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

The question of money — price — is vital in terms of the palliatives available to arrest the disease and alleviate symptoms. It is another piercing example of the gulf between the world’s rich and the world’s poor that the suffering from Aids may be alleviated, and even the lives prolonged, of those victims who can afford expensive treatment. The same principle applies to prevention. Everywhere in Africa moral and humanitarian decisions are a common dilemma, with money the deciding factor.

At the level of international — global — responsibility, the total sum needed annually for Aids prevention in Africa is in the order of $2.3 billion. Africa currently receives only $165 million a year in official assistance from the world community.

Other questions that rest with the world community become relevant: debt relief for developing countries, for example. The Director-General of the World Health Organization said last year that debt relief should be reviewed in light of the resources that governments with large debts need to confront HIV. The role of governments in financing is another example. Where does the defence budget not far exceed the public health budget to combat Aids? Nevertheless, what HIV and Aids mean to the capability to govern, ultimately, was revealed in South Africa by the Minister of Public Service and Administration in February. The public service is the largest employer in the country and the fundamental government structure. In 1999, one in eight South Africans was HIV-positive. It is estimated that 270,000 out of 1.1 million public servants could be infected by 2004. This looming crisis in governance exists almost everywhere on the African continent. If, in developing countries, defence budgets continue to leave HIV budgets relegated to a footnote, all we shall have left to defend in the end is a graveyard.

Aids is not only a health catastrophe, a challenge to medical science. It is socially enmeshed in the conditions of life that obtain while it spreads, just as the medieval plague was in its time. Although Aids is no respecter of class or caste, slum conditions, ignorance and superstition (it is a white man’s disease; it is a black man’s disease) make the poor its greatest source of victims. In working to prevent the spread of the virus, we must accept the idea that promiscuity is difficult to condemn when sex is the cheapest or only available satisfaction for people society leaves to live on the street. On another socio-economic level, casual sex thrives among young people who are materially privileged yet whom society has failed to endow with the real values of human sexuality, the knowledge that fulfilment involves contact with the other’s personality, that the sexual act is not some mere bodily function like evacuation — which is what some campaigners seem to reduce it to. There are subtleties, important ones, connected with any campaign against HIV and Aids, if it is to succeed in changing attitudes towards sexual mores. For there will be a cure discovered, there will be a vaccine — and after that? How shall we restore the quality of human relations that have been debased, shamed, reduced to the source of a fatal disease? The free condom dispenser is not the panacea. Neither, alone, is sex education restricted to anatomical diagrams and dire warnings in schools. The entire meaningfulness of personal sexual relations will need to be restored. That is what social health means, along with inoculation and survival. Self-interest cannot be discounted. So, to the developed world, a pragmatic word from the stricken African continent: call not to ask for whom the stock exchange bell tolls and the figures on the computer sound the alarm — the toll is for Europe, for the United States, even for those countries where HIV and Aids victims are few. For if the markets and vast potential markets for the developed world’s goods fail — if decimated populations mean there is no one left economically active with money to spend — that bell tolls for thee, globally.

HIV/Aids is everyone’s disaster. It has, finally, something to do with our whole manner of existence. It confronts us with questions that must be answered historically: what have we done with the world, politically? What are we doing with the world? What do we mean by development? Some Ugandans who had been in the audience of an Aids information play were asked what message it had brought them. One said, ‘Don’t go out with bar girls.’ Another said, ‘Stick to one partner.’ Then an older woman said: ‘Aids has come to haunt a world that thought it was incomplete. Some wanted children, some wanted money, some wanted property, and all we ended up with is Aids.’

Maybe she spoke for Africa.

2000

The re-publication of a book by Natalia Ginzburg has brought back to me not only a work I found uniquely beautiful in its tranquil honesty when I read it in translation from the Italian in the sixties; it has opened an overgrown way, that I thought to be a cul-de-sac, in my own life.

Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings — are what? Fictionalised family history? What was actually said; and what has been invented by Natalia that went on out of her hearing, in her Italian family from the thirties through the fifties: added exchanges between its members, imaginatively created by familiarity and the emotions, love, resentment, understanding, of which she was part?

But she writes: ‘The places, events, people in this book are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented.’ Not for her the usual disclaimer, all characters are fictitious, no living personages, etc. ‘The names are all real … Possibly some may not be pleased to find themselves described in a book under their own names. To such I have nothing to say.’ And yet, again, from this translator of Proust ( À la Recherche du Temps Perdu , no less), 1the other, self-admonition: ‘I must not be beguiled into autobiography as such.’ Her blindfold trail into the past is not signposted by an uneven paving stone or the bite into a madeleine, but by overhearing, echoing in her present, the intimate lingua franca of vanished family life.

The past is crowded out by the present during the day. Early in the morning I lie in bed eavesdropping on the birds and the rubrics heard in childhood surface from that past.

Natalia’s family sayings are concerned with family relationships increasingly affected by conflicting views on, and eventually actions of, fascists and anti-fascists — her family belonged to the latter. When I overhear in recollection my own family’s sayings, this is in the ambience of a different but related context: racism, first of the colonial kind, then that of its apogee, apartheid. But although Natalia Ginzburg married a foreigner, a Russian Jewish revolutionary, her own half-Jewish family was Italian, deeply rooted in their native country. There was no Old Country, not far behind them.

Now that family sayings come back to me from the house in a South African gold-mining town where I was born and grew up, I begin to see that, involved as I was in the clamour of racism and anti-racism, I did not hear that other voice whose significance I’ve never pursued. It’s a given: you don’t know your parents, ever, no matter how venerably stable your social background may be. But it is immigrant parents you particularly don’t know, if they have taken you, as I was, completely and unquestioningly into their assimilated life of the country of your birth, not theirs. My mother and maternal grandparents (the only ones I was ever to know) came to South Africa from England; my father from Latvia. There were revolutions and wars in Europe, nobody went back. Like Natalia, I don’t intend to be beguiled into autobiography. I can only confirm to myself that we lived entirely in the present, in the mining town and in the city where my grandparents lived. For me, the lives of parents and grandparents began with mine. My time, my place. Only now I’m led to decode from family sayings what these meant as clues to the life, the drowned Atlantis of the past where they had lived without me, back beyond me. The family sayings have become my small glossary of where they came from, not as marked on a map of the world but in attitudes and perceptions formed to deal with life — elsewhere; or to counter the immigrant’s alienation in the country he had adopted without assurance it had adopted him.