Abusive Narratives: Antjie Krog, Rian Malan, and the Transmission of Violence

Circulation of Testimonies

Since its publication in 1998, Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog's account of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for the South African Broadcasting Corporation, has drawn highly varying critical attention.¹ As critics run up a list of Krog's failures, they repeatedly point to her use of victims' testimonies as building blocks for a postmodern collage in which she shuns factual analyses of the moment and afterlives of human rights violations for the sake of impressionistic vignettes that convey her pained reactions to narratives of physical and psychological violence. Meira Cook rehearses the crux of these criticisms in her charge that in "eschewing documentary realism for imaginative reconstruction [Krog] produces a text that attempts to mime the inconsistencies and falsehoods of narrative in a contingent world."² These tensions between the quest for "truth and reconciliation" and notions of the contingency of narratives, those between the ethical positions of documentary realism in opposition to imaginative fictionalizing, appear in most appraisals of Krog.

The crucial issue in these assessments concerns the ethical nature of the author's concentration on her moral dilemma and her dramatic move to closure at the end of her narrative. Such closure presents tableaux of the transition to a democratic South Africa and the birth of a new white Afrikaner subjectivity as if these two "narratives" also entail a transition to an equitable society in which the legacies of colonization and apartheid brutality will be put right. As Laura Moss explains, Krog's text becomes especially problematic when it is read outside South Africa, where its audience does not have the contextual evidence that many South Africans, who were steeped in media coverage of the TRC for three years, have at their fingertips. Moss notes that Country of My Skull not only has become an international best seller, but it is being marketed by the publishers and promoted by South African government Web sites as the book to read about the new South Africa.³

In attending to another facet of these dilemmas, Sarah Ruden extends the accusation of political and socioethical disregard by reading Krog alongside the TRC sessions. Ruden charges that "both the TRC and Krog have extended the abuses of apartheid, the TRC by sacrificing both truth and reconciliation to political imperatives, and Krog by manipulating other lives like inanimate materials in an abstract design."⁴ As counterpoint to Country of My Skull, Ruden offers My Traitor's Heart, by press journalist Rian Malan, as a memoir that tackles the issues of narrating the brutalities of apartheid without trivializing victim testimonies.⁵ Malan's memoir succeeds, Ruden avers, because it was the product of years of research and painstaking work. Curiously, Ruden's praise offers a way into my engagement with Krog because Malan's text is similar to Country of My Skull in that it is troubled by a problematic move to narrative closure. Further, My Traitor's Heart is dogged by controversy, and critics less receptive than Ruden have declared it a white fantasy of unification with the African mother, a document that blames the victims of apartheid, or an itinerary of exaggerations that passes off the singular for the general.⁶ Malan structures his memoir on the trope of a two-tiered journey of an initial escape from the "heart of darkness" into exile and the return from exile into the heart of darkness. As Glen Retief points out, Malan, despite his good intentions, seals the subjects of his investigative reportage into metaphysical social processes that render the violence he seeks to bear witness to incomprehensible.⁷ In a sense, an essential part of the difficulties with both texts resides in the disavowed relationships both authors have to the traffic between forms of fiction and their memoirs, their entry into and traffic in a global literary marketplace as translators of South Africa, and the problematic manner in which their individual tropes of narrative closure could be misread for closure on the individual acts of violence the authors recount.

Invariably, the patterns of circulation detailed above...