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

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12 I am powerless to ignore what vibrates in me – I abhor and care for these five men [the same five mentioned earlier, applying for amnesty]. I get up one morning with my face swollen from a rash. My scalp itches so much that I have to empty a bottle of cortisone on it. The question haunts me: why do I want to give evil a human face? 40 It is not clear whether the text is aware of the connections between the face of evil and the author’s own face/skin which seems to be rejecting itself. It is as if her body wants to negate the identification with the men of her race, to grow a new skin – scorched, dark perhaps. This new skin will be the mark of having been born into a new language and a new lineage; it will qualify her to be taken ‘with you’. It is in this use of ‘you’ that I find Krog’s text to be emblematic of a new way of talking about whiteness, beyond the often narcissistic and sometimes exhibitionistic search for absolution, addressed to other white readers. I have pointed out earlier that Krog’s text is addressed in the first instance to a black woman to whom the text is dedicated, a victim with Afrikaans names on her lips. When Rian Malan and Reza de Wet imagine a benevolent black mother who welcomes back the white child (and I have indicated how problematic a sense of such a return is), there is little or no attempt to imagine the position of the good black mother, nor of the potentially displaced black siblings. Reviews of Country of my Skull repeatedly stress the fact that the text allows the ‘voices of the voiceless’ to be heard, an image that ignores that black South Africans have always had a voice, that it was the ear that was lacking. Both the US and South African introductions refer to voicelessness, one of the phrases that has recurred in almost all discussions of the South African situation. So the South African editor’s note concludes: ‘Many voices of this country were long silent, unheard, often unheeded before they spoke, in their own tongues, at the microphones of South Africa’s Truth Commission. The voices of ordinary people have entered the public discourse and shaped the passage of history. They speak here to all who care to listen.’ Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s Introduction concludes: 40 Ibid., p. 97. But one of [the TRC’s] certain legacies is the voices, so long unheard, that now speak for the record about a particularly brutal history. Those who testified, those who heard them and those, like Antjie Krog, who report on what they said, are all living South Africans who are struggling to make individual and collective sense of the past and to push ahead into a future that may or may not fulfil the promise left by those first-time voters in 1994. The Truth Commission, no more perfect than the messy work-inprogress called democracy, allowed them to face together, for the first time, the first task.
13 And Hunter-Gault’s signature places her in Johannesburg, South Africa; as the interpreter of Krog’s signature for her US audience. It would be easy for a white journalist to imagine herself, heroically, giving voice to the voiceless. Krog, I argue here, does not do this. Throughout the book, instead, she seems to be concerned with the question of what kind of voice she is allowed to have, how many layers of skin and identity she will need to shed before she is audible. She writes of her sense of imprisonment by her name, her race, her lineage: 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 forever be them – recognising 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. 41 This is not the ‘we’ that Reza de Wet uses innocently and naively, unaware of the exclusions effected by it it; this is a ‘we’ that speaks of being divided against itself, a ‘we’ that when it speaks of itself speaks as of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. A similar sentiment is expressed in a scene where the author describes being caught out as part of that ‘we’, which excludes her from a sense of sharing in another ‘we’: The proceedings are concluded with the anthem. I stand, caught unawares by the Sesotho version and the knowledge that I am white, that I have to reacquaint myself with this land, that my language carries violence as a voice, that I can do nothing about it, that after so many years I still feel uneasy with what is mine, with what is me. But then the passage continues, more hopefully: The woman next to me looks surprised when I sing the Free State version of ‘Nkosi’ [Krog speaks some Sesotho]. She smiles, holds her head close to mine and shifts to the alto part. The song leader opens the melody to us. The sopranos envelop, the bass voices support…. 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. 42 41 Country of my Skull, pp. 130 – 131. 42 Ibid., pp. 216 – 217.
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