Displacement, dispossession and conciliation: the politics and poetics of homecoming in Antjie Krog's Country of my skull

SUSAN SPEARY

Country of my skull offers an assemblage of excerpts from the testimonies of victims and amnesty seekers themselves, interspersed with and framed by reflections upon dialogues about, epistolary responses to and overtly fictionalised and poetic explorations of working through trauma.

I A preliminary note 

The epigraphs alongside may at first glance seem strangely juxtaposed, and yet they provide a conceptual map of the terrain that this analysis attempts to traverse, the methodologies it endeavours to bring into dialogue, and the trajectories it strives to mobilize. The need to examine the intersections between such seemingly disparate critical projects as trauma theory, spatial politics, narratology, and deconstruction's encounter with ethics suggested itself to me as I read Antjie Krog's 1998 memoir Country of my skull, which explores in their many multivalences the proceedings of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from the time of its inception in 1995 right up to the moment that the book went to press. The TRC was, of course, born of a political compromise, riddled by both internal dissension and considerable external critique, and subject not only to temporal and financial constraint but also to restrictions as to what fell under its  purview historically, geographically, jurisprudentially, and in terms of how "gross violations of human rights" were to be defined. Nonetheless, as the Commission set out to initiate a process of healing for those who came forward to testify with a view to fostering a more pervasive ethos of conciliation within an emergent and "New" South Africa, a number of provocative problems and challenges came to light. These are the focus of Krog's meditations, speculations and expositions throughout the text.

Although Krog supervised the SABC Radio team of TRC correspondents, as well as writing about the Commission's proceedings in the Mail & Guardian -- and selections and revised versions of her broadcasts and articles have been incorporated into the text -- Country of my skull is by no means simply a sampling or distillation of her reportage. Rather, it offers an assemblage of excerpts from the testimonies of victims and amnesty seekers themselves, interspersed with and framed by reflections upon, dialogues about, epistolary responses to and overtly fictionalized and poetic explorations of the philosophical and practical processes of working through trauma towards an emergent sense of home, belonging and self-possession. It is a processing of the process of witnessing, and although its autobiographical elements become increasingly foregrounded -- and have been the subject of considerable critique -- I would argue that the text manifests a processing that is always and necessarily dialogic. Krog, for instance, recounts a number of conversations with colleagues, psychologists and psychiatrists in which her own understandings of specific testimonies, of issues surrounding the Commission's operation, or of the concepts with which it is grappling (the relationship of guilt and shame, for example) are unsettled and resituated, without being overwritten. Letters from her readers serve a similar purpose. The crises documented within the text are profoundly concerned with ways of listening -- or constraints upon and failures thereof -- and with perceived threats of isolation and dispossession as the boundaries of a new national consciousness are tentatively and provisionally mapped out.

It seems to me that any engagement with the TRC, either through direct participation or secondary analysis and critique, is necessarily bound up with exploring ways of reconstituting selfhood both individual and collective; with renegotiating the boundaries of what Salman Rushdie has elsewhere termed "imaginary homelands" through the sharing of stories and working through of their implications in and for the present; and with addressing historical legacies of atrocity that are necessarily multivalent and never entirely knowable. The outcome of each of these explorations, as Krog evocatively demonstrates, depends fundamentally upon the modes of listening, reception and reaction enlisted in response to the testimonies themselves.

II Mappings in process

Country of my skull, as its title suggests, foregrounds the interrelations between the topographical, the national and the corporeal; the borders of each, in narrative, psychological and substantive terms, become the subject of enquiry and the object of reclamation, redefinition and "description" in Michel de Certeau's sense. The text is replete with figurative translations between the domain of the body and the domains of landscape and nationhood. Just as the latter two ideas coalesce in the word "country", so, too, do a number of significant concepts converge in the apparently ominous "skull". Although the word might seem to suggest a mapping of the narrator's interior landscape, its multiple associations (with death and burial, with excavation, with protection and even with infancy and malleability -- as suggested by the epigraph above, the first excerpts from victims' testimonies: To seize the surge of language by its soft, bare skull) serve to give each of these tropes or groundings or homelands the function of a leitmotif; each accrues associations as the text unfolds, and reorganizes its constituent elements associatively and provisionally (27).

The abundance of spatial and territorial tropes, as well as the recurrent evocations of interior and exterior landscapes in both Krog's text and my own analysis thereof is largely dictated by the context out of which Country of my skull issues. However, as I hope to demonstrate in the course of my reading, this patterning of imagery can also be productively discussed in the light of Michel de Certeau's work on the relationship between narrative and spatial operations, both strategic and tactical. In terms of the book's context, the word "apartheid" literally suggests the self/other divide that informed the regime's philosophical premises and legislative acts. This notion of separateness was discursively reproduced and inscribed on both topographical and psychological landscapes as the National Party sought to secure the boundaries between racially specific groups, and to eradicate the possibility for sustained dialogue, exchange or empathy between them. Whatever bordercrossings did occur were strictly regulated and policed or, alternatively, enacted as clandestine or defiant gestures of resistance. Quite literally, then, the apartheid regime attempted to ensure that there was to be no common ground shared by white South Africans and those "compatriots" designated to other racial categories. Indeed, the stretches of barren land between racially specific areas in the Western Native Townships and on the original maps of Soweto were called "cordons sanitaire". That this metaphor of separation is inflected by discourses of contamination and affliction speaks poignantly of the disease (dis-ease) associated with the affects of spatial othering, suggesting that to perturb ontologies rooted in separation would be to infect the system.

Although quite different in its diagnostic implications and couched in the language of psychotherapy -- apartheid now being seen not as a state of quarantine but as the affliction itself -- the rhetoric of politicians and of the media in post-apartheid South Africa has taken up this imagery of dis-ease. The very act of bringing together the victims, perpetrators and beneficiaries of apartheid at the TRC hearings, it was argued, would enable the nation to confront and reflect upon the otherness of itself, and to work through its traumatic past towards a state of healing and reconstitution. In theory, such face-to-face meetings in the space of the TRC tribunals in themselves constituted border-crossings and were therefore potentially powerful symbolic gestures; however, in fact, many victims lamented that the perpetrators were seeking forgiveness not from those whom they had harmed, but from those empowered to grant amnesty, and that their stories, therefore, remained fundamentally unheard. In discussions of the Commission by its advocates, parallels were tacitly invoked between the violated body of the victim and the violated body politic, as well as between individual and collective healing. Tacitly also, the "talking cure" afforded by public testimony was posited as a way of releasing victims and repentant perpetrators from their respective burdens of silence, of confronting the collective with a different version of its history than that heretofore inscribed in the official record, of circumventing future repetitions of atrocity and human rights violations, and ideally of eradicating residual hostilities.

To see the re-placement or reconfiguration of boundaries of self and other as integral acts of healing raises important questions about the nature of the narrative operations of testimony, and about who is being healed by it. It becomes necessary to consider what places are accorded to these witnesses and their stories in the remapping of national history and consciousness, as well as in the topographical (literal) remappings of the national landscape. To many South Africans, these issues are pressingly urgent given the emergence of new narratives of trauma and the spatial and psychological realignments to which they give rise. Competing stories, on the one hand, of escalating violence and crime; of mass emigration; of the mobilization of vigilante groups; or of retreat to gated communities on the part of the wealthy and privileged; and, on the other, reinscription of the rural idyll with stories of farms such as Vlakplaas as burial sites for victims of police hit-squads and interrogation units, raise questions as to how South African landscapes can now be read and mapped, and how the reader positions her/himself in relation to the discourses which inform understandings of them, and the trajectories through which they may be traversed.

Through its citing of and reflections upon the often contestatory stories that emerge within and around the TRC hearings, Country of my skull continually negotiates the shifting landscapes of a nation in transition, searching for a means of encoding them, inhabiting them and transfiguring them. Scrupulous attention is paid to the power dynamics at play in the course of bearing witness and to the way in which frontiers are variously crossed or reinforced in the process. The text stages the play of what Certeau describes as "the oral narration that interminably labors to compose spaces, to verify, collate, and displace their frontiers", and does so in such a way that the ongoing struggle for liberation does not simply settle into a politics of ascendancy -- a territorial war between contesting groundings in which further exclusions are ultimately enacted according to categories of "victor" and "vanquished". Krog draws attention to the fact that the psychological and narrative structures that inform the framing, articulation and assimilation of each testimony are specific not only to the context and experience of the traumatic event in question, but also to the particularities of culture, language and tradition of teller and audience alike. The whole notion that truth is transparently rendered in narrative through the act of testimony is continually and overtly called into question as she examines the pronounced discrepancies between accounts of the same events; between the various realities through which truths are mediated, registered and made comprehensible; and as she further demonstrates, the slippages between concepts of truth and of justice.

Moreover, Krog demonstrates that the testimonies given before the Commission were inflected by and filtered through not only psychoanalytical discourses of healing and reconstitution, but also through political, religious, constitutional, judicial, historiographical, ethical, communalist and nationalist discourses, all of which, in the process, were faced with their own limits and thus opened to potential reconfiguration. The intersections and divergences between these often competing discourses seem to me important to consider when assessing how this first stage in the official process of a nation's working through played itself out. Rethinking the relationships between testimony and truth, between speaker and audience, between individual and collective trauma, and between narrative and topographical mappings, I argue, is crucial to this enterprise.

Country of my skull works towards transcendence of histories of displacement and dispossession, and participates in the project of imagining new psychological states and topographies in which selfhood, both individual and collective, can be understood in more enabling and inclusive -- or at least less threatened and threatening -- ways. At the same time, it recognizes that the ends of these different levels of "working through" are not necessarily coterminous and are indeed often strikingly at odds, and that the processes of rethinking and remapping are necessarily ongoing.

III Shapes of memory/contours of home

From its opening chapter onwards, Country of my skull shuttles the reader between a range of transitional landscapes in which various communities and individuals are attempting to find, to understand and to assert their places under the new dispensation. While Queen Elizabeth's ceremonial recognition of the people and government of the "New" South Africa signals an official consecration of sorts, it is shown to be at best comically anachronistic and irrelevant to most South Africans, and at worst, completely out of touch with the complex processes of post-apartheid nation-building that are afoot. The narratives with which Krog juxtaposes her coverage of the royal visit speak of much more intricate behind-the-scenes negotiations of and responses to an altering political and experiential landscape in which white South Africans in particular are struggling to establish their bearings.

We witness Eugene Terre'Blanche, with high rhetorical flourish and on behalf of the AWB, claiming the "wide waving veld of freedom" as the rightful place of his men, and urging those present to "let the soldiers -- all soldiers -- my soldiers -- go home" (2). By taking up the language of the liberation struggle, by claiming his men to be poorer versions of other freedom-fighting soldiers, and by requesting that the cut-off date for amnesty seekers be shifted forward to April 1994, Terre'Blanche attempts to stand his ground, to concede nothing and to register his claim as a humble and deserving one, commensurate on all counts with the principles of full democracy.

A variation on the theme of where and how the Afrikaner will find a place in the new South Africa -- a concern which becomes increasingly central as the text unfolds -- is presented with much greater sympathy and subtlety as Krog takes the reader into the heart of her own family to witness their endeavours to make sense of new claims upon and threats to a lifestyle and landscape and homeplace previously felt to be securely and ineluctably theirs, but now experienced as under siege from without. The reader is placed alongside Krog and her parents -- and via Marnet radio connection, her sister-in-law and nine-year-old niece -- in the dark of midnight on the Free State Farm which has been the home of her youth, as her brothers, armed with rifles, set out in their bakkies to investigate a raid on the farm's cattle. Eventually, her sister-in-law loses track of her brothers' whereabouts, and Krog's family sits in terrified silence: "We wait. Then we think we hear shots. Is someone at the gate? The dogs bark. We wait. Who did the shooting? Who has been shot? And which is worse? What fierce scenes are being played out on the veld?" (5). Although her brothers appear cheerfully at breakfast the next morning, "dismiss[ing] the night before as just another normal night", the sense of tension, uncertainty and confusion carried over from the previous evening is not dissipated but confounded in the ensuing conversation (11). Her brothers, whose politics, she notes, are still "moderate National Party", remark that

"... the moment [the cattle thieves] run away ... it is then that I am overcome by an indescribable cold fury ... He who is trespassing and breaking the law by running away, forcing me to shoot him ... he is forcing me to point a gun at another human being and to pull the trigger ... and I hate him for that ... I told the magistrate it is not the value of the things they steal, it is the value of my life they steal, the value of my farm, the value of my future plans, the value of my peace of mind ..." (11)

The elder brother, Andries, speaks of becoming aware of

"... things in myself that I never knew were in me ... Like feeling daily how my family and I become brutalized ... like knowing I am able to kill someone with my bare hands ... I am learning to fight, to kill, to hate. And we have nowhere to turn. Some years ago we could pick up the phone and talk to the highest power in the country. Now my home town is run by a guy whose name I can't even pronounce." "Ja, but it was always like that for millions of black people," [he is reminded, to which he responds,] "Exactly ... I thought what was coming was a new dispensation for all ... what I see now is that the brutalization of ordinary people that was previously confined to the townships is not disappearing, but instead spilling over the rest of the country." (12)

Krog's account of her visit to her familial home stages not only her own rude awakening from her initial sense that she has crawled "back into a womb" of safety and childhood comfort by returning to this Free State farm -- it is immediately evident that this landscape has altered and become disorienting and must be learned anew -- but she also raises questions about the very terms according to which notions of safety, security, home and belonging can begin to be understood in a transitional context. What Krog suggests through her brothers' voices, perhaps less crude or disingenuous than that of Terre'Blanche in his "humble" appeal to fairness, equal treatment and democratic principle, is that the very precepts according to which land can be possessed, occupied, cultivated, shared or defended should not be assumed to be obvious.

The twelfth chapter ends with Krog's observation that "when the Truth Commission started last year, I realized instinctively: if you cut yourself off from the process, you will wake up in a foreign country -- a country that you don't know and will never understand" (131). The concern registered here with displacement and disorientation, or with potential loss and dispossession, is one she links as strongly to past failures to participate in processes of concilation as to the possibility of similar failures in the present. In a speech given in 1994 at a seminar on Truth and Reconciliation, excerpts of which appeared in the Sowetan on 4 October of that year, Krog raises such questions as the following:

Wasn't the mere fact that the abuses of the [Anglo-Boer] war were never exposed perhaps not a key factor in the character that formulated apartheid laws? Was the Boer veneration of Emily Hobhouse not a symptom of the desperate need for someone "from the other side" to recognize the wrongs that had been done? What would have happened if acknowledgement had been made about British wrongs and forgiveness asked? (8)

Leaving aside these speculations, she goes on to outline the far-reaching affects of the spatial and psychological othering which manifested themselves in the absence of any mechanism for conciliation at earlier historical junctures. She observes that

Apartheid divided us so successfully that practically no South African can claim memories other than those forged in isolated vacuums. Every one of us has half a memory. Therefore every one of us has a malformed identity which is unsure of how to deal with the reality as it now opens up to us. (8)

The contrast invoked between imaginatively projected possibilities of a history propelled by dialogue and conciliation and the all-too-well-known history of apartheid(s) is telling. The imperative to engage with stories of the past, with the claims of those who have previously been unacknowledged or dispossessed, and with other understandings of home, she suggests, is moral as well as political, and offers a powerful remedy to the damaged, partial and incapacitating versions of identity heretofore embraced by South Africans. Krog's attempt in Country of my skull to bring into dialogue and adjudicate between the narrative renderings of such incomplete and often mutually exclusive memories not only suggests a potential antidote for the "malformed" identities of South Africans living under the new dispensation, but also addresses very directly the need to reconceptualize and reform the "reality" of a nation in transition.

IV The story of another African farm

Krog's tales of her family's farm in the Free State provide a tacit counterpoint to the accounts of Vlakplaas which recur throughout Country of my skull. Her periodic revisitations of both sites and the attendant explorations of the significance each holds for the nation's history and consciousness can be seen as a writing back to the tradition of the plaasroman, a tradition which itself has occupied an important place in South Africa's narrations of nationhood. The disparities between the two landscapes with which Krog directly deals, and between each of these and the many farms with which the reader of South African literature is so closely acquainted, are readily apparent. No less striking are the differences between the histories that have unfolded within their respective borders, and yet it is with the similarities between all of them, and particularly between the cultural assumptions and commonalities shared by their overseers, inhabitants and even their "scribes", that Krog becomes increasingly occupied. After listening to the disclosures of several Vlakplaas operatives about committing torture, murder and extortion in the name of protecting the "fatherland", and then making the often unsettling transition to the role of protector within the domestic circles of their own families, Krog pursues the reverse trajectory, moving from the only-too-familiar contexts of their (and her own) domestic circumstances to that of the culture at large. She asks:

What am I to do with this? They are as familiar as my brothers, cousins and school friends. Between us all distance is erased. Was there perhaps never a distance except the one I have built up with great effort within myself over the years? From the faces alone I can tell who was taken up in the Broederbond, who is a Rapportryer, a Ruiterwag, who is working class. The Mentzes, I know, have a musical bloodline. Whether your name is Jack or Paul or Johannes -- it means something. In some way or another, all Afrikaners are related. If somebody says his father bought land here, or he grew up in Odendaalsrus or Welkom -- then I know. From the accents I can guess where they buy their clothes, where they go on holiday, what car they drive, what music they listen to. What I have in common with them is a culture -- and part of that culture over the decades hatched the abominations for which they are responsible. (96)

The obvious horror with which the recognition of these familiar traits and customs is registered leads Krog to the conclusion that "in a sense it is not these men but a culture that is asking for amnesty" (96). The distance that she acknowledges she has so consciously and tenaciously built up over the years between herself (as a subject, a speaking voice and a political agent of change) and a culture which seeks principally to protect and reinforce its borders of home is at this moment broken down, and another border-crossing necessitated.

Krog listens with painstaking care to the Vlakplaas men as she interviews them and as they put forward their testimonies, attending not only to the stories they tell, but also to the cultural codes and assumptions informing them, and to the appeals implicitly advanced therein. Her treatment of their disclosures demonstrates that modes of protecting and defending territory are not only spatial, but also narrative operations. As she reflects upon the divergent accounts of the murders of Richard and Irene Mutase in November 1987 (those put forward at the amnesty hearings by Jacques Hechter, Paul van Vuuren and Joe Mamasela; that recorded in the original newspaper report of the murders that appeared in the Sowetan; and the fictional rendering of the event by John Miles in his novel Kroniek uit die doofpot), Krog observes:

Hechter and Van Vuuren each told their own story today. And their stories became part of a whole circuit of narratives: township stories, literature, Truth Commission testimonies, newspaper reports ... The murder was the clay. The political climate, the amnesty conditions, the presence of Tshidiso Mutase [son of the murder victims] and his grandmother, the lawyers -- all of these were the hands forming the clay. So there are actually two stories: the story and the under-story, the matrix, the propelling force determining what is left out, what is used, how it is used. And at the heart of this force are the amnesty conditions. Today they gave rise to long descriptions of who gave the orders -- to create a context for political motivation. And then the gory finer details of the murders -- to create the impression of full disclosure.

... there is also the invisible audience -- the imagined audience on the horizon somewhere -- the listener decodes the story in terms of truth. Telling is therefore never neutral, and the selection and ordering try to determine the interpretation. (84--5)

Clearly, the tropes of clay and its handling remind us of the artifice of all narratives, and yet Krog goes much further than simply positing truth as inevitably obfuscated by the limits of the medium through which it is expressed. She draws attention to the multiple and intricately connected circuits of communication through which the story in question has been disseminated and absorbed into collective consciousness over time, and to the no less diverse determining factors according to which each of its narrative renderings -- each testimonial or proffered truth -- is shaped. Perhaps more importantly, she lays stress upon the less immediately apparent dynamics obtaining between tellers and their implied audiences: the wishes, desires, expectations and assumptions of each in the space of the other, which themselves serve to influence the form the testimony ultimately assumes. And in this instance, these are inextricably bound up with the formation or severance or sustenance of bonds of community.

Refusals such as FW de Klerk's to acknowledge any complicity or implication in atrocities committed in the name of his government and culture, Krog realizes, will not absolve the community of guilt and shame, nor will they guarantee a vindication of the Afrikaner in the eyes of future generations. On the contrary, such blatant denials will serve only to alienate the Afrikaans community from other South Africans and to exclude them from a new process of nation-building. She explains:

I look at the Leader in front of me, an Afrikaner leader. And suddenly I know: I have more in common with the Vlakplaas five than with this man. Because they have walked a road, and through them some of us have walked a road. And hundreds of Afrikaners are walking this road -- on their own with their own fears and shame and guilt. And some say it, most just live it. We are so utterly sorry. We are deeply ashamed and gripped with remorse. But hear us, we are from here. We will live it right -- here -- with you, for you. (99)

To continue to have agency, she recognizes, is to work towards shouldering responsibility, fostering dialogue, and traversing distances between public and private selves and others. The location of the Afrikaner in this passage, facing a mirror of shame and guilt, but emphatically "here" and engaged in the present is of no small significance. Krog's charting of movements towards certain articulations and the retracing of steps in the light of the effects and repercussions they have produced become important tactics throughout the text, enabling her to open to negotiation boundaries that are under dispute, while drawing attention to the claims upon which each is staked, and to the layerings and slippages of meaning that accrue in the process of their demarcation.

V The shifting ground of psychoanalysis and testimony

Given the TRC's mandate to address gross violations of human rights, it is hardly coincidental that the stories emerging in the course of the hearings were fundamentally articulations of trauma. Krog points out in her account of the workshop held for the journalists covering the Commission's proceedings that those who witnessed the testimonies on a daily basis began to manifest the same symptoms as the victims themselves (169--170). The complex relationships between the trauma victims and the witnesses to their narratives -- both first-hand and at further removes -- are a salient focus of concern in Country of my skull. Near the end of the text, Krog remarks:

For me, the Truth Commission microphone with its little red light was the ultimate symbol of the whole process: here the marginalized voice speaks to the public ear, the unspeakable is spoken -- and translated -- brought from the innermost depths of the individual it binds us anew to the collective. (237)

It is precisely in this transition or translation from individual to collective trauma that new land claims and truth claims begin to play themselves out, that dialogue and sharing of burdens and responsibility become possible, and that revised ways of envisioning and inhabiting home-place begin to be understood as necessary.

Geoffrey Hartman opens his introduction to Holocaust remembrance: the shapes of memory by recalling Freud's comparison of psychoanalysis to archaeological excavation and memory retrieval to field work. According to Freud, Hartman observes, "psychoanalysis cleared away each layer of mental sedimentation in order to find a buried object of desire" (1). Trauma theory, however, tells us that memory retrieval for the victim of violation is less an act of recovery than one of translation or re-placement of a profoundly threatening and potentially disintegrative event into the shape of a narrative account. The event, because unspeakable, is initially registered somatically but not narrativized; it is experienced as a silence rather than a realized story, and is understood, since not having been brought to closure, to be still present and threatening. The act of narration translates and resituates the moment of violation or trauma; in the process of its re-externalization and transmission to another, the event traverses the boundary between the victim's "self" and the world at large, redefining the relationship between the two. The initial act of testimony, then, is less a recuperation of lost knowledges and experiences than what Dori Laub calls "a genuine advent" (62) or coming-to-knowledge; it is the emergence of "a record that has yet to be made" (57). Laub suggests that testimony, while by no means disingenuous, is a creative and dialogic act; "the emergence of the narrative which is being listened to -- and heard -- is therefore the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the 'knowing' of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo" (57, emphasis mine). Laub catalogues many of the hazards of listening, cautioning against over-identification with the victim on the one hand (a subsuming of her or his trauma) and disavowal on the other (a distancing from or sanctification of the victim that ultimately exacerbates her or his sense of isolation and helplessness). He espouses a more carefully balanced, fluid, empathetic and multivalent process of meaning-making that is attentive both to the fundamental nature of what the testimony tells as well as to other meanings surrounding the event which the witness cannot articulate or encompass, and that involves a careful negotiation of the boundaries between both past and present, and between self and other.

Laub's emphasis on the listener's role in the narrativization of suffering and atrocity resonates interestingly with Derrida's contention in Spectres of Marx that although the past is at an infinite remove and its meanings never definitively recuperable, it is the ethical duty of those in the present to speak to, with and of its "spectres", those victims of atrocity who are casualties of histories in danger of being forgotten. Derrida suggests that it is only by engaging in such ongoing dialogues, and by acknowledging our debts to those whose losses have ultimately been our gains, that we can release ourselves from a history impelled by a cycle of vengeance and retribution. He explores how readers and witnesses might speak to the silences and repressions to which any historical account inevitably gives rise: silences which often signal very real effacements engendered by disenfranchisement, slavery, genocide and other strategic acts or policies aimed at denying subjects their humanity and their place in history. In so doing, he argues that "speaking to" such effacements is inextricably bound up with the problem of taking responsibility for them, for witnesses at any remove from the events in question. In other words, if a victim's understandings of atrocity take place in the process of narration, we, as listeners, need to keep asking not only what they take the place of, but also what they give place to and what place we give to them. Listening to accounts of trauma, in such a scenario, becomes a profoundly ethical and dialogic act, and not merely a means of facilitating the victim's psychic healing. How these stories reshape the listener's worlds is every bit as important as how they begin to reshape those of the victim and teller, and this is even more urgently the case when the trauma in question is collective.

Krog, developing on points raised in her 1994 speech on Truth and Reconciliation, similarly emphasizes the notion of history as legacy, as something inherited by those in the present, in which they are implicated, and for which they must take responsibility. When in small towns such as Ladybrand, she registers frustration at the tendency of white South Africans, and particularly Afrikaners, to ignore the TRC proceedings utterly or to vent hostility towards those involved with the Commission, while black South Africans flock to the tribunals and treat the proceedings with seriousness. She laments the silence of the Afrikaans churches (163) and quotes José Zalaquett's comment that "identity is memory. Identities forged out of half-remembered things or false memories easily commit transgressions" (24), a comment in keeping with Polish philosopher Adam Mischnik's observation, quoted in Chapter 2, that

there is such a thing as collective responsibility for a mental and cultural context which makes crimes against humanity possible. One should be aware of the fact that traditions are ambivalent and that one should stay critical about traditions and be very clear what should be continued ... Like Germany, South Africa will always need to question its mentality, while communities with a stronger democratic culture need not do it every so often. (24)

Krog's narrative is one which takes up this call to responsibility by continually interrogating traditions, conventions and their potential legacies. At the same time, she works towards imagining a state in which traditions needn't be seen merely as debilitating, a source of shame and restriction, a barrier to interconnection and participation in community life.

VI Chartings of transcendent spaces

Roberta Culbertson, in an essay entitled "Embodied memory, transcendence, and telling: recounting trauma, re-establishing the self", traces out the complex process according to which a trauma victim may come to reconstitute "that self taken away by the violator" -- a process that finds certain parallels in the working through of trauma as it is staged in Country of my skull (179). Culbertson makes the point that violation involves a deliberate invasion or encroachment -- whether actualized or threatened -- upon the very borders by which the self is defined. Like other theorists of trauma, Culbertson begins with the premise that the memory of violation, although constantly present, takes the form of a silence. The process she outlines, however, does not simply entail finding words to fill the silences surrounding acts that are unspeakable or unsayable as a precondition for achieving some approximation of catharsis or understanding; rather, she argues, it involves finding a language and topography of transcendence which enables the victim to "reestablish a fuller self over the [relatively powerless and violated] survivor self", to "set her boundaries again [and] reassert herself as a social reality not flowing out or possessed" (172).

Culbertson suggests that neither the act of violation itself nor its subsequent narration can ever be definitively understood, as the former necessarily involves the disparate "poles of body and culture, [which are] themselves wrapped in the meanings created or destroyed in the moment of harm", while the latter will yield meanings that will vary according to the circumstances of narration, the impetus to tell, the nature and degree of empathy of the audience, and the narrator's understanding of the social codes surrounding the traumatic moment (173). Culbertson, furthermore, speaks of the act of violation as one that is fundamentally dis-integrative, noting that "memories of abject fear, pain, anguish ... are left apart from the story of the self because if included in it they would destroy it, being so counter to the self's conception of itself as whole as to be inimical and threatening to it" (174). Because the causes of a victim's silence are multiple and both externally and internally manifested; because the somatic affects of violation are inextricably intertwined with the social memory of an abuse of relations of power; and because the cultural codes which inform the impetus behind the violation may only come to be understood by the victim retrospectively, Culbertson eschews the notion that the victim narrates her or himself into a state of reintegration, a return to a cohesive selfhood that preceded the acts of violation. Instead she speaks of the victim's "need for the reconstruction of memory, and the interplay of body, mind, and culture in the construction of a fiction that feels sufficiently like truth to be believed, to substitute for the complexity that, however real, feels inhuman, crazy, and untrue" (182, emphasis mine). Here again, it is a re-placement, a projection, a rescripting of selfhood that becomes necessary for survival.

Culbertson's analysis usefully complicates notions of retrieval, agency and the cathartic affects of working through, laying the ground for more nuanced discussions of the ethics of bearing witness and the ultimate uses towards which testimony may be enlisted, while at the same time affirming the need for necessary fictions which afford the victim both relief from her or his sense of dis-integration and the possibility for assuming agency. If trauma theory has raised questions about the efficacy of the talking cure and the very nature and status of testimony within the private scenario of therapy -- and Culbertson's case studies focus principally on the individual victim -- these questions are rendered all the more complex when testimony is relocated in the public sphere, and as it is subsequently disseminated in the mass media for immediate consumption, and in the aesthetic realm in such forms as books and documentaries, to increasingly large audiences who are often at even further removes from the events recounted. What Culbertson describes ultimately is a process whereby the victim redefines the multiple borders of selfhood and in so doing reconfigures her or his relationship with the world beyond. This enables her or him to lay to rest the survivor self who is understood as dispossessed, without agency and subject to the threat of recurrent invasions, in order to give birth to a reconfigured (hypothetical, desired and always provisional) self whose boundaries are more traversible, who can act upon and within the world, and who is thus better positioned to move beyond the traumas of the past while still retaining stories of them. What seems to be at stake is "fictioning" into being a self that can enter a space of intersubjectivity.

If Culbertson's categories of selfhood were to be extended, and the borders in question seen not only as corporeal and cultural, but also psychic, domestic and topographical, we begin to see more fully the ways in which competing conceptions of self come into play and require different processes of working through. An act of violation may threaten all configurations of selfhood simultaneously; for example in an "ethnic cleansing" rape, the body of the victim is penetrated, her psychic well-being devastated, her sense of home and safety obliterated, her status of belonging within her cultural group profoundly threatened, especially if she is impregnated, and the claim of her progeny to the land of their ancestors called into question. In most instances, though, the competing narratives of selfhood are violated to varying degrees, and this is even truer where the self in question is collective and its constituent parts fundamentally segregated or understood as oppositional or mutually exclusive. (Krog's "malformed identities" and "half memories" are called to mind.) In this instance, what is required is less a shoring up of boundaries than a means of making them traversible.

Two important points come to light here: first, to return to the metaphor of field work, testimony becomes less a singular act of archaeological retrieval -- the triumphant unearthing of incontestable proofs of the event in question -- than a dynamic and open-ended process of narrative mapping, of exploring and testing the limits and boundaries of the multiple and shifting landscapes being traversed together by witness and audience, and of assessing how the contours of the known worlds of both may be revised or redefined in order to accommodate emergent understandings. Likewise, description becomes less an act of empirical recording or monumentalizing than a mobilization of narrative operations. Meaning -- always partial in both senses -- is not mastered or secured through narrativization of trauma, so much as pursued. Second, the placement and transmission of the testimony become vital considerations: how the created knowledge is received, conveyed, externalized and/or re-internalized becomes a crucial part of the working through and integration of its import, and in determining the significance and consequences of its articulation. It is with this two-pronged rethinking of the place and placement of testimony that my enquiry is concerned.

VII Verifying, collating and displacing frontiers

In Country of my skull, both the metaphorical and the literal places and placements of testimony and working through are constantly at issue. Krog concedes that

It is asking too much that everyone should believe the Truth Commission's version of the Truth. Or that people should be set free by this truth, should be healed and reconciled. But perhaps these narratives alone are enough to justify the existence of the Truth Commission. Because of these narratives, people can no longer indulge in their separate dynasties of denial. (89)

Her commitment to a heteroglossic process and poetics as she attempts to realize possibilities for dialogue and empathy speaks of an important political positioning. Krog recognizes that in spite of -- if not because of -- the numerous existing and potential disjunctures between communities, speaking positions and conceptions of truth, and the equally pervasive reinforcements of boundaries and barriers that, as a legacy of apartheid, continue to divide them, re-narrativization of a national consciousness and history and sense of place has to occur, and that this is a particularly significant undertaking on the part of the formerly empowered. The sharing of stories and engagement with their implications gives rise to a re-cognition of the dangers of exclusionism attendant upon spatial and psychological othering. And yet a continuous obstacle to the initiation of such processes are the feelings of incapacity to which the traumatic nature of such narratives give rise.

A concern with trauma is insistently and explicitly foregrounded in the text, as Krog presents us with a nation and hundreds of individuals in the process of trying to incorporate stories that are so devastating that they threaten to disintegrate existing understandings of selfhood, both individual and collective, entirely. Arguably, Krog's working through of her own trauma of witnessing and of implication becomes the book's central structuring principle. Through the autobiographical segments in the text, she demonstrates that the situation of the "self" is never stable, recuperable, or cohesive; rather, it is always located simultaneously in different positions, places and times, and it is from each of these that the text's narrative trajectories are mapped. As a journalist, Krog is situated within the therapeutic scenario simultaneously as first-hand observer of the testimonials, and as second-hand witness, narrator and analyst of the events described. As an Afrikaner and ANC sympathizer -- the book is dedicated to "every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips" -- she continually traverses the distances between her identifications with and loyalties to a culture and language that are deeply implicated in many of the atrocities recounted, and her identifications with, empathy for and desire to be accepted by the victims of dispossession and displacement as they reformulate the parameters by which "home" and "country" can be described.

One of the fascinations of the book is the extent to which it draws attention to variations upon and associative effects of trauma -- its different forms and their equally diverse repercussions -- at each remove from the atrocities themselves, according to the listener's sense of implication in and responsibility for the events recounted, and across political, ethnic, racial and cultural lines. What becomes readily apparent is that although Krog's autobiographical narrator and many of the other speakers in the book continually express faith in the Commission's foundational principles; although they express an attendant desire for release from the past, and a longing for an emergent sense of conciliation and homecoming in which multiple notions of selfhood coalesce, nonetheless the ruptures, silences and disjunctions within and between each of the speaking subjects forestall any "completion" of mourning or an integrative or epiphanic moment of release from the hold of the past -- any ultimate healing of wounds, or a monolithic rendering of a unified public will or collective sensibility. The desire for homecoming, then, although repeatedly registered, is always forestalled by these ruptures that prevent the text (semantically) and its autobiographical narrator (psychologically) from achieving such a realization, thereby highlighting the need for renewed dialogues and border-crossings. While some victims express something approaching catharsis upon finding a receptive audience for their stories and are thus able to enter into a community of empathy, others are (further) traumatized by the act of testimony, rendered even more vulnerable by bringing their narratives into the public sphere. Still others, who seek and are denied amnesty, are left without hope of inclusion in any existing community or future collective; theirs are fundamentally narratives of disintegration.

Krog's insistent distinction between the "first narrative" of the victims of gross violations of human rights and the "second narrative" of the perpetrators seeking amnesty is vital to bear in mind. No equivalency is posited between the circumstances of traumatization experienced by those who were disclaimed and dispossessed of citizenship, human rights, access to proper housing and services, and recourse to justice during the apartheid era and the years preceding -- those who were also actively brutalized and subject to continual harassment and humiliation at the hands of the regime and its agents -- and those experiencing the first stirrings or potential impact of such threats under the new dispensation. The claim to "victim status" of the Afrikaner within the terms of Culbertson's framework of working through towards transcendence would, of course, be problematic, and yet the susceptibility of all those involved with or witnessing the TRC tribunals to the experience of trauma is plainly evident. Krog, I believe, keeps the reader aware of the differences between these two sets of framing circumstances (while also reminding us of many instances in which victim/perpetrator dichotomies do not hold). At the same time, she demonstrates that the common issues (the disintegration of a sense of selfhood and of the very foundations upon which that selfhood has been built, deep feelings of shame and degradation, frustration and loss of agency, and the sense of living under continual siege) are common to all trauma sufferers. She quotes Valkenberg psychiatrist Dr Sean Kaliski, who notes that

the reactions of white South Africans to the revelations of the Truth Commission can be divided into two main groups ... There are those who refuse point-blank to take any responsibility and are always advancing reasons why the Commission should be rejected and regarded as a costly waste of money. And then there are those who feel deeply involved and moved, but also powerless to deal with the enormity of the situation. (162)

In a similar vein, the psychologist who leads the workshop for TRC journalists warns his participants: "The more you empathize with the victim, the more you become the victim; you display the same kind of symptoms -- helplessness, wordlessness, anxiety, desperation" (170). In both instances, where listening and empathy are in evidence, positions of relative empowerment collapse into positions of helplessness and suffering. What this suggests is less that the pain of others has been appropriated than that taking responsibility for that pain is understood as overwhelmingly debilitating. In the face of shared trauma and the disempowerment entailed therein, a new space, position and relation to landscape and narrative needs to be embraced. It is here that Culbertson's notion of a projection of and movement towards a site of psychological and topographical transcendence enters the equation.

VIII Rethinking excavation, embodiment and homecoming

One such movement towards an imagined space of transcendence can be found in the poem with which the book ends. Here, Krog takes up her mother's project -- as articulated in an excerpt she cites early in Country of my skull from an essay her mother wrote on the occasion of Hendrik Verwoerd's assassination -- of inscribing boundaries of body, landscape and nation in a plea for responsibility to community. The passage written by her mother is worth citing in full. It reads:

As long as I live, I will never forget that Thursday morning when I was far from the house alone in the veld. A clump of trees grows there that I water regularly. Everything was bitterly dry. I stood with my foot on the wire fence watching how the thin stream trickles over the cracked earth. Our farm lies on the route to the south -- so we seldom notice the planes any more. But suddenly I became conscious of a drone from the south-east. In one way or another it was different from any other plane that I have heard. I looked up and remembered that I had heard over the radio that the coffin with the body of the Prime Minister would be taken to Pretoria that day. Could it be? And I looked again. But no, I thought, this is only one plane. There should be a whole squadron of our most beautiful, noble air-giants to take this man to his last resting place. It was a lonely, heavy bomber. It flew lower than I have ever seen a plane before. And its motors, I don't know how, sounded muted. And its flight very still, as if it should be handled with the utmost tenderness. And I realized, it is so that I am standing all by myself on the pale Free State landscape, while the body of this great man passes me by. In this moment the life of the man I only saw and admired from afar, had touched my life. And I don't have the arrogance nor the confidence of the new generation to control such a touch. It moved in my soul. And I was wondering what I should do? Should I go out on the streets and call upon people to consider what is happening to our country? Should I call on them with the only call that I know -- that of concentration camps, tears and blood? ... And I prayed that my hand should fall off if I ever write something for my personal honour at the cost of my people and what has been negotiated for them through years of tears and blood; that I will always remember that to write in Afrikaans is not a right, but a privilege bought and paid for at a price --
and that it brings with it heavy responsibilities. (98)

Once again, it is the farm that metonymically invokes the homeland. The fragility of the land suggested by the cracked earth, and the care with which the speaker tends the soil and attends to its symbolic significance, set the scene for a panegyric upon a leader whose role as the grand architect of apartheid would only be too well known by Krog's contemporary reader. Her mother's call to remember the heroic suffering and losses of the Afrikaner people as the grounds for both entitlement to the land and for responsibility to community would in all likelihood strike the reader of Country of my skull as remarkably dated in a post-apartheid era, and the reverent tone of the piece tragically misplaced given the nature of the testimonies with which this essay is juxtaposed, which show apartheid to be anything but heroic. And yet on some levels, the invocation to remember the cost at which present privileges have been won resonates strongly with contemporary narratives of nation-building.

In the poem with which Country of my skull ends, Krog provides a potential corrective. Like her mother before her, she invokes past atrocities, but not the concentration camps and Zulu/Afrikaner bloodletting, and not by articulating all the costs by which this community's place had been secured. In Krog's own reinscription, the traumas suffered are not those of her Afrikaner forbears; the landscapes are shared, and the languages to be listened to are not familiar ones, but require translation and reaching beyond established understandings of selfhood and subjectivity. Perhaps most importantly, the body is configured in metamorphosis, shuddering towards a new outline, envisioning itself a new skin:

because of you
this country no longer lies
between us but within
it breathes becalmed
after being wounded
in its wondrous throat

in the cradle of my skull
it sings, it ignites
my tongue, my inner ear, the cavity of heart
shudders towards the outline
              new in soft intimate clicks and gutturals

of my soul the retina learns to expand
daily because by a thousand stories
I was scorched

a new skin.

I am changed for ever. I want to say:
             forgive me
             forgive me
             forgive me

You whom I have wronged, please
take me

with you. (278--9)

Instead of citing mythologies of Afrikanerdom as a way of claiming the landscape as her own and claiming the use of the language as a privilege paid for with blood and sweat, the poem with which the book closes tropes the landscape, pain, suffering, belonging and language in very different ways, but maintains the claim of responsibility for community. Both her mother's essay and her own poem are transcendent projections of desires, but one monumentalizes and fetishizes and shores up boundaries and criteria for belonging and uses past suffering as justification for ascendancy and as a bond of community, while the other defamiliarizes and unsettles and moves from the space of interiority to a call for a new skin and for forgiveness as it endeavours to make all of those boundaries more permeable and open to negotiation. Implication and responsibility become key elements of understanding, translating and (re)placing trauma, and the text is indexed towards new forms of empathy for -- perhaps even incorporation of -- the other. Dori Laub argues that the "listener ... has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma witness and a witness to himself". Country of my skull enacts precisely such a witnessing, opening channels of empathy between self and other, past and present, and inviting remappings of all those literal and metaphorical imaginary homelands that are sought out as histories of dispossession are addressed and begin to be redressed.

But how to reconstitute that self taken away by the violator? - Roberta Culbertson

As operations on places, stories also play the everyday role of a mobile and magisterial tribunal in cases concerning their delimitation...In the traditional language of court proceedings, magistrates formerly `visited the scene of the case at issue'... in order to `hear' the contradictory statements (dits) made by the parties to a dispute concerning debatable boundaries...Preserved in the court records, [these operations of marking out boundaries] constitute an immense travel literature, that is, a literature concerned with actions organizing more or less extensive social cultural areas. But this literature itself represents only a tiny part...of the oral narration that interminably labours to compose spaces, to verify, collate, and displace their frontiers. - Michel de Certeau

If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it...One always inherits from a secret- which says `read me, will you ever be able to do so?'... the injunction itself (it always says `choose and decide from among what you inherit') can only be one by dividing itself, tearing itself apart, differing/deferring itself, by speaking at the same time several times - in several voices. - Jacques Derrida

The listener, therefore, has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma witness and a witness to himself. - Dori Laub

Works cited

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