In this article I seek to reflect on the progression of Antjie Krog's use of the tropes of "the voice", "the body", and "the skin" over the course of her three literary journalism texts, Country of ...My Skull (2002), A Change of Tongue (2004), and Begging to Be Black (2009). I use the term "literary journalism" to foreground the generic instability of Krog's texts, which weave together journalism, memoir, travel writing, social commentary, the poetic, and fictional elements. In Krog's writing, the form, style, and structure of her texts are as important in the process of creating meaning as her language choices and content. By writing at the messy, contested border between literature and journalism, Krog is able to explore the intangible and affective aspects of identity and belonging. I conclude by suggesting that, as Krog moves from a preoccupation with "the voice" and "the body" to the concept of "skin", she is able to draw on the notion of the "in-between" to address her most pressing concerns surrounding questions of white identity and national belonging.
This article explores the distinction between anti-colonial longing and post-colonial becoming through a commentary on Antjie Krog's Begging to Be Black. The epistemology and ontology of postcolonial ...becoming is the central concern. Begging to Be Black is a mytho-poetic narrative in which a world is imagined where King Moshoeshoe, missionaries from the 19th century, Antjie Krog and her friends and colleagues, ANC cadres, the Deleuzian philosopher Paul Patton, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the ANC Youth League are placed in the same narrative space where they can intermingle. And this is done to respond to a crisis of the present -- the difficulties South Africans face in grappling with the legacies of colonialism and Apartheid, and the fact that there is a process of un-homing and re-homing that Krog feels white South Africans in particular need to think about more deeply. The article compares Krog's approach to decolonization with that of the leading South African philosopher of ubuntu, Mogobe Ramose. Both Krog and Ramose offer the epistemological and ontological resources for grappling with the relationship between past, present and future in a decolonizing setting. The article examines how postcolonial critique may take place through liminal figures. Liminality is characterized as central to post-colonial becoming. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
In Begging to Be Black, Krog grapples with the idea of the vulnerable body as a response to Njabulo S Ndebele's inaugural Steve Biko Memorial Lecture (delivered in 2000). She expresses her loyalty to ...literary non-fiction in somatic terms: she hopes that it allows her potentially to discover a "thinning of skin" that avoids the imaginative challenges of fiction. I show how Krog responds to Ndebele's speech through two key intertexts in Begging to Be Black, and asks whether the preoccupation of the text with the idea of the vulnerable body paradoxically elides the particularities of embodied experience. Begging to Be Black incorporates J M Coetzee's Disgrace (
2000
1999
) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
1988 1899
in order to test the limits of the sympathetic imagination and understand what it means to share in bodily vulnerability, particularly in the light of racially differentiated experience.
This article analyses the role of ‘race’ in Antjie Krog’s non-fiction trilogy Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2003) and Begging to Be Black (2009). It explores her explicit use of ...terms such as ‘heart of whiteness’ and ‘heart of blackness’. Claims that Krog essentialises Africa and ‘black’ people are investigated. The article also addresses accusations of racism in Krog’s work. A partial answer to the persistent question of why Krog is so determinedly focused on ‘race’ is sought in the concept of complicity. There is definite specificity in the way Krog writes about ‘white’ perpetrators and ‘black’ victims in South Africa, but her trilogy should be read within the broader context of international restitution discourses, allowing for a somewhat different perspective on her contribution to the discussion of the issue of whether ‘white’ people belong in (South) Africa.Meestal ‘swart’ en ‘wit’: ‘Ras’, medepligtigheid en restitusie in die nie-fiksie van Antjie Krog.Hierdie artikel ontleed die rol van ‘ras’ in Antjie Krog se nie-fiksie trilogie Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2003) en Begging to Be Black (2009). Haar uitdruklike gebruik van terme soos ‘heart of whiteness’ en ‘heart of blackness’ word verken, tesame met aantygings van essensialisering van Afrika en ‘swart’ mense. Ook aantygings van rassisme teen Krog se werk word ondersoek. Die herhaaldelike vraag waarom Krog so vasbeslote gefokus bly op ‘ras’ word gedeeltelik beantwoord deur die begrip medepligtigheid te betrek. Krog skryf met onmiskenbare spesifisiteit oor ‘wit’ daders en ‘swart’ slagoffers in Suid-Afrika, maar haar trilogie moet binne die breër konteks van internasionale diskoerse oor restitusie gelees word. Dit plaas Krog se bydrae tot die debat oor die vraag of ‘wit’ mense tot (Suid-)Afrika kan behoort in ’n ietwat ander perspektief.
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".
. Vegetation science has relied on untested paradigms relating to the shape of species response curves along environmental gradients. To advance in this field, we used the HOF approach to model ...response curves for 112 plant species along six environmental gradients and three ecoclines (as represented by DCA ordination axes) in SE Norwegian swamp forests. Response curve properties were summarized in three binary response variables: (1) model unimodal or monotonous (determinate) vs. indeterminate; (2) for determinate models, unimodal vs. monotonous and (3) for unimodal models, skewed vs. symmetric. We used logistic regression to test the influence, singly and jointly, of seven predictor variables on each of three response variables. Predictor variables included gradient type (environmental or ecocline) and length (compositional turnover); species category (vascular plant, moss, Sphagnum or hepatic), species frequency and richness, tolerance (the fraction of the gradient along which the species occurs) and position of species along each gradient. The probability for fitting a determinate model increased as the main occurrence of species approached gradient extremes and with increasing species tolerance and frequency and gradient length. Appearance of unimodal models was favoured by low species tolerance and disfavoured by closeness of species to gradient extremes. Appearance of skewed models was weakly related to predictors but was slightly favoured by species optima near gradient extremes. Contrary to the results of previous studies, species category, gradient type and variation in species richness along gradients did not contribute independently to model prediction. The overall best predictors of response curve shape were position along the gradient (relative to extremes) and tolerance; the latter also expressing gradient length in units of compositional turnover. This helps predicting species responses to gradients from gradient specific species properties. The low proportion of skewed response curves and the large variation of species response curves along all gradients indicate that skewed response curves is a smaller problem for the performance of ordination methods than often claimed. We find no evidence that DCA ordination increases the unimodality, or symmetry, of species response curves more than expected from the higher compositional turnover along ordination axes. Thus ordination axes may be appropriate proxies for ecoclines, applicable for use in species response modelling.
In this article I elaborate on the potential role of the arts in the becoming post-apartheid of South Africa. As the close readings of discursive and visual artefacts such as Country of my Skull ...(Antjie Krog), The Man who Sang and the Woman who kept Silent (Judith Mason), and Indlovukati (Nandipha Mntambo) underline, articulating the memory of trauma in order to be able to create something new is not a linear and finite process but a cycle that has to be reiterated, time and again. Art’s dialogical character, materiality, and medium specificity allow it to perform contested truths and articulate complexities, in such a way as to help constitute new and multilayered communities.
The aim of this article is to examine the textual constructions of selfhood in the South African narrative There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile ...(2009), co-authored by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele. There Was This Goat is dedicated to understanding Mrs Konile and her Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony given in Xhosa, a testimony which many found incomprehensible. I trace and read Mrs Konile through the lens of Judith Butler and her ideas about self-narration and through Sarah Nuttall's concept of entanglement. These two approaches underline the social aspects of both self-narration and identity formation through narration, and therefore assist me in approaching the authors as simultaneous characters in the text, recipients of Mrs Konile's narrative, and creators of the textually represented Mrs Konile. The authors' dual function as writers of and characters within the narrative is an important factor which has been only briefly considered in much of the previous scholarly research on this multivoiced life writing text. This article argues that Mrs Konile is disempowered by the structure of the narrative, which positions her as a passive object of study rather than an active subject of her own life narrative.
Antjie Krog's Begging to be Black, published in 2009, uses the word 'conversation' a number of times in relation to its author's personal, philosophical and political interactions with people and ...texts. In the author's note that appears at the beginning of the text, she refers to the book's 'many conversations' and to the text itself as an attempt to understand the 'long conversation' between black and white in South Africa. This essay argues that Krog's textualisation of interconnectedness enables her to explore the formation of self in negotiation with 'difference' across time, space and racial boundaries. It examines Krog's textual deployment of multiple conversations (literal and metaphorical) as a way of working through issues of postcolonial identity.
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