Van Niekerk Research Articles

‘Embodying Space’: The Search for a Nurturing Environment in Marlene van Niekerk’s <i>Triomf, Agaat and Memorandum</i>

Marlene van Niekerk’s novels have been the subject of much lively critical discussion in the South African literary community. She has been praised for– among other features – her inventive use of the Afrikaans language, disregard for taboos and the breaching of stylistic and literary boundaries.

The Content of the Form and other Textual Politics. Configurations of Nationhood and Citizenship in Disgrace and Agaat*

This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and citizenship or, more generally, identity. It does so by analysing two recent South-African novels i.e. J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006). Both Disgrace and Agaat are examples of how the singularity of great literary works needs an interdisciplinary approach that does justice to the way in which a novel is part of, and simultaneously co-constructs, the discourses on history, identity and citizenship.

Going to the Dogs: Enduring Isolation in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf

Coming up on twenty years past 1994, the story of South Africa's first democratic elections is the stuff of legend: after decades of struggle and three days at the polls, apartheid came to a grinding halt with Nelson Mandela's landslide victory. In June of that year, one month after the country's black president pledged in the language of his former prison guards to let the past be past, a remarkable novel was published to herald the new dispensation. But Triomf was a decidedly affair, whose 450 bleak pages marked a sharp break with the dissident tradition for which Afrikaans fiction is best known. In lieu of South African worlding or reconciliation, it captured the unappealing subjects that seemed better left behind: a motley crew of swearing, sweaty, inbred Afrikaners and their mutts, described as too few, even for themselves (9; see Kruger Introduction). As a result, Triomf remains a profound indictment of white nationalist ideology and a forceful case study in the fictional possibilities of isolation. Its depiction of human-animal relationships that disrupt the fluid ascendancy from experience to paradigmatic significance, in particular, demands more widespread and enduring consideration. Ten years passed before Marlene van Niekerk's first novel--a relentless account of one poor, cut-off family's life in the weeks leading up to and after the elections--saw American publication, by which point it could be safely consigned to what Rob Nixon called the white-trash bin of history (see de Kock). It received attention mostly from South African academics and garnered nowhere near the international notice of Van Niekerk's second novel, Agaat (which, among other accolades, won nods of approval from Toni Morrison and Oprah in 2010). This essay aims in some small measure to redress this wrong, but more importantly to unravel Triomf's relevance for the hyper-local in a world-systems age. The stakes are high for South African fiction, postcolonial studies, and the sign of the global (Baucom 159) that has become the default orientation of literary scholarship: for all that a novel like Triomf is bound to a pivotal socio-political moment, what do we give up in casting local texts as allegory rather than as literary objects of a less determinate order? Is it time, moreover, to consider what aspects of world fiction are lost by filtering it through an impulse toward connection (Cooppan 10), or what Ian Baucom calls such dominant coinages as the intertextual, the transnational, and the cross-cultural (168)? From its confinement to the seemingly static world of a shunned house in a worn-out suburb, Triomf throws a wrench in the too-dominant model of flux. Yet it is the very localization of the novel's reception, I argue, that has precluded excavating the as a defining and complex theme within it; in other words, the widely held meaning of the text is distinct from how it generates meaning in and through the hermetic lives it depicts. And though considering what Triomf represents about South Africa's political transition and Afrikaner nationalism in particular is not mutually exclusive with considering its mode of representation, aspects of the novel that internally complicate the allegorical reading it presents have been all but overlooked. The idiosyncrasy of Triomf's dogs, to which an otherwise irredeemable cast of characters exclusively tune in their voices (13), cries out for serious attention that has not been forthcoming even in the midst of what has been called the animal turn in literary scholarship. This is perhaps because far from embodying the problem of alterity writ large, these dogs (and mainly one dog named Getty) represent forceful points of intersubjective engagement that defy the imposition of broader significance. In other words, the problem is that their individuation lands them outside of any generalizable message about intersubjective engagement, and therefore outside the reach of most animal-studies criticism or the narratives into which South African literature is typically absorbed. …

Karakterisering en die gebruik van verwysings na psalms, gesange en hallelujaliedere in die roman <i>Agaat</i> van Marlene van Niekerk

Characterisation and the use of references to psalms, hymns and hallelujah songs in Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Agaat The qualities of the main characters in Marlene van Niekerk‟s Afrikaans novel “Agaat” (2004) are often emphasised by the use of references to classical, folk and sacred music. As religious songs constitute an integral part of the Afrikaans community, it is fitting to include references to the texts of psalms, hymns and hallelujah hymns in an Afrikaans novel set on a farm. The novel makes extensive use of such references to portray the characters and their context. These references form one of the most important means of characterisation in the novel. The texts are often used by the characters in a harsh and ironic way – and without respect for the religious content – but there are also some touching situations in which the original religious context is retained.

From Thandi the Maid to Thandi the Madam: Domestic Workers in the Archives of Afrikaans Literature and a Family Photograph Album

ABSTRACT The article's central preoccupation is with the dialectic of presence/absence in the tense and intense relations of intimacy and distance in domestic service. In its mix of cultural, economic and political history, literary analysis and autobiography, the article traces the representation of South African domestic workers in both the author's memory and the collective memory of Afrikaans literature. Whether it is possible to reconstruct ‘the truth’ about the past from private and public archives such as photograph albums and literature is discussed against the background of Michel Foucault's concept of the archive, while the ‘sticky’ concepts of representation and appropriation are confronted. During the 1950s, famous Afrikaans authors such as Alba Bouwer and Minnie Postma contributed to the often benevolent ‘maternal’ image of the black domestic worker in Afrikaans literature and the ‘normalisation’ of white South Africans' assumption that they have a ‘right’ to the service of black people. The article also refers to Elsa Joubert's mediation and framing of the voice of Poppie Nongena in 1978, which sparked a furious debate on the problematic question of white authors being the interpreters and mediators of subaltern black female lives – an issue which remains acute. How this is dealt with is discussed with reference to post-apartheid authors such as Jan van Tonder, who exposes the domestic violence he witnessed as a child during the 1960s when the family servant was forced to take her small son ‘home’, while Marlene van Niekerk scrupulously interrogates whiteness in post-apartheid spaces of middle-class comfort, where most maids are still black and most madams still white.

Ethics and AIDS in Africa: The Challenge to Our Thinking edited by Anton A. Van Niekerk and Loretta M. Kopelman

Ethics and AIDS in Africa: The Challenge to Our Thinking edited by <i>Anton A. Van Niekerk and Loretta M. Kopelman</i>

CHAPTER 11: Fostering Creative Minds through Problem Solving in a 3-D Visualization Design Research Program

ABSTRACT This chapter describes how a design research project that develops children's 3-D visualization capacity fosters creative teaching and teaching for creativity. Through the spatial operation capacity framework (van Niekerk, 1997; Yakimanskaya, 1991) that guides the development of the mathematics in this study, children are exposed to activities that require them to act on a variety of physical and mental objects and transformations to develop spatial skills. Children use 3-D figures, 2-D representations of 3-D figures, verbal representations, and a dynamic computer interface to solve spatial problems. The project is enacted in a dual-language elementary school that serves a typical urban population.

“It was my … hanslam”: Agaat as a pastoral evocation of guilt and (possibly) forgiveness

Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (translated by Michiel Heyns) returns to the genre of the plaasroman and draws on the pastoral tradition and the biblical pastoral in particular. The relationship between the farmer Milla de Wet and her spurned foster daughter, now servant, Agaat Laurier, is reviewed when Milla lies on her death bed. This raises questions about guilt and forgiveness, which are discussed in relation to readings of Ricoeur and Derrida, and the prophet Nathan's parable to David, the shepherd‐king.

Sharing in God�s surprise: The place and role of the Department of Science of Religion and Missiology at the University of Pretoria

During the centenary year of the University of Pretoria (2008), the Department of Science of Religion and Missiology took stock of its activities during the past 55 years, since the first professor in Missiology, H.D.A. du Toit, was appointed. In his wake a number of missiologists followed � C.W.H. Boshoff, D. Crafford, P.G.J. Meiring, J.J. Kritzinger, P.J. van der Merwe, A.S. van Niekerk and C.J.P. Niemandt � each of whom has contributed to the formation of hundreds of ministers and missionaries, as well as to the development of missiology and science of religion in South Africa through their research and writings. In this article, the place of missiology among the other theological disciplines at the University of Pretoria is discussed, together with an analysis of the nature and the mandate of missiology and science of religion in South Africa in our day. This article discusses five specific challenges to missiology at the beginning of the third millennium, namely to maintain its theological �roots�; to operate in close relationship with the church; to focus on our African context; to concentrate on a relevant agenda; and to develop a responsible methodology. Attention is given to some of the more important publications by members of the Department.

Crossing the Borders of Identity Politics

This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the gendered construction of national boundaries. It does so by proposing a reconsideration of the terms singularity, difference and literariness while analysing two talked-about and best-selling postcolonial novels, Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee and Agaat (2004) by Marlene van Niekerk.

'n “Paradise Lost”: 'n Ondersoek na swart arbeid en wit ongemak in stedelike Suid-Afrika: Marlene van Niekerk se kortverhaal “Klein vingeroefening rondom die nosie van hibriditeit”

Summary Marlene van Niekerk's short story “Klein vingeroefening rondom die nosie van hibriditeit” (2001) confronts the ambivalence inherent in the legacy of Madamhood which is coupled with a post-apartheid sense of white displacement. This “small finger exercise on the notion of hybridity” offers a productive site to investigate theories of whiteness as an empty signifier and as a social construction. In this article, I trace manifestations of the reification of whiteness and suggest ways in which the narrative reveals the crises of whiteness and paradoxes upon which it is built. I argue that van Niekerk's deployment of layers of self-ironisation evident in her use of first-person narration, and the focalising perspective of the character “Marlene” allows her to examine her own duplicity in resisting and perpetuating normative Western whiteness inscribed in social narratives. This paper examines the narrator's multiple encounters with coloured and black domestic labourers and their white employers. Tracing the noticeable shifts in perspective from first to third person throughout the narrative, I argue that it is precisely during instances in which the narrator feels compromised and/or complicit in narratives of suburban Madamhood that she resorts to the third person, as if watching herself from a distance inevitably acting out a part she genuinely does not want to play. Furthermore, I also show that van Niekerk is vigilant in her interrogation of language and the way in which axioms and truisms (“the tyranny of the transparent”) are used to shore up white hegemony, and to render invisible the real place of power. What van Niekerk resists and subverts is the predictable sense that middleclass, matronly whiteness carries off its own legitimacy, which is reinforced by a concomitant sense of normative neutrality. And she accomplishes this, I suggest, in what may be read as a queering of the dynamics, which emerges most significantly in her treatment of the central image in the text: a pair of fork-tongued snakes, the multilayered symbolism of which exposes the paradoxes upon which whiteness and middleclass normativity are premised.

Ruth in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat

Summary Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006), which was translated from the Afrikaans into English by Michiel Heyns, examines the relationship between a dying white woman and her Coloured carer. In the course of the novel it becomes clear that the themes of (post)colonialism, race relations and gender dynamics are being explored; however, the means through which they are conveyed are through the complicated, distressing and moving relationship between the two protagonists, which exemplifies the relationship between white Afrikaners in particular (and by extension whites generally in South Africa) and Coloureds in particular (and by extension the racial other). Religion is a crucial aspect of the changing dynamics between these two representative characters. In this paper I examine the striking parallels between the novel and the Book of Ruth, particularly with regard to the relationship between the two female protagonists. I analyse van Niekerk's critique of supremacist religion, especially during apartheid, and her representation of the necessity for ruth, or compassion, in contemporary South Africa. I employ concepts raised by a number of feminist postcolonialist scholars of theology to illustrate the radical nature of van Niekerk's representation of religion and spirituality in the novel. In particular, I examine the implications of applying Marcella Althaus-Reid's controversial concept of the Bi/Christ to the text.

Inleiding: “Om kommunikasie op gang te kry”: Die begin en einde van Marlene van Niekerk se oeuvre

Summary Van Niekerk's novels are characterised by the special attention that is drawn to the use of language. This article focuses on the ways in which the mimetic possibilities of language are investigated in her novels. The restriction on communication, on knowledge of the self, knowledge and understanding of the other and of the world as a result of the fact that this knowledge and communication are determined by language is central in this investigation. Eventually it is pointed out how van Niekerk tries to reach beyond these restrictions of language by making use of narrative and metaphor.

Nationalism and the Farm Novel in South Africa, 1883–2004*

From Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) to Van Niekerk's Agaat (2004), the farm novel has reflected South Africa's experience of colonial conflict, white supremacy, gender struggle and nationalism. Revisited at key historical moments, the farm novel describes a deterministic relationship between genre and ideology, drawing attention to the role a particular fictional mode has played in justifying the disenfranchisement of blacks and the disempowerment of women. The social context in which the Afrikaans farm novel developed was one of emerging Afrikaner nationalism; it lent credibility to a story about Afrikaners' rural origins that provided an illusion of continuity in South African history and a description of an unchanging Afrikaner identity. Since the 1960s, leftist Afrikaans writers, concerned with the role the early farm novel played in promoting white supremacy, have rewritten it in order to deconstruct its themes and tropes. J.M. Coetzee's English-medium challenge to the farm novel genre, in his fiction and elsewhere, can be viewed in this context. Increasingly, since the end of apartheid, feminist versions of the genre have articulated connections between nationalist ideology, the canon and the representation of gender. I view recent rewritings by Marlene van Niekerk, particularly, as a challenge to both literary convention and racist-masculinist ideology. Her work draws attention to the genre's importance in describing the relationship between white supremacy and land ownership; moreover, it proposes new directions for the study of pastoral traditions in South African writing.

Molybdenum Exposure and Semen Quality: Meeker et al. Respond

We appreciate the comments by Sorahan and Sullivan that serve to reiterate the limitations we discussed in our article reporting relationships between metal concentrations in blood and semen quality among 219 men recruited through two Michigan infertility clinics (Meeker et al. 2008). As highlighted in their letter, these limitations included the possibility of chance findings due to multiple comparisons and the sensitivity of the molybdenum assay used, among others. However, dismissing our analysis as a “fishing expedition” is not appropriate, given the animal evidence for adverse effects on male reproductive function in relation to Mo (Institute of Medicine 2001; Jeter and Davis 1954; Lyubimov et al. 2004; Pandey and Singh 2002; Thomas and Moss 1951; Van Niekerk and Van Niekerk 1989; Vyskocil and Viau 1999; Yamaguchi et al. 2007) and other metals. Because evidence exists for numerous metals to be either harmful or beneficial to male reproduction, and because metals may interact with one another synergistically or antagonistically, we conducted this exploratory study to provide the most comprehensive human data to date on multiple metals and semen quality.

Examining the Servant's Subversive Verbal and Non-Verbal Expression in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat

Summary The power struggle between Milla and Agaat in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006) is one based in language. While the matriarch's perspective dominates the novel, thereby presumably silencing Agaat, the servant-cum-nurse employs alternative methods of communication, or mimetic gestures, to undermine Milla's point of view. Through verbal and non-verbal measures, Agaat attempts to counteract the dying woman's story. While these communicative measures rely on their finely nuanced and insidious attributes to function, they contain an essential ambivalence, as the controlling white woman never understands the full implications of her rejected child's communication.

Grondbesit in 'n postkoloniale plaasroman: Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat

Summary Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2004) can be read as a postcolonial farm novel which pays particular attention to the role of women, the representation of Coloured farm workers as well as issues relevant to landownership in South Africa. In Agaat the question of landownership is foregrounded when Agaat, a coloured woman, becomes the owner of the farm Grootmoedersdrift and when Jakkie, the only son of the white woman farmer Milla de Wet, returns to Canada to resume his work in ethnomusicology. Agaat presents a problematisation of the influence wielded by landownership on the identity of the farmer, as Milla, who dearly loves her farm, also claims the farm to achieve her emancipatory objectives as a woman. Furthermore, Jakkie's willing relinquishment of his claim to landownership contributes towards a problematisation of the identity formation of the Afrikaner farmer and his/her descendants in the farm novel. In contrast with the situation in the older farm novel, for Jakkie, landownership is no longer a defining identity marker. This article on landownership and, particularly, the relation between landownership and the identities of both Milla and Jakkie de Wet in Agaat, also assesses the contribution of Marlene van Niekerk's novel to the development of the Afrikaans farm novel within a postcolonial context.

Cracking the Code: Translation as Transgression in Triomf

Summary This article has been braided from two main strands: first, my arguments probe the conditions that pertain to the project of literary translation in South African letters, both in the light of my own research into and observations of conditions in the field, and my own experience as a working translator, a participant in a domain that I regard as extraordinarily rich but also highly problematic. Second, the argument considers aspects of my own translation of Marlene van Niekerk's paradigm-busting novel, Triomf (1994, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2004), as a case history which serves as possible corroboration of my arguments in the first part.

Intimate Enemies: A Discussion with Marlene van Niekerk and Michiel Heyns about Agaat and its Translation into English

Leon de Kock: Michiel, every translation has a feel about it. How did this one feel for you? Michiel Heyns: Much of the I was stimulated, and occasionally I had to ask Marlene what she meant. As you know, Marlene's Afrikaans is not just a matter of redoing the old thing, and that was sometimes strenuous, but by and large--I'm generalising now from the experience of seven months--it was stimulating, exciting, and very seldom boring. I round it a great experience, and I think I had a very good working relationship with Marlene. I felt I could always ask her things when really doubt. We lived about 20 km apart, and we'd meet once a week, or once a fortnight, to have an afternoon session, followed by a meal, perhaps. LdK: How would you characterise this translation? The level of co-authorship, the eo-translation here seems to be quite marked, as it was with Triomf. In such a case, I sometimes wonder whether one is beginning to talk about something more than just translation. MH: Yes, it's a collaboration; I suppose you did the same Triomf--we attributed copyright for the translation to both of us, because Marlene had a huge share the translation. Yes, it's not a matter of me sitting alone translating, and then presenting it to Marlene; there was an interaction all the time. I'm looking for a word for this ... Marlene van Niekerk: Co-creativity ... MH: Yes. It gave me perhaps an inkling of something you said yesterday, Leon [at Boekehuis Johannesburg]--that sense of freedom, that I could sometimes exceed the limit because I'd checked with Marlene, which I wouldn't have been able to do if I'd simply been working on my own. LdK: Yes, that's the other side of my notion that you should never translate anyone but a dead author; (1) you have more freedom this way, whereas if you were translating a dead author, you wouldn't dare. MH: No, you would not if you honoured his memory. This is where your word licence comes in, a sense, because the author can give you licence; of course the author can also deny you licence, but this case usually the licentiousness that you also talked about yesterday, was indeed licensed by Marlene, so that gives one a kind of freedom. MvN: I felt that Michiel brought a whole lot of his structures and of erudition to the text, took it into his structures and machinery, and, ja, I felt it was entirely gerymd. It was at some points quite explorative its sentences and quite improvisational its development of certain thoughts, and I thought, well, fine. If you put it into another of and creativity, you'll get something that works, and I was comfortable with it because I felt it was gerymd. What is the word I'm looking for? LdK: Congruent? MvN: Congruence. Concomitant. LdK: I felt that congruence. [To MH:] You got me reading T.S. Eliot this morning, the Four Quartets, and I felt the congruence, knowing Agaat, the strains of time future and time present. MH: Yes, and in my beginning is my ending and my ending is my beginning, which is an accurate description of the structure of the novel.... LdK: ... so, a sense, it was similar to what happened Triomft; the English version is slightly different and it's slightly, an extended version, almost ... MH: I think something potentialised. It was there to be brought out. So it's not as if you're imposing something on the original; you take a hint from the original and expand it; and because you're working a different language and it has a different cultural tradition, you can draw on that. As I said yesterday, I hope I'm not violating the work, but I'm pleased to hear you say you also found it, reading the Four Quartets; it resonates for me with this novel. LdK: I love that phrase machinery of erudition, because that's what writing is about, and it's quite unique to see this level of cooperation between two living South African writers, writing out of different languages and creating this one work, which is now . …

Irreparable Loss and Exorbitant Gain: On Translating Agaat

Summary This essay attempts an after-the-fact reflection on the process of translating a complex literary text, Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat. Central to the essay is the question of whether a translation should “foreignise” or “domesticate” the text, or as Umberto Eco puts it: “should a translation lead the reader to understand the linguistic and cultural universe of the source text, or transform the original by adapting it to the reader's cultural and linguistic universe?” Although it is impossible to opt for either of these positions exclusively, this essay inclines towards the former, and attempts to demonstrate from the translation of Agaat both the difficulties of negotiating a transition between two cultures, and its rewards. If much of the original culture is inevitably lost, especially where the language is itself strongly culture-specific, the translation may also gain something by its immersion in the receiving culture, establishing revitalising links with a whole new context.