| Larry Schwartz |
| South African novelist Eben Venter now lives in Melbourne but remains proud of his heritage. Larry Schwartz reports. WHEN St Kilda restaurateur Eben Venter revisited the South African farming community where he grew up for the funeral of a relative, he was surprised at the response to his first novel. The Afrikaans writer, who this month receives in absentia one of his native country’s most prestigious literary prizes, had thought of the book as “a peeling back of the flesh … a very sharp critique of them”. But the people of the eastern Cape town of Burgersdorp, where he worked on the family sheep farm before coming to Australia, did not quite see it that way. “They thought it was very funny,” says the meat-eating co-founder of the vegetarian Wild Rice restaurant. “And they thought that whatever criticism there was in the book of the way they lived and the way they treated the blacks, that’s already the past tense. That’s the old South Africa. That it’s been written off in a way. As if they’re not really part of it.” The book emerged from a short-list of top writers including the internationally acclaimed Andre Brink to take the W.A.Hofmeyr award, which is to be presented at a ceremony in Pretoria this month. THE Afrikaans title is `Foxtrot van die Vleiseters’. Venter says the publisher Tafelberg wants a literal translation for its forthcoming English edition, `Foxtrot of the Carnivores’. But he is suggesting `Sheeps’ Head for Supper’. A loosely autobiograhical family saga, partly inspired by his father’s gift as a storyteller, he says: “I see it as the fall of the Afrikaner from this graceful foxtrot that they’ve been doing.” Alone in a beautiful old farmhouse in one scene, the mother and daughter of the fictional Steenekamp family, dance to a Glenn Miller record while the dog barks as a truckload of black people steal the family’s sheep. “In a way this is a metaphor for the whole book,” says Venter. “What’s eventually going to happen is that they will lose a lot of this grand way of living … I don’t know exactly how they are going to lose it. We will have to see after the election. “But the funny thing about them is that they never really stop and contemplate their situation. They just seem to keep on dancing and when they have finished with the dance they sit down and have a leg of venison. “It’s as if they just continue without really thinking what is happening to them. In the end the patriarch says, `I’m just staying here’. There’s a sort of a mindlessness about them.” Another chapter ends with a scene in which a man gorges himself on meat, exclaims “o brood, o vleis” (“oh bread, oh meat”), falls backwards in his chair and dies of heart-attack. Before his departure the author had enrolled to do a doctorate in black consciousness at the Afrikaans University of Stellenbosch. “I guess you could say I was a white lefty. I mean I had a conscience, which I’m sure the black people would just laugh about. But anyway …” He decided to leave after the Botha Government declared a state of emergency in the mid-’80s. “That was the first time the violence overflowed from the urban townships to to the small towns. Everybody was in a way involved.” Listening to JJJ while crossing Sydney Harbor Bridge in an old Holden station wagon with a brother who had settled here years earlier, he felt a sense of freedom he had not known before. “I THINK in a way I get my identity by the racism of my own people. I can’t really write it out of myself. It’s part of my own personal history. It’s like having eaten a bitter leaf during the meal.” Since settling here in 1986 he realised from the plight of Australia’s Aborigines that what the Afrikaners had done “isn’t that unique”. He went from dishwashing to making macrobiotic meals in Sydney before opening his restaurant in “clean, cloudy and claustraphobic” Melbourne. He misses the passion of South African life. Venter tried unsuccesfully to write in English. “But it just didn’t work,” he says. “It was as if I couldn’t speak from my heart you know”. He realised an increasing affection for the Afrikaans language. In its infancy a “creole” pidgin Dutch created in the interaction of slaves and settlers that would ironically become, as one commentator has put it, “the talisman of a narrow racist nationalism”. Aware of some negative perceptions of the language, he told the crowd at the launch of the book in Pretoria some months ago, “if a man sits down to his breakfast and he reads Afrikaans on the milk carton and that makes the pap (porridge) bitter because his younger brother was killed in the Soweto riots because they didn’t want Afrikaans to be a medium of instruction, it is better that the language is omitted from the carton.” But he is convinced that the language will endure in the post- apartheid period unencumbered by the political connotations of recent decades. In Australia, the distance has made him aware not only of the weaknesses but strengths and his writing was not intended as cruel parody. “I really carved away the flesh but there is also a kindness in my knife. I didn’t want to write a vicious book because once I had moved away, I had lost the viciousness … I could see the good too.” The translation is still in the works but he looks forward to its eventual release here. “I would like Australians to read this book. I think they see Afrikaners as the guys they always see on TV. These pot-bellied, red- faced crazy horsemen, you know. My book is about Afrikaners who are not all like that.” THE SUNDAY AGE, 10-Apr-1994 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 