Country Of My Skull Analysis

Within Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, she utilizes the testimony of other individuals directly involved in the atrocities committed during the apartheid in South Africa. The inclusion of such has brought about debate among those that praise and condemn her work. The most distinct points of dispute are her combining autobiography with the testimony of others, her distorting and fictionalizing that testimony and other instances seemingly represented as fact, as well as the general sense of her telling other people’s stories for them. Both those that praise and those that condemn her methods carry strong, thought provoking arguments. Krog’s combination of autobiography with the testimony of others can actually be argued as one of the strengths

She takes the atrocities that occurred during apartheid and the suffering of the victims and uses them to tell her story. This can be viewed as belittling to the victims and their stories shared throughout the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. These testimonies full of pain and suffering are potentially viewed as the backdrop where Krog inserts herself as a main character in something much larger. Much of the testimonies of others are cut short with only small portions being shared. For instance pieces of stories as shared without any identity or even a full story represented (Krog 38-41). It serves its purpose as a writing technique yet Krog is able to give a sense of herself, a full, rounded individual where the victims are not. They appear in great numbers and are not given the time and attention many would argue they

Put simply, these stories are taken out of the hands of those that lived them and repackaged by someone else. That in itself can be seen as an issue even before considering the weight of these particular stories and the effect they had on the lives of the victims. To some it may seem as if Krog has hijacked another person’s suffering and serve it as a background to her experience. It can come across as a bit insulting when viewed in this way. Not only does the victim have no control over how the story is told, but they also are represented as a blur, one of many rather than an individual. Further, when exploring the book itself, Krog shows herself to include parts of people’s stories without explicit permission. In this instance she does not allow those sharing the story any control over what she includes. She puts herself about the editing of the storyteller and that can be seen as brazenly disrespectful, particularly when considering the way she describes herself as regretting the “prying” of her question (Krog