The paper engages the grey zone of violent resistance – the difficult choices and situations confronting liberation activists that elude easy binaries of conventional morality and that have generally fallen outside the grasp of transitional justice scholarship and its victim-perpetrator dichotomy. For this purpose, it draws on Albert Camus’s existential, aesthetic insight into experiential reality and ambiguity of rebellious politics. The relevance of Camus’s artistic perspective is manifested by placing it in dialogue with Frantz Fanon, a prominent theorist of revolutionary violence that shared an apt insight into the embodied character of rebellion, yet failed to adequately confront its ambiguity. Camus’ aesthetic sensibility, it is argued, is significant in dispensing with any abstract justification of violence as a legitimate means to achieve a given end. Instead, his insistence upon the limits of rebellious action opens the space where resistance violence can be judged in terms of its intersubjective meaning and cost. This insight into the ambiguities of violent rebellion, further, makes Camus’s account highly attentive to the conditions that render violence into a seemingly necessary course of affairs and draws attention to the difficulty of reclaiming the limits of action in a world turned upside down. His rebellious disposition thus also offers a propitious lens through which to illuminate the ambiguities of transitional politics – ever attentive to the predicament of reimagining justice in the wake of seemingly impassable injustice and to the danger of the new system reinstating the old cycles of violence. With this theoretical framework in mind, the paper demonstrates the political relevance of the literary attentiveness to the grey realities of resistance struggle on two selected South African novels: Tatamkhulu Afrika’s The Innocents, and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story. In particular, it discloses how narratives’ insight into the lived and tragic dimension of rebellion can provide a critical mirror to and importantly enrich the TRC’s vision of reconciliation.
