Agaat

by Marlene Van Niekerk

Translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns

The events of the novel are plotted on a temporal axis from the middle forties of the previous century to the middle nineties with a sprinkling of historical references to the colonial boom time in the Overberg during the nineteenth century. The location is a farm 20 kilometers outside of Swellendam beyond the Suurbraak settlement on the farm Grootmoedersdrift (fictional but “generic”) situated on the Klipriver at the foot of the Langeberg mountain range.
The novel deals with the relationship between a 67 year old white woman Milla (the first person narrator and focaliser) in the terminal stages of ALS (motor neuron disease) and her coloured caretaker Agaat. (Agatha)

Through flashbacks and lyrical intermezzos provided on other narrative planes of the novel, the history that leads up to this situation is revealed.
As a young woman, Milla more or less “saves” the 5 year old and slightly physically handicapped Agaat from her abusive and impoverished parental home and more or less “adopts” her as her own child and gives her a new home. This initial relationship is of course compromised and structured by the racist and supremacist ideologies rife in Afrikaans community in the sixties as well as the generally punitive and puritan ideas about child rearing at the time.

When Milla – after seven years of marriage – eventually falls pregnant with her own first child, the coloured girl Agaat, now in her puberty, is abruptly and without warning moved out of her bedroom in the house and made to occupy sparse servants quarters in the backyard.
Almost overnight her adopted mother changes her status from daughter to nanny.
Agaat deals with this trauma by slowly carving out for herself an indispensable role as childminder, as governess, as housekeeper and as a kind of general inspector and surveyor of garden and farmyard. Her revenge is to apply to her masters all the rules that they taught her. She asserts a terrible power by harnessing to herself the means and opportunities of the system that subjugated her.

(From publisher)

Marlene van Niekerk was born in 1954 in the Caledon district in the Western Cape. She studied philosophy, languages and literature at the universities of Stellenbosch, Amsterdam and Witwatersrand. She is lecturer for the Department of Afrikaans and Netherlands at Wits. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Sprokkelster (1976) and Groenster (1983) and a collection of short stories, Die vrou wat haar verkykers vergeet het (1992), which has also been published in a Dutch translation (Arena, Amsterdam (1998). She is presently working on a new novel and a second collection of short stories. She lives in Johannesburg.