“chew me until i bind”: Sacrifice and Cultural Renewal in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat

Abstract

Summary In Agaat (2006), Marlene van Niekerk presents the future of Afrikaner culture in a new matrilineal and racially hybrid genealogy. This matrilineal genealogy occurs through the self-sacrifice of the white matriarch, Milla de Wet. Van Niekerk disrupts and subverts dominant patriarchal, patrilineal and racial epistemes upon which the plaasroman is based by leaving the farm, not to Milla's son and putative male heir, but to the coloured housekeeper, Agaat. The allusive prose passage that is the focus of this article is written in the style of a prayer or lament with its mournful meditation on the onset of disease and decay in the soil and farming stock that Milla regrets not having saved from abuse and denigration. The lament becomes an appeal for a beneficent successor to care for and “breathe” life back into the soil. In this article we shall explore how Milla is presented as an Earth Mother, through the invocation of the Demeter-Persephone myth, supplicating for rebirth and renewal. Here the Earth Mother figure is described as sick and fallow, and yet awaiting a catalyst for regeneration. In this passage Milla presents herself as a pharmakos, ritual sacrifice or scapegoat, whose purpose is “to restore harmony in the community, to reinforce the social fabric” (Girard 2005: 8). Milla's question and plea, “who will chew me until i bind” (van Niekerk 2006: 35), and the recurring motif of cannibalistic sacrifice in the novel, can be read as a metaphor for the desire for social reconciliation and cohesion in contemporary South Africa.