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NADINE GORDIMER |
| That Nadine Gordimer is a great novelist is universally acknowledged. Yet her comparable creative power as a literary critic has not been as yet recognized. A reading of her forgotten book of cultural appreciation, The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing (1973), convinces one that it stands second to none in the echelons of African literary and cultural criticism. It is a minor masterpiece of incomparable power. Its historical sweep through the thematic and philosophical patterns of African literature from Thomas Mofolo to Peter Abrahams and from Chinua Achebe to Ngugi wa Thing’o makes it a landmark in Africa’s self-appreciation of its own genius. The book first and foremost reveals the Africanness of Gordimer’s great literary and historical imagination. The book summarizes what preceded it in the appreciation of Africa’s complexity and gives direction to what was to follow in her cultural criticism. One of the truly admirable things about this great woman is the actuality of her engagement with Africa’s cultural and political conundrums: this is what constitutes her unique Africanness, unique because there is no such thing as Africanness in generality. It was her historical sense of her belongingness to Africa that prevented her from going into self-imposed exile during the grimmest moments of the South African situation in the 1960s and in the early 1970s before the Soweto Uprising of 1976. In an interview of two years with the Online journal Salon, she had this to say about this matter: “There was a brief period when things looked grim in South Africa, from the point of view of any change coming. . . . We did think for a time of going to live in another African country. We thought of going to live in Zambia, we had certain friends there, we would go quite often. But in the end we did not go. But I didn’t consider going to Europe. I belong in Africa” (“An Interview with Nadine Gordimer: The conscience of South Africa talks about her country’s new racial order” by Dwight Garner, Salon, March 1998, my emphasis). Her sense of belongingness emerged when she was a teenager on encountering social injustice in South Africa. Her Nobel Lecture on December 7, 1991 was partly devoted to her amplification on this theme: “Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses---the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word. . . . In the small South African gold-mining town [Springs] where I was growing up I was. . . . the Gypsy, tinkering with words second-hand, mending my own efforts at writing by learning from what I read. For my school was the local library. Proust, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, to name only a few to whom I owe my existence as a writer, were my professors. In that period of my life, yes, I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books. . . . But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could. With adolescence comes the first reaching out to otherness through the drive of sexuality. . . . Unknowingly, I had been addressing myself on the subject of being, whether, as in my first stories, there was a child’s contemplation of death and murder in the necessity to finish off, with a death blow, a dove mauled by a cat, or whether there was wondering dismay and early consciousness of racism that came of my walk to school, when on the way I passed storekeepers, themselves Eastern European immigrants kept lowest in the ranks of the Anglo-Colonial social scale for whites in the mining town, roughly those whom colonial society ranked lowest of all, discounted as less than human---the black miners who were the stores’ customers. Only many years later was I to realize that if I had been a child in that category---black---I might not have become a writer at all, since the library that made this possible for me was not open to any black child. For my formal schooling was sketchy, at best” (“Writing and Being”). The ethical and philosophical belongingness which emerged as a reaction to social and racial injustice was to deepen her commitment to, and identification with, Africa. This identification with African took a multiplicity of forms. One major form of its expression was the embracing of her literary generation of African writers of the Sophiatown Rensaissance cultural movement (within which the Drum writers were situated) who were ‘separated’ from her by the cultural politics of the Apartheid order. In an interview of 1986 Nadine Gordimer relates the momentous nature of the defiance and transgression of the cultural boundaries imposed by the politics of injustice: “Well, when I came to Johannesburg in 1949, it was a kind of revelation to me when I actually got to know journalists and musicians through friends, many of whom came from Sophiatown. Zeke Mphahlele was my first black friend. We got to know each other when we were both quite young and it was an extraordinary thing for me to meet a black person who was not a servant or a delivery man, but someone who was struggling eith same problems of being a young writer. This is such a bond, yet it simply did not exist across the colour bar for most people. When Anthony Sampson took over Drum, he had, from the beginning, an extraordinary ease which a middle-class white like myself certainly didn’t have. Through him, I got to know the whole group of Drum personalities, starting with the famous Henry Nxumalo, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi and Todd Matshikiza. They were absolutely extraordinary people. . . . It was a time of tremendous, memorable parties I’ll never forget for the rest of my life” (“Nadine Gordimer”, Sophiatown Speaks, eds., Pippa Stein and Ruth Jacobson, Junction Avenue Theatre Company, 1986). Nadine Gordimer’s interaction with the last literary generation of the New African Movement gave her a sense of historicity that has been profoundly rare among whites in South Africa. She never had any illusions that South Africa was an African county, not a European country in Africa, that black majority rule would come much sooner than the ruling classes in apartheid South Africa thought, and that she herself completely identified with black majority rule. These formulations are partly what accounts for her greatness as an intellectual and as a political being. These were the political positions that defined her sense of political and intellectual belongingness. In the great essay of 1982, “Living in the Interregnum”, written long before democratic black majority rule emerged in 1994, she more systematically formulated the historical position that has enabled her to have an understanding of South African intellectual culture in the twentieth-century that is second best to none: “The sun that never set over one or other of the nineteenth-century colonial empires of the world is going down finally in South Africa. Since the black uprisings of the mid-seventies, coinciding with the independence of Mozambique and Angola, and later that of Zimbabwe, the past has begun rapidly to drop out of sight, even for those who would have liked to go on living in it. Historical co-ordinates don’t fit life any longer; new ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but to the ruled. It is not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my novel July’s People a quotation from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.’ In this interregnum, I and all my countrymen and women are living. . . . I have used the term ‘segment’ in defining my place in South African society because within the white section of that society---less than one fifth of the total population now, predicted to drop to one seventh by the year 2000---there is a segment preoccupied, in the interregnum, neither by plans to run away from nor merely by ways to survive physically and economically in the black state that is coming. . . . In the eyes of the black majority which will rule, whites of former South Africa will have to redifine themselves in a new collective life within new structures. . . . Blacks must learn to talk; whites must learn to listen---wrote the black South African poet Mongane Wally Serote, in the seventies. . . . I have already delineated my presence here [this essay was originally given as a James Lecture at the New York Institute of the Humanities] on the scale of a minority within a minority. Now I shall reduce my claim to significance still further. A white; a dissident white; a white writer. If I were not a writer, I should not have been invited here at all, so I must presume that although the problems of a white writer are of no importance compared with the liberation of 23.5 million black people, the peculiar relation of the writer in South Africa as interpreter, both to South Africans and to the world, of a society in struggle, makes the narrow corridor I can lead you down one in which doors fly open on the tremendous happening experienced by blacks. For longer than the first half of this century the experience of blacks in South Africa was known to the world as it was interpreted by whites. The first widely read imaginative works exploring the central fact of South African life---racism---were written in the 1920s by whites, William Plomer and Sarah Gertrude Millin. If blacks were the subjects but not the readers of books written about them, then neither white not black read much of what have since become the classics of early black literature---the few works of Herbert and Rolfes Dhlomo, Thomas Mofolo, and Sol Plaatje. Their moralistic essays dealt with contemporary black life, but their fiction was mainly historical, a desperate attempt to secure, in art forms of an imposed culture, an identity and history discounted and torn up by that culture. In the 1950s urban blacks---Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, following Peter Abrahams---began to write in English only, and about the urban industrial experience in which black and white chafed against one another across colour barriers. The work of these black writers interested both black and white at that improvised level known as intellectual, in South Africa: ‘aware’ eould be a more accurate term, designating awareness that the white middle-class establishment was not, as it claimed, the paradigm of South African life, and white culture was not the definitive South African culture” (“Living in the Interregnum”, in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics & Places, Penguin Books, New York, 1989). Nadine Gordimer’s unmatched sense of historical location was not only in relation to South Africa, but also in relation to Africa as well as world culture. The singular importance of The Black Interpreters is the way Gordimer examines South African literary culture in the context of the African continent. This contextualization and interconnection enables Gordimer to have a remarkable purview and perspective on African cultural politics and political philosophy. From the perspective of constantly searching for the dialectical interconnections and syntheses within African literature(s), Nadine Gordimer in an essay of 1992, “Turning the Page: African Writers and the Twenty-First Century”, makes an astonishing conceptual survey of the conundrums African literature has encountered in the twentieth-century: “Writers in Africa in the twentieth century, now coming to an end, have interpreted the greatest events on our continent since the abolition of slavery. We have known that our task was to bring to our people’s consciousness and that of the world that the true dimensions of racism and colonialism beyond those that can be reached by the newspaper column and screen image, however valuable these may be. We have sought the fingerprint of flesh on history. . . . Looking forward into the twenty-first century, I think we have the right to assess what we have come through. Being here; the particular time and place that has been twentieth-century Africa. This has been a position with particular implications for literature; we have lived and worked through fearful epochs. Inevitably, the characteristic of African literature during the struggle against colonialism and, latterly, neo-colonialism and corruption in post-colonial societies, has been engagement---political engagement. . . . Engagement is not understood for what it really has been, in the hands of honest and talented writers: the writer’s exploration of the particular meaning his or her being has taken in this time and place. For real ‘engagement’, for the writer, isn’t something set apart from the range of the creative imagination. It isn’t something dictated by brothers and sisters in the cause he or she shares with them. It comes from within the writer, his or her creative destiny, living in history. ‘engagement’ doesn’t preclude the beauty of language, the complexity of human emotions; on the contrary, such literature must be able to use all these in order to be truly engaged with life, where the overwhelming factor in that life is political struggle. . . . It seems to me that these are the two basic questions for the future of African literature. I think it’s generally agreed that consonance with the needs of the people is the imperative for the future in our view of our literature. This is the point of departure from the past; there, literature played the immeasurably valuable part of articulating the people’s political struggle, but I do not believe it can be said to have enriched their lives with a literary culture. And I take it that our premise, in Africa, is that a literary culture is a people’s right. . . . But we writers cannot speak of taking up the challenge of a new century for African literature unless writing in African languages becomes the major component of the continent’s literature. Without this, one cannot speak of an African literature. It must be the basis of the cultural cross-currents that will both buffet and stimulate that literature” (“Turning the Page: African Writers and the Twenty-First Century”, in Living in Hope and History: Notes From Our Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999). African writers as diverse as Naguib Mahfouz, Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka would assent to such reflections. Given their absolute seriousness and their unblinking engagement with Africa, who would hesitate even for a moment in recognizing Nadine Gordimer as a great New African and a central member of the New African Movement! | |