Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Film may re-create the past or create a future, but in its flickering beginnings it was the unique art form to capture, alive, the continuing present moment. Not surprising, then, that two themes were obsessive in a number of the films we saw. One was the new nihilism – youths on two continents living at the dead end of our century on emotionless sex and catatonic violence. The second was the self-destruction of Sarajevo.

  Twelve days spent seeing films and discussing them. The lives, the countries, the world created out of the imagination I entered became the real world. To emerge from the Palais des Festivals on to the beachfront and into the glare of a concerted gaze – that was fantasy. Cannes is a city of voyeurs. What are they hoping for as they press to the glass of the flag-fluttering cars? Their faces sag in disappointment: alas, I am not Sharon Stone. And if I were? What solace could I offer for the fate of looking on?

  By the way, there was the masterpiece I had hoped for, and we gave it the Palme d’Or. In it was the presence of the essential thing in small detail, caught in order to expose the larger things. Emir Kusturica’s Underground is a splendid masquerade of life triumphant, in brass-band bravura, through half a century in the birthplace of the avatars of war which used to be Yugoslavia.

  1995

  Remembering Barney Simon

  Theatre in South Africa without Barney Simon is unimaginable. With Athol Fugard – whose early plays he directed – back in the 1950s and 1960s, Simon broke the colonial mould of staging only those plays already applauded in the West End and on Broadway, discarded lack of confidence in our ability to judge theatre for ourselves, and opened the Brechtian road for South Africans to assert, as playwrights and actors, what Walter Benjamin called the ‘ability to relate their lives’; the tragedy and vitality, the defiant humour of poverty in the underworld of black townships that was, in fact, the real South Africa. During those years, it was the alternative theatre that kept the head of culture above engulfing apartheid. Where books were banned, the stage got away with the wily genre of illusion. Barney Simon was one of the founders of the Market Theatre, and from its beginnings in 1976 in the converted buildings of what had been our Johannesburg Covent Garden he put into its survival and growth as alternative theatre his very life. No one knows how many men and women who have become the makers of a unique black theatre and a unique non-racial theatre in South Africa, known over the world, come from his vision and patient energy as director/writer. His attitude was always not only to teach others what he knew, but – that was the brilliance of it – to draw from them what was deep in the streets and in themselves.

  I remember, decades ago, Barney Simon came by and asked if I would like to come with him to meet two young men who were keen to devise a play. They were Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema, and they had the germ of an idea in two out-of-works chatting in a graveyard where the great African National Congress leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Chief Albert Luthuli was buried. He got them to explore the idea, probing into the content; he told them to go home to Soweto and talk about it to street traders, crones, youths hanging around the bus stations, gangsters, taxi drivers, anyone – and come back with their gleanings a week later. From this material he nurtured their great talent as actors to shape with them Woza Albert (Come back, arise Albert), a marvellous work using music, mimicry, irony and stand-up comedy in a message of liberation. The play was the first of many successes for Mtwa and Ngema, a prototype of the new theatre, to be created by them and their contemporaries, that showed the world outside what the statute-book version of apartheid was really like in terms of black people’s account of their own lives.

  Simon was artistic director of the Market Theatre for virtually all his life, producing his own plays, international works and adaptations of others’ stories – Can Themba’s The Suit is one of them, running in London now – and in the last decade devoting enormous energy to the Laboratory, part of the Market’s theatre complex, where aspirant playwrights could develop and stage their plays under his superbly creative guidance. What was Barney Simon like as a man? In contrast to his masterly professionalism in the theatre, he was often bamboozled by the mechanisms of daily life: a sort of endearing Woody Allen character, defeated by burst pipes, car breakdowns, and, in human relations, open to exploitation in his kindness to anyone with a hard-luck story. He was a loving and loved friend; the theatre was his family. Wherever theatre flourishes in this free South Africa his work helped bring about, his spirit will be present: Woza Barney! Viva Barney!

  1995

  Our Century

  Ahundred years is the largest unit we can grasp, in terms of human life. After a hundred years, quantification begins again; it is not without significance that life is renewed in the Sleeping Beauty’s family castle after one hundred years. The turn of a century is the prince’s kiss of time. On the first morning of 2000, the world will be awakened to a new calendar, perhaps a new life.

  What has ours, our life in the twentieth century been?

  Living in the twentieth century, we cannot look upon it from the pretence of another perspective; nor should we try to if we are to discover what only we, if secretly, suppressedly, know best: the truth about ourselves, our time.

  Has it been the worst of times?

  Has it been the best of times?

  Or should we combine the two extremes in Dickensian fashion, and try ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’?

  The brief conception of our century I propose now is inevitably subjective; each of you will substitute or add your own, but there are surely many we, shaped by the same period, share.

  At once there arises from a flash brighter than a thousand suns the mushroom cloud that hangs over our century. Exploded almost exactly at the half-century, the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki rise as unsurpassed evil done, even in this century where more humans have been killed or allowed to die of starvation and disease, by human decision, than ever before in history; and where the Nazi holocaust, fifty years on, has become household words of horror as ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans and Africa.

  Unsurpassed evil laid at our door, certainly, because foremost of the ‘firsts’ our century can claim is that for the first time man invented a power of destruction which surpasses any natural catastrophe – earthquake, volcano eruption, flood. Thus the final conquest of nature, an aim pursued with the object of human benefit since the invention of agriculture in the Stone Age, has been achieved in our discovery of how to wipe ourselves out more quickly and efficiently than any force of nature. The demonic vow of our century seems to come from Virgil: ‘If I cannot move Heaven, I will stir up Hell.’

  The signing of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is brokered among nations, and the threat of an atomic war, which for forty years depended on the press of a button in the Pentagon or the Kremlin, is complacently half-forgotten since one protagonist in a Cold War is hors de combat. But the French, in this last decade, have tried out their nuclear capacity as if these loathsome apocalyptic weapons were now old toys a safe world can play with reminiscently.

  T.S. Eliot’s prediction was that we would end with a whimper; ours is that we could go out with a bang. The mushroom cloud still hangs over us; will it be there as a bequest to the new century?

  The strange relation between the forces of Good and Evil has been part of the mystery of human existence since we evolved as the only self-regarding creatures in the animal world. In our century, with its great leaps into what was formerly beyond human experience, the relation surely has become profoundly relevant and more inexplicable than ever. Einstein, exiled from his home country by the evil force of Nazism, split the atom, deciphering one of the greatest secrets of nature. What was intended to enrich humankind with an extension of knowledge of its cosmic existence, produced out of Good the malediction of our time: atomic capability, in whomsoever’s hands it remains or passes to.

  What is more puzzling and far more troubling is what appears to be a kind of symbiosis o
f Good and Evil. They pass from one into the other through some transparency we, bewilderedly, cannot fathom. We try to apply moral precepts to processes that function perhaps according to quite other laws, laws in which this human construct of ours, morality, does not exist at all. A sober contemplation for an age characterised by revolutionary scientific discovery.

  If we turn away from the absolutes of opposing Good and Evil as we must see them while human values are to survive, we come to the lower level – of paradox. We have made spectacular advances in discoveries that have made life more bearable for some and more pleasurable for others. We have eliminated many epidemics and alleviated much pain with new drugs; we have raised the dead in a real sense, by taking vital organs from the dead and planting them to function again in the living. Air travel has revolutionised the possibility of physical presence. The bundle of telecommunications – computer, fax, email, mobile phone – has speeded up communication by the spoken and written word. We have lifted the burden of manual workers and housewives by machines programmed to do onerous tasks; with other devices we have brought music and moving images into every house. We have broken the sound barrier, explored space, entered the angels’ realm, the sphere of the heavens. Most of us have enjoyed some of these embellishments of life.

  The Italian Futurist painters in the early decades of our age depicted in their imagination this world which is now ours as a world of sleek cars whirling unhampered through streets, planes buzzing like happy bees gathering the nectar of a new age between skyscrapers and rainbows in a radiantly clear sky.

  Their paintings look to us now like the work of a Grandma Moses of industrialisation; yet we shared this innocent ignorance of pollution, lacked with these artists the true vision of the future, which was that we would begin to choke on our technological progress, suffocate in our cities in our own foul breath of fumes and carcinogenic vapours. We have achieved much, but we have not always stayed at the controls of purpose.

  It is also intriguing to observe in ourselves how technology has intervened in the intangible, telescoping our emotions. Those antipodean states, dread and anticipation, have been practically outdated. In our century, the ordeal of dread is banished by instant full communication from anywhere to anywhere. And as for anticipation, that becomes instant gratification. So, not for the first or last time, the advances of technology contradict theories of human satisfaction expounded by the savants of that other kind of advance in knowledge that has dramatically distinguished our century, psychoanalysis. Apart from its purely sexual application, Freud’s deferred pleasure as a refinement of emotional experience does not compare, for us, with the immediate joy of hearing a lover’s voice, or getting a friend’s reply to a letter, at once, by email.

  Even adventurism has been transformed by technology. The intrepid of the Euro-Russo-American world walk on the moon and dangle in space instead of ‘discovering’ jungles and rivers the indigenous inhabitants have known as home since their personal creation myths explained their presence there. The new adventurers actually experience, by weightlessness, extinction while still alive, become phantoms whose feet cannot touch earth. They are the successors to the angels we, alas, no longer believe in because we have probed outer space and found no heaven.

  What has been the impact on the arts, in our century of unprecedented technological development?

  Technology is the means by which one of the positive, progressive consequences of the revolutions of the century – bloody or peaceful, failed or surviving – the determination to break open the elitism of the arts, has been made practical. From the era of troupes of actors and art exhibitions travelling through the villages of Russia after the October Revolution, to this decade of the nineties when villages and even squatter camps in Africa, in India, in the Middle East, have transistor radios, and television sets are run on car batteries, culture in its most easily assimilable form – entertainment sugaring information – has been democratised. There has been a redistribution of intellectual privilege through technology.

  Music has been brought to the masses by discs, and broadcasts which may be heard on the humblest of radios, whether it be pop or reggae or an opera performance many people would never have had the money or opportunity to attend. And by the same means a recognition and appreciation of the musical forms of the East and of Africa, from the ragas of Ravi Shankar to South Africa’s kwela and mbaqanga, have spread internationally.

  But it is television that has brought about the overwhelming cultural transformation.

  Television has altered human perception. It has changed the means of knowing; of receiving the world. Of the five senses, sight now outstrips all others; watching is the most important form of comprehension. Although television speaks, it is its endless stream of images out of which the child, the youth, even the mature and old who have had considerable direct experience of life, construct reality. The visual other world of television is renewed in palimpsest, day after day, night after night, for millions the last vision before sleep and the first woken to in the morning. I know that every workshop of young painters in my country shows strikingly the imprinting of artists’ creativity by television’s imagery, iconography, television’s visual hierarchy of what is meaningful in our life. Television has empowered the visual far beyond the capacity of the cinema, the art which democratised the enjoyment of leisure before the TV box entered homes. Through television, the service of technology to art developed in our century, we have produced a human mutation, a species that substitutes vicarious experience for the real thing.

  ‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ These are the words of Thomas Mann, one of the greatest literary interpreters of the real thing, which he lived through in personal experience of the twentieth century’s physical displacements and upheavals of perception.

  But we are not only children of our time, we are also of our place. My own consciousness and subconscious, from which I write, come even in the most personal aspects of mind and spirit from destiny shaped by the historico-political matrix into which I was born. My personal sense of the defining events of our century is dominated by two: the fall of Communism, and the end of colonialism. And the two are linked subjectively, even contradictorily, for me, since I was born a second-generation colonial in a capitalist-racist society and as I grew up I looked to the Left as the solution to the oppression of the poor and powerless all around me, in my home country and the world. When I was a toddler I was taken to wave a flag at the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, on his imperial visit to the then British Dominion, South Africa. As I grew I was told again and again of this momentous occasion, with a sense of values to be inculcated: loyalty in homage to imperial power, white man’s power.

  Nobody presented for the formation of my sense of values the fact that Mohandas Gandhi had lived in, and developed his philosophy in and through the country where I was born and was to live my life; the man who was to leave behind in that country principles of liberation that were to be important to the struggle for freedom by black people, my brothers and sisters unacknowledged by the values of the whites who took me to make obeisance to an English prince. The essence of the colonial ethos in which I was brought up is contained in that flag I was given to wave.

  It has become a truism to shake one’s head in wonder at the end of apartheid and the emergence of a free South Africa this century has just seen.

  A miracle; and coming to pass at the time when a new miracle is yearningly needed to compensate for the miracle the first quarter of the century promised for many – now a fallen star, the Red Star, flickered out.

  Human beings will always have the imperative to believe in the possibility of a better world of their own making. In the words of Jean Paul Sartre, socialism was seen as ‘man in the process of creating himself’. The depth of the sense of abandonment, now, not only among those who were Communists but among all of us to whom the broad Left, the ideals of socialism remain although these have b
een betrayed and desecrated in many countries as well as in the Gulags of the founding one – it is this sense of abandoment that the collapse of the Soviet Union brings to our century, rather than the disillusion many in the West would triumphantly claim.

  For whatever one’s judgement of its consequences, the most momentous single date in the social organisation of our century was unquestionably the October Revolution of 1917, as a result of which one-third of humankind found itself living under regimes derived from it. The disintegration of the Soviet world before the end of the same century that saw its beginning: has it brought the triumph of democracy or only the return of the liberalism that failed, after the First World War, to prevent the poor and unemployed of Italy and Germany from turning to fascism as the solution of their circumstances, many of which exist again in many parts of our world today?

  I can affirm that in my own country, South Africa, the Left’s revelation of the class and economic basis of racial discrimination was one of the formative influences that, along with Pan-Africanism, joined the people’s natural, national, inevitable will towards liberation. The other formative influence on the liberation struggle in South Africa is one of which I have already spoken, Mahatma Gandhi. He was one of the truly great individuals of our century whose lifetime within it we set against the monsters, from Hitler to Pol Pot, the century has produced. Gandhi was an original thinker on the nature of power, as distinct from power confined to the purely political concept as the tool for liberation, yet able to serve this tool as part of a high moral consciousness. His philosophy of satyagraha, ‘the force which is born of truth and love’, is perhaps the only genuine spiritual advance in an era of religious decline marked by crackpot distortions of faith, and, finally, by savage fundamentalism.