A Sustainable Place: Nadine Gordimer and South Africa

"Soon, in this generation or the next, it must be our turn to starve and suffer." So contemplates Mehring, the central character of Nadine Gordimer's novel The Conservationist, through whose consciousness—and sometimes subconscious—the narration of the novel flows.^[1] Mehring is in some guise the conservationist of the title: he has recently bought a farm on the outskirts of Johannesburg, and is much concerned with it as a sustainable agricultural site. Yet Mehring is also a wealthy white industrialist whose specialty is pig iron, and part of his motive in acquiring the farm is so he can write it off as a tax loss. Both of Mehring's concerns—industry and farm—depend on cheap black labour in South Africa, and a system of political subjugation that reproduces its availability. He has his human side and a feel for nature, but at other times resorts to a rampant macho realpolitik. Everyone wants shoes on their feet, he reasons, and people like him provide employment. Yes, others are subjugated, but this is the way the world works, and soon, in this generation or the next "it will be our turn to starve and suffer." Might as well make the most of it.

The Conservationist is a complex novel, arguably Gordimer's masterpiece in both thematic and aesthetic terms. Its relevance extends from its time to ours in various ways. The plot hinges on the discovery of a murdered black man buried shallowly in the third pasture of Mehring's farm. As such the body becomes a presence in the novel, and a looming presence in Mehring's mind. In fact, it becomes Mehring's most profound antagonist because, in its shallow burial, it corresponds to everything he has suppressed regarding his own complicity in the system of apartheid. To Mehring the body becomes an everyman, "one of them," representing metonymically the world of black South Africa, someone who, even in death, cannot claim (to use the title of one of Gordimer's early short stories) "six feet of the country."^[1] But that body will rise. Towards the end of the novel, a storm sweeping in from the Mozambique Channel lifts the body to the surface of the farm, and also to the surface of Mehring's mind. In an intense episode of breakdown he flees the farm, and it appears by the end of the novel that he has sold the farm to a succeeding owner. As the murdered black man at last receives a proper burial by Mehring's farmworkers, Gordimer writes, "They had put him away to rest, at last; he had come back. He took possession of this earth, theirs; one of them" (267). The phrase "he had come back" echoes the slogan of the African National Congress in South Africa in the 1950s: "Africa! May it come back!" With these political overtones, the black body has been both laid to rest and resurrected. His dignity has been restored and he is where he belongs, on land where he belongs, buried by people to whom he belongs. At a time when it seemed impossible, the novel has entered a prophetic mode, invoking the unforeseeable future when land and people will be one. Throughout the novel, political and psychic realities reinforce one another: the Freudian term "the return of the repressed" has an encompassing resonance for what we witness in The Conservationist.

A short account such as this cannot do justice to the full complexity of the work in all its textual, poetic, and visionary aspects. To give just one example: the black body in Mehring's third pasture is borne up by reeds; "reed" is the isiZulu term for "ancestor," and the role of the primary ancestor is to claim the land. The third pasture itself resonates as a symbolic term: against the twinned polarities of oppression and subjugation it suggests a third dynamic, of resurrection so to speak. There are many other dimensions of a novel which invokes Zulu religion and mythology and in which the entire "text" of Mehring's accustomed world is subverted even as he deploys it. Ultimately even his "no" in response to his fate comes to mean "yes" as he succumbs.^[2]

Even from this short account I would like to draw out certain issues that have a resonance for Gordimer's fiction as a whole. One is her sense of place, her profound attachment to the land of South Africa and its people, as well as her attention to the meanings of place.^[1] Another, by way of its counterpart, is her attachment to time—what I have elsewhere referred to as a "consciousness of history" in her work.^[2] This concerns not so much a sense of the past but rather the question of the unfolding present, its burdens, obligations, and implications. Equally in the novel we see a theme of belonging: what it means to belong in South Africa, what full belonging might mean. Related to all of these aspects, the novel explores a question adumbrated by its title, that is the issue of "conservation" or sustainability. What does conservation mean in a country such as South Africa? Does it come down in the end to conserving power—as it does for Mehring, notwithstanding his attachment to nature? Is an unjust system sustainable in the long term? How does the question of justice inflect a relationship to the land, and vice versa? Is there a way to make the symbolic farm—the archetypal site of production and reproduction in the long history of human settlement—sustainable and just for all?^[3] This is a question we might ask not only in South Africa but elsewhere as well.

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Issues such as these have constituted Gordimer's developing explorations through the course of her work. They began to take shape in her early short stories, a number of which concern the relations between masters and servants in the domestic setting of the household. Here we see some of the underlying assumptions and ironies of an urban liberalism: people who consider themselves kind and good yet whose condescension underpins their reliance on a system of racial inequality. One of Gordimer's early stories—indeed the story titled "Six Feet of the Country"—anticipates The Conservationist in its setting on a farm and its depiction of the hypocrisies of the white man who lives there with his wife. Lest we think this sort of thing is only a gender problem, however, in a number of these stories we see the divisions between white women and black women. Two decades later, thinking through the sociology of life in South Africa, Gordimer pointed out that white men and white women had more in common with one another than white women and black women.^[4] There was no easy gender alliance in the raced and classed realities of South Africa. Yet conversely, Gordimer has always held out a particular exception for the writer with regard to gender. When it came to their essential faculties, she insisted, "all writers are androgynous beings."^[5] It was this that perhaps allowed her to inhabit the male character of Mehring (and many others) with such assurance.

The question of belonging is adumbrated early on in Gordimer's fiction. Her first published novel, The Lying Days, revolves towards the end around whether its central character and narrator, Helen Shaw, will leave South Africa or return after she travels overseas. It is indicative that she decides to return, and in that respect the matter of belonging—where to belong—is settled. But how to belong, and what belonging might truly mean, those are very different matters. In Gordimer's second novel, A World of Strangers, the central character and narrator is an outsider, an Englishman who comes to South Africa to run a black magazine. His most meaningful interactions are with black characters, and by the end his commitment is to stay in South Africa as a mark of that, but it is clear that the work of true belonging is only beginning. Gordimer's third novel, Occasion for Loving, subverts all of this entirely. It tests the limits of interracial connection in that it tells the story of a love affair between a black man and a white woman which ultimately cannot survive the stresses and strains of apartheid. It is not only the laws that come between them but also the internalised effects of those laws in conditions of oppression and inequality. Here the standard roles are reversed: in social and political terms it is the white woman who has the power and the black man who does not, though a reverse dynamic along gender lines also emerges in their relationship. In somewhat devastating form a love relationship is unsustainable in the inequitable conditions of apartheid. In these forays, Gordimer was exploring in depth and with great acuity what she was discovering through her practice as a writer. As she commented, she was drawn to politics through writing, and not the other way round; she was "led by Kafka rather than Marx."^[6] As she put it at the time, "politics is character in SA."^[7] If one wanted to write about character, politics inevitably entered into the interior life of the characters one wrote about. That was Gordimer's domain, and if it dealt with realities that were ultimately unsustainable in the world outside of fiction, then in a paradoxical respect it was those same realities through which her fiction was sustained.

Who was the writer who embarked on such matters? In many ways, she was an unlikely candidate. Both of Gordimer's parents came from elsewhere: her father was an immigrant from Latvia, a watchmaker and jeweller; her mother's origins were in England. Both were Jewish, but that did not prevent faultlines within the home. Gordimer's mother, adopting prevailing Anglo-colonial ways, looked down on her husband with his East-European accent and obvious foreignness. Perhaps this engendered a feel in the young Gordimer for the intricacies of intimate life, the subtle shadings of everyday attachments and resentments. She grew up in Springs, a small town on the gold reef that extended outwards from Johannesburg, and early on was a lively and energetic young girl, riding her bicycle around—and sometimes on—the dangerous coal-mining slag heaps that created features of the landscape.^[8] She was also a dancer, competing in "eisteddfods"; the Welsh term for such competitions was itself a mark of cultural distance. At the age of ten, however, her mother took her out of school on the grounds of a putative heart condition, and the young Gordimer became an avid reader and also a mimic. Her first stories were fables for children, published in a Sunday newspaper when she was twelve. She published her first "adult" story at the age of fifteen.

She said afterwards that a profound laziness marked her post-school life—what she called "a sybaritic meagreness."^[9] She attended a year of university before dropping out. But challenged by a well-known writer to take herself seriously, she did, and that was the beginning of her writing life proper. Living in Johannesburg—soon divorced and with a small child—she began to delve into the world around her. All her models for writing came from elsewhere—specifically Britain but also Europe and the United States. How would one write about one's own society? There were models, among them the extraordinary Olive Schreiner, whose The Story of an African Farm was published in 1883. But Gordimer's life was specific to a modern African-colonial-urban environment, and she entered into it with gusto. The 1950s were formative for her. This was the era of "multiracialism"—a combination of movements both political, social and cultural in response to the racial segregation of apartheid. Writers, artists, musicians melded together across the colour lines in places such as Sophiatown, an area of Johannesburg where people who were not white still had freehold rights. This was the era of Drum magazine, featuring the work of an energized generation of black writers. The musician Hugh Masekela had his start in Sophiatown, as did the singer Miriam Makeba. There were cross-racial parties, love affairs, a whole new world opening up. It was also the era of the iconic political moments of the peaceful anti-apartheid movements: the Defiance Campaign, the women's march on Pretoria, the Congress of the People, and—the event that closed the decade down—the Treason Trial, which lasted from 1956-61, in which 156 accused were charged with a violent conspiracy to overthrow the government. They were all eventually acquitted, but the momentum of the decade was over. It ended definitively on 21 March 1960 when the Sharpeville Massacre took place. South Africa had entered a new phase with the ANC and Pan Africanist Congress banned, the declaration of a State of Emergency, and massive detentions around the country.

It was Gordimer's life, then, that introduced her to her subject matter. She was by definition someone who always approached the edges of the boundaries that contained her. She had an extraordinary zest for experience combined with a capacity for detachment that made her an observer of the world in which she was immersed. She became its inner chronicler, delving into the nooks and crannies of its social and psychic life. She was unafraid too to write of the areas of friction and distrust that marked relationships across the colour line. A short story titled "Which New Era Would That Be?" presented an insufferable liberal woman whose very attempt at cross-racial encounter is marked by an unself-conscious and deeply irritating obliviousness to the dynamics of her surroundings. It was partly for these reasons—both the political shifts of the time and the evident limitations of what she saw around her—that Gordimer moved away from a convenient liberalism, with its assumptions of the transcendent nature of personal relations—towards more radical positions. By the 1970s she was no longer calling herself a liberal but rather a "white South African radical."^[10] To her mind—and as seen through the lens of the times—liberals hoped to open up political structures so that black South Africans could be included in an existing system. But radicals wanted the system of racial capitalism—as it came to be understood on the left—to be replaced rather than improved. In the era of anticolonial movements in Africa and around the globe, and especially in the light of increased repression in South Africa and its progression towards a police state, the drift was revolutionary rather than evolutionary. Gordimer was never a revolutionary per se; but she had no patience with the comforts of presiding white assumptions.

There was much history she had to live through. The repression of the 1960s introduced a period of political quiescence, with the leaders of the liberation movements in prison or in exile. In the 1970s, a younger generation took to the Black Consciousness movement which focused, in the articulation of its leader, Steve Biko, on psychological liberation from the shackles of apartheid as preface to the political. For Black Consciousness students, white liberals and even radicals were part of the problem rather than the solution because they spoke and acted for blacks rather than letting blacks speak and act for themselves. Gordimer absorbed some of the force of these arguments, declaring in an essay from the period that "my consciousness inevitably has the same tint as my face."^[1] In a different essay she cited the poet Mongane Serote: "White people are white people,/ They must learn to listen./ Black people are black people,/ They must learn to talk."^[2] By the 1980s, South Africa had entered a period of breakdown. There were new populist movements allied with the ANC, and trade union activism was on the rise, while the South African state used a mysterious "third force" to disrupt, murder and "disappear" anti-apartheid activists; two States of Emergency were implemented in quick succession. This was the era that Gordimer, following the Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci, called "the interregnum," a period when, as Gramsci described it, "the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms."^[3] Evidence of those symptoms was everywhere. Soon Gordimer was appearing at funerals in the black townships to help protect students burying their comrades killed by the police. Later in the decade she appeared in court for the defence of ANC activists on trial. No one at that point could foresee the end of apartheid, but at the same time the situation appeared unsustainable, and Gordimer was making her position clear.

Yet she always insisted on the distinction between her role as a citizen and as a writer. In her essay, "Living in the Interregnum," which explored the conundrums of South African life in the 1980s, she declared that "Nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction."^[4] It is to her fiction then that we should turn to understand the inner history it delineated in its own way. In her novel A Guest of Honour (1971) she left the South African context behind in setting the work in an unspecified African country. The locale may have been different, and the novel was written during the only time Gordimer said she ever contemplated leaving South Africa. But if this was the case, then the novel resolved the question, because its central character, in very challenging circumstances that will in fact end his life, decides that Africa is indeed his place. Also quite evident in this work is Gordimer's feel for and attachment to African people and the African landscape, aspects of her temperament and her writing that appear too in her non-fictional essays exploring various South African and African locations, including Egypt, Botswana and the Congo.^[5] But it is in the great triad of her novels in this period that her in-depth investigations took place. One of them, The Conservationist, we have already discussed. In succeeding years this was joined by Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981).

Burger's Daughter is one of the major political novels of the twentieth century. The central character is Rosa Burger, daughter of Lionel Burger, famed anti-apartheid activist who has died in prison. As a character, Lionel was loosely based on the figure of Bram Fischer—the Afrikaner lawyer and communist who was a leading figure in the liberation movement in South Africa.^[6] Rosa, however, faces the world in a different time from Lionel's, with its intrinsic assumptions of cross-racial alliances and solidarities. This is now the time of Black Consciousness, which rejects Lionel's traditions, and of the Soweto Uprising of 1976, in which black school and university students took on the might of the South African state, initiating a whole new phase of political confrontation. In this context, Rosa, whose whole life has been contained by her family's legacy, wants nothing more than a private life, and circumstances in South Africa provide the reinforcement. She attends an interracial women's meeting, but all she is convinced of there are its middle-class liberal assumptions and futility. Immediately following that, in the depths of the Soweto township she comes across a black man desperately beating his exhausted donkey. Rosa is overwhelmed: it is something she confronts in the equivalent of an underworld for her. But whereas in the great myths of the Aeneid and the Odyssey the male hero descends to the underworld to discover his patrimony and destiny, Rosa's experience as a daughter is one of unknowing. Her conclusion is "I don't know how to live in Lionel's country."^[7] She leaves South Africa for France and England, where she has yet another devastating experience in a midnight phone call from someone she once knew well—the black child her family called "Baasie" ("little Boss" in Afrikaans) who lived with them as a member of the family. Now Baasie, grown to adulthood, rejects both her and her father. His real name is Zwelinzima ("Suffering Land" in isiZulu), he informs her. He is neither her little black Boss nor her brother: it is the Black Consciousness challenge in an intimate, piercing form. The South African racial family is broken. Rosa's only solution is to offer herself nonetheless. She returns to South Africa, and ends up in solitary confinement in prison, where on the wall of her cell at sunset she sees the "watermark of light" (361) that her father Lionel had once noted. Something about her father's tradition is sustained in conditions otherwise unsustainable. This is Rosa's place, but for the young white woman in her time it is a place of isolated, existential commitment.

• Barnard, Rita. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Boyers, Robert, Clark Blaise, Terence Diggory, Jordan Elgrably. "A Conversation with Nadine Gordimer." Salmagundi 62 (Winter 1984), 3-31.
• Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. 2nd ed. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
• Clingman, Stephen. "Surviving Murder: Oscillation and Triangulation in Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun." Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (2000): 139-58.
• Clingman, Stephen. The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Clingman, Stephen. Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary. 2nd ed. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013.
• Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.
• Gordimer, Nadine. The Lying Days. London: Gollancz; New York: Simon & Schuster; 1953.
• Gordimer, Nadine. "Six Feet of the Country." In Six Feet of the Country. London: Gollancz; New York: Simon & Schuster; 1956.
• Gordimer, Nadine. "Which New Era Would That Be?" In Six Feet of the Country. London: Gollancz; New York: Simon & Schuster; 1956.
• Gordimer, Nadine. A World of Strangers. London: Gollancz; New York: Simon & Schuster; 1958.
• Gordimer, Nadine. Occasion for Loving. London: Gollancz; New York: Viking; 1963.
• Gordimer, Nadine. "A Writer in South Africa." London Magazine, May 1965.
• Gordimer, Nadine. A Guest of Honour. London: Cape; New York: Viking; 1971.
• Gordimer, Nadine. The Conservationist. 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
• Gordimer, Nadine. No Place Like: Selected Stories. 1975. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
• Gordimer, Nadine. Burger's Daughter. London: Cape; New York: Viking; 1979.
• Gordimer, Nadine. July's People. London: Cape; New York: Viking; Johannesburg: Ravan; 1981.
• Gordimer, Nadine. The Essential Gesture: Writing , Politics and Places. Edited by Stephen Clingman. London: Cape; New York: Knopf; 1988.
• Gordimer, Nadine. My Son's Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
• Gordimer, Nadine. None to Accompany Me. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
• Gordimer, Nadine. The House Gun. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
• Gordimer, Nadine. The Pickup. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
• Gordimer, Nadine. No Time Like the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
• Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971.
• Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. London: Chapman & Hall, 1883.
• Serote, Mongane Wally. "Ofay-Watcher, Throbs-Phase." In Yakhal'inkomo. Johannesburg: Renoster, 1972.