Mark Gevisser
COUNTRY OF MY SKULL by Antjie Krog (Random House, R90)
‘We boers,” wrote Rian Malan in Business Day recently, “are terminally fed up” with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has become “increasingly irksome to those of us who thought we attained a certain nobility in 1994 by surrendering power to a mistrusted enemy in the interests of common progress, a gesture for which we have received little in the way of thanks save deteriorating services, rising crime and insults”.
To which Antjie Krog, with Country of My Skull, offers a riposte so eloquent, so personal and profound, so original, so rigorous, that her book on the commission is nothing less than the My Traitor’s Heart of this decade.
The comparison will no doubt irk both of them: although Malan and Krog use investigative journalism to find a place for themselves, as whites and Afrikaners, in South Africa, Malan’s conclusion was that he could never belong in a place of such violence, while Krog’s is that she cannot but belong in a place of such hope.
The quote selected for the book-jacket says it all. Krog, deeply disturbed, is at a session of the truth commission, when the proceedings break into the singing of a liberation hymn: “And I wade into song – in a language that is not mine, in a tongue I do not know. It is fragrant inside the song, and among the keynotes of sorrow and suffering there are soft silences where we who belong to this landscape, all of us, can come to rest.”
But despite her passions, Krog is no naive praise-singer. If democracy has made Malan bilious, it has made Krog, one of this country’s foremost poets, into one of its most thoughtful journalists. Her sprawling work interweaves a compelling account of the commission (she covered it for SABC radio) with personal narrative, social commentary, family history, truth commission testimony (and the literary analysis thereof), imagined conversations and shards of poetry. She shuttles, sometimes dangerously, between the methods of a poet and a journalist, and, in so doing, comes to as complex an understanding of the “truth and reconciliation” process as has been written.
She explains her modus operandi in a meta- moment, following her account of a group- therapy session the SABC’s truth commission reporters had to go through. One of her colleagues, reading her account, challenges her: “Hey, Antjie, that’s not quite what happened at the workshop … you’re not busy with the truth!”
“I am busy with the truth,” she retorts, “my truth … quilted together from hundreds of stories that we’ve experienced or heard in the past two years … In every story there is hearsay, there is the grouping together of things that didn’t necessarily happen together, there are assumptions, there are exaggerations … All of this makes up the whole country’s truth. So also the lies.” She even maintains that her description of an extramarital affair -and her confrontation with her husband over it – is fabricated: “I had to bring a relationship into the story so that I could verbalise certain personal reactions to the hearings.”
A strange and risky conceit indeed, for an author to invent a sexual transgression to get to a “truth” about truth and reconciliation. Krog conceeds that “the word ‘truth’ trips me up … I prefer the word ‘lie’. The moment the lie raises its head, I smell blood. Because it is there … where truth is closest.” A philosopher, she expands the definitions of “truth” and “reconciliation” beyond the legalism and political rhetoric that have all but strangled public discourse on the commission. In Krog’s world – as, perhaps, in Latin America or Eastern Europe -people talk ideas. They argue concepts on streetcorners; they rage and weep late into the night.
Krog is explicit about the terms of her personal engagement: her dedication is “for every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips”. Later, as she interviews Civil Co-operation Bureau murderers, “they are familiar as my brothers, cousins and school friends. Between us, all distance is erased. Was there perhaps never a distance except the one I have built up with great effort within myself over the years? What I have in common with them is a culture – and part of that culture over decades hatched the abominations for which they are responsible.”
Her profound sense of identification with perpetrators causes her, at one dramatic moment, to confront an FW de Klerk who reminds her of her father: she pushes her hand in his face at a public event, and screams, “Where are you? Where the fuck are are you?”
Her responses are sometimes violently personal. On one level, Country of My Skull is about her love affair with Desmond Tutu. When he holds a press conference from his hospital bed after his cancer diagnosis, she lingers, weeping: “I turn back and hold his hands. He smiles at me: ‘Don’t look so concerned – I will be okay … besides, we are fighting mos on the side of the angels.'”
That inclusive pronoun, “we”, is tremendously important: Krog wants there to be no doubt that she and Tutu are fighting on the same side. Later, they fall out, but are reconciled when he extracts that poor excuse for an apology from Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Unlike so many of us, who saw Tutu’s grovelling as a symbol for the impotence of the commission, Krog describes it as Tutu’s finest moment.
Does her personal quest for belonging and redemption get in the way of her narrative about the truth commission? Of course it does. That’s her point. At times, it’s hard not to be irritated by her over-engagement with her subject, or by her overwrought imagery. But, in a way, she sets herself up like the protagonist in a novel: one might not like her excesses, but they are hers, and so one accepts them.
And she can laugh at herself. At one moment during the commission process, she is walking down Adderley Street with a black colleague, Sello, when she bumps into Wilhelm Verwoerd, who works for the commission, and with whom she has a classically Krogian engagement about war psychosis and ambiguity.
When she tells Sello that the man is Hendrik Verwoerd’s grandson, he “hurls himself backwards, his feet stick out right into busy Adderley Street. He shrieks with pleasure. He trammels his fists on the pavement … [He] sits up and wipes the tears from his eyes: ‘Jirre! Julle Boere!'”