Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ These are the words of Thomas Mann, one of the greatest literary interpreters of the real thing, which he lived through in personal experience of the twentieth century’s physical displacements and upheavals of perception.

But we are not only children of our time, we are also of our place. My own consciousness and subconscious, from which I write, come even in the most personal aspects of mind and spirit from destiny shaped by the historico-political matrix into which I was born. My personal sense of the defining events of our century is dominated by two: the fall of Communism, and the end of colonialism. And the two are linked subjectively, even contradictorily, for me, since I was born a second-generation colonial in a capitalist-racist society and as I grew up I looked to the Left as the solution to the oppression of the poor and powerless all around me, in my home country and the world. When I was a toddler I was taken to wave a flag at the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, on his imperial visit to the then British Dominion, South Africa. As I grew I was told again and again of this momentous occasion, with a sense of values to be inculcated: loyalty in homage to imperial power, white man’s power.

Nobody presented for the formation of my sense of values the fact that Mohandas Gandhi had lived in, and developed his philosophy in and through the country where I was born and was to live my life; the man who was to leave behind in that country principles of liberation that were to be important to the struggle for freedom by black people, my brothers and sisters unacknowledged by the values of the whites who took me to make obeisance to an English prince. The essence of the colonial ethos in which I was brought up is contained in that flag I was given to wave.

It has become a truism to shake one’s head in wonder at the end of apartheid and the emergence of a free South Africa this century has just seen.

A miracle; and coming to pass at the time when a new miracle is yearningly needed to compensate for the miracle the first quarter of the century promised for many — now a fallen star, the Red Star, flickered out.

Human beings will always have the imperative to believe in the possibility of a better world of their own making. In the words of Jean Paul Sartre, socialism was seen as ‘man in the process of creating himself’. The depth of the sense of abandonment, now, not only among those who were Communists but among all of us to whom the broad Left, the ideals of socialism remain although these have been betrayed and desecrated in many countries as well as in the Gulags of the founding one — it is this sense of abandoment that the collapse of the Soviet Union brings to our century, rather than the disillusion many in the West would triumphantly claim.

For whatever one’s judgement of its consequences, the most momentous single date in the social organisation of our century was unquestionably the October Revolution of 1917, as a result of which one-third of humankind found itself living under regimes derived from it. The disintegration of the Soviet world before the end of the same century that saw its beginning: has it brought the triumph of democracy or only the return of the liberalism that failed, after the First World War, to prevent the poor and unemployed of Italy and Germany from turning to fascism as the solution of their circumstances, many of which exist again in many parts of our world today?

I can affirm that in my own country, South Africa, the Left’s revelation of the class and economic basis of racial discrimination was one of the formative influences that, along with Pan-Africanism, joined the people’s natural, national, inevitable will towards liberation. The other formative influence on the liberation struggle in South Africa is one of which I have already spoken, Mahatma Gandhi. He was one of the truly great individuals of our century whose lifetime within it we set against the monsters, from Hitler to Pol Pot, the century has produced. Gandhi was an original thinker on the nature of power , as distinct from power confined to the purely political concept as the tool for liberation, yet able to serve this tool as part of a high moral consciousness. His philosophy of satyagraha , ‘the force which is born of truth and love’, is perhaps the only genuine spiritual advance in an era of religious decline marked by crackpot distortions of faith, and, finally, by savage fundamentalism.

What Mohandas Gandhi began, out of a philosophy formulated in South Africa and applied tactically in India to bring about freedom from British imperial rule, Nelson Mandela has concluded. For Nelson Mandela’s unmatched, unchallengeable prestige and honour in the world today is recognition not only of his achievement, with and for his people, in the defeat of the dire twentieth-century experiment in social engineering called apartheid. It is recognition that other ghastly forms of social engineering tried in our century were defeated where they had taken refuge, for apartheid with its blatant racist laws was an avatar of Nazism. And finally, it is homage paid to Mandela in recognition that what was at stake was something greater by far than the fate of a single country; it was final victory gained for humankind over the centuries-old bondage of colonisation.

The sum of our century may be looked at in a number of ways.

The wars that were fought, the military defeats that turned into economic victories, the ideologies that rose and fell, the technology that telescoped time and distance.

We could dip a finger in a dark viscous substance and write on the window of our time, OIL. Oil became more precious than gold; it has been the ‘why’ of many wars of our day; repressive regimes go unreproached by democratic countries who are dependent on those regimes for oil; men, women and children die, for oil, without knowing why.

In intimate human relations, we have won sexual freedom, and lost it — to Aids.

Freud changed emotional cognition and self-perception. Another kind of perception moved from Picasso’s Guernica to a Campbell’s soup can, to the Reichstag wrapped in plastic, illustrating our cycles: worship of force and destruction, worship of materialism, desire to cover up and forget these choices we have made.

Now that the deeds are done, the hundred years ready to seal what will be recorded of us, our last achievement could be in the spirit of taking up, in ‘the ceaseless adventure of man’, 1control of our achievements, questioning honestly and reflecting upon the truth of what has been lived through, what has been done. There is no other base on which to found the twenty-first century with the chance to make it a better one.

1995

A few months ago I was a participant in an international gathering in Paris to evaluate the status of the artist in the world. There we were on an elegant stage before a large audience; among us was a famous musician, a distinguished sculptor, several poets and writers of repute, a renowned dancer-choreographer. We had come together literally from the ends of the earth. At this stately opening session we were flanked by the Director-General of our host organisation, the representative of a cultural foundation funded by one of North America’s multibillionaire dynasties, and France’s Deputy Minister of Culture. The Director-General, the representative of the multibillionaire foundation and the Deputy Minister each rose and gave an address lasting half an hour; the session, which also was to include some musical performance, was scheduled to close after two hours.

An official tiptoed along the backs of our chairs and requested us, the artists, to cut our addresses to three minutes. We humbly took up our pens and began to score out what we had to say. When the bureaucrats had finally regained their seats, we were summoned one by one to speak in telegraphese. All did so except the last in line. She was — I name her in homage! — Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer-choreographer from India. She swept to the podium, a beauty in sandals and sari, and announced: ‘I have torn up my speech. The bureaucrats were allowed to speak as long as they pleased; the artists were told that three minutes was time enough for whatever they might have to say. So — we have the answer to the status of the artist in the world today.’