An interrogation of the discourse on space and ...

On Space and Identity in Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull (1998) Louise Viljoen 1

Introduction: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Antjie Krog and her text

The unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison at the beginning of 1990, set in motion a process that resulted in the first democratic elections in South Africa in April 1994.

In the year after the elections, legislation was drafted to establish a Truth and

Reconciliation Commission. Its Human Rights Violations Committee was given the task of conducting investigations and holding hearings to determine the causes, nature and extent of human rights violations committed in the period between 1 March 1960 and a cut-off date of 6 December 1993. Its Amnesty Commitee had to facilitate the granting of amnesty to persons who made full disclosure of all the relevant facts relating to acts committed with a political objective and the Reparation and Rehabilitation Commmittee was required to recommend on reparation measures for victims. The bill was signed into law by President Nelson Mandela on July 1995 and the first hearings took place in April 1996. The award-winning Afrikaans poet, Antjie Krog, well-known for her fierce personal and creative engagement with the political struggle of the oppressed during the seventies and eighties, was one of 1

the journalists covering the hearings of the Truth Commission for the SABC (the public broadcasting service in South Africa). The text that she produced after the conclusion of the Commission’s work, called Country of my Skull (1998), is an interesting hybrid:

on the one hand it gives a factual,

journalistic account of the workings of the Truth Commision; on the other hand it is a highly personal and subjective account of the impact the Truth Commission had on the author. The extent of her personal involvement and subjective point of view is already indicated by the dedication of her book to “every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips”.

She observes the events from the

perspective of a white Afrikaner, who feels immense guilt about the abuses of the Afrikaner nationalist regime (for this she is berated from the left as well as the right side of the political spectrum - see Braude 1998 and Maree 1998). Although largely factual, parts of the text are fictional.

In interviews conducted shortly after the

publication of Country of my Skull, Krog stated that she did not tamper with the testimonies of the victims but that she fictionalised certain characters and events to articulate certain ideas (see Isaacson 1998 and Nieuwoudt 1998). The idea of fictionalising some parts of a text that was supposed to report on the workings of a Commission trying to retrieve the truth about the past was not well received or understood by everyone.

Braude (1998) is critical of Krog’s (postmodern) “refusal to assist her

audience to confidently differentiate between truth and falsehood” and feels that the “assertion of her creative right to do anything in representing the TRC is naive or dishonest”. The issue is complicated

2 because Krog prefers to take a complex view of truth which problematises rather than clarifies it: “The word ‘Truth’ makes me uncomfortable. The word ‘truth’ still trips my tongue. ‘Your voice tightens up when you approach the word “truth”,’ the technical assistant says irritated. ‘Repeat it twenty times so that you become familiar with it. Truth is mos jou job!’ [‘Truth is your job, after all!’] I hesitate at the word, I am not used to using it. Even when I type it, it ends up as either turth or trth. I have never bedded that word in a poem. I prefer the word ‘lie’. The moment the lie raises its head, I smell blood. Because it is there ... where the truth is closest” (36). The author also employs literary techniques common to the fictional genres of the narrative and the lyric. The text is constructed in the form of a narrative with events in a logical and chronological order, with characters that can be used as sparring partners in the discussion of issues raised by the Truth Commission (a Xhosa professor, a fellow journalist, a lover, brothers, a friend). According to one review she becomes something of a fictional character herself: “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” (Gevisser 1998: 26). Krog herself said in an interview: “Some of the things I wrote about did not happen to me. A book has to have flow, characters, a climax and an ending” (Isaacson 1998). It is also apparent that she attaches great importance to the use of narrative in the quest for truth: “Will a Commission be sensitive to the word ‘truth’? If its interest in truth is linked only to amnesty and compensation, then it will have chosen not truth, but justice. If it sees truth as the widest possible compilation of people’s perceptions, stories, myths and experiences, it will have chosen to restore memory and foster a new humanity, and perhaps that is justice in its deepest sense” (16). This is probably why she uses the term “narrative” to refer to the testimonies of victims, betrayers and perpetrators. She is also aware of the therapeutic, even existensial, value of telling stories: “We tell stories not to die of life” is the title she gives to one of the sections in which she reports on the testimony of a victim who lost his family when their vehicle struck a landmine. The craft of Krog the poet is also evident in the lyricism of the titles given to the different chapters, the poetic descriptions abounding in the text, the fact that parts of the report is structured like epic verse (e.g. “The Shepherds’ Tale” - 210-216) and the inclusion of poems in the text.

The author also

concedes that the writing of a factual report about something like the Truth Commission is foreign to her feeling that she is in essence a poet, not a journalist: “neither truth nor reconciliation is part of my graphite when sitting in front of a blank page, rubber close at hand. Everything else fades away. It becomes so quiet. Something opens and something falls into this quiet space. A tone, an image, a line mobilizes completely. I become myself. Truth and reconciliation do no enter my anarchy. They choke on betrayal and rage, they fall off my refusal to be moral. I write the broken line. For some brief moments of loose-limbed happiness everything I am, every shivering, otherwise useless, vulnerable

3 fibre and hypersensitive sense come together. A heightened phase of clarity and the glue stays ... and somewhat breathless, I know:

for this I am made.

I am not made to report on the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission” (36). The passion and ‘immorality’ of Krog’s poetry is carried over into her report on the Truth Commission; it is also in this sense that the text is a hybrid, feeding on the rhetorical constraints of a journalistic report as well as on the anarchy of literature. Another feature which increases the hybridity and ambivalence of the text is the fact that it was originally written in Afrikaans and then translated line by line into English with the help of Krog’s editor, Ivan Vladislavic (Nieuwoudt 1998). Much of the author’s struggle with the involvement of Afrikaners in past abuses is linked with her passion for her mothertongue, Afrikaans: “How do I live with the fact that all the words used to humiliate, all the orders given to kill, belonged to the language of my heart?” (238). In his foreword to the book the publisher stresses that everyone involved in the processes the Truth Commission underwent some transformation in identity: “The people who tells these stories, along with the people who listen to them and, like Antjie Krog, the people who report on them, are living South Africans. They are struggling to find identity for themselves, individually and collectively, within the shadows still cast by their country’s brutal history” (1998: viii). My article wants to focus on the way in which the search for identity is partly dependant on spatial elements like space, landscape, land and country. 2

Identity, subjectivity and space

Although it is generally recognised that gender, class, race and sexuality are four of the most frequently cited axes along which identity is constructed (Blunt & Rose 1994: 6), the reading of Country of my Skull alerts one to the fact that other factors like language, ethnicity, religion and spatial elements also come into play in the (re-)construction of identity.

Postcolonial critics have also pointed out the

2

intersections of place with identity (Nash 1994: 228) and commented on the importance of place in the construction of subjectivity (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1995: 392). Attention has also been given to the way in which landscape (as part of an aesthetic tradition) can be “a focus for the formation of identity” (Mitchell 1994: 2). Apart from this, space (in its various manifestations of place, landscape, land and country) is also recognised as an important factor in the construction of national identity (Nash 1994: 227-237; Bunn 1994: 128). Space has been prominent in traditional constructions of Afrikaner identity, as manifested in the importance attached to spatial elements (like place and landscape) in the Afrikaans literary tradition. The South African writer and critic, J.M. Coetzee, has linked the importance of space in Afrikaans literature to the ideological use of landscape in the construction of Afrikaner identity. Writing about the Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach, he comments on the “feelings of passionate intimacy with the South African landscape that, Afrikaners like to think, can be expressed only in Afrikaans, and therefore (here comes the sinister turn in the reasoning) can be experienced only by the Afrikaner. Closeness of fit between land and language is - so the reasoning goes - proof of the Afrikaner’s natural

4 3

ownership of the land” (1992: 377) . My thesis will be that Krog feels compelled by the process of the Truth Commission to construct a new identity for herself. This she does by reacquainting herself with and re-assessing the spaces, places and landscapes that previously constituted her identity as an Afrikaner and an Afrikaans writer. Trinh T. Minh-ha has written: “Identity is a way of re-departing. Rather, the return to a denied heritage allows one to start again with different re-departures, different pauses, different arrivals” (1990: 328). Re-visiting spaces, places, landscapes and the country she has known all her life enables Krog to use the South African “landscape as a shifting strategic source of identification without implying the adoption of ... a fixed, natural, or inherent identity” (Nash 1994: 239). She makes use of spatial notions (like for instance “landscape” and “country”) to identify her own position, but she does not fall back on the idea that there is a natural bond between her as an Afrikaner using the Afrikaans language and the landscape which makes her better suited than others to be the proprietor of the land and a citizen of the country. Her attitude seems to be more supple and humble; more contradictory and fluid. The reconstruction of identity also implies dis-placement from an earlier subject position. Several reviews pointed out that Krog’s narrative about the Truth Commission is highly subjective and personal (see for example Gevisser 1998). The subjectiveness of her position raises questions about the validity and justness of her observations about those being objectified in the process of being reported on. Robinson’s words on the methodology of “white women researching and representing others” in South Africa can also be applied to Krog’s reporting. Writing about the research of several privileged, white women writing about Indian women who live in the Kwazulu-Natal-province of South Africa, Robinson states: “The subjectivities of both researcher and researched, then, are strongly implicated in the constructions and representations produced in texts such as those reviewed here, and indeed in any texts resulting from academic research. Importantly, it is not only the obvious social location of the researcher - in terms of race, class, and gender - that shapes the textual productions, but also the details of disciplinary location, physical location during research, political persuasion, personality, and so forth” (1994: 217). In a certain sense Krog’s journalistic report on the TRC can be equated to research: her open admission of subjectivity is, therefore, methodologically sound. She openly admits to the different factors which influence her reporting (race, class, gender, ethnicity, physical location, political persuasion, personality, etc.).

This methodological approach also creates space for the

“necessary process of engagement and mutual transformations” (Robinson 1994: 218) during the process of research, reporting or narrating. This also rings true of Krog’s involvement with the Truth Commission: she is not only willing to engage with the Truth Commission, but also to transform her own identity in the process. The willingness of Krog as reporter to engage and transform along with the reported is especially apt in the context of postcolonial South Africa. Robinson writes: “All colonial peoples have experienced the dis-placement associated with colonization: South Africa’s population perhaps more than most. To dis-place (not erase or deny) our own subjectivities is essential if we are to ‘unlearn our privilege’” (1994: 219). As a white Afrikaans-speaking South African, a member of the group privileged by apartheid, Krog ‘dis-places’ herself and ‘unlearns her privilege’ by working towards

5 the transformation of her own identity through the re-visiting of spaces she knew before. Working out the methodological parameters within which a postcolonial feminist could conduct her research, Robinson states that it would have to include finding ways in which the researcher’s voice could be mediated and in which the voice of the researched could be included (1994: 219-220). Krog’s text does indeed include the voices of the ‘researched’ by virtue of the inclusion of large sections in which the testimonies of victims as well as perpetrators are reported verbatim. One of the most significant examples of the author’s willingness to give voice to other inhabitants of the country and to listen to other voices is manifested in her report of the testimony given by the shepherd Lekotse about a raid by the security police on his house one night in 1993. She calls her verbatim report of his testimony “The Shepherd’s Tale” (210-216). Because of the way in which it is reported (it is divided in lines like verse), it becomes a poetic narrative which is then extensively analysed and interpreted by the author (217-220). The tendency of Krog to work interpretations and analyses of the material into the text may indicate another attempt to dis-place herself and to lessen the distance between herself as the reporter or narrator and those who are reported or narrated. Writing about the question of a narrative’s truthfulness, Trinh T. Minh-ha observes: “S/he who speaks, speaks to the tale, as s/he begins telling and retelling it. S/he does not speak about it. For without a certain work of displacement, ‘speaking about’ only partakes in the binary opposition (subject/object; I/It; We/They) on which territorialized knowledge depends” (1990: 327). It can perhaps be argued that Krog speaks to the tale of the shepherd by the interpretive attention she devotes to it and by the way in which it is set apart from the rest of the text. She identifies with him from the perspective of her passion for the landscape in which his tale is set (see the passages about the landscape around Ladybrand immediately preceding “The Shepherd’s Tale” - 210) and because she has been submitted to the same dismantling of old values as he has been (“that was the day when his entire life’s philosophy, his perception of the world and his own place in it was destroyed “ - 217). The narrative techniques she points out can also be seen in her own narrative about the Truth Commission. She comments on the important role the demarcation of personal space plays in the shepherd’s tale, the use of images from his own world, the significance of the rhetorically repeated questions in his testimony and the use of archetypes “that support the theme of access to diversity” (220). The author’s attention to the detail of this “tale” gives an indication of the importance she attaches to the voices of ordinary people, of her respect for the those who are reported or narrated. The following sections of the article will focus on the way in which the transformation of identity in which the author is engaged is connected to a “remaking of spaces” (Blunt and Rose 1994: 19). Spaces, places, landscapes as well as the notions of land and a country are revisited in the process of forming a new personal and national identity. 4

The Politics of Location: de-naturalizing the landscape in the search for identity

6 Adrienne Rich’s phrase the “politics of location” which was coined in a feminist context to refer to the interpretation of the specificity of a particular woman (see Blunt & Rose 1994: 7), can also be applied in the case of Krog’s text. From the outset it becomes clear that she prefers to direct herself at local specificities, rather than broad overviews. This focus is made possible by the functioning of the Truth Commission which gives ordinary people the chance to specify the detail of their circumstances in giving evidence. The “politics of location” can also be related to postmodernist historiography’s interest in the petites histoires or small narratives rather than grand narratives, which only feature the rulers, the victorious and the important. Krog’s narrative gives voice to the ordinary men and women of South Africa by making abundant use of verbatim reports of testimonies, thus honouring their local specifics. This interest in specifics is illustrated by the radio team’s joy about their first report from the Truth Commission: “We’ve done it! The voice of an ordinary cleaning woman is the headline on the one o’ clock news” (32). The interest in specifics also leads to an interest in localities, i.e. the spaces, places and landscapes in which the different small histories which make South African history were acted out. One is reminded of the theory of spatial history which Carter proposed as an alternative to imperial history in The Road to Botany Bay (1987). Imperial history retrospectively forces events into a teleological order which emphasises progress in time and loses sight of the spatial dimension of history. Carter believes that the spatiality of historical experience can be retrieved in texts like journals, diaries, letters and uncompleted maps which hesitantly ‘write’ the space for later interpretation. Krog’s unusual attention to the details of location in her report on the hearings of the Truth Commission can be interpreted as an attempt to reclaim the spatiality of experience, as part of the process of forming a new personal and national identity. Writing about “imperial landscapes”, L.M. Mitchell states that “landscape is itself a physical and multisensory medium (earth, stone, vegetation, water, sky, sound and silence, light and darkness, etc.) in which cultural meanings and values are encoded” (1994: 14). Reading Krog’s descriptions of the landscapes in which the Truth Commission hearings are set, one can see how she invests ‘nature’ with cultural meaning, reading it in terms of cultural and historical codes. Writing about the first of the hearings in East London, a coastal city in the Eastern Cape, Krog wonders why the Truth Commission’s work should start in the Eastern Cape: “Why the Eastern Cape - why start at this scalp of green silence?” (33). She mentions the historical fact that this part of Africa was one of the first frontiers between black and white in Africa and that the “landscape of this part of the country provided a dramatic backdrop for the moral struggles around colonialism, expansionism, race and freedom” (33). She also elaborates on the region’s history of fierce resistance against apartheid counteracted by the government’s strong oppression of resistance.

Her description naturalizes the landscape by

suggesting that its “scalp of green silence” is the appropriate place in which to start the proceedings of the Truth Commission which will break the silence of the past. She also relates the geographical opposites in the landscape to the conflict between the opposing political groups in the anti-apartheid

7 struggle: “It has to be this part of the country that turns us inside out, that renders us: bare lips. It has to be this region of fierce opposites - meadows and plains, waterfalls and dongas, ferns and aloes that sparks from a speechless darkness the voices of the past” (34). According to Mitchell who wants to divest so-called imperial landscapes of their tendency to naturalize cultural and social constructions as if they were simply given and inevitable (1994: 2), one should be aware of what is written on the land: “We have known since Ruskin that the appreciation of the landscape as an aesthetic object cannot be an occasion for complacency or untroubled contemplation; rather, it must be the focus of a historical, political, and (yes) aesthetic alertness to the violence and evil written on the land, projected there by the gazing eye” (1994: 29). Krog acknowledges that the Eastern Cape landscape needs to be read in terms of the historical and political story written on the land by previous generations. One must however be careful not to repeat earlier naturalizations in which the cultural values attached to landscapes by groups like the Afrikaners were naturalized to justify land ownership (see Coetzee’s argument, 1992: 377). Krog’s description of another venue in which one of the Truth Commission hearings takes place, inscribes an aesthetic and literary tradition while at the same time undermining it. Describing the despair she feels at the heart-rending testimony of an Afrikaans-speaking man who lost his wife and children in a landmine explosion, she writes: “I give the phone to a colleague and flee blindly among the cables and electronic equipment ... out on to the stoep overlooking Nelspruit. I gasp for breath. Like two underwater swimmers, my eyes burst out to the horizons ... the mountains lit in a blushing light-blue hedge of peace. I am drowning. My eyes claw at the trees, the kloofs ... see, smell ... the landscape of paradise and a language from paradise: mispel, maroela, tarentaal, I whisper. The air is drowsy with jasmine and kanferfoelie. I sit down on the steps and everything tears out of me” (48-49). Again geographical space is invested with cultural and aesthetic meaning: she calls it “a landscape of paradise”, not unaware of the irony that the testimony she just heard proved that it is also a landscape with a history of violence. The aesthetic value attached to this “landscape of paradise” is connected with Afrikaans, a “language from paradise” in which she then proceeds to enunciate the words “mispel, maroela, tarentaal ... kanferfoelie”. In doing this she seems to confirm Coetzee’s argument that there is a tendency amongst Afrikaners (and in the Afrikaans literary system) to think that the essence of the South African landscape can only be expressed in Afrikaans (1992: 377). The stark contrast between the “landscape of paradise” (captured in the “language of paradise” Afrikaans) and the stories of violence written on this landscape is however starting to denaturalize the conventional meanngs attached to the idyllic landscape. The same ambivalence is present in her description of the Eastern Free State town Ladybrand when the Truth Commission sits there. Although she herself contributes to the literary aestheticizing of the landscape in this passage, she is aware of the history of violence which contradicts the beauty: “Undreamably the Eastern Free State town lies among the sweepings of grass and stone and windswept sky. Bare trees stand like tuning forks next to the vleie in a vapour of muggies and steam and birds. How could anything resembling brutality possibly have happened in this town with the golden sandstone glow? With the late afternoon sun pleasant as an amber coat agains

8 the cliffs? Over the plains of grass frosted to blonde and brown and rust” (207). The unsettling contrasts between idyllically beautiful South African landscapes and the history of violence written on them contributes to the transformation of her identity. During the same visit to Ladybrand the author elucidates the nature of her own relationship with the South African landscape in an intensely lyrical description (210): The next morning on my way to town I take a detour through the countryside. As far as the eye can reach there is rooigras. I stop. I once wrote: ‘I adore Themedra Triandra the way other people adore God.’ I want to lie down. I want to embrace. I want to sing the shiny silk stems upwards. I want to ride the rust-brown seeds, the rustling frost-white growth around ankles. Grass, red grass bareback against the flanks. This is my landscape. The marrow of my bones. The plains. The sweeping veld. The honeyblonde sandstone stone. This I love. This is what I’m made of. And so I remain in the unexplainable wondrous ambuscade of grass and light, cloud and warm stone. As I stand half-immersed in the grass crackling with grasshoppers and sand, the voices from the town hall come drifting on the first winds blowing from the Malutis - the voices, all the voices of the land. The land belongs to the voices of those who live in it. My own bleak voice among them. The Free State landscape lies at the feet at last of the stories of saffron and amber, angel hair and barbs, dew and hay and hurt. There is almost an element of religous mysticism in her relationship with the landscape:

it is is

transcendental (‘I adore Themeda Triandra the way other people adore God’), erotic (“I want to embrace...I want to ride the rust-brown seeds”) and inexplicable (“unexplainable wondrous ambuscade of grass and light”). The language of appropriation and possession still forms part of her discourse on the landscape (“my landscape”), but the author also wants to redefine this relationship in terms of being possessed by the landscape which is a constitutive factor in her identity (“This is what I’m made of”). If there is a question of possession at all, the author feels that the “land belongs to the voices of those who live in it. My own bleak voice among them” (210). Thus the author’s relationship with the landscape becomes something shared with the other peoples in the county.

Because the Truth

Commission has given voice to many of those who could not speak before, it makes possible a ‘recolonisation’ of the land - this time by the whole population of South Africa and this time by means of their narratives. If land is subjected at all, it is subjected by narratives rather than colonisers or landowners: “The Free State landscape lies at the feet at last of the stories of saffron and amber, angel hair and barbs, dew and hay and hurt” (210).

9 It has been commented that a tension exists between “land” as a commodity which commands a specific price and “landscape” which presents itself as a source of spiritual value (as in the case of the above description). Mitchell writes: “‘Landscape’ must represent itself, then, as the antithesis of ‘land’, as an ‘ideal estate’ quite independent of ‘real estate’, as a ‘poetic’ property ... rather than a ‘material’ one” (1994: 15). That Krog is conscious of this tension between “land” (which was appropriated by white settlers during the course of South African history) and “landscape” (with which she has a passionate relationship informed by her cultural, literary and historical background), is evident in the poem “grond” [“land”] from her collection poetry simply called Gedigte 1989-1995 [Poems 1989-1995]. The following translation of the poem is by Karen Press (Krog 1996: 119): land Under orders from my ancestors you were occupied had I language I could write for you were my land my land but me you never wanted no matter how I stretched to lie down in rustling blue gums in cattle lowering horns into Diepvlei rippling the quivering jowls drink in silky tassels in dripping gum in thorn trees that have slid down into emptiness me you never wanted me you could never endure time and again you shook me off you rolled me out land, slowly I became nameless in my mouth now you are fought over negotiated, divided paddocked sold stolen mortgaged I want to go underground with you land land that would not have me land that never belonged to me land that I love more fruitlessly than before Krog’s poem questions and undermines those parts of the Afrikaans literary tradition that have appropriated land aesthetically in order to naturalize ownership of the land. The traditional power relation is inverted: rather than humans having the power to subject the land (as evident from the metaphors of possession, appropriation and penetration of land in colonial discourse), in this poem the

10 land has the power and agency to reject the advances of the speaker. The poet uses the discourse of someone being rejected by a lover, an inversion of colonial discourse’s metaphors of sexual possession of ‘frontier’ landscapes. 4 The narrative of the farm: reconstructing personal identity Included in the author’s report on the Truth Commission is a narrative about the farm on which she grew up and to which she returns on two occasions in the text. It is crucial to redefine her relationship to the farm because this space played such an important part in the formation of her personal identity. The concept ‘farm’ evokes certain historical and cultural meanings in the South African and Afrikaner context. Colonisation and occupation of land in South Africa by European settlers is only one amongst the many meanings associated with the farm in the South African context. Farms in the Free State province (where Krog grew up) and the erstwhile Transvaal province are also linked to the settlement of land by Afrikaners (mostly descendants of Dutch colonists) who moved away from the Cape Colony during the nineteenth century to escape British colonial rule. Because of this, land (and by extension the farm) is strongly associated with freedom in constructions of Afrikaner history. The author’s mother voices the traditional, nationalist Afrikaner sentiment about land: “She said the other day land is the essence of the Afrikaner, because land brings freedom” (273). The image of the white settler farmer as someone who simply appropriated or claimed land, is modified by the reference to the fact that the family farm was bought and paid for in gold (274). The farm also plays a substantial role in South African literature written in English and Afrikaans (see Coetzee’s White Writing 1988). The importance of the farm in the Afrikaans literary tradition dates back to the novels of writers like C.M van den Heever, D.F. Malherbe, J. van Melle and others in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties. These novels reflected social conditions of the time, portraying the descendants of European settlers as landowners firmly entrenched in a feudal patriarchy. Since the sixties, however, the so-called ‘farm novel’ has been ceaselessly reworked in Afrikaans and the conventions of this subgenre subverted by writers like Etienne Leroux, Anna M. Louw, Etienne van Heerden, Koos Prinsloo and Eben Venter, reflecting changes in social and political conditions. As an Afrikaans speaker and writer Krog feeds into these traditions: her identity has not only been formed by growing up on a farm, but also by the specific role the farm has played in South African and Afrikaner history, culture and literature. The author attributes a primal and formative role to the space of the farm in her life. Her description of the farm during the first visit depicts a pre-oedipal space which is totally secure and peaceful in its feeling of timelessness: “As if back into a womb, I crawl - the heavy-light eiderdown, the hot-water bottle. Through the window I see the sleeping farmyard washed away in moonlight. A plover calls far off. Overcome with the carefreeness of my youth, I doze off - safe in this stinkwood bed, safe in this sandstone house, this part of the Free State. Everything so quiet. Stars roar past the yard” (4). During her second visit she describes the farm as the space which gave her words and therefore invested her with the ability to give meaning through language. Sleeping on the farm, she is awakened

11 by a thunderstorm: “I open the shutter and stand entranced by the storm - my nostrils filled with the blessed smell of wet earth and stone. This is the place that first wakened me for words and still does after all these years, these many other voices” (272).

It has been remarked that some settler

literatures are marked by a “sense of displacement” because of an awareness of a “gap between the ‘experienced’ environment and descriptions the language provides” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1995: 391). In Krog’s case, and according to the evidence of this passage, the reverse seems to be true: in her case it is the farm-environment that gave her access to voice, words, language, Afrikaans. She also calls the farm “(m)ost beloved state of heart” to which she returns “again and again”, hinting at her emotional relationship with the farm. Later she refers to it almost like one would to a lover, overcome by emotion or desire: “I’ve written about this farm obsessively. No other season can heal my words. I don’t speak of it. I call no planets hither. My being is weak with it, hangs on to it - yet it can no longer come from me” (273). Not only does the farm awaken her to words, it also heals her words after she has been away and has experienced the trauma of reporting on the Truth Commission. Paradoxically she feels that she cannot write about it any more: she has written about it “obsessively”, but “it” (i.e. writing about the farm) can no longer come from her. It could be that her experience of the Truth Commission has destroyed her earlier innocence about the unjust political system which sustained her privileged childhood on the farm. The image of the safe, secure and peaceful farm is disrupted in the first narrative about the author’s visit to the farm, because it deals mainly with the fear and tension of her brothers’ battle against stock theft. The idea of a pastoral idyll (often evoked by the early Afrikaans farm novels) that has been destroyed also features in the second narrative about the farm in which the author tells about a visit to the farm to celebrate Christmas with the family (272-275). On their way to the family farm the author and her family are unexpectedly met by a notice on the gate which warns that one can be met by an armed response if one sets foot on the farm without a prior appointment (272). The lush thicket of trees around the house has also been also been cut open to shoulder-height so that no one can hide near the house (272). The threat to the farm as haven of safety and privilege is articulated by the author’s mother: “Ma said she cannot cope with the fact that this farm, this lifelong have, this place that has always been the safest place we know, has turned into an island under threat. That when a car comes up the gravel road, we don’t know whether it’s carrying friends or killers” (273). Although the idyll of the farm has been affected by changing circumstances, experiencing the Truth Commission has eased the author’s relationship with the farm and her privileged upbringing as one of the class of white landowners. Spending Christmas on the family farm she writes: “I see my mother coming back from the chicken-run with her two youngest grandchildren, each swinging a basket of eggs. She seems frail, but the scene is so peaceful, we are so lucky, so privileged... But whereas this privilege used to upset me in the past, now I can hold against it a truth that we are all aware of. No longer an unaware privilege, but one that we know the price and mortality of” (272). Coming to terms with feelings of guilt about her privileged past through her contact with the work of the Truth

12 Commission and becoming conscious of new circumstances on the farm almost amounts to an oedipal passage, a coming to terms with the reality of South Africa. 5

Making space and imagining a county: reconstructing a national identity

Krog’s text also comments on the ways in which the Truth Commission influences existing arrangements of space in South Africa. This is made explicit by the author and professor Kondlo’s discussion about Nomonde Calata’s testimony in East London. Kondlo tells the author that he would like to adapt the testimony of Nomonde about the death of her husband Fort Calata to a comic (37) or graphic novel (41) titled The Contestation of Spaces. According to him Nomonde’s testimony (which is also a form of storytelling and historiography) must be seen against the background of the conventional gendering of spaces in the past: the traditional space in which men tell stories about their male ancestors and take decisions about economics, politics and history (37) versus the space in which food is prepared and the female storyteller tells fantastical stories which undermine boundaries (37-38). The Truth Commission takes Nomonde Calata out of the traditionally gendered story-telling space as she gives her testimony in the formerly “male space of the British Colonial city hall of East London” and is afforded the opportunity to relate her “story as part of the official history of this country” (38). She tells her story in a space that was racially exclusive (for whites only in colonial and apartheid times) and gender exclusive (reserved for males). The Truth Commission thus provides a “safe and official” space for witnesses like Nomonde to become “a historian, a custodian of history despite her gender” (40). Ironically her space is also “protected and officially demarcated”, made safe by the police who once persecuted her as part of their duty under the apartheid regime (38, 40). In this way the Truth Commission renegotiates the conventional meaning of spaces on the basis of race and gender in South African society. One of the recurring themes in Krog’s text is that of the Truth Commission making or creating a space that was not there before. This happens for victims and perpetrators alike: a perpetrator of human rights abuses like Colonel Roelf Venter makes the “very difficult and crucial leap with this statement allowing for a space where change is possible: then it was right, now it is wrong” (95). Voicing her disappointment that F.W. de Klerk, the last prime minister of the apartheid government, refuses to accept any blame for human rights violations committed by people loyal to his government, Krog again uses the image of making space: “And I wonder about the responsibility of the Leader. Shouldn’t he be establishing a space within which we can confront ourselves and our past? Shouldn’t he bring to the table the Afrikaner’s blunt honesty and fearlessness to grapple with the impossible? So that we can participate in the building of this country with self-respect and dignity?” (98) One gets the idea that the image of making space feeds visually on the vast open spaces the South African landscape is famous for. As an Afrikaner who wants to acknowledge and confront the past, Krog would like to move away (at least metaphorically) from a narrow and restricted position towards a larger and more accommodating space. She desires a space that will correspond with her transforming identity and be

13 able to accommodate change, a space that did not exist before when the conception of Afrikaner identity was something rigid, unforgiving and unforgivable. The implied metaphor of a restricted space applicable to this image of the Afrikaner past mutates further on in the text to that of a soundless space. Writing about the departure of De Klerk’s “hostile delegation” after their political submission before the Truth Commission, she asks: “Whence will words now come? For us. We who hang quivering and ill from the soundless space of Afrikaner past? What does one say? What the hell does one do with this load of decrowned skeletons, origins, shame and ash?” (128). The metaphor of a “soundless space” contrasts with the kind of space (vast, resonant and enveloping at the same time) that she sees in the making throughout the process of the Truth Commission. This is epitomised by her experience when the proceedings in Ladybrand are concluded with the singing of the new South African anthem: “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 / Sometimes the times we live in overflow with light” (216-217).

The space that has been made possible by the Truth

Commission is here signified by the space inside the song which has sensory attributes as if it were some soothing substance (“I wade into song”) with a fragrance (“It is fragrant inside the song”) and softness (“there are soft silences”) that promises rest. The metaphor of a vast and resonant space in which different voices can be heard is again used in the author’s final analysis of the Truth Commission at the end of her narrative: “Against a flood crashing with the weight of a brutalizing past on to new usurping politics, the Commission has kept alive the idea of a common humanity. Painstakingly it has chiselled a way beyond racism and made space for all our voices” (278). The idea of a space which can accommodate different voices and in which all South Africans (Afrikaners included) can “come to rest”, raises the question of a national identity apart from a personal identity. The possibility of a national identity can be connected to the author’s use of the spatial term “country”, which she mostly uses in the sense of “the land of a person’s origin, birth, residence, or citizenship”. Also implicit in her use of the term is the reference to “a political state or nation: the territory of a usually independent nation that is distinct as to name and the characteristics or attributes of its people” (Webster’s Dictionary). The term is prominently used in the title of the book, Country of my Skull. The political analyst Van Zyl Slabbert interprets “country of my skull” as a reference to a country that exists in the author’s imagination, hopes and dreams in his review of the book (1998). According to him the “country of my skull” refers to an ideal South Africa in which reconciliation and truth exists.

He is critical of the author’s optimism and finds this ideal country of her skull “‘n

ontoeganklike morele pantomime” [“an inaccessible moral pantomime”] (Slabber 1998). Slabber’s astute reading of the title alerts one to the connection between the use of the word “country” and the idea of a political state in which all South African citizens will share a new national identity. It is clear throughout that the author regards the Truth Commission as an important factor in the bringing about of a national identity which will unify South Africans while recognising their diversity. She feels that

14 taking part in the Truth Commission will bring about understanding and a sense of belonging to the country: “When the Truth Commission started last year, I realized instinctively: if you cut yourself off from the process, you will wake up in a foreign country - a country that you don’t know and that you will never understand” (131). Although she is strongly convinced of this, she sometimes despairs at the Commission’s ability to bring about forgiveness, especially for Afrikaners: “And suddenly it is as if an undertow is taking me out ... out ... and out. And behind me sinks the country of my skull like a sheet in the dark - and I hear a thin song, hooves, hedges of venom, fever and destruction fermenting and hissing underwater. I shrink and prickle. Against. Against my blood and the heritage thereof. Will I for ever be them - recognizing them as I do daily in my nostrils? Yes. And what we have done will never be undone. It doesn’t matter what we do” (130-131). In trying to forge a new identity which will tie in with the idea of a country and a national identity, the author re-departs from her own past as an Afrikaner. She quotes from a piece her mother wrote after the assasination of prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd (often referred to as the architect of apartheid) in 1966 and in which she mourns his death. Her mother also uses the word “country”, but in her case it is associated with Afrikaner history and the Afrikaner’s past. She refers to the events of the Anglo Boer War of 1899-1902 in which Afrikaners suffered oppression by the British Empire: “Should I go out on the streets and call upon people to consider what is happening to our country? Should I call on them with the only call that I know - that of concentration camps, tears and blood?” (98). More than thirty years later her daughter is striving towards another kind of country, an imagined country of the skull in which South Africans can be reconciled. Her idea of a country is inclusive rather than exclusively focused on Afrikaner history as in the case of her mother. She also uses a discussion with her (fictional) brothers Andries and Hendrik as a foil for her own feelings about the country and a national identity. Because they are farmers they voice the feeling of especially white farmers who do not share the author’s optimism and emotional investment in a new personal and national identity. They feel that the new “country” or political system will not accommodate or tolerate them: When her brother is asked: “But shouldn’t you be putting your energies into building the country?”, he answers (referring to the black majority living in South Africa): “They don’t want our energies. They want to build the country themselves. And that’s fair enough ... I want them to realize that we can be of help or of use or whatever’” (275). The author concludes her text with a poem in which the spatial concept of the “country” is again raised: because of you this country no longer lies between us but within it breathes becalmed after begin wounded in its wondrous throat

15 in the cradle of my skull it sing, it ignites my tongue, my inner ear, the cavity of heart shudders towards the outline new in soft intimate clicks and gutturals of my soul the retina lears to expand daily because by a thousand stories I was scorched a new skin. I am changed for ever. I want to say: forgive me forgive me forgive me You whom I have wronged, please take me with you In the imagery of the poem the country is no longer territory about which different groups fight (“this country no longer lies / between us”) as was indeed the case in South African history. As in the title of the book, the country is something which has been (emotionally) internalized in the process of being imagined (“within”).

The poem imagines the country in terms of a creature which now “breathes

becalmed / after being wounded / in its wondrous throat” so that a spatial concept is once again related to voice, language and the opportunity to speak. In contrast with the general trend to imagine a country as a woman in the process of constructing a national identity (Nash 1994: 229), the author represents the country as a vulnerable newborn or baby which resides in the “cradle” of her skull. Apart from the fact that the South African democracy was only four years old when this text was published in 1998, the metaphor also indicates the tentative, hesitant nature of the national identity being imagined by the author. It is also noticeable that “it” (this country) ignites “my tongue, my inner ear”: it influences her ability to speak as well as her ability to hear. Earlier in the text the author indicated that it was the farm (with all its historical, cultural and literary associations) which awakened her for words and language (272); now it is the newly born “country” taking form in her mind that enables her to speak, igniting her tongue. 6

Conclusion

16 Krog’s text represents a special case of constructing an identity in a time of transition. In her case it happens especially by means of a confrontation with spatial concepts like space, landscape, land and country, presenting ample proof that space is indeed one of the important axes along which identity is constructed. Although there seems to be a desire for closure in the passion to belong, the project of re-constructing an identity is an ongoing process of transformation and change. University of Stellenbosch, South Africa Notes 1

I will use the term Truth Commission in keeping with the author’s preference:

“We [the

radiojournalists - LV] also insist on the use to ‘Truth Commission’ rather than ‘TRC’, which would conceal the essence of the Commission behind a meaningless abbreviation” (32). 2

I use the term “place” to indicate a space that has been invested with historical and cultural

meaning, as defined by Darian-Smith e.a: “It is through the cultural processes of imagining, seeing, historicizing and remembering that space is transformed into place” (1996: 3). 3 Parry has commented that the narrators in Coetzee’s fiction effect a “distancing from the historic claim to the land celebrated by white settler writing” by deliberately voiding the South African landscape of emotional investment (1998: 161-162).

She argues that this textual practice “dissipates

engagement with political conditions it also inscribes” (1998: 164).

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