Editors’ Note, v

ARTICLES
Antjie Krog and the Autobiography of Postcolonial Becoming
Elizabeth Rodrigues, 725
Imagination disrupts documentary, as Antjie Krog compares the experience of attending the opening hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to being reborn. Figuratively placing herself back at the beginning of human development, in the early pages of Country of My Skull Krog registers the profound personal effects of the TRC’s public process of national redefinition, and equates its beginning with the beginning of a new life—or potential beginning, as, fittingly, her rebirth is not yet narrated. Before her, and before the South African nation, stands an imperative of transformation so profound that the comparison to physical birth seems apt, both appropriately extreme and appropriately impossible. No person and no country can literally go “back”; self and nation must attempt immediate change in medias res. Krog’s bold imagining invites us to consider how her autobiographical works stage the narrative of development in the context of postcoloniality as a process that cannot rely on inborn or teleological trajectories for its beginnings and ends but must actively and urgently construct its horizons.









