Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The girl is laughter-gasping, can’t contain the praise, the pleasure of her mother.

— What’d you and Gary get up to? He hasn’t been sitting at the TV has he?—

— Could be…he’s at the Mkizes.—

— He should have been with us to see his sister — and there’s the boy playing Creon, must have known him.—

But Gary Elias would feel unwelcome, self-outcast, self-reject, appearing in the school he’s insulted by leaving.

At this period in the emerging version of herself Sindiswa is wearing dreadlocks like the ones remembered she, Jabu, had appeared in, first, instead of her Afro bush, and that he had regretted. They flung defiance about Antigone’s face (not as beautiful as her mother, diluted by Reed strain) as she offers—

‘Never, had I been a mother of children, or if a husband had been mouldering in death, would I have taken this task upon me in the city’s despite. What law, ye ask, is my warrant for that word? The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the first-born, but father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother’s life could ever bloom for me again…’

Squeezes eyelids a moment at a hitch in the sequence.

‘…And what law of heaven have I transgressed? Why should I look to the gods any more…when I have suffered my doom I shall come to know my sin; but if the sin is with my judges, I could wish them no fuller measure of evil than they, on their part, mete wrongfully to me…’

If her father didn’t go to a Greek school she doesn’t think he might know. — Antigone’s brother Polynices is killed and left to rot by the cruel king Creon when he’s involved in a kind of revolution, Antigone’s buried him, that’s forbidden, so she’ll have to die… — Oh the plot’s much more complicated than that but her mother and father were in the fight against apartheid so they’ll…

Feels Jabu’s watching him, not the performance; as if she has learnt the role for herself. Reminding of those among them who never knew if the comrades were buried and had hoped some confessions to the Truth Commission might have meant they could find and claim what is left of each other. Exactly. — Go and fetch your brother now, Sindi, it’s time he came home — and tell Blessing and Peter, we’d like to see them. — She wants the Mkizes to have a chance to be warmed by the glow of Antigone inside Sindi, the girl they know with their own young in shared childhood of the Suburb…and Marc, Marc must see a rehearsal, he’ll be so amazed…the adaptation attempt, he’ll be able to give some tips to the cast.

What’s the word — simultaneity. While the school was dramatising justice for the children to understand as the condition for them to pursue living their future in this country, Jonathan was telling of the success of the plan of another, to leave, quit.

— Jonathan called, the son Ryan, he’s going to emigrate. He’s accepted at the university my Cape Town man suggested…Lucky boy.—

— Going to study, you mean. That’s not emigration.—

— But you know. It was the idea? He’ll be qualified to join a firm, the UK, the USA.—

The footfalls and voices of son and daughter arguing their way in, Gary Elias already calling — Wha’d’ you want me for? — and to his mother Ilantshiekhaya kwaNjabula beye mnandi impala! Lunch was lovely, Njabulo’s place, his uncle’s there from home, he brings greeting and stuff for you from Baba, Sindi’s been showing off reciting something, why’d you send her, Umthumeleni! —

What are you doing about it.

Again.

This time the country’s share of the world’s refugees sleeping in doorways and fouling neighbourhoods; it’s climate change like the carbon monoxide that is everywhere, it’s the atmosphere, in greater or lesser degree. Just keep breathing. What can universities do but study, research the phenomenon in the Department of Social Science, Politics, History, Humanitarian Studies — the law of human rights eternal above its distortions in the codes of differing countries, societies, circumstances. A seminar in the appropriate department, which a good number of lecturers from other faculties attend, addressed by the Nigerian Vice Chancellor Principal with the firm intellectual decorum broken only here and there by a slip, emotional anger in the African phrasing of his voice.

And a lunchtime meeting of students and some faculty members in a half-filled hall.

Again. Persuaded by students from the bridging classes now become voluntary coaching also for those in their second year, he’s one of the academics sitting at a table, each tapping a microphone like the clearing of a throat before giving a view on the subject. Xenophobia. That’s the identification, one word, on the Students Council posters hung on the railings outside. Is he the only one among the Professors Jean McDonald of economics, Lesego, African Studies, and the two elected final-year undergraduates, who will question it as glib.

In the audience the students sprawl attentively, there’s a girl in a chador gracefully upright in the front row and a male at the far end eating from a takeaway, it’s democratically correct, the people must not go hungry. He can’t point this out (tempting) — there’d be laughter making a spectacle of their fellow student — the simple presence of a basic need being followed inappropriately is an example of that need as what’s being evaded under the poster rubric.

—‘Xenophobia’—it’s our distancing from the fact that our people right here in our own country, at home (his hand unconsciously knotting itself, a fist) an existence as refugees from our economy, unemployed, unhoused, surviving by ingenuities of begging, waving cars into parking space for the small change (all of us who have cars drop this handout), standing at traffic lights with packets of fruit to sell through driver’s windows, if you’re female standing with a baby or one that can propel itself playing in the gutter. It’s easy — to call them, our own people xenophobic when they resort to violence to defend the only space, the only means of survival against competitors for this almost nothing . It’s not hatred of foreigners. The name for the violence is xenophobia?—

There’s some sort of applause, the confusion of palms smacking together, a couple of feet whose impact with the floor is muffled because the obese soles of canvas sports shoes don’t have the force of leather, contesting voices are thrown like paper darts. Jean McDonald is informally chairperson. She takes full advantage of her microphone. — You are pointing out the fact that we are not succeeding in meeting the rights of disadvantaged citizens of our own country — if we can’t do that, haven’t the resources or the will, government policy, how do we deal with the refugees, who are a threat to even the level of that state — of deprivation.—

— Capitalism! Keeps out people producing wealth for whites just like in apartheid—

— The West backs black dictators whose oppression leads to the wars — people have to get out or die—

— And the black fat cats? Here? They’re not living it high style while the Home Boys dig for the platinum, gold, bring dividends, seats on boards, capitalist BEE—

— Crap! What are we talking about? So — these people are Africans? Crap. They come from other countries, languages, cultures, they are foreigners.—

— Not foreign? Exceptions because they’re black?—

A white girl whose rising breasts jiggle emphasis. — African Union. There’s a European Union, and plenty of prejudice in England when immigrants come in and take jobs, the trade unions—

— Not if they’ll do the stuff the British don’t want to, plumbers are all from Poland—