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

The responses were alarmingly uniform: they read African literature from the African continent, mainly from South Africa. We were celebrating Chinua Achebe’s seventieth birthday as a focus of Writers’ Day 2000, but few had read more of his work than Things Fall Apart , which had been a set work in high schools. Only one mentioned Wole Soyinka, one other, Toni Morrison, another Fanon; Mahfouz was an unfamiliar name to them. The assertion was: we want to read about ourselves, our lives . Don Mattera countered with the discovery of oneself to be found in Dostoevsky. The riposte was: too far away and long ago. The director of Windybrow, Walter Chakela, a poet and playwright who runs workshops that have discovered and nurtured new talent among the young and unknown, and whose own plays bring to life and light African heroes both of the distant past and the recent one of apartheid, stunned the vociferous with the quiet announcement that he had begun to think as a poet, to range mentally in the imagination, from having to learn Wordsworth at school. He spoke of the identification with the intimacies of human feeling which are to be found in contact with great creative minds in all kinds of eras, countries. Finally, the audience was in rejection and derision of the fact — a litany — that Shakespeare was ‘stuffed down’ their necks at school; and what did Shakespeare know about them ?

And so now you, who have been patient, know why I quoted my version of a Shakespearean discourse.

Shakespeare — why Shakespeare? Because in Shylock’s speech any of these children of apartheid with their history of racism in their veins will find, here in the experience of another race, their people, themselves: hasn’t a black man eyes? Hasn’t a black man hands? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if, as many young people struggle within themselves against the acid desire for revenge upon those who oppressed their parents and destroyed their childhood, they come to read these lines: ‘The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction’ — will they not find something of their secret selves?

In the end it is a self-deprivation to approach literature, as Caryl Phillips says of history, through the prism of your own pigmentation.

That’s what whites did, first.

Rightful pride in African literature should not create a literary ghetto. Surely there have been enough ghettoes. It’s the end of Orientalism; for in African literature, Indian literature, Arabic literature, the Euro-American, Western world now begins to find something of itself . So surely the time has come for African literature to connect, beyond exclusive discourse at scholarly level about itself, its achievements, its problems, with the world of literature, the expansion of literary consciousness to which it belongs. Surely young people from among whom are our hopes for new African writers, should be urged to read widely, to set aside the dominant criterion of ‘relevance’ that belongs to the era when it was an essential element of consciousness-raising tactics of politics against racism. The struggle against racism is not over, as we well know, around the world, but if literature is to be the political memory of the present and future in which young people will live out their lives, should it not reflect, and reflect upon, between literatures, what Achebe calls ‘preliminary conversations … participations in a monumental ritual by millions and millions to appease a long and troublesome history of dispossession and bitterness, and to answer “present” at the rebirth of the world?’

The lion’s telling of his story has another, cogent, urgent, reason for identification with the literatures of that world.

In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God’s Word, the Word that was Creation. Its secular transformation came to us when it was first scratched on a stone tablet or traced on papyrus, and when it travelled from parchment to Gutenberg. That was the genesis of the writer, of literature.

In literature now we are indivisibly in a situation that did not exist when the lion’s telling began. It did not exist when Langston Hughes, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Es’kia Mphahlele, Ngûgĩ wa Thiong’o, Agostinho Neto, Kofi Awoonor began to write. But all literatures are conjoined today under threat of the image against the Word. We are certainly aware of that rival, self-appointed, but with plenty of independent popular corroboration. From the first third of the twentieth century the image has been challenging the power of the written world as a stimulation of the imagination, the opening up of human receptivity. The bedtime story of middle-class childhood has been replaced by the hours in front of the TV screen; in shack settlements all over the poor countries of the globe there is the battery-run television where no single book is to be found. We already have at least one generation grown that looks instead of reads. Yes, TV images are accompanied by the spoken Word, but it is the picture that decides how secondary the Word’s role shall be. The story-telling of the TV medium is the Big Picture; even in documentaries the spoken word is an accessory consisting generally of the most banal and limited vocabulary. Anyone who has run workshops for aspirant writers will know, as I do, how the mini-series vocabulary is often all that aspirants can command to express what are often original ideas. I am still waiting for some proof that, as has been claimed, TV has encouraged reading.

‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Whoever it was — a public relations savant, no doubt — who came up with the adage, the rejoinder is: ‘For how long?’

The image disappears from the screen; to recall it you have to have an apparatus, a cell, a battery, access to an electric power connection. The written word is simply there, in your pocket. The book in your hand can be read on the bus, in bed, in a queue, on a mountain-top, beside a stream, in a traffic jam. The American writer William Gass argues our case for us:

We shall not understand what a book is , and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together through many adventures and a long time. Words on a screen have visual qualities, to be sure, and these darkly limn their shape, but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be gone. Off the screen, they do not exist as words. They do not exist to be reseen, reread, they only wait to be remade, relit … I cannot argue in their margins …

And the lions of our African literature are confronted suddenly, just as other literatures, with another, the latest factor in the threat to debase the written word, this time presented by information technology as, indeed, an advancement in the dissemination of literature. Although it seems something of a gimmick, so far, with one thirty-page novel (Stephen King’s) written ‘for’ and ‘published’ on the internet, and one can hardly imagine Soyinka’s The Interpreters let alone War and Peace republished in this way, there is every likelihood that at a certain broad level there is going to be a public deprived for a lifetime — because it is going to be told by international websites what it needs, what cultural fulfilment is ; deprived of the pleasures and intellectual fulfilment I have described and quoted. People are going to ‘read’, not books, but texts passing on a screen, soon to be available like telephone messages to appear on the matchbox screens of mobile phones.