Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Now that family sayings come back to me from the house in a South African gold-mining town where I was born and grew up, I begin to see that, involved as I was in the clamour of racism and anti-racism, I did not hear that other voice whose significance I’ve never pursued. It’s a given: you don’t know your parents, ever, no matter how venerably stable your social background may be. But it is immigrant parents you particularly don’t know, if they have taken you, as I was, completely and unquestioningly into their assimilated life of the country of your birth, not theirs. My mother and maternal grandparents (the only ones I was ever to know) came to South Africa from England; my father from Latvia. There were revolutions and wars in Europe, nobody went back. Like Natalia, I don’t intend to be beguiled into autobiography. I can only confirm to myself that we lived entirely in the present, in the mining town and in the city where my grandparents lived. For me, the lives of parents and grandparents began with mine. My time, my place. Only now I’m led to decode from family sayings what these meant as clues to the life, the drowned Atlantis of the past where they had lived without me, back beyond me. The family sayings have become my small glossary of where they came from, not as marked on a map of the world but in attitudes and perceptions formed to deal with life – elsewhere; or to counter the immigrant’s alienation in the country he had adopted without assurance it had adopted him.

  My grandfather Mark Myers was in love with his old wife Phoebe, one could see that, but sceptical of her intelligence as a shopper. He was a connoisseur of fruit, as perfectionist as any wine buff. When she arrived back at their Johannesburg flat from the greengrocer she would have to unpack her string bag before his eyes. He would pick up and sniff the melon; then run a finger over a peach’s down, alert for bruises. Perhaps it was the avocado that caught her out, too hard, overripe, he would shake it gently to hear if there was an answer from the pip detached from the flesh. Then derisory judgement, softened by use of a love-name from the old life: ‘Bob, they saw you coming.’

  The reproachful quip didn’t exist in South African idiom. Mark Myers was a cockney, streetwise from Covent Garden. None of us knew what his work was before he came ‘out to Africa’ to prospect unsuccessfully for diamonds in Kimberley. But the saying became ours; if anyone in the family was conned, the affectionate jeer was to hand, from London. Bob, they saw you coming.

  If my grandfather’s past was still extant, privately, for him, in the copies of the News of the World, the yellow press London paper he subscribed to by mailship, my father’s past was sunk five fathoms. The inevitable shtetl in the region of Riga had disappeared or been renamed on the side of new frontiers, its remaining inhabitants killed in pogroms or later in war. He had left school when perhaps eleven years old, apprenticed as a watchmaker, and after emigrating to South Africa at thirteen for some years plied his trade along the gold mines and rose to become the owner of a jewellery store where he prospered enough to employ someone else to repair watches. That much we knew. And that was all: clearly his origins were humble in comparison with the middle-class ones of my mother, whose father made his modest living by the sophisticated means of playing the stock exchange – a respectable gambler. My mother was the product of a good school for girls, and played the piano. She did not reassure her husband in any way about his origins; when they quarrelled she had the last word with her family saying: he came from people who ‘slept on the stove’. He never spoke of his Old Country and I, no doubt influenced by my mother’s dismissal of his lowly foreign past, never asked him about it.

  My father’s sense of inferiority conversely had a sense of superiority: he had married ‘above himself’ as my mother made sure he realised. He might not have known the phrase, but he was aware of its significance. He had not sent back to the Old Country as some other immigrants did, before it disappeared, for a wife of his own kind from among those, cold and poor, who slept on the stove.

  But of course the principal and enduring source of his superior inferiority was that my mother was a native English speaker with genuine English-speaking parents. It was due to the advantage of living with her, listening to her, and having at least his own good fortune to have a parrot’s ear, that he spoke that language almost entirely without the accent of Eastern European Jews that provides material for stand-up comics. Yiddish must have been his mother tongue – there was no one to speak it with, of any generation, in our family; a dead language for him. When some German speaker, result of a new immigration, this time from Nazi pogroms, was a customer in his shop, it was revealed my father could speak a little German learned in his short spell of schooling. During the Second World War, when there was news from the Russian front, it appeared that he also knew some Russian; he could pronounce all the unpronounceable names of cities and generals. He had picked up enough Afrikaans to deal with customers, Afrikaner whites, in the town – had to. Even more evident of the exigencies of immigrant survival, he had taught himself something invented by colonial mining companies in order for the white bosses to be able to communicate with the black indentured men who came from all over Southern, Central and East Africa to work in the mines – a curt pidgin of verbs and nouns believed to be more or less understandable to all, a mixture of Zulu, Afrikaans and English, dubbed Fanagalo. Be like – do – like this; more or less the accepted, certainly intended meaning. It consisted mainly of commands. He must have acquired it – had to – in the early days of his immigration when he went from mine to mine mending workers’ watches.

  All this was mimicry, wasn’t it – surely the first essential for survival as an immigrant in any country, any time?

  He knew English. He was fluent enough for all the purposes of our daily communication. He had refined his pronunciation through his choice of an ‘English’ wife. He had ‘English’ daughters who read beside him, in the evenings, Doctor Dolittle and Little Women, books he had never heard of from a culture that his wife assured him did not belong to him.

  Yet – I hear it again. When he came home from his shop at the end of the day and my mother’s friends were gathered over their gin and vermouth, he would greet everyone with ‘What news on the Rialto?’

  Where did that quotation come from, to him? He did not read anything except a newspaper; he certainly had never read The Merchant of Venice. What painstaking early struggle with a phrasebook, what lessons in English he must have scrimped and saved to afford, does that family saying represent? His news was that he was part of the taken-for-granted cultural background of the company, by a tag if nothing else.

  My grandfather’s cockney sayings affirmed his past; my father’s, his need to hold a place in his present. When people complained about a misfortune, the shortcomings of the city council or the problems of making a living, he had another saying, this one more expressive in his adoptive Afrikaans than its equivalent might be in English: ‘So gaan dit in die wêreld’ – that’s the way of the world. He was ready with ‘Môre is nog ’n dag’ – tomorrow’s another day – if someone despaired in a troubling circumstance or lost the first round of a golf tournament. These sayings heard over and over, I didn’t recognise as the immigrant’s tactics, seeking acceptance. The stranger my father was, calling out. He was reinventing something: himself.

  How much of self-esteem comes from defining someone as lower than oneself on the ladder of human values?

  Where, on whom, from his precarious foothold, can an immigrant look down? An element of racism is identifying that person even while at the same time being identified by others as beneath them. By chance and history my father had come to a country where self-esteem via racism was indulged by those who were in absolute political power and social control, far from insecure. (The turn of history on them was to come much later, with the end of white rule …) That white community of South Africa – to which he could ‘belong’ at least by the pallor of his skin – despised the black people whose country they had colonised and ruled by force. So even an immigrant from a people who slept on the stove was provided wit
h someone, some humankind, to regard as beneath him. My father conformed to the racist social judgements of white townspeople, our family friends, his shopkeeper colleagues, using a saying of this extended family of whites as they did. The strongest condemnation of a white man’s crude behaviour, drunk or sober, was to call him ‘a white kaffir’.

  This was not a saying ever pronounced by my mother; in fact there would be in her face yet another confirmation of all that she found crude in my father; that he, of all people, should think it insulting for a white man to be called black.

  There were subtleties in racism among the sayings familiar to me in our town. Here, even my mother, who was not racist when it came to black and white, would make use of them. Among Jews, there was the other expression of disgust, ‘he’s a real Peruvian’. ‘He’ would be a Jew whose loud behaviour, flamboyance and vulgarity offended. The ‘real Peruvian’ did not come from Peru and the insulting implication surely devolved upon Peruvians as much as it did on the man so scorned. Why such behaviour should be associated with Peru, where no one in the community had ever been, and there was no one from that country among our white population of English, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, Jewish, German, Greek origin, I can explain only by suggesting that to the speaker Peru was the end of the earth, beyond civilisation, the last place God made; remote as Africa might seem to Peruvians. Perhaps the outlandish epithet also served to distance local Jews from conduct that might give a toehold of credence to anti-Semitism, which rumbled among Afrikaners – themselves discriminated against by the English-speaking whites.

  Fifty or more years later, I decode these family sayings as the echoes of lost home – Grandpa Myers’s – in an immigrant culture, or the innocently crafty attempt – my father’s – of survival in escape from that culture. These days, I walk past elegant shopping malls in the suburbs of Johannesburg through sidewalk markets where, capered about before me, dangled at me, are masks and jewellery, carvings and sculpture, cowrie-and-seed rattles. I’m importuned by strangers’ mimicry of South African sales-talk English. The vendors have come from all over Africa, they speak among themselves the mother tongues of their Old Countries, Mali, Nigeria, Congo, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Senegal, Ethiopia, anywhere and everywhere there is war, natural disaster of flood and drought, and poverty by comparison with which we are a rich country, despite our own share of the poor and workless.

  Their cajolings, reproduction of phrases understood by them only in sense of intention, are their family sayings. They’re the latest arrivals of the endless no-nation of immigrants, forming and reforming the world, a globalisation that long, long predates any present concept. That’s the news on the Rialto; nothing new. Just survival.

  2001

  The Dwelling Place of Words

  People always want to know when and where you write. As if there’s a secret methodology to be followed. It has never seemed to me to matter to the work – which is the writer’s ‘essential gesture’ (I quote Roland Barthes), the hand held out for society to grasp – whether the creator writes at noon or midnight, in a cork-lined room as Proust did or a shed as Amos Oz did in his early kibbutz days. Perhaps the questioner is more than curious; yearning for a jealously kept prescription on how to be a writer. There is none. Writing is the one ‘profession’ for which there is no professional training; ‘creative’ writing courses can only teach the aspirant to look at his/her writing critically; not how to create. The only school for a writer is the library – reading, reading. A journey through realms of how far, wide and deep writing can venture in the endless perspectives of human life. Learning from other writers’ perceptions that you have to find your way to yours, at the urge of the most powerful sense of yourself – creativity. Apart from that, you’re on your own.

  Ours is the most solitary of occupations; the only comparison I can think of is keeper of a lighthouse. But the analogy mustn’t go too far, we do not cast the beam of light that will save the individual, or the world from coming to grief on its rocks.

  Another standard enquiry put to fiction writers: what is your message? Milan Kundera has provided the response. The message is: ‘A novel searches and poses questions … The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. It does not prescribe or proscribe answers.’ We have the right and obligation of honesty to imply moral judgements we know people have, as exemplified in our fictional characters because – I paraphrase Goethe – wherever the writer thrusts a hand deep into society, the world, there will come up in it something of the truth. The writer her/himself stands before what has been dredged to light just as the reader will; what either makes of it will be individual moral judgement: her or his, writer’s or reader’s self-message.

  That is the low-wattage beam I would claim for my own writings cast from my lighthouse, and those of the great writers who have illuminated my life. For me, writing has been and is an exploration of life, the safari that will go on into that amazing wilderness until I die. That is why my novels and stories are what I call open-ended; I’ve taken up an invention of human beings at some point in their lives, and set them down again living at some other point. My novel written in the 1980s, July’s People, ends with a central character, a woman, wading through a shallow river, running from a situation. To what? I am often asked. The answer is I don’t know. The only clues I have, and pass on there for the reader in the text of the novel that has gone before, are the social and historical context, the conflicting threats and pressures, personal and aleatory, of a time and place that would make up her options – what she could or might attempt next. The sole conclusion – in terms of reading a signpost – was one that I myself could come to, after I had re-read the novel (for a writer becomes reader when the publisher’s proofs arrive), was that crossing through the water was some kind of baptism into a new situation, new life, however uncertain, hazardous, even unimaginable in the light of how she had lived thus far.

  One can’t even say that an individual death is the end of a story. What about the consequences the absence is going to have for others?

  What about the aftermath of a political and societal conflict apparently resolved, in a novel whose final page leaves the men and women, the country, the cities, the children born to these, at that point? Again, the reader has the narrative and text that has gone before, to waken his/her own awareness, own questioning of self and society.

  If the writer does not provide answers, is this a valid absolution from the ordinary human responsibility of engagement with society other than as the ‘essential gesture’, extended through literature?

  Does the writer serve the raison d’être that every human being must decide for the self, by asserting the exploration of the word as the end and not the means of the writer’s being? ‘Words became my dwelling place.’ The great Mexican poet and writer, Octavio Paz, wrote this; but in his superb life’s work, on his intellectual journey, he invaded that place; he also wrote ‘I learned that politics is not only action but participation, it is not a matter of changing men but accompanying them, being one of them.’ The reason-to-be was a bringing together of the dwelling place of the artist and the clamorous world that surrounded it.

  The great Günter Grass told me: ‘My professional life, my writing, all the things that interest me, have taught me that I cannot freely choose my subjects. For the most part my subjects were assigned to me by German history, by the war that was criminally started and conducted, and by the never-ending consequences of that era. Thus my books are fatally linked to these subjects, and I am not the only one who has had this experience.’

  He certainly is not the only one.

  In Europe, the USA, Latin America, China, Japan, Africa – where in the world could this not be so? There are none of us who can ‘choose our subjects’ free of the contexts that contain our lives, shape our thought, influence every aspect of our existence. (Even the fantasy of space fiction is an alternative to the known, the writer’s imaginative reaction to it.) Could Philip Roth erase
the tattoo of the Nazi camps from under the skin of his characters? Can Israeli writers, Palestinian writers, now ‘choose’ not to feel the tragic conflict between their people burning the dwelling place of words? Could Kenzaburo Oe create characters not bearing in themselves the gene of consciousness implanted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; could Czeslaw Milosz, living through revolution and exile, not have to ask himself in his poem ‘Dedication’, ‘What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?’ Could Chinua Achebe’s characters not have in their bloodstream the stain of a civil war in Nigeria? In Africa, the experiences of colonialism, its apogee, apartheid, post-colonialism and new-nation conflicts, have been a powerful collective consciousness in African writers, black and white. And in the increasing interconsciousness, the realisation that what happens somewhere in the world is just one manifestation of what is happening subliminally or going to happen in one way or another, affect in one way or another, everywhere – the epic of emigration, immigration, the world-wandering of new refugees and exiles, political and economic, for example – is a fatal linkage, not ‘fatal’ in the deathly sense, but in that of inescapable awareness in the writer. I have just written a novel, The Pickup, within this awareness, taking up at one point and leaving at another point in their lives, characters in our millennial phase of this eternal exodus and arrival.

  However, when a country has come through long conflict and its resolution, its writers are assumed to have lost their ‘subject’. We in South Africa are challenged – top of the list in journalists’ interviews – ‘So what are you going to write about now that apartheid has gone?’

  Apartheid was a plan of social engineering and its laws; novels, stories, poetry and plays were an exploration of how people thought and lived, their ultimate humanity out of reach of extinction. Life did not end with apartheid. ‘The new situation must bring new subjects’ – Czech writer Ivan Klíma wrote this, in exile, and out of the breakup of his country. In South Africa there is not breakup and its violent consequences, but a difficult and extraordinary bringing-together of what was divided. The new subjects, some wonderful, some dismaying, have scarcely had time to choose us.