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Encountering Others’ Empathy Toward Oneself in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2023

Saumya Lal Open the ORCID record for Saumya Lal [Opens in a new window]
Saumya Lal*
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Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
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Email: slal@lsu.edu
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Abstract

This article examines how Milla, the Afrikaner protagonist of Marlene van Niekerk’s post-apartheid novel Agaat, engages with others’ empathy toward herself. Theorizing empathy as a multivalent engagement with others’ experiences, I argue that Milla attempts to variously invite, avoid, and manipulate others’ empathy as she negotiates the anxiety of being misunderstood, the sense of vulnerability in being understood, and the dependence of her self-image on others’ opinions. Illustrating the fraught experience of encountering empathy toward oneself—a neglected topic in studies of empathy—the novel shows that empathy is neither always welcomed nor received passively by potential empathizees. Further, I suggest, the contrast between Milla’s approaches to empathy as empathizer and empathizee ironizes her struggles by indicating her proclivity for controlling empathic interactions. Demonstrating how power relations inform empathy, Agaat complicates the popular notion of empathy as a straightforward gateway to reconciliation by highlighting its characters’ ambivalences about receiving empathy.

Keywords

empathyMarlene van Niekerkpost-apartheidreconciliationself-other
Type
Article
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 2023 , pp. 311 - 331
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Marlene van Niekerk, interview by Hans Pienaar, LitNet, June 2, 2005 (https://oulitnet.co.za/nosecret/van_niekerk_pienaar.asp).

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5 Several critics have noted the parallel between the key dates in the novel and the turning points in South African history. Most importantly, Agaat is born in 1948, the year when the National Party came to power, and Milla adopts Agaat on December 16, 1953, and dies on the same day in 1996. The political significance of December 16, given its celebration as the Day of Reconciliation since 1995 and its erstwhile status as the Day of the Vow (marking Afrikaners’ victory over the Zulus in the Battle of Blood River), indicates the novel’s investment in the history and aftermath of apartheid.

6 The TRC has generated a huge body of scholarship, which would be impossible to survey in full here. A few important studies include Wilson, Richard, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chapman, Audrey R. and van der Merwe, Hugo, eds., Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)Google Scholar, and Sitze, Adam, The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussions of confessions and appeals to empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation, especially in relation to literary narratives, see Gallagher, Susan VanZanten, Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002)Google Scholar, Heyns, Michiel,“The Whole Country’s Truth: Confession and Narrative in Recent White South African Writing,” Modern Fiction Studies, 46.1 (2000): 42–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Posel, Deborah, “History as Confession: The Case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Public Culture 20.1 (2008): 119–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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