Review of Blood’s Inner Rhyme by Antjie Krog
South African poet Antjie Krog explores her complex relationship with her writer mother, Dot Serfontein, and anchors the book in the final few years her mother spent in a small flat with a caregiver.
Using correspondence between mother and daughter when Antjie was travelling overseas, and her visits to her mother in Kroonstad, she reflects on their connection. While they shared an abiding love for the Free State and a bond as the two creatives in their family, they had clear differences in ideology and outlook, and admiration was at times tempered with frustration. Afrikaner culture and heritage remained a sensitive area between them. Little anecdotes throughout the book illustrate Dot’s sharp intellect and feistiness, and the sense of humour of both women.
The author also reaches back to the Anglo-Boer War and draws material from Dot Serfontein’s old documents and unfinished writings. Then she blends in her own series of interviews conducted with people in inter-racial marriages in South Africa.
The timeline moves back and forth quite a lot and is punctuated with matter-of-fact extracts from the care staff’s daily log of how “the patient”, Antjie’s ailing mother, is faring. It is an unemotional but nonetheless sad background commentary on her age-related decline.
Antjie Krog’s “autobiographical novel” is her way of clarifying and finding closure on a relationship that was clearly precious to her, albeit one that was far from effortless.
A copy of Blood’s Inner Rhyme is available on short-term loan from the Chartered client library. The book is also published in Afrikaans under the title Binnerym van Bloed.