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

What can we do, all of us adults, to take up the responsibility to children, ‘restore their normal selves’, how rouse ‘the power of self-respect inherent in them originally’?

If we place a large share of the blame for their condition upon the media, are we then advocating censorship? The idea is repugnant and frightening to me, who spent decades fighting censorship of information, literature, the arts, in my country. I have in mind something so difficult to bring about that it may seem naive to mention it. Is it not possible that writers, actors, directors and producers of these programmes that make violence acceptably banal could reconsider their values? It is said in what is euphemistically known as the ‘entertainment industry’ — it has also become a brainwashing industry — that the industry simply gives the public what they want. But the public are long conditioned to want what the industry dictates. And why is that public so passive under this self-appointed authority? Is it because the visual media are the true representation of much accepted adult behaviour? The violence in the air has become the exhalation of being?

You know — more telling, even, than any statement in your letter — years ago you made a remarkable implicit claim for the ability of children to restore the power of self-respect inherent in them. The children in your story (in English translation entitled ‘Prize Stock’) are the ones in a remote Japanese village who, by their actions and attitudes, teach the adults that the black American airman who has fallen into their hands during the war is a human being, capable of emotional response and suffering. Taking your premise that the power of self-respect is inherent in children, this means that it also must exist , dormant, in the substance of adult men and women. How can we release this power of restoration in our present era and circumstances?

Kenzaburo, you did not know how much you were speaking for the end of our millennium when you used these words for an early story: ‘Who will teach us to outgrow our madness?’

Sincerely,

Nadine

1998

I first met Octavio Paz in the seventies, as a guest in his home in Mexico City. A long lunch, accompanying which was the benison of his rich mind. He was a man with a very large head, could have been a model for an Easter Island monolith, and his high white expanse of forehead held back, in a line straight across its cranial limit, the drama of tight-curled black hair. As you listened to him, that forehead seemed a headlight from which beamed illumination.

Every subject he touched upon was bright and new.

We had sporadic contact after that, and in the last year of his life a correspondence when he and I were trying to arrange for him to visit South Africa under the auspices of the Congress of South African Writers. He was keenly interested in our country, our engagement in transition from oppression to freedom, in particular freedom of the word, and it was only poor health that brought his plans to naught.

As a great contemporary poet, Octavio Paz defined himself more precisely as a Spanish American poet. For language was, to him, not only the instrument of his poetry, the harp of his lyricism — he saw it as the fundamental operative in the fate of human society; a sure barometer of the condition of ideological, political and social situations, and of individual responsibility for these. In one of his classic prose works, ‘The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid’, he wrote: ‘When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meaning.’

Of the question of corruption, he wrote:

Although moralists are scandalised by the fortunes amassed by the revolutionaries [in Mexico], they have failed to observe that this material flowering has a verbal parallel: oratory has become the favourite literary genre of the prosperous … and alongside oratory, with its plastic flowers, there is the barbarous syntax in many of our newspapers, the foolishness of the language on loudspeakers and the radio, and the loathsome vulgarities of advertising — all that asphyxiating rhetoric.

And, as so often with the writings of Octavio Paz, he might have been speaking of and for much of the rest of the world.

Like Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, Octavio Paz was one of those superb poets whose brilliance makes nonsense of the notion of lesser minds that taking on the turmoil and conflict in one’s society and its extension in the world, carrying contentious political and social substance up into the sacrosanct ivory tower, corrupts and destroys true creativity.

Octavio Paz risked activism in many ways during Mexico’s recurrent crises. I think of his resignation as his country’s ambassador to India in 1968, when the Mexican government fired upon and killed student protesters in Tlatelolco Plaza.

But the most enduring aspect of his activism — his intellectual activism, if one may make such distinctions in the personality of such a total man — the treasure he bequeaths us along with his poetry, is the ranging ontology of his essays. There, stemming from his philosophy of language, the significance of literature, history, politics and concepts of time interplay in perfect lucidity of discourse on our being. One of my favourite examples of such symbiosis is this one:

Every time the Europeans and their North American descendants have encountered other cultures and civilisations, they have called them backward . This is not the first time a race or a civilisation has imposed its forms on others, but it is certainly the first time one has set up as a universal ideal, not a changeless principle, but change itself. The Muslim or Christian based the alien’s inferiority on a difference of faith: for the Greeks or Toltecs, he was inferior because he was a barbarian, a Chichemecan. Since the eighteenth century, Africans or Asiatics have been inferior because they were not modern. The Western world has identified itself with change and time, and there is no modernity other than that of the West … the new Heathen Dogs can be counted in the millions … they are called ‘underdeveloped peoples’.

‘Underdeveloped’ — this adjective belongs to the anemic and castrated language of the United Nations. The word has no precise meaning in the fields of anthropology and history. It is not a scientific but a bureaucratic term … Its vagueness masks two pseudo-ideas: the first takes for granted that only one civilisation exists, or that different civilisations may be reduced to a single model — modern Western civilisation; the second affirms that changes of societies and cultures … are linear and progressive and that they can be measured.

Yet Octavio Paz was not a pessimist.

The beauty of imagery in his poetry, the elegant joy with which he handles the language whose power he reveres, and which triumphantly survives even translation — these are an affirmative love of life. I quote from one of his poems:

To see, to touch each day’s lovely forms

The light throbs, all arrows and wings.

The wine-stain on the tablecloth smells of blood.

As the coral thrusts branches in the water

I stretch my sense to this living hour;

the moment fulfills itself in a yellow harmony.

Midday, ear of wheat heavy with minutes, eternity’s brimming cup.

This sensibility coexisted in Octavio Paz along with rebellious anger against a succession of corrupt and/or incompetent governments. I quote from another poem:

We have dug up Rage

… The lovers’ park is a dungheap

The library is a nest of killer rats

The university is a muck full of frogs