Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

It’s raining and instead of the church swimming pool the comrades are in Jake and Isa’s house.

— Who’re these superior louts receiving higher education — no, tertiary, eh in our new ‘dispensation’—sounds less discriminatory between high and low opportunity? Who are these superiors themselves more degraded than any filthy degradation into which they initiate their ‘inferiors’.—it’s Jake.

Some things you can argue out only with yourself. He is hardly aware of his own voice — Were those young men so brutalised, don’t let’s call them beasts, beasts are innocent, hunt and attack only for survival — did their parents’ torture of so many in ingenious crude daily apartheid routine — did this seep into their DNA — do what? — haunt them into some hideous farce of repetition.—

Jabu launches across the room at him; for everyone there. — So they can’t help it?—

What had to be said — excuses? There cannot be any kind of haunting justification of present behaviour taken from that of grandfathers, uncles, fathers, who were the torturers in their Special Branch, their police, their army! Is there a skin-branding of shame which scars into defiance, indecency, the extortionate unbelievable? — So you don’t have to take any blame for your kind that an old bloodied coat can’t shrug off.

Only Pierre, the Afrikaner Dolphin can speak about the Free State, aloud — Boere . Afrikaners. — Pierre’s taken on the hardest kind of recognition, responsibility for what his people have done to themselves.

While they also produced a Dominee Beyers Naude who wouldn’t preach in a segregated Gereformeerde Kerk.

In that only refuge from what’s happening elsewhere, another university — in bed again away from all intrusions, there was tension to be felt in her. He stroked her hip where his hand lay. She drew away as if she were going to speak, say something that among crossing voices hadn’t been heard.

How not to have understood! He and the others mindblown by what had been done in the name of the white-skinned; themselves. She is part of the old women cleaners, the men lured to drink with the sons of the past masters, fed in a stew all that they’d had thrust down their throats all their people’s lives, the whites’ rejection pissed out as blacks’ share of life’s abundance.

Make love to her, would be the tender healing, most respectful acceptance of what she couldn’t release herself of without cursing him in the wordless sense of what his skin represents. But for once, first time ever, since the bold boy-girl desire met, ignoring the Reeds, ignoring Baba, in Swaziland, he could not expect to enter, taken in by her. How long will it be — it’s the country in mind now, not the Free State, no-no it’s too easy to say it’s colour, race, Jabu has multiple identities in living: in her convictions, ethics, beliefs, along with the congenital. A love between them, her Baba and her, which that other love, woman and mate, has not supplanted. Her bond with her Baba survived the disillusion and pain of that other visit the day when she went back home to KwaZulu after sitting — witnessing — at the rape trial and found her father outraged by the trial and triumphant in the dismissal of the charge against Zuma.

Also easy to miss within her multiple identities something you would rather miss. The attachment tangle, strength beneath any acquisition to selfhood, of that history called ‘tradition’ (didn’t colonials dub as a basket of customs anything other than their own ways dealing with the events of life and death). The attachment, not in sense of emotion but of a history alive in the present which he cannot claim to share with her and her Baba. Must face, like it or not — comrades and lovers as they are with their definitive shared history of the Struggle — leaving is different; for her, Jabu. Call it Australia. Whatever. He’s not leaving what she’s leaving.

What her father knows, she’s leaving.

— What did he say.—

— Nothing. At first. I almost thought he hadn’t heard me right. What I’d told.—

The father removed beyond belief. She read the conclusion taken, this one of the communication facilities of growing up together not as children but as adults. — No, his way of not being pushed, you know, taking his time…you see…for the meaning of what’s been said. He just opened the door in his room and sent a boy to fetch tea and only when we started to drink — Are you and your children going too. — Like asking a man in the family who’s off to a job he’s found in the city. I said again, opportunities…you’ve heard about. — Australia, England, America, Ghana — he said it—‘all the same’.—

Opportunities. Quoting from the cuttings — as a circumstance, reason Baba would perhaps respond to that she herself had not shown any recognition of to himself, Steve; but this was her Baba who had seen sending her away to education in Swaziland was his decision of opportunity for her.

— And then. He was angry. So then—

She pinches in her nostrils a moment, concentration to repeat her Baba faithfully, of course they would have been speaking in isiZulu. — He changed to English, ‘There are many white people going there, I read they call it something, relocating, that must be the word they took when they put us, black people into Locations outside the towns.’—

— That’s all? Didn’t ask anything, more about you.—

What about her; first thing she knew was coming upon the cuttings wasn’t it.

She smiled with closed lips and paused — before the evocation of Zuma’s man, the father. — Uzikhethele wena impilo yakho! You made your life, I let you choose, you must live the way it is in this time.—

What is she saying, comrade Jabu, that whatever her betrayal of her Baba, his bitter sorrow, her rejection of him; her betrayal of herself, Ubuntu, her country: a woman, in the order of her Baba’s community, she will live this time as ever on the decision of her man.

Australia, I am leaving with him, leaving our country, KwaZulu, leaving you. The woman goes where her man goes, that’s the ancient order understood, but he knows, Baba knows, had his own kind of revolution in nurturing his female child to independent being. Wouldn’t be deluded, would accept that she was emigrating — that reversal of what brought foreigners to take the continent, Africa which was not theirs — as a wife obedient to her husband. Baba will still force her to meet him on common if not equal ground — he is the father, ultimate authority after the Word of God — he had provided for her. She has to defend herself on the choice made for the children, hers and thereby Baba’s lineage, children of Africa, of the Zulu nation.

Protect herself from knotted liens of nature her man must recognise, always should have recognised, liens he didn’t have. Being born here is not enough. Even in the equality of the Struggle.

Sindiswa is about to be fourteen. When she’s asked what she wants as her birthday present she says one of the new mobile phones where you can see movies and read books, the pages passing, you don’t have to turn — her cell phone is old stuff.

— Oh please — must she be like all the kids (and his students) a clamp on her ear, apparently talking aloud to themselves.—

He keeps his ‘old style’ mobile in the car — for hijack emergencies…? There are breaks in real communication in the faculty room just when someone is putting together an argument worth hearing and he/she is claimed by a singsong sounding somewhere under clothes like a digestive gurgle. When a student comes to him to discuss a formula not clearly grasped — that’s what he’s there for, a teacher always available — he has bossily made it a rule that the thing must be switched off. He’s not cool, Prof Reed, although they say he was one of the whites in Umkhonto .