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The shimmering innards – writer Antjie Krog's ‘last' genre-busting masterpiece

This literary/historical puzzle is a tender and rare glimpse into matriarchal entanglement. Poet and celebrated author Antjie Krog has just published a majestic 'autobiographical novel', Die Binnerym van Bloed (Blood's Inner Rhyme – Penguin), traversing the lifelong writing bond with her mother, Dot Serfontein. Serfontein, also a celebrated editor, journalist, essayist, writer of popular short stories and prose, daughter of a Free State cattle farmer and formidable mother of five, including Krog, died at the age of 91 on 4 November 2016. For what she has claimed is her last book, Krog returns to her childhood landscape, not only to capture two significant chapters in well-lived, waning lives, but to excavate a deeper source of epigenetic fear, terror and anxiety always close by. This is a 'genre-busting' journey, a stripped-bare search for the origin of her own as well as Afrikaner neurosis, which runs like an exposed nerve through generations. The matriarch Documenting both her own and her mother's physical decline, their shared grappling with mortality, their talent for bending and shaping new ideas and language, this literary/historical puzzle is a tender and rare glimpse into matriarchal entanglement. It is a telling so intimate and hilarious, so detailed and filled with self-reflection and insight that it democratises their story, rendering it universal. We will all, one day if we live long enough, have to exist in and around the knowledge and acceptance of the failing, dying physical self and the death of a loved one, a cherished mother. But this is no pity party. While she may be a literary rock star travelling the globe to deliver lectures, dealing with real life as it unfurls – hotels, airports, men who hunt with bows and arrows – the body offers no special privileges. There is the retelling of an encounter with bedbugs in a hotel in Canada, a bladder infection, the discovery of a stubborn tick nestling in her bellybutton and a detached front tooth crown minutes before delivering an important talk. The cherry on top is a serious, self-inflicted and painful knee injury gained in a blind 'fight or flight' response out strolling in a forest. Between the sweeping and hilarious letter exchanges, during visits to her mother, Krog notes Serfontein's daily vital signs as written up in shorthand by the 24-hour nurse who looks after the aged matriarch in a retirement home. Here Serfontein is reduced to her liquid and food intake, her moods, bowel movements and which sores, cuts or bruises need tending. Now that we're on bowel movements, Krog's description of attempting to cope with a violent bout of diarrhoea while out on another walk, necessitating one of the most epic and side-splitting hunts for relief in the bushes and the subsequent clean-up, is priceless and so unexpected. But who has not found themselves trapped in a moment when we are no longer in control as our bodies attempt to violently expel a toxin from all available orifices. The silence following the war Images of potential catastrophe and armageddon are never far in the text and exchanges between the two literary giants, and in some instances the author is caught in the eye of the storm. Serfontein's range of writing centred on the working-class Afrikaner and their struggles. Rural tales set in tough landscapes of farms, church, politics and survival. As a girl Serfontein walked barefoot, raised her children, worked on her writing, built a career, built two stone houses alongside workers and farmed with her beloved Appaloosa horses. As Krog debates with her mother the grounding of her writing, she begins to probe an issue which has been silenced since the Boer War – the rape of young Afrikaner girls and women by British soldiers as well as those who fought on their side, including the commandeered black indigenous soldiers. This unspoken trauma is gradually prised open in all its horror. This as well as the effects of postwar traumatic stress on male family members who had survived and had felt enlivened by the war but were now back home, often a ruin. That their girlfriends, their wives, their mothers and their daughters had been raped and brutally sexually assaulted was not an issue women felt should be added to the emotional tinder box. And so it was that women kept their silence, wrapped in shame, carrying a huge burden. A description of how a brown baby born after a rape is smothered to death is devastating. In the book Krog explains to her mother that she is in search of the root of the anxiety and sense of foreboding shared by many Afrikaners who have carried these traumas, triumphs, perceived victories and deep wounds through generations. The author's relationship also with her own brothers and sister, her husband, her children, her culture, her religion, her language, the land in this pastoral milieu is cosmic and existential in its reach. Everything must come to an end. Even the selling of the farm where the remains of Krog's father, politician Willem Krog, are buried in the family graveyard. On a return visit after selling the farm to the government the new, allotted black owner asks the family why they would part with their land. Krog's brothers Vyver, Kootjie and Willem and her sister Jeannette have their own lives, their own farms, their own destinies. The farm, Middenspruit outside Kroonstad as well as the Free State landscape, occupies the inner contours of Serfontein and Krog's memories. Their final communication about love, life, loss and most importantly writing serves as a beautiful broken telegraph between generations of Afrikaners and their place in the country of their birth, South Africa. If you are able to read it in its original Afrikaans do so, but the English translation is nourishing. DM