Out of the Post-Mortem Veld

Maldoror's attitude to God and man is one of utter and insolent defiance.-- Paul Knight, Introduction

One of the most remarkable things about the documentary Alison is the power of the testimonials of those who witnessed the condition of the victim and the near state of grace with which she survived her trauma. The assigned prosecutor emoted with the starkest credulity imaginable that she expected to be dealing with a corpse. Alison Botha’s friends, the judge, her doctors, the constables handling the case, even her perpetrators, all were rocketed by the impact of her barely survivable injuries. The lead constable heading the investigation seemed to be the most affected by the savage infliction of wounds. He was fairly direct about the fact that he would have shot to kill du Toit and Kruger, and it would have been a valid execution when examined against Faulkner’s adage, “the past is never the past”.  What is extraordinary about this post-colonial misogynist virulence isn’t the physical mutilation. Examples of these by and large cut across cultures. Foucault was able to ferret out a French pathological killer for his social norm analytics which at first glance, seems atypical in its historical time frame. India has flash point gang rapes. North America makes serial pathology a cottage industry. The extraordinary thing here is Alison’s resilience, however a viewer wishes to contextualize it, this woman managed to stay sane, have children, marry, become a public speaker. This is the anomaly, in a country which became a harbinger for 20^th century guerrilla warfare.

Alison barely alludes to religion, except to counter-balance scientific empiricism with its subject’s miraculous rebound, and doesn’t reference politics, except for Ms Botha’s opening allusion to the Kingdom of South Africa, toying with the abstraction of a fairytale, which would be upended at the conclusion, but at the time of this unfortunate incident, an escalation of a serial pattern, the government was in transition from the National Party’s rigor, de Klerk being the last apartheid president, to Nelson Mandela’s majority rule reconciliation under the ANC, and such magnified social destabilization this crime represents seems to follow on the heels of national uncertainty. The dowager, like many shot out in the sixties, grew up with Africaan oppression being the uncontested whipping boy, similar to the childhood majesty of the Gargantua's. Gaira may have eaten people as if they were so many buffalo wings, but however primitive the FX for its day, the stuntmen give their creatures a grandeur that makes Gaira’s rescue from the torture of laser beams appropriate. The denouement, too, differs from the Godzilla franchise, by popularizing and disseminating Eastern ideas of the ying and yang attached to each other in a perpetual balance. Though investigation into the possibility of du Toit’s parole has thus far gotten no further than Giovanni Gerbi’s article, the notion of rehabilitation for these men is liberalism on a runaway train far worse than the authoritarian stricture it replaces. The responses of the citizenry stoops to the level of the perpetrators twenty year old savagery, and Alison doesn’t have enough to cope with without taking a side swipe from an American girlfriend, a woman named Sabrina engaged into the stupendous folly of romantizing a rage slasher. We can never believe we’ve seen it all, not that I did not cast my despair into this, telling myself if Alison put her pieces back together, I can survive the shortening life-span stresses of my wheelchair failure which hasn’t been rectified, but nothing in my autobiographical shrinkage is so mind altering.