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

My man, Reinhold Cassirer, with whom I lived for forty-eight years, sharing everything else in our lives, never saw a story or novel of mine in the making, although he was always the first to read it when it was done. He completely respected and protected this, my privacy.

A novel might take as long as three or more years. He should have been the one to respond to what it must have been like, living with a writer. 1

2003

If the great contemporary intellectuals can be counted on one hand, Edward Said is the index finger pointing to some of the most profound existential questions of our time, and going back, invaluably, to search out their beginnings. What we humans have made of ourselves in the collective that is the world.

The obituaries have focused on the aspect of Said’s life most newsworthy today: the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The great conviction, dedication, activist faith of Said’s life was, indeed, the Palestinian cause. He served it with courage and a nobility that excluded fundamentalism of any kind.

To say that there was more to his achievement than that is not to demean its urgency and the irreplaceable loss of its best spokes-person. He stood for real justice and peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

But Said’s unique brilliance was that he was the most eclectic intellectual of our time. He fused extraordinary literary talent — the writer, master of the beauty of language — with a philosophical, political, cultural, psychological quest of human motivation, bringing power-politics and the third eye of creative intuition into a synthesis of revelation. Proof that we cannot be understood in our motivations — the world cannot be understood — one without the other.

He was an academic of celebrated originality of mind; students did not fall asleep in Professor Said’s seminars. He was by avocation a pianist of performance level, sometimes playing under the baton of his friend, Daniel Barenboim.

Reading his works, one is dismayed to be confronted with the limits of one’s own supposedly wide reading: he had read everything in a number of languages and would pass on the benefit with lucidity and grace. Above all, along with enormous erudition, Edward Said had an intelligence of feeling . It glowed through his works and his physical presence.

In his greatest book, Orientalism , and its equally matchless successor-cum-sequel, Culture and Imperialism , he analyses the concept of Otherness, definitive in Orientalism. Orientalism is the projection, on people other than oneself, of one’s idea of what they are.

Said in this marvellous work reveals Orientalism’s origins and development from ancient times, in the textual representations conceptualised from the fragmentary experience of wandering explorers, the romantic and religious mysticism (the Orient an artefact, belonging to the past), the writings of poets and novelists, from Gérard de Nerval to Flaubert, Jane Austen to Conrad, the philologists and anthropologists who made a scientific subject out of it.

‘The Orient’ first referred to Islam and later encompassed Africa. India, Asia. Anywhere there were faiths, colours and cultures not Western and white. Said writes:

Modern Orientalism derives from secularising elements in 18th century European culture … the expansion of the Orient further east geographically and further back temporally …

Reference points were no longer Christianity and Judaism … the capacity for dealing historically (and not reductively, as a topic of ecclesiastical politics) with non-European and non-Judeo-Christian cultures was strengthened as history itself was conceived of more radically than before; to understand Europe properly meant also understanding the objective relations between Europe and its own previously unreachable temporal and cultural frontiers.

The result was ‘the Orient henceforth would be spoken for ’.

The precept on which colonialism is justified, out of Orientalism, was established. The Orient-Other is in the same position to this day, striving to speak and be heard for itself in the global structures that are attempting to re-form a world of Haves and Have-nots. For still, Said writes: ‘The white middle-class westerner believes it is his human prerogative not only to manage the world but also to own it, just because by definition “it” is not quite as human as “we” are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanised thought.’

New millennium Orientalism is surely United States President George Bush’s government’s crusade to decide ‘for them’ what the Iraqi people are and what their constitution and future should be.

In his 2003 preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism , Said writes of the present ‘threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies disseminated by the mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical precision but in fact obscure the terrible suffering produced by “clean” warfare.’

Said reveals the full concept of Orientalism in its ultimate avatar, evolved through its justification of colonialism, imperialism, to western hegemony in the new world order: a sum of inhumanly divisive, disruptive forces.

His life was subject to many of them. He was born in Jerusalem sixty-seven years ago, uprooted when a child from his natal country, as a Palestinian, and was acculturated to the West through education in England and the US. Yet in his person he posits unchallengeably, with the magnificent achievement of his own life-conduct and scholarship, the thesis self-evident in his enthrallingly moving memoir, Out of Place .

The title proposes that to be so, in a sense, may be a way to better understanding between individuals and nations, an open state of being attained against the monolithic cages of nationalism, religion and closed cultures.

He used these multiple identities, made them into the creation of a complete personality, a man of genius with an invaluable perspective to offer the world. In him, contradictions become a way of grasping something of the elusive truth that is somewhere in human coexistence.

I hope that without presumption, as his friend, and disciple in all I learned from him up to his last days, I may see as Edward’s credo the words of Dimitry, on trial in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . We are accountable to life ‘because we are all responsible for all’.

2003

It is hardly usual to begin an introduction with a caveat of the limitations of the work it prefaces. In the case of Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and The Colonized , I believe this is necessary in order to establish the classic work’s continuing validity. That validity is in its invaluable presentation and brilliant analysis of the condition of colonised people, the results of practical enactment of man’s inexhaustible capability of inhumanity to man; in this classic aspect of power, the work is timeless. What Equiano 113wrote of this power in 1789, what Memmi wrote of it in the late 1950s, is as true in our new millennium. Slavery was not abolished, it evolved into colonisation. Retrospect has not altered, by perspective, the meaning of what was done to subject peoples in their own land.

That said, Memmi’s study was first published in 1957, before Ghana became the first colonially occupied country in Africa to become independent. The book therefore pre-dates by what ideological forms, specifically in terms of participation of Leftist colonisers with the colonised, freedom from colonisation has been achieved in many countries, over the forty-six years since then. Memmi’s predictions about the role of the Left have been proved a fallacy.