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

For the broad middle class, which includes the skilled working class in many countries, the possibility of descending to poverty is subliminally present. Their concept of poverty is tinged by fear, as well as by concern for those who suffer it: there but for the grace of God go I. A change of government, inflation, a form of affirmative action whether on principle of colour, race or simply replacement of older employees with the young — these contingencies threaten middle-class safety with its home ownership, its insurance policies and pension funds. All the things that poverty strips one of; all the safety nets the poor do not have … Poverty is regarded as a blow of fate that just might come. Alternatively, whose fault is it? Perhaps, since the middle class is by and large industrious and ambitious — and has the possibility of advancement in terms of money and status, having a base to start from which the poor have not — the middle class often feels that it is lack of will, initiative and commitment to work as they themselves do, that keeps the poor in that condition.

The basic perception of poverty is the man begging in the street; the conclusion: surely there’s something else he could do? Unemployment is suspect as lack of ability; and well it may be in many developing countries where lack of skills makes people literally unemployable, unable to be active in sectors where employment would be available. But what has to be realised is how that lack comes about in the general disempowerment of poverty itself. To abolish the spectre of the man begging in the street, the woman huddled on her park bench home, the children staring from a refugee camp, is first to make the effort to understand what factors create this disempowerment.

How do victims themselves perceive their poverty?

They live it; know it best, beyond all outside conceptions. What, apart from the survival needs of food and shelter, do they feel they are most deprived of? Researchers moving among them have learned much that is often ignored, such as the perception of women that, as those who with their children suffer most, attention to their advancement through skills and education should take more than a marginal ‘special interest’ place in transformation of the lives of the disadvantaged in general. Consultation with how communities in poverty see themselves in relation to the ordinary fullness of life other communities take for granted is now recognised by research as integral to harnessing the negatives of social resentment and passivity into vital partnership for change. It is the fortunate world outside dollar-a-day subsistence that needs to begin to see the impoverished as our necessary partners in world survival, to be listened to in respect of the components of what a decent life is. It is the privileged world that needs to come to the realisation that a ‘decent life’ cannot be truly lived by any of us while one-quarter of the developing world’s population exists in poverty.

If economic poverty began when some had surplus production and some did not, and nothing much has changed in principle, the second cause of poverty as a phenomenon of human history is war, and nothing much has changed there, either. Wars, social conflict, whether at international, national or inter-ethnic level, still produce hunger and homelessness, the prime characteristics of poverty, and now, it seems, on a rolling action scale. The eradication of poverty implies a hand-in-hand relation with agencies of the non-violent resolution of conflict. The peace-keeping, peace-promoting work of United Nations and other formations, fraught with difficulty, danger and frustration, and controversial as it is, must be seen as a vital component of the decade’s aim.

The violence of nature — flood, drought and earthquake — is another factor that has caused poverty since ancient times, and that is something which is not within human capability to prevent, as wars are. But the violence perpetrated by humankind on nature is increasingly one of the causes of poverty. The destruction of indigenous forests, the pollution of oceans, the leaching out of the land by indiscriminate use of chemicals; these take away from communities their livelihood. The leakage of nuclear waste makes water unpotable and the very air unbreathable. The problem of poverty cannot be solved while the earth and its oceans that feed us are abused by ruthless government planning and blinkered human greed.

What are the moral perceptions of poverty?

These are governed by those looking on, looking in, so to speak, from the outside. ‘Poor but honest’: consider the dictum. Why do the rich never make the qualification, ‘Rich but honest’? No one has commented on moral attitudes in this context better than the German poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht. Here is his poem:

Food is the first thing. Morals follow on.

So first make sure that those who now are starving

Get proper helpings when we do the carving.

Is for people to be honest when they are starving our measure of virtue, or is it a measure of our hypocrisy? Common crime, up to a certain level — economic white-collar crime is the prerogative of the wealthy — is a product of poverty and cannot be countered by punitive methods alone. Some of the funds that citizens, living in urban fear of muggings and robberies, want to see used, as the saying goes, to ‘stamp out crime’ with more police and bigger prisons, would have better effect diverted to the aim of stamping out poverty. No one will be safe while punishment and pious moral dicta are handed out in place of food. The campaign against poverty is the best campaign against crime.

Finally, the definition of poverty does not end with material needs; the aim of its eradication will not be completed or perhaps even attainable without the world’s attention to the deprivation of the mind: intellectual poverty. As food is the basic need of the starved body, literacy is the basic need of the starved mind. According to the United Nations Development Programme’s ‘Human Development Report’, in the past fifty years adult illiteracy in the world has been reduced to almost half. If it can be virtually ended by early next century, it will be a great force in the six-point global action plan provided by the Report, and not only because the ability to read and write is crucial to participation in development, the open sesame to the world of work, mental skills and self-administration that is economic freedom. To be illiterate or semi-literate is to be deprived of the illumination and pleasure of reading, of one’s rightful share in and exploration of the world of ideas; it is to spend one’s life imprisoned between the walls of one-dimensional experience.

Illiteracy cruelly stunts the human spirit both as a cause and result of the disempowerment we now dedicate a decade to bring to an end. We are here to celebrate and discuss the means we know we have at our disposal; and I want to close with what I believe can be our text, for the day and the decade. It comes from William Blake. I quote:

Many conversed on these things as they labour’d at the furrow

Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery:

It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal.

Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little ones,

And those who are in misery cannot remain so long

If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.’

1997

Dear Kenzaburo,

Your letter brings the pleasure of realisation that we are simply taking up from where we were interrupted by the end of our encounter in the Tokyo hotel six years ago. There was so much to exchange; it has existed, in the parentheses of separate lives, ready to continue any time. The ambiguity, the connections that criss-cross against chronology between that short meeting and what was going to happen — an invisible prescience which would influence our individual thinking and writing — that turns out to have presaged the links of our then and now . You came to our meeting unknowingly in the foreshadow of the terrible earthquake that was to devastate a Japanese city later that year, and that I was to use, in a novel as yet not conceived, as a metaphor for apocalyptic catastrophe wreaked by nature, alongside that of contemporary devastation by humans upon themselves in Eastern Europe and Africa.