‘Blood's Inner Rhyme' by Antjie Krog

TimesLIVE

03-06-2025

ABOUT THE BOOK
I came to know the country, I have enacted my life not better or worse than others, the harvest was not richer or poorer than that of others, though full of good shoots. But I knew that I was coming to die here next to the river; I came to look for it like the elephants do.
Poet Antjie Krog returns to the landscape of her childhood. The Free State plains enchant her — it is her home and the home of her mother, the writer Dot Serfontein. In her 90s, Dot is frail and needs full-time care, but her intellect and sense of humour are razor sharp, and her writing is comparable to that of her daughter.
In Blood's Inner Rhyme, Krog breaks the boundaries between genres and writes about this relationship that continues to fascinate and torment her. Using letters, diary entries and care-home records, the book explores creative influence, ideological disagreements and the realities of ageing.
Krog exposes the insurmountable differences between generations but also shows the love and mutual admiration between two highly skilled writers. Beautifully and poignantly written, Blood's Inner Rhyme delves into cultural heritage, the Anglo-Boer War history, issues of land ownership and race, as well as romantic relationships across racial boundaries.
The story of the relationship between mother and daughter, this is Krog's most personal book, as well as the most universal.
EXTRACT
Elandspruit, 1956-1968
My earliest memory is of lying on a high white bed underneath bright lights looking at my ordinary brown sandals. My father brought me because my mother was in another part of the hospital. We all went home together: I with a stretched urinary tract and she with a new baby.
In truth, my earliest memory is that I smelled of pee; how I wet my pants on the way to the bathroom and hid in the toilets until the school bell rang. And my hands around my father's tie at the hospital. A white and blue striped tie. And both my hands grasping the tie. And that I made no sound. Pressing my face into the tie and hanging on with all my strength. And how a nurse pulled me away. And my father's unhappy concerned face. Pulled away from my father's arms, still clinging to the tie, seeing over the nurse's shoulder how his face became smaller and smaller until it was only a speck down there in the long hospital passage.
It was bitterly cold outside. My mother came in with an armful of wood. She pushed the back door closed with her back and packed the wood next to the fireplace. The winter wind tugged at the roof sheets and windows. She stood by the window and said cryptically: 'Who stirs at my window so intimate and slight? Come in dear stranger, it's evening, it's night.'
'What are you saying?'
'Poetry. I am reciting poems about winter.'
'What is poetry?'
'Grown-up rhymes.'
'Do you know more?'
Without turning to me, she said:
The twigs a-swerve, the branches shake
The noises that the winter make.
There stands a mother with her child
Alone in winter-winds so wild,
And no-one there to see her tears
And no-one there to soothe her fears
The twigs they swerve, the branches shake
It is the noise that winters make …
'I have to write an essay for a competition with the title 'In the blink of an eye …', but nothing has ever happened to me in the blink of an eye …'
'Pretend you are someone else. Take someone's life but colour it with your own life. Take a story from the Bible.'
So I imagined the prophet Elijah looking out over the drought-stricken Free State, the plains, the grass, the dust, praying for rain, and wrung a phrase from DJ Opperman: 'Where Thy northern wind rolls the dry thistle and sweeps it over the shaggy fallows, a cloud appears as large as a man's hand.'
'That's very clever,' nodded my mother.
I won a nationwide prize for under-twelve essays.
My mother put on a record with Fauré Lieder and stared out of the window while tears rolled down her cheeks. Then she went over to the coal stove and burned stacks of typed pages.
While my mother plaited my second braid, she said, businesslike: 'You will start menstruating one of these days, so I bought you a pack of sanitary towels and a girdle. They are in the cupboard by your bed.'
'The other girls in the hostel use tampons and plastic panties.'
'One never pushes all kinds of strange objects in between one's legs. You will hear from them again when they have ovary growths and miscarriages and heavy bleeding. And really, if you want to sit and sweat in plastic panties, I will get you a pair.'
The packet of Dr White's sanitary towels and the girdle lay on a book titled It Is Time that You Know.
It is difficult to negotiate an issue with my mother. When everyone along the hostel corridor started wearing delicate beginner-bras, she took me to Harding & Parker and insisted on a solid cotton Maidenform bra, because synthetic fabric 'makes you stink and sweat between your breasts'.
My mother pressed her own hair against her head and cut it with kitchen scissors. She did not shave her leg or underarm hair or upper lip. I never saw my mother with pretty shoes. There were thick callouses under her feet from going barefoot all the time. She looked like no-one I knew.
One day, unexpectedly, she took me to the cosmetic counter at Harding & Parker and said: 'Put makeup on the child so that she can get professional instruction in it.'
'But I don't want makeup!'
'That is strange. I thought you wanted to look like everyone else. You have been embittering my life since you had any sense because you wanted sharp-toed school shoes like everyone else and not healthy, round-toed Harley Streets, because you wanted a school briefcase like everyone and not a healthy backpack, because you wanted a plastic school tunic and not one of serge … so I thought: I give up! The Good Lord gave me a child who strives to be like everyone else. She wants to dissolve in the masses and one day be one of those women whose makeup accounts are larger than their bookshop accounts.'
When I got into the car with my face fully made up, my brothers dove down behind the seats with laughter.
'Do not for a minute think you're special! Writing, like music, runs in families. Genetics. Nothing remarkable. You are an ordinary child. You will go to school and finish your matric. And this complaint that you cannot write poems because of the mundane bourgeois life around you, my dear, do not for one moment think a move to Paris or Lesotho will change pathetic writing into something special. For God's sake, sit up straight. And stop with that nervous twitch pushing your glasses into place.'
'Why do you write under a different name?'
'Because I am two people. The one uses her own surname and writes her own stories and earns her own money. The other one has a husband and children.'
'Which one do you want to be the most?'
'The one who is satisfied having only a husband and children.'
'So why aren't you?'
'Because I am not good enough. The writing is so that I can make peace with the fact that I am not the apron-mother or the just-had-my-hair-done-mother.'
'So why don't you only write?'
'Nothing, no book or fame or prize, would I trade for this life on the farm among cattle and sheep and chickens and you lot. Your father and I have a very interesting life together. It is something you won't understand now, even though you imagine yourself a small Inquisition.'
I sat outside on the grass. Through the brightly lit windows I saw my large family going about their noisy business. Too many voices, too many sounds, too many bodies, too many demands. Through one window I saw my mother behind her typewriter. I knew she was busy writing a serial for the Sarie Marais and I knew how her face would look: muscles in her mouth moving as if voices were talking there, her eyes listening inwards. The next morning, she would take down the typewriter from the closed Singer sewing-machine table to bath the most recent baby. Afterwards she would take down the baby bath to hem sheets or make clothes. After dinner the typewriter would take its place again.
A piece of my mother's was published in the Sarie Marais. I read the first part:
I eventually agreed: I would go for a vacation in the Cape if the children didn't fight before we go. If there was the usual fighting, I'M NOT GOING.
Everything went well … until the morning of our departure, when the devil's own brawl broke out amongst the lot.
I said nothing, just went to the suitcase and unpacked my things.
'Surely you're not going to be that childish,' Pa said.
'It's not childish. When I promise a child something, I do it. It will give me great pleasure to send you away with the whole caboodle. I can read the books I've been wanting to read for years, will lunch at the hotel and sleep here at home with the dog, the shotgun and the wireless with me in the room.'
He looked disbelievingly at me and walked out. Gradually the fighting quietened down. I heard him: 'She has unpacked her clothes, she is staying. Now you will all go and apologise to her over your fighting.'
Antjie (11 years): 'We weren't fighting, we were arguing.'
Helena (9): 'She's lying, Pa, she slapped Hendrik.'
Antjie: 'I wasn't fighting, so I am not apologising. Ma can stay if she wants. See if I care.'
Pa: 'Oh, so you'll look after the baby in Cape Town, will you?'
It is a low blow, for her, but surely also for me.
Antjie: 'Listen Pa, I'm sick of Ma. She loves making everyone around her unhappy. And now she's pleased. She has spited us and she enjoys that. Well, I'm also going to unpack my clothes. I'm also staying here. I'm not looking after Pieter and I'm not apologising.'
Andries (7): 'Well, I will apologise. I'm not staying. Come, Helena, let's go.'
Helena: 'OK, come, Hendrik! You apologise first. This is all because of you!'
Andries: 'Bring Pietertjie, so Ma can soften. Ag please man, Antjie, come along, man!'
Antjie: 'I won't. I'm staying here.'
Andries: 'Oh, what a nasty person you are. It is best you stay behind.'
They entered, pushed one another, pressed Hendrik urgently forward, hissing in his ears: 'Sorry, Ma,' he mumbled. Sanctimoniously the rest also apologised — here and there with a twinkle in the eye.
'Now, for heaven's sake, repack the suitcase and get into the car,' Pa clenched through his teeth.
'Antjie has not apologised,' I said. I was sick and tired of the whole business as well, but could one give in to her?
'Antjie, come and apologise to your mother or do you want a hiding!' he shouted angrily.
'I will not.' A bit tenuous, but well and true.
At this stage my mild-mannered husband lost his temper: 'To hell with you both!' he roared. 'I am going to the Cape, even if alone. Those who want to go, get in! Those who want to stay, go to blazes!'
I thrust the clothes helter-skelter back into the suitcase, slammed it closed and ran — right into my daughter. We sized each other up. 'Sorry, Ma.' With pursed lips.
'All right' … just as stiffly.
'And say one doesn't like it if someone writes about you? Because it didn't happen that way, why would I deign to slap Hendrik?'
'Look,' my mother said and covered the bowl of dough in a thick blanket. 'Some children's mothers drink, others steal or assault their children, or sit at home empty-headed or for hours at tea parties gossiping. Your mother writes. And like hundreds of children across the world, you must make peace with that: your mother writes, and she writes about things happening around her.'
'And what if I feel you may write and all that, but me personally you must leave out? I don't want to be in your writing.'
'If you feel I distort things, nothing prevents you from writing your own story correcting it. That right I haven't taken from you. But listen here, if you really don't want to be in what I write, I will cut you out and simply write about my four children instead of five … you can then work at accepting your extinction, forever missing from one of the few families of which something has survived their lifetime.'
'And say I don't mind extinction?'
She stood quietly for a long time, head sunk forward, chin on her chest. Then she picked up a Pyrex bowl and threw it with an extra shift of her back against the wall above the stove, shattering it into a thousand pieces. Wide-eyed, Dora came in through the screen door.
I hate my mother. When I put in the hem of my school dress, I made it as short as those of the other girls. 'Undo that seam,' she shouts, 'or do you want to look like a slut?'
We are on the way to my cousin's wedding. I am wearing a beautiful black dress with gold-coloured studs. At the car my mother heads me off: 'Put something else on immediately! One doesn't wear black to a wedding.' I stand furious-faced. 'Fine! But remember: if they divorce later, it will be on your head.'
I wait in the car outside the municipal offices. My irate mother has stormed in to confront a Mr Erasmus who has given permission for Eskom's electricity lines to be erected for kilometres on her farm and not on the farm for which the electricity was intended. Chalk-white, she gets back into the car.
'Did he chase you away?'
She rests her head on the steering wheel. 'No, but I cursed him. Before I knew, I found myself uttering a terrible curse, forefinger in the air, Old Testament vocabulary and all.'
'Really, Ma, a curse of all things! He must be giggling behind his desk now …'
She starts the car and reverses with speed. 'We'll see. We'll see!'
'I am not very hungry,' my father says, as he pushes the food around his plate, mildly irritated. 'In any case, it looks really … drab and tastes like tin.'
'Oh,' my mother, sarcastically, 'and you know exactly what tin tastes like!'
I put down my knife and fork. Thank heavens. I hate offal and cabbage and now my father has relieved me of trying to eat it.
My mother goes to the kitchen and comes back with a few Moirs bottles. 'If you want more colourful food, I am at your service.'
She pours the bottles of food colouring over the food and stirs the offal to an emerald green, the potatoes to purple, the cabbage to vulgar pink.
Bristling, my father leaves the table. My mother spoons the garishly coloured food into her mouth like a queen.