On May 1, 2010 at The Great Hall in The Cooper Union, New York City, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival, Toni Morrison and Kwame Anthony Appiah sat down with Marlene van Niekerk to discuss Agaat, van Niekerk’s novel, which Morrison called “brilliant and haunting.” Here’s an excerpt from the conversation. The full interview can be found on the PEN World Voices website. The interview has been edited for clarity.
TONI MORRISON: All right. I was not in the reading mood at all when I received this book. And it was a big fat book and I thought, “I don’t want to read anything.” I’d just gotten out of the hospital, or went in, or something, and, you know, it’s like you can’t do anything but read Us Weekly or something. But I opened this book and I was totally taken by it, and instantly I wasn’t sure who was speaking in the first few lines. I really appreciated the sensibility of that, whoever it was who was speaking. And it became, for me, this journey, intense—I mean, I read this book, and it took me two days, I have to tell you.
But I read it, what we would call “reading through.” I found it so beautifully written, so interesting in its architecture where meaning really lies, and it was powerful and fully imagined, fully and completely imagined. Now those are all lit crit terms, I know. But there’s this amazing . . . situation where you have a woman who is dying, and cannot move, and cannot speak. Eventually her eyes close and she can’t move any of her muscles. And she’s totally dependent on a Black woman whom she rescued as a child, a thrown away child, a cast away child. And trained her to become what she is, which is a very competent, very loyal servant—but who also has her own mind and manipulative strategies, which she learned from the mistress.
I know I’m going on and on. But anyway, that’s the place. The rest of it is how we get the information that puts us at that point. How we learn where she came from, the white South African woman. What her desires are. Who was this little girl Agaat, and how did she become this way? And then all of the other things in the community and the family. It’s absolutely the most extraordinary book that I have read in a long, long time. You must read it.
KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: It’s natural, of course, for us outside of South Africa and perhaps it’s natural for South Africans too, to read Agaat as an allegory of your notions of history.
MARLENE VAN NIEKERK: Well, of course when one writes a novel, you try to make it as thick as possible, and to make it readable on different levels. So obviously, I took great care to line up the dates in a certain way so that it could also be an allegory of our country. And on the other hand, it’s only one, I think, of the mobilizing forces in the novel; as far as I’m concerned, the story’s about mothers and daughters.
TONI MORRISON: I wanted to ask you something about this novel, which is: I read an interview you gave in which you suggested that the woman Milla was—I don’t know if you said vampire—but you said she sucks the blood and she’s lustful that way, and manipulative that way, and controlling that way. Now when I read it the first time I was—because she’s generally the one who speaks, I mean it’s to her[self], so she knows her story from her point of view, but. . .I felt that she was wrong in many instances, overbearing in a few, but I didn’t get that feeling until I read [your] interview that she was really almost duplicating, in a way, the control and the real means of her own mother with her.
So when [Milla] takes this child and just reforms her, and tries—she even uses the word “slave” a couple of times in the text. And the magnificent thing, which is sort of understated until sort of the end, is how Agaat resists while working with her. It’s as though she’s loyal because that’s who she is, not necessarily because the woman deserves it. It’s just that: that’s who she is. It’s really. . . it bears another read, which I agree with by the way, and might deserve a third, but it’s really very complicated, and very interesting. But you still hold that position that she is a little, not quite evil, but. . .?
MARLENE VAN NIEKERK: Yeah, as far as one can hold a position on one’s own work, I mean one speaks very differently when one speaks back to [one’s own] work, as you would know when you sit there in the heat of the moment trying to make something. . .” But I think we have a saying that comes from the Bible: the sins of the fathers will be transplanted from generation to generation, until the third and the fourth generation. And I think Milla was really treated badly by her mother, and the only way which she knew was to subject the little Agaat to a whole set of morals, to a language. But you see—these things are always ambivalent—but I think Milla is truly a bitch. And I think if people fall for her self-excusing, self-justificatory wiles—
—Then I have succeeded! I make her a little bit better, I think, when she’s dead and dying and can’t speak, then when she is young and full of designs.
TONI MORRISON: You’re right.