By Johann Rossouw**
But nothing remains of them today. Like the Jews, the Afrikaners have forsaken themselves to a mighty diaspora and left the blood river for good; though unlike the Jews, they even cast their language on the waters like stale bread, drifting downstream rapidly so that some of the words of the language, words that everyone remembered and used once upon a time, floated away, faster and faster, and disappeared under the water. Under, then above, like fingerlings, sometimes you could almost see their splashings, but like miniscule traces of water life they eventually disappeared, never to be seen or heard of again, faster and in greater numbers, so that their presence became ever less noticeable, ever vaguer, until no sign whatsoever remained of the existence of these words.
Burning Bus by Stephen Allwright. Mixed media 2009
Thus an inner reflection of Marlouw, the main character of Eben Venter’s apocalyptic novel on a possible South African/ Afrikaans future, Trencherman, p 213 (translated by Luke Stubbs).
Like another apocalyptic novel on the future, Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised, Trencherman is the novel about which I’ve heard the most Afrikaans readers say: “I couldn’t finish it, it’s too terrible.”
This reaction is all too comprehensible: like Atomised projects from a contemporary decaying (French) consumer society towards the end of the human species, Trencherman projects from within an even more decayed society – in which consumerism has become the great ideal – towards the horrible death of most of the people in South Africa. More precisely, as is suggested in the opening quotation above, Trencherman also projects from within the present towards the death of the Afrikaners. Those who succeed in the novel to survive in South Africa (and elsewhere in Africa), barely lead what may be described as a life worthy of a human being. They are rather doomed to an atomistic existence of scraping through, in which the next meal nearly represents a small victory.
The similarities between Atomised and Trencherman must however not be overemphasised at the cost of the more important differences between the two novels. Houellebecq’s novel harks back to 19th-century naturalism, according to which man acts mostly in accordance with his biological and material drives, and according to which his spiritual life, inasmuch as he has something like it, is merely the function of biology and matter. Atomised can be read as a novel that wants to show that consumer society with its overemphasis on the satisfaction of biological and sensory needs is the natural and unavoidable outcome of human evolution that must eventually lead to the death of the species. Viewed thus Atomised is a deeply cynical novel.
Trencherman may on the contrary be described as a tragic novel. Tragic since, in the best Greek tragic tradition, it portrays a situation that could have been avoided had the different protagonists recognised their part in the situation as well as the limitations of their access to the truth. Since this does not happen partial or complete mutual destruction occurs, with the tragic hero exposed to the biggest destruction.
In Trencherman the two parties of black and white mostly represent the tragic protagonists. As a novel from the pen of a historically conscious Afrikaner Trencherman can be read as a melancholic consideration of the part of South African whites in the tragic situation that eventually leads to decay and destruction. Precisely due to the willingness of the Afrikaner main character, Marlouw, to recognise his people’s part, he also attains the moral authority to voice criticism of the other party – blacks. This criticism is never heartless: it stands under the aegis of nearly discouraged compassion and melancholia, a criticism that unavowedly asks: but couldn’t you have acted different than us?
The character in Trencherman who comes the closest to the classic tragic hero of the Greeks, is Koert Spies. Koert is the son of Marlouw’s sister and brother-in-law, Heleen and JP, who emigrated decades ago with Marlouw to Melbourne, Australia. There a fatal confluence of circumstances led to it that Koert became the product of cultural and language loss, liberal paternalism and consumerism.
When Koert, against his mother’s wishes, goes to South Africa, to the family farm that Marlouw and Heleen after the death of their parents transferred to the black family who worked on the farm, he speaks in a gibberish of Afrikaans, English, German and Dutch, he’s a videogame addict, and he harbours the vague hope to “help” the blacks.
The decaying country sucks him in, and when Marlouw reaches Koert after a hellish journey, Koert is an overweight, videogame-playing meat eater suffering from gangrene: due to the lack of cultural transmission biological impulses have gained the upper hand, and Koert is literally a rotting bastard whose liberal naivety, as happens all too often, has inverted into utter violence and individualism that must lead to abominable death.
In a certain sense, as with Atomised, the role of production and consumption is central to the tragedy of Trencherman. According to a black South African friend and astute political analyst, blacks in South Africa were chased out of production a century or more ago and their cultural memory decayed with their languages. This would then help to explain why so many South African blacks today, from the richest to the poorest, contributes less to production and much more to consumption and live as if there is no tomorrow.
Contrary to this, my friend argues, Afrikaners have always been involved in production and our language commitment has ensured the transmission of our cultural memory, and therefore our productive ability. What he does not take into account is the extent to which the loss of basic Afrikaans and cultural memory amongst the younger generation of Afrikaners and their parents also gradually makes them more consumers than producers.
Thus Afrikaner and African ironically becomes similar, is their dialogue and diversity undermined, and is decay in South Africa sped up. The worst possible version of this is portrayed in Trencherman, and Eben Venter deserves praise for the courage with which he makes us stare into the mirror of this possible death.
***
*This article is a slightly adapted English version of Rossouw’s Saturday column, Glasoog, in the Afrikaans daily Beeld, that originally appeared on February 7 2009. It is published here in the English with the kind permission of Beeld.
**Afrikaans writer and philosopher, and a PHD candidate in the Department of Politics, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Melbourne.
