Etienne van Heerden’s most recent novel has been translated into English. He spoke to Shaun de Waal
With the translation, one by one, of Etienne van Heerden’s novels (and a volume of stories) into English, his status as a major South African writer is becoming clearer to a larger audience.
His multi-prize-winning Toorberg, translated as Ancestral Voices, is a marvellous book, one which combines popular readability with literary excellence and profound issues in a manner accomplished by few writers of any nationality. It was followed into English by Casspirs and Camparis, Mad Dog and Other Stories and, last year, Leap Year.
Van Heerden’s most recent novel, Kikuyu, in Catherine Knox’s translation, has just been published by Kwela and Random House. In it, a writer looks back on his childhood: the period is the early Sixties and the locale a “holiday farm” in the Fish River Valley. The older Fabian’s purview overlaps with what he saw and heard as an inquisitive child, observing the eccentrics of the farm in what his depressed and demented father calls the Moordenaarskaroo.
What you often seem to do in your novels is create a little community, even if it is a diverse or fractured community, so the novels are about interactions or clashes within that community.
Kikuyu is a hotel novel, and the hotel is a wonderful space to bring people together. I wonder if it’s not to do with the way I grew up, in a very isolated farm environment, where the society is automatically sealed in, closed. I was very conscious as a child that we lived in a valley, for example.
Part of that may be that I left the Karoo when I was 14 and it’s mythologised in my mind. Maybe that’s part of my way of mythologising characters.
I think it’s about the feeling of a world that was sealed off, and the fascinating relationships that evolve. What I love is to bring together people who are totally diverse, and I find all I’ve got to do is introduce them and then everything happens. They just start partying, and I love that.
Is there a political undercurrent here, an echo of the idea of Afrikanerdom as a self-contained unit, isolated against the world – “we’ll manage on our own”?
The novel’s fibre is autobiographical but its details are not. My mother was from an English family, and I can’t say I really grew up with the feeling of being isolated in an Afrikaner community. I’d rather say I grew up with a great sense of outsidership, that we as a family were different from other families. Maybe that creates the sense of isolation.
There is the very conscious instrument of the outsider coming in to the community – in Toorberg it’s the magistrate coming in and investigating. It could be seen as a metaphor for a closed society facing itself, at the hands of an investigator, and perhaps it can be seen very broadly as a metaphor for what’s happening to the Afrikaner community at this stage, but perhaps it’s a bit far-fetched for Kikuyu. It’s a fascinating idea. In Kikuyu the mature writer looking back is the outsider, the investigator.
Yet each of the characters in Kikuyu is an outsider in his or her own way – the travelling lesbian Tant Geert, the father with his hallucinations, the old warrior the Veteran, and so on.
These were the type of people that I grew up with. I come from a very eccentric family on both sides. In the Fish River Valley, and in the Agtersneeuberg, the farm of Toorberg, there were very eccentric people who didn’t fit the stereotypes at all.
So there’s a lot of autobiography in the novel?
My mother, for example, was a mathematics teacher and she wasn’t the type of woman to get mixed up with someone like the Veteran, but people who knew my mother think it’s an excellent portrayal of her as a person. It was written just after she died.
She’s almost the main character.
Almost. There are many things that are not her – the same with my father. My father was quite a tortured guy, but there’s a lot that isn’t truth. He was on LSD – they were exploring ways to treat depression.
Tant Geert is very loosely based on Petronella van Heerden, the first Afrikaans female doctor. She used to visit our farm when I was a child. She wore these blazers and flannels, and sat like a man. Of course, she was a dyke but no one said it. A bright woman, she was the intellectual in the family. So it’s loosely based on her. I didn’t try to rewrite Petronella, it’s just a character I based on her. If the novel is autobiographical, you take it quite a long way from those origins. Your work often seems to start from a realistic basis, but you push it into another realm of intensity, like the vivid smells that pervade Kikuyu, or the quasi-mythical Beast that haunts the area.
When European readers read me they say the writing is much more African than we would know. Perhaps we’ve internalised more of Africa than we know.
What I call the mythological side you could see as magical realism – I prefer to see it as mythological. That is a realm that is African, and I feel comfortable with that. It sounds corny, but the first stories I heard were told by a coloured man, Robert. Every evening he sat in the kitchen and polished our shoes, and told us stories, mythological stories.
It’s also to do with that isolation, and coming back to childhood, it’s about a child looking at stuff. There’s not that much to look at, so what you do look at is loaded, charged. The gates, the furrows become mythological places, because there’s so little else. And life has a ritualistic element – at five o’clock, the cows go to the stable, and so forth.
It’s also because the book is about memory, and memory tends to intensify things, to give relief to them. It’s the intensity of memory.
There’s also the interplay between the young boy and the older writer. The young boy’s imagination is running riot already, and then you have him as an older writer, reimagining what has already been over-imagined.
It’s mostly a mature person’s viewpoint, but the book is dealing very self- consciously with the way in which we remember.
Isn’t it also about the stories we tell each other, perhaps conflicting stories, the way we constantly narrate ourselves and our lives?
Charles Jacoby [a visiting country singer] tells a story with his singing and his whole image. The father is in therapy, and the process of therapy is narrating yourself.
And presenting it to the therapist to be edited into shape.
Yes.
What is your interest in Olive Schreiner, who gets “resurrected” by Fabian and a friend in the novel? There doesn’t seem to be a connection to her work.
We had the farm next to Krantzplaats, where she lived and wrote, and her grave was on Buffelskop, just next to the farm. The stationmaster used to say, “Olaf Schneider – hy is daar begrawe!” My mother took me to the library, and there was the Olive Schreiner Room. The library was very important to us as a family in Cradock, a central place to go to on the way back from school, before driving back to the farm.
When I started writing, I thought, “Good heavens, such a coincidence – in the whole Karoo, two writers so close together.” The narrator in the book is a writer, so the resurrection of Olive becomes important – it’s the resurrection of the imagination. He is concerned with the power of the story.
In a recent novel, a writer is asked: “What is the purpose of serious literature?” So I put it to you.
One should first ask: what is serious literature? Serious literature is, in the first instance, about working with language, about looking at the world through the fibre of language. It works with language in a way that is different from the way journalism, say, works with language, and it does something to the fibre of language.
The purpose of literature, to me, would be to expand our way of looking at the world, expanding our world, creating spaces which haven’t been created before. If you create a character like Tant Geert, you create a whole space. Writing, for me, is a way of discovering, opening spaces. It’s like a mole, tunnelling underground, going this way, coming back, going that way. Dis om die volheid van die lewe te beskryf – our experiences, our sadnesses, our losses especially I suppose.
Good literature always has a confrontational gesture in it. It creates a new form of language; it confronts habitual language, our habitual ways of speaking. It’s also a confrontation with the world as it is known to us; it opens new possibilities. It’s a confrontation with existing ways of living and thinking and doing.
But it’s also confrontation between characters, and, of course, it’s a confrontation with the self. It’s about confronting meta-narratives, giving meaning to a stage in our history that is restless and difficult. It creates myths, it’s a way of mythologising our existence. People will always need stories.