public sphere because it is a pathology of the social. In Boianjiu’s novel, the focus 
on three individual women places the weight of the drama of complicity in the interaction 
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between the social and the individual. There is no division between the agents of violence and 
the civilians who wake up to find those agents on their streets. Boianjiu, like Brodetsky and 
Shelach – and like Vladislavić – turns our attention to the mutation of the self which is created as 
her characters come into their role in a complicit society. The bastardization of power and 
helplessness; agency and compulsion; perpetration and victimhood; and passion and suffering 
are symptomatic of these particular mutations.  
Ron resolves the complicated drama of Lea's current violence as he did the drama of the 
confession of her past. He will "have to help Lea let the man go soon, and scare him enough to 
keep a secret", but all that can wait until they had gone back to bed – the bed that is mere meters 
away from “Fadi”’s mutilated body (277). Treating a Palestinian man as one of Lea’s 
‘problems’, choosing union with her over an ethical reading of power relations, Ron fails or 
prefers not to identify Fadi as victim and Lea as perpetrator. In Morag’s model, a critical hearing 
of a perpetrator’s confession would derive the acknowledgement of social conditions of 
responsibility, thus turning the private post-trauma of the single perpetrator into a shared social 
dilemma (18-19). Ron is modeling a perverse response, one almost as vicious as Lea’s cruelty. It 
seems to me that in these scenes – a confession in a bathroom, the exposure of horrors in a half-
bedroom – the novel models a reading of Lea’s, Avishag’s actions that it seeks to foreclose.  
The Problem of Audience: Anglophone-Israeli Writing 
My reading of The People of Forever relies heavily upon the demands this novel makes 
on its readers. But who is this audience exactly? A native Hebrew-speaker with no English or 
American ancestry, Boianjiu nevertheless chose to compose and publish her work in a language 
that is alien to its subject-matter. No West-Bank checkpoint is policed in English; no IDF officer 
ridicules his subordinates in a foreign tongue. Rather than glossing over this fact, the book’s 
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style highlights it. One example of this emphasis is the novel’s title, a prosaic translation of a 
religious-nationalistic epigram coined by a politically prominent Rabbi and popularized on 
bumper-stickers and protest signs. The full saying translates to “the people of forever are not 
afraid of a long journey”, and holds eschatological as well as political meaning43. In English, 
however, it reads somewhat opaque: the sentence’s grammatical order feels wrong, and 
inaugurates the reader to the undercurrent of destabilization she will encounter in the book’s 
language. Boianjiu's English is pulled apart and stuck back together, with Hebrew peeking from 
the cracks. Neither Hebrew nor English readers will feel entirely at home in this novel.     
The audience of Boianjiu’s work is complicated: the novel’s language and publication 
history points, of course, to an American audience, with less-than-elegant interjections of 
background information backing up this assumption (Boianjiu 62; 68). The novel’s subject-
matter and the intricacies of Israeli society depicted in it point to an Israeli audience, but this is 
hard to reconcile with the language barrier and with the fact that the Hebrew translation was the 
latter of some 20 international publications. Boianjiu herself claims an ad-hoc audience, 
comprised of the multi-national participants of Harvard’s writing program (Boianjiu, Interview 
with Shani Boianjiu). But the question of audience is even more Gordian because the implied 
audience for this novel might well be nonexistent. The multiple possible markets enumerated 
above negate any one public’s ability to embody the text’s ideal readership, in fact depriving it of 
a "proper" audience – or leaving all readers incompetent. It could be claimed that this rendering-
 
43 The epigram is a title given by Rabbi Weitzman to a Rabbi A.I Kook paragraph which claims that Israel’s violent 
and conflictual national journey is no more than a testament to the Jewish nation’s longevity and strength. This 
concept was later adopted by right-wing religious groups to protest against the 2005 Israeli disengagement from 
Gaza and lament its execution. 
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insufficient of the audience joins an abnormally callous representation of violent acts to become 
the novel’s own violence, directed towards its readers.   
Aside from the narrative possibilities it opens up, People of Forever’s English text also 
enables Boianjiu to push back aesthetically and politically against familiar narratives of Hebrew 
literature describing Israeli systemic violence. The main stream of this corpus is concerned with 
male fighters, female victims, and a violence manifest through traditional combat (Hever, 
Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon; Bronfeld-Stein; Kimmerling 123–24). Thus, Boianjiu 
positions herself obliquely to the ideological code of Hebrew literature in more ways than the 
evasion of its language. Like some other contemporary authors, she does not participate in 
tracing a teleological track which leads from exile to salvation (Ibid, “מגולה לגאולה”). In keeping 
with the thematic typology of Hebrew literature, The People of Forever depicts Israel-Palestine’s 
colonial landscape through a neocolonial lens: the colonizing effort seems to be over, and Jewish 
sovereignty is the obvious state of affairs (Hever, “Map of Sand” 168). Unlike this 
characterization however, the novel does not attempt to conceal the violent process which 
brought this sovereignty into being, nor does it hide the fact that this sovereignty entails constant 
violent maintenance. In fact, precisely these ideas are foregrounded in The People of Forever: the 
never-ending supply of resources, violence and victimhood needed to maintain national control 
over the territory can be said to be the novel’s very subject-matter. In other words, rather than 
smoothing-away Israeli reality’s violent discrepancies, Boianjiu’s novel puts these very fissures 
at the centre of its stage. 
 
  
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CHAPTER 4 
TUNNELS, ANIMALS, AND LOST THINGS: THE LACUNA OF COLLECTIVE 
RESPONSIBILITY IN LAUREN BEUKES’ S ZOO CITY 
Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City (2010) is a speculative crime-noir set in Johannesburg. Zinzi Lelethu 
December, a recovering drug addict ‘animalled’ after her involvement in her brother’s murder, 
carries a sloth on her back as she navigates the harsh city underbelly, using her magical gift to 
find lost things and helping the crime syndicate which holds her drug debt to scam rich 
foreigners out of their money. When it was published, the novel was deemed apolitical, even 
“curiously amnesiac” regarding Johannesburg’s apartheid past (J. Brown 8).  
It is true that the novel employs a tight first-person present narration which stands in 
opposition to the memory-laden prose of Double Negative and other postapartheid realist South 
African fiction. It is equally true that race is not the central vector of difference in the novel’s 
social fabric. Instead, we get native South Africans separating themselves from immigrant and 
refugee Mkwerekwere; inner-city dweller Zinzi contrasting with enormously wealthy 
suburbanites as well as literal gutter-dwellers, further outside respected society than even she is; 
and, of course, the now-visible divide between people assumed innocent and those marked as 
criminals by an “aposymbiot” animal. The latter, derogatorily named “Zoos”, inhabit the decrepit 
high-rise buildings of central Johannesburg, the eponymous Zoo City. The novel hints at other 
nations’ policies of quarantining and even executing the ‘animalled’, and while protected from 
such acts under the South African constitution – as exalted and ridiculed in the novel as it is in 
today’s South Africa – it cannot shelter them from economic censure and prejudice. I argue that 
the matrix of difference plotted by the novel departs from the singular focus on race not as an 
‘amnesiac’ disavowal of apartheid but as a reaction to the contemporary South African urban 
social fabric. In superimposing multiple justice systems, the novel establishes public culpability 
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and complicity as unaddressed lacunae in law as well as metaphysical occurrence. The novel 
presents its readers with multiple ethical systems assumed universal, only to fray each of them 
and question their universality. Doing so, it gestures towards the alternative ethical possibilities 
of communitarian personhood and of care ethics. It is the speculative form, the form of “what 
if?”, which makes Zoo City a fundamentally questioning novel and affords the kinds of inquiry, 
analyzed throughout this chapter, which generates alternative ethics. 
Before describing the “ontological shift” on which the novel’s speculative element focuses, 
let us review the more familiar, human-generated justice systems which occupy its world. First 
among these is state law, with its police officers and court clerks, jailhouses and interrogation 
rooms. State law accounts for some of the constraints on Beukes’ characters: Zinzi is an ex-con, 
negotiating the loss of the privileges of her pre-jail life as well as the unwanted freedom outside 
prison’s tightly regimented existence (61). When Zinzi attempts to return a lost object to a rich 
client only to find the client dead, Sloth makes her an immediate suspect. She is interrogated by 
an officer, an interrogation which becomes a defining moment for the ethics of the novel: 
"All I'm saying is that you've murdered before." 
"The court said accessory to." 
"That's not what the thing on your back says." 
"He's a Sloth." 
"He's guilt. You know how many people I've shot in eleven years on the force? (…) A good 
cop doesn't need to shoot to kill." 
"Is that what you are? A good cop?" 
She spreads her hands. "You see a furry companion at my side?" (33) 
We learn many things here: first, the appearance of a cosmic justice-meting function has not 
spelled the end of policing, only shifted the biases police employ. Second, the legal system is 
more cognizant of guilt by degrees than the supernatural Undertow which ‘animals’ criminals, 
the latter oblivious to the differentiation between Zinzi’s murdering her brother and her being an 
accessory in his death. Third, the policewoman employs reverse causation – no animal, meaning 
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no guilt – which is a staple of the common understanding of legal justice systems. Since jails 
exist, this intuitive wisdom says, we can assume that anyone walking outside them is innocent.    
In Johannesburg’s landscape, the state system is augmented by a thriving private security 
sector which, just like the former, plots and controls movement through the city, wields the 
double-edged sword of safety (which spaces are safe for whom, and at who’s expense?), and 
empowers some individuals to discipline others (97). Notably, some populations wanted by the 
State comprise the bulk of the private sector’s workforce, the limits of the acceptable shifting 
along with financial interest44. And where neither State nor Private law rules, there are gangs: 
car-heist networks and drug cartels, debt collection syndicates and 419 scam rings. These too 
divide the city, fighting rival gangs and enforcing their own codes.  
Zoo City layers an additional legal system over – or rather, under – the man-made ones 
enumerated above. In Beukes’ version of the world, committing a serious crime – mostly murder 
– is followed by a set sequence of events. After committing the moral offense, a drop in air 
pressure is sensed, followed by a gathering of shadows. A menacing non-presence known as “the 
Undertow” materializes, threatening to consume the perpetrator (236). Then, an animal appears 
as if it walked to that spot from whichever place on the globe, and protects the guilty party from 
the Undertow. From that moment forward, the human’s existence is tied to and dependent on 
their animal’s proximity and survival: the animal feels what the human is feeling, and the person 
feels pain if the animal is far away (308). The animal confers a special talent on its human, like 
the ability to hear thoughts, find lost things, or become invisible. If the animal dies, the undertow 
 
44 This is true of the employment of Zoos – “Zoos do okay in the security sector, especially with Sentinel, which is 
the largest and therefore, as a matter of practicality, the most open-minded armed response company in the city” 
(79); and of non-citizens without legal status like Zinzi’s lover Benoit, whose experience surviving war in the other 
parts of Africa makes them valuable as a private security guards. “That's the thing about Africa”, she notes, “There 
are a lot of wars. A lot of unemployed ex-soldiers” (Ibid.) 
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returns to claim its human. The animals, their humans, and the magical powers are referred to by 
the novel’s scientific parlance as “aposymbiots”, and by its colloquial register as “maShavi”, a 
term originating in Shona cosmology.    
The Undertow and maShavi constitute a cosmic, natural justice system. They only appear for 
individuals who committed a crime – or, as it is doubtful global (super)natural forces are 
interested in the legal trappings of Human law, an infringement on some ethical rule. They are 
introduced by the novel’s characters and paratexts45 as manifestations of guilt; as scapegoats, 
either in themselves or by rendering their human companion sacrificial; and as lost spirits who 
latch onto morally-vulnerable individuals (33;202;61;181;201-2). Whatever their ontological 
nature, it seems safe to say that the animals are physical manifestations of responsibility for 
wrongdoing or of the felt sense of such responsibility.  
Zoo City’s world, then, is layered with multiple systems of crime prevention, punishment, 
and justice, matched by equally multifarious forms of violence. One would hope that the 
invention of a cosmic, ontological system of justice would remedy or amend the shortcomings of 
our own reality’s painfully flawed establishments. In fact, Beukes’ text highlights the flaws of 
every such system, creating a picture of overlap rather than supplementation. Taking, for 
brevity’s sake, the examples of State justice and the Undertow, the reader notes that both systems 
can only operate ex post facto, thus they do not prevent crime; that while the State shows 
disinterest in different orders of morality, persecuting murderers and “illegal” immigrants alike, 
the Undertow shows similar disinterest for degrees of responsibility, haunting and ‘animalling’ a 
 
45 Beukes augments and interrupts Zinzi’s narration with excerpted news articles, chat conversations, academic 
papers, online movie reviews, and other wide-ranging paratexts, each characterized by its own grammar and 
writing conventions. The acknowledgements reveal that some of these were written by fellow authors Beukes 
conscripted. These excerpts mirror the questioning of individualism in Zoo City as even the novel, that most self-
contained of forms, is regularly interrupted.    
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human trafficking ringleader to the same extent that it does an accidental accomplice to murder; 
and that both systems pursue justice in a way that assumes a bounded, sovereign individual 
subject which is the sole locus of right- or wrongdoing. Police and courts, gang law and 
Undertow, all fail to register systemic violence and collective responsibility. 
Establishing collective responsibility and complicity as ethical lacunae, the novel probes the 
limits of personal responsibility and of systemic injustice. I will introduce several such issues 
present in the book briefly, then concentrate on the novel’s climactic showdown as a drama of 
responsibility. The connection between questions of collective responsibility and complicity, as 
its shape has emerged in novels by Vladislavić and Boianjiu, Brodetzky and Shelach, has a long 
history. However, that history seems to rule against such a connection; sources in Euro-
American literary and political theory have proven loyal to the individual as the sole moral agent. 
In the genealogy of terms of complicity, the individual can be guilty and bear responsibility 
(Arendt, Jaspers); can be an accomplice or be complicit (Kutz, Mandel, Sanyal, Sanders) ; can be 
a beneficiary (Mamdani, Meister) or an heir of past wrongdoing (Schwab, Hirsch) – but she does 
so on her own, as individual. Indeed, the latest addition to this genealogy, put forth as an 
umbrella term, is the “implicated subject” – a term which strives to encapsulate different kinds of 
connections between contemporary individuals to past and ongoing injustices but stops short of 
drawing connections between those individuals (Rothberg, The Implicated Subject 13, 19). 
There are good reasons to shy away from collective responsibility. The most convincing of 
these is that collective responsibility carries with it the fictions of organic collectives and of 
equal personal responsibility. The first fiction sees the collective – the Nation, the community, 
the class – as an organic body, merged and undifferentiated, wholly backing its leaders 
(Rothberg, The Implicated Subject 18). This is a patently false view: yet I would suggest that 
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being inorganic and differentiated, collectives as such may yet bear responsibility. As to the 
second fiction – ‘if everyone is responsible, no one is’ – it is a salient one, especially as 
widespread complicity has historically been used to defer ethical reckoning (Arendt, Organized 
Guilt and Universal Responsibility 204; Macdonald 33–34)46. Still, throughout the previous 
chapters, I have shown how complicity is figured diagetically in the connections of character and 
material environment, and meta-diagetically in language that recourses to materiality. Might we 
not identify a collective based on material commonality, as Mamdani and Meister do with 
individuals? Can we not interrogate the ways real material gain given to a collective may create 
real moral debt by the same collective, without implying that its individual members are forgiven 
their own individual moral debts?47  
The interrogation scene which I quoted above is in a way a Foucauldian individuation scene. 
Disciplinary institutions, Foucault claims, not only punish ethical infringements but create 
individuals too; this is because for him, members of liberal societies define themselves by 
embracing a body of norms (and, importantly, by designating specific subgroups as ineligible for 
the personhood produced by the disciplinary institutions which maintain these norms) (Foucault 
et al. 242). The Undertow supposedly individuates Zinzi because it holds her – and only her – 
responsible for her brother’s death. Yet the form created by the Undertow is emphatically not an 
individual, as it has an animal attached to it and magical abilities flowing to and from it. The 
individual created by the penal system is cracked open. Through the crack, a collective appears. 
If Foucault’s claim is that an individual, penally-constituted, creates in turn the liberal society, 
 
46 Hannah Arendt in fact claims that towards the end of the Second World War the Nazi regime actively spread 
information about its once-secret genocidal activities, in order to force the general public into complicity and thus 
thwart punishment (Arendt, Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility 204). 
47 My suggestion here runs counter to others, like Rothberg, who hints at a model of ‘buying in’ to implication in 
injustice – a taxpayer becomes implicated in the actions of her government because she helps to finance those 
actions (Rothberg, The Implicated Subject 19)  
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Zoo City implies that a collective – a public – cannot be created by disciplinary systems which 
do not recognize public responsibility. Nevertheless, collectives and their attendant public 
responsibilities are present as the object towards which the novel’s speculation gestures, 
suggesting that they exist in excess of the disciplinary systems fleshed out in the plot. 
One instance of questioned responsibility is manifest in the material conditions of Zoo City, a 
speculative extension of Johannesburg’s central districts. History has seen Berea, Hillbrow, 
Braamfontein and surrounding neighbourhoods’ high-riser buildings, which were conceived as 
luxury apartments for a globe-trotting white elite, abandoned and crumbling following the flight 
of businesses and government offices to the suburbs. In recent decades these areas have been 
home to countless migrant workers streaming into the city from surrounding areas as well as to 
itinerant workers from elsewhere on the continent. Transportation, education, and 
communication infrastructures largely abandoned, the areas rely on highly changeable and 
creative forms of squatting and slum-lording, hawking and trading (see Eatough 703). Beukes 
does not need to stretch the imagination far, then, to describe the area as “Zoo City”, the only 
place a person like Zinzi, scorned for the Sloth who marks her as a criminal, can rent an 
apartment, among “barbed wire and broken windows… all the buildings connected via officially 
constructed walkways or improvised bridges to form one sprawling ghetto warren” (61). The 
bare wires and missing stairs go unfixed in the same way Zoo City murders go unsolved: they do 
not fall into anyone’s responsibility. Witnessing a gang fight from her neighbours’ window in the 
high-rise slum of Elysium, Zinzi narrates: 
The police are a joke with a punchline you've heard before. Armed response runs Zoo City 
and the downtown area the same way dogs piss on their territory. They're only interested in 
protecting their buildings. If a crime happens across the road, it's as if it doesn't happen at all. 
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They lose interest as soon as it's out of their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, Elysium and Aurum 
fall out of the borders of privatised law. Our landlord is too snoep to pony up for protection 
(233-4)   
Inhabitants are left to fend for themselves in the gaps created by the state’s prejudice and the 
private sector’s financial interests. But who is responsible? And how might an “ontological shift” 
of a different kind fill this ethical void? 
 The impasse around systemic violence and neglect is supplemented by questions the 
novel asks regarding the level of sovereignty held by individuals. Explaining how he killed a 
fellow kidnapped teenager under duress from Congolese rebels, Zinzi’s lover Benoit likens war 
to the mongoose he is cosmically attached to: “the war in the Congo is like an animal. You can't 
get away from it" (259). “There’s no such thing as free will”, seconds a young recovering addict 
Zinzi meets later on; no matter what the rehab professionals claim about choice, addiction is in 
the flesh: “[i]t's in the coding, right?… it's some bits of screwy DNA. I'm just meat with faulty 
programming" (172). Jayna Brown points out that Zoo City’s material environment, its grime 
and detritus, is “distinctly fleshly, organic” (J. Brown 7). And flesh, as Alexander Weheliye tells 
us, may anchor a figuration of humanity as in the tradition of oppressed Black people in North 
America (12). Who is responsible for the death of the child Benoit was ‘animalled’ for, if war 
itself is as preordained as the animal? The novel’s ‘fleshliness’ hails the vulnerability of bodies, 
incongruent with a Modern Western politics and culture resting on a notion of wounding as 
exceptional. Here the suffering of oppressed peoples figures in the domain of the mundane, 
offering pathways to understandings of humanity other than those hinging on a vision of 
impervious-until-wounded Man (Weheliye). In Beukes’ formulation, the material facts of the 
body – its essential vulnerability and connectedness as well as certain bodies’ differential 
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susceptibility to systemically-produced forms of violence (the state, extraction capitalism, gangs, 
sexual violence) – stands in partial opposition to free will and thus to the exclusivity of 
individual responsibility, which the novel’s forms of justice systems track48.    
 The terrible secret at the heart of the novel, a secret Zinzi spends its duration reluctantly 
uncovering, is that Odi Huron – a mysterious and successful music producer, a white man who 
“was one of a handful of white producers… who were willing to take a risk on black artists at a 
time when the apartheid government frowned sternly” on such moves, is planning to transfer his 
aposymbiotic albino crocodile to an unsuspecting (black) teenage pop-star (chap. 15). It is 
implied that Huron got his albino beast following the death of two of his employees in a gang-
related shooting at his club. While he was not there at the time, the fire safety exit that he kept 
padlocked cost the employees their life (163). To ostensibly ‘deserve’ the alligator, singer S’bu 
must be made to murder his twin sister, Song. Stripped and drugged, the popstar sibling duo are 
led to the alter-site. S’bu thinks he is playing an especially realistic computer game, yelling “Die, 
Cthul'mite!” as he slashes at his sister, who is not amused (335). Still, despite the drugs and the 
lies (the knives are supposedly spelled to be harmless), S’bu needs convincing. One of Huron’s 
minions, an animalled woman known simply as Marabou, “grabs S’bu’s wrist, swats [his sister 
Song’s] arm out of the way and, still holding S'bu's wrist, drives the knife into Song's chest” 
(336). After this, the boy delivers several blows on his own, until Song collapses.  
 The scene stresses under the overtones of narrative climax: the solution to a detective 
mystery, the Big Boss Fight of a computer game, the reveal of the foreshadowed monster… Yet 
while it occupies all these structures, it pierces their reliance on stable moral categories. Yes, Odi 
 
48 For more on the centrality of vulnerable bodies to Zoo City’s political reading, see Ericson’s “Thinking with 
Crocodiles, Thinking Through Humans: Vulnerable, Entangled Selves in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City” (Ericson). 
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Huron is firmly a baddie, and the reader cannot help but root for the flawed and injured Zinzi; 
but the weight of moral responsibility is punctured by the ethical incongruities presented in 
Huron, S’bu, Marabou, and the crocodile’s characters. 
 Marabou – whose given name is Amira – is an androgynously-dressed, ageless woman 
with an Eastern-European accent and a giant ungainly bird for a familiar. She initially tells Zinzi 
she was trafficked into Johannesburg in a container, “packed like tuna fish” with other girls (87). 
The not-so-proverbial gun in the first act belongs to her: scanning her lost things, Zinzi makes 
out a particular weapon among them, which Huron will use to shoot at Zinzi in the climactic 
scene. There are other signs that the woman is more sinister than a simple minion: half-joking 
remarks on the nature of her ‘procurement’ business and Zinzi’s convenient lack of social ties 
which makes her easy to vanish; a punch to the face of a pudgy teenage boy followed by a look 
of “forensic distaste” at the blood on her knuckles (92;101). It is her, we learn, who had 
‘procured’ the bodies of several aposymbiotic pairs as blood sacrifice for the transfer ceremony, 
targeting unattached people who would not be missed and coldly covering her tracks. The 
moment signifying Zinzi’s move from Huron’s employ to the investigator of his crimes is the 
occasion in which she reveals her suspicions about the birded lady: “you don't strike me as the 
tuna-fish type. You're more of a shark. Were you really inside the container, Amira? Or were you 
on the outside, arranging passage? Another kind of procurement?” Zinzi then marks her role 
change, thinking: “I'm out past the shark nets now” (252). In the climactic scene, it is Amira who 
butchers the animals she ripped from their humans; it is her who officiates the terrible ceremony; 
and it is by her hand that Song’s blood is spilled. Was she trafficked into South Africa as a sex 
worker? If she was, how does that change her moral standing in the plot? And how much of her 
actions are enabled by the sure knowledge that one cannot be ‘animalled’ twice? 
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 Marabou/Amira is only the first of the scene’s trifecta of ethically-muddled characters. A 
second is Odi Huron, the man himself. Huron disavows his implication in the events that won 
him his alligator, styling himself a victim: “It was a terrible shock. That these men could just 
break in and do this to me? To me! I didn't feel safe… The doctors diagnosed PTSD” (164). 
Beukes indites the twin white discourses of fear and safety, casting doubt on their sincerity. Odi 
was billed an eccentric recluse when he stopped leaving his mansion after the shooting at his 
club. After the crocodile is revealed, the reader gathers that the mogul was not willing to be seen 
with the animal in tow, electing to confine himself to the villa which sits atop a crocodile-
appropriate cavern system. We also gather that Odi either killed the 20-some people whose 
bodies were recovered from the cavern, among them renowned apartheid-era black icons, as a 
way to feed his beast; or in previous failed attempts to transfer the maShavi (344). Huron 
complicates the boundaries of ethical responsibility as they are posited by the novel’s justice 
systems. If he was indeed cosmically punished for the deaths of his employees, were the 
gangsters who shot them also animalled? And if the Undertow does track some form of indirect 
responsibility – Huron did not himself pull the triggers, but was liable in a more legal sense – 
why are other characters who are involved in shady dealings animal-free? Finally, does the 
accounting of indirect personal responsibility affect the Undertow’s mechanic in cases of more 
diffuse, collective, or social responsibility? These questions are raised, then left open by the 
novel, leaving the structures of personal responsibility eroded.  
 This last question is particularly germane in light of the allegorical weight of Huron’s 
status as an affluent white man, in postapartheid South Africa, hiding the evidence of his 
culpability while continually doing violence to non-white people. Even setting aside the albino 
whiteness, the grandeur of a modern house sitting atop sinister underground caverns filled with 
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the bodies of dead black South Africans is a “literary infrastructure” typical of postapartheid 
understandings of Johannesburg: 
Johannesburg… is a city of surfaces, capitalist brashness – and one which carries with it, 
too, a subliminal memory of life below the surface, of suffering, alienation, rebellion, 
insurrection – captured, not least, in the figure of the black migrant worker. Existing 
beneath the surface, the orders of visibility of the metropolis signal that there can be no 
surface without an underground (Nuttall and Mbembe). Mine dumps – man-made hills of 
gold dust, relics of the old gold mines on which Johannesburg was founded, heaving 
earth to the surface, the debris of wealth extraction, form the ubiquitous landscape of the 
city. Beneath it, marking the legacy of its origins, is a catacomb of tunnels left by gold 
mining (Nuttall 83–84). 
S’bu and Song Radebe, the twin musical prodigies that Odi Huron brings to the city and who 
find themselves naked and afraid in his underground cavern, echo the migrant workers of eGoli, 
place of gold, as Johannesburg was known. While physical extraction hovers at the edges of the 
novel, Beukes points out the ways in which its central industries – the music world, journalism, 
and other ‘soft’ productions – replicate the exploitation and hierarchical racial division of their 
‘hard’ counterparts49.  
Odi’s suspect invocation of fear for his own safety, quoted above, is replicated by white 
fear’s attendant physical structures: “gated communities fortified like privatised citadels. Not so 
much keeping the world out as keeping the festering middle-class paranoia in” (97). Crossing the 
gate into one such suburb, Zinzi must travel “under the boom, over a speed bump and into the 
rotten heart of leafy suburbia” (70). This image then materializes, as Zinzi examines Huron’s 
swimming pool with its “skin of rotten leaves”; this skin, of course, hiding the fact that the pool 
extends down under the mansion, to the subterranean (moral?) level of goldmines and sewage 
 
49 At one point Zinzi slips into her ‘Former Life’ job as a journalist to get a young sex worker to talk about the death 
of her friend. the Dictaphone recording is reproduced verbatim in the novel, and is frankly difficult to read, with 
Zinzi prodding her distressed interviewee for information. A fellow reporter after the story is overjoyed: “Oh this is 
gold, baby. This is gold” (305) 
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lines. Huron’s character is thus laden with all the bells and whistles of South African whiteness, 
rendering acute the questions his character raises regarding the ethics of collective responsibility. 
 The character of S’bu, animalled despite killing under the influence of drugs and duress, 
pierces the final punctures in any sense of an orderly moral system in the novel. A docile and 
unassertive character, S’bu is convinced he is in a video game even after his sister is dead: “Re-
spawn, you big baby”, he teases her prostrate body (337). With the Undertow coming for him, 
the crying teenager is bullied into repeating a cultic “I take this animal” by Odi Huron (338). The 
obscene nuptial ends with Marabou killing S’bu, firing the gun that was foreshadowed with her 
introduction to the novel; but not before the crocodile makes his new allegiance clear. What kind 
of moral system would hold S’bu accountable, under these circumstances? And what is the 
reader to do with the abyss between the Undertow’s dogged insistence on responsibility and its 
utter silence in matters larger than one individual? 
        In the background of the novel’s climax floats apartheid. The speculative present of 
Zoo City is most assuredly a postapartheid present. From the presence of White South Africans 
in the story, we can surmise the Undertow is not activated by beneficiary status. What does it 
mean, ten years after the theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commision hearings, to write a 
novel about the limits and failings of personal responsibility? From its earliest days, the TRC 
was lamented for not centering systematic benefits conferred as a result of systematic injustices 
(Mamdani, “Reconciliation without Justice”). The very form of the hearings, confessions of a 
single informant under the binary categories of victim or perpetrator, reified both these subject-
positions and the boundedness of the individuals who bore them (Schaffer and Smith 1578)50. A 
 
50 While this is true of the TRC’s formal constraints, actual participating persons of course “tested, stretched, 
evaded and exceeded the limits” of these positions (Schaffer and Smith 1578).  
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decade after this critique, it seems that systemic, common responsibility remains an ethical 
lacuna. If question-asking is the purview of speculative fiction, the first of Beukes’ questions – 
what if murders were punished by a gathering of shadows and a coupling of human and animal? 
– is undergirded by a second one: what is the ontological status of complicity? 
Alternatives 
Zoo City does not lay a plan for addressing the systemic nature of injustice and its resultant 
complicity at the foot of its reader. It does, however, gesture towards alternative ethical systems 
which approach the responsibility-bearing unit, the single person, in ways orthagonal to the 
Western philoso-legal tradition. I will elaborate the possibilities put forth by two such systems: 
Shona ethics and the ethics of care, and explain how – despite the novel’s careful puncturing of 
any claims these systems might have to totality – they nevertheless offer ways of thinking 
through complicity. 
 The Shona are an ethnic group, the majority of whom live in the places now known as 
Zimbabwe and South Africa. While the Shona identity solidified during the Mfecane of the early 
19th century, mutually intelligible dialects and a common cosmology point to a long 
philosophical tradition shared by the group51. Shona tradition enters Zoo City through language: 
maShavi is a shona term, familiar to Beukes through an illustrated collection of Southern African 
myths (Beukes 353). Indeed, Penny Miller’s Myths and Legends of Southern Africa makes a 
guest appearance in the novel in the form of a quote explaining the origin of Shavi. This excerpt 
is itself planted in a longer paratext from a (fictional) etymological text for “Animalled Terms” 
(201). The double mediation underscores the distance between Shona philosophy and its citation 
 
51 The Mfecane (Nguni: “crushing”) was a period of war, conquest, and forced migration between the Bantu-
speaking nations of Southern Africa that occurred in the first half of the 19th century. Some peoples were 
scattered, others completely destroyed and new groups formed. 
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within the novel; yet I wager that this citation is nevertheless worth following – after putting in 
place several caveats.  
 The first caveat is that awkwardness is inevitable in attempting to write an oral tradition 
of which one is not a part into academic text. The necessity of citation sends one to other written 
texts, and these inevitably end up citing ‘early written accounts’, most notably by European 
missionaries, upon whom I am reluctant to confer any authority. The second is that scholars in 
African Philosophy departments represent myriad schools of thought, some of which are pitted 
against each other in on the issues described below (see Matolino; Gyekye). My only hope is that 
my account of Shona personhood would seem equally inaccurate to people from every such 
school.  
 Shona ethics, like many African traditions, is a social morality wherein the individual 
identifies and defines herself through communal social belonging, with moral rights and wrongs 
closely following understandings of harmony and discord within the community (Munguini 140, 
146; Metz 334). Rather than identitarian terms – my identity is based on my social belonging – 
this communitarian concept of personhood is ontological: there is no existence, certainly no 
personhood, outside the social context (Menkiti). This is the relationship encapsulated by the 
Shona maxim ‘munhu munhu nevanhu’, ‘a person is a person with other people’ or ‘I am because 
we are’ (Samkange and Samkange)52. Thus, while the individual person remains a central locus 
of responsibility, that responsibility is held primarily towards the public rather than other 
persons; and personhood itself is something that the community can withdraw, or refuse to 
confer (Munguini 149). It is no wonder then that the measure of goodness for individual 
 
52 The Zulu equivalent of hunhu is Ubuntu, made famous world-over by Hillary Clinton and an open-source 
computer operating system.  
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character is the community: a good person is she who promotes harmony in the community, 
while bad character traits are the traits which are taken to promote discord (ibid; 146)       
Artist Sekai Manchache begins her interrogation of maShavi with the declaration that 
“[i]n Shona culture ideas of consciousness are underpinned by the concept of spirit” 
(Manchache). Rather than a binary model of life and death, though, Shona cosmology has the 
spirits of dead people occupying the same space as those of the living. This means that the living 
are accountable to their dead ancestors in ways similar to their accountability to living elders. It 
also means that the spirits of people who died away from their families, and thus not been 
welcomed into this system of accountability, roam free and may come to inhabit living persons. 
These spirits can influence their hosts’ lives in positive or negative ways, and bring with them 
special abilities – not unlike the shavi that enables Zinzi to find lost things in the novel. A Shavi 
is, then, a logical conclusion of a cosmology at once entrenched in the web-like ties of lineage 
and cohabitation and in the presence of the spirits of forefathers: the possibility of dying away 
from home creates a dangerous loophole in this ethics of obligation, which is solved through a 
new, postmortem cohabitation. 
Beukes’ animal maShavi thus bring with them into the novel a set of priorities, an 
understanding of right and wrong, and a contingent view of the individual. This is not an ideal or 
perfect system, but simply an alternative one to the bounded individualism of culpability as it is 
lived in most legal societies and as it is reflected in the novel53. For one, the community may 
decide that one is not in fact human: Beukes’ narrator informs the readers that some interpret 
animalled individuals as zvidhoma or malevolent spirits, “which would qualify us for torture and 
 
53 For scholarly critiques of African relational/communitarian ethics and their role in women’s marginalization see 
(Mama; Oelofsen; Chimakonam and Toit).   
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burning in some rural backwaters” (62). But if Zinzi’s abilities manifest Johannesburg as a 
writhing web of interconnected people and objects, and if the text itself is habitually interrupted 
and opened up by paratexts of all registers – locating it within a web of information and 
misinformation – is a relational ethics not more fitting to the world of the novel? 
    A second gesture towards alternative ethical systems occurs at the level of the novel’s 
language. The writing and reading of Zoo City in English assumes a certain universality of the 
language and of its attendant moral system, both bequeathed to South Africa through 
colonization. However, the novel itself puts a double wrench in that universality, further positing 
Western Anglophone ethical logic as subject to interruption, fraying, and incompletion. I have 
established that the novel is continually augmented and interrupted by paratexts fictional and 
non-fictional. Each of these carries with it an English, adding to the place-specific idiom which 
the novel’s characters think and converse in. Note, for instance, the heteroglossia inherent in the 
Crime Watch joutnalist’s “Huron got himself chowed last night by his secret animal, a moerse 
white Crocodile” (344) and the academic psychology paper which states that the “Undertow" [is] 
a quantum manifestation of nonexistence, a psychic equivalent of dark matter that indeed serves 
as a counterpoint to, and bedrock for, the principle of existence” (181). In a discussion of 
Anglophone African writers, Somali Nuruddin Farah noted that to communicate a 'flavor' of 
native-African languages through English would require him to relinquish metaphor and 
leitmotiv-based writing in favor of proverb-based writing (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 51). By 
this metric, Beukes' fast-paced polyglot language, with characters speaking Internet and Drug-
Dealer as well as Afrikaans and Shona, certainly gives the reader a 'strong flavor' of the 
multicultural and creative linguistic idiom of its setting. The result is an English made slightly 
strange, molded by registers and disciplines, yes – but also by personal idiosyncrasies, hybrid 
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mediascapes, immigration patterns, and heightened supernatural and animal presence. All these 
modify English in ways that yet seem so natural as to make a statement regarding the 
malleability and creativity of the “international” language’s place-specific usage. 
The novel’s social heteroglossia might be executed with a facility that naturalizes it; but 
that does not mean it is always readable. While Zoo City presents the reader with an ‘inside 
view’ of Zoo City, implying that the complexities of place are accessible to her, its 
overabundance of information and media is counterpunctuated by conspicuous silences (Propst 
415). The novel opens with a warning: “In Zoo City, it’s impolite to ask” (Beukes 7). If Beukes’ 
predecessor white authors used language “to expose shortcomings in inter-racial and ethnic 
communication among social groups in the racially-divided society of the apartheid era" 
(Andindilile 21), Beukes uses English - or Jozi-English - to expose the reader as outsider: to 
challenge her, to make her race to catch up. This short-winded temporality then extends to the 
ethical underpinning of the novel, with readers struggling to grasp the layering of justice systems 
and their interaction with each other. Both English and (its) ethics come up frayed, with creative 
possibilities appearing through both their threadbare places. 
I have argued that Zoo City invokes alternative ethical systems which might approach 
complicity’s collective responsibility. One such intimation gestures towards Shona ethics; a 
second, the language, relations, and place-making of urban cosmopolitanism (Chipkin 106). I 
turn now to a third moral framework: care ethics.  
Care ethics stems from the deceptively simple premise that dependency relationships 
generate responsibilities (Collins). Scholars and practitioners of this ethics oppose the rationalist 
roots and individualist ontology of the philosophical tradition behind rights theory, finding it 
inadequate, among other reasons, for its preference for abstract, formal, and quantifiable rules 
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and its devaluing of emotion and the body (Baier 18; Ruddick 4). If the morality of rights is 
premised on an independence from others, care ethics suggests a subject continually needing, 
who always exists within intimate relationships with others.54 These are the needs which create 
responsibilities, webbing outwards to create an ethical system. At its best, care ethics does not 
idealize relationships but recognizes their political characteristics and implications. While many 
scholars in this relatively new tradition focus on immediate, smaller scale relationships, some 
hold that this kind of relational ethics has superior resources for dealing with the power and 
violence that imbues all relations, including those on the global level (Held 172–73). 
Zoo City manifests multiple levels of care, need, and their failings. The human-nonhuman 
animal care of the aposymbiotic relationship is chief among these, but even prior to it, Zinzi’s 
lost things maShavi relies on human-object care. Zinzi is sensible of strands of energy 
connecting a person to a lost object, the lines connecting through emotional ties. If an object was 
not important, she cannot trace it. This posits the city as an affective network, with an 
infrastructure of sentimental ties that links people and things parallel to other forms of 
infrastructure – highways or sewage lines – also prevalent in the novel55. Thus, care is 
established as the unlikely thread connecting the city’s dangerous, labyrinthian network.  
On first glance, Zinzi Lelethu December seems as self-reliant and self-interested as any 
noir detective. Her tough demeanor, shrewd resilience and determined ambition paint a picture 
of a hard boundary between her self and her surroundings. In fact, when her lover accuses her of 
being selfish – “you don't care about anyone else, Zinzi” – she tells him he could expect nothing 
 
54 Though the scholarly formulation of care ethics is new, cultures of obligation are quite common: see for instance 
characterizations of Jewish social order as based in obligation rather than rights (Cover 65–74). 
55 On the central role infrastructure planning plays in the novel see (Eatough 703–11); though his analysis hinges 
on Beukes’ animals as private property, which I contest below.  
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else of her: “"I'm an addict! It comes with the fucking territory” (256-7). But Zinzi’s existence is 
inextricably tied to another living being, Sloth: “the feedback loop of the separation anxiety is 
crippling. Crack cravings have nothing on being away from your animal” (142). In addition to 
her aposymbiot, Zinzi and all other “apos” are linked to the Undertow, ever conscious of its 
presence and the “shadow-self absorption” that it implies (180). How individuated is anyone, if a 
selfish, self-serving crook is so porous? 
Beukes’ premise of ‘animalling’ as a punitive action makes intuitive sense and does not, 
in the abstract, bring to mind daily animal care. The monotheistic mythology of the scapegoat 
ties immoral action to an external animal form: in the bible, the Jewish people’s sins are 
conferred upon two goats, one to be sacrificed as a sin offering, the other to be banished to the 
wilderness as atonement (The English Bible Lev. 16). The novel cites a similar procedure of 
animal banishment as recourse for unwanted spirit possession in Shona tradition. The physical 
weight of an animal familiar also makes metaphoric sense: people who have killed then bear the 
weight of their animal for the rest of their lives. And there is always the suggestion that the 
Aposymbiot had behaved in a way that is less-than-human, viewing the animality of maShavi a 
transitive property56. But in reading Zoo City, encounters a richly textured description of people 
having to care for their punishment-animals, moments of care which stand in stark relief to the 
cut-throat, fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of Johannesburg. 
Remarking on the novel’s animal premise, one internet commenter was reminded of the 
U.S-based family planning programme wherein teenagers are required to carry around an egg or 
a doll for 24 hours (Cairnduff). Indeed, when Zinzi got out of prison, still scared of the new life 
 
56 Last time Zinzi’s parents saw her she had “Sloth curled up in my lap like my own personal scarlet letter” – the 
scarlet letter itself harking back to the biblical mark of Cain, further connecting animality with punishment.  
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that would become hers, she was only convinced to go outside her apartment because “Sloth was 
mewling for food” (chap. 7). In Zoo City’s markets and Spazza shops, Zinzi can get Cassava 
leaves for Sloth as well as wood lice to feed Benoit’s mongoose (142). Prison canteens serve 
“slightly wilted leaves or dead insects or hay or raw offal, depending on your animal's dietary 
requirements” (61). In light of these descriptions, the animals operate less like inert marks of sin 
or expelled scapegoats, and more like a continuous, intimate obligation of care.  
When Huron successfully transfers his alligator to S’bu, the animal leans its massive head 
against S’bu’s leg “in something like affection” (339); an affection it has lost for its former 
human, who quickly becomes croc food. Sloth takes care of Zinzi in other ways too: he frowns 
upon her smoking habit, refuses to let her dump out a cup of tea into an unsuspecting plant pot, 
and orientates her in Johannesburg’s drain tunnels, his eyesight superior to hers in the dark (14; 
15; 213). In turn, Zinzi not only feeds Sloth but calms him when they end up in stressful 
situations, and protects him fiercely (308). 
We could speculate about the remedial properties of the aposymbiotic care relationship, 
assuming that there is an inherent logic to animalling. But I am more concerned with the way in 
which the ultimate transgression at the heart of the novel is Odi Huron’s absolute refusal to care 
for his animal, a refusal which costs the lives of multiple characters and which ends up causing 
his own death. While all over the city hardened criminals must cajole, pet, forage, and persuade 
in order to care for their animals, Odi Huron refuses the job completely. “He's yours now, kid. 
Congratulations," he says to the shocked and bloodied S’bu, "enjoy feeding the fucker” (339). 
This is only the central, and most overt, of concatenated failures of care: Throughout the novel, 
slumlords refuse to pay for private security, leaving Zoo City to the gangs and drug lords; the 
public forgets to care about Song and S’bu after they finish their stint in a glitzy reality TV show 
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(119); the police don’t care about ‘Zoos’ (11;239); and nobody cares about the homeless people 
disappearing from the city into Huron’s lair. Even Johannesburg is not fed properly, resorting to 
self-cannibalism (288). Dependency relationships generate responsibilities.  
A particularly memorable failure of care is revealed when Zinzi encounters three young 
drug addicts/dealers who are living in a rain gutter. The tsotsis steal her phone, threaten her, and 
chase her into the gutter system, but their most memorable transgression has to do with the 
porcupine Shavi belonging to their leader. 
[A] Porcupine hauls itself out of the darkness, limping forward on three paws, its quills 
rattling. It nudges [the leader’s] knee with its stubby snout in wary affection. Thick ropes 
of drool hang from its jowls. Its eyes are dull. Its back foot is missing. The stump has 
healed badly, the tissue grey, the spiky hairs matted with dried blood and pus. It smells of 
damp and rot, like the broken concrete of the hole it crawled from. 
"What the fuck did you do to this animal?" 
"It's good money," Nasty wheedles, mocking me. "You want some? We can get a good 
price for that Sloth. Rare animal, hey? Start with a finger. Or a paw… "You won't miss it. 
You won't even notice." The Porcupine watches me with its beady little eyes, and despite 
myself… I start backing out, slowly (206-7) 
This scene is memorable for its description of animal physical decay, for the affection the animal 
nevertheless has for the person who is selling its body for parts, and for the embodied iteration of 
extraction economy. Zinzi, normally unflappable, is unsettled by the porcupine and the loophole 
he represents in the maShavi system – and so is the reader.  
Care is practiced throughout the novel not as an ethics, but out of existential necessity. 
Nevertheless, the perverse wrongness of the mamed and festering porcupine exemplifies how the 
text activates the circuits by which the reader will recognize care as a moral good. Readers can 
overlook some of the murders which have earned characters their animals, but judge this gross 
failure to care as a distinct category of wrongs within the criminal matrix of the novel. The 
‘rotten heart’ of Beukes’ suburbia is located, then, not in the acts of extraction which proliferate 
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throughout the novel, but in individuals and communities washing their hands of the 
responsibilities created by the needs of those around them. Stephanie Collins reminds us that 
care is never a strictly dyadic relationship: “it is impossible to do justice to care ethics”, she says, 
“without discussing the duties of groups” (Collins 124–25). The very idea of complicity arises 
from the recognition that harm is not dyadic either – that violence, especially such enacted over 
time, cannot be sustained without structures which also create collectives. The pairing of 
violence and care seems less unlikely when we recognize that both are relationships between 
persons understood as embodied, porous, and socially emplaced. The novel’s emphasis on care 
and its failures thus gestures towards the collective duties generated by human and nonhuman 
needs.    
Chapter Summary   
I started this chapter by alluding to the claim that Zoo City is amnesiastic regarding apartheid – 
that it erases Johannesburg’s past while attempting to navigate its political present. I would like 
to consider how Beukes’ novel, animated as it is by Zinzi’s drug debts, is embedded in and adds 
to a particularly South African set of tropes. A central idiom in white postapartheid South 
African fiction has been a kind of assumed inheritance. The returning white émigré, who left the 
country – to avoid army service, to escape family censure, to find more-palatable political 
climate – returns to the farm/country house/suburban villa, to contend with a dying parent and 
with the inheritance their impending death portends57. Inheritance here is metaphoric, of course, 
of the moral weight which is borne by South African whites – a weight tied un-metaphorically to 
the wealth encapsulated in farm, country house or suburban villa. The relationship with the 
 
57 The most overt example of an inheritance novel might be Mark Behr’s Kings of the Water (2010); Yet emigres 
returning to contend with dead or dying parents are all over the corpus – in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, 
discussed in Chapter 1; in Zoe Wicomb’s October (2014; though Wicomb is not white, her protagonist is). 
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parent is often fraught; just as often, there is a sense of reluctance, an unwillingness to accept the 
burden of the past.  
 The amorphous metaphor of inheritance is completely absent in Zoo City. We do, 
however, get debt as a metaphor: Zinzi’s drug debt was bought by a crime syndicate. To pay said 
debts, she fleeces moderately wealthy foreigners, online and in person, capitalizing on the 
African commodities of international pity and guilt and revealing herself the morally-ambiguous 
protagonist that she is. These debts are metaphorical – “financial as well as moral”, as Zinzi puts 
it. Whether through inheritance or debt, it seems capital links complicity to actionable 
responsibility. Yet the shift to debt as an expression of living among systemic violence seems to 
me to make a real difference. 
 Barring the construction of collectives by penal systems which recognize them as 
responsible, we might gather collective responsibility from material gains granted to a collective 
(‘follow the money’, if you will). It is compelling to think of one’s own complicity as 
inheritance: the ‘real’ offending party now dead, I nevertheless receive the burden of their 
conscience. Debt, in contrast. is an obligation: whether inherited or accrued, it creates a 
temporality in which a payment was deferred and thus still waits to be resolved. Inheritance is 
intended to consolidate wealth generationally, implying intra-group engagement, cementing the 
boundaries of the beneficiary collective; debt seems to necessitate a directional relation in which 
repayment happens.  
 The above is a very distant reading. For one, Zinzi’s debt is not one of privilege but of 
vice, her drug addiction. She is also importantly not a white character, but an upper middle-class 
coloured person (though Beukes is white). If the returning émigré novels with their inherited 
house or farm is a direct corollary to white south africans’ complicity with apartheid and its 
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aftermath, Zinzi’s debt is just a hint – a suggestion – of a different figurative framework. Why 
pursue it then? Because debt is compelling as a framework in that it helps assuage the fear of 
indiscriminate collective blame which Arendt and others voiced and which I suspect is at the 
heart of many complicit societies’ denial of complicity58. The systemic and longstanding 
oppression of one group of people by another is not quantifiable in financial terms, as debates 
regarding reparations in the United States and elsewhere exemplify. But the gain that hegemonic 
groups accrued over years, unevenly distributed though it is within those groups, may be more 
readily calculated; and even if we do not do the math, the knowledge of an ever-accruing debt 
could bring us more humbly to the discussion tables of the future.             
   
  
 
58 This is exemplified in many philosophy scholars’ writings, who often base culpability for collective wrongdoing in 
knowing participation – sidestepping the cultural issue of denial and disavowal which is at the centre of complicit 
societies (see Feinberg’s taxonomy of responsibility in his 1970 Doing & Deserving: Essays in the Theory of 
Responsibility, 233; and the more recent Lawson 2013, “Individual Complicity in Collective Wrongdoing”; Kutz 
2000, “Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age”) (Feinberg 233; Lawson; Kutz). 
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CONCLUSION 
“History would break over me like a wave that had already swept through the manor 
house and bear me off in a jumble of picture frames and paper plates” (Vladislavić, Double 
Negative 51). 
“On the news she hears about a huge wave that came from the sea and, without warning, 
washed our town away.” (Brodetzky, Almost Olympic Size Pool 234) 
“A tsunami wave cannot be violent, even when it takes a heavy death toll” (Ariel Handel, 
“Violence”, in: Mafte'akh, The Lexical Review of Political Thought, p. 54) 
In the above quote from a keywords journal of political thought in Hebrew, the author proffers 
that violence is impossible in the absence of an active social agent (Handel 54). A tsunami wave, 
no matter how devastating, is not a social agent, therefore, it is not violent per se. Is the 
recurrence of a giant wave as a reckoning with complicity then a narrative exculpation of the 
complicit society? It might be; certainly, shying away from a fictional vision of future political 
reckonings in favor of a mythically-tinged flow of water might be read that way. But I suggest 
that we might also read these instances of rising waters as echoes of the climate catastrophe that 
has been advancing on our world in ever more palpable ways in the last twenty years. This 
horizon of ecological ruination which simultaneously places into question the assertion that a 
tsunami cannot be violent. Handel himself concedes, following Agamben, that the active model 
wherein an agent does violence to a second agent requires a third entity, a regulatory field of 
norms within which the violent act is carried out and which might be termed society (Handel 54). 
As the unequal distribution of climate disruption’s harm is revealed, and as the active or passive 
collusion of states and corporations with climate’s destructive forces continues to be 
documented, the innocence supposedly encapsulated in a giant wave (as opposed to, say, an 
uprising of the oppressed) is no longer a viable reading.  
 Imagining reckoning as a wave does make the subject/object of violence more diffuse. 
One can look at more direct, overtly political examples of imagined reckonings in both South 
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African and Israeli corpuses: Nadine Gordimer’s 1982 July’s People and Amos Kenan’s 1984 
The road to Ein Harod are prominent examples. Yet these seem to no longer be possible in 
contemporary writing in either corpus. The echoes of climate catastrophe which become 
wrapped up in Hebrew and South African complicity literature signal emergent structures of 
feeling: a sense of diffuse violence which is sure to ‘catch up’ with one, whatever one’s place in 
it is; and a sense of shared destiny under ecological ruin which is belied by the unequal 
distribution of harms and comforts in both societies today. 
A Note About Race   
As I wrote this dissertation, the USA erupted into turmoil over police brutality towards Black 
Americans. In discussions of race in the USA, whiteness as an identity and as an ideology is only 
beginning to be articulated. Yet it is already clear that whiteness here, where I am writing, is an 
unmarked category; that it is defined by ease and comfort, and by the absolute expectation of 
such (McIntosh; DiAngelo). This tenet which stands at the heart of American whiteness is 
emphatically not shared by South African whites or Israeli Jews. While members of hegemonic 
societies, much of my discussion of Vladislavić’s depiction of material culture in chapter 1 
hinges on the importance of the meticulous construction of ease and comfort to continued South 
African complicity (see also Cane 78: “whiteness always needed to be affirmed, even created”, 
qted in the introduction to this dissertation). Similarly, the deeply embattled portrait of Jewish-
Israeli selfhood drawn by Boianjiu in chapter 3 is part of the reason I take issue with depictions 
of Zionism as a racial project, at least if race is understood through a North American lens. The 
constant shoring-up of the world is a violent labor taken up by the complicit. They do not assume 
privilege in the same sense whiteness confers privilege onto white people in other geographies. 
To large extent, what creates Jewish Israelis and white South Africans as social groups is the 
168 
 
 
expectation that they exert themselves. They are shaped by their constant subordination to the 
project of maintaining ethno-national sovereignty – and by the concurrent need to forget that 
exertion, to conceive of their privilege as ex-nihilo.  
The frameworks for ethno-national violence in Israel/Palestine and South-Africa are vastly 
different. But rather than rendering the reading-together of these complicities mute, this 
difference means that one context’s overt characteristics can help us elucidate those aspects of 
the other which are latent, hidden, or emergent. As I point out in chapter 1, South African 
whiteness is becoming more rather than less embattled. South African and Israeli complicities 
are evolving in an involuntary, unaware relationship to each other. 
  
169 
 
 
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