Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Trotta, drunk, takes ‘heroic’ exception – ‘My grandfather saved the Emperor’s life … I, his grandson, will not stand by and allow the dynasty of the Supreme War Lord to be insulted!’ He is forced to leave ignominiously.

  As the District Commissioner’s son deteriorates through gambling and drink, Roth unfolds with marvellous subtlety what was withheld, and longing for release, in the father. The old District Commissioner’s unrealised bond with his old valet, Jacques, is perfectly conveyed in one of the two superlative set pieces of the novel, when Jacques’s dying is, first, merely a class annoyance because the servant fails to deliver the mail to the breakfast table, and then becomes a dissolution of class differences in the humanity of two old men who are all that is left, to one another, of a vanished social order: their life.

  The second set piece both echoes this one and brings back a scene that has been present always, beneath the consequences that have richly overlaid it. The levelling of age and social dissolution respects no rank. The DC not only now is at one with his former servant; he also, at the other end of the ancient order, has come to have the same bond with his exalted Emperor. In an audience recalling that of the Hero of Solferino, he too has gone to ask for the Emperor’s intercession. This time it is to ask that Carl Joseph not be discharged in disgrace from the army. The doddering Emperor says of Carl Joseph,

  ‘That’s the young fellow I saw at the last manoeuvres …’ And since this confused him a little, he added, ‘You know, he nearly saved my life. Or was that you?’

  A stranger catching sight of them at this moment might have taken them for brothers … The one felt he had changed into a District Commissioner, the other, that he had changed into the Emperor.

  The unity of Roth’s masterwork is achieved in that highest faculty of the imagination Walter Benjamin72 speaks of as ‘an extensiveness … of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes’.

  Carl Joseph, firing on striking workers, hears them sing a song he has never heard before, the ‘Internationale’. At the same time, he has a yearning to escape to the peasant origins of the Trotta family. Unable to retreat to the ‘innocent’ past, superfluous between the power of the doomed empire and the power of the revolution to come, he is given by Roth a solution that is both intensely ironic and at the same time a strangely moving assertion of the persistence of a kind of naked humanity, flagellated by all sides. Leading his men in 1914, he walks into enemy fire to find something for them to drink. ‘Lieutenant Trotta died, not with sword in hand but with two buckets of water.’

  Carl Joseph’s cousin, of The Emperor’s Tomb, has never met him although Roth knows how to give the reader a frisson by casually dropping the fact that they were both in the battle at which Carl Joseph was killed. But this Trotta links with the peasant branch of the family, through his taking up, first as a form of radical chic, another cousin, Joseph Branco, an itinerant chestnut roaster from Roth’s familiar frontier town. Emotionally frozen between a mother who, like the DC, cannot express her love, and a young wife who turns lesbian after he leaves her alone on their wedding night while he sits with a dying servant (the vigil of the DC with Jacques composed in a new key), Trotta forms his warmest relationship with Branco and Branco’s friend, the Jewish cab driver. They go to war together, live together as escaped prisoners of war in Siberia, and in this phase of Roth’s deepest reflection on the elements of his mega-novel, exemplify brilliantly his perception that consistency in human relations is not a virtue but an invention of lesser novelists. The ideal camaraderie of the three men cracks along unpredictable lines, just as the complexity of Trotta’s love for and indifference to his wife, and her constant breaking out of what has seemed to be emotional resolutions to their life, are consonant with the jarring shifts of war and post-war that contain them.

  As with all Roth’s work, this phase is as wonderfully populous as any nineteenth-century novel, psychologically masterly, particularly in the person of Trotta’s mother and the tangents of distress and illogical fulfilment in the relationship between him and her. But The Emperor’s Tomb was one of Roth’s last works, published only the year before he died, the year of the next war for which all that was unresolved in the previous one was preparing in his world, his time. Although he wrote at least two more novels after this one, he concludes this phase, and – for me – the summation of his work, with a scene in which Trotta is in a café. On that night ‘my friends’ excitement … seemed to me superfluous’ – as it does to the reader, since it is not explained until, with Roth’s power to shatter a scene with a blow of history:

  … the moment when the door of the café flew open and an oddly dressed young man appeared on the threshold. He was in fact wearing black leather gaiters … and a kind of military cap which reminded me at one and the same time of a bedpan and a caricature of our old Austrian caps.

  The Anschluss has arrived. The café empties of everyone, including the Jewish proprietor. In an inspired fusion of form with content, there follows a dazedly disoriented piece of writing that expresses the splintering of all values, including emotional values, so that the trivial and accidental, the twitching involuntary, takes over. Trotta sits on in the deserted café, approached only by the watchdog. ‘Franz, the bill!’ he calls to the vanished waiter. ‘Franz, the bill!’ he says to the dog. The dog follows him in the dawn breaking over ‘uncanny crosses’ that have been scrawled on walls. He finds himself at the Kapuzinergruft, the Emperor’s tomb, ‘where my emperors lay buried in iron sarcophagi.’

  ‘I want to visit the sarcophagus of my Emperor, Franz Joseph … Long live the Emperor!’ The Capuchin brother in charge hushes him and turns him away. ‘So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?’

  I know enough of the facts of Joseph Roth’s life to be aware that, for his own death, he collapsed in a café, a station of exile’s calvary.

  1991

  Turning the Page

  African Writers on the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century

  In the beginning was the Word.

  Over the centuries of human culture the word has taken on other meanings, secular as well as religious. To have the word has come to be synonymous with ultimate authority, with prestige, with awesome, sometimes dangerous persuasion, to have Prime Time, a TV talk show, to have the gift of the gab as well as that of speaking in tongues.

  In the twenty-first century, the word flies through space, bounces from satellites, now nearer than it has ever been to the heaven from which it was believed to have come. But its most significant transformation occurred for us – the writers – long ago (and it was in Africa) when it was first scratched on a stone tablet or traced on papyrus, when it materialised from sound to spectacle, from being heard to being read as a series of signs, and then a script; and travelled through time from parchment to Gutenberg. For this is the genesis story of the writer. It is the story that wrote you or me into being.

  It was, strangely, a double process, creating at the same time both the writer and the very purpose of the writer as a mutation in the agency of human culture. It was both ontogenesis as the origin and development of an individual being, and the adaptation, in the nature of that individual, specifically to the exploration of ontogenesis, the origin and development of the individual being. For we writers are evolved for that task. Like the prisoner incarcerated with the jaguar in Borges’s story ‘The God’s Script’ who was trying to read, in a ray of light that fell only once a day, the meaning of being from the markings on the animal’s pelt, we spend our lives attempting to interpret through the word the readings we take in the societies of which we are part. It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.

  Writers in Africa in the twentieth century interpreted the greatest events on our continent since the abolition of slavery, from Things Falling Apart in the colonialist regimes, crossing the River Between oppression a
nd liberation, passing Up in Arms through the Fog at the Season’s End, Down Second Avenue, singing the Song of Lawino on the Mission to Kala, overcoming Nervous Conditions and discarding the Money Order as the price of bondage, enduring the House of Hunger, challenging the World of Strangers created by racism, recognising we were shirking responsibility as Fools for Blaming ourselves on History. Confessing as An Albino Terrorist, telling as the Interpreters the Tough Tale of the struggle for Freedom.73

  There is no prize offered for correctly identifying the writers of the books whose titles you should recognise strung together to tell the story in the account I have just given, nor will it be necessary to point out that these titles and writers are only a random few of those that have made manifest in our literature the embattled awakening of our continent.

  We have known that our task was to bring to our people’s consciousness and that of the world the true dimensions of racism and colonialism beyond those that can be reached by the media, the newspaper column and screen image, however valuable these may be. We writers have sought the fingerprint of flesh on history.

  The odds against developing as a writer able to take on this huge responsibility have, for most of our writers, been great. But as Agostinho Neto said, and proved in his own life: ‘If writing is one of the conditions of your being alive, you create that condition.’

  Out of adversity, out of oppression, in spite of everything.

  Before we look forward into the twenty-first century we have the right to assess what we have come through, and what it means to be here, this particular time and place that has been twentieth-century Africa. This has been an existential position with particular implications for literature; we have lived and worked through one of those fearful epochs Brecht has written of when ‘to speak of trees is almost a crime’. Our brothers and sisters have challenged us with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz’s cry: ‘What is poetry which does not serve nations or people?’ And we have taken up that challenge. Inevitably, the characteristic of African literature during the struggle against colonialism and, later, neo-colonialism and corruption in post-colonial societies, has been engagement – political engagement.

  Now, unfortunately, many people see this concept of engagement as a limited category closed to the range of life reflected in literature; it is regarded as some sort of upmarket version of propaganda. Engagement is not understood for what it really has been, in the hands of honest and talented writers: the writer’s exploration of the particular meaning that being has taken on in his or her time and place. For real ‘engagement’, for the writer, is not something set apart from the range of the creative imagination at the dictate of his brothers and sisters in the cause he or she shares with them; it comes from within the writer, his or her creative destiny as an agency of culture, living in history. ‘Engagement’ does not preclude the beauty of language, the complexity of human emotions; on the contrary, such literature must be able to use all these in order to be truly engaged with life, where the overwhelming factor in that life is political struggle.

  While living and writing under these conditions in Africa, some of us have seen our books lie for years unread in our own countries, banned, and we have gone on writing. Many writers have been imprisoned: Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Jack Mapanje, Jeremy Cronin, Mongane Wally Serote, Breyten Breytenbach, Dennis Brutus, Jaki Seroke and a host of others. Many, such as Chinua Achebe and Nuruddin Farah, have endured the trauma of exile, from which some never recover as writers, and which some do not survive at all. I think, among too many, of Can Themba and Dambuze Marechera.

  What has happened to writers in other parts of the world we cannot always dismiss as remote from being a threat to ourselves, either. In 1988, what the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis called the ‘fearsome rhythm of our time’ quickened in an unprecedented frenzy, to which the writer was summoned to dance for his life. There arose a threat against writers that takes its appalling authority from something more widespread than the power of any single political regime. The edict of a world religion had sentenced a writer to death.

  For three years now, wherever he is hidden, Salman Rushdie has existed under the pronouncement upon him of the fatwa. There is no asylum for him anywhere. Every time this writer sits down to write, he does not know if he will live through the day; he does not know whether the page will ever be filled. The murderous dictate invoking the power of international terrorism in the name of a great and respected religion is not something that happens to ‘somebody else’. It is relevant to the themes that concern us, and will continue to do so, in African literature as part of worldwide post-colonial literature, for Rushdie’s novel is an innovative exploration of one of the most intense experiences we share, the individual personality in transition between two cultures brought together in that post-colonial world. For the future freedom of the word, and for the human rights of all of us who write, the fatwa of death must be declared an offence against humanity and dealt with by those who alone have the power to do so – democratic governments everywhere, and the United Nations. The precedent of the fatwa casts a shadow over the free development of literature on our continent as it does everywhere, even as we believe ourselves to be moving into the enlightenment of the twenty-first century.

  What do we in Africa hope to achieve, as writers, in the new century? Because we are writers, can we expect to realise literally, through our work, that symbol of change, the turning to a fresh page?

  What are the conditions under which we may expect to write – ideological, material, social?

  It seems to me that these are the two basic questions for the future of African literature. I think it is generally agreed that consonance with the needs of the people is the imperative for the future in our view of African literature. This is surely the point of departure from the past; there, literature played the immeasurably valuable part of articulating the people’s political struggle, but I do not believe it can be said to have enriched their lives with a literary culture. And I take it that our premise is that a literary culture is a people’s right.

  We shall all, as I have suggested, make the approach from our experience in the twentieth century; we shall all be hazarding predictions, since we do not know in what circumstances our ambitions for a developing literature will need to be carried out. We have our ideas and convictions of how literary development should be consonant with these needs of our people; we cannot know with what manner of political and social orders we shall have to seek that consonance.

  I think we have to be completely open-eyed about the relations between our two basic questions. We have to recognise that the first – what we hope to achieve in terms of literary directions – is heavily dependent on the second: the conditions under which we shall be working as writers. A literary culture cannot be created by writers without readers. There are no readers without adequate education. It’s as simple – and dire – as that. No matter how much we encourage writers who are able to fulfil, according to their talents, the various kinds and levels of writing that will take literature out of the forbidding context of unattainable intellectualism, we shall never succeed until there is a wide readership competent beyond the school-primer and comic-book level. And where there are readers there must be libraries in which the new literature we hope to nurture, satisfying the need of identification with people’s own daily lives, and the general literature that includes the great mind-opening works of the world, are available to them.

  Will potential readers find prose, poetry and non-fiction in their mother tongues? If we are to create a twenty-first-century African literature, how is this to be done while publishing in African languages remains mainly confined to works prescribed for study, market-stall booklets and religious tracts? We have long accepted that Africa cannot, and so far as her people are concerned, has no desire to, create a ‘pure’ culture in linguistic terms; this is an anachronism when for purposes of material development the continent eagerly seeks means of technological develop
ment from all over the world. We all know that there is no such workable system as a purely indigenous economy once everyone wants computers and movie cassettes. Neither, in a future of increasing intercontinental contact, can there be a ‘pure’ indigenous culture. We see, a plain fact all over Africa, that the European languages that came with colonial conquest have been taken over into independence, acquired by Africans and made part of their own convenience and culture. (Whites, of course, have never had the good sense to do the same with African languages …)

  But we cannot speak of taking up the challenge of a new century for African literature unless we address the necessity to devise the means by which literature in African languages becomes the major component of the continent’s literature. Without this one cannot speak of an African literature. It must be the basis of the cultural crosscurrents that will both buffet and stimulate that literature.

  What of publishing?

  We write the books; to come alive they have to be available to be read. To be available, they have to be competently distributed, not only through libraries, but also commercially. Many of us have experienced trying to meet the needs of the culturally marginalised by launching small, non-profit publishing ventures in African literature. We find ourselves stopped short by the fact that the distribution network, certainly in the southern African countries (I don’t imagine there is much difference in countries in the north), remains the old colonial one. Less than a handful of networks makes decisions, based on the lowest common denominator of literary value, on what books should be bought from publishers, and has the only means of distributing these widely to the public, since they own the chain bookstores that dominate the trade in the cities, and are the only existing bookstores in most small towns. In South Africa, for example, in the twentieth century, there have been and are virtually no bookstores in the vast areas where blacks have been confined under apartheid.