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TimesLIVE
6 days ago
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- TimesLIVE
‘Blood's Inner Rhyme' by Antjie Krog
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.
News24
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News24
‘An extraordinary few days': Franschhoek Literary Festival kicks off with Town Hall ceremony
The Franschhoek Literary Festival takes place from 16 to 18 May 2025. The festival features panels, interviews and other presentations from well-known authors and other noteworthy figures. This year's participants include Antjie Krog, Bibi Slippers, Caryn Dolley, Africa Melane, Deon Meyer, Jonathan Jansen, Zapiro, and many more. Book lovers from far and wide are descending upon Franschhoek for the annual literary festival from 16 to 18 May. The Franschhoek Literary Festival (FLF) had its opening ceremony on Thursday night at the Town Hall, hosting authors, festival organisers, local school representatives and Stellenbosch municipality officials. 'It's so exciting to be back here, and we have an extraordinary few days to look forward to of open dialogue, rigorous debates, illuminating conversations about boundary pushing South African literature, connection through stories and ideas, and of course, the big difficult conversations that matter,' said programme director Jennifer Blane. 'The FLF is a space where writers from country, continent, and the wider world share the stage, bringing fresh perspectives on the most urgent, relevant and thought-provoking topics of the day,' she said. 'None of it would be possible without our remarkable South African writers. Your courage, your talents, your hours of hard work are what make it accessible, vibrant, relevant, and timely and full of life.' 'Thank you for your fabulous books. They have been such a joy in this programme.' READ | Coming to FLF: Love, death and Tupperware in Salt Water Pool Boy – read the first chapter FLF board chair Anika Ebrahim said at the ceremony: 'As we start this festival in a world of hard things, this literary festival provides the stillness that we need to open our minds and our hearts so that we can better make sense of it all.' 'In my experience, these three days have always helped me to consider new perspectives, to be more tolerant, to expand and deepen my own understanding,' she said. 'Books, writers, readers, thinkers and discourse do that. It facilitates that. It's essential to the life of a community, to the life of a country, to a people. It's essential for harmony.' Grattan Kirk, CEO of Exclusive Books, also spoke about the role of literary events like FLF in the local book industry. 'These types of events are really important for us and our brand,' Kirk said. Festival director Candice Kerchoff also spoke about the FLF's schools programme. The festival works with four schools in the area. Grattan Kirk, CEO of Exclusive Books, at the opening of the Franschhoek Literary Ontong/News24 'The festival supports the employment of four facilitators at those schools. So, that means the libraries are not a white elephant. Kids are visiting the library there regularly, and it's part of the curriculum.' They also challenged the facilitators to introduce book reviews to the schools. The students' reviews, which were in the form of words and colourful drawings, were displayed in the hall. The festival, which marks its 18th year, features panels, interviews and other presentations from well-known authors and other noteworthy figures. This year's participants include Antjie Krog, Bibi Slippers, Caryn Dolley, Africa Melane, Deon Meyer, Jonathan Jansen, Zapiro, and many more.
Mail & Guardian
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mail & Guardian
Returning to the bones of home
Always in the blood: Antjie Krog's autobiographical novel Blood's Inner Rhyme has just been published. Photo: Brenda Veldtman This is a lightly edited excerpt from South African author Antjie Krog's autobiographical novel Blood's Inner Rhyme . It's my first visit to the Free State after spending almost a year overseas. As I turn the rented car from Bram Fischer Airport north onto the N1, my eyes throw themselves like obsessed lovers on the landscape of my youth. The world is all winter-sky, grass and harvested maizefields. I want to grasp this specific colour of grass with all my senses — foraging, caressing, tracing the benedictory plains with their blinding flax-blondness, their soft-seeded grass-plumes, all bleached by frost. It is said that one's body can only truly love one landscape. I pull over. Roll down the windows, burst from my rind, spread shoots to breathe the pure wind-dried winter air. During the two-hour drive to Kroonstad my favourite sites greet me like close relatives: there's that clump of thorn trees where I once saw the amber smear of a jackal; here is that plain that has no single human blemish — no wire, no border, no telephone pole, not even a tree, just a lush hill of unmolested grass; beyond this farm are the four eucalyptus trees where I once ran out of petrol; in a while I will see the smoke-blue tips of the far-away Maluti Mountains, leaching their blue into the sky. My neck lifts, my blood goes quiet, the seams of my self-control loosen, my hinges are suddenly light as thistle … I am where I am supposed to be. It's already dusk when I enter the town. In the weak streetlights it is difficult to avoid the sudden potholes, dark stretches of water or rubbish, and the enormous sombre monster-hulks of transport lorries that have parked along the main street for the night. I press the button at the gates of Arborpark. 'I knew it was you! Always earlier than the time you gave,' my mother cries, impressed, over the intercom. I stop under the tree by her flat. The garage door lifts. 'Just come in over here.' My mother is not one for physical contact, but the smell of her house, a mixture of tamboti wood, furniture oil, wool and mutton, enfolds me in an embrace I always miss when away from her. She stares at me: 'Jeez, but your hair looks rejected! What was wrong with the German hairdressers?' We burst out laughing and I hold her for a moment. My arms still vibrate from the brittle unwilling skeleton in my arms and the unexpected hump, as I take my suitcase to my room. The single bed has various layers of my mother's woollen blankets and home-made quilts, the thick winter sheets don't go together, and a hole in the coverlet is patched with hasty stitches. By the bed on the Singer-machine table is a small glass vase with dark-red late-autumn leaves. I slide in at my mother's table the way I've been able to throughout my life. And as always there is a small casserole with a special butterfly mutton chop, a fried egg and some baked vegetables. 'And this is Victoria,' she introduces me with unmistakable pride. The smile around my mother's night nurse Victoria's mouth indicates that she fully reads the moment's subtext. 'And the surname?' I ask. 'Motloang.' We shake hands. My mother and I talk until late before we go to bed, her schedule, carefully planned by the night nurse, completely disrupted. It must be past midnight when there is a commotion at the door. It opens, the light is switched on. 'It really is you,' my mother says behind her Zimmer frame. 'I woke up and thought I must have been dreaming that you are here with me … but here you are! Are you warm enough?' Behind my mother, Victoria's concerned face appears. The next morning at breakfast, my mother asks: 'Do you shit in the mornings or later in the day?' My mother is a fearless and ferocious swearer, but for a moment I'm lost: 'What on earth are you talking about?' 'We have been without water for a week. I have one big bottle of water, but that's for tea and drinking. If you are a morning-shitter you must come with me out to the farm for ablutions. Thank goodness the man renting agreed that your sister could remain in the farmhouse … otherwise we would have had to go and beg strangers for swimming-pool water like the rest of the old people here. But if you are an afternoon person, you will have to go later by yourself — but be warned, by then it's the rest of the family's after-work shitting time.' She shakes her head. 'To think that this has become the poor farm's main activity — the flushing away of family bowel-evacuations … And you cannot even regard it as a harvest or bringing an income!' We drive out with Lydia, a day nurse. My sister Helena rises among her roses, pruning shears in her hand: 'Everything is prepared for you.' We do our ablutions but our eyes feast on the house where we were all once a family together, a house of sandstone and reused materials built by my mother with Simon Mtimkulu and his son David. I see how my toes spread wetly on the ironstone floor of the passage, I smell the sandstone walls and see how the winter sun casts golden blocks on the yellowwood floors in the bedrooms. When the three of us walk back to the car, cleansed and with empty colons, Helena calls me aside. 'The tenant came yesterday and said he doesn't know how long he can still rent here. Last week a fence was simply cut, and five cattle stolen.' Later in the afternoon, after coffee and rusks, my mother asks that I sort her photographs — 'snaps', she calls them. Among them is one of her as a four- or five-year-old girl on a large block of sandstone with a cat in her arms. I look at my mother where she is sitting now with her legs in the sun, one hand lightly caressing a cat lying like a loose apron on her lap. Cats and horses are her two great loves. 'The cat in the photo looks moerig!' I say. 'It was an old cat when it arrived on the yard, so it was called Oukat. First, he belonged to your uncle Danie, who clipped his whiskers, took him along when hunting porcupines and fed him finches until he vomited feathers. After that he was Aunt Nooientjie's cat. She dressed him in doll's clothes and pushed him in a pram. I will never forget one Sunday, when there were visitors drinking coffee on the stoep, he came across the grass, hind legs stepping high to miss the seam of the doll's dress, bonnet askew on his head, with a massive rat in his jaws. Eventually he became mine and we respected each other.' 'So, this isn't the cat that always lay at Great Granny's feet, and the day before her death leapt off the bed, as if it knew she was going to die?' 'No, that was Swartkat. But look at this one here … she understands me so well. When I am upset, or restless, then she determinedly climbs onto my lap as if to say: 'Stop your nonsense, look here we both are, count your blessings!'' Blood's Inner Rhyme is published by Penguin Random House.
