The aim of my study has been to explore the concept and application of nostalgia in two of Etienne van Heerden’s novels, Ancestral Voices and 30 Nights in Amsterdam, based on my initial interest in why Van Heerden’s novels are so widely read. I wanted to ascertain the relevance and accessibility of his writing — stories about Afrikaners, set in South Africa — for local as well as broad, global audiences.
Beginning my investigation by placing Van Heerden’s novels within Afrikaans and South African literature, I found that he is a writer, among many, who return to plaasroman conventions and themes; and this raises the question of why the plaasroman (albeit in many new forms) continues to fascinate the writer and reader. It is at this early point in my investigation that nostalgia, as a concept, becomes apparent: the plaasroman, as a genre, is nostalgic, being based on the idyllic idea of the farmer and the farm, the family and the land, all working in the name of God, and hoping for an imaginative return to a time of (perceived) simplicity and belonging.
However, on examining the development of the plaasroman genre, and questioning and challenging the idyll of its focus, the themes of the plaasroman — for example, the search for identity, the question of belonging and duty, and the examination of human response to change — become apparent as themes that are common with those of postcolonial theory, which also highlights conditions of identity, location, time and memory.
So, Van Heerden’s writing is nostalgic, therefore, while its themes are postcolonial. If we bear in mind, accordingly, that postcolonial conditions — or postcolonial culture — are broadly manifest throughout the world today, then conditions/cultures that are postcolonial can also be considered global. As I mentioned in the subsection
‘Nostalgia: People and Spaces’ in the first chapter of this study, many people in the modern world are living in ‘different spaces’ either because they have physically moved to a different location, or because the space that they occupy has altered.
Postcolonial themes in literature resonate with a broad global range of people and can often be regarded as global themes.
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The same can be said of nostalgia. According to Svetlana Boym, nostalgia is “a symptom of our age” and we are today experiencing a “global epidemic of nostalgia”
(Boym, 2001:xiv). As discussed in the first chapter, modern conditions are conducive to nostalgia, which is an emotion that is widely known and experienced. If that is the case, then a language of nostalgia can be considered to be a global language, and nostalgic literature will resonate with a broad global range of people. In short, Van Heerden’s novels have global concerns that make them relevant and interesting to a global readership. Van Heerden’s nostalgic approach aids in broadening the appeal of his novels because both his message and mode of communication are globally recognisable, even though the content and context are local.
In light of the above conditions, the application of postcolonial nostalgia as a critical tool is effective and illuminating. Bearing in mind that, as Boym has said, “nostalgia can be both a social disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure” (Boym, 2001:354), I utilised Boym’s typologies of nostalgia to identify examples of both restorative and reflective nostalgia. The varying examples of nostalgia — there are many instances of both restorative and reflective nostalgia — indicate a view of the past that is not polarised or one-dimensional but, rather, complex and nuanced. Van Heerden has risen to “the challenge facing the writer… [which] is to locate and recover experiences that a community has failed to understand and assimilate” (Su, 2005:148).
He has used nostalgia reflectively to approach pleasant memory as well as trauma, and has aided in the articulation of ‘unspeakable things’, that is, traumas and memories that are often not spoken of or that have been submerged or subverted.
We return to the past, “to the pause, the moment of shock”, says Gaylard, “when the old certitudes are no longer working” (2005:49); an idea that concurs with Dlamini’s view that nostalgia, ironically, “for all its fixation with the past, is essentially about the present” (2010:16). In this light, the value of a nostalgic approach — if it is a reflectively nostalgic approach that focuses on longing — is particularly evident when the two novels are compared and the development of Van Heerden’s view is examined. I found that Van Heerden, by continuing to explore themes of identity and belonging in/with his writing, charts a development in the Afrikaner’s psyche and outlook. This is particularly evident in the trajectory formed by the two novels which I
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have chosen for this study: Afrikaner insulation in Ancestral Voices opens up to a cosmopolitan outlook in 30 Nights in Amsterdam. The time difference of twenty-two years between the publication dates of the novels means that the ‘present’ in which each of the novels was written — and that provoked a nostalgic return to the past — was different for each of the novels and, therefore, results in different nostalgic focuses. The scope of exploration of Ancestral Voices covers the Afrikaner’s experience from the time of arrival in the Karoo, and deals with a community striving to cope and survive within a changing environment. In 30 Nights in Amsterdam, the scope of longing is broader than that of Ancestral Voices: it goes beyond the Afrikaners’ arrival/beginning in the Karoo, to explore earlier roots in Europe, thus opening up the world of the Afrikaner to the future, in order to show that changes are occurring within a changing world. The Afrikaner, Van Heerden’s view indicates, has moved away from a ‘closed’, ancestral perspective, to share and participate in an environment of global change, an environment that precludes isolation and insulation.
Van Heerden’s novels are a window on Afrikaner culture enabling readers better to understand the complexities of the Afrikaner psyche, as well as the developments that are continuing — although less ideologically fraught — within Afrikaans/cosmopolitan culture. To expand on such a metaphor of development and change, therefore, we could expand the scope of the investigation to include other texts from Van Heerden’s oeuvre. Further dissertations could explore, for example, The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002), which has also enjoyed a broad readership. It examines Afrikaner nationalism and identity, utilises magical realism, and the Karoo landscape is, once again, central to the novel. Mad Dogs and Other Stories (1992), is a collection of short stories which focuses, in part, on the border war, and is “among the few representative literary texts that reflect critically” (Popescu, 2008:92) on that aspect of Afrikaner/South African history. Also, as I conclude this dissertation, the publication of a novel by Van Heerden entitled Gifkaroo (in Afrikaans) and/or Poison Karoo (in English, translated by Isobel Dixon) is imminent (Van Heerden, 2013). This novel promises to develop the idea of human affinity with place/space, as it deals with the fracking of oil in the Karoo, much as Ancestral Voices dealt with the search for, and
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acquisition of, water in the Karoo. Will nostalgia feature in this new novel? Will the Karoo expand into a global metaphor?
It would be interesting to compare instances of nostalgia from any or all of the above mentioned texts with each other and with Ancestral Voices and 30 Nights in Amsterdam; and to consider the significance of the publication dates of the three texts spaced neatly by a decade each (that is, 1992, 2002 and 2013); furthermore, it would be interesting to examine what prompted nostalgia at the time of writing in each case.
This study, nonetheless, must be limited to two of Etienne Van Heerden’s novels. My conclusion is that nostalgia, as a tool to be used in addressing the past, can be harnessed as a positive force in the individual and/or collective search for identity and belonging. I conclude also that postcolonial nostalgia in Ancestral Voices and 30 Nights in Amsterdam has added to the broad appeal of the novels, in that the local content and context have resonated beyond ancestral voices, to global voices. Van Heerden’s reputation as both an Afrikaans writer and a writer of the world seems assured.
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