The (Ab)Use of Empathy in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain

Abstract

Empathy and intimate exposure(s) that interweave micro relations with macro politics are literary tropes used in narrating and navigating postapartheid social formation and reimaging alternative ways of relationality that seek to normalise freedom(s). Bystrom and Coetzee use these reading practices to examine how contemporary artists yoke domesticity with national politics to discursively deconstruct narratives of (un)belonging that frame immigrant lived experiences in South Africa. This article seeks to extend the conversations further by examining how Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2017) interweaves female menstrual blood with precarity, intimate exposure and lack of empathy or intergroup biases to critique the (mis)use of narratives of black pain that deploy the language of apartheid to justify negrophobia and a growing anti-illegal foreigner sentiment in South Africa. This paper suggests that the use of anger, tropes of a South African black pain and its embodiment, and (anti)racist discourses impede the formation of an imagined, inclusive postapartheid South Africa. It concludes that Matlwa’s text suggests that a sense of a distinctly black South African identity which is limited to itself, yet hinged on a darker side of empathy, silences the Other’s modes of self-narration that seek to counter widely circulated narratives of queerness, lack and destitution that are used to cast the foreigner in the public imaginary. Consequently, the foreigner is coerced to mimic popularised discourses on race and gendered relations, thus recirculating and recycling discourses that embolden toxic masculinities and femininities in private and public cultures.