Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  … generally speaking they have not got quite the right idea of what is taking place in the mind of a writer or what exactly his joys and sorrows, his aims, successes and failures are. They do not, for instance, even suspect the pleasure which Gogol mentions and which consists of castigating oneself and one’s faults in the imaginary characters one depicts; they are quite sure that all a writer does is to ‘develop his ideas’ … Let me illustrate my meaning by a small example. I am an inveterate and incorrigible Westerner. I have never concealed it and I am not concealing it now. And yet in spite of that it has given me great pleasure to show up in the person of Panshin [a character in A House of Gentlefolk] all the common and vulgar sides of the Westerners: I made the Slavophil Lavretsky ‘crush him utterly’. Why did I do it, I who consider the Slavophil doctrine false and futile? Because, in the given case, life, according to my ideas, happened to be like that, and what I wanted above all was to be sincere and truthful.

  In depicting Bazarov’s personality, I excluded everything artistic from the range of his sympathies, I made him express himself in harsh and unceremonious tones, not out of an absurd desire to insult the younger generation, but simply as a result of my observations of people like him … My personal predilections had nothing to do with it. But I expect many of my readers will be surprised if I tell them that with the exception of Bazarov’s views on art, I share almost all his convictions.

  And in another essay, Turgenev sums up: ‘The life that surrounds him [the writer] provides him with the content of his works; he is its concentrated reflection; but he is as incapable of writing a panegyric as a lampoon … When all is said and done – that is beneath him. Only those who can do no better submit to a given theme or carry out a programme.’

  These conditions about which I have been talking are the special, though common ones of writers beleaguered in the time of the bomb and the colour bar, as they were in the time of the jackboot and rubber truncheon, and, no doubt, back through the ages whose shameful symbols keep tally of oppression in the skeleton cupboard of our civilisations.

  Other conditions, more transient, less violent, affect the freedom of a writer’s mind.

  What about literary fashion, for example? What about the cycle of the innovator, the imitators, the debasers, and then the bringing forth of an innovator again? A writer must not be made too conscious of literary fashion, any more than he must allow himself to be inhibited by the mandarins, if he is to get on with work that is his own. I say ‘made conscious’ because literary fashion is a part of his working conditions; he can make the choice of rejecting it, but he cannot choose whether it is urged upon him or not by publishers and readers, who do not let him forget he has to eat.

  That rare marvel, an innovator, should be received with shock and excitement. And his impact may set off people in new directions of their own. But the next innovator rarely, I would almost say never, comes from his imitators, those who create a fashion in his image. Not all worthwhile writing is an innovation, but I believe it always comes from an individual vision, privately pursued. The pursuit may stem from a tradition, but a tradition implies a choice of influence, whereas a fashion makes the influence of the moment the only one for all who are contemporary to it.

  A writer needs all these kinds of freedom, built on the basic one of freedom from censorship. He does not ask for shelter from living, but for exposure to it without possibility of evasion. He is fiercely engaged with life on his own terms, and ought to be left to it, if anything is to come of the struggle. Any government, any society – any vision of a future society – that has respect for its writers must set them as free as possible to write in their own various ways, in their own choices of form and language, and according to their own discovery of truth.

  Again, Turgenev expresses this best: ‘Without freedom in the widest sense of the word – in relation to oneself … indeed, to one’s people and one’s history, a true artist is unthinkable; without that air, it is impossible to breathe.’

  And I add my last word: In that air alone, commitment and creative freedom become one.

  1976

  English-Language Literature and Politics in South Africa

  Speaking of South Africa, the association of politics with literature produces a snap equation: censorship. But is that the beginning and end of my subject? Indeed, it may be the end, in a literal sense, of a book or a writer: the book unread, the writer silenced. But censorship is the most extreme, final, and above all, most obvious effect of politics upon a literature, rather than the sum of the subject. Where and when, in a country such as South Africa, can the influence of politics on literature be said to begin? Politics, in the form of an agent of European imperialism – the Dutch East India Company – brought the written word to this part of Africa; politics, in the form of European missionaries who spread along with their Protestantism or Catholicism the political influence of their countries of origin, led to the very first transposition of the indigenous oral literature to the written word. When the first tribal praise-poem was put down on paper, what a political act that was! What could be communicated only by the mouth of the praise-singer to the ears of those present, was transmogrified into a series of squiggles on paper that could reach far beyond his living physical presence, beyond even the chain of memory of those who came after him. With that act a culture took hold upon and was taken hold upon by another.

  Does not the subject begin quite simply, right there? And does not it extend, not simply at all, through the cultural isolation of whites who left their Europe over three centuries ago as the result of political events such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Napoleonic wars, the pogroms of Eastern Europe; does it not extend through the cultural upheaval of blacks under conquest; and the cultural ambiguity of the children one race fathered upon the other? The relationship of politics to literature in South Africa implies all of this, just as it does the overtly political example of writers forced into exile, and the subsequent development of their writings within the changed consciousness of exile. For some books are banned, and so South Africans never read them. But all that is and has been written by South Africans is profoundly influenced, at the deepest and least controllable level of consciousness, by the politics of race. All writers everywhere, even those like Joyce who cannot bear to live in their own countries, or those like Genet who live outside the pale of their country’s laws, are shaped by their own particular society reflecting a particular political situation. Yet there is no country in the Western world where the daily enactment of the law reflects politics as intimately and blatantly as in South Africa. There is no country in the Western world where the creative imagination, whatever it seizes upon, finds the focus of even the most private event set in the overall social determination of racial laws.

  I am not going to devote any time, here, to outlining or discussing how the Publications Control Board, the censorship system, works in South Africa. I take it that anyone interested in South African literature is familiar with the facts. But lest it be thought that I pass over that matter of censorship lightly, let me remark aside that personally, although I myself have continued and shall continue to bang my head in protesting concert against that particular brick in the granite wall, my fundamental attitude is that South Africans cannot expect to rid themselves of the Publications Control Board until they get rid of apartheid. Censorship is an indispensable part of an interlocking system of repressive laws.

  There are other forms of censorship in South Africa. Anyone under a political ban may not be published or quoted; which means that the books of a number of white writers in exile, and those of a number of black writers in exile and at home, are automatically banned, no matter what their subject or form. Through this kind of censorship, the lively and important group of black writers who burst into South African literature in the 1950s and early 1960s disappeared from it as if through a trap door. A young black writer, Don Mattera, went the same way in 1973. Only those of us who care parti
cularly for literature and writers remember; by the time the newspaper has been left behind on the breakfast table, most people have forgotten the banned authors and books listed there – the ultimate triumph of censorship.

  I have said that South African literature was founded in an unrecorded political act: the writing down in Roman characters of some tribal praise-song. But the potted histories in DLitt theses always set its beginning with the writings of a white settler, an Englishman, Thomas Pringle. He was born the year the French Revolution started and came to South Africa in 1820, under the British government scheme of assisted immigration resorted to because of the agricultural depression in England that followed Waterloo. For we white South Africans may somewhat unkindly be called, as Norman Mailer did his fellow Americans, ‘a nation of rejects transplanted by the measure of every immigration of the last three hundred and fifty years’. Pringle led a Scottish party to settle on the border of the so-called Neutral Territory of the Cape from which the Xhosa people had been driven. Thus far, he is a classic white frontiersman; but this Scottish scribbler of album verse at once felt the awkward necessity to adapt his late Augustan diction and pastoral sentimentality to the crude events of Africa.

  First the brown Herder with his flock

  Comes winding round my hermit-rock

  His mien and gait and vesture tell,

  No shepherd he from Scottish fell;

  For crook the guardian gun he bears,

  … Nor Flute has he, nor merry song …

  But, born the White man’s servile thrall,

  Knows that he cannot lower fall.

  Pringle was never quite to find the adequate vocabulary for what moved him to write in Africa (Coleridge deplored his archaisms), but he astonishingly anticipated themes that were not to be taken up again by any writer in South Africa for a hundred years, and longer. Unlike the majority of his fellow frontiersmen, he refused to regard the cattle raids carried out by the Xhosa as proof that they were irredeemable savages. In a poem entitled ‘The Caffer’ he asks awkward questions of the whites.

  He is a robber?—True; it is a strife

  Between the black-skinned bandit and the white,

  (A Savage?—Yes, though loth to aim at life,

  Evil for evil fierce he doth requite.

  A heathen?—Teach him, then, thy better creed,

  Christian! If thou deserv’st that name indeed.)

  He foreshadowed the contemporary South African liberal view, obliquely comforting to the white conscience, but none the less true, that any form of slavery degrades oppressor as well as oppressed:

  The Master, though in luxury’s lap he loll … quakes

  with secret dread, and shares the hell he makes.

  Pringle was one of the first and is one of the few whites ever to grant that blacks also have their heroes. He wrote a poem about the Xhosa prophet Makana who led an army of 10,000 tribesmen on the British Settlement at Grahamstown in 1819:

  Wake! Amakosa, wake!

  And arm yourselves for war.

  As coming winds the forest shake,

  I hear a sound from far:

  It is not thunder in the sky,

  Nor lion’s roar upon the hill

  But the voice of HIM who sits on high

  And bids me speak his will

  … To sweep the White Men from the earth

  And drive them to the sea.

  Pringle even wrote of love across the colour line, long before miscegenation laws made it a statutory crime and the so-called Immorality Act provided the theme of so many South African novels and stories:

  A young Boer speaks:

  ‘… Our Father bade each of us choose a mate

  Of Fatherland blood, from the black taint free

  As became a Dutch Burgher’s proud degree.

  My brothers they rode to the Bovenland,

  And each came with a fair bride back in his hand;

  But I brought the handsomest bride of them all—

  Brown Dinah, the bondmaid who sat in our hall.

  My Father’s displeasure was stern and still;

  My Brothers’ flamed forth like a fire on the hill;

  And they said that my spirit was mean and base,

  To lower myself to the servile race.’

  And the young Boer asks,

  ‘… dear Stranger, from England the free,

  What good tidings bring’st thou for Arend Plessie?

  Shall the Edict of Mercy be sent forth at last,

  To break the harsh fetters of Colour and Caste?’

  Pringle himself was back in England the free after only six years in South Africa, hounded out of the Cape Colony by the English Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, for his fight against press censorship introduced to protect the British colonial regime against any mention of those controversial issues of the time, slavery, the condition of the blacks, and the anti-British feelings of the Boers …

  After Pringle is packed off ‘home’ in 1826, a long colonial silence falls. Diaries are kept, chronicles are written by white missionaries and settlers, but no soundings are put down to the depths reached only by imaginative writing until Olive Schreiner writes The Story of an African Farm in the 1880s. It is a very famous book and one that, as a South African remembering it as a mind-opening discovery of adolescence, one tends to think of as all-encompassing: that is to say, that final accomplishment, the central themes of South African life given unafraid and yet non-exhibitionist expression by a writer whose skill is equal to them. But reading it again, and it is a book that stands up to re-reading, one finds that of course it is not that at all. It is one of those open-ended works whose strength lies at the level where human lives, our own and the book’s characters, plunge out of grasp. The freedom that Lyndall, one of the two extraordinary main characters, burns for, is not the black man’s freedom but essentially spiritual freedom in the context of the oppression of women through their sexual role; yet the passion of revolt is so deeply understood that it seems to hold good for all sufferings of oppression. The society Lyndall rejects is the shallow white frontier society; yet the rejection questions societal values that gave rise to it and will endure beyond it. It is a book whites in South Africa like to think of also as transcending politics; I have never met a black who has read it, with, ironically, the important exception of Richard Rive, who has just completed a book about Olive Schreiner’s life and work. Certainly no black could ever have written African Farm. The alienation of Lyndall’s longing to ‘realise forms of life utterly unlike mine’ is attempted transcendance of the isolation and lack of identity in a white frontier society; in the final analysis, this is a book that expresses the wonder and horror of the wilderness, and for the indigenous inhabitant that wilderness is home. The novel exists squarely within the political context of colonialism. Olive Schreiner’s conscience was to reject colonialism, and her creative imagination to disappear in the sands of liberal pamphleteering, many years later. Perhaps she would have written no more imaginative work, anyway. But perhaps she took the conscious decision that Jean Paul Sartre, in the context of the Pan-African struggle, has said any writer should make, to stop writing if he is needed to do any other task that, as he sees it, his country requires of him. It is certain that political pressures, in the form of a deep sense of injustice and inhumanity existing within their society, can cause certain writers to question the luxury value of writing at all, within a country like South Africa.

  The establishment of South African literature in English and (so far as it existed) in African languages as a literature of dissent came in the 1920s and early 1930s. The white man’s military conquest of the blacks was over. The war between the whites, Boer and Briton, was over; the white man’s other war, in which Boer and black had fought under the British flag along with the Briton, was over. In the State of Union of the four South African countries, the British Cape Colony and Natal, the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, blacks had been deprived of such rights as the
y had held at the pleasure of the more liberal of the separate governments. The black man’s trusting willingness to identify his destiny with the white man’s expressed in the victory praise-song-cum-poem of Samuel Mqhayi, a Khosa poet of the time, assumed a common black–white patriotism after the 1914–18 war:

  Go catch the Kaiser, Let the Kaiser come and talk with us

  We’ll tell him how the Zulus won at Sandlwana

  Of Thaba Ntsu where the Boers were baffled …

  The assumption was met with rebuff and betrayal; only white men could be heroes, at home or in Valhalla.

  Then William Plomer, aged nineteen, published in 1925 a work of genius, a forced flower fertilised upon an immature talent by reaction against racialism now entrenched under the name of a union of the best interests of all people in South Africa. Turbott Wolfe (Plomer’s hero as well as the title of the novel) trails the torn umbilical cord of colonialism; Wolfe is not a born South African but an Englishman who plunges into Africa from without. But he understands at once: ‘There would be the unavoidable question of colour. It is a question to which every man in Africa, black, white or yellow, must provide his answer.’ The colonial cord is ruptured, early on and for ever, for South African literature because Plomer’s novel does not measure Africa against the white man, but the white man against Africa. With it, a new literary consciousness was born: that no writer could go deeply into the life around him and avoid some sort of answer. Laurens van der Post’s In a Province is awake to it, concerned with modern Africans in conflict with white-imposed values rather than Africans as exotic scenic props in the white man’s story. So, fighting against it all the way, is Sarah Gertrude Millin’s God’s Stepchildren. This extraordinarily talented novel begs the question, as a kind of answer, by revealing the morality South Africa has built on colour and the suffering this brings to people of mixed blood, but nowhere suggesting that the sense of sin suffered by Barry Lindsell, play-white grandson of a white missionary and a Hottentot woman, is tragically, ludicrously and wastefully misplaced, until Barry Lindsell confesses to his young English wife that he has black blood and she says in surprised relief: ‘Is that all?’ Meanwhile, the novel has shown that it is, indeed, everything, in the life around her from which the author drew her substance.