Pain, Resilience, and the Agency Memoir

Abstract

A notable trend in the life narratives in South Africa this year is the individual authors’ determination to create a new normal when their will to live seems to be shattered. The three texts of witness -Vanessa Govender's Beaten but not broken, Helena Kriel’s The Year of Facing Fire, and liana Gerschlowitz’s Saving My Sons - exemplify a range of “survival tools” on how to survive the harsh realities that life sometimes throws on our path. The texts inscribe pain, anxiety, loneliness, coping with illness, and near-death experiences. More crucially, they are testimonies of survival and resilience, of images and scattered memories, and of things that become normalized in our societies when they shouldn’t be.