Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art; trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.

  —Nobel Prize Lecture, 1991

  LIVING ON

  A FRONTIERLESS LAND:

  CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION

  Process noun, GLOCALIZATION. Formed by telescoping global and local to make a blend; the idea is modeled on Japanese dochakuka (derived from dochaku, “living on one’s own land”), originally the agricultural principle of adapting one’s farming techniques to local conditions, but also adopted in Japanese business . . . for global localization, a global outlook adapted to local conditions. The idea of going for the world market (global marketing) was a feature of business thinking in the early Eighties. By the late Eighties and early Nineties, Western companies had observed the success of Japanese firms in doing this while at the same time exploiting local conditions as well.’—Oxford Dictionary of New Words, 1991

  That is the etymology of a word that is not yet recorded in that dictionary, Globalization. There is always something to learn from the way a term such as this one, now widely and unthinkingly used by us all, has been derived. Then we shall at least know, by its origins, exactly what we’re talking about. The term has emerged out of need for the expression of political, economic, social, and cultural changes. It’s an omnibus term, of course, not only carrying its variety of passenger interest, but travelling to and through different terrains. The best-known and accepted of these is, indeed, that for which the term was coined, while elaborating on its original limitations in Japanese understanding: the expansion of trade over the oceans and air-space, beyond traditional alliances which were restricted by old political spheres of influence, particularly in the era of colonialism, and by the barriers of the Cold War. Now there are new formations hiding behind the acronyms of new groupings of countries on the world terrain of trade, but at the same time other barriers, important ones, are being breached. One has only to glance round at the occupants of business-class seats in aircraft to see the flying caravan (I change metaphors) of government trade missions, industrialists and merchants, busy at their laptops in preparation for presentations that will vend—more valuable than spices ever were—minerals and commodities, industrial, mining, and communications plant, and—yes—arms, to the world-wide oases of buyers, who in turn will have something to sell: resources natural and manufactured which the traders lack back home.

  Does the globalization of culture follow the same process?

  On the principle of opening up the bounty of our world, ill-distributed as it has been by both nature and humans, it does. Both are gathered under the rubric of human development which is now understood as not achievable in isolation by any one country or even grouping of countries—a down-to-earth acceptance that we cannot come closer than this to the idealistic (and ideological) concept of one world which some of us are old enough to remember nostalgically. But the great difference is that culture is a ‘trade’ foremost in intangibles, not materials and money, and it is, paradoxically, both its power and its weakness that it is only partially dependent on the exchange of money in order to operate. In its essence, much of real culture, as opposed to the exploitation of culture as a billboard, TV-slot public relations commodity, has no market value. The exceptions, anyone will be quick to point out, are the popular music groups and individual musicians, arising in their home countries genuinely from the people’s culture rather than any elite, who are celebrated and highly paid while at the same time making the musical heritage of their own countries known and appreciated, all over the world. But writers who come from, let us say, Canada, Norway, Cuba, Egypt, to a poetry conference in Australia, dancers who come from Japan, India, the U.S.A., Spain, to a workshop in Ghana—their ‘rate of exchange’ is the expansion of ideas, the possibilities of their art, as coming from the life and spirit of the Other, the unknown country and society. No material benefit is involved beyond the staples of an airfare, food, and lodging . . . The concept of selling and buying as a principle of globalization does not apply. The ethic of mutual enrichment without consideration of material profit is that of cultural globalization; by the very nature of trade globalization of the world’s material resources, this ethic is secondary to it.

  Once one moves into the dimension of ethics, many questions present themselves. First, one must examine what the aim of globalization of culture is, or, to be less didactic, could be. Is it, in the attempt to heal the peoples of the world in their wounding divisions, the manifestations of xenophobia that underlie conflict, an aim of emphasizing the unity, the oneness of cultural expression? Therefore a conformity, even if of the highest order? A tactic to avoid value judgments of which is the highest art form among those achieved nationally, judgments influenced by the nature of what is regarded as culture in the various countries making such judgments? Or is the aim to value the differences, bring them into play across aesthetic frontiers and thus disprove the long-held sovereignty of national and political divisions over the development of human potential?

  Most of us would agree the aim is the latter. Yet each answer brings another question; immediately, this is the question of language, since language is the means of many cultural activities corollary to the great one of literature itself. It is vital to that field of mixed media, the image and the spoken word, in the theatre and the theatre’s international extension, TV drama. Intellectual debate depends on language, although the exchange of ideas and insight comes without need of words in the revelation of paintings and music. Care has to be taken, however, that one or two of the short list of self-styled world languages do not become decisive in our reach for globalization of culture. This could be a subconscious lapse into the very state the concept of freeing culture seeks to end; a value decision that high culture, true culture, resides within those international ‘families’ allied by language affiliations (Romance languages, for example), shared frontiers decided after old wars, political alignments and realignments, ideological loyalties. The short list can’t be justified on account of number of speakers of a language, since vastly-spoken Chinese and Arabic don’t feature on it. Of course they don’t; and why? Because it is out of the old conditioning of Western culture, ‘the formidable structure of cultural domination’ Edward Said cites, that much of the drive towards cultural globalization, creativity freed to roam and procreate, has come; old habits engender autocratic attitudes that die hard!

  As one of the speakers and writers of one of those ‘world languages’, am I advocating that globalization means everyone must learn Chinese in order for this to be realized? Hardly a feasible condition, even if desirable. No doubt the Chinese, along with the Arabs, the Japanese, and others will have to learn English, French, German, and Spanish, as they are already doing, perforce, in pursuit of the other form of globalization, trade and technology. As for the peoples of Africa, they are already long accustomed to the imperative of learning the languages of the West, depending on under which colonial rule they have lived. But if cultural globalization is to be more than another failed One World, it must be conceived genuinely broadly in active cognition that there should be no hierarchy of languages directing it.

  What practical steps can be suggested to tackling with more than such statements this huge problem of words?

  Since literature is the heavy-duty vehicle of the Word, carrying a large freight of culture, cross-translation of the literature of the languages of the world is an important part of the answer. This requires co-operation betwe
en publishing houses world-wide, in reciprocal publication of works of fiction, poetry, drama, and general prose beyond the category of journalism—this last reaches most peoples and languages through the international networks of translation in newspapers and on television newscasts. The Departments of Culture in governments have a neglected responsibility, in terms of the extension of their own countries’ cultures, to subsidize such publication, and, indeed, it must be seen not as some luxury subvention, but recognized also by the Departments of Foreign Affairs as a logical part of their function in developing peaceful, fruitful, and progressive relations with other countries: allocation from Foreign Affairs’ budgets should be mandatory.

  Exchange visits of writers, artists, dramatists, film-makers, composers, musicians, dancers—every means of expression of the arts—have been growing, but although the embassies of many countries are helpful in funding these on behalf of their nationals, many more exchanges are needed to give practitioners of the arts the chance to enrich one another’s ability and spread creative variety and innovation. Diseases, alas, are pandemic; in our world on the eve of the new millennium, art is not. Again, subvention from governments and business—the brothers and sisters from their side of the globalization process, international trade—is imperative if cultural globalization is to be achievable.

  How, in national specificity, does each country go about moving beyond itself to procreate a culture that will benefit self and others? In some cases, the effort must begin at home on the country’s own continent. If I single out my own country, South Africa, it is not only as personal special interest, but because South Africa was the example, the epitome of cultural isolation, suffered until apartheid was defeated by the liberation movements and a government of national unity, led by the African National Congress, was formed in 1994. Economic sanctions and cultural boycotts, which were stoically endured as necessary to end the apartheid regime, meant for the cultural community that we were cut off not only from Europe and the Americas but also from the rest of the continent to which we belong, even countries of some of our closest neighbours. Our first action, therefore, has been the fulfilling one of inviting our African counterparts around us to bring their literary culture to our country, and to take up return visits to theirs.

  Isolation from our own continent predated, in fact, that of the apartheid era. Preceding it, the cultural domination of the North–South axis was imposed by colonisation-cum-Europeanisation (the latter persisted even when South Africa was no longer a British colony, but the white-ruled independent Union of South Africa); this meant that cultural connections were with Europe and North America almost exclusively: their literature, their theatre, their music and plastic arts. The arts of the continent to which we belonged were relegated to the anthropology departments of universities.

  From our new establishment of connection with the creativity of our African selfhood we also have begun to move out of the restriction of North—South culture, invaluable though it remains in the cultural collective, to profit from the untapped South–South opportunities and—above all—affinities, that Eurocentric colonial attitudes ignored and denied us. South African writers and artists are exchanging working visits with their counterparts in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Cuba, among other countries on the side of the world that matches our own, not least in the presence of the descendants of Africans who, enslaved, yet took eternal elements of African culture with them.

  This South–South initiative, now only in its beginnings, is surely something that Europe and North America could pursue along with us, rather more vigorously than it appears they do, set within their cultural parameters, for even the riches of Western culture are limiting, in the context of a global culture.

  Globalization is a circular, not a linear concept; the very root of the word implies this shape of wholeness, at once a setting forth and receiving in one continuous movement. And in confirmation of this, I find myself returned to what perhaps should have been my beginning: what do we mean by ‘culture’? I have assumed the mandate of my subject was culture-as-the-arts, inclusive of the crafts. But culture has many definitions, constantly argued. For some people, it would include, for example, the cultural implications of food—I think of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s splendid exegesis, The Raw and the Cooked. Mores and manners, too, are accultured; above all, technology invades—shades into?—culture of the arts when, as now, people engage in cultural exchange of a kind, in the contradictory isolation, alone with a screen, through texts and graphics conjured up on the Internet. There is even a lyricism of international Internet jargon—its basic procedure is known by the poetic verbal imagery ‘surfing the Net’. Is this a globalization of poetry on a scale previously unimaginable, or a sign of the global subsumption of the arts in the unquestionable, already achieved globalization of electronics?

  When we speak of the globalization of culture, North, South, East, West, we have still to decide what these other parameters of it are. Only then can we make reality of culture ‘living on its own land’: the frontierless territory of creativity.

  OUR CENTURY

  Our century.

  Our defining claim, for I do not think it likely there is anyone here among us who dates from the nineteenth century? And if there should be some ancient patriarch or matriarch, then that venerable survivor certainly will have lived the major part of the human span in the twentieth.

  My century. I share it with all: I was born in the first quarter and here I am, still living, in this, the final decade.

  Even for those who are young and whose lives will move over to maturity in the twenty-first century, the turn of a century is the striking of a special midnight; when the first two digits of the date change, it is not the familiar movement of a clock’s hands shifting to a new day, it is the toll that ends an era, it is an anniversary in recorded history, a birthday for humanity.

  Whether this means that the human race is ageing, or whether it means that it is growing up, we—who have invented the measure of time but cannot, in our fragile container of flesh, conceive of time lived as millennia—cannot say.

  A hundred years is the largest unit we can grasp, in terms of human life. After a hundred years, quantification begins again; it is not without significance that life is renewed in the Sleeping Beauty’s family castle after one hundred years. The turn of a century is the prince’s kiss of Time. On the first morning of 2000, the world will be awakened to a new calendar, perhaps a new life.

  What has ours, our life in the twentieth century been?

  I am not an historian and I hope I shall not disappoint too much those who expect a scholarly and comprehensive treatise on twentieth-century history, not a date or a treaty missing. On the other hand, I may also reassure those who dread such a treatise that they are not going to be subject to it.

  Of course, there are consequences of my grave limitations.

  Many wars, many changes of frontier, many schismatic ideologies, many important thinkers, will be missing. Significance, in human consciousness, is consistent only for real historians. Many scientific discoveries will be ignored, while others are seen as crucial to certain aspects of our life. As a child of this century who has experienced personally at least part of its radical momentum and sought to explore and understand more in the experience and consciousness of others, the conception of our century I gather together now is subjective. The curve of our existence is being followed by my eye. I hope this is subjectivity not in the sense of confined to myself, but rather to that naturally shared with many others shaped by the same period.

  Living in the twentieth century, we cannot look upon it from the pretence of another perspective; nor should we try to if we are to discover what only we, if secretly, suppressedly, know best: the truth about ourselves, our time.

  Has it been the worst of times?

  Has it been the best of times?

  Or should we combine the two extremes in the Dickensian fashion: ‘It was the best of times, it was the wo
rst of times’?

  At once there arises from a flash brighter than a thousand suns the mushroom cloud that hangs over our century.

  Exploded almost exactly at the half-century, the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki rise as unsurpassed evil done, even in this century where more human beings have been killed or allowed to die of starvation and disease, by human decision, than ever before in history; where the Nazi Holocaust, fifty years on, has become household words of horror as ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans and in Africa.

  Unsurpassed evil because not only does an atom bomb kill and maim, it curses the children of survivors, the unborn, with monstrous physical and mental defects.

  Unsurpassed evil laid at our door, certainly, because foremost of the ‘firsts’ our century can claim is that for the first time man (and I use the male gender accurately, specifically) invented a power of destruction which surpasses any natural catastrophe—the power of earthquake, volcano eruption, flood. Thus the final conquest of nature, an aim pursued with the object of human benefit since the invention of agriculture in the Stone Age, has been achieved in our discovery of how to wipe ourselves out more quickly and efficiently than any force of nature. The demonic vow of our century seems to come from Virgil: ‘If I cannot move Heaven, I will stir up Hell.’

  Six million Jews were gased or starved to death in a systematic process. It defined unspeakable years in our century. President Truman’s ordering of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought ‘the defining moments of terror’ in our century. Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese Nobel Laureate in Literature, compiled an anthology of stories by Japanese writers of which he says he has come to realize these ‘are not merely literary expressions, composed by looking back at the past, of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. They are also highly significant vehicles for thinking about the contemporary world . . . because civilisation is headed either towards extinction or towards salvation from that fate, we inescapably face an unknowable future.’