Ronald Suresh Roberts
THE HOUSE GUN by Nadine Gordimer (David Philip, R99,95)
PARADISE by Toni Morrison (Chatto & Windus, R110)
‘Little illegal niggers with guns and no home training need to be in jail,” says a black resident of a blacks-only town, in Toni Morrison’s Paradise. Conversely, in Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun, young white Duncan Lindgard, despite his seemingly impeccable suburban home training, gets jailed for murder.
Both books portray racially scarred societies in what Gordimer calls “an intimacy of menace”. There is menace among whites themselves (Gordimer) and blacks themselves (Morrison), not only between whites and blacks. Additionally, in both books, racially imprisoned mindsets thrive outside prison walls.
In Morrison’s Ruby, “a prison calling itself a town”, blacks worship racial purity. In defence of this principle they replay the Salem witch trials (“Bitches. More like witches”), routing a nearby interracial women’s commune.
In The House Gun, Duncan finds that “prison is a normal place”. His parents, although not literally imprisoned, remain caged in post-apartheid whiteness. As she has before, Gordimer in The House Gun again shows “predatory” white colonial security devouring the predators themselves. In her 1991 story Once Upon a Time, white suburbanites hired “DRAGONS TEETH The People For Total Security” to install razor wire on their garden wall. Then their son died while pretending to be the fairytale “Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss Sleeping Beauty back to life”.
In Morrison’s Ruby, black racial purity furnishes similarly flawed security against the supposed menace of “racial tampering”. Ruby’s dark-black aristocracy was itself historically rebuffed by “fair-skinned colored men”, who forbade the dark-blacks, Ruby’s eventual founders, to stay in light-black towns for “longer than a night’s rest”.
In exploring intra-black apartheid, complete with the one-night-stopover rule that apartheid-era Bloemfontein had for Indians, Morrison provocatively raises issues that Gordimer herself addressed in the New York Times Magazine last year: South Africa and the United States have swopped places in racial separatism. While all shades of black and white South Africans fitfully commingle, varieties of black and white Americans move doggedly apart.
So these two novels frame a conversation, unprecedented in its nuances, about identity. Morrison sympathetically debunks Afrocentrism, while Gordimer intricately demeans white supremacy.
“All Sloane knew about Africa was the seventy-five cents she gave to the missionary society collection. She had the same level of interest in Africans as they had in her: none. But Roy talked of them as though they were neighbors or, worse, family,” writes Morrison. Nevertheless, Morrison’s book is profoundly black-centered. The only significant “white” character in Paradise dies in the opening sentence (“They shoot the white girl first”). Morrison thus enacts a black-centred vision which is constructively critical, not merely celebratory, and which rejects black separatism.
While Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) was worn down by battling whiteness, Morrison overwhelms it. Paradise is unblinded by whiteness: at page 46, an “authoritative voice” explicitly breaks that spell. In South Africa, Njabulo Ndebele is similarly Rediscovering the Ordinary (1991), beyond fixation (including fixated horror) with apartheid’s brutal whiteness.
In an essential gesture of reciprocation, Gordimer’s new novel is her boldest move Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994), the title of white historian David Roediger’s book. To Roediger, the whiteness of whites, “far from being natural and unchallengeable, is highly conflicted, burdensome and even inhuman”. Undoing white supremacy requires, not colourblindness, but “exposing, demystifying and demeaning the particular ideology of whiteness”.
Gordimer has for decades done what leading cultural critics like Roediger and Paul Gilroy have today begun analysing. Her fiction subtly demeans white supremacy and, with varying degrees of success, enacts racial “rebirths”, beyond white consciousness. Gordimer’s critics have badly neglected this emerging theme of cultural studies internationally, presumably misled by Gordimer’s own essentially accurate but rather bland talk, in interviews and non-fiction, of finding “our common humanity”. There is much more happening here than this clich, suggests.
It is Morrison who identifies the issue, commenting that Gordimer is unusual among white writers in portraying blacks without demonising or romanticising us. Compare Gordimer, for instance, to Ernest Hemingway. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1990), Morrison highlights Hemingway’s gymnastic idiom, in To Have and Have Not (1937), where a black seaman (“the nigger”) serves a white, Harry Morgan. “I looked and saw that he had seen a patch of flying fish,” says Harry. Hemingway’s “nigger” cannot voice his own elementary thoughts, let alone influence white consciousness.
Conversely, in The House Gun, Duncan’s fate rests with the courtroom voice of a black lawyer, Hamilton Motsamai. More important than Motsamai’s pompous legalese, however, is Khulu Dladla, Duncan’s friend. Awaiting the inevitable “guilty” verdict, Duncan’s father hands him a note, written “at Khulu’s dictation”: “UNGEKE UDLIWE UMZWANGEDWA SISEKHONA.” Duncan, whom Khulu has taught Zulu, translates: “‘you will never be alone because we are alone without you.’ It has been said for them, the parents, there is nothing more to be said.”
Khulu exerts emotional authority – beyond the Sturm und Drang of the democratised courtroom – in a white family’s gravest private moment. It is Khulu, too, who insists that the parents honour Duncan’s wishes and care for (white) Natalie’s child.
Whether the child is Duncan’s or his dead victim’s (who cuckolded Duncan) remains unknown. But “children belong, never mind doubts about their origin, in the family” insists Khulu. He emphatically expands the closed biological circle that was explicit in the title of Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979). There, a childhood friendship between white Rosa and black Baasie collapses in the adulthood of the black consciousness Seventies. When Rosa eventually reconciles herself to her late father’s legacy and discovers home “comforts” in an apartheid prison, Baasie pays no visit and Rosa has no “blood relative.”
By contrast, in the new South African circumstances, Gordimer in The House Gun can credibly extend the intimacy of “blood relationships” beyond ties of blood. Duncan embraces a child potentially blood-linked to the man Duncan himself killed. Such an embrace is the only way “to bring death and life together” in a country where the politics of blood ties has multiplied bloodshed.
In juxtaposing death and childbirth, the 19th-century Russians meant, as Vladimir Nabokov said of Leo Tolstoy, that “death is soul birth” into heavenly afterlife. But in Gordimer and Morrison, rebirth is earthbound: it means overcoming natal destiny, like the pregnant girl who flees separatist Ruby, “revolted by the work of her womb”, viewing her own black segregationist “flesh-producing flesh as foreign”.
Conversely, the Lindgards balk at being “biological” parents of a “crime”, squabble subtly about whose progeny this crime really is, cleave towards mythical white innocence, and end natally severed from their own son, a “criminal” escapee from whiteness. Khulu’s final comment on the elder Lindgards? “Well, they’re white, after all.”
Ronald Suresh Roberts is writing a biography of Nadine Gordimerqqqq Aguide for the paranoid
Barbara Ludman
SAFE, SECURE AND STREETWISE (Reader’s Digest, R169,95)
Can you answer these questions? -(a) It’s late at night and you’re driving home when you notice a car following you – and then a tyre bursts. Do you know how far you can drive until the rim breaks?
(b) You’ve got to walk through a dangerous area but that’s cool, you’ve got a whistle. Do you know where to carry it?
(c) You’ve just moved into a shack settlement, and you feel vulnerable in a world of strangers. How can you keep your money safe and possessions secure? (Answers below.)
This latest guide for the paranoid – which is pretty much the entire South African population – has a wealth of useful information on securing your life, your possessions, your sanity. Quite a lot of it seems over the top, even for urban nightmares like Johannesburg; householders putting in all the recommended security devices, for example, would feel they were living in a fortress. But much of it is common sense, and some of it uncommonly useful – whether dealing with abusive husbands, hijackers, gangs or con artists.
Scattered throughout in time-honoured Reader’s Digest style are little boxes with true-life cautionary tales: the little old lady who opened her door to give a beggar a cup of tea and was found dead, hours later; the taxi driver who found a gun in a passenger’s sports bag and discovered he’d been transporting a gang leader.
There are checklists: seven things to do if you have driven into a riot or demonstration, or what to do when your house has been broken into; there’s an appointment checklist for people who have agreed to meet a stranger. It’s on the same page as “Profile of a Serial Killer”.
The book comes with a pamphlet for children, which has some sensible advice, presented in games and quizzes and cartoons.
Here are the answers to the questions above: (a) Alloy rims will break quickly, but steel ones will last longer – front rims 15 kms, back rims, 30, preferably long enough to get you to the nearest police station. (b) On a wrist loop so it hangs in your palm. (c)Try to settle as a group, with friends. Keep your money in a bank – and don’t travel anywhere, even to the shops, alone. xxxx Con of ‘racial democracy’
Anthony Marx’s new book deals with race and the nation-state. Angella Johnson reports
In 1991 Nelson Mandela visited Brazil and hailed its “racial democracy” as a model for South Africa, much to the horror of local political activists who were quick to correct this false impression of a rainbow nation.
Mandela was dismayed to find that a system which was widely acclaimed when he was jailed in 1963 had since been discredited as discriminatory and racist.
In his new book Making Race and Nation (Cambridge University Press), Professor Anthony Marx sheds some light on how Brazil managed to con its 50% black population into accepting racial discrimination, by creating an illusion of racial inclusion. The United States and South Africa, on the other hand, became embroiled in social unrest because of state-legislated discrimination aimed at reinforcing white privilege.
In this comparative study of racial mobilisation, Marx – an associate professor of political science at Columbia University – addresses the question of how race became a central aspect of politics this century.
He does so by comparing apartheid and resistance to it, the Jim Crow laws and protest against them in the American South and the myth of racial democracy in Brazil.
His conclusion? “That states legally encoded racial order and used racial domination to produce stability among their divergent white groups. The result was major social conflict between those who ruled by exclusion and those demanding to be included.
Black identity and protest built upon earlier emergent racial solidarity – were shaped by state policies -and those policies were later reversed in response to the protests they had provoked, writes Marx.
Brazil, which had no official racial-domination laws, avoided mass black protests “because the white elite was already united”, he told the Mail &Guardian. “There was no competing European fragment akin to the Afrikaners or the different factions in the US, so the Portuguese were unchallenged in establishing central colonial authority.”
He argues that in times of conflict the elite strikes bargains and deploys state authority to unify a core constituency of whites within the state by excluding blacks. “The nation-state and economy were thereby preserved and developed.”
In South Africa a coalition was created between the English and the Afrikaners by institutionalising common prejudices against black Africans, while the US used Jim Crow laws to unite North and South after the Civil War.
Such state-initiated white nationalism, underlined by black oppression, was strong enough to integrate warring or competing groups but left the wound of racism to fester into “black-white” conflict.
Where authorities legally reinforced discrimination, the unintended result was major social conflict between those who ruled via exclusion and those demanding inclusion. In the absence of official racial domination (as in Brazil) such conflict was muted.
According to Marx polities were shaped by these dynamics, with varying forms of official racial domination in South Africa and the American South persisting until black opposition replaced “intra-white” conflict as the most pressing challenge to the nation-state.
Marx insists that selective exclusion was not tangential to nation-state, as liberals claim, but was central to how social order was maintained. He further contends that states are more inclined to celebrate cultural difference in order to paper over their failure to redress social and economic inequalities. “The apartheid regime followed this policy and it is now being accommodated by political parties as they try to garner ethnic support.” Whites, he says, are particularly worried that anti-white rhetoric is now being preached in order to unify blacks.
Marx, who published his first book (Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990) in 1992, said he hopes the book will challenge people to rethink the links between racial conflict and the building and development of the nation-state.