Country of My Skull

I finished Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog today. Krog is a journalist (and accomplished poet) who was tasked to report on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for SABC Radio (South African Broadcast Company). The book is a memoir of that period of her life and what the TRC meant to her personally, nationally.

There's no other way to say it, this is an exquisite book.  She artfully weaves actual TRC testimony, personal disclosure about her joys and ambivalences, and narrative of the public's embrace and rejection of this period in South Africa's history.

If books were written with a color palette, Krog uses very few primary colors. Krog herself is a liberal-minded, anti-apartheid, farm-country born Afrikaner, still deeply in love with her country and at times even her culture. I can only imagine it took every bit of her life as a poet to hold together the many hues of her life. Make no mistake, there is clarity. What happened during Apartheid, what it did to victim and perpetrator alike, is evil. Evil. EVIL. Yet there is also confusion, complexity, and exhaustion.

Toward the end of the book, she is able finally to say what is both obvious and painful. Reconciliation is not a process; it is recursive. In the course of human history, in clashes between peoples, it never ends. And it is the confusion of this realization I found beautiful, compelling, and disorienting.

I suppose Tutu's book I wrote about earlier is more popular and better known, but this is the better book.