1 They Never Wept, the Men of my Race: Antjie Krog's Country of my ...

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4 some reviewers; instead it is the author’s attempt to make explicit the connections between her life and her letters, between the name of her ancestors and her work as a reporter on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Country of my Skull Krog makes more than a few references to the fact that it is explicitly not poetry she is writing. So she is using the poet’s signature (Antjie Krog rather than Samuel), only to erase it, to resist it. The book ends with a poem written by Krog, but significantly in English. The argument will return to this poem, but here it is useful to quote the last few lines to make my point about whom the book addresses: You whom I have wronged, please Take me With you. 12 The signature which seems, then, in the first place to indicate that this text is written for fellow-Afrikaners, addressed to them/us is misleading. A number of things, including this concluding poem, contradict this expectation. In the first place, the text is written in English, and has not (yet) been translated into Afrikaans. Unlike Krog’s other works, it was not published by her Afrikaner establishment publishers Human & Rousseau, but – in South Africa as well as in the United States - by Random House (a resonantly named publisher in the context of this text which is so concerned with cultural homelessness). The book is dedicated in the following way ‘for every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips’. This need not imply that these victims are the only, or even primary, readers; but in this dedication Krog sets up an identification between the signature (on the cover) and the Afrikaans name uttered by the ‘victim’. The extended title of the US edition, recently published by Times Books, a division of Random House, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, 13 gives a more pessimistic gloss to the original title, and also sets up an opposition between guilt and forgiveness, with sorrow as the term that possibly mediates between the two. On the cover of the US edition Krog’s name is smaller, the title bigger; and Krog is ‘introduced’ by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, award-winning US journalist and currently National Public Radio’s chief correspondent in Africa. Hunter-Gault’s introduction adds little that the South African introduction, called ‘Publisher’s Note’, 14 does not say; its value lies in the fact that Charlayne Hunter-Gault associates herself with the project, has a similar signature for US readers and viewers to Krog’s for South African readers and listeners. 12 A. Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg, Random House, 1998), p. 279. 13 A. Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York, Random House, 1999). 14 A. Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg, Random House, 1998), pp. vi-viii.
5 So when an addressee is invoked in the motto, a black woman, a ‘victim’, is addressed, and the text seems to be directed to a black audience. The author thus seems to be calling to attention her historic reading public, her Afrikaans readers, to witness her addressing a black woman; and in this address putting all the Afrikaans names (including that of her own family) on the lips of a woman who names them as her aggressors and victimisers. 15 In this sense Krog’s text attempts to address, simultaneously, an audience that consists of black South Africans as victims of white aggression, and their white aggressors. This discussion of the images and the signature indicates that this text can be seen as divided against itself, doubling up on itself. In this sense its concern with address is symptomatic of a crisis around audience I find not only in this text, but, more generally, in other recent texts by white South Africans. It is a crisis about the name of the fathers, the legacy of the past and of the Afrikaans language; and a crisis around who the addressee of a text produced by a white South African could be. In texts like this one, the author is at pains to distinguish herself from the men of her race as she calls them, and the voice becomes one in search of a new ear, a new genealogy into which she can write herself; because for her it has become impossible to speak any longer only in the language of the fathers. Shoshana Felman, in another context, in her work on testimony, writes of translation: Translation thus itself becomes a metaphor for history, not only in that it demands the rigor of a history devoid of pathos, but in that it opens up the question of how to continue when the past, precisely, is not allowed any continuance. Translation is the metaphor of a new relation to the past, a relation that cannot resemble, furthermore, any past relation to the past but that consists, essentially, in the historical performance of a radical discontinuity….’ 16 Hence Krog’s signing of her father’s name, which is also the name of the beloved Afrikaner poet, and then writing a text in English and dedicating it to the victim who had an Afrikaans name on her lips, can be read as a powerful statement about discontinuity, about the inability to continue with things as they were before. Near the end of her book Krog describes a return to her family home, at Christmas time. 15 The UK edition cover raises additional questions around signature and audience. The cover shows, instead of the landscape of the South African and US editions, a black woman holding what looks like a piece of earth. The woman on the photograph is Joyce Mthimkulu, and she is holding the last remains of her son. The portrait used on this cover seems to suggest, problematically, that Krog is speaking for someone like Joyce Mthimkulu. In the argument I make here I show how Krog goes to some trouble not to do this. 16 S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises in Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London, Routledge, 1992), p. 162.
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Page 17: 17 Hilary Sapire School of Archaeol

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