Obituary

Nadine Gordimer, Nobel laureate, activist, dies

JOHANNESBURG (AP) – Nadine Gordimer was first a writer of fiction and a defender of creativity and expression. But as a white South African who hated apartheid’s dehumanisation of blacks, she was also a determined political activist in the struggle to end white minority rule in her country.

Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991 for novels that explored the complex relationships and human cost of racial conflict in apartheid-era South Africa, died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg last Sunday. She was 90 years old. Her son Hugo and daughter Oriane were with her at the time, Gordimer’s family said in a statement Monday.

The author wrote 15 novels as well as several volumes of short stories, non-fiction and other works, and was published in 40 languages around the world, according to the family.

“She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its ongoing struggle to realise its new democracy,” the family said. Her “proudest days” included winning the Nobel prize and testifying in the 1980s on behalf of a group of anti-apartheid activists who had been accused of treason, they said.

Per Wastberg, an author and member of the Nobel Prize-awarding Swedish Academy, said Gordimer’s descriptions of the different faces of racism told the world about South Africa during apartheid.

“She concentrated on individuals, she portrayed humans of all kinds,” said Wastberg, a close friend. “Many South African authors and artists went into exile, but she felt she had to be a witness to what was going on and also lend her voice to the black, silenced authors.”

Gordimer struggled with arthritis and rheumatism but seemed to be in good spirits when they last spoke three weeks ago, he said.

“Our country has lost an unmatched literary giant whose life’s work was our mirror and an unending quest for humanity,” South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, said in a statement.

Prof Adam Habib, vice-chancellor and principal of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, described Gordimer as a “revered intellect”.

During apartheid, Gordimer praised Nelson Mandela, the prisoner who later became president, and accepted the decision of the main anti-apartheid movement to use violence against South Africa’s white-led government.

“Having lived here for 65 years,” she said, “I am well aware for how long black people refrained from violence. We white people are responsible for it.”

Gordimer grew up in Springs town, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Britain and Lithuania. She began writing at age nine, and kept writing well into her 80s.

She said her first “adult story,” published in a literary magazine when she was 15, grew out of her reaction as a young child to watching the casual humiliation of blacks. She recalled blacks being barred from touching clothes before buying in shops in her hometown, and police searching the maid’s quarters at the Gordimer home for alcohol, which blacks were not allowed to possess.

That “began to make me think about the way we lived, and why we lived like that, and who were we”, she said in a 2006 interview for the Nobel organisation.

In the same interview, she bristled at the suggestion that confronting the human cost of apartheid made her a writer.

“If you’re going to be a writer, you can make the death of canary important,” said Gordimer, a small and elegant figure. “You can connect it to the whole chain of life, and the mystery of life. To me, what is the purpose of life? It is really to explain the mystery of life.”

She said she resisted autobiography, asserting that journalistic research played no part in her creative process.

Telling Times, a 2010 collection of her nonfiction writing dating to 1950, offers some glimpses of her own experience. She wrote in a 1963 essay of a meeting with a poet giving her an idea of a life beyond her small home town and her then aimless existence.

Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days, appeared in 1953, and she acknowledged that it had autobiographical elements. A New York Times reviewer compared it to Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, saying Gordimer’s work “is the longer, the richer, intellectually the more exciting”.

She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist, a novel about a white South African who loses everything.

Among Gordimer’s best-known novels is Burger’s Daughter, which appeared in 1979, three years after the Soweto student uprising brought the brutality of apartheid to the world’s attention.

Some readers believe the family at its centre is that of Bram Fischer, a lawyer who broke with his conservative Afrikaner roots to embrace socialism and fight apartheid. The story is salted with real events and names – including Fischer’s. The main character is a young woman on the periphery of a famous family who must come to terms with her legacy and her homeland.

Her 1987 novel, A Sport of Nature, prophesised the end of apartheid and included a liberation leader based on Mandela.

“Gordimer writes with intense immediacy about the extremely complicated personal and social relationships in her environment,” the Nobel committee said on awarding the literature prize in 1991.

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Gordimer said that as a young artist, she agonised that she was cut off from “the world of ideas” by the isolation of apartheid. But she came to understand “that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place”.

After the first all-race election in 1994, Gordimer wrote about the efforts of South Africa’s new democracy to grapple with its racist legacy. She remained politically engaged, praising South Africa for the progress it had made, but expressing concern about alleged backsliding on freedom of expression.

“People died for our freedoms,” Gordimer, who had had works banned by the apartheid government, told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview. “People spent years and years in prison, from the great Nelson Mandela down through many others.”

THE ESSENTIAL NADINE GORDIMER

For readers not familiar with Nadine Gordimer, the 1991 Nobel Prize laureate for Literature, Bookends makes a few suggestions.

The Conservationist

About a rich South African who loses everything in a Job-like scenario. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his wife, son, and mistress leave him, his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to him, and even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, to destroy his farm.

July’s People

Not all whites in South Africa are outright racists. Some, like Bam and Maureen Smales understand the plight of blacks during the apartheid state. But what can they do when the blacks stage a full-scale revolution? Here, Gordimer imagines a bloody South African revolution, in which white people are hunted and murdered after black people begin a revolution against the apartheid government. The Smales find succour in July, a longtime former servant who provides protection for them in his village.

The House Gun

An “intellectual thriller” about a white South African husband and wife see their only son go on trial for the murder of a friend that raises certain questions like: do parents ever really know their children? And can we ever really live a life without prejudice?

Jump & Other Stories

Gordimer’s collection of 16 expertly crafted stories reveals themes that range far beyond apartheid.

In “Home”, the lead female character struggles with her worry over her mother who she has never had a good relationship with, and the lead male character begins to doubt his wife’s fidelity. Marital infidelity is a major element of “Safe Houses”, when a fugitive from the law uses an affair with a married woman as a means to hide from police. And in “The Moment Before the Gun Went Off”, a white man accidentally shoots his black employee.

SIDEBAR

FOR MORE APARTHEID CLASSICS, CHECK OUT:

This past weekend saw the celebration of the birthday of former president of South Africa Nelson Mandela. In acknowledgment, Bookends suggests 4 books on the subject of apartheid.

Disgrace by JM Coetzee: A white professor’s spectacular fall from grace coincides with his confrontation of the frightening reality of the new South Africa.

A Dry White Season by Andre Brink: A simple, apolitical white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies-that is, until the sudden arrest and subsequent “suicide” of a black janitor from his school.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton: In search of missing family members, a Zulu priest leaves his South African village for Johannesburg in the 1940s. But with the backdrop of the violence and racial tension of apartheid, the going is treacherous.

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela: A moving memoir of one of history’s greatest and most compelling figures. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela tells, for the first time, the extraordinary story of his life – an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph.

NEW IN MAGAZINES

Online lit mag launched

A new digital literary magazine, Susumba’s Book Bag, has launched in Jamaica. According to Tanya Batson-Savage, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, the aim is to provide a “space for writers with something to say, and readers who want to hear from some of the best voices that the Caribbean has to offer, whether they be established, emerging or never heard from before. Indeed, one of the most exciting things about the Book Bag is that it provides an opportunity to discover new voices, and these can then rest alongside established ones”.

The Book Bag is a quarterly magazine that publishes short stories, flash fiction and poetry every May, August, November and February. There is an open submission policy, and submissions are accepted throughout the year, except in December. There are no themes for the Book Bag, but the editor is looking for writing that is “refreshing and different”.

Batson-Savage also noted, “The Book Bag is also providing an avenue where established Caribbean writers can talk about books and writing, exploring the craft as well as the artistry. I think that this is a wonderful thing for both aspiring writers as well as readers as they get to delve into the mind of a writer.”

Submissions will be accepted from across the region as well as the diaspora.

Guidelines for submissions:

The Book Bag accepts a maximum of 5 poems and 2 short stories at a time. Simultaneous submissions are OK, but they ask that you notify them immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere.

There is no bias of genre or style. The only requirement is that it be good, so send your best work.

Short stories should range from 2,500 to 3,500 words while flash fiction is from 10 – 600 words. They prefer poetry to err on the side of Mervyn Morris, ie, the shorter the better. However, they do accept longer work. But if the poem is at the 33 to 64 line tipping point (longer than a page), please only submit two poems at a time.

There is no reading fee, and submissions are only accepted via e-mail. Please include your submissions as a attachment to the e-mail as either a .doc or .txt or.rtf

Send submissions to info@susumba,com Subject: Lastname-Firstname-Submission

The next call for submissions opens today, July 20, and closes August 22, 2014.

Susumba Book Bag can be found at www.susumba.com

Review:

A Journey to Self

Seduce by Desiree Reynolds

Reviewed by: Ann-Margaret Lim

In Seduce, Desiree Reynolds, very much like Dennis Scott in An Echo in the Bone, takes the reader back to their past to explain the present. Like Scott, too, Reynolds has chosen death and someone’s transitioning period when it is believed they have not fully passed on to the other side. In other words, the nine-night or vigil, as the present time in which the story unfolds, whilst going back into history, the “bone”, to tell the full story of the main character, who in fact, could even be interpreted as the reader.

The major differences between Seduce and An Echo in the Bone? Well, Reynolds’ main character, who is dead, is female and her name is Seduce, whilst Scott’s main character is Crew, who is also dead. Interestingly enough, even in this difference lies a similarity – the symbolism of the names. Crew represents more than one, a group of workers on a ship, perhaps. And of course, a slave ship is conjured, because of the context of the book. It could also be the crew on the great slave ship of the plantation. At the same time, Seduce conjures the seductive allure of the velvet black skin of Reynolds’ main character that has through history captivated the onlooker, who in the context of the plantation, has taken that black skin without permission.

The other major difference between Seduce and An Echo in the Bone is that the former is not a play, as is the latter.

I’m very much appreciative of Reynolds for writing this book, which I think offers readers a counterpart to the traditional male/main character in the context of our slave and colonial history. Through Seduce, Reynolds gives us the voice and story that has for the most part being noticeably absent.

Having been introduced to the character Seduce from different characters in the novel, and also herself, the reader knows she was an exotic beauty with velvet black skin who apparently mesmerised men, married or not. Even dead, Seduce seems to have a hold on the entire community.

Having seen 12 Years a Slave, one pictures the lead actress Lupita N’yongo’s or the African supermodel Alek Wek’s beautiful skin tone, each time Seduce’s bewitching black skin is mentioned, so my only ‘issue’ with Seduce is its cover. The face on the cover should believably be that of Seduce, since her name is written in white across the mouth of the half-face on the cover. Imagine the classic and beautifully striking contrast of that white word Seduce on a pure-black skin, and all the potent images it would conjure!

With that said, Seduce, the 2013, Peepal Tree-published book is nevertheless a winner, since it’s a very ambitious book that tackles the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of the present situation of displaced Africans. And it tackles this through literature. Anthropology, history, cultural studies – it’s all in the brew of this pepperpot stew Reynolds’ brilliantly active mind has mixed.

Set in Seduce’s home in a fictitious Caribbean country called Church, which is apparently still operating under colonial rule, and right after Seduce, an old lampi (prostitute) has died, her story emerges.

The story is told through various characters, including Seduce herself, which, in my opinion, lends itself to being easily transformed into a play. Fact is, I see Seduce being played on stages worldwide.

As the characters relate Seduce’s story, and consequently their stories too, Desiree Reynolds weaves an intriguing tale of displaced Africans and their relationship with their motherland. A hovering shadow in this book is Seduce’s ancestor Lucretia, who was a rebel slave ( reminiscent of Jamaicans’ magical Nanny) and who it is believed has something to with Seduce’s granddaughter’s apparent madness, since she speaks of herself as we, not I.

Mikey, Seduce’s longtime lover and father of one of her two children, goes back to the Black Isle to participate in their liberation war, only to find little comfort and sense of belonging there. And of course, the symbolism of Mikey being a Rastaman is not lost on the reader, who knows that Rastafarians have preached repatriation, with some actually resettling in Africa.

The relationship we have with ourselves and our blackness is also another important aspect that Reynolds tackles. Having seen the tribulations her black skin and poor status in life attract, Seduce, a bonafide lampi, decides that her child would be conceived with a white-looking man, to better its chances.

It was a day when me mine restless, could not quiet, and all of a sudden me realize why, as me watch him come down di gangplank, curly light-brown hair, like a halo circling him head. Me wait a long time for dis man. Mi body want a child an I want fi mek sure it get di best start. Me want di right man, an he was right, his body right, an’ his hazel eyes was right.

Glory, the child conceived from her meeting with the sailor, is perhaps physically what Seduce wanted. She is indeed fair and her hair is ‘pretty’, but Glory and her mother do not have a good relationship. Fact is, Glory sees herself as better than her mother and sees Seduce’s vigil more as an opportunity to get herself in the right crowd, having resented the alienation she thinks she’s suffered because of her mother’s profession.

So as not to give away the twists in the story, I’ll leave it at this: Glory is indeed not the white sheep her skin may lead some to think she is, but she’s not evil either, just mainly conflicted within herself as many displaced Africans and Creole children of the plantation are.

So, as the reader looks at the mother/daughter relationship through Seduce and Glory, he must also examine the relationship he has with himself. And herein lies another beauty of Reynolds’ book – each of the main characters is struggling with aspects of themselves. For Mikey, it is coming to grips with loving a woman more than she loves him back, and also finding that going back to Africa still hasn’t fulfilled hm. For Marshall, the town’s main policeman, it is trying to understand why he, too, has loved Seduce and why, though he is almost white, he is still drawn to the black. All of the major characters grapple with coming to grips with some reality or truth affecting their lives, which is somehow intermingled with Seduce’s life.

Indeed, Seduce is a book about relationships — mainland/colony; parent/child; brother/sister; community/individual; spiritual/physical and, looming very largely, the male/female relationship.

In Church, many Caribbean readers will see their own islands — the struggles with skin colour, race, religion and African retention, the appeal and repulsion of the Empire and the juicy secrets that islands like ours always seem to have.

For my money, Seduce is a contemporary Caribbean masterpiece and Reynolds is a seriously gifted writer.

Bookends serial:

Love Wounds

Chapter 21

I caused the disintegration of my relationship with Martin. The day I came face to face with that truth, I felt free. I don’t know how else to explain it. I felt light. Like a burden somehow had lifted off me, a burden I didn’t even know I’d been carrying. I viewed the break-up with Martin as the worst thing that had ever happened to me in my entire adult life because I’d loved him-he was the only man I truly ever loved-and he’d broken my poor defenceless heart. I remember sitting in front of Dr Johnny, murmuring the words almost to myself while he sat there watching me, a small self-congratulatory smile around his lips. “Good, Greta,” he said finally. “The first step is to own it. Take responsibility for what your part was.”

The doctor was right. I had to change the narrative, the lie I’d told myself, the lie I’d been telling myself-that I’d been wronged by Martin, the man I loved. That after six years of being together he’d just picked up and left me. Without any good reason. Without just cause. I could even stop implying that he’d cheated on me; he hadn’t. I cheated on him. I was the reason he left. I was responsible.

He never found out about Ian, though, thank God. Ian and I hadn’t lasted long enough for either party to have got sloppy-we’d hooked up for only a couple of times-and allowed what was essentially nothing more than a fling to ruin our respective relationships. Well, not in that chaotic way infidelity can tear things apart anyway. I don’t know what happened to Ian and his girlfriend after we ended things with each other. I like to think nothing; the boy was smooth enough to make me suspect I wasn’t the first person with whom he’d stepped out on the poor girl. Her clinginess that afternoon at the theatre made me figure she had reason, whether real or imagined, to not trust Ian.

After all, he’d called me later that night after he’d taken her home from the movie, and we’d checked into a motel, which we didn’t leave until the wee hours of the morning. I’d gone home and lied to Martin about having been stuck at the office dealing with a work crisis. But, as sorry as I felt to have been a part of what must eventually be the shaky foundation that would one day topple them, if they weren’t strong enough to withstand storms, I couldn’t think about them. I could only think about what I’d done to Martin, how I’d messed up our relationship.

I’m not trying to excuse my behaviour, but the fact is I had a miscarriage that I suffered in secret-and then I probably went a little crazy. My way of coping was by having a fling with Ian. As I said before, it didn’t last long. The real regret was that, even after I broke things off with Ian, I was still unable to work it out with Martin. It was too late to tell him I got pregnant and had a miscarriage in a bathroom stall at work, and that secret, I think, became the wedge between us that eventually drove us apart. He sensed that something had changed between us and, to his credit, he did try to find out what was wrong. But I’d grown emotionally distant; a blind person could have realised that something had changed. Very soon the damage had become irreparable, and we both began drifting away from each other.

One secret had had the power to cause so much pain, so much heartbreak.

That night after leaving Dr Johnny’s I felt emotionally drained. I lay on my bed still fully dressed, staring up at the ceiling. I did not know how long I stayed like that. On the bed beside me was a tray of food Eulee had brought me, untouched. I didn’t have an appetite. I just kept thinking about Martin. I’d loved him once-maybe I still did-and he had loved me. Why hadn’t I told him I was pregnant? For a long time, I’d convinced myself that the reason was that I believed he wouldn’t have wanted another child. Chelsea and her mother were a handful as it was; I didn’t think it would be fair to add more babymother drama to his plate. But now that the curtain had been pulled away and I was being honest with myself, admitting all the ugly truth, I could afford to admit that I hadn’t told Martin about the pregnancy because it was I who didn’t want a child. I don’t know if maybe I’d have wanted one with him at another juncture, but at that psychological point in time, I hadn’t wanted to be tied down with one. I’d been on the brink of going in for an abortion when I’d miscarried. Yes, when I’d sat on that toilet bowl haemorrhaging away the foetus, I’d been secretly relieved the decision had been made for me.

The next morning I woke up only to find I’d passed out there on my bed, still in my clothes. I heard Eulee humming and moving around in the next room and was grateful she had spent the night, and for her loyalty. Staying over in the guest room was something she did every now and then, since Martin and I split up, whenever she felt as though I was an emotional wreck and she needed to be on hand just in case something went wrong at night.

I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and eased off my shoes. From the open window I could hear a bird singing in the trees. I wondered if it felt as alone as I did. Because I was alone. Over the past year I’d slept with a succession of men. But they were other women’s husbands; they did not belong to me. I’d felt so hip and modern sleeping with men with whom I had no strict emotional attachments, but there in my room, I realised the awful truth: I was alone.

Even Chester, who, admittedly, I’d started having feelings for, belonged to someone else: my best friend, Carlene. I lay back on the bed, not knowing what to do. I felt as though the earth beneath my feet was shifting. I can’t go on living this way, I thought. But what other way was there to live? I was 36 years old and single. The only available men were all married or losers. The last time Chester and I had slept together he’d told me he wasn’t going to give me up without a fight. How could I stay with him and have an honest relationship with Carlene now? I’d been sleeping with her husband, for God’s sake. And how could I end it with him and still live in such close proximity? Things had been strained between Chester and I since I’d come back from Amsterdam but there was still interest there; I saw it in his eyes whenever I saw him watching me on my deck from his garden, and in the way my heart missed a beat when my cellphone rang and his name came up.

Then, as if on cue, my phone rang. Listlessly, I reached over to the nightstand and picked it up, and my heart lurched…

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK