Antjie Krog: Towards a Syncretic Identity

Abstract

Krog’s striving towards a new syncretic South African identity develops in her later oeuvre on two fronts: thematically in terms of content, and with relation to form, in terms of the increasing use of an African-based orally orientated poetics. At the basis of her poetics lies the aim to “revolutionise” the language through transgressing taboos, while her “translation as transformation” project is at the basis of a search for a common humanity. My hypothesis is that there exist unresolved tensions in the implied ideological project of the later Krog oeuvre, based on the tension between the writerly and orally orientated traditions on which she draws. The striving towards healing of the communal and individual psyche in Kleur kom nooit alleen nie [Colour Never Comes Alone] (2000) is largely given up in Verweerskrif [Body Bereft] (2006), but taken up again in the co-authored work, There Was This Goat (2009), which illustrates the strengths and profits of intellectual and creative collaboration on an intercultural basis.