Abstract
For true healing to take place in Post- apartheid South Africa, the wounds of history have to be dehisced via the ambit of memory. A conscious move to address their traumatic past, the psyche of and daily reality of living in the new South Africa need to be addressed. This paper pays critical attention to painful remembrances of oppressive apartheid in selected poems of Antjie Krog. In engaging the past atrocities of apartheid, Krog tries to deal with the feelings of Afrikaner guilt engendered by revelations at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This paper reads some of Krog's Post-apartheid poems in her two collections Down to my Last Skin (2000) and Body Bereft (2006). The essence is to interrogate memory as a personal imaginative apprehension of historical antecedent of a supposed South African society. This is a way of helping present society to come to terms with its past in order to forge a new society that is ironically built on the pains of the past. The paper leans on the eclectic theories of Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and New Historicism.
Introduction
The South African literary milieu is basically shaped by the political and social evolution of the country. According to John Saul and Patrick Bond, the repressive apartheid law split the South African population into four official racial groups: 'Whites', 'Indians', 'Coloureds' and 'Blacks'. The Afrikaners defined each racial group's scope of action and interaction with the other. In the ideology of apartheid, White' equals 'good, human and civilised' while 'non-white' equals 'bad, inhuman and savage'. After decades of armed struggle, on 27th April 1994, independence became a reality for Republic of South Africa under the elected leadership of Nelson Mandela. Consequently, South African literary tradition as a social construct is inevitably shaped by their traumatic and gruesome history. Post- apartheid poetry engages themes like nation building, re-evaluation of identity question, reconciliation, femininity among others.
Content
The apartheid period was characterised by incessant killings, imprisonment, disappearances, exile for anti-apartheid activists. Victims of these villainous years include politicians, journalists and creative writers. Antjie Krog though arguably a white woman but an ANC activist, became an enemy of the apartheid regime when at seventeen she wrote the controversial poem “My Beautiful Land” which castigated the obnoxious regime thereby distancing herself from her racial group’s evil. What would be dismissed as a youthful vagary matured into a poetic voice that has withstood the test of four decades in consistently advocating for equality of all races in South Africa. Krog’s exposure as a journalist to the ugly revelations at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of inhuman treatments meted out on Blacks further heightens her poetic ardour in voicing the Afrikaner guilt. This creates a space for healing and for charting a course for a new South Africa
Conclusion
Antjie Krog's poetics remains incisive and relevant in relentlessly interrogating socio-political, gender and neo-liberal issues in contemporary South Africa. Her engagement with the historical to demystify the present for nation building is very apt in fulfilling her poetic role. James Oliver concurs that: "The reawakening of South Africa will be remembered through the words of her poets, writers and in the images of her painters and sculptors more than by the adjurements of her politicians or the lawmakers. Of all our writers, it is the poet who holds us most in thrall, for it is the poet who gives voice to our deepest thoughts and emotions"(Quoted in Ndlovu 2000:2).
This paper reveals a poet's role as an impassioned chronicler of the past and as a recorder of the testimonies of those who might be forgotten. To the extent that Krog's evocation of memory, is, intended to promote individual healing so as to effect national healing. Rather than turning to the past repeatedly (which is, Freud has shown, an obstacle to remembering), the past should be exhumed for the sake of the future. Ricoeur argues that we have "a duty to remember and a duty to forget" (11). The duty to remember is a duty to use the past as lessons for future generations; the duty to forget is a duty to go beyond anger and hatred. This is pivotal to Krog's engagement with memory in the building of the new South Africa she so desires.
This paper reveals a poet's role as an impassioned chronicler of the past and as a recorder of the testimonies of those who might be forgotten. To the extent that Krog's evocation of memory, is, intended to promote individual healing so as to effect national healing. Rather than turning to the past repeatedly (which is, Freud has shown, an obstacle to remembering), the past should be exhumed for the sake of the future. Ricoeur argues that we have "a duty to remember and a duty to forget" (11). The duty to remember is a duty to use the past as lessons for future generations; the duty to forget is a duty to go beyond anger and hatred. This is pivotal to Krog's engagement with memory in the building of the new South Africa she so desires.
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2004.
Caruth, Cathy. "Introduction". Trauma Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy
Caruth. London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Coullie, Judith Lutage. "Remembering to forget: Testimony, Collective memory
and the genesis of the 'new' South African nation in Country of My Skull".
SA Lit Beyond 2000. Eds. Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta.
Scotsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011. (1-23).
Davies, Merryl Wyn, Nandy, Ashis and Sardon, Ziauddin. Barbaric Others: A
Manifesto on Western Racism. Middlesex: Pluto Press, 1993.
Dix, Brett Garvin. "Cultural Memory and Myth in Seamus Heaney's Bog Poems,
and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull and Down to My Last Skin (An
Unpublished MA Thesis)" University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.
Gqola, Pumla. "Whirling worlds? Women's Poetry, Feminist Imagination and
Contemporary South Africa publications". Scrutiny 2, 16 (2) 2011: Issues in English Studies in S.A.
...
Osborne, John. Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography: Volume II, 1955-1966. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
Ricoeur, Paul. "Memory and Forgetting". Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. eds R Kearmey and M. Dooley. London: Routledge 1998.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: University Press, 1978.
Saul, John and Bond, Patrick. South Africa: The Present as History. Johannesburg: Knopf Publishers, 1990.
Soyinka, Wole. The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Spark, Allister. The Mind of South Africa. Johannesburg: Knopf Publishers, 1990. Print.
Steinberg, Robert J. Cognitive Psychology (2nd ed). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.
Veeser, Aram Harold. The New Historicism Reader. Ed. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.
Vogt, Isabella. "Born in Africa but..": Women's poetry of post-Apartheid Soutn Africa in English. Hochschulschriften: Suedwestdeutcher Verlaggwer, 2010.