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Last time, this timeAntjie KrogI am finding myself in the bizarre position of being called to account why a fork is not a spoon. Put differently: Why was a non-fiction text not written like a factual report? I reported for two years as a radio journalist about the processes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The reporting ranged from news bulletin items to longer stories. On a daily basis I, and many other journalists, reported facts in as objective a manner as possible. This reporting was my contribution as a professional journalist to the process. Country of My Skull is my own, highly personalised version of experiences at the TRC. Country of My Skull is NOT a journalistic or factual report of the Truth Commission. In fact, the problem of truth, the ethical questions around the “making” of truth, the use of other people’s truths, the relation between power and truth, and other factors at play in the execution of truth, all form part of the text itself. For me, we were forging a new vocabulary in an open and democratic society where finally the past had been made known. Everybody was a textmaker. Everyone’s input was equal. Words like reconciliation, retributive justice, transitional justice, post-traumatic stress symptoms, etc, which have since become neatly defined and packaged, were still new and open and often unknown. My desire to respect this equality of input would have been undermined by a bibliography, as it would have foregrounded certain texts as “established truth" while perhaps implicitly relegating the testimonies of victims to something “less”. So I tried to acknowledge sources in another way. Throughout the book fellow textmakers were named, often together in a single paragraph, often under alternative names to protect their identities, often as spokespersons for ideas. Knowing that the text of Country of My Skull was a quilt of personal, South African and international input, and not a revelatory egg laid exclusively by myself, all source material was sent to the literary museum in Grahamstown for anybody to access. It is a pity that what could have been an interesting conversation – as the seminar “Fact bordering Fiction” of the English Department at Stellenbosch had proven last year – had become a scenario of unhelpful attacks. Is Boyhood fiction? Is Midlands, with its changed names and town, fact? In the Netherlands my work falls under the rubric of Creative Non-Fiction (ie different from Faction). At an international publishers’ conference in Berlin last year a representative from Knopf Publishing House observed that writers were moving towards a new genre regarding non-fiction. Many people didn’t like what Country of My Skull had to say. But what is happening now is more like saying this fork is not a spoon, therefore the fork is a terrible spoon. In conclusion: I am a Sylvia Plath groupie and have always been, shall we say, unsympathetic to the poetry of Ted Hughes. Country of My Skull was written under great pressure during three months’ negotiated leave from the SABC. There was no way, with so many experts around, that I would have turned to Hughes’s prose essays for information on myth. My sources on myth were Johan Degenaar (with his ample references to Claude Levi-Strauss), Ian Buruma and Jung, all acknowledged as textmakers (p 237), as was Isabel Hofmeyr (p 47). The “student” poem comes from my own poetry volume Jerusalemgangers (1985, p 13), and I know Prof Kondlo* well.
*Not his real name.
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