Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  In South Africa there has been demonstrated recently an ostensibly wider potential readership for writers within our population of 29 million, only five million of whom are white. Politically motivated, in the recognition that the encouragement of literature is part of liberation, trade unions and community groups among the black population have set up makeshift libraries and cultural debate. Now, I do not believe that one should ever underestimate the powers of comprehension of anyone who is literate. I don’t believe anyone should be written down to. (Had I been confined in this way I certainly never would have become a writer.) Once the love of literature ignites, it can consume many obstacles to understanding. The vocabulary grows in proportion to the skills of the writer in providing imaginative leaps. But these must land somewhere recognizable; and most writers share no givens with the kind of potential readership I have just described.

  In Africa and many places elsewhere, John Updike’s beautifully-written genre stories of preoccupation with divorces and adulteries could touch off no referential responses in readers for whom sexual and family life are determined by circumstances of law and conflict that have no referents in the professional class of suburban North America. The domestic traumas of black South Africans are children imprisoned in detention, lovers fleeing the country from security police, plastic shelters demolished by the authorities and patched together again by husband and wife. The novels of Gabriel García Márquez, himself a socialist, presuppose an answering delight in the larger-than-life that can find little response in those whose own real experience outdoes all extremes, the solitudes of apartheid surpassing any hundred years of solitude. The marvellous fantasies of an Italo Calvino require givens between writer and reader that are not merely a matter of sophistication.

  Life is not like that for this readership. Books are not (Barthes) made of other books, for them. Furthermore, the imaginative projection of what life might be like is not like that. These texts cannot be ‘read’ even in terms of aspirations. Surely this is true of serious writers in and from most countries where material conditions do not remotely correspond with those of the reader.

  It is most obvious in South Africa. White writers, living as part of an over-privileged minority, are worlds away from those of a migratory miner living in a single-sex hostel, a black schoolteacher grappling with pupils who risk their lives as revolutionaries, black journalists, doctors, clerks, harassed by the police and vigilantes round their homes. The gap sometimes seems too great to reach across for even the most talented and sensitive power of empathy and imaginative projection. I am not saying, nor do I believe, that whites cannot write about blacks, or blacks about whites. Even black writers, who share with these readers disaffection and humiliation under racist laws, generally acquire middle-class or privileged unconventional styles of living and working concommitant with middle-class signifiers, as they make their way as writers. Often it is only by a self-conscious effort of memory—using the signifiers of childhood, before they joined the elite of letters, or drawing on the collective memory of an oral tradition—that they can be sure they will be ‘read’ by these readers. Freedom of movement—week-end trips, stays in hotels, choice of occupation—which punctuates the lives of many fictional characters, signifies nothing to the migratory worker whose contract does not allow him to stay on in town if he changes jobs, and whose ‘holiday’ at the end of eighteen months down a mine is the return home to plough and sow. The cosseted white adolescent who rebels against the materialism of parents signifies nothing to the child revolutionaries, often precociously intelligent, an increasing phenomenon in Latin America as well as South Africa, who have abandoned parents, never known home comforts, and taken on life-and-death decisions for themselves. Even among white-collar readers of this milieu, existential anguish—Sartre’s nausea or Freud’s discontents—finds no answering association where there is a total preoccupation with the business of survival. The Spoils of Poynton cannot be read as the apotheosis of the cult of possession by someone who has never seen such objects to covet, someone whose needs would not correspond to any attraction they are presupposed to have—that ‘given’ attraction taken as read, by the writer.

  You might well object: Who expects a poorly-educated clerk or teacher to read Henry James? But, as I have tried to illustrate, many signifiers that are commonplace, assumed, in the cultural code of the writer find no referents in that of the potential wider readership.

  What can the writer count on if she/he obstinately persists that one can write for anyone who picks up one’s book? Even the basic emotions, love, hate, fear, joy, sorrow, often find expression in a manner that has no correspondence between one code of culture and another. The writer may count on the mythic, perhaps. On a personification of fears, for example, recognizable and surviving from the common past of the subcon scious, when we were all in the cave together, there were as yet no races, no classes, and our hairiness hid differences in colour. The prince who has turned into a frog and the beetle Gregory who wakes up to find himself transformed into are avatars of the fear of being changed into something monstrous, whether by the evil magic of a shaman or by psychological loss of self, that signify across all barriers, including that of time. They can be ‘read’ by anyone, everyone. But how few of us, the writers, can hope ever to create the crystal ball in which meaning can be read, pure and absolute; it is the vessel of genius, which alone, now and then, attains universality in art.

  For the rest of us, there is no meta-culture. We ought to be modest in our claims. There is no generic reader, out there.

  The kiss of the millennium when art shall be universal understanding shows no sign of being about to release us from our limitations.

  —1989

  THE LION, THE BULL,

  AND THE TREE

  Léopold Sédar Senghor’s life almost spans the twentieth century; but he is a man of the century in a way more important than longevity. He embodies the entire black experience, for slavery was still in the living memory of old Africans when he was born, and by the time of his ninetieth birthday the freedom cry from South Africa, mayibuye—Come back, Africa, return from colonisation to possess your African self—had been realized over the whole continent, including the final arsenal of white racist rule, South Africa itself.

  Africa has many heroes to name, but surely none has quite the relevance to the present, in synergistic terms, that Senghor has. He made of himself a great poet and a powerful political leader; a feat that would seem impossible, for the pragmatic compromises that presidential leadership demands invariably sacrifice and plummet to earth, wounded, the creative imagination of the poet. (Look at the silence that has fallen upon the poet in President Václav Hável.) Senghor created, with Aimé Césaire, the separatist movement of négritude, drawing from the then youthful Wole Soyinka the cheeky riposte, ‘A tiger doesn’t have to proclaim his tigritude.’ Senghor became a distinguished scholar, extolling the language of the coloniser, lecturing on their own literature to the conquerors of his own country, the French. He was a Deputy in France’s Assemblee Nationale, and an African socialist in the movement of liberation for his country from French rule; he is a devout Catholic and a brilliantly eloquent expositor of traditional African beliefs and philosophy, the power of the African ethos versus Christianity.

  He has made of these apparent irreconcilables a new man; the new African, a prototype that most of the rest of the continent hasn’t caught up with yet.

  It is fascinating to follow this extraordinary adventure of the human spirit. Senghor has never spared himself exploration of the fundaments which underlie human divergences; secondary causes were not the easy choices he would take: the established categories of racism—prejudice explained by white primitivism, reaction to black skin. For me, his most profound piece of philosophical thinking is ‘The African Apprehension of Reality’, which is also a daring foray into its concommitant, the white apprehension of reality. For apprehension is no less than the first principle of consciousness,
the beginning of everything, our place in relation to nature and our perceptions of fellow human beings. Ironically—perhaps because that was the moral hierarchy established by the colonial milieu into which he was born—he commences with the white apprehension, as a measure set up. ‘Let us consider first the European as he faces an object . . . He first distinguishes the object from himself. He keeps it at a distance. He freezes it out of time and, in a way, out of space . . . He makes a means of it. He destroys it by devouring it. “White men are cannibals”, an old sage in my own country told me . . . “It is this process of devouring which they call humanizing nature or more exactly domesticating nature . . . they don’t take into account that life cannot be domesticated.” ’

  To this Senghor opposes: ‘The African is as it were shut up inside his black skin. He lives in primordial night. He does not begin by distinguishing himself from the object, the tree or stone, the man or animal or social event. He does not keep it at a distance. He does not analyse it . . . He turns it over and over in his supple hands, he fingers it, he feels it. The African is . . . a pure sensory field. Subjectively, at the end of his antennae, like an insect, he discovers the Other.’

  These existential dicta could and do rouse hackles of accusation: the apprehension attributed to the whites is racist and derogatory, and that attributed to the blacks is obeisance to a romantic primitivism that so easily can be used by whites to ‘prove’ that blacks are childish and backward. Of course, Senghor’s thesis is that in order to free him or herself from alienation, the human must not lose in the isolation of cerebration his/her invaluable sensuous connections with all creation. As for the charge of slavish romanticising of black sensibilities, the existential state he claims for these is strikingly similar to the concept of living in tune with universal energy extolled in a great philosophy-cum-way-of-life, at the other side of the world, the Vedanta.

  Senghor goes beyond what most analysts of the human condition do in identifying the divisions separating one form of apprehension of existence from another. He not only posits a dilemma, asks a question; he proceeds to solve it in himself, to provide an answer. Sometimes in surprisingly curious ways, unafraid, as always, of inevitable criticism from his own people—the hardest to bear. Having characterised Europeans as ‘white cannibals’ who devour life instead of celebrating their place and shared purpose in it with all living things, he asks, in a poem dedicated to a president of France, no less than Georges Pompidou:

  Lord God, forgive white Europe.

  It is true, Lord, that for four enlightened centuries, she has

  scattered the baying and slaver of her mastiffs over my land

  and opened my heavy eyelids to the light of faith;

  who opened my heart to the understanding of the world,

  showing me the rainbow of fresh faces that are my brothers’.

  More contradictions brought boldly together.

  John Reed and Clive Wake write of the ‘fulness of his [Senghor’s] cultural position, just as his theoretic writing on négritude postulates an ultimate all-inclusiveness in the concept of the Culture of the Universal’. Within the confidence of this position, which was hard-won for a black man between two worlds, Senghor could write a poem like the one I have quoted. He fought in the French Army and was imprisoned by the Germans in the war against the Nazis. The discriminatory treatment by the French of his fellow Senegalese soldiers inspired some of his best poetry; at the same time, as Reed and Wake write, ‘War confirms Senghor’s loyalty to France’; and his spirit is able to make of that a finding of a ‘new solidarity with his own people and also with the common people of France’. He made no excuses for his attachment to Europe and a European religion, and did not allow these to become a threat to his commitment to Africa. This remarkable ability to synergise has served in extension to his personal and particular conversion to Marxism. As Claude Wauthier remarks, Senghor reconciled ‘the humanist aspect of Marx’s thinking with his own religious convictions’. And, I would add, with the needs of the African ethos to consider ways to appropriate the industrialised world.

  As a South African, I naturally have a particular interest in Senghor’s play, Chaka, based on one of the earliest imaginative interpretations of African history and heroes to be written by a black, a kind of founding document, certainly, of our South African literature—Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka. Chaka is a towering figure whose shadow will continue to fall many ways over the struggle against colonialism, from its beginnings as military conquest resisted in the era of Chaka, to the tactics of modern guerrilla armies such as South Africa’s Umkhonto weSizwe and civilian mass action. Chaka was a cruel despot, he even killed his own wife, Noliwe: Senghor has been accused of not condemning, in his play, Chaka’s brutality, but his interpretation of Chaka’s killing of his beloved wife may also be understood as symbolic of the terrible ultimate sacrifice of all that is personal demanded by a struggle for freedom. Claude Wauthier says, ‘Senghor sees Chaka as a forerunner of African unity, a visionary who wanted to prepare for the fight against the white invader.’

  Senghor’s writing, for those of us who lived far from his complementary political life, was a source in the cultural struggle that contributed, with an essential spirit, to the liberation struggle in South Africa. Now there is a new phase of liberation to be sought in our country. The need for reconciliation of cultures. Here, in his life and writings, Senghor is a pioneer. At the first Congress of African Writers and Artists in 1956 he said, ‘We are all cultural half-castes’. But his life has revised and refuted that definition. ‘Half-caste’ posits a diminution of one blood, one identity, its dilution by another. He proves that it is possible to keep your own culture and identity intact while fully appropriating another; while participating widely, opening yourself to thought-systems, ideas, mores, of other peoples. He is not a black Frenchman. He is perhaps the most successful example of cultural wholeness achieved in Africa in a single individual. It is surely something to be celebrated; for Africa cannot cast off the world culturally, economically, ecologically, any more than Europe, the Americas and Asia can cast off Africa in any of these ways. It is an ideal that underlies the extraordinary political and social initiative headed by that other man of the century, Nelson Mandela, in our own country: in its generalized, pragmatic form it is the determination to achieve a nonracial democracy in the not-so-easy circumstances of an African country that has a sizeable population of people who have been given the right to declare themselves as nothing other than White Africans.

  Senghor has come all the way; we others have the cultural synthesis still to make. None expresses the ideal fulfilment of it better than he:

  . . . unity is rediscovered, the reconciliation of

  the Lion the Bull and the Tree,

  the idea is linked to the act, the ear to the

  heart, the sign to the sense.

  GÜNTER GRASS

  In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.

  So wrote Thomas Mann.

  When Günter Grass and I were talking together last year, he said, ‘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.’

  The destiny of the man or the woman as a writer is to open up, explore, illuminate the inescapable destiny of our time of which Thomas Mann wrote. No writer of the twentieth century who has come after Mann’s generation has fulfilled this destiny better than Günter Grass. Not only in Germany, but in the world.

  While the television pictures of war in the streets and celebrations in the palaces flash by and the newspaper headlines are pulped for recycling, the dog Prinz, the Flounder, and the Toad—they are seers of the consequences of events, the past that
is never over.

  The Snail is the ikon of our slow and painful trail when, as Günter’s companion in great achievement, Bertolt Brecht, says: ‘The travails of the mountains lie behind us./Before us lie the travails of the plains.’ Oskar, from under the skirts of the past, misses nothing of what the world is making of itself for the future.

  Genius is always controversial, no matter in what context it occurs. The iconoclasm of painters who rearrange the perceptions of the eye is attacked from whatever is the current conservatism—abstraction, conceptualism, neo-expressionism, whatever. In literature, for the writer as for the painter, there is the same basic imperative: we have to find the way to ‘say’ in our medium, what can deal with, express our time in its particularity and in its place fatally roped to human history.

  Günter Grass not only has brought a formidable intellect to the political meaning of human destiny—his own life shaped by it in the dire twentieth-century manifestations of war and social engineering. He has found, for himself, in his writing the richly discursive, expansive mode, the ironic humour, the inverse tenderness, the chaos become a kind of order, the fantastic character of ordinary life in times when brutality is everyday and lies are retold often enough to become that apparently outdated definition, truth.