Reconciliation and forgiving: the power of happy memory

The question of violence in post-conflict cultures is provisionally re-framed. The essay interrogates the efficacy of remembrance and forgetting in the form of narratives that unveils the ontological destabilization of historical traumas. In those traumas, the greatest violence is the aggression found in the universalizing tendency of global colonisation, a violence emerging from a South African apartheid which eventually ends in dehumanizing both the perpetrators and the victims. The essay looks at the possibility of reconciliation as experiencing the impossible, the miracle, in the reconstruction of history in its decapitalised form.