Karina Magdalena Brink
9 May 2008
Windhoek — WITH her latest novel Get a Life (2005) Gordimer turns to an entirely new topic, not only in her own oeuvre, but also in South African literature: ecology and environmental protection.
The novel, most probably the first truly self-conscious "green" novel in South Africa, closely examines the environmental problems arising from industrial development in the country and exposes the strikingly ignorant and greedy attitudes of people involved in it.
The novel is also a portrayal of two marriages at different stages in the couples' lives. Significantly, Get a Life, Loot, and Gordimer's latest short story collection Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007), are dedicated to Gordimer's late husband Reinhold Cassier. Loot in particular mentions in the dedication his birth and death dates as well as the date when the couple met on 1 March 1953. In an interview in 2003, Gordimer was asked whether after her husband's death writing brought her "peace, solace from the everyday." And Gordimer responded:
Thus, it is no surprise that there is a shift in Gordimer's recent writing in the urgency of the writer's confrontation with death. It is by no means absent from her earlier fiction, but there the confrontation took on a more unexpected, violent form. In Gordimer's later work, preoccupation with ageing and natural death becomes more evident as in None to Accompany Me or Get a Life.
Gordimer's continuing commitment to her country, the life around her, is not only exemplified by her writing, but also by her activism. She is an UN Ambassador of Goodwill and supports the global campaign to eradicate poverty. Her editorship of Telling Tales in 2004 is another of the countless reasons why she has been called, in spite of her insistence that she is not, the "moral conscience of her nation". Telling Tales is an anthology of short fiction by famous authors from around the world, among them Margaret Atwood, Susan Sontag, Günther Grass; all profits from the sale of the book worldwide go to the Treatment Action Campaign, their HIV and AIDS preventive education and for medical treatment of infected people.
More recently Gordimer has urged writers across the world to protest against the human rights abuses in Burma, herself writing to the Secretary General of the United Nations to voice protest against the oppression of the Burmese people by the military junta. Only three weeks ago she spoke out against the terrible events which took place at the UFS, which I am sure you were also able to follow in the local media. Gordimer is never afraid to confront pressing socio-political issues and in her "actions" and in her "fiction" devotes herself constantly to making South Africa and the world a better place.
She also continues to 'imagine the nation' and its identity within a process of globalisation not only in her fiction, but also in her non-fiction, especially her second collection of essays published since 1994, Living in Hope and History:
Notes from Our Century (1999). The turn of the twenty-first century invited many reflections upon the upcoming millennium and its promises and challenges for the art world.
Thus, in the essay "Turning the Page: African Writers and the Twenty-First Century", Gordimer analyses the relevance and the future of political engagement in African literature. In the past, the task of African writers was "to bring to our people's consciousness and that of the world the true dimension of racism and colonialism beyond those that can be reached by the newspaper column and screen image, however valuable these may be. We have sought the fingerprint of flesh on history."
As the page turns, to use her phrase, Gordimer and other African writers face new problems, many of which are inherited from the past: the level of illiteracy in African countries, the legacy of colonial distribution networks in publishing, the lack of state subsidies, the invasion of cultural pulp, even multi-lingualism, which in itself is not a negative legacy, but certainly not an easy factor in considerations about publishing and improving literacy since the infrastructures needed for both are underdeveloped in languages other than English and Afrikaans - all in all "factors that stand against the writer's act of transforming literature in response to a new era", forcing writers "to take on contingent responsibilities that should not be" theirs. However, Gordimer is more than ever prepared to take on the challenge:
Another of the essays in the collection, "The Status of the Writer in the World Today: Which World? Whose World", is an answer to Edward Said's review of Writing and Being where he chided Gordimer for thinking that Naguib Mahfouz has not been recognised for his greatness in world literature. She was confining her judgment to Western perceptions, argued Said, neglecting the fact that Mahfouz's literary greatness had long been recognised in Arabic literature.
Said's comment prompted Gordimer's revaluation of the concept of "world literature" and the assessment of African writers "in the worlds-within-'the world'" they occupy. In this essay she pleads for the meeting and interchange between African writers, "to meet in the flesh, take one another's hands, hear one another"; for "a Pan-African network of publishers and distributors"; for accessibility through translation; for a system of supporting cultural organisations; and for "cultural self-realisation and development in an Africa that never existed before, because it is an Africa that has come through:
emerged from the experience of slavery, colonial oppression, the humiliating exploitation of paternalism, economic and spiritual degradation, suffering of every nature human evil could devise. A continent that has liberated itself; overcome." As it is now that "Africans have established, beyond question, that our continent is not part of anyone's erstwhile empire."
In the essay "Living on a Frontier-less Land: Cultural Globalisation", Gordimer takes up similar issues and asks about the process of globalisation of culture and its aims, analysing how South Africa can enter the scene and contribute to it. She stresses how important "creativity of our African selfhood" is and that communication between artists around the world does not just happen along the North-South axis "imposed by colonisation-cum-Europeanization", but also along the South-South axis. The countries of the South share a common background of colonisation and slavery that offers many opportunities of exploration "that Eurocentric colonial attitudes ignored and denied us."
Gordimer invites the Western world to join in this exploration of "existential ties" between the southern hemispheres, "for even the riches of Western culture are limiting, in the context of a global culture."
It is fascinating to read in these essays how complete and final Gordimer's move into the embrace of her country and Africa has become. As Ronald Suresh Roberts notes in his controversial Gordimer biography, No Cold Kitchen (2005): "From inside a heritage of homage to Europe, Gordimer emerged as the twentieth century's foremost white Afrocentrist." There is no questioning of terms anymore: "we" and "our" definitely mean South Africa, Africa and countries with similar affinities; "they" and "their" refers to the Western world. However, for Gordimer, there is no hierarchy involved;
everybody is welcome to join "the frontier-less territory of creativity."
By now, Gordimer's work is known all over the world. Most of her writing has been made available to an international public through numerous translations. As the author of fourteen novels, eleven short story collections, four collections of critical writing, two photographic collaborations and countless reviews; as editor and scriptwriter and as a tireless participant in cultural and social activities in her home country and around the world, Nadine Gordimer lives and writes at the age of eighty-four in her house in a quiet part of Johannesburg, which has been her home for almost half a century. She will continue 'singing' and 'croaking' in her, ie also our, world - for her people, ie all of us.
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