"The story goes that Pynchon stumbled on the genocide while looking for a pamphlet on Malta. He then devoted himself to reading everything he could on it — consulting German reports, anthropological studies, Herero dictionaries, anything. It’s no small feat, considering that V. was published in 1961 and most of the history books on the genocide were written in the 2000s. The Herero massacre wasn’t even really talked about until mid-1990s, since the Namibia was controlled by the South African government — and its apartheid — until then...
You learn about the way the Germans tortured the Hereros, the way they killed them — and you learn it from the point of view of a German character, Kurt Mondaugen. This deliberate choice is part of Pynchon’s responsible storytelling technique: first, it’s one of the only ethical ways of recounting the genocide as a foreign author, since the Herero point of view is not appropriated. The massacre should be told by the Herero people: it is their trauma, their story. Pynchon couldn’t just put words in their mouths, words they didn’t choose. It would have been a third silencing of the tribe: the first being the literal silencing of the people by death, the second the silence of history on the event, and the third, the bleaching of the Herero’s (fictional) voice. Instead, by telling the story slant, Pynchon leaves space for the true voice to come...
In the [later Pynchon] novel, the Hereros have traversed continents and now find themselves in Germany. There, they grapple with their identities, their displaced condition, the massacre of their people... through his fully-fledged Herero characters — you’ll find no essentialist, indeterminate ‘African’ descriptions here — we learn more about the tribe’s rich history: we are introduced to their culture, language and religion, an account that is well-researched and highly accurate. In this way, the Hereros aren’t seen as faceless victims of a genocide: they are a people, with history, with culture, identity...
What about the would-be Pynchons of today? The justice warriors, sickened by events around the globe, wanting to help but afraid of speaking for the Other? If that’s you, then the greatest thing you can do is help us speak for ourselves, and read our work: be an ethical megaphone. Social media, obviously, provides multiple platforms for you to engage with writers and showcase their work. A Google search will easily tell you all about authors in different, ‘remote’ countries: contact them, and if they write in a foreign tongue, contact their translator or agent...
Or if you want to tell our stories, tell them with us."
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