Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Meanwhile, I watched children coming through the gate from their school on one side of the wall to reach their homes on the other side. The everyday disruption of Palestinian lives is inconceivable, even as you experience some small part of it.

  Through my friendship with the late Edward Said, outstandingly brilliant intellect of our time, dedicated proponent of Palestine complete with just borders, and his wife Miriam Said, I was enabled to be received in what is known as the heart and mind of the occupied West Bank, Ramallah. Despite my participation in the International Festival of Writers, boycotted by Palestine, I was warmly welcomed by Dr Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary of Al Mubadara, ‘the Palestine national initiative for the realisation of Palestinian national rights and creation of a just, durable peace’ – a group whose members were assembled. They drove me about Ramallah, informing me of what I was seeing again as the results of occupation. Around a table for lunch at Al Mubadara, I learned first-hand about the political standpoint, tactics and work of the Palestine Initiative. They reject the Hamas denial of the right of Israel to exist, while pursuing a non-violent but inexorable struggle against the present and ongoing occupation of Palestine.

  Dr Barghouti is a member of the Palestine parliament who achieved second place behind Mahmoud Abbas in the 2005 elections, focusing major attention on the demand to end further construction of Israel’s wall and the dismantling of its existence. He talked about customary rhetoric among political leaders, encouraging colleagues to speak. I heard how the Palestine Initiative, while ineluctably dedicated to a Palestinian state on acceptable, just frontiers, is also concerned with internal Palestinian divisions. ‘Just’ being under endless disagreement, where both Israel and Palestine each believe they have an ancient right to the entire territory, even while bitterly recognising, force majeure of the contemporary world, that would only be achieved by unspeakable bloodshed in a horrific war.

  I left for the Other Side with a huge poster: ‘40 years under occupation’, reproducing coloured maps, green for Palestine splattered with red spots indicating Israeli ‘colonies’, incredible rearrangements, swaps of bitterly disputed territory, from 1948 to present – with a final blank map for the future, bearing only a question mark. There are some extraordinary responses to the blank map of the future. Returning from occupied territory to the conference in Jerusalem, the car in which I was transported plunged into a deep, long tunnel off the highway. My Palestinian escort told me this was one of those envisaged by Israel to connect, along 1967 lines, the far-flung pieces of Palestine that Israel recognises, without using the highways that lead through Israeli territory.

  The question mark remains.

  It hangs over peace negotiations – that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers. Israeli and Palestinian poets and fiction writers bear their particular responsibility of inward witness, not for the television and newsprint immediacy of the day, but in lasting works that bring up from beneath the news something of the contradictions of the human condition, enduring, living in hope, a time and place.

  2008

  The Lion in Literature

  I am black: hasn’t a black man eyes? Hasn’t a black man hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a white is: if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a black wrongs a white, what is his humility, his revenge? If a white wrongs a black, what should his sufferance be by white example, why revenge? The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’

  You will have no difficulty in recalling a different version of this monologue.141 In fact, the two will be playing along in your mind, as in mine, as the same text in two voices; and it is the volume they create together that will be what I shall be venturing to put before you.

  Colonialism was not only the conquest of land and the dispossession of peoples; it was also, as Edward Said has established with his term Orientalism, a representation of peoples through literature written by others. In his work Culture And Imperialism, he writes, ‘I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between different individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British, French, American – in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced.’ Jane Austen and the British Empire, Flaubert and the Middle East, Conrad and Kipling in Africa – even Thomas Mann and the Death in Venice that Mann assumes to be an infection from the tainted Other, the Orient – these are some examples of the literary concept of the Other, in the culture of domination. ‘Texts are protean things,’ Said says, ‘they are tied to circumstance and to politics large and small …’

  Imperialism was the big one. In his book entitled Orientalism he focuses mainly on the phenomenon of Orientalism as applicable to the Middle East and Far East, but we can recognise it as just as valid for Africa and even the way Africans were seen in the African diaspora, that ironic form of reverse colonisation by Africans in the home countries of the old colonial masters. Africa, Africans were, existed, as literary exoticism – half attraction, half contempt for the Other – that formed an ethos which inspired, accompanied and supplied self-righteous justification, even for slavery, in a worldwide conquest by dominant powers. To turn Rabbie Burns’s famous dictum on its head: for Africa it was not a matter of ‘Would the Lord the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us’ but would whatever gods may be give us the gift to see ourselves as we know ourselves to be, and to make the world recognise this reality.

  It has been a long haul, and I am not going to roll-call all the great names in Africa and her diaspora who have achieved it. ‘Being you, you cut your poetry out of wood.’ That is Gwendolyn Brooks’s metaphor for the process. Thinking of his appropriate metaphor for the beginning of the African story, Chinua Achebe recounts a proverb: ‘Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.’

  Africa was slow, perhaps, for many reasons, to produce her own historians in the strict sense of history as a separate literary discipline – the pace has accelerated, and in the case of South Africa is really only beginning, not only with the rewriting of school history books, but in dramatic resuscitations in drama and dance, as well as novels, of the past that was buried under colonial versions. But in fiction as prose and poetry, haven’t Africa’s pride of lions produced their own historians? Haven’t they established incontrovertibly literature as what Edward Said calls ‘a form of political memory’: the past and present as created by Africans themselves, their characters and lives, their view of self and their regard on the world, fully emerged from the regard of the world upon them? Africa is no longer the world’s invention, but herself, confident of this whether on the African continent or in its diaspora.

  How strong is that confidence? How deep does it go? Is it by now, the twenty-first century, become so firm a foundation that we, of Africa, are ready to take up a reconnection with the literary culture of the outside world on a new basis, on our terms? The African Literature Association was created and has met through the crisis years of African cultural identity to defend and nurture the creativity on which that identity depended. I ask myself, is it not time to lift the horizon of that splendid identity and accept that literature, the illumination of the human imagination, has no frontier guards, no immigration laws, thank whatever gods may be. All literature belongs to all of us, everywhere. Once free of censorship, it is pure intellectual freedom, any limitations to be overcome by translation. And this conference is dealing with the highly important practicalities of relations between translators, publishers and critics. Why do we not glory in this freedom, ta
ke advantage of it? A positive globalisation among some dubious ones.

  This call is redundant, yes, even absurd, in our gathering here – all in this company of literati have read, all their lives, world literature. But I raise the question before you out of serious concern in a wider context. I must speak now about the situation in South Africa, which is the one I know intimately, but I more than suspect, from my reading of critical and literary journals in other countries, that something like prevails in the United States.

  Young black readers and, most important, aspirant writers confine themselves to reading African and African-American writers. The lion’s African story, it goes without question, is the one that must take first place; therein emerges the ethos of the people and the land. But to find writings from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Arab countries, India, the Far East, etc. ‘irrelevant’ is to re-enter – voluntarily, this time! – a cultural isolation formerly imposed by the arrogance of imperialism. The same principle applies to any African writing that is not more or less narrowly contemporary; except for some student painstakingly assembling a thesis at a university, I have found no young reader/writer in Southern Africa who has heard of, let alone read, in the canon of African literature, Olaudah Equiano;142 even Plaatje143 is just a name to them, if respected at a distance.

  Internationally, the range of reading might – it is just beginning to – include one or two of the Latin American writers, principally because our country’s government has begun to break the North–South axis and promote trade, investment and exchange of technological skills South–South with Latin American countries; trade followed the Bible and gun in colonial times, now cultural exchange follows the opening up of trade. (Although, in the case of music, between Latin America and Southern Africa, the happy exchange preceded trade as a move in globalisation.)

  I should like to give account of a recent gathering in Johannesburg where the self-limitation of literary experience was explicitly evidenced in all its manifestations and even delusions. On Writers’ Day there was a celebration held at Windybrow Cultural Centre, appropriately an old mansion, once the grand home of a colonial mining magnate, now the fine shabby complex of two theatres, music, drama and film workshops, in an area that has ‘gone black’ since the end of apartheid and racial segregation. There were readings of poetry and prose by young rap and other poets, and by a few old hands such as once-banned Don Mattera and myself, but the main dynamism was the discussions started in the audience. That audience was overwhelmingly young, about 150 black men and women, and, as usual, there was a vivid articulacy of complaints from them.

  Some of these were of a politico-social nature about which we all share concern in the new dispensation of South Africa from which we expect so much. Libraries are still almost exclusively in the areas where whites and the new black affluent class live. The paucity of libraries, the total absence of school libraries – except for a dusty shelf of Teach Yourself Accounting, How-To-Do-It books – is unchanged in what are and will long remain the areas where the greatest concentration of black citizens live. This was one of the valid answers given from the floor to why there is a poor reading culture in our country, stemming from the basic reason, high illiteracy and semi-literacy, and culminating in the lack of access to books. But challenges came from those of us on the platform who mingled with the audience. The plaintiffs were all fully literate and claimed to be reader/writers: What – on the premise that you cannot be a writer unless you are a reader, that is our only true schooling – did they read?

  The responses were alarmingly uniform: they read African literature from the African continent, mainly from South Africa. We were celebrating Chinua Achebe’s seventieth birthday as a focus of Writers’ Day 2000, but few had read more of his work than Things Fall Apart, which had been a set work in high schools. Only one mentioned Wole Soyinka, one other, Toni Morrison, another Fanon; Mahfouz was an unfamiliar name to them. The assertion was: we want to read about ourselves, our lives. Don Mattera countered with the discovery of oneself to be found in Dostoevsky. The riposte was: too far away and long ago. The director of Windybrow, Walter Chakela, a poet and playwright who runs workshops that have discovered and nurtured new talent among the young and unknown, and whose own plays bring to life and light African heroes both of the distant past and the recent one of apartheid, stunned the vociferous with the quiet announcement that he had begun to think as a poet, to range mentally in the imagination, from having to learn Wordsworth at school. He spoke of the identification with the intimacies of human feeling which are to be found in contact with great creative minds in all kinds of eras, countries. Finally, the audience was in rejection and derision of the fact – a litany – that Shakespeare was ‘stuffed down’ their necks at school; and what did Shakespeare know about them?

  And so now you, who have been patient, know why I quoted my version of a Shakespearean discourse.

  Shakespeare – why Shakespeare? Because in Shylock’s speech any of these children of apartheid with their history of racism in their veins will find, here in the experience of another race, their people, themselves: hasn’t a black man eyes? Hasn’t a black man hands? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if, as many young people struggle within themselves against the acid desire for revenge upon those who oppressed their parents and destroyed their childhood, they come to read these lines: ‘The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction’ – will they not find something of their secret selves?

  In the end it is a self-deprivation to approach literature, as Caryl Phillips says of history, through the prism of your own pigmentation.

  That’s what whites did, first.

  Rightful pride in African literature should not create a literary ghetto. Surely there have been enough ghettoes. It’s the end of Orientalism; for in African literature, Indian literature, Arabic literature, the Euro-American, Western world now begins to find something of itself. So surely the time has come for African literature to connect, beyond exclusive discourse at scholarly level about itself, its achievements, its problems, with the world of literature, the expansion of literary consciousness to which it belongs. Surely young people from among whom are our hopes for new African writers, should be urged to read widely, to set aside the dominant criterion of ‘relevance’ that belongs to the era when it was an essential element of consciousness-raising tactics of politics against racism. The struggle against racism is not over, as we well know, around the world, but if literature is to be the political memory of the present and future in which young people will live out their lives, should it not reflect, and reflect upon, between literatures, what Achebe calls ‘preliminary conversations … participations in a monumental ritual by millions and millions to appease a long and troublesome history of dispossession and bitterness, and to answer “present” at the rebirth of the world?’

  The lion’s telling of his story has another, cogent, urgent, reason for identification with the literatures of that world.

  In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God’s Word, the Word that was Creation. Its secular transformation came to us when it was first scratched on a stone tablet or traced on papyrus, and when it travelled from parchment to Gutenberg. That was the genesis of the writer, of literature.

  In literature now we are indivisibly in a situation that did not exist when the lion’s telling began. It did not exist when Langston Hughes, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Es’kia Mphahlele, Ngûgĩ wa Thiong’o, Agostinho Neto, Kofi Awoonor began to write. But all literatures are conjoined today under threat of the image against the Word. We are certainly aware of that rival, self-appointed, but with plenty of independent popular corroboration. From the first third of the twentieth century the image has been challenging the power of the written world as a stimulation of the imagination, the opening up of human receptivity. The bedtime story of middle-class childhood has been replace
d by the hours in front of the TV screen; in shack settlements all over the poor countries of the globe there is the battery-run television where no single book is to be found. We already have at least one generation grown that looks instead of reads. Yes, TV images are accompanied by the spoken Word, but it is the picture that decides how secondary the Word’s role shall be. The story-telling of the TV medium is the Big Picture; even in documentaries the spoken word is an accessory consisting generally of the most banal and limited vocabulary. Anyone who has run workshops for aspirant writers will know, as I do, how the mini-series vocabulary is often all that aspirants can command to express what are often original ideas. I am still waiting for some proof that, as has been claimed, TV has encouraged reading.

  ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Whoever it was – a public relations savant, no doubt – who came up with the adage, the rejoinder is: ‘For how long?’

  The image disappears from the screen; to recall it you have to have an apparatus, a cell, a battery, access to an electric power connection. The written word is simply there, in your pocket. The book in your hand can be read on the bus, in bed, in a queue, on a mountain-top, beside a stream, in a traffic jam. The American writer William Gass argues our case for us:

  We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together through many adventures and a long time. Words on a screen have visual qualities, to be sure, and these darkly limn their shape, but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be gone. Off the screen, they do not exist as words. They do not exist to be reseen, reread, they only wait to be remade, relit … I cannot argue in their margins …