Vulnerable Bodies in Antjie Krog's Begging to Be Black

In Begging to Be Black, Krog grapples with the idea of the vulnerable body as a response to Njabulo S Ndebele's inaugural Steve Biko Memorial Lecture (delivered in 2000). She expresses her loyalty to literary non-fiction in somatic terms: she hopes that it allows her potentially to discover a "thinning of skin" that avoids the imaginative challenges of fiction. I show how Krog responds to Ndebele's speech through two key intertexts in Begging to Be Black, and asks whether the preoccupation of the text with the idea of the vulnerable body paradoxically elides the particularities of embodied experience. Begging to Be Black incorporates J M Coetzee's Disgrace (2000 Coetzee, J M. 2000 [1999]. Disgrace. London: Vintage. [1999 Coetzee, J M. 2000 [1999]. Disgrace. London: Vintage. ]) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness 1988 [1899 Coetzee, J M. 1988. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press. ] in order to test the limits of the sympathetic imagination and understand what it means to share in bodily vulnerability, particularly in the light of racially differentiated experience.