Scholars raise 2 salient questions regarding poetry in post-apartheid South Africa. One is whether new poetry emerged in the post-apartheid South Africa, and the other is whether poetry produced ...during and after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is capable of capturing the imagination of the reading public without resorting to the bigotry of Black versus White. Literature highlights the need for South African poets to move away from using historical facts as the basis for making literary representation. We acknowledge that the use of historical facts as the basis for literary representation of societies may be seen as insensitive to the victims of the injustices of the past practices in highly politically polarised communities. At the same time, we argue that historical narratives with positive ideological intent can heal wounds and unite a nation. To justify this position, we adopted a 2-fold perspective: firstly, we investigated the effects of using history as the basis for literary representation and, secondly, we examined the extent to which post-apartheid South African poets may use history as a necessary tool to enforce unity and a sense of forgiveness.
This article explores praise poems as biographical documents. Antjie Krog’s poem “pryslied” (“praise poem”), written in reaction to Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration, is compared to two ...Xhosa praise poems performed at the inauguration. This comparison makes an appreciation of her poem as praise poem possible. The three praise poems are specifically analysed as texts in which the biography of Mandela is both reproduced and created. From this analysis it becomes clear to what extent Krog applies the conventions and means of the traditional Xhosa praise poem in her poem. Ultimately the focus of the article is on the contribution Krog’s poem makes not only to the biography of Mandela, but also to the genre of the praise poem in South Africa and to South African literature. However, problematic aspects of Krog’s use of the izibongo tradition are also addressed, and a possible solution is suggested.
To Write Liberty Krog, Antjie
Current writing,
01/2018, Volume:
30, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The keynote for the International Conference, Writing for Liberty, held in Cape Town in 2017 is a response to the contradictory demands made on writers: to respond to the suffering in the world and ...to refrain from appropriating the pain of the marginalised. Taking a cue from Isaiah Berlin's analysis of the two kinds of liberties: liberty to be free and liberty from interference with freedom, an argument is made for the freedom of a writer to write what she wants. This freedom is radically tempered in a reading of some novels by JM Coetzee. Here I explore the quality of skill, anguish and powerlessness to which a writer has to submit within the structure of her text.
This article argues that it is productive to combine cognitive literary studies and postcolonial criticism, and that this constitutes a new formalist approach. Drawing on insights from cognitive ...science, it describes how Antjie Krog's 1998 book Country of My Skull facilitates processes of empathetic engagement and identification. It proposes that postcolonial writing, because it is often particularly experimental, is a crucial area of focus for cognitive literary studies, inviting elaboration of existing models about the phenomenology of reading. Moreover, the article argues that attention to the way narrative strategies are linked to cognitive processes allows us to form scientifically grounded and contextually situated hypotheses about how postcolonial texts function as agents in their socio-historical contexts, and to show how their formal, aesthetic dimension is crucial for their ethical, critical, and political force.
Preludium til misjonen i Finnmark Skjelmo, Randi Hege; Willumsen, Liv Helene
Teologisk Tidsskrift,
2017, Volume:
6, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Open access
Denne artikkelen er i hovedsak en gjennomgang av en kopibok skrevet av Isaac Olsen, som var omreisende lærer i Finnmark i perioden 1703–1716. I tillegg trekkes noen komplementerende dokumenter inn ...for kronologisk å belyse og drøfte Olsens virke i forkant av den offisielle misjon i Finnmark, som Thomas von Westen ledet. Artikkelens kildegrunnlag er originaldokumenter fra Kulturhistorisk Museum i Oslo og Det Kongelige Bibliotek i København. Kildene er innhentet og transkribert av forfatterne. Artikkelen avdekker kontrasten mellom de mål Olsen hadde for sin virksomhet, og den førkristne samiske religionsutøvelse. Dette resulterte for Isaac Olsens del i en frykt og en overbevisning om at den tradisjonelle samiske religion måtte utryddes for å fremme den kristne misjons sak.
Antjie Krog’s Body Bereft (2006) details both the bodily changes brought about by older age and the ways in which these changes fracture a person’s previously-stable sense of self. This article reads ...Krog’s depiction of the ageing body in a small selection of poems from this collection in relation to the unavoidable reality of bodily decay and what is referred to in gerontological theory as ‘successful ageing’. This tension dominates large parts of the gerontological field, and can be seen in Krog’s ambivalent representation of older age in Body Bereft. Through close readings of a number of poems, I will investigate the ways in which Krog problematises the relationship between the lived experience of older age with its concomitant sense of deterioration, and the societal impetus to age well and accept ageing with magnanimity. I will demonstrate that this collection foregrounds the poet’s refusal to accept pre-existing discourses that delimit ageing as something either to bemoan or celebrate. I will conclude that this refusal finds particular expression in her poems “dommelfei / crone in the woods” and “how do you say this”.
The poetry volume Mede-wete by Antjie Krog is a sustained questioning of ethical relations between self and other, an on-going preoccupation of Krog in both her poetry and literary non-fiction works. ...This review article of Mede-wete (also available as Synapse in translation from Afrikaans into English by Karen Press) traces four forms of interconnectedness or synapses that shed light on Krog's project to establish ethical connections between the self, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, both the human and non-human other. Love and family bonds, reaching out to the cultural other, a sense of shared materiality with the environment, and, consequently, a longing for mystical unity constitute four of the synapses as announced in the title of the volume of poetry. The strength of the often challenging poetry emanates strongly from the daring use of language that includes syllable disturbances and surprising compounds. In many respects, Krog's impressive volume belies her apparent pessimism that Afrikaans poets and writers today are little more than "thighshifters-in-flinching-language" (Synapse 113). Keywords: Afrikaans poetry, Antjie Krog, ethics, Mede-wete, otherness.
This article returns to the controversial topic of Krog's alleged plagiarisms in her highly acclaimed account of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Country of My Skull, and ...connects Krog's borrowings with a less-noted feature of that work, that is her heavy editing (arguably, fictionalisation) of some of the testimonies reproduced by her in that book. Most critics read the testimonies presented in Country of My Skull as faithful versions of those given at the hearings, edited only for punctuation and readability (as Krog insists was her method), and many critics offer commentary on the TRC based on Krog's rendering of it. Catherine M. Cole
1
has noted, though, in her book Performing South Africa's Truth Commission, that the changes are more substantive. Tracing these alterations alongside Krog's obscuring of authorship via various borrowings, I argue that the two phenomena work in tandem to 'forge' an indigenous South African voice, which Krog casts as specifically 'black'. These observations I frame within a larger argument about the pressures of national authorship, and transcultural accountability and literary honour. In so doing, I discuss previously un-noted borrowings by Krog - from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and from the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers.
Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, the first major retrospective on the TRC, has, on the one hand, been praised for its deeply passionate, literary take on a subject entangled in the discourses of ...politics and social science. On the other, the book has been the site of fierce controversy: Krog, a privileged Afrikaner, engages directly with her beneficiary status while simultaneously appropriating the voices of victims in her narrative. Since the book's publication, debate about the relationships between identity, voice, memory, and truth, has only become more heated. In this article, I return to Krog's seminal text as a case study of such struggles over voice, analysing Krog's engagement with multiple voices through the lenses of narrative theory and memory studies. Particularly, I apply Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of "heteroglossia" and "polyphony" and Michael Rothberg's concept of "multidirectional memory" in order to reframe the scholarly debate over the book and its ethics of memory. I contend that, though Krog tests ethical boundaries, Country's ability to confound standards of genre with a diverse set of voices and styles is both a major aesthetic feat and an act of democratisation.
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