It is worth staying for a while with this question of voice because it produced one of the most extraordinary and unanticipated turns of the trial. Four witnesses – Michelle Burger and her husband Charl Johnson, Estelle van der Merwe and Dr Johan Stipp – testified that they heard the unmistakeable voice of a woman before the shots were fired: a woman, more than one of them insisted, who sounded as if she feared for her life. On the witness stand, each of them was adamant that the voice of the person ‘screaming hysterically’ was a woman’s voice.37 Their testimony was finally dismissed as inconclusive (largely owing to inconsistencies in timings). The argument for the defence was that the cries they heard came after, not before, the fatal shots were fired, and were those of Pistorius as it dawned on him what he had done: establishing the timeline between cry and shots was therefore crucial to the defence, as was the assertion that Steenkamp would have been so instantly and fatally wounded after the first shot that she would have been incapable of making any sound.
The cries, man or woman, came after. Masipa didn’t seem to register that Pistorius’s own claim that he was screaming ‘on top of his voice’ as he made his way along the corridor was inconsistent with his argument that the cries heard by the witnesses came after the shots were fired: ‘It was the accused[’s] version that he screamed on top of his voice, when ordering the intruders to get out.’38 When you read Pistorius’s statement, it seems pretty clear that his repeated insistence that he was shouting out was his means – under legal instruction, no doubt – of countering the witnesses who claimed to have heard a woman’s screaming voice before the shots were fired (in which case all the time spent trying to establish that the screams came after the shots, and could therefore not have been Steenkamp, was a complete waste).
But if there was screaming before the shots, how to see off the charge that it could have been her voice? At this point, the trial suddenly became surreal as it turned on its head the perfect heterosexual narrative which accounts for so much of the seductive pull of this case. When he screams, the defence claimed, Oscar Pistorius – Blade Runner, stud, hero – sounds like a woman. At one point, in support of this argument, Roux asked two female witnesses to demonstrate the crying they had heard: unsurprisingly, they sounded like women, as would any woman letting out ‘two long wails’ (unsurprisingly, he did not repeat the experiment with any of the male witnesses, who presumably would have sounded like men). He also announced that decibel tests and an expert witness would establish that when Pistorius is anxious, he screams like a woman. In fact no such testimony was ever laid before the court and no audio of Pistorius screaming was ever played. Samantha Taylor stated that when Oscar screamed, ‘it sounded like a man.’ Roux dismissed her evidence on the grounds that she had never heard him in situations where he perceived his life to be in danger, which she had to concede.39
Better to sound like a woman than to have murdered one. Better a cross-gender identification than a killing masculinity (on that much, feminism, and not only feminism, would surely agree). To save his skin, Oscar Pistorius ventriloquised a woman, or was led by his legal team to do so. He took her place. Behind what might be seen as a moment of unanticipated and welcome gender confusion – since gender confusion is always, or nearly always, to be welcomed – we might also, or rather, see a man going to the furthest lengths he can go, including sacrificing the image of himself as a man, to make absolutely sure that no one hears the voice of a woman crying out in fear for her life.
* * *
Gender trouble has become one of the theoretical mantras of our time. But there are forms of gender uncertainty which add insult to injury and one of the most glaring instances I have come across was surely on display at this trial. We know that for the ANC women protesting outside the court and for women the world over, this case bore all the signs of lethal domestic violence (even if Steenkamp and Pistorius did not strictly share a home). We know that what often appears to be, indeed might be, the most intimate, loving relationship can fail to protect. We know that passionate attachment can be the riverbed of hatred, that, as many women discover too late, sex is often the bedfellow of crime – although, as I make clear throughout this book, I am not a feminist who believes all men, simply by dint of being men, are violent towards women. We also take note, as British journalist Suzanne Moore was the quickest to point out, after the first sentence imposed by Masipa, that Pistorius got less for killing Reeva Steenkamp than he would have got for killing a rhino (five years with parole possible after ten months).40
But the fact that this was a case where a man had killed his girlfriend did not stop the defence from arguing – incredibly and offensively – that, because of his disability, when Pistorius shot through that door he himself could best be understood by being compared with an abused woman who, after years of pressure, finally snaps and kills her abuser. When, as one would expect, the analogy was challenged by Masipa – ‘how does [an abused woman’s situation] apply to the accused in this case?’ – Roux, as I see it, only makes matters worse:
* * *
* * *
I am not talking about abuse here. You know I cannot run away. I cannot run away. I do not have a flight response […] His experience with that disability, over time you get an exaggerated fight response […] That is the ‘slow burn’ effect. Not abuse … That constant reminder I do not have legs, I cannot run away. I am not the same … He can pretend … he can pretend that he is fine […] because of the anxiety […] it was in that sense that I say the abuse is different, but it is the same. Without legs, abuse, abuse, abuse. So ultimately when that woman picks up that firearm … we can use the common word, I have had enough, I am not shooting you because you have just assaulted me, not because of one punch with a fist in my face. I would never have shot you because of one punch with a fist in my face, but if you have done it 60, 70 times, that effect of that over time, it filled the cup to the brim that is … in that sense, My Lady.41
* * *
* * *
Now Pistorius does not just sound like a woman, he is a woman. This almost defies comment, but not quite. There is a kernel of truth in here, to which I will return, about Pistorius having to pretend he was fine for most of his life. But this mimicry of a woman, this claim yet again to be speaking in a woman’s voice – ‘I have had enough’ – a woman who, we are to imagine, has just been, for the sixtieth or seventieth time, the target of physical abuse – while clearly beyond the pale, might at the same time be read as a veiled confession, the unconscious acknowledgement by the defence of the very version of this story which they are busy exerting their utmost skills to repudiate: that this is a story of a man enacting violence against a woman, a woman who – if statements by Steenkamp’s friends and family are anything to go by – had had enough.
Here is part of a 518-word WhatsApp message Steenkamp sent Pistorius eighteen days before she died, as read out in court, which was one of the few moments when her own words were heard: ‘you have picked on me incessantly since you got back from CT and I understand that you are sick but it is nasty […] I am scared of you sometimes and how you snap at me and of how you will react to me […] I am not some other bitch, you know, trying to kill your vibe.’42 ‘Normal relationships’, Masipa commented in her judgement, ‘are dynamic and unpredictable most of the times, while human beings are fickle. Neither the evidence of a loving relationship, nor of a relationship turned sour can assist this court to determine whether the accused had the requisite intention to kill the deceased. For that reason the court refrains from making inferences one way or another in this regard.’43 Again she is right – certainly about relationships. Yet for me this is perhaps the darkest moment in the judgement, when the law, when a woman judge, fails to give due weight to another woman, one who will not survive. For while I do not believe that all women are at risk from all men, I do believe that a woman does not say she is scared of a man without cause and that when she does so, we must listen. It is the ‘how you will react to me’ – �
�I am scared of you sometimes […] and of how you will react to me’ – the fear in the future tense which, for me, is most loudly calling for our attention. In Afrikaans, ‘will react’ can also be understood as a continuous present, as in ‘how you do react to me’, but if anything that makes matters worse.44
None of which of course excludes the presence of love, as any abused woman will testify (her fear is not incompatible with her leaving him an unopened valentine’s card). For the same reason, Pistorius’s grief at Steenkamp’s death – which must include the repeated moments of his weeping, retching and vomiting in the courtroom – surely cannot be taken as proof that he lacked the requisite intent to kill her. As if guilt cannot intensify grief. As if you cannot regret with all your heart what was your most fervent wish only seconds ago. As if love and murderousness are incompatible. Instead Masipa argued that Pistorius’s grief would have had to be fake, which it clearly wasn’t, if he had wanted to kill his girlfriend – just one more moment in the proceedings where, for me, we sorely needed Freud. Here is another. Interrogated by Nel as to why he thinks Steenkamp did not cry out, Pistorius replies: ‘I presume that she would think that the danger was coming closer to her. So why will she shout out?’45 Another veiled confession – although the moment appears to have received no commentary – in which Pistorius, trying to wriggle out of one corner (why did she not cry out?), lands himself in another by correctly, if unintentionally, identifying himself as the approaching danger against which Steenkamp was protecting herself (‘the danger was coming closer’).
And another: cross-examined by Nel on why he was screaming after firing the shots, Pistorius said, ‘I slowly made my way back, tried to shout for Reeva, screaming.’ ‘Why did you scream?’ ‘I wanted to ask Reeva why she was phoning the police.’ By this point Steenkamp was dead. The statement would have been even more damning had he made it with reference to the time before the shooting as he approached the bathroom. Nonetheless at the very least it gives us Pistorius confessing that Steenkamp was calling the police as he insists he asked her to do, which means they could hear each other; and suggesting that she was not in fact doing so at his instigation and, therefore, by implication, had her own reasons for calling them. The two reasons of course cancel each other out: he asked her to call the police, he did not know why she was calling them (what Freud would call the ‘kettle logic’ of the unconscious). Amazingly, his choice of words – ‘why she was phoning the police’ – wasn’t picked up by the prosecutor or anyone else.46
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Sex, race, disability, and that’s not all, even if it is too much or certainly more than enough. So let’s return to Roux’s comment: ‘He can pretend that he is fine.’ They were of course the perfect couple. They both honed their bodies. On her left ankle, Steenkamp had a tattoo of the word ‘Lioness’ (she was a Leo), which she explained on Twitter: ‘Abundance and power are yours, for you are the lioness.’47 She had trained herself to ‘flawless super-fitness’, Hagen Engler, editor of FHM magazine, recalled in a column in the Daily Maverick, days after she was killed.48 On Pistorius’s upper back, these words from Corinthians are tattooed:
* * *
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I do not run like a man running aimlessly
I do not fight like a man beating the air.
I execute each strike with intent.
I beat my body and make it my slave.
I bring it under my complete subjection
To keep myself from being disqualified
Having called others to the contest.
* * *
* * *
The line about making my body my slave is not in most translations from Corinthians, nor is subjection described as ‘complete’. Pistorius was raising the stakes. He was also punishing, or even indicting, himself. ‘To keep myself from being disqualified’ is telling. In 2007, he had been under investigation by the International Association of Athletics Federations to determine whether his prostheses gave him an unfair competitive advantage. (He eventually won his case and was allowed to compete in the Beijing Olympics in 2008.) We might contrast this with the May 2019 ruling of the IAAF, sport’s governing body, against DSD (intersex) South African athlete Caster Semenya, that she would have to reduce her testosterone in order to compete, a decision seen as ‘discriminatory’ and greeted with an outcry.49 As if, however accepted on the surface, there is always an aura of suspicion hovering over disabled and trans bodies, an unspoken demand that they not excel themselves too much.
Commenting on an interview he conducted with Bill Schroeder, headmaster of Pretoria Boys High School, Carlin observes that the lessons his mother imparted to Pistorius ‘all boiled down to the same thing […] to run as fast as he could.’ We don’t need Freud here to note the ambiguity and impossible weight of that demand: running to win, getting the hell out at any price. Schroeder recalls that when he tentatively asked Pistorius’s mother about her thirteen-year-old son, ‘But … is he going to cope?’ referring to his prosthetic legs, she exchanged glances with her son and shrugged: ‘I don’t think I follow […] What are you saying?’ She then observed, ‘There’s no problem at all. He’s absolutely normal.’50 On the first page of his autobiography, written before the killing of Steenkamp, Pistorius explains the attitude integral to his family’s philosophy: ‘This is Oscar Pistorius, exactly as he should be. Perfect in himself.’51 In fact his mother was a depressive and an alcoholic who died when Pistorius was fifteen. As Carlin points out, the words ‘my mother’ were the two words Pistorius repeated most in his testimony (his mother slept with a firearm under her pillow, Pistorius slept with a firearm under his bed).
For disability studies, indeed for anyone involved with disability, Sheila Pistorius’s description of her son, and the Pistorius family philosophy, would surely be correct – in the eyes of any humane philosophy, all bodies are as they ‘should be’. Today, under a Conservative government in the UK whose reasserted harshness towards disability seems to know no limits, it may be more important to insist on this than ever before. As feminist literary critic Cora Kaplan observed twenty years ago, the discourse of fiscal responsibility in both the United States and Great Britain has long had disability in its sights as an intolerable economic burden on so-called ‘normal’ citizenry.52 Sheila Pistorius’s ‘He’s absolutely normal’ could then be read as a socially attuned riposte. The only response to such bureaucratic inhumanity must be to argue that need or frailty, alongside the human dignity – indeed ‘normality’ – of the disabled, should be recognised. We are talking about justice and human rights (which are the terms in which much recent disability studies defines its task).
But this in itself is something of a double bind. Insist on dignity and normality, the risk is that both physical and psychic suffering become invisible, denied, and then have to deny themselves (he is perfect). Worse, such a denial veers dangerously close to the repudiation of weakness and suffering that has historically licensed the sometimes genocidal cruelty directed towards the disabled themselves: because you suffer, because we have to see your suffering, we will not suffer you. ‘In the context of recent disability theory,’ writes Hilary Clark, ‘[the] experience of darkness – of suffering in disability and chronic illness – is not much emphasised […] to talk about what one has suffered and lost no longer feels quite decent.’53 She is writing in a book of essays on the life and writing of poet and literary critic Nancy Mairs, who was struck down with multiple sclerosis and whose best-known essay is called ‘On Being a Cripple’, now an unspeakable word but one which she reclaims for herself. ‘Society is no readier to accept crippledness’, Mairs writes, ‘than to accept death, war, sex, sweat or disease.’54 For Mairs it is emancipatory not oppressive, and the opposite of inhuman, to speak openly of a body that fails.
On these matters, the trial of Oscar Pistorius is truly a case book. Professor Merryll Vorster, the forensic psychiatrist called by the defence, was in no doubt that the amputation of both of Pistorius’s lower limbs a
s a pre-verbal child under a year would have been experienced as a traumatic assault, that the family attitude had meant that he was never allowed to see himself as disabled, and that this had a significant detrimental impact on his development: ‘By concealing his disability, it rendered him less able to access the emotional support he required.’55 In a vicious cycle, she argued, his physical vulnerability made him more anxious, which then made him more intent on concealing his physical vulnerability from the world. We could say that his disability became the encrypted secret of his body and his life.
When the prosecution saw that Vorster’s comments might lead to a defence based on General Anxiety Disorder, Nel immediately demanded that Pistorius undergo a full psychiatric assessment. It was a moment of high drama – leading to a one-month suspension of proceedings. Nel had taken a risk. Hoping to rule out a possible defence for Pistorius, he might instead have been opening the door to his being acquitted on grounds of mental incapacity. When the court resumed, however, the decision was unequivocal: Pistorius suffered no form of mental debility and showed no lack of criminal capacity, which would have prevented him from knowing the consequences of his act or from distinguishing between right and wrong. ‘There was’, Masipa comments in her judgement, ‘no lapse of memory or any confusion on the part of the accused.’56
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 24