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

Fifty or more years later, I decode these family sayings as the echoes of lost home — Grandpa Myers’s — in an immigrant culture, or the innocently crafty attempt — my father’s — of survival in escape from that culture. These days, I walk past elegant shopping malls in the suburbs of Johannesburg through sidewalk markets where, capered about before me, dangled at me, are masks and jewellery, carvings and sculpture, cowrie-and-seed rattles. I’m importuned by strangers’ mimicry of South African sales-talk English. The vendors have come from all over Africa, they speak among themselves the mother tongues of their Old Countries, Mali, Nigeria, Congo, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Senegal, Ethiopia, anywhere and everywhere there is war, natural disaster of flood and drought, and poverty by comparison with which we are a rich country, despite our own share of the poor and workless.

Their cajolings, reproduction of phrases understood by them only in sense of intention, are their family sayings. They’re the latest arrivals of the endless no-nation of immigrants, forming and reforming the world, a globalisation that long, long predates any present concept. That’s the news on the Rialto; nothing new. Just survival.

2001

People always want to know when and where you write. As if there’s a secret methodology to be followed. It has never seemed to me to matter to the work — which is the writer’s ‘essential gesture’ (I quote Roland Barthes), the hand held out for society to grasp — whether the creator writes at noon or midnight, in a cork-lined room as Proust did or a shed as Amos Oz did in his early kibbutz days. Perhaps the questioner is more than curious; yearning for a jealously kept prescription on how to be a writer. There is none. Writing is the one ‘profession’ for which there is no professional training; ‘creative’ writing courses can only teach the aspirant to look at his/her writing critically; not how to create. The only school for a writer is the library — reading, reading. A journey through realms of how far, wide and deep writing can venture in the endless perspectives of human life. Learning from other writers’ perceptions that you have to find your way to yours, at the urge of the most powerful sense of yourself — creativity. Apart from that, you’re on your own.

Ours is the most solitary of occupations; the only comparison I can think of is keeper of a lighthouse. But the analogy mustn’t go too far, we do not cast the beam of light that will save the individual, or the world from coming to grief on its rocks.

Another standard enquiry put to fiction writers: what is your message? Milan Kundera has provided the response. The message is: ‘A novel searches and poses questions … The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. It does not prescribe or proscribe answers.’ We have the right and obligation of honesty to imply moral judgements we know people have, as exemplified in our fictional characters because — I paraphrase Goethe — wherever the writer thrusts a hand deep into society, the world, there will come up in it something of the truth. The writer her/himself stands before what has been dredged to light just as the reader will; what either makes of it will be individual moral judgement: her or his, writer’s or reader’s self-message.

That is the low-wattage beam I would claim for my own writings cast from my lighthouse, and those of the great writers who have illuminated my life. For me, writing has been and is an exploration of life, the safari that will go on into that amazing wilderness until I die. That is why my novels and stories are what I call open-ended; I’ve taken up an invention of human beings at some point in their lives, and set them down again living at some other point. My novel written in the 1980s, July’s People , ends with a central character, a woman, wading through a shallow river, running from a situation. To what? I am often asked. The answer is I don’t know. The only clues I have, and pass on there for the reader in the text of the novel that has gone before, are the social and historical context, the conflicting threats and pressures, personal and aleatory, of a time and place that would make up her options — what she could or might attempt next. The sole conclusion — in terms of reading a signpost — was one that I myself could come to, after I had re-read the novel (for a writer becomes reader when the publisher’s proofs arrive), was that crossing through the water was some kind of baptism into a new situation, new life, however uncertain, hazardous, even unimaginable in the light of how she had lived thus far .

One can’t even say that an individual death is the end of a story. What about the consequences the absence is going to have for others?

What about the aftermath of a political and societal conflict apparently resolved, in a novel whose final page leaves the men and women, the country, the cities, the children born to these, at that point? Again, the reader has the narrative and text that has gone before, to waken his/her own awareness, own questioning of self and society.

If the writer does not provide answers, is this a valid absolution from the ordinary human responsibility of engagement with society other than as the ‘essential gesture’, extended through literature?

Does the writer serve the raison d’être that every human being must decide for the self, by asserting the exploration of the word as the end and not the means of the writer’s being? ‘Words became my dwelling place.’ The great Mexican poet and writer, Octavio Paz, wrote this; but in his superb life’s work, on his intellectual journey, he invaded that place; he also wrote ‘I learned that politics is not only action but participation, it is not a matter of changing men but accompanying them, being one of them.’ The reason-to-be was a bringing together of the dwelling place of the artist and the clamorous world that surrounded it.

The great Günter Grass told me: ‘My professional life, my writing, all the things that interest me, have taught me that I cannot freely choose my subjects. For the most part my subjects were assigned to me by German history, by the war that was criminally started and conducted, and by the never-ending consequences of that era. Thus my books are fatally linked to these subjects, and I am not the only one who has had this experience.’

He certainly is not the only one.

In Europe, the USA, Latin America, China, Japan, Africa — where in the world could this not be so? There are none of us who can ‘choose our subjects’ free of the contexts that contain our lives, shape our thought, influence every aspect of our existence. (Even the fantasy of space fiction is an alternative to the known, the writer’s imaginative reaction to it.) Could Philip Roth erase the tattoo of the Nazi camps from under the skin of his characters? Can Israeli writers, Palestinian writers, now ‘choose’ not to feel the tragic conflict between their people burning the dwelling place of words? Could Kenzaburo Oe create characters not bearing in themselves the gene of consciousness implanted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; could Czeslaw Milosz, living through revolution and exile, not have to ask himself in his poem ‘Dedication’, ‘What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?’ Could Chinua Achebe’s characters not have in their bloodstream the stain of a civil war in Nigeria? In Africa, the experiences of colonialism, its apogee, apartheid, post-colonialism and new-nation conflicts, have been a powerful collective consciousness in African writers, black and white. And in the increasing interconsciousness , the realisation that what happens somewhere in the world is just one manifestation of what is happening subliminally or going to happen in one way or another, affect in one way or another, everywhere — the epic of emigration, immigration, the world-wandering of new refugees and exiles, political and economic, for example — is a fatal linkage, not ‘fatal’ in the deathly sense, but in that of inescapable awareness in the writer. I have just written a novel, The Pickup , within this awareness, taking up at one point and leaving at another point in their lives, characters in our millennial phase of this eternal exodus and arrival.