by

“the doing of sorry”

Norman Wirzba:

Tutu, Krog, Gobodo-Madikizela, and others working with the TRC understood that the work of forgiveness is ongoing. It doesn’t end when a perpetrator confesses and offers an apology, or when a victim says, “I forgive you.” A genuine apology “must communicate, convey, and perform as a ‘speech act’ that expresses a desire to right the relationship damaged through the actions of the apologizer… It clears or ‘settles’ the air in order to begin reconstructing the broken connections between two human beings.” Or as Stefaans Coetzee (a member of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement convicted of killing four people and injuring sixty-seven others in a bomb attack) came to realize, saying sorry isn’t enough. “There must be doing of sorry.”

…If people fail to investigate the past, they will fail to notice how past structures and patterns of behaving are still influencing and operating in the present and thus not have a clear understanding of what needs to change. But dealing with all the past is not easily done, especially when recalling it brings people face to face with histories of violence and neglect. As numerous scholars have noted, people find it hard to live honestly with themselves. They prefer to repeat to themselves and to others stories about the past that cast them in a good or at least acceptable light. The impulse reverberates in the cultural liturgies that perpetuate myths of a community’s or nation’s innocent and glorious past. But the impulse also resounds in individuals, as Jacqueline Rose observes: “Our minds are endlessly engaged in the business of tidying up the landscape of the heart so that… we can feel better about ourselves.” This strategy is dangerous because it depends on people denying or distorting their histories. In this denial and distortion they (a) lie about the pain and suffering circulating through the world and (b) refuse to acknowledge their role in perpetuating, whether intentionally or not, that pain and suffering. When people repudiate their role in the creation and perpetuation of brutality in the world, they grant violence “its license to roam, since it then becomes essential that someone else bear the responsibility, shoulder the burden, pay the price.”