Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘What do we know / But that we face / One another in this place’ – William Butler Yeats. That is surely the subject that in the dwelling place of words, everywhere, chooses the writer.

  2001

  The Entitlement Approach

  Governance’: ‘the action or manner of governing’, ‘the state of being governed’. In the past this dictionary definition was taken as referring specifically to national governments and their people. But in our age of globalisation, of global resources and certainly global problems, the concept of governance in relation to tackling world poverty starts at a much higher level, the Everest of international finance. Governance in individual countries is influenced by and in many instances prescribed by these. So we have to begin by facing the opposing conceptions most widely held about the devolution from the heights, down to earth.

  Recipient countries of loan funds through the IMF and World Bank resent conditions imposed by the agencies of the financial Everest as to the ways in which the money is to be used. They even assert that development – the object – is hampered by such conditions.

  The agencies cite stringent necessity for conditions in order to counter their experience of corruption as a government conduit through which the funds disappear without any development reaching a country’s population.

  So governance begins above a country’s own laws and administration. Whether debt owed to the Everest should be written off, in view of crippling interest payments required even from countries which do use the money for sustainable development, is another question – should Everest be a usurer, or should it be the real agent of redistribution of wealth?

  There are encouraging signs of a change in conception on the part of donors and recipients. Mamphele Ramphele, speaking as Managing Director of the Human Development Unit of the World Bank, says that the approach now needed is for ‘countries to take ownership’ of development rather than ‘receive prescribed programmes of action … to leverage their own destiny and build capacity for themselves’.105 Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade says of Africans who have been ‘financing debt by loans and aid for years’, ‘Those instruments don’t take us far … we must first understand how we got into debt in the first place.’106 This facing of reality by both donor and debtor gives credence to the claim by ten African leaders conferring with the IMF and World Bank this year, of a ‘major step forward to define a new approach to fight poverty in Africa’.

  What principal areas of national life depend on good national governance if poverty is to be tackled on the ground, within each country? Foremost, surely: unemployment, post-colonial land redistribution, use and exploitation of natural resources, health care with emphasis on the Aids epidemic, education; and not least, corruption. There is a determining condition if these are to be addressed: press and media freedom. There is no good governance without a population free to participate in open debate on government policy and practice, to effect for themselves progress in the condition of their lives.

  ‘Entitlement relations’107 – Amartya Sen’s phrase defines for me what global governance through international finance and national governance on the ground need to have with a population on the premise that they are to tackle poverty the only effective way – together. And here UNDP, with partnership stressed as its mode of operation in the twenty-first century, provides a model in its proven dedication to be, itself, a partner in enterprises of and for good governance. Experience in project innovation has taught the lesson that success is dependent on making sure governance of a country has the minimum means, and the will, to cooperate – the capacity. This implies that capacity training is, in itself, a project in the partnership of governance with poverty elimination. A project cannot succeed where the capacity to implement it – whether through lack of trained personnel, communication facilities – is not at least in a parallel state of development. To reach the end, there must be the minimal means. Then the energy and determination of the population can, and does, take off for success.

  The developing world, the peoples of that world, have entitlement; entitlement to the redistribution of the world’s wealth rather than the euphemistic ‘aid’, entitlement to just, incorruptible governance. The right to recognition of, and action within, the interdependence of governance and the millennial, global problem, poverty.

  2001

  The Ballad of the Fifth Avenue Hotel

  The Fifth Avenue Hotel. Easter 1954. Dim purple lighting on toy bunny rabbits perched over our heads all around a ledge beneath the restaurant ceiling. I am thirty years old, I have published two books of stories and a first novel; I am in the USA for the first time and I’m seated at table with a famous American writer – a Southerner, like myself, although my South is Africa – whose work I greatly admire. She is Carson McCullers. We have been brought together, in my neophyte’s privileged anticipation, by the kindness of her sister, Margaret Smith, and Cyrilly Abels, editors of Mademoiselle, then a literary-innovative women’s magazine that, along with The New Yorker, had published some of my stories. There before me is that life-questioning image, the wonderful face of a wise child who was born devastatingly knowing too much – the face of the being who wrote The Ballad of the Sad Café.

  What I didn’t know was that Carson had just come out of long weeks of detoxification, shut away somewhere. What I also didn’t know was what that experience could do to the victim; how dazed was the return to the world. What followed was surely a scene written by her friend Tennessee Williams. Carson kept saying to Margaret, ‘Sister, I think we need a a new beau.’ It wasn’t ironic or in lunch-table jest; it was a grave and determined conclusion. With me was my new husband (of one month). All through the meal Carson leaned a hand with a delicate fork, taking morsels from his plate. The questions I had ready to ask the writer who had meant much to me fled my mind. I managed somehow to tell her of my admiration for her work; don’t remember that brought any response.

  Bunny rabbits sister we need a new beau.

  So America was a purple-lit fantasy with a foreboding message. If this was what fame could mean for a writer, I didn’t think I wanted it ever to come to me. My husband (my new beau) was more compassionately moved, less judgemental; less frightened, although he himself had just taken on that risky mate, a writer.

  Meeting those emissaries of American culture, the writers, has been mostly good and reassuring since that sad ballad of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Soon there was Eudora Welty, American Chekhov, whose stories had early influenced me: Eudora in Jackson, Mississippi, as wonderful in person as she is as a writer. An American original of a special kind.

  I haven’t always encountered American writers in their home country. John Updike and I met happily in Australia, where at the Adelaide Festival we looked like a comedy duo, he so gangling tall, I so small. Kurt Vonnegut literally embodied a wry American brand of humour at a writers’ get-together in Sweden. I met James Baldwin in France and we talked as if we’d known each other always; perhaps we had, in our experience of racism, he in his country, I in mine – what this means for the transformations of the writer’s imagination.

  Some encounters have resulted in precious friendship. At a literary conference there was a woman with a damn-you-all beautiful face and swirling black hair, sitting on a step outside the venue: I recognised Susan Sontag. We fled the deliberations and explored the foreign city; the first of many exhilarating times together. Elisabeth Hardwick lent me Robert Lowell’s den-apartment with library, in New York; gave me the freedom of her rich mind as well as the place where she still lives.

  Of course I’d met America through their writings – all of them – along with the America of Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Miller, Hemingway et al. (he more definitively American abroad than at home); had been confronted with the country in this deepest way, before coming face to face.

  2001

  Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart

  Things fall apart.

  Chinua Achebe’s title, quote
d from a poem by William Butler Yeats, seems a challenging declaration: what chaos will the reader be confronted with when taking up the opening pages of this book, first published in 1958?

  But the title is a presentiment: Achebe is going to create what was complete before the situation in the title is to come about. Only then can the revelation of disintegration be fully understood. Achebe did not begin this first novel, and does not begin his later ones, with description of the setting of the story. In what country his characters live, what kind of life in what sort of landscape, city, village – he plunges us immediately among the people themselves in their full activity, and their physical surroundings of a region of Nigeria, West Africa, emerge as part of their identity as the reader follows. Okonkwo, the central character, is introduced in the first paragraph as a young man who has brought honour to his village by his fame as a wrestler, never thrown by opponents in any of the bouts of the traditional sport popular in the region. ‘The drums beat and the flutes sound and the spectators held their breath … Amazile was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten … he was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.’

  Achebe has the master story-teller’s knowledge that the present – what is happening to his characters now – can be totally meaningful only if (the way it is in our own lives) the past that has formed these people is shown as still within them, directing their lives. Okonkwo’s story is taken up in an actual period not long before Nigeria’s independence from British rule. ‘That was … twenty years ago or more, and during this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush fire in the harmattan.’ Okonkwo’s father was a failure by the standards of this Nigerian village of the Ibo clan with which we have quickly been made familiar through lively anecdotal exchange. Idle, owing thousands of cowries (the local currency), he had never qualified to take the series of traditional titles which recognise honour and success in Umuofia, and which are marked not by the medals that are presented to dignitaries in the European world, but by special anklets worn by those honoured. Even after his father has been dead for ten years, the driving motive in Okonkwo’s life is to be everything his father was not. Okonkwo has triumphed in tribal battles, he’s a wealthy farmer with three wives, and has taken two titles while still young. But this distinction and success bring about an obligation that Achebe introduces as natural, unexceptional in a close-knit society, yet whose consequences he is going to lead us to discover along with him, without advance warning – such is his power to engage the reader rather than tell a story.

  Now an introduction must not reveal too much of what is in the book itself, only arouse anticipation; so I shan’t recount the dramatic warring dispute between Umuofia and a neighbouring village, Mbaino, which results in Okonkwo being given the responsibility of taking into his household Ikemefuna, an Mbaino boy, given as reparation. The child at first is terrified, cannot understand what is happening to him, but he is a lively boy, becomes popular in Okonkwo’s household and a special friend of Okonkwo’s son Nwoye. Okonkwo, who regards the show of any emotion as weakness (the weakness of his father), is inwardly fond of the boy and so treats him familiarly like everybody else – ‘with a heavy hand’. Ikemefuna calls him Father and sometimes has the honour of being allowed to carry Okonkwo’s stool and goatskin bag to village ancestral feasts.

  Ikemefuna takes part with the whole family in the planting of the yam. The yam is introduced here as ‘the king of crops’, the beautiful, bustling detail of its cultivation both the cycle of seasons and, as life-sustaining food, the cycle of human existence; from this first novel can be traced further the yam’s compelling emergence, in Achebe’s later work, as a philosophical and political symbol: life and death in the opposition of the yam and the knife.

  The Feast of the New Yam is a two-day village celebration with feasting, palm wine and the customary great wrestling match between Okonkwo’s village and its neighbours. It’s a joyful interlude in which Achebe generously, for the reader’s pleasure, uses his gifts of creating a whole community of men, women and children as people we instantly get to know intimately, recognising their individual ways of expressing themselves. The comedy of sharp exchanges and laughter sounds against the drums beating out the wrestling dance; you can almost smell the scents of the cooking. There are delightful conversations to be overheard between the women, half pidgin English, half to be followed as translated by Achebe from the rich imagery of the Ibo language. The undercurrent of the order of life for the Umuofians is revealed in what appears to be ordinary talk, gossip and conventional polite enquiry. Ezinma, Okonkwo’s favourite daughter, comes to our attention. A woman who knows the girl’s mother and has seen a number of her children die early, asks about Ezinma. The mother says: ‘She has been well for some time now. Perhaps she has come to stay.’ ‘I think she will stay,’ says the other woman. ‘They usually stay if they do not die before the age of six.’

  Now Ikemefuna has lived in Okonkwo’s household for three years and Okonkwo is pleased that his influence on Nwoye is excellent. He encourages the two boys to sit with him, manly, in his obi – his quarters. He tells them stories of tribal wars and his own bold exploits. Nwoye prefers the folk stories and legends his mother used to tell him, and which enrich this novel with a cast of wily characters – including cosmic Earth and Sky – that make Disney’s pale by contrast. The time of harmony, peace and plenty continues with the arrival of the great sky-darkening horde of locusts – here, not the curse of the biblical locusts but a delicacy everyone turns out to catch and eat.

  Achebe’s exploration of life – which is what all literature, all art is – through the wonderful powers of his imagination, reveals in all his writings the particular vulnerability of human beings when they are most happy. It is then that some almost forgotten conflict in the past suddenly raises the knife against the yam. Okonkwo is in his obi with Ikemefuna and Nwoye, crunching locusts and drinking palm wine, when the village elder, Ezeudu, arrives and asks to see Okonkwo outside. There he says something incomprehensible to Okonkwo, presenting Ikemefuna as an outcast who cannot continue to be accepted by the Umuofians. The Oracle of the Hills and Caves has declared he must be killed. The old man says, ‘That boy calls you father. Do not bear a hand in his death … They will take him outside Umuofia as is the custom, and kill him there. But I want you to have nothing to do with it. He calls you father.’

  How Okonkwo is fatefully involved in this inescapable murder is told mainly through the thoughts of the boy who, believing he is being returned to his home village, is being escorted by the Umuofians to his death. As he is struck by the matchet of one of the men he runs towards Okonkwo, calls out ‘“My father, they have killed me!” Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.’

  For a time Okonkwo can neither eat nor sleep. He drinks wine ‘from morning till night, and his eyes were red and fierce like the eyes of a rat when it was caught by the tail and dashed against the floor’. For the sacrifice of Ikemefuna, his son Nwoye will never forgive him, with fateful consequences to unfold in his own life and that of his father.

  But Okonkwo recovers: ‘he is not a man of thought but of action; it is the season to tap his palm trees for wine, and the family of a suitor for his daughter, sixteen-year-old Akueke, is about to arrive’. The negotiations between the two families over cowrie bride-price and the amount of palm wine the bridegroom’s family is expected to provide are enchantingly comic and slyly character-revealing, without malice – a feature of Achebe’s humour, particularly in his early work, before the ugly and terrible times of civil war and post-independence corruption within which he was writing sharpened humour into teeth-clenched satire.

  It is in the chatter at the marriage negotiations that the white man enters for the first time in Umuofia and th
e novel. There is discussion about different customs among different villages. Someone remarks

  ‘But what is good in one place is bad in another place …’

  ‘The world is large,’ said Okonkwo, ‘I have even heard that in

  some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.’

  ‘That cannot be,’ said Machi. ‘You might as well say that the

  woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.’

  ‘It is like the story of white men who, they say, are white like

  this piece of chalk,’ said Obierika ‘… And these white men, they say, have no toes.’

  ‘Have you ever seen them?’ asked Machi.

  ‘Have you?’ asked Obierika.

  ‘One of them passes here frequently’ [says Machi.] ‘His name is Amadi.’ Those who knew Amadi laughed. He was a leper, and the polite name for leprosy was ‘the white skin’.

  The people of Umuofia are great talkers. They become lively companions of the reader, who is overhearing their memories, rivalries, opinions, teasing, original views, all expressed with humour and intimate imagery that come from their way of life, its continuum of history, legend, security of place. The joking reference to the fact that no one has seen a white man is merely a snatch of the exchanges that criss-cross from subject to subject. The white man is butt of a laughable anecdote; he is not there yet, with his Bible and his gun. But Achebe has sounded the single beat of a distant drum, just as subconsciously in our own everyday talk there may occur an unnoticed reference to something that is looming, one day to change our lives.