Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  How do victims themselves perceive their poverty?

  They live it; know it best, beyond all outside conceptions. What, apart from the survival needs of food and shelter, do they feel they are most deprived of? Researchers moving among them have learned much that is often ignored, such as the perception of women that, as those who with their children suffer most, attention to their advancement through skills and education should take more than a marginal ‘special interest’ place in transformation of the lives of the disadvantaged in general. Consultation with how communities in poverty see themselves in relation to the ordinary fullness of life other communities take for granted is now recognised by research as integral to harnessing the negatives of social resentment and passivity into vital partnership for change. It is the fortunate world outside dollar-a-day subsistence that needs to begin to see the impoverished as our necessary partners in world survival, to be listened to in respect of the components of what a decent life is. It is the privileged world that needs to come to the realisation that a ‘decent life’ cannot be truly lived by any of us while one-quarter of the developing world’s population exists in poverty.

  If economic poverty began when some had surplus production and some did not, and nothing much has changed in principle, the second cause of poverty as a phenomenon of human history is war, and nothing much has changed there, either. Wars, social conflict, whether at international, national or inter-ethnic level, still produce hunger and homelessness, the prime characteristics of poverty, and now, it seems, on a rolling action scale. The eradication of poverty implies a hand-in-hand relation with agencies of the non-violent resolution of conflict. The peace-keeping, peace-promoting work of United Nations and other formations, fraught with difficulty, danger and frustration, and controversial as it is, must be seen as a vital component of the decade’s aim.

  The violence of nature – flood, drought and earthquake – is another factor that has caused poverty since ancient times, and that is something which is not within human capability to prevent, as wars are. But the violence perpetrated by humankind on nature is increasingly one of the causes of poverty. The destruction of indigenous forests, the pollution of oceans, the leaching out of the land by indiscriminate use of chemicals; these take away from communities their livelihood. The leakage of nuclear waste makes water unpotable and the very air unbreathable. The problem of poverty cannot be solved while the earth and its oceans that feed us are abused by ruthless government planning and blinkered human greed.

  What are the moral perceptions of poverty?

  These are governed by those looking on, looking in, so to speak, from the outside. ‘Poor but honest’: consider the dictum. Why do the rich never make the qualification, ‘Rich but honest’? No one has commented on moral attitudes in this context better than the German poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht. Here is his poem:

  Food is the first thing. Morals follow on.

  So first make sure that those who now are starving

  Get proper helpings when we do the carving.

  Is for people to be honest when they are starving our measure of virtue, or is it a measure of our hypocrisy? Common crime, up to a certain level – economic white-collar crime is the prerogative of the wealthy – is a product of poverty and cannot be countered by punitive methods alone. Some of the funds that citizens, living in urban fear of muggings and robberies, want to see used, as the saying goes, to ‘stamp out crime’ with more police and bigger prisons, would have better effect diverted to the aim of stamping out poverty. No one will be safe while punishment and pious moral dicta are handed out in place of food. The campaign against poverty is the best campaign against crime.

  Finally, the definition of poverty does not end with material needs; the aim of its eradication will not be completed or perhaps even attainable without the world’s attention to the deprivation of the mind: intellectual poverty. As food is the basic need of the starved body, literacy is the basic need of the starved mind. According to the United Nations Development Programme’s ‘Human Development Report’, in the past fifty years adult illiteracy in the world has been reduced to almost half. If it can be virtually ended by early next century, it will be a great force in the six-point global action plan provided by the Report, and not only because the ability to read and write is crucial to participation in development, the open sesame to the world of work, mental skills and self-administration that is economic freedom. To be illiterate or semi-literate is to be deprived of the illumination and pleasure of reading, of one’s rightful share in and exploration of the world of ideas; it is to spend one’s life imprisoned between the walls of one-dimensional experience.

  Illiteracy cruelly stunts the human spirit both as a cause and result of the disempowerment we now dedicate a decade to bring to an end. We are here to celebrate and discuss the means we know we have at our disposal; and I want to close with what I believe can be our text, for the day and the decade. It comes from William Blake. I quote:

  Many conversed on these things as they labour’d at the furrow

  Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery:

  It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal.

  Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little ones,

  And those who are in misery cannot remain so long

  If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.’

  1997

  From a Correspondence with Kenzaburo Oe

  Dear Kenzaburo,

  Your letter brings the pleasure of realisation that we are simply taking up from where we were interrupted by the end of our encounter in the Tokyo hotel six years ago. There was so much to exchange; it has existed, in the parentheses of separate lives, ready to continue any time. The ambiguity, the connections that criss-cross against chronology between that short meeting and what was going to happen – an invisible prescience which would influence our individual thinking and writing – that turns out to have presaged the links of our then and now. You came to our meeting unknowingly in the foreshadow of the terrible earthquake that was to devastate a Japanese city later that year, and that I was to use, in a novel as yet not conceived, as a metaphor for apocalyptic catastrophe wreaked by nature, alongside that of contemporary devastation by humans upon themselves in Eastern Europe and Africa.

  And so now I should not have been surprised that you, writing to me, are preoccupied by the question of violence entering deeply into your awareness, just as it has made its way into mine. This is a ‘recognition’ between two writers; but it goes further. It is the recognition of writers’ inescapable need to read the signs society gives out cryptically and to try to make sense of what these really mean.

  I must tell you that when I began to write The House Gun it came to me as the personal tragedy of a mother and father whose son, in a crime of passion, murders their human values along with the man he kills. The parallel theme, placing their lives in the context of their country, the new South Africa, was that they – white people who in the past regime of racial discrimination had always had black people dependent upon them – would find themselves dependent upon a distinguished black lawyer to defend their son. That was going to be the double thesis of my novel. But as I wrote (and isn’t it always the way with us, our exploration of our story lures us further and further into the complexity of specific human existences?) I found that the context of mother, father and son was not existentially determined only geographically and politically; there was the question of the very air they breathed. Violence in the air; didn’t the private act of crime passionel take place within unconscious sinister sanction – the public, social banalisation of violence?

  You make the true and terrible observation ‘all the children of the world, in their perception and consciousness of their era, are the mirrors upon which the massive universal violence is reflected’. You are rightly most concerned about the situation of children, and I’ll come to that, but first I must comment on th
e extraordinary, blinkered attitude to violence which I have just recently been subjected to rather than encountered, in Europe and the United States.

  Whenever I was interviewed, journalists would propose the question of violence in South Africa as an isolated phenomenon, as if street muggings, burglaries, campus ‘date rapes’, brawls resulting in serious injuries between so-called sports matches were not part of everyday life in their countries.

  Let me admit at once that South African cities have at present a high place on the daunting list of those with the worst crime rate in the world. Some South American cities have been prominent on that list so long that this has come to be regarded complacently by the rest of the world as a national characteristic, a kind of folk custom rather than a tragedy. Conversely, South Africa’s violent crime is seen as a phenomenon of freedom – interpreted among racists everywhere (and there are still plenty) as evidence that blacks should have been kept under white hegemony for ever.

  The reasons for the rise of crime in South Africa, however, are not those of black people’s abuse of freedom. They are our heritage from apartheid. What the world does not know, or chose not to know, was that during the apartheid regime from 1948, state violence was quotidian and rampant. To be victims of state violence was the way of life for black men, women and children. Violence is nothing new to us; it was simply confined to daily perpetration against blacks. They were shut away outside the cities in their black townships at night, or permanently banished to ethnically defined territory euphemistically known as ‘homelands’, from which only male contract workers were allowed to come to the cities. This was how urban law and order was kept. Violence, and the desperate devaluation of life it called forth, was out of sight. Now that the people of our country are free in their own country to seek work and homes wherever they please, they flock to the cities. But the cities were not built for them; there is no housing for such vast numbers, and their presence on the labour market has swelled the ranks of the unemployed enormously. Their home is the streets; hunger turns them, as it would most of us who deplore crime on full stomachs, to crime, and degradation degenerates into violence. These are the historical facts that make the reasons for violence in South Africa exceptional. Economic development has the chance to change this deal with violence, here, although it is not a total solution, to a significant extent.

  As for the matter of guns as domestic possessions along with the house cat – while I was in the USA two schoolboys aged eleven and thirteen shot and killed several classmates and their teacher, and while I was in Paris a schoolboy shot and killed his classmate. Why did these children have access to guns? Where did they get them? The American children took the guns from the house of their grandfather; the French child from that of his father. The guns were simply there, in these family homes, commonplace objects, evidently not kept under lock and key, if they had any legitimate place at all in household equipment. I’ve just read American statistics revealing that a gun in the house is forty-three times more likely to kill a member of the household than an intruder. And now you tell me that a Japanese boy killed a companion and hung up the victim’s head in public; a boy fatally stabbed his teacher; an old man was beaten to death by two girls; and a father was killed by his son and the son’s friend.

  This brings us to what is the ultimate responsibility of adults in your country, in mine, in the whole world: why could children cold-bloodedly kill? What has made them horrifically indifferent to the pain and death of others, so that they themselves are prepared to inflict these? What has happened to their ‘tender years’?

  Setting aside the particular experience of South Africa, I think the woman who challenged you, citing environmental causes – an environment created entirely by the power and will of adults – was correct. If you look back at your own childhood experience, Kenzaburo, and I look back at mine, surely we shall see how our morality, our humanity was distorted by the agenda of adults, something we had to struggle with and shed by our own efforts as we grew: a confirmation of your conviction that there is the ‘power of recovery inherent in children themselves’, yes. You were brainwashed – no less – into believing the immortal worth of the Emperor was such that you must be prepared to kill yourself at his command. I was brainwashed – no less – into believing that my white skin gave me superiority and absolute authority over anyone of another colour.

  Children are not subjected to this sort of evil conditioning today. Then what is it, in countries dedicated to peace and democracy, reformed in aversion to the authoritarian cruelties of the past, that makes violence acceptable to children? I know it’s easy to lay responsibility on the most obvious – the visual media, television and electronic games, now also part of home furnishings. But the fact is that these household presences have become the third parent. They raise the child according to a set of values of equal influence to that of the biological parents. The power of the image has become greater than the word; you can tell a child that a bullet in the head kills, a knife in the heart kills. The child sees the ‘dead’ actor appear, swaggering in another role, next day. This devaluation of pain, with its consequent blunting of inhibitions against committing violence, has become, with the acts of glamorous gangsters, mortal-ray-breathing heroes of outer space, the daily, hourly formation of youthful attitudes. It is hauntingly clear to me that these children who kill do not have – it’s like an atrophied faculty – the capacity to relate to pain and destruction experienced by others. I think this is what has happened to the ‘inner psyche of these juvenile delinquents’ you speak of.

  What can we do, all of us adults, to take up the responsibility to children, ‘restore their normal selves’, how rouse ‘the power of self-respect inherent in them originally’?

  If we place a large share of the blame for their condition upon the media, are we then advocating censorship? The idea is repugnant and frightening to me, who spent decades fighting censorship of information, literature, the arts, in my country. I have in mind something so difficult to bring about that it may seem naive to mention it. Is it not possible that writers, actors, directors and producers of these programmes that make violence acceptably banal could reconsider their values? It is said in what is euphemistically known as the ‘entertainment industry’ – it has also become a brainwashing industry – that the industry simply gives the public what they want. But the public are long conditioned to want what the industry dictates. And why is that public so passive under this self-appointed authority? Is it because the visual media are the true representation of much accepted adult behaviour? The violence in the air has become the exhalation of being?

  You know – more telling, even, than any statement in your letter – years ago you made a remarkable implicit claim for the ability of children to restore the power of self-respect inherent in them. The children in your story (in English translation entitled ‘Prize Stock’) are the ones in a remote Japanese village who, by their actions and attitudes, teach the adults that the black American airman who has fallen into their hands during the war is a human being, capable of emotional response and suffering. Taking your premise that the power of self-respect is inherent in children, this means that it also must exist, dormant, in the substance of adult men and women. How can we release this power of restoration in our present era and circumstances?

  Kenzaburo, you did not know how much you were speaking for the end of our millennium when you used these words for an early story: ‘Who will teach us to outgrow our madness?’

  Sincerely,

  Nadine

  1998

  Octavio Paz: Poet-Archer

  I first met Octavio Paz in the seventies, as a guest in his home in Mexico City. A long lunch, accompanying which was the benison of his rich mind. He was a man with a very large head, could have been a model for an Easter Island monolith, and his high white expanse of forehead held back, in a line straight across its cranial limit, the drama of tight-curled black hair. As you listened to him, that forehead seemed a hea
dlight from which beamed illumination.

  Every subject he touched upon was bright and new.

  We had sporadic contact after that, and in the last year of his life a correspondence when he and I were trying to arrange for him to visit South Africa under the auspices of the Congress of South African Writers. He was keenly interested in our country, our engagement in transition from oppression to freedom, in particular freedom of the word, and it was only poor health that brought his plans to naught.

  As a great contemporary poet, Octavio Paz defined himself more precisely as a Spanish American poet. For language was, to him, not only the instrument of his poetry, the harp of his lyricism – he saw it as the fundamental operative in the fate of human society; a sure barometer of the condition of ideological, political and social situations, and of individual responsibility for these. In one of his classic prose works, ‘The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid’, he wrote: ‘When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meaning.’

  Of the question of corruption, he wrote:

  Although moralists are scandalised by the fortunes amassed by the revolutionaries [in Mexico], they have failed to observe that this material flowering has a verbal parallel: oratory has become the favourite literary genre of the prosperous … and alongside oratory, with its plastic flowers, there is the barbarous syntax in many of our newspapers, the foolishness of the language on loudspeakers and the radio, and the loathsome vulgarities of advertising – all that asphyxiating rhetoric.

  And, as so often with the writings of Octavio Paz, he might have been speaking of and for much of the rest of the world.