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

Colonialism was not only the conquest of land and the dispossession of peoples; it was also, as Edward Said has established with his term Orientalism, a representation of peoples through literature written by others. In his work Culture And Imperialism , he writes, ‘I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between different individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires — British, French, American — in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced.’ Jane Austen and the British Empire, Flaubert and the Middle East, Conrad and Kipling in Africa — even Thomas Mann and the Death in Venice that Mann assumes to be an infection from the tainted Other, the Orient — these are some examples of the literary concept of the Other, in the culture of domination. ‘Texts are protean things,’ Said says, ‘they are tied to circumstance and to politics large and small …’

Imperialism was the big one. In his book entitled Orientalism he focuses mainly on the phenomenon of Orientalism as applicable to the Middle East and Far East, but we can recognise it as just as valid for Africa and even the way Africans were seen in the African diaspora, that ironic form of reverse colonisation by Africans in the home countries of the old colonial masters. Africa, Africans were , existed, as literary exoticism — half attraction, half contempt for the Other — that formed an ethos which inspired, accompanied and supplied self-righteous justification, even for slavery, in a worldwide conquest by dominant powers. To turn Rabbie Burns’s famous dictum on its head: for Africa it was not a matter of ‘Would the Lord the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us’ but would whatever gods may be give us the gift to see ourselves as we know ourselves to be , and to make the world recognise this reality.

It has been a long haul, and I am not going to roll-call all the great names in Africa and her diaspora who have achieved it. ‘Being you, you cut your poetry out of wood.’ That is Gwendolyn Brooks’s metaphor for the process. Thinking of his appropriate metaphor for the beginning of the African story, Chinua Achebe recounts a proverb: ‘Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.’

Africa was slow, perhaps, for many reasons, to produce her own historians in the strict sense of history as a separate literary discipline — the pace has accelerated, and in the case of South Africa is really only beginning, not only with the rewriting of school history books, but in dramatic resuscitations in drama and dance, as well as novels, of the past that was buried under colonial versions. But in fiction as prose and poetry, haven’t Africa’s pride of lions produced their own historians? Haven’t they established incontrovertibly literature as what Edward Said calls ‘a form of political memory’: the past and present as created by Africans themselves, their characters and lives, their view of self and their regard on the world, fully emerged from the regard of the world upon them ? Africa is no longer the world’s invention, but herself, confident of this whether on the African continent or in its diaspora.

How strong is that confidence? How deep does it go? Is it by now, the twenty-first century, become so firm a foundation that we, of Africa, are ready to take up a reconnection with the literary culture of the outside world on a new basis, on our terms? The African Literature Association was created and has met through the crisis years of African cultural identity to defend and nurture the creativity on which that identity depended. I ask myself, is it not time to lift the horizon of that splendid identity and accept that literature, the illumination of the human imagination, has no frontier guards, no immigration laws, thank whatever gods may be. All literature belongs to all of us, everywhere. Once free of censorship, it is pure intellectual freedom, any limitations to be overcome by translation. And this conference is dealing with the highly important practicalities of relations between translators, publishers and critics. Why do we not glory in this freedom, take advantage of it? A positive globalisation among some dubious ones.

This call is redundant, yes, even absurd, in our gathering here — all in this company of literati have read, all their lives, world literature. But I raise the question before you out of serious concern in a wider context. I must speak now about the situation in South Africa, which is the one I know intimately, but I more than suspect, from my reading of critical and literary journals in other countries, that something like prevails in the United States.

Young black readers and, most important, aspirant writers confine themselves to reading African and African-American writers. The lion’s African story, it goes without question, is the one that must take first place; therein emerges the ethos of the people and the land. But to find writings from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Arab countries, India, the Far East, etc. ‘irrelevant’ is to re-enter — voluntarily, this time! — a cultural isolation formerly imposed by the arrogance of imperialism. The same principle applies to any African writing that is not more or less narrowly contemporary; except for some student painstakingly assembling a thesis at a university, I have found no young reader/writer in Southern Africa who has heard of, let alone read, in the canon of African literature, Olaudah Equiano; 142even Plaatje 143is just a name to them, if respected at a distance.

Internationally, the range of reading might — it is just beginning to — include one or two of the Latin American writers, principally because our country’s government has begun to break the North — South axis and promote trade, investment and exchange of technological skills South — South with Latin American countries; trade followed the Bible and gun in colonial times, now cultural exchange follows the opening up of trade. (Although, in the case of music, between Latin America and Southern Africa, the happy exchange preceded trade as a move in globalisation.)

I should like to give account of a recent gathering in Johannesburg where the self-limitation of literary experience was explicitly evidenced in all its manifestations and even delusions. On Writers’ Day there was a celebration held at Windybrow Cultural Centre, appropriately an old mansion, once the grand home of a colonial mining magnate, now the fine shabby complex of two theatres, music, drama and film workshops, in an area that has ‘gone black’ since the end of apartheid and racial segregation. There were readings of poetry and prose by young rap and other poets, and by a few old hands such as once-banned Don Mattera and myself, but the main dynamism was the discussions started in the audience. That audience was overwhelmingly young, about 150 black men and women, and, as usual, there was a vivid articulacy of complaints from them.

Some of these were of a politico-social nature about which we all share concern in the new dispensation of South Africa from which we expect so much. Libraries are still almost exclusively in the areas where whites and the new black affluent class live. The paucity of libraries, the total absence of school libraries — except for a dusty shelf of Teach Yourself Accounting, How-To-Do-It books — is unchanged in what are and will long remain the areas where the greatest concentration of black citizens live. This was one of the valid answers given from the floor to why there is a poor reading culture in our country, stemming from the basic reason, high illiteracy and semi-literacy, and culminating in the lack of access to books. But challenges came from those of us on the platform who mingled with the audience. The plaintiffs were all fully literate and claimed to be reader/writers: What — on the premise that you cannot be a writer unless you are a reader, that is our only true schooling — did they read?