Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Njabulo Ndebele invokes the intimate sorrows of forced removal less obviously and perhaps more tellingly. Limehills, Dimbazas – these valleys of plenty seldom have adequate water supplies and the new ‘inhabitants’ often have to walk a long way to fetch water:

  There is my wife. There she is

  She is old under those four gallons of water,

  It was said taps in the streets

  Would be our new rivers.

  But my wife fetches the water

  We drink and we eat.

  I watch my wife: she is old.

  (‘Portrait of Love’)

  And Oswald Mtshali also takes as subjects some dark current events. He uses the Aesopean mode to write devastatingly of a ghastly recent disaster anyone living in South Africa would be able to identify instantly, although its horrors are transliterated, so to speak, into Roman times. A year or two ago a prison van broke down on the road between Johannesburg and Pretoria; the policemen in charge went off to seek help, leaving the prisoners locked inside. It was a hot day; the van was packed; they died of suffocation while the traffic passed unconcerned and unaware:

  They rode upon

  the death chariot

  to their Golgotha—

  three vagrants

  whose papers to be in Caesar’s empire

  were not in order.

  The sun

  shrivelled their bodies

  in the mobile tomb

  as airtight as canned fish.

  We’re hot!

  We’re thirsty!

  We’re hungry!

  The centurion

  touched their tongues

  with the tip

  of a lance

  dipped in apathy:

  ‘Don’t cry to me

  but to Caesar who

  crucifies you.’

  A woman came

  to wipe their faces.

  She carried a dishcloth

  full of bread and tea.

  We’re dying!

  The centurion

  washed his hands.

  (‘Ride Upon The Death Chariot’)

  James Matthews writes of the Imam Abdullah Haron, one of the number of people who have died while in detention without trial. He writes of ‘dialogue’ as ‘the cold fire where the oppressed will find no warmth’. Perhaps most significantly, he reflects the current black rejection of any claim whatever by whites, from radicals to liberals, to identify with the black struggle:

  They speak so sorrowfully about the

  children dying of hunger in Biafra

  but sleep unconcerned about the rib-thin

  children of Dimbaza.

  (‘They Speak So Sorrowfully’)

  And again, in a poem called ‘Liberal Student Crap!’:

  The basis of democracy rests upon

  Fraternity, Equality and not LSD

  I should know fellows

  Progressive policy the salvation of us all

  You just don’t understand

  There’s no-one as liberal as me

  Some of my best friends are

  Kaffirs, Coolies and Coons

  Forgive me, I mean other ethnic groups

  How could it be otherwise?

  I’m Jewish; I know discrimination

  from the ghetto to Belsen

  So, don’t get me all wrong

  Cause I know just how you feel

  Come up and see me sometime

  My folks are out of town.

  Whatever the justice of this view of young white people militant against apartheid – and increasing numbers of them are banned and restricted along with blacks – on the question of white proxy for black protest he has a final unanswerable word:

  can the white man speak for me?

  can he feel my pain when his laws

  tear wife and child from my side

  and I am forced to work a thousand miles away?

  does he know my anguish

  as I walk his streets at night

  my hand fearfully clasping my pass?

  is he with me in the loneliness

  of my bed in the bachelor barracks

  with my longing driving me to mount my brother?

  will he soothe my despair

  as I am driven insane

  by scraps of paper permitting me to live?

  (‘Can The White Man Speak For Me?’)

  He does not spare certain blacks, either, nor fear to measure the fashionable against the actual lineaments of the black situation. He addresses one of the black American singers who from time to time come to South Africa and perform for segregated audiences:

  Say, Percy dad

  you ran out of bread that you got to

  come to sunny South Africa to sing soul

  or did you hope to find your soul

  in the land of your forefathers?

  … Say, Percy dad

  will you tell nina simone back home

  that you, a soul singer, did a segregated act

  or will you sit back flashing silver dollar smiles

  as they cart the loot from your Judas role to the bank.

  (‘Say Percy Dad’)

  And he accuses:

  my sister has become a schemer and

  a scene-stealer

  … songs of the village

  traded in for tin pan alley

  black is beautiful has become as artificial as the wig she wears.

  (‘My sister has become a schemer’)

  Matthews uses indiscriminately the clichés of politics, tracts and popular journalism and these deaden and debase his work. But occasionally the contrast between political catchwords and brutal sexual imagery carries a crude immediacy:

  democracy

  has been turned

  into a whore

  her body ravished

  by those who pervert her

  in the bordello

  bandied from crotch to hand

  her breasts smeared

  with their seed …

  (‘Democracy has been turned into a whore’)

  And in the context of fanatical laws framed in the language of reason, within which he is writing, even clichés take on new meaning: they mock the hollowness of high-sounding terms such as ‘separate development’ or clinical ones such as ‘surplus people’ – the behaviouristic vocabulary that gives a scientific gloss to mass removals of human beings.

  James Matthews is a paradigm of the black writer in search of a form of expression that will meet the needs of his situation by escaping strictures imposed on free expression by that situation. He is older than other writers I have discussed; more than a decade ago he was writing short stories of exceptional quality. There were signs that he would become a fine prose writer. Whatever the immediate reasons were for the long silence that followed, the fact remains that there was little or no chance that the themes from the cataclysmic life around him he would have wished to explore would not have ended up as banned prose fiction. He stopped writing. He seems to have accepted that for him to have dealt honestly in prose with what he saw and experienced, as a coloured man slowly accepting the black heritage of his mixed blood as his real identity, might be written but could not be read. He is the man who wrote the words I quoted at the beginning of this survey: ‘To label my utterings poetry/and myself a poet/would be self-deluding …’

  He is indeed not a poet, although his old creative gifts, uneasy in a medium to which they are not suited, now and then transform his ‘declarations’ into something more than that. And so he is also an example of yet another distortion, this time within a black literature that expresses rejection of distortion and the assertion of new values for blacks: the black writer’s gifts can be, and often are, squeezed into interstitial convolutions that do not allow him to develop in the direction in which development is possible for him as an artist.

  At its best, ‘turning to poetry’ has released the fine talents of an Mtshali and a Serote, a Dues and a young Ndebele. At its least, it ha
s provided a public-address system for the declarations of muzzled prose writers like Matthews. But if he stands where I have put him, as the symbolic figure of the situation of black writing, the sudden ban on his book ‘Cry Rage!’ (during the very time when I was preparing these notes) suggests that black writing in South Africa may once again find itself come full circle, back again at a blank, spiked wall. This is the first book of poems ever to be banned within South Africa. If there were to be a lesson to be learned in a game where it seems you can’t win for long, it would seem to be that only good writing with implicit commitment is equal both to the inner demands of the situation and a chance of surviving publication, whatever the chosen literary form.

  In terms of a literary judgement, yes, it is never enough to be angry. But unfortunately this does not hold good as an assurance that black poetry of real achievement can continue to be published and read in South Africa. Some of the best writing ever done by South Africans of all colours has not escaped, on grounds of quality, banning in the past. Black Orpheus, where now? How? What next?

  1973

  A Writer’s Freedom

  What is a writer’s freedom?

  To me it is his right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his society. If he is to work as well as he can, he must take, and be granted, freedom from the public conformity of political interpretation, morals and tastes.

  Living when we do, where we do, as we do, ‘freedom’ leaps to mind as a political concept exclusively – and when people think of freedom for writers they visualise at once the great mound of burned, banned and proscribed books our civilisation has piled up; a pyre to which our own country has added and is adding its contribution. The right to be left alone to write what one pleases is not an academic issue to those of us who live and work in South Africa. The private view always has been and always will be a source of fear and anger to proponents of a way of life, such as the white man’s in South Africa, that does not bear looking at except in the light of a special self-justificatory doctrine.

  All that the writer can do, as a writer, is to go on writing the truth as he sees it. That is what I mean by his ‘private view’ of events, whether they be the great public ones of wars and revolutions, or the individual and intimate ones of daily, personal life.

  As to the fate of his books – there comes a time in the history of certain countries when the feelings of their writers are best expressed in this poem, written within the lifetime of many of us, by Bertholt Brecht:

  When the Regime ordered that books with dangerous teachings

  Should be publicly burned and everywhere

  Oxen were forced to draw carts full of books

  To the funeral pyre,

  An exiled poet,

  One of the best,

  Discovered with fury when he studied the list

  Of the burned, that his books

  Had been forgotten. He rushed to his writing table

  On wings of anger and wrote a letter to those in power.

  Burn me, he wrote with hurrying pen, burn me!

  Do not treat me in this fashion. Don’t leave me out.

  Have I not

  Always spoken the truth in my books? And now

  You treat me like a liar! I order you:

  Burn me!

  Not a very good poem, even if one makes allowance for the loss in translation from the German original; nevertheless, so far as South African writers are concerned, we can understand the desperate sentiments expressed while still putting up the fight to have our books read rather than burned.

  Bannings and banishments are terrible known hazards a writer must face, and many have faced, if the writer belongs where freedom of expression, among other freedoms, is withheld, but sometimes creativity is frozen rather than destroyed. A Thomas Mann survives exile to write a Dr Faustus; a Pasternak smuggles Dr Zhivago out of a ten-year silence; a Solzhenitsyn emerges with his terrible world intact in the map of The Gulag Archipelago; nearer our home continent: a Chinua Achebe, writing from America, does not trim his prose to please a Nigerian regime under which he cannot live; a Dennis Brutus grows in reputation abroad while his poetry remains forbidden at home; and a Breyten Breytenbach, after accepting the special dispensation from racialist law which allowed him to visit his home country with a wife who is not white, no doubt has to accept the equally curious circumstance that his publisher would not publish the book he was to write about the visit, since it was sure to be banned.4

  Through all these vicissitudes, real writers go on writing the truth as they see it. And they do not agree to censor themselves … You can burn the books, but the integrity of creative artists is not incarnate on paper any more than on canvas – it survives so long as the artist himself cannot be persuaded, cajoled or frightened into betraying it.

  All this, hard though it is to live, is the part of the writer’s fight for freedom the world finds easiest to understand.

  There is another threat to that freedom, in any country where political freedom is withheld. It is a more insidious one, and one of which fewer people will be aware. It’s a threat which comes from the very strength of the writer’s opposition to repression of political freedom. That other, paradoxically wider, composite freedom – the freedom of his private view of life – may be threatened by the very awareness of what is expected of him. And often what is expected of him is conformity to an orthodoxy of opposition.

  There will be those who regard him as their mouthpiece; people whose ideals, as a human being, he shares, and whose cause, as a human being, is his own. They may be those whose suffering is his own. His identification with, admiration for, and loyalty to these set up a state of conflict within him. His integrity as a human being demands the sacrifice of everything to the struggle put up on the side of free men. His integrity as a writer goes the moment he begins to write what he ought to write.

  This is – whether all admit it or not – and will continue to be a particular problem for black writers in South Africa. For them, it extends even to an orthodoxy of vocabulary: the jargon of struggle, derived internationally, is right and adequate for the public platform, the newsletter, the statement from the dock; it is not adequate, it is not deep enough, wide enough, flexible enough, cutting enough, fresh enough for the vocabulary of the poet, the short-story writer or the novelist.

  Neither is it, as the claim will be made, ‘a language of the people’ in a situation where certainly it is very important that imaginative writing must not reach the elite only. The jargon of struggle lacks both the inventive pragmatism and the poetry of common speech – those qualities the writer faces the challenge to capture and explore imaginatively, expressing as they do the soul and identity of a people as no thousandth-hand ‘noble evocation’ of clichés ever could.

  The black writer needs his freedom to assert that the idiom of Chatsworth, Dimbaza, Soweto5 is no less a vehicle for the expression of pride, self-respect, suffering, anger – or anything else in the spectrum of thought and emotion – than the language of Watts or Harlem.

  The fact is, even on the side of the angels, a writer has to reserve the right to tell the truth as he sees it, in his own words, without being accused of letting the side down. For as Philip Toynbee has written, ‘the writer’s gift to the reader is not social zest or moral improvement or love of country, but an enlargement of the reader’s apprehension’.

  This is the writer’s unique contribution to social change. He needs to be left alone, by brothers as well as enemies, to make this gift. And he must make it even against his own inclination.

  I need hardly add this does not mean he retreats to an ivory tower. The gift cannot be made from any such place. The other day, Jean Paul Sartre gave the following definition of the writer’s responsibility to his society as an intellectual, after himself having occupied such a position in France for the best part of seventy years: ‘He is someone who is faithful to a political and social body but never
stops contesting it. Of course; a contradiction may arise between his fidelity and his contestation, but that’s a fruitful contradiction. If there’s fidelity without contestation, that’s no good: one is no longer a free man.’

  When a writer claims these kinds of freedom for himself, he begins to understand the real magnitude of his struggle. It is not a new problem and of all the writers who have had to face it, I don’t think anyone has seen it more clearly or dealt with it with such uncompromising honesty as the great nineteenth-century Russian, Ivan Turgenev. Turgenev had an immense reputation as a progressive writer. He was closely connected with the progressive movement in Tsarist Russia and particularly with its more revolutionary wing headed by the critic Belinsky and afterwards by the poet Nekrasov. With his sketches and stories, people said that Turgenev was continuing the work Gogol had begun of awakening the conscience of the educated classes in Russia to the evils of a political regime based on serfdom.

  But his friends, admirers and fellow progressives stopped short, in their understanding of his genius, of the very thing that made him one – his scrupulous reserve of the writer’s freedom to reproduce truth and the reality of life, even if this truth does not coincide with his own sympathies.

  When his greatest novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in 1862, he was attacked not only by the right for pandering to the revolutionary nihilists, but far more bitterly by the left, the younger generation themselves, of whom his chief character in the novel, Bazarov, was both prototype and apotheosis. The radicals and liberals, among whom Turgenev himself belonged, lambasted him as a traitor because Bazarov was presented with all the faults and contradictions that Turgenev saw in his own type, in himself, so to speak, and whom he created as he did because – in his own words – ‘in the given case, life happened to be like that’.

  The attacks were renewed after the publication of another novel, Smoke, and Turgenev decided to write a series of autobiographical reminiscences which would allow him to reply to his critics by explaining his views on the art of writing, the place of the writer in society, and what the writer’s attitude to the controversial problems of his day should be. The result was a series of unpretentious essays that make up a remarkable testament to a writer’s creed. Dealing particularly with Bazarov and Fathers and Sons, he writes of his critics: