Complicity,entanglement,and translation: Three English/Afrikaans texts

Abstract

Using Mark Sanders’ definition, Afrikaans is a “complicit” language, both in terms of the assistance it has given to apartheid, and in the way it evidences cultural and linguistic entanglement. But the texts examined in this article, J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977), Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998), and A.H.M. Scholtz’s Vatmaar (1995), also show a keen awareness of English’s role as an instrument of cultural imperialism. They are not composed in, or translated into, English in an attempt to distance themselves from complicity so much as to reveal it. They also speak of the opportunities writing in a hybridized English, or in a mixture of English and Afrikaans, offers to those who wish to describe intimacies “gained”, “resisted”, “uninvited” or “ignored” in opposition to apartheid (Nuttall, 2009: 1). As Afrikaans-speaking writers writing in English and vice versa, Coetzee, Krog, and Scholtz complicate the relationship between language and identity that apartheid sought to codify and secure and which local and global literary markets often reinforce. Their texts tend to offer linguistic hybridity, if not always as a practice, at least as an ideal in the pursuit of which such fixed categories are destabilized, and the folded-togetherness of South African languages and identities can be realized in textual and material terms. In considering the interaction of textual studies, literary studies, and print culture around questions of translation and translingualism in South Africa, it is hoped that we might create more space for the publication and critical reception of texts that re-fashion national and personal histories in radically productive ways.

Introduction

Sarah Nuttall has proposed that we think of post-apartheid South African culture and society in terms of “entanglement”, a “condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with”, displaying “an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored and uninvited” (2009: 1). As Nuttall shows, this concept is itself entangled with that of complicity (2009: 6–7), which Mark Sanders describes both in its narrow sense of culpability or responsibility, and in the wider sense of “human joinedness” or “foldedness with the other” (2002: 1; 11). Sanders is concerned with the role of the intellectual in opposition to apartheid, and not with the literary work itself. But his attention to Afrikaans literary culture, under the influence of intellectuals such as N.P. van Wyk Louw and Breyten Breytenbach, together with his articulation of complicity in both these senses, can be extended into a way of seeing literary works by Afrikaans writers as themselves enmired in questions of cultural responsibility for apartheid, and as simultaneously providing evidence of the folded-togetherness of South African languages and ethnicities.

Sanders’ concept of complicity is helpful in foregrounding the implications of writing in Afrikaans and the pressures which bear for and against that choice. It also allows us to understand Afrikaans texts in their wider South African and global setting, rather than viewing them as “local” in a restrictive sense. Afrikaans writers have long been interested in literary and cultural contexts beyond South Africa, and in reimagining those contexts to include or inform their own experience. ¹ Their relationship with English and with English translations is a complex one, because of sociopolitical considerations such as the contamination of Afrikaans by apartheid (at both a linguistic and an ideological level, through the vocabulary of apartheid as well as its worldview, and its attempt to claim the Afrikaans language itself for a white speech community), the painful history of Anglo-Afrikaans conflict in which attempts to “Anglicize” Afrikaners played an important role, and the dominance of English in a contemporary global setting of neo-colonialism by English-speaking nations.

The case studies below offer examples of texts by Afrikaans-speaking writers that have been written in English, or translated into English by the writers themselves. Such traverses are driven by engagements to political and textual cultures, at a local and global level, demonstrating their writers’ understanding of the complicity of South African languages in both the narrow and the wide sense described by Sanders. The evidence of these linguistic entanglements is apparent in English texts which are infiltrated by Afrikaans (dialogue, glossed words, code switches) to varying degrees, but does not always survive global or even local publication. In the case of the last text under consideration, it has largely been lost in the translation of an English — or at any rate bilingual — work back into Afrikaans. Collectively and individually, these texts (if not, to the same degree, the books as which they are sold) put pressure on the boundaries and limits of a literature in Afrikaans, and to a certain extent, a South African literature in English as well.

J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (1977; 1978)

Although not an Afrikaans writer in a conventional sense, J.M. Coetzee — one of whose parents was English-speaking and the other Afrikaans — has declined to release himself from membership of the Afrikaner “gang” and the complicity that comes with it (Coetzee, 1992: 341–3). He has shown considerable interest in Afrikaans literature and literary history, and has, on one notable occasion, written in the language. As is often noted, the 1978 South African edition of In the Heart of the Country is bilingual, with English narration but predominantly Afrikaans dialogue. ² There are early examples of speech, if not dialogue, in both English and Afrikaans. Magda’s father’s bride uses English, the “brown folk” are imagined talking in Afrikaans in section 13, Magda pictures her expressions and tone of voice “speaking” to her servants in English in section 18, and addresses Anna in Afrikaans in section 32 while trying to hide the parricide. But beginning at section 41, with the first conversation between Magda’s father and Hendrik, the interactions between servants and masters, father and daughter, and, later, Magda and the neighbours, take place mostly in Afrikaans. As a result, the hierarchies of the colonial household and community are particularly obvious in the South African edition, as Andrew Van der Vlies shows. The dialogue illustrates Coetzee’s feeling that Afrikaans is a language well suited to conveying “racially defined” distinctions (Coetzee, 1988: 131); Van der Vlies describes how it demonstrates Magda’s adherence to racist and patriarchal conventions and her sense of station with regard to her servants. It also, perhaps less obviously, reveals the gendered and inter-generational power relations at work in the exchanges between Magda and her father. ³ In her diverse relationships, Magda uses Afrikaans to express both “solidarity and distance”, as does Hendrik, whose Afrikaans accommodates itself both to a “performance” of subservience, and to claims of affinity (for example when demanding his salary from Magda) (Van der Vlies, 2007: 138–9).

More could be made, in considering the 1978 edition, of how the dialogue expresses the white characters’ desire for intimacy with their servants. Magda is nostalgic for past intimacies, physical and linguistic (“I grew up with the servants’ children. I spoke like one of them before I learned to speak like this […] My lost world is a world of men, of cold nights, woodfire, gleaming eyes, and a long tale of dead heroes in a language I have not unlearned” (Coetzee, 1978: 6)), while her father, in seducing Anna, plays with the different registers available through the informal second person pronoun “jy” (“jy” is how a master would address his servants, but also how those on intimate or friendly terms might address each other) (Coetzee, 1999/1977: 7). In these relationships, Afrikaans’ ideological association with the white hegemony, and its practical or emotional role as a lingua franca between whites and “coloureds”, are at work in sometimes contradictory ways. The language is, in itself, evidence of cultural proximity and of unacknowledged debts — the transformation of Afrikaans into the language of white supremacist nationalism is equivalent to a disavowal of its roots as a pidgin spoken by the early “coloured” population of the Cape.

Van der Vlies describes the scene, in section 74, in which Magda’s father and Anna “exchang[e] forbidden words”, as a violation of racial and linguistic orders which derives special power, in the South African edition, from the use of personal pronouns in Afrikaans which are not translatable into English. He reads section 203 in relation to this moment: “[e]ager to find a way out of this linguistic and existential impasse, Magda attempts sisterly intimacy with Klein-Anna” (2007: 141). Though generally persuasive, this reading downplays the scene’s homoeroticism (by contrast, Derek Attridge observes that Magda feels physical desire for both Hendrik and Anna) (2004: 25). Magda asks Anna invasive questions about whether she gets undressed to go to bed with Hendrik, whether she enjoys sex (“Kry jy lekker” — the Afrikaans suggests pleasure and voyeurism to a greater degree than “do you have a nice time” in the international version), how it was with Magda’s father, and so on, then lies down with Anna, despite the latter’s obvious reluctance: “I find her head and press my lips against her forehead. For a moment she struggles, then stiffens and endures me. We lie together, at odds, I waiting for her to fall asleep, she waiting for me to go” (1978: 101–2).

In section 74 Magda complains that her father has destroyed the words “ons” [“we”], “ons twee” [“we two”] and “kom jy saam met my” [“come with me”], and then laments that he and Anna have corrupted the language she must speak to Hendrik (1978: 35; 1999/1977: 38). Perhaps what he has destroyed is the illusion of innocence in the language she shares with him. Magda’s speech in this section moves between English and Afrikaans, and since English is apparently Magda’s interior language, her deployment of it here seems to reveal a wish to share her private self with Anna. But it also constitutes an attempt to escape the culpability associated with using her father’s language. (It is significant that Magda never addresses Hendrik in English; her sense of culpability or sympathy towards him is obviously of a different order.) Sanders discusses Coetzee’s indebtedness to René Girard, showing how for Girard, “human desire is triadic: the desirer takes another’s desire as a model and imitates the other in his or her desire. What ensues is a dynamic of escalating rivalry over the desired object, which sees desirer and model become increasingly indistinguishable” (2002: 152). Magda’s attempt, in competition with her father, to escape complicity in the sexual exploitation of Anna, is unsuccessful and disingenuous, as Anna’s resistance and Magda’s coerciveness (“press”, “struggles”, “stiffens”, “endures”) testify.

The scene also speaks of the entanglement of English in Anna’s seduction, a seduction which bears a strong resemblance to rape. Attridge’s concerns about the dangers of reading Coetzee’s novels in an “allegorical” way are instructive. It might nevertheless be useful here to think about the role English and English literature have played, as educational instruments in South Africa and other English-speaking colonies, in the psychological conditioning of servant populations — in the colonization of the mind, to use Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s formulation (1986). Magda herself is subject to English’s sovereignty, to the extent that she is an Afrikaans speaker. Brian Macaskill calls Afrikaans her “native tongue” (1998: 75), but as Attridge points out, the text never addresses the matter of which speech community Magda belongs to: “is Magda really an English speaker, for whom Afrikaans is a necessary instrument in practical matters?” (2004: 22). She is, like her creator, perhaps most accurately understood as belonging to both — or as having an English self and an Afrikaans one that behave in sometimes different ways. ⁴ If English is a language in which Magda expresses her power over Anna, it is also, significantly, the language in which she is spoken to by the “bride” her father brings home — a situation in which Magda is subjected to the other woman’s pursuit of domestic power. Here, character and text are at odds. Magda switches between languages in an attempt to evade acknowledging complicity, or subservience, while Coetzee’s text displays its entanglement with the language of apartheid (and in a larger sense, the entanglement of white English with apartheid) as well as its vulnerable position as a “local” version of an international English work.

The South African edition of In the Heart of the Country was published by Ravan Press, which had also published Dusklands (1974), and which was associated with oppositional writing mostly by urban, black, English-medium writers, members of the Drum generation and their successors. It was the home of Staffrider magazine, a “cross-racial collaboration” set up by Mike Kirkwood (Sanders, 2002: 14; 170). ⁵ In 1974, Kirkwood had challenged “Butlerism”, what David Attwell describes as “a certain liberal sense of what it meant to be an English-speaking South African” (or ESSA) (1993: 30). Instead of viewing the ESSA, as Guy Butler had done, as a bringer of enlightenment and humanity, a mediator “facilitating the emergence of a more humane national culture and polity”, Kirkwood recontextualized “the ESSA identity in terms of imperialism”, claiming that the English “shared” with the Afrikaners the position “of the ruling class in an essentially colonial set of relationships, where stratification took on a racial coloring” (Attwell, 1993: 30–1). In the aftermath of the 1976 uprisings, which had responded to the imposition of Afrikaans-medium education (particularly for social studies and arithmetic) in black schools (Lodge, 1983: 328), the presence of In the Heart of the Country on the list of a press known for publishing oppositional black writing frames the novel within a larger discussion about the relationship between Afrikaans and epistemic violence. But the context of Ravan’s association with Staffrider and Kirkwood’s critique of English-speaking white South Africa also entangles the novel’s Englishness in responsibility for apartheid.

Considering the differences between the novel’s editions has offered productive ways of thinking about Coetzee’s contribution to “local” as well as international literary cultures, despite his “ongoing project” of rendering the category of a national literature “problematic” (Van der Vlies, 2007: 150). As Van der Vlies and Hermann Wittenberg have shown, the importance to Coetzee of offering a South African edition, even after an international English version translated by Coetzee himself had been published the year before, was considerable. It demonstrates his resistance to “the pure colonial situation” in which South African “literary products are flown to the metropolitan centre and re-exported to us at a vastly increased price”, his “commitment to radical politics”, and his desire to retain a South African audience for his work (Coetzee, cited in Wittenberg, 2008: 139; Van der Vlies, 2007: 135). Wittenberg describes Coetzee as withholding a “firm commitment to Ravan” in his concern that the novel would be banned from distribution in South Africa by the Publications Control Board (2008: 137). ⁶ He had also sought reassurance that Ravan was in a “‘position to survive the financial effects of a banning’” (Wittenberg, 2008: 136). In addition to his fears about what banning would mean for his own authorship and Ravan’s future, Coetzee was, according to Wittenberg, “troubled […] by the impact that possible censorship” might have on his “writing process” (2008: 137). However, having identified international publication as a solution to these problems, and obtained a contract with Secker and Warburg, Coetzee still pursued the publication of a South African edition, especially when — ironically — it appeared likely that the London publisher would not market the novel in South Africa out of fear that it would be banned. Coetzee’s willingness to publish even a “self-censored” version of the novel in South Africa demonstrates his concern not to lose his South African audience, which was significant (Wittenberg, 2008: 140; 142). ⁷ But where Van der Vlies sees Coetzee as “tacitly” recognizing that he was contributing to a “South African” literature with the Ravan edition (2007: 149), Wittenberg views the publication history of In the Heart of the Country as evidencing Coetzee’s wish to “‘break out of the local market’ — and to sacrifice local publication, if necessary” (2008: 146). He sees Coetzee as abandoning the “experiment of the vernacular edition” from then on, offering Life & Times of Michael K (1983) as an example of a novel that might also have been published in a bilingual edition (2008: 147).

The bilingualism of the Ravan edition complicates the question of the novel’s relationship with the canon, in both its international and local forms. In the Heart of the Country is often described as parodying the plaasroman or farm novel, whose influence on Afrikaans literature and usefulness for apartheid thinking has been discussed extensively by Coetzee and others. ⁸ Susan Fitzmaurice has described the transitions between English and Afrikaans in the Ravan edition as “correspond[ing] broadly with [Magda’s] two worlds: English as the language of private commentary, Afrikaans as that of fiction”; English expresses her “truth — her subjective, phenomenal world”, Afrikaans “the fictional life she creates for herself — a structural epic world which lies outside her experience” (1999: 180; 179). Fitzmaurice also points out that Afrikaans is Magda’s “medium of interaction” and that it is “confined” to dialogue (1999: 180). In contrast to Fitzmaurice’s observation about the relationship between Afrikaans and fiction, or fictionality, Attridge points out that Magda’s final address to her father is in “highly conventional ‘literary’ English”, although she “has always used Afrikaans” with him until that point (2004: 23). Magda’s “speech of reminiscence” to her father, through its connection with literary convention, draws attention to the novel’s relationship with the international literary canon at a moment when Magda herself seems to be looking for a way out of her physical and cultural isolation (namely through her interest in the Spanish-speaking pilots traversing her skies). Attridge, who is concerned to demonstrate the relationship of all of Coetzee’s fiction to the “global milieu”, remarks that “to encounter the juxtaposition between the two languages is to be made aware of the main narrative’s mediation via English, and via the European fictional tradition” (2004: 169; 22; my emphasis). What both his account and Fitzmaurice’s highlight is the way in which the entanglement of English and Afrikaans in the Ravan edition emphasizes the novel’s participation in textual cultures, demonstrating the complicity of these cultures in the local and global environments which gave rise to apartheid (in the narrow sense) and which demand opposition to it (in the wider sense).

But Fitzmaurice also observes how language “does the work of the brutal social order that it stereotypically encodes” and how Magda is “trapped by the social rules and controls of the languages she knows” (1999: 185; 184). Having recognized that her interactions with Hendrik and Anna are compromised by the servants’ subversion of linguistic codes through irony, and having failed to establish intimacy with Anna through the “intermingling” of linguistic forms (an attempt which must fail because these forms are “not reciprocal”), Magda tries to speak an “Esperanto-type ‘Spanish’” in an attempt to escape her “communicative vacuum” (1999: 181; 183; 184). This vacuum has been created partly by the clear separation of languages which the transitions between English and Afrikaans reflect, and their separate functions in signifying Magda’s “distinct worlds” (1999: 168). Fitzmaurice suggests that linguistic hybridity, as exemplified by Esperanto, offers a way out of Magda’s impasse, but also that Afrikaans is “more resilient and less vulnerable than the social order” in crossing “the boundaries of distance and deference” (1999: 185). This is an experiment in which “coloured” Afrikaans writers were already engaged, and that white writers — most notably, Marlene van Niekerk — would continue by putting even greater pressure on the boundaries between English and Afrikaans, and between “high” or standard and demotic Afrikaans. Coetzee’s novel, particularly in its “local” variant, draws attention to the entanglement and complicity of South African languages as well as the difficulties of trying to escape the sociopolitical circumstances they encode and perform.

Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (1998)

Country of My Skull is the poet Antjie Krog’s account of her experiences, as a radio journalist, of covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; it is also a representation of her attempt to come to terms with her own Afrikaansness, the complicity of white Afrikaners in apartheid, and the place of Afrikaans and white Afrikaners in the new nation. ⁹ She attempts with some difficulty to replace her sense of embeddedness within a culture and language delimited by white supremacy and nationalism, and a landscape perceived through the language and ideology of that nationalism, with an allegiance to the Commission itself as (sometimes, not always) representative of the new and future South Africa. In a sense this is a form of self-translation, and her commitment to it is conveyed through expressions of faith in the role played by the Commission in healing and rebuilding the nation, as well as textual gestures of longing and belonging in relation to the Commissioners themselves, particularly Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The heightened and self-conscious tone and diction of these moments call attention to their emotional density and strain, and also reveal some of the challenges for Krog in marrying her role as a reporter with a poet’s instincts and habits. Tutu’s stewardship of the Commission is informed by his own “Africanization” of the concept of reconciliation and his celebration of ubuntu (as Sanders explains, the Zulu formulation “‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’” means “a human being [umuntu] is a human being through human beings [abantu]”) (Krog, 2002/1998: 110; Sanders, 2002: 120). This notion of a shared humanity is seized upon by Krog in her attempts to come to terms with the differences between South Africa’s peoples, as well as her struggle with her fears that whites, and particularly Afrikaners, will be excluded from the making of the country’s future.

Krog/the narrator’s sense of marginality is profound, complex, and multifaceted. She is on the periphery of all of the communities represented in the book, including her family and her fellow reporters (despite the closeness that comes from shared trauma, the latter are often divided along lines of gender and ethnicity in their responses to the Commission’s work and the testimonies they hear). As a liberal in an Afrikaner community which is represented generally as resistant to change, she is something of an anomaly. In her professional identity as a reporter and writer she must attempt to remain critical about, if not emotionally removed from, her subject. In her relationship with the Commission and the community of victims it supports, she is also marginalized, in various ways, by her ethnicity, race, and gender as an Afrikaans-speaker, a white person, and a woman. The book represents the Commission as failing or sidelining female victims, and suggests that a moment of tension between Krog and the Commission, in which her journalistic integrity is questioned, is partly the result of sexism. ¹⁰

In her obvious desire to reach a readership which includes victims of apartheid, women, opponents of racism, and other whites willing to acknowledge their complicity in apartheid, Krog offers her book in English. She feels a second-class citizen in the language: she recounts having to look up “scurrilous” in her Afrikaans-English dictionary before she can understand what Deputy Chairperson Alex Boraine has accused her of, and in a moment of fury at her editor complains that her tongue has been “paralyzed in a fucking second language” (2002: 227; 167). She also clearly resents English cultural imperialism in its local and international forms: a businessman is told he “‘should apply for amnesty’” for his Victorian accent and the narrator offers only an apparently approving silence; an English-speaking journalist’s sarcastic denunciation of an Afrikaner leader makes her anger shrivel “before his Accent. And his Truth”; the British Queen’s visit is described with anti-colonial outrage and disdain (2002: 241; 131; 7–9). Despite these personal reservations, however, she recognizes that writing in English allows her to avoid using a language closely associated with trauma and violence (the book is dedicated to “every victim who had an Afrikaner surname on her lips”, and Krog acknowledges that “all the words used to humiliate, all the orders given to kill, belonged to the language of my heart”); it also gives her access to readers whose “truths” are different to hers, and for whom English is not “a colonial language” like Afrikaans (2002: 238). ¹¹ Writing in English she is able, as has been said of Nadine Gordimer, “to get around that most difficult, loaded issue of self-interest by replacing the question of what will happen to whites under the coming black majority rule with the demand of how to offer one’s self” (Barnouw, 1994: 257–8). In a revealing moment, she quotes a statement by her mother that writing in Afrikaans is a “privilege bought and paid for at a price”, which “brings with it heavy responsibilities”, subverting the nationalist subtext of these sentiments to suggest that it may be required of Afrikaners, in the new dispensation, to offer up Afrikaans in reparation for apartheid (2002: 98–9). ¹² Clearly, for Krog, the nationalism which reveals the evidence of its complicity (in the narrow sense) in its achievement of cultural and linguistic singularity (Afrikaans), must be prepared to sacrifice that singularity in pursuit of complicity (in the wider sense) or ubuntu.

It is perhaps inevitable that an Afrikaans writer of Krog’s political persuasion, handling a subject such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission several years after the end of apartheid, should choose to write in English. As Sanders points out, the position of the dissident writer within Afrikaans culture — of lojale verset or “loyal resistance” — had become untenable by the 1980s (2002: 60–1; 140). Associated with the canonical poet N.P. van Wyk Louw, who had promoted apartheid in Europe, and compromised by its history as a means “for the Afrikaner establishment to contain and to regulate dissidence”, lojale verset, together with “the example of Louw”, eventually “lost most of its credibility among Afrikaners opposed to minority rule” (Sanders, 2002: 139; 140). ¹³ As Krog replaces her allegiance to Afrikanerdom with an allegiance to the Commission, she reveals her vulnerability to the restrictive fealties (her complicity in the narrow sense) of group membership which lojale verset serves. In discussion with a colleague about the culture of honour which keeps individuals from speaking out against their group even when it does wrong, Krog (perhaps playing devil’s advocate) questions whether ubuntu “effectively safeguard[s]” this culture. Her colleague responds that “‘Tutu has gone a long way towards redefining the concept of ubuntu’”, and poses the “‘more interesting question’” of whether Krog herself has been safeguarding it in her relationship with the Commission. He goes on to remark upon the speed with which she offered her apology after the attack on her journalistic integrity, despite having been “proved […] right”. He explains her behaviour to her in terms of a desire to be “included in their circle” (2002: 263–4), but might as easily describe it in terms of lojale verset. Krog is “taken aback” by his observation. The exchange reveals the way in which conceptual or ethical habits can, at a subconscious level, survive translation across languages and contexts. It displays and to an extent affirms Krog’s entanglement in Afrikaans culture, since it is that very entanglement which permits her, however problematically, to commit herself to a new national community.

Looking back on the process of writing Country, Krog describes having to translate her poems “for black students or for poets with whom I shared a stage at rallies and poetry readings” (2000: inner cover; 3). She says that she “longed to interact as a poet with South Africans who do not read Afrikaans” but felt “alienated” from translations of her poems, which seemed “too English and remote from their Afrikaans origins” (2000: 3). As a result she decided to write Country in Afrikaans and translate it herself into English, “keeping the underlying Afrikaans structure and rhythm intact” (2000: 3). Country is the first of her works to make its original appearance in English. Its successor, A Change of Tongue (2003), was also translated from an Afrikaans draft by Krog and her son, but was subsequently released in Afrikaans in 2005. Both Country and A Change of Tongue were edited by Ivan Vladislavić, a highly regarded South African writer in English. Country does indeed speak with an Afrikaans accent at times, particularly when the subject is one with which Krog feels a troubling, if not exactly “uninvited” intimacy (to use Nuttall’s words). Krog recounts how an English-speaking colleague tells her that her “whole body language and tone of voice” changes when she is talking to fellow Afrikaners, and there is a studied (self-conscious, performative) quality to the sections dealing with Afrikaans public figures and subjects (e.g., “The newspapers publish photographs of a toothy P.W. lovingly kissed by a blonde woman with skattige ogies” — “sweet little eyes”, says the glossary) (2002: 92; 265; 299).

The book contains a great deal of paraphrased or direct reported speech, often by non-Afrikaners, so more than one accent can be heard, and the Afrikaans “structure and rhythm” for which Krog makes a claim is framed by, and folded together with, the structure and rhythm of many other South African languages. Much of the testimony reproduced in the book has itself already been translated by Commission interpreters, so Krog’s retrospective foregrounding of the work’s “underlying” Afrikaansness is a revealing distortion. (Nuttall suggests that it may be of benefit to Krog to be perceived as Afrikaans since “there has been in South Africa since the 1980s a public discourse by blacks to the effect that they would rather deal politically with Afrikaners than with the brand of liberalism said to characterize English-speaking South Africans” [2009: 67].) The interpreters in the book describe their personal identities collapsing into the identities of those for whom they translate (“At Tzaneen a young Tswana interpreter is interviewed. He holds on to the table top, his other hand moves restlessly in his lap. ‘It is difficult to interpret victim hearings,’ he says, ‘because you use the first person all the time. I have no distance when I say “I” … it runs through me with I’” [Krog, 2002: 129].) As the quotation marks around “I” fall away, so the text in turn enacts a surrender of its Afrikaans identity to an English one, which is itself a mediation between, or collapsing together of, languages and cultures. Krog’s is not a Victorian-accented English which, in the very act of speaking, reveals the extent of its non-cooperation with the Commission’s project (the businessman criticized for speaking in it is clearly invested in denying his and his company’s involvement in apartheid). Rather, in its acknowledgement of complicity (in both senses), it attempts to realize in text the principle of ubuntu to which Tutu’s leadership of the Commission aspires.

A.H.M. Scholtz, Vatmaar (1995; 2000)

The manuscript of Vatmaar, written (mostly) in English by an Afrikaans-speaking, “coloured” writer, was originally sent to an “English publisher in Cape Town”. The editor there referred it to an Afrikaans publisher on the grounds that “so much Afrikaans appeared in the text”. He “suspected that the writer was Afrikaans-speaking” because the manuscript “‘felt’ so Afrikaans” (Van der Merwe, 1996: 26). ¹⁴ This is the account provided by the novel’s editor and Kwela Books’ director, Annari van der Merwe, while Heilna du Plooy attributes the realization “that the novel was essentially Afrikaans, in linguistic structure as well as vocabulary” to Van der Merwe herself (2002: 161). The language of the manuscript, which Van der Merwe describes as “vreeemde Afrikaanserige Engels” [“strange Afrikaansy English”] (1996: 26) was, as Du Plooy puts it, “reworked” by Wium van Zyl in “close collaboration” with the author (2002: 161). The novel was later translated into an English version by Chris van Wyk. Vatmaar won the Eugene Marais Prize, the M-Net Book Prize, and the CNA Literary Award, but neither of A.H.M. Scholtz’s subsequent works (Langsaan die Vuur, 1996 and Afdraai, 1998) was translated into English.

Van der Merwe provides her account of Vatmaar’s publication history in response to a magazine reader’s letter expressing her reservations that a translated work was being hailed as a “‘great discovery for Afrikaans’”. She reassures the reader of the novel’s authenticity (of its Afrikaansness; that the reworking of the manuscript was overseen by the writer himself), and offers an example of a “typical” passage, selected “fairly at random”, in its progression from manuscript, to Van Zyl’s “translation”, to published text (1996: 26). (The quotation marks around “translation” are Van der Merwe’s own, and indeed Van Zyl is acknowledged in the novel itself not as a translator as such, but rather for his “contributions to the nurturing [“versorging”] in Afrikaans of those parts of the manuscript which were originally in English”). From her example, the manuscript’s language seems to span Afrikaans and English, and standard and demotic Afrikaans, in a way not dissimilar to Van Niekerk’s Triomf (Queillerie, 1994). One section is particularly rich and effortless in its transitions between linguistic codes:

The Domanie said, he is so grateful that God has given him the geleentheid to welcome the lovely en gesonde mense van Vatmaar into the fold of die Moederkerk as Afrikaans was their huistaal. There it goes again Oom Chai thought onse huistaal but your Moedertaal. (Van der Merwe, 1996: 26)

Van der Merwe notes that the italics are Scholtz’s own. In Van Zyl’s initial translation, an effort to standardize the Afrikaans content is apparent: for example, “Domanie” becomes “dominee” (the former, demotic, spelling is restored in the published version). He also formalizes the punctuation, grammar, and orthography in the original, for example: “Daar begin dit alweer, het Oom Chai gedink. Dit is onse huistaal, maar jou moedertaal!” [“There it begins again, Oom Chai thought. It is our home language, but your mother language!”]. Note the addition of commas, a full stop and an exclamation mark; the downgrading of the upper case “M” on “Moedertaal”; and the introduction of deixis on “it is our home language”. The published version separates “al” and “weer”, and casualizes “dit is” to “dis”, but otherwise retains Van Zyl’s alterations. Perhaps most significantly, it changes the “your” before “moedertaal” to “their”. One can only speculate as to why this last change was made, with Scholtz’s approval. Perhaps the writer recognized the loss of the ironic effects of the code-switching in the original — which by virtue of its hosting of Afrikaans within English, effectively places scare quotes around “huistaal”, “Moedertaal” and even “Afrikaans” — and compensated for this loss by substituting a distancing pronoun. The substitution dramatically alters the passage’s meaning, particularly in terms of its sense of audience. Oom Chai’s critique of white Afrikaners’ linguistic proprietorship (they view Afrikaans as theirs by genetic inheritance, rather than environment), addressed to an imagined audience of white Afrikaners, becomes a kind of aside, offered to Afrikaans-speakers excluded from the white hegemony. Given Oom Chai’s centrality as a character and his involvement in the narration of the community’s history, this raises intriguing questions about how Scholtz might have imagined his audience, through different stages of the novel’s development.

The comparison with Triomf, published a year before Vatmaar, is instructive. Van Niekerk’s groundbreaking novel makes extensive use of code-switching and demotic Afrikaans to undermine the nationalist myth of a “pure” Afrikaans language and ethnicity. As a highly educated, white writer, Van Niekerk could write in a non-standard Afrikaans without being viewed as a primitive, whereas much has been made by Van der Merwe and others of Scholtz’s “meagre” [“karige”] education in Afrikaans, as if he were a kind of Afrikaans-speaking Amos Tutuola — his novel a “jewel” in the rough, despite or perhaps because of its author’s lack of formal education (Kannemeyer, 2005: 670). ¹⁵ Van der Merwe says that, as a publisher, “you don’t want to publish a text that deviates so much from standard Afrikaans that this becomes an obstruction for the reader” (1996: 27), but this concern seems to me to belong to an Afrikaans literature before Triomf, or at any rate to a literary culture as removed from its surroundings as “white” Afrikaans has sometimes been from the actual speaking and writing habits of many Afrikaans-speakers. It neglects the long history of “coloured” and black writers who have used demotic and non-standard varieties of Afrikaans (which feature significant borrowing from English). It also represents code-switching, an inevitable characteristic of a multilingual society, as an impediment to a text’s comprehensibility. Van der Merwe clearly does not anticipate that the novel will reach an audience experienced in these linguistic manoeuvres — in other words, she expects it to find a readership accustomed, as white Afrikaans-speakers are, to “pure” Afrikaans. There may be an economic justification for this assumption, given the very high cost of books in South Africa relative to the earning power of many workers. Also, it is fair to say that there is an uncomfortable relationship between “coloured” identity and Afrikaans, which might deter “coloured” readers from buying a novel whose characters show a warm relationship with the language. (Until relatively recently “coloured” Afrikaans writers have had to defend themselves against the charge that to write in Afrikaans is to acquiesce with apartheid.) Economic considerations notwithstanding, what appears to be a kind of cultural imperialism on Van der Merwe’s part — the appropriation of the novel by the literary establishment she represents, away from English and arguably away from a “coloured” readership — sits uncomfortably with the novel’s critique of colonial rapaciousness and linguistic parochialism.

As Du Plooy explains, Vatmaar “can be translated as ‘For the taking,’ or something like ‘To be had’ in the sense of ‘You can take it’ or ‘You can have it’” (2002: 157). The (fictional) village of the novel’s title is founded on materials taken from Boer homesteads by the English military and its “Cape-boys” during the farm clearances of the South African War. ¹⁶ The narrator’s sympathy for these Afrikaner women and children, soon to end up in British concentration camps, is clear (and indeed the anti-British sentiments expressed here and there in the novel lend some credibility to Van der Merwe’s assessment of it as an Afrikaans work, although, of course, one does not have to be Afrikaans-speaking to be critical of British imperialism). ¹⁷ While the founders of Vatmaar are not chastised for their participation in these events, their actions are framed within a general thematics of appropriation and theft. Colonialism has introduced an alien concept — ownership of people and of the earth — and with it the practice of theft in various forms, including unpaid or underpaid labour. Ta Vuurmaak, an old Griqua man, reflects regretfully upon these cultural changes. Subjugated peoples respond by asserting their power, where they can get away with it, through theft (particularly of diamonds and livestock). But at the same time such appropriations are linked, figuratively, to the novel’s concern with linguistic and cultural “goods”, and with demonstrating their adaptability and importance. ¹⁸ This emphasis on appropriation and exchange, in concert with the novel’s title, works to remind readers both of the effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and of the absurdity of nationalism’s claim to ownership of language and culture.

The black cover of the novel’s first Afrikaans edition, inlaid with a sepia photograph of a “coloured” family, marks it as telling a story of the past, and of a community underrepresented in Afrikaans literature. (Subsequently the cover becomes more colourful.) There are a few striking and inevitable differences between the published Afrikaans version and the English translation which appeared in 2000. The title of the former is grammatically ambiguous and functions both as a proper noun and as an imperative, inviting readers to take a share in “coloured” Afrikaans culture, or perhaps to appropriate or recreate cultural goods in their own way. By contrast, A Place Called Vatmaar gestures towards the unfamiliar or the extinct, perhaps because it is aimed at an English readership that lacks an obvious linguistic kinship with most of the novel’s characters. In the former, speakers are marked by their use of different varieties of Afrikaans, calling attention to the diversity of the language and its speakers (one character, for example, is marked as a speaker of Cape Afrikaans or “Kaaps”, to use a term coined by Adam Small.) The translation tries somewhat awkwardly to reproduce the feeling of this language in English (e.g.,: “‘Jous know, I’ll never dig a grave for udder people’” for “‘Djy wiet, ek grawe nooit ’n gat vir ’n anner mens nie’”) (2000: 267; 1995: 223). The subtitle of the Afrikaans edition, “’n Lewendagge verhaal van ’n tyd wat nie meer is nie/A living story of a time that is no more” connects linguistic vitality with the demotic (“living” in standard Afrikaans is “lewendigge”), as well as orality and (hi)storytelling, in a way the standard English of the translation cannot fully convey.

Van der Merwe is concerned not to lose a book like Vatmaar, even with its “unusual genesis”, for Afrikaans, and to nurture a talent she believes to be lacking only the “self-confidence” to view itself as Afrikaans (1996: 27; 26). But however good her intentions towards the author himself, one wonders how much has been lost with the manuscript’s bilingualism, both in the Afrikaans version and in the English (re?)translation. As she deemphasizes the role translation has played in altering the text’s meaning and target readership — maintaining that the published version only realizes the manuscript’s (latent?) Afrikaansness — she declines to examine the ways in which the encouragement to think of himself as an Afrikaans writer might have fundamentally altered Scholtz’s career trajectory. (He would write in Afrikaans from then on, a fact which Van der Merwe offers as a kind of a priori proof of his Afrikaansness.) Her attempt to disentangle the manuscript’s English from its Afrikaans, and vice versa, reveals the application of standards which, I argue, should not hold sway in a literary environment which encompasses writers like Marlene van Niekerk and Adam Small.

It may not be entirely fair to see Vatmaar as a victim of a “pure” Afrikaans literature’s attempt to protect its embattled status, in the new nation, especially when one recognizes that the published novel does include demotic language. In fairness to Van der Merwe, we might credit her with a certain dedication to introducing Vatmaar’s emblematic, Afrikaans-speaking mixed-race community to a largely white audience at an opportune moment of political transition and national redefinition. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the radical experiment of Scholtz’s manuscript, which depicts the entanglement of English and Afrikaans in the linguistic world of many South Africans, has been sacrificed to the perhaps inevitable, standardizing economic drive of the local and global publishing industry. That there was not considered to be a place for a bilingual (or translingual) Vatmaar in a South African or world literature — as there was for In the Heart of the Country or Triomf — is, I think, a great pity.

Conclusion

Afrikaans is a complicit language, both in terms of the assistance it has given to apartheid, and in the way it evidences origins in languages as diverse as Zulu, Khoisan, Dutch, German, French, English, Arabic, and Malay. Perhaps, more than English and its local derivations, Afrikaans points towards the entanglement of the colonial and the indigenous, and of the impoverishment that can result when these concepts are disentangled. But I do not mean to suggest that it is the only South African language of which these principles are generally true. The texts I have examined here all show a keen awareness of English’s role as an instrument of cultural imperialism. They are not composed in — or translated into — English in an attempt to distance themselves from complicity so much as to reveal that complicity through juxtaposition, framing devices, and irony. They also speak of the opportunities writing in a hybridized English, or in a mixture of English and Afrikaans, offers to those who wish to describe intimacies “gained”, “resisted”, “uninvited” or “ignored” in opposition to apartheid. As Afrikaans-speaking writers writing in English and vice versa, J.M. Coetzee, Antjie Krog, and A.H.M. Scholtz complicate the relationship between language and identity that apartheid sought to codify and secure and which local and global literary markets often reinforce. Their texts tend to offer linguistic hybridity, if not always as a practice, at least as an ideal in the pursuit of which such fixed categories are destabilized, and the folded-togetherness of South African languages and identities can be realized in textual and material terms. Further research might investigate the extent to which post-apartheid writers are experimenting with bi- or multi-lingualism beyond English and Afrikaans, or consider the publication histories of these works in other languages and countries.

It is not my intention to claim for literature in South Africa a particular purchase on the challenge of describing complicity, or even to affirm an abstraction of complicity limited to the realm of the literary as offering any material reparation, or any form of consolation which might rival it, to those who have suffered under apartheid (Chew, 2012). Instead, I would like to suggest that in considering the interaction of textual studies, literary studies, and print culture around questions of translation and translingualism in South Africa, we might create more space for the publication and critical reception of texts that re-fashion national and personal histories in radically productive ways.