Madame and Maid
Marlene van Niekerk’s audaciously innovative first novel, Triomf, drew dark comedy and pathos from a despised, dysfunctional and creepily inbred family of “white trash” Afrikaners anxiously awaiting South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 – the year it was published. With its use of slang and deflating assault on the shibboleth of linguistic as much as racial purity, it became the first novel in Afrikaans to win the Noma award for publishing in Africa. Triomf’s ironic setting was an eponymous Johannesburg suburb built on the rubble of Sophiatown, a multiracial haven of writers and jazz players bulldozed in the 1950s under grand apartheid. In her second novel, van Niekerk shifts further into the Afrikaner heartland, to a farm at the West Cape, to probe more traditional subject matter of maids and madams, power and land.
Published in 2004 as Agaat, and retitled The Way of Women in Michiel Heyns’s English translation, the novel is narrated through the unreliable eyes and memory of Milla de Vet, the inheritor of a farm named Grootmoedersdrift, outside the town of Swellendam. Milla, now 70, lies dying of a wasting disease. Paralysed but for her blinking eyelids, she is dependent for even the most intimate bodily functions on another woman, Agaat Lourier. Their intriguingly close yet oddly ambiguous relationship is gradually traced back almost 50 years, through Milla’s selective reminiscing and jottings from diaries she has kept since her marriage in 1947.
Agaat, born with a stunted arm on Milla’s mother’s estate and abused by the family that rejected her, was “saved” at the age of five by the childless Milla and installed on her farm, rather like what is known in Afrikaans as a hanslam, an orphan or rejected lamb reared by hand. Yet as so-called coloured in the baas household, the foundling was neither adopted child nor maid but required to fulfil both roles. The tensions and contradictions in Agaat’s position and the shifting neediness of her madam-cummother are amplified when Milla has a son. Yet Agaat, in a convoluted contest of wills with Milla, subverts her relegation to nanny and uniformed servant by displacing Milla in the boy’s affections. “I am a slave but You-are-mine,” she whispers in his ear.
Not long after democracy arrives in the mid-1990s, Agaat faces the prospect of freedom with Milla’s impending death. In less skilled hands, this reversal of power seems too literal and contrived. Yet for van Niekerk it becomes not so much a drama of crude playback as a minute exploration of intimate relationship corroded by unequal power, of enforced assimilation and complex strategies of resistance.
The Way of Women combines the stark intensity of a remarkable death-bed chamber piece, which nonetheless contains some humour, with a compendious sweep from 19th-century boom time in the Cape to the Angolan war, from farming manuals on bovine botulism to embroidery patterns and Afrikaans nursery rhymes. The book evokes worn images of heroic Boer womenfolk tilling the veld and delivering their own infants, while their menfolk go fishing and nurse hangovers. Some sections could have been trimmed, although the novel retains momentum and suspense, with surprises withheld till the end. With its own forensic take on the pathologies of maids and madams, it offers an understated cautionary tale on inheriting the lessons of the masters – and madams – along with their power.
Maya Jaggi, The Guardian Weekly