Lionel Abrahams
LIVING IN HOPE AND HISTORY: NOTES FROM OUR CENTURY by Nadine Gordimer (Bloomsbury)
This is a gathering of Nadine Gordimer’s essays: reflections, reviews, tributes, conference papers, reports, letters and addresses to the United Nations, the Nobel Prize audience and other eminent bodies – the earliest from 1959 but most from the Eighties and Nineties. In a letter to the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who looks to her for ”a word of hope”, she describes herself as ”only a realistic optimist” and anticipates the present volume thus: ”So I am putting together a modest book of some of the non-fiction pieces I’ve written, a reflection of how I’ve looked at this century I’ve lived in.”
These writings – tide-marks of her extending consciousness of contemporary conditions, issues, literature and opinions – are distinguished by the breadth and urgency of her concerns, the compass and depth of her information, and the frequently penetrating eloquence of her impassioned rhetoric. The collection brings forcibly home how singular and prodigious a presence she has grown into on South Africa’s (and doubtless the world’s) intellectual stage. Her comment on Leopold Sedar Senghor’s career – ”It is fascinating to follow this extraordinary adventure of the human spirit” – can fairly be applied to her own.
I found the experience of reading this book by turns enthralling, illuminating, rousing and challenging, yet, at certain points, dismaying. Her topics – some of them informed interests, some of them profound concerns – range from the status of the artist, to Aids, to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and the menace of religious fanaticism, to TV’s banalisation of violence, to the corruption of language, to the implications of economic and cultural globalisation, to sexual liberation, to literacy, to the prospects for literary translation and publishing in Africa, to the Internet, to the imperatives of poverty and the paradoxes of 20th-century technological advancement.
To quote some of her characteristic illuminations and challenges:
”It is detachment that sins against life.”
”For to be illiterate is … to spend one’s life imprisoned between the walls of one-dimensional experience.”
”… literature has its implicit and unalterable social role.”
”What alienates the Writer from the State is that the State – any State – is always certain it is right.”
”… to discover the conditions of life. That is what the Writer’s imagination seeks to do everywhere; and … it is generally not what the State would have from the Writer.”
”Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art?”
”Who, anywhere in the world, translates the raw material of the human condition, which millions experience but for which millions have no words?” – in protest against the ”gagging” of almost all our known black writers as ”named communists”, in 1966.
Her two most recurrent themes are literature and politics. And then the inter-relationship between the two, particularly as it implicates morality, responsibility, truth, justice, imagination, individuality and freedom. Both main themes afford her occasions for celebration. She is ever magnanimously ready with praises honouring heroes of various kinds. She writes about writers with an enthusiasm that lifts her encomiums above mere cool criticism. Even in the case of Roland Barthes, where her main intention is to point out the limited applicability of his theory of reading, specifically in the socio-economic context of Africa, she first invokes the intellectual excitement of encountering his ideas.
Yet the oceanic breadth of her reading ensures that her choice of favourites for appreciative exploration never lacks discrimination. She writes here with a rich intensity of vision on the achievements of Senghor, Gunter Grass, Naguib Mahfouz and the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth. Among the many others to whom she more fleetingly makes obeisance are Blake, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Yeats, Proust, Kafka, Camus, Borges, Kundera, Achebe, Mphahlele, Heaney and Serote.
The urgency with which she writes on politics is that of commitment, and her political commitment colours her literary comment as well as everything else in this volume. She would say illuminates, holding her politics to be the chief expression of her moral sense. In 1959 she writes, ”… my opposition to apartheid is compounded not only of a sense of justice, but also out of a personal, selfish, and extreme distaste for having the choice of my friends dictated to me …”
Later, she seeks the source of Beyers Naude’s political conversion in: ”Sense of justice, that spirit-level indicator, origin unknown?” And addressing students at a Wits graduation ceremony, she tells them: ”The sense of the rights of human existence is there inside you … – a collective conscience painfully arrived at …” and warns them against ”that vapid death- rattle: Oh, when I was a student I used to get steamed-up about things”.
”… painfully arrived at …” Passages I have quoted will already have suggested that keeping faith with her commitment, her sense of justice, her conscience, has not been, for Nadine Gordimer, a simple, easy matter. Indeed, she seems to have had to wage her own struggle within the Struggle. The most naked indication is the following sentence from her essay on Roth: ”It troubles me that the writers whom I tend to admire most – Roth, Kundera, Milosz, Levi, Kis – are those who reject, out of their own experience, the Left to which I remain committed in hope of its evolution.” How easy, how safe, to have kept such a predicament secret! This inner struggle, however, has in no visible way hampered her wholehearted service to her commitment.
Politics receives the main emphasis in the longest section of the volume. She tackles apartheid, analyses its corruptive moral legacy, and assesses its politics of censorship; she glorifies the rally to welcome Walter Sisulu and others on their release from prison; she eulogises Nelson Mandela, celebrates the 1994 election, then critically reviews the first year; she pauses to endorse, with an added punch of wit, the African National Congress’s damnation of Mangosuthu Buthelezi; she contrasts disappointing race relations in the United States with the hopeful ones in South Africa, presses the United Nations to action on poverty, et cetera.
Political matters engage her beyond that section – and sometimes contentiously, as on the role of communism, for one, in her survey of the 20th century. But politics is inseparable from contention, and by her lights, all her political acts of writing are functions of realism, conscience and human responsibility.
With so much justified and so much to admire, then, why am I occasionally dismayed? Apart from certain responses to being made aware of my relative ignorance, obtuseness or callousnesss, it is that I feel flickers of apprehension about the direction a line of thought seems to be tending in. For example, when Gordimer asserts in an address: ”I can speak of literature and politics, pass from one to the other in one breath … because the former … is created inescapably within the destined context of politics” (her emphasis) – I have to ask, if the condition is indeed ineluctable, why is there a need to insist on it? What’s the agenda?
And when, citing this as evidence of Mahfouz’s essential quality of ”Wisdom” , she quotes his major character, Kamal – ”a struggle towards truth aiming at the good of mankind as a whole” – I uncomfortably quibble: What kind of truth it it that is imbued with an aim? I feel slightly chilled on reading: ”It is for the average white to discover, earn and affirm a valid identity in a society with a black majority … Groups of extremists who cannot adjust will die out with the present generation, I believe.”
I am not comforted by her explanation, in 1997, of destructive union actions, trashings on campuses, taxi violence, et cetera: ”…people … lose the faculty of using the law when, at last, such recourse is open to them”. (Her emphasis.) In like vein comes: ”The tactics of a desperate liberation struggle are all that many people know how to employ.” And at ”Apartheid was an avatar of Nazism. The theories of racial superiority and most of the repulsive and cruel ways of implementing them were the same in both regimes”, I question ”most”: how do we tally the one called the final solution?
There are other discomposing passages, but none more so than: ”Senghor has been accused of not condemning, in his play, Chaka’s brutality, but his interpretation of Chaka’s killing of his beloved wife may also be understood as symbolic of the terrible ultimate sacrifice of all that is personal demanded by a struggle for freedom.” (Her emphasis.) But after all, Gordimer knows the world and yearns for ”the good of mankind as a whole”, so perhaps my misgivings amount only to waves of vertigo that affect me when I look down out of my ivory tower.
(A pity that the publishers have not done a due job in respect of typos and adequate apparatus. Inter alia, we find – in the contents list! – ”Madela” for ”Mandela”, while ”1988” at the end of an essay which refers to ”1988 a decade ago” is one of too few attempts to indicate the occasions of these historically orientated papers.)