Nadine Gordimer - Living in Hope and History - Notes from Our Century

In Africa and many places elsewhere, John Updike’s beautifully-written genre stories of preoccupation with divorces and adulteries could touch off no referential responses in readers for whom sexual and family life are determined by circumstances of law and conflict that have no referents in the professional class of suburban North America. The domestic traumas of black South Africans are children imprisoned in detention, lovers fleeing the country from security police, plastic shelters demolished by the authorities and patched together again by husband and wife. The novels of Gabriel García Márquez, himself a socialist, presuppose an answering delight in the larger-than-life that can find little response in those whose own real experience outdoes all extremes, the solitudes of apartheid surpassing any hundred years of solitude. The marvellous fantasies of an Italo Calvino require givens between writer and reader that are not merely a matter of sophistication.

Life is not like that for this readership. Books are not (Barthes) made of other books, for them. Furthermore, the imaginative projection of what life might be like is not like that. These texts cannot be ‘read’ even in terms of aspirations. Surely this is true of serious writers in and from most countries where material conditions do not remotely correspond with those of the reader.

It is most obvious in South Africa. White writers, living as part of an over-privileged minority, are worlds away from those of a migratory miner living in a single-sex hostel, a black schoolteacher grappling with pupils who risk their lives as revolutionaries, black journalists, doctors, clerks, harassed by the police and vigilantes round their homes. The gap sometimes seems too great to reach across for even the most talented and sensitive power of empathy and imaginative projection. I am not saying, nor do I believe, that whites cannot write about blacks, or blacks about whites. Even black writers, who share with these readers disaffection and humiliation under racist laws, generally acquire middle-class or privileged unconventional styles of living and working concommitant with middle-class signifiers, as they make their way as writers. Often it is only by a self-conscious effort of memory — using the signifiers of childhood, before they joined the elite of letters, or drawing on the collective memory of an oral tradition — that they can be sure they will be ‘read’ by these readers. Freedom of movement — week-end trips, stays in hotels, choice of occupation — which punctuates the lives of many fictional characters, signifies nothing to the migratory worker whose contract does not allow him to stay on in town if he changes jobs, and whose ‘holiday’ at the end of eighteen months down a mine is the return home to plough and sow. The cosseted white adolescent who rebels against the materialism of parents signifies nothing to the child revolutionaries, often precociously intelligent, an increasing phenomenon in Latin America as well as South Africa, who have abandoned parents, never known home comforts, and taken on life-and-death decisions for themselves. Even among white-collar readers of this milieu, existential anguish — Sartre’s nausea or Freud’s discontents — finds no answering association where there is a total preoccupation with the business of survival. The Spoils of Poynton cannot be read as the apotheosis of the cult of possession by someone who has never seen such objects to covet, someone whose needs would not correspond to any attraction they are presupposed to have — that ‘given’ attraction taken as read, by the writer.

You might well object: Who expects a poorly-educated clerk or teacher to read Henry James? But, as I have tried to illustrate, many signifiers that are commonplace, assumed, in the cultural code of the writer find no referents in that of the potential wider readership.

What can the writer count on if she/he obstinately persists that one can write for anyone who picks up one’s book? Even the basic emotions, love, hate, fear, joy, sorrow, often find expression in a manner that has no correspondence between one code of culture and another. The writer may count on the mythic, perhaps. On a personification of fears, for example, recognizable and surviving from the common past of the subcon scious, when we were all in the cave together, there were as yet no races, no classes, and our hairiness hid differences in colour. The prince who has turned into a frog and the beetle Gregory who wakes up to find himself transformed into are avatars of the fear of being changed into something monstrous, whether by the evil magic of a shaman or by psychological loss of self, that signify across all barriers, including that of time. They can be ‘read’ by anyone, everyone. But how few of us, the writers, can hope ever to create the crystal ball in which meaning can be read, pure and absolute; it is the vessel of genius, which alone, now and then, attains universality in art.

For the rest of us, there is no meta-culture. We ought to be modest in our claims. There is no generic reader, out there.

The kiss of the millennium when art shall be universal understanding shows no sign of being about to release us from our limitations.

— 1989

Léopold Sédar Senghor’s life almost spans the twentieth century; but he is a man of the century in a way more important than longevity. He embodies the entire black experience, for slavery was still in the living memory of old Africans when he was born, and by the time of his ninetieth birthday the freedom cry from South Africa, mayibuye —Come back, Africa, return from colonisation to possess your African self — had been realized over the whole continent, including the final arsenal of white racist rule, South Africa itself.

Africa has many heroes to name, but surely none has quite the relevance to the present, in synergistic terms, that Senghor has. He made of himself a great poet and a powerful political leader; a feat that would seem impossible, for the pragmatic compromises that presidential leadership demands invariably sacrifice and plummet to earth, wounded, the creative imagination of the poet. (Look at the silence that has fallen upon the poet in President Václav Hável.) Senghor created, with Aimé Césaire, the separatist movement of négritude, drawing from the then youthful Wole Soyinka the cheeky riposte, ‘A tiger doesn’t have to proclaim his tigritude.’ Senghor became a distinguished scholar, extolling the language of the coloniser, lecturing on their own literature to the conquerors of his own country, the French. He was a Deputy in France’s Assemblee Nationale, and an African socialist in the movement of liberation for his country from French rule; he is a devout Catholic and a brilliantly eloquent expositor of traditional African beliefs and philosophy, the power of the African ethos versus Christianity.

He has made of these apparent irreconcilables a new man; the new African, a prototype that most of the rest of the continent hasn’t caught up with yet.

It is fascinating to follow this extraordinary adventure of the human spirit. Senghor has never spared himself exploration of the fundaments which underlie human divergences; secondary causes were not the easy choices he would take: the established categories of racism — prejudice explained by white primitivism, reaction to black skin. For me, his most profound piece of philosophical thinking is ‘The African Apprehension of Reality’, which is also a daring foray into its concommitant, the white apprehension of reality. For apprehension is no less than the first principle of consciousness, the beginning of everything, our place in relation to nature and our perceptions of fellow human beings. Ironically — perhaps because that was the moral hierarchy established by the colonial milieu into which he was born — he commences with the white apprehension, as a measure set up. ‘Let us consider first the European as he faces an object. . He first distinguishes the object from himself. He keeps it at a distance. He freezes it out of time and, in a way, out of space. . He makes a means of it. He destroys it by devouring it. “White men are cannibals”, an old sage in my own country told me. . “It is this process of devouring which they call humanizing nature or more exactly domesticating nature. . they don’t take into account that life cannot be domesticated.” ’