Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  A casino deal was the origin of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Bidders for a gambling licence were awarded it on condition they include in their amusement complex a ‘social responsibility’ project. The fact that the museum shares a site with a giant roller-coaster offends people like me, who find this demeaning of the dignity of the South African freedom struggle – but the fact is we, our African National Congress majority government and the political movements to which we belong, talked about but never achieved an apartheid museum for ourselves. Once your back is turned on the roller-coaster-casino complex, the museum building, work of South African architects, has much of the impact of the Libeskind one, indeed recalls it, bringing two forms of stark racism appropriately together, the Nazi and the apartheid.

  At the entry you buy a plastic card: if you are white, it states you are black, if you are black, it labels you white. You enter through separate adjoining spaces; so black experiences the privilege of being white, and white experiences the discrimination of being black. The journey within the museum has this striking underlying theme, with the documents, the vocabulary of discrimination, its crudity and cruelty. But emphasis, finally, is on resistance – the freedom movements and their heroes. There is much criticism of who and what is left out. Some see the museum as concentrating on the role of the African National Congress in liberation, although there was an alliance of the ANC with the South African Indian Congress and the South African Communist Party. White liberals say they have been ignored; the Pan-African Congress finds its role in liberation underplayed; there are faces and names, deeds, missing or passed over in a TV clip.

  What is the object of such museums? It’s accepted that by confrontation with the gross inhumanity of the past in the Washington Holocaust Museum, the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Johannesburg Apartheid Museum, what we witness we shall never be any party to. It shall never happen again.

  But while facing the past, it is happening again in parts of our globalised world; has been happening: from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, tribal genocide in Rwanda, to the devastation of lives in conflict between the Christian faithful and the Muslim faithful in Côte d’Ivoire, the destruction of Palestinian lives by Israel and the taking of Israeli lives by Palestinian suicide bombers. A visitor to the Washington Holocaust Museum remarked to writer Philip Gourevitch in 1995, ‘We know the atrocities that happen in the world right now. And what are we doing? We’re sitting in a museum.’2

  We’re still there, eight years later.

  2003

  Fear Eats the Soul

  Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind? Some such surely has existed for the past many weeks, except, perhaps, in those enclaves, isolated by nature – if impenetrable forest, impassable ice haven’t been finally invaded by information technology. There used to be people who were come upon in their remote fastnesses, after wars, unaware that war had happened. We have a conscious world as never before; awareness of an impending war between the dominant power among nations and an opposing power of amorphous capacity (who knows for sure who will join forces in religious solidarity) has been an all-pervading change of global climate which we all have breathed in. On an ostensible issue of weapons of mass destruction many reactions come forth: anger, belligerence, disbelief, holy outrage from the Faithful of Democracy and the Faithful of Islam. Among enemies, fearing poison gas and unseen infection by disease (for won’t the gas blow back upon, won’t the disease infect those who distribute it) there’s a miasma of that climate no special clothing, no masks and plastic-hung shelters can protect against. Fear. It’s unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is.

  One looks for some sort of wisdom in how others have contemplated fear. There’s the gung-ho of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural address back in 1933. Was it Hitler’s rise to power, so distantly European, he had in mind when he pronounced ‘Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ Sounds hollow now, after new forms of human extermination we’ve discovered for ourselves since then.

  Can fear be a force for the good?

  Remember the old adage ‘Best safety lies in fear’. But that, it will be morally countered, condones cowardice; shrinking from the duty to defend at risk the values your society holds. Thucydides was the first philosopher I educated myself with as an adolescent; it’s natural that I go back to him now and find in an old notebook another take on the phenomenon of fear. ‘That war is an evil is something that we all know, and it would be pointless to go on cataloguing all the disadvantages involved in it. No one is forced into war by ignorance, nor, if he thinks he will gain from it, is kept out by fear.’ (My italics.) The mass protests against the United States war on Iraq are made on the conviction that the gain, by war, of control of the world’s second greatest oil fields is not ‘kept out’ by fear that thousands of the people categorised as ‘enemy led’ will be killed and body bags of the righteous young victors will never require fuel oil again.

  ‘Fear has many eyes and can see underground’ observes Cervantes. Didn’t the fear of what is happening – the roar is in our ears – begin within us when 11 September 2001 buried the invincible? If time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate, doesn’t T. S. Eliot wander ahead over Ground Zero when he writes, way back in 1922, ‘And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’

  I am one of those who live far from the terrible threat of strike and retaliation across oceans and skies. But I am not in that now non-existent enclave of isolation, out-of-this-world. And like many who are distant from the continents of battle, I have nevertheless a personal stake in this war: someone closest to me lives with his young family in the vulnerable heart of New York. He tells me that the children’s school has notified parents that the school basement has been equipped as a shelter, with water supplies and an adapted ventilation system that will keep out noxious elements. Some people, he says, have packed up and left the city, the obvious target of violence, direct or insidious. Is this ceding ground to those who threaten? Or is it a sensible option for people who have the means to absent themselves from their wage-earning posts and have some place to go: somewhere safe. Safe: who can tell what and where is beyond striking distance of the unconventional weapons we are told come from laboratories, not armouries?

  I ask: What are you going to do?

  So he reminds me: What did you and your kind do during the crises of apartheid, when there was danger of being arrested by the political police, or having some right-wing fanatic put a bomb to blow you up in your car?

  Go carry on with your life.

  Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul.

  2003

  Living with a Writer

  There seems to be some confusion, here: I am the writer. So I can only conclude that I shall be relating what it is like to be living with myself. Not that there isn’t a situation cited: everyone is faced with the basic problem of the self. A secret intimacy which, it is said, influences all others. First Know Thyself. Perhaps the most difficult relationship of all?

  I’ve had to live with myself through a long life as a writer and as a woman. It wouldn’t have been much different existentially had that life been between the writer and a man. Whatever the gender, we writers have to make, no matter how, clear distinction between what life-space is reserved for the writer and what must be that of the – what shall I term it? – socio-biological life. Sounds grandiose, that term, but I can’t settle for ‘emotional life’ because there are strong emotions involved in the product of the writing life.

  The apportionment of time and attention means self-discipline of a very strict kind. A journalist has a deadline to meet.
The poet, novelist is her/his own boss. The publisher may specify, in a contract, when the manuscript shall be delivered, but this is on the writer’s estimate, as task-master, of when it shall be fulfilled by the workings of an imagination which keeps no clock or calendar. If the advance payment runs out before the work is achieved, that’s the nature of the gap between creativity and commerce.

  It goes without saying that no writer waits for what people who are not writers call inspiration. Not that it doesn’t come; but usually not in the hours set down for the writing table, the typewriter, word processor (or whatever the tool may be). Those hours are for the transformation of something already occurred, themes that take hold, beneath some other activity or situation. Waking up in the middle of the night. Ceasing to hear what the babble in a bar or a meeting is about. A displacement to a level of another irresistible, intense concentration elsewhere. I think I began to write, relating narratives, conversations, impressions silently to myself as a child sitting in the back of my parents’ car on drives long or short. Now I often have this same sort of experience on long-distance flights; between a here and a there, the demands of exchange with other people, I’m living with myself: the self of the individual imagination. (The collective imagination is what you and I enter through literature, theatre, films.)

  I believe writers, artists in general, have something of the monster in their personality. If selfishness is monstrous. Like most writers – I’ll guarantee – I’ve had to accept in myself that I would have to without compunction put the demands of my writing generally before human obligations – except, perhaps, while falling in love. On the principle that every businessman or woman executive is protected from random visitors and telephone calls by a guard of receptionist and secretary, I long ago made it clear to everyone, even those closest and dearest to me, that during my working hours no one must walk in on me, expect to reach me. Since the house where I live with others is also my workplace, I’ve made as an exception only an interruption to tell me the house is on fire. When my children were too young for boarding school my writing hours were those when they were absent at day school, and during the holidays the monster-writer decreed that they keep out of sight and sound during those same hours. But I got what I no doubt deserved one day when my small son transgressed, playing outside near my window, and I heard him reply to a friend’s question ‘What’s your mother’s job?’ – ‘She’s a typist.’ His response to living with a writer.

  I’ve found myself to be a secretive person to live with. I don’t know if this is general, for writers. I have been unable to share with anyone the exigencies, the euphoria at having arrived at what I wanted in my work or the frustration at finding it lacking. I cannot understand how the great Thomas Mann could bring himself to read the day’s stint of writing aloud to his assembled family each evening. I’ve always been convinced no one could reach what I really was saying in a piece of writing until I had satisfied myself finally that it was the best I could possibly do with it.

  My man, Reinhold Cassirer, with whom I lived for forty-eight years, sharing everything else in our lives, never saw a story or novel of mine in the making, although he was always the first to read it when it was done. He completely respected and protected this, my privacy.

  A novel might take as long as three or more years. He should have been the one to respond to what it must have been like, living with a writer.1

  2003

  Edward Said

  If the great contemporary intellectuals can be counted on one hand, Edward Said is the index finger pointing to some of the most profound existential questions of our time, and going back, invaluably, to search out their beginnings. What we humans have made of ourselves in the collective that is the world.

  The obituaries have focused on the aspect of Said’s life most newsworthy today: the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  The great conviction, dedication, activist faith of Said’s life was, indeed, the Palestinian cause. He served it with courage and a nobility that excluded fundamentalism of any kind.

  To say that there was more to his achievement than that is not to demean its urgency and the irreplaceable loss of its best spokes-person. He stood for real justice and peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

  But Said’s unique brilliance was that he was the most eclectic intellectual of our time. He fused extraordinary literary talent – the writer, master of the beauty of language – with a philosophical, political, cultural, psychological quest of human motivation, bringing power-politics and the third eye of creative intuition into a synthesis of revelation. Proof that we cannot be understood in our motivations – the world cannot be understood – one without the other.

  He was an academic of celebrated originality of mind; students did not fall asleep in Professor Said’s seminars. He was by avocation a pianist of performance level, sometimes playing under the baton of his friend, Daniel Barenboim.

  Reading his works, one is dismayed to be confronted with the limits of one’s own supposedly wide reading: he had read everything in a number of languages and would pass on the benefit with lucidity and grace. Above all, along with enormous erudition, Edward Said had an intelligence of feeling. It glowed through his works and his physical presence.

  In his greatest book, Orientalism, and its equally matchless successor-cum-sequel, Culture and Imperialism, he analyses the concept of Otherness, definitive in Orientalism. Orientalism is the projection, on people other than oneself, of one’s idea of what they are.

  Said in this marvellous work reveals Orientalism’s origins and development from ancient times, in the textual representations conceptualised from the fragmentary experience of wandering explorers, the romantic and religious mysticism (the Orient an artefact, belonging to the past), the writings of poets and novelists, from Gérard de Nerval to Flaubert, Jane Austen to Conrad, the philologists and anthropologists who made a scientific subject out of it.

  ‘The Orient’ first referred to Islam and later encompassed Africa. India, Asia. Anywhere there were faiths, colours and cultures not Western and white. Said writes:

  Modern Orientalism derives from secularising elements in 18th century European culture … the expansion of the Orient further east geographically and further back temporally …

  Reference points were no longer Christianity and Judaism … the capacity for dealing historically (and not reductively, as a topic of ecclesiastical politics) with non-European and non-Judeo-Christian cultures was strengthened as history itself was conceived of more radically than before; to understand Europe properly meant also understanding the objective relations between Europe and its own previously unreachable temporal and cultural frontiers.

  The result was ‘the Orient henceforth would be spoken for’.

  The precept on which colonialism is justified, out of Orientalism, was established. The Orient-Other is in the same position to this day, striving to speak and be heard for itself in the global structures that are attempting to re-form a world of Haves and Have-nots. For still, Said writes: ‘The white middle-class westerner believes it is his human prerogative not only to manage the world but also to own it, just because by definition “it” is not quite as human as “we” are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanised thought.’

  New millennium Orientalism is surely United States President George Bush’s government’s crusade to decide ‘for them’ what the Iraqi people are and what their constitution and future should be.

  In his 2003 preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism, Said writes of the present ‘threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies disseminated by the mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical precision but in fact obscure the terrible suffering produced by “clean” warfare.’

  Said reveals the full concept of Orientalism in its ultimate avatar, evolved through its justification of colonialism, imperialism, to western hegemony
in the new world order: a sum of inhumanly divisive, disruptive forces.

  His life was subject to many of them. He was born in Jerusalem sixty-seven years ago, uprooted when a child from his natal country, as a Palestinian, and was acculturated to the West through education in England and the US. Yet in his person he posits unchallengeably, with the magnificent achievement of his own life-conduct and scholarship, the thesis self-evident in his enthrallingly moving memoir, Out of Place.

  The title proposes that to be so, in a sense, may be a way to better understanding between individuals and nations, an open state of being attained against the monolithic cages of nationalism, religion and closed cultures.

  He used these multiple identities, made them into the creation of a complete personality, a man of genius with an invaluable perspective to offer the world. In him, contradictions become a way of grasping something of the elusive truth that is somewhere in human coexistence.

  I hope that without presumption, as his friend, and disciple in all I learned from him up to his last days, I may see as Edward’s credo the words of Dimitry, on trial in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. We are accountable to life ‘because we are all responsible for all’.

  2003

  With Them You Never Know

  Albert Memmi

  It is hardly usual to begin an introduction with a caveat of the limitations of the work it prefaces. In the case of Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and The Colonized, I believe this is necessary in order to establish the classic work’s continuing validity. That validity is in its invaluable presentation and brilliant analysis of the condition of colonised people, the results of practical enactment of man’s inexhaustible capability of inhumanity to man; in this classic aspect of power, the work is timeless. What Equiano113 wrote of this power in 1789, what Memmi wrote of it in the late 1950s, is as true in our new millennium. Slavery was not abolished, it evolved into colonisation. Retrospect has not altered, by perspective, the meaning of what was done to subject peoples in their own land.