Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  William Plomer returned to South Africa once, briefly, in 1956, after thirty years away. We met at last the writer of the only novel of poetic vision to come out of our country since Olive Schreiner’s Story of An African Farm. A tall man, quietly and handsomely dressed, exquisitely courteous, receiving with a slight smile the gushing accusation: Mr Plomer, why have you written so few novels, why haven’t you gone on writing about Africa? But he had given the answer elsewhere, when he wrote ‘Literature has its battery hens; I was a wilder fowl.’

  He died in 1973 and did not live to see the end of that epitome of the age of colonialism, apartheid, overcome in the victory of the South African black liberation movements. The native question as the answer. But he had heard and understood the answer, half a century before.

  2003

  Atlantis

  If there was one thing I knew about Cuba, it was as a country emerged from the staggering burden of a colonial past and a dictatorship – Batista’s, as we emerged from apartheid’s white minority one – but Cuba now, uniquely, subjected for more than forty years to a USA blockade. If Castro’s regime, as long as Soviet Communist power existed, was a launching pad against the USA, militarily and ideologically, neither threat has any existence today. I am a signatory to the international protest demanding that the USA lift the blockade; and I’m aware that in the USA there is a considerable body of opinion that wants it abolished.

  I am a member of the African National Congress in South Africa, but not of the South African Communist Party, one of its alliance partners. I didn’t go to Cuba prepared to celebrate uncritically what the Fidel Castro regime has achieved, nor rejoice in Western glee over its failures to provide important freedoms.

  Cubans are poor, yes. Even the writers, academics and cultural administrators I spent time with are poor by the modest standards of people working in the arts in Europe, the USA and even my own country. In the crowds at the opening of the Havana International Jazz Festival, pelvis-to-buttock, breath-to-breath in standing room only, there was a calm equilibrium that could be sensed. A Cuban companion joked, ‘We aren’t jealous of the ones who found seats. We don’t own property. There’s no keeping up with the Joneses, you see. We don’t have any Joneses.’

  Storming the bourgeoisie is the convention of revolution; taking over its ruin there is a reality. Creating a new and more just life may take longer than the forty-four years since the beginning of the Castro regime. This reality of taking over the grandiloquent ruins of colonio-capitalism in economic circumstances brought about by factors in the present is nakedly in your face as you drive along the sweep of the ancient fortressed harbour towards old Havana. Here are the empty hulks of a long façade of vast mansions that must have been merchants’ headquarters or sumptuous residences – but no, not empty. Where even three walls stand at one of the jagged, roofless levels people are bravely living. Glimpse of a table, bed.

  Terrible living conditions, comparable to those in parts of Johannesburg where illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries in conflict, squat. In a shopping alley that runs off a grand square of exquisite seventeenth- to nineteenth-century buildings, I was among dignified people, wearing the T-shirts and jeans of our international uniform, buying pizzas from hole-in-the-wall vendors. The minimum wage in Cuba is twelve dollars a month. How does one subsist? Education and medical care are good and free, and here are shed-depots where everyone exchanges their ration tickets for basic foods at low prices payable in pesos. A wartime measure – but then the USA blockade is a wartime action against a country where no one is at war with anyone.

  I was driven more than 350 kilometres from Havana to a resort of the Caribbean Paradise style dating from Batista’s time, available in dollars only. It was uncrowded, since tourists – unfortunately for the island’s economy – due to the USA’s ban on its citizens’ travel to Cuba, were confined to a Canadian party and several French people. USA ‘exemptions’ allowed 176,000 Americans to visit in 2001, and 25,000 came clandestinely; but I encountered very few anywhere.

  Everywhere royal palms are watchtowers over the Cuban landscape. The roads were walled with sugar cane interrupted by villages. I had the displaced feeling I was in the old Deep South of the USA; these rows of cabins, with someone sitting out in a rocking chair. But this wasn’t the Deep South, it was rural Cuba 2003. The poor in their rocking chairs had big cigars in their mouths. Almost the only cars and buses were on the single highway; there are few private cars in Cuba, these mainly vintage Oldsmobiles, de Sotos and Chryslers. The weekend family outing was measuredly taking place by horse and cart.

  In Havana I had asked a writer why there were no independent newspapers in Cuba, no freedom of expression, stressing the difference there is between a press seeking to bring down a regime and a newspaper advocating reforms within it. Money, rather than fear of state retribution, he said. The only funds available to any reformist group for paper and printing would come from the Cubans in Florida whose sole intention is to topple Castro, and the importance of whose vote in USA elections keeps the blockade in force. But I knew that dissident Cuban journalists land in prison …

  I see Cuba as a place of symbols. An Atlantis risen to confront us. The fall of the Soviet Empire drowned the island in our time as a relic of twentieth-century power-politics. To visit it is to come upon a piece of our not distant past, significantly surfaced.

  Here is all that is left of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of our twentieth century, in the form it took as the utopian dream for a just world.

  Here is the flotsam of vulgar capitalist materialism: the forties and fifties cars with their airflow flourish, fishtail embellishments, somehow kept running!

  Two features from our past: the once great solution to an unjust world, Marxist-Leninism, become another kind of honourable folk-wisdom to follow, rather than the unquestionable solution to that world; and the trivial values of that world: they seemed shockingly reduced to the same level against the realities of our twenty-first-century survival. One of Cuba’s intellectuals asks ‘Cuba: socialist museum or social laboratory?’ Could it be the latter? A social democracy of the Left already showing a tendency to follow the inspiration of José Marti: could Fidel Castro (or his successor) make use of the ideas of his original mentor for human justice, facing inevitable millennium facts, testing globalisation’s universality, without betraying an evolved revolution?

  The end of the USA’s strangulation blockade will not solve magically the problems of a country with few natural resources. But the beginning of any transformation of Cuba’s nobly borne hardship and poverty is the lifting of the outrageous edict. The blockade is a shameful and meaningless act of an overweening power, senseless in terms of world politics since the Soviet Union doesn’t exist.

  2003

  Thirst

  Turn a globe and it seems our world is awash with endless water. A paradox, that delegates to the World Water Forum taking place in Kyoto come with a crisis agenda that the future of our planet is a growing thirst which threatens all living matter. While 70 per cent of our earth’s surface is covered by water, 97.5 per cent is salt water. Good only for whales, fish, crustaceans, and so on. Of the 2.5 per cent of fresh water on which life subsists, almost three-quarters is frozen in ice caps. Not unexpected that water resources can be a source of conflict between communities and territories. But necessity demands that water be shared for everyone’s survival. Perforce it becomes a catalyst for international cooperation: water is also an agent for peace.

  We are prodigal in our use of the precious liquor of life. In the twentieth century its use grew at twice the rate of the world population growth. Changing climate patterns, pollution, reckless deforestation, draining of wetlands – all contributed to the colossal binge. While extravagance was and is in progress for some countries and people, more than a billion lack access to a steady supply of clean water. Over 2.2 million, mostly in the developing countries, die each year from diseases carried by the impure water that is all they
have to drink. Six thousand children die every day – yes, I stop, appalled, as I write this – of the same cause.

  The benefice of water affects many less obvious aspect of poverty. While campaigns proceed to provide life-prolonging drugs to sufferers in Africa’s plague of HIV/Aids, the success of treatment regimes requires the physical resistance booster of decent living conditions – and these begin with clean water. The edict ‘Water is life’ takes on many nuances.

  The provision of a water supply to communities is only half a solution to its lack. Absence of effective sanitation means that the supply becomes polluted by seepage of faecal matter. The thirst is quenched but disease is imbibed with it. So access to effective sanitation along with fresh water supply is now recognised as the essential two-fold provision to meet human needs.

  There are high-sounding terms which link the water supply factor indivisibly to others in the broad concept of providing a liveable environment now, and ensuring it for the future. ‘Sustainable development’, ‘biological diversity’, ‘resource management’, ‘streamline existing’. Not least emphasised is ‘good governance’ to be implemented by both territorial and international policies. At the launch of the African-European Union Strategic Partnership on Water Affairs and Sanitation last year, the Presidents of South Africa and Nigeria, Thabo Mbeki and Olusegan Obasango, and Presidents of the European Council and European Union, Andus Fogh Pasmussen and Romano Prodi, issued a statement ‘underlining that water resource management needs to be addressed at all levels’ and that ‘a balance between water needs and those of the environment can contribute to the goal of halting the loss of environment resources by 2015’. They stressed the dependency of this goal on the new strategic long-term partnership between governments … the relevant stakeholders … civil society and the private sector.’ In fact everybody who ever turned on a tap or filled a glass. Human interdependence; it even specifies that water resource development should be ‘gender sensitive’.

  If this last looks like a nervous nod granting feminists the equal experience of thirst, it is in fact serious recognition of the (literally) heavy responsibility of women in the distribution systems of water in vast areas of the world. Theirs is the biblical category of drawers of water. And too often, in many countries, they carry it in vessels on their heads for many miles. Their generations-long role in what one might call human reticulation has been greatest on the African continent; in South Africa, coincident with the World Water Forum in Japan, there will be the presentation of ‘Women In Water Awards’ by the Department of Water and Forestry, to ‘highlight and promote the participation of women in water resources management’ both as the old bearers of its weight and their new role in overseeing, educating their communities in the fair-sharing and conservation of fresh water supplies.

  The ‘World Water Report’, outcome of the Forum, will gather its conclusions from delegates’ projects dedicated to conserve the world’s water and to ensure that it does not favour the private swimming pools of the rich countries while the taps of the poor run dry. A leading proposition before the Forum is the United Nations Development Programme ‘Community Water Initiative’, with a budget of 500,000 dollars for this year alone, rising to a target of 50 million over five years. It will support ‘innovative, community-level approaches to water supply, sanitation and watershed management to an increasing number of developing countries as one part of the UNDP’s drive to halve, by 2015, the number of the world’s people who are without access to potable water’.

  There are so many threats to our continued existence; one hardly need name them. Some affect specific countries, regions defined by power groups. They are resolved or bring disaster to this or that part of the world. And if we can keep our patch of the planet clear of them, well, we turn away and hope to flourish through the next generation’s day. But one threat applies to us all. If we do not recognise our global life-dependency on water, we shall thirst, on a parched planet.

  2003

  Questions Journalists Don’t Ask

  Anybody who has any kind of public persona – pop star, sports hero, politician, artist, writer – knows the predictable questions a journalist will ask in an interview, according to whatever defining area of professional achievement the interviewee belongs. (We could reply in our sleep.) Such is fame or notoriety – pop stars and politicians the best copy. Writers – none of whose achievements have been or are famous on that scale, except perhaps Romeo and Juliet, Gone With The Wind and Harry Potter – are obliged, by their publishers, to be interviewed. I am one of them. (The authors of the Bible are a collective, agents of a Creativity said to be in heaven, therefore inaccessible.)

  As years have gone by in a long writing life, I have musingly assembled in memory a short list of the questions journalists don’t ask. These sometimes would seem to me much more interesting – better copy? – than the ones they do. So I’ve decided to interview myself, and see what I can winkle out that they don’t think to. This implies I must also answer myself no matter how reluctant that self may be? Yes. Not I’ll be the judge, I’ll be the jury, but I’ll be the journalist, I’ll be victim. Some sample questions from me to me:

  N.Q.

  What is the most important lack in your life?

  N.A.

  I’ve lived that life in Africa without learning an African language. Even in my closest friendships, literary and political activities with black fellow South Africans, they speak only English with me. If they’re conversing together in one of their mother tongues (and all speak at least three or four of each other’s) I don’t understand more than a few words that have passed into our common South African use of English. So I’m deaf to an essential part of the South African culture to which I’m committed and belong.

  N.Q.

  What’s the most blatant lie you’ve ever told?

  N.A.

  Really can’t distinguish. Living through apartheid under Secret Police surveillance made those of us who opposed the regime actively, accomplished liars. You lied that you didn’t know the whereabouts of someone the police were looking to arrest, you lied about your encounters and movements; had to, in order to protect others and yourself.

  N.Q.

  You’ve achieved something as a writer, OK; but you have a daughter and a son, how do you rate as a mother?

  N.A.

  Ask them. If you don’t want to hear any other self-protective lies.

  N.Q.

  What was the best compliment you’ve ever been paid?

  N.A.

  When I was, years and years ago, on a camping trip on a farm, I was bitten by ticks that had brushed off the long grass I’d been walking through. When I complained of this, the old and very unattractive farmer said ‘If I was a tick, I’d also like to bite you.’

  N.Q.

  What is the most demeaning thing said about you as a writer?

  N.A.

  My eight-year-old son, when asked by a schoolfriend what his mother’s job was, said ‘She’s a typist.’ True, I was in my study typing some fiction or other at the time; I overheard, through my window, his judgement in the garden.

  N.Q.

  You were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at the hands of the King of Sweden. Do you look back on that as the best moment in your life?

  N.A.

  Best moment? Reinhold Cassirer and I had just married, and were at a party in London. He had gone to find a friend in an adjoining room. I found myself standing beside a woman I didn’t know, both of us amiably drinks in hand. He appeared in the doorway. She turned aside to me and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Who’s that divine man?’ I said: ‘My husband.’

  N.Q.

  How do you react to a bad review of one of your books?

  N.A.

  Ignore it if it’s by some hack, easily recognised by his/her poor understanding of what the book’s about. Pretend (to myself) to ignore it if it’s written by one whose judgement and critical ability I respect; and then take that judgement into a
ccount when, as my own sternest critic, I judge what I achieved or didn’t in that book.

  N.Q.

  How gratified are you to have your writing praised?

  N.A.

  Same answer as the one above: not at all, if I don’t respect the judgement of the one who praises, gratified when I believe the piece of work justifies such recognition coming from someone whose honesty, intellect and level of literary judgement I respect.

  N.Q.

  While writing, do you take drugs, smoke marijuana or drink alcohol to beef up your creative imagination?

  N.A.

  Only a double Scotch; hours after my writing day is over. (Wow! That quiz would be a tough one for many of my fellow writers, starting off with De Quincey.)

  N.Q.

  Do you think a writer should also know how to cook?

  N.A.

  Yes. The ivory tower has no kitchen. Work done there needs the earth of the ordinary tasks, distractions of everybody’s existence, although we writers complain like hell about this.

  N.Q.

  As a liberated woman, would you nevertheless prefer to have been born a man?

  N.A.

  Both sexes experience the joys of love-making. If she chooses, a woman has the additional extraordinary experience of growing a life inside herself, and presenting the world to it. It’s painful – all right. But the wider experience in life a writer has, the better the ability to identify with lives other than the writer’s own, and create varieties of character, states of being, other than his/her own. I sometimes think, for example, I’ve missed out on extending emotional experience by never having been sexually attracted to a woman. Anyway, a writer as such is a special kind of androgynous creature, all sexes and all ages when creating fictional characters, all the people he or she has known, observed or interacted with. So while I’m a woman, as a writer I’m a composite intelligence.