Body, history and mythicisation: Antjie Krog's South African novel, A change of tongue.

Antjie Krog's autobiographical novel A change of tongue presents a diversified conglomerate of different genres and parts. One of the major thematic focal points is the evident aim of the I-narrator/protagonist to reconstitute her identity as a white Afrikaans woman so as to establish her claim to belong, as a 'post-white' African, to the land and its aboriginal people. This paper investigates this intent through an analysis of the depiction of the physicality of the novel's main figures, and especially that of the I-narrator. This analysis, in turn, reveals a significant tendency towards mythicising, which highlights some of the problematic of the text, along with the inner contradictions inherent in the I-narrator's desire to be assimilated unquestionably and legitimately into the new socio-political context of her country. It will be shown that her attempt to re-write her personal white identity into a native African one leads to the individualistic and subjective misrepresentation of an established historical reality and context by mythicising it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]