In Blood’s Inner Rhyme, Antjie Krog returns to her Free State roots and to
her mother, writer Dot Serfontein. In her nineties, Dot is frail but sharp, and
their complex bond unfolds through letters, diary entries and care-home
records. This deeply personal book explores creative legacy, generational
tension, race, land, love and history. Krog writes with poignancy and power
about the push-pull between mother and daughter, the country’s past and
present, and the inevitability of ageing and death. A moving exploration of
identity and inheritance, it’s both Krog’s most intimate and most universally
resonant work to date.
Arborpark, Flat 7
I keep all your letters. One day you can compile us in a plundered book like Audrey Blignault’s daughter. Initially I wondered whether the sudden revival of my oeuvre was thanks to you, but when I saw so many Dot Serfonteinisms in your work and some of our private family phantom(b)s, I thought, thus we constitute each other. Dreamt last night of old Miss Barnes of all people. She resented intelligent children. Any enthusiastic show of hands or snapping of fingers and you were humiliated into the deepest chasm – she would pull at her hair and beseech the Lordest of Lords to please abet her. No, Miss Barnes wanted a pupil to await a question with dull mud eyes looking into the distance, as if shoving large blocks of ignorance around in your head in the hope of hitting a pilot light. I saw clever children in her class become so dumb and insecure within a year that they got anxiety attacks before writing an ordinary class test. She had a massive bosom and very thin legs. One day in class while looking at her I wrote in my textbook: Barnes Boegbeeld. The next thing she was at my desk, read the words, yelled, clutched, foamed while ripping out the page, grabbed me by the neck and threw me out of class. It was strange: the elation I felt. I knew it was that word Figurehead, with its alliteration of B’s, that caused it.
Arborpark, Flat 7
You are right, literature has done surprisingly little exploration into the mother–daughter relationship, or as you put it: M(Other)–daughter. Therefore a speech on this topic at Oranje Girls High would be breaking ground. It’s terrible that only now when everybody around me is doddering on titanium hips, I realised that even the Bible has nothing on the subject. Says a lot about the adulterous relationship of Bathsheba, the mother- and daughter-in-law relationship of Ruth and Naomi, the mother–son relationship of Jacob and his mother, Hannah and her son Samuel, Mary and Jesus, even brother and sister in the story of Tamar, but nothing about mother–daughter. The mother and daughter around Moses are only referred to as gutsy saviours of the baby boy. Even Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, which have a mouthful to say about the contentious woman, the chatterbox woman, the faithless woman, the godfearing woman, have nothing about mother and daughter …
Fairytales are obviously howling with female defects, witches and awful step-mothers. And there it is: No mother stands up for her daughter. Red Riding Hood’s mother is nothing more than a waving, utterly irresponsible skullbowl at the front door, Sleeping Beauty’s mother could not compile a proper guest list, Gretel’s mother has a remarkably erratic pantry … And Afrikaans poetry? Ingrid Jonker, but very grievous.
Perhaps the Greeks are the only ones who got the inner rhymes right: Ceres grieving so intensely about Persephone that the world was falling apart, coming to an end … One’s mother is the person one abandons many times over, but she: never. Forget the saying “We marry our mothers”. Perhaps a daughter shouldn’t know what she is internalising of the mother … perhaps the most successful relationship is a non-relationship, a break out of each other’s grasps … But then there is this poem: “Mother, I am not, except in your earth. When you yelled and your skin shivered, my bones took fire – you do not return to me, from you I recover not.”
Day report
24 April 2013
6.55 Pt got full wash. Teeth and hair care. Blood pressure 115 over 70.
7.20 Ate breakfast. Sat peacefully watching TV. Had good bowel movement.
8.00 Walked a bit with physio.
9.00 Tea and biscuit.
10.00 Sat reading a book. Reverend’s wife read bible and prayed.
11.00 Drew at the table with paints.
12.00 Lunch with medication.
13.00 Afternoon nap.
14.00 Helped with commode. Big bowel movement.
16.00 Coffee and rusks.
16.45 Watering the potplants.
18.00 Dinner.
“Main issue though is that I am no longer up to maintaining the antjie krog that I (or is it you?) brought into being. I am tired, especially tired of her.”
Arborpark, Flat 7
Auntie Tientie visited me last weekend. She half-deaf and I half-blind – we had a wonderful time. On Saturday we took our sketchbooks and watercolours to the beautiful old Anglican church, unpacked our chairs, our basket with tea and biscuits, and were just about to get started when a bearded young man rushed up to us with reddish face and lots of spittle making it plain that two old fossils like us were in mortal danger. Couldn’t we see? We were targets! See, our handbags sommer lying in the open, the keys still in the car! “They” robbed the churchgoers the other day: watches, cellphones, offertory, the whole caboodle. We tried to protest, but he simply packed up on our behalf and bundled us pell-mell back into the car.
So, we had our tea at the flat and entertained ourselves remembering how we two prepared ourselves to participate in the honour guard on horseback for the symbolic ox-wagon trek in 1938. From old Mr Abrahams, the harness-maker, we borrowed authentic old side-saddles from his attic. Magnificent saddles they were, with the seats stitched in flower patterns. Weekends we practised in our long nightgowns to ride side-saddle. And just in case we were asked to ride ahead carrying a flag, we practised with broomsticks. Oh, we became so practised, we could leap ditches, canter, gallop, and imagined ourselves in dramatic scenes, storming a hill full of enemies with flowing tunic and striding lance.
That centenary was my first experience of mass hysteria. I let myself be trampled only to have the tip of my handkerchief lit from a flaming torch. It was our first experience of torches. We Voortrekkers each had to make our own one with tin, a two-inch screw, a twenty-inch asbestos wick (Tientie still remembers!), lamp oil or paraffin, and a wooden handle. In those days, there were no floodlights. The showgrounds were ghostly lit by large bonfires and the trembling torches with which we stood guard at the Voortrekker wagons. Several children suffered burn-wounds which became a mark of honour. Something took hold of one: the barbaric roar of flames from giant fires; the smell of burnt rags and paraffin; the clenched fists of speakers; the out-of-tune piano accompanying choirs with possessed faces belting nationalistic songs; the preachers praying until sweat beaded their foreheads. It awoke a fire, a fever, a mania in one.
Of course, in retrospect the little programme was naive and on the historic photograph we were two mere dots right at the back of the guard of honour … But for us it was the hour of rapture.
Ai, my child, guess what Tientie remembered of all my writing? Of all my books. Just a single paragraph I then had to read to her several times:
Somebody had once visited the outhouse in the night and accidentally dropped the electric torch down the hole. The next morning it was still lustily burning down there. Of course, Tientie and I looked with great interest into the hole and came face to face for the first time with the monsters that keep themselves in long-drops. Used to trifling things like mite larvae in currants or skin-thin little organisms in boarding-school porridge, we were horrified to the core of our very beings at the giant maggots – pale, thick manfingers rising like dough in silent masses from below. We dragged each other half-conscious into fresh air. Still, I think the young people of today would have much less self-aggrandisation and more respect for the judgements of the hereafter if they could see some serious old-fashioned maggots munching on one’s excreta.
A scatological family, ours.
But oh, it remains wonderful to do watercolours. In the mornings I set up a little still life from whatever is around me. Then draw, then the watercolour and, while my eyes see that my left hand is clumsy, the morning is, when I look up, past!
Antwerp, Belgium
Both your letters arrived safely. What am I doing in Antwerp? I am what they call a writer-in-residence. There are many things here that remind me of you. To live alone for so long is more difficult than I thought. Initially I couldn’t understand the struggling. I normally do many things on my own; like you, I like being alone; like you, I was never surrounded by groups of friends. I am not a fearful person, or a chatterbox, so I thought being freed from my daily grind would be fantastic. Main issue though is that I am no longer up to maintaining the antjie krog that I (or is it you?) brought into being. I am tired, especially tired of her. So, here I am, rid of her, anonymous. Why do I feel so unstable?
Mostly practical: to find a rhythm for one person and to keep it up. You said once that it was so difficult to find a structure for your day after Pa’s death. It is true! What time to get up? What to wear when nobody cares?
Sometimes I cook, but then always too much (who cooks half a tomato, ten beans and a spoon of rice?), so leftovers are stored. But the following day, I would eat anything but that food.
Without knowing it, Ma, you have built up a mighty lot of experience on the theme: the Alone-Standing-One. Which of course becomes more and more the Alone-Sitting-One, but you are, with flaming courageous sword, as always still a point ahead of me.
Extracted from Blood’s Inner Rhyme by Antjie Krog, out now. Oook beskikbaar in Afrikaans as Binnerym van bloed.
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