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Fiela's child and Sorg are two female-authored popular Afrikaans novels that entertain as subtext dynamics of female agency in the same region and historical period, namely the Little Karoo of the late 19th century. The two novels present a pertinent counter-discursive paradigm to the more mainstream master narrative representations of women of the time. The novels were written and published during the late-apartheid and early post-apartheid years, 1985 and 2006, respectively, and as a result of these dynamics of production, they also engage with the socio-politics of this time, maybe even more so than with the British imperial colonialist period in which the novels are set. As such, both novels step into the discursive streams that flow in and around the trauma work that is associated with South Africa's contemporary engagement with its colonial and apartheid legacies and heritage. Both texts also contribute to the creation and popularisation of new national master narratives. It is then in this context that these texts can be seen as participating in the multivocal discursive project of new identity construction, specifically identity construction through the writing of a new heterogeneous national autobiography.
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Original Research
doi:10.4102/lit.v35i1.1010hp://www.literator.org.za
National trauma work and the depiction of
women in two Afrikaans historical Karoo novels:
Fiela's child and Sorg
Author:
Belinda du Plooy1
Aliaon:
1Research Capacity
Development, Nelson
Mandela Metropolitan
University, South Africa
Correspondence to:
Belinda du Plooy
Email:
belinda.duplooy@nmmu.
ac.za
Postal address:
PO Box 77000, Nelson
Mandela Metropolitan
University, Port Elizabeth
6031, South Africa
Dates:
Received: 10 May 2013
Accepted: 26 Aug. 2013
Published: 11 Feb. 2014
How to cite this arcle:
Du Plooy, B., 2014, 'Naonal
trauma work and the
depicon of women in two
Afrikaans historical Karoo
novels: Fiela's child and
Sorg', Literator 35(1), Art.
#1010, 13 pages. hp://
dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.
v35i1.1010
Note:
This arcle emanates from a
conference paper the author
delivered at the 24th Biennial
Conference of the Southern
African Historical Society,
Gaborone (Botswana) in
June 2013. Extracts from
Pistorius's ([2006] 2010)
Sorg was translated from
the original Afrikaans by the
author of this arcle.
Copyright:
© 2014. The Authors.
Licensee: AOSIS
OpenJournals. This work
is licensed under the
Creave Commons
Aribuon License.
Fiela's child and Sorg are two female-authored popular Afrikaans novels that entertain as
subtext dynamics of female agency in the same region and historical period, namely the Little
Karoo of the late 19th century. The two novels present a pertinent counter-discursive paradigm
to the more mainstream master narrative representations of women of the time. The novels
were written and published during the late-apartheid and early post-apartheid years, 1985
and 2006, respectively, and as a result of these dynamics of production, they also engage with
the socio-politics of this time, maybe even more so than with the British imperial colonialist
period in which the novels are set. As such, both novels step into the discursive streams that
ow in and around the trauma work that is associated with South Africa's contemporary
engagement with its colonial and apartheid legacies and heritage. Both texts also contribute
to the creation and popularisation of new national master narratives. It is then in this context
that these texts can be seen as participating in the multivocal discursive project of new identity
construction, specically identity construction through the writing of a new heterogeneous
national autobiography.
Introducon
In this article, I shall engage with two popular Afrikaans historical novels written by South African
women. In both instances, the novels were written by white women who present ctionalised
narratives with female main characters who are coloured (in South Africa this is a contentious
term used to refer to people of mixed-race) (Erasmus 2001; Du Pré 1994). Both novels are set in
the same historical period and geographical area, namely the Klein Karoo in the Eastern Cape
Province of South Africa during the latter part of the 19th century. Neither novel was written
during this time but rather during the more recent apartheid and post-apartheid periods in South
African history. The critically acclaimed Fiela's child by Dalene Matthee was rst published in
1985 in Afrikaans but was also translated into other international languages whilst the less-well-
known Sorg by Micki Pistorius was rst published only in Afrikaans in 2006.
Matthee's ([1985] 2010b) Fiela's child (see also Matthee [1985] 2010a) was written and published
during the apex of national social unrest and the political struggle against apartheid. Pistorius's
novel, in contrast, was published more than 20 years later, which was 12 years after the change
from apartheid to a democratic system of government. During the time between the publication
dates of the two novels, the suffering caused by apartheid became an inescapable reality for all
South Africans, particularly through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) public
Page 1 of 13
Nasionale trauma-werk en die uitbeelding van vroue in twee Afrikaanse historiese Karoo-
romans: Fiela se Kind en Sorg. Fiela se kind en Sorg is twee populêre Afrikaanse romans deur
vroue geskryf wat in dieselfde tyd en omgewing afspeel, naamlik aan die einde van die
negentiende eeu in die Klein Karoo, en wat die dinamika van vroulike agentskap as subteks
het. Die twee romans verskaf belangrike teen-diskursiewe paradigmatiese uitbeeldings wat in
teenstelling staan met die meer algemene hoofstroom uitbeeldings van vroue in meesterverhale
van die betrokke historiese tyd. Die romans is gedurende die apartheid- en postapartheidsjare
geskryf, in 1985 en 2006 onderskeidelik, en as gevolg van hierdie produksie-dinamika handel
beide tekste ook oor die sosio-politieke bestel van hierdie tyd, moontlik selfs meer as oor die
Britse imperialisties-koloniale tyd waarin hulle afspeel. As sulks tree beide tekste midde-in
die diskursiewe onderstrominge van Suid Afrika se hedendaagse omgang met 'n geskiedenis
en erfenis van kolonialisme en apartheid. Albei tekste dra dan ook by tot die skepping en
popularisering van nuwe meesterverhale. Dit is binne hierdie konteks dat beide tekste bydra
tot die meerstemmige diskursiewe projek van hernude identiteitskonstruksie, hoofsaaklik in
terme van die omskrywing of beskrywing van 'n nuwe heterogene nasionale outobiograe.
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Original Research
doi:10.4102/lit.v35i1.1010hp://www.literator.org.za
engagement with individual and national culpability,
responsibility, restitution, forgiveness and healing. Though
the novels are set in a time that predates apartheid and its
direct effects, the novels implicitly engage with apartheid
via its precursor eras and ideologies. The novels nudge the
reader into engaging with ethical questions that surfaced
during the country's past and which now occupy a central
place in contemporary popular imagination, discourses
and, most signicantly, the current (re)construction of new
national narratives and identities.
Whilst one recognises that these novels are just two examples
from popular ction, amongst a pluralistic and heterogeneous
array across many literary and non-literary genres, they both
contribute in their own way, and in conversation with each
other, to the new narration of South Africa's story. In this
sense, the theme of life-writing or autobiography here relates
not to autobiographies in the conventional sense, as life stories
of the authors or even the ctional characters, but rather to the
new narration of the life story of a country: a dialectical and
multivocal national autobiography. The autobiographical
sub-genre of testimonials, life histories presented via the
intercession of narrators, is a particularly useful metaphor
to use. McClintock (1990:218) refers to Sommer's work on
testimonials and identies the following aspects as most
signicant in terms of literary narration: It is dialogic, public
and communal rather than individual. In it, the privileged
scribe records the oral testimony of the unprivileged. It bears
the imprint of both speakers' voices. There is a dispersed
authority of voice. They speak of struggles, and they are
written from interpersonal class and ethnic positions.
Provided that authors avoid the traps of paternalism and
essentialism, narrative testimonials (speaking the lives of
others into being or bearing witness) have the potential to be
utilised in strategic ways to give voice to subaltern subjects
who have been rendered invisible by the epistemic violence
of master discourses. Most importantly, as McClintock (1990)
states:
[Testimonials ] effectively … call on the reader to enter into
collaboration with the collective history. The reader is invited
to extend the historical community; and that extension is not
simply the embrace of a given community, but also involves
active participation, the labour of identication and, above all,
hard choices about the politics of transformation. (p. 219)
Trauma and remembering occupy a central place in this active
extension of the self through the labour of identication with
another. Accordingly, trauma 'work' is a central concern
in the (re)narration of the history of South Africa (Jones
1995; McGonegal 2009; Sanders 2007). Govinden (1995:170)
describes narrative remembering – what Toni Morrison
(1987) calls re-memory – as constructions of uniqueness as
well as commonality and of coming to terms with the past
through the present. Shohat (1992) describes the national
trauma experience as follows:
For communities which have undergone brutal ruptures, now in
the process of forging a collective identity, no matter how hybrid
that identity has been before…the retrieval and reinscription
of a fragmented past becomes a crucial contemporary site for
forging a resistant collective identity. A notion of the past must
thus be negotiated differently; not as a static fetishized phase
to be literally reproduced, but as fragmented sets of narrated
memories and experiences on the basis of which to mobilize
contemporary communities. (p. 109)
The convergence of interrelated and simultaneous variations
on the theme of trauma – namely, that of women's oppression
through patriarchal systems, racialised oppression through
colonialism and apartheid and the marginalisation and
exploitation of indigenous people – form the background to
my reading of Fiela's child and Sorg as representative of the re-
narration of South Africa. In this article, I shall look at ways
in which the themes of national trauma, memory, life writing
and female resistance converge in these novels and how their
interweaving reects and contributes to the construction of
new narratives of national history and identity.
Seng and brief plot summaries
Both novels start around the year 1870 in the Eastern Cape
region of South Africa. They are set in the Langkloof in the
semi-arid Little Karoo, around the town of Oudtshoorn, and
what the tourism trade today calls the Garden Route, around
the Tsitsikamma forest. It is also in the vicinity of the town
of Knysna which was, at the time in which the novels are set,
a thriving export seaport for products of the region (mostly
wood and ostrich products). The two areas are separated by
the majestic Outeniqua mountain range.
Fiela's child tells the story of Fiela Komoetie and her poor but
decent mixed-race family (husband Seling and ve children)
who live on their own small farm in the Langkloof where
they survive through subsistence farming. A man arrives on
the farm one day to take their details for census purposes and
discovers that Fiela's youngest child, 12-year-old Benjamin,
is white. It transpires that, nine years earlier, Fiela awoke
one night to nd this child, lost and crying, in front of her
farm house. Not knowing where he came from, she took him
in and incorporated him into her own family where he was
loved and cared for as one of their own. The child is then
forcibly removed from Fiela, and a court case ensues in which
a destitute and decrepit white family of woodcutters, the Van
Rooyens, from the Tsitsikamma forest on the other side of the
mountains claims him as their own child, Lukas, who had
disappeared nine years earlier. Against his will, Benjamin/
Lukas is forced to accompany them, and the rest of the novel
tells of Fiela and Benjamin/Lukas's individual struggles
to be reunited with each other. After many unhappy years
spent in the forest and later as a sherman/sailor in Knysna
during which he falls in love with his forest 'sister', Nina
van Rooyen, he returns to Fiela in the Langkloof to settle his
identity crisis. However, he is haunted by the possibility that
he really could be Lukas van Rooyen and the implications of
incest this would carry for a union with Nina. Returning to
Knysna via the forest, he confronts his 'white' mother, Barta,
who nally admits that she lied years before, under pressure
from the census man, when she claimed him as her own
child. Freed from the burden of a life in the forest as Lukas,
he returns to Nina as Benjamin Komoetie, an identity that he
freely chooses and embraces:
Page 2 of 13
Original Research
doi:10.4102/lit.v35i1.1010hp://www.literator.org.za
Page 3 of 13
From now on I will be known as Benjamin Komoetie. It is not
a new name, it's my old name … I'll be going back to the Long
Kloof. To my people. (Matthee [1985] 2010b:309)
Sorg tells the story of Eva Damon, a servant of mixed-race
decent, and Hendrik van der Westhuizen, a white farmer,
and their descendants. The two plot lines (one historical
and the other contemporary) develop parallel to each other,
merging at the end as Tessa and Danie, the great-great-
great-grandchildren of Eva and Hendrik, meet and fall in
love during the Klein Karoo Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn, an
annual national cultural event. The contemporary strand of
the story line is also populated by ghosts from the past, and
the signicant characters of the historical plot (most notably
Eva and Hendrik) are seen to be waiting around in a kind
of ethereal limbo for Tessa and Danie to meet, reunite the
families and thereby correct the wrongs of the past. The
historical plot is introduced with Eva's arrival as the new
house maid on Hendrik's family farm, ironically called
Sorgniet, shortly before his wedding to Isabella. Hendrik
immediately desires Eva, and she is equally attracted to him.
There is a sexual encounter between them, and from that,
a love relationship develops, deeply fraught with sexual
desire, power, control and ownership. Hendrik's marriage to
Isabella is unhappy from the start, but they have a son, Evert,
and later also a daughter, Cornelia. Eva and Hendrik in turn
have a son, Daniёl.
When an economic recession hits the farm community,
Hendrik is ruined. Eva offers to buy the piece of farm land
where the mixed-race workers' homes are situated and where
she had started what was initially a small yard business with
geese and ostriches but which had grown into a prosperous
enterprise as a result of her entrepreneurial spirit and the
friendship and advice of a roving Jewish tradesman. For
the sake of economic survival, Hendrik is forced to sell part
of his farm to Eva, but it leaves him feeling betrayed and
emasculated and forever sets them against each other. Love,
desire, revenge and counter-revenge against the backdrop
of the South African War make up the rest of the story
which culminates in Hendrik disinheriting Evert, both sons
permanently leaving the farm (Evert dies in the First World
War and Daniёl in another unnamed country), Hendrik
attacking and blinding Eva and, in a nal act of revenge
from Eva, the tragic death of Lia and her unborn child, the
only remaining heir to the farm, Sorgniet . The novel ends on
a celebratory note, with the meeting of Evert and Daniёl's
descendants (Tessa and Danie) amidst the festive atmosphere
of the Oudtshoorn festival and the subsequent 'settling' of
the ghosts of Eva and Hendrik: 'and so Oudtshoorn's sins are
cleansed' (Pistorius [2006] 2010).
Two rivers again became one … one from DaniÑ‘ l's
descendants and one from Evert's. One white and one mixed-
race (Pistorius [2006] 2010).
Producon and recepon dynamics
The dynamics around the production and reception of
the two novels were very different and demand brief
contextualisation. Both novels can be categorised as popular
historical ction though Matthee's novel is also viewed
as 'literary' and as such is often prescribed by schools and
universities in South Africa. Matthee's novels were, in fact,
the most often prescribed novels for schools between 1984
and 1990 (Fairer-Wessels 2010:134; Van der Westhuizen
2004:144) whilst previous decades saw literary texts dealing
with similar concerns censored and even banned. In contrast,
Pistorius's ([2006] 2010) novel, Sorg, was less enthusiastically
received in 2006, receiving quite severe treatment from
renowned literary critic, Hambidge (2013) who dismissed it
as overly ambitious and melodramatic with ineffective use of
magic realism and redundant imagery.
Fiela's child forms part of what today is known as Matthee's
series of four 'forest' novels and contains a subtle subtext of
eco-consciousness and environmentalism. The rst of these
novels, Kringe in 'n bos, was published in 1984, one year before
Fiela's child, which is the second of the four novels. At the
time, these novels were a unique phenomenon in Afrikaans
literature. Not only did they cross the divide between
'literary' and 'popular' ction by being enthusiastically
accepted on both sides (Brink 1987; Kannemeyer 2005; Smuts
1984), but at the time, they also represented the largest-
ever marketing strategy in Afrikaans literature. Van der
Westhuizen (2004:144) and Fairer-Wessels (2010:135) show
how this represented a turning point in Afrikaans literary
production, reception and popularisation dynamics: A
publicity campaign started months before the rst novel
was published, including advertising, reviews, newspaper
articles, radio and television interviews with the author and
translations into various international languages (even before
publication of the original Afrikaans versions). As a result,
the sales gures for Matthee's novels reached unprecedented
heights (Van der Westhuizen 2004:144), followed by library
orders, book-club subscriptions, inclusion in school curricula,
literary and environmental awards and later very successful
stage and screen adaptations of Fiela's child.
The time of publication is particularly signicant: During
the mid-1980s, South Africa was in turmoil. Increasing
international pressure through sanctions and internal civil
unrest crystallised into the often violent anti-apartheid
'struggle' movement. Race relations in the country were at
breaking point, with fear and anger the pervasive emotions
on all fronts. Amid these conditions, Matthee's story of a
mixed-race mother's unconditional love for a white child
entered the national imagination and resonated with the
slowly changing political and ideological dynamics of the
country. As a result, Fiela's child played a signicant role
in acclimatising popular attitudes toward reconciliation
amongst its mostly white Afrikaans-speaking readership
public and represented a larger cultural shift in consciousness
about race relations in South Africa. It also inuenced a
generation of children and students who studied the text
as part of school and university curricula and through this
institutionalised discursive practice contributed to the early
reconguration of the mainstream South African popular
imagination.
Matthee's novels present small, individual stories as opposed
to grand master narratives and can, in Foucauldian terms,
Original Research
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hp://www.literator.org.za
Page 4 of 13
be seen as signicant discursive events in the South African
landscape. Fiela's child represents a moment of historical
transformation, signifying when what previously was not
said is said and what was said is no longer said (Lemert &
Gillan 1982:42, 121), thereby '(re)presenting reversals in
force relations … a coming together of rearrangements of …
relations' (Lemert & Gillan 1982:43).
In contrast to Fiela's child, Sorg was produced amidst
very different social, political and economic conditions.
Technology, globalisation and competition, combined with
a transforming social and political climate, presented the
post-millennium reading public with a much larger global
stage, more popular products competing for investments of
time, money and attention and an institutionalised corporate
marketing agenda that often focused on consumption
and consumerism rather than social critique or political
expression. Amidst all of this, Sorg became, at least, just
another popular historical romance novel and, at most, a bit
of a curiosity because of the author's particular position in
South African society.
The author, Pistorius, is best known as a highly acclaimed
criminologist and psychological proler, specialising in
crimes committed by serial killers. She was the rst criminal
proler to be employed (signicantly in 1994, the ofcial date
of apartheid's demise) by the South African Police Service
(SAPS). Her public persona as a female proler catching
serial killers was entrenched through a number of media
articles and interviews as well as through ve non-ction
books she wrote about serial killers in South Africa. In 2000,
she resigned from the SAPS. In a television interview in July
2000, she said that she had to live with a constant feeling of
uneasiness, as she invited these killers into her mind and
that, towards the end of her career found the need to cleanse
herself of the dark memories by writing down her thoughts
(Phirippides 2000). Using this as a personal trauma-writing
and cleansing process, she also tapped into the rising global
interest in crime and crime narratives, and as a result, these
books were very successful, even amongst the general public.
Breaking away from crime writing, Pistorius wrote her debut
novel Sorg, which could supercially be categorised as
a historical romance, in 2006. However, with the added
signicance of her expertise in victimology – what Pistorius
herself calls 'trying to work out what the victim felt [and]
what went on in the killer's mind' (Phirippides 2000)
– and her background in and understanding of social
manipulation, the dynamics of power, control, psychological
dysfunction and trauma, the novel lends itself to a larger
psycho-social and socio-political contextual reading. Even
though as a historical romance, it is far removed from the
gritty modern reality of serial murder, Sorg conveys a
critical contemporary engagement with historical atrocities,
human rights violations and the psycho-social dynamics and
systems that move individuals to often tragic ends. If one
considers the post-apartheid time during which this novel
was written – thinking of the much publicised TRC hearings
and its concomitant effect of 'entrench[ing] … a new public
morality' (Attwell & Harlow 2000:1) – one cannot dismiss it
as merely another popular historical romance, irrespective of
its 'literary' quality. The inescapable politics of production
and reception are central to the dynamics of any text. This
provides scope for a reading of Sorg for the contribution
it makes to the South African national engagement with
traumatic memory and reconciliation. As such, it is also, like
Fiela's child, a literary event marking a moment of historical
discursive transformation and the reversal of socio-political
power dynamics and force relations.
The novels as 'ghost work': Trauma
and naonal autobiography
In both novels the symbolic use of the theme of haunting and
ghosts acts as metaphor for personal unrest and individual
restlessness as well as for alienation from a sense of belonging to
a community. As liminal beings, ghosts move in an in-between
world where their very disruptiveness becomes a resistance to
and refusal of so-called historical reality. Quite simply, ghosts
are associated with unresolved memories and trauma. When
read in the context of the traumatic history of South Africa,
this also carries the implications that the characters are being
haunted by history. As such, both novels become literary
trauma work, thereby: 'creating a space for mourning' and
'coming to terms with [ our] legacy' (Tran 2011:53) through
Morrison's concept of re-memory, which Wisker (2000:6)
describes as 'a re-investigation and imaginative re-envisioning
[of ] the past by way of the lens of the present'.
Ester, Van der Merwe and Mulder (2012:5) use Frank
Hermans's denition of trauma in Woordeloos tot verhaal,
their work on trauma and narrative in Afrikaans and Dutch
literature. Hermans says that a traumatic experience is one
in which a person is confronted by death, the threat of death,
serious wounding or a threat to physical integrity of the self
or other and in response to which the person would react
with feelings of anxiety, helplessness and disgust. Caruth
(1991:1) eloquently summarises it when she says that a
traumatic narrative is one which oscillates between a crisis
of death and the correlative crisis of life, between the story
of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the
unbearable nature of its survival (Tran 2011:64).
For Tran (2011:53), following Caruth, trauma itself may
provide the very link between cultures, not as a simple
understanding of the pasts of others but rather, within the
traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen
through the departures we have all taken from ourselves.
Arguably that has nowhere been clearer in recent history
than in the South African 'truth and reconciliation' process.
The TRC hearings, amnesties and related processes may have
had a specic end-date, but this is not the case for experiences
of trauma. As Graham (2003) correctly says:
the Commission has … given birth to a crisis of public memory
and collective agency which have long-lasting effects and
repercussions in terms of the ways South Africans engage with
history and one another'. (p. 11)
Gobodo-Madikizela (2008:169) rightfully points out that
South African trauma is unnished business. Literature and
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Page 5 of 13
other forms of creative production full a very important
role in the continuing trauma work of South Africa, and
the 'ofcial' TRC processes should be seen as only an initial
major contributing factor and catalyst to an on-going process
of healing (Tran 2011:54). As Ester et al. (2012:7) say, narrative
production in this sense means the conversion of life and
lived experience into story, and as such, it is an engagement
with the search for causal relationships and patterns. It is thus
ultimately a hermeneutical process of existential meaning-
making, for as Rigney (2005:381) says, certain things are
remembered not because they are actually true of the past
(which may or may not be the case) but because they are
somehow meaningful in the present.
Narratives are therefore also the task and even preoccupation
of nations (Ester et al. 2012:7) with concomitant implications
for the dynamic interplay of socio-political power shifts
and identity transformations. McClintock (1990) says the
following about Joubert's (1978) Die swerfjare van Poppie
Nongena:
The story does not express the disappearance of power but rather its
redistribution under contest. Identity does not transcend power;
it comes into being through the ceaseless contest and results in
dispersal and realignment of power rather than a vanishing of
power. (p. 209)
It is the social practices that constitute the redistribution of
power and the moments of rearrangement of force relations
(Lemert & Gillan 1982:43) that can be presented to the
popular imagination of a society through literary and other
artistic texts. Such texts can illuminate the extended systemic
contexts in which institutions, discourses, hierarchies,
bureaucracies and related power dynamics perpetuate
and reinforce trauma, resulting in the personal as well as
collective engagement with trauma. It is the traumas that
result from social practices and the subsequent damaging
extended constellations of life experiences (Erikson 1994)
that are the focus of trauma work. In the context of a national
history, the traumatic 'damage' is equally on a personal,
individual and a national scale and is reected in the
multifarious imaginations, preoccupations, fears, memories,
hallucinations, narratives and discourses of the traumatised.
It also implies multivocal interpretations and renderings,
complexities and paradoxes rather that a singular grand
or master account of historical catastrophic experience
(Tran 2011:55).
In terms of South African literature as trauma work, many
others (Attridge & Jolly 1998; Bethlehem 2006; Brink 1998;
De Kok 1996; Ester et al. 2012; Gagiano 2006; Graham 2003;
Human 2004, 2009; Nkosi 1998; Thomas 2009; Tran 2011;
Van der Merwe & Gobodo-Madikizela 2008; Vosloo 2012)
have identied it as a signicant vehicle for attempts at
'reect[ing ] South Africa's changing mood as the country
endeavours to work through its trauma' and for 'exploring
the tenuous relationship between memory and forgetting
and healing and forgiveness in order to respond to the greater
challenges posed by the limits of empathy and sympathy'
(Tran 2011:59). Pearson (2000, in Chapman 2003:1) says that
South African literature since 1990 has been involved with the
ambiguities of transition, the tension between memory and
amnesia, whilst Chapman (1996) points out that literature
helps to interrogate the South African mythos. Literary texts
are thus constructs of what Rigney (2005:11) and Erll and
Rigney (2006:115) would call '"cultural memory" in that they
are public acts of remembrance that make … remembrance
observable and come to shape our views of the past'.
Through cultural memorial practices, of which literature
is only one, meaning becomes inscribed in specic cultural
and textual themes, sites and ideals through processes of
convergence, superimposition, mythologising, recursivity,
modelling, transfer and translation (Rigney 2005:11). As such,
literature selectively engages other cultural products and
historiographies to interpret the past in specic ways and to
create an imagined communality based on the exchange of
memories (Rigney 2005:11). Thus memory, and in particular
literary memory, becomes the locus of everything that is
missing in history proper (Rigney 2004:365, following Pierre
Nora) and is always discursively informed and mediated by
the experiences and memorial constructions of 'other' people
as well as the institutionalised systems of power of a society.
Haunng as a theme in the novels
Matthee's Fiela and Pistorius's Eva rise from the memories
of a denied or silenced history to reclaim a new space for
those marginalised by ideologies, practices of power and
hegemonic dominance. The ghostly ship at Noetzie haunts
Fiela's child, Benjamin/Lukas. He arrives at a moment of
personal catharsis when he identies with an unnamed
'ghost' ship that mysteriously appears off the coast of
Noetzie, much as he himself mysteriously appeared in the
middle of the night at Fiela's front door:
There was something about that dead ship that touched his
whole being – he was like a stranger to himself, standing on the
sand of an unknown bay where a ship lay wrecked that did not
belong there either. … Nobody knows how it got there. When the
sun came up this morning, there she was … As far as we could
see, there is no name on her … (Matthee [1985] 2010b:208, 209)
His crisis of identity reaches its climax when, amid a raging
sea storm, the full burden of his loss, longing and grief
overwhelms him when he is unable to save a drowning man
and identies his own fate in this man. This propels him onto
a journey in which he is, like the oundering ghost ship,
tossed from mother to mother and between the forest and
the veld in search of his true identity. He is reunited with
his mixed-race family in the Karoo, and he realises that
they are his true emotional home and that race and colour
are articial boundaries superimposed on the true human
and humane bonds of love and care forged between people.
However, it is only his white forest-mother, Barta, who can
nally release him from his (and her own) torment. This she
does – with words torn from her like pieces of her own esh
(Matthee [1985] 2010b:298) – when she admits to having
wrongfully claimed him as her own child under pressure
from the census man who did not want to see him returned
to a mixed-race family.
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Barta's choice is, however, also informed by another trauma,
namely the loss of her own child, the (real) Lukas who
disappeared into the ghostly forest as a three-year old child.
The grief of a mother longing for her lost child is presented in
the mirror images of Barta and Fiela who, despite their many
differences, also share the same traumatic experience. Pain
begets pain, and trauma multiplies as Barta tries to replace
her own lost child with another whilst inadvertently being
aided by the powerful forces of institutional systems and
structures in the form of the census man and magistrate who
give legal weight to her claim to Fiela's child. The real Lukas,
the unburied, unclaimed and unmourned-for child of Barta
and Elias van Rooyen is the ghost that subtly haunts this
novel, like the ghost ship which haunts the Knysna coast. He
is only nally laid to rest when Barta admits her culpability
in Fiela's and Benjamin's trauma:
I took somebody else's child that day. I only found out when it
was too late, after we came home with him. Then I thought it was
my imagination and I pushed it away but it would never stay
away for long and now it never goes away … I swore falsely. He
is not Lukas. … I can no longer bear it; the burden is too great.
Our Lukas's bones were picked up along the Gouna river; he got
lost and the angels took him. (Matthee [1985] 2010b:298)
Written more than a decade before the TRC hearings that
so deeply affected South Africa, Fiela's child hauntingly pre-
empts the many stories of grief and loss, so many of which
were the stories of mothers who lost children, that cathartically
played itself out on the national stage during the early post-
apartheid years. As Barta confesses her guilt, culpability and
own deep trauma, she retrospectively becomes a symbol of
a national discursive process of confession, unburdening
and healing that South Africa would only formally engage
in years after the publication of this novel. Commemorating
and memorialising the previously silenced and denied
suffering of so many people and providing a public but
safe space (Graham 2003:11) for dealing with personal
and national trauma, the TRC created a national arena for
critical engagement with issues of culpability, accountability
and restitution. Similarly, Matthee ([1985] 2010b) and
Pistorius ([2006] 2010) weave tales in which these issues are
interrogated and by means of which readers (predominantly
white and Afrikaans, but also mixed-race and Afrikaans
and, owing to the English translations, English speakers of
all races) can safely and cathartically recognise, identify with
and mourn for their own and others' traumatic losses. Rigney
(2005) describes this as follows:
Representations of the past facilitate sympathy with respect to
'other' people whom we do not know in any direct way, even
if we think of them as our ancestors, and even with respect to
people who do not belong in any straightforward way to the
'imagined community' with which we usually identify. In other
words, the act of remembrance itself may arouse interest in other
people's experiences and sympathy for them. (p. 25)
In Sorg, ghosts from the past haunt Oudtshoorn as an entire
community of ghosts are seen to inhabit this town in the
Little Karoo. They nd themselves in a kind of limbo since
they cannot rest until the trauma they have experienced and
wrought are confessed and resolved. As a result, the story of
Eva must be told in a kind of confessional or testimonial way
to the reader (predominantly white and Afrikaans, possibly
also mixed-race and Afrikaans since there are no English or
other translations of the novel) as well as to the descendents
of the two main characters. The narrative catharsis that
is experienced as a result nally settles the ghosts who
can escape from their restless limbo. In reuniting the 'lost'
descendents, Tessa and Danie, this catharsis also provides
them with a sense of emotional and historical belonging that
is unrelated to ownership of the land but rather speaks of
being part of the land and by implication of the narrative of
the people of the land. At the start of the novel, both of them
are presented as searching for something they seem unable
to dene. Tessa says, 'It is as if there is something waiting for
me and I cannot stop before I nd it' (Pistorius 2010:21), and
Danie says: 'If only I knew what I am searching for … If only
I could nd it or at least know what I am searching for, then
I can settle' (Pistorius [2006] 2010:21).
As the TRC has shown, it is often not only individuals who
are traumatised but indeed whole communities and even
societies. Pistorius's ([2006] 2010) Sorg plays on this theme
as confession, forgiveness, restitution and reconciliation play
itself out in the pages of the novel. Riddled by the guilt of, and
shame about, their culpability in their own and one another's
personal traumas, the ghosts are driven to put things right
by restoring what was destroyed. The nal stage of such a
restoration process is, or so the novel proposes, forgiveness
of self. Of this, the character Isabella, Hendrik's wife and
the only main character in the novel who achieves self-
insight, personal transformation and a type of enlightenment
during her lifetime, is an example: Those like Isabella who
could forgive themselves found rest in the graveyard, but
the others who remained attached to their riches and their
own ghosts are today still imprisoned in their feather palaces
(Pistorius [2006] 2010:228). Only once the burden of the
past had been laid down, the transgressions confessed and
forgiven, could the healing of those who remained start as
the ghosts disappeared. Tessa and Danie run hand-in-hand
in the pouring rain down Baron Van Reede Street. As they
go, the ghosts start to cheer and applaud, even the Khoi and
San ghosts deep in the mountain applaud louder and louder
(Pistorius [2006] 2010:239).
The representaon of women in the
novels
In both novels, the female main characters are mixed-race
women who struggle for themselves, their families and
their communities against an inhospitable geographical
environment and equally inhospitable imperial-colonialist
and patriarchal socio-political environment. Both Fiela and
Eva are presented as dynamic, complex and fully-developed
subjects with agency. They are far removed from the one-
dimensional and stereotypical depictions of indigenous
women of colour (and arguably women in general) found
in colonial master narratives. Conrad's Heart of darkness
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([1899] 1987) and Haggard's ([1885] 1994), King Solomon's
mines ([1885] 1994), for example, stand as perennial examples
of the ways in which indigenous women were depicted as
slaves, servants, savages or sorceresses or merely functioned
as literary and thematic devices for paternalistic and
patriarchal discourses of exoticism, otherness, native naiveté
and female essentialism. Accordingly, women have a long
history of being associated with tropes related to masculine
expansionism, conquest, territoriality and land ownership,
with women's bodies often being presented as uninhabited,
conquerable 'virgin' land or containers of mysterious hidden
treasures. McClintock's (1995) Imperial leather: Race, gender
and sexuality in the colonial contest provides an analysis of the
way in which women's bodies were ideologically mapped
(also quite literally as in the treasure map of Haggard's
King Solomon's mines) in relation to colonisation and its
accompanying power discourses of gender, race and class.
Fiela's child and Sorg are set at a pivotal time not only in
South African but also in world history at the consolidation
of Britain's imperial power and the apex of the industrial
revolution, which made possible the subsequent extensive
exploitation of colonies as part of 'the transition … from
merchant capitalism to industrial capitalism … it was in
this interregnum that the capitalist mode of production
established itself as the most dominant' (Masilela 1988). Like
elsewhere in the 'empire', in South Africa, gender, class and
race mixed to form social stratications and a caste system
that privileged male over female, white over everything
else, English over any local languages, Christianity over
indigenous spiritual traditions and the budding capitalist
economic and labour system over any alternatives based
on communalism. The late 19th century was also a time of
great economic, social and cultural dissatisfaction, violence
and change, particularly in South Africa with the discovery
of gold and diamonds in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand
and the ensuing war for independence against Britain acting
as major change-agents.
In this context, both novels' subtextual themes of female
ownership, servitude, marginalisation, agency and
subjectivity are critically reective of the time in which the
novels are set and the sanctioned roles of women in society.
Both Fiela and Eva are shown as struggling with their own
identity as women in a world controlled by men, as so-
called 'coloureds' (mixed-race) in a world controlled by
white people and as subjects of imperialist rule. Both female
main characters are depicted as subversive, challenging
and disruptive to the rules, laws and conventions of their
time. Occupying a variety of dynamic liminal spaces of in-
betweenness – as educated (though marginally), independent,
mixed-race, female, matriarchal, matrilineal, land-owning
entrepreneurs and community leaders – both Fiela and Eva
enter the traditional domain of (white) men and thereby
become vehicles for the depiction of deant female agency
and subjectivity on many levels. By presenting such complex,
dynamic and subversive female characters, Matthee and
Pistorius's texts present interesting alternative discourses of
marginalised female identities in the Eastern Cape region of
South Africa around the end of the 19th century.
Women and land rights
Both Eva and Fiela are mothers, and mothering, particularly
mother love across the racialised 'colour line', is the central
theme running through both novels. As such, the novels also
present an interestingly ironical comment on the historical
nationalist 'mother of the nation' ideal and its associated
familiar symbolism which can be found in both white
Afrikaner (Moedertjie) and black African (Mama Africa)
nationalist discourses (Gaitskell & Unterhalter 1989; Jacobs
2009). Boehmer (1991, cited in Murray 2006:83) says that gures
of mothers of the nation are emblazoned everywhere, but the
presence of women in the nation is ofcially marginalised
and generally ignored. McClintock (1993:61) and Boehmer
(1991:5) argue that, in discourses of nation building, women
thus usually become mere symbols of metaphorical meaning
whereas 'the nation' is metonymically by implication always
male. As a result, men also symbolically become drivers
of national progress whilst women are presented as the
embodiment of national memory (McClintock 1993:65).
In contrast to this, the novels Sorg and Fiela's child depict
women as dialectical beings in constant shifting conversation
with themselves, others and the systems of power they have
to negotiate for survival. In addition, as mixed-race women,
both of their main characters move between the traditional
maternal stereotypes of white and black cultures, dismantling
and problematising the experience of motherhood. Both
Eva and Fiela are seen to engage in active and deliberate
economic and political manipulations with motivations
related to the founding of a legacy, more reminiscent of the
traditional symbolism of 'founding fathers' than of merely
bearers of nationalist sons (Boehmer 1991; Loin 1998).
They openly challenge the accepted and sanctioned social
hierarchies and socio-cultural institutions of their society and
culture and reorganised the very concept of 'family', which
is, as McClintock (1993:63) argues, the very founding genesis
narrative of any national history.
A related theme in both texts can be found in the
representation of both female main characters as successful
entrepreneurs who take on the responsibility of creating
prosperity for their families and children as well as for their
communities. The Little Karoo around Oudtshoorn where
the novels are set is rich farmland, especially for farming with
ostriches (for meat, eggs, leather and feathers), and the town
of Oudtshoorn, at the time of the novels, was the centre of the
booming international ostrich trade (Van Waart 1990). At the
end of the 19th century, it was what Nel and Hill (2008:2264)
describe as the 'economic heartland of the country by virtue
of extensive rangeland agriculture, which … dominated the
then rural-based economy of the country'. In both novels, the
female main characters obtain material and economic wealth
by farming the land and trading feathers. Futhermore, Sorg's
Eva is also later surreptitiously trading in diamonds mined
in Kimberley, thereby securing prosperity and an inheritance
for their families – an arena traditionally perceived to be the
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preserve of men (white men, in fact). As Murray (2006:83)
succinctly points out, 'private ownership of land lies at the
centre of both colonialism and patriarchy … [l]and ownership
was also at the heart of apartheid'. Though women were
often instrumental in passing wealth along through the
institution of marriage and through re-marriage (Dooling
2005; Giliomee 1983, 2010; Hall 1994; Mitchell 2007; Von
Fintel, Du Plessis & Jansen 2013), the cultural perception of
male dominance and ownership persisted since the women,
along with their property, were perceived as belonging to the
man they married.
The very fact that both novels present a rearranged matrilineal
genealogical system, disruptive of the traditional patriarchal
system, is signicant. Both Eva and Fiela are depicted as
matriarchs and originators of new lines of descent (and,
ironically, dissent). Eva and Fiela disrupt the normative
power relationships and their associated discourses and
rewrite history by means of the ways they manage the
relationship that exists for them between motherhood and
land ownership. In Fiela's child, there is a many-layered
paradox involved in this since, rstly, Benjamin's true origins
are, and forever will be, unknown. He could thus in effect be
of any racial or ethnic background since without the modern
science of genetic identication his genetic origins could
never be known in his own time.
Secondly, his choice to self-construct his identity in alignment
with his mixed-race mother and family represents a massive
socio-political ideological power shift, as does the implication
of him as a 'white' man being given land in Africa, as part of
his inheritance, by his mixed-race mother. The implications
of this are far-reaching on many levels for a country that,
at the time, had a state-controlled system of and a socio-
political obsession with aligning and legislating ideological
constructions of race and identity. The deance here, which is
unmistakable, conveys a message of common humanity and
resistance to articially constructed discourses and systems.
A similar deance can be found in Sorg when Eva shrewdly
uses the 1888 economic crisis as an opportunity to buy a part
of Hendrik's family farm thereby ensuring an inheritance for
their (mixed-race) son, who is also Hendrik's (illegitimate)
eldest child. Hendrik tragically completely ignores the fact
that, through this, his eldest son will, as tradition demands,
inherit the land. This land is later passed down through
generations of the children of Eva's mixed-race community,
many of whom obtained education and professions as a
result of the little farm community's prosperity. At the end of
the novel, the ghost of Eva relates this history to Danie:
My little farm was developed into a trust under the van der
Westhuizen name. Daniёl's name. During the apartheid years,
when we were not allowed to own land, some or other little
government employee surely thought the trust belongs to a
white family and never investigated it further. That's how the
little coloured farm survived under a white surname. The trust is
now large and the coloured men who wanted to study to become
attorneys manage it. Some of my people still live there, as you
know, but their children all receive bursaries to go and study all
over across the globe. (Pistorius [2006] 2010:228)
South African literary genres: The
farm novel and oral tradions
The themes of inheritance and land ownership place both of
these novels in conversation with two of South Africa's major
literary genres, namely, that of the pastoral 'farm novel'
(plaasroman , in Afrikaans) and indigenous orality. As others
(Coetzee 1996, 2000; Prinsloo & Visagie 2009; Smit 2005; Smit-
Marais & Wenzel 2006; Van Coller 2003, 2006) have shown, the
South African farm novel is a genre in which land rights and
culturally inscribed meanings of ownership are always either
reinforced or contested and problematised. In fact, Mishra
and Hodge (2005:375) even trace the etymology of 'colonial' to
its root in the Latin words for farmer and its associations with
the inhabitation and cultivation of land. Hand-in-hand with
this goes the patriarchal imperative of male supremacy and
its associated rights with the farmhouse and yard as symbols
of female–driven domesticity, complementing but always
subservient to male mastery over the family and its land.
As a result, colonial and nationalist agendas often revolve
around the ideal of 'home' as a vestige of social, cultural and
political values relating to insularity, safety and protection
from that which is 'other' and the general threatening chaos
outside the controlled environment of home and family.
Like other national settler or frontier traditions, the South
African farm novel as a genre engages with race and gender
as determinants of identity through the representation of
colonial and nationalist-sanctioned claims of white and
male superiority. This is usually presented as white women
being relegated only to domestic-based power relationships
over the household, children and servants. It relates to what
McClintock (1995:5) calls the cult of domesticity. At the same
time, women were denied political power and often also
economic power. Within the same ideological framework,
other races and indigenous people are relegated to servile
roles as labourers and mere 'hands' or resources by means
of which the land can be 'tamed', 'mastered' and 'worked'
to bring progress and prosperity to 'the family', and by
extension the nation.
Examples of colonial and nationalist land-rights reinforcement
discourses can be found especially in Afrikaans post-war (the
South African War, 1902 onwards) and post-independence
(1961) literature such as Cilliers's ([1911] 1954) epic poem
Martjie, Van den Heever's ([1935] 1985) Somer and Laat vrugte
([1939] 1978) and Venter's Great Trek tetralogy Geknelde land
(1960), Offerland (1963), Gelofteland (1966) and Bedoelde land
([1968] 1984). Examples of South African works by English
authors are Schreiner's ([1883] 2003) Story of an African farm
which is often also seen as a critique of the pastoral idyll and
Smith's ([1926] 2006) The beadle. Novels in which land rights
in South Africa are questioned, contested and problematised
abound, especially from the 1970s onward. In fact, it has
indeed become one of the perennial themes in South African
literature, being deeply inscribed with other contested notions
such as identity, belonging, self and other. In Afrikaans there
are, amongst many others, Leroux's ([1962] 1991) Sewe dae by
die Silbersteins, Louw's Kroniek van Perdepoort ([1975] 2007),
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Toorberg (1986) and Die stoetmeester Van Heerden (1993), Ek
stamel ek sterwe by Venter ([1996] 1999), Opperman's (1996)
Donkerland and Van Niekerk's (2004) Agaat. Many of these
were also translated into English and other languages and
are generally accepted as 'literary' rather than 'popular'
novels though these are, of course, contentious and contested
terms. In English 'literary' writing, there are most notably
Gordimer's ([1974] 1983) The conservationist and Coetzee's
novels, for example, In the heart of the country ([1977] 1982),
The life and times of Michael K ([1983] 1985) and Disgrace
([2001] 2008).
Coetzee's ([2001] 2008) Disgrace and van Niekerk's (2004)
Agaat in particular engage with the relationship between
women and the right to (farm) land in South Africa. As the
relationship between women and land in South Africa is
increasingly being explored, so, inevitably, identities and
power relations are also questioned and reconstituted. In the
simultaneous 'literary' and 'popular' Fiela's child and the more
exclusively 'popular' Sorg, the women are presented as the
procurers of land, the ones who invest in the land emotionally
and nancially and as those in whom legal ownership of
the land is in turn invested. In both novels, there is also a
subtle subtext of female-driven ecologically conscious ethical
farming and of a consciousness of communal responsibility,
which are themes that also increasingly emerge in what is
accepted as more 'literary' farm-novel literature as in Disgrace
and Agaat.
In contrast to the farm novel, the land rights of indigenous
peoples are often represented in literature through the use
of images from oral mythologies and histories, another
type of national consciousness as Bahri (1995), Mishra and
Hodge (2005) and McClintock (1995) argue, with their often
concomitant ethereal symbols, mystical rituals and animal
association. In Sorg specically, the themes of indigenous
ancestral oral memory and the land rights of the earliest
inhabitants of the area are continually present, questioning
the rights of colonial-invested ownership. The narrative
is constantly enriched with a cosmological subtext, that of
the 'original' Big Ostrich and its complex and contentious
relationship with humans, in an indigenous story of creation
which acts as counter-narrative to the authorial power of the
European biblical genesis narrative.
In Matthee's novel, there is also the subtle presence of an
oral narrative in the back story of Fiela's husband, Seling,
which becomes a type of origin story for the Komoetie family
since it provides some existential answers to why they are
who they are, as individuals and as a family unit. Because
Seling killed their neighbour in a ght about a stolen sheep,
he was imprisoned and later sentenced to highly dangerous
physical labour, and by implication starvation, as part of the
construction crew of convicts that built the road from Knysna
to the Langkloof. With their newborn baby in her arms, Fiela
went searching for Seling. Once she found, him she spent
the next four years tracking the builders daily like a lion
would its prey, crawling like an animal and slithering on her
stomach like a snake to provide Seling surreptitiously with
contraband food to keep him alive. It is during this time that
the white child mysteriously arrives on her doorstep. Her
tracking and care of Seling forms a precursor to her search
for Benjamin/Lukas across mountains and ravines (Matthee
[1985] 2010b:93) and when she slithered through the dust like
a snake (Matthee [1985] 2010b:93) at the magistrate's to claim
back the child.
In both novels, land rights and inheritance are questioned
through the symbolic use of animal associations. In both
novels, there is a haunting in the guise of animal spirits
(elephants in Fiela's child and ostriches in both novels),
which reminds one of the totemic or animistic spiritualities
of indigenous peoples. In Fiela's child, the elephants of the
Tsitsikamma forest are sometimes tolerant of human intruders
but at other times are vindictive and retributive regarding
human cruelty to the forest and its animals. They roam the
forest like prehistoric ghosts and are exclusively depicted as
female. They are deeply protective of their own offspring but
also of human children – 'elephants don't step on children'
(Matthee [1985] 2010b:5) – but become dangerous enemies of
those who attempt to harm them or their kind, as Elias van
Rooyen tries to do to his own detriment. The freedom of the
elephants to roam as they please and the haughty deance
and pride of Fiela's hen ostrich (Matthee [1985] 2010b:163)
are symbolic of the resistance to enforced power and docility
that can also be detected in the character of Fiela. In Sorg, Eva
is likewise often associated with a wild mare that cannot be
tamed, with all the conventional associated sexual innuendo.
Whilst acknowledging the potential historical and discursive
problems around associations between women and
indigenous people and animals (Adams & Donovan 1995;
Baker 2008; Fanon 1963; Haraway 1989; Said 1978), with the
concomitant associations of 'husbandry', submissiveness
and domestication, the use of animal symbolism does
not in either of the novels degenerate to implications of
mastery, exploitation, naturalisation or domestication. This
is largely because Fiela's humanity and her embodiment of
what is traditionally associated with 'civilised' (also read
'white') values in colonial discourses are offset against the
often inhumane and near-animalistic living conditions
and behaviour of the destitute white Van Rooyen family
in the forest. Similarly, in Sorg, Eva's dignity and (mostly)
altruistic community involvement are offset against the
cruelty, pretence and narcissism of the seemingly socially
elite Van der Westhuizen family. Reversing the traditional
tropes associated with coloniser and colonised here serves
to illuminate the humanity of both female main characters,
which, combined with their deance and subversiveness,
prevent the novels from slipping into stereotypical
depictions of indigenous identity and romanticised female
essentialism. Furthermore, neither of the women is presented
or constructed by means of the male gaze or point of view.
In Sorg, Hendrik's lust for Eva is presented in animalistic
(specically equine) terms, but this is presented as a subtle
critique rather than as justication or sanctioning. In fact,
female lust and sexuality are equally present in the novel
but then as a deliberate choice of action and agency whilst
Hendrik is often presented as a slave of his desires. In both
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novels, it is the women who tame the animals and the land
and successfully turn their products into prot. Conversely,
attempts by men in the novels to control or master animals
are presented as unsuccessful: In Sorg, Hendrik's farm
ounders, he has a nervous breakdown and is physically
and economically saved by Eva, and in Fiela's child, Elias
is maimed and nearly dies when he tries to kill a female
elephant for her ivory.
Relaonships between women:
'Wring back' and complicity
Though McClintock (1992, 1995) and others (Bahri 1995;
Mishra & Hodge 1993, 2005; Shohat 1992; Slemon 1989)
astutely summarise the many pitfalls associated with the use
of the term 'postcolonial', for the limited purpose and scope of
this article, it will simply and broadly be viewed as signifying
that which interrogates and undermines colonialism and the
imperial centre and constructs new existential and ideological
alternatives (Ashcroft, Grifths & Tiffen 1989; Shohat 1992;
Viljoen 1996). In agreement with Bahri (1995:52), it is also
acknowledged that the plural 'postcolonialisms' is a more
appropriate use of the term for the purpose of emphasising
the diversity, variety and hybridity of positions and
relationships within the larger conceptual framework. Shohat
(1992:106) signicantly notes that the concept 'postcolonial'
also forms a critical locus for moving beyond anti-colonial,
nationalist, modernising narratives that inscribe Europe
as an object of critique, towards a discursive analysis and
historiography addressing decentred multiplicities of power
relations. Owing to the limited purpose and scope of this
article that does not allow for more in-depth discussions, the
same broad principle could here also apply to the concept
'post-apartheid', signifying not only that which disrupts and
critically engages with apartheid ideologies but also that
which moves beyond mere anti-apartheid discourse towards
the analysis and construction of new ways of speaking and
thinking about individual, group and national identities and
afliations.
As Louise Viljoen (1996) points out:
since the sixties but especially during the seventies and political
emergency of the eighties, Afrikaans women writers have
occupied a strong place in the tradition of dissidence against the
apartheid regime in Afrikaans literature … identifying with the
liberation struggle of black people in their texts. (p. 63)
The danger here would be, as Robbe (2010:109) points out,
the commodication of mixed-race women's narratives
by white women authors, thereby rendering the subaltern
voices as mere products of a commercial economically
driven process. However, the depictions of the complex
relationships between women in the novels by Matthee
([1985] 2010b) and Pistorius ([2006] 2010) open critical spaces
for dialogue between women of mixed-race and white
women. The novels present a variation on the 'writing back'
theme introduced in The empire writes back (Ashcroft, Grifths
& Tiffen 1989) and speak of a complex discursivity of literary
and identity production by white women who occupy the
space of simultaneously but ambiguously feeling aligned
with the colonised but also being trapped in the discourses
of imperialism and patriarchy (Viljoen 1996:63; McClintock
1995:7). Both novels can be read as subtextual attempts by
white women to understand and engage with the complicity
of white women in oppressive systems of power as other
white female authors such as Elsa Joubert, Antjie Krog and
Lettie Viljoen or Ingrid Winterbach have also attempted to
do. Such a reading also presents a concomitant variation
on the theme of trauma work: life stories of marginalised
coloured women written by individuals who are viewed
traditionally as aligned with the wielders of power, white
women. As such, these narratives are at some level also an
interrogation of whiteness (McClintock 1995:9), but they
avoid simplistic victim versus perpetrator dichotomies
to open spaces for deeper interrogations of issues around
individual and communal complicity in, and resistance to,
oppression, violence and trauma.
Both Matthee ([1985] 2010b) and Pistorius ([2006] 2010) are
clearly deeply aware of the complexity and ambiguity of white
women's position within imperialist and patriarchal systems
of power, being both central because of racial alignment
with white men but also marginalised as women in an
androcentric, male-dominated and male-privileging power
structure. For example, the wild untamed independence of
Nina in Fiela's child is a commentary on the boundaries set
for white women of the time, particularly amongst the very
poor. For such women, marriage to a man of higher social
and economic standing or else what amounted to indentured
servitude as maids and child-minders to more afuent white
families were the only ways to survival. The latter is then
indeed Nina's eventual fate when her father sends her to
work for a family in town.
Nina's mother, Barta, is oppressed to the point of being
broken in body and spirit by her husband and their desperate
circumstances, but as a white woman, she also has a power,
sanctioned by the colonial law of the time, that exceeds that
of the mixed-race Fiela. The ironic dichotomy between the
proud and feisty mixed-race Fiela and the decrepit and
servile white Barta disrupts the traditional idea of white
superiority and 'coloured' (mixed-race) servitude. It depicts
the plight of many white women, particularly here amongst
the very poor, under the authority of male dominance.
Conversely it depicts the loving relationship between Fiela
and her husband where she is clearly the dominant, arguably
even domineering, gure, albeit in a benevolent way.
In Sorg, Eva's relationship with her 'mistress' and rival for
Hendrik's affections, Isabella, is also dynamic and complex.
Isabella and her daughter, Cornelia (who is later called Lia),
likewise present the reader with a tragic commentary on
the possibilities open to young white women of the time,
albeit as rich men's daughters at the other end of the social-
class spectrum from Barta and Nina. As in Fiela's child, the
relationship between mixed-race and white women is of
central importance in Sorg. Both Isabella and Lia are depicted
as wielding great power but only in a sexualised way, either
overtly like Lia, the teasing coquette, or covertly through
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marriage and domesticity like Isabella, with the associated
tragedy that ensues for both. Male ownership by a father or
(potential) husband provides these women with power and
access to other types of ownership (house, clothes, servants,
social status) but, ironically, never the highly signicant
land which is reserved for male heirs only. In stark contrast
to Hendrik's 'ownership' of Lia and Isabella as father and
husband, Eva, the servant, ercely claims and protects
her independence even to the point of alienation and self-
destruction, refusing all forms of intimacy other than those
by means of which she can disrupt the conventional power
structures through controlling men (her lover and his sons,
one of whom is also her own). However, she also ultimately
controls others (often to tragic ends) through her sexuality but
with very different consequences as it makes her prosperous,
ensuring her the ownership of land and an inheritance for
her descendants and community.
Most signicant for the theme of female inter-racial
relationships is the fact that, at the close of both novels,
the white women experience a form of cathartic self-insight
which none of the men does, through their empathetic
engagement with 'the other'. This is an imaginary
confrontation and moment of catharsis in Barta's case when
she realises the extent and effect of the pain she had caused
others. For Isabella, it is a physical confrontation with the
blind Eva in Eva's cave-home when they symbolically have
tea together to share news of their respective sons in battle
during the South African War. Thus there is in each novel
the implication of forgiveness and reconciliation between the
women on opposing sides of the traditional power divide.
In both novels, the colour line, which becomes the fault
line of love and allegiance, is disrupted when, in Matthee's
novel, the two women who vie for the love of the child-man
Benjamin/Lukas both reconcile themselves with the truth,
namely, that he in fact belongs to neither of them, and in
Pistorius's novel, Isabella and Eva transcend their individual
personal pride when they become reconciled as mothers
instead of remaining opposing parties in the struggle
over a man who does not respect, love or care for either of
them – as the name of the farm might ironically suggest:
Sorgniet, meaning 'carefree' or 'no worries' but also implying
'uncaring' or 'careless'.
Neither novel engages with trauma, culpability and
forgiveness as simplistic perpetrator versus victim
dichotomies. The struggles and suffering of all the characters
(female and signicantly also male, but the male characters fall
outside of the immediate scope of this article) are revealed as
part of a larger agonistic human existential crisis though this
does not imply that the sufferings are equal or even similar.
Eva remains viciously bitter and vengeful about ownership
and the inheritance of land until the end of the novel, and
it is only through the reunion of her and Hendrik's white
and mixed-race descendants many generations later that
her 'ghost' is nally laid to rest in the novel, implying some
sense of hopefulness for reconciliation and forgiveness in
this country – an experience of forgiveness and reconciliation
that has become a new and rather idealised national
metanarrative for South Africa. In contrast, Matthee's Fiela
is much more readily forgiving, transcending her bitterness
in forgiving Barta. It is, however, only after Benjamin/Lukas
nds his own way 'home' to Fiela and openly chooses and
acknowledges her as his mother that she can fully release
her hatred of Barta and extend forgiveness. She sends him
back to poverty-stricken Barta with a gift of half a sheep as a
gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Conclusion
McClintock (1990:199, 1993:61) reminds us that Ernest
Gellner (1964) said that nationalism is not the awakening of
nations to self-consciousness: It invents nations where they
do not exist. In such a national project, ction often plays
a signicant role as trauma and its effects are remembered,
re-imagined and recreated via the cultural texts of a society.
McClintock (1990:199, 1993:61) further reminds us that
Benedict Anderson (1983) said that nations are imagined
communities in the sense that they are systems of cultural
representation whereby people come to imagine a shared
experience of identication with an extended community.
In South Africa's recent discursive history, one nds many
different hermeneutic streams which conate in the one big
existential question: 'Who are we?' Thus, for example, one
paradoxically nds the inevitable supercial pre-election
political rallying cries and popular cultural discourses
about nation-building, for example during international
sporting events, co-mingling with the deep trauma of TRC
testimonies. All of these are part of the multivocal processes
of re-invention which are, as McClintock argues (1990:199,
1993:61), not mere allegorical phantasmagoria of the mind
but, in fact, intricate social fabrications invented through
daily contest – in newspapers, schools, presses and popular
culture (McClintock 1990:199) – and which are radically
constitutive of people's identities (McClintock 1993:61).
When reading texts such as Matthee's Fiela's child and
Pistorius's Sorg, one must not lose sight of the fact that
these novels are but two imaginings amidst a multifarious
multitude. However, they do seem to align themselves with a
specic narrative approach to the experience of the trauma of
apartheid and its aftermath, portraying the anticipation and
possibility of a more stable future (Tran 2011:60). They also
contribute to the (re)construction of popular national grand
narratives which are often narratives of (increasingly female)
heroic struggle, traumatic loss, redemption, forgiveness
and the triumph of the human spirit despite seemingly
insurmountable adversity. These novels provide us with
spaces to remember imaginatively and deal with the trauma
of ghosts from the past in all their dialectical and complex
multivocal reconstructions in order to reconstruct self-
consciously and self-narrate a new national autobiography
which manifests as a revised hermeneutically-styled
hybrid process of participative meaning-making. Written
two decades apart, both novels represent moments on the
continuum of discursive transformation in the multi-tongued
national narrative process by means of which South Africa
slowly deals with its traumatic history and ideologically
realigns itself with an ideal of equality and non-racialism.
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Acknowledgments
Compeng interests
The author declares that she has no nancial or personal
relationship(s) which may have inappropriately inuenced
her in writing this article.
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ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
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![Susan Marais]()
- Marita Wenzel
This article investigates how J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" (1999) – portrayed as a postcolonial and postmodern fictional event – embodies, problematises and subverts the vision of the pastoral farm novel tradition by transcending traditional configurations of space and place. The novel offers a rather bleak apocalyptic vision of gender roles, racial relationships and family relations in post-apartheid South Africa and expresses the socio-political tensions pertaining to the South African landscape in terms of personal relationships. As a fictional reworking of the farm novel, "Disgrace" draws on the tradition's anxieties about the rights of (white) ownership, but within a post-apartheid context. As such, "Disgrace" challenges the pastoral farm novel's "dream topography" (Coetzee, 1988:6) of the family farm ruled by the patriarch – a topography inscribed – with the help of the invisible labour of black hands – as a legacy of power and ownership to be inherited and cultivated in perpetuity. Accordingly, the concept "farm" is portrayed as a contested and liminal space inscribed with a history of violence and dispossession – a dystopia. This article therefore conceptualises "Disgrace" as an antipastoral farm novel that reconfigures the concept "farm" – within the context of the South African reality – by subverting, inverting and parodying the structures of space and place postulated by the pastoral farm novel.
- Benedict Anderson
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
- H. Rider Haggard
Book synopsis: When Allan Quatermain is approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to search for Sir Henry's missing brother, deep in the African interior, he agrees to lead their expedition. Quatermain has a map to the fabled King Solomon's Mines, whose treasure the missing man sought to attain. Their journey takes them to Kukuanaland, where they find a warrior tribe in thrall to King Twala. Soon the white men are embroiled in a desperate tribal battle, and Quatermain's expedition can only reach its goal with the aid of Gagool, the ancient 'mother' no one trusts. Haggard's exciting adventure story captivated readers when it was first published in 1885. It helped inaugurate a wave of 'lost world' romances inspired by the exploits of British explorers in colonial Africa. This new edition looks at Haggard's own African experiences and unlikely literary success, and his ambivalent attitude to the native tribes and the ravages of the British Empire.
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288312359_National_trauma_work_and_the_depiction_of_women_in_two_Afrikaans_historical_Karoo_novels_Fiela%27s_child_and_Sorg
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