The Oxford History of Life-Writing by Patrick Hayes;

Author:Patrick Hayes; [Hayes, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192668967
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

The strenuous empathic effort these lines describe involves not only the literal adoption of an unfamiliar African language, ‘new in soft intimate clicks and gutterals’ (a process of learning that she would take much further with her collaborators in There was this Goat), but nothing less than a rebirth: the work of self-examination and empathic attunement to the testimonies will scorch ‘a new skin’. This process of scorching, in which a white skin is darkened by the fire of emotional trial, is clearly one that must involve pain, and which indeed values that pain in a quasi-religious way. But it also depends upon a response. Avoiding the presumption of definitively speaking for the other, Country of My Skull is instead a rending exploration of complicity, an experience of being wracked by the pain of the victims, which is premised on a difficult request for inclusion, not an assumption that reconciliation will be offered.

While admirers of Krog are surely right to value her complex handling of empathy in relation to complicity, it is nonetheless worth remembering that ultimately her book cannot redress at the level of emotion and personal culture what only politics can achieve. The emotional and ethical intensity of Country of My Skull is so absorbing that it is quite easy to forget this fact, and at times Krog seems to forget it as well.55 Yazir Henry, one of the victims whose testimony is cited in Country of My Skull, claimed that the very fact Krog was able to use his testimony for purposes of reimagining her identity is evidence of the continuing structural inequalities in South Africa, from which (he claims) her book is ultimately a distraction.56 There is a moment near the end of Country of My Skull where Krog is describing her parents’ farm and reflecting on the achievements of the Commission’s investigations. ‘I see my mother coming back from the chicken-run with her two youngest grandchildren, each swinging a basket of eggs. She seems frail, but the scene is so peaceful, we are so lucky, so privileged’, Krog acknowledges. ‘But whereas this privilege used to upset me in the past,’ she continues, ‘now I can hold it against a truth that we are all aware of. No longer an unaware privilege, but one that we know the price and mortality of.’57 While she clearly values this moment of insight, and may well be right to claim that ‘redefining identity is a fundamental step towards reconciliation’, it is also decisive proof of Yazir Henry’s point that no real material transformation has taken place.58 Read more sceptically, the farm itself is of course still in the hands of the white folk who, in a way that resonates with the strong legacy of Calvinism in Afrikaner culture, allow themselves to feel better about the fact of their ownership through their breast-beating introspections.

Yet Krog is usually her own best critic, and the burden of Yazir Henry’s criticism is registered in the pessimistic turn taken by the Epilogue she added to the 1999 edition, where she reflects on the limitations of the Commission.

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