A few days after The Sunday Times broke the news of Stephen Watson’s article about Antjie Krog, I received two phone calls. The first was from someone whose relationship with English was strained, and who was very fond of the neologism ”fuckdick”. In the 10 seconds that passed before I hung up, he explained that, ”you Inglis fuckdick are racist against Antjie Krog”. Since he managed to refrain from calling Krog a fuckdick, I gathered that he was a supporter of hers.
The second was from an earnest, intelligent and very worried-sounding young Afrikaans woman. Without introducing herself, she told me: ”It’s very wrong what you’re doing.” I asked what she meant, and she replied that I had defamed Krog by publishing Watson’s article in New Contrast, the journal of which I am editor until aggrieved publisher Random House buys it, burns it and sows salt among the ruins. I asked her if she’d read the piece, and she said that she hadn’t, but that it was wrong all the same. Her tone was shaky, almost tearful, but her point was clearly made: Why, oh God why, had I printed such heresy?
For heresy it was. As a columnist I have received scores of vitriolic e-mails, but only a few phone calls. Those who go to the trouble of hunting down my cellphone number, and who try to show me the error of my ways are always the same: they are religious people who feel that their faith has been attacked. Here was the same pious respect for an injured deity, and the same pity and contempt for the mortal who had impugned it — and I had not even written the article.
Whether or not Watson’s article is defamatory will perhaps be left to lawyers to decide. As far as New Contrast and myself are concerned, I am more than happy — eager, in fact — to give Krog the right of reply in the next issue, if she’ll accept the offer from a relatively minute journal. I published Watson’s article because I found it intriguing. If she wishes to return the favour and sling a cream pie at Watson, I would be happy to provide the venue.
This discussion, then, is not about the allegations and the retorts that came thick and fast from Krog’s camp on the Litnet website. It is instead about the religio-literary fervour, revealed by the furore, that fuels the faithful; both those who admire her, and those who admire her detractors.
It was most clearly evident in the large headline on Litnet that trumpeted an ”Attack on Krog”. Not ”Krog Accused of Plagiarism, Hits Back With Thermonuclear Arsenal of Experts”. Not ”Watson Alleges Plagiarism”. Not even ”Antjie Defamed By Rogue Poet”. No, it was ”Attack on Krog”, as epic a phrase as ”The Guns of Navarone” or ”From Here to Eternity”. It resonates with grandeur, journalistic majesty and yes, biblical mythology. Attack on Jericho, attack on Krog — both seem to jostle for position in that part of the mind that deals with the fight between good and evil and the persecution of innocents.
It’s not surprising. Krog has established a hold on the imagination of South Africa’s readers (all 173 of them) in a way that no other writer of fiction or poetry has managed in a very long time. But more than this, she has managed to extract from their souls something very close to adoration. JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer have fans, admirers and acolytes. Krog has apostles. A personality cult is in full worship, and her reticence to play up to that popularity has simply stoked it higher.
But apart from being young, intense, emotional and fiercely protective of a personality they have divined from their imaginations and a few lines of verse, Krog’s devotees generally share another bond: their language. When the crown jewels of modern Afrikaans literature are put on display (and they do glitter, to be sure), Krog is up near the top of the diadem. She may be straddling the linguistic fence, but to those who love her she is very much ”onse Antjie.”
The acrimony in this particular instance is one of impugned reputations and aesthetic (and therefore intensely personal) attacks, but it laid bare the boil that festers under the apparently unified façade of ”South African literature”.
I don’t know how writers in English and Afrikaans get along, but I do have plenty of experience of how their followers relate to one another. Most of this experience has been gained while pinned up against a bar or a lectern by people desperate to unload on someone they perceive as living ”in the writing world” and as having no literary or linguistic agenda. What they tell me is always the same, and always derogatory.
For the Afrikaans readers who pin my ears back, English writing is flaccid, simpering, over-worked and under-flavoured. It is nothing but navel-gazing autobiography looking for dangerous insights in the fairy nooks and rented paddocks of middle-class suburbia. The English readers, on the other hand, view Afrikaans writing as a stuck record of bleak landscapes populated by laconic misanthropes and willowy women fighting their secret erotic yearnings for the swartes down in the lower 40.
The battle lines are also geographical. Afrikaans literature, I am told, is from Stellenbosch, while the English stuff comes out of Cape Town. If you want to get published in English, do a masters in creative writing and have a homosexual relationship with a married academic (for some amateur Afrikaans critics, the two acts amount to the same thing). To be published in Afrikaans, simply post your manuscript to Kwela or Tafelberg with a sepia photograph of the great-great-grandmother who died in the British concentration camps.
Krog’s retort on Litnet — that she, unlike Watson, knows more than one South African language — cuts straight to the heart of this tension, even if it was intended as a specific rebuttal to a specific allegation in this instance. Afrikaans writers know South Africa, it asserts; English writers only jerk off on it. Yes, reply the English, the jailor always forms an intimate relationship with his prisoner. And so on we go.
Of course, these are all generalisation and clichés, but then so is most of what passes for amateur literary debate in this country. Those polemicists who turned the pages of Contrast blue in the 1980s have removed themselves completely from this furore. Perhaps in their middle age they have become wary of burning bridges and attacking influential figures. Perhaps they simply see this incident as academic handbag-swinging.
But whatever the reason, all that’s now left are lawyers and Inglis fuckdicks.
What about the reader?