Bearing Witness to the Ethics and Politics of Suffering: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Inconsolable Mourning, and the Task of Educators

Abstract

How can educators and their students interrogate the ethics and politics of suffering in ways that do not create fixed and totalized narratives from the past? In responding to this question, this essay draws on J. M. Coeetze's Disgrace, and discusses how this novel constitutes a crucial site for bearing witness to the suffering engendered by apartheid through inventing new forms of mourning and community. The anti-historicist stance of the novel is grounded on the notion that bearing witness to suffering without betraying it means refusing to represent it, that is, refusing to translate history and speak of it; instead, the novel's characters remain inconsolable before history. The essay builds on these ideas and considers whether educators and their students need to (re)learn the limits of historicism in comprehending conflict, oppression, otherness and suffering; also, it examines the educational implications of such a pedagogical task.

Working with survivors of war rape and sexual violence: fieldwork reflections from Bosnia-Hercegovina

“…This triggered new feelings of guilt. Yet, it is not the case, pace Zembylas (2009: 233), that ‘being desensitized essentially means unwilling to do something about others’ suffering’. It was probably my frustration at being unable to significantly help the people with whom I was working, and my concomitant sense of powerlessness, that greatly contributed to my desensitization.…”

Witnessing

“…Zembylas (2009) advanced this activism view of witnessing when he explored how educators and students can bear witness to suffering in an active pedagogy of “inconsolable mourning” (p.223) instead of a fixed historical account of suffering and oppression. He emphasized the limitations of historicism in revealing the truth of human suffering and suggested that literature can “bear witness to the Other” (p. 224).…”

“…The story traces the outcomes of this situation and the story characters endure rather than transcend “the degraded present” (Zembylas, 2009, p. 227). Zembylas (2009) suggested that the “most important contribution of Disgrace …is its position that educators and their students need to resist the process of verbalization that turns suffering into another (digestible) historical narrative, instead, we are urged to confront the indigestible materiality of the suffering” (p. 231). Zembylas’s account of Disgrace underscored his notion of inconsolable mourning as an effective educational strategy in bearing witness.…”

Theoretical Thinking on Suffering

“…In the teaching-learning process, Zembylas (2009) wrote about the challenges that educators face in sensitizing students and scholars to the trauma of suffering. Zembylas suggested there are three potentially negative reactions students/scholars can have to hearing suffering testimonies:…”

“…In the teaching-learning process, Zembylas (2009) wrote about the challenges that educators face in sensitizing students and scholars to the trauma of suffering. Zembylas suggested there are three potentially negative reactions students/scholars can have to hearing suffering testimonies: (1) they may feel uncomfortable and react defensively; (2) they may feel resentment or sentimentalize the situation; and, (3) they may become desensitized and “get irritated by the descriptions of suffering in some way, refuse engagement with it or minimize its effects, mis-read it conveniently, and reduce it to a few pedantic phrases” (p. 232).…”