The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. - Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
In an eulogy to Stuart Hall, earlier this year, Gayatri Spivak wrote, “A generation of intellectuals and activists, and intellectual-activists, is disappearing.” Eqbal Ahmed, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Stuart Hall and now Nadine Gordimer. In the world of gentrified eulogies written by indifferent men, it is easy to forget the remarkable life of radical resistance and the consistent vigour with which they spoke truth to power.
Nadine Gordimer was an intimate stranger, translating the unyielding cruelty of the apartheid state. Over the course of six decades, she relentlessly articulated the terrible cost of racism, violence and oppression. Robert Green was precise when he observed, “finally when the history of the nationalist apartheid governments from 1948 to the end comes to be written, Nadine Gordimer’s shelf of novels will provide the future historian with all the evidence needed to assess the price that has been paid”. Gordimer the writer is intimately entwined with South Africa’s political history and the apartheid era. It is impossible to talk about her work, without talking about her country’s history.
Apartheid was a deliberate policy of segregation that created a fractured society. While segregation had a long history in South Africa, grounded in British colonial heritage, as well as the Afrikaner nationalism, it was after 1948, under Apartheid that the greater excesses of exploitation and oppression began to occur. Words remain inadequate to convey the deep sense of entrapment that the black South African’s experienced under this inhumane regime. Essayist and author Lewis Nkosi describes it as a living “a daily exercise in the absurd”. In his essay he writes, “What a black man goes through in his daily life sounds like an exaggerated Kafka novel.”
The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 became the inflection point, when peaceful protestors were met with repression and violence. The aftermath was marked by the apartheid state’s brutal suppression of political resistance. Black political organisations were banned and effective opposition was crushed by the state. A state of emergency was declared, detaining thousands of people, including prominent anti-apartheid activists and writers. By the mid 1960s South African Black writers Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Lewis Nkosi, Todd Matshikiza and Ezekeil Mphahlele had all left South Africa, and their work was banned. Sophiatown writer Nat Nakasa committed suicide in exile and Can Themba’s alcohol-related death were both tragedies of exile. It was in this climate of fear and intellectual disarray that Gordimer began creating her oeuvre.
Gordimer always maintained that she was not political; that instead she had come, “to the abstraction of politics through the flesh and blood of individual behaviour.” She didn’t know what politics was about until she saw it all happening to people. She became politically engaged in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre. She witnessed her friends being arrested and incarcerated. Many disappeared, some lived and others died under incarceration. Occasion for Loving, written during this period, articulates the complete failure of liberal politics to confront the Apartheid state. Liberal politics, for Gordimer, demonstrated an inadequacy to confront political and economic structures, their strategies too moderate and too insignificant to bring about change. In one interview, she states, “Liberal is a dirty word. Liberals are people who make promises they have no power to keep”. Politics, for Gordimer, had to be radical, if it was to confront an oppressive state. She drew heavily from Frantz Fanon’s and the American Black Power movement to articulate her radical stance in her politics and writing. Her critique of liberal failure to confront systems and bring about change remains valid today.
Her position in South Africa was always precarious. Her radical politics alienated her from the whites. Belonging to the white minority distanced her from the blacks, many of whom argued that whites could never know blacks well enough to write about them. A critique she struggled and lived with all her literary life. In A World of Strangers, she would confront this question. What roles did white South African’s play in the liberation struggle? Questions of representations in literature — who can and cannot write about an oppressed minority — are confrontations that we face today.
As she wrote in protest, she also fought censorship. Her steadfast critique of the apartheid regime continued and several of her works were banned throughout the 1960s and 1970s. July’s People was banned under apartheid, and faced further censorship under the post-apartheid government. Describing July’s People as “deeply racist, superior and patronising”, the book was removed from the school’s reading list, along with works by other anti-prominent apartheid writers. The fight to have one’s book read, and not burnt, or pulped is still a recurring crusade.
In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda wrote his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, The Treason of the Intellectual, when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were engulfing Europe. “Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organisation of political hatreds.” he wrote. Benda’s utterances continue to have a deep resonance today, as we witness men and women abdicating their intellectual duty to think and question. We live in troubling times, one no more morbid, testing or cruel than the ones that Gordimer lived through. But what we are beginning to lack are the writers who remain faithful to the instinct of truth. The public space for intellectual disagreement is shrinking and writers write in service of the nation and not for the truth. Gordimer once candidly stated that she had no allegiances to South Africa as a writer.
A writer, in the words of Albert Camus, cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. It is precisely at this juncture that we need to rethink the difficult and remarkable life of Nadime Gordimer, women and men like her who by choice lived a precarious life. As I write today about the life of a remarkable subversive, I cannot ignore another act of violence unfolding against the Palestinian people, and the accompanying silence. Things which are taken for granted in the western world such as basic rights, employment and free movement are actively legislated against by the State. Their rights have eroded to the point of non-existence. It would take a monumental persistence to keep writing in defence of their rights.
I end this with a line from Proust who influenced Grodimer the most, to remind ourselves of our thinking duty, “We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”
