Nadine Gordimer: My Son's Story

Their eyes fixed him. Their fear held them. I saw what it was — they expected him to have brought something out of what was destroyed. Something for them. He stood with blackened hands dangling open before them, he passed a weary gesture across his forehead that left a smudge he was unaware of. And he grinned. He grinned and his whole face drew together an agonized grimace of pain and reassurance, threat and resistance drawn in every fold of skin, every line of feature that the human face could be capable of conveying only under some unimaginable inner demand. It was very strange, what he brought them.

And then of course the old rhetoric took up the opportunity. We can't be burned out, he said, we're that bird, you know, it's called the phoenix, that always rises again from the ashes. Prison won't keep us out. Petrol bombs won't get rid of us. This street — this whole country is ours to live in. Fire won't stop me. And it won't stop you.

Flocks of papery cinders were drifting, floating about us— beds, clothing — his books?

The smell of smoke, that was the smell of her.

The smell of destruction, of what has been consumed, that he first brought into that house.

It's an old story — ours. My father's and mine. Love, love/ hate are the most common and universal of experiences. But no two are alike, each is a fingerprint of life. That's the miracle that makes literature and links it with creation itself in the biological sense.

In our story, like all stories, I've made up what I wasn't there to experience myself. Sometimes — I can see — I've told something in terms I wouldn't have been capable of, aware of, at the period when it was happening: the licence of hindsight. Sometimes I can hear my voice breaking through, my judgments, my opinions elbowing in on what are supposed to be other people's. I'll have to watch out for that next time. Sometimes memory has opened a trapdoor and dropped me back into the experience as if I were living it again just at the stage I was when I lived it, so I've told it that way, in the present tense, with the vocabulary that was all I had to express myself, then. And so I've learned what he didn't teach me, that grammar is a system of mastering time; to write down 'he was', 'he is', 'he will be' is to grasp past, present and future. Whole; no longer bearing away.

All of it, all of it.

I have that within that passeth show.

I've imagined, out of their deception, the frustration of my absence, the pain of knowing them too well, what others would be doing, saying and feeling in the gaps between my witness. All the details about Sonny and his women? — oh, those I've taken from the women I've known. 'Sonny is not the man he was'; someone has said that to me: his comrades think it's because Aila's gone. But I'm young and it's my time that's come, with women. My time that's coming with politics. I was excluded from that, it didn't suit them for me to have any function within it, but I'm going to be the one to record, someday, what he and my mother/Aila and Baby and the others did, what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold. That's what struggle really is, not a platform slogan repeated like a TV jingle.

He's been detained again. I wake up before it's light, these days, and I'm aware of him there, shut away. As if he we're breathing in the next room in the house that's burned down. I've sent him this but I don't know if they'll give it to him. It's not Shakespeare; well, anyway…

4 a.m.

A bird sharpening its song against the morning Furze of prison blanket mangy against the lips Bird out there Long ago we picked it up Wired the tiny skeleton to make it bird again

Bird

Come, I'll hold you cupped in my two hands

Stroke your smooth feathers

Open the bars of my fingers and let you

Go!

Through the spaces of the iron bars

Fly!

Come, lover, comrade, friend, child, bird Come

I entice you with my crumbs, see-Dove

Sprig of olive in its beak

Dashes in swift through the bars, breaks its neck Against stone walls.

What he did — my father — made me a writer. Do I have to thank him for that? Why couldn't I have been something else?

I am a writer and this is my first book — that I can never publish.