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English Studies in Africa

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‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of

the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature
David Medalie
Published online: 19 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: David Medalie (2012) ‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-
Apartheid Literature, English Studies in Africa, 55:1, 3-15, DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2012.682460

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 ‘TO RETRACE YOUR STEPS’: THE POWER OF
THE PAST IN POST-APARTHEID LITERATURE
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David Medalie

Abstract
In South Africa, many literary works published since 1994 are concerned with
the ways in which the past makes its influence felt in the present. History in these
works is not relegated to the past, but, paradoxically, is imbued with an active
and authoritative presence. This paper analyses the depiction of the presence
and power of the past in three significant novels of the post-apartheid period,
all of which address this issue explicitly and in detail: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,
Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat In all three
works the representation of post-apartheid South Africa is marked by dystopian
elements. Although certain characters experience inner growth and some display
generosity and compassion, these redemptive elements tend to be restricted to
individuals and to circumscribed interpersonal interactions, rather than being
suggestive of a wider social cohesion. The same is true of art, which, in different
forms, plays a significant role in all three works: there is no dearth of creativity
in individuals, but little to suggest the encouragement of social cohesion through
culture. Disgrace, The Heart of Redness and Agaat all present the past as readily
accessible, particularly to those who wish to perpetuate old grievances and
conflicts, or who seek historical justifications for present-day abuses. But what
they conspicuously do not represent is the integration of past and present in a
dynamic and healthy continuum. The past is thus shown to be more likely to
darken the present than to illuminate it.
Keywords: Coetzee, Mda, Van Niekerk, De Kok, South Africa, post-apartheid,
dystopia.

In Book VI of Virgil’s The Aeneid, Aeneas meets the Sibyl of Cumae. He enters a ‘vast cavern…
the secret place/ of the terrifying Sibyl’ (ll.10-11). This oracular figure is known for her ‘mystic/
utterances’ (ll.72-73): as Aeneas approaches her shrine, he finds that ‘[t]he vast flank of the
Euboean cliff is pitted with caves/ from which a hundred wide tunnels, a hundred mouths lead,/

3
DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2012.682460 english Studies in Africa 55 (1)
E-mail: David.Medalie@up.ac.za ©  University of the Witwatersrand
pp 3–15
 David Medalie

from which as many voices rush: the Sibyl’s replies’ (ll.42-44). The prophetess is not unwilling
to speak, but what she says is neither single nor simple: the ‘hundred mouths’ disperse meanings
in all directions and her words contain ‘fearful enigmas…tangling truths and mysteries’ (ll.98-
100).
Aeneas pleads with the Sibyl to allow him entry to the Underworld, so that he can see his
father once more: ‘…let me have sight of my dear father, his face; show me the way,/ open wide
the sacred doors’ (ll.108-109). The Sibyl assures him that there will be no difficulty in entering
Hades – ‘the path to hell is easy’ (l.126), she says. It is the return which will be fraught with
difficulty: ‘…but to retrace your steps, and go out to the air above,/ that is work, that is the task’
(ll.128-129).
In the story of Aeneas’s meeting with the Sibyl and his entry into the Underworld lie many
allegorical possibilities, some of which I have found it useful to draw upon in reflecting on the
relationship between past and present as represented in post-apartheid literature. Particularly
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suggestive are, firstly, the fact that the figure who makes it possible for Aeneas to return to
the past has made an art of elusive meanings, entangling ‘truths and mysteries’ in her clouded
prophecies; and, secondly, that having once chosen to enter a land where figures from the past
gather, the adventurer will find the journey back to the present arduous.
South African literature of the post-apartheid period is difficult to categorise. It is both
diverse and encumbered with sameness, profound and glib, predictable and unpredictable,
linguistically ambitious and linguistically drab. Making generalisations about it is problematic
and attempting to trace all its moods and manifestations is an impossible (and perhaps even
pointless) task. But what one can say is that, if one looks at the most significant literary texts of
the last seventeen years, what is central to most of them is a preoccupation with the relationship
between the apartheid past and the post-apartheid present. They seem unable to engage the
present without summoning the past. Jacob Dlamini, satirising what he calls a ‘romantic telling’
of South African history, in which ‘there is a neat separation between a merry precolonial Africa,
a miserable apartheid South Africa and a marvellous new South Africa in which everyone is
living democratically ever after’, concludes that ‘[t]here are many South Africans for whom
the past, the present and the future are not discrete wholes, with clear splits between them’
(12). Writing in 1994, the very year of the first democratic elections, Njabulo Ndebele warned
that ‘seldom does the new in human history emerge so clearly as the sun at dawn. Rather, the
new is experienced as a process of becoming’ (65). Those writers who have reflected in their
work this ‘process of becoming’ have tended to be suspicious of notions of historical rupture
and termination. They have sought, instead, to represent change as complex, knotty, jolting and
subject to unexpected turns and reversals.
This is exemplified in the poetry of Ingrid de Kok. Her third collection, Terrestrial Things
(2002), provides a multi-faceted exploration of the impingement of the past on the present in
contexts both personal and political. The volume is divided into four sections, one of which –
‘Stretched horizon’ – focuses explicitly on the past and includes scenes and presences from the
speaker’s childhood and youth. The first poem in this section, ‘Sticks on stone’, foregrounds,
particularly in the fourth movement, the complexity of the relationship between present and past:
IV
Gather it all together at once
in an instant, into the grip of one hand:
people, places, shapes, weather, times,
then drop like pick-up sticks on stone,

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 ‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature

observe intersections, scry the mirror

of the forgotten, read the bones. (ll.14-21) (41)

Even as she ‘gather[s] it all together’ (l.16), the speaker of the poem ‘drop[s]’ the disparate
elements of her past ‘like pick-up sticks on stone’ (l.19), with the intention, presumably, of
assembling them yet again. The past, according to these images, is kaleidoscopic: ceaselessly
moving in and out of coalescence, constantly losing and regaining its patterns. Scrying (or
descrying) usually refers to the interpretation of the future by means of crystal balls and other
forms of divination, but here, significantly, the speaker urges herself to ‘scry the mirror/ of
the forgotten’ (ll.20-21), as if, paradoxically, it is the occluded past which requires prophetic
interpretation.
This idea recurs in many significant works of the post-apartheid period: the notion that the
past is known and yet unknown; that it is a terrain which reassures us with its familiarity and
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alienates us with its strangeness. To demonstrate this, I have chosen to focus on three novels:
J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, published in 1999, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, published
in 2000, and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat, published in 2004 in Afrikaans, and in an English
translation (by Michiel Heyns) in 2006. I am not suggesting that these three are more important
than other works written after 1994, nor am I implying that it is unproblematic to extrapolate
from them in order to make claims about post-apartheid literature. But I do feel that, in different
ways, these three novels – in what they have in common, and in the ways in which they differ
from one another – guide us towards a recognition of the centrality of the past in post-apartheid
writing, and help us to frame important questions about it.
If one looks back at diagnoses of and prophecies about South African culture during the
apartheid years, what one finds in the work of certain writers and cultural commentators is a
belief that literature and other art forms have the potential to be a socially unifying force, and
the hope that after apartheid they would fulfil that very function. Not everyone shared this belief
or set much store by this hope; but it is nevertheless striking how both recur across the decades.
Guy Butler, for instance, writing in 1950, shortly after the Nationalist Party came to power,
asks whether it is possible for literature to ‘have a substantial effect on society’ and whether
it could ‘help to bring about the cohesion necessary for a common culture’ (38). Nat Nakasa,
writing in 1963, speaks of ‘a shared nationhood, the idea of a common experience’ and of South
African writers ‘accept[ing] their presence in the country as members of one community, the
South African community’ (82). In 1983, Es’kia Mphahlele laments that ‘[i]n the absence of
a national literature that is defined by common ideals, sentiments and major concerns, South
African writers find themselves speaking, recording and replaying from separate cubicles’ (376).
Lewis Nkosi, writing in 1994, anticipates that the ‘total abolition of apartheid’ will lead to ‘the
creation of a single national culture, certainly I hope with local variations, which will embrace
all the people of South Africa’ (40).
Such hope and ambitions may seem naïve in the twenty-first century, particularly in view of
the tiny local readership available to most South African writers and the almost negligible status
of literary culture in efforts to promote social cohesion in South Africa. From that perspective,
South African literature has largely failed to deliver what was sought (or has failed to engage
those for whom it was intended), and may be said to have at best a very minor role to play. That
is what one is forced to conclude if one looks at it from the outside and sees it as a commodity.
But what of the inside – the work of literature as artefact, as an expression of and judgment on
the dream of ‘cohesion’? What do these works tell those of us who read them; what do they say

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 David Medalie

in particular about the textures of newness in a reconstituted society, and about the trace of the
past as an element in that reconstitution?
J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is undoubtedly the best-known literary text of the post-
apartheid period, and, arguably, the most famous South African novel written in English since
Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.
Interestingly, all of these works lie outside the years of formal apartheid: The Story of an
African Farm was written during the colonial period, Cry, the Beloved Country just before the
Nationalist Party victory of 1948, and Disgrace five years after the first democratic elections.
Paton’s novel and Coetzee’s, framing as they do the apartheid years chronologically, seem to
invite comparison, particularly since Cry, the Beloved Country tends to be associated with hope,
while Disgrace has gained notoriety as a gloomy or pessimistic novel. However, it is not without
its redemptive elements, which has led to much disagreement about the extent to which it does
or does not convey despair about or disillusionment in post-apartheid South Africa.
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Part of the difficulty is that such possibilities of hope, of secular redemption, which the
novel construes are located entirely in the individual – in his or her capacity to change, to slough
off even engrained modes of conduct or thinking – and in small, circumscribed and compromised
interactions between individuals. None of this seems to permeate the wider social context. And
perhaps this is what has made the novel seem bleak to many readers: not that the characters are
unsympathetic – for, indeed, most of them have at least some redeeming qualities, and there
are instances throughout of acts of generosity, compassion and forgiveness – but that they seem
to live their lives in a society adrift in vice or amorality. In Cry, the Beloved Country, there is
a moral logic (characteristically liberal-humanist) which Paton urges: change the heart of the
individual, and that transformed individual in turn will help to bring about change in society.
But in Disgrace even the hope of such a logic falters: individuals seem unable to enlarge their
lives or their actions and are thus doomed to inconsequentiality, as suggested by David Lurie’s
perception of himself as ‘obscure and growing obscurer. A figure from the margins of history’
(167).
When Lurie first invites Melanie Isaacs to his home, at the beginning of his seduction of her,
he invites her to watch a film by Norman McLaren. It features two dancers:

Recorded by a stroboscopic camera, their images, ghosts of their movements, fan out
behind them like wingbeats. It is a film he first saw a quarter of a century ago but is still
captivated by: the instant of the present and the past of that instant, evanescent, caught
in the same space. (15)

The film, for Lurie, is visual poetry. It appeals to him because the camera has succeeded in
capturing the trace of the past movements of the two figures as they dance in the present, thus
achieving an almost magical simultaneity of past and present: ‘the instant of the present and the
past of that instant, evanescent, caught in the same space’. Here there is a synthesis of past and
present, the one folded into the other in perfect reconciliation.
The dancers in the McLaren film represent a utopian configuration of the relationship
between past and present, but elsewhere in the novel the situation could not be more different:
there the relationship tends to be dystopian, damaged and damaging itself further, as the past
forces itself onto the present and grinds it down with its oppressive weight. ‘History’ in Disgrace
is almost a character in its own right, pursuing a severe logic of its own. This comes across in one
of the rare instances in which Lurie’s daughter, Lucy, speaks to him about what happened when
the two of them were attacked on her smallholding and she was raped:

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 ‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature

Halfway home, Lucy, to his surprise, speaks. ‘It was so personal,’ she says. ‘It was done
with such personal hatred. That was what stunned me more than anything. The rest was…
expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them.’

He waits for more, but there is no more, for the moment. ‘It was history speaking through
them,’ he offers at last. ‘A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have
seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors.’ (156)

Lurie is attempting to console Lucy with his reassurance that ‘[i]t may have seemed personal,
but it wasn’t’, but the vision he presents her with, of a past deterministically and inexorably
‘speaking’ through a brutal present, and particularly through violence, is devastatingly bleak.
From a socio-political point of view, it represents the nadir of hopelessness, for it seems to
preclude the possibility that a society can turn itself around, that it can avert the grim logic of its
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past, which – at least according to a widespread perception – is what South Africa did with the
abolition of apartheid.
Post-apartheid South Africa as represented in Disgrace is the site of crude struggles for
ownership of land and possessions, but also of history and stories. Part of what angers Lurie in
the wake of the attack and Lucy’s refusal to lay a charge with the police is that her decision gives
the rapists full possession of the story of what occurred: ‘[l]ike a stain the story is spreading
across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners. How they put her in
her place, how they showed her what a woman was for’ (115). South Africa has a long history
of victors who, with their coercive narratives, erase the stories of those whom they overpower;
and it is no coincidence that most of the novel is set in the Eastern Cape, where the old frontier
wars were fought. In this new incarnation of the conflict the ham-handed appropriation of history
continues.
Like Aeneas, Lurie encounters the Underworld, but in this case it is a Hades of the here-
and-now; a living hell. As in his earlier novel Age of Iron (1990), Coetzee uses Dante’s Inferno
to comment intertextually on social and political problems in South Africa. Having failed to
persuade Lucy to leave the smallholding where she was attacked, Lurie moves into a rented room
in Grahamstown and explains to Bev Shaw why he cannot continue living with his daughter:

‘The problem is with the people she lives among. When I am added in, we become too
many. Too many in too small a space. Like spiders in a bottle.’

An image comes to him from the Inferno: the great marsh of Styx, with souls boiling up
in it like mushrooms….Souls overcome with anger, gnawing at each other. A punishment
fitted to the crime. (209-210)

Having refused or failed to form a viable human community in the living world, these ‘souls’
experience an horrific punishment in the Underworld, where they are compelled to spend eternity
in diabolical and futile fury, since, as Lurie points out, the ‘punishment [is] fitted to the crime’.
The analogous implication seems to be that South Africa, having for many years chosen the path
of ‘anger’, must now face the consequences in the form of a remorseless and retributive chain
of cause and effect.
However, the novel presents us with images of the Underworld which are not quite as
despairing. In the opera which Lurie is writing, entitled Byron in Italy, the dead Lord Byron,
‘exiled from life’ (185), sings from the Underworld in response to the song of the grieving

7
 David Medalie

Teresa, a middle-aged woman with whom he had an affair when she was young. The voice
of the figure of Byron in Lurie’s incomplete opera is not robust: it is described as ‘wavering
and disembodied’, as ‘faint’ and ‘faltering’ (183); but answer it does. It is not deaf to Teresa’s
supplication. However, it responds to the specific circumstances of her life: a woman ‘past her
prime’ (182), whose earlier good looks have been replaced by a ‘heavy bust’, ‘stocky trunk’ and
‘abbreviated legs’ (181). It has no wider resonance.
Towards the end of the novel, Lucy tells her father that, even though she is to give birth to
a child who was conceived when she was raped, she is ‘determined to be…a good mother and a
good person’, adding ‘[y]ou should try to be a good person too’. The two sentences that follow,
emanating from the third-person narrator, but reflecting Lurie’s thoughts, seem mournfully
bathetic: ‘A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times’ (216). In Cry, the Beloved
Country, the hope was that goodness in people would mitigate, even avert a looming historical
and political darkness; but now there is only goodness within or despite the ‘dark times’. In
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Disgrace, responsiveness to others and inner growth are muted possibilities at a personal or
interpersonal level, but the damage inflicted by the injurious relationship between past and
present as represented in the novel is so great that it seems to have extinguished the likelihood
of any form of social morality.
In The Heart of Redness, the focus is on a community divided within and against itself in
a conflict that has endured for a century and a half. Like Disgrace, Mda’s novel is concerned
with the legacy of past generations, with what – as David Lurie puts it – ‘came down from the
ancestors’. The narrative moves continuously between past and present and, through an elaborate
paralleling of incidents and doubling of characters (some of them with the same names) across
the generations, establishes the past as an unshakeable presence in the present – seen either as
stubbornly regressive or as resurgent and vital, depending on one’s perspective. The hostility,
described as a ‘war’ (62), afflicts the Wild Coast community of Qolorha-by-Sea. The apparently
unbridgeable division is between the Believers and the Unbelievers. The Believers are associated
with ‘redness’ as a result of the ‘red ochre that women smear on their bodies and with which
they also dye their isikhaka skirts’ (71). For them, ‘redness’ signifies cultural continuity and
authenticity, as essential to the community as blood is to the life of the individual. But for the
Unbelievers, ‘redness’ represents ‘unenlightenment’ and ‘backwardness’ (71).
The tension between the two groups dates back to a specific historical incident: the prophecies
of Nongqawuse, who, in 1856, with the support of other prophets and prophetesses such as
Nombanda, Mhlakaza and later, Nonkosi, instructed the amaXhosa to kill their cattle and destroy
their crops and the contents of their granaries. ‘Lungsickness’ had afflicted the herds, and this
was understood to mean that ‘[t]he existing cattle are rotten and unclean’ (54), as Mhlakaza puts
it. The illness of the cattle, in turn, was interpreted as a consequence of the spiritual corruption
of the community: ‘[y]ou have all been wicked,’ Mhlakaza says, ‘and therefore everything that
belongs to you is bad’ (54). Nongqawuse prophesied that once the cattle had been killed and the
crops destroyed, ‘new people [would] arise from the dead…with new cattle, horses, goats, sheep,
dogs, fowl and any other animals that the people may want’ (55). The Believers complied; the
Unbelievers rejected her prophecy. The disagreement permeated even the family unit: husbands
and wives turned against each other, and so did the twin brothers named Twin and Twin-Twin,
who became bitter foes.
As in Disgrace, the stranglehold of the past is associated with anger. The praise name
of Twin-Twin, the Unbeliever, is ‘He Who Wakes Up With Yesterday’s Anger’ (212). In the
contemporary period, the community as a whole is still wrestling with ‘[y]esterday’s [a]nger’,

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 ‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature

divided as ever into Believers and Unbelievers. The quarrel has simply acquired a new set of
contexts. The Unbelievers disparage traditional cultural practices and are in favour of a plan to
construct ‘a casino on the Gxarha mouth’ and facilities for ‘water sports in the great lagoon’ (66).
Modernity, for them, is identified with progress. Most vociferous amongst them is the principal
of the local secondary school, Xoliswa Ximiya, who deprecates all manifestations of traditional
culture: ‘[t]he mere mention of [Nongqawuse’s] name makes her cringe in embarrassment’ (96)
and she sees it as shameful that ‘the girls are frolicking about topless, wearing only traditional
skirts’ (150). She is emphatically in favour of the casino and holiday resort. The Believers, on
the other hand, oppose the development, arguing that it will destroy their traditional way of life.
Throughout the novel there is a motif of scars and scarring. For no obvious reason, the
Unbelievers find themselves afflicted by scars which appear on their bodies. Their ancestor
Twin-Twin was left with scars as a result of a flogging ‘after he had been identified as a wizard
by Prophet Mlanjeni’ (13). Now one of his descendants, Bhonco, the father of Xoliswa Ximiya,
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squirms in his sleep because his scars are itchy: ‘[h]e cannot reach them properly, because they
cover his back….Why he has to be burdened with the scars of history, he does not understand’
(12). At the end of the novel, in a delightful irony, these ‘heathen scars’ afflict Xoliswa Ximiya
too: this independent and modern woman, of all the Unbelievers the most scornful of traditional
cultural practices, ‘finds that the scars of history have erupted on her body. All of a sudden her
ancestor’s flagellation has become her flagellation’ (261).
Despite the humorous aspects of this, the association of scarring with history points to a
morbid relationship between past and present. The community of Qolorha-by-Sea has been
damaged by its history. In addition, the wider South African context, as represented in the novel,
is lamentably dystopian. Camagu, who has returned to the country after decades of exile in the
United States, is bitterly disillusioned by the corruption of the political elite, known as ‘the
Aristocrats of the Revolution’ (33), with their ‘luxury German sedans, housing allowances, and
expense accounts’ (30). He is also critical of the passivity of the population at large: ‘[w]hining
and whingeing’, he thinks, ‘is the pastime of this new democracy’ (32).
Camagu makes his home in the village and, being an outsider, tries his best to avoid being
drawn into the festering strife: ‘I am not an Unbeliever,’ he says, ‘I am not a Believer either.
I don’t want to be dragged into your quarrels. My ancestors were not even here among yours
when the beginning of your bad blood happened’ (118). But it is impossible to remain neutral.
In the end, he finds himself siding with those who oppose the construction of the casino and
holiday resort, convinced that it is the expedient developers who will benefit from it, not the
local community, and that it will cause the destruction of ‘indigenous plants and birds’ (277). A
compromise of sorts is found when the area is declared a national heritage site and holiday camp,
which will draw tourists to the area, including those who wish to visit Nongqawuse’s valley. In
an historical irony, the prophetess who caused such widespread devastation is now transformed
into a mythological figure to entice tourists – as Camagu says, ‘Nongqawuse really sells the
holiday camp’ (276). The past, when all else fails, can become a commodity.
Unlike Disgrace, The Heart of Redness is partly a comic novel, an unpredictable mix – as
is characteristic of much of Mda’s fiction – of comedy, tragedy and magical realism. But the
characters are no less ‘burdened with the scars of history’ than are those in Disgrace. Although
Mda’s disapprobation of contemporary South Africa centres in this novel on political corruption
and indifference to the plight of marginalised people, whereas for Coetzee violence is the major
ingredient, the critique is equally scathing. In The Heart of Redness, such accommodations of past
and present as the novel provides are marked by compromise and vulnerability. The establishment

9
 David Medalie

of the national heritage site does not bring an end to the conflict within the community, and the
site itself remains vulnerable: Camagu thinks to himself that ‘[t]he whole country is ruled by
greed….Sooner or later the powers that be may decide, in the name of the people, that it is good
for the people to have a gambling complex at Qolorha-by-Sea. And the gambling complex shall
come into being’ (277). In the war between past and present as represented in The Heart of
Redness, the most one can hope for, it seems, is a short-lived and uneasy truce.
Although the community as a whole is weakened and torn apart by stubborn and futile
quarrels, the novel suggests that there are still sources of cultural vitality which may be tapped.
Mda locates these chiefly in song, especially that of Qukezwa, a young woman with whom
Camagu falls in love. Qukezwa sings while she rides a galloping horse:

Many voices come from her mouth. Deep sounds that echo like the night….Flaming
sounds that crackle like a veld fire. Light sounds that float like flakes of snow on top of
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the Amathole Mountains. Hollow sounds like laughing mountains....As if a whole choir
lives in her mouth. (152)

Unlike the ‘hundred mouths’ of the Sibyl of Cumae, Qukezwa’s singing unites ‘[m]any voices’
and harmonises them, whereas the Sibyl’s multiple communications disperse and fracture
meaning. The young woman’s singing makes Camagu believe that she ‘could be the guardian
of a dying tradition’ (152). It is not clear, though, whether the gifted young singer will be able
to make that ‘dying tradition’ part of a living present. As in Disgrace, art – specifically music
and song – seems to inhabit a separate sphere, unable to make a significant contribution to the
revitalisation of an enervated community.
Of the three novels under discussion here, Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat1 offers by far the
most intricate investigation of the relationship between history and the present. As in The Heart
of Redness, the narrative oscillates continuously between past and present, but whereas in Mda’s
novel there is a relatively straightforward to-and-fro movement between the mid-nineteenth
century and the late twentieth century, in Agaat we find layers and layers of ‘pastness’: episodes
from the early 1950s, from the mid-1980s, and references to ‘deep’ cultural histories, interwoven
with the present, which take the narrative even further back in time. As in Disgrace and The
Heart of Redness, contemporary South Africa – at least in its more social, public aspects – is
represented in largely unflattering terms: Jakkie, returning from Canada for his mother’s funeral,
discards his newspaper at the airport, dismissively describing its contents as ‘[r]ugby players on
the front page and the back page and the centre pages, lawlessness and corruption, child rape,
political denial of AIDS, middle-class sex scandals, letters from indignant creationists’ (682).
However, unlike Coetzee’s and Mda’s novels, the representation here of dystopian elements has
a perfunctory quality: it is not where the heart of this novel lies.
What Van Niekerk gives us instead is a dialectic of past and present which is so intricate, so
convoluted, so claustrophobic, and rendered in such exquisite and tortuous detail, that it is almost
impossible to say where the one ends and the other begins. In Disgrace and The Heart of Redness
the past has left its scars, literal or figurative, but in Agaat the past is still being discovered,
still emergent, still being born, still dying. It crowds and threatens to stifle the present: with
memory, with sensory stimulation, with tenderness and with sour rebuke. The use of detail in
this voluminous novel of almost seven hundred pages is, from a certain perspective, a form of
plenitude: a tour-de-force of inventive seeing and thus of creating the thing anew. But there is
another way of interpreting it. Jakkie, who has been away for years from Grootmoedersdrift, the

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 ‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature

farm where he grew up, and which is the setting of the novel, speaks of ‘[a]n abundance that
never suffices, as always on Grootmoedersdrift’ (677). The accumulation of detail in the novel
may also be understood as ‘an abundance that never suffices’, as an urgent and desperate attempt
to fill the spaces left by loss, displacement and hollowness.
Milla de Wet, stricken with Motor Neurone Disease, unable to communicate except through
blinking her eyelids, is cared for in the last years of her life by Agaat Lourier, a coloured woman
who has been part of Milla’s household ever since Milla took the child, who was physically
deformed and had been abused and malnourished, away from her family and brought her to
Grootmoedersdrift. Like the mentally handicapped Benjy in William Faulkner’s The Sound and
the Fury, who narrates an entire section of the novel although he has no ability to speak, the
mute Milla narrates the scenes set in the present. In both cases, the narrative is going beyond
what is realistically feasible to do more than ordinary human speech can ever do: it is speaking
what cannot be spoken, telling us what silent sorrow and voiceless suffering would sound like
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if only they could make themselves heard. Agaat is about the power of artifice and of making:
descriptions of stitching, sewing and embroidery abound, and they are associated with the
vaulting artistry of a narrative which, in supplying silence with a voice, makes a possibility out
of impossibility. Milla says sewing is an attempt to ‘reconcile the world with itself’ (387: italics
in the original), and the same is true of a narrative which tries to sew everything together. Agaat,
saddened by the departure of her adored Jakkie, Milla’s son, when he goes away to high school,
embroiders onto a cloth her vision of what a rainbow looks like. Milla’s description of the cloth,
years later, shows that she has come to understand how Agaat has woven sorrow and loss into it:

It’s an embroidery of nothing and nowhere. What Agaat must have imagined to lie behind
the tender despair of defenceless creatures, behind the firefly, the evening star, the poppy,
the blond lad in his corduroy pants. Everything that slipped out of her grasp, Jakkie’s
whole childhood, replaced with this embroidered emptiness. (218)

In narrative terms, the intricacy of the ‘embroidering’ – with fine and elaborate detail, with
metaphor, with allusion – may be seen as an analogous attempt to make something out of
‘nothing and nowhere’, to express empathy, to compensate for (and yet also to acknowledge)
loss and emptiness.
The relationship between the two women is profoundly complex and necessarily ambiguous,
considering the uncertain status of Agaat within the De Wet household: more than a servant,
yet never quite one of the family. By the time Milla is in the last throes of the disease, Agaat
has, at least ostensibly, become the one with all the power. In gaining possession of the farm,
in instituting a ‘new order’ (330), she has been empowered beyond what anyone could have
imagined when she first arrived. But she has no family of her own and her relationship with the
other coloured people is strained, since she treats them sternly and with no small measure of
condescension. Yet, even when Milla is utterly helpless and Agaat entirely in control, even while
Agaat – who has insisted on caring for her herself – ministers with extraordinary solicitude to
the dying and incapacitated woman, the old struggles continue to express themselves. Nothing,
it seems, not even illness and death, can bring an end to them. The two women are bound to each
other: as Milla says, ‘our imagination is a shared one…we thought each other up’ (211-212). But
the bonds between them are imbued with meanings which change from moment to moment. The
problematic history of their relationship obtrudes to such an extent that there is never a clear-
cut now in their response to each other, only an accumulation of past moments permeating the

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 David Medalie

present. Milla’s husband says bitingly that the relationship between Milla and Agaat is a ‘joint
unholy history’; a case of ‘lov[ing] your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart’ (545).
‘How many voices has Agaat?’ (450) asks Milla. It is an impossible question to answer,
since Agaat remains throughout an enigmatic figure, given to gnomic utterances. When Jakkie,
who wants to take her for a spin in his aeroplane, urges her to remove her servant’s attire, saying
‘[y]ou are not your apron and your cap’, she replies, ‘I am’ (609). Later he even describes her as
an ‘Apartheid Cyborg. Assembled from loose components plus audiotape’ (677). Only towards
the end does one get an intimation of what she really thinks; until then, she is someone onto
whom others tend to project their anger and frustrations. She reads Milla’s own diaries back to
her, an activity which the stricken woman interprets as Agaat’s ‘squeez[ing] anew from history
a last pressing of indignation’ (236). Milla rescued her, but then rejected her – particularly when
she fell pregnant and made Agaat move out of the house and into the servants’ quarters. She is
the older woman’s creation, but also – to borrow a word from Coetzee – her ‘disgrace’. Milla
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describes Agaat as her ‘archive’, her ‘parliament’ and her ‘hall of mirrors’ (554). Increasingly
she recognizes that their relationship will always be limited by the language of ordinary human
intercourse, which encumbers them with the detritus of old and tortuous power relationships.
For her to understand what it must ‘feel like to be Agaat’, Agaat would have to ‘explicate it
in a language other than the tongue [Milla] had taught her’ (554). In order for them to relate
differently to each other, they would have to devise an entirely new mode of communication:
Milla has a fantasy in which she sees herself and Agaat concocting together ‘an adequate
language with rugged musical words’ in which they could ‘argue and find each other’ (555). But
such a language does not exist.
I wish now to return to the questions I posed earlier and ask, again, what understanding
we may gain from these novels about the power of the past as represented in post-apartheid
literature, bearing in mind that these three works constitute a small sample, and with an
awareness that a different selection of texts would probably provide different answers, or at
least different emphases. In all of these three, the past – whether associated with colonialism or
apartheid or both – remains an insistent and haunting presence, almost like a spirit in purgatory,
unable to come to rest because its demands have not been met and its wrongs have not been
righted. This unappeased and unsatiated past infiltrates the present and threatens the future. It
remains: on the skin, in the bones, in silences and in words. It perpetuates and even nourishes old
resentments, so that, like Twin-Twin in The Heart of Redness, people continue to ‘wake up with
yesterday’s anger’ or, like Agaat (according to Milla’s interpretation of her feelings and conduct),
they ‘squeeze anew from history a last pressing of indignation’. It has no fixed shape or pattern
and tends to engraft itself parasitically onto contemporary conflicts. It has damaged relationships
between individuals, but not irreparably: all three novels enact possibilities for forgiveness and
depict the formation of powerful and, in some cases, unexpected bonds between individuals,
often forged out of the pain of past and present suffering. The greater damage seems to be to
the fabric of society itself and to the very notion of social cohesion. The Heart of Redness and
Agaat do, to some extent, represent new social initiatives, but in the former, as we have seen,
they are tentative and modest, while in the latter they are associated mostly with Agaat’s taking
over the farm and running it as she wishes, but her dismissive attitude to the farmworkers seems
to imply that no general benefit will accrue. From that perspective, the often-expressed hope
that literature in the post-apartheid period would act as a socially unifying force seems utterly
lost, since not only has South African literature as a commodity failed to fulfil that function, but
the texts themselves seem deeply sceptical of (and therefore conspicuously fail to represent) the
possibility of social unity.

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 ‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature

What is striking, however, is the extent to which forms of art are given great prominence
in all three novels: music, singing and dancing, embroidery and writing. This suggests that
inventiveness and creativity have proved to be more than capable of surviving the damage
inflicted on the present by the past. But the creativity tends to be enclosed in privacy rather than
being socially expansive, and may therefore even seem esoteric – the most extreme example of
this being David Lurie’s attempts, while his own life crumbles around him, to write an opera
about Lord Byron’s sojourn in Italy. There is very little sharing of creativity, and almost no sense
in which the individual vision may be invested with social currency. The novels place much
emphasis on the making of art, but very little on the making of culture.
Like George Orwell before him, George Steiner has devoted a great deal of attention to what
he sees as the fundamental connection between politics and language. For Steiner, inhumanity at
the political or social level will inevitably manifest itself in discourse. In ‘The Hollow Miracle’,
a controversial essay published in 1959, Steiner discusses what he believes to be the deplorable
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state of the German language after the war:

A language shows that it has in it the germ of dissolution in several ways. Actions of the
mind that were once spontaneous become mechanical, frozen habits (dead metaphors,
stock similes, slogans)….Instead of style, there is rhetoric. Instead of precise common
usage, there is jargon….All these technical failures accumulate to the essential failure: the
language no longer sharpens thought but blurs it….The language is no longer adventure
(and a live language is the highest adventure of which the human brain is capable). In
short, the language is no longer lived; it is merely spoken. (208)

These three novels are anything but ‘technical failures’. Their linguistic virtuosity, especially
in Mda’s and Van Niekerk’s novels, betokens a form of transcendence. In Steiner’s terms, all
three enact the idea of language as ‘adventure’. Based on the criteria outlined above, the novels
suggest that change in South Africa has not been a ‘hollow miracle’. Nevertheless, in each of
them there remains a hollowness that will not be filled, a sombre journey that no amount of
linguistic inventiveness can turn into an adventure. Like the scars on the Unbelievers’ backs in
The Heart of Redness, these texts cannot help reproducing the scars and disgraces of the past, of
being encumbered themselves by the very history they seek to exorcise or transform.
The notion of language and story-telling damaged beyond healing as indexical of psychic
and social damage is the subject of Ingrid de Kok’s poem ‘Parts of speech’, which is also from
Terrestrial Things. It is the first poem in a section entitled ‘A room full of questions’, which
deals with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (described as ‘this stained place’) (l.11)
(21) and the testimonies provided by victims and oppressors. ‘Parts of speech’, especially in the
first stanza, offers a cheerless vision of what great suffering does to language and story-telling:
Some stories don’t want to be told.
They walk away, carrying their suitcases
held together with grey string.
Look at their disappearing curved spines.
Hunchbacks. Harmed ones. Hold-alls. (ll.1-5)

The stories ‘walk away’, defeated (or filled with sad resignation) and deformed by what they will
not tell. They are the ‘[h]armed ones’, metonymic of the damaged lives they represent. Later in
the poem, however, the speaker envisions what these stories could do if it were possible to urge
them into speech:

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 David Medalie

Why still believe stories can rise

with wings, on currents, as silver flares,
levitate unweighted by stones,
begin in pain and move towards grace,
aerating history with recovered breath?

Why still imagine whole words, whole worlds:

the flame sputter of consonants,
deep sea anemone vowels,
birth-cable syntax, rhymes that start in the heart,
and verbs, verbs that move mountains? (ll.16-25)

These final stanzas pessimistically relinquish the hope of liberating the stories – ‘[w]hy still
believe…’ (l.16); ‘[w]hy still imagine… ’(l.21) – while at the same time intimating what such
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a liberation would achieve. The lines provide the very language which they declare to be
impossible. Within the sad renunciation, there is a soaring lyricism as the speaker imagines
stories ‘ris[ing]/ with wings, on currents, as silver flares’ (ll.16-17), the imagination summoning
into being whole words, whole worlds and verbs ‘that move mountains’ (l.25). Significantly, the
healing of wounded stories and of a damaged past is central to this transcendence: the speaker
describes stories that ‘begin in pain and move towards grace,/ aerating history with recovered
breath’.
The dialectic of possibility and impossibility which these lines articulate is akin to what we
find, in very different ways, in Disgrace, The Heart of Redness and Agaat. They too perform
acts of imaginative and linguistic virtuosity even as they show what is impossible; what
cannot be done or undone. All three novels do indeed describe a trajectory that ‘begin[s] in
pain and move[s] towards grace’, although ‘grace’ is in each case muted or qualified. In The
Heart of Redness and Agaat, there is an attempt to ‘aerate history’, to disperse the darkness and
claustrophobia of the past, but it is only partially successful, while the pervasive dystopia of
Disgrace shows history almost deterministically maintaining its grip. This has a profound effect
on the relationships between the characters: it forces all of them, not only Agaat and Milla, to
inhabit a ‘joint unholy history’. The crippling weight of the past contorts the most magnanimous
of gestures, so that even moments of rapprochement seem suspect: further examples of ‘loving
your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart’.
In addition, it necessarily affects also the relationship between the text and the reader:
at the most basic level, these novels (especially Disgrace and Agaat) are likely to make the
reader ‘uncomfortable’; to disturb him or her. As long ago as 1961, Nadine Gordimer described
the relationship between writer and reader in South Africa as ‘an extraordinary and terrifying
intimacy…[t]hey walk, hand in hand, round a dark house scarcely knowing what they may
discover together about their way of life’ (38). Fifty years later, the description still seems
pertinent. Then separation from and ignorance of other people’s lives darkened every relationship,
including that between writer and reader. Now it is the shadow of the past which unsettles writer
and reader by darkening the house which they explore together. All three novels reflect upon the
meanings of that shadow, but, like the Sibyl of Cumae, they do so in complex, indirect and even
mystifying ways, thus illuminating but also deepening the darkness with utterances that contain
‘fearful enigmas…tangling truths and mysteries’.
All three represent the past as easy to call upon, to incarnate in the here-and-now. The
perpetrators of violence in Disgrace, at least according to David Lurie’s interpretation of their

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 ‘To Retrace Your Steps’: The Power of the Past in Post-Apartheid Literature

motives, find justifications for their deeds in past abuses. The opposing sides in The Heart
of Redness have no difficulty in discovering in the past ample nourishment of their present
antipathies. In Agaat, old grievances thicken the air of the room in which Milla is dying. But
these novels show that, having once summoned the past, it is extraordinarily difficult to set it
aside, to divest it of its atavistic elements, or to reconcile and integrate it with the present in a
meaningful continuum. Thus they demonstrate the validity of the Sibyl’s cautionary words: ‘…
but to retrace your steps, and go out to the air above,/ that is work, that is the task’ (ll.128-129).

NOTE
1. I am basing my discussion here on Michiel Heyns’s acclaimed translation of Agaat into
English. The highly allusive quality of the novel and the extensive use of songs, rhymes
and idioms make parts of it very difficult to translate precisely or literally. The creative
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translation which Heyns provides instead may to some extent be deemed an original
work in its own right.

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Accessed 18 October 2011

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