Living History, Fading Minds: Dementia as the Gateway to Historical Past in South Africa via Antjie Krog's Blood's Inner Rhyme (2025) and Julia Martin's The Blackridge House (2019).

This manuscript analyzes the literary, social and cultural representations of dementia in Antjie Krog's Blood's Inner Rhyme (2025) and Julia Martin's The Blackridge House (2019). I contend that the authors' accounts of their mothers' struggle with dementia, from its onset to its end, function as living archives of personal and national history. I employ life writing, aging studies, and, to a lesser extent, historiography to examine the literary, social cultural, and historical dimensions of such experiences. I address the narrative construction of the mothers' identity in later life by highlighting the role of archives and family memories in the context of contemporary South Africa. Thus, I aim to illustrate the instrumental role of life narratives in the creation of safe spaces for intergenerational dialogue and reconciliation with a troubled past on a personal and national level. I also contend that humanities-based inquiry brings to the fore the essential aspects of later life, thereby challenging the pathologizing medical in the representation of dementia, which often disregards the reality of old people as vessels of knowledge. Eventually, I showcase that illness life narratives function as accessible repositories of public knowledge that render visible the realities of aging.