Discover the human dignity of words, with the South African Antjie Krog
Audio 03:59
A strong voice of Afrikaans poetry, Antjie Krog has gained worldwide recognition since her emotional review of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
© Antjie Krog
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
12 mins
Known worldwide for her emotional reports listing the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Antjie Krog is above all a poet.
She is the author of some fifteen collections of poems whose themes range from criticism of apartheid to feminism, including the aging body, the cause of the marginalized, but also the landscape as a metaphor and ecology.
The question of ecology is at the heart of his collection
Messe pour un planet fragile,
which has just been published in French, translated from Afrikaans by Georges-Marie Lory.
Publicity
Renowned writer, memorialist, journalist, South African Antjie Krog is a woman of many talents.
But in her country, she is best known as a multiple award-winning poet, heir to the great tradition of literature in the Afrikaans language, whose emblematic figures are called André Brink or Breyten Breytenbach.
Born in 1952 in the gold mining town of Kroonstadt in the Orange Free State, Antjie Krog has been writing poetry since her early childhood, to fill her loneliness, as she says in her memoir
A Change of Tongue
, published in 2003. She also writes to give voice to her poetic sensitivity to the beauty of landscapes and people.
She likes to tell how, at the age of 7 or 8, she became aware of the power of words and the privileged relationship she maintains with poetic speech.
“I hadn't cried at my grandmother's funeral
,” she remembers, “
but I burst into tears as I reread what I had written in my diary on this occasion a few weeks later.
I realized then that I was more sensitive to the power of words than to naked reality.
"
"Mandela, my mother and me"
“
My mother was no stranger to my coming to literature,
” says the writer. And to add: “
She was a great reader of literatures from all over the world. Suddenly, I grew up in the middle of libraries filled with novels written by Russian, German or Dutch authors. Afrikaans literature was in its infancy by then, but my mother bought whatever she could get her hands on. She had read Breytenbach as soon as she left her first book. Often she would recite poems to us in Afrikaans. So I can say that literature has always been part of my life.
"
Indeed, for a long time, little Antjie had fallen asleep listening to her mother reciting poems in Afrikaans. A guttural language, whose words click in the ear and move with its powerful sounds. But the beautiful understanding between mother and daughter is shattered when Antjie publishes in her school magazine a poem celebrating friendship beyond the racial barrier. "
One day
, she imagined,
black and white, hand in hand will bring love and peace to (her) beautiful country
".
The stammering poet was just 18 years old.
In the midst of segregation, his poem caused a scandal, magnified by the media.
The echoes will reach the ears of Mandela, then imprisoned for life in distant Robben Island.
"
If a young Afrikaner makes such wishes, all is not lost in this country
", would have declared the future Madiba to his companions in misfortune.
Antjie Krog defines herself as a rebellious poet, but she admits that at the time it was not so much the feeling of revolt that had pushed her to write these verses, but rather a feeling of incomprehension in the face of injustice. .
“
No, it wasn't a revolt,
” she says.
Honestly, I thought then that everyone shared my point of view, but I quickly became disillusioned.
The company was still conservative and didn't want that to change.
As for my mother, she had always been very open-minded towards my writings.
But after the scandal of the poem, she imagined that I had the wrong company.
So I was enrolled in a conservative university in the hope of seeing me get back on the right path.
At the time, I also received a lot of letters, sent by black men and women or of the Jewish faith.
I said to myself as I went through these letters that the dream I had mentioned in my poem was nothing reprehensible, at least in the eyes of a good part of the population of my country
.
"
Become a poet
Contrary to the expectations of the Krog family, attending conservative educational circles will not cure their daughter of her concern for the marginalized, the segregated, or the cause of women. Having become a poet, Antjie Krog repeatedly returns to her favorite themes in the collections of poems that she has since published. Collections with enigmatic and somber titles
: Ni pillard, ni fuyard
(Le Temps qui fait, 1984),
Une syllable de sang
(Le Temps qui fait, 2013), to name only the collections translated into French.
With around fifteen collections of poetry in Afrikaans to his credit, the first of which dates from 1970, Antjie Krog has established himself as the most influential voice of his generation. It is also one of his poems, "Le Chant du griot", which was read at Nelson Mandela's investiture ceremony in 1994.
Paradoxically, it was his prose memoirs that made Antjie Krog known around the world. These memoirs, entitled
The Pain of Words
, are made up of testimonies from the victims and executioners of the apartheid era, as well as reflections on the history and future of democratic South Africa. An atypical book to say the least, it takes up as a poet and a thinker the work of journalistic review of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the author had done for nearly two years, between 1996 and 1998, on the radio station. South African National. Both a historical document and a literary text, "
this book will perhaps one day earn its author the Nobel Prize for Literature
", estimates its French translator Georges Lory.
Back to poetry
A new collection of poems by Antjie Krog, entitled
Mass for a fragile planet, has just been
published in French
.
In this very latest creation by the South African poetess, the latter's major concerns are mingled: the future of the planet, the cohabitation of the rich and the poor, but also the future of the Afrikaans language in which Antjie survives. Krog sees the assurance of the revival of post-apartheid South African literature.
“
The pioneers of Afrikaans literature
,” she recalls, “
used a very formal language. Then, during the apartheid years, Afrikaans had become a harsh and standardized idiom. Since 1994, this language has evolved a lot, insofar as the majority of speakers now come from the black or mestizo population. Their ways of speaking, their vocabulary, their accents constitute the dominant norm today. What is more, these new speakers come from neglected neighborhoods, which have never had a voice in the matter. As a result, Afrikaans literature has been enriched with visions hitherto completely unseen in this language.
"
For the poet, this literary renewal also and above all passes through language, through work on the materiality of language, as she explains in the inaugural poem of her new collection, devoted to “griots”.
She has made the latter her models, qualified as "
cabinetmakers of memory
", who work "on
the human dignity of words / the nobility of words
".
Is there a better way to be a poet?
Read Antjie Krog in French:
Mass for a fragile planet and other poems
, translated from Afrikaans by Georges-Marie Lory.
Joca Seria editions, 2021 (poems)
A syllable of blood
, translated from Afrikaans by Georges-Marie Lory.
Editions Le Temps That Takes, 2013 (poetry)
Neither plunderer nor fugitive
, Editions Le Temps que faut, 2004 (poems)
The pain of words
, translated from English by Georges-Marie Lory.
Éditions Actes Sud, 2004 (prose)
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