Identity, specifically the search for an own identity, a struggle with invisibility of not being seen, words that burn your mouth with which you wrestle because they need to convey more than just the story that you want to and must tell because the words must become art. There must be feeling, emotion, and atmosphere.

From left to right: Amanda Barnard, Anastasia De Vries and Valda Jansen

These were some of the things in the heart of Valda Jansen, a poet, award-winning author and journalist, former teacher and alumna of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), when she delivered the Jan Rabie Marjorie Wallace memorial lecture, titled The Invisible Woman with a Quill in her Hand: “Ich bin die Frau von gestern”. Jansen delivered her lecture in the Woodstock campus of UWC earlier this month in front of a select audience of writers, literati, journalists, academics and senior students.

The Jan Rabie Marjorie Wallace Memorial lecture is a highlight on the calendar of the Department of Afrikaans and Nederlands, said Dr Donovan Lawrence, Head of the Department. 

In his talk, UWC Rector and Vice-Chancellor Professor Tyrone Pretorius said the title of Jansen’s lecture brought to the fore something of the power of invisibility and the silence of inaudibility.

He reminded the audience of the project proposal for which Jansen was awarded the Jan Rabie Marjorie Wallace writer’s bursary in 2020, namely, giving a voice and visibility to Zara Schmelen, an indigenous woman who lived about 200 years ago and was silenced, overlooked and dehumanised by history.

In the process, Jansen struggles with how “the writer, as an intermediary, can establish a translingual and transcultural bridge that connects strong women across generations”.  And struggle she does – her lecture echoing the rector’s words – because if “we want to remember Zara with the dignity that she deserves, we need to defy all these remnants of colonialism and apartheid and other forms of discrimination”.

To pluck her lost history from oblivion and record the life of people who are her child’s ancestors requires reflection on historical fiction, history,  and the influence of the writer’s personal past.

She who knows invisibility, who has felt it on her own body, grown up with it and still wrestles with it. As writer, she places herself in her stories, but do not mistake those stories to be about her. “My aim with writing is not to tell the story, or not necessarily to write my own story, what happened to me. It is, in the first place, rather to convey a feeling in words. An atmosphere. Stimmung, as the Germans say.” 

She struggles with this all the time, she admits, “not that I must write my story, but rather how I must write my story”. She speaks of wrestling with words, words that absorb everything, people, emotions, and the pieces of them that remain behind in the language as if the language itself remembers words. “Language also carries with it much baggage. Words are burdened with the past. This is the intergenerational trauma of words.”

So how does she write about a woman who lived 200 years ago, the woman she says, who lays her words in the writer’s fingers? The women about whom not much is recorded besides the name given to her by her missionary husband, Zara. How do you come to the point where you can think yourself into the past and start hearing an imagined voice, asks the writer, who was honoured with another Jan Rabie-related prize in 2017 for her debut book, Hy kom met dieskoenlappers.

For this, she was awarded the Jan Rabie Rapport Prize. She says: “To think back 200 years, one needs to listen long and carefully. To the rhythm of an ox-wagon, the rhythm of two people talking in an open space with time to spare. To the rhythm of words in a language long before it was given a name. To the rhythm of a life on the threshold of big changes and revolutions. The fisticuffs of colonial powers, abolishment of slavery. It is like listening to the sound of history when it was still reality.”

Her book in the making starts in the year 2014, with the descendants of the main character and the missionary, 200 years after their wedding. Two parallel stories that play off in the 19th and the 21st centuries.

However, she wants to reconstruct history rather than deconstruct it. “We, therefore, first just play with the words. Reconstruct. Deconstruct. Self-destruct.” Think back to another time she invited you. Think back to a time between the wars of Shaka Zulu on the one side of the country, and those of Napoleon on the other side of the world, and the places where the book must take place.

“Then I close my eyes. Keep the current picture in my head. And delete. First, the tallest buildings. Then, all the others, one after the other. Until only a few remain. I imagine the picture in Johann Hinrich’s field of vision on the day he came ashore in September 1811. If I want to see what the world looks like, I must eliminate it. Take away. Erase. Throw away. If I want to see the full picture.”

She came to listen to Jansen’s lecture and to read an extract from Hy kom met die skoenlappers, but then walked away with the words of her critical-analytical thinking standing on stilts, says Courtneigh Ess, a lecturer in the department of Afrikaans and Dutch Studies. Reconstruct. Deconstruct. Self-destruct.

For Jay-Deane Swartz, a third-year student, the most memorable was when Jansen let Zara “speak” when she told how the woman who had been invisible till now looked her straight in the eye and said: “But I can tell you one thing. And it is God’s truth. Stories are things that must be told. Every person has a story. It is the duty of the world to listen to these stories.”

It was an opportunity for words and stories and singing. As if she came to dedicate the song to Jansen, Jodi Jantjies, also an alumna of UWC, then sang, among others, “Give me the words”, as if in response to Jansen reaching back to what Jane Austen wrote in Sense and Sensibility: “And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.”

So, to her, we give the last word. She who spoke about how, in and through her writing, and now in the recording of a woman from 200 years ago who was silenced and forgotten. She is taking herself out of the little boxes that were imposed and forced upon her. She who says: “Ich bin die Frau von gestern. I am the woman from earlier. Here I am again.”