Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  What Mohandas Gandhi began, out of a philosophy formulated in South Africa and applied tactically in India to bring about freedom from British imperial rule, Nelson Mandela has concluded. For Nelson Mandela’s unmatched, unchallengeable prestige and honour in the world today is recognition not only of his achievement, with and for his people, in the defeat of the dire twentieth-century experiment in social engineering called apartheid. It is recognition that other ghastly forms of social engineering tried in our century were defeated where they had taken refuge, for apartheid with its blatant racist laws was an avatar of Nazism. And finally, it is homage paid to Mandela in recognition that what was at stake was something greater by far than the fate of a single country; it was final victory gained for humankind over the centuries-old bondage of colonisation.

  The sum of our century may be looked at in a number of ways.

  The wars that were fought, the military defeats that turned into economic victories, the ideologies that rose and fell, the technology that telescoped time and distance.

  We could dip a finger in a dark viscous substance and write on the window of our time, OIL. Oil became more precious than gold; it has been the ‘why’ of many wars of our day; repressive regimes go unreproached by democratic countries who are dependent on those regimes for oil; men, women and children die, for oil, without knowing why.

  In intimate human relations, we have won sexual freedom, and lost it – to Aids.

  Freud changed emotional cognition and self-perception. Another kind of perception moved from Picasso’s Guernica to a Campbell’s soup can, to the Reichstag wrapped in plastic, illustrating our cycles: worship of force and destruction, worship of materialism, desire to cover up and forget these choices we have made.

  Now that the deeds are done, the hundred years ready to seal what will be recorded of us, our last achievement could be in the spirit of taking up, in ‘the ceaseless adventure of man’,1 control of our achievements, questioning honestly and reflecting upon the truth of what has been lived through, what has been done. There is no other base on which to found the twenty-first century with the chance to make it a better one.

  1995

  The Status of the Writer in the World Today

  Which World? Whose World?

  A few months ago I was a participant in an international gathering in Paris to evaluate the status of the artist in the world. There we were on an elegant stage before a large audience; among us was a famous musician, a distinguished sculptor, several poets and writers of repute, a renowned dancer-choreographer. We had come together literally from the ends of the earth. At this stately opening session we were flanked by the Director-General of our host organisation, the representative of a cultural foundation funded by one of North America’s multibillionaire dynasties, and France’s Deputy Minister of Culture. The Director-General, the representative of the multibillionaire foundation and the Deputy Minister each rose and gave an address lasting half an hour; the session, which also was to include some musical performance, was scheduled to close after two hours.

  An official tiptoed along the backs of our chairs and requested us, the artists, to cut our addresses to three minutes. We humbly took up our pens and began to score out what we had to say. When the bureaucrats had finally regained their seats, we were summoned one by one to speak in telegraphese. All did so except the last in line. She was – I name her in homage! – Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer-choreographer from India. She swept to the podium, a beauty in sandals and sari, and announced: ‘I have torn up my speech. The bureaucrats were allowed to speak as long as they pleased; the artists were told that three minutes was time enough for whatever they might have to say. So – we have the answer to the status of the artist in the world today.’

  This experience set me thinking back to another that I have had, on a deeper and more personal level.

  In my Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, a year or two ago, which subsequently were published under the title Writing and Being, I devoted three of the six lectures to the writing and being each of Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz and Naguib Mahfouz. Edward Said, himself another writer whose work is important to me, reviewed the book extremely favourably in a leading English paper, while yet taking me to task for my indignant assertion that Mahfouz is not given his rightful place in contemporary world literature, is never mentioned in the company of such names as Umberto Eco, Günter Grass, etc., and certainly not widely read even by those whom one considers well-read; I know that a number of my friends read his work for the first time as a result of my published lecture.

  Mahfouz neglected? – Said chided me.

  Mahfouz not recognised for his greatness in world literature?

  What world did I define him by, what world did my purview confine me to in my assessment? In the literature of Arabic culture, the world of the Arabic language, Mahfouz is fully established in the canon of greatness and, in the populist canon of fame, while controversial, is widely read.

  Edward Said was right. What I was conceiving of as ‘world literature’ in my lecture, was in fact that of the Euro-North Americans into which only a few of us foreigners have been admitted. Naguib Mahfouz is recognised as a great writer in the world of Arabic literature, of whose canon I know little or nothing.

  But wait a moment – Said, I saw, had hit intriguingly upon a paradox. He was placing the concept of another ‘world literature’ alongside the one I had posited with my eyes fixed on Euro-North America as the literary navel-of-the-world. In the all-encompassing sense of the term ‘world’, can any of our literatures be claimed definitively as ‘world’ literature? Which world? Whose world?

  The lesson Edward Said gave me, along with the lesson provided by Mallika Sarabhai at the gathering in Paris, is a sequence, from the situation of artists in general, on the one hand, to the question of literary canons, on the other, that becomes the naturally relevant introduction to my subject, here among my brother and sister African writers: our status, specifically as writers, in the worlds-within-‘the world’ we occupy.

  Status. What is status, to us?

  First – it never can go without saying – the primary status must be freedom of expression. That is the oxygen of our creativity. Without it, many talents on our continent have struggled for breath; some have choked; and some have been lost to us in that other climate, the thin air of exile.

  Suppression of freedom of expression by censorship and bannings was in many of our countries a feature of colonial regimes – I myself was such a victim of the apartheid government, with three of my own works, and an anthology I collected of South African writers’ works, banned. Suppression of freedom of expression has continued to be a feature of not a few of our independent regimes, leading outrageously and tragically in one of them, Nigeria, to the execution of one writer and the threat of death sentence placed upon another. But thankfully, in many of our countries, including mine, South Africa, and yours, Ghana, freedom of expression is entrenched.

  Freedom to write. We have that status; and we are fully aware that it is one that we must be always alert to defend against all political rationalisations and pleas to doctor our search for the truth into something more palatable to those who make the compromises of power.

  Quite apart from the supreme issue of human freedom, our claim to freedom to write has a significance, a benefit to society that only writers can give. Our books are necessary: for in the words of the great nineteenth-century Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol,77 they show both the writer and his or her people what they are. ‘The writer is both the repository of his people’s ethos, and his revelation to them of themselves.’ This revelation is what regimes fear, in their writers. But if our status as writers is to be meaningful, that fear is proof of our integrity … And our strength.

  Status, like charity, begins at home. The modern movement of African writers to define their status in this century was within our continent itself. With the impact of colonialism and its coefficient industrialisation, the keeper of the w
ord – one who is marked for expression of the creative imagination with the ‘ring of white chalk’ round the eye by Chinua Achebe’s old man of Abazon, in Anthills of the Savannah – with the impacts of colonialism the traditional status of the keeper of the word, the griot, was not, could not be adapted as a status for one whose poetry and stories were disseminated to the people-become-the-public at the remove of printed books, remote from any living presence of their creator in the flesh, their origin in the creative imagination. The keeper of the word became invisible; had no ready-defined place in society.

  I am not going to reiterate, or rather regurgitate, the history, including the influence from the African diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean, that both preceded and coincided with the first congress of African writers and artists in 1956.78 And it is significant, in terms of progress, to recall that it was not held in Africa at all, but in Paris.

  I am looking at the modern movement from the distance made by events between then and now; from the epic unfurling of Africa’s freedom from colonial rule in its many avatars, way back from Ghana’s, the first, forty years ago, to South Africa’s, the latest and final one.

  In the broad sweep of hindsight one can see that Kwame Nkrumah’s political postulation of Pan-Africanism had its cultural equivalent in the movement of negritude. Negritude, as a word, has long become an archaism, with its first syllable – although coming from the French language – suggestive of the American Deep South. But the other invented word, with which the young Wole Soyinka cheekily attacked the concept, has remained very much alive because over and over again, in the work of many African writers, Soyinka’s iconoclasm has been proved mistaken. ‘A tiger doesn’t have to proclaim his tigritude’, he pronounced. But as each country on our continent has come into its own, in independence, the expression of Africanness, the assertion of African ways of life, from philosophy to food, has intensified: Africa measuring herself against her selfhood, not that of her erstwhile conquerors.

  Africanness is fully established. So what status do we writers have, now, right here at home, in our individual countries?

  Is it the kind of status we would wish – not in terms of fame and glory, invitations to dine with government ministers, but in terms of the role of literature in the illumination of our people, the opening up of lives to the power and beauty of the imagination, a revelation of themselves by the writer as the repository of a people’s ethos? Alongside the establishment of African values – which in the case of our best writers included a lack of fear of questioning some, thus establishing that other essential component of literature’s social validity – the criterion in almost all of our countries has been the extent to which the writer has identified with and articulated, through transformations of the creative imagination, the struggle for freedom. And this, then, indeed, was the role of the writer as repository of a people’s ethos. Today the status, if to be measured on the scale of political commitment, is more complex.

  Yes, economic neo-colonialism is a phase that threatens freedom, in a people’s ethos. Yes, the greedy wrangles of the Euro-North American powers to manipulate African political change for the spoils of oil supplies and military influence are concerns in a people’s ethos. Yes, the civil wars waged by their own leaders, bringing appalling suffering – these are all part of a people’s ethos to be expressed, for now that our continent has rid itself of its self-appointed masters from Europe the sense of identity in having a common enemy has eroded and in many of our countries brotherhood has become that of Cain and Abel.

  Between writers and the national state, the threat of death by fatwa or secular decree, from Mahfouz to Saro Wiwa and Soyinka, has become the status of the writer in some of our countries. Yet these and less grim political themes tend to be the mise-en-scène of contemporary writing on our continent rather than its centrality. Africanism itself is an economic and cultural concept rather than an ideological one, now. For writers, the drama of individual and personal relations that was largely suppressed in themselves, and when indulged in was judged by their societies as trivial in comparison with the great shared traumas of the liberation struggle, now surfaces. When we in South Africa are asked, ‘What will you write about now apartheid is gone’, the answer is, ‘Life has not stopped because apartheid is dead.’ Life, as it did for you in Ghana after 1957 and for all the other countries of our continent after their liberation, begins again. There is so much to write about that was pushed aside by the committed creative mind, before; and there is so much to write about that never happened, couldn’t exist, before. Freedom and its joys, and – to paraphrase Freud – freedom and its discontents, are the ethos of a people for its writers now.

  So we have lost the status of what one might call national engagement that we had. Some few of us take on the responsibility to become writer-politicians – at random I think of poet Mongane Wally Serote, now in the Mandela government’s Ministry of Culture and diplomats, like your own poet, Kofi Awoonor. But there are unlikely to be any future Senghors, poet-presidents. And I ask myself, and you: do we writers seek, need that nature of status, the writer as politician, statesperson? Is it not thrust upon us, as a patriotic duty outside the particular gifts we have to offer? Is not the ring of chalk round the eye the sign of our true calling? Whatever else we are called upon to do takes us away from the dedication we know our role as writers requires of us. As the cultural arm of liberation struggles, we met the demands of our time in that era. That was our national status. We have yet to be recognised with a status commensurate with respect for the primacy of the well-earned role of writer-as-writer in the post-colonial era.

  How would we ourselves define such a status?

  What do we expect, of our governments, our societies, and in return expect to give of ourselves to these? I have personally decisive convictions about this, constantly evolving as the country I belong to develops its cultural directions, and I am sure you have your convictions, ideas. And we need to exchange them, East–West, North–South, across our continent; that, indeed, is my first conviction. We need to meet in the flesh, take one another’s hands, hear one another, at valuable encounters like this present opportunity under the banner of the Pan African Writers’ Association.

  But you and I know that the best there is in us, as writers, is in our books. The benefit and pleasure of personal contact is, in any case, limited to a fortunate few. Much more importantly, we need to read one another’s work. We and the people of our countries need natural and easy access to the writings that express the ethos of our neighbouring countries: what they believe, what they feel, how they make their way through the hazards and joys of living, contained by what varieties of socio-political and cultural structures they are in the process of pursuing. Forty years after the first country – yours – to attain independence, in the libraries and bookshops of our countries you still will find, apart from works by writers of each country itself, only a handful of books by the same well-known names among African writers from other countries of our continent. Every now and then, there may be a new one, a Ben Okri who comes to us by way of recognition in Europe, along the old North–South cultural conduit. Without the pioneering work of Hans Zell, and the invaluable Heinemann African Writers Series, the publication of journals from the old Présence Africaine to those bravely launched, often to a short or uneven life, by writers’ organisations or publishers in our various countries, the cross-pollination of literature in Africa would scarcely exist where it should: among ordinary readers rather than the African literati we represent, here.

  The best part of two generations has gone by since the African continent began its inexorable achievement of independence that has now culminated: a priority in our claim for the status of writers and writing in Africa surely is that there should be developed a pan-African network of publishers and distributors who will cooperate – greatly to their own commercial advantage, by the way – to make our writers’ work as prominently and naturally available as the Euro-
North American potboilers which fill airport bookstalls. This does not mean that we should export potboilers to one another! It means that writing of quality which readers in your countries and mine never see, unless they happen to have the resources to come across and mail-order from specialist book catalogues, would be beside our beds at night and in our hands as we travel on buses, trains and planes. There is a publishing industry on our continent, varying in different countries, as re-evidenced, after earlier studies, in Hans Zell’s and Cecile Lomer’s 1996 work, Publishing and Book Development in Sub-Saharan Africa,79 and I understand there has been recently established the resource centre, the African Publishing Network, APNET. I would suggest that such a network doesn’t yet exist, and welcome any such initiative to weave it.

  You will say that the old obstacle of our Babel’s Tower of languages rises before an African network of publishing. But the fact is that colonial conquest, with all its destruction and deprivation, ironically left our continent with a short list of linqua francas that have been appropriated to Africa’s own ends in more ways than pragmatic communication for politics and trade. English, French and Portuguese – these three at least are the languages used by many African writers in their work – for good or ill in relation to national culture: that is another whole debate that will continue. These three languages have virtually become adjunct African languages by rightful appropriation; and the translation into them of African-language literature, which itself is and always must be the foundation and ultimate criterion of the continent’s literature, is not an obstacle but an opportunity. Where are the translation centres at our colleges and universities, where young scholars could gain deep insights into their own languages while learning the skills of translation? Here is a field of cultural advancement, cultural employment in collaboration with publishers, waiting to be cultivated. We have an OAU uniting our continent, sometimes in contention as well as common purpose, on matters of mutual concern in international affairs, governance, policy and trade; we need an OAC, an Organisation of African Culture to do the same for Pan-African literature and the arts. Only then should we have a ‘world literature’: the world of our own, our challenge to the title each culturo-political and linguistic grouping on our planet has the hubris to claim for itself.