Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  In this context, long before the term ‘cultural worker’ was taken over from the vocabulary of other revolutions, black writers had to accept the social responsibility white ones didn’t have to – that of being the only historians of events among their people; Dhlomo, Plaatje, Mofolo created characters who brought to life and preserved events either unrecorded by white historians or recorded purely from the point of view of white conquest.30 From this beginning there has been a logical intensification of the demands of social responsibility, as over decades discrimination and repression set into law and institution, and resistance became a liberation struggle. This process culminated during the black uprising of 1976, calling forth poetry and prose in an impetus of events not yet exhausted or fully explored by writers. The uprising began as a revolt of youth and it brought to writers a new consciousness – bold, incantatory, messianically reckless. It also placed new demands upon them in the essential gesture that bound them to a people springing about on the balls of their feet before dawn-streaks of freedom and the threat of death. Private emotions were inevitably outlawed by political activists who had no time for any; black writers were expected to prove their blackness as a revolutionary condition by submitting to an unwritten orthodoxy of interpretation and representation in their work. I stress unwritten because there was no Writers’ Union to be expelled from. But there was a company of political leaders, intellectuals, and the new category of the alert young, shaming others with their physical and mental bravery, to ostracise a book of poems or prose if it were found to be irrelevant to the formal creation of an image of people anonymously, often spontaneously heroic.

  Some of my friends among black writers have insisted that this ‘imposition’ of orthodoxy is a white interpretation; that the impulse came from within to discard the lantern of artistic truth that reveals human worth through human ambiguity, and to see by the flames of burning vehicles only the strong, thick lines that draw heroes. To gain his freedom the writer must give up his freedom. Whether the impulse came from within, without, or both, for the black South African writer it became an imperative to attempt that salvation. It remains so; but in the 1980s many black writers of quality have come into conflict with the demand from without – responsibility as orthodoxy – and have begun to negotiate the right to their own, inner interpretation of the essential gesture by which they are part of the black struggle.31 The black writer’s revolutionary responsibility may be posited by him as the discovery, in his own words, of the revolutionary spirit that rescues for the present – and for the post-revolutionary future – that nobility in ordinary men and women to be found only among their doubts, culpabilities, shortcomings: their courage-in-spite-of.

  To whom are South African writers answerable in their essential gesture if they are not in the historical and existential situation of blacks, and if (axiomatic for them in varying degrees) they are alienated from their ‘own’, the historical and existential situation of whites? Only a section of blacks places any demands upon white writers at all; that grouping within radical blacks which grants integrity to whites who declare themselves for the black freedom struggle. To be one of these writers is firstly to be presented with a political responsibility if not an actual orthodoxy: the white writer’s task as ‘cultural worker’ is to raise the consciousness of white people, who, unlike himself, have not woken up. It is a responsibility at once minor, in comparison with that placed upon the black writer as composer of battle hymns, and yet forbidding if one compares the honour and welcome that await the black writer, from blacks, and the branding as traitor, or, at best, turned backside of indifference, that awaits the white, from the white establishment. With fortunate irony, however, it is a responsibility which the white writer already has taken on, for himself, if the other responsibility – to his creative integrity – keeps him scrupulous in writing about what he knows to be true whether whites like to hear it or not; for the majority of his readers are white. He brings some influence to bear on whites, though not on the white government; he may influence those individuals who are already coming-to bewilderedly out of the trip of power, and those who gain courage from reading the open expression of their own suppressed rebellion. I doubt whether the white writer, even if giving expression to the same themes as blacks, has much social use in inspiriting blacks, or is needed to. Sharing the life of the black ghettoes is the primary qualification the white writer lacks, so far as populist appreciation is concerned. But black writers do share with white the same kind of influence on those whites who read them; and so the categories that the state would keep apart get mixed through literature – an unforeseen ‘essential gesture’ of writers in their social responsibility in a divided country.

  The white writer who has declared himself answerable to the oppressed people is not expected by them to be ‘more than a writer’, since his historical position is not seen as allowing him to be central to the black struggle. But a few writers have challenged this definition by taking upon themselves exactly the same revolutionary responsibilities as black writers such as Alex La Guma, Dennis Brutus and Mongane Serote, who make no distinction between the tasks of underground activity and writing a story or poem. Like Brutus, the white writers Breyten Breytenbach and Jeremy Cronin were tried and imprisoned for accepting the necessity they saw for being ‘more than a writer’. Their interpretation of a writer’s responsibility, in their country and situation, remains a challenge, particularly to those who disagree with their actions while sharing with them the politics of opposition to repression. There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

  In South Africa the ivory tower is bulldozed anew with every black man’s home destroyed to make way for a white man’s. Yet there are positions between the bulldozed ivory tower and the maximum security prison. The one who sees his responsibility in being ‘only a writer’ has still to decide whether this means he can fulfil his essential gesture to society only by ready-packaging his creativity to the dimensions of a social realism those who will free him of his situation have the authority to ask of him, or whether he may be able to do so by work George Steiner defines as ‘scrupulously argued, not declaimed … informed, at each node and articulation of proposal, with a just sense of the complex, contradictory nature of historical evidence’.32 The great mentor of Russian revolutionary writers of the nineteenth century, Belinsky, advises: ‘Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge – they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.’33 Octavio Paz, speaking from Mexico for the needs of the Third World, sees a fundamental function as social critic for the writer who is ‘only a writer’. It is a responsibility that goes back to source: the corpus of language from which the writer arises. ‘Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.’34 This was the responsibility taken up in the post-Nazi era by Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, and is presently being fulfilled by South African writers, black and white, in exposing the real meaning of the South African government’s vocabulary of racist euphemisms – such terms as ‘separate development’, ‘resettlement’, ‘national states’, and its grammar of a racist legislature, with segregated chambers for whites, so-called coloureds and Indians, and no representation whatever for the majority of South Africans, those classified as black.

  If the writer accepts the social realist demand, from without, will he be distorting, paradoxically, the very ability he has to offer the creation of a new society? If he accepts the other, self-imposed responsibility, how far into the immediate needs of his society will he reach? Will hungry people find revelation in the ideas his work contains ‘without his knowledge’? The one certainty, in South Africa as a specific historical situation, is that there is no opting out of the two choices. Outside is a culture in sterile decay, its achievements culminating in the lines of tin toilets set up in the veld for people ‘resettled’ by force. Whether a writer is black or white, in South Africa the essenti
al gesture by which he enters the brotherhood of man – which is the only definition of society that has any permanent validity – is a revolutionary gesture.

  ‘Has God ever expressed his opinion?’ – Flaubert, writing to George Sand. ‘I believe that great art is scientific and impersonal … I want to have neither hate, nor pity, nor anger. The impartiality of description would then become equal to the majesty of the law.’35

  Nearly a century passed before the nouveau roman writers attempted this kind of majesty, taking over from another medium the mode of still life. The work aspired to be the object-in-itself, although made up of elements – words, images – that can never be lifted from the ‘partiality’ of countless connotations. The writers went as far as it is possible to go from any societal demand. They had tried so hard that their vision became fixed on Virginia Woolf’s mark on the wall – and as an end, not a beginning. Yet the anti-movement seems to have been, after all, a negative variation on a kind of social responsibility some writers have assumed at least since the beginning of the modern movement: to transform the world by style. This was and is something that could not serve as the writer’s essential gesture in countries such as South Africa and Nicaragua, but it has had its possibilities and sometimes proves its validity where complacency, indifference, accidie, and not conflict, threaten the human spirit. To transform the world by style was the iconoclastic essential gesture tried out by the Symbolists and Dadaists; but whatever social transformation (in shaping a new consciousness) they might have served in breaking old forms was horribly superseded by different means: Europe, the Far, Middle and Near East, Asia, Latin America and Africa overturned by wars; millions of human beings wandering without the basic structure of a roof.

  The Symbolists’ and Dadaists’ successors, in what Susan Sontag terms ‘the cultural revolution that refuses to be political’ have among them their ‘… spiritual adventurers, social pariahs determined to disestablish themselves … not to be morally useful to the community’ – the essential gesture withheld by Céline and Kerouac.36 Responsibility reaches out into the manifesto, however, and claims the ‘seers’ of this revolution. Through a transformation by style – depersonalised laconicism of the word almost to the Word – Samuel Beckett takes on as his essential gesture a responsibility direct to human destiny, and not to any local cell of humanity. This is the assumption of a messenger of the gods rather than a cultural worker. It is a disestablishment from the temporal; yet some kind of final statement exacted by the temporal. Is Beckett the freest writer in the world, or is he the most responsible of all?

  Kafka was also a seer, one who sought to transform consciousness by style, and who was making his essential gesture to human destiny rather than the European fragment of it to which he belonged. But he was unconscious of his desperate signal. He believed that the act of writing was one of detachment that moved writers ‘with everything we possess, to the moon’.37 He was unaware of the terrifyingly impersonal, apocalyptic, prophetic nature of his vision in that ante-room to his parents’ bedroom in Prague. Beckett, on the contrary, has been signalled to and consciously responded. The summons came from his time. His place – not Warsaw, San Salvador, Soweto – has nothing specific to ask of him. And unlike Joyce, he can never be in exile wherever he chooses to live, because he has chosen to be answerable to the twentieth-century human condition which has its camp everywhere, or nowhere – whichever way you see Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky.

  Writers who accept a professional responsibility in the transformation of society are always seeking ways of doing so that their societies could not ever imagine, let alone demand: asking of themselves means that will plunge like a drill to release the great primal spout of creativity, drench the censors, cleanse the statute books of their pornography of racist and sexist laws, hose down religious differences, extinguish napalm bombs and flame-throwers, wash away pollution from land, sea and air, and bring out human beings into the occasional summer fount of naked joy. Each has his own dowsing twig, held over heart and brain. Michel Tournier sees writers’ responsibilities as to ‘disrupt the establishment in exact proportion to their creativity’. This is a bold global responsibility, though more Orphic and terrestrial than Beckett’s. It also could be taken as an admittance that this is all writers can do; for creativity comes from within, it cannot be produced by will or dictate if it is not there, although it can be crushed by dictate. Tournier’s – this apparently fantastical and uncommitted writer’s – own creativity is nevertheless so close to the people that he respects as a marvel – and makes it so for his readers – the daily history of their lives as revealed in city trash dumps.38 And he is so fundamentally engaged by what alienates human beings that he imagines for everyone the restoration of wholeness (the totality which revolutionary art seeks to create for alienated man) in a form of Being that both sexes experience as one – something closer to a classless society than to a sexually hermaphroditic curiosity.

  The transformation of experience remains the writer’s basic essential gesture; the lifting out of a limited category something that reveals its full meaning and significance only when the writer’s imagination has expanded it. This has never been more evident than in the context of extreme experiences of sustained personal horror that are central to the period of twentieth-century writers. The English critic John Bayley has written of Anna Akhmatova:

  A violently laconic couplet at the end of the sections of Requiem records her husband dead, her son in prison … It is as good an instance as any of the power of great poetry to generalise and speak for the human predicament in extremity, for in fact she had probably never loved Gumilev, from whom she had lived apart for years, and her son had been brought up by his grandmother. But the sentiment [of the poem] was not for herself but for ‘her people’, with whom she was at that time so totally united in suffering.39

  Writers in South Africa who are ‘only writers’ are sometimes reproached by those, black and white, who are in practical revolutionary terms ‘more than writers’, for writing of events as if they themselves had been at the heart of action, endurance and suffering. So far as black writers are concerned, even though the humiliations and deprivations of daily life under apartheid enjoin them, many of them were no more among the children under fire from the police in the seventies, or are among the students and miners shot, tear-gassed and beaten in the eighties, or are living as freedom fighters in the bush, than Akhmatova was a heart-broken wife or a mother separated from a son she had nurtured. Given these circumstances, their claim to generalise and speak for a human predicament in extremity comes from the lesser or greater extent of their ability to do so; and the development of that ability is their responsibility towards those with whom they are united by this extrapolation of suffering and resistance. White writers who are ‘only writers’ are open to related reproach for ‘stealing the lives of blacks’ as good material. Their claim to this ‘material’ is the same as the black writers’ at an important existential remove nobody would discount. Their essential gesture can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekhov demanded: ‘to describe a situation so truthfully … that the reader can no longer evade it’.40

  The writer is eternally in search of entelechy in his relation to his society. Everywhere in the world, he needs to be left alone and at the same time to have a vital connection with others; needs artistic freedom and knows it cannot exist without its wider context; feels the two presences within – creative self-absorption and conscionable awareness – and must resolve whether these are locked in death-struggle, or are really foetuses in a twinship of fecundity. Will the world let him, and will he know how to be the ideal of the writer as a social being, Walter Benjamin’s story-teller, the one ‘who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story’?41

  1985

  Letter from Johannesburg

  Dear—,

  What is it you need to know about us that you cannot read as plain reportage, I wonder?
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  Well, maybe there is an indication in the ambiguity of the pronoun ‘us’. When I, as a white English-speaking South African, employ it in this context, of whom do I speak? Of whom do you Americans understand me to be speaking? For you ask about the ‘position that non-Afrikaners find themselves in after the declaration of the State of Emergency in South Africa’, and doubtless you would assume it is from that position that I respond because I am white, English-speaking, etc. But your question at once reveals that an old misconception is still current abroad: the Afrikaners are the baddies and the English-speakers the goodies among whites in our country; all Afrikaners support the State of Emergency1 and the sadistic police and army actions that led up to it, and all English-speakers would implode apartheid tomorrow if it were possible to prevail against the Afrikaner army that mans the Afrikaner fortress. This surprises me because anyone who follows the reports of foreign press correspondents in South Africa must be aware that in November 1984 the then Prime Minister, Mr P. W. Botha, received an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote for his new constitution with its tricameral parliament for whites, Indians and so-called coloureds, and total exclusion of the black majority. The referendum held was open to whites only, Afrikaans and English-speaking; Mr Botha could not have received a mandate if the English-speakers had voted ‘no’. ‘Yes,’ they said, voting along with Mr Botha’s supporters in the National Party. ‘Yes,’ they said, 15½ million black people shall have no say in the central government of South Africa.