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Rewriting the Plaasroman: Nostalgia,Intimacy and (Un)homeliness in Marlenevan Niekerk's AgaatCaren van HouwelingenPublished online: 19 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Caren van Houwelingen (2012) Rewriting the Plaasroman: Nostalgia, Intimacyand (Un)homeliness in Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat , English Studies in Africa, 55:1, 93-106, DOI:10.1080/00138398.2012.682467

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93DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2012.682467 English Studies in Africa 55 (1)carenvanhouwelingen@gmail.com © University of the Witwatersrand

pp 93–106

rEWriting thE PLAASROMAN: nostAlgiA, intimAcY And (un)homElinEss in mArlEnE VAn niEKErK’s AGAAT1

caren van houwelingen

Abstract

In her 2004 novel, Agaat, Marlene van Niekerk revisits the traditional plaasroman in order to rethink one of the most problematic and troubling characteristics of Afrikaner whiteness in South Africa: the assumed ownership and domestication of the African land. While Agaat has been described as ‘feminist’, ‘postcolonial’ (Prinsloo and Visagie 72–77), and even ‘anti-nationalist’ (Devarenne 642), I argue in this article that the novel should also be read as a type of ‘complicitous critique’ (Warnes 121) – a work that reflects nostalgically, yet critically, on Afrikaner nationalism and political power. I locate the roots of Afrikaner nationalism (and the way it is elaborated in the novel) within the plaasroman: a genre that conceptualized the ‘domesticated’ African landscape as a mythical Afrikaner ‘home’. It is to this tradition that Agaat writes back as Van Niekerk explicitly questions the legitimacy of the narrative of Afrikaner belonging: the novel maps the ways in which Milla, the white female protagonist, nostalgically establishes her subjectivity and identity in relation to her farmland. Paralysed by Motor Neuron Disease, however, she is imprisoned in the intimate space of the home, and thus barred from fully inhabiting her farm and home. In this way, the author produces a vision of ‘home’ that fosters feelings of alienation and unbelonging – for both Milla and her coloured servant, Agaat. Furthermore, I argue that the novel ‘rediscovers the ordinary’, and registers a vision of the quotidian that is uncomfortable and unhomely, so that the two central characters come to share experiences of ‘home as homelessness’ (Ndebele ‘A home’ 28). For Van Niekerk, revisiting the past finally becomes a revisionist intervention that does not simplistically reassert ‘old or redundant definitions and institutions’ (‘Afrikaner’ 141), but rather thinks critically about home, connecting the personal and the everyday with the public and political.

Keywords: Home, the plaasroman, Afrikaner whiteness, landownership, nostal-gia, intimacy, estrangement, femininity.

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introduction

In 1992, two years before South Africa’s first democratic election, Afrikaans novelist and poet Marlene van Niekerk wrote that every form of historical research attempts to accomplish two things: ‘to make sense of the present and to answer to or to legitimize the needs and conditions of the present’ (‘Afrikaner’ 141).2 Her two novels, Triomf (1994) and Agaat (2004), published during and after the political transition, undertake exactly this: in order to ‘make sense of the present’, they revisit and ‘critically reinterpret’ South Africa’s apartheid history. At the heart of her project stands a present engagement with the past: an imaginative and revisionist intervention that ‘consider[s] possibilities for new definitions and new constitutions’ (Van Niekerk ‘Afrikaner’ 141) for the future. Aware of the various complexities that would shape the process of establishing ‘a non-sexist, non-racist democratic’ future South Africa, Van Niekerk has critically – yet cautiously – described national efforts to this end as not very different from ‘simply covering a very sick person with a nice warm blanket and believing our duty done’ (‘Afrikaner’ 142). In search of a more effective intervention she revisits the past of the white Afrikaner, engaging with history through a mode that Dennis Walder calls ‘postcolonial’ nostalgia: a style of historicizing that commands an ethical engagement with the past by connecting ‘what you remember with the memories of others, colonisers and colonised and in-between’ (Walder 14).

The ethical and political underpinnings of Agaat are illustrated through Van Niekerk’s use of the traditional Afrikaans ‘farm novel’ (plaasroman) – a genre which Agaat ‘deconstructs’, ‘rethinks’ and ‘takes … by storm’ (De Kock 138). The author reinterprets the genre’s three most important ideological assumptions: patriarchal sovereignty, the white subject’s assumed ownership of the land, and the marginalization of the non-white other, who is rendered as an extension of the landscape and denied his/her rightful ownership of the land. Yet one of Agaat’s more striking features is the way in which it, via the plaasroman, thinks through the problematic question of belonging – particularly that of a group of people who, as South African novelist J.M. Coetzee has argued, is ‘no longer European, not yet African’ (11). Van Niekerk investigates the Afrikaner as a political, linguistic and cultural grouping by locating its mythological origins within the plaasroman as narrative and text. She deconstructs Afrikaner identity and subjectivity, and demythologizes its relationship to the land, the cultivated space of the farm, and the racial Other. The author does this by reading it through the (problematic) relationship between the white, Afrikaans, female protagonist, Milla de Wet, and her coloured servant, Agaat Lourier. An intimate – and at times violent – relationship is established between the two women. In the narrative present, Milla is slowly dying from Motor Neuron Disease (MND): mute, immobile, and wasting away, she has to be fed and cleaned by her servant.

Agaat might be seen as Van Niekerk’s post-apartheid engagement with Afrikaner cultural politics, which she does in a nostalgic – yet reflective – manner through Milla’s gaze upon her past. Reading the novel, one is reminded of Svetlana Boym’s conceptualizations of ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia – the latter is a form of reminiscence on the ambivalences of home, and the forms of belonging associated with it that refuse the recuperative, consoling work of ‘restorative’ nostalgia.3 Van Niekerk’s use of the plaasroman enables her to grapple with Afrikaner nostalgia in order to open up various doublenesses veiled within the original format of the genre: although Agaat relives a certain Afrikaner past, it also critiques and revises it and does so in large part by rendering visible and foregrounding the role of women and racial others. It is also through Milla’s narrative – assuming the form of an interior monologue that shifts between tenses and perspectives – that the author foregrounds the ambiguities underscoring Afrikaner

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nostalgia. Milla’s deeply established bond with her maternally named and matriarchally-owned farm, Grootmoedersdrift,4 continually inflects her recollections. Yet her memories of home – as both the physical, lived space of the farmhouse and as metaphor for belonging – constantly make apparent the duplicitous and even horrific events in her past. Memory and remembering therefore function in the novel as a mode through which Van Niekerk addresses Afrikaner nationalism and the unspoken inconsistencies of white power in South Africa – including the ways in which this hegemonic, coercive power cracks at the seams, always threatening to implode.

In the novel, the spaces of the farmhouse and the cultivated farmland are two important locations within which Van Niekerk interrogates white, Afrikaner power. Most particularly, she exposes the making of Afrikaner identity and its explicit connections with the political domination over, and ‘civilizing’ of, the African landscape and other subjects. Scenes of exploitation, together with Milla’s awareness of her complicity in this exploitation, are paired with detailed depictions of everyday life within the intimate space of the home. This enables Van Niekerk to embark on ‘a conscious act of revisionism’ (De Kock 140), allowing her to depict the ways in which the public and private, political and personal interconnect and permeate the relationship between Milla and Agaat as well as everyday life on an Afrikaner farm. On the cultivated landscape of Milla’s family farm, and in the privacy of the farmstead, Milla becomes dependent on the labour of others who live and work there – most prominently, Agaat. The author thus depicts the history of an Afrikaner woman and her relationship with her farm and servant, revealing the inner workings of power – even in personal relationships. As Christopher Warnes argues in relation to Etienne van Heerden’s revisionist plaasroman, Toorberg, Van Niekerk ‘us[es] the tensions of the [plaasroman] against itself’ (130), unravelling the entangled histories of white feminism and white landownership in (post)colonial South Africa.

By exploring the themes of history, memory, intimacy and home, Van Niekerk asks whether a painful and oppressive past can be revisited in a meaningful way: does re-presenting the past signify complicity with it? Her answer lies in her use of a critical form of thinking about home (in various senses), one that remembers and combines details of the everyday and the personal with the political and public. Agaat finally argues that the recognition of complicity, together with an awareness of its interweaving with the quotidian, might become the basis of a radical reinterpretation of the past. A rethinking of apartheid that aims to produce ‘new perspectives’ on white Afrikaner culture and identity can only be effected, she argues, by ‘interpreting the past’: through remembering ‘old or redundant definitions and institutions of Afrikaans and Afrikaans culture’ (Van Niekerk ‘Afrikaner’ 141).

Agaat as Plaasroman, White Afrikaner nationalism and the farm as mythical ‘home’

Afrikaans language and culture has historically established itself through a particular engagement with its spatial and geographical context. Linked to this was the process of developing an Afrikaner nationalist identity, associated with ‘a national future in Africa’5 and expressed notably ‘in terms of a unique relationship to the South African landscape’ (Coetzee 174). In his (now canonical) study of white settler writing in Africa – White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa – J.M. Coetzee writes that the Afrikaner understood and conceptualized a space ‘to which he claim[ed] to be native’ (174), yet was not. The plaasroman genre specifically addressed, and attempted to justify this narrative of assumed belonging to the land. Entering into a ‘complicitous critique’ of the genre, Van Niekerk’s (anti-)plaasroman responds to this

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connection between Afrikaner identity and the land, and the ways in which the space of the farm came to stand for a mythical cultural ‘home’.

Coetzee maps the inception and development of the plaasroman during the early twentieth century, and locates its roots within European Romanticism’s conception of man’s relationship with nature and the German Bauernroman’s nationalist underpinnings. The plaasroman became ‘an ideologically important genre justifying colonial subjugation and white supremacist claims to Afrikaner ownership of the land’ (Devarenne 627). Developing out of literary modes that foreground ‘the myth of the return to the earth’ (Coetzee 79), an unfettered, pastoral lifestyle, and reacting against English-language anti-farm novels such as Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, the plaasroman inserted the Afrikaner subject not within unmapped nature, but rather in the cultivated landscape of the farm.6

During the early twentieth century, Afrikaans novelists were encouraged to depict ‘evidences of a “natural” bond between volk and land’ (Coetzee 61). This led to their producing patriotic works which ‘naturalized’ white Afrikaners’ land-ownership by moulding Afrikaner identity upon the characteristics of the African land itself. Through a pastoral mode, the plaasroman managed to lend ‘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’ (Devarenne 627). The plaasroman was able to embed this ‘unchanging Afrikaner identity’ within the land so that white ownership of the land assumed the characteristics of a type of ‘natural’ bond. Among other features of the land, ‘wide horizons’ came to depict ‘an expansive future’, while stretching panoramas signalled ‘freedom of personal and national destiny’ (Coetzee 61). In this way, the farm novel came to cast the farm as a space that located the Afrikaner’s history and lineage, concretizing nationalist Afrikaner identity and its symbolic bond to the African landscape (Coetzee 108–109).

Coetzee writes that ‘[e]very return to the farm tends to be a version of pastoral, sharing in the anxiety of (high) pastoralism about the moral justification of such a return’ (74). Yet while Van Niekerk’s Agaat returns to the farm, it vividly addresses the inconsistencies of the pastoral mode embedded in the genre by placing them at the centre of the narrative, and even inverting them. As a critical rewriting of the traditional plaasroman, Agaat has been described as a feminist inversion of the genre (Prinsloo and Visagie 77), a postcolonial farm novel (72), and even an ‘anti-nationalist work’ (Devarenne 642) and can thus be grouped with a substantial body of revisionist plaasromans that, since the early 1960s (Prinsloo and Visagie 86), sought to ‘define their political projects in opposition to the traditionalism and (proto)nationalism’ enshrined by the genre (Devarenne 633). Warnes notes that in Van Heerden’s ‘counterdiscursive’ 1986 plaasroman, Toorberg (translated as Ancestral Voices), there occurs a jarring between ‘the novel’s politics and the generally conservative nature’ of the genre from which it develops and against which it writes (Warnes 121). Like Van Heerden’s text, Agaat is also bound to the conservative genre that prefigures it. How, then, does one unveil the underlying misogynism, racism, and assumed ownership of the land within a genre ‘designed exactly to naturalise or obscure’ (Warnes 121) those elements? Warnes, borrowing the term from Linda Hutcheon, calls this type of novel a ‘complicitous critique’ (124), a form of fiction that intends to ‘detoxify … cultural representations and their undeniable political import’ (Hutcheon qtd in Warnes 124).

Via Van Niekerk’s critically nostalgic rewriting of the plaasroman and its function of narrativizing Milla’s Afrikaner history, Agaat addresses a key element of the genre: owning, and taking ownership of, the land. Van Niekerk shows how white Afrikaner identity is explicitly linked to material property – notably the farmstead and the cultivated farmland. In the model

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proposed by the plaasroman, the establishment of the farm emerges out of the Afrikaner settler’s interaction and relationship with the African land. Coetzee notes that, for the Afrikaner, the project of establishing one’s culture and sense of self was closely associated with inscribing and cultivating the earth – a ‘devotion of labour to the past and future of the farm, which is nature inscribed with fences, walls, buildings, boreholes, irrigation channels, and signed above all with the scars of the plough’ (99). ‘Hack[ing] [the farmland] out of the primeval bush’ (Coetzee 85) thus bound the subject and his forefathers to the farm.

Van Niekerk’s novel is placed against the background of the ‘imagined political community’ (Anderson 5) of Afrikaners, which was built on the linked ideas of cultural and racial homogeneity, and an approach to space characterized by domesticating the untamed landscape. Establishing a national, Afrikaner identity thus meant to own the earth and to enter into a relationship with it by cultivating it, and became the central feature of the plaasroman genre. Inscribing the land with the plough was to encode the identity of the Afrikaner community upon and within it, to mark and transform the earth so that it served as a constant reminder of one’s culture and heritage. In Agaat, Van Niekerk depicts the Afrikaner’s approach to the land through Milla’s relationship with Grootmoedersdrift – a simultaneously intimate and violent interaction. The land becomes an object which Milla dominates and domesticates; it embodies her actualization as a white (female) Afrikaner, and even forms part of her consciousness (Prinsloo and Visagie 78). Thus, while the earth of Grootmoedersdrift is cultivated and controlled, it paradoxically also holds the potential to affirm Milla’s Afrikaner identity. In this way, the cultivated earth is the necessary precursor to the establishment of Milla’s identity.

Closely associated with owning property, Milla’s whiteness continually establishes itself in relation to her farm, and particularly through its cultivation. In the novel, Milla associates her female body with – even describes it as – the (matriarchal) farmland of Grootmoedersdrift. Bound to her bed, she is barred from walking on, and seeing, the farm, and imagines her body as ‘a clod in a field, a shallow contour’ (Agaat 102). Femininity, employed as a metaphor for the (farm)land in the plaasroman, also finds expression in Van Niekerk’s novel. The land of Grootmoedersdrift and the objects on it become synonymous with the sexualized female body, or the fallow virgin land requiring husbandry to become fertile: ‘I am fallow field’, Milla asserts, and asks,

‘who will gently plough me on contour plough in my stubbles and my devil’s thorn fertilise me with green-manure … who will harvest who shear who share my fell my fleece my sheaf my small white pips’. (35, emphasis in original)

She also likens her diseased body to sick or bad land: she sees herself as a ‘sick merino sheep’, as ‘exhausted soil’, ‘fallow land full of white stones’, a ‘blown-up cow and acre of lodged grain’, ‘rusty wheat’, and a ‘drift … in flood’ (423, emphasis in original).

Part of Van Niekerk’s response to the patriarchal underpinnings of the plaasroman is her depiction of Milla’s almost-reciprocal relationship with the farmland in the narrative past. Standing in contrast to male writers’, narrators’ and/or characters’ traditional ‘husbanding’ of the land, Van Niekerk explores the making of Afrikaner identity – via the land – through the two symbols of the map and the mirror. When she is sick and confined to her bed in the narrative present, Milla turns to the maps of the farm in an effort to affirm her position as landowner. She expresses her desire to see

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the maps of Grootmoedersdrift, the maps of my region, of my place. Fixed points, veritable places, the co-ordinates of my land … on dotted lines, on the axes between longitude and latitude. I want to see the distances recorded and certified. (40, emphasis added)

Unable to work on – take ownership of – her land, Milla describes the maps as a code that would remind her of her region, her place, her land. These spaces are places ‘to clamp [her]self to’ (40) as she seeks in the maps those representations that would confirm her position as landowner. Through ‘an incision, a notch, an oculation’ (40), she believes she might not only symbolically inscribe the land with the mark of her Afrikaner culture, but also ground her sense of self. However, Van Niekerk rejects this affirmation through Milla’s illness in the present (which coincides with the political transition in the novel), and shows how Agaat delays Milla’s reunion with the maps of Grootmoedersdrift. Thus, through Agaat, the author denies the protagonist’s ownership of the farm, and the white Afrikaner’s drive to cultivate the land and civilize others, while simultaneously rejecting the knowability of the African land through the maps.

Similar to the identity-affirming potential of the maps is the mirror that stands in Milla’s room. Within this space – associated with Milla’s diseased white body – the mirror reflects the garden outside ‘sharper’ and ‘clearer than a garden can be’ (153), bringing it into the interior space of the room. French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre writes that the mirror ‘is an object … which informs us about space’: an ‘imaginary’ yet ‘quite real’ sphere that ‘discloses the relationship between me and myself, my body and consciousness of my body’, transforming ‘what I am into the sign of what I am’(186). In this sense, he asserts, the mirror simultaneously ‘reproduces and displays what I am’ and ‘signifies what I am’ (186). Usually employed to reflect the body (functioning psychoanalytically as a ‘confrontation with the self’ [Burger 184]), the mirror, as Van Niekerk shows in this part of the novel, reflects not Milla’s body and face, but her property: the contained space of her garden-farm (Coetzee 4) outside. Through the mirror, Van Niekerk thus ‘discloses the relationship’ (Lefebvre 185) between Milla’s sense of self and the image of the garden reflected in the mirror. We read how Milla’s garden-farm becomes a crucial marker of identity: the act of looking at her land, she insists, should ‘satiate’ her ‘with what [she] [has] occupied here’, because without her world ‘inside’ her she will ‘contract and congeal’ (Agaat 105). Like the maps, the mirror’s representations of the farm are therefore explicitly identity-affirming, functioning in such a way that she symbolically becomes her property.

Clearly, Agaat simultaneously ascribes to and explicitly subverts the tenets of the plaasroman – specifically its domineering approach to the landscape. The patriarchal authority of the traditional plaasroman is replaced in the novel with a matriarchy on Grootmoedersdrift; yet, similar to patriarchy, Milla’s matriarchal lineage also charts, maps, and inscribes the land. The imperial endeavour – traditionally associated with Western manliness, the penetration of virgin land and the civilizing of others – is here interestingly figured as a specifically feminine project, as is asserted most prominently in the name of the farm. At the forefront of this process stands the female protagonist, her maternal heritage (all the owners of Grootmoedersdrift had been women), and the act of cultivating the land (one is reminded of metaphors such as ‘mother earth’). During a New Year’s Eve party on a neighbouring farm, the newly married Milla gives a defiant speech on farming wherein she juxtaposes ‘scientific’ farming methods with older systems that ‘respect’ the ‘rhythms of nature’ (110). In an attempt to explain her contempt for Jak’s ‘barbaric’ (113) farming methods, she draws an analogy between the soil of the farmland and her own female body. She asserts that ‘[i]f a farmer clears and levels his land year after year it’s as good as beating his wife every night’ (114), thus associating Jak’s management of the

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land with his violent behaviour towards her. For Milla, farming is an activity that is ‘all about synergies’, a ‘subtle’ ‘game’ to be played with nature where ‘[e]verything is important […] the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree’ and ‘the deepest stone in the drift’ (87).

However, despite this feminist critique, Van Niekerk nevertheless portrays Milla’s interaction with the land as a domineering and patronizing project: she realizes the inherent contradiction of her farming as she engages in a (traditionally) Western and masculinist project. Though Milla’s methods certainly seem more ecologically sound and are therefore juxtaposed with Jak’s exploitation of the land, they are also ambiguous as they infantilize the African land – an approach that resembles Milla’s adoption of Agaat as child, and her process of casting her as racial Other. As she reads her father’s farming manuals detailing ‘the deterioration of the veld in our country & the exhaustion & ill-treatment of the soil’ (75), Milla states that the practice of cultivating the earth is something that Agaat should be taught. She writes in her diary that Agaat

must also learn the old ways & the care of the defenceless earth, the little pans & the vleis & the ‘tortisses’ & how we must protect it all against the onslaughts of so-called civilisation because how many centuries does it not take for mother-rock to crumble & disintegrate to soil & then humans come along & destroy it through avarice and carelessness. (75)

Although she launches an attack on what she glosses as ‘so-called civilization’, it is also clear, however, that her argument for reinstating ‘the old ways’ infantilizes the earth, claiming, maternalistically, to protect the ‘defenceless ... little pans’ and ‘tortisses’ against ‘onslaughts’. Similarly to those civilizing missions she despises, Milla, in turn, perpetuates a form of controlling the earth that patronizes and ‘protects’.

The ethical problematic underscoring Van Niekerk’s ‘complicitous’ plaasroman is reiterated within the narrative itself when Milla realizes her complicity in the exploitation on the farm. She describes the farm as an ambiguous space that leaves her unable to ‘act rightly and justly’ when she is confronted with the ‘destitution’ of the farm workers (293). This spills over into her understanding of the white Afrikaner’s domination of the land: Milla expresses her doubts about (white) farming in Southern Africa when she describes Afrikaners as ‘a little group of people at the southern tip of Africa in the process of totally destroying’ the land (113). We see here how symbols of motherhood and femininity – traditionally metaphors of nurturing and preservation – now become associated with dominating, white Afrikaner political power and its ‘taming’ of the land and its peoples. In some ways, then, Milla’s fetishized approach to the land echoes Jak’s unnatural (‘scientific’) farming methods.

Van Niekerk’s revision of the plaasroman can be seen to reiterate and rehearse, as well as ‘undermine’ (Van Niekerk qtd. in De Kock 141) some of the political themes underscoring the genre. The novel shows how a reactionary feminist reinterpretation of the plaasroman might be complicit in the colonizing mission, yet the author’s mimicry also interrogates western feminism’s complicity in the imperial project. Van Niekerk ends her novel with a crucial and powerful resolution. Milla bequeaths the farm to Agaat who, as Prinsloo and Visagie argue, could be seen as a possible descendent of the Khoi – the original inhabitants of the Grootmoedersdrift landscape (73). With this strategically political move, the author symbolically undoes the patriarchal, sexist and racist underpinnings of the traditional genre, destabilizing the notions of Afrikaner nationalism and white political power in South Africa, while also problematizing the complex relationship between Milla’s (Afrikaner) identity and white landownership (76).

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the unhomely home: intimacy, the Everyday and Estrangement

Van Niekerk thus employs the plaasroman genre strategically: she illustrates not merely the Afrikaner’s relationship to the land, but also the inner workings of the white Afrikaner family, allowing her to unveil the interconnections between the public and private, the political and the personal. As such, she interrogates not only the external space of the farm but also the internal space of the home. Rita Barnard has argued that representations of the space of the white, family home – illustrated through the work of white South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer – are ‘ideologically productive’ as they reproduce on an ordinary and intimate scale ‘dominant social relations’ (44). In Agaat (as in Triomf) Van Niekerk explores the inconsistencies of white Afrikaner apartheid subjectivity, Afrikaner nationalism, and the political transition, placing her critique in the space of the family home. From this symbolic position she interrogates the inner mechanics of a white state. In an interview with Leon de Kock and Michiel Heyns, Van Niekerk has asserted that her ‘main thrust and main obsession’ in writing Agaat was ‘the workings of power in intimate relationships’ (qtd. in De Kock 141). The novel illustrates the intimate and caring relationship between Milla and Agaat as a form of interaction explicitly shaped by the workings of violence. The story unfolds from Milla’s perspective via flashbacks, memories, hallucinations and diary readings. At the end of the novel, the beginning of their story is revealed: the young, married and childless Milla ‘rescues’ Agaat as an abused and neglected toddler and ‘adopts’ her as her own child. When Milla falls pregnant, Agaat is abruptly relocated from her bedroom in the family home to an outside servant’s room so that the bond between them is transformed into that between master and servant. In the narrative present, Milla is diagnosed with MND and the power relationship between the two women is inverted. Repeating Milla’s manner of caring for Agaat’s infant body, Agaat subjects Milla’s disease-ridden body to intense scrutiny. She cleans it meticulously, controls and systematizes it, and attends to every possible bodily function and/or ailment.

Via the Grootmoedersdrift farmstead, Van Niekerk explores the ambiguity of white Afrikaner identity, (white Afrikaner) nationalism and cultural homogeneity. Probing the interior of the family home, she hones in on the ways in which the politics of Afrikaner nationalism shapes everyday events within an intimate space. In his influential 1986 essay, ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary’, Njabulo Ndebele rejects the spectacular political nature of many South African novels, arguing in favour of a literary movement where ‘the ordinary daily lives of people should be the direct focus of political interest’ (Rediscovery 52). This, he argues, would enable novelists to rediscover the ‘necessary detail[s]’ (46) of the ordinary. Recently, Ndebele has altered his conceptualization of the ordinary to a vision of the everyday that is ‘inflected by or supplemented with intimacy’ (Samuelson). This intimacy, as Meg Samuelson notes, is however ‘not a cosy one’ (Samuelson). Perceiving home and intimacy as ‘the shared experience of homelessness’ and ‘the fellow-feeling of loss’ (Ndebele ‘A Home’ 28), Ndebele understands intimacy as characterized by ‘uncanny recognitions and shifting certainties’ (Samuelson).

Agaat sketches such an uncanny, unhomely intimacy. The novel rejects the spectacular in favour of a piercing – yet uncomfortable and alienating – examination of the familiar. It is filled with the details of everyday tasks, and becomes an extensive catalogue that lists daily, household objects (including embroidery, farming and cooking). While Van Niekerk depicts details of everyday life in minutiae, her focus on the everyday is also underscored by both Milla’s and Agaat’s problematic interconnected histories in and around the house. The novel deliberately employs the everyday to shore up the political edge of normal tasks and events: through this,

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Agaat’s mundane household tasks signal her uncomfortable position as exploited coloured worker, while the objects that fill the white family home index the precarious privilege and material wealth of the white Afrikaner.

The intimacy of the Grootmoedersdrift home is not a place that facilitates belonging and feelings of being at home, but is rather ‘a hotbed of unfulfilled desire, failed investments and projects going nowhere, cold-heartedness, violence, revenge and tyranny’ (Buikema 320). The author depicts this by characterizing the spaces of the farmstead as death-like environments. Milla’s bedroom stands at the heart of the family home, and is a space within which her body lies wasting away. From her confinement, she sees her bedroom as a ‘chamber of death’ that is ‘filled … with the signs of [her] end’, a space within which ‘nursing-aids’ ‘are applied to the polite dismantling’ of her body and thus ‘promise no recovery’ (Agaat 152). Here, she likens her death to evaporating ‘[d]ust’, ‘[w]ind’ and ‘[a]sh’ (369), while Agaat’s meticulous care of her body feels like the process of ‘embalming’ (531). Later, when Milla’s son, Jakkie, returns to the farm following his mother’s death, he feels her bedroom emanating ‘a sweetish miasma of mortality’ (279).

Barnard argues that the space of the house can be understood as ‘ideological apparatuses, in very much the Althusserian sense of the term’ (49). She writes that houses

are the means by which individuals are ‘interpellated’ as subjects: the means by which individuals are trained so that they will ‘know their place’ in the social hierarchy, and so that, from these ‘places’ they in turn will help to reproduce its structures. (49)

In this sense, the white family home can be seen as the ‘quintessential colonial space’ because of its rootedness in apartheid’s policy of racially segregated housing (48), functioning according to a strict system of placement and displacement. What Barnard refers to as ‘knowing one’s place’ during apartheid – one’s awareness of one’s race and of the places that are available or prohibited to you – is illustrated in Van Niekerk’s novel.

It is particularly the interior space of the white family home that registers the mechanisms and effects of exclusion and control. A rigid system of organization reigns over Milla’s house, and consequently shapes the ways in which Agaat is placed in relation to the intimacy of the farmstead. The spatial separation of white wealth and coloured poverty is both illustrated and complicated by the spaces to which Agaat is relocated as a child, as well as the numerous spaces within which she is placed as a child-turned-servant in the white family house. We first encounter Agaat in the shanty with her family on Milla’s mother’s farm, crouching in the hearth; she then moves to Milla’s white family farmhouse as a child, followed by another relocation to the outside room (an old storeroom transformed into a make-shift bedroom). During Milla’s illness, Agaat eventually sleeps in the liminal space of the passage in the house. Although Milla notes there are ‘many rooms in the house’ (21), Agaat refuses Milla’s gesture as a form of resistance against incorporation into the house – something previously denied her. Van Niekerk shows how Agaat’s physical placement in relation to the white home (in-between the interior of the farmhouse and the workers’ hovels) portrays her metamorphosis from a family member to a domestic servant – an ambiguous role that excludes her from both the servants on the farm, as well as the white family. This physical transition replaces Agaat’s childhood sense of belonging with physical and cultural estrangement, and provides the reason for her bitterness towards Milla.

When Agaat is included in the space of the home, she is not only interpellated as a potentially legitimate citizen, but is also trained to become a simultaneously white and coloured (Other)

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subject. Van Niekerk encapsulates her ambiguous position within the apartheid social structure and racial hierarchy, and her estrangement from both the coloured servants and white family, in her storeroom-bedroom. Symbolically storing away or hiding Agaat’s racial and cultural otherness from the propriety and intimacy of the white home, Agaat’s room is outside of, but still connected to, the farmstead. Her room becomes an ambiguous space that both symbolizes her rejection by white hegemonic power, and draws into question ‘white bourgeois morality’ (Wicomb 146). Containing her personal belongings, it also upholds the ideals of white propriety and purity towards which she, under Milla’s ‘guidance’, is supposed to strive. We read how the room is whitewashed (Agaat 36) and filled with white bedding, embroidered white cushions, and scrubbed-white objects, while it also contains her servant’s outfits, hanging neatly in her cupboard. Agaat’s movement from centre to periphery within the spaces of the house is thus seen as coterminous with Milla’s on-going project of ‘civilizing’ her. For Agaat, ‘knowing one’s place’ implies making the transition from a family member to a raced servant, which the physical space of her room continually rehearses. Although Milla’s initial inclusion of Agaat in her home can be seen as a radical (though problematic) gesture, it is also the necessary precursor to Agaat’s exclusion. Milla’s ‘civilizing’ of her servant is therefore a process that can only leave Agaat ambivalently placed between belonging and estrangement, within a physical space linked to and separated from homeliness and belonging.

Agaat’s homelessness is not, however, counterpoised with Milla’s belonging. Images of Milla’s estrangement from the home space, and of the systems of displacement at work in and around Grootmoedersdrift, are employed by the author to illustrate how white property and land ownership are underscored by the presence and labour of racial others. Agaat is displaced from the intimacy and property of the white family. Similarly, a sense of estrangement also characterizes Milla’s experiences on the farm during her ‘healthy’ past, which extends and intensifies as she is (very literally) alienated from her surroundings in the present tense of the novel. Confined to her bed, her paralysed body bars her from inhabiting her home, denies her access to the farmland, and renders her mute. For her, the white farmstead is transformed from a family home into an unhomely space where she is immobile, while her interaction with the farmland is reduced to nostalgic memories. As Milla’s body and Agaat’s ‘out of place’-ness (to borrow Ian Baucom’s phrase)7 dispose them ‘outside’ or ‘beside’ themselves (Butler 26) physically and psychically, we see how Van Niekerk explores the strangeness of the everyday through the two women’s shared dislocation. ‘Undone by each other’ (Butler 23) in different ways, Milla and Agaat come to share a type of intimacy through which they find a form of ‘home’ in their shared homelessness (Ndebele ‘A Home’ 28). Their displacement and precarity thus become the ‘tie’ (Butler 22) which binds them together. Sites over which they have either lost, or never had, control – the house and the farmland – are shown to be ever–present reminders of the two women’s loss of power and/or identity, reminders of their estrangement from each other and the spaces they inhabit.

The diseased and dying white female body mediates the intimate relationship between Milla and Agaat, but also becomes the sign of Milla’s lack of corporeal agency, and her physical alienation from her home and farmland. After the political transition, she is unable to fully inhabit her property: in this way, she fails to lay claim to her position as a white landowner during South Africa’s apartheid past. While registering her inability to uphold acceptable standards of white propriety, her sick body also marks her as a politically inactive subject while her ability to assert herself as a wealthy and empowered white Afrikaner slowly diminishes. Van Niekerk furthermore frames her narrative with a prologue and epilogue, spoken by Milla’s son, Jakkie: a figure who consciously breaks away from his farm–home, as well as his Afrikaner national

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identity (Prinsloo and Visagie 78). In this way, the author structures the text around a rejection and withering away of Afrikaner political power. Paired with Jakkie’s framing narrative, Milla’s ailing white female body comes to signify the white Afrikaner’s systematic loss of political agency – in her relationship with Agaat, as well as in the broader context of South African politics. The novel consequently articulates Afrikaner national identity during and after the transition as an unhomely one, expressing ultimately its estrangement from the ownership of the land and the cultivation of the land as mythical ‘home’.

Van Niekerk illustrates this alienation from Afrikaner national identity and its historical narratives of ‘home’ further through her experimentation with perspective. Milla’s narrating and narrated voice becomes symptomatic of a type of historical doubleness, separating from itself and performing a type of psychic splitting that conforms to what Sarah Nuttall has described as a type of split, white gaze (63). Articulating her feelings of unhomeliness and estrangement from her property, Milla’s voice jostles between different perspectives and tenses as she recalls her (hi)story: it moves from the first person while she lies in bed (in the present tense) to the second person as she nostalgically reflects upon her past. At other times, her voice is channelled by the narrative stream of her diaries, written in the first person (and subsequently also read by Agaat). At intervals, she furthermore seems to transcend her body as she speaks in a stream of consciousness style (presented in italics). Via this form of estrangement from the self and its particular history, Van Niekerk shows how Milla dissociates from her identity and her life narrative. In this way, the author severs the ties between the notion of an autonomous identity and a coherent and chronological narrative, thus diffusing the political power associated with the white Afrikaner and his/her claims to a singular national history. Crucially, this impasse within Milla’s psyche illustrates the difficulty with which the personal and the political, and the private and public are integrated. Her alienated gaze upon herself, her home, farmland, and history thus comes as the result of this stalemate: for Milla, it becomes impossible to integrate a past of white privilege with a present within which she is confronted with the systematic wasting away of everything that once characterized her as white and Afrikaans.

conclusion

In Agaat, Van Niekerk writes into the novel Milla’s awareness of her life story as being a narrative. Her life is both written down in, and contained by, the narrative of her diaries, while her memories of her past slowly unfold. However, the author shows Milla’s personal history not as a singular story, but rather as one that closely converges with the history of a people (the Afrikaner volk) as well as Agaat’s life narrative. The novel closely links remembering and nostalgia with a textual form (one that recalls the plaasroman as text–history), presented by the author through the textuality of Agaat as printed novel itself, its intertextual relationship with other plaasromans, and the diaries that contain Milla’s life narrative. One of the most significant examples of a form of textual narrative is Milla’s description of her body or corporeality, which symbolizes her identity as Afrikaner and, as Rosemarie Buikema suggests, ‘acts like a text’ (320). Turned into a metonym for her life story as it is narrativized and textualized in her diaries, her body becomes a ‘turned open book’ as she lies in bed. ‘I page myself to the outside’, she states, so that ‘[t]he sounds of the late harvest come to inscribe themselves in me’ (Agaat 103). Because of her MND, we also see how Milla’s vocal cords have atrophied: this leads her to communicate via eye signals which Agaat painstakingly deciphers with the help of an alphabet

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chart. Later, while Agaat meticulously cleans her, Milla describes her servant as trying to ‘reveal something of [her] inner being’ (333), as if to unlock a meaning.

Via her protagonist, Van Niekerk’s textualization of the white female body not only rewrites the ‘creation myth’ of Afrikaner culture, but also engages with the banal and the everyday. And while it has been argued that the novel is able to de-politicize (Visagie) Afrikaner ‘cultural goods’ (Heyns), the Grootmoedersdrift farmstead also clearly becomes the main spatial locus where the quotidian and the political become explicitly entangled. The farmhouse is presented not merely as a space for intimacy and belonging, but also as one furnished with the paraphernalia and baggage of white power and privilege. Through depicting the details of everyday life, the ambiguities inherent in a domineering political system are unveiled. In the novel, the details of household objects and the logistics of everyday tasks point not only to the influence of politics upon the lives of ordinary people, but also signal the ways in which a central hegemonic power employs structures of placement to control and categorize the human subjects within its structure. Agaat revisits Afrikaner tradition and its links with South Africa’s apartheid past in order to relive the everyday privileges of white Afrikaner subjects. However, the novel also explicitly calls this tradition into doubt. Employing reflective nostalgia to bring into relief Afrikaner culture and its embeddedness in apartheid ideology, it simultaneously uncovers details of everyday life that seem to escape the confines of the political. In this way, Van Niekerk shows how the personal and the political are interlinked, and articulates the necessity of revisiting the quotidian details of the past in order to envision a future narrative. The dissimilarities between Milla’s personal history and the history of apartheid in South Africa consequently address the ambivalence of memory and the making and writing of historical narratives.

Van Niekerk’s text reveals that a form of complicity might always be a necessary risk in order to re-enter and prise open historical narratives. Although in revisiting the plaasroman she partially reinstates the politics of the genre, she does so in order to unveil the unspoken inconsistencies that saturate it. The contradictions that shape the form in which Agaat is presented do therefore not destabilize or diminish the effect of the novel’s ethical thrust, but rather acknowledge the importance of revising the narratives of the past. Through its critically reflective nostalgia, the text is careful not to herald past inequalities and recognizes the instability and open-endedness of historical narratives – especially those predicated on the prosperity of some and the exclusion of others. Subverting a highly politicized and contentious version of the past finally means for Van Niekerk to revisit it nostalgically and re-present it with suspicion. By revealing the complexities and ambiguities that characterize the relationship between the white, Afrikaner protagonist and her coloured servant, the author’s vision in Agaat is one that registers shared (and varied) senses of homelessness, and the multiple ways in which the (hi)story of the self is entangled with that of the other.

notEs1. An adapted version of this essay originally appeared as a chapter in my Master’s thesis,

‘White Women Writing the (Post)Colony: Creolité, Home and Estrangement in Novels by Rhys, Duras and Van Niekerk’, completed in the English Department at Stellenbosch University (March 2012). I also wish to thank the National Research Foundation, the Harry Crossley Foundation and Stellenbosch University for their generous monetary support during the course of my graduate studies.

2. Van Niekerk’s paper, ‘Afrikaner Woman and her Prison’, was first presented at The

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7th Conference on South African Literature (Bad Boll, September 25–27, 1992). Proceedings were later published in 1996.

3. In her monograph, The Future of Nostalgia Boym writes that nostalgia expresses ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed’ (xiii). For her, ‘restorative’ nostalgia attempts to re-establish ‘truth and tradition’, while ‘reflective’ nostalgia ‘dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging’ (xviii). David Medalie, in his article, ‘The Uses of Nostalgia’, similarly identifies two forms of nostalgia at work in post–apartheid South African literature: an ‘unreflecting’ nostalgia bent on idealizing the past, and a ‘critical or evolved nostalgia’ which not only recognizes ‘the constructedness of memory’ (40), but also ‘links past and present [and thus] transforms both’ (42).

4. Milla’s son, Jakkie, translates ‘Grootmoedersdrift’ as ‘[g]ranny’s [f]ord’ and ‘[g]ranny’s passion’ (Van Niekerk Agaat 6); the title of the international imprint of the novel – ‘The Way of the Women’ – also signifies a maternal/female history or histories.

5. In her novel, Van Niekerk writes, of course, towards a different kind of national future, one standing in opposition to the Afrikaner ethnic nationalism to which Coetzee refers.

6. Coetzee revisits the early farm novels of C.M. van den Heever, and notes how these texts associated the idea that ‘man’s truth’ can be ‘recover[ed] … in nature’ with an Afrikaner national identity (Coetzee 110). In this way, the thesis that ‘the Afrikaner will lose his independence and (eventually) his identity’ once he loses his claim to the land was produced (110).

7. Baucom’s phrase is taken from his monograph, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity.

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Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.Barnard, Rita. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford:

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Princeton University Press, 1999. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.Buikema, Rosemarie. ‘Crossing the Borders of Identity Politics: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 16.4, 2009: 309–23. Burger, Willie. ‘Deur ‘n Spieël in ‘n Raaisel: Kennis van die Self en die Ander in Agaat deur

Marlene van Niekerk’. Journal for Language Teaching/Tydskrif vir Taalonderrig 40.1, 2006: 178–93.

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University Press, 1988. De Kock, Leon. ‘Intimate Enemies: a Discussion with Marlene van Niekerk and Michiel Heyns

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