Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  Will these potential readers find prose, poetry, and nonfiction in their mother tongues?

  If we are to create a twenty-first-century African literature, how is this to be done while publishing in African languages remains mainly confined to works prescribed for study, market-stall booklets, religious tracts? We have long accepted that Africa cannot, and so far as her people are concerned, has no desire to, create a ‘pure’ culture in linguistic terms; this is an anachronism when for purposes of material development the continent eagerly seeks means of technological development from all over the world.

  We all know that there is no such workable system as a purely indigenous economy once everyone wants computers and movie cassettes.

  Neither, in a future of increasing intercontinental contact, can there be a ‘pure’ indigenous culture. We see, a plain fact all over Africa, that the European languages that came with colonial conquest have been taken over into independence, acquired by Africans and made part and parcel of their own convenience and culture. The brilliant examples of this acquisition are there to be read in the work of some black African writers. (Whites, of course, have never had the good sense to do the same with African languages . . . )

  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.

  What of publishing?

  We write the books; to come alive, they have to be read. To be available, they have to be competently distributed, not only in terms of libraries, but also commercially. Many of us in Africa have had experience of trying to meet the needs of the culturally marginalised by launching small, non-profit publishing ventures in African literature. We find ourselves stopped short by the fact that the distribution network, certainly in the southern African countries (I don’t imagine there is much difference in countries to the north), remains the same old colonial one. Less than a handful of distribution networks make decisions, based on the lowest common denominator of literary value, on what books should be bought from publishers, and this handful has the only means of distributing these widely to the public, since they own the chain bookstores which dominate the trade in the cities and are the only existing bookstores in most small towns. In South Africa, for example, in the twentieth century, there have been and are virtually no bookstores in the vast areas where blacks have been confined under apartheid.

  Another vital question: What will be the various African states’ official attitude to culture, and to literature as an expression of that culture? We writers don’t know, and have every reason to be uneasy. Certainly, in the twentieth century of political struggle, state money has gone into guns, not books; literature, culture, has been relegated to the dispensable category. As for literacy, so long as people can read state decrees and the graffiti that defy them, that has been regarded as sufficient proficiency. As writers, do we envisage, for example, a dispensation from a Ministry of Culture in South Africa to fund publishing in African languages, and to provide libraries in rural communities and in the shanty towns which no doubt will be with us, still, for a long time? Would we have to fear that, in return for subvention, writers might be restricted by censorship of one kind or another? How can we ensure that our implicit role—supplying a critique of society for the greater understanding and enrichment of life there—will be respected?

  Considering all these factors that stand against the writer’s act of transforming literature in response to a new era, it seems that we writers have, however reluctantly, to take on contingent responsibilities that should not be ours. We’ll have to concern ourselves with the quality and direction of education—will our schools turn out drones or thinkers? How shall we press for a new policy and structure of publishing and distribution, so that writers may write in African languages and bring pleasure and fulfillment to thousands who are cut off from literature by lack of knowledge of European languages? How shall we make the function of writers, whose hand held out to contribute to development is in the books they offer, something recognized and given its value by the governing powers of the twenty-first century? We have to begin now to concern ourselves with the structures of society that contain culture, and within which it must assert its growth.

  And there is yet one more problem to be faced by the naked power of the word, which is all we have, but which has proved itself unkillable by even the most horrible of conventional and unconventional weaponry. Looking back, many well-known factors inhibited the growth of a modern African culture, an African literature, in the century whose sands are running out through our fingers. One hardly need cite the contemptuous dismissal of all African culture by frontier and colonial domination; the cementing-over of African music, dance, myth, philosophy, religious beliefs, and secular rituals: the very stuff on which the literary imagination feeds. The creativity of Africa lay ignored beneath the treading feet of white people on their way to see the latest Hollywood gangster movie or to pick up from the corner store a comic with bubble text in American. And soon, soon, these were joined by black people in the same pursuit, having been convinced, since everything that was their own was said to be worthless, that this was the culture to acquire. The habit of chewing cultural pulp is by now deeply established among our people. And it is so temptingly cheap to be bought from abroad by our media, including the dominant cultural medium of our time, television, that literature in Africa not only has to express the lives of the people but also has to assert the beauty and interest of this reality against megasubculture—the new opium of the people . . .

  Surely the powers of the imagination of our writers can be exerted to attract our people away from the soporific sitcom, surely the great adventures that writers explore in life can offer a child something as exciting in image and word as the cumbersome battle between Japanese turtles? We in Africa don’t want cultural freedom hijacked by the rush of international sub-literature into the space for growth hard-won by ourselves in the defeat of colonial culture. That is perhaps the greatest hazard facing us as we turn the page of African literature and write the heading: twenty-first century.

  —UNESCO Symposium

  Harare, Zimbabwe, 1992

  REFERENCES:

  THE CODES OF CULTURE

  When I am asked that interviewer’s stock-in-trade, ‘For whom do you write?’, I reply irritatedly, ‘For anyone who reads me.’

  The question is crass, giving away the media’s assumption that a writer, like itself, presumes ‘readership potential’. It seems typical of the anti-art tenet of commercialism: give the public what they know. But writers—artists of all kinds—exist to break up the paving of habit and breach the railings that confine sensibility; free imaginative response to spring up like grass. We are convinced that we are able to release the vital commonality of the human psyche, our reach limited only by the measure of our talent. After all, isn’t this what we ourselves have received at the touch of other writers? If we are not manufacturing for Mills and Boon, if we are not writing political tracts disguised as works of the imagination, we do not have in mind a shadow company of heads out there, the chat-show groupies or the Party supporters.

  But for some time, now, I have felt a certain unease when I snap, ‘Anyone who reads me.’ The echo comes: ‘Oh really? My, my!’ I begin to think there is a question to be asked, but it is not ‘For whom do we write?’ It is ‘For whom can we write?’ Is there not such a thing as writer potential, perhaps? The postulate reversed? And may I dismiss that one high-handedly? These doubts—or more accurately suggestions—have come about in my particular case less from readings in literary theory over the years than as a result of experience out there in the world among—not ordinary people, to a writer no-one is ordinary—among non-literary people. Which does not imply that they do not read, only that their re
ading does not take place in the matrix of culture most literature presupposes.

  And here there must be a self-correction again. The suggestions are raised as much by the contradictions between literary theory—which, of course, is concerned with the reader’s perceptions as well as the writer’s conscious and subconscious intentions—and the actual life experience of the man or woman on the receiving end of all these deliberations: the generic reader. For the generic reader surely must be the one I have in mind when I answer that I write for ‘anyone who reads me’?

  More than twenty years ago, we were all entranced by or sceptical of (or both at once) the discoveries of structuralism and its analysis of our art and our relationship to the reader. The Freudian explanations we had gone by seemed simplistic and speculative by comparison. The subconscious was ectoplasm in contrast with the precise methodology of a work such as, say, Roland Barthes’ S/Z, published in 1970 on the basis of work done in the sixties. The whole emphasis of literature passed from writer to reader. Barthes’ goal was ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text’, of ‘what can be read but not written’. The novel, the short story, the poem, were redefined as a ‘galaxy of signifiers’. As Richard Howard sums up, Barthes’ conviction of reading was: ‘What is told is always the telling’. And Harry Levin wrote: ‘To survey his [the writer’s]; writings in their totality and chart the contours of their “inner Landscape” is the critical aim of current Structuralists and Phenomenologists. All of these approaches recognize, as a general principle, that every writer has his own configuration of ideas and sentiments, capacities and devices.’

  Barthes’ brilliance, with its element of divine playfulness, made and makes enthralling reading—for those of us who share at least sufficient of his cultural matrix to gain aesthetic pleasure and revelation from his cited ‘signifiers’. It’s a detective game, in which the satisfaction comes from correctly interpreting the clue—elementary, for Sherlock Holmes, but not for my dear Watson. Barthes, in the structural analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, is the Sherlock Holmes who, deducing from his immensely rich cultural experience, instantly recognizes the fingerprints of one cultural reference upon another. The reader is Watson, for whom, it may be, the ‘signifier’ signifies nothing but itself, if there is nothing in the range of his cultural experience for it to be referred to. It is a swatch that does not match any colour in his spectrum, a note that cannot be orchestrated in his ear. So that even if he is told that Balzac’s clock of the Elysée Bourbon is actually chiming metonymic reference to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and from the Faubourg Saint-Honorè to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, and then to the Restoration as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’—there remains a blank where that reader is supposed to be reading ‘what is not written’. The signifier works within a closed system: it presupposes a cultural context shared by writer and reader beyond literacy. Without that resource the reader cannot ‘read’ the text in Barthean abundance. ‘Words are symbols that assume a shared memory’, says Borges. The Faubourg Saint-Honoré is just the name of a district, it has no elegant social/intellectual associations, either as an image conjured up from visits to Paris or as a symbol described in other books, visualized in paintings. The Bourbon Restoration brings no association as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’ because the reader doesn’t know the place of the Bourbon Restoration in French political and social history. The polymath interchange of the arts, letters, politics, history, philosophy, taken for granted by Barthes, is not the traffic of that reader’s existence.

  When one says one writes for ‘anyone who reads me’ one must be aware that ‘anyone’ excludes a vast number of readers who cannot ‘read’ you or me because of givens they do not share with us in unequal societies. The Baudelairean correspondences of earlier literary theory cannot work for them, either, because ‘correspondence’ implies the recognition of one thing in terms of another, which can occur only within the same cultural resource system.

  This is the case even for those of us, like me, who believe that books are not made out of other books, but out of life. Whether we like it or not, we can be ‘read’ only by readers who share terms of reference formed in us by our education—not merely academic but in the broadest sense of life experience; our political, economic, social, and emotional concepts, and our values derived from these; our cultural matrix. It remains true even of those who have put great distances between themselves and the inducted values of childhood; who have changed countries, convictions, ways of life, languages. Citizenship of the world is merely another acculturation, with its set of givens that may derive from many cultures yet in combination becomes something that is not any of them.

  Posing to himself the big question, Tor whom do we write?’, Italo Calvino wrote: ‘Given the division of the world into a capitalist camp, an imperialist camp and a revolutionary camp, whom is the writer writing for?’

  While—if he has any sense—refusing to write for any camp, despite personal political loyalties (and I think there are more of them than Calvino allows), the writer certainly writes from within one of them. And the reader reads from within one. If it is not the same as that of the writer, he is presumed at least to ‘read’ in the writer’s signifiers some relevance to his own, different cultural matrix. But frequently the reader does not find equivalents, in that culture, for the writer’s referential range, because he has not ‘read’ that range. He cannot. The signifying image, word, flashes a message that cannot be received by a different set of preconceptions. This happens even at apparently homogenous cultural levels. In reviews of your fiction and the interviews to which you are subjected, this process can hatch in your text like a cuckoo’s egg. What comes out is unrecognizable, but the reader, the reviewer, journalist, insists that it is yours.

  I experienced this when I came to the United States for the publication of a novel of mine entitled Burger’s Daughter. The daughter and other characters in the story were centred round the personality of Lionel Burger, exemplifying the phenomenon—and problem—of ideology as faith in the family of an Afrikaner who, through becoming a Communist, devotes his life and theirs to the liberation of South Africa from apartheid. In reviews, Burger was unfailingly referred to as a liberal; I myself perpetrated the unthinkable lack of deference to a famous talk-show personality when I contradicted his description of Burger as a noble white liberal.

  He’s not a liberal, he’s a Communist, I interrupted.

  But it was no good. None of these people ‘read’ me because in the ethos of mainstream American society a Communist could never be, no matter in what country or social circumstances, a good man. Yet it had to be acknowledged that Burger was a good man because he was a fighter against racism; therefore my signal must be that Burger was a liberal. This is not a matter of misreading or misunderstanding. It is the substitution of one set of values for another, because the reader cannot conceive of these otherwise.

  Yet not politics but class most calls into question the existence of the generic reader, the ‘whoever reads me’. And by class I mean to signify economics, education, and, above all, living conditions. The cultural context from laws to latrines, from penthouse to poorhouse, travelled by jet or on foot.

  I grant that the difference between the material conditions of life signified in the text and those of the reader must be extreme, and manifest in the dogged daily experience of the reader, if the writer cannot be ‘read’ by him. As the seventeen-year-old daughter of a shopkeeper in a small mining town in Africa, I was able to ‘read’ The Remembrance of Things Past. Why? Because, although the lineage Proust invented, so faithful to that of the French noblesse, genuine and parvenue, could not signify for me, the familial mores from which the novel sets out, so to speak, and are there throughout—the way emotions are expressed in behaviour between mother and child, the place of friendship in social relations, the exaltation of sexuality as romantic love, the regulation of
daily life by meals and visits, the importance of maladies—all this was within the context of middle-class experience, however far-flung.

  And by the way, from where did I get the book? Why, the municipal library; and I could use the library because I was white—and so for me that also was part of the middle-class experience. No black could use that library; in the concommitance of class and colour a young black person of my age was thus doubly excluded from ‘reading’ Proust’s Meseglise and the Guermantes Ways: by lack of any community of cultural background, and by racist material conditions . . .

  Hermeneutic differences between writer and reader are still extreme in our world, despite the advance in technological communications. There is a layer of common culture spread thin over the worlds, first, second, and third, by satellite and cassette. The writer could count on the ‘signifier’ ‘Dallas’ or ‘Rambo’ to be received correctly and fully by any reader from Iceland to Zimbabwe, and almost any other points on the map culturally remote from one another. But the breadth of this potential readership paradoxically limits the writer; producing, it would seem, something close to the generic reader, it confines the writer to a sort of primer of culture, if he expects truly to be ‘read’. It excludes signifiers that cannot be spelt out in that ABC. The writer’s expectations of readership have diminished in inverse proportion to the expansion of technological communications.

  And the effect of extreme differences in material conditions between writer and reader remains decisive. Such differences affect profoundly the imagery, the relativity of values, the referential interpretation of events between the cultural givens of most writers and, for example, the new class of industrial workers, emancipated by the surplus value of leisure earned first by mechanisation and then computerisation. Writers, longing to be ‘read’ by anyone who reads them, from time to time attempt to overcome this in various and curious ways. John Berger has experimented by going to live among peasants, trying to enter into their life-view as formed by their experience. He writes about their lives in a mode that signifies for us, who are not French peasants; we ‘read’ him with all our experience we share with him of literary exoticism, of life-as-literature providing the necessary layers of references. He doesn’t say whether the peasants read what he writes; but remarks that they are aware that he has access to something they don’t have, ‘another body of knowledge, a knowledge of the surrounding but distant world’. A recent review of one of Bobbie Ann Mason’s books sums up the general problem: ‘She writes the kind of fiction her characters would never read.’