Etienne van Heerden
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Etienne van Heerden (born 1954) is a South African author.
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[edit] Biography
Van Heerden was born in 1954, six years after the official advent of Apartheid. His mother was a mathematics teacher and English speaking, representing an easier, more relaxed and liberal South African attitude. His father, a merino stud breeder, farmed the family farm in the Karoo, the oldest family farm in the line of one direct patriarchal lineage in the Eastern Cape. He was Afrikaans speaking, and Van Heerden was reared Afrikaans, with Tuesdays as the day for English speaking at home, and comics ordered from London.
Van Heerden initially studied law, and was admitted to the South African Side Bar as attorney. He freelanced as deputy sheriff for the Civil Court, and moved about in the townships around Cape Town, dispensing civil summonses and learning a great deal about life in a suppressed community.
As a young practitioner, his clients were mostly from the black and coloured crime-ridden communities around Cape Town.
Van Heerden also lectured Legal Practice at the Peninsula Technikon and spent two years in advertising. At age thirty, with the birth of his eldest daughter, Van Heerden left the routine of a budding Cape Town advertising agency, and with his family relocated to the University of Zululand, northern Natal, where he started out on his academic career in Literature.
During the eighties he was member of a group of Afrikaans writers secretly meeting the banned ANC of Mandela and exiled writers at the now famous Victoria Falls Writers’ Conference, held in Zimbabwe, just north of South Africa.
Van Heerden is seen as member of a generation of Afrikaans artists who contributed significantly to opening up the Afrikaner psyche to change.
Van Heerden is married to Kaia, a practicing doctor, and lives in Stellenbosch. The couple has two daughters, Imke and Menán.
He regularly teaches at universities in Europe, and has been Writer in Residence at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He was a member of the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program in 1990, and has been back on visits to this university, of which he is an Honorary Fellow in Writing. He regularly reads his fiction at events such as the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, the Winter Nights Festival in the Hague, Netherlands, the Time of the Writer Festival in Berlin, Germany, the Zimbabwe Book Fair and other festivals and events internationally.
[edit] Awards
[edit] List of writings
Van Heerden has published two books of poetry, two books of short stories, a collection of cabaret songs, theoretical and academic work, and novels. His activity spans a wide range — a syndicated columnist in the major three Afrikaans dailies, published countrywide in South Africa, his own program on satellite television, and founder-editorship of one of the few South African internet startups surviving the dot.bomb meltdown in South Africa.
[edit] Books
- Matoli (1978)
- My Cuban (1983)
- Om te AWOL (1984)
- Toorberg (English: Ancestral Voices)(1986, 1989)
- Casspirs en Camparis (English: Casspirs and Camparis) (1991)
- Die Stoetmeester (English: Leap Year) (1993, 1997)
- Kikoejoe (English: Kikuyu) (1996)
- Die Swye van Mario Salviati (English: The Long Silence of Mario Salviati) (2000, 2003)
- In stede van die liefde (2005)
[edit] Other publications
[edit] External links
[edit] General (see talk page)
Van Heerden is best known for his book, Die Swye van Mario Salviati (in English, The Long Silence of Mario Salviati). It is the story of a legendary treasure that was lost, but also serves as an exposé of a small South African town, the colorful characters that inhabit it, and a young woman's search for meaning in her life.
Describing the generation of South African authors of which he is internationally the most widely known, Etienne van Heerden quotes the American writer Philip Roth: “Actuality was outdoing our talents.”
Van Heerden, born in 1954, debuted in a time when he and other young Afrikaans writers saw themselves as New Journalists, filling the silences of a censored socio-political space with their fictions.
His first book, a juvenile novel (Matoli), using a farm setting as a microcosm of South Africa’s racial tensions, was published in 1978, when Van Heerden was engaged in postgraduate Law studies. In the novel, named after the young black boy who steals the rifle of the owner’s son in a symbolic act of transfer of power, Van Heerden predicted the regime changes of later years to younger readers.
It was the first Afrikaans juvenile novel touching on racial issues, he explains, and points to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as major inspiration for this first book.
His next work of fiction was the short story collection, My Cuban (1983), in which the title story explores the complex and eroticized relationship between the captor, a South African paratrooper, and the captive, a Cuban soldier.
The setting is the border between Namibia and Angola, which was, in the eighties, a flashpoint of battle between South Africa’s Apartheid forces (covertly supported by the USA) and Fidel Castro’s soldiers, aided by the Marxist MPLA.
Van Heerden, born blind in the right eye, was not called up for combat duty, but served as a dog handler, playing his alsatian at major festivals, urging Caesar to jump through hoops of fire, which is an apt description, he says, of the risks writing carries.
His first international breakthrough was the novel Toorberg (1986; English: Ancestral Voices 1989), which was published in ten languages, and appeared in the USA as well.
It won all the major literary awards in South Africa, and established Van Heerden as the leading novelist of his generation.
He went on to publish the novels Casspirs en Camparis(1991; English: Casspirs and Camparis), Die Stoetmeester (1993; English: Leap Year 1997), Kikoejoe (1996; English: Kikuyu) and Die Swye van Mario Salviati (2000; English: The Long Silence of Mario Salviati 2003 ), an international seller, bought by Greek, French, Dutch, German and Russian publishers. His most recent novel is In stede van die liefde, published in 2005 (not yet - in October 2006 - available in English).
Van Heerden was born six years after the official advent of Apartheid and his novel Kikuyu describes the childhood years of a protagonist living through the years when the Winds of Change were blowing over Africa.
During the eighties he was member of a group of Afrikaans writers secretly meeting the banned ANC of Mandela and exiled writers at the now famous Victoria Falls Writers’ Conference, held in Zimbabwe, just north of South Africa.
Six years later Mandela took power, and Van Heerden is seen as member of a generation of Afrikaans writers, intellectuals and rock artists who contributed significantly to opening up the Afrikaner psyche to change.
Van Heerden confides that his mother was a mathematics teacher and English speaking, representing an easier, more relaxed and liberal South African attitude. His father, a merino stud breeder, farmed the family farm in the Karoo, the oldest family farm in the line of one direct patriarchal lineage in the Eastern Cape. He was Afrikaans speaking, and Van Heerden was reared Afrikaans, with Tuesdays as the day for English speaking at home, and comics ordered from London, he tells.
Van Heerden’s major novels are historical novels, either gazing back at the distant past, reinventing the events, or documenting contemporary history, such as Casspirs and Camparis, a satirical novel set in the eighties in South Africa, in a time of great turmoil and excitement. The novel ends with Mandela’s release and the promise of new times.
He talks of the unpredictability of the past, and sees his task as voicing the silences, continually re-imagining the past when so much of life used to be buried under military power and censorship.
“My generation of writers saw ourselves as alternative historians, urged by circumstances to lay bare the true currents of power, and the disparities between the possessors and the dispossessed,” he explains. “We wrote against canonized Apartheid history.”
He quotes an important saying: “If you don’t take out that which is within you, that which is within you will destroy you, but if you take out that which is within you, that which is within you will save you.”
Van Heerden also wrote and staged satirical cabarets in the Dutch and German tradition, which was a very effective method of protest, he explains, during the difficult eighties.
His cabarets are still a regular feature of the major arts festivals in South Africa.
Although one of his early books was an anti-military novella, Om te awol (1984), Van Heerden never left South Africa permanently, and now teaches at the University of Cape Town, where he is the Hofmeyr Professor in the School of Languages and Literatures, and chairs the Afrikaans and Netherlandic Studies Section.
Of his generation of writers, Van Heerden has won the most literary awards in his native country. He regularly teaches at universities in Europe, and has been Writer in Residence at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He regularly reads his fiction at events such as the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, the Winter Nights Festival in the Hague, Netherlands, the Time of the Writer Festival in Berlin, Germany, the Zimbabwe Book Fair and other festivals and events internationally.
He was a member of the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program in 1990, and has been back on visits to this university, of which he is an Honorary Fellow in Writing.
Van Heerden initially studied law, and was admitted to the South African Side Bar as attorney. He freelanced as deputy sheriff for the Civil Court, and moved about in the townships around Cape Town, dispensing civil summonses and learning a great deal about life in a suppressed community.
As a young practitioner, his clients were mostly from the black and coloured crime-ridden communities around Cape Town.
Van Heerden also lectured Legal Practice at the Peninsula Technikon and spent two “glorious years” in advertising. This led to his novel Casspirs and Camparis (Casspirs were armoured vehicles used for riot control during township protests).
However, at age thirty, with the birth of his eldest daughter, Van Heerden left the eight in the morning to five the next morning routine of a budding Cape Town advertising agency, and with his wife, baby daughter and an enormous Labrador trekked to the remote University of Zululand, in the subtropical province of northern Natal, just south of Mozambique, where he started out on his academic career in Literature.
In 1987 the writer André Brink offered him a position at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, and here Van Heerden settled into a career of writing and teaching.
His current activities at the University of Cape Town include the supervision of Creative Writing, where he has led a generation of young Afrikaans authors to published status, and the lecturing of courses in Literary Theory, Media Studies, and South African and Dutch Literature.
He is also involved with the new Master of Fine Arts program in Film and New Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, where he teaches Internet and Web Theory.
His PhD, published, was a study on engagement and postmodernism.
His research interests include Internet and Web Theory and Historiography and Fiction, on which he has published in journals internationally.
He has published two books of poetry, two books of short stories, a collection of cabaret songs, theoretical and academic work, and novels. His activity spans a wide range — a syndicated columnist in the major three Afrikaans dailies, published countrywide in South Africa, his own program on satellite television, and founder-editorship of one of the few South African internet startups surviving the dot.bomb meltdown in South Africa.
The site LitNet voices South African culture, is multilingual, and creates a space for rigorous cultural debate and new writing, with established South African authors and many new voices participating.
The site has drawn more than five hundred thousand page impressions per month.
He serves on the board of directors of NB Publishers, which includes, amongst others, Kwela, Tafelberg, Best Books and Human and Rousseau publishers.
Van Heerden is married to Kaia, a practicing doctor, and has two daughters, Imke and Menán.
His German-speaking wife’s family lives in Europe, and the Van Heerden family members regularly spend holidays in Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.
He lives in Stellenbosch, the oldest town in South Africa, in the home he spent his high school and university years in, after the early death of his father and the traumatic loss of the family farm. Amidst high mountain ranges and vineyards, Stellenbosch’s beauty is internationally known, and Van Heerden loves to cycle and walk in the mountains.
Although he lives in the Western Cape, Van Heerden returns, in his writing, to the Karoo of his childhood. This arid and mythological part of South Africa’s deep interior is his own “landscape of the mind”, he says.
He writes in Afrikaans, and points out that more than half of Afrikaans speakers are not white Afrikaners, but so-called Coloured South Africans, descendents of slaves from the East and the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa.
Surviving a quadraple coronary bypass at the age of 47, Van Heerden still lives passionately and refers to his surgery as “a character building experience”.
“Hypercholesterol,” he smiles, “is a genetic Calvinist disease, visited onto white Afrikaans males. It’s the sins of the fathers, flowing in our veins.”
