A Change of Tongue
by Antjie Krog
(Random House)
In one hectic debate she is told that even if “she learned to live the black life of risk” she would never be an African, she would always be a kangaroo. Preferring a eucalyptus tree, Krog says, “It is impossible to imagine the South African landscape without it. Small towns, farmyards, railway lines, forests, windbreaks. The eucalyptus towers over so many memories.”
This short excerpt from a longer tribute to the qualities of bloekombome occurs in Krog’s new book, A Change of Tongue (Random House), in which she takes a good long look at where we are now, surveys the road we have come along, and what lies ahead. In this vast compendium of treasures, a skilful, often funny, blend of anecdote and argument, she ranges from her childhood and early adult years in the Kroonstad area to a “poet’s caravan” through Mali; from assessing her relationships with comrades of the 1980s to a semi-official visit to see the rural poverty of the Transkei.
Krog originally conceived the book as a collection of essays, but it assumed its own form, between genres. It took more than a year and more than five rewrites, and a daily battle to escape The Country of My Skull “which was like a monster sitting next to me” speaking in tones of comic mockery. “I had to dive so deep underwater that I couldn’t hear it.”
She says A Change of Tongue “is far more carefully thought out and structured. It works in a way like a poem, there are more intertextual references.” And she has worked on the text with a poet’s careful attention to language. It was first written in Afrikaans, then translated by her son Andries Samuels into “neutral English”. Krog explains: “I tried other people with translation, but it sounds too English … is then so foreign that I can no longer work on it. I need to have it in Afrikaans so that the tone, and the length, and the rhythm are right.”
Musing on why Afrikaans writers “now suddenly” want to publish in English, Krog says that, in her case, “it’s that I want to interact with what I perceive is the creativity of the new South Africa, and English is its language”. Of Afrikaans she says it is no longer “a completely armoured language. It’s insecure, and it’s lost a lot of [she pauses here] … volume, and it’s much nicer to work in, now that it’s vulnerable.”
But the title, A Change of Tongue, does not refer in any simple way to a change of language — Afrikaans to English (while retaining the cadences of Afrikaans). Krog mentions that the fish depicted on the cover is a sole, a tongvis in Afrikaans, which undergoes a skeletal rearrangement as it matures.
Transformation permeates this book. Early on Krog elucidates the difference between change and transformation, citing examples from Kroonstad, where black people insisted nothing had changed, while white people said everything had. The problem was the need for a deeper grappling with issues and structure.
Krog recounts some sharp debates between her and old friends, comrades of the 1980s. “I pick up a hardening of attitudes, and I pick up racism. And I think, more than anything else, the book is a plea — we have to start imagining ourselves the other.” She refers to the intensely lyrical, transporting, linking passages at the start of each section, “where you have to become something else”. With these she offers a sort of mind-changing, meditative exercise, a small liberation while reading them: “Imagine yourself moonlight, a tree, water, another human.”
Then, in one of these, she describes a woman, who in the desperation of her illness and poverty, sits down on a train track with her two children. “Be her — you know, imagine her, and with that in your conscience, live a life here. Ja, it’s for all of us, not only for whites, not only for blacks.” This is the starting point for real transformation.
She also gives a long and fascinating account of participating in a “poet’s caravan” through Mali with poets from all over Africa. At first afflicted with a sense of “the precipice of not belonging”, she gradually surrenders to the “enormous transformation of accepting you are not the only voice” — and finally shakes off the Western notion of the poet, “sad and lonely”, to experience the poet integrated in the community — the imbongi, the griot. She modifies her poems for performance in desert towns, learns to incorporate the audience and simply to allow Afrikaans to be heard in the welter of all the other African languages.
Both in West Africa and back home, Krog characteristically confronts something that is difficult for her — she concedes that where there is a lack of proper clean sanitation she finds it very hard to transform, “and I don’t know whether I should transform there”. So it’s a bit mystifying to find that sewage features throughout the book, from long-drops and septic tanks to sophisticated municipal systems. She agrees it has a metaphorical purpose. “Sewage is a metaphor for a lot of things — for example, for the waste that is left out of transformation. What you do with that waste, and what does it say, and how can it be abused and used?”
A recurring thread throughout is the family farm outside Kroonstad, with its veld and cattle, and the willows along the Valsch rivier. On the subject of farm attacks she says: “I was a bit surprised at the confidence with which the Human Rights Commission says it’s purely criminal.” She digresses on relations between farmers and their workers, then adds: “This is in many ways a traumatised country — the violence of the past affects every single family. And we come from a past with a fractured morality. We have no coherent morality to say ‘This is wrong, for all of us.’ We’ve never had that — we are in the process of trying to establish a morality that we all agree on.”