Title: The Fictional Documentation of Truth in A Dry White Season

Abstract: In the context of the apartheid period in South Africa, André Brink's A Dry White Season combines fiction, real events and traumatic memories. Through fictional literary texts, this novel integrates the author’s own national memory with the archival memory of official history. Brink, in this documentary novel, represents the hidden truth and reproduces the voiceless history of the Black ethnic group and the traumatic experiences of both Whites and Blacks. By doing so, the novel highlights the moral shame and spiritual trauma apartheid brought to the White intellectuals, thus narrating the history of the interaction between fiction and truth through referring to and recovering history. This paper analyzes the historical contexts and events in Brink’s novel in order to replace the master narrative of South African history with the collective traumatic experience of both Blacks and Whites. It argues that this documentary fiction restores the true history through fictional representation of historical events and authentic traumatic memory.

Keywords: André Brink, A Dry White Season, historical narrative, traumatic, memory, South Africa,

apartheid

Author: Meiqin Li, Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China; Randan Zheng, School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.