Charaxes and Collaborative Becoming in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat

Abstract

This article focusses on Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006 [2004] trans. Michiel Heyns) and its fabulation of the magical Overberg of the south-western Cape. While the mother–child bond has received much scholarly attention, what deserves closer examination is the tentacular imbrication of the creaturely world into this dynamic. Adopting a posthuman, ecocritical lens, this article highlights the intermediary role played by creatures in these complex intimacies. In particular, I focus on Agaat’s ‘kin-making’ with the Emperor Butterfly which serves as a mediator between Milla and Agaat. Elucidating the chthonic themes in the novel, I turn to Haraway’s Living with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which calls for making “kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (2016: 1). I argue that the multispecies kinship practices presented in Agaat provide a “response-able” approach to living on a damaged earth, planting seeds for “worldings committed to partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resurgence” in these hard times of planetary crises (71).

Keywords:

• Van Niekerk
• Agaat
• kin-making
• Donna Haraway
• butterfly
• sympoiesis
• chthonic

Acknowledgements

This article emerges out of my doctoral thesis, “Orion, Ram’s-horn and Labyrinth: Quest and Creativity in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, Agaat and Memorandum”, supervised by Prof. Cheryl Stobie. I am indebted to Michael Wessels for inspiring a revision of part of this thesis, and his guidance as the then external examiner of the thesis.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In South Africa the term ‘coloured’ does not refer to black people in general, but those commonly thought of as ‘mixed race’. Coloured people are also the descendants of Cape slaves, the indigenous Khoisan people and various other black groups as well as Europeans (Adhikari 2005: 2). They occupy an interstitial position between the white minority and black majority in the South African racial hierarchy (2). The term, ‘coloured’, is highly contentious because of its association with miscegenation, and thus scandal (Wicomb 1998). Also see G J Gerwel (1988).

2 In a lecture presented at the University of Utrecht Marlene van Niekerk (2008) discusses the shaman-like nature of Agaat Lourier and Lambert Benade in Triomf, referring also to their proclivity for starting fires.

3 The invocation of Osiris in the theology of the emperor butterfly is not the only reference made to Egyptian mythology. Milla directly refers to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which she misnames “The Book of Death”, after Agaat has prepared her “last meal” (Van Niekerk 2006 [2004]: 581).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean Rossmann

Jean Rossmann is a lecturer in English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College. Her research interests lie in South African fiction, world myth, ecology, spirituality and Nietzschean philosophy.