Saturday, July 19, 2014

My hero / Nadine Gordimer by Gillian Slovo

Nadine Gordimer

My hero: Nadine Gordimer

Gillian Slovo remembers how her fellow South African author's passion for the truth was coupled with a brilliant sense of humour

Plus tributes from JM Coetzee, Justin Cartwright and Elizabeth Lowry

Gillian Slovo, JM Coetzee, Justin Cartwright and Elizabeth Lowry
Sat 19 Jul 2014 08.45 BST

he first time I met Nadine Gordimer as an adult was after she won the Nobel prize for literature in 1991. I had heard of her ferocious reaction when anyone dared change a word, or even a comma, of her work, so I expected her to have self-confidence and a sharp tongue. But it had never occurred to me that she would be so funny.

Her description of her time at the award ceremony in Stockholm – first stop, a dinner-jacket fitting for the then scruffy poet and ANC representative Mongane Wally Serote; next step, the agony of making conversation with minor royalty – was hilarious. And at a subsequent meeting, in the chaotic runup to South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, Nadine had us in stitches on the floor with her re‑enactment of a conversation she'd just heard that morning on the radio between three people: Nelson Mandela, a clueless member of the public and someone pretending to be Mandela. She was a good mimic: I wouldn't have put it past her to have been the pretend Madiba.All my life she has been a towering figure in South Africa – fearless and a hugely influential writer and activist. She is celebrated for her lyricism, her distinctive cadences, her commitment – the sense that a writer's life is worthless unless it makes the world a better place – and her indomitable opposition to injustice and discrimination, will never be forgotten. She thought that a writer's life, to have any meaning, must be political. It is impossible to overestimate the fierceness of her belief that justice would eventually prevail, and it is astonishing what risks she took to help her friends in the ANC.

I spoke to her three or four times during the transition, and I stood with her in line as she voted for the first time in a free election. There she was, this tiny, beautiful, woman – already quite elderly – joyfully waiting her turn with whites and blacks. It was an extremely moving and symbolic moment, as if, with this act alone, South Africa was going in one bound to escape its frightful past.

There was always something of the romantic about her. She helped black writers generously and she denied that there was something JM Coetzee called "White Writing"; this seemed to me merely a question of semantics. She was drawn to the leaders of the "struggle", but above all others, she loved Nelson Mandela. She told me that after his release and the trauma of the separation from Winnie, who refused to give up her young lover, Mandela was often lonely in his mansion not far away and would call her to ask if he could come for dinner. His favourite meal was chicken, preferably roasted, taken in the panelled dining room and served by servants of long standing.

It was with her housekeeper – the correct term for maid in today's Johannesburg – that she was locked in a storeroom by four young robbers. The housekeeper was screaming in fear until Nadine spoke harshly to the men, reminding them that they should have respect for the housekeeper, who was old enough to be their grandmother. Nadine said she was not in the least frightened: she simply said to herself that she was now experiencing what many South Africans had already suffered. It occurred to me that writers will always see material where lay people see a disaster.

In the 20 years of post-apartheid South Africa, she embraced a different style: her books became schematic so that characters tended to stand for something, rather than being alive on the page in their own right. The House Gun, (19938), for instance, is rather wooden, because the characters are there primarily to tick various boxes in the new South Africa. iIt lacks the power and empathy of The Conservationist – joint winner of the Booker prize in 1974 – and Burger's Daughter (1979). To my mind, her later books were too firmly tethered to reality and to political issues, unlike, for example, the books of Coetzee.

All my life she has been a towering figure in South Africa – fearless and a hugely influential writer and activist. She is celebrated for her lyricism, her distinctive cadences, her commitment – the sense that a writer's life is worthless unless it makes the world a better place – and her indomitable opposition to injustice and discrimination, will never be forgotten. She thought that a writer's life, to have any meaning, must be political. It is impossible to overestimate the fierceness of her belief that justice would eventually prevail, and it is astonishing what risks she took to help her friends in the ANC.

In recent years she turned on the corruption and incompetence of the ANC government. When she was in London last she would only talk about the attempt by Jacob Zuma and his cronies to evade the constitution and to silence opposition. She wanted me to understand that South Africa has a wonderful constitution and a world-class Bill of Rights. All that is required – she said – is that they should be honoured; they are South Africa's secular religion, and the government's Protection of State Information Bill was intent on subverting them. She said that the bill was a sham designed to hide widespread corruption. It has not yet been passed into law after vocal opposition.

I asked her if she would have preferred to have had a quieter life – "the normal life, the one that never was". She dismissed the idea: she wouldn't have preferred a quieter life; she had an astonishingly rich life. And the reward – perhaps as much for a life of fearless opposition to the South African regime as for her writing – was the Nobel prize in 1991.

She liked to say that nothing is as true as her fiction; it is certainly true that her fiction shone an unwavering light on the human suffering of apartheid.

Elizabeth Lowry

I first read Nadine Gordimer as a student in apartheid South Africa. After 10 years, The Late Bourgeois World (1966), her novel about white resistance to the apartheid regime which the South African government banned in 1976, had just been unbanned. What was immediately noticeable about the book wasn't its subversiveness, but its extreme formal and emotional control – its delicacy, in fact. Here lay the real shock: this supposedly crassly incendiary novel, so dangerous, apparently, that it had to be suppressed, was the very opposite of incendiary. It offered a nuanced view of conflicted white suburban life that was scrupulously true to its own eminently civilised vision and intentions. It was, in a word, literature.

Gordimer will be remembered as a political voice, but she was, first and foremost, a great artist. Although she believed passionately that an author operating in a highly politicised culture could not ignore the issues of her time without being guilty of an ethical evasion, she remained accountable to the last to her own principled idea of what a writer should be, defining her work as something in which "creative self absorption" must always be checked by "conscionable self awareness". Like others before and after her – Olive Schreiner, André Brink, Mongane Serote – she tried to reconcile the sometimes clashing claims of history and fiction by writing in the realist tradition, but she had a fastidious commitment to truth-telling that was all her own. Her novels are resolutely rooted in the world to which she belonged, the white liberal South African milieu from the 1950s to the present. This was something for which she made no apologies, even though it earned her criticism from contemporaries with a more fashionably metafictional bent, such as her fellow Booker winner JM Coetzee, or her comrades in the ANC who insisted, during the apartheid years, that the proper purpose of fiction was to promote the revolution – and, post-apartheid, that the new majority government should be beyond censure. Hers was an at times thankless task: her novel July's People (1981), banned by the apartheid government for being scaremongering in its vision of a post-revolutionary South Africa, was – plus ça change – later re-banned by the ANC in Gauteng as "racist, superior and patronising".

Gordimer's decision to restrict herself to writing about what she knew was always a deliberate one, a sophisticated corollary to her conviction that the primary role of the South African novelist is faithfully to record social conditions. At the same time, she triumphantly avoided the impoverished aesthetic of merely political writing. Tellingly, one of her last public acts was to oppose the ANC's protection of State information bill, a secrecy law that proposes to crack down on journalists and anti-government whistleblowers. This was entirely in character. After a long career of consistently speaking truth to power, she stood up, to the end, for freedom of speech.

THE GUARDIAN