The balancing act

It requires the artistry of a ballerina to balance literature and politics. And Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer seems to do it without straining herself, writes Srinivas Parsa

SHE has a poise that stems from having faced difficult situations over a lifetime. Unflappable, understanding, under-stated in rhetoric and aesthetic — that is Nadine Gordimer, 83 — the South African writer who lived through the tyrannical racial order of minority white Europeans. The best example of her particular genius is the short and quite unnoticed work of fiction, The Late Bourgeois World, published in 1982. White herself, she cast herself on the side of the Black majority. Not just a sympathiser of the right cause, she is with the African National Congress (ANC). After the 1994 regime change, she remains an ANC member in spite of the rising Black majoritarian sentiment within it.

Nadine Gordimer is an interesting contrast to the other White woman and Nobel Laureate from the neighbouring former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Doris Lessing — she won the Nobel in 2007, Gordimer in 1991 — is a feisty leftist, who recanted her communism and who did not write just about class struggle but ventured into science fiction and the existential exploration of the female self. Gordimer, on the other hand, is a bourgeois at heart and in gesture. That is why, poise, that carefully balancing of inner and outer agitation, is her defining characteristic.

This was the Gordimer that one got to see and hear at the India International Centre (IIC) in New Delhi recently. On a visit to India arranged by the Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs, she also stopped over at
Mumbai and Kolkata, where she delivered the Nobel lecture. At the IIC, Gordimer did what she seemed to be at home doing — reading from her work.

She read from the title story of her latest collection of published short
fiction, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She was not a dramatic reader either. The voice was sufficiently undulated, but it was more like a soft reading in a chamber. A clear ramble because it was a story, like many of her other stories, about a character’s memories and impressions in an encounter with the outer landscape. Many in the audience confessed that that they could not make out what it was all about. It was about a White professor’s search for his roots in the new South Africa. What caught the attention of the audience was the line, "Once there were Blacks wanting to be Whites. Now it is the Whites wanting to be Blacks." Then there was also the ironical observation: "You can’t ever be on somebody’s side."

Later, in reply to an indirectly worded question about the significance of the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in South Africa, Gordimer said, "You are referring to Obama." Then she came up with that perfect summing up of the development, which perhaps only a creative writer can do. She said: "Obama is reconciliation in himself: he is half white and half black." It is hard to beat the explanation.

Asked whether writers are a little lost in post-apartheid South Africa as had happened with the East European writers after the fall of communism, she posed a counter question, "Do you mean apartheid as a political career?" When the questioner clarified, "No, as a creative stimulus." She then shot back, "Writing against apartheid would be propaganda, and there is need for good propagandists."

She went on to say that a creative writer had plenty to write about in the new South Africa, exploring the human experience. An ardent anti-apartheid activist, she does not feel that literature can be used to fight a battle for a good cause. That would remain mere propaganda. Literature has to address and explore things that are more universal and abiding.

Her political activism remains apart from her literary engagement. Not that they don’t come together in her writings — they do constantly and that is also their charm — but she does not use one to justify the other. Gordimer is not an aesthete. Nor an advocate of subordinating literature for the greater cause of fighting injustice. She is committed to both, but they must remain apart.

Gordimer referred to the many problems that her country faces. She said
there is now a black middle-class, but poverty among the blacks is widespread because they are in the majority. "It is a class question, now," she said. There is a recognition that racial struggle has now been replaced by class struggle.

Referring to Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, she made the acerbic
comment that if an angel were to tell him (Mugabe) to step down, he would turn around and say, "You (the angel) are an agent of white imperialists!" Gordimer felt that Mugabe should retire gracefully, but admitted that she didn’t have a solution to making this happen. — WFS

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