11 April 2008
Windhoek — African Nobel Prize Winner, Nadine Gordimer by Karina Magda-lena Brink over the next few weeks. The paper was presented at the University of Namibia on April 3.
ALREADY in her eighties, Nadine Gordimer is still continuing an amazing literary career, which, by now, exceeds over 70 years. She has been a fundamental presence on the South African literary stage as an author of short stories, novels, reviews, essays and diverse other criticism which have shaped the literary landscape of her country and the academic and literary scene worldwide. Always the defender of human rights and a declared opponent of apartheid, now, 14 years after the first free elections in South Africa, and 17 years after receiving the ultimate recognition a writer can hope for, the Nobel Prize, Gordimer is still close to the pulse of the country's developments using her seismographic perception to capture and transform reality into fiction.
Gordimer has repeatedly been called "the voice", "the conscience" or "the interpreter" of the nation. When in an interview I conducted with her in 2004 I asked her whether she perceives herself as such, she vehemently denied it.
Yet, despite her denial, many have no doubt about her status and her achievements. Whether it is a South African academic such as Andries Walter Oliphant, or Per Wästberg, the chairman of the Nobel Committee, Gordimer's friends and critics see her as the "archivist and lighthouse keeper" of South African reality. At the same time her work captures, what Wästberg referred to as "a universal landscape." It is this "universal landscape" that makes her so accessible to readers across the world. However, she has always been aware of her subjectivity and her being part of a minority of voices. For a long time, as a white person trying to link up with South Africa's real majority, the blacks, she remained a minority within a minority, the whites that fiercely opposed apartheid.
Naturally, no single person can represent an entire nation's conscience, especially not in a country like South Africa, which is strongly characterised by social diversity. Moreover, every person is limited in their perception of the world, whether through internal or external circumstances. Thus, Gordimer's vision is also subject to various limitations, but the integrity with which she has approached her society and has written about it has been exceptional.
She might not be South Africa's sole "conscience", "voice", or "interpreter", but she is one of the most important ones. She has certainly brought worldwide attention to South Africa and is still one of the few South African authors known outside of the country.
The role of writers in South Africa has always been precarious. In the past, they had to negotiate the position of their writing between commitment and indifference on the one hand, and between aesthetics and functionality on the other. Their role, naturally, had to be reconsidered in the post-apartheid era. Fourteen years is not a long time, one must not forget that only recently did apartheid still exist, protected and enforced by the government of the country and its laws.
Gordimer's awareness of the horrifying discriminatory political situation in her country started quite early and developed during her personal life and literary career into strong opposition and an open struggle against apartheid.
Before 1994, most of her writing was called "political". However, she repeatedly argued that she was not a political writer; for her that would have meant being a propagandist, which she never wanted to be and never was. Her books were politically charged because the reality depicted in them was politically charged. Because of apartheid, the personal in her stories necessarily evoked the political. But it was the personal that was always at the centre of her attention, and that interest did not shift when apartheid was abolished.
Gordimer's fiction has always been deeply rooted in the reality it was looting, as she herself expressed it during our interview in 2004. She told me that "to loot" is "to pick" things and that is what she is doing: she is constantly "taking from life", and that is why she chose "loot" as the title of her 2003 short-story collection. She always stays close to the question of the writer's responsibility, commitment and creativity in a society where culture and politics remain interlinked. Her priority, nevertheless, continues to be writing as such, not as a political instrument, but as a means of artistic expression.
The post-apartheid order brought with it many challenges even for a writer of such calibre as Gordimer. Throughout the recent years she proved more than once her ingenuity to adjust to new circumstances. In her fiction, she has turned to contemporary themes such as land politics, fractured human relationships, AIDS, violence, belonging, identity, corruption, education, the situation of refugees in Africa, ecology or globalisation. In her life, as a South African citizen, she has been able to embrace, at last, her status as a postcolonial subject (or agent). It is this embrace that I would like to call Gordimer's third birth.
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