The White South African Writer in Our National Situation

Abstract

[The following essay which appeared in the West German scholarly journal Matatu in 1988 ended with the following words: “Nonetheless Nadine Gordimer is in many ways the very air of our cultural climate in South Africa today.” Reading her latest collection of critical essays published two years back, Living in Hope and History: Notes From Our Century (Farrar-Straus-Giroux, New York, 1999), this estimation of our great writer to this author still holds. It would seem that from the very beginning of her literary project her critical and literary imagination has been profoundly integrative and totalizing in the representation of South African cultural space. Though she started writing seriously from the early 1950s when her themes were purely ‘white’, by the late 1950s, at the time when she encountered the Sophiatown Renaissance writers and joining in their cultural movement, her imagination had already begun projecting and gesturing itself in integrative ways, as can be seen in her review of Noni Jabavu’s Drawn in Colour (“From The Third World’, Contact, April 16, 1960) as well as in the novel of 1966 which established her incomparable voice: The Late Bourgeois World. Her imagination not only integrated the cultural space of South Africa, but also the historical and geographic space of Africa in political ways as can be seen in her magisterial essay of 1960-1 which in effect is a critique of Joseph Conrad: “The Congo River” (assembled in her collection of essays The Essential Gesture [1988]). This author ‘discovered’ Nadine Gordimer in his profoundest moment of spiritual crisis concerning Marxism upon reading this great essay immediately upon its appearance at the American Library in Warsaw: “Living in the Interregnum”, New York Review of Books, January 20, 1983. Within a month of this discovery, this author read The Late Bourgeois World on a particular day at the British Council Library in Warsaw. From the moment of that terrible Winter in Poland, Nadine Gordimer has been at the center of this author’s intellectual engagements. It is very instructive and exhilarating that a full decade after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe Nadine Gordimer in Living in Hope and History re-affirms her alignment with the ideology of Marx. There could be no greater lesson than this in April 2001. This essay of 1988 attempted to evaluate how had a few but very important white South African writers had succeeded or failed in constructing an integrative national culture when white sprematist ideology was the order of the day. Nadine Gordimer was the intellectual inspiration of this cultural cartographing. But fundamentally the essay made the political argument that black nationalism would be unacceptable in a post-apartheid South Africa as white nationalism had not been acceptable in the apartheid whatever its hegemonic pretences. The lessons of Nadine Gordimer are inexhaustible.]