Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  That is all the expertise needed to judge the reasonable needs of any fellow human being. Forget about his colour or ‘what he was used to’; he hungers, thirsts, and must work for a living just as you do. It is too easy for us to shelter behind the analyses of the behavioural sciences, that serve to rationalise the American ‘hamlet’ system in Vietnam as the ‘restructuring’ of society rather than the waging of war, and the crypto-behavioural theory of apartheid that rationalises arbitrary resettlement in South Africa on the premise that affinity of skin colour and race overrides all other human needs.

  In South Africa, in ten years, 900,000 black people have been moved from their homes because the lands on which they were living – and some had been settled up to a hundred years – have been declared ‘black spots’ in a white area. The blacks have had no choice. The moves are decreed under laws they had no voice in making, since they have no vote. They are poor people, who lived humbly where they were; do not imagine that they are set down in some sort of model village, the shell of a bright new community waiting to be inhabited.

  They are usually eventually granted some sort of compensation for the houses they leave behind to be bulldozed, but where they are sent, there are no new ones: at best, some basic building materials may be supplied, and they are expected to build new homes themselves, living meanwhile in tents that may or may not be supplied. There may be water nearby, and fuel; often they must walk miles for these necessities. If they are rural people and are moved to a bit of ground classified non-rural, they must sell their cattle before they go.

  The bit of ground may be near a white town where work is available, or may not – it has not proved to be part of the ‘planning’ to ensure in advance that those who lose employment by the move shall be provided with alternative employment where they are ordered to live. Some settlements consist entirely of unemployables – officially termed ‘surplus people’, ‘redundant people’, ‘non-productive people’ – swept out of the towns since they cannot serve as units of labour.

  The physical conditions of resettlement are practically without exception of such desolation that confronted with them, one is almost unable to think beyond bread and latrines. The sense of urgency aroused on behalf of people whose struggle for existence has been reduced to a search for wood to make a fire, a bucket of clean water to drink, 20 cents to pay a bus fare to a clinic, is inclined to set the mind safely on ameliorating such unthinkable concrete hardships. Newspaper accounts of these conditions have led the public of Johannesburg, for example, to do what is known locally as ‘opening its heart’ to pour forth from the cornucopia of white plenty, blankets, food and medicine to warm, feed and tend the tent-and-hovel black ‘towns’.

  This is done in the name of common humanity. But in the name of common humanity, how do white people manage to close their minds to the implications of the resettlement policy while at the same time ‘opening their hearts’ to its callous and inevitable results?

  In the second richest country in Africa, in the new decade of the twentieth century, choosing to manipulate the lives of a voteless and powerless indigenous majority in accordance with a theory of colour preference, we in South Africa are reproducing the living conditions of nineteenth-century European famine victims allowed to labour under sufferance in another country. In a world with a vast refugee problem still unsolved from the last World War and the lesser ones that have succeeded it, we who have never suffered the destruction of our own soil and cities have created encampments of people living like the homeless refugees of Palestine, Biafra and Vietnam.

  Every human life, however humble it has been, has a context meshed of familiar experience – social relationships, patterns of activity in relation to environment. Call it ‘home’, if you like. To be transported out of this on a government truck one morning and put down in an uninhabited place is to be asked to build not only your shelter but your whole life over again, from scratch. For the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are having this experience forced upon them in South Africa there is no appeal.

  As for the whites – if our hearts were ever really to be opened perhaps all we should find would be, graven there, this comment from one of the inhabitants of a resettlement: You can’t say no to a white man.

  1971

  Unchaining Poets

  A few weeks ago South African censors banned a T-shirt bearing the legend, ‘Help Cure Virginity’.

  At the same time, long-standing bans on William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus and Françoise Sagan’s A Certain Smile were lifted.

  Who was it who submitted a T-shirt for the censors’ weighty consideration? Who or what made them read Ellison, Faulkner, etc., banned by their predecessors operating under South Africa’s Customs and Post Office acts before the present Publications Control Board came into existence with the Publications and Entertainments Act in 1963?

  The logic behind these decisions of the board is known only to its members, government appointees all.

  T-shirts aside, my concern is literature. Unfortunately, the lifting of bans on a few books is not a general indication that censorship is about to be relaxed in South Africa. On the contrary. A committee representing seven government departments has been investigating ‘new ways’ of applying the Publications and Entertainments Act, since during the last few years there have been repeated criticisms of the board, whose rulings have been upset by court decisions.

  For the right of appeal to the courts against bannings by the board exists, although since the writer is first pronounced guilty of producing something obscene or objectionable, and only then gets the chance to defend the work in question, the usual processes of law are reversed. Threats of abolition of the right have been brandished frequently; the Dutch Reformed Church has been zealous with this particular sword. Now the Minister of the Interior, Dr Connie Mulder, who has received the findings of the investigating committee, has announced that the right of appeal will not be abolished but there will be ‘changes in the system of appeal’ against the board’s decisions.

  Statements by the Minister himself and others in official positions do not inspire writers’ confidence in the possible nature of these ‘changes’. Dr Mulder commented that the present checkmate between judges and censors was unsatisfactory. Marais Viljoen, Minister of Labour, said that individual judges were being placed in an invidious position because ‘having to give decisions on the country’s morals was a difficult task’. And Andries van Wyk, retiring vice-chairman of the board, has predicted that censors will not relax their hardline attitude on matters involving race, sex and politics while the present government is in power.

  At the same time as T-shirts are being banned, Faulkner is no longer illicit reading, and writers darkly await the censors’ new ways of dealing with their work, the quiet phenomenon of new black poets – and publishers ready to risk publishing them – continues in Johannesburg.

  It began last year with the publication of Oswald Mtshali’s Sounds of A Cowhide Drum, also published in New York. Fourteen thousand copies were sold in South Africa; a wide readership for any poet, anywhere. This year Yakhal’inkomo (the cry of cattle at the slaughterhouse), the remarkable poems of another young black man, Mongane Wally Serote, have appeared under the same imprint. The publishers are three young white poets, Lionel Abrahams, Robert Royston and Eva Bezwoda. Another publisher has in preparation an anthology of the work of eleven black South African poets.

  Why this upsurge of poetry under censorship?

  Nearly all the seminal black writers in South Africa went into exile in the 1960s, and their works are banned. This has had a stunting effect on prose writing among young blacks; it seems it has produced, perhaps subconsciously, a search for a less vulnerable form of expression. Some of the people writing poetry are very talented; some are not. For all, poetry is a dragonfly released whose shimmer censors must find difficult to pin down to any of the Publica
tions and Entertainments Act’s ninety-seven definitions of what is undesirable. What poetry expresses is implicit rather than explicit.

  1972

  The New Black Poets

  ‘Poetry does indeed have a very special place in this country. It arouses people and shapes their minds. No wonder the birth of our new intelligentsia is accompanied by a craving for poetry never seen before … It brings people back to life.’

  This was written of the contemporary Soviet Union by Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, in her autobiography, Hope Against Hope. But perhaps the same might be said of the new poetry being written in South Africa by black South Africans. Three individual collections have been published within eighteen months. I know of at least two more that are to come, this year. An anthology representative of the work of eleven poets is in the press at the time of writing. Poems signed with as yet unknown names crop up in the little magazines; there are readings at universities and in private houses, since the law doesn’t allow blacks to read to whites or mixed audiences in public places. For the first time, black writers’ works are beginning to be bought by ordinary black people in the segregated townships, instead of only by liberal or literary whites and the educated black elite.

  Aspirant writers are intimidated not only by censorship as such but also by the fear that anything at all controversial, set out by a black in the generally explicit medium of prose, makes the writer suspect, since the correlation of articulacy and political insurrection, so far as blacks are concerned, is firmly lodged in the minds of the Ministers of the Interior, Justice and Police. Polymorphous fear cramps the hand.

  Out of this paralytic silence, suspended between fear of expression and the need to give expression to an ever greater pressure of grim experience, has come the black writer’s subconscious search for a form less vulnerable than those that led a previous generation into bannings and exile. In other countries, writers similarly placed have found a way to survive and speak through the use of different kinds of prose forms. Perhaps, if black writing had not been so thoroughly beheaded and truncated in the sixties, there would have been creative minds nimble enough to keep it alive through something like the skaz – a Russian genre, dating from Czarist times, which concentrates a narrative of wide-ranging significance in a compressed work that derives from an oral tradition of story-telling, and takes full advantage of the private and double meanings contained in colloquial idiom. Both the oral tradition and the politically charged idiom exist in black South Africa.

  Or the solution might have been found in the adoption of the Aesopean genre – as in a fable, you write within one set of categories, knowing your readers will realise that you are referring to another, an area where explicit comment is taboo. Camus used this device in La Peste, and again, Stalin’s generation of writers learned to be dab hands at it.

  The cryptic mode is a long-established one; it has been resorted to in times and countries where religious persecution or political oppression drives creativity back into itself, and forces it to become its own hiding-place, from which, ingenious as an oracle, a voice that cannot be identified speaks the truth in riddles and parables not easily defined as subversive. In South Africa there are ninety-seven definitions of what is officially ‘undesirable’ in literature: subversive, obscene or otherwise ‘offensive’. They are not always invoked, but are there when needed to suppress a particular book or silence an individual writer. Seeking to escape them, among other even more sinister marks of official attention, black writers have had to look for survival away from the explicit if not to the cryptic then to the implicit; and in their case, they have turned instinctively to poetry. Professor Harry Levin defines a poem as ‘a verbal artefact’ whose ‘arrangement of signs and sounds is likewise a network of associations and responses, communicating implicit information’. In demotic, non-literary terms, a poem can be both hiding-place and loud-hailer. That was what black writers within South Africa were seeking.

  There will be many people whose toes will curl at this crude pragmatic conception of how poetry comes to be written. One cannot simply ‘turn’ to poetry. It is not simply there, available to anybody with a few hours of home study to spare, like a correspondence course in accountancy or learning to play the recorder. As a prose writer, I don’t need reminding of the levels of literature, where poets sit on Kilimanjaro. That snowy crown is not within reach of everyone who wants to write; even those who can start a grass fire across the prose plain will find themselves short of oxygen up at that height.

  Poetry as a last resort is indeed a strange concept; and a kind of inversion of the enormous problems of skill and gifts implied in electing to write poetry at all. Many who are doing so in South Africa today are not poets at all, merely people of some talent attempting to use certain conventions and unconventions associated with poetry in order to express their feelings in a way that may hope to get a hearing. One of them has said:

  To label my utterings poetry

  and myself a poet

  would be as self-deluding

  as the planners of parallel development.

  I record the anguish of the persecuted

  whose words are whimpers of woe

  wrung from them by bestial laws.

  They stand one chained band

  silently asking one of the other

  will it never be the fire next time?

  (‘To label my utterings poetry’ by James Matthews)

  From the Icelandic saga to Symbolism, from a Chaucer creating English as a democratic literary medium to a Günter Grass recreating areas of the German language debased by Nazi usage, writers in their place at the centre of their particular historical situation have been forced by this kind of empiricism and pragmatism to ‘turn to’ one form of expression rather than another.

  There are two questions to ask of the black writers who have ‘turned to’ poetry in South Africa. In the five years since this spate of poetry began, these questions have been shown to be so bound together that I don’t know which to put first. So, without prejudice at this point: Question – through the implicit medium of poetry, are black writers succeeding in establishing or re-establishing a black protest literature within South Africa? Question – are they writing good poetry?

  These questions, as I have said, seem to have demonstrated an indivisibility that I hesitate to claim as a universal axiom. Where protest speaks from a good poem, even one good line, both questions are answered in a single affirmative. When Mandlenkosi Langa, in his ‘Mother’s Ode to a Still-born Child’, writes:

  It is not my fault

  that you did not live

  to be a brother sister

  or lover of some black child

  that you did not experience pain

  pleasure voluptuousness and salt in the wound

  that your head did not stop a police truncheon

  that you are not a permanent resident of a prison island

  his irony says more than any tract describing in spent emotives the life-expectations of the black ghetto under white oppression in the police state, etc. When, writing again of a newborn child already dead – symbol of the constant death-in-life that runs through this black poetry – Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali in ‘An Abandoned Bundle’ makes the image of dogs ‘draped in red bandanas of blood’ scavenging the body of a baby dumped on a location rubbish heap, he says more about black infant mortality than any newspaper exposé, and by the extension that the total vision of his poem provides, more about the cheapness of life where race is the measure of worth.

  The themes chosen by the new black poets are committed in the main to the individual struggle for physical and spiritual survival under oppression. ‘I’ is the pronoun that prevails, rather than ‘we’, but the ‘I’ is the Whitmanesque unit of multi-millions rather than the exclusive first person singular. There is little evidence of group feeling, except perhaps in one or two of the young writers who are within SASO (South African Students’ Organisation), the
black student organisation whose politico-cultural manifesto is a combination of negritude with Black Power on the American pattern.

  The themes, like those of the poets who preceded the present generation (they were few in number and were forced into exile), are urban – although it is doubtful whether one can speak of the tradition or influence of a Kunene or a Brutus, here. Few of the young aspirants writing today have read even the early work of exiled writers: it was banned while they were still at school. The striking development of Dennis Brutus’s later and recent work, for example, is unknown except by a handful of people who may have spotted a copy of Cosmo Pieterse’s Seven South African Poets or Thoughts Abroad that has somehow slipped into a bookshop, although the statutory ban on Dennis Brutus would mean that the book itself is automatically banned.

  It is axiomatic that the urban theme contains the classic crises: tribal and traditional values against Western values, peasant modes of life against the modes of an industrial proletariat, above all, the quotidian humiliations of a black’s world made to a white’s specifications. But in the work we are considering I believe there also can be traced distinct stages or stations of development in creating a black ethos strong enough to be the challenger rather than the challenged in these crises.

  The starting point is essentially post-Sharpeville – post-defeat of mass black political movements: the position that of young people cut off from political education and any objective formulation of their resentments against apartheid. The stations are three: distortion of values by submission of whites; rejection of distortion; black/white polarity – opposition on new ground.

  In terms of the personal, immediate and implicit within which the poems move, the first station – distortion by submission – is often demonstrated by apartheid through the eyes of a child. Mike Dues writes in his poem ‘This Side of Town’: