Marlene van Niekerk

Marlene Van Niekerk (born 10 November 1954) is a South African poet,writer, and academic. She is best known for her novels, the satirical tragicomedy Triomf (1994) and the Hertzog-winning Agaat (2004), which explore themes including the family, the change in power dynamics occasioned by the end of Apartheid, and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Van Niekerk is also a poet. She writes in her native tongue, Afrikaans, and teaches at Stellenbosch University. Quotes A butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity. Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift. Marriage is holy and it's private. After all the years, after everything that you'd had to endure, after everything that you'd undertaken, however good or bad, long after you'd given up all hope, the reward. Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel. And I will close my eyes and prepare myself so that they can unscrew my head and allow the map to slip into my lacunae. So that I can be filled and braced from the inside and fortified for the voyage. Because without my world inside me I will contract and congeal, more even than I am now, without speech and without actions and without any purchase upon time. Does a mirror preserve everything that has been reflected in it? Is there a record of light, thin membranes compressed layer upon layer that one has to ease apart with the finger-tips so that the colors don't dissipate, so that the moments don't blot and the hours don't run together into inconsequential splotches? So that a song of preserved years lies in your palm, a miniature of your life and times, with every detail meticulous in clear, chanting angel-fine enamel, as on the old manuscripts, at which you can peer through a magnifying glass and marvel at so much effort? So many tears for nothing? For light? For bygone moments? It’s the first time in my life that I understand it like this, the impersonal unity of all living things. It doesn’t matter who is who. The speaker and the listener. The shell and the sea, the mother cat and the human hand that stirs her blind litter, the wind and the soughing pine, the dry drift and the flood. It’s one energy. We are one, Agaat and I, I feel it stir in my navel. First smile An unseasonal little shower of rain fell here and a lot of butterflies drowned so we put them in the sun and they came back to life and flew up and then Agaat SMILED A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him. I think I’m that kind of writer who’s always looking for trouble: I think a little bit intense and a little risky and a little bit interested in making accidents happen that I can use. I think it’s more interesting to write things that you don’t know than that you know. My relationships with my translators have always been very friendly, generous and wonderful learning experiences, hopefully for both parties. I read Dutch well, and collaborated intensely and fruitfully with the translator. I read German and French but only enough to answer questions or correct the most glaring translation mistakes. The English translators with whom I have worked most intensely belong to a special category, because English is my second language. In an interview Marius and I know each other very well and it was great fun to work with him. He got the cloth out, polished the text, and then we sat together working over problems and tweaking things here and there. A lot of dictionaries were involved: we are both second-language speakers, and have to check things, but he has more experience than I do and is also theoretically trained. So it was a question in a few cases of my licence versus his strictness! In an interview The practical genesis of ‘The Swan Whisperer’ was quite different. There was no collaborative intent when either of us made the respective works; I had no contact with the artist and no say in the selection of the works included here. There are resonances, in form and content, as one would expect in the work of artists hailing from the same brutal corner of the earth. I can strongly identify with Kentridge’s thematics of colonial cruelty to totally defenceless people and animals, (cf. the list of victims’ names of the genocide of the Nama people by the Germans in 1904, and the city map/rock piercing the back of the rhinoceros), his interest in the powerful technologies of broadcasting, peeping, framing, entrapment and capture (held amongst others in images of telescopes, cameras, megaphones, maps, lists), his visual techniques of erasure, dismemberment and fragmentation, and the strong associative and narrative elements in his work. External links Category: living people