Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  And so now I should not have been surprised that you, writing to me, are preoccupied by the question of violence entering deeply into your awareness, just as it has made its way into mine. This is a ‘recognition’ between two writers; but it goes further. It is the recognition of writers’ inescapable need to read the signs society gives out cryptically and to try to make sense of what these really mean.

  I must tell you that when I began to write The House Gun it came to me as the personal tragedy of a mother and father whose son, in a crime of passion, murders their human values along with the man he kills. The parallel theme, placing their lives in the context of their country, the new South Africa, was that they—white people who in the past regime of racial discrimination had always had black people dependent upon them—would find themselves dependent upon a distinguished black lawyer to defend their son. That was going to be the double thesis of my novel. But as I wrote (and isn’t it always the way with us, our exploration of our story lures us further and further into the complexity of specific human existences?), I found that the context of mother, father, and son was not existentially determined only geographically and politically; there was the question of the very air they breathed. Violence in the air; didn’t the private act of crime passionel take place within unconscious sinister sanction: the public, social banalisation of violence?

  You make the true and terrible observation ‘all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are the mirrors upon which the massive universal violence is reflected’. You are rightly most concerned about the situation of children, and I’ll come to that, but first I must comment on the extraordinary, blinkered attitude to violence which I have just recently been subjected to rather than encountered, in Europe and the United States.

  Whenever I was interviewed, journalists would propose the question of violence in South Africa as an isolated phenomenon, as if street muggings, burglaries, campus ‘date rapes’, brawls resulting in serious injuries, and even death, between so-called fans at sports matches, were not part of everyday life in their countries.

  Let me admit at once that South African cities have at present a high place on the deplorable list of those with the worst crime rate in the world. Some South American cities have been prominent on that list so long that this has come to be regarded cynically by the rest of the world as a national characteristic, a kind of folk custom rather than a tragedy. Conversely, South Africa’s violent crime is seen as a phenomenon of freedom—interpreted among racists everywhere (and there are still plenty of them) as evidence that blacks should have been kept under white hegemony for ever.

  The reasons for the rise of crime in South Africa, however, are not those of black people’s abuse of freedom. They are our heritage from apartheid. What the world does not know, or chose not to know, was that during the apartheid regime from 1948, State violence was quotidian and rampant. To be victims of State violence was the way of life for black men, women, and children. Violence is nothing new to us; it was simply confined to daily perpetration against blacks. They were shut away outside the cities in their black townships at night, or permanently banished to ethnically-defined territory euphemistically known as ‘homelands’, from where only male contract workers were allowed to come to the cities. This was how urban law-and-order was maintained. Violence, and the desperate devaluation of life it called forth, was out of sight. Now that the people of our country are free in their own country to seek work and homes wherever they please, they flock to the cities. But the cities were not built for them; there is no housing for such vast numbers, and their presence on the labour market has swelled the ranks of the unemployed enormously. Their home is the streets; hunger turns them, as it would most of us who deplore crime on full stomachs, to crime, and degradation degenerates into violence. These are the historical facts which make the reasons for violence in South Africa exceptional; economic development has a chance to deal with them to a significant extent, but not entirely.

  As for the matter of guns as domestic possessions in South Africa, along with the house cat—while I was in the U.S.A. two schoolboys aged eleven and thirteen shot dead several classmates and their teacher, and while I was in Paris a schoolboy shot and killed his classmate. Why did these children have access to guns? Where did they get them? The American children took the guns from the house of their grandfather; the French child from that of his father. The guns were simply there, in these family homes, commonplace objects, evidently not kept under lock and key, if they had any legitimate place at all in household equipment. I’ve just read American statistics revealing that a gun in the house is forty-three times more likely to kill a member of the household than an intruder.

  And now you tell me that a Japanese boy killed a companion and hung up the victim’s head in public; a boy fatally stabbed his teacher; an old man was beaten to death by two girls, and a father was killed by his son and the son’s friend.

  This brings us to what is the ultimate responsibility of adults in your country, in mine, in the whole world: why could children cold-bloodedly kill? What has made them horrifically indifferent to the pain and death of others, so that they themselves are prepared to inflict these? What has happened to their ‘tender years’?

  Setting aside the particular experience of South Africa, I think the woman who challenged you, citing environmental causes—an environment created entirely by the power and will of adults—was correct. If you look back at your own childhood experience, Kenzaburo, and I look back at mine, surely we shall see how our morality, our humanity was distorted by the agenda of adults, something we had to struggle with and shed by our own efforts as we grew: a confirmation of your conviction that there is the ‘power of recovery inherent in children themselves’, yes. You were brain-washed—no less—into believing that the immortal worth of the Emperor was such that you must be prepared to kill yourself at his command. I was brainwashed—no less—into believing that my white skin gave me superiority and absolute authority over anyone of another colour.

  Children are not subjected to this sort of evil conditioning today. Then what is it, in countries dedicated to peace and democracy, reformed in aversion to the authoritarian cruelties of the past, that makes violence acceptable to children? I know it’s easy to lay responsibility on the most obvious—the visual media, television and certain electronic games, now also part of home furnishings. But the fact is that these household presences have become the third parent. They raise the child according to a set of values of equal influence to that of the biological parents. The power of the image has become greater than the word; you can tell a child that a bullet in the head kills, a knife in the heart kills. The child sees the ‘dead’ actor appear, swaggering in another role, next day. This devaluation of pain, with its consequent blunting of inhibitions against committing violence, has become, through the acts of glamorous gangsters, mortal-ray-breathing heroes of outer space, the daily, hourly formation of youthful attitudes. It is hauntingly clear to me that these children who kill do not have—it’s like an atrophied faculty—the capacity to relate to pain and destruction experienced in the flesh of others. I think this is what has happened to the ‘inner psyche of these juvenile delinquents’ you speak of.

  What can we do, all of us adults, to take up the responsibility to children to ‘restore their normal selves’, how rouse ‘the power of self-respect inherent in them originally’?

  If we place a large share of the blame for their condition upon the media, are we then advocating censorship? The idea is repugnant and frightening to me, who spent decades fighting censorship of information, literature, the arts, in my country. I have in mind something so difficult to bring about that it may seem naïve to mention it. Is it not possible that writers, actors, directors, and producers of these programmes that make violence acceptably banal could reconsider their own values? It is said in what is known as the ‘entertainment industry’—it has also become a brain-washing industry—that the i
ndustry simply gives the public what it wants. But the public is long conditioned to want what the industry dictates. And why is that public so passive under this self-appointed authority? Is it because the visual media are the representation of much accepted adult behaviour? The violence in the air is the exhalation of our being?

  You know—more telling, even, than any statement in your letter—years ago you made a remarkable implicit claim for the ability of children to restore the power of self-respect inherent in them. The children in your early story (in English translation entitled ‘Prize Stock’) are the ones in a remote Japanese village who, by their actions and attitudes, teach the adults that the black American airman who has fallen into their hands during the war is a human being, capable of emotional response and suffering. Taking your premise that the power of self-respect is inherent in children, this means that it also must still exist, dormant, in the substance of adult men and women. How shall we release this power of restoration in our present era and circumstances?

  Kenzaburo, you did not know how much you were speaking for the end of our millennium when you once used these words: Teach us to outgrow our madness.

  Sincerely,

  Nadine

  10 May 1998

  Dear Nadine (please allow me to reciprocate using each other’s given names)

  Thank you very much indeed for your welcome reply. It has served to rescue me from the sense of helpless isolation from the whole world as well as from the Japanese society, to which I have recently been susceptible. Your letter reminds me of the same kind of encouragement that I experienced in watching on television the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics held in Nagano, Japan, last February. The keynote of the ceremony was basically one of age-old nationalism. The ceremony reached its climax, however, when my friend Seiji Ozawa conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the provincial town of Nagano with its orchestra while simultaneously the singers sang in unison at a number of places—in Africa, China, etc., with the Song of Joy resounding all over the world.

  Seiji did his best to conduct whole mankind on this planet to unity by overcoming the time-lag that would normally be unavoidable in satellite transmission. I was deeply struck by the determined conviction which I detected in his face. By determined conviction I mean his act of praying—he once told me that while engaged in the performance of music he would attain the feeling that he was praying.

  Dear Nadine it was thoughtful of you to remind yourself of my O Teach us to Outgrow our Madness. I am grateful to you and alive to the poignancy attached to the phrase. For the title of my work I borrowed the phrase from W. H. Auden’s poem. It constitutes a part of the ‘voice of Man’ uttered in the middle of the battle between the Japanese army and the Chinese guerrillas. This universal voice concludes as follows: ‘Till, as the contribution of our star, we follow/The clear instructions of that justice, in the shadow/Of whose uplifting, loving and constraining power/All human reasons do rejoice and operate.’

  Along with this prayer, which has not been fulfilled, I cannot but think of the sufferings that Seiji Ozawa himself experienced during the post-war period. A contemporary of mine, Seiji as a boy was brought up on the Chinese mainland.

  As for the background of urban violence in the newly-born South Africa, you have traced it in the whole modern history that began with apartheid. Dear Nadine, I admire your insight and courage, in contrast to the inadequacy of the Japanese media searching ineffectively for the origin of juvenile violence in this country.

  Many people here say that the present juvenile violence is the product of the post-war democracy, the family system based on it, and the educational system as an extension of these. Notably enough, nobody speaks of the historical process by which, from the beginning of modernisation, Japan perpetrated violence to the utmost in other parts of Asia for the sake of self-aggrandisement until the end of World War II, when the massive violence of nuclear weapons burnt down the two Japanese cities. It seems that people have failed to reflect upon how ‘the violence in the air’, in your words, has been engendered. People are failing to do what we soon did after the end of the War.

  An objection will be readily raised that there is little bearing of the Nanking incident on the Japanese children of today. This is the situation which I find myself in. I, for one, assert that it would be an effective way of anti-violence education to think, together with children, how Japanese citizens as a whole could make up for the irredeemable violence committed by the state in the past. Adults will have to change before children; adults thereby will restore confidence that they can change—these could be the concrete plans to be put into practice both at home and at school.

  When I, an undergraduate student of foreign literature, started my career as a writer, I embraced the following two fundamental principles. One was to recapture afresh what custom had bedimmed: all the lustre of either consciousness or sensibility. On looking back I realize that this was nothing but ‘defamiliarisation’ as defined by the Russian formalists. Not only the novelists but also the media have the obligation to show to adults as well as to children the heavy and weary weight of death, violence and pain that comes home to human existence.

  Another of my principles was to attach primary importance to imagination. In those days my contention was that there was in ordinary Japanese no equivalent to ‘imagination’ either in English or French. It is urgently needed to investigate whether serious literature and writings in the mass media give expression adequate enough to evoke imagination about death, violence and pain.

  You are particularly concerned about the colossal mass media targeting children as their audience and instead of making them feel the images of death and violence as reality, represent these images as something with which they could not be directly involved. As a result death, violence and pain become something commonplace in the consciousness and sensibility of children. Their imagination has been numbed.

  Such a trend is explicitly evident in the representation of chaotic future society by means of the visual media and cartoons (accompanied by words) produced under its influence. However, the masterpieces in Utopian literature, from Thomas Moore through Zamiatin to George Orwell, were invariably concerned with the present in which they lived, suffered and entertained their hopes. In the images of a violent future world prevalent in the visual media are reflected the men and society common to the present world, as you have agreed with me, ‘overshadowed by massive violence’.

  In my first letter I also wrote that ‘all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are mirrors upon which the massive universal violence is reflected or are its miniature models.’ Children perceive ‘the violence in the air’ overshadowing the present age and are familiarised to representations of violence by the visual and various other media. Under the circumstances, how vulnerable they are! As regards their vulnerability I may put it another way by saying that they can easily be victimised and incite those who are willing to victimise them. They can at once be weaklings who are victims of violence and bullies who exert violence—against other children, against their family members, or even against themselves by means of suicide, as Dante depicts in Canto XIII of Inferno.

  What then should we do? I know from experience, painstaking though it may be, that I could not avoid thinking of what I should do as a novelist. As I am sure that you will never misunderstand me, I do not in the least regard the writing profession as something of a privilege. I simply wish to restore confidence that, in this age of the endless expansion of the visual media, television, computer games, etc., the novel’s apparently old-fashioned methods of representations have the power of ‘defamiliarising’ death, violence and pain and could play the role of revitalizing and developing imagination for that purpose.

  Would it be possible at all for the novel to regain children and youths as readers? When I say this, I am conceiving of the novel not as mere verbalization of the visual media but as something that genuinely deserves its name.
And I wish to regain the reader who will be reading this kind of novel with much wished-for intensity. Shall we ever succeed in doing this? It will not be very easy in this country. At the present moment the more ambitious publishers draw their attention to anything other than literature.

  Still I wish to repeat that violence prevailing all over the world is a problem of modern history that we have inherited from the generation immediately before us. Are we allowed to bequeath it unsolved to the next generation? While knowing that we are exacerbating it, aren’t we standing on the verge of giving up our responsibilities? Under these circumstances I think it will be an urgent matter to address to adult readers.

  Dear Nadine, please forgive me for having kept talking of grim subjects. I have been doing so, however, in the hope that, even concerning the difficult realities, you will be returning to us an essentially bright and encouraging message which I have always discovered in your admirable writings.

  Yours sincerely

  Kenzaburo

  Johannesburg, 15th May 1998

  Dear Kenzaburo,

  I know so well your sense of helplessness before the banalisation of violence, the inability to feel the pain of others and the casual willingness to inflict it upon them, among which we are living. We are writers, not politicians, and as sometime political activists we are always among people better equipped for the role. Our writings are the ‘essential gesture’ (I quote Roland Barthes again, as I did for the title of one of my books) by which we reach out to grasp the hand of our society. But the vocation of literature seems so remote from violence; the hand we extend is struck aside by it. Yet violence is also a means of expression. That is what you and I have come to recognize. It is the way in which modern urban society expresses itself. If there is a means at all by which we can be effective, as writers, in striving to change this, it can only be to counter it by giving the alternative—in your words ‘expression adequate enough to evoke imagination about death, violence and pain’.