In the past decades in South Africa, there have been attempts by contemporary South African authors to re-read and re-write their identity. As a dominant contemporary South African novelist, André Brink uses similar themes to redefine South Afrikaner's national identity. As a South African writer, throughout his works, Brink considers historical facts as fundamental elements for creating a narrative form in which the Afrikaners could distinguish from the dominant power during apartheid. In his post-apartheid writings, the author concentrates on a democratic society where the Afrikaners have become marginalized. In the narrative that transferred from history, there exists an undeniable gap, and Brink uses the memories of specific South Afrikaners' characters to fill this gap. However, this research will make an effort to investigate the linkage between memory, narrative, and identity in André Brink's Rumors of Rain (1978), The Rights of Desire (2000), and Before I Forget (2004). The study demonstrates the processes of events in which the characters challenge their identity crisis during the apartheid and post-apartheid era, but its main focus is on their narrative of the past upon which they experience therapeutic effects. Since these characters lack an identity, they became depressed—therefore, by deconstructing their past memories, they could reconstitute a new identity. For analyzing the characters' psychological problems, this study draws on narrative therapy. It is an interdisciplinary approach in Medical Humanities concerned with mental health and pathological discourse. This approach concentrates on the modern power discourses to problematize social justice, the marginalized communities where people have subjugated to experience trauma under political apparatus. With its meaning and life-making features, narrative therapy privileges spoken or written language to deconstruct traumatic life experiences in an attempt to reconstitute a new identity. It views identity as a specific ideological framework constructed through dominant social order and memory as a socially and culturally constructed product and reflection of individual's inner self in the dialogical context. Both memory and identity in the roots are political. Such political elements play significant roles in refashioning Afrikanerdom in Brink's writings of apartheid and post-apartheid.
