Accountability, acknowledgement and the ethics of “quilting” in Antjie Krog's country of my skull

Abstract

Summary This paper is primarily concerned with accountability and acknowledgement, and their relationship to one another, in Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull (1998). Arguing that both accountability and acknowledgement become ethically problematic in Krog's transposition of one form of textual practice to another (for example, her transposing of testimony and of academic non‐fictional texts into fictional narrative or poetry), the paper proposes that two very different ethical problems arise in Country of My Skull because of an elision of textual and generic frames that ultimately erases traces to textual “origins”: whether that origin be the testimonies given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, or other textual materials used by Krog in the making of this text. The ethical consequence of this muddying of genres and textual frames is twofold: first, the appropriation of individual testimonial voices and, second, plagiarism ‐ two very different ethical transgressions which, nevertheless, bear consideration alongside one another since the two may be seen to emerge from the same textual practice as Krog's; what she refers to as “quilting”. While Krog sees textual quilting as allowing for a multivocal text that does not present a singular or coherent notion of national truth, I will argue that it also allows Krog to transpose one form of textuality into a different generic frame altogether. While this is not in and of itself problematic, the ethical consequences of the transposition, reinterpretation, and transformation of one textual object to another require careful consideration. The paper ultimately suggests that fictional and poetic texts need to acknowledge and be accountable to the original texts that they transpose and transform by providing the reader with a clear and interpretable trace‐back to that original.