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

This experience set me thinking back to another that I have had, on a deeper and more personal level.

In my Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, a year or two ago, which subsequently were published under the title Writing and Being , I devoted three of the six lectures to the writing and being each of Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz and Naguib Mahfouz. Edward Said, himself another writer whose work is important to me, reviewed the book extremely favourably in a leading English paper, while yet taking me to task for my indignant assertion that Mahfouz is not given his rightful place in contemporary world literature, is never mentioned in the company of such names as Umberto Eco, Günter Grass, etc., and certainly not widely read even by those whom one considers well-read; I know that a number of my friends read his work for the first time as a result of my published lecture.

Mahfouz neglected? — Said chided me.

Mahfouz not recognised for his greatness in world literature?

What world did I define him by, what world did my purview confine me to in my assessment? In the literature of Arabic culture, the world of the Arabic language, Mahfouz is fully established in the canon of greatness and, in the populist canon of fame, while controversial, is widely read.

Edward Said was right. What I was conceiving of as ‘world literature’ in my lecture, was in fact that of the Euro-North Americans into which only a few of us foreigners have been admitted. Naguib Mahfouz is recognised as a great writer in the world of Arabic literature, of whose canon I know little or nothing.

But wait a moment — Said, I saw, had hit intriguingly upon a paradox. He was placing the concept of another ‘world literature’ alongside the one I had posited with my eyes fixed on Euro-North America as the literary navel-of-the-world. In the all-encompassing sense of the term ‘world’, can any of our literatures be claimed definitively as ‘world’ literature? Which world? Whose world?

The lesson Edward Said gave me, along with the lesson provided by Mallika Sarabhai at the gathering in Paris, is a sequence, from the situation of artists in general, on the one hand, to the question of literary canons, on the other, that becomes the naturally relevant introduction to my subject, here among my brother and sister African writers: our status, specifically as writers , in the worlds-within-‘the world’ we occupy.

Status. What is status, to us?

First — it never can go without saying — the primary status must be freedom of expression. That is the oxygen of our creativity. Without it, many talents on our continent have struggled for breath; some have choked; and some have been lost to us in that other climate, the thin air of exile.

Suppression of freedom of expression by censorship and bannings was in many of our countries a feature of colonial regimes — I myself was such a victim of the apartheid government, with three of my own works, and an anthology I collected of South African writers’ works, banned. Suppression of freedom of expression has continued to be a feature of not a few of our independent regimes, leading outrageously and tragically in one of them, Nigeria, to the execution of one writer and the threat of death sentence placed upon another. But thankfully, in many of our countries, including mine, South Africa, and yours, Ghana, freedom of expression is entrenched.

Freedom to write. We have that status; and we are fully aware that it is one that we must be always alert to defend against all political rationalisations and pleas to doctor our search for the truth into something more palatable to those who make the compromises of power.

Quite apart from the supreme issue of human freedom, our claim to freedom to write has a significance, a benefit to society that only writers can give. Our books are necessary : for in the words of the great nineteenth-century Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol, 77they show both the writer and his or her people what they are . ‘The writer is both the repository of his people’s ethos, and his revelation to them of themselves.’ This revelation is what regimes fear, in their writers. But if our status as writers is to be meaningful, that fear is proof of our integrity … And our strength.

Status, like charity, begins at home. The modern movement of African writers to define their status in this century was within our continent itself. With the impact of colonialism and its coefficient industrialisation, the keeper of the word — one who is marked for expression of the creative imagination with the ‘ring of white chalk’ round the eye by Chinua Achebe’s old man of Abazon, in Anthills of the Savannah — with the impacts of colonialism the traditional status of the keeper of the word, the griot, was not, could not be adapted as a status for one whose poetry and stories were disseminated to the people-become-the-public at the remove of printed books, remote from any living presence of their creator in the flesh, their origin in the creative imagination. The keeper of the word became invisible; had no ready-defined place in society.

I am not going to reiterate, or rather regurgitate, the history, including the influence from the African diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean, that both preceded and coincided with the first congress of African writers and artists in 1956. 78And it is significant, in terms of progress, to recall that it was not held in Africa at all, but in Paris.

I am looking at the modern movement from the distance made by events between then and now; from the epic unfurling of Africa’s freedom from colonial rule in its many avatars, way back from Ghana’s, the first, forty years ago, to South Africa’s, the latest and final one.

In the broad sweep of hindsight one can see that Kwame Nkrumah’s political postulation of Pan-Africanism had its cultural equivalent in the movement of negritude. Negritude, as a word, has long become an archaism, with its first syllable — although coming from the French language — suggestive of the American Deep South. But the other invented word, with which the young Wole Soyinka cheekily attacked the concept, has remained very much alive because over and over again, in the work of many African writers, Soyinka’s iconoclasm has been proved mistaken. ‘A tiger doesn’t have to proclaim his tigritude’, he pronounced. But as each country on our continent has come into its own, in independence, the expression of Africanness, the assertion of African ways of life, from philosophy to food, has intensified: Africa measuring herself against her selfhood, not that of her erstwhile conquerors.

Africanness is fully established. So what status do we writers have, now, right here at home, in our individual countries?

Is it the kind of status we would wish — not in terms of fame and glory, invitations to dine with government ministers, but in terms of the role of literature in the illumination of our people, the opening up of lives to the power and beauty of the imagination, a revelation of themselves by the writer as the repository of a people’s ethos? Alongside the establishment of African values — which in the case of our best writers included a lack of fear of questioning some, thus establishing that other essential component of literature’s social validity — the criterion in almost all of our countries has been the extent to which the writer has identified with and articulated, through transformations of the creative imagination, the struggle for freedom. And this, then, indeed, was the role of the writer as repository of a people’s ethos. Today the status, if to be measured on the scale of political commitment, is more complex.

Yes, economic neo-colonialism is a phase that threatens freedom, in a people’s ethos. Yes, the greedy wrangles of the Euro-North American powers to manipulate African political change for the spoils of oil supplies and military influence are concerns in a people’s ethos. Yes, the civil wars waged by their own leaders, bringing appalling suffering — these are all part of a people’s ethos to be expressed, for now that our continent has rid itself of its self-appointed masters from Europe the sense of identity in having a common enemy has eroded and in many of our countries brotherhood has become that of Cain and Abel.