Gordimer: She had courage to question

At the beginning of this week, Nadine Gordimer, valiant anti-apartheid literary campaigner, Nobel laureate, brilliant trail-blazer of South African women writing, passed away.

Her death is an incalculable loss to world literature, to South Africa and to the sisterhood of African women writers.

Gordimer was halfway through her 91st year of life, but she was such a timeless presence in Africa’s literary consciousness that it’s difficult to imagine her being gone. It’s almost like waking up on a fine Cape Town morning and finding Table Mountain gone!

Another Nobel literature laureate, Ernest Hemingway, I believe, once said that the writer’s duty is to be tough and survive and write. That’s just what Nadine Gordimer did to the hilt.

Born and raised in a rather dour immigrant family, where her English-born mother was so smotheringly controlling and protective that she wouldn’t even allow her to play and run around like other little girls, Gordimer spent her childhood in home-tutored loneliness. Her most precious consolation was reading and she devoured nearly all the printed material available in her narrow environment.

This was to stand her in very good stead when she at last got a taste of freedom at the famous Witwatersrand University, where she studied Literature from 1945. Her writing began to take root, justifying the oft-made and oft-ignored observation that avid reading is the best preparation for good writing.

POLITICAL WRITER

And once she had started writing, there was no looking back. From the publication of her first collection of short stories, Face to Face, in 1949 to this second decade of the 21st century, Nadine Gordimer steadily put out a stupendous body of top quality writing, in the form of novels, stories, essays, and even a rather reluctant memoir, Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008.

To worldwide literary audiences, Nadine Gordimer was best known for her so-called anti-apartheid novels, A World of Strangers, The Late Burgeois World, July’s People and, especially, Burgher’s Daughter. All of these texts, except July’s People, were banned reading in South Africa for long periods during the apartheid era.

Yet, surprisingly, Nadine Gordimer often expressed the point that she didn’t regard herself as a “political” writer. This may perhaps be understood in two main ways.

First, Nadine Gordimer, though politically engaged and a supporter of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, was not as politically explicit and activist as her fellow white contemporaries, like Helen Suzman or Ruth First.

Suzman, as you might remember, was the most outspoken opponent of apartheid in the South African Parliament for the better part of 30 years, enduring endless harassment and vilification from the white supremacists. Ruth First actively worked for Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the liberation struggle, and was eventually assassinated for it by the apartheid spy network.

Secondly, Gordimer seems to have taken the concept of political writing to imply the advocacy of specific partisan positions and programmes, an approach that she does not think creative writing should take, and which she does not practise in her novels.

What she does, and what makes her writing strike us as poignantly ‘political’, is to present her world, the world of apartheid South Africa, as she saw and felt it, with an incisive precision and a persistently critical questioning. She does not judge or tell us what things should be like. But she is constantly compelling the reader to look at what things are like, and asking why they should be like that. 

“I’ve never written anything with the idea of persuading people or exposing something,” she was quoted once as saying. “I’ve just written about what I’ve sensed, what is there, what I’ve learned. And if there’s a message, it’s what people read from it.”

CONSTANTLY GAGGED

What Nadine Gordimer saw and sensed in the racist, white supremacist South Africa of her times was an inhuman and absurd system that either viciously poisoned relationships or made them utterly impossible.

Remember apartheid legislated even about what happened in people’s bedrooms, with laws like the infamous Immorality Act that criminalised intimacy between people of different races.

There was no way Gordimer could write about such a reality honestly without being perceived as being political. Hence the frequent and prolonged bans on her books by a misguided autocracy that thought that silencing frank voices with censorship could help prop up an unsustainable injustice.

But let us bring Nadine Gordimer home to our times and climes. For it’s only too easy for us to point fingers and gleefully praise her lucid bashing of “those racist chauvinists” of a now happily bygone era.

Yet Gordimer remains crucially relevant to us here and now. This is because the characters, the situations and the relationships that she creates and reflects in her books are timelessly human.

Apartheid, whether legislated or quietly practised, is not entirely a matter of race or colour. The ethnic ghettos of our cities, or the abysmal chasms between the manicured ‘residential areas’ and the trash-littered hovels of our slums, all have their parallels in Gordimer’s work.

A young expatriate, for example, who lands in Nairobi or Kampala today, and wants to make friends in both Korogocho and Muthaiga, or Kisenyi and Kololo, would find a direct equivalent in the young Englishman of Gordimer’s A Land of Strangers. The class, wealth and ethnic discriminations among us can be just as puzzling as the apartheid divides between the ‘whites-only’ neighbourhoods and the black townships of her world. We also appreciate Gordimer’s work because of the way it fires our imagination by deploying the great literary “what if” — the unique ability to project her awareness into characters and situations — that truly constitutes poetic prophecy.

Once when I was discussing July’s People with an undergraduate class at Kenyatta University, I had the impression that the majority of the students considered it to be an exaggeration, although they didn’t say so openly.

REST IN PEACE

The novel is created around a black house servant who takes his white employer’s family to his rural home for protection from riots which break out around their residence. The basic question raised by the narrative is: “what if the black-and-white roles were to be reversed?”

Is it too far-fetched? One only needs to look at South Africa today to get an answer. A black majority government is in charge of the lives of all South Africans. One can only hope that the new rulers will learn from the prophecies of visionaries like Nadine Gordimer and put up a better show than their predecessors.

As we bid goodbye to this rare literary icon, and celebrate her inspiring life and work, we cannot help feeling obliged to respect the narrative power of accurately and critically observed reality, and to always creatively imagine a better future, as Nadine Gordimer always did, with her indefatigable “what if”.

Rest in peace, Nadine Gordimer.