Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The problem is that agitprop, not recognised under that or any other name, has become the first contemporary art form that many black South Africans feel they can call their own. It fits their anger; and this is taken as proof that it is an organic growth of black creation freeing itself, instead of the old shell that it is, inhabited many times by the anger of others. I know that agitprop binds the artist with the means by which it aims to free the minds of the people. I can see, now, how often it thwarts both the black writer’s common purpose to master his art and revolutionary purpose to change the nature of art, create new norms and forms out of and for a people recreating themselves. But how can my black fellow writer agree with me, even admit the conflict I set up in him by these statements? There are those who secretly believe, but few who would assert publicly, with Gabriel García Márquez: ‘The duty of a writer – the revolutionary duty, if you like – is simply to write well.’ The black writer in South Africa feels he has to accept the criteria of his people because in no other but the community of black deprivation is he in possession of selfhood. It is only through unreserved, exclusive identification with blacks that he can break the alienation of being ‘other’ for nearly 350 years in the white-ordered society, and only through submitting to the beehive category of ‘cultural worker’, programmed, that he can break the alienation of the artist/elitist in the black mass of industrial workers and peasants.

  And, finally, he can toss the conflict back into my lap with Camus’s words: ‘Is it possible to be in history while still referring to values which go beyond it?’

  The black writer is ‘in history’ and its values threaten to force out the transcendent ones of art. The white, as writer and South African, does not know his place ‘in history’ at this stage, in this time.

  There are two absolutes in my life. One is that racism is evil – human damnation in the Old Testament sense – and no compromises, as well as sacrifices, should be too great in the fight against it. The other is that a writer is a being in whose sensibility is fused what Lukács calls the duality of inwardness and outside world, and he must never be asked to sunder this union. The coexistence of these absolutes often seems irreconcilable within one life, for me. In another country, another time, they would present no conflict because they would operate in unrelated parts of existence; in South Africa now they have to be coordinates for which the coupling must be found. The morality of life and the morality of art have broken out of their categories in social flux. If you cannot reconcile them, they cannot be kept from one another’s throats, within you.

  For me, Lukács’s ‘divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life’ is what a writer, poorly evolved for the task as he is, is made for. As fish that swim under the weight of many dark fathoms look like any other fish but on careful examination are found to have no eyes, so writers, looking pretty much like other human beings, but moving deep under the surface of human lives, have at least some faculties of supra-observation and hyperperception not known to others. If a writer does not go down and use these – why, he’s just a blind fish.

  Exactly – says the new literary orthodoxy: he doesn’t see what is happening in the visible world, among the people, on the level of their action, where battle is done with racism every day. On the contrary, say I, he brings back with him the thematic life-material that underlies and motivates their actions. ‘Art lies at the heart of all events’, Joseph Brodsky writes. It is from there, in the depths of being, that the most important intuition of revolutionary faith comes: the people know what to do, before the leaders. It was from that level that the yearning of black schoolchildren for a decent education was changed into a revolt in 1976; their strength came from the deep silt of repression and the abandoned wrecks of uprisings that sank there before they were born. It was from that level that an action of ordinary people for their own people made a few lines low down on a newspaper page, the other day: when some migrant contract workers from one of the ‘homelands’ were being laid off at a factory, workers with papers of permanent residence in the ‘white’ area asked to be dismissed in their place, since the possession of papers meant they could at least work elsewhere, whereas the migrant workers would be sent back to the ‘homelands’, jobless.

  ‘Being an “author” has been unmasked as a role that, whether conformist or not, remains inescapably responsible to a given order.’ Nowhere in the world is Susan Sontag’s statement truer than in South Africa. The white writer has to make the decision whether to remain responsible to the dying white order – and even as dissident, if he goes no further than that position, he remains negatively within the white order – or to declare himself positively as answerable to the order struggling to be born. And to declare himself for the latter is only the beginning; as it is for whites in a less specialised position, only more so. He has to try to find a way to reconcile the irreconcilable within himself, establish his relation to the culture of a new kind of posited community, non-racial but somehow conceived with and led by blacks.

  I have entered into this commitment with trust and a sense of discovering reality, coming alive in a new way – I believe the novels and stories I have written in the last seven or eight years reflect this – for a South Africa in which white middle-class values and mores contradict realities has long become the unreality, to me. Yet I admit that I am, indeed, determined to find my place ‘in history’ while still referring as a writer to the values that are beyond history. I shall never give them up.

  Can the artist go through the torrent with his precious bit of talent tied up in a bundle on his head? I don’t know yet. I can only report that the way to begin entering history out of a dying white regime is through setbacks, encouragements and rebuffs from others, and frequent disappointments in oneself. A necessary learning process …

  I take a break from writing.

  I am in a neighbouring black country at a conference on ‘Culture and Resistance’. It is being held outside South Africa because exiled artists and those of us who still live and work in South Africa cannot meet at home. Some white artists have not come because, not without reason, they fear the consequences of being seen, by South African secret police spies, in the company of exiles who belong to political organisations banned in South Africa, notably the African National Congress; some are not invited because the organisers regard their work and political views as reactionary. I am dubbed the blacks’ darling by some whites back home because I have been asked to give the keynote address at a session devoted to literature; but I wonder if those who think me favoured would care to take the flak I know will be coming at me from those corners of the hall where black separatists group. They are here not so much out of democratic right as out of black solidarity; paradoxically, since the conference is in itself a declaration that in the conviction of participants and organisers the liberation struggle and post-apartheid culture are non-racial. Yet there is that bond of living conditions that lassos all blacks within a loyalty containing, without constraining or resolving, bitter political differences.

  Do I think white writers should write about blacks?

  The artless question from the floor disguises both a personal attack on my work and an edict publicly served upon white writers by the same orthodoxy that prescribes for blacks. In the case of whites, it proscribes the creation of black characters – and by the same token, flipped head-to-tails, with which the worth of black writers is measured: the white writer does not share the total living conditions of blacks, therefore he must not write about them. There are some whites – not writers, I believe – in the hall who share this view. In the ensuing tense exchange I reply that there are whole areas of human experience, in work situations – on farms, in factories, in the city, for example – where black and white have been observing one another and interacting for nearly 350 years. I challenge my challenger to deny that there are things we know about each other that are never spoken, but are there to be written – and received w
ith the amazement and consternation, on both sides, of having been found out. Within those areas of experience, limited but intensely revealing, there is every reason why white should create black and black white characters. For myself, I have created black characters in my fiction: whether I have done so successfully or not is for the reader to decide. What’s certain is that there is no representation of our social reality without that strange area of our lives in which we have knowledge of one another.

  I do not acquit myself so honestly a little later, when persecution of South African writers by banning is discussed. Someone links this with the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union, and a young man leaps to reply that the percentage of writers to population is higher in the Soviet Union than in any other part of the world and that Soviet writers work ‘in a trench of peace and security’.

  The aptness of the bizarre image, the hell for the haven he wishes to illustrate, brings no smiles behind hands among us; beyond the odd word-substitution is, indeed, a whole arsenal of tormented contradictions that could explode the conference.

  Someone says, out of silence, quietly and distinctly: ‘Bullshit.’

  There is silence again. I don’t take the microphone and tell the young man: there is not a contrast to be drawn between the Soviet Union’s treatment of writers and that of South Africa, there is a close analogy – South Africa bans and silences writers just as the Soviet Union does, although we do not have resident censors in South African publishing houses and dissident writers are not sent to mental hospitals. I am silent. I am silent because, in the debates of the interregnum, any criticism of the Communist system is understood as a defence of the capitalist system which has brought forth the pact of capitalism and racism that is apartheid, with its treason trials to match Stalin’s trials, its detentions of dissidents to match Soviet detentions, its banishment and brutal uprooting of communities and individual lives to match, if not surpass, the gulag. Repression in South Africa has been and is being lived through; repression elsewhere is an account in a newspaper, book or film. The choice, for blacks, cannot be distanced into any kind of objectivity: they believe in the existence of the lash they feel. Nothing could be less than better than what they have known as the ‘peace and security’ of capitalism.22

  I was a coward and often shall be one again, in my actions and statements as a citizen of the interregnum; it is a place of shifting ground, forecast for me in the burning slag heaps of coal mines that children used to ride across with furiously pumping bicycle pedals and flying hearts, in the Transvaal town where I was born.

  And now the time has come to say I believe the Western world stands on shifting ground with me, because in some strange pilgrimage through the choices of our age and their consequences the democratic left of the Western world has arrived by many planned routes and plodding detours at the same unforeseen destination. The ideal of social democracy seems to be an abandoned siding. There was consternation when, early this year, Susan Sontag had the great courage and honesty publicly to accuse herself and other American intellectuals of the left of having been afraid to condemn the repression committed by Communist regimes because this was seen as an endorsement of America’s war on Vietnam and collusion with brutish rightist regimes in Latin America.

  This moral equivocation on the part of the American left draws parallel with mine at the writer’s congress, far away in Africa, that she has given me the courage, at second hand, to confess. Riding handlebar to handlebar across the coal slag, both equivocations reveal the same fear. What is its meaning? It is fear of the abyss, of the greater interregnum of human hopes and spirit where against Sartre’s socialism as the ‘horizon of the world’ is silhouetted the chained outline of Poland’s Solidarity, and all around, in the ditches of El Salvador, in the prisons of Argentina and South Africa, in the rootless habitations of Beirut, are the victims of Western standards of humanity.

  I lie and the American left lies not because the truth is that Western capitalism has turned out to be just and humane, after all, but because we feel we have nothing to offer, now, except the rejection of it. Communism, in practice since 1917, has turned out not to be just or humane either; has failed, even more cruelly than capitalism. Does this mean we have to tell the poor and dispossessed of the world there is nothing to be done but turn back from Communist bosses to capitalist bosses?

  In South Africa’s rich capitalist state stuffed with Western finance, 50,000 black children a year die from malnutrition and malnutrition-related diseases, while the West piously notes that Communist states cannot provide their people with meat and butter. In two decades in South Africa, three million black people have been ejected from the context of their lives, forcibly removed from homes and jobs and ‘resettled’ in arid, undeveloped areas by decree of a white government supported by Western capital. It is difficult to point out to black South Africans that the forms of Western capitalism are changing towards a broad social justice in the example of countries like Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Austria, with their mixed welfare economies, when all black South Africans know of Western capitalism is political and economic terror. And this terror is not some relic of the colonial past; it is being financed now by Western democracies – concurrently with Western capitalist democracy’s own evolution towards social justice.

  The fact is, black South Africans and whites like myself no longer believe in the ability of Western capitalism to bring about social justice where we live. We see no evidence of that possibility in our history or our living present. Whatever the Western democracies have done for themselves, they have failed and are failing, in their great power and influence, to do for us. This is the answer to those who ask, ‘Why call for an alternative left? Why not an alternative capitalism?’ Show us an alternative capitalism working from without for real justice in our country. What are the conditions attached to the International Monetary Fund loan of approximately $1 billion that would oblige the South African government to stop population removals, to introduce a single standard of unsegregated education for all, to reinstate millions of black South Africans deprived of citizenship?23

  If the disillusioned American left believes the injustices of Communism cannot be reformed, must it be assumed that those of capitalism’s longer history, constantly monitored by the compassionate hand of liberalism, can be? The dictum I quoted earlier carried, I know, its supreme irony: most leaders in the Communist world have betrayed the basic intuition of democracy, that ‘the people know what to do’ – which is perhaps why Susan Sontag saw Communism as fascism with a human face. But I think we can, contrary to her view, ‘distinguish’ among Communism and socialist democracies just as among Western democracies, and I am sure, beyond the heat of a platform statement, so does she. If the US and Sweden are not Botha’s South Africa, was Allende’s Chile East Germany, though both were in the socialist camp?

  We of the left, everywhere, surely must ‘distinguish’ to the point where we take up the real import of Sontag’s essential challenge to love truth enough, pick up the blood-dirtied, shamed cause of the left, and attempt to recreate the left in accordance with what it was meant to be, not what sixty-five years of power-perversion have made of it. If, as she rightly says, once we did not understand the nature of Communist tyranny, now we do, just as we have always understood at first hand the nature of capitalist tyranny. This is not a Manichaean equation – which is god and which the devil? is not a question the evidence could easily decide, anyway – and it does not license withdrawal and hopelessness. We have surely learned by now something of where socialism goes wrong, which of its precepts are deadly dangerous and lead, in practice, to fascist control of labour and total suppression of individual freedom. Will the witchcraft of modern times not be exorcised, eventually, by this knowledge?

  In the interregnum in which we coexist, the American left – disillusioned by the failure of Communism – needs to muster with the democratic left of the third world – living evidence of the failure of capitalism – th
e cosmic obstinacy to believe in and work towards the possibility of an alternative left, a democracy without the economic and military terror which exists, at present, in both left and right regimes. If we cannot, the possibility of real social democracy will die out, for our age, and who knows when, after what even bloodier age, it will be rediscovered.

  There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal. This is where the responsibility of the American left – and liberals? – meets mine. Without the will to tramp towards that possibility, no relations of whites, of the West, with the West’s formerly subject peoples can ever be free of the past, because the past, for them, was the jungle of Western capitalism, not the light the missionaries thought they brought with them.

  1981

  The Idea of Gardening

  J. M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K

  Allegory is generally regarded as a superior literary form. It is thought to clear the reader’s lungs of the transient and fill them with a deep breath of transcendence. Man becomes Everyman (that bore).

  From the writer’s point of view, allegory is no more than one among other forms. But I believe there is a distinction between the writer’s conscious choice of it, and its choice of him/her. In the first instance, loosened by time from ancient sources of myth, magic and morality, allegory is sometimes snatched from the air to bear aloft a pedestrian imagination or to distance the writer, for reasons of his own, from his subject. In the second instance, allegory is a discovered dimension, the emergence of a meaning not aimed for by the writer but present once the book is written.

  J.M. Coetzee, a writer with an imagination that soars like a lark and sees from up there like an eagle, chose allegory for his first few novels. It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write. So here was allegory as a stately fastidiousness; or a state of shock. He seemed able to deal with the horror he saw written on the sun1 only – if brilliantly – if this were to be projected into another time and plane. His Waiting for the Barbarians was the North Pole to which the agitprop of agonised black writers (and some white ones hitching a lift to the bookshop on the armoured car) was the South Pole; a world to be dealt with lies in between. It is the life and times of Michael K, and Coetzee has taken it up now.