ME: Would it not be better for the sake of closure to see the trial through?

L. BASCOMBE: Sometimes, in seeking closure, we merely open more unresolved issues for ourselves to stew over.

ME: So, I would hear things that would bother me more than I am already bothered?

L. BASCOMBE: Precisely. The only thing that concerns me is whether you will spend the rest of your life wondering why your father did what he did. Might it not be better to hear the truth once, so you can start processing it?

ME: Would he tell the truth?

L. BASCOMBE: I don’t know. Possibly not.

ME: Besides, I think I know why he did it. He wanted the housebreaking to look authentic, but he didn’t want the men to take anything valuable. And he found it exciting to engineer my rape. For years, I believed it was shock and grief I saw on his face as he watched me being raped, but a part of me always recognised it as excitement. It was thrilling for him to witness my violation. I don’t think he knew himself how he would react until it happened. He is not a good man. My mother was a good woman, but my father is not a good man.

L. BASCOMBE: And what are you?

ME: I am human, and therefore fallible. I am middle class, and have therefore not had my goodness tested much. I am broken by what has been done to me. A broken thing isn’t capable of meaningful moral choices.

L. BASCOMBE: Are you ready to give up your obsession with John Coetzee?

ME: No.

* * *

The Journal of Literature of the African Diaspora has been out for several weeks now. When an invitation to join a panel discussion lands in my inbox, I am excited for a few seconds, believing that John Coetzee will be one of the panellists. He won’t, of course. There will be two men and two women, including me. The other three people on the panel are academics. I will be embarrassingly out of place. Or rather, I will be the hamster and they will be the scientists. All four belong in the laboratory, but not on equal terms.

The discussion will be held at a SAPIENS conference at Constantia University. SAPIENS stands for something like the South African Parastatal for Industrial, Economic and Natural Sciences. It makes for a nice acronym—one that suggests wisdom on the part of the members, without overtly making any such claim.

They are holding a symposium based on the articles in the journal, all of which have generated considerable interest in the public sphere. While academics take their own work very seriously, they are not accustomed to anyone else doing so. The fact that this edition of the journal has been tweeted about, blogged about, and even discussed on television, has come as a pleasant surprise to the contributors.