The basic tenant of Susan Sontag’s widely read book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), as I understand it, is that there is no universalising “we” when it comes to contemplating another’s suffering [1]. Tumelo Mtimkhulu’s One final act of love (2023) shares this sentiment. As a sound sculpture, it includes obituaries sent into and broadcast on Lesedi FM over the last ten years. Although only on-air for a short period — between seven to fifteen minutes — Mtimkhulu writes of his work as an attempt to ‘make concrete the grief by giving shape to it, providing a “skin” or “body” or “shell” in which to exist’; one that is not limited to the temporal framework of the broadcast but that can live on, ‘as a ghost would in a haunted house’ [2].

Described by the artist as a ‘rudimentary form — reminiscent of houses typically drawn by children,’ [3] the sculpture reads more like the idea of a home. Set in flat monochrome — black, dark grey, light grey, white — it is easy to walk around but not to inhabit. There are no lights on inside. The windows, like eyes, are blacked out. An empty chair, crudely shorn, sits in place of a doorway, extending itself through the form of the house in two- and three-dimensions.

As the title suggests, Mtimkhulu’s work is not just about honouring the lives of those lost, but is dedicated as an accompaniment to the grief of the living. Where some would insist on empathy as a coming to know — to be in the shoes of — Mtimkhulu, like Sontag, favours a sustained engagement with the incomprehensibility of loss. What is maintained, cherished — given shape to — is this ‘final act’; the desire on the part of the person submitting the obituary to honour the life of a loved one, and, on the part of Mtimkhulu, to sit in community with their grief.

Central is the recognition that, for most listeners, the experience of mourning is inevitably that of contemplating grief from the outside. The chair is not to be sat on. Nor is one invited to enter the house, to occupy the position of the bereaved. Rather, Mtimkhulu invites us to listen in, yet even here the invitation has its limits.

At base, One final act of love is rooted in memory — ‘the memory of having grown up listening to Dipihi(Dipei) tsa Bafu [...] to the sonorous voice of the broadcaster (often Ntate Thuso Motaung) reciting the names of the deceased, their places of birth and where they will be buried’ [4]. Further, he writes:

Although unspoken, everyone at home sat in silence to honour the persons whom we have not known and will never know. As their names entered our home through the radio, it was as though we were being invited to grieve with each of the families. These are people who generally would not make it onto the front page of any newspaper. [5]

Mtimkhulu’s recollection raises a number of questions. The first is a question of address. Who does he mean by “we”? His immediate family, no doubt, but beyond that? The broader community of listeners? Who is being invited to grieve?

This question is important in light of the radio station’s history. Established in Bloemfontein under the banner of Radio Sesotho in 1962 (its name changed in 1996), [6] Lesedi FM formed part of a larger project on the part of the apartheid state that, whilst touted as a ‘heritage protection project,’ [7] also reinforced segregation along ethnic lines, creating a kind of echo-chamber which strengthened ties within communities, but always in opposition to others. [8]

While such stations have undergone significant changes since their establishment in the ‘60s, their audiences have remained by and large intact. From this, we can see that the submission of obituaries is not without an awareness that those listening share something of a collective memory. In other words, that these obituaries have been shared in community. One may not personally know the deceased, yet some semblance of familiarity persists.

To some extent, the bereaved can trust that their obituary will be respected, and that the process of honouring one’s dear departed will not fall on deaf ears. What does it mean, then, to stretch the bandwidth of that collective “we”? To take such obituaries and give them a sustained life beyond their intended audience? By extension, what can Mtimkhulu’s repositioning of these obituaries, particularly the artist’s desire to maintain and amplify a certain distance, tell us about the nature of mourning, loss, and our engagement therein?

One clue can be found in Mtimkhulu’s own writing about the work, where he refers to his memory as something that resists ‘linguistic appropriation’ [9]. Coupled with his reluctance to permit audiences entry, Mtimkhulu could, after Carli Coetzee, be said to highlight an awareness ‘of the different contexts within and to which we speak’ [10]. Here, the “we” is reinforced by his choice of term ‘Ntate’, which, in the context of the white cube in South Africa, bears ‘more than the connotation of an older person worthy of respect’ [11] because it stresses the artist’s ‘untranslated relationship’ with the broadcaster; ‘a gesture towards a certain kind of human intertextual placement’ which places the broadcaster’s ‘worth outside English, and beyond the reaches of the room.’ [12]

As someone who does not understand Sesotho, I cannot listen to the broadcasts without becoming conscious of the gap between those in mourning and myself. In this way, Mtimkhulu’s recontextualisation of these obituaries echoes Teju Cole’s recognition that mourning is always, inevitably, shaped by varying degrees of proximity and distance. ‘In certain scenes of mourning,’ writes Cole:

there are those who weep with abandon, sometimes throwing themselves at the body. Often, these are the most closely bereaved, who, in the loss, are at a loss of themselves. But there are frequently others, who are also grieving but perhaps with a bit more distance, a distance that allows them to take in more than the loss, to take in the smell as well and to therefore cover their noses. [13]

Here, smell brings the realisation of death home. In Mtimkhulu’s case, however, no such proximity is possible. One cannot see, smell, or touch. Rather, what is afforded is an acknowledgement of these varying degrees of proximity and distance, amplified by the extension of this invitation on the part of the artist to others who do not necessarily belong to this community of listeners.

‘Perhaps it is significant, that these are neighbors,’ continues Cole, ‘for you would not mind the smell — or there are things you would find more urgent than the smell — if it were your child.’ [14] Rather, he writes of an awareness of things outside of the room — the registering of a smell, for example — as indicative of ‘a certain distance’; a distance which creates ‘a space for the spectator to enter.’ Although we ‘cannot feel this particular mother’s grief, this sister’s loss,’ he continues, we can still ‘know what it means to be in community and at the same time be susceptible to olfactory stimuli. We can at least be neighbors.’ [15]

Evident here is that, while Mtimkhulu occupies a position within the community of listeners to whom the obituaries are addressed, his experience is still that of relative distance; a neighbour. One final act of love, therefore, does not assume familiarity on the part of his audiences but invites people to listen in from their own relative position.

Here, one could also argue that Mtimkhulu’s desire to ‘make concrete’ or ‘give shape’ to such grief attempts to bring home the realities that underpin these obituaries for their newfound audience, countering the kinds of dehumanisation often experienced by those who make up this community of listeners. While insistent on distance, Mtimkhulu’s repositioning reminds audiences who are at a remove that these obituaries belong to real people; people ‘who generally would not make it onto the front page of any newspaper,’ [16] but who are nevertheless loved, respected, cared for.

This point became evident after Mtimkhulu shared Cole’s essay, intended to provide a wider ambit through which to enter his work. The essay begins with a critique of the kind of language used to describe (and circumscribe) the experience of migrants and refugees:

When we speak of migration, it is easy to resort to watery language: we speak of a ‘flow’ of refugees, an ‘influx’, a ‘wave’, a ‘flood’. These are not neutral terms: they make the condition of our fellow human beings a cause for alarm, not on their behalf, but on ours. But people are not water, they are not inanimate. When I watch the clips of slave-trading from Libya [...] I am not watching a wave or a flood. I am watching people being sold. The numbers are called out, and I witness a human being un- humaned. [17]

In contrast to the news — which not only ‘asserts itself as a neutral report on the state of things, and elicits predictable responses’ but is in fact ‘an elaborate enterprise driven by the predictability of the response’ (‘“A boat sank,” a news report might say, “and 700 people died.” The reader’s response might be, “what a pity.” “Thousands of people have died crossing the US-Mexico border.” “So sad.”’) [18] — the experience described by Mtimkhulu is one of attentiveness and respect. Each person is given a name, alongside details related to ‘their places of birth and where they will be buried’ [19]. Here, the reality of those deceased and those grieving is brought home, as is the recognition of the gap between one’s immediate experience of grief and the invitation to accompany the bereaved in theirs.

While Mtimkhulu’s work is not situated within the context of displacement, slavery, or any other largescale geopolitical trauma, what is at stake in both his and Cole’s accounts is how people are either humanised or dehumanised; their realities grounded or abstracted. In One final act of love, one might learn of the particulars of a given case, yet the extent to which such information is revealed is determined solely by the person who sends in the obituary. What is important here is the agency of those in mourning to decide, through this ‘final act of love,’ what information to include or not. In other words, to set the parameters through which a public comes to learn about the life and death of said loved one.

This approach is also important in light of the view that news of death today, particularly in the media, has become all but ‘spectacle,’ which, as Sontag points out, maintains a privileged position through which the realities of others are regularly eroded; a ‘breathtaking provincialism’ which ‘assumes that everyone is a spectator’ and which ‘suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world’ [20].

Just as it is ‘absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain,’ Sontag continues, so it is absurd to assume that the suffering of others has no effect on those who encounter it through film, social media, and so on: ‘There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality’ [21].

To be clear, Sontag is writing about war photography: what to do with images of war and death, increasingly ubiquitous since the camera’s invention in 1839, and their affective capacity to touch people. Considered mementos ‘of the vanished past and the dear departed,’ [22] she writes that photographs have long ‘kept company with death.’ [23] From their appearance in newspapers detailing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War to the introduction, on the ‘home front,’ of a new kind of ‘tele-intimacy with death and destruction’ [24] during America’s war on Vietnam, Sontag writes of such images as having become ’living room sights and sounds’ [25]. Yet where some might argue, as Sontag initially did in On Photography (1977), [26] that ‘repeated exposure’ runs the risk of desaturating their impact, making them ‘less real,’ [27] here she argues that it is not increased exposure but the means and mechanics of their distribution — how such images are ‘used’ (abstracted, manipulated) — that impacts their affective capacity. The example provided is that of television:

Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires. What looks like callousness has its origin in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images. Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content [...]. The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored. Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump-started, again and again. [28]

Like Mtimkhulu — whose recontextualisation of these obituaries outside the temporal framework of the broadcast enables them to live on, ‘as a ghost would in a haunted house’ — Sontag calls for a sustained engagement, a certain ‘intensity of awareness’:

Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self righteously. Don’t forget. [29]

Here, the task is not to understand or assume knowledge about what others are going through, but to dwell in that space of incomprehensibility. As writes Avery Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters, to be haunted is to be drawn ‘affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.’ [30]

Apparent throughout is the desire, after Cole, to not just look but see, to not simply hear but listen [31]; to not simply ‘raise awareness’ but to ‘bear witness’ [32]; to not assume one’s grief, but to ‘at least be neighbours’.

ENDNOTES

1. To this end, she concludes her book on war photography by saying, ‘We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.’ See Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003).

2. See Mtimkhulu, Tumelo. “One final act of love,” 10.

3. Mtimkhulu, “One final act...,” 9.

4. Mtimkhulu, “One final act...,” 9.

5. Mtimkhulu, “One final act...,” 9.

6. South African Broadcasting Corporation. “About Radio Bantu.” SABC (2023). Available online here.

7. Khan, Atiyyah. “Black Music Under Apartheid South Africa.” Funambulist Magazine (29 June 2020). Available online here.

8. As writes Khan, ‘Stations were established according to the geographic location of “Native tribes.”’ Further, Khan writes: ‘In this battle of the airwaves, Radio Bantu was the main tool for the state to spread propaganda. Such importance was placed on this project that a huge budget was allocated for erecting FM radio towers around the country. The deliberate mass production of cheap battery-operated transistor radios ensured that migrant workers and miners travelling into the big cities would continue listening to broadcasts...’ See Khan, “Black Music Under Apartheid...”

9. Mtimkhulu, “One final act...,” 9.

10. Coetzee, Carli. Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits

    University Press, 2013): 49.

11. Coetzee, Accented Futures, 46.

12. Coetzee, Accented Futures, 46.

13. Cole, Teju. “Ethics.” In Coming to our Senses (London: University of Chicago Press, 2021): 200. This was

    originally delivered as a series of three lectures, available online here.

14. Cole, “Ethics,” 200–1.

15. Mtimkhulu, “One final act...,” 10.

16. Cole, “Ethics,” 196.

17. Cole, “Ethics,” 201–2.

18. Mtimkhulu, “One final act...,” 9.

19. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 110–11.

20. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 110–11.

21. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 24.

22. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 24.

23. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 18.

24. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 21.

25. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 106.

26. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 105–6.

27. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 105–6.

28. Sontag, Regarding the Pain..., 115.

29. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: New

    University of Minnesota Press edition, 2008): 8.

30. Cole, “Ethics,” 197.

31. Cole, “Ethics,” 197.