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Abstract
Krog’s Begging to Be Black is an attempt to articulate whiteness in postapartheid South Africa. This article contends that Krog’s desire for blackness is modulated by her persistent “white guilt,” and therefore her memoir foreshadows a mode of writing, the confessional uncanny, whereby her claim to national belonging is expressed.
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Notes
1 See https://citizenshiprightsafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/1998/05/mamdani- 1998-inaugural-lecture.pdf Section: Citizenship in Contemporary South Africa; paragraph 1.
2 Ibid. Section: When Does a Settler Become a Native?; paragraph 2.
3 Krog, Begging to Be Black, 203–204. Further references to this book are indicated by page number.
4 Engle, “The Political Uncanny.”
5 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1.
6 See Rothberg, “Introduction,” 1–28.
7 Engle, “The Political Uncanny,” 110.
8 Ibid., 107.
9 Ibid., 107.
10 Ibid., 107.
11 Gagiano, “… to Remember Is Like Starting to See,” 265.
12 Ibid., 273–277; 261.
13 Jacobs and Bank, “Biography in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” 165–166.
14 Ibid., 171.
15 Ibid., 171.
16 See Dlamini, “Apartheid Confessions,” 772–785.
17 The weapon that killed the Wheetie is found in Krog’s garden and so, it is in the space of her own house that the uncanny object appears disrupting the placidness of home.
18 Engle, “The Political Uncanny,” 110.
19 Ibid., 110.
20 Ibid., 110.
21 Ibid., 110.
22 Following Van Niekerk, I also envisage Krog’s Country of My Skull, A Change of Tongue and Begging to Be Black as a trilogy, although they, as she remarks, were probably never intended to be so from the start. See Van Niekerk, “The National Question in Antjie Krog’s ‘Transformation Trilogy’,” 42–58.
23 See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom; Fatima Meer, Memories of Love and Struggle; Dr Goonam, Coolie Doctor; Amina Cachalia, When Hope and History Rhyme; Caesarina Kona Makhoere, No Child’s Play. In Prison under Apartheid; Zubeida Jaffer, Our Generation; Indres Naidoo, Island in Chains, among others.
24 Krog, A Change of Tongue, 118.
25 Ibid., 66.
26 See Collier, “Context Privilege,” 295–318.
27 See Green et al., “Reviewing Whiteness,” 395.
28 Ibid., 395.
29 Ibid., 400.
30 Jacobs and Bank, “Biography in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” 166.
31 Ibid., 166.
32 Paul Celan was a German-speaking Romanian poet who during World War II was deported to a concentration camp. The complexity of Celan’s experience—the confluence of his Jewishness with the German language—is uncannily used by Krog to intensify her own confusion as a white South African in a city, Berlin, with “a history of Aryanization” (157) that runs parallel to South Africa’s apartheid past.
33 This reinforcement of “South Africanness” she undergoes in Berlin contrasts hugely with the “deep precipice of not belonging” she had to face on her trip around the African continent as a participant of the caravan of poetry and which she minutely describes in A Change of Tongue. Her white skin and Afrikaans poetry endangers her “South Africanness” to the extent that she herself questions her right to be the poet representing South Africa. See A Change of Tongue, 300.
34 See Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. Unlike the Early Modern conversions, Krog’s peculiar conversion inadvertently introduces the very same faith that she so vigorously wants to abandon. To put it differently, Krog’s admittance to the new congregation requires not so much a change of faith but a change of color, and yet, the articulation of her desire for her new faith|colour, namely, her desire for blackness, falls back onto the very same apartheid racial foundations that located “whiteness” at the center of identity formation and which, incidentally, unleashes her predominant white guilt.
35 Motha, “‘Begging to Be Black’. Liminality and Critique,” 285–305.
36 Rodrigues, “Antjie Krog and the Autobiography of Postcolonial Becoming,” 725–744.
37 The Wheetie’s murder takes place in the period of the CODESA’s (The Convention for a Democratic South Africa) negotiations. As Mahmood Mamdani explains in “Beyond Nuremberg: The Historical Significance of the Post-apartheid Transition in South Africa,” these negotiations between the ANC and The National Party were held against the backdrop of violence perpetrated on both sides. In Mahmood’s words, “in the tussle of political wills that ensued, both sides employed an array of resources, from mass mobilization to targeted violence.” See Mamdani, “Beyond Nuremberg,” 68.
38 The Inkhata Freedom Party (IFP), founded in 1975 in KwaZulu by Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, chief of the Zulu people and chief minister of the homeland, supported mainly by the Zulu people was strategically used by white authorities still in power in South Africa to, in Antjie Krog’s words, “rope in existing criminal gangs, which were then supported logistically and legally” (256).
39 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1.
40 Dlamini, “Apartheid Confessions,” 772–785. Krog’s inveterate commitment to publicly expose the racist configuration of her Afrikaner background and the “white guilt” that results from being intimately related to this culture is reflected in an interview conducted by Shannon Hengen interestingly entitled “‘Little Perpetrators’: The South African Voice of Antjie Krog.”
41 Krog dedicates Begging to Be Black to a fictional character, Petrus, from Coetzee’s Disgrace and introduces him as a key element of her exploration into blackness. I also engage with another fictional character from the same novel, Lucy, to develop my argumentation.
42 I find it necessary to highlight here the parallelism between Krog and Petrus as far as the foreignness of the English language is concerned. It is beyond the scope of this present article to probe into the nuances of Krog’s choice of English as the language used to write her memoirs instead of her Afrikaans mother tongue, which is a strong footprint of her poetry. For the time being, suffice it to say that Krog’s language choice is just but another instantiation of South African memoirists’ preference for English over their own mother tongues to write their life experiences. According to Gagiano, “having one’s autobiography published in English, for the majority whose mother tongue is not English, testifies to a desire to reach beyond one’s immediate associates in ‘place’ as much as in time.” See Gagiano, “‘To Remember Is Like Starting to See’,” 262.
43 Krog’s appropriation of Petrus’s story resonates with Spivak’s forceful statement about the impossibility of allowing the subaltern to speak. What is noteworthy regarding Krog’s positioning in this matter is her discursive ambiguity. When asked by Patton whether she is writing a novel on the issue of blackness, she immediately replies with a “No, I can’t, I don’t want to write novels” (267), because, she surmises, “I cannot ever really enter the psyche of somebody else, somebody black” (267). A few lines later, she openly admits that “I simply don’t know enough about blackness […] to imagine it in terms other than my exact self or the exotic opposite of myself” (268) and she concludes by declaring that “to imagine black at this stage is to insult black” (268). What I am trying to convey at this stage is how Spivak’s compelling question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is instructing Krog’s reasoning. Nonetheless, and despite the profound ambivalence toward speaking black that she shows, Krog appropriates Petrus’s story. See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 66–111.
44 Engle, “The Political Uncanny,” 108.
45 Ibid., 108.
46 See Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, and “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 149–168.
47 Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 156.
48 Ibid., 153.
49 Ibid., 156.
50 Dyer, White, 3.
51 See Pujolràs-Noguer, “Imperially White and Male,” 1–19.
52 “My Beautiful Land” was published in her school yearbook and it promotes interracial love. She later on translated it into English and included it in the 2000 collection, Down to My Last Skin.
53 Van Nierkerk, “The National Question,” 48.
54 Ibid., 51.
55 Ibid., 54.
56 Van Jacomien’s question, “Can she as a ‘white’ settler ever become a native African?” is to be inscribed within the South African national schema and, more concisely, the present postapartheid South African national design. The contestation of national belonging at a racial level takes place not only in South Africa but also in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States of America and so, it could be argued whether a common discursive framework is actually at work regarding their respective black citizens. This is not the aim of this article, and therefore a discussion on the native condition of Black British people or African-Americans, for that matter, must be discarded. However, I would like to emphasize the need for this transnational dialogue to be undertaken as the international response to the Black Lives Matter movement apropos the current racial turmoil in America clearly exemplifies.
57 Coetzee, Disgrace, 112.
58 Ibid., 112.
59 Ibid., 112.
60 Engle, “The Political Uncanny,” 113.
61 Mamdani, Section: When Does a Settler Become a Native?; paragraph 2.
62 Ibid. Section: Citizenship in Contemporary South Africa; paragraph 9.
63 Ibid. Section: Citizenship in Contemporary South Africa; paragraph 9.
64 Mamdani, “Beyond Nuremberg,” 73.
65 Ibid., 73.
66 Ibid., 77.
67 Ibid., 78.
68 Ibid., 78.
69 Ibid., 78.
70 I would like to emphasize here how the tempo of the writing of the memoir is crucial in order to understand Krog’s, to my mind, failed attempt to meaningfully inscribe herself as white South African in the national schema. This is what distances her from the experience cataloged by Ruth First in 117 Days. First, unlike Krog, writes herself into the history of South Africa as an antiapartheid activist, a position Krog cannot claim for herself in view of the new historical period looming ahead, that of postapartheid South Africa. Krog’s insistent allusions to her antiapartheid activism are enshrouded by a certain degree of nostalgia for a position that secured a dignified white South Africanness that she abjured apropos her performance in the Wheetie episode.
71 Gready, “Novel Truths,” 156.
72 Mamdani, “Beyond Nuremberg,” 80.
73 Engle, “The Political Uncanny” (italics in original), 113.
74 Ibid., 113.
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Esther Pujolràs-Noguer
Esther Pujolràs-Noguer (Serra-Húnter Fellow) is a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the Universitat de Lleida. She is the director of the UdL-based research group, Ratnakara https://ratnakara.org/, which specializes in the study of the literatures and cultures of the South West Indian Ocean. Her research interests revolve around the convergence of gender and ethnicity and the representation of trauma. She has been a member of various funded research projects, the most recent ones focused on Life Writing in an Indian Ocean setting: The Aesthetics of Remembering: Empathy, Identification. Mourning and Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World. She has published extensively on Indian Ocean writers such as Abdulrazak Gurnah and M. G. Vassanji and is the editor of a Special Issue on Indian Ocean Imaginaries published by Revista canaria de estudios ingleses https://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/22454. She has also conducted creative writing workshops aimed at helping victims of gender violence to overcome their traumas at the premises of Isis-WICCE and Femrite, Kampala, Uganda https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/llibres/2018/195164/Invisible_Traumas.pdf. She has published on Indian Ocean writers, specifically Abdulrazak Gurnah and M. G. Vassanji. Her most recent publications include “Imperially White and Male. Colonial Masculinities in M. G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1994) and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion (2005)” (Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies) and “Desiring/Desired Bodies: Miscegenation and Romance in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction). Together with Dr Felicity Hand, she is the editor of Relations and Networks in South African Indian Writing (Brill-Rodopi). At present, she is a member of the funded research project, The Aesthetics of Remembering. Empathy, Identification. Mourning.