Struggles Over Voice: Polyphony, Appropriation, and the Construction of Truth in Country of My Skull

Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, the first major retrospective on the TRC, has, on the one hand, been praised for its deeply passionate, literary take on a subject entangled in the discourses of politics and social science. On the other, the book has been the site of fierce controversy: Krog, a privileged Afrikaner, engages directly with her beneficiary status while simultaneously appropriating the voices of victims in her narrative. Since the book's publication, debate about the relationships between identity, voice, memory, and truth, has only become more heated. In this article, I return to Krog's seminal text as a case study of such struggles over voice, analysing Krog's engagement with multiple voices through the lenses of narrative theory and memory studies. Particularly, I apply Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of "heteroglossia" and "polyphony" and Michael Rothberg's concept of "multidirectional memory" in order to reframe the scholarly debate over the book and its ethics of memory. I contend that, though Krog tests ethical boundaries, Country's ability to confound standards of genre with a diverse set of voices and styles is both a major aesthetic feat and an act of democratisation.