Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008

The Prison-House of Colonialism: Ruth First’s and Ann Scott’s Olive Schreiner

Who is qualified to write about whom? Subjects very often do not get the biographers their works and lives demand; they are transformed, after death, into what they were not. There must be a lot of fuming, beyond the grave.

Olive Schreiner has been one of the worst-served, from her spouse’s version of her life, in accordance with what a husband would have liked his famous writer-wife to be, to the hagiographic selectivity of two or three other biographies which have appeared since her death in 1920. At last, the perfectly qualified candidates have presented themselves: two people who represent a combination of the dominant aspects of Schreiner’s character; her feminism and her political sense; and each of whom corrects the preoccupational bias of the other.

Schreiner’s feminism followed the tug of colonial ties with a European ‘home’, it was conceived in relation to the position of women in late nineteenth-century Europe; through her tract, Woman and Labour, she is a Founding Mother of women’s liberation in Britain, and one of her two new biographers, Ann Scott, is a young English feminist. Schreiner’s political awareness was specific, through her understanding of the relation of capitalist imperialism to racialism in South Africa; and Ruth First, her other biographer, is a South African radical activist,⁹ thinker and fine writer who went into exile in Britain years ago but is now close to her — and Olive Schreiner’s — real home again, teaching at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique.

First and Scott make a superb combination and one is curious about how they overcame the tremendous differences between their two ideological approaches. Take the statement: ‘We have tried to create a psychologically believable woman of the late 19th Century largely on the basis of the psychoanalytic language of the 20th.’ Was Ruth First able to follow this basic approach because of the new attitude to psychoanalysis that has been penetrating Marxist thinking through the work of Jacques Lacan and others since the failure of the 1968 student uprising in Paris? The book is a model of disinterested collaboration and scholarship, and the reconciliation it achieves between the viewpoints of the authors and their subject brings great rewards for the reader.

This biography establishes a level of inquiry no previous biographer was perhaps in a position to attempt. So far ahead of her own times, Schreiner was obscured in succeeding ones by the kind of critical assessment then prevailing. Now First and Scott can write:

We see Olive Schreiner’s life writing as a product of a specific social history. We are not only looking at what she experiences but at how she, and others, perceived that experience; at the concept with which her contemporaries understood their world, and, again, at the consciousness that was possible for her time — after Darwin, before Freud, and during the period when Marx’s Capital was written.

Olive Schreiner was born in South Africa of missionary parents, and as a twenty-one-year-old governess in 1886 wrote The Story of an African Farm, a novel which brought her immediate world fame that has lasted ever since. In her work and life (she had the missionary sense of their oneness), it becomes clear from this study, she was hampered crucially by the necessity of fighting the ways of thought which imprisoned her and others, equipped only with the modes available within those concepts. Only once did she invent a form to carry her advanced perceptions: a literary one, for The Story of an African Farm. Her short novel about the conquest of Rhodesia, Trooper Peter Halket, shows as true an interpretation of historical realities, re-read during the week of Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations, as Schreiner claimed it did when she wrote it, during Rhodes’s conquest of Mashonaland: but it has the preachy, nasal singsong of a sermon. When she wanted to find a way to express her political vision, she took up the form of allegory typical of the hypocritical Victorian high-mindedness she had rejected along with religious beliefs.

About sex, she lied to herself continually — protesting to her men friends that she wanted ‘love and friendship without any sex element’ in letters whose very syntax paces out yearning sexual desire. She recognised the sexual demands of women in a period when they were trained to believe that their role was merely to ‘endure’ male sexual demands, but she used Victorian subterfuges (on a par with the ‘vapours’), disguised as feminism to hide a sense of shame at the idea of her own sexual appetite. The spectacle of the rebel dashing herself against the cold panes of convention is that of a creature doubly trapped: by a specific social history, and by the consciousness possible to her in her time.

First and Scott suggest further that Schreiner’s reputation as an imaginative writer has suffered by the ‘persistent view that her social comment is obtrusive and damaging to her work’; the novel — The Story of an African Farm — on which that reputation rests has been acclaimed, sometimes by people who would not share even her liberal views, let alone the radical element in them, as having its genius in ‘transcending politics’, and by extension, Schreiner’s political fervour. The present biographers will be interested to know that a reverse trend is now appearing in South African criticism; Schreiner is no longer praised for soaring above politics, but attacked for turning out to be nothing but the broken-winged albatross of white liberal thinking. C. I. Hofmeyer, a young white lecturer at an ‘ethnic’ university for South African Indians, said at a conference recently:

Although Schreiner was cognisant of the power of the speculator and capitalist to triumph because of their access to power, she none the less continued to harbour a tenuous optimism that justice, equality and rightness of the liberal democracy would come to triumph via the operation of the ‘enlightened’ liberal remnant of the English community. Of course, it did not, and the bourgeois democracy that Schreiner had hoped for soon developed into the repressive colonial state. This development is significant in so far as it shows the weaknesses in the thinking of Schreiner and her class.

If Schreiner was a ‘genius’, the lecturer continued, this was ‘a critical category that obscures the extent to which she was rooted in nineteenth-century assumptions’.

Whether or not one can swallow this (old) view of genius as a class-determined concept rather than an innate, congenital attribute — and whether Schreiner had it or not — the tension in her relationship to these nineteenth-century assumptions, so brilliantly conveyed in this book, was the source of her achievements and her failures.

Olive Schreiner, like other South African writers (William Plomer, Roy Campbell, Laurens van der Post) up until after the Second World War, when writers both black and white became political exiles, looked to Europe and went to Europe. Some went permanently, after the initial success of work born specifically of their South African consciousness. Some went ostensibly because they had been reviled for exposing the ‘traditional’ South African way of life for what it is (Plomer, Turbott Wolfe). But the motive generally was a deep sense of deprivation, that living in South Africa they were cut off from the world of ideas; and underlying this incontestable fact (particularly for Schreiner, in her time) was another reason which some had a restless inkling was the real source of their alienation, although they could express it only negatively: that the act of taking the Union Castle mailship to what was the only cultural ‘home’ they could conceive of, much as they all repudiated jingoism, was itself part of the philistinism they wanted to put at an ocean’s distance from them. Even Sol Plaatje, one of the first black writers, had this instinct, since he was using Western modes — journalism, the diary, the novel — to express black consciousness.

They went because the culture in which their writings could take root was not being created: a culture whose base would be the indigenous black cultures interpenetrating with imported European cultural forms, of which literature was one; and because the works they had written — or would have found it imperative to attempt, if they were to express the life around them — were solitary contradictions of the way in which that life was being conceptualised, politically, socially and morally.

Olive Schreiner felt stifled (the asthma she suffered from is a perfect metaphor) by the lack of any questioning exchange of ideas in the frontier society in which she lived. I suppose one must allow that she had a right to concern herself with a generic, universal predicament: that of the female sex. During her restless, self-searching years in England and Europe, and her association with Havelock Ellis, Eleanor Marx, Karl Pearson, women’s suffrage and English socialism in the 1880s, she studied intensively theories on race and evolution, and participated in progressive political and social movements; but feminism was her strongest motivation. Yet the fact is that in South Africa, now as then, feminism is regarded by people whose thinking on race, class and colour Schreiner anticipated, as a question of no relevance to the actual problem of the country — which is to free the black majority from white minority rule.

Her biographers point out that, once living again in South Africa, she resigned from the Women’s Enfranchisement League when its definition of the franchise qualification was changed so as to exclude black women. But in the South African context, where she always felt herself to belong, and to which she always returned, in the end to die there, the women issue withers in comparison with the issue of the voteless, powerless state of South African blacks, irrespective of sex. It was as bizarre then (when a few blacks in the Cape Colony had a heavily qualified vote) as now (when no black in the Republic of South Africa has a vote) to regard a campaign for women’s rights — black or white — as relevant to the South African situation. Schreiner seems not to have seen that her wronged sense of self, as a woman, that her liberation, was a secondary matter within her historical situation. Ironically, here at least, she shared the most persistent characteristic of her fellow colonials (discounting the priorities of the real entities around her) while believing she was protesting against racism.

First and Scott give a fascinating account of the neuroticism of this amazing woman, in whose tortured, heightened sense of being all the inherent contradictions of her sex and time existed. One enters into their biography as into a good discussion with people better informed on the subject than oneself.

For myself, I am led to take up the question of Olive Schreiner’s achievement exclusively as an imaginative writer, in relation to the conceptual determinants within which she lived, even while warring against them. First and Scott quote the argument — and I think they see her wronged by it — that after African Farm her creativity disappeared ‘into the sands of liberal pamphleteering’. The observation was originally mine. Their book confirms, for me, that whatever else she may have achieved, Schreiner dissipated her creativity in writing tracts and pamphlets rather than fiction. This is not to discount her social and political mission; neither is it to attempt to nail her to the apartheid Tendenzroman. It is to assert that, by abandoning the search for a form of fiction adequate to contain the South African experience, after her abortive experiments with a ‘distancing’ allegory, she was unable in the end to put the best she had — the power of her creative imagination — to the service of her fierce and profound convictions, and her political and human insight. It is true that, as First and Scott claim, ‘almost alone she perceived the race conflicts during South Africa’s industrial revolution in terms of a worldwide struggle between capital and labour’. But she wrote about these insights instead of transforming them through the creation of living characters into an expression of the lives they shaped and distorted. This could have achieved the only real synthesis of life and work, of ideology and praxis, for Olive Schreiner, raising the consciousness of the oppressed from out of the colonial nightmare, and that of the oppressor from out of the colonial dream, and telling the world what she, uniquely, knew about the quality of human life deformed by those experiences.

1980

Letter from the 153rd State

We have to succeed in our bid to establish a non-racial society, in our bid to establish civil liberties … Once the reconciliation between the races is complete, once we have the opposing forces in harmony, then whatever the difference in the political sphere we will, at least, have that oneness which upholds a democratic society. I think it will also act as a consolidating factor for Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana, Angola, and even for the former High Commission territories, Lesotho and Swaziland. The progressive forces in South Africa will have a basis on which to demand that transformation take place as quickly as possible in their society.

… Let me say that our principles remain … as a party we stand by the socialist ideology deriving, to an extent, from Marxism and Leninism. We don’t hide that. At the same time we are not governed by those principles alone. We also have our own tradition, and the principles that we have developed here under the influence of Christianity, while we were occupied by the West. In other words, while we adhere to definite socialist principles there is a streak of morality that runs through them, and this morality is a synthesis of our tradition and our Christian practice here … We have always lived as a collective society. Land belongs to all. True, each person has his own cattle and goats but there was always a distinction between what was communal and what the individual acquired as his own property. The rivers and the fruit trees have always been common to us all.

Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister, Zimbabwe

Just eighteen weeks after the creation of a new African state that not only its prime minister predicts will have a definitive influence on the future of all southern Africa, I had the chance to visit that state for myself. To go to Zimbabwe (or any other African country no longer ruled by a white minority) as a South African is different from going as a European or American; and to travel as a private person accustomed to observing from the underground point of view of the novelist is different from arriving with the journalist’s conscious, skilled determination to find news. I was less informed than a good journalist would be; as someone both African and white, I think I understood what I saw for myself — as distinct from what I might be told or told about — rather more accurately than a visiting European or American could.

And yet it is difficult, in the sniffing-the-air alertness, the awkward solemnity of first setting foot on the tarmac of change, not to read in headline fashion what meets the eye. I always warn myself that there are two places from which I must not generalise any impressions: airports and bars. The white immigration officer at Salisbury airport turned the pages of my passport with a metal beak instead of a hand. At once I saw that brave adaptation as the machine gun beaten into the tool of peace. For me, the man had sacrificed his arm fighting a senseless war for Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and his artificial hand, efficiently manipulated in the service of a black majority government, was acceptance that that war, like the flesh-and-blood hand, was lost and done with.

But what proof did I have that he hadn’t had his arm severed in an ordinary road accident?

The bar at my second-rate hotel was full, of course, like the bars of grander hotels nearby, and during my stay it was never anything else. The faces were black, mostly young, the drink was beer, and the atmosphere no more thickly felted with voices and smoke than in comparable bars anywhere.

That scene was something I know how to read more certainly than the immigration officer’s artificial hand. Where the colour bar has been grudgingly relaxed in white-ruled Africa, the practice has been to let blacks into public bars before opening to them libraries, sports and hobby clubs, and other facilities for amusement and activity created by whites for their own city leisure. This packing of the bars by young blacks doesn’t signify to me that Zimbabweans, more than other city youngsters, are interested in no other pastime but drinking, but that bars were probably the first of the white man’s pleasures opened to them when the Rhodesians were stalling power-sharing by giving placebos, and that the old colonial habits and leisure arrangements have not yet been replaced by new ones.

We all know how close the conviviality of the bottle is to the aggression of the bottle. One of the most stupid things whites ever did in Africa was to make the bar the first public place where they would mix with blacks socially, and drinking the first pleasure to be openly shared by black and white. Almost without exception, the scattered incidents of violence that are occurring in the new state, whether racial insults followed by blows between black and white, or political fights between blacks, happen in the vicinity of bars. The immediate answer for Zimbabwe lies, alas, only in hindsight: during their prosperous rule of ninety years in Rhodesia (I date this from the establishment of Cecil John Rhodes’s Pioneer Column camp at Salisbury, September 1890) whites should have created more opportunities for white and black to get to know one another while sober. And whites should have opened to blacks places other than bars where the energies of men back from the war could be spent more constructively than dangerously.

The long-term answer will be taken up within the movement of the whole society itself, political and economic. At the moment the city of Salisbury¹⁰ — the most beautiful colonial city in Africa — is a wide, sunlit stage set. The play for which British government, international mining and white settlers’ agricultural and commercial headquarters were built — with their pillars, verandahs and palms they are more mansions than public premises, an imperialist architectural aesthetic expressing perfectly the concept of the colonies as a kind of greater country estate of the British Empire family — that play has closed.

Black urban couples with their children wander across the polo-field-sized streets window-shopping, old women in from the country carry long rolled mats balanced on their heads in a queer inversion of tightrope walking, young men hawk, discreetly as if offering dirty postcards, chess sets carved from local stone: all were here before, but now their presence has a different meaning. The props of the capital city are theirs, a city conceived by others; they seem not to have occupied it psychologically, yet. There are some constructions — not necessarily of white walls, handsome teak doors and brass fittings — they may never want to occupy, and others that their government, newly committing itself to socialism with a mixed economy, and land distribution and development to keep the rural population in agriculture, is determined to see they do not.

I spent most of my time in two of these colonial mansions. In both, the walls stood, but the internal human construction had been started anew. One was the House of Assembly. The official flunkey was a C. Aubrey Smith figure from the set of that play that has folded, wandered in to bear the golden turnip-topped mace before the Speaker of the House at those points in parliamentary procedure decreed by tradition. Here, the change of power from the minority of 230,000 whites to the majority of some 6.8 million blacks is set out clearly by change of colour as Lewis Carroll roses painted to order in the Duchess’s garden. There is no official opposition to Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s government. It is dominated by his own ZANU-PF Party, which nevertheless includes Joshua Nkomo, leader of the rival Patriotic Front Party (he would have been prime minister if Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe as a result of early negotiation instead of ultimate civil war), and two white ministers. David Smith of the Rhodesian Front is Minister of Commerce. Whites have minority rights to a guaranteed number of seats in parliament for twenty years. The all-white Rhodesian Front’s members sit together on one side of the House as if in a group photograph taken at some Old Boys’ gathering. The good looks of the (segregated) clubman — pink faces, silver-touched hair — prevail. Acrimonious remarks from this side of the House — bitter saliva flies from both sides — come in British rather than colonial accents.

The black MPs are not only sharp-tongued, highly articulate men like Dr Herbert Ushewokunze. He is the Minister of Health whose irregular postponement, the day I was present, of a debate on ministerial estimates for which the Rhodesian Front had prepared its arguments led to sarcastic exchanges and a walkout by five RF members (‘to the canteen’, Dr Ushewokunze did not fail to suggest). Filling the backbenches (‘back’ in the parliamentary sense only) were men and women painstakingly self-educated beyond the miserable facilities provided by successive white governments in their pursuit of Cecil Rhodes’s ‘hinterland’ paradise for whites. When a member from a rural constituency stood up to speak about Minister of Education Dzingai Mutumbuka’s bill introducing free primary education for all children, the man on his feet in a lumpy Sunday suit was a schoolteacher whose own education, he explained, and that of his children, had meant hardship for his parents and, in turn, for himself. One by one, other men and women stood up eagerly, even passionately, putting forward in the supreme forum of parliamentary democracy the claims of the people in their districts for new schools and more teachers.

The language of parliament is English. Some did not always have the right words for the expression of their ideas; but the ideas corresponded with desperate sincerity to real entities in the lives of the people they represent. When these MPs thanked the minister for something all the decades of white rule in a rich country never provided, this was no Party back-slapping but the response to a realisation long withheld. During that week, when the British and American press was giving front-page scandal space to the alleged murder of a white farmer by a black cabinet minister, Edgar Tekere, and the ‘defection’ of General Walls from his curious position as commander of the ex-guerrilla forces he had once fought, I don’t suppose there was more than a line for the truly enormous event of free education for Zimbabwean children.

The white MPs did not display much interest in the bill, for that matter. Well, there had always been government money for white children’s schools. This hangover of racial divisions showed itself most depressingly in a debate on the employment bill of the Minister of Labour, Mr Kumbirai Kangai. A clause the House grew coldly tense over was that dealing with new legislation providing for complaints by domestic servants against unfair dismissal. Voices of the past seemed to be sounding hollowly through the mouth of the present. As whites are (almost exclusively) the employers and blacks are the servants, the debate, without anyone on either side ever admitting it, was according to the familiar scenario. I could have prompted the ensuing dialogue from my seat behind glass (bulletproof? a precaution from the war?) in the visitors’ gallery.

Some Rhodesian Fronters were very interested in this clause. With ramrod decorum they approached it exclusively from the unexpressed experience of the Master and the Madam with Boys and Girls. If the servant’s complaint of unfair dismissal was in fact itself dismissed, would the exonerated employer be compensated for his time spent at the hearing, and the working time lost by other servants in his employ who might have wasted days giving evidence?

The black MPs, equally tight-buttocked, concealed their sympathies for the smarts and indignities of the back yard in an insistence that the minister’s raising of the status-less servant to a worker with rights (and a minimum wage!) like any other worker not be reduced by amendments. Surely there was no one, even of the doctors, academics and other university-educated people among the black men and women seated in that House, some member of whose family had not cleared away ‘the white man’s scum!’ (The phrase is Ezekiel Mphahlele’s — the black South African writer.)

The other mansion in which I spent my time was a real one, a private house from the Rhodesian Gone With The Wind era.

‘The Ranche House’ stands on a ridge in what is now a Salisbury suburb but must have held the sovereignty of its original owner’s eye over virgin grassland all the way to the hills of rock and the msasa trees that turn as maples do, but in spring not autumn. The garden with its formal perspective of wide shallow steps is still there. The single-storey white house spreads even more widely than climbing the steps had prepared me for — when it was built, for those for whom it was built, there was all the space in the world, for the taking. There was money to observe grace and style; on either side of the simple farmhouse gable a whim to place vents in the form of baroque ox-eye windows could be indulged. It is a very lovely façade. A pity architectural beauty often has its political implications …

I don’t know the full story of the house’s internal adaptation through Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 and the seven years of war that resulted; but its last occupation in the style and political philosophy for which it was built was surely that of Mr Justice Robert Tredgold, Chief Justice of the Central African Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. With the breakaway of Nyasaland as the new country of Malawi, this federation became a cartographical error almost as soon as it was drawn on the map, and by the time Northern Rhodesia became Zambia in 1964 seemed as distant and presumptuous a European piece of African map-making as the Berlin Conference of 1885 which shared Africa out among European powers. I gather that for some years The Ranche House has been used by various educational institutions; there are barrack classrooms, and a hall and canteen have been built where, by now, young black men and women talk French over their traditional African lunch of stew and putu (maize mash, like polenta and just as delicious) because they are doing an intensive course in that language as part of their training to staff Zimbabwe’s new diplomatic missions abroad.

When I was there The Ranche House was also giving hospitality to a ‘media workshop’. I was one of a collection of twenty or so unlikely characters who could only have been brought together by the search for an author like Mugabe. The blacks included conscientiously note-taking young men from the ruling party, public relations officers for ZANU-PF, journalists from the government information service, announcer/producers from the Zimbabwe (state) Broadcasting Corporation and TV, journalists from the principal newspapers, a research fellow with a film star’s face from the literature department of the University of Zimbabwe. These tame titles in fact designated, among others, the two men sitting behind me who until a few months ago were regional commanders of the guerrilla forces, and a tall young man with the strong Semitic nose that Arab slavers seem to have left behind in their raids on Central Africa, who joined the liberation army straight from a rural school and spent part of the war in Egypt studying media at Cairo University.

Those black members of our workshop who had not been freedom fighters nearly all were veterans of periods of political detention in the white man’s prisons; each curriculum vitae listed the career of being ‘inside’ if not ‘outside’ (infiltrating with the guerrilla forces), and military terms slipped into tea-break chatter — people would talk about waiting to be redeployed rather than about looking for a job. One of the ZANLA commanders wore a short-sleeved safari jacket of a vaguely military green for the first few days, and several copper bracelets looping over a watch of the military hardware kind on his elegant, iron-black arm; but he appeared in a perfectly hung ‘redeployed’ three-piece suit on the final day.

The white participants at the workshop consisted mainly of those Old Africa Hands, often in the para-journalistic occupations, who move from territory to territory, serving governments white and black, oiled with a professionalism that allows them to pass unharmed from hand to hand, from colonial to black capitalist to black socialist states, from democracies to dictatorships and vice versa. Here they were again: among a Press and Liaison Officer for Ministers of Government, an Editorial Training Officer for a newspaper group (still owned by a South African company), and an awesomely titled Senior Information Officer for All Media, was a jolly fellow who once managed a hotel I stayed at twenty-five years ago in Zambia. There was another — a Graham Greene rather than Pirandello character, this one, with a comedian’s long jaw, a sharp regional humour from England, and close-to-the-nose bright eyes — whose previous job was that of head of President Kamuzu Banda’s secret police in neighbouring conservative Malawi.

Yet with the exception of two irascible Germans vying in jealous whispers for the privilege of organising us all (the workshop was sponsored by the West German Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which seems close to the Social Democratic Party), there was no acrimony in this old mansion. Never, in six days of discussion, was a breath of the old hates exhaled in the House of Assembly. People addressed one another as ‘comrade’ and whether initially this was for some ideological carpetbaggers an insurance while for other participants an affirmation of political convictions, the title turned out to be an ordinary expression of comradely feeling that grew among all. Our discussions ranged with a charmed life over minefield subjects, from the point of view both of colour and party differences. ZANU-PF men in broadcasting and TV debated respectfully with people like Ronald Mpofu, a middle-aged individualist who complained that zealous ZANU-PF Party men among radio announcers slip into their disc-jockey patter what he called ‘honeymoon slogans’ plugging the Party. Stanley Mhondoro, the man who had gone to war straight from school, counselled: ‘As a nation we must learn to distinguish Party matters from national issues.’ When the subject of offensive terminology was raised by the young literary academic Musaemura Munya, opinions were not identifiable by colour; there was agreement that terms like kraal, whose literal meaning is a place where cattle are confined but which has been used throughout colonial English-speaking Africa to denote the homes of rural black people, should be dropped by the media, since men in independent Africa are not regarded as cattle.

The workshop’s main business was with ways and means to open the minds of a long-neglected population not only to information but more importantly to education of a kind that provides the means to assess information intelligently. On this question, a few Old Africa Hands of a very different kind were raptly listened to. Alexander Katz, an American chartered accountant who many years ago quit the United States as a result of the McCarthy hearings and came to live in what was then Rhodesia, spoke about ‘the colonialism of the professions’. In a colonial regime, ‘the settlers know everything; the people nothing’. In the colonialism of the professions, which too easily survives the overthrow of colonialism, ‘the professionals know everything; the ordinary public nothing’.

He proceeded to go through the annual report of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting and TV Corporation, pointing out how little this revealed of how public money had been spent during the Smith regime, and bluntly asking whether Zimbabweans were going to be intimidated by accountants’ jargon into accepting a comparable state of ignorance about what were now their own public affairs. Ruth Weiss, an English journalist (once a child refugee, in South Africa, from Nazi Germany) having the status of foul-weather friend of Robert Mugabe himself, could speak some plain truths about interdependence and dependency among the states of southern Africa.

But the issue that contained all others was always there, and discussion faced with considerable if not complete honesty those sheer and slippery walls as it came up against them: will the ethics of the media be decided in the interests of the nation, or the truth?

Even as I write, I don’t know whether to put the ‘interests of the nation’ in quotes, for that, too, is perhaps significant of a personal ethical bias … For a people just emerged from colonial rule as victors of a seven-year war in which they had to destroy their own homes as well as those of the people they were fighting, Lenin’s dreadful 1920 dictum may seem the voice of reason and right: ‘Why should freedom of speech be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticised?’

Time and again, the quasi-divine dispensation of ‘doing what it believes to be right’ was a syntactical presence in our discussion, if not an open statement; it will be hard for Zimbabwe not simply to compensate fiercely for what it knows to be wrong: the Smith government’s absolute control of the media in exclusive promotion of views and information favourable to justification for white minority rule. But always among us was some black hand beckoning for the chairman’s permission to raise the question — how inalienable is a government’s right to believe itself to be right? What ethic silences criticism? The Minister of Information, Dr Nathan Shamuyarira, a former newspaper editor, abolished all the white Rhodesian government’s restrictions on reporting and on the entry of foreign newsmen as soon as the Mugabe government took power. Some of the latter, he feels, have abused their welcome by sensational reporting, particularly of minor remarks as policy statements. When we all parted, it looked as if a Press Council may be set up as a result of The Ranche House workshop. The problem it will have to deal with is not, as the outside world might be quick to conclude, simply to preserve freedom of the press, but rather to create it within a continent where it scarcely exists, in a new country struggling with a past that, though both Western and white-dominated, alienated most people from any such tradition.

During the week I was in Zimbabwe the country became the 153rd member of the United Nations. Zimbabwe television still runs genteel British middle-class series (The Pallisers has followed The Forsyte Saga) and cute American children’s programmes suited to the taste of the majority of people who can afford sets — whites to whom England is not home and the US is foreign, but who have no indigenous culture. On the night of the event we saw Robert Mugabe, a black man, the Prime Minister of the country we were viewing from, being smiled on beneath the flags of the international community of nations. His American hosts beamed with particular emotion in Washington. But he came home with nothing substantial. He said that President Jimmy Carter was ‘well-disposed to giving Zimbabwe more aid, perhaps not in the near future, but in the long term’.

Indeed, not in this term; not until after the American presidential election; and then will money be forthcoming only if Ronald Reagan does not become President in Carter’s place?

Seen from Salisbury, there was something shameful about those banquets, ringing speeches, fraternal handclasps far away. What does pomp signify, if not practical help to enable the new human entity to survive?

Mugabe came home with very little to a country which, though burgeoning with potential for world investors in minerals such as chrome and iron, agricultural products such as tobacco and sugar, even ethanol (fuel from maize), has now emerged from an economically devastating war and is enduring a drought that for two years has compounded the agricultural aspect of that devastation. Above all, Zimbabwe is facing the expectations of 30,000 freedom fighters who won the country’s independence and are now waiting idle in camps, waiting to live the normal life they fought for. At the Lancaster House talks, the Patriotic Front Alliance agreed to compensate ‘dispossessed’ white farmers on the condition that Britain and the West would provide the money to buy whatever land is needed to meet the requirements of black Zimbabweans. The amount discussed was between 560 and 800 million Rhodesian (then) dollars, and Lord Carrington indicated that an African Development Bank would be established with Britain supplying the initial capital and encouraging wider Western support. The metamorphosis of freedom fighters into citizens at peace is directly related to the question of land; it was envisaged that most would cultivate the land under a project called Operation Seed. But these promises from the West seem in danger of becoming procrastination. Of the total of $250 million in international aid available this year, so far the United States has given only $22 million, and President Carter’s statement in August to Robert Mugabe seems to bring into doubt the $25–$30 million the US promised for the fiscal year starting in October 1980, as well as the $20–$25 million for housing guarantees now under discussion with the US. Of the £750 million promised by Britain over three years, only £7 million has been given.

Zimbabwe’s people cannot wait for their country’s potential to be realised; Robert Mugabe cannot uphold through an indeterminate transition period those civilised standards that the West now has high hopes of from him in its turnabout from regarding him as a terrorist. The West must put adequate aid into the country immediately, not merely because it was promised by Kissinger, or pledged by the Lancaster House agreement, but because to ditch Mugabe now by talk of helping him some tomorrow is to make it impossible for him to attempt what those UN celebratory smiles and handshakes were surely acknowledging — his ‘bid to establish a non-racial society … civil liberties … and a consolidating factor in all southern Africa’.¹¹

1980

The South African Censor: No Change

Sharing the preoccupations of my fellow writers, I was the first to express the conviction, now become a general stand, that the release from ban of a few books by well-known white writers is not a major victory for the freedom to write, and that the action carries two sinister implications: first, those among us who are uncompromising opponents of censorship with wide access to the media can be bought off by special treatment accorded to our books; second, the measure of hard-won solidarity that exists between black and white writers can be divided by ‘favouring’ white writers with such special treatment, since no ban on any black writer’s work has been challenged by the Directorate’s own application to the Appeal Board.

I don’t claim any prescience or distinction for early arrival at this conviction — Burger’s Daughter (1979), my novel,¹² happened to be the first released as a consequence of the Directorate’s new tactics. It was natural for me to examine the package very carefully when my book came back to me — apparently intact, after all the mauling it had been through. It was inevitable that I should come upon the neat devices timed to go off in the company of my colleagues. It was not surprising that they should recognise for themselves these booby-traps set for us all, since a week or two later André Brink received the same package containing his novel A Dry White Season (1979). And then, in time for April and the seating of the new Chairman of the Appeal Board, came Afrikaans literature’s Easter egg, all got up for Etienne le Roux with the sugar roses of the old Appeal Board’s repentance and the red ribbon defiant of Aksie Morale Standaarde, the NGK and Dr Koot Vorster — of course, Magersfontein, O Magersfontein!¹³ was not released as the two other books were, as a result of the Director’s own appeal against his Committee’s bannings, but its release on an ultimate appeal by the author’s publishers transparently belongs to the same strategy in which the other two books were ‘reinstated’.

I am one who has always believed and still believes we shall never be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Personally, I find it necessary to preface with this blunt statement any comment I have about the effects of censorship, the possible changes in its scope, degree, and methodology. Any consideration of how to conduct the struggle against it, how to act for the attainment of immediate ends, is a partial, pragmatic, existential response seen against a constant and over-riding factor. Today as always, the invisible banner is behind me, the decisive chalked text on the blackboard, against whose background I say what I have to say. We shall not be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Censorship is the arm of mind-control and as necessary to maintain a racist regime as that other arm of internal repression, the secret police. Over every apparent victory we may gain against the censorship powers hangs the question of whether that victory is in fact contained by apartheid, or can be claimed to erode it from within.

What exactly has changed since 1 April 1980?

What exactly does the ‘born again’ cultural evangelism staged with the positively last appearance of Judge Lammie Snyman and the previews of rippling intellectual musculature displayed by thirty-seven-year old Dr Kobus van Rooyen, mean?

The Censorship Act remains the same. It is still on the statute book. The practice of embargo will continue. The same anonymous committees will read and ban; a censorship committee having been defined in 1978 by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court as ‘An extra-judicial body, operating in an administrative capacity, whose members need have no legal training, before whom the appellant has no right of audience, who in their deliberations are not required to have regard to the rules of justice designed to achieve a fair trial, whose proceedings are not conducted in public and who are not required to afford any reasons for their decision’. The enlarged panel of experts has some of the old names, among whom is at least one known Broederbonder, and the new ones are recruited from the same old white cadres. The powers of the Board are what they always were.

There is no change in the law or procedure, then. Nor is any promised, or even hinted at.

What we have is a new Chairman of the Appeal Board, in a position whose power we already know: although he does not make decisions alone, the Chairman of the Appeal Board is the ultimate authority and decision-maker in the whole process of censorship. We also know that the head of any institution — and censorship is an institution in our national life — interprets the doctrinal absolutes and directs the tactical course towards that institution’s avowed objectives according to his own personal ideas of how these should be achieved. His flair — for which quality he will have been chosen, all other qualifications being equal — will influence procedure, make innovations in the way the same things are done, whether the institution is a bank accumulating capital or a Directorate of Publications controlling people’s minds.

Therefore it can only be the philosophy and psychology of censorship that have changed. Why and how is something we shall have to delve into in the months to come, beyond a first snap understanding of what was plain behind the unbanning of a small group of books in quick succession — the hope to placate certain white writers, the suggestion of an attempt to divide the interests of black and white writers. These actions were surely already the product of Dr van Rooyen’s thought, since he was running the Appeal Board for some time before he was appointed Chairman in April 1980. They were the first show of the quality of mind, the concept of culture, the concept of the relation of literature to society, to politics, to economics, to class as well as colour, the new Chairman has, and on which — as we see — the nature of what we are up against now will be dependent.

Since he took office he has made policy statements — signification from which it will be possible to trace the grid of his purpose. Taking as given the ordinary motives of personal ambition and good pay in his acceptance of the job of chief censor, we need to know how he sees his particular mission. We need to know what his sense of self and other is. For that is the vital factor in the praxis of censorship, the phenomenon of censorship as a form of social and cultural control. Philosophically speaking, on this sense of self and other is the authority of censorship conceived. A we controlling a them. Dr van Rooyen won’t tell us what this private sense deciding his widely affective thoughts and actions is; but we have the right to find out. I’ll ask you to look at the evidence of his statements presently; first I want to return to the evidence of his actions — or actions behind which his hand can be detected — the unbanning of certain highly controversial books.

André Brink has pointed out that the week that his novel, dealing with the death by police brutality and neglect of a black man in prison, was released from ban, Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s story collection, Call Me Not A Man, was banned. The reason for banning supplied to Matshoba’s publisher was objection to one of the stories only, ‘A Glimpse of Slavery’, dealing with the experiences of a black man hired out as prison labour to a white farmer.

Death in prison or detention; the abuse of farm labour. Both are subjects whose factual basis has been exposed and confirmed in the proceedings of court cases and, in one instance at least, a commission of inquiry. Two writers, each of whom can make with Dostoevsky a statement of the writer’s ethic: ‘Having taken an event, I tried only to clarify its possibility in our society’; the work of one is released, the other banned.

Now, in preparation for the new regime, from which we are being persuaded we may expect a new respect for literature, and are asked to accept this as a new justification for censorship, there has been much emphasis on literary quality in recent decisions by the Appeal Board. It seems that Dr Kobus van Rooyen wants to substitute the silver-handled paper-knife of good taste for the kerrie of narrow-mindedness and prudery, as the arbitrary weapon. But although it was decided by a censorship committee that there was ‘not inconsiderable merit in much of the writing in this collection of short stories by the African writer Mtutuzeli Matshoba … with regard both to the quality of the writing and to the author’s insight in the human situations which he interprets’, although the Committee members found the stories ‘generally of a high quality’, they banned the book because of a single story. They did this — again I let them speak for their anonymous selves — ostentatiously from the new ‘literary’ angle, claiming that this particular story was flatly written and the accumulation of its events improbable. But what was hatched beneath the peacock feathers was the ostrich with his familiar kick. They banned the book on one-seventh of its contents, to be precise. They returned, when dealing with a black writer, to the precept followed in the past, when a work was to be judged ‘undesirable’ or ‘desirable’ not in relation to the quality of the whole, but could be damned because of a single chapter, page or even paragraph.

The sole basis for the ban on Matshoba’s book rested ultimately on a declared calculation made in the imperatives of political repression, not literary quality, although literary quality is invoked — the Committee stated that the appeal to the reader of the story ‘lies not in the literary creation but rather in the objectionable nature of the events which are presented … even if all these situations … had occurred in this context in which they are set in the story, the presentation of these scenes in a popular medium would be undesirable’.

The italics are mine. The standard used by the censors here is that of political control over reading matter likely to reach the black masses. If this is not so, let us challenge the Directorate to act in accordance with Dr van Rooyen’s statement that the banning of a book by the ‘isolation method’ would now be rejected, and therefore ask for the ban on Matshoba’s book to be reviewed by the Appeal Board.

My novel, Burger’s Daughter, was released by the Appeal Board although, among all the other sections under which it had been deemed offensive, there were numerous examples cited under D Section 47 (2) of the Censorship Act. One was the remark by English-speaking schoolgirls mouthing prejudices picked up from their parents: ‘Bloody Boers, dumb Dutchmen, thick Afrikaners’.

Miriam Tlali’s novel Muriel at the Metropolitan in the version found inoffensive and left on sale for several years, was banned in 1979 on the sole objection of three offences under the same section of the Act, the principal being the reference by the narrator-character to an Afrikaans-speaking woman as a ‘lousy Boer’.

Well, these ugly racist epithets are not my personal ones, nor, I think, are they Miriam Tlali’s; but they are heard around us every day, and there are certain characters whose habitual inability to express themselves without them is another fact about our society no honest writer can falsify. Yet Tlali’s book, otherwise quite inoffensive from the censors’ point of view, is ultimately banned while mine is ultimately released. Is it more insulting for a white South African to be abused by a black character in a book than by a white one? What is clear is that a censorship committee regards it as necessary to prevent black readers from reading their own prejudices, their own frustrations, given expression in the work of a black writer; outside the considerations assiduously to be taken into account by a new and enlightened censorship there is an additional one, operative for black writers only that nullifies most of the concessions so far as black writers are concerned — they may not say what white writers say because they are calculated to have a wider black readership, and to speak to blacks from the centre of the experience of being black, to articulate and therefore confirm, encourage what the black masses themselves feel and understand about their lives but most cannot express.

And with this trend taken by the Censorship Directorate in the period preparing us for the advent of a new Chairman, we come to the event itself, and the statements of policy made by Dr Kobus van Rooyen since 1 April.

He has not said much; and one of his statements has been to the effect that he intends to say even less: he has announced that he will take no part in public debates on censorship. The Star (5/4/1980) editorial pointed out, of public debates: ‘these insights to the workings of a censor’s mind were what helped speed the retirement of his predecessor. They will be missed.’

Indeed.

Dr Kobus van Rooyen would be unlikely to present the image that emerged from the public appearances and statements of his predecessor. Nevertheless, Dr van Rooyen does not intend taking any risks. What interests us more is that he does not want openly to proselytise his philosophy of censorship any more than he intends to be open to the influence of counter views. This is an autocratic approach — let us not call it an arrogant one. From it we can understand that here is a man whose view of culture is elitist, someone in whose mind, whether consciously or not, is posited the idea of an official cultural norm. The fact that his version of that norm is likely to differ, here and there, in emphasis, does not mean that it is any less fundamentalist than that defined implicitly, along with the law, in the Censorship Act. The shift in emphasis is a realpolitik adjustment to catch up with the change in the relation of literature to life that has taken place in South Africa, and that a clever man cannot ignore. The concept — that there is a right for a single power group to decide what is culture, remains the grid on which, although — like the most functional of contemporary business premises — all manner of interior open-space arrangements may be made to suit the tenant, the total structure must be accepted. The myth of the South African culture sustains a man who is so convinced of his approach to his job that he is not prepared to discuss it let alone admit any necessity to defend it.

Roland Barthes points out that traditional myth explains a culture’s origins out of nature’s forces; modern myths justify and enforce a secular power by presenting it as a natural force. Sophisticated officials of this government may be openly sceptical of some of the more ritualistic aspects of our societal myth — the Immorality Act, the awful malediction of four-letter words, etc. — but sophistication must never be taken for enlightenment; acceptance of the concept of a culture based on an elite dispensation to the masses who cannot create anything valid for themselves, acceptance of the role of literature in life according to that culture, are still firmly based on a particular myth of power.

Only from within that myth could Judge Lammie Snyman have taken the cultural standpoint revealed when he said earlier this month that blacks are ‘inarticulate people, who, I am sure, are not interested’ in censorship (The Star, 8/4/1980). And what a lightning flash lit up a whole official mentality for us when, summing up his entire five years in which it was his responsibility to decide ‘what was likely to corrupt or deprave an immature mind, or whether it was likely to horrify or disgust’ the people of South Africa, he added: ‘Of blacks, I have no knowledge at all.’

His ‘average ordinary South African’ — whose standards of morality and literary judgement he constantly invoked during his term of office — was not to be found among the majority of the South African population. For this reason, Dr Kobus van Rooyen has abandoned the creature. But not the idea that he has the right to create another of his own, whose imaginary or rather conditioned sensibilities and susceptibilities will be the deciding factor in what shall and shall not be read by all of us. What is regarded as Dr van Rooyen’s most important statement is his announcement that his creature will be the ‘probable reader’. Important it is, but not, I am afraid, for reasons assumed by some.

The assumption is that sexual explicitness as an integral part of sophisticated literature written in the idiom of educated people will now be passed. That complex works dealing with contentious or radical political characters and events above the level of simple rhetoric will also be passed. And there the effect of the change apparently ends, and so can only be regarded as beneficial; after all if you have not the educational background and trained intellect to follow these works, that is hardly the responsibility of the censors.

It is not? By putting on the top shelf, out of reach of those masses Lammie Snyman confessed he knew nothing about, imaginative, analytical presentation of the crucial questions that deal with their lives, is one not hampering the healthy cultural development censorship purports to be guarding?

We should like to be able to put that question to the new Chairman of the Appeal Board, who evidently does know a great deal about those masses. Does he see the justification of that hampering, in a mission to adjust the strategy of the myth of hostile forces he well understands?

Why may intellectual readers handle inflammables?

Is it because this readership is predominantly white, and radical initiative by whites has been contained by imprisonment, exile, bannings and the threat of right-wing terrorism while the moderate, let alone the revolutionary initiative for social change has passed overwhelmingly to blacks, and is not contained?

Why may white writers deal with inflammables?

Is it because the new censorship dispensation has understood something important to censorship as an arm of repression — while white writings are predominantly critical and protestant in mood, black writings are inspirational, and that is why the government fears them?

The definition of the ‘probable reader’ can be arrived at by the old pencil-in-the-hair and fingernail tests, believe me. The criterion for reading matter allowed him is not literary worth but his colour.

As a cultural and not merely a politically manipulable prototype, the ‘probable reader’ is a creature of class-and-colour hierarchy. He cannot be visualised, in our society, by those of us sufficiently free-minded to see that culture in South Africa is something still to be made, something that could not be brought along with mining machinery in the hold of a ship, nor has been attained by the genuinely remarkable achievement of creating an indigenous language out of European ones. He cannot be visualised by anyone who understands culture not as an embellishment of leisure for the middle classes, but as the vital force generated by the skills, crafts, legends, songs, dances, languages, sub-literature as well as literature — the living expression of self-realisation — in the life of the people as a whole.

Behind the ‘probable reader’ is surely the unexpressed concept of the ‘probable writer’. The new Chairman of the Appeal Board has assured him that ‘satirical writing will be allowed to develop’. To most of us this is an elitist concession. Of course, nobody stops anyone from writing satire, whatever his colour. But in the relation of literature to life at present, satire is unlikely to appeal to black writers. It requires a distancing from the subject which black writers, living their lives close within their material, are not likely to manage; it requires a licence for self-criticism that loyalty to the black struggle for a spiritual identity does not grant at present. So effective weapon though satire may be, as a social probe in certain historical circumstances or stages, it will not, so far as it is a concession by this government to freedom of expression, fall into the hands of the ‘wrong’ probable writer …

Similarly, the new directive that the general public (probable reader distinction again) ‘does not have to accept literary works and that a writer is a critic of his society and therefore often in conflict with the accepted moral, religious and political values’ will benefit — if anyone, since we still have to prove ourselves unharmful and inoffensive to whichever probable reader our work is allotted, in the censors’ consideration — will benefit writers of work in the critical and analytical mode but lift no barriers for the inspirational. Yet there is no ignoring the fact that the inspirational is a dynamic of our literature at present. Franz Kafka’s standard, that ‘A book must be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea inside us’, is not the censors’. Neither is there any sign of acceptance that in South Africa we writers, white and black, are the only recorders of what the poet Eugenio Montale calls ‘unconfessed history’.

That has been made, and is being made every day, deep below the reports of commissions and the SABC news; it is the decisive common force carrying us all, bearing away the protective clothing of ‘probable readers’ as paper carnival costumes melt in the rain.

In the final analysis, censorship’s new deal is the pragmatic manifestation of an old, time-honoured view of culture, already dead, serving repression instead of the arts, and its belated recognition of literary standards is its chief strategy. This recognition is shrewd enough to see what Lammie Snyman did not — that the objective validity of literary standards as a concept (there are works of genuine creation, there is trash) could be invoked for a purpose in which, in fact, they have no place and no authority. The criteria by which the quality of literature can be assessed have nothing whatever to do with calculation of its possible effect on the reader, probable or improbable. The literary experts who are instructed to take this factor into account, and do so, are not exercising any valid function as judges of literature.

And in affirmation of freedom of expression, which is the single uncompromised basis of opposition to censorship, the literary worth or otherwise of a work is not a factor — what is at stake each time a book falls into the censors’ hands is the right of that book to be read. Literary worth has nothing to do with that principle.

We must not fudge this truth. The poor piece of work has as much right to be read — and duly judged as such — as the work of genius. Literary worth may be assessed only by critics and readers free to read the book; it is a disinterested, complex and difficult judgement that sometimes takes generations. There is a promise that future judgements by the censors will ‘more readily reflect the opinions of literary experts appointed’. The invocation of literary standards by censors as a sign of enlightenment and relaxation of strictures on the freedom of the work; above all, the reception by the public of this respected and scholarly concept as one that could be enthroned among censors — both are invalid. Let us never forget — and let us not let the South African public remain in ignorance of what we know: censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

1981

Unconfessed History: Alan Paton’s Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful

Alan Paton’s last novel, Too Late The Phalarope, was published almost thirty years ago. The events central to his new one are an oblique explanation for the gap: the political activism of the man prevented the writer from exercising what Harry Levin calls ‘that special concentration of the ego’ which enables a writer to ‘discover the power within himself’. In honourable retirement from politics, Paton has freed the power within himself; and it is inevitable that it should find its expression in what Czeslaw Milosz has called ‘unconfessed history’: the personal dimension of events that can be perceived only through their recreation in imaginative works.

The new novel, intended to be the first of a trilogy, begins roughly in the period of South African history in which the previous novel was set. Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful strides vigorously through the years from the first Nationalist Afrikaner government to its ideological apogee, the accession in 1958 of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, who, assuming the godhead of the chosen white Volk, promised a creation of ‘separate freedoms’ for black and white that would be achieved, not in six days, but by 1976. Some of the issues occurring within the book’s span (six years during the 1950s) were: the Bantu Education Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the consolidation of the black ‘homelands’ (yes, 13 per cent of the land, and the loss of South African citizenship for the black majority), and the removal of ‘coloured’ voters of the Cape from the common roll. The 1950s also witnessed the formation of the Liberal Party (the only legal non-racial party, once the Communist Party was banned); the establishment of the secret society Broederbond’s control of government; the alliance of black, Indian, and coloured mass movements and white leftist movements in the Congress of the People, at which the Freedom Charter (similar to the United Nations Charter, and now banned) was adopted; the beginning of the boycott movement against racialism in South African sport, and of the opposition of church to state on the question of ‘mixed’ worship. It was the era of the great mass movements of black (sprinkled with white) passive resistance to unjust laws. It saw the beginning of white right-wing urban terrorism, many years before the suppressed and outlawed black liberation movements turned in tragic desperation to the sporadic urban terrorism that frightens South Africans today.

In Paton’s novels one hears voices. That is his method. It derives perhaps — fascinatingly — from the secret level at which the suprarational of creative imagination and the supra-rational of religious belief well up together in him. In Phalarope a voice bore witness to the undoing of a young man by racist laws that made a criminal act out of a passing sexual infidelity. A loving relative watched what she was powerless to prevent; hers was the voice of compassion. In Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful, watcher has turned spy. Characters’ actions are seen now by hostile, distorting eyes and recorded in the evil cadences of poison-pen letters. Paton’s technique remains the same, but his viewpoint has changed from sorrowful compassion to irony. Compare the hushed shock with which Paton described Pieter van Vlaanderen’s ‘fall’ (he has made love to a black girl) from the love of wife and family, honour and self-respect in Phalarope, with the prurient cackle of Proud White Christian Woman when she writes anonymously to Robert Mansfield, a leader of the Liberal Party: ‘How are your black dolly girls? … Does your wife like to be poked by the same stick that has been poking the black dolly girls?’

The phalarope, rare bird of understanding that came too late between father and son in the earlier novel, is recognised between the generations in the proud acceptance by the wealthy Indian family, the Bodasinghs, of their daughter’s involvement in the Defiance Campaign against unjust laws. And, much later in the narrative, the bird figures again in the rise of internal moral conflicts and their liberal resolution within formerly self-righteous racists, like Van Onselen, a civil servant and one of the ‘voices’, and his Aunt Trina, to whom his running commentary on central events and protagonists in the book is addressed. This type of happy-end conversion is sometimes difficult to believe and slightly embarrassing to read. Perhaps it is best taken as another symbol: that of Alan Paton the man’s continued faith in the power of seeing the light, which is in tension with the writer’s ironic doubt that its beam goes all the way to a change in power structure. Proud White Christian Woman’s ‘conversion’, on the other hand, is brought about by brutal circumstance that, alas, seems closer to the actualities of change in South Africa: the threat of her own death. She is dying of cancer, as there are signs that white society is beginning to know it can die of apartheid.

* * *

Yet, with few exceptions, the writer wins out over the man. The most dangerous episode in the book, from the point of view of those who see Paton’s assertions of faith as lapses into sentiment, is steely and silencing. An Afrikaner judge, in line for the highest legal honour in the land, disqualifies himself by ceremonially washing and kissing, in a black church, the feet of his old servant, to restore a breach of faith between the whites who administer a black ghetto and the blacks who live in it. The strangeness and awkward solemnity is somehow enhanced by devices of irony that also expose the incident’s South African craziness. Comments within the book take the form of snippets of supposed newspaper reports wryly and slyly aping the attitudes and vocabularies of left and right. Criticism from the left is pre-empted:

The episode is totally meaningless and irrelevant, and it shows once more how unrelated to our realities are the bourgeois values of goodwill and sporadic benevolence in our South African situation … an example of white condescension at its very worst … The wages that she earns probably amount to three or four per cent of the judge’s salary. Such gross inequalities are not removed by any amount of washing or kissing.

Every word is true, and Paton knows it; but for him that truth lies alongside the other, his faith.

He probably will be accused, now, of Manichaeanism. The trouble with being a public, political figure as he has been is that the writer will always be judged in relation to that figure. But Paton ought, with this work, to be granted the writer’s freedom and, indeed, obligation to show the Manichaean elements in the society that is his material. Since he is a fervently personal writer, his own convictions may dominate, but he fulfils a writer’s vision by seeing everything that is there. He does not let himself shirk much. He is aware that if the 1950s were the high years of white liberalism, they saw more importantly the beginning of the revolutionary period for blacks. Chief Luthuli, talking to the fictional Robert Mansfield, Liberal Party leader, about the African National Congress alliance with the Communist Party, says: ‘When my house is burning down and we are all running to the fire, I don’t say to the man next to me, Tell me first, where did you get your bucket, where did you draw your water?’ From the mouth of another of the real personages who converse with fictional ones, Dr Monty Naicker, comes: ‘This is going to be our life from now on. Some of us have to be destroyed now so that freedom can come to others later.’

Before I knew I was going to review this book, I read it and wrote to Alan Paton in response. What I said remains valid for me upon re-reading the book as critic rather than fellow writer, and I am going to take the liberty of paraphrasing myself below.

One cannot read this book without the total absorption that comes from recognition of its truth and admiration for the artistic truth into which that has been transposed. There are many characters, yet this is not so much a novel as a meditation on subjects and characters in a novel. Paton has made a meditation his own novelistic form. He seems more interested — and he succeeds in making the reader more interested — in his reflections on the characters and events than in these people and events themselves. When his characters speak — even the ‘voices’, the marvellous ventriloquist’s acts of Proud White Christian Woman and Van Onselen — it is quite simply Alan Paton speaking. This was, I think, a fault in some of his earlier work. He did not always succeed in creating what Patrick White has called the ‘cast of contradictory characters of which the writer is composed’. But this time, yes, Alan Paton is speaking, and such is his skill, so individual the music of his lyricism, the snap of his staccato, the beauty of his syntax, that what ought to be a failure becomes somehow the strength of the work. Style is a matter of finding the one way to say exactly what you have to say. What Paton wants to say here is so central to his own experience, at conscious and subconscious levels, that it is natural to hear it in his own voice.

Why a novel, then, and not just another volume of his autobiography (one was published recently)? Ah, but this is not his story; it is part of ours, the South Africans’. That demands an imaginative transposition. This one is achieved with shining intelligence and acerbity, a young man’s book with the advantage of an old man’s experience of the battle with life and words.

1982

Mysterious Incest

Patrick White’s Flaws in the Grass: A Self-Portrait

What do you expect from an autobiography? Those who write them are as uncertain as those who publish them. They don’t even use the term, any longer. Czeslaw Milosz subtitled his a search for self-definition; Sartre, endowed by nature with the physical possibility of never looking anyone in the eye, stressed that his autobiography was nothing but words. The Australian novelist Patrick White has written one of the two key autobiographies by contemporary writers (my other nomination is Milosz’s) that fit the lock of the creative process. Yet he has insisted that his publishers misrepresent and undervalue his book by stating on the jacket that it is ‘merely’ a self-portrait in the form of sketches.

All these cautionary riders to the form: biography, well yes; auto — don’t ask too much. Too much of what? There’s another decision. A review I read in an English literary magazine sulked because Patrick White had not written enough about being a homosexual. I, personally, should have been disappointed if he had written more about being a homosexual than about becoming and being a writer. Is autobiography the story of a personality or the work that has made the subject an object of sufficient public interest to merit writing about him/herself? If the subject is an artist, and in particular a writer, for whom the act is performed in the medium of his own art, what one wants, expects, is a revelation of the mysterious incest between life and art.

In his own books, White finds something of the ‘unknown man’ thesis that writers expect to find when they visit the author, and that he is ‘unable to produce’. That unknown man is the writer of this autobiography; neither White the novelist nor White the man, but of their dark union: he has produced the revelation. It is read by glares of Australian sun and flares of European war, in the first, main section, a broken narrative that carries perfectly the philosophical proposition of its title, Flaws in the Glass, and in the second section, ‘Journeys’, by a kind of reflection cast up in sea crossings that are also connections, of a non-narrative nature. The scrappy third section at first appears to be a filler the book could have done without. On reading cat-scratch anecdotes, wry incidents, and a brilliantly elliptical telephone conversation, one realises all these are the geneses of unwritten short stories — a condition that offers addenda to the existence of the unknown man.

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 of Australian parents and brought back to Australia about the time he was able to sit up. He had imported English nannies, and later fulfilled colonial parental ambitions by being sent ‘home’ — away — to Cheltenham, where he suffered traditional miseries endured by embryonic writers in English public schools — and then some, if we are to believe that anti-colonial jeers were as bad as racialism, at that time. (I myself wonder whether his own infant snobbery — suppressed dislike of being a colonial, shame of his own people’s apparent crassness in comparison with the nasty genteel indifference of assured ancestry — doesn’t make him exaggerate this paradoxical phenomenon of empire.) As a young adult, he came back to try living on the Australian land — the Monaro region that has continued working through its relationship with his consciousness, and is magnificently recreated fifty years later in The Twyborn Affair. Going to England for a university education, he stayed on after Cambridge to become a writer in a London bedsitter.

Of course. That is the pilgrimage of the colonial artist of the twenties and thirties — and before. In late-nineteenth-century South Africa, Olive Schreiner felt ‘stifled’ (significant metaphor for the asthma sufferer she was, as White himself is) in drawing-room pockets of colonial culture, and went to England to breathe. In Australia, White could not ‘come to terms with the inhabitants’; away from Australia, the ‘consolation of the landscape’ always drew him back: but — it was a ‘landscape without figures’. Intermittent self-exile, in England, America, and during the war in Africa and the Middle East, represents the split in being that is the initial stage in life’s painful pull towards art.

Australia was mother-land, father-land, in an extraordinary sense. White refers to his actual mother always as ‘Ruth’; she is a character rather than the closest relative in the kinship of blood. He seems to feel he inhabited her, that is all, for a time — like any other lodging left behind. England — the mother country to colonial ones — proved as little of a mother surrogate to run to; her earth alien. When aged seventy he worries away at the puzzle of his relation to his father, father and fatherland become one in an analysis that opens out like a great wound beyond its familial references. ‘Had I been able to talk to him, and if, at the risk of sounding priggish, there had been some vaguely intellectual ground on which we could have met, I would have loved my father.’

He would have loved Australia. If he had felt able to talk to Australians of his own upper crust, if there had been some ground … Australia would not have been for him an inescapable landscape without figures, a place of silence between the extermination of indigenous people and culture, and the burble of Sunday family lunch at the Sydney Club. This patrician-looking man (in Australia, he was the sole native I met whose Cambridge English had no comfy cadence of the miaow vowel) sought out the Lizzies, Flos and Matts who were family servants. He came to love them ‘through their connection with everyday reality’. By contrast: ‘I had never seen my father in the context of reality’ (my italics). This is no less than a definition of colonial culture. All its referents were in one or the other of the Old Countries. It was not connected with the real entities of the country it claimed. The Lizzies, the Flos and Matts claimed no culture; but they lived at one with everyday reality on Australian earth. That was where the substance of a live culture would come from. The child’s instinct led him faithfully.

Did the ‘unreality’ of colonial life create ‘unreal’ family relationships? The fact that I can generalise from Patrick White’s experience to that around me in another colonial society gives the idea some credence. But writers ‘make’ themselves out of such impasses. White writes, ‘I have stuck by my principles [the middle-class ones instilled by his parents] while knowing in my irrational depths what it was to be a murderer, or be murdered.’ This knowing began by knowing what it is to be Lizzie, Flo and Matt. All writers have to find the way to knowledge that remains, for most other people, buried within themselves. Being pitched in to conflict between the unreality of colonial life (bourgeois safety) and the reality of native entities of land and/or people (revolutionary danger of untamed nature, masses and mores) is the beginning of the way for writers in colonial societies, whether or not colour is involved. White has ‘come to terms’ with Australians by recognizing the in himself, in the writer’s irrational depths beyond class, race or sex, at the same time as he stands apart from them. He talks to fellow Australians of themselves through his creation of them in his work. Surprising that he still troubles, in this book, to answer accusations that he is hard on them; he is hard on himself, in them.

The problem of colonialism, social and political, was resolved for the life by the work — almost. There was another problem, fed from the same bloodstream. White knew from an early age that he was homosexual. This doubled his sense of exclusion, since he felt himself set apart, if differently, both in Australia and London. He knows now that a solitary existence is the normal condition for artists. But, leading that existence as a young writer in London, he blamed his seclusion ‘wrongly on my homosexual temperament, forced, at that period anyway, to surround itself with secrecy, rather than on the instinctive need to protect my creature core from intrusion and abuse’.

Of homosexuality as a component in the development of a writer he makes the familiar claim that the homosexual temperament ‘strengthens our hand as man, woman, artist’, then, with the acerbity that is so much a part of his chameleon’s-eye originality, swivelling to observe all from unfamiliar angles, he is unafraid to add: ‘Homosexual society as such has never had much appeal for me. Those who discuss the homosexual condition with endless hysterical delight … have always struck me as colossal bores. So I avoid them, and no doubt I am branded as a closet queen. I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of man or woman according to actual situations or the characters I become in my writing.’ White is a wizard at definitions. But this ‘mind possessed’ is a definition of any writer, of any sex; White would have had it even if he had married the girl his mother selected, and fathered six little Australians. We are all pansexual, at work. Again, he at one stage considered writing ‘as a disguise’; in his case, for unapproved sexual desires — for other writers, for all writers, a disguise which is also a guise in which life becomes art?

Even if he had been born a generation later, it is doubtful if White would ever have had the temperament to be ‘gay’ rather than plain homosexual. The emotional isolation he felt was resolved for him when, during the Second World War, he met Manoly Lascaris. This ‘unlikely relationship between an Orthodox Greek and lapsed Anglican egotist agnostic pantheist occultist existentialist would-be though failed Christian Australian has lasted forty years’. It is a relationship that describes its own parabola through White’s work. And I am not referring only or principally to the character Angelos Vatzatis, composed of respect, love and irony in The Twyborn Affair. White chooses another symbol. He states with the single verbal gesture of deep emotion that Manoly Lascaris became ‘the central mandala in my life’s hitherto messy design’. That symbol, working inward, became central to one of his books, The Solid Mandala.

Any artist who knows what it means to sustain a long relationship with a human partner while the ego that is the genie of creation clamours through a lifetime will recognise a moving achievement in the service of the man and the genie. It is clear that Manoly has been able to temper the two worlds White could not live in — Australia and Europe. Manoly helped to resolve White’s Australian/colonial/class alienation by solving the personal motherless/fatherless/homosexual alienation. This stranger and Greek was the one who was able to take Patrick White back to Australia, after the war, and make it possible for him to accept and inhabit it as home, an Australian among Australians, despite the Cambridge vowels and the lack of appreciation of his work (he alleges) until he became visible on the wide screen of the Nobel Prize. The genuine, essential link to Europe, through Manoly’s culture and personality, has surely given White the freedom in which to re-create Australian consciousness in his unique grasp of the concrete, the relative and the transcendent. The responsibility of Europe for Australia is always there. There are no antipodes to which human nature can ship what is intrinsic to it.

Everyone is always immensely interested to know which of his works a writer thinks his best. White’s list: The Aunt’s Story, The Solid Mandala, and The Twyborn Affair. He is one of the few writers who care to, and are able to give the genesis of his novels without self-consciousness. What he cannot give, of course, is the magicking, half witches’ brew, half elixir, that makes the old farmhouse he once lived in the eternal one of a novel, or twins two aspects of himself in his characters, the Brown brothers. Though the three novels of his choice — one an early work, one from his middle period, and the third his latest — are very different, The Twyborn Affair is the culminating expression of White’s vision, a vision that has made of Australian boiled mutton and plum duff an Ensor carnival. The bobbing, oversize heads are recognisable everywhere. Like the spirit of carnival, he carries them through the streets, dancing beauties and vomiting drunks, in celebration of life; and in the knowledge that King Carnival is always to be killed.

The fishhook of White’s social conscience (which seems to have kept up, if somewhat awkwardly, with his movement as a writer) winkled himself out of writers’ seclusion to take to the public platform in support of the Gough Whitlam government and in hope of an Australia-with-a-human-face. Political finagling felled that government, and White sees himself once again as the ‘skeleton at the Australian feast’ of Mammon. What this great artist is grieving over, really — a grief encompassing disappointed hopes for Australian socialism — is the situation all contemporary artists complain of. The Futurists dreamed that by our time technology would have freed the imagination unlimitedly. What has happened is that technology has outstripped imagination in an unimaginable way; capturing human responses in the shallows, instilling a yearning for things instead of revelations. Looking up from the broken plastic and bottles afloat in Sydney harbour, the nearest White can get to optimism is the grim, cocky message: ‘Don’t despair … it is possible to recycle shit.’

1982

The Child Is the Man: Wole Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood

It is not always possible to find the child again. Proust did, not only by reason of his genius but because the emotional force of the child — parent relationship was never exceeded by any other in his strange life. In this sense, he was never looking back; the child Marcel was with him. But other writers, even wonderful ones, are not as successful. Czeslaw Milosz finds his way back to the Issa Valley by what has never left him: the communion with nature that was the joy of childhood and — on the evidence of a recent interview — consoles the ageing exile, honoured far from home, who assures Americans that communion may be made just outside their violent cities. Yet the Issa Valley childhood is not reinhabited but consciously interpreted from the distance of the life that followed.

As autobiographer of childhood the African writer has an advantage as special as, if very different from, that of Proust. His sense of self is au fond his Africanness. Adult experience as poet, novelist, playwright, often exile, is mingled with other countries, languages, cultures from which his colour always distinguishes him. Childhood belongs to African experience and it is not over: it remains with him for ever in his blackness, an essential identity never superseded by any other. The history of enslavement, oppression and race prejudice secures this for him. The advantage extends to the reader. The old adage is paraphrased — one’s pleasure in the autobiography lies in the fact that the child is not only father to the exceptional man, but still is the man. The Guinean writer Camara Laye’s Dark Child (L’enfant noir), published in the early fifties, owes some of its status as a minor classic to this exoticism, which is more than territorial.

Wole Soyinka of Nigeria is an exceptional man indeed. Poet, playwright, novelist, he has done something Camus despaired of seeing any activist achieve — lived the drama of his time and been equal to the writing of it. During the Nigerian civil war he defied his Yoruba loyalties for a greater one, and campaigned against the sale of arms to either side. He tried to stop the war; he was tortured, imprisoned by General Gowon for two years under ghastly conditions, and survived to fulfil magnificently, with The Man Died, the need (in his own words) for ‘a testimony of the political prisoner’s isolation in solitude that would become a kind of chain letter hung permanently on the leaden conscience of the world’.

Soyinka, an elegant writer, has in his recent novels tended to be an overly self-conscious one. For the best of reasons — he is never complacent, always searching out the most striking and complete way to say what he has to say — he sometimes produces the bad result of making the reader aware of the writer’s unresolved choices. Too many words, too many inversions, too many clamouring clauses which punctuation cannot handle intelligibly. This is the opening sentence of Season of Anomy: ‘A quaint anomaly, had long governed and policed itself, was so singly-knit that it obtained a tax assessment for the whole populace and paid it before the departure of the pith-helmeted assessor, in cash, held all property in common, literally, to the last scrap of thread on the clothing of each citizen — such an anachronism gave much patronising amusement to the cosmopolitan sentiment of a profit-hungry society.’

It is not surprising, then, that his approach to his years of childhood should have more in common with Tristram Shandy than with Proust or Laye, although Laye’s home was also in West Africa. For the first ninety pages or so, the tone is waggish. The ‘worked-up’ anecdotal dialogue of his parents and others reads like inventions based on what are really family sayings — whose origin is germane, a whole view of life rather than a response to a single happening. It is hard to believe that a boy under five thought of his mother as ‘Wild Christian’ although the fact that everyone referred to his father as ‘HM’ (headmaster) would have made it natural for him to see that as a name for intimate use, and not a title. It is hard to accept that a three-and-a-half-year-old’s sassy ripostes were as well phrased as the supremely articulate adult now ‘hears’ them in memory. And as for rediscovering the time dimensions of childhood, the scrappy organisation of the first part of the book does not at all express the child’s extended time spans and the size of events that swell with these, measured neither by seasons nor by dates.

Perhaps this section of the book is a collection of previously written fragments. There is, at least, one good story among the usual sort of reminiscence of punishments and pleasures that adults ‘arrange’ as the pattern of early years — the delightful tale of old man Paa Adatan, who, in return for the price of a meal from a market stall, undertook to defend any property against the arrival of ‘dat nonsenseyeye Hitler one time’. His striking-force capacity ranged from drawing a magic line in the dust before a shop front (‘If they try cross this line, guns go turn to broom for dem hand. Dem go begin dey sweeping dis very ground till I come back’) to performing fearsome warrior dances. Like other wily misfits at different times and in different countries, he knew how to make of the world’s villainy an excuse for his layabout existence: ‘Na dis bastard Hitler. When war finish you go see. You go see me as I am, a man of myself.’

When the people in his village of Aké begin to be aware of the distant 1939–1945 war, the small boy Wole does seem to take over the interpretation of his own experience, maybe because by then he was just old enough to have sorted the hot and cold of sensuous impressions into some order available to memory. One forms the oblique picture of him for oneself, without the interference of the adult Soyinka’s artifice. Wild Christian and HM are no longer ideograms of idiosyncrasy, but those most mysterious beings of our lives, parents. In the loving daily battle between the mother (who dispensed Christian charity and discipline as practically as the contents of her cooking pots) and father (scholarly agnostic towards both Christian and Nigerian gods) and their unpredictable child, he emerges as original innocence; not original sin, as his parents sometimes seemed to believe. Paying a family visit one Sunday at the palace of the Odemo, the titled head of HM’s home village of Isara, the eight- or nine-year-old outraged the assembled African nobility by failing to prostrate himself before one of them. ‘Coming directly from the Sunday service probably brought the response’ to the child’s head — ‘If I don’t prostrate myself to God, why should I prostrate to you? You are just a man like my father aren’t you?’

Original innocence was still with the grown man when, knowing well, this time, he was defying the might of chauvinism and the world armaments industry, he took on his own ‘side’ as well as the Biafran ‘side’, identifying the only enemy as the war they were waging.

Parents are generally the scapegoats for all our adult inadequacies. Was there, then, something about Wole Soyinka’s childhood, some security that produced the courage both physical and intellectual, and prepared him for the outlandish demands his era was to make of him? Yet his environment is revealed not as the natural paradise lesser writers edit, out of black yearning for a pre-conquest state of being or white yearning for a pre-industrial one, from the footage of reality. To begin with, his parents were middle-class, his mother a shopkeeper and debt-collector as well as a wild Christian, his father more interested in books than traditional status possessions; and the middle, in modern African societies, is the ground of the tug between the African way of life and the European way in which, as Chinua Achebe has definitively chronicled, things fall apart.

The tally of beatings, administered by every Aké adult in every kind of authority, is positively Victorian, although there’s no suggestion that the British imported this style of punishment. In the 1940s in Nigeria even adolescent maidservants (black) were beaten by their mistresses (black) for wetting their sleeping mats; and, indeed, the high incidence of bed-wetters reported by the young Wole, who suffered creeping damp when sharing a communal sleeping mat, would in the West more likely be attributed to the beatings rather than ‘cured’ by them. Thirty-six strokes for an adolescent schoolboy who had ‘made’ a schoolgirl pregnant was regarded neither as cruel punishment nor as an injustice singling out one of the two it takes to make a baby.

Perhaps the trauma of all these beatings was dissolved in the witness that accompanied them? They did not take place in camera, between victim and castigator, alone with sin, but in the tumble of crowded households and even in a kind of dance through the streets. The purpose may have been public humiliation, but since every spectator had been or next time might be victim, there must have been a balm of fellow feeling flowing towards the wounds even as they were being inflicted. At any rate, the child never doubts that he is loved, which means that although he chafes against incidences of parental lack of understanding and a kind of sadistic, cock-fighting adult playfulness (setting him against his younger brother), he never seems to regard himself as unhappy, or rather seems never to have expected to be happier. Again, this may have something to do with the strong sense of community, not only with other children but with the particularly wide range of relationships the society provided — ‘chiefs, king-makers, cult priests and priestesses, elders …’

Like a piece of etú, the rich locally woven cloth, social relations were a garment whose ceremonial weight was at the same time cosily enclosing. The child was never overawed by it; could snuggle up there just as the bedbugs (to the amused surprise of this middle-class white reader) had their own homely interstices in the Soyinka middle-class household with its servants and library. The different coordinates — which style of life goes with which class, which conventions with which kind of respect, which snobbishness with which pretension — are the source for non-Africans, who (of course) know only the styles of life that go with their social categories, of a fascination that takes hold with the hand of the child.

When the not-quite-heaven that was Wole’s natal village of Aké extends, along with the parental relationship, to his father’s natal territory at Isara, the fascination becomes complete. The grandfather, with a painful scarification ceremony, puts the boy in the care of the god Ogun just as Wild Christian has put him in the care of Christ. Again, the result is not a trauma but greater security for the child. And the writer finds his way to him with a felicity of evocation and expression on the ‘axis of tastes and smells’ along which the preparation of foods provides a family genealogy, a wonderfully sensuous first sense of self, other and belonging. The whiff of identical flavour in dishes prepared by different hands, different generations, is the child’s own historiography and system of kinship. Just as the visitors and supplicants to HM’s yard, despite the particular ‘tang of smoke and indigo’ they bring, remind one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s father’s court in the Polish ghetto, so the patterns of living perceived through the tastebuds evoke Günter Grass’s culinary interpretation of Europe’s disasters and survivals. The pleasures of entering Wole Soyinka’s childhood, for a stranger, consist not only in differences but in correspondences as well.

1982

Living in the Interregnum

Police files are our only claim to immortality.

Milan Kundera

I live at 6,000 feet in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change. The vision is heady; the image of the demonic dance is accurate, not romantic: an image of actions springing from emotion, knocking deliberation aside. The city is Johannesburg, the country South Africa, and the time the last years of the colonial era in Africa.

It’s inevitable that nineteenth-century colonialism should finally come to its end there, because there it reached its ultimate expression, open in the legalised land- and mineral-grabbing, open in the labour exploitation of indigenous peoples, open in the constitution-alised, institutionalised racism that was concealed by the British under the pious notion of uplift, the French and Portuguese under the sly notion of selective assimilation. An extraordinarily obdurate crossbreed of Dutch, German, English, French in the South African white settler population produced a bluntness that unveiled everyone’s refined white racism: the flags of European civilisation dropped, and there it was, unashamedly, the ugliest creation of man, and they baptised the thing in the Dutch Reformed Church, called it apartheid, coining the ultimate term for every manifestation, over the ages, in many countries, of race prejudice. Every country could see its semblances there; and most peoples.

The sun that never set over one or other of the nineteenth-century colonial empires of the world is going down finally in South Africa. Since the black uprisings of the mid-seventies, coinciding with the independence of Mozambique and Angola, and later that of Zimbabwe, the past has begun rapidly to drop out of sight, even for those who would have liked to go on living in it. Historical coordinates don’t fit life any longer; new ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but to the ruled. It is not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my most lately written novel a quotation from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.’

In this interregnum, I and all my countrymen and women are living. I am going, quite frequently, to let events personally experienced as I was thinking towards or writing this paper interrupt theoretical flow, because this interaction — this essential disruption, this breaking in upon the existential coherence we call concept — is the very state of being I must attempt to convey. I have never before expressed so personal a point of view. Apart from the usual Joycean reasons of secrecy and cunning — to which I would add jealous hoarding of private experience for transmutation into fiction — there has been for me a peculiarly South African taboo.

In the official South African consciousness, the ego is white: it has always seen all South Africa as ordered around it. Even the ego that seeks to abdicate this alienation does so in an assumption of its own salvation that in itself expresses ego and alienation. And the Western world press, itself overwhelmingly white, constantly feeds this ego from its own. Visiting journalists, parliamentarians, congressmen and congresswomen come to South Africa to ask whites what is going to happen there. They meet blacks through whites; they rarely take the time and trouble, on their own initiative, to encounter more than the man who comes into the hotel bedroom to take away the empty beer bottles. With the exception of films made clandestinely by South African political activists, black and white, about resistance events, most foreign television documentaries, while condemning the whites out of their own mouths, are nevertheless preoccupied with what will happen to whites when the apartheid regime goes.

I have shunned the arrogance of interpreting my country through the private life that, as Theodor Adorno puts it, ‘drags on only as an appendage of the social process’ in a time and place of which I am a part. Now I am going to break the inhibition or destroy the privilege of privacy, whichever way you look at it. I have to offer myself as my most closely observed specimen from the interregnum; yet I remain a writer, not a public speaker: nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction.

There is another reason for confession. The particular segment of South African society to which I belong, by the colour of my skin, whether I like it or not, represents a crisis that has a particular connection with the Western world. I think that may become self-evident before I arrive at the point of explication; it is not the old admitted complicity in the slave trade or the price of raw materials.

I have used the term ‘segment’ in defining my place in South African society because within the white section of that society — less than one-fifth of the total population now,¹⁴ predicted to drop to one-seventh by the year 2000 — there is a segment preoccupied, in the interregnum, neither by plans to run away from nor merely by ways to survive physically and economically in the black state that is coming. I cannot give you numbers for this segment, but in measure of some sort of faith in the possibility of structuring society humanly, in the possession of skills and intellect to devote to this end, there is something to offer the future. How to offer it is our preoccupation. Since skills, technical and intellectual, can be bought in markets other than those of the vanquished colonial power, although they are important as a commodity ready to hand, they do not constitute a claim on the future.

That claim rests on something else: how to offer one’s self.

In the eyes of the black majority which will rule a new South Africa, whites of former South Africa will have to redefine themselves in a new collective life within new structures. From the all-white parliament to the all-white country club and the separate ‘white’ television channels, it is not a matter of blacks taking over white institutions, it is one of conceiving of institutions — from nursery schools to government departments — that reflect a societal structure vastly different from that built to the specifications of white power and privilege. This vast difference will be evident even if capitalism survives, since South Africa’s capitalism, like South Africa’s whites-only democracy, has been unlike anyone else’s. For example, free enterprise among us is for whites only, since black capitalists may trade only, and with many limitations on their ‘free’ enterprise, in black ghettos.

A more equitable distribution of wealth may be enforced by laws. The hierarchy of perception that white institutions and living habits implant throughout daily experience in every white, from childhood, can be changed only by whites themselves, from within. The weird ordering of the collective life, in South Africa, has slipped its special contact lens into the eyes of whites; we actually see blacks differently, which includes not seeing, not noticing their unnatural absence, since there are so many perfectly ordinary venues of daily life — the cinema, for instance — where blacks have never been allowed in, and so one has forgotten that they could be, might be, encountered there.

I am writing in my winter quarters, at an old deal table on a verandah in the sun; out of the corner of my eye I see a piece of junk mail, the brochure of a chain bookstore, assuring me of constantly expanding service and showing the staff of a newly opened branch — Ms So-and-So, Mr Such-and-Such, and (one black face) ‘Gladys’. What a friendly, informal form of identification in an ‘equal opportunity’ enterprise! Gladys is seen by fellow workers, by the photographer who noted down names, and — it is assumed — readers, quite differently from the way the white workers are seen. I gaze at her as they do … She is simply ‘Gladys’, the convenient handle by which she is taken up by the white world, used and put down again, like the glass the king drinks from in Rilke’s poem.¹⁵ Her surname, her African name, belongs to Soweto, which her smiling white companions are less likely ever to visit than New York or London.

The successfully fitted device in the eye of the beholder is something the average white South African is not conscious of, for apartheid is above all a habit; the unnatural seems natural — a far from banal illustration of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. The segment of the white population to which I belong has become highly conscious of a dependency on distorted vision induced since childhood; and we are aware that with the inner eye ‘we have seen too much ever to be innocent’.¹⁶ But this kind of awareness, represented by white guilt in the 1950s, has been sent by us off into the sunset, since, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, ‘guilt saps modern man’s belief in the value of his own perceptions and judgments’, and we have need of ours. We have to believe in our ability to find new perceptions, and our ability to judge their truth. Along with weeping over what’s done, we’ve given up rejoicing in what Günter Grass calls headbirths, those Athenian armchair deliveries of the future presented to blacks by whites.

Not all blacks even concede that whites can have any part in the new that cannot yet be born. An important black leader who does, Bishop Desmond Tutu, defines that participation:

This is what I consider to be the place of the white man in this — popularly called — liberation struggle. I am firmly non-racial and so welcome the participation of all, both black and white, in the struggle for the new South Africa which must come whatever the cost. But I want to state that at this stage the leadership of the struggle must be firmly in black hands. They must determine what will be the priorities and the strategy of the struggle. Whites unfortunately have the habit of taking over and usurping the leadership and taking the crucial decisions, largely, I suppose, because of the head start they had in education and experience of this kind. The point is that however much they want to identify with blacks it is an existential fact … that they have not really been victims of this baneful oppression and exploitation. It is a divide that can’t be crossed and that must give blacks a primacy in determining the course and goal of the struggle. Whites must be willing to follow.¹⁷

Blacks must learn to talk; whites must learn to listen — wrote the black South African poet Mongane Wally Serote, in the seventies. This is the premise on which the white segment to which I belong lives its life at present. Does it sound like an abdication of the will? That is because you who live in a democracy are accustomed to exerting the right to make abstract statements of principle for which, at least, the structures of practical realisation exist; the symbolic action of the like-minded in signing a letter to a newspaper or in lobbying Congress is a reminder of constitutional rights to be invoked. For us, Tutu’s premise enjoins a rousing of the will, a desperate shaking into life of the faculty of rebellion against unjust laws that has been outlawed by the dying power, and faculties of renewal that often are rebuffed by the power that is struggling to emerge. The rider Desmond Tutu didn’t add to his statement is that although white support is expected to be active, it is also expected that whites’ different position in the still-standing structures of the old society will require actions that, while complementary to those of blacks, must be different from the blacks’. Whites are expected to find their own forms of struggle, which can only sometimes coincide with those of blacks.

That there can be, at least, this coincident cooperation is reassuring; that, at least, should be a straightforward form of activism. But it is not; for in this time of morbid symptoms there are contradictions within the black liberation struggle itself, based not only, as would be expected, on the opposing ideological alignments of the world outside, but on the moral confusion of claims — on land, on peoples — from the pre-colonial past in relation to the unitary state the majority of blacks and the segment of whites are avowed to. So, for whites, it is not simply a matter of follow-the-leader behind blacks; it’s taking on, as blacks do, choices to be made out of confusion, empirically, pragmatically, ideologically or idealistically about the practical moralities of the struggle. This is the condition, imposed by history, if you like, in those areas of action where black and white participation coincides.

I am at a public meeting at the Johannesburg City Hall one night, after working at this paper during the day. The meeting is held under the auspices of the Progressive Federal Party, the official opposition in the all-white South African parliament. The issue is a deal being made between the South African government and the kingdom of Swaziland whereby 3,000 square miles of South African territory and 850,000 South African citizens, part of the Zulu ‘homeland’ KwaZulu, would be given to Swaziland. The principal speakers are Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of 5.5 million Zulus, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Mr Ray Swart, a white liberal and a leader of the Progressive Federal Party. Chief Buthelezi has consistently refused to take so-called independence for KwaZulu, but — although declaring himself for the banned African National Congress — by accepting all stages of so-called self-government up to the final one has transgressed the non-negotiable principle of the African National Congress, a unitary South Africa.

Bishop Tutu upholds the principle of a unitary South Africa. The Progressive Federal Party’s constitution provides for a federal structure in a new, non-racial South Africa, recognising as de facto entities the ‘homelands’ whose creation by the apartheid government the party nevertheless opposes. Also on the platform are members of the Black Sash, the white women’s organisation that has taken a radical stand as a white ally of the black struggle; these women support a unitary South Africa. In the audience of about two thousand, a small number of whites is lost among exuberant, ululating, applauding Zulus. Order — and what’s more, amicability — is kept by Buthelezi’s marshals, equipped, beneath the garb of a private militia drawn from his tribal Inkatha movement, with Zulu muscle in place of guns.

What is Bishop Tutu doing here? He doesn’t recognise the ‘homelands’.

What are the Black Sash women doing here? They don’t recognise the ‘homelands’.

What is the Progressive Federal Party doing — a party firmly dedicated to constitutional action only — hosting a meeting where the banned black liberation salute and battle cry — ‘Amandhla! Awethu!’: ‘Power — to the people!’ — is shaking the columns of municipal doric, and a black man’s tribal army instead of the South African police is keeping the peace?

What am I doing here, applauding Gatsha Buthelezi and Ray Swart? I don’t recognise the homelands nor do I support a federal South Africa.

I was there — they were there — because, removed from its areas of special interest (KwaZulu’s ‘national’ concern with land and people belonging to the Zulus), the issue was yet another government device to buy support for a proposed ‘constellation’ of southern African states gathered protectively around the present South African regime, and to disposses black South Africans of their South African citizenship, thus reducing the ratio of black to white population.

Yet the glow of my stinging palms cooled; what a paradox I had accommodated in myself! Moved by a display of tribal loyalty when I believe in black unity, applauding a ‘homelands’ leader, above all, scandalised by the excision of part of a ‘homeland’ from South Africa when the ‘homelands’ policy is itself the destruction of the country as an entity. But these are the confusions blacks have to live with, and if I am making any claim to accompany them beyond apartheid, so must I.

The state of interregnum is a state of Hegel’s disintegrated consciousness, of contradictions. It is from its internal friction that energy somehow must be struck, for us whites; energy to break the vacuum of which we are subconsciously aware, for however hated and shameful the collective life of apartheid and its structures has been to us, there is, now, the unadmitted fear of being without structures. The interregnum is not only between two social orders but between two identities, one known and discarded, the other unknown and undetermined.

Whatever the human cost of the liberation struggle, whatever ‘Manichaean poisons’¹⁸ must be absorbed as stimulants in the interregnum, the black knows he will be at home, at last, in the future. The white who has declared himself or herself for that future, who belongs to the white segment that was never at home in white supremacy, does not know whether he will find his home at last. It is assumed, not only by racists, that this depends entirely on the willingness of blacks to let him in; but we, if we live out our situation consciously, proceeding from the Pascalian wager that that home of the white African exists, know that this depends also on our finding our way there out of the perceptual clutter of curled photographs of master and servant relationships, the 78 rpms of history repeating the conditioning of the past.

A black man I may surely call my friend because we have survived a time when he did not find it possible to accept a white’s friendship, and a time when I didn’t think I could accept that he should decide when that time was past, said to me this year, ‘Whites have to learn to struggle.’ It was not an admonition but a sincere encouragement. Expressed in political terms, the course of our friendship, his words and his attitude, signify the phasing out or passing usefulness of the extreme wing of the Black Consciousness movement, with its separatism of the past ten years, and the return to the tenets of the most broadly based and prestigious of black movements, the banned African National Congress. These are non-racialism, belief that race oppression is part of the class struggle, and recognition that it is possible for whites to opt out of class and race privilege and identify with black liberation.

My friend was not, needless to say, referring to those whites, from Abram Fischer to Helen Joseph and Neil Aggett, who have risked and in some cases lost their lives in the political struggle with apartheid. It would be comfortable to assume that he was not referring, either, to the articulate outriders of the white segment, intellectuals, writers, lawyers, students, church and civil rights progressives, who keep the whips of protest cracking. But I know he was, after all, addressing those of us belonging to the outriders on whose actions the newspapers report and the secret police keep watch, as we prance back and forth ever closer to the fine line between being concerned citizens and social revolutionaries. Perhaps the encouragement was meant for us as well as the base of the segment — those in the audience but not up on the platform, young people and their parents’ generation, who must look for some effective way, in the living of their own personal lives, to join the struggle for liberation from racism.

For a long time, such whites have felt that we are doing all we can, short of violence — a terrible threshold none of us is willing to cross, though aware that all this may mean is that it will be left to blacks to do so. But now blacks are asking a question to which every white must have a personal answer, on an issue that cannot be dealt with by a show of hands at a meeting or a signature to a petition; an issue that comes home and enters every family. Blacks are now asking why whites who believe apartheid is something that must be abolished, not defended, continue to submit to army call-up.

We whites have assumed that army service was an example of Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘powerlessness of the individual involved in a mechanism that works independently of his will’. If you refuse military service your only options are to leave the country or go to prison. Conscientious objection is not recognised in South Africa at present; legislation may establish it in some form soon, but if this is to be, is working as an army clerk not functioning as part of the war machine?

These are reasons enough for all — except a handful of men who choose prison on religious rather than on political grounds — to go into the South African army despite their opposition to apartheid. These are not reasons enough for them to do so, on the condition on which blacks can accept whites’ dedication to mutual liberation. Between black and white attitudes to struggle there stands the overheard remark of a young black woman: ‘I break the law because I am alive.’ We whites have still to thrust the spade under the roots of our lives; for most of us, including myself, struggle is still something that has a place. But for blacks it is everywhere or nowhere.

What is poetry which does not save nations or peoples?

Czeslaw Milosz

I have already delineated my presence in my home country on the scale of a minority within a minority. Now I shall reduce my claim to significance still further. A white; a dissident white; a white writer. I must presume that although the problems of a white writer are of no importance compared with the liberation of 23.5 million black people, the peculiar relation of the writer in South Africa as interpreter, both to South Africans and to the world, of a society in struggle, makes the narrow corridor I can lead down one in which doors fly open on the tremendous happening experienced by blacks.

For longer than the first half of this century the experience of blacks in South Africa was known to the world as it was interpreted by whites. The first widely read imaginative works exploring the central fact of South African life — racism — were written in the 1920s by whites, William Plomer and Sarah Gertrude Millin. What have been recognised now as the classics of early black literature, the works of Herbert and Rolfes Dhlomo, Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje, were read by the literate section of the South African black population, were little known among South African whites, and unknown outside South Africa. These writers’ moralistic works dealt with contemporary black life, but their fiction was mainly historical, a desperate attempt to secure, in art forms of an imposed culture, an identity and history discounted and torn up by that culture.

In the fifties, urban blacks — Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, following Peter Abrahams — began to write in English only, and about the urban industrialised experience in which black and white chafed against one another across colour barriers. The work of these black writers interested both black and white at that improvised level known as intellectual, in South Africa: aware would be a more accurate term, designating awareness that the white middle-class establishment was not, as it claimed, the paradigm of South African life and white culture was not the definitive South African culture. Somewhere at the black writers’ elbows, as they wrote, was the joggle of independence coming to one colonised country after another, north of South Africa. But they wrote ironically of their lives under oppression; as victims, not fighters. And even those black writers who were political activists, like the novelist Alex la Guma and the poet Dennis Brutus, made of their ideologically channelled bitterness not more than the Aristotelian catharsis, creating in the reader empathy with the oppressed rather than rousing rebellion against repression.

The fiction of white writers also produced the Aristotelian effect — and included in the price of hardback or paperback a catharsis of white guilt, for writer and reader. (It was at this stage, incidentally, that reviewers abroad added their dime’s worth of morbid symptoms to our own by creating ‘courageous’ as a literary value for South African writers …) The subject of both black and white writers — which was the actual entities of South African life instead of those defined by separate entrances for white and black — was startingly new and important; whatever any writer, black or white, could dare to explore there was considered ground gained for advance in the scope of all writers. There had been no iconoclastic tradition; only a single novel, William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe, written thirty years before, whose understanding of what our subject really was was still a decade ahead of our time when he phrased the total apothegm: ‘The native question — it’s not a question, it’s an answer.’

In the seventies black writers began to give that answer — for themselves. It had been vociferous in the consciousness of resistance politics, manifest in political action — black mass organisations, the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress, and others — in the sixties. But except at the oral folk-literature level of ‘freedom’ songs, it was an answer that had not come, yet, from the one source that had never been in conquered territory, not even when industrialisation conscripted where military conquest had already devastated: the territory of the subconscious, where a people’s own particular way of making sense and dignity of life — the base of its culture — remains unget-at-able. Writers, and not politicians, are its spokespeople.

With the outlawing of black political organisations, the banning of freedom songs and platform speeches, there came from blacks a changed attitude towards culture, and towards literature as verbal, easily accessible culture. Many black writers had been in conflict — and challenged by political activists: are you going to fight or write? Now they were told, in the rhetoric of the time: there is no conflict if you make your pen our people’s weapon.

The Aristotelian catharsis, relieving black self-pity and white guilt, was clearly not the mode in which black writers could give the answer black resistance required from them. The iconoclastic mode, though it had its function where race fetishists had set up their china idols in place of ‘heathen’ wooden ones, was too ironic and detached, other-directed. Black people had to be brought back to themselves. Black writers arrived, out of their own situation, at Brecht’s discovery: their audience needed to be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they functioned.¹⁹ They began to show blacks that their living conditions are their story.

South Africa does not lack its Chernyshevskys to point out that the highroad of history is not the sidewalks of fashionable white Johannesburg’s suburban shopping malls any more than it was that of the Nevsky Prospekt.²⁰ In the bunks of migratory labourers, the 4 a.m. queues between one-room family and factory, the drunken dreams argued round braziers, is the history of blacks’ defeat by conquest, the scale of the lack of value placed on them by whites, the degradation of their own acquiescence in that value; the salvation of revolt is there, too, a match dropped by the builders of every ghetto, waiting to be struck.

The reason for the difficulty, even boredom, many whites experience when reading stories or watching plays by blacks in which, as they say, ‘nothing happens’, is that the experience conveyed is not ‘the development of actions’ but ‘the representation of conditions’, a mode of artistic revelation and experience for those in whose life dramatic content is in its conditions.²¹

This mode of writing was the beginning of the black writer’s function as a revolutionary; it was also the beginning of a conception of himself differing from that of the white writer’s self-image. The black writer’s consciousness of himself as a writer comes now from his participation in those living conditions; in the judgement of his people, that is what makes him a writer — the authority of the experience itself, not the way he perceives it and transforms it into words. Tenets of criticism are accordingly based on the critic’s participation in those same living conditions, not on his ability to judge how well the writer has achieved ‘the disposition of natural material to a formal end that shall enlighten the imagination’ — this definition of art by Anthony Burgess would be regarded by many blacks as arising from premises based on white living conditions and the thought patterns these determine: an arabesque of smoke from an expensive cigar. If we have our Chernyshevskys we are short on Herzens. Literary standards and standards of human justice are hopelessly confused in the interregnum. Bad enough that in the case of white South African writers some critics at home and abroad are afraid to reject sensationalism and crass banality of execution so long as the subject of a work is ‘courageous’. For black writers the syllogism of talent goes like this: all blacks are brothers; all brothers are equal; therefore you cannot be a better writer than I am. The black writer who questions the last proposition is betraying the first two.

As a fellow writer, I myself find it difficult to accept, even for the cause of black liberation to which I am committed as a white South African citizen, that a black writer of imaginative power, whose craftsmanship is equal to what he has to say, must not be regarded above someone who has emerged — admirably — from political imprisonment with a scrap of paper on which there is jotted an alliterative arrangement of protest slogans. For me, the necessity for the black writer to find imaginative modes equal to his existential reality goes without question. But I cannot accept that he must deny, as proof of solidarity with his people’s struggle, the torturous inner qualities of prescience and perception that will always differentiate him from others and which make of him — a writer. I cannot accept, either, that he should have served on him, as the black writer now has, an orthodoxy — a kit of emotive phrases, an unwritten index of subjects, a typology.

The problem is that agitprop, not recognised under that or any other name, has become the first contemporary art form that many black South Africans feel they can call their own. It fits their anger; and this is taken as proof that it is an organic growth of black creation freeing itself, instead of the old shell that it is, inhabited many times by the anger of others. I know that agitprop binds the artist with the means by which it aims to free the minds of the people. I can see, now, how often it thwarts both the black writer’s common purpose to master his art and revolutionary purpose to change the nature of art, create new norms and forms out of and for a people recreating themselves. But how can my black fellow writer agree with me, even admit the conflict I set up in him by these statements? There are those who secretly believe, but few who would assert publicly, with Gabriel García Márquez: ‘The duty of a writer — the revolutionary duty, if you like — is simply to write well.’ The black writer in South Africa feels he has to accept the criteria of his people because in no other but the community of black deprivation is he in possession of selfhood. It is only through unreserved, exclusive identification with blacks that he can break the alienation of being ‘other’ for nearly 350 years in the white-ordered society, and only through submitting to the beehive category of ‘cultural worker’, programmed, that he can break the alienation of the artist/elitist in the black mass of industrial workers and peasants.

And, finally, he can toss the conflict back into my lap with Camus’s words: ‘Is it possible to be in history while still referring to values which go beyond it?’

The black writer is ‘in history’ and its values threaten to force out the transcendent ones of art. The white, as writer and South African, does not know his place ‘in history’ at this stage, in this time.

There are two absolutes in my life. One is that racism is evil — human damnation in the Old Testament sense — and no compromises, as well as sacrifices, should be too great in the fight against it. The other is that a writer is a being in whose sensibility is fused what Lukács calls the duality of inwardness and outside world, and he must never be asked to sunder this union. The coexistence of these absolutes often seems irreconcilable within one life, for me. In another country, another time, they would present no conflict because they would operate in unrelated parts of existence; in South Africa now they have to be coordinates for which the coupling must be found. The morality of life and the morality of art have broken out of their categories in social flux. If you cannot reconcile them, they cannot be kept from one another’s throats, within you.

For me, Lukács’s ‘divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life’ is what a writer, poorly evolved for the task as he is, is made for. As fish that swim under the weight of many dark fathoms look like any other fish but on careful examination are found to have no eyes, so writers, looking pretty much like other human beings, but moving deep under the surface of human lives, have at least some faculties of supra-observation and hyperperception not known to others. If a writer does not go down and use these — why, he’s just a blind fish.

Exactly — says the new literary orthodoxy: he doesn’t see what is happening in the visible world, among the people, on the level of their action, where battle is done with racism every day. On the contrary, say I, he brings back with him the thematic life-material that underlies and motivates their actions. ‘Art lies at the heart of all events’, Joseph Brodsky writes. It is from there, in the depths of being, that the most important intuition of revolutionary faith comes: the people know what to do, before the leaders. It was from that level that the yearning of black schoolchildren for a decent education was changed into a revolt in 1976; their strength came from the deep silt of repression and the abandoned wrecks of uprisings that sank there before they were born. It was from that level that an action of ordinary people for their own people made a few lines low down on a newspaper page, the other day: when some migrant contract workers from one of the ‘homelands’ were being laid off at a factory, workers with papers of permanent residence in the ‘white’ area asked to be dismissed in their place, since the possession of papers meant they could at least work elsewhere, whereas the migrant workers would be sent back to the ‘homelands’, jobless.

‘Being an “author” has been unmasked as a role that, whether conformist or not, remains inescapably responsible to a given order.’ Nowhere in the world is Susan Sontag’s statement truer than in South Africa. The white writer has to make the decision whether to remain responsible to the dying white order — and even as dissident, if he goes no further than that position, he remains negatively within the white order — or to declare himself positively as answerable to the order struggling to be born. And to declare himself for the latter is only the beginning; as it is for whites in a less specialised position, only more so. He has to try to find a way to reconcile the irreconcilable within himself, establish his relation to the culture of a new kind of posited community, non-racial but somehow conceived with and led by blacks.

I have entered into this commitment with trust and a sense of discovering reality, coming alive in a new way — I believe the novels and stories I have written in the last seven or eight years reflect this — for a South Africa in which white middle-class values and mores contradict realities has long become the unreality, to me. Yet I admit that I am, indeed, determined to find my place ‘in history’ while still referring as a writer to the values that are beyond history. I shall never give them up.

Can the artist go through the torrent with his precious bit of talent tied up in a bundle on his head? I don’t know yet. I can only report that the way to begin entering history out of a dying white regime is through setbacks, encouragements and rebuffs from others, and frequent disappointments in oneself. A necessary learning process …

I take a break from writing.

I am in a neighbouring black country at a conference on ‘Culture and Resistance’. It is being held outside South Africa because exiled artists and those of us who still live and work in South Africa cannot meet at home. Some white artists have not come because, not without reason, they fear the consequences of being seen, by South African secret police spies, in the company of exiles who belong to political organisations banned in South Africa, notably the African National Congress; some are not invited because the organisers regard their work and political views as reactionary. I am dubbed the blacks’ darling by some whites back home because I have been asked to give the keynote address at a session devoted to literature; but I wonder if those who think me favoured would care to take the flak I know will be coming at me from those corners of the hall where black separatists group. They are here not so much out of democratic right as out of black solidarity; paradoxically, since the conference is in itself a declaration that in the conviction of participants and organisers the liberation struggle and post-apartheid culture are non-racial. Yet there is that bond of living conditions that lassos all blacks within a loyalty containing, without constraining or resolving, bitter political differences.

Do I think white writers should write about blacks?

The artless question from the floor disguises both a personal attack on my work and an edict publicly served upon white writers by the same orthodoxy that prescribes for blacks. In the case of whites, it proscribes the creation of black characters — and by the same token, flipped head-to-tails, with which the worth of black writers is measured: the white writer does not share the total living conditions of blacks, therefore he must not write about them. There are some whites — not writers, I believe — in the hall who share this view. In the ensuing tense exchange I reply that there are whole areas of human experience, in work situations — on farms, in factories, in the city, for example — where black and white have been observing one another and interacting for nearly 350 years. I challenge my challenger to deny that there are things we know about each other that are never spoken, but are there to be written — and received with the amazement and consternation, on both sides, of having been found out. Within those areas of experience, limited but intensely revealing, there is every reason why white should create black and black white characters. For myself, I have created black characters in my fiction: whether I have done so successfully or not is for the reader to decide. What’s certain is that there is no representation of our social reality without that strange area of our lives in which we have knowledge of one another.

I do not acquit myself so honestly a little later, when persecution of South African writers by banning is discussed. Someone links this with the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union, and a young man leaps to reply that the percentage of writers to population is higher in the Soviet Union than in any other part of the world and that Soviet writers work ‘in a trench of peace and security’.

The aptness of the bizarre image, the hell for the haven he wishes to illustrate, brings no smiles behind hands among us; beyond the odd word-substitution is, indeed, a whole arsenal of tormented contradictions that could explode the conference.

Someone says, out of silence, quietly and distinctly: ‘Bullshit.’

There is silence again. I don’t take the microphone and tell the young man: there is not a contrast to be drawn between the Soviet Union’s treatment of writers and that of South Africa, there is a close analogy — South Africa bans and silences writers just as the Soviet Union does, although we do not have resident censors in South African publishing houses and dissident writers are not sent to mental hospitals. I am silent. I am silent because, in the debates of the interregnum, any criticism of the Communist system is understood as a defence of the capitalist system which has brought forth the pact of capitalism and racism that is apartheid, with its treason trials to match Stalin’s trials, its detentions of dissidents to match Soviet detentions, its banishment and brutal uprooting of communities and individual lives to match, if not surpass, the gulag. Repression in South Africa has been and is being lived through; repression elsewhere is an account in a newspaper, book or film. The choice, for blacks, cannot be distanced into any kind of objectivity: they believe in the existence of the lash they feel. Nothing could be less than better than what they have known as the ‘peace and security’ of capitalism.²²

I was a coward and often shall be one again, in my actions and statements as a citizen of the interregnum; it is a place of shifting ground, forecast for me in the burning slag heaps of coal mines that children used to ride across with furiously pumping bicycle pedals and flying hearts, in the Transvaal town where I was born.

And now the time has come to say I believe the Western world stands on shifting ground with me, because in some strange pilgrimage through the choices of our age and their consequences the democratic left of the Western world has arrived by many planned routes and plodding detours at the same unforeseen destination. The ideal of social democracy seems to be an abandoned siding. There was consternation when, early this year, Susan Sontag had the great courage and honesty publicly to accuse herself and other American intellectuals of the left of having been afraid to condemn the repression committed by Communist regimes because this was seen as an endorsement of America’s war on Vietnam and collusion with brutish rightist regimes in Latin America.

This moral equivocation on the part of the American left draws parallel with mine at the writer’s congress, far away in Africa, that she has given me the courage, at second hand, to confess. Riding handlebar to handlebar across the coal slag, both equivocations reveal the same fear. What is its meaning? It is fear of the abyss, of the greater interregnum of human hopes and spirit where against Sartre’s socialism as the ‘horizon of the world’ is silhouetted the chained outline of Poland’s Solidarity, and all around, in the ditches of El Salvador, in the prisons of Argentina and South Africa, in the rootless habitations of Beirut, are the victims of Western standards of humanity.

I lie and the American left lies not because the truth is that Western capitalism has turned out to be just and humane, after all, but because we feel we have nothing to offer, now, except the rejection of it. Communism, in practice since 1917, has turned out not to be just or humane either; has failed, even more cruelly than capitalism. Does this mean we have to tell the poor and dispossessed of the world there is nothing to be done but turn back from Communist bosses to capitalist bosses?

In South Africa’s rich capitalist state stuffed with Western finance, 50,000 black children a year die from malnutrition and malnutrition-related diseases, while the West piously notes that Communist states cannot provide their people with meat and butter. In two decades in South Africa, three million black people have been ejected from the context of their lives, forcibly removed from homes and jobs and ‘resettled’ in arid, undeveloped areas by decree of a white government supported by Western capital. It is difficult to point out to black South Africans that the forms of Western capitalism are changing towards a broad social justice in the example of countries like Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Austria, with their mixed welfare economies, when all black South Africans know of Western capitalism is political and economic terror. And this terror is not some relic of the colonial past; it is being financed now by Western democracies — concurrently with Western capitalist democracy’s own evolution towards social justice.

The fact is, black South Africans and whites like myself no longer believe in the ability of Western capitalism to bring about social justice where we live. We see no evidence of that possibility in our history or our living present. Whatever the Western democracies have done for themselves, they have failed and are failing, in their great power and influence, to do for us. This is the answer to those who ask, ‘Why call for an alternative left? Why not an alternative capitalism?’ Show us an alternative capitalism working from without for real justice in our country. What are the conditions attached to the International Monetary Fund loan of approximately $1 billion that would oblige the South African government to stop population removals, to introduce a single standard of unsegregated education for all, to reinstate millions of black South Africans deprived of citizenship?²³

If the disillusioned American left believes the injustices of Communism cannot be reformed, must it be assumed that those of capitalism’s longer history, constantly monitored by the compassionate hand of liberalism, can be? The dictum I quoted earlier carried, I know, its supreme irony: most leaders in the Communist world have betrayed the basic intuition of democracy, that ‘the people know what to do’ — which is perhaps why Susan Sontag saw Communism as fascism with a human face. But I think we can, contrary to her view, ‘distinguish’ among Communism and socialist democracies just as among Western democracies, and I am sure, beyond the heat of a platform statement, so does she. If the US and Sweden are not Botha’s South Africa, was Allende’s Chile East Germany, though both were in the socialist camp?

We of the left, everywhere, surely must ‘distinguish’ to the point where we take up the real import of Sontag’s essential challenge to love truth enough, pick up the blood-dirtied, shamed cause of the left, and attempt to recreate the left in accordance with what it was meant to be, not what sixty-five years of power-perversion have made of it. If, as she rightly says, once we did not understand the nature of Communist tyranny, now we do, just as we have always understood at first hand the nature of capitalist tyranny. This is not a Manichaean equation — which is god and which the devil? is not a question the evidence could easily decide, anyway — and it does not license withdrawal and hopelessness. We have surely learned by now something of where socialism goes wrong, which of its precepts are deadly dangerous and lead, in practice, to fascist control of labour and total suppression of individual freedom. Will the witchcraft of modern times not be exorcised, eventually, by this knowledge?

In the interregnum in which we coexist, the American left — disillusioned by the failure of Communism — needs to muster with the democratic left of the third world — living evidence of the failure of capitalism — the cosmic obstinacy to believe in and work towards the possibility of an alternative left, a democracy without the economic and military terror which exists, at present, in both left and right regimes. If we cannot, the possibility of real social democracy will die out, for our age, and who knows when, after what even bloodier age, it will be rediscovered.

There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal. This is where the responsibility of the American left — and liberals? — meets mine. Without the will to tramp towards that possibility, no relations of whites, of the West, with the West’s formerly subject peoples can ever be free of the past, because the past, for them, was the jungle of Western capitalism, not the light the missionaries thought they brought with them.

1981

The Idea of Gardening: J. M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K

Allegory is generally regarded as a superior literary form. It is thought to clear the reader’s lungs of the transient and fill them with a deep breath of transcendence. Man becomes Everyman (that bore).

From the writer’s point of view, allegory is no more than one among other forms. But I believe there is a distinction between the writer’s conscious choice of it, and its choice of him/her. In the first instance, loosened by time from ancient sources of myth, magic and morality, allegory is sometimes snatched from the air to bear aloft a pedestrian imagination or to distance the writer, for reasons of his own, from his subject. In the second instance, allegory is a discovered dimension, the emergence of a meaning not aimed for by the writer but present once the book is written.

J.M. Coetzee, a writer with an imagination that soars like a lark and sees from up there like an eagle, chose allegory for his first few novels. It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write. So here was allegory as a stately fastidiousness; or a state of shock. He seemed able to deal with the horror he saw written on the sun¹ only — if brilliantly — if this were to be projected into another time and plane. His Waiting for the Barbarians was the North Pole to which the agitprop of agonised black writers (and some white ones hitching a lift to the bookshop on the armoured car) was the South Pole; a world to be dealt with lies in between. It is the life and times of Michael K, and Coetzee has taken it up now.

Michael K (the initial probably stands for Kotze or Koekemoer and has no reference, nor need it have, to Kafka) is not Everyman. In fact he is marked out, from birth, by a harelip indelibly described as curled like a snail’s foot. His mother is a servant in Cape Town, which means he is a so-called coloured, and he grows up fatherless in a home for handicapped children. His deformity distorts his speech and his actual and self-images. He shrinks from the difficulty of communication through words and the repugnance he sees holding him off, in people’s eyes; thus he appears to be, and perhaps is, retarded — one of those unclassifiable beings that fascinated Dostoevsky, a ‘simple man’. He is suitably employed as a gardener by the municipality of Cape Town. A civil war has been going on for an unspecified time — as such wars do, undeclared and unending — and in various parts of the country — as such wars are waged in our time, Michael K’s time — with roving destruction missing patches of stranded calm. Michael is no more aware of this war than of much else in society that ignores him (women, the possibility of friends), until his mother is dying of dropsy and neglect in an overcrowded hospital and begs to be taken ‘home’ to the farm in the near-desert country of the Karoo where she was born the child of labourers.

She and her purse of savings are taken on the road in a wheel-barrow shelter put together by her simple son. Turned back the first time because of lack of permits, set upon by thugs as desperately homeless as themselves, they do not get very far before the mother dies. A purpose for his apparently unnecessary continued existence coheres slowly in Michael K’s mind: he will take his mother’s ashes, presented to him as a brown paper parcel, to be buried at the ‘home’ she spoke of. He finds it, or what may be it, abandoned by the white owners; the coloured labourers no doubt long ago moved off the land under one of the schemes to herd blacks away from whites that were the beginnings of the war.

He lives there in the veld, sowing and tending a handful of pumpkin seeds, until frightened off by the arrival of an army deserter; is picked up and commandeered for a forced labour camp; returns to the farm, which is visited by guerrillas from whom he conceals himself only to be captured, starving, by the army. Interrogated as the guerrillas’ suspected contact man, he is kept in the makeshift hospital of a ‘rehabilitation’ camp for captured rebels set up on a former race course in Cape Town. One night he disappears from his bed and is given up as lying dead somewhere beyond the walls.

But Michael K is alive. Fled — yet again — from the sinister care of a gang of beach nomads who dispense to him, out of pity, wine and sex (travesty of untasted joys), he is holed up among abandoned beach furniture in the apartment where his mother once worked.

I have escaped the camps; perhaps, if I lie low, I will escape the charity too.

The mistake I made, he thought, going back in time, was not to have had plenty of seeds, a different packet of seeds for each pocket … Then my mistake was to plant all my seeds together in one patch. I should have planted them one at a time spread out over miles of veld in patches of soil no larger than my hand, and drawn a map and kept it with me at all times so that every night I could make a tour of the sites to water them.

This, then, is the simple story of a ‘simple’ man. And it begins unexceptionally, anybody’s refugee plodding predictably away from hunger and homelessness without much hope that these will not be waiting again at the end of the journey. You can shake your head decently over yet another evocation of commonplace misery; the only particular reaction, this time, a slight sense of impatience — did it all have to be laid on so thick? Does the man have to be harelipped, etc., on top of everything else?

But Coetzee’s mode, from the beginning, is soon seen to have arisen solely out of the needs of content, and is purely and perfectly achieved. As the reader is drawn into the novel there comes the extraordinarily rare occurrence of one’s response to its events opening up along with that of the central character himself. This is the reverse of facile identification, a prehensile comprehension stirs to take hold where the grasp of familiarity doesn’t reach. A fellow inmate of the labour camp says to Michael K, ‘You’ve been asleep all your life. It’s time to wake up.’ For the reader, too.

It is here that allegorical symbols occur. The work speaks: a voice inside the reader. Michael K is a real human being experiencing an individual body, but for some of us he will be the whole black people of South Africa, whatever gradations of colour the South African Population Registration Act sorts them into; for some he will be the inmate of Auschwitz or Stalin’s camps. Others will see the split lip and strangled speech as the distortion of personality that South African race laws have effected, one way or another, in all of us who live there, black and white. Similarly, white privilege may be seen to come to its end in one of Coetzee’s implosive images, when the white guard’s portable refrigerator is smashed and its contents spilled — ‘a tub of margarine, a loop of sausage, loose peaches and onions … five bottles of beer’.

The abstraction of allegory and symbol will not give access to what is most important in this magnificent novel, however. Neither will seeing it as a vision of the future. If it is set ahead in time at all, then this is done as a way of looking, as if it had come to the surface, at what lies under the surface of the present. The harried homelessness of Michael K and his mother is the experience, in 1984, of hundreds of thousands of black people in South African squatter towns and ‘resettlement’ camps. A civil war is going on in 1984 on South Africa’s borders, between black and white. Coetzee has won (or lost?) his inner struggle and now writes, from among the smell of weary flesh, a work of the closest and deepest engagement with the victimised people of Michael K’s life and times.

Political statements are made implicitly through the situations and reactions of Michael K that have no obvious political meaning. The deserter who comes to the farm is the grandson of the white farmer from Michael’s mother’s girlhood: Visagie’s descendant and that of his labourer are living a parallel life now that the old structure is destroyed, one a fugitive from duty within the army that hunts and kills, the other fugitive from its pursuit. In the presence of the two on the farm is contained the core of tenure — this is the land that was taken by conquest, and then by deeds of sale that denied blacks the right even to buy back what had been taken from them. Can’t the fugitives accommodate each other? Neither knows how to do this outside the ghostly pattern of master — servant. So Michael instinctively runs; and when he returns to find the boy has gone, he does not even then move into the Visagie house.

When he articulates the reason, it comes not as from an author’s mouthpiece, but as what lies developing inside Michael, unsaid, unable to be shaped by his misformed lip. ‘Whatever I have returned for, it is not to live as the Visagies lived, sleep where they slept, sit on their stoep looking out over their land … It is not for the house that I have come … The worst mistake, he told himself, would be to try to found a new house, a rival line, on his small beginnings.’ (His hidden pumpkins.) Here is the concrete expression, through the creative imagination, of political debate about the future of South Africa under black majority rule: whether or not it should take over what has been the white South African version of the capitalist system.

Yet the unique and controversial aspect of this work is that while it is implicitly and highly political, Coetzee’s heroes are those who ignore history, not make it. That is clear not only in the person of Michael K, but in other characters, for example the white doctor and nurse in the ‘rehabilitation’ camp, who are ‘living in suspension’, although for the woman, washing sheets, time is as full with such tasks as it has ever been, and for the doctor it is a state of being ‘alive but not alive’, while for both ‘history hesitated over what course it should take’. No one in this novel has any sense of taking part in determining that course; no one is shown to believe he knows what that course should be. The sense is of the ultimate malaise: of destruction. Not even the oppressor really believes in what he is doing, any more, let alone the revolutionary.

This is a challengingly questionable position for a writer to take up in South Africa, make no mistake about it. The presentation of the truth and meaning of what white has done to black stands out on every page, celebrating its writer’s superb, unafraid creative energy as it does; yet it denies the energy of the will to resist evil. That this superb energy exists with indefatigable and undefeatable persistence among the black people of South Africa — Michael K’s people — is made evident, yes, heroically, every grinding day. It is not present in the novel.

Except in the person of Michael K?

If so, then this can be only because Coetzee, while fiercely moved far beyond commonplace understanding of their plight, does not believe in the possibility of blacks establishing a new regime that will do much better. (If Michael K is shown to see himself ‘like a parasite dozing in the gut’, he can never develop the metaphor by becoming the internal underground rebel who destroys the body of the enemy society he inhabits.) Camps with high walls will always have their uses, reflects the camp doctor. Freedom is defined negatively: it is to be ‘out of all the camps at the same time’ according to Michael K, who in this context seems occasionally to have conceptual musings that really belong to the sophisticated intelligence of the doctor. While ‘we have all tumbled over the lip into the cauldron’, the doctor, who takes over the narrative in the first person towards the close of the novel, finds Michael K ‘a soul blessedly untouched by doctrine, untouched by history’, a creature no ‘organ of state’ would recruit as one of its agents. This white liberal feels chosen by the victim of his own society; wasted Michael K becomes the doctor’s burden and his only hope of salvation. He believes Michael K can lead him out of history of those ‘areas that lie between camps and belong to no camp’. A revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions rises with the insistence of the song of cicadas to the climax of this novel.

I don’t think the author would deny that it is his own revulsion.

And so J.M. Coetzee has written a marvellous work that leaves nothing unsaid — and could not be better said — about what human beings do to fellow human beings in South Africa; but he does not recognise what the victims, seeing themselves as victims no longer, have done, are doing, and believe they must do for themselves. Does this prevent his from being a great novel? My instinct is to say a vehement ‘No’. But the organicism that George Lukács defines as the integral relation between private and social destiny is distorted here more than is allowed for by the subjectivity that is in every writer. The exclusion is a central one that may eat out the heart of the work’s unity of art and life.

For is there an idea of survival that can be realised entirely outside a political doctrine? Is there a space that lies between camps? Again, this book is unusual in positing its answer while writers customarily say it is their business only to explore questions. The place is the earth, not in the cosmic but the plain dirt sense. The idea is the idea of gardening. And with it floods into the book, yet again, much more than it seemed to be about: the presence of the threat not only of mutual destruction of whites and blacks in South Africa, but of killing, everywhere, by scorching, polluting, neglecting, charging with radioactivity, the dirt beneath our feet. From this perspective the long history of terrible wars whose reason has been advanced as ‘to augment human happiness’ could, I suppose, be turned away from; only the death of the soil is the end of life. The single sure joy Michael K can experience is the taste of a pumpkin he has grown, hidden from the just and unjust of marauding history. Under the noise of the cicadas, with delicacy and sureness, Coetzee has been drawing upon the strength of the earth to keep his deceptively passive protagonist and the passionate vitality of this book alive.

All along, dying Michael K has been growing. It began when he fertilised the earth with the burden of his mother’s ashes; that, hidden to him, was his real reason to be. The only time he is tempted to join history — to tag behind the guerrilla band when he sees them leaving the farm — he knows he will not go ‘because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.’ Beyond all creeds and moralities, this work of art asserts, there is only one: to keep the earth alive, and only one salvation, the survival that comes from her. Michael K is a gardener ‘because that is my nature’: the nature of civilised man, versus the hunter, the nomad. Hope is a seed. That’s all. That’s everything. It’s better to live on your knees, planting something …?

1984

Postscript: J. M. Coetzee took Australian citizenship in 2006.

New Notes from Underground: Breyten Breytenbach’s Mouroir

Mouroir is the work of that rarity which Camus despaired of finding, an individual who has lived, as protagonist and victim, the central experience produced by his time and place and who possesses a creative ability equal to his experience. A poet and a painter, faced with injustice before which words and pigment seemed to fail, Breytenbach put away his pen and brush and became a revolutionary. Whether he was a good one or not is something for those of us safe behind our desks to argue over. He spent seven years in a South African maximum security prison, the ventricle-and-auricle of the struggle against oppression in South Africa. For a white man, to have gone through that is to have come as close as is possible to the experience in South Africa — that of black people.

Yet this is not a prisoner’s book. It will be a crass injustice of underestimation and simplification if it is presented and received that way. In it the ordinary time focus of a man’s perceptions has been extraordinarily rearranged by a definitive experience that, the writer understands, belongs as much to the time before it happened as to the time after. Prison irradiates this book with dreadful enlightenments; the dark and hidden places of the country from which the book arises are phosphorescent with it.

Breytenbach is polylingual; he wrote his book in English and Afrikaans under a French title. Although mouroir is the word for ‘old people’s home’, it seems he has reinterpreted it as a dovetailing of mourir (to die) and miroir (a mirror). What Breytenbach knows, and shows by means of his recurring mirrors, eliding, reversing, breaking up events, emotions and perceptions, is that the death presence of prison is always there in a country where people oppress and are oppressed. A target on the stoep,²⁵ set up for the innocent amusement of Afrikaner youths enjoying themselves in a seaside cottage, is not only the black man their parents and mentors are preparing them to kill but also the youths themselves, to be killed in turn. ‘Tuesday’, an endless journey created under that title out of an actual journey and recalled throughout the book with the regularity of a calendar, is the day of release: the day on which Breytenbach himself came out of prison, and also the day of freedom, to which a name must be given if ever it is to come, to jailed and jailer, the day when, as Breytenbach expresses it totally, ‘life must be tempted back to earth’. In another facet of the book is a passage that is a perfect metaphor for colonial culture:

With enormous trouble we transported grown trees, for instance, from the coast to the house — along the way the leaves and fruit dragged in the dust; it was the abduction of an exotic princess from a far-off empire; we then dug a deep hole and made the tree to stand upright in it. Occasionally it took several weeks, months even, before the transplanted tree shrivelled up entirely and had to be unearthed — that is, if it hadn’t tilted over all by itself in the meantime … But it never took root. Trees or brushwood, anything that could capture the wind and give it sound, is even so always needed round a house. Because otherwise you lose all memory of yourself and are gobbled up by nothingness to become part of the night.

Breytenbach is a writer who carries his whole life with him, all the time. His work takes on the enormous task of assuming full responsibility for what he was and is; the self cannot be disowned, either by the young Afrikaner growing up as one of the chosen Volk, speaking the language of the master, or by the artist fled to Paris (two generations of Afrikaner intellectuals did flee, later than but like the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, looking hopelessly for a way out of being what they were), or by the failed revolutionary. All these personae are present in every single moment of Breytenbach’s working consciousness — the consciousness of the writer, which is different from that which serves for shaving or for buying lettuce. This fusion is what makes it impossible for him to write a work that can conveniently be fitted into even the broad concept of ‘story collection’ or ‘novel’.

This is not to say that Breytenbach has written a book of fragments, that there is no narrative in the work. Narrative is an old railway line on which service has been discontinued. But of course service does continue; other forms of transport perform the railway’s function. Inner logic (concepts, dreams, and symbols) also narrates. It has a sequence of its own, and sequence of any kind is narrative. But this sequence — unlike that of time — is highly individual, different in each subconscious and consciousness, and very, very few writers have the ability to use it as the unique shape of their work. Breytenbach is one of these, the greatly gifted. This inner logic, for which there is no recognised literary form (certainly not the long-polluted stream of consciousness, nor surreal surrender of control) is his form. (Even he cannot label it: ‘Mirrornotes of a Novel’ — his subtitle — will hardly do.)

With the overthrowing of time values in Breytenbach’s writing comes a concomitant freeing from attachment to individual characters. If you are not going to be told what happens to them next, you don’t have any obligation to identify with Minnaar or Levedi Tjeling. As Breytenbach himself airily remarks (one of his mirrors is that of ironic self-regard), these two so-called characters ‘disappear from the story since they were never of any importance for its development, except perhaps as wraiths to be addressed …’ At first, for reasons of habit, one misses characters, word-skeletons to be dressed up in what happens to them ‘next’. But soon an exhilarating liberty like that of a Buñuel film is granted: if someone walks into a room where the characters are being ‘developed’, why not drop them and go off with him into his life? Here is a work in which all choices (as to which way it might go) are present.

Is it, then, an alternative autobiography? (Breytenbach could have been, might be, all these people.) He writes of ‘liquidating the “I”’, but also of ‘an “I”, a departure’. He himself is the centrifuge from which all seeds are cast and sown again: the horror, the humour, the love, the knowing and unknowing, he has received from living in his world and era. Yet there is none of the self-obsession of a Henry Miller or a Céline. A world is not defined by self: he defines himself by a world — that world in which ‘white is posture, a norm of civilisation’. South Africa has produced in this writer an exacerbated self-consciousness, exactly what Stalin’s Russia created in Anna Akhmatova — what the English critic John Bayley has called ‘the power … to generalise and speak for the human predicament in extremity.’ Akhmatova wrote sublime lines about her husband’s death, her son’s imprisonment. She had been parted for years from the husband; her son had been brought up by his grandfather. The sorrow and anger of the poem were not for herself but for ‘somebody else’s wound’, for others who were suffering tragedies like these. Breytenbach has (has earned) this power to extrapolate suffering beyond what he has suffered himself. And as for responsibility for suffering, a one-and-a-half-page parable/parody entitled ‘Know Thyself’ will leave a share of that lodged within every reader.

Writing in the English language, Breytenbach is a phenomenon of the Nabokovian rather than the Conradian order. (No space to take up what I believe is the fine difference here, except to say that Conrad is incomparably at ease in the language, whereas Nabokov’s performance is his achievement.) A native speaker of a minor language — Afrikaans, derived mainly from Dutch — Breytenbach has a few failures in making new English words out of a collage of old ones. By contrast, his imagery is so exquisite, chilling, aphoristic, witty, that one is reminded how that ancient and most beautiful attribute of writing has fallen into desuetude in prose. Someone ‘dons his trousers the way one would mount a horse’ and has a ‘thick black moustache tied like a secondary tie under the nose’; a rainy sky is ‘heaven with its grey beard’. In an all-existent, rather than a non-existent, urban complex Breytenbach puts ‘an artificial cherry orchard vibrating a wind’; of a prisoner sentenced to death (it’s done by hanging in South Africa), he says, ‘His life was to be reeled in with a cord.’ Aural and visual are combined: murmuring voices behind the walls sound ‘as if the whole prison were filled with fast-running water’. Visual and onomatopoeic: a ‘flock-a-flap’ of birds. Visual and visceral: the tide ‘withdrawn a long way, like a huge thirst’. And again and again Breytenbach strikes a spark by turning a cliché into something new while retaining the original image: ‘Life unfolds, gets folded, wrinkled.’

If Breytenbach’s imagery is to be compared with anyone’s it is that of Czeslaw Milosz, with whom he shares an intense response to nature and a way of interpreting politically determined events and their human consequences through the subtleties of the physical world. Once more a fusion of the creative imagination makes reality out of mere facts. For the rest, I do not think one need look for comparisons to evaluate Breytenbach’s book. It is his own — perhaps the highest compliment any writer can earn.

Exactly what Breyterbach’s politics are now is difficult to tell. The matter is not irrelevant; if it were, this beautiful and devastating book would be betrayed, since its chemistry is politics, that chemistry of man opposing man, of good struggling with evil, from which one sees — with a shudder — both mushroom clouds and works of art arise. Does Breytenbach, like Régis Debray (quoted by Walter Schwarz in the Guardian last March), regard himself as having been ‘essentially emotional, not noted for his discernment, locked in mythical conceptions of the external world which he recreates as the effigy of his own obsessions’?

Breytenbach’s political conviction is no mythical conception of the external world; he had a conviction of the indefensible concrete cruelty and shame of white oppression of blacks, and the necessity to ally oneself with the blacks’ struggle to free themselves. His obsession was that to make this alliance it was necessary to jump the barbed fence between artist and revolutionary, what he calls ‘the contradiction between dreams and action’. He fell — how hard and humiliatingly one gets some ideas. But when he laughs at or mourns the spectacle of himself, this does not mean he disavows the truth on which the obsession was based: that South Africa is rotting in its racism, as much under a new constitution (which makes blacks foreigners without rights in their own country, and with which Ronald Reagan’s America chooses to be ‘constructively engaged’) as it was under the old name of apartheid.

He writes from the underground that is exile. It is impossible, for his countrymen and for all of us, to stop our ears against the excruciating penetration of what he has to say.

1984

The Essential Gesture

When I began to write at the age of nine or ten, I did so in what I have come to believe is the only real innocence — an act without responsibility. For one has only to watch very small children playing together to see how the urge to influence, exact submission, defend dominance, gives away the presence of natal human ‘sin’ whose punishment is the burden of responsibility. I was alone. My poem or story came out of myself I did not know how. It was directed at no one, was read by no one.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of creativity. I should never have dreamt that this most solitary and deeply marvellous of secrets — the urge to make with words — would become a vocation for which the world, and that lifetime lodger, conscionable self-awareness, would claim the right to call me and all my kind to account. The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read, and comes to realise that he is answerable. The writer is held responsible: and the verbal phrase is ominously accurate, for the writer not only has laid upon him responsibility for various interpretations of the consequences of his work, he is ‘held’ before he begins by the claims of different concepts of morality — artistic, linguistic, ideological, national, political, religious — asserted upon him. He learns that his creative act was not pure even while being formed in his brain: already it carried congenital responsibility for what preceded cognition and volition: for what he represented in genetic, environmental, social and economic terms when he was born of his parents.

Roland Barthes wrote that language is a ‘corpus of prescriptions and habits common to all writers of a period’.²⁶

He also wrote that a writer’s ‘enterprise’ — his work — is his ‘essential gesture as a social being’.

Between these two statements I have found my subject, which is their tension and connection: the writer’s responsibility. For language — language as the transformation of thought into written words in any language — is not only ‘a’ but the corpus common to all writers in our period. From the corpus of language, within that guild shared with fellow writers, the writer fashions his enterprise, which then becomes his ‘essential gesture as a social being’. Created in the common lot of language, that essential gesture is individual; and with it the writer quits the commune of the corpus; but with it he enters the commonalty of society, the world of other beings who are not writers. He and his fellow writers are at once isolated from one another far and wide by the varying concepts, in different societies, of what the essential gesture of the writer as a social being is.

By comparison of what is expected of them, writers often have little or nothing in common. There is no responsibility arising out of the status of the writer as a social being that could call upon Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison or John Berger to write on a subject that would result in their being silenced under a ban, banished to internal exile or detained in jail. But in the Soviet Union, South Africa, Iran, Vietnam, Taiwan, certain Latin American and other countries, this is the kind of demand that responsibility for the social significance of being a writer exacts: a double demand, the first from the oppressed to act as spokesperson for them, the second, from the state, to take punishment for that act. Conversely, it is not conceivable that a Molly Keane, or any other writer of the quaint Gothic-domestic cult presently discovered by discerning critics and readers in the United States as well as Britain, would be taken seriously in terms of the interpretations of the ‘essential gesture as a social being’ called forth in countries such as the Soviet Union and South Africa, if he or she lived there.

Yet those critics and readers who live safe from the realm of midnight arrests and solitary confinement that is the dark condominium of East and West have their demands upon the writer from such places, too. For them, his essential gesture as a social being is to take risks they themselves do not know if they would.

This results in some strange and unpleasant distortions in the personality of some of these safe people. Any writer from a country of conflict will bear me out. When interviewed abroad, there is often disappointment that you are there, and not in jail in your own country. And since you are not — why are you not? Aha … does this mean you have not written the book you should have written? Can you imagine this kind of self-righteous inquisition being directed against a John Updike for not having made the trauma of America’s Vietnam war the theme of his work?

There is another tack of suspicion. The London Daily Telegraph reviewer of my recent book of stories said I must be exaggerating: if my country really was a place where such things happened, how was it I could write about them? And then there is the wish-fulfilment distortion, arising out of the homebody’s projection of his dreams upon the exotic writer: the journalist who makes a bogus hero out of the writer who knows that the pen, where he lives, is a weapon not mightier than the sword.

One thing is clear: ours is a period when few can claim the absolute value of a writer without reference to a context of responsibilities. Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of works appearing in Index on Censorship. These are the rags of suppressed literatures, translated from a Babel of languages; the broken cries of real exiles, not those who have rejected their homeland but who have been forced out — of their language, their culture, their society. In place of Joyce we have two of the best contemporary writers in the world; Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera; but both regard themselves as amputated sensibilities, not free of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the sense that Joyce was free of Ireland — whole: out in the world but still in possession of the language and culture of home. In place of Joyce we have, one might argue, at least Borges; but in his old age, and out of what he sees in his blindness as he did not when he could see, for years now he has spoken wistfully of a desire to trace the trails made by ordinary lives instead of the arcane pattern of abstract forces of which they are the finger-painting. Despite his rejection of ideologies (earning the world’s inescapable and maybe accurate shove over to the ranks of the Right) even he senses on those lowered lids the responsibilities that feel out for writers so persistently in our time.

What right has society to impose responsibility upon writers and what right has the writer to resist? I want to examine not what is forbidden us by censorship — I know that story too well — but to what we are bidden. I want to consider what is expected of us by the dynamic of collective conscience and the will to liberty in various circumstances and places; whether we should respond, and if so, how we do.

‘It is from the moment when I shall no longer be more than a writer that I shall cease to write.’ One of the great of our period, Camus, could say that.²⁷ In theory at least, as a writer he accepted the basis of the most extreme and pressing demand of our time. The ivory tower was finally stormed; and it was not with a white flag that the writer came out, but with manifesto unfurled and arms crooked to link with the elbows of the people. And it was not just as their chronicler that the compact was made; the greater value, you will note, was placed on the persona outside of ‘writer’: to be ‘no more than a writer’ was to put an end to the justification for the very existence of the persona of ‘writer’. Although the aphorism in its characteristically French neatness appears to wrap up all possible meanings of its statement, it does not. Camus’s decision is a hidden as well as a revealed one. It is not just that he has weighed within himself his existential value as a writer against that of other functions as a man among men, and found independently in favour of the man; the scale has been set up by a demand outside himself, by his world situation. He has, in fact, accepted its condition that the greater responsibility is to society and not to art.

Long before it was projected into that of a world war, and again after the war, Camus’s natal situation was that of a writer in the conflict of Western world decolonisation — the moral question of race and power by which the twentieth century will be characterised along with its discovery of the satanic ultimate in power, the means of human self-annihilation. But the demand made upon him and the moral imperative it set up in himself are those of a writer anywhere where the people he lives among, or any sections of them marked out by race or colour or religion, are discriminated against and repressed. Whether or not he himself materially belongs to the oppressed makes his assumption of extraliterary responsibility less or more ‘natural’, but does not alter much the problem of the conflict between integrities.

Loyalty is an emotion, integrity a conviction adhered to out of moral values. Therefore I speak here not of loyalties but integrities, in my recognition of society’s right to make demands on the writer as equal to that of the writer’s commitment to his artistic vision; the source of conflict is what demands are made and how they should be met.

The closest to reconciliation that I know of comes in my own country, South Africa, among some black writers. It certainly cannot be said to have occurred in two of the most important African writers outside South Africa, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. They became ‘more than writers’ in answer to their country’s — Nigeria’s — crisis of civil war; but in no sense did the demand develop their creativity. On the contrary, both sacrificed for some years the energy of their creativity to the demands of activism, which included, for Soyinka, imprisonment. The same might be said of Ernesto Cardenal. But it is out of being ‘more than a writer’ that many black men and women in South Africa begin to write. All the obstacles and diffidences — lack of education, of a tradition of written literary expression, even of the chance to form the everyday habit of reading that germinates a writer’s gift — are overcome by the imperative to give expression to a majority not silent, but whose deeds and whose proud and angry volubility against suffering have not been given the eloquence of the written word. For these writers, there is no opposition of inner and outer demands. At the same time as they are writing, they are political activists in the concrete sense, teaching, proselytising, organising. When they are detained without trial it may be for what they have written, but when they are tried and convicted of crimes of conscience it is for what they have done as ‘more than a writer’. ‘Africa, my beginning … Africa my end’ — these lines of the epic poem written by Ingoapele Madingoane²⁸ epitomise this synthesis of creativity and social responsibility; what moves him, and the way it moves him, are perfectly at one with his society’s demands. Without those demands he is not a poet.

The Marxist critic Ernst Fischer reaches anterior to my interpretation of this response with his proposition that ‘an artist who belonged to a coherent society [here, read pre-conquest South Africa] and to a class that was not an impediment to progress [here, read not yet infected by white bourgeois aspirations] did not feel it any loss of artistic freedom if a certain range of subjects was prescribed to him’ since such subjects were imposed ‘usually by tendencies and traditions deeply rooted in the people’.²⁹ Of course, this may provide, in general, a sinister pretext for a government to invoke certain tendencies and traditions to suit its purpose of proscribing writers’ themes, but applied to black writers in South Africa, history evidences the likely truth of the proposition. Their tendency and tradition for more than three hundred years has been to free themselves of white domination.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors? And there is some evidence that it ceases to. What writer of any literary worth defends fascism, totalitarianism, racism, in an age when these are still pandemic? Ezra Pound is dead. In Poland, where are the poets who sing the epic of the men who have broken Solidarity? In South Africa, where are the writers who produce brilliant defences of apartheid?

It remains difficult to dissect the tissue between those for whom writing is a revolutionary activity no different from and to be practised concurrently with running a political trade union or making a false passport for someone on the run, and those who interpret their society’s demand to be ‘more than a writer’ as something that may yet be fulfilled through the nature of their writing itself. Whether this latter interpretation is possible depends on the society within which the writer functions. Even ‘only’ to write may be to be ‘more than a writer’ for one such as Milan Kundera, who goes on writing what he sees and knows from within his situation — his country under repression — until a ban on publishing his books strips him of his ‘essential gesture’ of being a writer at all. Like one of his own characters, he must clean windows or sell tickets in a cinema booth for a living. That, ironically, is what being ‘more than a writer’ would come down to for him, if he were to have opted to stay on in his country — something I don’t think Camus quite visualised. There are South Africans who have found themselves in the same position — for example, the poet Don Mattera, who for seven years was banned from writing, publishing, and even from reading his work in public. But in a country of total repression of the majority, like South Africa, where literature is nevertheless only half-suppressed because the greater part of that black majority is kept semi-literate and cannot be affected by books, there is — just — the possibility for a writer to be ‘only’ a writer, in terms of activity, and yet ‘more than a writer’ in terms of fulfilling the demands of his society. An honourable category has been found for him. As ‘cultural worker’ in the race/class struggle he still may be seen to serve, even if he won’t march towards the tear gas and bullets.

In this context, long before the term ‘cultural worker’ was taken over from the vocabulary of other revolutions, black writers had to accept the social responsibility white ones didn’t have to — that of being the only historians of events among their people; Dhlomo, Plaatje, Mofolo created characters who brought to life and preserved events either unrecorded by white historians or recorded purely from the point of view of white conquest.³⁰ From this beginning there has been a logical intensification of the demands of social responsibility, as over decades discrimination and repression set into law and institution, and resistance became a liberation struggle. This process culminated during the black uprising of 1976, calling forth poetry and prose in an impetus of events not yet exhausted or fully explored by writers. The uprising began as a revolt of youth and it brought to writers a new consciousness — bold, incantatory, messianically reckless. It also placed new demands upon them in the essential gesture that bound them to a people springing about on the balls of their feet before dawn-streaks of freedom and the threat of death. Private emotions were inevitably outlawed by political activists who had no time for any; black writers were expected to prove their blackness as a revolutionary condition by submitting to an unwritten orthodoxy of interpretation and representation in their work. I stress unwritten because there was no Writers’ Union to be expelled from. But there was a company of political leaders, intellectuals, and the new category of the alert young, shaming others with their physical and mental bravery, to ostracise a book of poems or prose if it were found to be irrelevant to the formal creation of an image of people anonymously, often spontaneously heroic.

Some of my friends among black writers have insisted that this ‘imposition’ of orthodoxy is a white interpretation; that the impulse came from within to discard the lantern of artistic truth that reveals human worth through human ambiguity, and to see by the flames of burning vehicles only the strong, thick lines that draw heroes. To gain his freedom the writer must give up his freedom. Whether the impulse came from within, without, or both, for the black South African writer it became an imperative to attempt that salvation. It remains so; but in the 1980s many black writers of quality have come into conflict with the demand from without — responsibility as orthodoxy — and have begun to negotiate the right to their own, inner interpretation of the essential gesture by which they are part of the black struggle.³¹ The black writer’s revolutionary responsibility may be posited by him as the discovery, in his own words, of the revolutionary spirit that rescues for the present — and for the post-revolutionary future — that nobility in ordinary men and women to be found only among their doubts, culpabilities, shortcomings: their courage-in-spite-of.

To whom are South African writers answerable in their essential gesture if they are not in the historical and existential situation of blacks, and if (axiomatic for them in varying degrees) they are alienated from their ‘own’, the historical and existential situation of whites? Only a section of blacks places any demands upon white writers at all; that grouping within radical blacks which grants integrity to whites who declare themselves for the black freedom struggle. To be one of these writers is firstly to be presented with a political responsibility if not an actual orthodoxy: the white writer’s task as ‘cultural worker’ is to raise the consciousness of white people, who, unlike himself, have not woken up. It is a responsibility at once minor, in comparison with that placed upon the black writer as composer of battle hymns, and yet forbidding if one compares the honour and welcome that await the black writer, from blacks, and the branding as traitor, or, at best, turned backside of indifference, that awaits the white, from the white establishment. With fortunate irony, however, it is a responsibility which the white writer already has taken on, for himself, if the other responsibility — to his creative integrity — keeps him scrupulous in writing about what he knows to be true whether whites like to hear it or not; for the majority of his readers are white. He brings some influence to bear on whites, though not on the white government; he may influence those individuals who are already coming-to bewilderedly out of the trip of power, and those who gain courage from reading the open expression of their own suppressed rebellion. I doubt whether the white writer, even if giving expression to the same themes as blacks, has much social use in inspiriting blacks, or is needed to. Sharing the life of the black ghettoes is the primary qualification the white writer lacks, so far as populist appreciation is concerned. But black writers do share with white the same kind of influence on those whites who read them; and so the categories that the state would keep apart get mixed through literature — an unforeseen ‘essential gesture’ of writers in their social responsibility in a divided country.

The white writer who has declared himself answerable to the oppressed people is not expected by them to be ‘more than a writer’, since his historical position is not seen as allowing him to be central to the black struggle. But a few writers have challenged this definition by taking upon themselves exactly the same revolutionary responsibilities as black writers such as Alex La Guma, Dennis Brutus and Mongane Serote, who make no distinction between the tasks of underground activity and writing a story or poem. Like Brutus, the white writers Breyten Breytenbach and Jeremy Cronin were tried and imprisoned for accepting the necessity they saw for being ‘more than a writer’. Their interpretation of a writer’s responsibility, in their country and situation, remains a challenge, particularly to those who disagree with their actions while sharing with them the politics of opposition to repression. There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

In South Africa the ivory tower is bulldozed anew with every black man’s home destroyed to make way for a white man’s. Yet there are positions between the bulldozed ivory tower and the maximum security prison. The one who sees his responsibility in being ‘only a writer’ has still to decide whether this means he can fulfil his essential gesture to society only by ready-packaging his creativity to the dimensions of a social realism those who will free him of his situation have the authority to ask of him, or whether he may be able to do so by work George Steiner defines as ‘scrupulously argued, not declaimed … informed, at each node and articulation of proposal, with a just sense of the complex, contradictory nature of historical evidence’.³² The great mentor of Russian revolutionary writers of the nineteenth century, Belinsky, advises: ‘Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge — they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.’³³ Octavio Paz, speaking from Mexico for the needs of the Third World, sees a fundamental function as social critic for the writer who is ‘only a writer’. It is a responsibility that goes back to source: the corpus of language from which the writer arises. ‘Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.’³⁴ This was the responsibility taken up in the post-Nazi era by Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, and is presently being fulfilled by South African writers, black and white, in exposing the real meaning of the South African government’s vocabulary of racist euphemisms — such terms as ‘separate development’, ‘resettlement’, ‘national states’, and its grammar of a racist legislature, with segregated chambers for whites, so-called coloureds and Indians, and no representation whatever for the majority of South Africans, those classified as black.

If the writer accepts the social realist demand, from without, will he be distorting, paradoxically, the very ability he has to offer the creation of a new society? If he accepts the other, self-imposed responsibility, how far into the immediate needs of his society will he reach? Will hungry people find revelation in the ideas his work contains ‘without his knowledge’? The one certainty, in South Africa as a specific historical situation, is that there is no opting out of the two choices. Outside is a culture in sterile decay, its achievements culminating in the lines of tin toilets set up in the veld for people ‘resettled’ by force. Whether a writer is black or white, in South Africa the essential gesture by which he enters the brotherhood of man — which is the only definition of society that has any permanent validity — is a revolutionary gesture.

‘Has God ever expressed his opinion?’ — Flaubert, writing to George Sand. ‘I believe that great art is scientific and impersonal … I want to have neither hate, nor pity, nor anger. The impartiality of description would then become equal to the majesty of the law.’³⁵

Nearly a century passed before the nouveau roman writers attempted this kind of majesty, taking over from another medium the mode of still life. The work aspired to be the object-in-itself, although made up of elements — words, images — that can never be lifted from the ‘partiality’ of countless connotations. The writers went as far as it is possible to go from any societal demand. They had tried so hard that their vision became fixed on Virginia Woolf’s mark on the wall — and as an end, not a beginning. Yet the anti-movement seems to have been, after all, a negative variation on a kind of social responsibility some writers have assumed at least since the beginning of the modern movement: to transform the world by style. This was and is something that could not serve as the writer’s essential gesture in countries such as South Africa and Nicaragua, but it has had its possibilities and sometimes proves its validity where complacency, indifference, accidie, and not conflict, threaten the human spirit. To transform the world by style was the iconoclastic essential gesture tried out by the Symbolists and Dadaists; but whatever social transformation (in shaping a new consciousness) they might have served in breaking old forms was horribly superseded by different means: Europe, the Far, Middle and Near East, Asia, Latin America and Africa overturned by wars; millions of human beings wandering without the basic structure of a roof.

The Symbolists’ and Dadaists’ successors, in what Susan Sontag terms ‘the cultural revolution that refuses to be political’ have among them their ‘… spiritual adventurers, social pariahs determined to disestablish themselves … not to be morally useful to the community’ — the essential gesture withheld by Céline and Kerouac.³⁶ Responsibility reaches out into the manifesto, however, and claims the ‘seers’ of this revolution. Through a transformation by style — depersonalised laconicism of the word almost to the Word — Samuel Beckett takes on as his essential gesture a responsibility direct to human destiny, and not to any local cell of humanity. This is the assumption of a messenger of the gods rather than a cultural worker. It is a disestablishment from the temporal; yet some kind of final statement exacted by the temporal. Is Beckett the freest writer in the world, or is he the most responsible of all?

Kafka was also a seer, one who sought to transform consciousness by style, and who was making his essential gesture to human destiny rather than the European fragment of it to which he belonged. But he was unconscious of his desperate signal. He believed that the act of writing was one of detachment that moved writers ‘with everything we possess, to the moon’.³⁷ He was unaware of the terrifyingly impersonal, apocalyptic, prophetic nature of his vision in that ante-room to his parents’ bedroom in Prague. Beckett, on the contrary, has been signalled to and consciously responded. The summons came from his time. His place — not Warsaw, San Salvador, Soweto — has nothing specific to ask of him. And unlike Joyce, he can never be in exile wherever he chooses to live, because he has chosen to be answerable to the twentieth-century human condition which has its camp everywhere, or nowhere — whichever way you see Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky.

Writers who accept a professional responsibility in the transformation of society are always seeking ways of doing so that their societies could not ever imagine, let alone demand: asking of themselves means that will plunge like a drill to release the great primal spout of creativity, drench the censors, cleanse the statute books of their pornography of racist and sexist laws, hose down religious differences, extinguish napalm bombs and flame-throwers, wash away pollution from land, sea and air, and bring out human beings into the occasional summer fount of naked joy. Each has his own dowsing twig, held over heart and brain. Michel Tournier sees writers’ responsibilities as to ‘disrupt the establishment in exact proportion to their creativity’. This is a bold global responsibility, though more Orphic and terrestrial than Beckett’s. It also could be taken as an admittance that this is all writers can do; for creativity comes from within, it cannot be produced by will or dictate if it is not there, although it can be crushed by dictate. Tournier’s — this apparently fantastical and uncommitted writer’s — own creativity is nevertheless so close to the people that he respects as a marvel — and makes it so for his readers — the daily history of their lives as revealed in city trash dumps.³⁸ And he is so fundamentally engaged by what alienates human beings that he imagines for everyone the restoration of wholeness (the totality which revolutionary art seeks to create for alienated man) in a form of Being that both sexes experience as one — something closer to a classless society than to a sexually hermaphroditic curiosity.

The transformation of experience remains the writer’s basic essential gesture; the lifting out of a limited category something that reveals its full meaning and significance only when the writer’s imagination has expanded it. This has never been more evident than in the context of extreme experiences of sustained personal horror that are central to the period of twentieth-century writers. The English critic John Bayley has written of Anna Akhmatova:

A violently laconic couplet at the end of the sections of Requiem records her husband dead, her son in prison … It is as good an instance as any of the power of great poetry to generalise and speak for the human predicament in extremity, for in fact she had probably never loved Gumilev, from whom she had lived apart for years, and her son had been brought up by his grandmother. But the sentiment [of the poem] was not for herself but for ‘her people’, with whom she was at that time so totally united in suffering.³⁹

Writers in South Africa who are ‘only writers’ are sometimes reproached by those, black and white, who are in practical revolutionary terms ‘more than writers’, for writing of events as if they themselves had been at the heart of action, endurance and suffering. So far as black writers are concerned, even though the humiliations and deprivations of daily life under apartheid enjoin them, many of them were no more among the children under fire from the police in the seventies, or are among the students and miners shot, tear-gassed and beaten in the eighties, or are living as freedom fighters in the bush, than Akhmatova was a heart-broken wife or a mother separated from a son she had nurtured. Given these circumstances, their claim to generalise and speak for a human predicament in extremity comes from the lesser or greater extent of their ability to do so; and the development of that ability is their responsibility towards those with whom they are united by this extrapolation of suffering and resistance. White writers who are ‘only writers’ are open to related reproach for ‘stealing the lives of blacks’ as good material. Their claim to this ‘material’ is the same as the black writers’ at an important existential remove nobody would discount. Their essential gesture can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekhov demanded: ‘to describe a situation so truthfully … that the reader can no longer evade it’.⁴⁰

The writer is eternally in search of entelechy in his relation to his society. Everywhere in the world, he needs to be left alone and at the same time to have a vital connection with others; needs artistic freedom and knows it cannot exist without its wider context; feels the two presences within — creative self-absorption and conscionable awareness — and must resolve whether these are locked in death-struggle, or are really foetuses in a twinship of fecundity. Will the world let him, and will he know how to be the ideal of the writer as a social being, Walter Benjamin’s story-teller, the one ‘who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story’?⁴¹

1985

Letter from Johannesburg

Dear—,

What is it you need to know about us that you cannot read as plain reportage, I wonder?

Well, maybe there is an indication in the ambiguity of the pronoun ‘us’. When I, as a white English-speaking South African, employ it in this context, of whom do I speak? Of whom do you Americans understand me to be speaking? For you ask about the ‘position that non-Afrikaners find themselves in after the declaration of the State of Emergency in South Africa’, and doubtless you would assume it is from that position that I respond because I am white, English-speaking, etc. But your question at once reveals that an old misconception is still current abroad: the Afrikaners are the baddies and the English-speakers the goodies among whites in our country; all Afrikaners support the State of Emergency¹ and the sadistic police and army actions that led up to it, and all English-speakers would implode apartheid tomorrow if it were possible to prevail against the Afrikaner army that mans the Afrikaner fortress. This surprises me because anyone who follows the reports of foreign press correspondents in South Africa must be aware that in November 1984 the then Prime Minister, Mr P. W. Botha, received an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote for his new constitution with its tricameral parliament for whites, Indians and so-called coloureds, and total exclusion of the black majority. The referendum held was open to whites only, Afrikaans and English-speaking; Mr Botha could not have received a mandate if the English-speakers had voted ‘no’. ‘Yes,’ they said, voting along with Mr Botha’s supporters in the National Party. ‘Yes,’ they said, 15½ million black people shall have no say in the central government of South Africa.

And ‘yes’ said the Reagan government, entering into constructive engagement with a policy destructive of justice and human dignity, while mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

There is no such special position as ‘one in which non-Afrikaners find themselves’ now, nor has there been for a very long time. The categories do not fall so neatly into place. The actual division among whites falls between those — the majority — Afrikaner and English-speaking who support, whether directly or circuitously, the new constitution as a valid move towards ‘accommodating black aspirations’ (let us not invoke justice), and those — the minority — English-speaking and Afrikaner who oppose the constitution as irremediably unjust and unjustifiable. There are fewer Afrikaners than English-speakers in the latter category, but the support of English-speakers in the former represents a majority in their language group. When blacks speak about the ‘Boere’ these days, the term has become a generic rather than an ethnic one: it is likely to refer to a mode of behaviour, an attitude of mind, a position in which the nomenclature encompasses all whites who voluntarily and knowingly collaborate in oppression of blacks. Not all Afrikaners are ‘Boere’, and many English-speakers with pedigrees dating back to the 1820 Settlers are …

States of mind and ways of life under crisis would be expected more or less to follow the lines of division, and I believe that states of mind do. Everywhere I go I sense a relaxation of the facial muscles among whites who had appeared to be tasting the ashes of the good life when Soweto was on fire in the week before the State of Emergency was declared. Approval of the state’s action is not often explicit in my company because it is known that I belong to the minority-within-the-white-minority that opposes the constitution as a new order of oppression in contempt of justice, and sees the State of Emergency as an act of desperation: a demonstration of the failure of the government’s atrocious ‘new deal’ only a few months after it was instituted. The general feeling among whites is that fear has been staved off — at least for a while. The police dogs are guarding the gates of paradise. Keep away from roads that pass where the blacks and the police/army are contained in their vortex of violence, and life can go on as usual. One can turn one’s attention to matters that affect one directly and can be dealt with without bloodying one’s hands: lobbying all over the world against disinvestment and sports boycotts — an area where sophisticated people understand one another in economic and leisure self-interests; for many, the only brotherhood that transcends nation and race. There is a physical and mental cordoning-off of ‘areas of unrest’. The police and army take care of the first, and that extraordinary sense of whiteness, of having always been different, always favoured, always shielded from the vulnerabilities of poverty and powerlessness, takes care of the second. We whites in South Africa present an updated version of the tale of the Emperor’s clothes; we are not aware of our nakedness — ethical, moral, and fatal — clothed as we are in our own skin. This morning on the radio the news of the withdrawal of more foreign diplomats from South Africa, and the continuing threat of the withdrawal by foreign banks, was followed by a burst of pop-music defiance by the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation, on behalf of Afrikaner and English-speaking whites. Allies, yelled a disco idol, We’re allies, with our backs against the w-a-ll …

As for the less worldly among the white majority, they express openly their approval of government violence in the last few months, and there is a group that believes there has not been enough of it. ‘The government should shoot the lot.’ This remark was offered to my friend the photographer David Goldblatt in all crazy seriousness, not as a manner of speaking: there are whites in whose subconscious the power of the gun in a white man’s hand is magical (like his skin?) and could wipe out an entire population nearly four times as large as that of the whites. This, in bizarre historical twinship, is the obverse of the belief of the mid-nineteenth-century Xhosa prophetess, Nongquase, who told her people that by following her instructions they could cause all those who wore trousers (the white men) to be swept away by a whirlwind …

It is not true that the South African government is bent on genocide, as some black demagogues have averred (the black man is too useful for that); but it is true that the unconscious will to genocide is there, in some whites. So is belief in the old biblical justification for apartheid that has been embarrassedly repudiated by even the Dutch Reformed Church. Over lunch on his father’s Transvaal farm recently, I met a handsome young Afrikaner on leave from military service. Grace was said; when the young man lifted his bowed head he began an exposition of biblical justification that was all his own, I think: blacks are the descendants of Cain and a curse on humankind. I did not rise to the bait; but my eyes must have betrayed that I could scarcely believe my ears. When, among the women of the family, I was being shown their new acquisition, a pristine white dishwasher that had replaced the black maid, he took the opportunity to fire at me: ‘Yes, it’s a good white kaffir girl.’

During the weeks that led up to the State of Emergency, the Eastern Cape black townships had become ungovernable — even in the streets of Grahamstown, the English 1820 Settlers’ Association show-piece answer to the Afrikaner Voortrekker Monument at Pretoria, soldiers and armoured vehicles had taken the place of festival visitors. Most whites in South Africa were in a state of anguish: over the outcome of the New Zealand government’s determination to stop the All Blacks’ rugby tour of South Africa. It was only when Soweto became a hell to which Johannesburg’s black workers returned each night as best they could (buses would not venture farther than Soweto boundaries) that white faces in Johannesburg became strained.

But the state of mind of the minority-within-the-white-minority did not have to wait for any declaration to be aware of an emergency beyond the national rugby fields. People like Bishop Tutu, Reverend Beyers Naudé and Sheena Duncan of the Black Sash — a women’s organisation that has done more than any other source to expose the appalling forced removals of black rural people — had been warning for months that an uprising was inevitable: built into the new constitution as its own consequence. The government was arresting trade union leaders and leaders of the non-racial United Democratic Front. Just as, abroad, one may mutter abhorrence of apartheid and go on funding it morally and materially, so the government continued (as it continues) to reiterate a litany of dedication to consultation and change while arresting almost every black leader with any claim to be consulted about change. On the minority side of the dividing line between white and white, a new organisation had grown in urgent response to the use of army recruits against the people of the black township of Sebokeng last October. Resistance to conscription was suddenly no longer some fringe defection on religious grounds by a handful of Seventh Day Adventists, but a wave of revulsion against ‘defending one’s country’ by maiming, killing, and breaking into the humble homes of black people. In this horrifying domestic context, the End Conscription Campaign held a three-day gathering in Johannnesburg where a large crowd of young men and their families debated the moral issues of conscientious objection and defined their position not as pacifist but as a refusal to defend apartheid. I gave a reading there of poetry by South African writers black and white in whose work, like that of playwrights, lately, this has been the theme. The subject has to be handled gingerly, whether in poetry or platform prose; it is a treasonable offence, in South Africa, to incite anyone to refuse military service. The ECC is not yet a mass movement, and maybe will not be, but the government is sufficently alarmed by it to have detained several members.

For years, when one asked blacks why they allowed black police to raid and arrest them, they would answer: ‘Our brothers have to do what whites tell them. We are all victims together.’ Now, black youths are confronted with what surely always was clear would be the ultimate distortion of their lives by apartheid: brothers, co-opted as police informers and City Fathers by white power, becoming enemies.

Many of us who belong to the minority-within-the-white-minority already were accustomed, before the State of Emergency, to using the telephone for the kind of call not made outside thriller movies in your country. When the South African Defence Force raided the capital of one of our neighbouring countries, Botswana, earlier this year, we feared for the lives of friends living in exile there. For some days, we could piece together their fate only by exchanging guarded word-of-mouth news. For my fellow writer, Sipho Sepamla, the news was bad; he travelled across the border to Botswana to the funeral of a relative murdered in the raid, and we were nervous about his doing so, since the brutal raid — which resulted in indiscriminate killing, so that even children died — was purportedly against African National Congress revolutionaries, and the demonstration of any connection with even random victims could rub off as guilt by association. With the beginning of the State of Emergency there came mass arrests, and severe penalties for revealing without authority the identity of any detainee. The names we know are confined to those permitted by the police to be published. Who can say how many others there are? So our ominous kind of morning gossip has increased — and there remains the fear that the individual one calls may not answer because he or she has been taken.

Some of us have friends among those who are the accused in the treason trials, mainly trade unionists and leaders of the United Democratic Front, in session or about to commence. I telephone my old friend, Cassim Saloojee, a social worker, and an office-bearer in the United Democratic Front. He is at home on bail after many weeks of detention before being formally charged with treason. One discovers, these days, that genuine cheerfulness exists, and it is a by-product of courage. He has only one complaint, which is expressed in a way that catches me out: ‘I’ve been spending my time watching pornographic films.’ And with my tactfully unshockable laugh, I remember that active resistance to apartheid is political pornography in South Africa. The state has seized video cassettes of public meetings made by the United Democratic Front as records of their activities. For the purposes of their defence, the accused must study what may now be used as evidence against them. ‘Ninety hours of viewing …’

The case is sub judice, so I suppose I cannot give here my version of whether the particular meetings I attended (the UDF is a non-racial, non-violent and legally constituted movement) could possibly be construed as violent and treasonous, but I hope that among all that footage there is at least recorded the time when the crowd in a Johannesburg hall heard that there was police harassment of some supporters in the foyer, and from the platform Cassim Saloojee succeeded in preventing the crowd from streaming out to seek a confrontation that doubtless would have resulted in police violence.

While writing this letter I have had a call from a young white student at the University of the Witwatersrand, down the road, who himself is a veteran of detention, and whose brother is now in detention for the second time. At last, after more than two weeks, Colin Coleman’s parents have managed to get permission to visit Neil Coleman in prison — like well over a thousand others, he has not been charged. The parents are founder members of the well-established Detainees Parents’ Committee, a title and status that indicate the enduring state of mind, stoic but unintimidatedly active on the part of all prisoners of conscience, black and white, whether or not in the family, that prevails among white people like these. Colin has called to ask me to take part in a panel discussion on South African culture to be held by the students’ Academic Freedom Committee. Irrelevant while we are in a State of Emergency? Concurrently with engagement in the political struggle for the end of apartheid, there exists an awareness of the need for a new conception of culture, particularly among whites. Young people like these are aware that a change of consciousness, of the white sense of self, has to be achieved along with a change of regime, if, when blacks do sit down to consult with whites, there is to be anything to talk about. The arts in South Africa sometimes do bear relation to the real entities of South African life in the way that the euphemisms and evasions of white politics do not.

These are the states of mind of the majority of white South Africans, and of the minority within the white population. In the first, the preoccupations of the second are no more than newspaper stories you, too, read thousands of miles away: so long as the Casspir armoured monsters patrol the black townships and even mass funerals are banned, the majority feel safe, since there is no possibility that they may be imprisoned for a too-active sense of justice, or find any member of their families or their friends in detention, on trial, or in danger of losing a life in right-wing terrorist attacks. Nor is there any possibility that one of their lawyers might be gunned down, as was a member of a treason trial defence team outside her home a few nights ago.

The conditions of life, for whites, are a different matter. Even those few whites who have members of their families in prison themselves continue to wake up every morning as I do, to the song of weaver birds and mechanical-sounding whirr of crested barbets in a white suburb. Soweto is only eight miles from my house; if I did not have friends living there, I should not be aware of the battles of stones against guns and tear gas that are going on in its streets, for images on a TV screen come by satellite as easily from the other side of the world as from eight miles away, and may be comprehended as equally distanced from the viewer. How is it possible that the winter sun is shining, the randy doves are announcing spring, the domestic workers from the back yards are placing bets on the numbers game, Fah-Fee, with the Chinese runner, as usual every afternoon? In terms of ways of life, conditions of daily living are sinisterly much the same for all whites, those who manage to ignore the crisis in our country, and those for whom it is the determining state of mind. Some go to protest meetings, others play golf. All of us go home to quiet streets, outings to the theatre and cinema, good meals and secure shelter for the night, while in the black townships thousands of children no longer go to school, fathers and sons disappear into police vans or lie shot in the dark streets, social gatherings are around coffins and social intercourse is confined to mourning.

The night the State of Emergency was declared I was at a party held at an alternative education centre, the Open School, in the downtown area where banks and the glass palaces of mining companies run down into Indian stores and black bus queues. The school is directed by Colin and Dolphine Smuts (black, despite their Afrikaans surname) for black youths and children who study drama, painting, dance and music there — subjects not offered by government ‘Bantu’ education. The occasion was a celebration: the school, which had been in danger of closure for lack of funds, had received a Ford Foundation grant. Colin had not known until the evening began whether the new ban on gatherings might not be served on the celebration; Dolphine had gone ahead and prepared food. There were polite speeches, music, drumming, and the declamatory performance of poetry that has been part of resistance rhetoric since young people began to compose in prison in 1976, and which sets such gatherings apart from their counterparts in other countries. Soweto was sealed off by military roadblocks. Yet the black guests had come through somehow, thoroughly frisked in the ‘elegantly casual’ clothes we all, black and white, wear to honour this kind of occasion. I asked a couple I had not met before what it was like to be in Soweto now, looking at them in the inhibited, slightly awed way one tries not to reveal to people who have emerged alive from some unimaginable ordeal. The man took a bite from a leg of chicken and washed it down with his drink. ‘In your street, one day it’s all right. The next day, you can cross the street when a Casspir comes round the corner, and you’ll die. It’s like Beirut.’

Yes, if you want to know what it’s like here, it’s more like Beirut than he knew. I remember a film I once saw, where the camera moved from destruction and its hateful cacophony in the streets to a villa where people were lunching on a terrace, and there were birds and flowers. That’s what it’s like. I also remember something said by a character in a novel I wrote ten years ago. ‘How long can we go on getting away scot free?’

1985

Huddleston: A Sign

Above this desk at which I write there are children’s paintings, a poster showing Marcel Proust as a small boy with a large bow tie and a watch-chain, a carving from the Central African Republic that looks like a human sundial, and a photograph. These are my treasures, under whose signs I spend my working life.

The photograph was taken by my friend David Goldblatt at the beginning of his career, in 1952, at the Newclare squatter camp, Johannesburg. It is a night scene, lit only by a tin brazier. The light from lozenges of incandescent coal brings forward out of the dark a pair of gaunt, tightly clasped hands, the long fingers tautly interlaced, making a great double fist. They are the hands of a white man. Above them there is darkness again, until the furthermost reach of light leaps on the bright white band of a clerical collar, and, more softly, brings from oblivion the three-quarter face. There is a pointed ear standing alertly away from the head and lean jaw, and the tendon from behind the ear down the neck is prominent and tense. The ear is cocked intently and the eyes are concentrated.

The man is the young Father Trevor Huddleston. He is listening to and looking at someone you can’t make out — a faint lick of light touching knuckles and thumb held towards the fire, a shirt collar framing the knot of a tie, and above that a shape almost one with the night, unrecognisable as a face. But the man, the black man, is there; he is there in the extraordinary, still, self-excluding attention of the young priest. Trevor Huddleston’s immense awareness of black people, in a city and country and time when white people ignored their lives, categorised them as so many statistics, planned to move them about as so many plastic pins on a demographic map, is in the photograph. It is there as an emblem of the Defiance Campaign, in which Huddleston had currently engaged that attention of his, and which the whites in power crushed while their supporters turned their heads away. It is there as an omen of what was to come: Sharpeville, at the start of a new decade; the 1976 uprising; the school, rent and shop boycotts, the troops in the black townships, the detention of thousands without respect for childhood or old age, the strikes in factories and mines — and the deaths, the deaths, the unrolling death-scroll of constantly intensified state violence that, in the 1980s, inevitably brought forth counter-violence from its victims. Within the chiaroscuro of that photograph the black people of South Africa are wholly present in the attention of a white man who, from the beginning of his experience in our country, saw them not as statistics and movable counters in some ugly and insane plan to keep races apart and class domination in power, but as blood, heart, brain and spirit, as human beings dispossessed of their birthright and certain to regain it.

That is what is in the instant of a night in Newclare in 1952. I have no religious faith, but when I look at that photograph of a profoundly religious man, I see godliness in a way I can understand deeply, I see a man in whom prayer functions, in Simone Weil’s definition,¹ as a special form of intelligent concentration. Everything that is in that photograph is what whites in South Africa have turned away from, towards deliberate fragmentation, callous and stupid denial, wild political distraction, mindless elevation of indifference; turned away to catastrophe.

Yet Trevor Huddleston’s concentration remains. It asserts, always, that another way of thinking and living existed, and still exists. What is asserted there was passed on by Huddleston to many people and has never been forgotten or abandoned by them, but handed down to another generation. He belongs to the living history of the liberation movement in an ancestry all of us, black and white, who are involved in the movement now are inspired to claim. He is the only white man to have received the Isitwalandwe — the highest distinction in African society; that award was conferred upon him in a particular context at the Congress of the People in 1955, but I know of no one in any of the liberation organisations who, whatever their political ideology, does not revere him. Certainly, all whites in the struggle are under his sign.

Everyone in the contemporary world is familiar with the old pious condemnation of churchmen who ‘meddle in politics’. In South Africa, it was invoked against the Reverend Michael Scott before Huddleston, and after Huddleston against Bishop Ambrose Reeves and others, as it is now against the Reverend Allan Boesak and (and how!) Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There is a more subtle and sophisticated form of attack — derogation. Its vocabulary, too, is worn smooth: ‘sentimental liberalism’, ‘starry-eyed Utopianism’. ‘Priests and pinkos’ don’t understand that politics is the ‘art of the possible’. The inference is always that churchmen who accept political action as part of their responsibility for humankind are well meaning but unfitted for the task. In short, they lack the necessary specific intelligence.

Trevor Huddleston’s place in South African history demonstrates exactly the reverse. In him, early on, it was clear that ‘intelligence’ in all its senses has combined to produce exactly what would have been the specific intelligence necessary to find a peaceful political end to racism in all its avatars, economic, social, religious. Intelligence means superior understanding and quickness of apprehension; inherent mental qualities. It also means what may be acquired: to have intelligence of something is to have news and knowledge of it. Then there is the dimension of Simone Weil’s definition: the faculty of ‘intelligent concentration’ that is prayer. Trevor Huddleston summoned all three into synthesis. (How evident this is in his book, Naught for your Comfort.) His actions showed a superior understanding of the political future of South Africa far in advance not only of parliament but also of most liberal thinkers among people who had the vote — the white minority. Those actions were based on the first-hand knowledge, ‘intelligence’, gained working among the majority — the black South Africans whose lives were to be the decisive factor in South African politics. Through the focus of his Weilian faculty, he saw us all clearly, as few of us saw ourselves.

Some of the non-violent forms of resistance that have been seen to bring results, since, stem from his kind of specific intelligence. He saw before anyone else that a sports boycott would rudely waken the average ‘non-political’ white voter from the sleep of complacent tacit racism. His initiative has resulted in the most successful and long-lived anti-apartheid campaign ever sustained. His political action, supporting the ANC, encouraging the people of his parish in Sophiatown to resist one of the first population removals, was evidence of a prescient understanding and political forecast of what was to come: the vast and terrible shifting of whole populations, let alone townships, about the country, the isolation of people in ethnic backwaters dubbed ‘states’, the destruction of community life, and, finally, the stripping of black South Africans of their citizenship.

He was a good politician, that churchman. If our professional politicians had had his intelligence they would not have behind them today the failed Verwoerdian ‘grand apartheid’; with them, the doomed Outhouses of Parliament for so-called coloureds and Indians only; and ahead an immediate future that, because of ‘reforms’ whose scenario is still projected in black and white, and whose script still keeps ultimate power in white hands only, promises only violence. Their tragic lack of intelligence — not being able to grasp the fact of the social forces of their own post-colonial era, not being open to the information that the majority was plainly giving them, not having any political morality other than that based on physical attributes of skin and hair — has brought this tragedy about.

I didn’t know Trevor Huddleston well, personally. I met him in the early 1950s through our mutual friend Anthony Sampson, and, set beside my great admiration for the public figure, there is an endearing trivial memory. Some years later a party for Anthony Sampson was held in my house. While my husband Reinhold Cassirer and I were still preparing food and drink, the first guest arrived. It was Huddleston, and he and Anthony settled on the verandah. Our son, taking on hostly duties for the first time, kept offering a plate of stuffed eggs, and to his dismay the guest never refused, but kept absently reaching out and eating them. The small boy came rushing indignantly into the kitchen: ‘Mum, the man in a skirt is finishing all the eggs!’

An uncharacteristic side-glance at that figure striding so ascetically through our lives in Johannesburg in the 1950s, less at home in white suburbia than in the Sophiatown of crowded yards, shebeens, vigorous street life, the blare of pata-pata music, and the roof-raising voices of the congregation singing in the people’s lovely home on the hill, his Church of Christ the King. But wherever I encountered him, here or there, ‘the man in a skirt’ was an assurance that South Africa didn’t have to be as it was, that the barriers set up between black and white must come down in situations other and greater than private affinities and friendships — those relationships which many of us in the 1950s enjoyed but which lacked the necessary political energy and dedication to bring freedom.

He left us, left South Africa physically. It was not of his own volition. But he hasn’t gone, any more than Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada and their fellow prisoners are not with us. He acted here, and has continued to act in exile, to achieve a different South Africa, which he knew was and knows is possible, and will be.

1988

The Gap Between the Writer and the Reader

When I am asked that interviewer’s stock in trade, ‘For whom do you write?’ I reply irritably, ‘For anyone who reads me.’ The question is crass, giving away the press’s assumption that a writer presumes ‘audience potential’. It seems typical of one of the anti-art tenets of commercialism: give the public what they know. But writers — artists of all kinds — exist to break up the paving of habit and breach the railings that confine sensibility: free imaginative response to spring up like grass. We are convinced that we are able to release the vital commonality of the human psyche, our reach limited only by the measure of our talent. After all, isn’t this what we ourselves have received at the touch of other writers?

If we are not manufacturing for Mills and Boon, if we are not writing political tracts disguised as works of the imagination, we do not have in mind a shadow company of heads out there, the chat-show groupies, or the Party supporters. But for some time now, I have felt a certain unease when I snap, ‘Anyone who reads me’. The echo comes: ‘Oh really? My, my!’

I begin to think there is a question to be asked, but it is not ‘For whom do we write?’ It is ‘For whom can we write?’ Is there not such a thing as writer potential, perhaps? The postulate reversed? And may I dismiss that one highhandedly?

These doubts — or more accurately suggestions — have come about in my particular case less from readings in literary theory over the years than as a result of experience out there in the world among, not ordinary people — to a writer no one is ordinary — among non-literary people. Which does not imply that they do not read, only that their reading does not take place within the culture most literature presupposes.

And here there must be a self-correction again. The suggestions are raised as much by the contradictions between literary theory — which, of course, is concerned with the reader’s perceptions as well as the writer’s conscious and subconscious intentions — and the actual experience of the man or woman on the receiving end of all these deliberations: the generic reader.

For the generic reader surely must be the one I have in mind when I answer that I write for ‘anyone who reads me’. More than twenty years ago, we were all entranced by or sceptical of (or both at once) the discoveries of structuralism and its analysis of our art and our relationship to the reader. The Freudian explanations that interested some of us seemed simplistic and speculative by comparison. The subconscious was ectoplasm in contrast with the precise methodology of a work such as, say, Roland Barthes’s S/Z, which had been published in 1970 on the basis of work done in the sixties, and in which the whole emphasis of literature passed from writer to reader. Barthes’s goal was ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text’, of ‘what can be read but not written’. The novel, the short story, the poem, were redefined as a ‘galaxy of signifiers’.⁴⁴ As Richard Howard sums it up, Barthes’s conviction of reading was that ‘what is told is always the telling’.⁴⁵ And Harry Levin wrote,

To survey his [the writer’s] writings in their totality and chart the contours of their ‘inner landscape’ is the critical aim of current Structuralists and Phenomenologists. All of these approaches recognise, as a general principle, that every writer has his own distinctive configuration of ideas and sentiments, capacities and devices.⁴⁶

Barthes’s brilliance, with its element of divine playfulness, made and makes enthralling reading — for those of us who share at least sufficient of his cultural background to gain aesthetic pleasure and revelation from his cited ‘signifiers’. It’s a detective game, in which the satisfaction comes from correctly interpreting the clue — elementary, for Sherlock Holmes, but not for my dear Watson. Barthes, in the structural analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, is the Sherlock Holmes who, deducing from his immensely rich cultural experience, instantly recognises the fingerprints of one cultural reference upon another. The reader is Watson, for whom, it may be, the ‘signifier’ signifies nothing but itself, if there is nothing in the range of his cultural experience for it to be referred to. It is a swatch of cloth that does not match any colour in his spectrum, a note that cannot be orchestrated in his ear. So that even if he is told that Balzac’s clock of the Elysée Bourbon is actually chiming a metonymic reference to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Paris of the Bourbon restoration, and then to the restoration as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’⁴⁷ — there remains a blank where that reader is supposed to be reading ‘what is not written’. The signifier works within a closed system: it presupposes a cultural context shared by writer and reader beyond mere literacy. Without that resource the reader cannot ‘read’ the text in Barthesian abundance.

‘Words are symbols that assume a shared memory’, says Borges.⁴⁸ Without that memory the Faubourg Saint-Honoré is just the name of a district, it has no elegant social or intellectual associations, either as an image conjured up from visits to Paris or as a symbol described in other books, visualised in paintings. The Bourbon restoration brings no association as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’ because the reader doesn’t know the place of the Bourbon restoration in French political and social history. The polymath interchange of the arts, letters, politics, history, philosophy, taken for granted by Barthes, is not the traffic of that reader’s existence.

When one says one writes for ‘anyone who reads me’ one must be aware that ‘anyone’ excludes a vast number of readers who cannot ‘read’ you or me because of concerns they do not share with us in grossly unequal societies. The Baudelairean correspondences of earlier literary theory cannot work for them, either, because ‘correspondence’ implies the recognition of one thing in terms of another, which can occur only within the same cultural resource system. This is the case even for those of us, like me, who believe that books are not made out of other books, but out of life.

Whether we like it or not, we can be ‘read’ only by readers who share terms of reference formed in us by our education — not merely academic but in the broadest sense of life experience: our political, economic, social and emotional concepts, and our values derived from these: our cultural background. It remains true even of those who have put great distances between themselves and the inducted values of childhood: who have changed countries, convictions, ways of life, languages. Citizenship of the world is merely another acculturation, with its set of givens which may derive from many cultures yet in combination becomes something that is not any of them.

‘In our time, the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms’ — so said Thomas Mann, and I quoted this as an epigraph for one of my early novels. I saw the proposition then as the destiny of my characters: now I can see that it could be applied to the destiny of literature. For if politics interprets destiny, it must be accepted that the destiny of culture cannot be separated from politics. Posing to himself the big question, ‘For whom do we write?’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘Given the division of the world into a capitalist camp, an imperialist camp and a revolutionary camp, whom is the writer writing for?’⁴⁹

While — if he has any sense — refusing to write for any camp, despite his personal political loyalties (and I think there are more of these than Calvino allows), the writer certainly writes from within one of them. And the reader reads from within one. If it is not the same as that of the writer, he is presumed at least to ‘read’ in the writer’s signifiers some relevance to his own, different cultural background.

But frequently the reader does not find equivalents, in that culture, for the writer’s referential range, because he has not ‘read’ that range. He cannot. The signifying image, word, flashes a message that cannot be received by a different set of preconceptions.

This happens even at apparently homogeneous cultural levels. In reviews of your fiction and the interviews to which you are subjected, this process can hatch in your text like a cuckoo’s egg. What comes out is unrecognisable, but the reader, reviewer, journalist, insists that it is yours.

I experienced this when I came to the United States for the publication of a novel of mine entitled Burger’s Daughter. The daughter and other characters in the story were centred around the personality of Lionel Burger, exemplifying the phenomenon — and problem — of ideology as faith in the family of an Afrikaner who, through becoming a Communist, devotes his life and his children’s to the liberation of South Africa from apartheid.

In reviews, Burger was unfailingly referred to as a liberal: I myself was guilty of an unthinkable lack of deference to a famous talk-show personality when I contradicted his description of Burger as a noble white liberal.

‘He’s not a liberal, he’s a Communist,’ I interrupted.

But it was no good. None of these people ‘read’ me because in the ethos of mainstream American society a Communist could never, no matter in what country or social circumstances, be a good man. Yet it had to be acknowledged that Burger was a good man because he was a fighter against racism: therefore my signal must be that Burger was a liberal.

This is not a matter of misreading or misunderstanding. It is the substitution of one set of values for another, because the reader cannot conceive of these otherwise.

Yet not politics but class most calls into question the existence of the generic reader, the ‘whoever reads me’. And by class I mean to signify economics, education and, above all, living conditions. The cultural setting from laws to latrines, from penthouse to poor-house, travelled by jet or on foot.

I grant that the difference between the material conditions of life signified in the text and those of the reader must be extreme, and manifest in the dogged daily experience of the reader, if the writer cannot be ‘read’ by him. And the powers of the imagination should never be underestimated. They sometimes can produce miracles of what, in the complexity of the work being read, is the most limited of referential links. As the seventeen-year-old daughter of a shopkeeper in a small mining town in Africa, I was able to ‘read’ Remembrance of Things Past. Why? Because, although the lineage Proust invented, so faithful to that of the French noblesse, genuine and parvenue, could not ‘signify’ much for me, the familial mores from which the book sets out, so to speak, and are there throughout — the way emotions are expressed in behaviour between mother and child, the place of friendship in social relations, the exaltation of sexuality as romantic love, the regulation of daily life by meals and visits, the importance of maladies — all this was within the context of middle-class experience, however far-flung.

And, by the way, where did I get the book from? Why, from the municipal library: and I could use the library because I was white — and so for me that also was part of the middle-class experience. No black could use that library: in the concomitance of class and colour a young black person of my age was thus doubly excluded from ‘reading’ Marcel Proust: by lack of any community of cultural background and by racist material conditions …

Hermeneutic differences between writer and reader are still extreme in our world, despite the advance in technological communications. There is a layer of common culture spread thin over the worlds, first, second and third, by satellite and cassette. The writer could count on the ‘signifier’ Dallas or Rambo to be received correctly and fully by any reader from Iceland to Zimbabwe, and almost any other points on the map culturally remote from one another. But the breadth of this potential readership paradoxically limits the writer: producing, it would seem, something close to the generic reader, it confines the writer to a sort of primer of culture, if he expects to be ‘read’. It excludes signifiers that cannot be spelled out in that ABC. The writer’s expectations of wider readership have diminished in inverse proportion to the expansion of technological communications.

And the effect of extreme difference in material conditions between writer and reader remain decisive. Such differences affect profoundly the imagery, the relativity of values, the referential interpretation of events between the cultural givens of most writers and, for example, the new class of literate peasants and industrial workers, emancipated by the surplus value of leisure earned by mechanisation and computerisation.

Writers, longing to be ‘read’ by anyone who reads them, from time to time attempt to overcome this in various ways. John Berger has experimented by going to live among peasants, trying to enter into their life-view as formed by their experience. He writes about their lives in a mode that signifies for us, who are not French peasants: we ‘read’ him with all the experience we share with him of literary exoticism, of life-as-literature providing the necessary layers of reference. He doesn’t say whether the peasants read what he writes, but remarks that they are aware that he has access to something they don’t have: ‘another body of knowledge, a knowledge of the surrounding but distant world’.⁵⁰ A recent review of one of Bobbie Ann Mason’s books sums up the general problem: ‘[She] writes the kind of fiction her own characters would never read.’⁵¹

In my own country, South Africa, there has been demonstrated recently a wider potential readership for writers in our population of 29 million, only 5 million of whom are white. Politically motivated, in the recognition that the encouragement of literature is part of liberation, trade unions and community groups among the black majority have set up libraries and cultural debate.

Now, I do not believe that one should be written down to. (Had I been confined in this way, I certainly never should have become a writer.) Once the love of literature ignites, it can consume many obstacles to understanding. The vocabulary grows in proportion to the skills of the writer in providing imaginative leaps. But these must land somewhere recognisable: and most writers share no assumptions with the kind of potential readership I have just described.

In Africa and many countries elsewhere, Updike’s beautifully written genre stories of preoccupation with divorces and adulteries could touch off few referential responses in readers for whom sexual and family life are determined by circumstances of law and conflict that have very little in common with those of the professional class of suburban America. Their domestic problems are children in detention, lovers fleeing the country from security police, plastic shelters demolished by the authorities and patched together again by husband and wife. The novels of Gabriel García Marquéz, himself a socialist, presuppose an answering delight in the larger-than-life that can find little response in those whose own real experience outdoes all extremes. The marvellous fantasies of Italo Calvino require assumptions between writer and reader that are not merely a matter of sophistication.

Life is not like that for this potential readership. Books are not made of other books, for them. Furthermore, the imaginative projection of what life might be like is not like that. These texts cannot be ‘read’ even for the aspirations they suggest.

Surely this is true of most of us who are serious writers, in and from most countries where material conditions do not remotely correspond with those of the potential reader. It is most obvious in South Africa. White writers, living as part of an overprivileged minority, are worlds away from those of a migratory miner living in a single-sex hostel, a black schoolteacher grappling with pupils who risk their lives as revolutionaries, black journalists, doctors, clerks, harassed by the police and vigilantes around their homes. The gap sometimes seems too great to reach across for even the most talented and sensitive power of empathy and imaginative projection.

I am not saying, nor do I believe, that whites cannot write about blacks, or blacks about whites. Even black writers, who share with these readers disaffection and humiliation under racist laws, generally acquire middle-class or privileged, if unconventional, styles of living and working concomitant with middle-class signifiers, as they make their way as writers. Often it is only by a self-conscious effort of memory — using the signifiers of childhood, before they joined the elite of letters, or drawing on the collective memory of an oral tradition — that black writers can be sure they will be ‘read’ by their readers. Freedom of movement — weekend trips, stays in hotels, choice of occupation — which punctuates the lives of many fictional characters, signifies nothing to the migratory worker whose contract does not allow him to stay on in town if he changes jobs, and whose ‘holiday’ at the end of eighteen months down a mine is the return home to plough and sow.

The cosseted adolescent who rebels against the materialism of philistine parents signifies nothing to the child revolutionaries, an increasing phenomenon in Latin America as well as South Africa, often precociously intelligent, who have abandoned parents, never known home comforts, and taken on life-and-death decisions for themselves. Even among white-collar readers of this milieu, ‘existential anguish’ — Sartre’s nausea or Freud’s discontents — finds no answering association where there is a total preoccupation with the business of survival. The Spoils of Poynton cannot be read as the apotheosis of the cult of possession by someone who has never seen such objects to covet, someone whose needs would not correspond to any attraction they are presupposed to have — that given attraction taken as read, by the writer.

You might well object: who expects a poorly educated clerk or teacher to read Henry James? But, as I have tried to illustrate, many signifiers that are commonplace, assumed, in the cultural mode of the writer find no referents in that of the potential wider readership.

What can the writer count on if she/he obstinately persists that one can write for anyone who picks up one’s book? Even the basic emotions, love, hate, fear, joy, sorrow, often find expression in a manner that has no correspondence between one code of culture and another.

The writer can count on the mythic, perhaps. On a personification of fears, for example, recognisable and surviving from the common past of the subconscious, when we were all in the cave together, when there were as yet no races, no classes, and our hairiness hid differences of colour. The prince who turns into a frog and the beetle Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into are avatars of the fear of being changed into something monstrous, whether by the evil magic of a shaman or by psychological loss of self, that signify across all barriers, including that of time. They can be ‘read’ by anyone, everyone. But how few of us, the writers, can hope ever to create the crystal ball in which meaning can be read, pure and absolute: it is the vessel of genius, which alone, now and then, attains universality in art.

For the rest of us, there is no meta-culture. We ought to be modest in our claims. There is no generic reader, out there. The kiss of the millennium when art shall be universal understanding shows no sign of being about to release us from our limitations.

1989

Censorship — The Final Solution: The Case of Salman Rushdie

Riots, book-burning, the demand that a work shall be banned worldwide, publishers boycotted, the threatened toppling of a prime minister, five dead — has ever a book been the pretext for such a frenzy of righteous barbarism?

Reviled, sentenced to death by a religious authority, a price offered for his head, forced to flee his home and live under police guard — has ever a writer been persecuted as Salman Rushdie is? Victor Hugo, Flaubert, D.H. Lawrence and others may have suffered public opprobrium or exile. Milan Kundera, forbidden to write, had to earn a living cleaning windows. In Stalin’s Soviet Union writers were banished to the Gulag. In South Africa, some writers have been forbidden to publish. Many books have been banned; some writers banned from any form of publishing their work. Even in the most repressive regimes, none — although they had offended public morals or political orthodoxy — was condemned to a double death: Rushdie’s book to be expunged from world literature for ever, his life to be forfeited.

And this bloodthirsty baying comes from a pack of millions, not one fraction of one per mille of whom have read the book. That is clear from the simplistic reduction in which it is arraigned as being literally ‘about’ the Prophet Mohammed — and nothing else. Whereas anyone who actually has read, and been sufficiently literate fully to understand, this highly complex, brilliant novel knows that dominant among its luxuriant themes is that of displacement. Mohammed and the Muslim faith are the novelist’s metaphors for, among other human dilemmas, spiritual displacement in the reversal of a process which brought imperialists to adjust themselves among the populations they conquered, and in our age brings people from those populations to reconcile the dichotomy between their own culture and the world of the West that has set them apart from that culture without granting acceptance in return.

The method being used by the Muslim leaders and communities against Salman Rushdie is (literally) a murderous refinement of the unchanging principle of censorship, which was and is and always will be to harness the word to the tyrant’s chariot. The tyrant may be a dictator, a regime, moral or religious bigotry. For me, the Rushdie affair has revealed how any of these agents of censorship can advance, in collusion, its gains against freedom of expression. I am no stranger to censorship, living in South Africa. At various times,⁵² three of my own books have been banned, and for several years, now, the press and media here have been grimly restricted under successive States of Emergency imposed to stifle opposition to apartheid. Yet it was an ugly revelation to find, in my country where the government outlaws freedom of expression, where all who use the written word are fighting against the Publications Control Board and its ancillary laws, where individual Muslims have a proud and brave record in the liberation movements, that local Muslim extremists rose in fanatical response to a proposed visit by Salman Rushdie last November.

He had been invited to speak on censorship at a book week dedicated to that theme. The story is one that has become familiar: rabble-rousing meetings outside mosques, threats to burn bookshops, death threats not only to Rushdie but to those, including members of the Congress of South African Writers, involved in the invitation. And all this, of course, by people who had not read the book.⁵³ I know, because I had the single copy in the country, a proof sent to me by his American publisher. No matter; it was easy for the Muslim extremists to get the book banned, at once, in absentia. A word to the Publications Control Board (no doubt) from some member of the Muslim community with influence in the House of Delegates (the segregated ‘house’ of Indian collaborators in our apartheid tricameral parliament that excludes Africans), and it was done. We writers had the alternative of risking Salman Rushdie’s life for our principles of freedom of expression or cancelling the visit. Now, with five dead in Pakistan, it can be seen that we made the only possible choice. But through religious thuggery the state has gained an ally in repression of the word, here.

I admit I have no religious sensibilities, of any faith, to be offended by a work of fiction. But I accept and respect that others have. Numerous books, plays, films have appeared in which Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, God himself, have been satirised, fictionally divested of divinity, and cast as imperfect mortals. The Christian faith remains unshaken. Surely Islam cannot be threatened by the fantasy of a single novel? Satan has taken a hand, all right, in the affair of The Satanic Verses. I can’t believe that anyone’s Divinity could sanction what is being done to a writer. Religious fanaticism has discovered censorship’s Final Solution for that enemy of darkness, the word. I write that with a shudder.

1989

The African Pot

My collection of African pots were bought at roadsides and village markets under trees. They were viewed at no vernissage, but among little pyramids of tomatoes, onions, bananas and mangoes. They have no provenance beyond my memory of where I found them. They are unsigned and I do not know if the artists are living or dead.

What is the relation of ownership to appreciation, I wonder? Since the great private collections of works of art must belong — because these people can afford to pay for them — to the rich, we jealously dismiss their appreciation as acquisitiveness. Because the shrewd and affluent middle class buy works of art as investment we decide pleasure doesn’t come into it; they have price tags hanging on their walls. As democrats we assert the honest way to enjoy art is at the humble cost of a museum entry ticket. Art ought to belong to everybody, and this is the closest society can get to making it available to all, as a right, while preserving it for the benefit of all. (And, of course, some museums are free.) There’s a moral convention that ownership must be punished by an inability to receive what the work of art has to offer.

But, looking at my pots, I realise that the special relationship I have with them doesn’t come because I own them — ownership implies a market value or prestige, of which qualities they are innocent. It comes because I have the luxury of looking at them again and again, days without number, from the different perspectives of my daily life, in the objectivity of the different qualities of light that fall upon them, and in the subjectivity of my own moods. Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks is a painting I might choose as my favourite picture; but what chance do I have to drop in to the National Gallery in London more than once a year to renew my sense of the divine in her face?

Seen from the top of the stairs my pots strike me as a sort of keyboard — resonators of a musical instrument — where they are ranged on their low table. Or a choir. Their round apertures are open mouths, and the different circumferences of these, according to the size of the pot, suggest that they are actually mouthing, soundlessly, in close harmony: WAH wah WAHWAH wah-h … If I were to become sensitive enough to them, through long association, I might even be able to begin to hear it with my eyes and transpose the notation to my ears. Seen differently, at eye level, as you enter by the front door, the pots are pure volume; round, round-round, the elipses of their sides — but they have no sides, their spheres simply curve out of sight! — seeming to spin immobilely away from one another. They are ranged close but however clumsily I might shift them about they cannot be arranged faultily, so that they jostle: their roundness ensures that they touch only lightly, at their fullest diameter.

How can I write about one among my pots? In the anonymity of their creation — unattributed, traditional, functional in origin — they are, in a sense, all one pot.

Unlike other works of art, they do not attempt to recreate something in another medium: pigment on canvas creating a language of line and colour that stands for shape, space and light; marble standing for flesh. They are the earth they are made of. They are its colours — the colours of fields, swamps and river beds. Their common material is mediated only by fire, and on many of them fire has painted the only decoration, cloudy green-black shadings and inspired black brush-strokes sparse as those of Japanese masters. The fire is not the controlled one of a kiln, but the same open-air one where the cooking pots bubble. They are shaped not on a wheel but by hands; their surface texture has the faint striations of human skin. When you put your hand against my pots you are palm-to-palm with the unknown artist.

They are all as perfect, removed from their function, as they are for their function — which would be to hold water, maize, porridge or beer. They simply are. Their form can take on many concepts, material and abstract. Globe of the world/planet Earth; I twirl the large ones slowly. Hunger/repletion; I look down the inner maw or follow the promise of plenty in their calm rotundity. The big one I bought in Lesotho I held on my lap coming home by plane, thighs spread for its weight and arms round it for protection; a pot grand as a full womb. Then there is the little one that comes from Swaziland, blackened with the application of graphite from local outcrops, with its unique moulded ear-shapes in low relief. There is the one I found in Venda, with its incised curving bands, delicate as the veins on a leaf; and there’s the very old one, its mouth not at the apex but obliquely tipped in balance, below, and its pale, grave-clay tints.

But I have put the Lesotho pot up on the desk before me and I know what I did not know until I began to think about my pots in the way one thinks anew of something one is going to write about. This pot is my favourite. Or rather, it favours me by answering some need. Perhaps it makes visible and concrete some proportion and wholeness I can’t attain in my life. It’s a large pot, yes, and the material of which it is made provides not only its shape but also its decoration. The base of sunset-rose clay is met at the widest part of the belly by dun bronze clay and is smeared over it in sweeping upwards strokes to form a calm garland of curves, like four suns rising above or sinking below a dim horizon. Its wide mouth is rimmed with the same sunset colour. The outline of the suns is not neat, and if I turn my pot I see gradations of colour, like the heart of flames, round its base. It stands firm if I rock it; and yet I know that integral to its beauty is its fragility, a thing of the earth meant to return to the earth. Enjoy it until it breaks.

To write about something is to remake it. I am now closer to my pot, to the maker of my pot, dead or alive, than I have ever been.

1989