Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Work by white writers who tried to trace, through imaginative insights, in terms of political, social and spiritual options open to South African whites, the motivation of the young whites who turned to sabotage against the regime in the late 1960s, was banned. My novel The Late Bourgeois World, Mary Benson’s At The Still Point, Jack Cope’s The Dawn Comes Twice, C. J. Driver’s Elegy for a Revolutionary, none of these has been read by South Africans themselves, who lived through the experience of that period. It all happened; it certainly exists within their memory; it does not officially exist in South African literature.

  Again, by comparison, how was writing in Afrikaans developing in the 1960s? The changes were regarded as so fundamental that the era gave a generic term to the writers who emerged, the Sestigers (the Sixty-ers). In the words of one of them, André Brink, ‘a conscious effort was made to broaden the hitherto parochial limits of Afrikaans fiction’, to challenge certain cultural taboos in Afrikanerdom: the Calvinist taboos on uncompromising religious exploration and the challenging of old, especially sexual, moralities. Against the background events of a country that seemed on the brink of a revolution, the Sestigers preoccupied themselves with just precisely these things, and with William Burroughs-inspired experiment in literary form. They challenged with sexual candour and religious questioning, taunting the church and the Afrikaans Academy of Letters; but the evidence that not one of them published anything that was banned shows how they turned away, astonishingly, from the deepest realities of the life going on around them. The Sestigers’ outstanding prose writer, and indeed the most sweeping imaginative power in South African literature as a whole, Etienne le Roux, makes the lofty claim that his trilogy, Towards a Dubious Salvation, is a ‘metaphysical’ novel; but if a writer is part of the creative consciousness of the society in which he lives, is it not a form of betrayal, of creative as well as human integrity, to choose to turn away from the messy confrontation of man with man, and address oneself to God? In fact, reading this dazzling book, you sometimes have the feeling that Etienne le Roux is God, an infinitely detached Olympian observer, amusing himself by recording all those absurd and dirtily flamboyant little battles and copulations way, way down on earth.

  Only in 1974, for the first time, has a book by an Afrikaans writer been banned. André Brink has written a novel that breaks the political taboos answering the challenge he himself published in a newspaper five years ago: ‘If Afrikaans writing is to achieve any true significance within the context of the revolution of Africa (of which we form part) … it seems to me that it will come from those who are prepared to sling the “No!” of Antigone into the violent face of the System.’ Not unpredictably, his novel suffers from the defiant exultation and relief of that cry, coming so belatedly from the Afrikaans novel, looting a newly seized freedom of expression on whose validity the seal of ‘banned’ was almost sure to be set. Perhaps it was inevitable that this novel should demand of its creator that it encompass all that is forbidden in the ninety-seven definitions of what the Censorship Act finds ‘undesirable’; that it should roll up pell-mell all the forbidden themes and many of the cliché situations written about already by others. It follows that this novel cannot do André Brink justice, as a writer. Yet its exaggeration, its stylistic piling-up of words, images, events, like a series of blows – Take that! and that! and that! – remind one of the works of certain black South African writers, in which the truth is in the excesses and even absurdities because this is the fantasy bred by our society; it is the truth as evidence of the kind of nightmares that grow out of our kind of daylight.

  That ‘No!’ of Antigone has come out loud and clear from Afrikaans literature once only before, and from a poet, Ingrid Jonker. Somehow she managed, without compromising her great gifts, to write a poem of the 1960s that sets the era’s events in a perspective that takes in past and present and projects the future as no writer, black or white, has done after her. The poem refers to the pass-burning campaigns of the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress, when women and children were killed in the course of police and military action.

  The child is not dead

  the child lifts his fists against his mother

  who shouts Afrika! shouts the breath

  of freedom and the veld

  in the locations of the cordoned heart.

  The child lifts his fists against his father

  In the march of the generations who are shouting Afrika! shout the breath

  of righteousness and blood

  in the streets of his embattled pride.

  The child is not dead

  not at Langa nor at Nyanga

  nor at Orlando nor at Sharpeville

  nor at the police post in Philippi

  where he lies with a bullet through his brain.

  The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers

  on guard with their rifles, saracens and batons

  the child is present at all assemblies and law-giving

  the child peers through the window of houses and into the hearts of mothers

  this child who wanted only to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere

  the child grown to a man treks on through all Africa

  the child grown into a giant journeys over the whole world

  Without a pass.

  What is the position of South African literature in the mid-1970s, the era of Bantustan independence within the country while former guerrilla movements become constitutional governments in countries round about; the era of dialogue on black–white federalism; of streaky, if not exactly thoroughly mixed sport; and of the re-emergence of mass black action in the form of striking labour forces? The series of blood-lettings over the years, writers going into exile, emphasises the enormous influence of politics on literature not only in the obvious way, that so many writers are in imposed or self-imposed exile, but also in the state of South African society as reflected in their work if they continue to live here in South Africa, as opposed to the vision of the place held by writers now removed from the actual scene. A writer as immensely gifted as Dan Jacobson, after a series of novels rooted ‘from memory’ so to speak, in South Africa, has begun to write novels thematically remote from it. A liberation, of a kind …? Alex La Guma, in the gentle, beautifully written In the Fog at the Season’s End, writes, like so many black exiles, as if life in South Africa froze with the trauma of Sharpeville. Since he is a good writer, he cannot create at the newspaper-story level, and cannot, from abroad, quite make the projection, at the deepest level, into a black political milieu that has changed so much since he left. Ezekiel Mphahlele’s novel, The Wanderers, also suffers from this lack of connection. Only the poet Dennis Brutus seems to have drawn strength from the ‘bitter bread of exile’ and to have developed his gifts fully, if perhaps differently from the way he might have at home. In a collection of poems that places him perhaps higher in achievement than any of the younger generation, Arthur Nortje, exiled and dead before his book Dead Roots was published two years ago, writes the spiritual autobiography of exile on the most harrowing level. In the end, he who has had to make do with crumbs from the white man’s table at home may find no stomach left for Europe’s bounty:

  I drag my shrunken corpulence

  among the tables of rich libraries.

  Famous viands tasted like ash …

  These are the terrors of exile, for a writer; and the decimation of a literature.

  At home, significant South African drama in English has been created, single-handed, by Athol Fugard. The obvious major influence of Beckett on his work is a fascinating example of an esoteric mode, in which character is sacrificed to symbolic abstraction, and dialogue largely disembodied, returned to flesh and the individual involved rather than alienated. This is an interesting example of a writer’s methodological response to his socio-political situation.

  Of the new novelists, few and far between, who have emerged lately, a black one, Bessie Head, in exile but still on the contine
nt of Africa, expresses an indiscriminate repugnance for all political aspirations in all races, and a white one at home, Sheila Fugard, takes into the arcane realm of Buddhist mysticism the old white liberal justificatory myth of the power of love to melt racialism. One of the two most interesting newcomers, J. M. Coetzee, with his two-part novel, Dusklands, links the behaviouristic conditioning of peoples by other peoples as a congenital flaw in human nature. His first narrative, that of a South African working in 1970 as a United States government official on a ‘New Life Project’ for the people of Vietnam, posits the choice offered by the anthropologist Franz Boas: ‘if we wish to take over the direction of a society we must either guide it from within its cultural framework or else eradicate its culture and impose new structures’. It does not require much insight to understand where the reader’s eyes are being turned: to that other society, in South Africa, where both these techniques of socio-political manipulation have been tried upon the indigenous population. And this could lead us obediently to a conclusion: if white South Africans are no better, they are merely just as bad as other people with the will to follow up military with psychological conquest. Like them, they run the risk of losing their own souls in the contest; the narrator retreats into madness in which he has ‘high hopes of finding whose fault I am’.

  The second narrative is a superbly written attempt of a dubious kind to which South African white writers are beginning to turn irresistibly, it seems, in unconscious search of a new justificatory myth: the explanation of the present in terms of the past; and therefore, does it not follow, a present as helplessly inexorable as the past? The narrator in this story set in 1760 goes hunting elephant and falls ill among hostile Hottentots. With a putrefying backside as the sum of his pain and humiliation, he enters the old Conradian heart of darkness. In order to survive, he must live as the people he despises as savages manage to live; he must admit, in himself, hideous instincts that he had attributed only to them. The final irony of some of his reflections would seem to make them those of a twentieth-century Coetzee, rather than an eighteenth-century one: ‘To these people [the Hottentots] for whom life was nothing but a series of accidents, had I not been simply another accident? Was there nothing to be done to make them take me more seriously?’ And again, ‘I am an explorer. My essence is to open what is closed, to bring to light what is dark. If the Hottentots comprise an immense world of delight, it is an impenetrable world, impenetrable to men like me, who must either skirt it, which is to evade our mission, or clear it out of the way.’ After his recovery and return to white settlement he goes back with a punitive expedition to the Hottentots who succoured and tortured him. He wipes them out in ‘the desolate infinity of my power over them’. The fatalism, the detachment borrowed from history in this novel are best signified by the choice of epigraph for the second narrative, a quotation from Flaubert: ‘What is important is the philosophy of history’.

  Another newcomer, D. M. Zwelonke, apparently a member of Poqo, the underground wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress, has written a first novel in exile after a spell on Robben Island. His book takes its title from and is set on that prison island where once Makana, the prophet who wanted to drive the white man into the sea, was also imprisoned. Much of the writing is naive and sometimes even nonsensical, but where he deals with the dreams and nightmares that spring from spare diet, solitary confinement and the repetitious labour of endless stone-breaking, no polished ‘imagining’ of the situation by anyone, even a black writer, could achieve his branding-iron impact. As for the book’s vision of the white man, here it is another new myth-making:

  We have seen the mole and a curse has befallen us. There is a time-old legend that he who sees the mole shall hear of a friend’s relative’s death. An evil omen was forecast: we have seen the colonial monster in his bathroom, naked, playing with his penis and anus. In consequence he was enraged. He caught us and dragged us to Makana Island, and there we were his prisoners. A curse has fallen on us. He is like the mole because he cannot see. He gropes in the blind alley of the tragedy of history.

  All this is a long, long way from the world of black writer Lewis Nkosi in the 1950s, the mixed parties where black and white argued politics, arms around each other’s necks, glass in hand … And it is the vision, too, that hovers in incantation over the resurrection of black writing after the apathetic post-Sharpeville silence induced by censorship and the relentless equation, in the minds of the Security Police, between black articulateness and subversion. I believe these new young black writers instinctively attempt poetry rather than prose because poetry is the means of literary expression least accessible to the rules of thumb employed by the Censorship Board. The deracination of their predecessors of the 1950s does not attract them; they are street-corner poets whose work reflects an affirmation of black identity aimed at raising black consciousness rather than rousing white consciousness to the black man’s plight. Blacks have seen white culture, naked, for what it has proved to be, for blacks: long posited as an absolute value, and eternally withheld from them. These writers are interpreting the assertion of a particular kind of black separatism which exists concurrently with, if discounted by, the official kind accepted in dialogue between Bantustan leaders and white leadership in and outside the South African government. Mongane Wally Serote makes the black claim to the right to dictate terms:

  White people are white people

  They must learn to listen.

  Black people are black people

  They must learn to talk.

  Irony is perhaps the best literary mode of expression, where passionate assertion will not pass the censors. James Matthews’s book of poems Cry Rage! plumbs with passion not always matched by skill the hollowness of high-sounding apartheid terms such as ‘separate development’ and ‘surplus people’, but is banned. Another of these young poets, Don Mattera, has recently been picked off by being declared a banned person; one wonders how long the betterknown Adam Small, who, like Mattera, has taken the decision of many people of mixed blood to see themselves now as blacks rather than half-whites, will go on being published if along with that abandoned half-white status he also abandons the idea of love, always acceptable to whites, as a weapon of a struggle. Judging from some of his statements lately, I do not think he will again be writing in terms such as these:

  You can stop me

  goin’ to Groote Schuur

  in the same ambulance

  as you

  or tryin’ to go Heaven

  from a Groote Kerk pew

  you can stop me doin’

  some silly thing like that

  but O

  there’s somethin’ you can

  never never do:

  true’s God

  you can stop me doin’

  all silly things of that sort

  and to think of it

  if it comes to that

  you can even stop me hatin’

  but O

  there’s somethin’

  you can never never do—

  you can’t

  ever

  ever

  ever stop me

  loving

  even you!

  In conclusion, to return to the situation in which all South African writers find themselves, whether black or white, writing in English, Afrikaans, Sesuto, Zulu, what-have-you – even if he successfully shoots the rapids of bannings and/or exile, any writer’s attempt to present in South Africa a totality of human experience within his own country is subverted before he sets down a word. As a white man, his fortune may change; the one thing he cannot experience is blackness, with all that implies in South Africa. As a black man, the one thing he cannot experience is whiteness, with all that that implies. Each is largely outside the other’s experience-potential. There is no social mobility across the colour line. The identification of class with colour means that breaching class barriers is breaking the law, and the indivisible class-colour barrier is much, much more effective, from the poi
nt of view of limiting the writer’s intimate knowledge of his society, than any class barrier has ever been. The black writer in South Africa writes from the ‘inside’ about the experience of the black masses, because the colour bar keeps him steeped in its circumstances, confined in a black township and carrying a pass that regulates his movements from the day he is born to the status of ‘piccanin’ to the day he is buried in a segregated cemetery. The white writer, aseptically quarantined in his test-tube elite existence, is cut off by enforced privilege from the greater part of the society in which he lives: the life of the proletariat, the nineteen millions whose potential of experience he does not share, from the day he is born ‘baas’ to the day he is buried in his segregated cemetery.

  The black writer would seem to have the advantage here; there are only four million whites. But this compartmentalisation of society works both ways. The black writer is extremely limited in his presentation of white characters, witness the frequency with which his are no more than cardboard or caricature. What he cannot know about the white man’s life because of those large areas of the white experience he is excluded from by law, he supplies out of a fantasy distorted by resentment at the exclusion. The very force of the accusation he feels he must make against the white man sometimes loses the strength it should have. So it happens that you come across, in the work of a talented black writer, a white character so clumsily presented he seems to have no place in the work. A black South African, in exile in a nearby territory I visited recently, challenged my assertion that the presentation of white characters in work by black writers is limited by caricature: on the contrary, he countered, this is the way whites are, so far as blacks are concerned. I think he makes an interesting point. Caricature under these circumstances is perhaps not a deliberate distortion of the subject but a form of truth about those who see the subject that way. The idea relates to my own observation about André Brink’s novel.