The race for reparation(s), the (im)possibility of repair in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull

Abstract

ABSTRACTDemands for reparations led by African American communities for centuries of enslavement parallel calls by the South African state for the reparation of socioeconomic disadvantage rooted in colonial and apartheid pasts. Where such appeals are necessary and legitimate within a broader context of social redress and reconciliation, a comparative, relational reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) extends normative ideologies of reparations to include a critical engagement with existential reparation. This paper offers a literary exploration of the efficacy of reparations in overcoming legacies of racial discrimination and disadvantage. It argues further argues that Beloved and Country of My Skull’s creative representations of the tension between healing/repair and irreparable woundedness do not just engage chronic black ontological precarity; their narrative interrogation of (the possibility of) existential reparation problematizes (historically) conventional identitarian processes and advances morally responsive and socially transformative ways of being in the world.