Charaxes and Collaborative Becoming in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat

Abstract

This article focusses on Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006 [2004] trans. Michiel Heyns) and its fabulation of the magical Overberg of the south-western Cape. While the mother–child bond has received much scholarly attention, what deserves closer examination is the tentacular imbrication of the creaturely world into this dynamic. Adopting a posthuman, ecocritical lens, this article highlights the intermediary role played by creatures in these complex intimacies. In particular, I focus on Agaat’s ‘kin-making’ with the Emperor Butterfly which serves as a mediator between Milla and Agaat. Elucidating the chthonic themes in the novel, I turn to Haraway’s Living with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which calls for making “kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (2016: 1). I argue that the multispecies kinship practices presented in Agaat provide a “response-able” approach to living on a damaged earth, planting seeds for “worldings committed to partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resurgence” in these hard times of planetary crises (71).