White Bread and Whitewashing: Whiteness and Food in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf

Abstract

Summary Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, published in Afrikaans in the year of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and in English five years later, remains one of the most powerfully cogent deconstructions of whiteness and Afrikaner nationalism to have appeared in local literature in the last twenty-five years. While a relatively large body of scholarship has analysed Van Niekerk’s interrogation of whiteness in the novel, this article focuses specifically on the everyday quotidian practices through which white- ness is maintained and perpetuated as an epistemic formation. Most Afrikaans and English criticism briefly emphasises food imagery in Triomf to signify not only the Benades’ economic impoverishment but also their moral and cultural degeneracy: the Benades – the family on which the novel centres – subsist on an unwholesome diet of margarine-smeared white bread, polony and Klipdrift brandy. However, critics’ cursory mentions of food imagery do not do justice to the nuanced and dexterous manner in which Van Niekerk employs food discourse to destabilise whiteness and show it up as a heterogenous construction. In this article, I analyse instances in the novel where the family interacts with food in various spaces in order to offer new and different ways in which whiteness can be read productively in the South African context.