'Waar gaan ons heen van hier?': The struggle between autonomy and relationality in Antjie Krog's "land van genade en verdriet"(2000)

Antjie Krog's cycle of poems entitled "land van genade en verdriet" in Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (2000) tracks and problematises the repercussions of a process of reconciliation by foregrounding issues of guilt, space, language and the desire and difficulty to start anew. Krog's treatment of the above issues resonates strongly with Judith Butler's work on vulnerability, relationality and her theories on the creation of community through a sharing of grief and loss. This article researches how the interaction of these different approaches (one poetic, one theoretical, with different historical settings) opens up the reading of Krog's central question "waar gaan ons heen van hier?". It does not conclude with clear-cut answers to the many questions flowing from Krog's enquiry, but offers, instead, a contention which Krog and Butler seem to share: that the autonomy of our bodies reflects a porous boundary which provides a location of communality from which at least some answers can be intimated