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Writing and Being
Whether talking about her own writing, interpreting the works of others, or giving us a window on the world that "we in South Africa are attempting to reconstruct," Nadine Gordimer has much to tell us about the art of fiction and the art of life. In this deeply resonant book Gordimer examines the tension for a writer between life's experiences and narrative creations. She asks first, where do characters come from--to what extent are they drawn from real life? We are touching on this question whenever we insist on the facts behind the fiction, Gordimer suggests, and here she tries to unravel the mysterious process that breathes "real" life into fiction. Exploring the writings of revolutionaries in South Africa, she shows how their struggle is contrastingly expressed in factual accounts and in lyrical poetry. Gordimer next turns to three writers linked by their search for a life that transcends their own time and in distinctive and telling ways, Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz defy accepted norms of loyalty to the mores and politics of their countries. Their search in Egypt, Nigeria, and Israel for a meaningful definition of home testifies to what it must the destination of the human spirit beyond national boundaries. Ending on a personal note, Gordimer reveals her own experience of "writing her way out of" the confines of a dying colonialism.
145 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
4 people are currently reading
173 people want to read
About the author
Nadine Gordimer
328 books953 followersNadine Gordimer was a South African writer, political activist, and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".
Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.
Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 17, 2009
These six essays by the South African Nobel prizewinner address four themes: how writers create characters, the difference between fiction and testimony, how writers are driven to find their “place” or “home” by pursuing truth, and how writers relate to their native cultures.
*Adam’s Rib: Fictions and Realities. In her first essay Gordimer discusses the creation of fictional characters by identifying the theoretical extremists: those who say that fictional characters are purely autobiographical and that the author is always writing only about himself, and those (e.g., post-modernist Roland Barthes) who say that the reader actually does the writing and that the author (in effect) does not exist. Gordimer knocks these extreme positions, preferring a view based on her own experience: good authors create characters from observed features and behavior of many people, bits and pieces which are mysteriously blended into new wholes and brought to life (larger than life, actually ) as characters who are as various and inconsistent as real people. (“One of the few things the writer knows is that inconsistency is the consistency of human character.”) A sensible view. On one thing I disagree with Gordimer: she says she does not believe in characters who come out of nowhere and take over a book, but I do, because I myself have had this amazing and delightful experience.
*Hanging on a Sunrise: Testimony and the Imagination in Revolutionary Writings. This essay focuses on the difference, in revolutionary writings, between nonfiction testimony and imaginative works (fiction and poetry). As examples, she cites testimonies and poetry by revolutionaries in the South African struggle for Black liberation. Gordimer naturally comes down on the side of poetry which, unlike testimony, which tends to age quickly, promises, if captured in imaginative language, to live forever.
*Three Middle Essays. Each of the three essays in the middle of the book is about a different author who went too far (in the good sense) in challenging the conventional but wrong wisdom of his society. The authors: Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt (Cairo Trilogy), Nigerian Chinua Achebe (Anthills of the Savannah), and Amos Oz of Israel (Fima). All three risked their lives to tell unpopular truths—and paid the price: Mahfouz was stabbed by an Islamic fundamentalist, Achebe was exiled, and Oz was ostracized. Gordimer repeatedly alludes to Mahfouz’s parable of the man who goes on a pilgrimmage to Cairo to find Zaabalawi, who will heal him. Finally, exhausted from his quest, the man falls asleep in a bar, and when he awakes, his head is wet. The people in the bar tell him that while he was asleep, Zaabalawi came and sprinkled water on him to refresh him. “Having had this sign of Zaabalawi’s existence, the sick soul will go on searching for him all his life—‘Yes I have to find Zaabalawi.’” Zaabalawi is the Concealed Side of Truth that the artist seeks but never fully finds, yet his “suffering is part of the cure.” “The truth is the real definition of ‘home’: it is the final destination of the human spirit beyond national boundaries, natal traditions.” The truth is the real reality sought by artists, philosophers and religiouses, beside which the ordinary social reality of nations and cities and towns seems petty, insignificant. Driven by their quests for Zaabalawi, Mahfouz, Achebe and Oz risk their lives by challenging the phony “truths” of their native societies. “In their Other World, as writers, Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz have the compulsion, the integrity and the audacity to answer the call of the Concealed Side, go too far, after Zaabalawi in pursuit of the truth, the forgotten Promised land where their peoples could appease an embittered history.”
*That Other World that Was the World. In her concluding essay Gordimer tells what it was like to grow up as a colonial in South Africa—without a true “home.” Her mother’s native England was not her home, nor her father’s native Latvia; South Africa was not her home because its people were not her people. Without a strong culture to identify with and mostly sheltered from the harsh realities of the South African police state, she had to create herself primarily from reading about “that other world [Europe:] that was the world.” “I ate and slept at home, but I had my essential being in books.” And eventually, “my principle means of ‘making myself’ was my writing.” Then, moving as a young adult to Johannesburg, she fell in with a group of bohemian actors, writers, painters and poets, white and black, and began to get a feel for the real South Africa. She assisted the Black revolution both directly and through her writing , and in so doing helped bring about a new society where, for the first time in her life, she began to feel at home. “I had to be part of the transformation of my place for it to know me.” “I am a small matter; but for myself there is something immediate, extraordinary, of strong personal meaning. That other world that was the world is no longer the world. My country is the world, whole, a synthesis. I am no longer a colonial. I may now speak of ‘my people.’”
Writing and Being is a good read for anyone interested in the writing of fiction, in the relation of fiction to social change, and/or in the death of Western colonialism and the ensuing “indigenous colonialism” in newly liberated nations.
*Adam’s Rib: Fictions and Realities. In her first essay Gordimer discusses the creation of fictional characters by identifying the theoretical extremists: those who say that fictional characters are purely autobiographical and that the author is always writing only about himself, and those (e.g., post-modernist Roland Barthes) who say that the reader actually does the writing and that the author (in effect) does not exist. Gordimer knocks these extreme positions, preferring a view based on her own experience: good authors create characters from observed features and behavior of many people, bits and pieces which are mysteriously blended into new wholes and brought to life (larger than life, actually ) as characters who are as various and inconsistent as real people. (“One of the few things the writer knows is that inconsistency is the consistency of human character.”) A sensible view. On one thing I disagree with Gordimer: she says she does not believe in characters who come out of nowhere and take over a book, but I do, because I myself have had this amazing and delightful experience.
*Hanging on a Sunrise: Testimony and the Imagination in Revolutionary Writings. This essay focuses on the difference, in revolutionary writings, between nonfiction testimony and imaginative works (fiction and poetry). As examples, she cites testimonies and poetry by revolutionaries in the South African struggle for Black liberation. Gordimer naturally comes down on the side of poetry which, unlike testimony, which tends to age quickly, promises, if captured in imaginative language, to live forever.
*Three Middle Essays. Each of the three essays in the middle of the book is about a different author who went too far (in the good sense) in challenging the conventional but wrong wisdom of his society. The authors: Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt (Cairo Trilogy), Nigerian Chinua Achebe (Anthills of the Savannah), and Amos Oz of Israel (Fima). All three risked their lives to tell unpopular truths—and paid the price: Mahfouz was stabbed by an Islamic fundamentalist, Achebe was exiled, and Oz was ostracized. Gordimer repeatedly alludes to Mahfouz’s parable of the man who goes on a pilgrimmage to Cairo to find Zaabalawi, who will heal him. Finally, exhausted from his quest, the man falls asleep in a bar, and when he awakes, his head is wet. The people in the bar tell him that while he was asleep, Zaabalawi came and sprinkled water on him to refresh him. “Having had this sign of Zaabalawi’s existence, the sick soul will go on searching for him all his life—‘Yes I have to find Zaabalawi.’” Zaabalawi is the Concealed Side of Truth that the artist seeks but never fully finds, yet his “suffering is part of the cure.” “The truth is the real definition of ‘home’: it is the final destination of the human spirit beyond national boundaries, natal traditions.” The truth is the real reality sought by artists, philosophers and religiouses, beside which the ordinary social reality of nations and cities and towns seems petty, insignificant. Driven by their quests for Zaabalawi, Mahfouz, Achebe and Oz risk their lives by challenging the phony “truths” of their native societies. “In their Other World, as writers, Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz have the compulsion, the integrity and the audacity to answer the call of the Concealed Side, go too far, after Zaabalawi in pursuit of the truth, the forgotten Promised land where their peoples could appease an embittered history.”
*That Other World that Was the World. In her concluding essay Gordimer tells what it was like to grow up as a colonial in South Africa—without a true “home.” Her mother’s native England was not her home, nor her father’s native Latvia; South Africa was not her home because its people were not her people. Without a strong culture to identify with and mostly sheltered from the harsh realities of the South African police state, she had to create herself primarily from reading about “that other world [Europe:] that was the world.” “I ate and slept at home, but I had my essential being in books.” And eventually, “my principle means of ‘making myself’ was my writing.” Then, moving as a young adult to Johannesburg, she fell in with a group of bohemian actors, writers, painters and poets, white and black, and began to get a feel for the real South Africa. She assisted the Black revolution both directly and through her writing , and in so doing helped bring about a new society where, for the first time in her life, she began to feel at home. “I had to be part of the transformation of my place for it to know me.” “I am a small matter; but for myself there is something immediate, extraordinary, of strong personal meaning. That other world that was the world is no longer the world. My country is the world, whole, a synthesis. I am no longer a colonial. I may now speak of ‘my people.’”
Writing and Being is a good read for anyone interested in the writing of fiction, in the relation of fiction to social change, and/or in the death of Western colonialism and the ensuing “indigenous colonialism” in newly liberated nations.
December 26, 2021
I like the part discussing Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy.
July 17, 2025
I expected much more…
July 24, 2008
Gordimer is excellent, that doesn't need saying. This books contains her nobel price speech as well as a number of essays about writing and authors she admires. In a way, it's a book for writers, but any book for writers is also a book for readers who are interested in a deeper understanding of writing - and reading, because there is no writing without reading.
The short form of the essays make this book perfect as an intellectual night-time treat for the interested reader.
The short form of the essays make this book perfect as an intellectual night-time treat for the interested reader.
October 10, 2007
Read in preparation for my interview with her. It's partly illuminating, but I am less interested in her as a theorist. Her essays on other African writers - Mahfouz and Achebe - are notable.
September 15, 2014
Primo Levi's metamir, "a metaphysical mirror does not obey the law of optics but reproduces your image as it is seen by the person who stands before you.
Edward W. Said - Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, the novel as "a discrete analogy of the mechanism' of the writer's life. To put forth the secret of one's imagination is not to enact a religious event, but to perform a religious rite; that is, the rite implies but withholds the actual event."
The writer's life is the story, according to Edward Said.
"What is told is the telling," according to Roland Barthes.
Toni Morrison: The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self... is the test of their power.
According to Barthes, 'the Faubourg Saint-Honoré is a wealthy neighbourhood. The weath is itself connoted: a neighbourhood of nouveaux-riches, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré refers by synecdoche to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, a mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect; where gold is produced without an origin, diabolically (the symbol of speculation).'
[A synecdoche is a figure of speech - a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something, or vice versa: bubbles or bubbly to refer to Champagne or any other sparkling wines.]
'Words are symbols that assume a shared memory,' Borges says.
Frank Kermode's words: to use fiction for its true purpose, the discovery and registration of the human world.
'Armed and Dangerous': My Underground Struggle against Apartheid - Ronnie Kasril's book. A fanfare characteristic of a man to whom flamboyance is germane as fire-breathing to a dragon.
Karl Georg Büchner (17 Oct 1813 – 19 Feb 1837) was a German dramatist, writer of poetry and prose, and revolutionary: 'Terror is the outgrowth of virtue' -- the virtue of revolt against oppression.
Jeremy Cronin:
I think of what Engels said
about freedom being
the understanding of necessity.
"You commune with the stale bread of yourself."
a shrike: a bird of prety
Mongane Wally Serote:
We
We are men and women, children
,,,
We sleep with our boots on.
This past stands for the denial of the lives of black people by whites; the long discounting of their existence as feeling and thinking humans. It is a past that extends naturally from his people to that of the poor and preyed-upon of the world, in a vision of migratory birds:
despair, with which the spirit of ghosts
still sings on rows of telephone wires
where birds sing in chorus with bundles of resting souls
with heaps of life lost
in the insatisable fathom of civilisation
for what
Africa
Asia
Latin America, for what?
What can we do
for
this world, which we share and shape
whose corners you can touch if you stretch your arms
whose roof you can reach if you stand up
was and is our
we make and have made it
because
all of us die from what we all have eaten and have done.
The ethos of Serote's and Cronin's poetry is restoration: of the spirit beyond and above setting the story straight, which is the business and usefulness of testimony.
Octavio Paz terms our 'metahistory... a common end that lay above individuals and had to do with values that were . . . transcendent.'
Serote predicted:
One morning
my people will hang on a sunrise. . . we shall stand face to
face with the sun... leaving behind us
so many dead
wounded
made
so many senseless things
we shall have buried apartheid -- how shall we shake hands
how shall we hug each other that day? ... what first words
will we utter?
We are searching for those words. Wounded precarious; yet hanging on a sunrise.
Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz: the Arab, the African, the Jew. These are writers at one in being ready to go too far
Proust wrote: Do not be afraid to go too far, for the truth lies beyond.
These writers' work arches across the poles apart characteristic of our time: the age of commitment, and the age of alienation, by which our century surely shall be known. They are engaged in this war within us: the fanaticism which can arise from the nobility of the one, the deathly apathy which can arise from the other.
Naguib Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy is a mighty pyramid of creativity that encompass the years from 1918, the end of one war, to 1944, the last months of another.
One of Jawad's discarded mistresses says to the male guests: Gentlemen, you're my witnesses. Observe how this man, who used to be unhappy if he couldn't stick the tip of his mustache in my belly button, can't bear the sight of me.
No woman was anything more than a body to him.
The failure of this sophisticated sexual aestheticism, itself a tyranny mirroring Jawad's own kind toward his family, Mahfouz establishes as the paradox of excess an unfulfilment -- Jawad's 'thirst for love.''
Jawad is unable by his tendency to flout all religious taboos away from Palace Walk and to impose religious orthodoxy with exaggerated strictness within its wall, to slake that thirst among his family.
Mahfouz: What is the subject closest to your heart?
"Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of kings, and basic human freedom in the context of society and the family. The types of freedom follow from one to the other. In the trilogy, for example, after the revolution brought political freedom, Abdul Jawad's family demanded more freedom from him.
Revolutionary politics is no longer merely one of the subjects of discussion among male companions in coffee houses and at drinking parties, the traditional life ordered by religion and authoritarianism. It enters the house.
Jawad returns to the house in Palace Walk, hearing his youngest son, Kamal, singing a song:
Visit me once each year
for it's wrong to abandon people forever.
In societies where domination by an outside power exists or has existed, the occupation of the national personality is resisted not by obvious means alone -- political opposition and rebellion, religious fervour, cultural assertion -- by perhaps also by the display of sexual energy as a force that has not been, cannot be, touched by alien authority: the life-force itself.
'Desire was a blind and merciless tyrant.'
Kamal finds that
Strangely enough the political activities of the day present an enlarged version of his life. Kamal felt the same emotion and passion about the political situation as he did about his personal condition.
The pull between the personal and the historico-political is manifest in all the residents of Palace Walk.
Kamal tells himself, 'The problem is not that truth is harsh but that liberation from ignorance is as painful as being born. Run after truth until you're breathless.'
Kamal writes a letter to his father, comparable to Kafka's letter to his father, and, like Kafka's letter, never to be delivered:
You're my link to the Stone Age. How miserable I am now as I try to liberate myself from your influence. And I'll be just as miserable in the future when I free myself from my father. For this reason, I propose... that the family be abolished... Indeed, grant me a nation with no history and a life without a past.
'In the distance, visible through a telescope, was the mountain of reality on which was inscribed its password: Open your eyes and be courageous." Egypt's hero of the exile, the revolution, the liberation and the constitution has died. Kamal mourns Sa'd Zaghlul, admiring him as much as his heroes Copernicus, the chemist Ostwald, or the physicist Mach: he says: 'for an effort to link Egypt with the advance of human progress is noble and human. Patriotism's a virtue if it's not tainted by xenophobia."
In the context of an occupied country, in place of being chauvinist, that kind of nationalism becomes, 'nothing more than a local manifestation of a concern for human rights.'
Sugar Street, the final volume of the trilogy begins roughly 10 years after the end of Palace of Desire and after 54 years of British occupation of Egypt. At Palace Walk, Kamal is 'sad to watch the family age... his father, who had been so forceful and mighty grow weak... his mother wasting away and disappearing into old age,' the disintegration into an almost catatonic state of that once charming caged butterfly, his sister Aisha.
The embrace of society without commitment, one becomes the 'superfluous man' first encountered in 19th century literature.
Mahfouz, way back in 1957 when he published this volume set in the Thirties, understood his world well enough to foreshadow the Muslim fundamentalism that would distort a great religion into a threat against hope of democracy not only in Egypt but in many other countries of the world, and thrust a knife into his neck.
Ahmad's turn to Communism is the natural phenomenon of youth in countries that have lived under the imperialist rule of the West and the pashas of indigenous tradition who have colluded with it.
[Pasha (Ottoman Turkish: پاشا, Turkish: paşa), formerly bashaw, was a higher rank in the Ottoman Empire political and military system, typically granted to governors, generals and dignitaries and others. As an honorary title, Pasha, in one of its various ranks, is equivalent to the British title of Lord, and was also one of the highest titles in pre-republican Egypt.
While Kamal ends up as an unmarried teacher and an emotionally crippled recluse, life capriciously, cruelly, offers him another chance. "See how a glance, a gesture, or a smile can make the earth tremble today."
The Concealed Side would seem to be the best explanation for his inability to act upon or within society in a way meaningful to him.
The agitated rope of life is suspended, in this epoch, over the outcome of the 1939-45 war. Human life going up in the smoke of incinerators, mushroom clouds. For a land weary of colonial occupation, the bitter speculation of which master would be less intolerable, the unknown German or the familiar hated English.
"What distinguishes man from all other creatures if not his ability to condemn himself to death by his own free will?" Naguib Mahfouz
The way to truth is to be able to risk one's life for it.
"Mysticism is an evasion of responsibilities and so is a passive faith in science. There is no alternative to action, and that requires faith. The issue is how we are to mold for ourselves a belief system that is worthy of life. The choice of a faith has still not ben resolved. The greatest consolation I have is the fact that the struggle is not over yet. It will be raging even when, like my mother's my life has only 3 more days remaining."
Kamal quotes to his friend Riyad what Ahmad said after he visited him in prison:
I believe in life and in people... I also see myself compelled to revolt against ideals I believe to be false, since recoiling from this rebellion would be a form of treason. This is the meaning of perpetual revolution.
Kamal, walking in the streets of Cairo with his brother Yasin, encounters a familiar figure from Palace Walk, an old blind shaykh, calling out to passersby: Which way to paradise? Someone laughs: First turn to your right.
"Art is the interpreter of the human world," claims one of Mahfouz' personages.
The quest for the Home that is truth, undefined by walls, by borders, by regimes.
Achebe has the great storyteller's gift of letting the reader discover the event and the moment.
In the struggle for justice, the old man gives a vigorously lyrical disquisition on the place of Ikem, claimed for all three writers, Mahfouz, Achebe and Oz:
The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story, afterwards -- each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather, I will say boldly: the story.
Recalling-Is-Greatest. Why? Because only the story can continue beyond the war and warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spokes of the cactus fence.
Ikem has told the story -- the story of corruption -- in many critical editorials.
The President's laughter is a threat; levity is power's contempt.
Ikem ended a crusading editorial with a verse to be sung to the tune of the hymn, 'Lord Thy Word Abideth'
The worst threat from men of hell
May not be their actions cruel
Far worse that we learn their way
And behave more fierce than they
To behave worse than the foreign masters: this is the accepted legacy of colonialism.
The concept of justice, whose ultimate meaning can come only out of the absolute respect for the dignity of the humblest individual human life.
Like Ikem, he has long felt the 'necessity... to connect his essence with earth and earth's people,' those 'one thousand live theaters' of the people of the Gelegele market. Achebe creates the realization that to counter lie in one's society is the final test of connecting that essence, the final test of freedom: Mahfouz' definitive freedom: from colonization, from absolute rule of any kind, in commitment to and within the condition, the close company, of fellow citizens.
Politics and its language, in imagery, in allusion, in interpretation of daily life, are so pressing a part of everyday speech.
Early on in Achebe's novel, Ikem, who has an affinity with Chris' lover, Beatrice, visits her and reads to her what he calls a love-letter to his country:
The 'love-letter' is a testament of a political and ethical philosophy foreshadowing (the novel was published in 1987) the reaction against political ideologies that was to come with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the vacuum left by the evanescence of the Cold War. The reaction was and is a paroxysm of revulsion, one might say, against all political ideologies except that loosest concept, democracy, open to many interpretations, which allows doubts and contradictions while it does not always risk deciding how to deal with these.
Ikem tells his country:
"None of this is a valid excuse for political inactivity or apathy. Indeed to understand it is an absolute necessity for meaningful action, the knowledge of it being the only protective inoculation we can have against false hopes and virulent epidemics of gullibility. In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists, contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life."
In this love-letter of Achebe, he posits and pits the power of sheer human intelligence as the only effective weapon against the ultimate Super Power of lies and gullibility. Intelligence in all its avatars and contexts: as truth-as-information, as comprehension, as tolerance, as love -- love in the sense in which Simone Weil once defined prayers as a particular form of intelligent concentration.
A question for us to ask ourselves in this time of the forced retirement of political gods, what structure for 'meaningful action' do we have to house personal conscience? according to what plan that will translate the general good into action shall we re-form?
Democracy, with a pretty poor record in the form in which Western capitalism practised it upon countries like Kangan -- can it reform itself appropriately and adequately for the needs of such countries, respecting that contradictions are the very stuff of life?
...the paranoia of separation that prevailed, matched each to the colour of his or her skin.
Le Premier Homme Albert Camus
For fictional Jacques, the premise is Colonial: that's the story of who I am. The one who belongs nowhere.
The one who has no national mould.
As Jacques grows up he comes to the realization that he must make himself. The precept is: if he is not to be the dangling participle of imperialism, if he is not to be the outsider defined by Arabs -- a being non-Arab -- what is he? A negative. In this sense, he starts from zero. He is the constructor of his own consciousness. He is The First Man.
One cannot exaggerate sufficiently the tendency of human beings to keep sipping the daily syrup of life in a cosy enclave. Ours was a place secure and comfortable so long as one kept to the simple rules.
But with every adolescence there comes to everyone the inner tug of war -- the need to break away, and the need to bond.
What was dismaying was the lack of discovery of what one might turn to, bond with.
A life ordered, defined, circumscribed by the possession of a white skin. I did not know anything else, yet I knew I could not commit myself there. I felt it as a vague but menacing risk, bondage, not bonding.
Rilke roused and answered the emptiness in me where religious faith was missing. Chekhov and Dostoevsky opened for me the awesome mysteries of human behavior. Proust taught me that sexual love, for which every adolescent yearns, is a painful and cruel affair as well as the temptation of bliss. Yeats made me understand that there was such a thing as a passion for justice, quite as strong as sexual passion.
These and other writers were my mentors, out of whom I tried to make an artificial construct of myself. When young people are said to 'live in books' rather than in themselves, this is regarded as an escape; it is more likely a search.
It is not only in a religious sense that one may be born again. In 1994, the struggle, the final process of decolonization was achieved, after decades when the end receded again and again. In April 1994, all South Africans of all colours went to the polls and voted into power their own government, for the first time.
We know we have to perform what Flaubert called 'the most difficult and least glamorous of all tasks: transition.'
Edward W. Said - Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, the novel as "a discrete analogy of the mechanism' of the writer's life. To put forth the secret of one's imagination is not to enact a religious event, but to perform a religious rite; that is, the rite implies but withholds the actual event."
The writer's life is the story, according to Edward Said.
"What is told is the telling," according to Roland Barthes.
Toni Morrison: The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self... is the test of their power.
According to Barthes, 'the Faubourg Saint-Honoré is a wealthy neighbourhood. The weath is itself connoted: a neighbourhood of nouveaux-riches, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré refers by synecdoche to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, a mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect; where gold is produced without an origin, diabolically (the symbol of speculation).'
[A synecdoche is a figure of speech - a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something, or vice versa: bubbles or bubbly to refer to Champagne or any other sparkling wines.]
'Words are symbols that assume a shared memory,' Borges says.
Frank Kermode's words: to use fiction for its true purpose, the discovery and registration of the human world.
'Armed and Dangerous': My Underground Struggle against Apartheid - Ronnie Kasril's book. A fanfare characteristic of a man to whom flamboyance is germane as fire-breathing to a dragon.
Karl Georg Büchner (17 Oct 1813 – 19 Feb 1837) was a German dramatist, writer of poetry and prose, and revolutionary: 'Terror is the outgrowth of virtue' -- the virtue of revolt against oppression.
Jeremy Cronin:
I think of what Engels said
about freedom being
the understanding of necessity.
"You commune with the stale bread of yourself."
a shrike: a bird of prety
Mongane Wally Serote:
We
We are men and women, children
,,,
We sleep with our boots on.
This past stands for the denial of the lives of black people by whites; the long discounting of their existence as feeling and thinking humans. It is a past that extends naturally from his people to that of the poor and preyed-upon of the world, in a vision of migratory birds:
despair, with which the spirit of ghosts
still sings on rows of telephone wires
where birds sing in chorus with bundles of resting souls
with heaps of life lost
in the insatisable fathom of civilisation
for what
Africa
Asia
Latin America, for what?
What can we do
for
this world, which we share and shape
whose corners you can touch if you stretch your arms
whose roof you can reach if you stand up
was and is our
we make and have made it
because
all of us die from what we all have eaten and have done.
The ethos of Serote's and Cronin's poetry is restoration: of the spirit beyond and above setting the story straight, which is the business and usefulness of testimony.
Octavio Paz terms our 'metahistory... a common end that lay above individuals and had to do with values that were . . . transcendent.'
Serote predicted:
One morning
my people will hang on a sunrise. . . we shall stand face to
face with the sun... leaving behind us
so many dead
wounded
made
so many senseless things
we shall have buried apartheid -- how shall we shake hands
how shall we hug each other that day? ... what first words
will we utter?
We are searching for those words. Wounded precarious; yet hanging on a sunrise.
Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, Amos Oz: the Arab, the African, the Jew. These are writers at one in being ready to go too far
Proust wrote: Do not be afraid to go too far, for the truth lies beyond.
These writers' work arches across the poles apart characteristic of our time: the age of commitment, and the age of alienation, by which our century surely shall be known. They are engaged in this war within us: the fanaticism which can arise from the nobility of the one, the deathly apathy which can arise from the other.
Naguib Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy is a mighty pyramid of creativity that encompass the years from 1918, the end of one war, to 1944, the last months of another.
One of Jawad's discarded mistresses says to the male guests: Gentlemen, you're my witnesses. Observe how this man, who used to be unhappy if he couldn't stick the tip of his mustache in my belly button, can't bear the sight of me.
No woman was anything more than a body to him.
The failure of this sophisticated sexual aestheticism, itself a tyranny mirroring Jawad's own kind toward his family, Mahfouz establishes as the paradox of excess an unfulfilment -- Jawad's 'thirst for love.''
Jawad is unable by his tendency to flout all religious taboos away from Palace Walk and to impose religious orthodoxy with exaggerated strictness within its wall, to slake that thirst among his family.
Mahfouz: What is the subject closest to your heart?
"Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of kings, and basic human freedom in the context of society and the family. The types of freedom follow from one to the other. In the trilogy, for example, after the revolution brought political freedom, Abdul Jawad's family demanded more freedom from him.
Revolutionary politics is no longer merely one of the subjects of discussion among male companions in coffee houses and at drinking parties, the traditional life ordered by religion and authoritarianism. It enters the house.
Jawad returns to the house in Palace Walk, hearing his youngest son, Kamal, singing a song:
Visit me once each year
for it's wrong to abandon people forever.
In societies where domination by an outside power exists or has existed, the occupation of the national personality is resisted not by obvious means alone -- political opposition and rebellion, religious fervour, cultural assertion -- by perhaps also by the display of sexual energy as a force that has not been, cannot be, touched by alien authority: the life-force itself.
'Desire was a blind and merciless tyrant.'
Kamal finds that
Strangely enough the political activities of the day present an enlarged version of his life. Kamal felt the same emotion and passion about the political situation as he did about his personal condition.
The pull between the personal and the historico-political is manifest in all the residents of Palace Walk.
Kamal tells himself, 'The problem is not that truth is harsh but that liberation from ignorance is as painful as being born. Run after truth until you're breathless.'
Kamal writes a letter to his father, comparable to Kafka's letter to his father, and, like Kafka's letter, never to be delivered:
You're my link to the Stone Age. How miserable I am now as I try to liberate myself from your influence. And I'll be just as miserable in the future when I free myself from my father. For this reason, I propose... that the family be abolished... Indeed, grant me a nation with no history and a life without a past.
'In the distance, visible through a telescope, was the mountain of reality on which was inscribed its password: Open your eyes and be courageous." Egypt's hero of the exile, the revolution, the liberation and the constitution has died. Kamal mourns Sa'd Zaghlul, admiring him as much as his heroes Copernicus, the chemist Ostwald, or the physicist Mach: he says: 'for an effort to link Egypt with the advance of human progress is noble and human. Patriotism's a virtue if it's not tainted by xenophobia."
In the context of an occupied country, in place of being chauvinist, that kind of nationalism becomes, 'nothing more than a local manifestation of a concern for human rights.'
Sugar Street, the final volume of the trilogy begins roughly 10 years after the end of Palace of Desire and after 54 years of British occupation of Egypt. At Palace Walk, Kamal is 'sad to watch the family age... his father, who had been so forceful and mighty grow weak... his mother wasting away and disappearing into old age,' the disintegration into an almost catatonic state of that once charming caged butterfly, his sister Aisha.
The embrace of society without commitment, one becomes the 'superfluous man' first encountered in 19th century literature.
Mahfouz, way back in 1957 when he published this volume set in the Thirties, understood his world well enough to foreshadow the Muslim fundamentalism that would distort a great religion into a threat against hope of democracy not only in Egypt but in many other countries of the world, and thrust a knife into his neck.
Ahmad's turn to Communism is the natural phenomenon of youth in countries that have lived under the imperialist rule of the West and the pashas of indigenous tradition who have colluded with it.
[Pasha (Ottoman Turkish: پاشا, Turkish: paşa), formerly bashaw, was a higher rank in the Ottoman Empire political and military system, typically granted to governors, generals and dignitaries and others. As an honorary title, Pasha, in one of its various ranks, is equivalent to the British title of Lord, and was also one of the highest titles in pre-republican Egypt.
While Kamal ends up as an unmarried teacher and an emotionally crippled recluse, life capriciously, cruelly, offers him another chance. "See how a glance, a gesture, or a smile can make the earth tremble today."
The Concealed Side would seem to be the best explanation for his inability to act upon or within society in a way meaningful to him.
The agitated rope of life is suspended, in this epoch, over the outcome of the 1939-45 war. Human life going up in the smoke of incinerators, mushroom clouds. For a land weary of colonial occupation, the bitter speculation of which master would be less intolerable, the unknown German or the familiar hated English.
"What distinguishes man from all other creatures if not his ability to condemn himself to death by his own free will?" Naguib Mahfouz
The way to truth is to be able to risk one's life for it.
"Mysticism is an evasion of responsibilities and so is a passive faith in science. There is no alternative to action, and that requires faith. The issue is how we are to mold for ourselves a belief system that is worthy of life. The choice of a faith has still not ben resolved. The greatest consolation I have is the fact that the struggle is not over yet. It will be raging even when, like my mother's my life has only 3 more days remaining."
Kamal quotes to his friend Riyad what Ahmad said after he visited him in prison:
I believe in life and in people... I also see myself compelled to revolt against ideals I believe to be false, since recoiling from this rebellion would be a form of treason. This is the meaning of perpetual revolution.
Kamal, walking in the streets of Cairo with his brother Yasin, encounters a familiar figure from Palace Walk, an old blind shaykh, calling out to passersby: Which way to paradise? Someone laughs: First turn to your right.
"Art is the interpreter of the human world," claims one of Mahfouz' personages.
The quest for the Home that is truth, undefined by walls, by borders, by regimes.
Achebe has the great storyteller's gift of letting the reader discover the event and the moment.
In the struggle for justice, the old man gives a vigorously lyrical disquisition on the place of Ikem, claimed for all three writers, Mahfouz, Achebe and Oz:
The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story, afterwards -- each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather, I will say boldly: the story.
Recalling-Is-Greatest. Why? Because only the story can continue beyond the war and warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spokes of the cactus fence.
Ikem has told the story -- the story of corruption -- in many critical editorials.
The President's laughter is a threat; levity is power's contempt.
Ikem ended a crusading editorial with a verse to be sung to the tune of the hymn, 'Lord Thy Word Abideth'
The worst threat from men of hell
May not be their actions cruel
Far worse that we learn their way
And behave more fierce than they
To behave worse than the foreign masters: this is the accepted legacy of colonialism.
The concept of justice, whose ultimate meaning can come only out of the absolute respect for the dignity of the humblest individual human life.
Like Ikem, he has long felt the 'necessity... to connect his essence with earth and earth's people,' those 'one thousand live theaters' of the people of the Gelegele market. Achebe creates the realization that to counter lie in one's society is the final test of connecting that essence, the final test of freedom: Mahfouz' definitive freedom: from colonization, from absolute rule of any kind, in commitment to and within the condition, the close company, of fellow citizens.
Politics and its language, in imagery, in allusion, in interpretation of daily life, are so pressing a part of everyday speech.
Early on in Achebe's novel, Ikem, who has an affinity with Chris' lover, Beatrice, visits her and reads to her what he calls a love-letter to his country:
The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world, and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest. But they are not the only ones. There are others -- rural peasants in every land, the urban poor in industrialized countries, Black people everywhere including their own continent, ethnic and religious minorities and castes in all countries. The most obvious practical difficulty is the magnitude and heterogeneity of the problem. There is no universal conglomerate of the oppressed. Free people may be alike everywhere in their freedom but the oppressed inhabit each their own peculiar hell. The present orthodoxies of deliverance are futile to the extent that they fail to recognize this... The simplistic remedies touted by all manner of salesmen... will always fail because of man's stubborn antibody called surprise. Man will surprise by his capacity for nobility as well as for villainy. No system can change that. It is built into the core of man's free spirit.
The 'love-letter' is a testament of a political and ethical philosophy foreshadowing (the novel was published in 1987) the reaction against political ideologies that was to come with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the vacuum left by the evanescence of the Cold War. The reaction was and is a paroxysm of revulsion, one might say, against all political ideologies except that loosest concept, democracy, open to many interpretations, which allows doubts and contradictions while it does not always risk deciding how to deal with these.
Ikem tells his country:
Experience and intelligence warn us that man's progress in freedom will be piecemeal, slow and undramatic... Reform may be a dirty word then but it begins to look more and more like the most promising route to success in the real world...Society is an extension of the individual. The most we can hope to do with a problematic individual psyche is to re-form it... We can only hope to rearrange some details in the periphery of the human personality. Any disturbance of its core is an irresponsible invitation to disaster. Even a 1-day-old baby does not make itself available for your root-and-branch psychological engineering, for it comes trailing clouds of immortality. What immortality? Its baggage of irreducible inheritance of genes... It has to be the same with society. You reform it around what it is, its core of reality; not around an intellectual abstraction.
"None of this is a valid excuse for political inactivity or apathy. Indeed to understand it is an absolute necessity for meaningful action, the knowledge of it being the only protective inoculation we can have against false hopes and virulent epidemics of gullibility. In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists, contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life."
In this love-letter of Achebe, he posits and pits the power of sheer human intelligence as the only effective weapon against the ultimate Super Power of lies and gullibility. Intelligence in all its avatars and contexts: as truth-as-information, as comprehension, as tolerance, as love -- love in the sense in which Simone Weil once defined prayers as a particular form of intelligent concentration.
A question for us to ask ourselves in this time of the forced retirement of political gods, what structure for 'meaningful action' do we have to house personal conscience? according to what plan that will translate the general good into action shall we re-form?
Democracy, with a pretty poor record in the form in which Western capitalism practised it upon countries like Kangan -- can it reform itself appropriately and adequately for the needs of such countries, respecting that contradictions are the very stuff of life?
...the paranoia of separation that prevailed, matched each to the colour of his or her skin.
Le Premier Homme Albert Camus
For fictional Jacques, the premise is Colonial: that's the story of who I am. The one who belongs nowhere.
The one who has no national mould.
As Jacques grows up he comes to the realization that he must make himself. The precept is: if he is not to be the dangling participle of imperialism, if he is not to be the outsider defined by Arabs -- a being non-Arab -- what is he? A negative. In this sense, he starts from zero. He is the constructor of his own consciousness. He is The First Man.
One cannot exaggerate sufficiently the tendency of human beings to keep sipping the daily syrup of life in a cosy enclave. Ours was a place secure and comfortable so long as one kept to the simple rules.
But with every adolescence there comes to everyone the inner tug of war -- the need to break away, and the need to bond.
What was dismaying was the lack of discovery of what one might turn to, bond with.
A life ordered, defined, circumscribed by the possession of a white skin. I did not know anything else, yet I knew I could not commit myself there. I felt it as a vague but menacing risk, bondage, not bonding.
Rilke roused and answered the emptiness in me where religious faith was missing. Chekhov and Dostoevsky opened for me the awesome mysteries of human behavior. Proust taught me that sexual love, for which every adolescent yearns, is a painful and cruel affair as well as the temptation of bliss. Yeats made me understand that there was such a thing as a passion for justice, quite as strong as sexual passion.
These and other writers were my mentors, out of whom I tried to make an artificial construct of myself. When young people are said to 'live in books' rather than in themselves, this is regarded as an escape; it is more likely a search.
It is not only in a religious sense that one may be born again. In 1994, the struggle, the final process of decolonization was achieved, after decades when the end receded again and again. In April 1994, all South Africans of all colours went to the polls and voted into power their own government, for the first time.
We know we have to perform what Flaubert called 'the most difficult and least glamorous of all tasks: transition.'
Want to read
December 1, 2020I DON'T need to read this book, but note here a good review by Edith Milton in
WRB Jan 1996 "Home at Last"
It's a series of lectures she gave on South AFrican and other writers.
The reviewer's take on Gordimer is that she values authors who look towards "the common struggles and insistent failures of human history".
"What she sees everywhere is incompleteness."
"One of the highest moral achievements is an ability to disagree with oneself, a self-contradictory humanity. Ambivalence ..."
Three works discussed in the lectures are:
Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy. [primordial narcissism of the patriarchal system]
Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah
Amos Oz: Fima
WRB Jan 1996 "Home at Last"
It's a series of lectures she gave on South AFrican and other writers.
The reviewer's take on Gordimer is that she values authors who look towards "the common struggles and insistent failures of human history".
"What she sees everywhere is incompleteness."
"One of the highest moral achievements is an ability to disagree with oneself, a self-contradictory humanity. Ambivalence ..."
Three works discussed in the lectures are:
Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy. [primordial narcissism of the patriarchal system]
Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah
Amos Oz: Fima
June 20, 2017
Berisi ceramahnya saat penerimaan Nobel dan enam esai panjang yg menyoroti penulis dan karya sastra poskolonial, utamanya Mahfouz, Achebe dan Oz, yg mewakili Arab, Islam, Afrika, Kristen, Israel, Yahudi, sekularitas, Komunis, dan kaitannya dengan keterasingan dan pencarian dari tempat tinggalnya sendiri.
September 11, 2021
A series of essays on the writer's responsibility to depict their time and place, through critical review of the authors Naghib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz, ending in Gordimer's description of her own involvement with the anti-apartheid movement. A little academic - the final essay is the most compelling.
February 26, 2020
Great author but I hadn't read most of the books she used as examples so I didn't get as much out of it as I had hoped. Still some really great insights. Learning about those other stories made me want to read them so I'm happy I read it.
August 5, 2008
What can I say, except that Nadine Gordimer is so wonderful.
Read
October 2, 2011I'm still reading the last essay. Potent stuff re: the emotional experience of priviledge and what it takes to start seeing the things you can't see.
April 29, 2014
Libro completamente dimenticabile, con interviste poco interessanti.
La chiosa è l'intervista, a metà circa, di Alain Elkann - che si argomenta da sola.
La chiosa è l'intervista, a metà circa, di Alain Elkann - che si argomenta da sola.
August 26, 2014
Pretty good. I like what she's saying most of the time, but I don't find her academic style particularly easy to read.
Read
October 13, 2014Can't recall where I picked this up but can't wait to read or reread it.
April 16, 2017
As a South African there are a number of memorable/meaningful paragraphs e.g.
"Resignation! Ha ha ha ha ha. Where do you think you are? Westminster or Washington D.C.?"
The President's laughter is a threat; levity is power's contempt.
Especially relevant in April 2017
"Resignation! Ha ha ha ha ha. Where do you think you are? Westminster or Washington D.C.?"
The President's laughter is a threat; levity is power's contempt.
Especially relevant in April 2017
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews