Nadine Gordimer: The unflinching and honest gaze

Beethoven may’ve been one sixteenth Black. Not Nadine Gordimer. Her identity – in a S Africa that fought with the Allies against German racism in WWII, but ironically adopted a clinicalversion of it in espousing the abhorrent Apartheid for itself – was guided not by the colour of her skin but her socio-politics. 

The daughter of a Jewish Latvian watchmaker and a middle-class British mother,  Gordimer was an author whose works consistently reflected her political courage and her stark intellectual honesty over six decades of writing. Father of the S African nation Nelson Mandela – whose banned ANC the ardent anti-Apartheid activist gravitated to – confessed to reading all her unbanned works in prison, saying reading her gave him an intense insight into the White Liberal mind. 
 
“I could’ve been a writer anywhere. But in my country, writing meant confronting racism ,” Gordimer was quoted in a 1990 interview. For an author of her character and worldview, that meant shining the search light consistently on the “intersection between the personal and the political and the way in which individual lives are bent out of shape by external forces” as feminist/writer Margaret Atwood wrote in a tribute in the Guardian at Gordimer’s passing away. 
 
And she shone that light  in an universal manner that sensitised and politically outraged readers the world over against the colour-coded disenfranchising of an entire indigenous people by White minority colonisers.  Apartheid defined her country's peoples for decades, leaving an indelible birthmark on their collective history and their interpreting their progression into the future as a modern nation state. 
 
When Gordimer’s work July’s People came out in 1981, she wasn't prescribed text for the undergrad English Litt course I entered, but there was unabashed hunger to beg, borrow or steal  a copy of what was being billed as the boldest work of the literary titan who penned Burger’s Daughter just a few years ago. The storyline, for the first time, traced an imagined post Revolution, after-Apartheid society set in S Africa. Jo'burg promptly banned it.
 
Irony dogged the book even as late as 2001 when it was described as “deeply racist, superior and patronising” albeit this time, within a post-ANC and post-Apartheid S Africa. Some sections perceived Gordimer as attempting to supplant the post-Apartheid experience with a biased White  perception. 

Still highly politically courageous and starkly intellectually honest, Gordimer had begun to  progressively turn her  acutely unflinching and critical eye on the ANC regime inasmuch as she had on the Boer rulers earlier. My Son’s Story, published in 2005, a whole decade after the ANC swept to power in 1994, sought to explore for the first time the mostly not-spoken-of and complex physical, existential spaces inhabited by “coloureds” in a skin tone-coded country and their positioning in the anti-Apartheid struggle that led to the formation of the new S African nation.

By the time Gordimer came up with No Time Like the Present in 2012, a  modern S Africa was already well on the road to transformation, with socio-political concerns of a radically different nature dominating the post-Revolution generation. Corruption, crime, heightened consumerism and brand consciousness, all the concerns defining economically emerging nations the world over, showed up here. As did tacit and overt questions by the ex-Revolutionary on the motivation for the anti-racial struggles, the expectations of a post-Apartheid society and its socio-political trajectory.

Some of Gordimer’s best works are short stories, however. Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black was a collection of short stories that showcased her as a master of the genre. The title story reflects a certain irony at the changing socio-political realities of the day through a professor who desperately searches for Black roots in post-Apartheid S Africa, mostly to be close to the powerful.  Something the author herself steadfastly refused to do despite her prolonged literary success.
 
In that same collection, Dreaming of the Dead, her  imagined tribute to  the late Anthony Sampson, Edward Said and Susan Sontag, conjured up a meeting  at a Chinese restaurant. This was  an attempt (according to one reviewer) to give her dead peers an intellectual afterlife that would allow for deep insights that are not apparent in the confusion of living. In that story, Gordimer perceives a certain discomfiture in life compared to these giants. Well, after July 13, this revered S African author could join the high table of her intellectual peers, ready for more intellectually honest and deep insights that the din of living will not allow.