Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  I am not invoking the concept of alienation in the Marxist sense, as the consequence of man’s relation to the means of production, although that undoubtedly has its appositeness in the industrialisation of blacks under apartheid and therefore our society as a whole. There are many ways in which man becomes divided from others and distanced from himself. Alienation as such is a condition of rejecting and/or being rejected. The black artist lives in a society that rejected his culture for hundreds of years. He has turned his alienation in the face of those who rejected him and made of his false consciousness the inevitable point of departure towards his true selfhood. The white artist belongs to the white culture that rejected black culture, and is now itself rejected by black culture. He is the non-European whose society nevertheless refused to acknowledge and take root with an indigenous culture. He is the non-black whom blacks see as set apart from indigenous culture. He does not know as yet whether this is a dead end or can be made a new beginning.

  Any homogeneity in the nature of the work produced by these artists is brought about by what shackles them together rather than what they share. South African artists belong to the Dionysiac ‘disintegrated consciousness’ that Hegel defines by its antagonism to the external power of society – if by nothing else, they are united in the wish to be free of imposed social circumstances, although they would define these in accordance with a widely differing experience of circumstantial reality. From a disintegrated consciousness, all seek wholeness in themselves and a reconnection with the voltage of social dynamism. Opposition to an existing society implies a hunger to create and identify with another and better one. The abjuration of a set of values implies an intention to create and relate to another set. For the artist, these implications become part of the transformations of reality which are his work.

  ‘Relevance’ and ‘commitment’ are conceptualisations of this movement. They become the text claimed by artists who, individually, understand different things by them; they also become the demands made upon the artist by his people. Relevance and commitment pulse back and forth between the artist and society. In a time and place like this one, they have become, in the words of Lionel Trilling, ‘the criteria of art and the qualities of personal life of men that may be enhanced or diminished by art’.

  How close are these terms that question the existence of the painter, sculptor, writer, composer, photographer, architect, in South Africa today? In fact, they are juxtaposed as much as cognate. And in this, again, they are a signification of the tension between the artist and his society in which his creativity is generated. For relevance has to do with outside events; and commitment comes from within.

  For the black artist at this stage in his development relevance is the supreme criterion. It is that by which his work will be judged by his own people, and they are the supreme authority since it is only through them that he can break his alienation. The Black Consciousness thinker, Bennie Khoapa, states that the black artist’s only option is personal transformation; he must be ready to phase himself out of the role of being carrier to what the poet, Mafika Pascal Gwala, calls white official ‘swimming pool and caravan culture’. The external reality to which relevance paces out the measure of his work is not a step away from him: another writer, Njabulo Ndebele, says ‘blacks are operating’ from within ‘a crushing intellectual and educational environment’. Sartre’s philosophical dictum sums up: ‘The exploited experience exploitation as their reality’ – the artist has only to do what every artist must in order to become one: face his own reality, and he will have interiorised the standard of relevance set up outside. Then, theoretically, he has solved the aesthetic and social problem, put himself in meaningful relationship to his society.

  But relevance, in the context of the absolutes placed upon the black artist by the new society to which he is dedicated, has another demand. Struggle is the state of the black collective consciousness and art is its weapon. He accepts this as the imperative of his time. Weapons are inevitably expected to be used within an orthodoxy prescribed for the handling of such things. There is a kit of reliable emotive phrases for writers, a ready-made aesthetic for painters and sculptors, an unwritten index of subjects for playwrights and list of approved images for photographers. Agitprop binds the artist with the means by which it aims to free the minds of the people. It licenses a phony sub-art. Yet the black artist is aware that he is committed, not only as a voluntary act, but in the survival of his own being and personality, to black liberation. It is at this point that, as an artist, commitment takes over, from within, from relevance, and the black artist has to assert the right to search out his own demotic artistic vocabulary with which to breathe new life and courage into his people. His commitment is the point at which inner and outer worlds fuse; his purpose to master his art and his purpose to change the nature of art, create new norms and forms out of and for a people recreating themselves, become one aim.

  For the black artist, the tendentiousness of the nature of art goes without question. He cannot choose the terms of his relevance or his commitment because in no other community but the predicated one which blacks have set up inside themselves are his values the norm. Anywhere else he is not in possession of selfhood. The white artist is not quite in the reverse position; that would be too neat for the complexity of the state of art, here. He can, if he wishes, find his work’s referent in an aesthetic or ontological movement within the value-system traditional to whites. White South African culture will not repudiate him if he does. Even if he were to decide to be relevant to and find commitment only to himself, he could still find some kind of artistic validity so long as he were to be content to stay within the kind of freedom offered by that closed value-system. Yet the generally tendentious nature of art, overwhelmingly so in writing, if less consciously so in painting and the plastic arts, in South Africa, shows that few white artists take up these options. One could reverse the proposition and say they don’t ‘opt out’ – if it were not for the fact that the rejection of whites-only values by no means implies a concomitant opting in: to black culture. The white artist, who sees or feels instinctively that exclusively white-based values are in an unrecognised state of alienation, knows that he will not be accepted, cannot be accepted by black culture seeking to define itself without the reference to those values that his very presence among blacks represents. Yet for a long time – a generation at least – the white artist has not seen his referent as confined within white values. For a long time he assumed the objective reality by which his relevance was to be measured was somewhere out there between and encompassing black and white. Now he finds that no such relevance exists; the black has withdrawn from a position where art, as he saw it, assumed the liberal role Nosipho Majeke defined as conciliator between oppressor and oppressed.

  If the white artist is to break out of his double alienation, he too has to recognise a false consciousness within himself, he too has to discard a white-based value-system which it is fashionable to say ‘no longer’ corresponds to the real entities of South African life but which in fact never did. But unlike the black, he does not have a direct, natural, congenital attachment to these entities. We are not speaking of artistic modes and forms, here, but of the substance of living from which the artist draws his vision. Exploitation, which the blacks experience as their reality, is something the white artist repudiates, refuses to be the agent of. It is outside himself; he experiences it through a moral attitude or a rational empathy. The black creation of new selfhood is based on a reality he, as a white, cannot claim and that could not serve him if he did since it is not his order of experience. If he is to find his true consciousness, express in his work the realities of his place and time, if he is to reach the stage where commitment rises within him to a new set of values based on those realities, he has to admit openly the order of his experience as a white as differing completely from the order of black experience. He has to see the concomitant necessity to find a different way, from that open to the black a
rtist, to reconnect his art through his life to the total reality of the disintegrating present, and to attempt, by rethinking his own attitudes and conceptions, the same position the black artist aims for: to be seen as relevant by and become committed to commonly understood, commonly created cultural entities corresponding to a common reality – an indigenous culture.

  I suppose I shall be accused of using the schema of a Black Consciousness philosophy. It is an indication of the rethinking, remaking needed in South African cultural contexts that for years no one, not even blacks, ever questioned the exclusive use of white cultural analyses. In my view, this conference should not be afraid of having kick-me political labels pinned on its back; it should assert the urgent need and right to use whatever ideas, from whatever source, that may reflect the facts of life here and penetrate the cataract of preconceptions grown over our vision. This is consistent with an abandonment of the old positions of white and black in culture and the scrapping of the assumption that white-based culture is the mean, for white as well as black.

  What I have outlined so far is a brief analysis of the imperatives laid upon South African artists by their society. Of course it is all not so clear-cut as that. When we turn to the nature of the work the artist produces, we become aware of the terrible problems in which the artist is enmeshed while following those imperatives, even if, as in the case of black artists, he feels sure he knows his way. The nature of contemporary art here, in the aspect of subject matter, is didactic, apocalyptic, self-pitying, self-accusatory as much as indicting. Apartheid in all its manifestations, the petty jigger that niggles under the skin, the bullet that reaches the heart, informs the ethos of what is produced even by a non-objective painter or an architect seeking an aesthetic for cheap housing to replace a demolished crossroads. As Pieyre de Mandiargues says in one of his novels, ‘When you have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measure, must it not be recited, spoken?’

  But when we posit a post-apartheid art – and we must, right now, out of the necessity implied by the facts examined so far, and forth-rightly expressed in the white artist Andrew Verster’s question: ‘Is there a South African art or is it still to happen?’ – we switch off the awful dynamism of disintegration and disaster. The black artist is aware of a great force ready to charge him, the Yeatsian drive to ‘express a life that has never found expression’, his part in the recreation of his people in their own image. For him, the new orientation may be already psychologically established; but it is by no means fully formulated. The important cultural debate that was taking place, in the early and mid-seventies in publications like the yearly Black Review and the publications of the Black Community Programmes, has been cut off by the banning of organisations and individuals concerned. Black art has not really visualised itself beyond protest. It has not even dealt with aspects of present-day art that do a disservice to the very purpose relevance imposes upon them – for example, the commodity-maker of ‘black image’ sculpture and painting, the production of artefacts of protest that the white man hangs on his wall as he keeps a carved walking stick in his hall. These aspects may have grave effects on the future of art, carry over a distortion of the moment of identification between the artist and his subject that Proust defines as style. In the dragon’s breath heat of the present, this neglect is more than understandable. But understanding does not shift aside problems that will confront the new black culture. Black thinkers are aware of them. Ezekiel Mphahlele and Lewis Nkosi began an inquiry twenty years ago, and their essays were banned. In this decade, it is a continuingly shameful and criminally stupid action on the part of the South African government to have reduced the black cultural debate to a clandestine affair showing itself here and there in white and/or literary journals.

  Black artists are primarily concerned with a resuscitation of the pre-colonial culture as a basis, concreted over by the interruption of a purely white-based culture, for an indigenous modern African culture. They break through the concrete with the drums and folk epics that celebrate the past and effectively place the heroes of the present liberation struggle – Mandela, Sobukwe, Biko, Hector Petersen – in a parthenon of inspirational culture-heroes along with Plaatje and Mofolo, but to embody the objective reality of modern blacks they must synthesise with all this the aspirations of people who still want TV and jeans – what George Steiner calls ‘the dream-life and vulgate’ of contemporary, individual lives. It is comparatively easy to create a people’s art – that is to say an aesthetic expression of fundamentally shared experience, during a period when the central experience of all, intellectuals, workers and peasants alike, is oppression: the pass laws are a grim cultural unifier. It is quite another matter when the impact of experience breaks up into differing categories of class-experience. The avowed black aim is a culture springing from and belonging to the people, not an elite. This new orientation involves turning away from Europe but at the same time setting up an essential relationship between the past and the technological present recognised as something distinct from the inherent threat of all-white culture, something that cannot be denied and is with blacks in Africa for ever. Post-apartheid, beyond liberation in the political sense, and moving on within the total context of liberation in which black culture sees its future – unless black artists can achieve a strong, organic synthesis on these lines their art will be nostalgic, there will be a hiatus between modern life and art, for them. They will be in danger of passing into a new phase of alienation. The questions of relevance and commitment will come up again. This may not seem much of a concern in the fierce urgency of present dangers, but it is one of the many that make the black artist’s struggle towards true consciousness a continuing one, and the future of art in South Africa uncertain.

  If the white artist is to move on to express a life that has never found expression, this presupposes, on the one hand, that white culture will remake itself, and on the other that black culture will accept him as one who has struck down into liens with an indigenous culture. That remaking could inform his vision, it could replace the daemonic forces of disintegration which both drove him into alienation and were his subject. But unless this happens he will know less and less and see less and less, with the deep comprehension and the inner eye necessary to creation, of the objective realities he came to recognise when he rejected the false consciousness constituted in traditional white-based culture. In the post-apartheid era, the white’s position will depend much more on external forces than will that of the black artist. Having changed his life, the white artist may perhaps stake his place in a real indigenous culture of the future by claiming that place in the implicit nature of the artist as an agent of change, always moving towards truth, true consciousness, because art itself is fixed on the attainment of that essence of things. It is in his nature to want to transform the world, as it is a political decision for those who are not artists to want to transform the world. The revolutionary sense, in artistic terms, is the sense of totality, the conception of a ‘whole’ world, where theory and action meet in the imagination. Whether this ‘whole’ world is the place where black and white culture might become something other, wanted by both black and white, is a question we cannot answer; only pursue.

  Although I am white and fully aware that my consciousness inevitably has the same tint as my face, when I have spoken of white attitudes and opinions I have not taken it upon myself to speak for whites, but have quoted attitudes and opinions expressed by whites themselves, or manifest (in my opinion) in their work. When I have spoken of black attitudes and opinions, I have not taken it upon myself to speak for blacks, but have quoted attitudes and opinions expressed by blacks themselves or (in my opinion) manifest in their work. It’s difficult to end on the customary high note; the state of culture in South Africa does not encourage it. Yet when I go so far as to use ‘we’ to speak for our culture, the pronoun in itself expresses some kind of obstinate collective intention to assume that there is at least the possibility of a single, common
, indigenous nature for art in South Africa. Any optimism is realistic only if we, black and white, can justify our presence by regarding ourselves as what Octavio Mannoni, in his study of the effects of colonialism, terms ‘apprentices of freedom’. Only in that capacity may we perhaps look out for, coming over the Hex River Mountains or the Drakensberg, that ‘guest from the future’ that Nadezhda Mandelstam calls upon, the artist as prophet of the resolution of divided cultures.

  1979

  Pula!

  Botswana

  Pula. In the middle of southern Africa there is a country whose coat of arms bears, instead of some Latin tag boasting power and glory, the single word: rain.

  On the map Botswana appears as a desert big as France. And sometimes, in Botswana, looking at the figures of men, the bole of thorn tree or palm, a single donkey, breaking the white light, it seems a vast sand-tray in which these are lead toys stuck upright. But they are rooted there. This Kalahari sand nourishes them – grasses, thorn bush, mopane forest, birds, beasts and 600,000 people. They live on it, in it and off it. In places it hardens into a crust of salt; it swallows, in the north-west, the waters of a great delta. But even the final desiccation of the south-west provides harsh sustenance for those – beasts and men – who know where to find it, and for those who know how to space their thirst, there is water if you dig for it.