Struggles Over Voice: Polyphony, Appropriation, and the Construction of Truth in Country of My Skull

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Antjie Krog
• narrative
• memory
• ethics
• genre studies
• Christianity

Notes on contributor

Michael Britt is a first-year Master's student in the Department of English at McGill University focusing on African literature in English, the Cold War, media, memory, and genre studies. He has written about Milan Kundera and other transnational authors of postwar Europe at the fall of the Soviet Union and is currently researching South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His Master's thesis explores media and literary representations of the TRC with a focus on memory, trauma, truth, and genre.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Monica Popescu, a great friend and supervisor, for being a mentor, helping me with draft after draft, and aiding tirelessly with my financial support during the writing of this paper. I also thank Ellie Goldsmith, Zain R. Mian, Lilika Kukiela, and Bridget Walsh, close friends and peers whose moral and intellectual support has been invaluable.

Notes

1. The imposition of this binary was arguably a practical necessity that, though seemingly innocuous, had the effect of omitting other possible positions such as that of the “beneficiary” of apartheid, who may not have participated directly in gross human rights violations but nevertheless benefited from the structures supported by such violations. Krog herself falls into this category, and as such Country is an examination of the beneficiary perspective. In that sense, the book is a necessary corrective to the gap.

2. See Asmal, Asmal and Roberts (1996), Gade (2017), Gibson (2005), Gibson (2006), Stanley (2001) and Wilson (2001).

3. I have briefly discussed the issue of genre in Country of My Skull, but it is a worthy topic on its own. The book is part historical reportage, part memoir, part philosophical reflection, part theatrical production, and even part novel. Its resistance to singular definition is a prime example of heteroglossia in and of itself, for Krog's genre-bending amounts to a confusion of different languages (genres, Bakhtin will argue, each have their own languages). See Bakhtin's essay, “Discourse in the Novel.”

4. “Inspiration.” Oxford English Dictionary. “Inspire” derives from the root “spire,” which in turn derives from the upward motion of a flame commonly associated with the inherent ascension of the “spirit.” To “In-spire,” then, is literally to “put the spirit into.” In its etymological relationship to fire, the word “ignites” also becomes meaningful: to “ignite” the “tongue” is to spark the flame of inspiration.

5. See Motsemme (2004) and Cole (2010) for discussion of silence and extra-linguistic outbursts (crying, screaming, collapsing) as performance. Those who have taken the TRC from the angle of performance theory have argued convincingly that such forms of communication are productive rather than reductive. They constitute forms of communication, and, of course, storytelling, and are at the heart of the TRC's dramatic project. We must be careful not to slip into an easy binary between the absolute negativity of silence and the absolutely liberating effect of speech.

6. See Stanley (2001), Gibson (2005), and Gibson (2006).

7. Also see Gade (2017). The importance of ubuntu, Christianity, and general philosophical/religious rhetoric to the TRC has been debated in recent years, with some commentators diminishing their importance and others emphasising it. Whether or not such rhetorical structures provided groundwork for the TRC, however, it cannot be denied that their constant invocation by commissioners and commentators shaped public discourse about collective vs. individual culpability, punishment, and identity.