Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Personal Proust

There are two ways in which great literature impacts upon society. The one is cultural, in narrow definition of culture as practice of the arts: the writer breaks the traditional seals of the Word, takes off into exploration of new modes of expression, challenges and changes what fiction is. After Proust, after Joyce, yes, the novel could never be the same.

The other impact of great literature is its power of changing the consciousness of the reader — even if that lay reader were to have no awareness of how it has been done, the literary techniques and devices the writer has taken up, reinvented or invented. As a fiction writer I have been alertly privy to and no doubt learned from the literary innovations of Marcel Proust. But a writer finds her/his own voice or is not a writer. What has remained with me for a lifetime is the influence of Proust’s emotional and aesthetic perceptions. So what I want to talk about is this other impact. The Proust who influences the persona. The Proust after reading whom the reader can never be the same.

This is a grave matter; wonderful. Perhaps dangerous. For there are those among us whose epiphany comes not from the faiths of religion, philosophy or politics, but the illumination of the subterranean passages of life by the imaginative writer.

I was at quite an advanced age — late teens — for one who had lived in books since early childhood, when long after Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, I came upon that mistitled Remembrance of Things Past in the Modern Library edition of the Scott Moncrieff translation. I had survived a lonely mother-love-dominated childhood and so my first response was one of recognition; here was a writer who understood that childhood better than I did myself: an identification. But later as I read and returned to that book its effect was something different, exegetical, prophetic to the series of presents, existential stages I was coming to, passing through.

Holed up in an armchair in the tin-roofed house of a mining town in the South African veld, far, far in every way from the Méséglise Way, Swann’s Way, Combray, Balbec and the Boulevard Haussmann, I discovered that the intense response I had to natural beauty, to flowers, trees, and the sea visited once a year, was not something high-mindedly removed from the drives of existence I was struggling with, but part of a sensuality which informs, belongs with awakening sexuality, the conflation of emotional and aesthetic formation. Every time, any time, one turns back to The Novel one finds the delight of something relevant to a past perception that one had missed before … For example, in my recent re-reading of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (my third in French) I have seen how pollen recurs, the natural product become a metaphor — the wind-distributed fecundity part of the very air we breathe — first coming from the regard of the girl the narrator follows with his eyes on the drive with Madame de Villeparisis in A L’ Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs. And then there’s the bumblebee that enters the courtyard with pollen that signifies the attraction cast in the air between noble Baron de Charlus and the lowly waistcoat-maker, Jupien. Proust himself pollinates ineffable connections between needs and emotions aroused by various means, in us.

In the context of projected existence, I came to Proust from D. H. Lawrence and Blake; sexuality was fulfilment guaranteed to the bold, anyone who would flout interdictions and free desire: ‘Abstinence sows sand all over/The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,/ But Desire Gratified/Plants fruits of life and beauty there.’¹⁰³ And this gratification between men and women was the image of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on simulated clouds — like Italo Calvino, I had formed my notion of future emotional life as innocently, lyingly portrayed by movies of the time. The processes of loving, as exemplified in the desperate pilgrimage of Swann — what a Way that is, ecstatic, frustrating, impossible to turn away from, viewing the pursued beloved from the terrible angles of suspicion, losing the will to continue, grabbed by the will to go on; always, moving along with him, one has moments when one wants to shake him: stop! And sees he cannot, will not. Maybe that’s the principle of love … And in the end, that devastating conclusion: this woman, for whom he has spoiled years of his life, was really not his type at all.

Proust reformed, informed my youthful understanding of the expectations of sexual love, showed me its immense complexity, its ultimate dependency on the impossibility of knowing the loved one — the very defeat of possession — and the concomitant process of self-knowledge, often dismaying.

The cloud-mating of Fred and Ginger dispersed for ever. In the life of the emotions I was embarked upon my expectations were tutored by the greatest exploration ever made of the divine mystery of the sexual life in its ambient world of sensuality. No time to discuss the continuation of the theme with Albertine; only to observe that not only does it not matter a damn if an Albertine was really an Albert transformed by the alchemy of imagination rather than a sex-change operation — himself a homosexual, no one has written better than Marcel Proust of heterosexual relations. Perhaps literary genius can be defined yet once again: as a creativity that is all things, knows everything, in every human.

After early readings of The Book I read, of course, Les Plaisirs et Les Jours, Jean Santeuil, Contre Sainte-Beuve, but to these I have not returned. Like all of us, I have more or less the gamut of Proust scholarship in English and French. But all have been surpassed, for me, by the publication this year of Roger Shattuck’s Proust’s Way, an amazing feat of originality where one would have thought that all the gold-bearing ore had long been brought to the surface. My present reading of The Book has become a new one, filled with new understanding, possibilities, and new joys, through the variety of lenses provided by Roger Shattuck’s radiant vision.

Marcel Proust is a writer with whom one moves along, for life; reading and re-reading without ever exhausting the sources he reveals only when one is ready for, or made ready for them. At the grand and poignant final social-gathering-of-all-social-gatherings narrator/Marcel finds past friends and acquaintances unrecognisably changed by age, while still having the sense of himself as he had been back in his mother’s eyes. He replies to a young woman’s invitation to dine: ‘With pleasure, if you don’t mind dining alone with a young man’ and only when he hears people giggle, adds hastily ‘or rather an old one’. Later he realises that the span of time represented by the aspect of the gathering not only had been lived through but was his life, presented to him.

As I grow old I find myself ready for the revelation, Time Regained, of this Proustian source when, among old friends with whom I was always the youngest of the circle, I realise we are, now, all alike, disguised in the garb of ageing. I, like everyone else, have to be introduced — to myself. Proust makes it another epiphany.

2000

Africa’s Plague, and Everyone’s

Sixty-nine per cent of the world’s victims of HIV and Aids are in sub-Saharan Africa. This figure is not easy to take in. Aids seems to have come upon everyone while we were looking the other way: it happened to some sex or colour other than our own; it was endemic to some other country.

In South Africa it was quite some time before the realisation that the disease was not the unfortunate problem of our poorer neighbouring countries, but was our own. Now, out of South Africa’s 43 million people, about 4 million have been infected by HIV and a further 1,700 are infected daily. Recently, in a Johannesburg home caring for orphaned or abandoned babies born with Aids, there was a service in memory of forty who had died there not long before. While South Africa is the most highly developed country on the African continent, we are faced with this kind of future for the generations to come.

But every community, every affected country, has to decide how to approach what is no longer a problem but a catastrophe. There is prevention, and there is cure. The ideal is to seek both at once, but this is beyond the capacity of most countries where the disease is rampant. Cure, and prevention by inoculation, are not within the capacity of lay people; these are in the hands of medical science, which implies money to be provided to advance research. Immediate prevention is in the hands and initiative of each population itself. I believe we cannot emphasise bluntly enough that the cure and vaccine development depend on money. And until recently, the country that has the money, the United States, perhaps inevitably has concentrated on a vaccine for a subtype of Aids prevalent in the Northern Hemisphere. It was only at the World Economic Forum’s meeting this year that President Clinton announced that large-scale aid for vaccine development would be forthcoming from the United States. Only now has the International Aids Vaccine Initiative announced a third international development project, based on those subtypes of the virus most prevalent in the direly affected regions of Southern and East Africa, the subtypes C and A. It is encouraging that the project is being pursued in wide collaboration among researchers of the United States, South Africa, Kenya and Oxford University, and that the philosophy of the initiative is that of ‘social venture capital’, meaning that in return for financing, it has secured rights to ensure that a successful vaccine, when it is achieved, will be distributed in developing countries ‘at a reasonable price’. The formation of an International Partnership Against HIV/Aids in Africa is to be welcomed as extremely important in the same context.

The question of money — price — is vital in terms of the palliatives available to arrest the disease and alleviate symptoms. It is another piercing example of the gulf between the world’s rich and the world’s poor that the suffering from Aids may be alleviated, and even the lives prolonged, of those victims who can afford expensive treatment. The same principle applies to prevention. Everywhere in Africa moral and humanitarian decisions are a common dilemma, with money the deciding factor.

At the level of international — global — responsibility, the total sum needed annually for Aids prevention in Africa is in the order of $2.3 billion. Africa currently receives only $165 million a year in official assistance from the world community.

Other questions that rest with the world community become relevant: debt relief for developing countries, for example. The Director-General of the World Health Organization said last year that debt relief should be reviewed in light of the resources that governments with large debts need to confront HIV. The role of governments in financing is another example. Where does the defence budget not far exceed the public health budget to combat Aids? Nevertheless, what HIV and Aids mean to the capability to govern, ultimately, was revealed in South Africa by the Minister of Public Service and Administration in February. The public service is the largest employer in the country and the fundamental government structure. In 1999, one in eight South Africans was HIV-positive. It is estimated that 270,000 out of 1.1 million public servants could be infected by 2004. This looming crisis in governance exists almost everywhere on the African continent. If, in developing countries, defence budgets continue to leave HIV budgets relegated to a footnote, all we shall have left to defend in the end is a graveyard.

Aids is not only a health catastrophe, a challenge to medical science. It is socially enmeshed in the conditions of life that obtain while it spreads, just as the medieval plague was in its time. Although Aids is no respecter of class or caste, slum conditions, ignorance and superstition (it is a white man’s disease; it is a black man’s disease) make the poor its greatest source of victims. In working to prevent the spread of the virus, we must accept the idea that promiscuity is difficult to condemn when sex is the cheapest or only available satisfaction for people society leaves to live on the street. On another socio-economic level, casual sex thrives among young people who are materially privileged yet whom society has failed to endow with the real values of human sexuality, the knowledge that fulfilment involves contact with the other’s personality, that the sexual act is not some mere bodily function like evacuation — which is what some campaigners seem to reduce it to. There are subtleties, important ones, connected with any campaign against HIV and Aids, if it is to succeed in changing attitudes towards sexual mores. For there will be a cure discovered, there will be a vaccine — and after that? How shall we restore the quality of human relations that have been debased, shamed, reduced to the source of a fatal disease? The free condom dispenser is not the panacea. Neither, alone, is sex education restricted to anatomical diagrams and dire warnings in schools. The entire meaningfulness of personal sexual relations will need to be restored. That is what social health means, along with inoculation and survival. Self-interest cannot be discounted. So, to the developed world, a pragmatic word from the stricken African continent: call not to ask for whom the stock exchange bell tolls and the figures on the computer sound the alarm — the toll is for Europe, for the United States, even for those countries where HIV and Aids victims are few. For if the markets and vast potential markets for the developed world’s goods fail — if decimated populations mean there is no one left economically active with money to spend — that bell tolls for thee, globally.

HIV/Aids is everyone’s disaster. It has, finally, something to do with our whole manner of existence. It confronts us with questions that must be answered historically: what have we done with the world, politically? What are we doing with the world? What do we mean by development? Some Ugandans who had been in the audience of an Aids information play were asked what message it had brought them. One said, ‘Don’t go out with bar girls.’ Another said, ‘Stick to one partner.’ Then an older woman said: ‘Aids has come to haunt a world that thought it was incomplete. Some wanted children, some wanted money, some wanted property, and all we ended up with is Aids.’

Maybe she spoke for Africa.

2000

What News on the Rialto?

The re-publication of a book by Natalia Ginzburg has brought back to me not only a work I found uniquely beautiful in its tranquil honesty when I read it in translation from the Italian in the sixties; it has opened an overgrown way, that I thought to be a cul-de-sac, in my own life.

Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings — are what? Fictionalised family history? What was actually said; and what has been invented by Natalia that went on out of her hearing, in her Italian family from the thirties through the fifties: added exchanges between its members, imaginatively created by familiarity and the emotions, love, resentment, understanding, of which she was part?

But she writes: ‘The places, events, people in this book are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented.’ Not for her the usual disclaimer, all characters are fictitious, no living personages, etc. ‘The names are all real … Possibly some may not be pleased to find themselves described in a book under their own names. To such I have nothing to say.’ And yet, again, from this translator of Proust (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, no less),¹ the other, self-admonition: ‘I must not be beguiled into autobiography as such.’ Her blindfold trail into the past is not signposted by an uneven paving stone or the bite into a madeleine, but by overhearing, echoing in her present, the intimate lingua franca of vanished family life.

The past is crowded out by the present during the day. Early in the morning I lie in bed eavesdropping on the birds and the rubrics heard in childhood surface from that past.

Natalia’s family sayings are concerned with family relationships increasingly affected by conflicting views on, and eventually actions of, fascists and anti-fascists — her family belonged to the latter. When I overhear in recollection my own family’s sayings, this is in the ambience of a different but related context: racism, first of the colonial kind, then that of its apogee, apartheid. But although Natalia Ginzburg married a foreigner, a Russian Jewish revolutionary, her own half-Jewish family was Italian, deeply rooted in their native country. There was no Old Country, not far behind them.

Now that family sayings come back to me from the house in a South African gold-mining town where I was born and grew up, I begin to see that, involved as I was in the clamour of racism and anti-racism, I did not hear that other voice whose significance I’ve never pursued. It’s a given: you don’t know your parents, ever, no matter how venerably stable your social background may be. But it is immigrant parents you particularly don’t know, if they have taken you, as I was, completely and unquestioningly into their assimilated life of the country of your birth, not theirs. My mother and maternal grandparents (the only ones I was ever to know) came to South Africa from England; my father from Latvia. There were revolutions and wars in Europe, nobody went back. Like Natalia, I don’t intend to be beguiled into autobiography. I can only confirm to myself that we lived entirely in the present, in the mining town and in the city where my grandparents lived. For me, the lives of parents and grandparents began with mine. My time, my place. Only now I’m led to decode from family sayings what these meant as clues to the life, the drowned Atlantis of the past where they had lived without me, back beyond me. The family sayings have become my small glossary of where they came from, not as marked on a map of the world but in attitudes and perceptions formed to deal with life — elsewhere; or to counter the immigrant’s alienation in the country he had adopted without assurance it had adopted him.

My grandfather Mark Myers was in love with his old wife Phoebe, one could see that, but sceptical of her intelligence as a shopper. He was a connoisseur of fruit, as perfectionist as any wine buff. When she arrived back at their Johannesburg flat from the greengrocer she would have to unpack her string bag before his eyes. He would pick up and sniff the melon; then run a finger over a peach’s down, alert for bruises. Perhaps it was the avocado that caught her out, too hard, overripe, he would shake it gently to hear if there was an answer from the pip detached from the flesh. Then derisory judgement, softened by use of a love-name from the old life: ‘Bob, they saw you coming.’

The reproachful quip didn’t exist in South African idiom. Mark Myers was a cockney, streetwise from Covent Garden. None of us knew what his work was before he came ‘out to Africa’ to prospect unsuccessfully for diamonds in Kimberley. But the saying became ours; if anyone in the family was conned, the affectionate jeer was to hand, from London. Bob, they saw you coming.

If my grandfather’s past was still extant, privately, for him, in the copies of the News of the World, the yellow press London paper he subscribed to by mailship, my father’s past was sunk five fathoms. The inevitable shtetl in the region of Riga had disappeared or been renamed on the side of new frontiers, its remaining inhabitants killed in pogroms or later in war. He had left school when perhaps eleven years old, apprenticed as a watchmaker, and after emigrating to South Africa at thirteen for some years plied his trade along the gold mines and rose to become the owner of a jewellery store where he prospered enough to employ someone else to repair watches. That much we knew. And that was all: clearly his origins were humble in comparison with the middle-class ones of my mother, whose father made his modest living by the sophisticated means of playing the stock exchange — a respectable gambler. My mother was the product of a good school for girls, and played the piano. She did not reassure her husband in any way about his origins; when they quarrelled she had the last word with her family saying: he came from people who ‘slept on the stove’. He never spoke of his Old Country and I, no doubt influenced by my mother’s dismissal of his lowly foreign past, never asked him about it.

My father’s sense of inferiority conversely had a sense of superiority: he had married ‘above himself’ as my mother made sure he realised. He might not have known the phrase, but he was aware of its significance. He had not sent back to the Old Country as some other immigrants did, before it disappeared, for a wife of his own kind from among those, cold and poor, who slept on the stove.

But of course the principal and enduring source of his superior inferiority was that my mother was a native English speaker with genuine English-speaking parents. It was due to the advantage of living with her, listening to her, and having at least his own good fortune to have a parrot’s ear, that he spoke that language almost entirely without the accent of Eastern European Jews that provides material for stand-up comics. Yiddish must have been his mother tongue — there was no one to speak it with, of any generation, in our family; a dead language for him. When some German speaker, result of a new immigration, this time from Nazi pogroms, was a customer in his shop, it was revealed my father could speak a little German learned in his short spell of schooling. During the Second World War, when there was news from the Russian front, it appeared that he also knew some Russian; he could pronounce all the unpronounceable names of cities and generals. He had picked up enough Afrikaans to deal with customers, Afrikaner whites, in the town — had to. Even more evident of the exigencies of immigrant survival, he had taught himself something invented by colonial mining companies in order for the white bosses to be able to communicate with the black indentured men who came from all over Southern, Central and East Africa to work in the mines — a curt pidgin of verbs and nouns believed to be more or less understandable to all, a mixture of Zulu, Afrikaans and English, dubbed Fanagalo. Be like — do — like this; more or less the accepted, certainly intended meaning. It consisted mainly of commands. He must have acquired it — had to — in the early days of his immigration when he went from mine to mine mending workers’ watches.

All this was mimicry, wasn’t it — surely the first essential for survival as an immigrant in any country, any time?

He knew English. He was fluent enough for all the purposes of our daily communication. He had refined his pronunciation through his choice of an ‘English’ wife. He had ‘English’ daughters who read beside him, in the evenings, Doctor Dolittle and Little Women, books he had never heard of from a culture that his wife assured him did not belong to him.

Yet — I hear it again. When he came home from his shop at the end of the day and my mother’s friends were gathered over their gin and vermouth, he would greet everyone with ‘What news on the Rialto?’

Where did that quotation come from, to him? He did not read anything except a newspaper; he certainly had never read The Merchant of Venice. What painstaking early struggle with a phrasebook, what lessons in English he must have scrimped and saved to afford, does that family saying represent? His news was that he was part of the taken-for-granted cultural background of the company, by a tag if nothing else.

My grandfather’s cockney sayings affirmed his past; my father’s, his need to hold a place in his present. When people complained about a misfortune, the shortcomings of the city council or the problems of making a living, he had another saying, this one more expressive in his adoptive Afrikaans than its equivalent might be in English: ‘So gaan dit in die wêreld’ — that’s the way of the world. He was ready with ‘Môre is nog ’n dag’ — tomorrow’s another day — if someone despaired in a troubling circumstance or lost the first round of a golf tournament. These sayings heard over and over, I didn’t recognise as the immigrant’s tactics, seeking acceptance. The stranger my father was, calling out. He was reinventing something: himself.

How much of self-esteem comes from defining someone as lower than oneself on the ladder of human values?

Where, on whom, from his precarious foothold, can an immigrant look down? An element of racism is identifying that person even while at the same time being identified by others as beneath them. By chance and history my father had come to a country where self-esteem via racism was indulged by those who were in absolute political power and social control, far from insecure. (The turn of history on them was to come much later, with the end of white rule …) That white community of South Africa — to which he could ‘belong’ at least by the pallor of his skin — despised the black people whose country they had colonised and ruled by force. So even an immigrant from a people who slept on the stove was provided with someone, some humankind, to regard as beneath him. My father conformed to the racist social judgements of white townspeople, our family friends, his shopkeeper colleagues, using a saying of this extended family of whites as they did. The strongest condemnation of a white man’s crude behaviour, drunk or sober, was to call him ‘a white kaffir’.

This was not a saying ever pronounced by my mother; in fact there would be in her face yet another confirmation of all that she found crude in my father; that he, of all people, should think it insulting for a white man to be called black.

There were subtleties in racism among the sayings familiar to me in our town. Here, even my mother, who was not racist when it came to black and white, would make use of them. Among Jews, there was the other expression of disgust, ‘he’s a real Peruvian’. ‘He’ would be a Jew whose loud behaviour, flamboyance and vulgarity offended. The ‘real Peruvian’ did not come from Peru and the insulting implication surely devolved upon Peruvians as much as it did on the man so scorned. Why such behaviour should be associated with Peru, where no one in the community had ever been, and there was no one from that country among our white population of English, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, Jewish, German, Greek origin, I can explain only by suggesting that to the speaker Peru was the end of the earth, beyond civilisation, the last place God made; remote as Africa might seem to Peruvians. Perhaps the outlandish epithet also served to distance local Jews from conduct that might give a toehold of credence to anti-Semitism, which rumbled among Afrikaners — themselves discriminated against by the English-speaking whites.

Fifty or more years later, I decode these family sayings as the echoes of lost home — Grandpa Myers’s — in an immigrant culture, or the innocently crafty attempt — my father’s — of survival in escape from that culture. These days, I walk past elegant shopping malls in the suburbs of Johannesburg through sidewalk markets where, capered about before me, dangled at me, are masks and jewellery, carvings and sculpture, cowrie-and-seed rattles. I’m importuned by strangers’ mimicry of South African sales-talk English. The vendors have come from all over Africa, they speak among themselves the mother tongues of their Old Countries, Mali, Nigeria, Congo, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Senegal, Ethiopia, anywhere and everywhere there is war, natural disaster of flood and drought, and poverty by comparison with which we are a rich country, despite our own share of the poor and workless.

Their cajolings, reproduction of phrases understood by them only in sense of intention, are their family sayings. They’re the latest arrivals of the endless no-nation of immigrants, forming and reforming the world, a globalisation that long, long predates any present concept. That’s the news on the Rialto; nothing new. Just survival.

2001

The Dwelling Place of Words

People always want to know when and where you write. As if there’s a secret methodology to be followed. It has never seemed to me to matter to the work — which is the writer’s ‘essential gesture’ (I quote Roland Barthes), the hand held out for society to grasp — whether the creator writes at noon or midnight, in a cork-lined room as Proust did or a shed as Amos Oz did in his early kibbutz days. Perhaps the questioner is more than curious; yearning for a jealously kept prescription on how to be a writer. There is none. Writing is the one ‘profession’ for which there is no professional training; ‘creative’ writing courses can only teach the aspirant to look at his/her writing critically; not how to create. The only school for a writer is the library — reading, reading. A journey through realms of how far, wide and deep writing can venture in the endless perspectives of human life. Learning from other writers’ perceptions that you have to find your way to yours, at the urge of the most powerful sense of yourself — creativity. Apart from that, you’re on your own.

Ours is the most solitary of occupations; the only comparison I can think of is keeper of a lighthouse. But the analogy mustn’t go too far, we do not cast the beam of light that will save the individual, or the world from coming to grief on its rocks.

Another standard enquiry put to fiction writers: what is your message? Milan Kundera has provided the response. The message is: ‘A novel searches and poses questions … The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. It does not prescribe or proscribe answers.’ We have the right and obligation of honesty to imply moral judgements we know people have, as exemplified in our fictional characters because — I paraphrase Goethe — wherever the writer thrusts a hand deep into society, the world, there will come up in it something of the truth. The writer her/himself stands before what has been dredged to light just as the reader will; what either makes of it will be individual moral judgement: her or his, writer’s or reader’s self-message.

That is the low-wattage beam I would claim for my own writings cast from my lighthouse, and those of the great writers who have illuminated my life. For me, writing has been and is an exploration of life, the safari that will go on into that amazing wilderness until I die. That is why my novels and stories are what I call open-ended; I’ve taken up an invention of human beings at some point in their lives, and set them down again living at some other point. My novel written in the 1980s, July’s People, ends with a central character, a woman, wading through a shallow river, running from a situation. To what? I am often asked. The answer is I don’t know. The only clues I have, and pass on there for the reader in the text of the novel that has gone before, are the social and historical context, the conflicting threats and pressures, personal and aleatory, of a time and place that would make up her options — what she could or might attempt next. The sole conclusion — in terms of reading a signpost — was one that I myself could come to, after I had re-read the novel (for a writer becomes reader when the publisher’s proofs arrive), was that crossing through the water was some kind of baptism into a new situation, new life, however uncertain, hazardous, even unimaginable in the light of how she had lived thus far.

One can’t even say that an individual death is the end of a story. What about the consequences the absence is going to have for others?

What about the aftermath of a political and societal conflict apparently resolved, in a novel whose final page leaves the men and women, the country, the cities, the children born to these, at that point? Again, the reader has the narrative and text that has gone before, to waken his/her own awareness, own questioning of self and society.

If the writer does not provide answers, is this a valid absolution from the ordinary human responsibility of engagement with society other than as the ‘essential gesture’, extended through literature?

Does the writer serve the raison d’être that every human being must decide for the self, by asserting the exploration of the word as the end and not the means of the writer’s being? ‘Words became my dwelling place.’ The great Mexican poet and writer, Octavio Paz, wrote this; but in his superb life’s work, on his intellectual journey, he invaded that place; he also wrote ‘I learned that politics is not only action but participation, it is not a matter of changing men but accompanying them, being one of them.’ The reason-to-be was a bringing together of the dwelling place of the artist and the clamorous world that surrounded it.

The great Günter Grass told me: ‘My professional life, my writing, all the things that interest me, have taught me that I cannot freely choose my subjects. For the most part my subjects were assigned to me by German history, by the war that was criminally started and conducted, and by the never-ending consequences of that era. Thus my books are fatally linked to these subjects, and I am not the only one who has had this experience.’

He certainly is not the only one.

In Europe, the USA, Latin America, China, Japan, Africa — where in the world could this not be so? There are none of us who can ‘choose our subjects’ free of the contexts that contain our lives, shape our thought, influence every aspect of our existence. (Even the fantasy of space fiction is an alternative to the known, the writer’s imaginative reaction to it.) Could Philip Roth erase the tattoo of the Nazi camps from under the skin of his characters? Can Israeli writers, Palestinian writers, now ‘choose’ not to feel the tragic conflict between their people burning the dwelling place of words? Could Kenzaburo Oe create characters not bearing in themselves the gene of consciousness implanted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; could Czeslaw Milosz, living through revolution and exile, not have to ask himself in his poem ‘Dedication’, ‘What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?’ Could Chinua Achebe’s characters not have in their bloodstream the stain of a civil war in Nigeria? In Africa, the experiences of colonialism, its apogee, apartheid, post-colonialism and new-nation conflicts, have been a powerful collective consciousness in African writers, black and white. And in the increasing interconsciousness, the realisation that what happens somewhere in the world is just one manifestation of what is happening subliminally or going to happen in one way or another, affect in one way or another, everywhere — the epic of emigration, immigration, the world-wandering of new refugees and exiles, political and economic, for example — is a fatal linkage, not ‘fatal’ in the deathly sense, but in that of inescapable awareness in the writer. I have just written a novel, The Pickup, within this awareness, taking up at one point and leaving at another point in their lives, characters in our millennial phase of this eternal exodus and arrival.

However, when a country has come through long conflict and its resolution, its writers are assumed to have lost their ‘subject’. We in South Africa are challenged — top of the list in journalists’ interviews — ‘So what are you going to write about now that apartheid has gone?’

Apartheid was a plan of social engineering and its laws; novels, stories, poetry and plays were an exploration of how people thought and lived, their ultimate humanity out of reach of extinction. Life did not end with apartheid. ‘The new situation must bring new subjects’ — Czech writer Ivan Klíma wrote this, in exile, and out of the breakup of his country. In South Africa there is not breakup and its violent consequences, but a difficult and extraordinary bringing-together of what was divided. The new subjects, some wonderful, some dismaying, have scarcely had time to choose us.

‘What do we know / But that we face / One another in this place’ — William Butler Yeats. That is surely the subject that in the dwelling place of words, everywhere, chooses the writer.

2001

The Entitlement Approach

Governance’: ‘the action or manner of governing’, ‘the state of being governed’. In the past this dictionary definition was taken as referring specifically to national governments and their people. But in our age of globalisation, of global resources and certainly global problems, the concept of governance in relation to tackling world poverty starts at a much higher level, the Everest of international finance. Governance in individual countries is influenced by and in many instances prescribed by these. So we have to begin by facing the opposing conceptions most widely held about the devolution from the heights, down to earth.

Recipient countries of loan funds through the IMF and World Bank resent conditions imposed by the agencies of the financial Everest as to the ways in which the money is to be used. They even assert that development — the object — is hampered by such conditions.

The agencies cite stringent necessity for conditions in order to counter their experience of corruption as a government conduit through which the funds disappear without any development reaching a country’s population.

So governance begins above a country’s own laws and administration. Whether debt owed to the Everest should be written off, in view of crippling interest payments required even from countries which do use the money for sustainable development, is another question — should Everest be a usurer, or should it be the real agent of redistribution of wealth?

There are encouraging signs of a change in conception on the part of donors and recipients. Mamphele Ramphele, speaking as Managing Director of the Human Development Unit of the World Bank, says that the approach now needed is for ‘countries to take ownership’ of development rather than ‘receive prescribed programmes of action … to leverage their own destiny and build capacity for themselves’.¹⁰⁵ Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade says of Africans who have been ‘financing debt by loans and aid for years’, ‘Those instruments don’t take us far … we must first understand how we got into debt in the first place.’¹⁰⁶ This facing of reality by both donor and debtor gives credence to the claim by ten African leaders conferring with the IMF and World Bank this year, of a ‘major step forward to define a new approach to fight poverty in Africa’.

What principal areas of national life depend on good national governance if poverty is to be tackled on the ground, within each country? Foremost, surely: unemployment, post-colonial land redistribution, use and exploitation of natural resources, health care with emphasis on the Aids epidemic, education; and not least, corruption. There is a determining condition if these are to be addressed: press and media freedom. There is no good governance without a population free to participate in open debate on government policy and practice, to effect for themselves progress in the condition of their lives.

‘Entitlement relations’¹⁰⁷ — Amartya Sen’s phrase defines for me what global governance through international finance and national governance on the ground need to have with a population on the premise that they are to tackle poverty the only effective way — together. And here UNDP, with partnership stressed as its mode of operation in the twenty-first century, provides a model in its proven dedication to be, itself, a partner in enterprises of and for good governance. Experience in project innovation has taught the lesson that success is dependent on making sure governance of a country has the minimum means, and the will, to cooperate — the capacity. This implies that capacity training is, in itself, a project in the partnership of governance with poverty elimination. A project cannot succeed where the capacity to implement it — whether through lack of trained personnel, communication facilities — is not at least in a parallel state of development. To reach the end, there must be the minimal means. Then the energy and determination of the population can, and does, take off for success.

The developing world, the peoples of that world, have entitlement; entitlement to the redistribution of the world’s wealth rather than the euphemistic ‘aid’, entitlement to just, incorruptible governance. The right to recognition of, and action within, the interdependence of governance and the millennial, global problem, poverty.

2001

The Ballad of the Fifth Avenue Hotel

The Fifth Avenue Hotel. Easter 1954. Dim purple lighting on toy bunny rabbits perched over our heads all around a ledge beneath the restaurant ceiling. I am thirty years old, I have published two books of stories and a first novel; I am in the USA for the first time and I’m seated at table with a famous American writer — a Southerner, like myself, although my South is Africa — whose work I greatly admire. She is Carson McCullers. We have been brought together, in my neophyte’s privileged anticipation, by the kindness of her sister, Margaret Smith, and Cyrilly Abels, editors of Mademoiselle, then a literary-innovative women’s magazine that, along with The New Yorker, had published some of my stories. There before me is that life-questioning image, the wonderful face of a wise child who was born devastatingly knowing too much — the face of the being who wrote The Ballad of the Sad Café.

What I didn’t know was that Carson had just come out of long weeks of detoxification, shut away somewhere. What I also didn’t know was what that experience could do to the victim; how dazed was the return to the world. What followed was surely a scene written by her friend Tennessee Williams. Carson kept saying to Margaret, ‘Sister, I think we need a a new beau.’ It wasn’t ironic or in lunch-table jest; it was a grave and determined conclusion. With me was my new husband (of one month). All through the meal Carson leaned a hand with a delicate fork, taking morsels from his plate. The questions I had ready to ask the writer who had meant much to me fled my mind. I managed somehow to tell her of my admiration for her work; don’t remember that brought any response.

Bunny rabbits sister we need a new beau.

So America was a purple-lit fantasy with a foreboding message. If this was what fame could mean for a writer, I didn’t think I wanted it ever to come to me. My husband (my new beau) was more compassionately moved, less judgemental; less frightened, although he himself had just taken on that risky mate, a writer.

Meeting those emissaries of American culture, the writers, has been mostly good and reassuring since that sad ballad of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Soon there was Eudora Welty, American Chekhov, whose stories had early influenced me: Eudora in Jackson, Mississippi, as wonderful in person as she is as a writer. An American original of a special kind.

I haven’t always encountered American writers in their home country. John Updike and I met happily in Australia, where at the Adelaide Festival we looked like a comedy duo, he so gangling tall, I so small. Kurt Vonnegut literally embodied a wry American brand of humour at a writers’ get-together in Sweden. I met James Baldwin in France and we talked as if we’d known each other always; perhaps we had, in our experience of racism, he in his country, I in mine — what this means for the transformations of the writer’s imagination.

Some encounters have resulted in precious friendship. At a literary conference there was a woman with a damn-you-all beautiful face and swirling black hair, sitting on a step outside the venue: I recognised Susan Sontag. We fled the deliberations and explored the foreign city; the first of many exhilarating times together. Elisabeth Hardwick lent me Robert Lowell’s den-apartment with library, in New York; gave me the freedom of her rich mind as well as the place where she still lives.

Of course I’d met America through their writings — all of them — along with the America of Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Miller, Hemingway et al. (he more definitively American abroad than at home); had been confronted with the country in this deepest way, before coming face to face.

2001

Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart

Things fall apart.

Chinua Achebe’s title, quoted from a poem by William Butler Yeats, seems a challenging declaration: what chaos will the reader be confronted with when taking up the opening pages of this book, first published in 1958?

But the title is a presentiment: Achebe is going to create what was complete before the situation in the title is to come about. Only then can the revelation of disintegration be fully understood. Achebe did not begin this first novel, and does not begin his later ones, with description of the setting of the story. In what country his characters live, what kind of life in what sort of landscape, city, village — he plunges us immediately among the people themselves in their full activity, and their physical surroundings of a region of Nigeria, West Africa, emerge as part of their identity as the reader follows. Okonkwo, the central character, is introduced in the first paragraph as a young man who has brought honour to his village by his fame as a wrestler, never thrown by opponents in any of the bouts of the traditional sport popular in the region. ‘The drums beat and the flutes sound and the spectators held their breath … Amazile was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten … he was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.’

Achebe has the master story-teller’s knowledge that the present — what is happening to his characters now — can be totally meaningful only if (the way it is in our own lives) the past that has formed these people is shown as still within them, directing their lives. Okonkwo’s story is taken up in an actual period not long before Nigeria’s independence from British rule. ‘That was … twenty years ago or more, and during this time Okonkwo’s fame had grown like a bush fire in the harmattan.’ Okonkwo’s father was a failure by the standards of this Nigerian village of the Ibo clan with which we have quickly been made familiar through lively anecdotal exchange. Idle, owing thousands of cowries (the local currency), he had never qualified to take the series of traditional titles which recognise honour and success in Umuofia, and which are marked not by the medals that are presented to dignitaries in the European world, but by special anklets worn by those honoured. Even after his father has been dead for ten years, the driving motive in Okonkwo’s life is to be everything his father was not. Okonkwo has triumphed in tribal battles, he’s a wealthy farmer with three wives, and has taken two titles while still young. But this distinction and success bring about an obligation that Achebe introduces as natural, unexceptional in a close-knit society, yet whose consequences he is going to lead us to discover along with him, without advance warning — such is his power to engage the reader rather than tell a story.

Now an introduction must not reveal too much of what is in the book itself, only arouse anticipation; so I shan’t recount the dramatic warring dispute between Umuofia and a neighbouring village, Mbaino, which results in Okonkwo being given the responsibility of taking into his household Ikemefuna, an Mbaino boy, given as reparation. The child at first is terrified, cannot understand what is happening to him, but he is a lively boy, becomes popular in Okonkwo’s household and a special friend of Okonkwo’s son Nwoye. Okonkwo, who regards the show of any emotion as weakness (the weakness of his father), is inwardly fond of the boy and so treats him familiarly like everybody else — ‘with a heavy hand’. Ikemefuna calls him Father and sometimes has the honour of being allowed to carry Okonkwo’s stool and goatskin bag to village ancestral feasts.

Ikemefuna takes part with the whole family in the planting of the yam. The yam is introduced here as ‘the king of crops’, the beautiful, bustling detail of its cultivation both the cycle of seasons and, as life-sustaining food, the cycle of human existence; from this first novel can be traced further the yam’s compelling emergence, in Achebe’s later work, as a philosophical and political symbol: life and death in the opposition of the yam and the knife.

The Feast of the New Yam is a two-day village celebration with feasting, palm wine and the customary great wrestling match between Okonkwo’s village and its neighbours. It’s a joyful interlude in which Achebe generously, for the reader’s pleasure, uses his gifts of creating a whole community of men, women and children as people we instantly get to know intimately, recognising their individual ways of expressing themselves. The comedy of sharp exchanges and laughter sounds against the drums beating out the wrestling dance; you can almost smell the scents of the cooking. There are delightful conversations to be overheard between the women, half pidgin English, half to be followed as translated by Achebe from the rich imagery of the Ibo language. The undercurrent of the order of life for the Umuofians is revealed in what appears to be ordinary talk, gossip and conventional polite enquiry. Ezinma, Okonkwo’s favourite daughter, comes to our attention. A woman who knows the girl’s mother and has seen a number of her children die early, asks about Ezinma. The mother says: ‘She has been well for some time now. Perhaps she has come to stay.’ ‘I think she will stay,’ says the other woman. ‘They usually stay if they do not die before the age of six.’

Now Ikemefuna has lived in Okonkwo’s household for three years and Okonkwo is pleased that his influence on Nwoye is excellent. He encourages the two boys to sit with him, manly, in his obi — his quarters. He tells them stories of tribal wars and his own bold exploits. Nwoye prefers the folk stories and legends his mother used to tell him, and which enrich this novel with a cast of wily characters — including cosmic Earth and Sky — that make Disney’s pale by contrast. The time of harmony, peace and plenty continues with the arrival of the great sky-darkening horde of locusts — here, not the curse of the biblical locusts but a delicacy everyone turns out to catch and eat.

Achebe’s exploration of life — which is what all literature, all art is — through the wonderful powers of his imagination, reveals in all his writings the particular vulnerability of human beings when they are most happy. It is then that some almost forgotten conflict in the past suddenly raises the knife against the yam. Okonkwo is in his obi with Ikemefuna and Nwoye, crunching locusts and drinking palm wine, when the village elder, Ezeudu, arrives and asks to see Okonkwo outside. There he says something incomprehensible to Okonkwo, presenting Ikemefuna as an outcast who cannot continue to be accepted by the Umuofians. The Oracle of the Hills and Caves has declared he must be killed. The old man says, ‘That boy calls you father. Do not bear a hand in his death … They will take him outside Umuofia as is the custom, and kill him there. But I want you to have nothing to do with it. He calls you father.’

How Okonkwo is fatefully involved in this inescapable murder is told mainly through the thoughts of the boy who, believing he is being returned to his home village, is being escorted by the Umuofians to his death. As he is struck by the matchet of one of the men he runs towards Okonkwo, calls out ‘“My father, they have killed me!” Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.’

For a time Okonkwo can neither eat nor sleep. He drinks wine ‘from morning till night, and his eyes were red and fierce like the eyes of a rat when it was caught by the tail and dashed against the floor’. For the sacrifice of Ikemefuna, his son Nwoye will never forgive him, with fateful consequences to unfold in his own life and that of his father.

But Okonkwo recovers: ‘he is not a man of thought but of action; it is the season to tap his palm trees for wine, and the family of a suitor for his daughter, sixteen-year-old Akueke, is about to arrive’. The negotiations between the two families over cowrie bride-price and the amount of palm wine the bridegroom’s family is expected to provide are enchantingly comic and slyly character-revealing, without malice — a feature of Achebe’s humour, particularly in his early work, before the ugly and terrible times of civil war and post-independence corruption within which he was writing sharpened humour into teeth-clenched satire.

It is in the chatter at the marriage negotiations that the white man enters for the first time in Umuofia and the novel. There is discussion about different customs among different villages. Someone remarks

‘But what is good in one place is bad in another place …’

‘The world is large,’ said Okonkwo, ‘I have even heard that in

some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.’

‘That cannot be,’ said Machi. ‘You might as well say that the

woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.’

‘It is like the story of white men who, they say, are white like

this piece of chalk,’ said Obierika ‘… And these white men, they say, have no toes.’

‘Have you ever seen them?’ asked Machi.

‘Have you?’ asked Obierika.

‘One of them passes here frequently’ [says Machi.] ‘His name is Amadi.’ Those who knew Amadi laughed. He was a leper, and the polite name for leprosy was ‘the white skin’.

The people of Umuofia are great talkers. They become lively companions of the reader, who is overhearing their memories, rivalries, opinions, teasing, original views, all expressed with humour and intimate imagery that come from their way of life, its continuum of history, legend, security of place. The joking reference to the fact that no one has seen a white man is merely a snatch of the exchanges that criss-cross from subject to subject. The white man is butt of a laughable anecdote; he is not there yet, with his Bible and his gun. But Achebe has sounded the single beat of a distant drum, just as subconsciously in our own everyday talk there may occur an unnoticed reference to something that is looming, one day to change our lives.

Okonkwo is just beginning to be able to reconcile himself to — thrust aside — his part in the death of Ikemefuna when his favourite daughter, Ezinma, of whom he thinks so proudly that he has paid her the highest compliment in wishing that she were a boy, falls ill. Iba — malaria — does not respond to the treatment Okonkwo and her mother Ekwefi, one of his wives, give her. With this event, Ekwefi emerges from the wings where so far the village women have remained while men take the centre stage in the story. She is to be the first of a series of women characters, each growing in the author’s intuition of women and recognition of their qualities, their pilgrimage towards the self-realisation that is equality with men in life’s decisions and activities, which was to culminate in the character of Beatrice in his 1987 novel Anthills of the Savannah. Bearing and rearing children is the purpose and dignity allotted to women in Umuofia society. Achebe, the most honest of writers, simply allows us our own judgement of the facts: the fate of local women. Ekwefi has borne ten children and all but Ezinma died in infancy; it is his other wives who have given Okonkwo sons. Ekwefi’s suffering speaks for itself in her natural, dramatic, poetic lament:

Her deepening despair found expression in the names she gave her children. One of them was a pathetic cry, Onwumbiko — ‘Death, I implore you’. But Death took no notice; Onwumbiko died. The next child was a girl, Ozoemena — ‘May it not happen again’. She died, and two others after her. Ekwefi then became defiant and called her next child Onwuma — ‘Death may please himself’. And he did.

So Ezinma at ten years old is the single survivor, best beloved of both parents. It is generally accepted in the village that she is an ogbanje. The concept is rather like that of karma: one who dies in one life returns to live again. But here the rebirth represents a curse.

Some of them [the children] did become tired of their evil rounds of birth and death, or took pity on their mothers and stayed. Ekwefi believed deep inside her that Ezinma had come to stay … a medicine man had dug up Ezinma’s iya-uwa. The iya-uwa was the bond with the world of ogbanje, and the discovery meant that the bond had been broken.

But Ezinma’s latest grave illness suggests that the iya-uwa might not have been the genuine one. In desperation the parents summon the medicine man, Okagbue, to find out from the child where it is believed she herself has buried her real iya-uwa. Ezinma leads Okagbue, her parents and a following crowd on a wild-goose chase (perhaps mischievously!) beyond the village and then back again to an orange tree beside her father’s obi. The medicine man digs a pit there so deep that he can no longer be seen by the tense crowd. Finally, he throws out a rag on his hoe; some women run away in fear. Ceremoniously he unties the rag and the fetish, a smooth, shiny pebble, falls out. ‘“Is this yours?” he asked Ezinma. “Yes,” she replied. All the women shouted with joy because Ekwefi’s trials were at last ended.’ But Achebe, weaving his diviner’s creative texture of life back and forth, suddenly announces that all this happened a year before the point at which his narrative has arrived now, and Ezinma is once more shivering with iba. This time, Okonkwo cures the attack with an inhalation brewed from grasses, roots and barks of medicinal trees. Natural science, rationality, has won over superstition.

The presence of the supernatural, however, in its particular forms is among and embodied in the Umuofians’ daily life just as the supernatural, in their particular forms of belief, is embodied in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and other beliefs.

One of the forms the supernatural takes in Umuofia is the ancestors in the guise of — inhabiting, it is believed — a masquerade of men which among other purposes, administers justice in disputes. The law: not in the judge’s wig and gown, but the fearsome appearance of the egwugwu, ancestral spirits emerging from a sacred hut to sound of drums and flutes. The masquerade faced ‘away from the crowd, who saw only its backs with the many coloured patterns and drawings’ of their masquerade costumes. We can see some of these costumes today in many of the museums of the world, and they are recalled to us from books on African art, for they are recognised as a spectacular and profound art form. Symbolic, like all religious art, they represent, as one of the crowd gathered says, ‘what is beyond our knowledge’.

The case to be heard by the representatives of the ancestors this time is a commonplace enough one: a wife and children have been abducted from her husband by her family. He demands that they shall return the bride-price he paid for her.

A member of her family, Odukwe, declares what the man has said is true; but what is also true is that ‘My in-law, Uzowulu, is a beast … no single day passed in the sky without his beating the woman … when she was pregnant, he beat her until she miscarried.’

Uzowulu shouts: ‘It is a lie. She miscarried after she had gone to sleep with her lover.’

To roars of laughter from the crowd, Odukwe, no mincer of words, continues: the wife may be allowed to return to her husband ‘on the understanding that if he ever beats her again we shall cut off his genitals for him.’

And one elder in the crowd says to another, ‘I don’t know why such a trifle should come before the egwugwu.’ Here is Achebe delighting in puncturing solemnity with a sly aside.

The interaction between the lively, happy daily life of the village, centred by Achebe on Okonkwo’s family, and the ever-present darkness of supernatural beliefs beneath it continues at this pre-colonial stage in the community’s history. The reader is listening in to a cosy, wonderful evening of story-telling exchange between Ezinma and her mother when the graphic legend of the Tortoise, who names himself ‘All of You’, who engages with the birds, named ‘People of The Sky’, is shattered by the arrival of Chielo, priestess of the god Agbala. She claims Ezinma as ‘her daughter’ and declares that Agbala demands that the child come to him ‘in his house in the hills and the caves’. Okonkwo protests; the priestess screams, ‘Beware Okonkwo! Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god is speaking?’

There follows an exciting night-long ordeal of tension and dread as the priestess, with Ezinma on her back, takes the trail, terrified Ekwefi following. The priestess and Ezinma disappear into a narrow cave mouth. Ekwefi vows that if she hears Ezinma cry out she will ‘rush into the cave to defend her against all the gods in the world. She would die with her.’ Okonkwo has decided to follow: he suddenly appears and they wait together until dawn. Achebe understands so well the curious process by which memory distracts, sustainingly, from the most fearful events. Beside Okonkwo, Ekwefi finds herself thinking of their youth. Another dawn: she was going to fetch water. His house was on the way to the stream. She knocked at his door. ‘Even in those days he was a man of few words. He just carried her to his bed and in the darkness began to feel around her waist for the loose end of her cloth.’

Achebe leaves us in suspense, on that intimate pause. The story is taken up surprisingly next day: Okonkwo’s friend Obierika is celebrating a joyous occasion, the wedding of his daughter: life goes on; whatever fears and disasters threaten individuals, the yam and the knife eternally contend. For Okonkwo, tragedy has been averted: we learn, as the preparations for the feast begin, that Ezinma is sleeping safely in her bed — the priestess brought her back and laid her there, unharmed. On the turning wheel of human life, the festive scene of the wedding is followed by another ceremony in the cycle, the funeral of a man who had the distinction of having taken three anklet titles out of the four created by the clan. Okonkwo is among the men who, to drumming and dancing, fire a last salute to the dead dignitary. Then comes ‘a cry of agony and shouts of horror. It was as if a spell had been cast.’ And it is as if a spell has been cast on Okonkwo: his gun has exploded and killed the dead man’s sixteen-year-old son. Achebe does not, and doesn’t have to remind us of the echo here of the other crime Okonkwo was led into by circumstance — the final death-blow he gave Ikemefuna — we hear it.

‘The only course open to Okonkwo was to flee from the clan. It was a crime against the earth goddess to kill a clansman … the crime was of two kinds, male and female. Okonkwo had committed the female, because it had been inadvertent. He could return to the clan after seven years.’

Seven years.

Okonkwo has become an exile; of a kind. For he takes his wives and children to the village of Mbanta, from where his mother came and where she was returned for burial. He is well received by his mother’s kinspeople, given land, helped to build an obi and huts for his family, supplied with seed-yams. ‘… but it was like beginning life anew … like learning to become left-handed … his life had been ruled by a great passion — to become one of the lords’ in his clan in Umuofia. ‘That had been his life-spring. And he had all but achieved it. Then everything had been broken.’ To Okonkwo, personally, has come to pass this prophecy of Achebe’s title Things Fall Apart.

The second section of the novel is taken up in the second year of Okonkwo’s exile. The white man makes his real, ominous entry this time. A visit of an old friend from Umuofia brings news of the destruction of their neighbouring village, Abame.

During the last planting season a white man had appeared in their clan.

‘An albino’ suggested Okonkwo.

‘He was not an albino. He was quite different. He was riding an iron horse. The first people who saw him ran away; but he stood beckoning to them … The elders consulted their Oracle and it told them that the strange man would break their clan and spread destruction among them … And so they killed the white man and tied his iron horse to their sacred tree because it looked as if it would run away to call the man’s friends. It was said that other white men were on their way.’

They were indeed; they came to the market day and killed everyone there. Okonkwo’s friend Obierika says

‘We have heard stories about white men who made the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no-one thought the stories were true.’

‘There is no story that is not true’ said someone else. ‘The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.’

Two years pass once again. The white man, in the person of missionaries, has come to both Umuofia and Mbanta. Okonkwo’s son has appeared in Umuofia as a convert. Obierika comes to Mbanta to tell Okonkwo that when he asked Nwoye ‘“How is your father?” Nwoye said, “I don’t know. He is not my father.”’ But Okonkwo does not want to speak of the son who has rejected his origin for God the Father.

Achebe, having dropped this bombshell, reels the story back to create the scene of the arrival of the missionaries, which has already taken place. The event is bitingly hilarious. When they had all gathered the white man began to speak to them. He spoke through an interpreter who was an Ibo man. Many people laughed at the way the white man appeared ‘evidently’ to be using words strangely. According to the interpretation, instead of saying ‘myself’ he always said ‘my buttocks’. But he was a man of commanding presence and the clansmen listened attentively.

He said he was one of them … The white man was also their brother because they were all sons of God. And he told them about this new God, the creator of all the world and all the men and women. He told them they worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone … the true God lived on high and that all men when they died went before him for judgement.

‘We have been sent by this great God to ask you to leave your wicked ways and false gods and turn to Him so that you may be saved when you die.’

‘Your buttocks understand our language,’ said someone light-heartedly and the crowd laughed.

When the white missionary speaks of the Son of God,

Okonkwo, who only stayed [at the gathering] in the hope that it might come to chasing the men out of the village or whipping them, now said: ‘You told us with your own mouth that there was only one god. Now you talk about his son. He must have a wife, then.’

The crowd agreed.… ‘Your buttocks said he had a son,’ said the joker. ‘So he must have a wife and all of them must have buttocks.’

But Nwoye, that day, had been impressed and moved. ‘It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question … the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.’

The missionaries ask for land to build a church and the elders give them land — in the Evil Forest, where were buried people who died of evil diseases, and which was the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine men when they died. ‘They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.’

The missionaries begin to build their church; ‘The inhabitants of Mbanta expected them all to be dead within four days.’ None of them died. ‘And then it was known that the white man’s fetish had unbelievable power. It was said that he wore glasses on his eyes so that he could see and talk to evil spirits.’ Nevertheless, the missionaries begin to make converts.

Nwoye kept his attraction to the new faith secret, for fear of his father. But someone sees Nwoye among the Christians and reports this. When the boy comes home Okonkwo is overcome with fury and grips him by the neck.

‘Where have you been.’ [Nwoye struggles to free himself.] ‘Answer me!’ roared Okonkwo, ‘Before I kill you!’ [He seizes a stick and gives the boy savage blows.]

‘Leave that boy at once’ said a voice in the outer compound. It was Okonkwo’s uncle, Uchendu. ‘Are you mad?’

Okonkwo did not answer. But he left hold of Nwoye, who walked away and never returned.

The conflict between the white man’s religion and the religion of the Ibo people of Umuofia and Mbanta is personified for Okonkwo in Nwoye, a Christian convert now at a missionary school in Umuofia from which Okonkwo is exiled. ‘… his son’s crime stood out in stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one’s father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors?’

But his distress is soon to go beyond the defection of his son. Animosity and hostile acts between the Christian missionaries and converts and the people of Mbanta was threatening to disrupt the entire way of life. And ‘… stories were gaining ground that the white man had not only brought a religion but also a government. It was said that they had built a place of judgment in Umuofia to protect the followers of their religion. It was even said that they had hanged one man who killed a missionary.’ In these observations and rumours of the Ibos Achebe brings alive to the reader how what goes under the Western label ‘colonialism’ — the guise of conquest by means other than war itself — was seen, realised, experienced by the people themselves: how they visualised the church and the courthouse in their own words, their own ideas of social order. Okonkwo becomes active among the elders in their response to church and court. The decision finally is made to ostracise the Christian converts: the unity that had existed in each village through countless generations is fractured.

At this time Okonkwo’s seven years of exile are about to end. After the cassava harvest he announces his farewell.

‘I am calling a feast because I have the wherewithal. I cannot live on the bank of a river and wash my hands with spittle. My mother’s people have been good to me and I must show my gratitude.’ And so three goats were slaughtered and a number of fowls … It was like a wedding feast. There was foo-foo and yam pottage, egusi soup and bitter-leaf soup and pots and pots of palm wine.

An elder makes a speech. ‘A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes … We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so. You may ask why I am saying all this. I say it because I fear for the younger generation, for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his father and his ancestors, like a hunter’s dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan.’

Okonkwo has returned from exile.

… seven years was a long time to be away from one’s clan. A man’s place was not always there, waiting for him. As soon as he left, someone else rose and filled it. The clan was like a lizard: if it lost its tail it soon grew another … He knew that he had lost the chance to lead his warlike clan against the new religion, which he was told, had gained ground. He had lost the years in which he might have taken the highest titles in the clan. But some of these losses were not irreparable. He would return with a flourish, and regain the seven wasted years … the first thing he would do would be to rebuild his compound on a more magnificent scale.

If Nwoye is a traitor whose existence is no longer recognised by his father, that father would show his wealth by initiating his five other sons in the ozo society. ‘Only the really great men in the clan were able to do this. Okonkwo saw clearly the high esteem in which he would be held, and he saw himself taking the highest title in the land.’ Among his sons and daughters Ezinma is still his favourite child and he continues to wish she were a boy; as a compensation for what her strong character could have achieved as his son he envisages that her beauty and personality will attract a son-in-law who would be a ‘man of authority within the clan’.

Returning to his clan and village, Okonkwo seems to have left behind, along with the years of exile, the Mbata elder’s fearful warning. Okonkwo’s vision of re-establishment is that within the traditional society which has in reality changed irreparably — the tail the lizard has grown is not the same as that of the old body grown whole again. There are many men and women in Umuofia who realise that ‘The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed in Umuofia.’ They have entered the world of production not only for their own consumption, but for sale and profit. ‘… And even in the matter of religion there was a growing feeling that there might be something in it after all, something vaguely akin to method in the overwhelming madness.’

The current white missionary, Mr Brown, was not over-zealous in his task of conversion to Christianity, he was a peacemaker ‘who came to be respected even by the clan, because he trod softly on its faith. He made friends with some of the great men of the clan and on one of his frequent visits to the neighbouring villages he had been presented with a carved elephant tusk, which was a sign of dignity and rank.’ And the numbers of converts to the church was steadily growing. One of the great men had given a son ‘to be taught the white man’s knowledge in Mr Brown’s school’. Learning to read and write was an achievement, even if not on the same great level as the anklet of the clan’s titles. ‘… it was not long before the people began to say that the white man’s medicine was quick in working.’

Mr Brown’s school produced results. A few months in it were enough to make a literate court messenger or even a court clerk. Some Umuofians became teachers or pastors as new schools and churches were built by the British. The establishment of colonial occupation provided such opportunities. But — ‘From the very beginning religion and education went hand in hand.’ If you wanted the one it had to be in the grasp of the other. Achebe’s integrity as a writer in search of truth, and his honesty as a man, recognise that progress was real — in the forms of knowledge as it exists essential to the modern world in which Africa was so soon inevitably to become part; for gain or painful loss in terms of its own forms of knowledge and wisdom.

Achebe has the playwright’s gift of making a conversation between people of opposing faiths and ideas an exciting to-and-fro. In Chapter 21 the missionary, Mr Brown, and the elder, Akunna, have a brilliant exchange on their different religious beliefs. Neither succeeds in converting the other, of course, but they learn more about their different beliefs; so do we, and about the apparently common human need to have a divine explanation and guidance for existence on earth.

Akunna says,

‘You say there is one supreme God who made heaven and earth. We also believe in Him and call Him Chukwu. He made all the world and the other gods.’

‘There are no other gods’ said Mr Brown. ‘Chukwu is the only God and all others are false. You carve a piece of wood … and you call it a god. But it is still a piece of wood.’

‘The tree from which it came was made by Chukwu, as indeed all minor gods were. But He made them for His messengers so that we could approach Him through them. It is like you. You are the head of your church.’

[Mr Brown: ] ‘No. The head of my church is God himself.’ [Akunna: ] ‘I know, but there must be a head in this world among men.’

[Brown: ] ‘The head of my church in that sense is in England.’

‘That is exactly what I am saying. The head of your church is in your country. He has sent you here as his messenger …’

And now politics enters the verbal contest.

‘Or let me take another example, the District Commissioner … Your Queen [Queen Victoria] sends her messenger, the District Commissioner. He finds he cannot do the work alone and so he appoints kotma [assistants] to help him. It is the same with God or Chukwu. He appoints the smaller gods to help him because his work is too great for one person.’

[Mr Brown: ] ‘You should not think of Him as a person. It is because you do that you imagine he must need helpers. And the worst thing about it is that you give all the worship to the false gods you have created.’

‘That is not so … when his servants fail to help us we go to the last source of hope. We appear to pay greater attentions to the little gods but that is not so. We worry them because we are afraid to worry their Master.’

… ‘You said one interesting thing’ said Mr Brown. ‘You are afraid of Chukwu. In my religion Chukwu is a loving Father and need not be feared by those who do His will.’

‘But we must fear him when we are not doing his will,’ said Akunna. ‘And who is to tell his will? It is too great to be known.’

Okonkwo’s homecoming has turned out ‘not as memorable as he had wished … Umuofia did not appear to have taken any special notice of the warrior’s return. The clan had undergone such profound change during his exile that it was barely recognisable.

The new religion and government and the trading stores were very much in the people’s eyes and minds …’ Now he, too, ‘mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart’.

The sense of presentiment which Achebe creates as we read takes the form of a new upheaval in the person of Mr Brown’s successor. Reverend Smith ‘saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness.’

There was a saying in Umuofia that ‘as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him. Mr Smith danced a furious step and so the drums went mad. The over-zealous converts … now flourished in full favour.’ This culminates in the disastrous clash between church and clan that has been gathering since Mr Brown left. One of the most heinous crimes against the clan was the sacrilege of unmasking an egwugwu — remember the masquerade of the embodied spirits of the ancestors? Now, during the masquerade ceremonies a Christian convert, Enoch, dares to do just this. An ancestral spirit has been desecrated by the act and the whole of Umuofia is thrown into violent confusion. Reverend Smith and the members of his flock decide to protect their fellow Christian, the violator, hiding him from the wrath of the band of egwugwu and the people. Smith stands before the mob and refuses to give up Enoch; there is terrible tension as it seems Smith is going to be killed. But the head of the ancestors, Ajofia, makes a dramatic intervention.

‘The body of the white man, I salute you,’ he said, using the language in which immortals spoke to men …’ Tell the white man that we will not do him any harm,’ he said to the interpreter, ‘Tell him to go back to his house and leave us alone … But this shrine must be destroyed …’

… He turned to his comrades, ‘Fathers of Umuofia, I salute you’ and they replied with one guttural voice.

He turned again to the missionary. ‘You can stay with us if you like our ways. You can worship your own god. It is good that a man should worship the gods and spirits of his fathers.’

The church is burned down.

For a few days the people’s anger is pacified, although all go about armed with a matchet or gun in case of attack by Christian zealots. Then the District Commissioner sends for the leaders of Umuofia to come to his headquarters for what he calls a ‘palaver’. Okonkwo is one of the six, warning the others to be fully armed. ‘“An Umuofia man does not refuse a call” he said. [However: ] “He may refuse to do what he is asked …”’

The District Commissioner wants to hear the elders’ account of what happened at the masquerade. His manner, and the atmosphere, is calmly official, conveyed in the terse, cool style Achebe uses here. The leader of the six is about to speak, when the District Commissioner says, ‘Wait a minute, I want to bring in my men so that they too can hear your grievances and take warning.’ Like Okonkwo and his companions the reader is unprepared: ‘It happened so quickly that the six men did not see it coming. There was only a brief scuffle, too brief even to allow the drawing of sheathed matchet. The six men were handcuffed and led into the guardroom.’

The District Commissioner:

‘We shall not do you any harm if you agree to co-operate with us. We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy. If any man ill-treats you we shall come to your rescue. But we will not allow you to ill-treat others. We have a court of law where we judge cases and administer justice just as it is done in my own country under a great queen. I have brought you here because you joined together to molest others, to burn people’s houses and their places of worship … I have decided that you will pay a fine of two hundred cowries.’

Imprisoned, after three days of hunger and bullying by the warders the six begin to talk about accepting the fine in exchange for their release.

‘We should have killed the white man if you had listened to me’ Okonkwo snarled.

‘We could have been in Umuru now waiting to be hanged’ [someone says to him.]

‘Who wants to kill the white man?’ asked a messenger who had just rushed in. ‘You are not satisfied with your crime, but you must kill the white man on top of it.’ He carried a strong stick and he hit each man a few blows on the head and back. Okonkwo was choked with hate.

The villagers collect two hundred and fifty cowries, just to be sure to appease the white man, unaware that the messengers will pocket the extra fifty — one of Achebe’s ironic asides on the beginnings of corruption. Okonkwo goes home to his obi where Ezinma has come with food prepared for him; but he cannot eat; Ezinma and friends who have gathered see where the warder’s whip has cut into his flesh.

During the night the gong of the village crier announces a meeting to be held next day. ‘Everyone knew that Umuofia was at last going to speak its mind about the things that were happening.’

We find sleepless Okonkwo in a strange state of mind: ‘… he had brought down his war dress, which he had not touched since his return from exile. He had shaken out his smoked raffia skirt and examined his tall feather headgear. The bitterness in his heart was now mixed with a kind of childlike excitement.’

He lies on his bamboo bed and thinks about the treatment he received at the white man’s court. ‘If Umuofia decided on war, all would be well. But if they chose to be cowards he would go out and avenge himself.’

When Okonkwo and his fellow elder Obierika arrive at the meeting-place there are already so many people that — one of Achebe’s uniquely original images — ‘if one threw up a grain of sand it would not find its way to earth again’. Okonkwo distrusts the man Eginwanne who is due to address the crowd. Obierika asks.

‘Are you afraid he would convince us not to fight?’

‘Afraid? I do not care what he does to you. I despise him and those who listen to him. I shall fight alone if I choose.’

‘But how do you know he will speak against war?’

‘Because I know he is a coward.’

But before the man can begin to speak, Okika, ‘a great man and a great orator’, leaps to his feet and salutes his clansmen.

‘Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad day-light, then you know that something is after its life … When I saw you all pouring into this meeting from all quarters of the clan so early in the morning, I knew something was after our life … This is a great gathering. No clan can boast of greater numbers of greater valour. But are we all here? I ask you: Are all the sons of Umuofia with us here? … They are not. They have broken the clan and gone their several ways … our brothers have deserted us and joined a stranger to soil our fatherland. If we fight the stranger we shall hit our brothers. Our fathers never dreamt of such a thing, they never killed their brothers. But a white man never came to them. So we must do what our fathers would never have done. Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: “Men have learnt to shoot without missing their mark and I have learnt to fly without perching on a twig.” We must root out this evil. And if our brothers take the side of evil we must root them out too. And we must do it now.’

The tragic climax of this incomparable creation of a society in a time and place of inescapable, irrevocable upheaval and change closes the circle where it began: with the man whose life embodies it — Okonkwo. But it is not for me, it is for Chinua Achebe himself to tell you, for you to read for yourself the stunningly unexpected last pages of this story, the unforeseen consequences, decided by Okonkwo himself, of violent means he has resorted to under the pressures of that time and place, old Africa and the impact of colonial rule, with his own stormy personality fully revealed by the novelist. And there is a surprise postscript to the dramatic end of his story. Suddenly an about-turn in the viewpoint from which it has been told. Now the tragic events are as seen by the eyes and realised in the words of the District Commissioner, not the individuals of Umuofia with whom we’ve become so familiar. And I shan’t reveal the final twist in the last sentence, with its challenge to the reader to laugh, and grimace with disgust, at the same time, at a white colonial mentality.

Things Fall Apart is a work that delights and shocks, rousing many questions. Does Chinua Achebe glorify the past? In this work of the imagination transforming history as poetry — lyrical imagery — common speech, anecdote, suffering, celebration, humour, the extraordinariness a great writer discovers in ordinary life — he makes no such sweeping judgements. He does not deny the inevitability of change; only looks into its ruthless processes with a steady and deeply human gaze.

In Chinua Achebe’s second novel, Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son converted to Christianity, appears, No Longer At Ease (the book’s title) carrying continuity to the epic of dealing with change begun with Things Fall Apart. And later, with the brilliant satire, A Man Of The People, Achebe takes up the story when change has been established, four years after Nigeria’s independence; his unmatched personal and intellectual nerve exposing, in the words of the narrator, Odili Samalu, ‘with deepening dismay the use to which our hard-won freedom was being put by corrupt, mediocre politicians’. A dismay that comes to its conclusion in one of the most devastating final sentences of a book ever written: the words of Odili, ‘I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest — without asking to be paid.’

2002

Joseph Conrad and Almayer’s Folly

What does one expect to find, returning to a writer’s first novel after years of reading his others have overlaid it? Outdistanced it?

The most widely read of Joseph Conrad’s novels is Heart Of Darkness, whose very title has passed idiomatically into a metaphor for the evil of humankind in oppression of one another. As colonialism in its peculiarly historical form — conquest military, religious, commercial — began to near its end from the middle of the twentieth century, Conrad’s narrator’s recollection of what he found in a trading station up the Congo River in the late nineteenth century came to epitomise, for many readers and literary critics, the document of the colonialist phenomenon. For some it is the finest proof of Conrad’s genius, laying bare with passion and irony that the heart of darkness is within the white exploiters of other peoples and not in the jungle Congolese whose hands were amputated by Belgian King Leopold’s philanthropic company if they did not produce the required quota of wild rubber. For others, including the great African writer, Chinua Achebe, the novel is literary colonialism, representing Africans as savages with whom contact brings degradation for whites. Conrad’s view of his novels set in the world outside Europe: ‘The critic … seems to think that in these distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all problems is found in the barrel of a revolver or on the point of an assegai. And yet it is not so … There is a bond between us and that humanity so far away.’¹⁰⁸

Conrad’s other major novels are Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), read not alone for the transporting skill of Conrad’s story-telling and evocation of land- and water-scapes, but for the astonishing relevance his themes have to our recent past and our present international preoccupations. The secret agent is not only to be found in Conrad’s London just before the Russian Revolution; the way the agent operates matches for us the known but unseen presence of other secret agents of contemporary causes. Under Western eyes there is today the aftermath of Soviet Communism whose desperately dramatic beginnings and complex individual human psychology between the forces of faith and betrayal are his theme in St Petersburg. Nostromo, Italian immigrant shadily employed by the vast European-owned silver mine company which controls every aspect of life of the indigenous population of a South American country, is put to use between it and the abortive revolutions in which one set of indigenous corrupt politicians is toppled and replaced by another; a theme of the three-cornered act between capitalism, the poverty of underdevelopment and local corruption, seen every day on our millennial television.

So much prescience, so much genius of understanding the concept of progress and its perilous gains, the moral market of human action and feeling that we now posit as globalisation.

Are the themes that Conrad was to spend his life exploring for what ultimate meaning a single writer can hope to reach, already present in his first use of the imagination on what has been observed and/or experienced? His three great themes were the sea and its contributing rivers, colonialism and revolution. In some of his works all three are combined. A sailor from the age of seventeen, Conrad knew well the coast and rivers of the Malay Archipelago, and his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, is created there as Sambir, on the Pantai River. Colonialism and the sea are indissolubly linked, here, as the superbly, cosmically indifferent sea is the means by which the trader-colonialist venture, Nietzsche’s ‘world as the will to power’ comes about.¹⁰⁹ Revolutionary action as such is not the subject, but in the rivalry of the indigenous rajas co-opted on this side or that of the Dutch, English and Arabs seeking control of the region, it is — for the post-colonial reader — foreshadowed.

Almayer’s Folly is also a story of racism (which Conrad was to plumb further with Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and other works) in the ultimate, intimate expression of colonialism affecting individual relationships — an ‘also’ that grows with a complex narrative of other concerns with such insidious skill that its explicit dominance climaxes as a shock. There! says Conrad.

Captain Lingard, known on the coast as ‘King of the Sea’, runs supply ships for ‘The Master’, trader Hudig, whose warehouses are filled with ‘gin cases and bales of Manchester goods’, a demand for which has been created among the local Malays. Lingard is legendary for having ‘discovered’ (colonialists were always ‘discovering’ features known to indigenous peoples from ancient times) a river; a profitable trading highway whose location he keeps to himself. He takes a fancy to the young English-speaking Dutchman, Kaspar Almayer, who is a clerk in Hudig’s warehouse. Almayer begins his association with Lingard clerking for him on sailings up and down the Archipelago. Lingard has an adopted daughter, a Malay girl taken from a boat in one of his forays against pirates; he demands that Almayer should marry her. ‘And don’t you kick because you’re white. None of that with me! Nobody will see the colour of your wife’s skin. The dollars are too thick for that … And mind you, they will be thicker yet before I die. There will be millions, Kaspar! And all for her — and for you, if you do as you’re told.’

The beckoning dollars are too thick for qualms. Almayer marries the girl, is provided with a modest house and set up to run Lingard’s trading post at Sambir.

It is a loveless match with a woman with whom colour and cultural differences are never overcome. Her relationship with Almayer is that of harridan, avaricious and aloof, knowing herself despised. But she gives him a daughter, Nina. Almayer’s desire for wealth (he has built a pretentious house, symbol of wealth not yet attained, known on the Archipelago as ‘Almayer’s Folly’, in which he doesn’t live) becomes one with the passion of his love for this girl-child. On the first page of the novel, ageing Almayer’s thoughts are

… busy with gold; gold he had failed to secure yet … He absorbed himself in his dream of wealth and power away from this coast … forgetting the bitterness of toil and strife in the vision of a great and splendid reward. They would live in Europe, he and his daughter. They would be rich and respected. Nobody would think of her mixed blood in the presence of her great beauty and his immense wealth.

Nina was sent away to Singapore to be educated as an English lady and has returned as a young woman, having been rejected by the woman in whose care she was because her beauty distracted the attention of suitors intended for the daughters of the house. In Sambir she lives strangely impassively, alienated from her mother despite her share of Malay blood, isolated in her father’s adoration. The realisation of his dream of her future depends on his conviction that there is a mountain of gold deposits, Gunong Mas, to which he has planned a secret exploratory expedition with Dain, a raja’s son from Bali. Lakamba, the local raja in Sambir, is also involved, for a share of the gold, while Lingard, who discovered it, left for Europe to raise capital for the venture and has not been heard of in years. Unknown to Almayer, Dain and Nina are attracted to each other.

All these intense personal preoccupations are going on within historico-political changes in the Archipelago. Almayer’s trade has been taken over by the Arabs, his warehouse is empty, bankrupt. The Dutch, the British, the Arabs and the raja, the up-river Dyak tribes — all are embroiled in territorial and trade rivalries, which inevitably have extended to include smuggled gunpowder. Dain, on behalf of his father, the independent raja of Bali, in conflict with the Dutch, has first come to Sambir to buy it; Almayer has been persuaded to obtain the gunpowder, with the collusion of Lakamba, on Almayer’s condition that Dain would help him in his enterprise at Gunong Mas. Almayer’s friend, sea-captain Ford, would buy the gunpowder in Singapore and smuggle it from his ship to a brig by which Dain would bring it to his father. But a Dutch ship spies the brig, and when Dain runs it ashore inside the reefs, the Dutch follow in their boats, killing Dain’s crew and losing two of their own men in the ensuing struggle. It is believed in Sambir that Dain is among the dead.

Nina’s reaction to the news is mysterious to the reader; Conrad is master of the tension of withholding reasons for reactions. Stunned or impassive, it seems, she calmly brings her desolated father a glass of gin. ‘Now it is all over, Nina.’ The gold of Gunong Mas will never be his to take her away to ‘a civilisation … a new life … your high fortune … your happiness’.

But Dain is alive; Nina in her great love, and her mother in her avarice (she has received a bride-price in dollars from him and sees her particular ambitions for her daughter to be realised as the wife of a future raja) revive him when he drags himself to the Almayer compound at night. They help him haul a body of one of the drowned men on to the river bank and the mother defaces it unrecognisably and forces Dain’s ring and anklet upon a finger and leg. Dain is hidden in a nearby settlement. There a hawker of cakes, Taminah, who is in love with him although he has barely ever acknowledged her existence who discovers he is not the dead man and his life is in danger. She knows the white men — the Dutch — will be seeking him; she could tell them all. ‘Did they wish to kill him? … no, she would say nothing … she would go to him and sell him his life for a smile, a gesture even … be his slave in far-off countries’ away from her jealous hatred of Nina.

A party of Dutch officers arrives at Almayer’s compound. They believe he knows where Dain is.

‘And he killed white men!’ [Nina says.]

‘Yes, two white men lost their lives through that scoundrel’s freak.’

‘… Then when you get this scoundrel will you go? … Then I would get him for you if I had to seek him in a burning fire … I hate the sight of your white faces … I hoped to live here without seeing any other white face but this.’

She touches her father’s cheek. The Dutch are led by drunk, embittered Almayer to the corpse that has been brought into the courtyard. ‘This is Dain.’

With the connivance of Babalatchi, go-between of Lakamba, Nina and her mother, plans are made for Dain’s escape. And here this first novel, like a rising gale bringing a tempest, elevates Conrad’s powers as a writer to forecast — in my opinion to outreach — what he will achieve in works that were to come. For there is an almost prudish discretion, an averting of the eyes from any description of sexual love in Conrad’s otherwise flouting of conventions in nineteenth-century literature. The love of father for daughter, mother for son, sister for brother, is generally his most explicit depiction of human emotion. But this work is the exception. At the reunion of Nina and Dain in his hideout, the wild answers of the body to the tensions and danger — the unreasonableness, in terms of the other kind of love, Almayer’s vision of his daughter’s fulfilment — are truly erotic. Their power clashes with the gigantic despair of Almayer become Lear; all pleading and violent reproach having failed to get her to stay with him, Almayer casts his desperate sorrow like a curse: ‘I shall never forgive you, Nina; and tomorrow I shall forget you.’

Her love of Dain is a betrayal of her father’s love; betrayal is increasingly to be a theme of Conrad’s deeply delved situations between political imperatives and personal lives, as well as in the relationships between men and women. (It is fascinating to foresee, here, its apogee to come in Under Western Eyes.)

Where lesser writers are content to have reached in relative fulfilment, one finality, Conrad, even in this first novel, is not, although the vision of old Almayer on his knees obliterating the footprints of his daughter in the sand where she has walked away with her chosen love to a boat is one that leaves its imprint on the mind long after the book is closed. Almayer burns the past; burns down the fine house known as Almayer’s Folly and dies, an opium smoker in the sole company of an old Chinaman. Shortly before his death he has said, to himself rather than to the rare visit of Captain Ford: ‘I cannot forget.’

The curse was pronounced upon himself, as well as on his daughter. It is compounded, symbolic in his abandoned loneliness, by the situation itself as the alienation of the coloniser. So, for Conrad, there is no finality in the way human lives might have gone, and he will spend the rest of his writing life in restlessly brilliant quest of their possibilities, the realised becoming the unrealised, to be followed in another and another working of the imagination on elusive reality. The constructions he evolved to do this began with his first novel, where he was then and thereafter to break the linear narrative. Almayer’s story is not told sequentially, it moves as our human consciousness does, where what happened in the past seamlessly interrupts the present, and what is to come occurs presciently between these. He makes demands on the reader to follow him in the cut-and-paste interplay of that consciousness: an invigorating pleasure only great writers can offer. A nineteenth-century writer who died early in the twentieth, Conrad’s work hurdled over modernism and practised post-modern freedom that was to enter literary theory long after his death.

Conrad’s writing is lifelong questioning: even the title of this book poses one. What was ‘Almayer’s Folly’? The pretentious house never lived in, his obsession with gold, his obsessive love for his daughter, whose cogenitors, the Malay woman’s race, he despised? All three? As if to answer some of these questions, Conrad did something else highly original, if doubtful in its success as an example of his work. A year after the publication of Almayer’s Folly in 1895, he produced — what shall I call it — a prologue-novel to it, An Outcast Of The Islands, in which Almayer and his then small daughter are also central characters. But I don’t advise reading Conrad in the way he obviously did not choose to be read; don’t start with An Outcast Of The Islands; open the first pages of Conrad’s magnificent literary creation by taking up Almayer’s Folly.

2002

A Coincidence of Wills?

There comes a time in a reading life when you realise — there, on your bookshelves, are books you may never re-read. Books that once changed your sense of being. That opened your eyes, your understanding of human emotions, the context of your consciousness in the world.

Proposing the literature of the imagination as truth out of the reach of histories, I’ve often said ‘If you want to know about Napoleon’s famous retreat from Moscow, you have to read War and Peace, not a history book.’

Now facing me is the scuffed, monumental one-volume War and Peace. When did I last read it, and when shall I read it again — ever?

So now I have. And I understand that just as you discover new meaning in situations that recur in your life as changing social and political mores contain you, so every time you re-read a great work you discover something you missed because you and an earlier period were not ready for it: a hidden message for the particular present.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 and the novel was published in 1864. The time-span it covers is that of the Napoleonic wars in Russia from 1805 to 1812. It therefore chronicles events that happened before he was born. He was not writing about his own time, and I’m not reading about my own time. What the author and I have in common is that we are illuminating, each his own time, with intimations for the present that were there in the past. For him about 52 years distant; for me in 2003, 191 years.

The grandeur of the story moves from society salons around Tsar Alexander I, with the intrigues of love, its concomitant bargaining power in money and noble names, to the battlefields where none of these counts in snow, pain, hunger and death. The themes run concurrently, with fictional characters mixed with historical ones, invented gossip with actual military despatches. Tolstoy was a post-modernist nearly two centuries ago; his fiction brilliantly appropriated anything it demanded: life itself is incongruity.

Among the characters who emerge from the salons, Pierre Bezukhov is the most extraordinarily alive for me. He is rich, a count if only by a nobleman’s liaison with a mistress; educated abroad, he is of no particular career. He himself makes a misalliance, falling in love and marrying the femme fatale, Helen. The choice of the name a touch of Tolstoy’s wry humour. She is unfaithful, and there begins what was latent in Pierre’s character, the examined life as a search for existential meaning. He tries Freemasonry (in the 1960s he would have been barefoot chanting Hare Krishna in the street), he tries good works among slave-peasants, his disillusion with materialism foresees the discontents of the well-endowed swallowing Ecstasy in our millennium of great riches and greater poverty. For Pierre the war against Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was his saviour. First Napoleon’s prisoner of war, then ragged and hungry in the ruins of Moscow, he finds among his fellow wretches that the will to live is itself the joy in life.

But it is not the bold and subtle understanding of personal conflicts that makes this 139-year-old novel contemporary. It is its amazing prescience of the nature of endless violence, the confusion and hopelessness of its persistent use to solve human problems between peoples and nations, multiplying them down the centuries.

Tolstoy calls into question the cause of catastrophic events being attributed to a single symbolic individual. A Napoleon, Hitler — now, for us, a Bin Laden, a Saddam Hussein. ‘To the question as to what is the real causation of historical events … the course of this world depends on the coincidence of the wills of all those who are concerned in the issues …’ The world, in 1812, was what its peoples made it, not Napoleon or Alexander I, as ours is what we have made and are making of it. The hollowness of victories achieved by violence is there when Napoleon retreats from Moscow, and the Russian peasants come in from the country to loot from their own people; it is there when we see the same desperate moral breakdown in the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Kosovo, Burundi, every month somewhere new. On the day 80,000 men, Russians, Frenchmen, were killed at Borodino, ‘Napoleon neither fired a shot nor killed a man’. This is not the old fact that the leaders sit safe while they send Everyman out to kill or be killed. Tolstoy implies, beyond time and changing circumstances, the days of empires become our day of globalisation, that as individuals we bear responsibility for our world, which creates symbolic messianic politicians and leaders, taking us into chaos and foretelling our own corruption.

Re-reading Tolstoy’s book is to realise that we live, not as a brave new millennium so much as an epilogue to what is revealed in that book of the senseless, persistent suffering and demoralisation of violence as the inhuman condition.

2003

Witness — Past or Present?

Like all witnesses to human acts that come second-hand, the reactions of visitors to museums dedicated to horrors perpetrated in the past, differ.

The United States Holocaust Museum in Washington opened in 1993. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, 2001. The Jewish Museum in Berlin, 2001. While no one questions the need for such institutions to confront us with a past still within living memory of many, there are criticisms that come between awed acceptance and total dismissal of the achievement.

I think we have first to consider the way in which the definition ‘holocaust’ has come to be dispersed in meaning quite far from the dictionary one: the intent of genocide. We now report any massacre between factions, nations, as a holocaust, though the violent intention is to gain power over others, not wipe them off the face of the earth. This brings into question whether the old narrow definition was correct, and a case is demonstrable in the differences between the three museums. The Washington museum illustrates a holocaust, the intention to kill all Jews in Germany and the countries it occupied. The Berlin museum and the Johannesburg museum share with it a related but different, double purpose: the Jewish museum chronicles the political and cultural history of Jews in Germany before the Nazi extermination came into practice, as well as the experience of that period; the apartheid museum creates the African pre-colonial background, the period of early white settlement, the effect of exploitation, industrialisation, loss of land tenure on Africans, as well as their political subjection, and focuses on the black population’s struggle to attain ultimate freedom. Perhaps the present-day meaning of ‘holocaust’ extends to any attempt by any means to kill the right of a people to live without discrimination and oppression?

The three museums are all subject to criticism in both their shared and specific aspects. We visitors are onlookers at a distance of time and space. The process called perspective.

A recurrent criticism of the Holocaust Museum is that a museum of the Nazi holocaust should be one encompassing and dedicated to the experience of all who suffered it, six million Jews, five million anti-Nazi activists, homosexuals, Gypsies and others. The counter-argument is that the Nazis’ avowed holocaust was the culmination of a unique 2,000-year-old history of persecution of Jews. The lingering smell of the shoes of gas-oven victims, relics in the museum, perhaps brings ominous understanding, unspecified, of what genocide means.

For eighteen months after the opening, the Jewish Museum in Berlin was empty. I visited when the exhibits were in place, but there was something new to me — the impact of architecture as a blow-in-the-chest statement. Daniel Libeskind’s building is an affront in itself: the affront of harassment, enclosure, the persecution of walls, material and ideological. Some opinions are that it should have been left empty, in that statement. The exhibits attempt to recreate the life, culture and beliefs of German Jews since medieval times, even earlier. Critical debate has been rough: the museum creates ‘a Disney world aesthetic’,¹ it is ‘a gigantic misunderstanding … a failure … simplifying the facts’. Yet it is demonstrably honest about the uncomfortable facts of the assimilation attempts of German Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as their remarkable contributions to German cultural life — which drained away under Nazi persecution, mainly to the benefit of the United States. There is displayed the German-Jewish Christmas tree, and the silver basin and ewer provided by a prominent family who desperately tried to hedge prescience of a coming fate by having some of their sons baptised Christian while the others remained Jewish. The holocaust documents and photographs are somehow more personal than the evidence in the Washington museum. There is criticism that this testimony of the dead needs to be completed by accounts of the lives of German Jews in the diaspora; apparently the extension is planned.

A casino deal was the origin of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Bidders for a gambling licence were awarded it on condition they include in their amusement complex a ‘social responsibility’ project. The fact that the museum shares a site with a giant roller-coaster offends people like me, who find this demeaning of the dignity of the South African freedom struggle — but the fact is we, our African National Congress majority government and the political movements to which we belong, talked about but never achieved an apartheid museum for ourselves. Once your back is turned on the roller-coaster-casino complex, the museum building, work of South African architects, has much of the impact of the Libeskind one, indeed recalls it, bringing two forms of stark racism appropriately together, the Nazi and the apartheid.

At the entry you buy a plastic card: if you are white, it states you are black, if you are black, it labels you white. You enter through separate adjoining spaces; so black experiences the privilege of being white, and white experiences the discrimination of being black. The journey within the museum has this striking underlying theme, with the documents, the vocabulary of discrimination, its crudity and cruelty. But emphasis, finally, is on resistance — the freedom movements and their heroes. There is much criticism of who and what is left out. Some see the museum as concentrating on the role of the African National Congress in liberation, although there was an alliance of the ANC with the South African Indian Congress and the South African Communist Party. White liberals say they have been ignored; the Pan-African Congress finds its role in liberation underplayed; there are faces and names, deeds, missing or passed over in a TV clip.

What is the object of such museums? It’s accepted that by confrontation with the gross inhumanity of the past in the Washington Holocaust Museum, the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Johannesburg Apartheid Museum, what we witness we shall never be any party to. It shall never happen again.

But while facing the past, it is happening again in parts of our globalised world; has been happening: from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, tribal genocide in Rwanda, to the devastation of lives in conflict between the Christian faithful and the Muslim faithful in Côte d’Ivoire, the destruction of Palestinian lives by Israel and the taking of Israeli lives by Palestinian suicide bombers. A visitor to the Washington Holocaust Museum remarked to writer Philip Gourevitch in 1995, ‘We know the atrocities that happen in the world right now. And what are we doing? We’re sitting in a museum.’²

We’re still there, eight years later.

2003

Fear Eats the Soul

Can there be the phenomenon of a world state of mind? Some such surely has existed for the past many weeks, except, perhaps, in those enclaves, isolated by nature — if impenetrable forest, impassable ice haven’t been finally invaded by information technology. There used to be people who were come upon in their remote fastnesses, after wars, unaware that war had happened. We have a conscious world as never before; awareness of an impending war between the dominant power among nations and an opposing power of amorphous capacity (who knows for sure who will join forces in religious solidarity) has been an all-pervading change of global climate which we all have breathed in. On an ostensible issue of weapons of mass destruction many reactions come forth: anger, belligerence, disbelief, holy outrage from the Faithful of Democracy and the Faithful of Islam. Among enemies, fearing poison gas and unseen infection by disease (for won’t the gas blow back upon, won’t the disease infect those who distribute it) there’s a miasma of that climate no special clothing, no masks and plastic-hung shelters can protect against. Fear. It’s unacknowledged; shared by friend and foe if nothing else is.

One looks for some sort of wisdom in how others have contemplated fear. There’s the gung-ho of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural address back in 1933. Was it Hitler’s rise to power, so distantly European, he had in mind when he pronounced ‘Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ Sounds hollow now, after new forms of human extermination we’ve discovered for ourselves since then.

Can fear be a force for the good?

Remember the old adage ‘Best safety lies in fear’. But that, it will be morally countered, condones cowardice; shrinking from the duty to defend at risk the values your society holds. Thucydides was the first philosopher I educated myself with as an adolescent; it’s natural that I go back to him now and find in an old notebook another take on the phenomenon of fear. ‘That war is an evil is something that we all know, and it would be pointless to go on cataloguing all the disadvantages involved in it. No one is forced into war by ignorance, nor, if he thinks he will gain from it, is kept out by fear.’ (My italics.) The mass protests against the United States war on Iraq are made on the conviction that the gain, by war, of control of the world’s second greatest oil fields is not ‘kept out’ by fear that thousands of the people categorised as ‘enemy led’ will be killed and body bags of the righteous young victors will never require fuel oil again.

‘Fear has many eyes and can see underground’ observes Cervantes. Didn’t the fear of what is happening — the roar is in our ears — begin within us when 11 September 2001 buried the invincible? If time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate, doesn’t T. S. Eliot wander ahead over Ground Zero when he writes, way back in 1922, ‘And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’

I am one of those who live far from the terrible threat of strike and retaliation across oceans and skies. But I am not in that now non-existent enclave of isolation, out-of-this-world. And like many who are distant from the continents of battle, I have nevertheless a personal stake in this war: someone closest to me lives with his young family in the vulnerable heart of New York. He tells me that the children’s school has notified parents that the school basement has been equipped as a shelter, with water supplies and an adapted ventilation system that will keep out noxious elements. Some people, he says, have packed up and left the city, the obvious target of violence, direct or insidious. Is this ceding ground to those who threaten? Or is it a sensible option for people who have the means to absent themselves from their wage-earning posts and have some place to go: somewhere safe. Safe: who can tell what and where is beyond striking distance of the unconventional weapons we are told come from laboratories, not armouries?

I ask: What are you going to do?

So he reminds me: What did you and your kind do during the crises of apartheid, when there was danger of being arrested by the political police, or having some right-wing fanatic put a bomb to blow you up in your car?

Go carry on with your life.

Dangers are relative, over time and distance; fear is relative, whether it menaces a multitude or a single life, but it always demands the same answers: a yes, or a no. Capitulate within oneself, or refuse to submit to attrition, fear that eats the soul.

2003

Living with a Writer

There seems to be some confusion, here: I am the writer. So I can only conclude that I shall be relating what it is like to be living with myself. Not that there isn’t a situation cited: everyone is faced with the basic problem of the self. A secret intimacy which, it is said, influences all others. First Know Thyself. Perhaps the most difficult relationship of all?

I’ve had to live with myself through a long life as a writer and as a woman. It wouldn’t have been much different existentially had that life been between the writer and a man. Whatever the gender, we writers have to make, no matter how, clear distinction between what life-space is reserved for the writer and what must be that of the — what shall I term it? — socio-biological life. Sounds grandiose, that term, but I can’t settle for ‘emotional life’ because there are strong emotions involved in the product of the writing life.

The apportionment of time and attention means self-discipline of a very strict kind. A journalist has a deadline to meet. The poet, novelist is her/his own boss. The publisher may specify, in a contract, when the manuscript shall be delivered, but this is on the writer’s estimate, as task-master, of when it shall be fulfilled by the workings of an imagination which keeps no clock or calendar. If the advance payment runs out before the work is achieved, that’s the nature of the gap between creativity and commerce.

It goes without saying that no writer waits for what people who are not writers call inspiration. Not that it doesn’t come; but usually not in the hours set down for the writing table, the typewriter, word processor (or whatever the tool may be). Those hours are for the transformation of something already occurred, themes that take hold, beneath some other activity or situation. Waking up in the middle of the night. Ceasing to hear what the babble in a bar or a meeting is about. A displacement to a level of another irresistible, intense concentration elsewhere. I think I began to write, relating narratives, conversations, impressions silently to myself as a child sitting in the back of my parents’ car on drives long or short. Now I often have this same sort of experience on long-distance flights; between a here and a there, the demands of exchange with other people, I’m living with myself: the self of the individual imagination. (The collective imagination is what you and I enter through literature, theatre, films.)

I believe writers, artists in general, have something of the monster in their personality. If selfishness is monstrous. Like most writers — I’ll guarantee — I’ve had to accept in myself that I would have to without compunction put the demands of my writing generally before human obligations — except, perhaps, while falling in love. On the principle that every businessman or woman executive is protected from random visitors and telephone calls by a guard of receptionist and secretary, I long ago made it clear to everyone, even those closest and dearest to me, that during my working hours no one must walk in on me, expect to reach me. Since the house where I live with others is also my workplace, I’ve made as an exception only an interruption to tell me the house is on fire. When my children were too young for boarding school my writing hours were those when they were absent at day school, and during the holidays the monster-writer decreed that they keep out of sight and sound during those same hours. But I got what I no doubt deserved one day when my small son transgressed, playing outside near my window, and I heard him reply to a friend’s question ‘What’s your mother’s job?’ — ‘She’s a typist.’ His response to living with a writer.

I’ve found myself to be a secretive person to live with. I don’t know if this is general, for writers. I have been unable to share with anyone the exigencies, the euphoria at having arrived at what I wanted in my work or the frustration at finding it lacking. I cannot understand how the great Thomas Mann could bring himself to read the day’s stint of writing aloud to his assembled family each evening. I’ve always been convinced no one could reach what I really was saying in a piece of writing until I had satisfied myself finally that it was the best I could possibly do with it.

My man, Reinhold Cassirer, with whom I lived for forty-eight years, sharing everything else in our lives, never saw a story or novel of mine in the making, although he was always the first to read it when it was done. He completely respected and protected this, my privacy.

A novel might take as long as three or more years. He should have been the one to respond to what it must have been like, living with a writer.¹

2003

Edward Said

If the great contemporary intellectuals can be counted on one hand, Edward Said is the index finger pointing to some of the most profound existential questions of our time, and going back, invaluably, to search out their beginnings. What we humans have made of ourselves in the collective that is the world.

The obituaries have focused on the aspect of Said’s life most newsworthy today: the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The great conviction, dedication, activist faith of Said’s life was, indeed, the Palestinian cause. He served it with courage and a nobility that excluded fundamentalism of any kind.

To say that there was more to his achievement than that is not to demean its urgency and the irreplaceable loss of its best spokes-person. He stood for real justice and peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

But Said’s unique brilliance was that he was the most eclectic intellectual of our time. He fused extraordinary literary talent — the writer, master of the beauty of language — with a philosophical, political, cultural, psychological quest of human motivation, bringing power-politics and the third eye of creative intuition into a synthesis of revelation. Proof that we cannot be understood in our motivations — the world cannot be understood — one without the other.

He was an academic of celebrated originality of mind; students did not fall asleep in Professor Said’s seminars. He was by avocation a pianist of performance level, sometimes playing under the baton of his friend, Daniel Barenboim.

Reading his works, one is dismayed to be confronted with the limits of one’s own supposedly wide reading: he had read everything in a number of languages and would pass on the benefit with lucidity and grace. Above all, along with enormous erudition, Edward Said had an intelligence of feeling. It glowed through his works and his physical presence.

In his greatest book, Orientalism, and its equally matchless successor-cum-sequel, Culture and Imperialism, he analyses the concept of Otherness, definitive in Orientalism. Orientalism is the projection, on people other than oneself, of one’s idea of what they are.

Said in this marvellous work reveals Orientalism’s origins and development from ancient times, in the textual representations conceptualised from the fragmentary experience of wandering explorers, the romantic and religious mysticism (the Orient an artefact, belonging to the past), the writings of poets and novelists, from Gérard de Nerval to Flaubert, Jane Austen to Conrad, the philologists and anthropologists who made a scientific subject out of it.

‘The Orient’ first referred to Islam and later encompassed Africa. India, Asia. Anywhere there were faiths, colours and cultures not Western and white. Said writes:

Modern Orientalism derives from secularising elements in 18th century European culture … the expansion of the Orient further east geographically and further back temporally …

Reference points were no longer Christianity and Judaism … the capacity for dealing historically (and not reductively, as a topic of ecclesiastical politics) with non-European and non-Judeo-Christian cultures was strengthened as history itself was conceived of more radically than before; to understand Europe properly meant also understanding the objective relations between Europe and its own previously unreachable temporal and cultural frontiers.

The result was ‘the Orient henceforth would be spoken for’.

The precept on which colonialism is justified, out of Orientalism, was established. The Orient-Other is in the same position to this day, striving to speak and be heard for itself in the global structures that are attempting to re-form a world of Haves and Have-nots. For still, Said writes: ‘The white middle-class westerner believes it is his human prerogative not only to manage the world but also to own it, just because by definition “it” is not quite as human as “we” are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanised thought.’

New millennium Orientalism is surely United States President George Bush’s government’s crusade to decide ‘for them’ what the Iraqi people are and what their constitution and future should be.

In his 2003 preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism, Said writes of the present ‘threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies disseminated by the mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical precision but in fact obscure the terrible suffering produced by “clean” warfare.’

Said reveals the full concept of Orientalism in its ultimate avatar, evolved through its justification of colonialism, imperialism, to western hegemony in the new world order: a sum of inhumanly divisive, disruptive forces.

His life was subject to many of them. He was born in Jerusalem sixty-seven years ago, uprooted when a child from his natal country, as a Palestinian, and was acculturated to the West through education in England and the US. Yet in his person he posits unchallengeably, with the magnificent achievement of his own life-conduct and scholarship, the thesis self-evident in his enthrallingly moving memoir, Out of Place.

The title proposes that to be so, in a sense, may be a way to better understanding between individuals and nations, an open state of being attained against the monolithic cages of nationalism, religion and closed cultures.

He used these multiple identities, made them into the creation of a complete personality, a man of genius with an invaluable perspective to offer the world. In him, contradictions become a way of grasping something of the elusive truth that is somewhere in human coexistence.

I hope that without presumption, as his friend, and disciple in all I learned from him up to his last days, I may see as Edward’s credo the words of Dimitry, on trial in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. We are accountable to life ‘because we are all responsible for all’.

2003

With Them You Never Know: Albert Memmi

It is hardly usual to begin an introduction with a caveat of the limitations of the work it prefaces. In the case of Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and The Colonized, I believe this is necessary in order to establish the classic work’s continuing validity. That validity is in its invaluable presentation and brilliant analysis of the condition of colonised people, the results of practical enactment of man’s inexhaustible capability of inhumanity to man; in this classic aspect of power, the work is timeless. What Equiano¹¹³ wrote of this power in 1789, what Memmi wrote of it in the late 1950s, is as true in our new millennium. Slavery was not abolished, it evolved into colonisation. Retrospect has not altered, by perspective, the meaning of what was done to subject peoples in their own land.

That said, Memmi’s study was first published in 1957, before Ghana became the first colonially occupied country in Africa to become independent. The book therefore pre-dates by what ideological forms, specifically in terms of participation of Leftist colonisers with the colonised, freedom from colonisation has been achieved in many countries, over the forty-six years since then. Memmi’s predictions about the role of the Left have been proved a fallacy.

He begins his book with ‘A Portrait of the Colonizer’, but in view of my homage to the nature of the work’s achievement, despite its shortcomings, I’ll reverse the order of chapters and begin with Chapter Two, ‘Portrait of the Colonised’. I take permission for this chronological impertinence from the very first sentence of the chapter: ‘Just as the bourgeoisie proposed an image of the proletariat, the existence of the colonizer requires that an image of the colonized be suggested.’ That image is where colonisation begins; its premise, its ikon.

The subtitle of the chapter has the rider ‘The Mythological Portrait of the Colonized’ (my italics) — Memmi’s wry comment on the ‘dialectic exalting the colonizer and humbling the colonized’. In colonialist mythology the colonised is a litany of faults and inadequacies. He’s unbelievably lazy — at the same time this authorises his low wages. Skilled work is done by the coloniser’s compatriots, imported; and if Memmi’s typecast of their physique and demeanour is a caricature, it’s sketched with the quick flash of humour. Irony makes its point in that light: ‘The colonized … is asked only for his muscles; he is so poorly evaluated that three or four can be taken on for the price of one European.’ Memmi turns the reader to the conclusion left out of the coloniser’s evaluation: ‘… one can wonder, if their [the coloniseds’] output is mediocre, whether malnutrition, low wages, a closed future, a ridiculous conception of a role in society, does not make the colonized uninterested in his work’. The coloniser having established that the colonised is a ‘hopeless weakling’, from this, Memmi shows, comes the concept of a ‘protectorate’: it is in the colonised’s own interest that he be excluded from management functions, and that those heavy responsibilities be reserved for the coloniser. ‘Whenever the coloniser adds … that the colonised is a wicked, backward person, he thus justifies his police and his legitimate severity … The humanity of the colonised, rejected by the coloniser, becomes opaque … Useless … to try to forecast the coloniseds’ actions: (“They are unpredictable!” “With them you never know!”).’ Memmi chips in to these too-often overheard remarks: ‘The colonized must indeed be very strange, if he remains so mysterious after years of living with the coloniser.’

‘The colonised means little to the coloniser … The colonised is not this, is not that.’ This mythological portrait Memmi draws is of a stunning negation. For the coloniser, the colonised is nobody.

It is not only the rough-and-ready man who saw the conquered and colonised as the ultimate other. An intellectual began his work in Africa on the same premise. In 1928 a psychiatrist from Europe practising in a mental hospital for South African black men ‘made a startling discovery … the manifestations of insanity … are identical in both natives and Europeans … This discovery made me inquisitive to know if the working fundamental principles of the mind in its normal state were not also the same.’¹¹⁴ But maybe Cecil Rhodes the empire-builder had the last word in assessment of the human worth of the colonised: ‘I prefer land to niggers.’¹¹⁵

‘We should not, however, delude ourselves … by thinking that if only the colonizers would have been more generous, more charitable, less selfish, less greedy for wealth, then everything would have been very much better than it is now — for in that case they would not have been colonizers.’¹¹⁶

‘Does The Colonial Exist?’ The title of the first part of Memmi’s analysis of the coloniser brings a semantic question to be got out of the way. Memmi’s use — or perhaps his translator’s use, in this English edition of the book — of the terms ‘colonial’ and colonizer’ as interchangeable. But a colonialist is one who advocates the policy of colonisation; further, he may be one delegated, within the Colonial Service, to administer that policy, a colonial functionary in the European power’s governance of territory taken by conquest of the original inhabitants. He is not a citizen of that territory, his country remains one across the world. A coloniser is a settler in the conquered territory, coming from another country but taking up residence and citizenship (usually granted after a period specified by the colonialist power). He occupies and owns, either under a settler dispensation to extend the ‘mother’ country’s domains, or purchased from it, land taken by that colonialist power from the indigenous people. The coloniser regards himself as a permanent inhabitant. The difference is important. Memmi does have a subcategory to his concept of the colonial/coloniser. This one, identified as the ‘European living in a colony having no privileges’ — a class distinction within the ruling class that places him barely above the colonised — certainly didn’t exist in the colonial countries I have known. The mere fact of skin colour guaranteed kith-and-kin privileges decreed by the colonial power. The category may have been singular to Tunisia.

It is with the coloniser’s indubitable existence that Memmi’s study recedes honourably to the shelves of the classic past. He sees the coloniser as one taking ‘simply a voyage towards an easier life’. There follows a fascinating account of the components of that easy life of the time — servants, climate, automatic qualification for superior status over the multitude. What Edward W. Said has defined as ‘How you supply the forces of world-wide accumulation and rule with a self-confirming ideological motor.’¹¹⁷ The coloniser, Memmi continues ‘has not yet become aware of the historic role which will be his. He is lacking one step in his new status … the origin and significance of this profit … This is not long in coming. For how could he fail to see the misery of the colonised and the relation of that misery to his own comfort?’ The colonised kept underfoot are ‘no longer a simple component of geographical or historical decor. They assume a place in his life … He cannot even resolve to avoid them.’ He must constantly live in relation to them, for it is this very alliance which enables him to lead the life which he decided to ‘look for in the colonies; it is this relationship which creates privilege’. Memmi posits that the coloniser soon ‘knows, in his own eyes as well as those of his victim, that he is a usurper … He must adjust to being both regarded as such, and to this situation.’

What is missing in this analysis is what any coloniser knows — yes, I speak as a coloniser’s offspring — that the coloniser justified his/her situation by asserting that the colonisers brought enlightenment, technical as well as religious, to the indigenous people living in the heart of darkness. (It is almost obligatory to make a bow to Conrad, here.) On the coloniser’s scale there was a trade-off balance, a straight deal that could ignore morality. Memmi in turn seems to ignore this forced deal in its psychological impact on both sides. (He deals with it only in his 1965 preface.)

Studying the coloniser, Memmi gives much attention to the grades of privilege he says are accorded in the colonial situation, and it is here that it is most evident his perspective was coming from the Maghrib, culturally arabised territories, while only propositionally extended to the rest of the African continent and colonised countries everywhere. This leads to conclusions that do not necessarily hold good for colonisation generally. He draws interesting distinctions between the societal positions arrived at by colonisers coming from various countries to Tunisia and Algeria, for example, Italians, Maltese, Corsicans, Spaniards and Jews (who even if they are from Morocco evidently are from that non-place, the diaspora). These are candidates for assimilation at various levels. The different levels of their acceptance by the already settled coloniser population — what the colonised thought of the continuous invasion did not count — didn’t apply in any of the African countries I know. In these, if you were white you were welcomed by the colonial government and colonisers to shore up the white population, though as the colonial powers had been officially Christian since the Crusades, you were more welcome if you were of that faith. In South Africa right up to the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, whites only were accepted as immigrants. Once legally established, their situation in ‘black’ Africa was that of the indiscriminate privilege of being white. Even Jews did not, as Memmi avers in general, find themselves ‘rejected by the colonized’ and sharing ‘in part the physical conditions of the colonised, having a communion of interests with him’. In South Africa, which was to become the most prosperous and highly industrialised of countries on the African continent, some Jewish colonisers¹¹⁸ became founders of the gold and diamond industry, and their only share of the condition of the colonised was to employ them in their thousands to work underground as migrant labourers. Christian colonisers made the laws that ensured this labour supply, enforcing through taxes a cash economy in place of traditional land-based agricultural sufficiency.

Many of Memmi’s conclusions, prognostications one might call them, have not been borne out by events. He considers the options of the coloniser, once he is aware ‘under the growing habit of privilege and illegitimacy’ that ‘he is also under the gaze of the usurped’. There is ‘his inevitable self-censure’. With the chapter ‘The Colonizer Who Refuses’ it is assumed that he is in this crisis of conscience for the sins of the fathers and his own. And now one must pause to set aside another of the confusions of terminology in the work. Memmi has visualised the coloniser as one in this condition who ‘immediately thinks of going home’ but ‘being compelled to wait until the end of his contract, he is liable to get used to the poverty [of the colonised]’. That man cited is a functionary of the colonial government, there is an official limit to his confrontation with guilt, he will leave it behind when his span of duty ends. The coloniser cannot be seen as one with him; the coloniser has no contract that will elapse. He has no determined span of the life he has been living; he is committed to it. Many continued to live as before, counting on the mother country to hold off change, keep the colonised at bay indefinitely.

Another coloniser ‘no longer agrees to become what his fellow citizens have become’. He is the genuine ‘Colonizer Who Refuses’. He remains — but vows not to accept the role of protagonist of colonisation. He will reject that disgraced position.

But how? Here Memmi’s analysis leaps — as it does impressively when he’s using his philosopher’s vision to relate a specific to an eternal human situation. ‘It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships. From now on, he lives his life under the sign of a contradiction which looms at every step, depriving him of all coherence and all tranquillity … What he is actually renouncing is part of himself … How can he go about freeing himself of the halo of prestige which crowns him?’ If the coloniser persists in refusal ‘he will learn that he is launching into an undeclared conflict with his own people’. Granted; but he will also discover others among colonisers who are ready to oppose, to one or another degree of courage, the regime that is defined in its very name — colonialism — as a give-away of injustice.¹¹⁹

History has proved that there were more options open to the refusenik than Memmi would allow. There was the ‘humanitarian romanticism’ Memmi himself recognises, and says is ‘looked upon in the colonies as a serious illness … the worst of all dangers … no less than going over to the side of the enemy’. It is extraordinary that Memmi does not acknowledge that what was regarded as the worst of all dangers was not the reformist liberalism ‘humanitarian romanticism’ implies — in a black man’s definition ‘the role of the liberal as the conciliator between oppressor and oppressed’¹²⁰ — but the theory and tactics of Communism reaching the colonised.

Going beyond liberalism, the coloniser’s refusal has ‘closed the doors of colonialism to him and isolated him in the middle of the colonial desert’. No — he has isolated himself from the doomed false values of the colonial desert, voluntarily. But Memmi continues to follow the rebel’s downfall as he sees it: ‘Why not knock at the door of the colonized whom he defends and who would surely open their arms in gratitude?’ Memmi is dismissive of that knock at the door. ‘To refuse colonization is one thing; to adopt the colonized and be adopted by them seems to be another; and the two are far from being connected … To succeed in this second conversion, our man would have to be a moral hero.’ Memmi, still (out of habituation?) using the old condescending colonial vocabulary: ‘adopt’, ‘adopted’, evidently believes such men couldn’t exist. The hero ‘discovers that if the colonized have justice on their side, if he can go so far as to give them his approval and even his assistance, his solidarity stops there … He vaguely foresees the day of their liberation and the reconquest of their rights, but does not seriously plan to share their existence, even if they are freed.’ Memmi gives no example of a like situation he has observed. On what evidence — before the historical event — was his assumption based?

Again, I make no apology for the fact that as Memmi’s perspective peers into the subject from the Maghrib, mine comes from the Southern and Central African continent, with consonant limitations but also the experience implied. To suggest that the coloniser’s rebellion could serve no purpose in liberation of the colonised is to deny the possibility — outlawed, evidently, by what Memmi sees as the racially congenital deficiencies of all the colonisers — of a range of actions taken by rebels among them, from Stewart Gore-Brown accompanying UNIP’s Kenneth Kaunda to negotiate return of a territory, named for the arch-imperialist Rhodes, back from the British for rebirth as Zambia, to Ronnie Kasrils, white South African, becoming Head of Military Intelligence and Joe Slovo, white South African, as chief strategist, in South Africa’s liberation army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, during the guerrilla war against apartheid. Men and women Leftist colonisers in South Africa were imprisoned, as Nelson Mandela and thousands of his fellow black South Africans were, tortured as Steve Biko was, for activities with the liberation movements. Two of them, white South Africans Bram Fischer and Dennis Goldberg, were given life sentences.

This brings us to Memmi’s other summary dismissal of the Left in liberation from colonial regimes. For the Leftists of his generation, he states, ‘the word “nationalism” still evokes a reaction of suspicion, if not hostility’. For doctrinal reasons, yes, and in some experiences of his time, the 1950s, the Left felt ‘ill at ease before nationalism’. But political accommodation did not end there. In liberation movements that followed, from Ghana and Guinea-Bissau to Mozambique, Angola and beyond, the precepts and methods of the Left were adapted boldly in nationalism’s service. It was, if you like, ironical that an ideology from the white world should prove an effective tool of participation in overcoming the colonial powers of that world. (Of course it was the only solution, according to Marxist theory.) That Leftist ideology in Stalinist form overran nationalism, in some countries, with disastrous results for the freed colonised, is something one wonders how Memmi regards. Has he seen this as an extension of his thesis of the inadequacies of the colonised Left to take the true path of the Left and influence effectively the future of the colonised? And what does he think of the role of the Left today, in its renaissance after the collapse of the mother country, the Soviet Union, as now a force along with the Green and Feminist, Gay and Lesbian, multiple non-governmental groups, together against globalisation which leaves the former colonised still as the poorest in the world?

One of the tributary sources of Memmi’s failure of vision vis-à-vis the contribution of Leftist colonisers to the development of liberation movements is that he does not allow that the progeny of colonisers could earn a civic and national status other than that of coloniser, eternal outsider. Demonstrably, it is not valid to make the claim on natal grounds; that’s not enough. But he doesn’t allow that foreign plants might mutate and strike roots. As we have witnessed, history subsequent to his writing of this book has proved him in part right, in part wrong.

He is right, in that during the period of liberation movements arising and the post-colonial era that ensued, a majority of colonisers in many countries did not recognise the right of the colonised to liberation movements, nor were prepared to live under the independence of colonial rule these won. They made of themselves an anachronism, fossilised in the past. Many left; but deracinated from Europe, fled to wherever white rule might last a few more years — for example, from Angola, Mozambique and the Rhodesias to South Africa.

Memmi was wrong, in that there was a minority of colonisers mainly of the Left spectrum, who identified themselves with the position that colonialism was unjust, racist and anti-human, and were prepared, first to act against it along with the great mass force of the colonised, and then to live under that force’s majority government. That is the logic of freedom; these colonisers saw that colonialism had misshapen them, too, its privileges were distortions, and the loss of these in post-colonial society would be and is normality they had never had a chance to experience. This logic reinforces, does not attempt to deny or diminish in any way, with white hubris, the fact that the colonised have freed themselves — no other could have done that in their name, out of the principles of any ideology. Theirs was ‘a kind of historical necessity by which colonial pressure created anti-colonial resistance’.¹²¹

In examining the anachronism ‘The Coloniser Who Accepts’, Memmi makes en passant an extraordinary statement. ‘Compared to colonial racism, that of European doctrinaires seems transparent, barren of ideas and, at first sight, almost without passion.’ This written by a Jew in the 1950s, after the Nazi doctrine had sent millions of Jews, Gypsies and others to their death on its fanatically pursued racist theory. The colonial racist doctrine, extremely interestingly examined by Memmi, is summed up by him: the coloniser and the colonised, a definitive category formed by the colonial mind to justify that doctrine, ‘is what it is because they are what they are, and neither one nor the other will ever change’. How was this racial stasis to be maintained?

Memmi refutes religious conversion as one of the means to keep the colonised subservient, the coloniser’s authority standing in for the Divine Will on earth. ‘Contrary to general belief, the colonialist [coloniser] never seriously promoted the religious conversion of the colonised.’ He certainly did. Indeed, missionaries preceded colonisers in most territories, conquest advanced, gun in one hand and Bible in the other. ‘When colonialism proved to be a deadly, damaging scheme, the church washed its hands of it.’ The ‘deadliness’ was that ‘conversion of the colonized to the colonizer’s religion would have been a step towards assimilation’. The facts disprove this. While the church resigned many to freedom available to them only in heaven, reinforcing the colonialist creed of no such availability on earth, it produced others inspired by the rebel Jesus’s example, rebels themselves against the colonial system, unreconciled to it. The church establishment itself was highly ambiguous in its functions of representing Divine Justice, blessing slaves to save their souls before they were shipped.

If any such was needed, Memmi does establish eloquently that racism was not ‘an accidental detail, but … a consubstantial part of colonialism … the highest expression of that colonial system’. He takes leave of ‘The Colonizer Who Accepts’ with a sardonic salute: ‘Custodian of the values of civilization and history, he accomplishes a mission; he has the immense merit of bringing light to the colonized’s ignominious darkness. The fact that this role brings him privileges and respect is only justice; colonization is legitimate … with all its consequences … Colonization is eternal and he can look to his future without worries of any kind.’

If this coloniser who accepts to stay on in the country after liberation, living as he always did, tolerated by the independent government of the former colonised and privately retaining his old privileges — greasing a palm or two so that he may carry on farming the vast lands that were taken from the colonised — he may find he does have worry of a final kind. The land is seized back from him by those whose it was before colonisation stole it.

‘Colonisation is eternal.’

Perhaps in his devastating appraisal of colonialist arrogance Memmi spoke more prophetically than he knew.

Could one expect him in the 1950s to have looked all the way ahead to neocolonialism? Maybe it is unfair; one should be satisfied to have his deep and dread probing into the condition of people living under a unique combination of racism and greed: the colonial will to claim right to take as booty other people’s lives, other people’s lands, that was fundamental colonialism. But he might have foreseen that if colonies freed themselves of colonial governance, colonialism would not give up so easily. Mannoni did in 1947: ‘We must not, of course, underestimate the importance of economic relations, which is paramount; indeed it is very likely that economic conditions will determine the whole future of colonial peoples.’ In his 1965 preface Memmi affirms that for him ‘the economic aspect of colonization is fundamental’ but in his book he does not deal with those aspects of the economics of colonialism that were prescient when he wrote it. He remarks only that the self-appointed colonial mother complained that the colony was costing more to maintain than it was worth. What the original liens of colonialism established in trade mean in worth in post-colonial times, is plenty. There are former colonies whose natural resources, from cocoa to gold, are still bought low and sold high. One of globalisation’s immense tasks is to serve as the means of tackling this final form of colonialism. And it cannot be done for the developing countries that once were colonies (supposing there would be the will to do so …) but with them, in full recognition of their essential place in policy decisions.

The sickness of the world, technologically boastful, humanly inadequate, cannot be healed by traditional masters of the world alone. Events are proving that they themselves are not immune to anything, from terrorist attacks to HIV/Aids. Fanon saw this from the past, went further: ‘The Third World … faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers.’¹²² The only update necessary is the amendment: to which Europe, the USA and other rich countries have not been able to find the answers.

2003

William Plomer and Turbott Wolfe

‘I think Turbott Wolfe may have been a man of genius.’

The first sentence boldly stakes out William Plomer’s power as a writer. He has taken you, the reader, by the scruff of the neck, for your attention. And it is up to him never to let it flag. For this is an extraordinary claim for a novelist to follow in the creation of his central character: produce the goods. How a genius? An artist? A writer? A thinker? There’s the caveat ‘may have been’, with the canny calculation that the verdict is going to be for the reader to find out, decide for him/herself. Plomer’s great gift in involving the reader controversially in his story is there, right away.

Plomer chose for his first novel the Conradian device of having the writer be narrator at second hand. Turbott Wolfe is introduced as a kind of Marlow, telling his tale not as an old salt — Marlow in Heart of Darkness — but a sick man with little time ahead of him and much to tell.

It turns out that Turbott Wolfe is only a leisure-time writer, an amateur artist; if he may be a genius, it is not as that sort of visionary. His vision is that which dares to venture through the blinding density of moral, political and social acceptances of the colonial era to a reality that could be obscured but not banished.

He is telling his story late, in a reverse exile, back in the banal, rose-patterned chintz comforts of England, from where he left as a young man ‘sent out to Africa’ in the 1920s for his health and to make his colonial fortune. He was set to run a trading store in Lembuland, ‘a region neither too civilized nor too remote’, and in preparation spent his parental annuity on stocking up with books, paint, pens, ink, paper, and — unlikely provision but significant of his idea of the life he expected to lead — a piano. The baggage of a genteel ‘civilized’ European life transported to Ovuzane, in remote South Africa. He began there organising his time between ‘trade and folk-lore [research on the spot] and painting and writing and music’. What an anachronism this was is soon evident as three realities invade its superficiality: the vast, undomesticated splendour of the landscape, the pettiness, crudity, sanctimoniousness of the local white population of colonial officials, farmers and missionaries, and the unselfconscious dignity and physical beauty of the blacks whom he served in his store.

Wolfe (or his creator, Plomer) is sharp-tongued but if some of his descriptions of the white locals are pitiless caricature, that stands for the total caricature of human relations that is the set-up of colonialism. His earliest experience of Ovuzane society is when he comes upon ‘Schönstein’s Better Shows’, a travelling funfair where his few darting observations, like film clips that will develop coherence later, reveal the nature of the place and people in which and among whom he finds himself. To the roar of the hurdy-gurdy ‘a gross European in one of the swing-boats’ kisses a coloured girl and she flings away from him, to jeering laughter; the fair owner has a wife ‘barefaced by day and barebacked by night’. In a mob, ‘English, Dutch, Portuguese, nondescript were the whites; Bantu, Lembu, Christianized and aboriginal, Mohammedan negroes were the blacks; and the coloureds were all colours and all races fused. It came upon me suddenly in that harsh polyglot gaiety that I was living in Africa; that there is a question of colour.’

Then there are encounters with white neighbours given wickedly Dickensian names — Bloodfield, Flesher, mischievously label their coarse nature — who are jealous of what they see as his cultural snobbishness in having a ‘studio’, and disgusted when it is discovered that he has black people sit as models for his paintings, makes music there with them on their traditional instruments and his piano. ‘Surely you don’t have these blooming niggers in here?’

It is at once exceptional that a young man of Wolfe’s conventional background should have so quickly shed any illusions he must have had about his presence. Plomer makes it not only believable, but inescapable for him: ‘There would be conflict between myself and the white; there would be conflict between myself and the black.’

Wolfe describes these whites with an undisguised loathing and pokes gentle but demeaning fun at the old missionaries, such as Bishop Klodquist, who came to save souls among the Africans with ‘a Bible and a bottle of vin ordinaire … no pyjamas, and not a word of Lembu’.

Wolfe blurts angrily, ‘Give me a good old criminal lunatic any day, rather than ask me to breathe the same air as Flesher and Bloodfield.’

And just when you, the reader, find Turbott Wolfe to be proving himself as bigoted as the people he despises, Plomer catches you out in too hasty a conclusion. Judgement is not as simple as that. There’s the self-searching of Wolfe’s own conclusion, ‘And seeing continually incessant lines of natives trooping in and out of the store I turned my feelings, in escape from the unclean idea of Flesher and Bloodfield, far too much into sympathy with the aboriginal.’

So he tends, at first, to idolise the blacks in apposition to loathing the whites. With a lens of overcompensation for the local Europeans’ dehumanising image of Africans, ‘My eye was training itself to admire to excess the over-developed marvellous animal grace of each Lembu individual. I was becoming ecstatic … over the patriarchal grace of each old man … over the aged women … warm-handed tender daughters.’ But again there are no easy resolutions in the pace of this restlessly, relentlessly questioning novel. At the same time, Wolfe becomes aware ‘I was losing my balance … I suspected danger. I found myself all at once overwhelmed with a suffocating sensation of universal black darkness. Blackness. I was being sacrificed, a white lamb, to black Africa.’

The image resurrects, from the subconscious of the young white man, colonialism’s self-justification in the concept of Christianity in battle with paganism. But as Mongane Wally Serote, the South African novelist and poet, has written, ‘You cannot fight yourself and be in an army of the people. The spirit must tear itself from the ghosts, it must sense and know its destiny. It must take care and charge of itself.’¹²³

It is not as a white lamb but a man in love that Turbott Wolfe gains, through pain, his equilibrium of human vision. Since he has no woman, the local name the Africans have given him is ‘Chastity Wolfe’. Now a particular young woman is among the black people who buy from his store. ‘I was very strongly attracted … by a native girl … She took away the breath of Chastity Wolfe.’ The description of the girl is exaltation: ‘An aboriginal, perfectly clean’ in contrast to the grubby spirit of the Bloodfields and Fleshers, ‘perfectly beautiful … She was an ambassadress of all that beauty … outside history, outside time, outside science.’ And the paean to the girl is interrupted by a tirade against missionary Christianity. ‘She was … of a type you will find nowhere now: it has been killed by the missions, the poor whites and the towns. There was a chance … to build up a new Christianity … But it is too late now. The missionaries brought them [the Africans] the sacrament, but I could give you more than one instance where they brought them syphilis too. They took away everything from the natives … and what on earth did they give them instead? … Christianity is dead. It is a lost cause.’ The girl ‘was a living image of what has been killed … by our obscene civilization that conquers everything’. And yet: ‘As soon as I had fallen in love with Nhliziyombi I was afraid of falling in love with her.’ This was surely the last pull of the shackles of race consciousness dragging at the freedom of vision struggling to be attained along with his growing political awareness.

The emergence of the new, post-colonial man was not to be born through fulfilled sexual love, although love in its total sense, free of glib religious or political edicts, is the only human approach in which iconoclastic Wolfe believes. He loses Nhliziyombi after unresolved, half-enchanted, half-agonised passion marvellously conveyed. He emerges to face both the angry opprobrium of Bloodfield, Flesher and company for having descended to falling in love with a black (while they have black mistresses bearing their children — but in the back yard, not the white man’s house) and the moment of truth flung down before him by a white woman. Mabel van der Horst has the response to the question of colour that Wolfe found himself confronted with at Schönstein’s Better Shows: ‘there is no native question. It isn’t a question. It’s an answer.’

To give the answer expression, Wolfe, Mabel, a newly arrived missionary of a different kind, Friston — who is secretly a Communist — Zachary Msombi, a half-Western-educated young black man, and his cousin Caleb, Wolfe’s assistant in the store, found an association, grandiloquently named ‘Young Africa, an Important New Movement for the Regeneration of Our Country’.

HORROR was written on the sun.

A moment — of insight as genius? — flashing the image in a poem Plomer chooses to attribute to Friston, not Wolfe; it is what colonialism has scrawled on the face of Ovuzane, of Africa.

‘Young Africa’ becomes confused and dazzled; Friston drugs himself into delirium over jealousy as Mabel makes love with Zachary in an adjoining room. Did she want to found a revolutionary movement only in order to justify her choice of a black husband? Friston recovers sufficient sobriety — or gains enough change of heart and head — to officiate at the wedding before disappearing to be arrested as a Communist in some other colonially occupied territory. As for Wolfe — hounded by the colonial commissioner, reviled by the Bloodfield cohort who demand his deportation, he pre-empts this by taking his own decision to leave. He puts the trading store up for sale and I shan’t pre-empt the author’s final, devastating laconic thrust by revealing who snaps at the opportunity to own it. Turbott Wolfe sums himself up: ‘I am an egoist,’ he tells the black man Caleb, ‘I have just enough money to go and live quietly in England … In England I shall be pointed at as an eccentric, because I try and use my brains … You will marry and settle down in your own country, among your own people … You will find happiness and I shall find emptiness.’

Tantalising for anyone living in the post-colonial world, it is for the reader to decide: was Turbott Wolfe a failure as a man of his time? Perhaps he was in Africa too soon? The day of the answer had not yet come.

William Plomer was nineteen years old when he began to write Turbott Wolfe. He was — yes — working in a trading store in Zululand, South Africa, in the 1920s. Only once is he identified as the author to whom Turbott Wolfe is telling his story. As Wolfe lies ‘… I know I am dying) in this cold and mothy bed’ he addresses by name ‘My good William Plomer’. A bit of an obvious ploy on the part of William Plomer to warn the reader not to assume (in fact the reader knows …) that Turbott Wolfe is William Plomer’s creation of an alternate self. As all characters a fiction writer creates are alternate selves: the people we might have been by the mysterious accident of birth.

William Plomer was born of English parents in South Africa in 1903 but always insisted that he could not claim himself as South African ‘since nobody, if a cat happened to have kittens in an oven, regards them as biscuits’. His childhood and education were divided back and forth between England, his ancestral home, and South Africa, where his father held various posts in colonial administration and did some farming. Nor very successfully; the trading store turned out to be the sole support of the Zululand farming venture.

Turbott Wolfe, written in pencil in school exercise books of the kind sold in a trading store, was sent to Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press in London. Knowing nothing of publishers and the unlikelihood of them wanting to take on outlandish works by unknown writers, young Plomer couldn’t have been more fortunate in his stab at finding a publisher. The Woolfs recognised the extraordinary originality of the novel, both in subject and style, in reference to what Edward Said, speaking of various literatures, terms ‘historical modes of being’.¹²⁴ In this instance, the world-historical mode of colonial being, for both the coloniser and the colonised. It is an inexplicable lapse on the part of literary scholars and critics that Turbott Wolfe is not recognised as a pyrotechnic presence in the canon of renegade colonialist literature along with Conrad. While the work is only intermittently satire — and does not spare the narrator anti-hero, Turbott Wolfe himself, often attacked out of his own mouth, so to speak — it reveals William Plomer as that rarity, a writer brilliant enough to present deep, passionate seriousness with trenchant wit.

Turbott Wolfe was a success in England when published in 1926; disturbing, critically acclaimed. In New York a critic wrote, ‘Look elsewhere for your bedtime story.’ In South Africa the book drew down upon Plomer’s head such outrage that the twenty-two-year-old author could not have continued to find any kind of social acceptance there, and in the context of Double Lives (title of his later autobiography) — his life already a consciousness evolved between one continent, one culture, and another — he went to try yet another culture, Japan. He learned the language, worked as a literature teacher, formed some of the most important relationships of his adulthood and stayed for several years. From that period came his second novel, Sado.

But like Turbott Wolfe, he spent the rest of his life in England, where he wrote more fiction, autobiography and biography, and became one of the best poets of his generation, along with Auden, MacNiece, Spender, much quoted for his vivid humour and subtle critique of humbug of any kind.

William Plomer returned to South Africa once, briefly, in 1956, after thirty years away. We met at last the writer of the only novel of poetic vision to come out of our country since Olive Schreiner’s Story of An African Farm. A tall man, quietly and handsomely dressed, exquisitely courteous, receiving with a slight smile the gushing accusation: Mr Plomer, why have you written so few novels, why haven’t you gone on writing about Africa? But he had given the answer elsewhere, when he wrote ‘Literature has its battery hens; I was a wilder fowl.’

He died in 1973 and did not live to see the end of that epitome of the age of colonialism, apartheid, overcome in the victory of the South African black liberation movements. The native question as the answer. But he had heard and understood the answer, half a century before.

2003

Atlantis

If there was one thing I knew about Cuba, it was as a country emerged from the staggering burden of a colonial past and a dictatorship — Batista’s, as we emerged from apartheid’s white minority one — but Cuba now, uniquely, subjected for more than forty years to a USA blockade. If Castro’s regime, as long as Soviet Communist power existed, was a launching pad against the USA, militarily and ideologically, neither threat has any existence today. I am a signatory to the international protest demanding that the USA lift the blockade; and I’m aware that in the USA there is a considerable body of opinion that wants it abolished.

I am a member of the African National Congress in South Africa, but not of the South African Communist Party, one of its alliance partners. I didn’t go to Cuba prepared to celebrate uncritically what the Fidel Castro regime has achieved, nor rejoice in Western glee over its failures to provide important freedoms.

Cubans are poor, yes. Even the writers, academics and cultural administrators I spent time with are poor by the modest standards of people working in the arts in Europe, the USA and even my own country. In the crowds at the opening of the Havana International Jazz Festival, pelvis-to-buttock, breath-to-breath in standing room only, there was a calm equilibrium that could be sensed. A Cuban companion joked, ‘We aren’t jealous of the ones who found seats. We don’t own property. There’s no keeping up with the Joneses, you see. We don’t have any Joneses.’

Storming the bourgeoisie is the convention of revolution; taking over its ruin there is a reality. Creating a new and more just life may take longer than the forty-four years since the beginning of the Castro regime. This reality of taking over the grandiloquent ruins of colonio-capitalism in economic circumstances brought about by factors in the present is nakedly in your face as you drive along the sweep of the ancient fortressed harbour towards old Havana. Here are the empty hulks of a long façade of vast mansions that must have been merchants’ headquarters or sumptuous residences — but no, not empty. Where even three walls stand at one of the jagged, roofless levels people are bravely living. Glimpse of a table, bed.

Terrible living conditions, comparable to those in parts of Johannesburg where illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries in conflict, squat. In a shopping alley that runs off a grand square of exquisite seventeenth- to nineteenth-century buildings, I was among dignified people, wearing the T-shirts and jeans of our international uniform, buying pizzas from hole-in-the-wall vendors. The minimum wage in Cuba is twelve dollars a month. How does one subsist? Education and medical care are good and free, and here are shed-depots where everyone exchanges their ration tickets for basic foods at low prices payable in pesos. A wartime measure — but then the USA blockade is a wartime action against a country where no one is at war with anyone.

I was driven more than 350 kilometres from Havana to a resort of the Caribbean Paradise style dating from Batista’s time, available in dollars only. It was uncrowded, since tourists — unfortunately for the island’s economy — due to the USA’s ban on its citizens’ travel to Cuba, were confined to a Canadian party and several French people. USA ‘exemptions’ allowed 176,000 Americans to visit in 2001, and 25,000 came clandestinely; but I encountered very few anywhere.

Everywhere royal palms are watchtowers over the Cuban landscape. The roads were walled with sugar cane interrupted by villages. I had the displaced feeling I was in the old Deep South of the USA; these rows of cabins, with someone sitting out in a rocking chair. But this wasn’t the Deep South, it was rural Cuba 2003. The poor in their rocking chairs had big cigars in their mouths. Almost the only cars and buses were on the single highway; there are few private cars in Cuba, these mainly vintage Oldsmobiles, de Sotos and Chryslers. The weekend family outing was measuredly taking place by horse and cart.

In Havana I had asked a writer why there were no independent newspapers in Cuba, no freedom of expression, stressing the difference there is between a press seeking to bring down a regime and a newspaper advocating reforms within it. Money, rather than fear of state retribution, he said. The only funds available to any reformist group for paper and printing would come from the Cubans in Florida whose sole intention is to topple Castro, and the importance of whose vote in USA elections keeps the blockade in force. But I knew that dissident Cuban journalists land in prison …

I see Cuba as a place of symbols. An Atlantis risen to confront us. The fall of the Soviet Empire drowned the island in our time as a relic of twentieth-century power-politics. To visit it is to come upon a piece of our not distant past, significantly surfaced.

Here is all that is left of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of our twentieth century, in the form it took as the utopian dream for a just world.

Here is the flotsam of vulgar capitalist materialism: the forties and fifties cars with their airflow flourish, fishtail embellishments, somehow kept running!

Two features from our past: the once great solution to an unjust world, Marxist-Leninism, become another kind of honourable folk-wisdom to follow, rather than the unquestionable solution to that world; and the trivial values of that world: they seemed shockingly reduced to the same level against the realities of our twenty-first-century survival. One of Cuba’s intellectuals asks ‘Cuba: socialist museum or social laboratory?’ Could it be the latter? A social democracy of the Left already showing a tendency to follow the inspiration of José Marti: could Fidel Castro (or his successor) make use of the ideas of his original mentor for human justice, facing inevitable millennium facts, testing globalisation’s universality, without betraying an evolved revolution?

The end of the USA’s strangulation blockade will not solve magically the problems of a country with few natural resources. But the beginning of any transformation of Cuba’s nobly borne hardship and poverty is the lifting of the outrageous edict. The blockade is a shameful and meaningless act of an overweening power, senseless in terms of world politics since the Soviet Union doesn’t exist.

2003

Thirst

Turn a globe and it seems our world is awash with endless water. A paradox, that delegates to the World Water Forum taking place in Kyoto come with a crisis agenda that the future of our planet is a growing thirst which threatens all living matter. While 70 per cent of our earth’s surface is covered by water, 97.5 per cent is salt water. Good only for whales, fish, crustaceans, and so on. Of the 2.5 per cent of fresh water on which life subsists, almost three-quarters is frozen in ice caps. Not unexpected that water resources can be a source of conflict between communities and territories. But necessity demands that water be shared for everyone’s survival. Perforce it becomes a catalyst for international cooperation: water is also an agent for peace.

We are prodigal in our use of the precious liquor of life. In the twentieth century its use grew at twice the rate of the world population growth. Changing climate patterns, pollution, reckless deforestation, draining of wetlands — all contributed to the colossal binge. While extravagance was and is in progress for some countries and people, more than a billion lack access to a steady supply of clean water. Over 2.2 million, mostly in the developing countries, die each year from diseases carried by the impure water that is all they have to drink. Six thousand children die every day — yes, I stop, appalled, as I write this — of the same cause.

The benefice of water affects many less obvious aspect of poverty. While campaigns proceed to provide life-prolonging drugs to sufferers in Africa’s plague of HIV/Aids, the success of treatment regimes requires the physical resistance booster of decent living conditions — and these begin with clean water. The edict ‘Water is life’ takes on many nuances.

The provision of a water supply to communities is only half a solution to its lack. Absence of effective sanitation means that the supply becomes polluted by seepage of faecal matter. The thirst is quenched but disease is imbibed with it. So access to effective sanitation along with fresh water supply is now recognised as the essential two-fold provision to meet human needs.

There are high-sounding terms which link the water supply factor indivisibly to others in the broad concept of providing a liveable environment now, and ensuring it for the future. ‘Sustainable development’, ‘biological diversity’, ‘resource management’, ‘streamline existing’. Not least emphasised is ‘good governance’ to be implemented by both territorial and international policies. At the launch of the African-European Union Strategic Partnership on Water Affairs and Sanitation last year, the Presidents of South Africa and Nigeria, Thabo Mbeki and Olusegan Obasango, and Presidents of the European Council and European Union, Andus Fogh Pasmussen and Romano Prodi, issued a statement ‘underlining that water resource management needs to be addressed at all levels’ and that ‘a balance between water needs and those of the environment can contribute to the goal of halting the loss of environment resources by 2015’. They stressed the dependency of this goal on the new strategic long-term partnership between governments … the relevant stakeholders … civil society and the private sector.’ In fact everybody who ever turned on a tap or filled a glass. Human interdependence; it even specifies that water resource development should be ‘gender sensitive’.

If this last looks like a nervous nod granting feminists the equal experience of thirst, it is in fact serious recognition of the (literally) heavy responsibility of women in the distribution systems of water in vast areas of the world. Theirs is the biblical category of drawers of water. And too often, in many countries, they carry it in vessels on their heads for many miles. Their generations-long role in what one might call human reticulation has been greatest on the African continent; in South Africa, coincident with the World Water Forum in Japan, there will be the presentation of ‘Women In Water Awards’ by the Department of Water and Forestry, to ‘highlight and promote the participation of women in water resources management’ both as the old bearers of its weight and their new role in overseeing, educating their communities in the fair-sharing and conservation of fresh water supplies.

The ‘World Water Report’, outcome of the Forum, will gather its conclusions from delegates’ projects dedicated to conserve the world’s water and to ensure that it does not favour the private swimming pools of the rich countries while the taps of the poor run dry. A leading proposition before the Forum is the United Nations Development Programme ‘Community Water Initiative’, with a budget of 500,000 dollars for this year alone, rising to a target of 50 million over five years. It will support ‘innovative, community-level approaches to water supply, sanitation and watershed management to an increasing number of developing countries as one part of the UNDP’s drive to halve, by 2015, the number of the world’s people who are without access to potable water’.

There are so many threats to our continued existence; one hardly need name them. Some affect specific countries, regions defined by power groups. They are resolved or bring disaster to this or that part of the world. And if we can keep our patch of the planet clear of them, well, we turn away and hope to flourish through the next generation’s day. But one threat applies to us all. If we do not recognise our global life-dependency on water, we shall thirst, on a parched planet.

2003

Questions Journalists Don’t Ask

Anybody who has any kind of public persona — pop star, sports hero, politician, artist, writer — knows the predictable questions a journalist will ask in an interview, according to whatever defining area of professional achievement the interviewee belongs. (We could reply in our sleep.) Such is fame or notoriety — pop stars and politicians the best copy. Writers — none of whose achievements have been or are famous on that scale, except perhaps Romeo and Juliet, Gone With The Wind and Harry Potter — are obliged, by their publishers, to be interviewed. I am one of them. (The authors of the Bible are a collective, agents of a Creativity said to be in heaven, therefore inaccessible.)

As years have gone by in a long writing life, I have musingly assembled in memory a short list of the questions journalists don’t ask. These sometimes would seem to me much more interesting — better copy? — than the ones they do. So I’ve decided to interview myself, and see what I can winkle out that they don’t think to. This implies I must also answer myself no matter how reluctant that self may be? Yes. Not I’ll be the judge, I’ll be the jury, but I’ll be the journalist, I’ll be victim. Some sample questions from me to me:

N.Q.

What is the most important lack in your life?

N.A.

I’ve lived that life in Africa without learning an African language. Even in my closest friendships, literary and political activities with black fellow South Africans, they speak only English with me. If they’re conversing together in one of their mother tongues (and all speak at least three or four of each other’s) I don’t understand more than a few words that have passed into our common South African use of English. So I’m deaf to an essential part of the South African culture to which I’m committed and belong.

N.Q.

What’s the most blatant lie you’ve ever told?

N.A.

Really can’t distinguish. Living through apartheid under Secret Police surveillance made those of us who opposed the regime actively, accomplished liars. You lied that you didn’t know the whereabouts of someone the police were looking to arrest, you lied about your encounters and movements; had to, in order to protect others and yourself.

N.Q.

You’ve achieved something as a writer, OK; but you have a daughter and a son, how do you rate as a mother?

N.A.

Ask them. If you don’t want to hear any other self-protective lies.

N.Q.

What was the best compliment you’ve ever been paid?

N.A.

When I was, years and years ago, on a camping trip on a farm, I was bitten by ticks that had brushed off the long grass I’d been walking through. When I complained of this, the old and very unattractive farmer said ‘If I was a tick, I’d also like to bite you.’

N.Q.

What is the most demeaning thing said about you as a writer?

N.A.

My eight-year-old son, when asked by a schoolfriend what his mother’s job was, said ‘She’s a typist.’ True, I was in my study typing some fiction or other at the time; I overheard, through my window, his judgement in the garden.

N.Q.

You were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at the hands of the King of Sweden. Do you look back on that as the best moment in your life?

N.A.

Best moment? Reinhold Cassirer and I had just married, and were at a party in London. He had gone to find a friend in an adjoining room. I found myself standing beside a woman I didn’t know, both of us amiably drinks in hand. He appeared in the doorway. She turned aside to me and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Who’s that divine man?’ I said: ‘My husband.’

N.Q.

How do you react to a bad review of one of your books?

N.A.

Ignore it if it’s by some hack, easily recognised by his/her poor understanding of what the book’s about. Pretend (to myself) to ignore it if it’s written by one whose judgement and critical ability I respect; and then take that judgement into account when, as my own sternest critic, I judge what I achieved or didn’t in that book.

N.Q.

How gratified are you to have your writing praised?

N.A.

Same answer as the one above: not at all, if I don’t respect the judgement of the one who praises, gratified when I believe the piece of work justifies such recognition coming from someone whose honesty, intellect and level of literary judgement I respect.

N.Q.

While writing, do you take drugs, smoke marijuana or drink alcohol to beef up your creative imagination?

N.A.

Only a double Scotch; hours after my writing day is over. (Wow! That quiz would be a tough one for many of my fellow writers, starting off with De Quincey.)

N.Q.

Do you think a writer should also know how to cook?

N.A.

Yes. The ivory tower has no kitchen. Work done there needs the earth of the ordinary tasks, distractions of everybody’s existence, although we writers complain like hell about this.

N.Q.

As a liberated woman, would you nevertheless prefer to have been born a man?

N.A.

Both sexes experience the joys of love-making. If she chooses, a woman has the additional extraordinary experience of growing a life inside herself, and presenting the world to it. It’s painful — all right. But the wider experience in life a writer has, the better the ability to identify with lives other than the writer’s own, and create varieties of character, states of being, other than his/her own. I sometimes think, for example, I’ve missed out on extending emotional experience by never having been sexually attracted to a woman. Anyway, a writer as such is a special kind of androgynous creature, all sexes and all ages when creating fictional characters, all the people he or she has known, observed or interacted with. So while I’m a woman, as a writer I’m a composite intelligence.

N.Q.

Why did you instruct your publisher to withdraw a novel of yours from the shortlist of the English ‘Orange Prize’ for women writers?

N.A.

I don’t think the sex of a writer is any criterion for literature. We are heterogeneous in our imagination, I believe. Writers black, female, gay, lesbian do the cause of recognition of their talents disservice in measuring their achievements particularly, exclusively, against themselves. Oh — you’ll note that, as far as I know, there is no category of prizes for males only, or whites, or for heterosexuals only.

N.Q.

You’re seventy-nine years old — when are you going to write your autobiography?

N.A.

Autobiography? Never. I am much too jealous of my privacy. Secretive, if you like. It’s all one has, in the end. Whereas anyone’s biographer has to make do with what’s somehow accessible, by hook or by crook.

N.Q.

Do you think people will still be reading books — printed on paper, bound — in the future?

N.A.

No. I think a hundred years or less from now, the image of words projected on screens of limitless kinds and flowing directly as sound into ears — even beyond what technological means exist at present — will have made the book like a stone tablet dug up by archaeologists. I’m shudderingly relieved to know I won’t be around to be so deprived.

Well: I can now draw my own conclusions about the character of the individual I was interviewing … It would be interesting to hear from other interviewee victims, what questions they — thankfully? — are never asked.

2003

‘To You I Can’: Gustave Flaubert’s November

November. ‘When the trees have shed their leaves, when the sky still keeps in twilight the russet tint that gilds the faded grass, it is sweet to see extinguishing itself all that not long ago still burned in you.’

Autumn. And it is with a man’s recall of that season of life that there begins the most beautiful, unsparing, shaming and unashamed, emotionally and morally pitiless evocation of its antithesis, the season of fires ignited. Flaubert’s novella is an unsurpassed testament of adolescence.

Gustave Flaubert was barely twenty years old when he completed it in 1842. He was the one burning. ‘The puberty of the heart precedes that of the body.’ As a schoolboy aged fifteen he fell worshipfully in love with somebody’s wife. On his first travels beyond Rouen, where he was born, and still a virgin at eighteen despite tortuous sexual desires, he was made love to by the daughter of the proprietor of the hotel where he lodged in Marseille. He did not forget either conquest the women made of him, soul or body; they were transposed into one, the woman Marie, in this book.

This I learn from reading the many biographies of the author. Flaubert, more than any other fiction writer I can cite, including Marcel Proust, has been subjected to the process of taking the writer’s creation as a kind of documentary basis for what is more interesting to explore: his/her life. It’s not what you write, it’s who you are. This guesswork on the processes of the imagination is surely a denigration, if scholarly unconscious, of literature: the act of creation itself. Fiction cannot be ‘explained’ by autobiography; it remains, like the composition of music, a profound mystery while a source of human understanding only the arts can offer.

I give the hotel-keeper’s daughter simply as an example of the still fashionable literary methodology — not outdated along with the psychological novel but somehow reinforced by post-modern theory that anything pertinent to the author, even childhood snaps reproduced in the text, belongs in his/her fiction. I don’t care, and frankly, I think Flaubert’s reader won’t care whether or not the transporting experience of this book is really that of the author’s young life. All that counts is that it is a work of genius written by a twenty-year-old. Genius: as always on that extremely rare level of mind and spirit, the exploration of human motivation, action and feeling remains relevant, becomes again and again astonishingly contemporary in generations long after that within which it was conceived.

The years on which the narrator looks back from his November were the reign of King Louis Philippe, 1830–1848, years of post-Napoleonic disillusion, when revolutionary change as an agent to bring about justice, end privilege and corruption, create values to replace those shabbily glittering, seemed impossible. There was nothing to believe in, secular or religious, that was not a sham in relation to deep needs. Nothing to aspire to beyond materialism; and if resigned to this, no youth had the chance of access without sponsorship in high places. There are many countries in our twenty-first century where young people today experience the same frustration, malaise, updating the nineteenth-century escape to absinthe and opium by whatever alcoholic concoction at hand, and shooting up heroin.

Flaubert’s reluctant law student, from a provincial bourgeois family with unrealised Voltairean ideas, has no name as narrator, drawing one without intermediary breath-to-breath into his life. He dispenses with his study assignments summarily in favour of poetry, unlikely ambitions in the arts, and fantasies: ‘I would go as far as I could into my thought, revolve it in all its aspects, penetrate to its farthest depths … I built myself palaces and dwelt in them as an emperor, plundered the mines of all their diamonds and strewed them in bucketsful over the road I was to traverse.’

The awakening of the imagination comes through the evocative power of words, and so does the sexual awakening. ‘Woman, mistress especially … bowled me over … the magic of the name alone’ threw the adolescent ‘into long ecstasies’. This is the genesis of an erotic narrative, an achievement that has nothing to do with pornography and everything to do with acknowledgement of the sexual drive in symbiosis with the spirit and intellect.

The ‘mystery of woman’ obsesses him in the streets with small details enchantingly described, from which he creates for himself the whole woman, tries to attach to each passing foot ‘a body, a body to an idea, all these movements to their purposes, and I asked myself where all these steps were going’. Out of unsatisfied desires comes the revenge of rejection of what’s denied. He’s taken pleasure in watching prostitutes and seeing rich beauties in their carriages. This turns to savage disgust for them all, and extends to both levels of society they represent. The rebel without a cause, an empty heart, wants to lose himself in crowds. ‘What is this restless pain, that one is proud of … and that one hides like a love?’ (We’d diagnose depression, today.) His desperate plunges into commune with nature are no consolation; forces as erotic as sexual fantasies are what he enjoys there, only reinforcing his sexual frustration.

‘Nothing but a great love could have extricated me.’

Unable to act, suffocated by youthful arrogance and fantasy — the young man not only has not realised the love, sexual and ideal, he places at the centre of being; he still looks for the sign that will beckon him to it. Seeking distraction, he responds to a sign that would seem to have no relation to this depth of need; he accepts the invitation in the eyes of a prostitute. If he has no name of his own he cares to give the reader, she has called herself Marie. Relieved of his virginity with a voluptuousness beyond the conceptions of his fantasies, he goes home with self-repulsion and returns with renewed desire. What would be described too inadequately as an affair, begins. She is older than him, in every way, years and breadth of experiences; a beauty in whom we recognise some of the characteristics of the unapproachable women he has idealised. The complexity of what we glibly term sexual satisfaction is conveyed subtly, marvellously, as something that truly can be read. Hyperbole has to be revaluated, in this prose. The professionally uncalled-for passion that has come about between her and this young initiate bonds the paradox of the situation into a communion of melancholy and sensuality. Love?

He has not known love. She has been used by many men but not known love; both despair of ever knowing it yet while doubting its existence within the morals and mores of their time, continue tortuously to seek it. From her, the woman who belongs to every man, he hears ‘the first words of love I had heard in my life’. With her body lying upon him, in exquisitely described awareness of her physicality he is led to receive her in her whole being, not a means, a substitute for the unattainable. ‘Contemplating this woman so sad in pleasure … I divined a thousand terrible passions that must have riven her … to judge from the traces left, and then I thought I would enjoy hearing her tell her life, since what I sought in human existence was its vibrant pulsating side.’ He begs her for her story. Marie is aware that a prostitute’s life outside the bed is not a story clients want to be reminded of. But as often throughout this book the flow of intimacy, irony, contemplation and self-scrutiny is suddenly stoppered: there’s a curt statement that switches your mind to a new possibility of revelation.

‘To you I can.’

And in her four words there’s unspoken nuance on the strange nature of their closeness. Why ‘to him’?

She begins a soliloquy that could be lifted out of the book as a novella in itself. Flaubert complained in his early writings that language is inadequate to depths of feeling. This is over whelmingly disproved by himself in Marie’s telling of her story. One might doubt whether a woman of her brutally humble background could have such a command of words to embody feelings. What can’t be questioned, only received with amazement, is how a male writer could enter identity with a woman out of his class and kind, so utterly. This is the writer’s clairvoyance, that all writers share to a certain extent, which this time is beyond what inevitably comes to mind in comparison — James Joyce’s creation of inner musings of Molly Bloom. The twenty-year-old Flaubert achieved close to the great Hungarian writer-critic Georg Lukács’s definition of the fiction writer’s unachievable ultimate aim: wholeness; how to express all. Flaubert’s narrator says he is ‘like a bee gathering everything to nourish me and give me life’. Flaubert, creating him and the woman Marie, attains this — for his work. The brief novel, with its hurtingly fresh evocation of passion for nature and sexual love as two fused expressions of the same primal source, its implicit social critique, linking individuals to their time, is shocking, yes — not in the sense of offensive but of awakening as you read, areas of thought evaded, hidden. I leave it to you, the reader, to reach The End — at what point the author puts aside his account of his narrator’s life, turns away to begin the novels of his celebrated maturity, including Madame Bovary.

Gustave Flaubert’s famously cryptic remark of that period: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ Madame Bovary is myself. In this early novel, all the manifestations of life revealed are somewhere buried in all of us. We were or are young. C’est nous. It’s us.

2004

Leo Tolstoy and The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Tolstoy plunges the reader directly into his stories; no ponderous scene-setting used by other nineteenth-century writers. War and Peace begins with the broadside announcement by a St Petersburg socialite, Napoleon has taken Genoa and Lucca — the era of the Napoleonic wars is instantly stage-set. The opening of Anna Karenina is a calm bombshell: ‘Everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household.’ The Death of Ivan Ilyich thrusts the reader into the office of the court among lawyers to hear ‘Gentlemen! Ivan Ilyich has died.’

The story begins at its end. But this is not just a familiar novelistic device, followed by a rewind of a life. The intention is to shock — and in an unconventional way. It succeeds. These are Ilyich’s lawyer colleagues and friends; and their unspoken reaction to the sad news is, ‘What about that, he’s dead; but I’m not.’ His intimate colleague Pyotr Ivanovich is anxious to be done with the obligatory visit to pay respects to the corpse lying in the deceased’s home and get away to his game of cards. To make up for this irreverence he crosses himself repeatedly until the formula seems excessive as he gazes at the dead man’s face; he sees there a ‘reproach or a reminder to the living’ but it has ‘no relevance’ to him. So tolls an ominous note that resounds throughout the story: no one wants to face the mystery of death as inevitable in his or her own person. The note resonates with a prevailing materialism that makes a brassy travesty of life’s final event. Praskovya Fyodorovna, Ivan’s wife, weeps while she enquires ‘most thoroughly’ about the price of the burial plot and whether she could not somehow extract more compensation money for her husband’s demise from the government in which he had a prestigious position as a member of the Chamber of Justice. Only the peasant servant Gerasim, handing Pyotr Ivanovich his fur coat, remarks innocently, ‘It’ll be the same for all of us.’

What did Ivan Ilyich die of? — the gentlemen asked.

Will it be the same for all? Tolstoy has a devastating diagnosis which will be revealed through his unflinching genius in this short novel which encompasses such great themes.

Ivan Ilyich was the son of a civil servant who ‘made the sort of career … that gets people to a position in which … though it proves clear they are unfit to do any real job, nonetheless, due to their … rank, they … are given fabricated, fictitious posts and non-fictitious thousands …’ of roubles. Ivan consequently ‘assimilated … their ways, their outlooks on life, and established friendly relations with them’. His acquired characteristics Tolstoy lists as sensuality, vanity and — somewhat misplaced, it would seem, in the same category as something reprehensible? — liberalism. But that may be explained when the reader comes to understand that the story is being told in the context of the writer’s convictions when he wrote it in 1886.

After law school, Ivan is provided by his father with a post as an officer in a provincial government for which he is kitted out materially from the most luxurious shops. He is urbane, suitably obsequious to the Governor, popular with the men and has amorous liaisons in accordance with what is manly and fashionable. I’m tempted to quote directly from Tolstoy time and again, since his castigation in the form of wry wit makes his observations so succinct in comparison with any lame attempt at paraphrase. ‘Everything took place with clean hands, in clean shirts, with French words … in the very highest society.’ Five years later, Ilyich’s career takes off with the new judicial initiatives put in place as a result of the freeing of the serfs in 1861. He becomes examining magistrate in a different province. The higher post brings within him a sense of the power of the ruling class. He doesn’t directly abuse this power; more subtly, its seduction lies in trying to ‘emolliate its manifestations’: the classic ethos of liberalism exposed by Tolstoy, as when Ilyich dismisses ‘from his mind all circumstances’ (my italics) relating to a case; but Tolstoy’s infallible skill implants in the reader’s subconscious what will be recalled when exposition comes later, as one realises that Tolstoy is accusing society of creating criminals out of unjust social conditions. The implication follows that in accordance with the general hypocrisy of his way of life Ilyich was not dispensing justice.

Outward form is what he follows in everything.

‘Indeed, why on earth shouldn’t I get married?’ He marries an attractive, intelligent girl of the right class. Not a great love. But suitable. Marriage in that milieu is, like death, a matter of accoutrements. ‘Conjugal caresses’ are simply an adjunct to the right furnishings and objects d’art to keep up with the Tsarist high society Joneses. But with pregnancy and the advent of crying babies, the suitable wife becomes fractious and there are vulgar scenes between the couple. The pleasant decorum of bourgeois life seems to be unfairly disrupted by primal reality. To escape it — though Ilyich does not or will not see this as a retreat from reality — he devotes himself obsessively to his work. There, too, there is no satisfaction, only an insufficient salary and, after seventeen years at middle-level posts, the evidence that he has been passed over for advancement to a presiding judgeship. The angry single purpose of his life, now, is to ‘get a post with a salary of five thousand roubles’. Again, as his father managed for him when he was a youth, he finds such a post through knowing the right people. Pride and pocket rejoice: ‘Ivan Ilyich was completely happy.’ This is expressed the only way he knows how. He sets about furnishing the finest house he’s ever had with the luxuries which will surely please his wife and cushion the hell he has found in marriage. Supervising the interior decorating himself, he falls while adjusting the drape of a curtain and hurts his side, but, in the general euphoria, ignores the mishap as trivial.

Where does moral downfall begin in our lives? What is trivial in the distortion of human values? Tolstoy, the self-accusatory moralist who was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for rejection of what he declared distortion of Christ’s original teachings, has the genius of dramatising, through his individual characters in apparently trivial actions, how we become what we are. Ivan Ilyich’s slow death begins soon in the splendid new house, and in his struggle to fulfil the duties of the five-thousand-plus-fringe-benefits post, while suffering an illness which doctors quarrel over attempting to diagnose. It is a new source of shrill reproaches from his wife: illness is his fault, as everything that affects her adversely always is. The only individual who waits upon the suffering man and does not resent his infirmity as deliberately spoiling a pleasant personal life is that servant Gerasim whom we overheard saying of death in the opening pages of the story, ‘It’ll be the same for all of us.’ Yes — the creative mastery of Tolstoy, in which every detail has significance, nothing occurs just to be forgotten, brings this man back into the story. He empties the bedpan without revulsion and it is he who quite naturally takes the burden of Ilyich’s legs up on his strong shoulders to ease pain. Of course, Tolstoy is glorifying the human values he saw in the peasants who had been — and despite the abolition of serfdom still were — despised by the privileged class who betrayed these values flamboyantly, destructive of humanity both in themselves and towards others. Isn’t the peasant behaving as the powerless vassal subservient to a master? Yet the passages in which Ilyich and Gerasim are alone together are so moving that they seem, and perhaps intentionally are, an underlying theme in the overall disillusion of this book; it is possible that people could become truly human in their relations to one another, despite the contrary evidence of history, of race, economic and social class, the material accoutrements of division that have been allowed by Ivan Ilyich to determine his life. Whether it is so or not, he believes his terminal illness was caused by his forgotten mishap when he fell trying to adjust the drape of a curtain — a symbol of privilege gained and stolen by injustice: the private ownership of vast lands, the indiscriminate exile to Siberia of the desperately poor turned to petty crime, and the blessing of the church over all this.

The story is usually regarded as an amazing narrative of the experience of dying, a search for the meaning of death. It is all that, and more: it’s a great questioning of what is and what ought to be, in a human life.

What did Ivan Ilyich die of?

He was fatally sickened by his times.

2005

Susan Sontag

Going back to my shelf of Susan Sontag books it’s as if, although I’ve known them so well, it has taken her death to make me realise the extraordinary range of her achievement. Seven volumes of essays, six novels, two film scripts, several plays, all the outstanding insight, great searching intelligence and imaginative power.

Of her fiction she said: ‘To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.’ To her non-fiction writing and her personal philosophy one had best apply her own words rather than attempt a lame summing up. She said: ‘To be a moral human being is to be obliged to pay certain kinds of attention.’

Hers was the unsparing attention of a brilliant mind interpreting in the many modes she commanded, our times, our world. It was a scrutiny, an empathy unmatched. Sontag was one of a handful of universal intellectuals who represent and create contemporary thought at the highest essential level. Sontag matters; through her writings she will continue to matter in our era of conflict and bewildering ambiguity of values from which she did not flinch but took on responsibilities with her talents as an artist and her qualities as a human being.

Sontag was never satisfied with what she had achieved if changing circumstances meant that she must return with a further perspective to the implications of the accomplished work. Her 1973 book, On Photography, is a classic on the claims of photography as an art and, in history, the most influential interchange between reality and the image. She was not content to leave it at that. Her experiences in Vietnam, and more recently in Sarajevo, where she produced a play to keep alive the defiant survival of the spirit under bombardment, returned her to the extremes of the significance of turning the camera on human experience. In 2003, her most recent work daringly and controversially returned her to the role of photography and its ultimate viewers in Regarding the Pain of Others.

An accusation? To herself and the rest of us? ‘Non-stop imagery (television, streaming videos, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite … Images of the sufferings endured are so widely disseminated now that it is easy to forget how recently such images became what is expected from photographers.’ This short book, written as if with one deep breath taken, questions whether in any claim to be moral human beings we are paying ‘certain kinds of moral attention’ to our reception of horrifying images.

Sontag never turned her strong, beautiful face from any aspect of human life. Her gaze did not spare herself. In 1978, after cancer, she wrote Illness As Metaphor. Her subject was not physical illness itself but stigma and socio-religious metaphors representing the condition as punishment for misdemeanour of some kind. In 1989, with consciousness that Aids as an epidemic with primary sexual associations had become a new metaphor, she needed the alertness of profound thought to add to the earlier book. Beginning Aids and its Metaphors, she says: ‘Metaphor, Aristotle wrote, consists in giving the things a name that belongs to something else … Of course, all thinking is interpretation. But that does not mean it isn’t something correct to be against interpretation.’ To use the metaphor ‘plague’ for Aids is to stigmatise its sufferers with the image of the untouchable, as for victims of the medieval bubonic plague. She makes me aware that I myself am guilty of this … Isn’t it the special quality of a marvellously original mind to shake up one’s thinking? To personify illness as a curse is, in a sense, primitive, when the reality is nurturing the spirit of people to resist disease physically while under treatment, and for medical science to find the cure. That is her thesis. She was to meet her own death by illness, with fighting courage.

I had the immense good luck to be Sontag’s friend. In her exhilarating presence you came alive with new zest. Along with formidable intellectual drive, her familiarity with many cultures, the arts and politics, she was a warm and loving person, quick with a witty riposte to stupidity but sensitive to the feeling of others. She certainly would challenge me now: and what about my novels? She often felt she had been drawn away, by her own convictions of how life should be taken on, from her vocation of the imagination: fiction. She wrote, ‘Many things in my world have not been named … even if they have been named, have never been described.’

The last day I talked to her, on the telephone to her bed in hospital, she told me two things most important to her. If she recovered once again from cancer she had beaten twice before, she wanted to come back to South Africa, the people and the landscapes with which she had immediately bonded in 2004. That her time with us was to be her last of many ventures to understand and interpret the world so meaningfully is something for us to be glad of.

The second important thing was that she must survive to continue a new work begun. I am sure it was the novel she wanted to write — the novel that was still to come from her. I hope that her adored son, David Reiff, himself a fine writer, will find what she had already written and we shall hold, published, the proof of a marvel of creative force that was Sontag, until the end. We shall not see her like again. But her unique writings exist, as her being.

2005

Home Truths from the Past: Machiavelli or Erasmus?

Signposts to the human condition lie toppled down all over the past, from the stele marking Roman military bases to the rubble of what were once homes, relic of the latest conflict in — you name which country comes to mind.

It’s a given cliché that we have only the past to learn from. At least, the opposition of great thinkers who took boldly contending different directions may have relevance to our human condition in the brave new millennium. For example, Machiavelli or Erasmus, who has most to say to us in the twenty-first century? Each was committed to the situation between the ruler and the ruled; the empowered (to use contemporary jargon) and the disempowerable (to invent my own), which term carries a present condition of powerlessness further.

Machiavelli and Erasmus — are they really dead? In speaking of the perceptions of their own shared era, they could be speaking of ours. The century we’ve only just left behind and the one we’ve only recently begun. No reminder needed of the bloodstains of the twentieth which are appearing afresh on the twenty-first, from Iraq to the Sudan. And every week, new bloodshed elsewhere. The world is as beautiful and as ugly as it was nearly six centuries ago, albeit transformed in many ways by scientific achievements.

I turn first to Machiavelli because he seems to have had no less than prescience of our time when he was analysing human aspirations in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Italy. His title The Prince is simply another nomenclature for the presidents and prime ministers, the dictators, fanatical religious leaders, the families ennobled by ownership of corporations — our cast on the globalised stage. Machiavelli’s premise that ‘the end which every man keeps before him is glory and riches’ is as evident today as it was in his day. His most famous work The Prince is a manual for politicians that proves to have six centuries of shelf-life. His ‘principalities’ stand for the national states of this, our era spanning the twentieth century and its heritage in the twenty-first. He advocates the absolute necessity of war to defend principalities and provides the methodology to gain support of the people who lose their lives in war. The prince, he says, must himself have a warrior image. He must uphold that if the principality is not fully armed it will be despised by other principalities. Machiavelli certainly would have been Bush’s ally in the invasion of Iraq. He would have appreciated the phrase ‘axis of evil’. What would he have thought of nuclear capability? Welcomed it as the ultimate in arms, refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty? With grim subtlety accepted nuclear power as the end of power, in its power of annihilation?

As for the pandemic wars largely fought by mercenaries, going on around us fired by religious differences and fuelled by the resources of oil fields rival principalities want to secure for themselves — he gives timely warning: the prince who relies on mercenaries to shore up his power must know ‘they are ambitious and unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowards before enemies’.

The Machiavellian rules for a prince’s conduct if he is to keep himself in power domestically as well as at war are practised in some of our principalities at present. It is recognised, as he says ‘that how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live’. Yes, but let’s be practical. For a prince to hold his own it is ‘necessary for him to know how to do wrong … for if everything is considered carefully, it will be found that something which looks like virtue, if followed, would be his ruin; whilst something else, which looks like vice, yet followed brings him security and prosperity’.

Machiavelli’s concept of liberalism is not as we understand liberalism politically in terms of freedom of expression and tolerance. His liberalism refers to material possessions, land grants and money buying loyalty to the prince; and surely this concept is followed today while liberal bribes are the recognised process of arms deals brokered by government ministers?

As for statecraft, tackling whether it is better to be loved than feared by the people, he advises ‘every prince ought to be considered clement and not cruel’, but because it is difficult to unite ferocity and love in one prince: ‘it is much safer to be feared than loved when one of either must be dispensed with’.

He was wrong about the either/or: think of the adoring crowds worshipping Hitler at the same time that he was murdering Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. Saddam Hussein had his share of adulation. We have new principalities that have hard-won their freedom from colonialist princes in the twentieth century; some now have their Idi Amins both loved and feared at once.

Should we accept for the new princes Machiavelli’s dictum that it is impossible for them to avoid imputation of cruelty, owing to the new states, wherever in our world, being full of dangers threatening their power? This posits that if the world’s tolerance of oppression is immoral, it is also realistic. That’s Machiavelli. What of the prince’s fear of the people who have experienced his salutary cruelty? There’s a precept for that eventuality: ‘Men ought to be well treated or crushed, because they can revenge themselves for lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.’

Seize the people’s incipient revolt by the jugular, with all the powers of decimation in forced population removals, indefinite detention and torture, whose practice the new millennium’s princes have inherited from the twentieth century when they themselves suffered these methods.

Machiavelli still shocks, six centuries later. But when he is at his most machiavellian his unsparing vision of humankind pokes a forefinger into one’s own probable moral ambiguity. It’s not easy to feel innocent of this in relation to public life and the princes one votes for, as one reads: ‘It is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities … but it is very necessary to appear to have them … to appear to have them is useful.’

God’s principality — in Machiavelli’s dealings with his time — is approached much as the secular principalities are. He details the historical machinations of the popes and those who made use of the power of religious authority in worldly struggles for power and wealth. He comments almost jealously, as a statesman in and out of favour of princes, that ‘religious leaders alone have states and do not defend them … subjects and do not rule them … such principalities are secure and happy … being exalted and maintained by God’.

So God is not invoked in Machiavelli’s morality. Only when this may be — Machiavelli’s prime criterion — useful. As when writing of Pope Leo he manages to link the Pope’s power to the secular might of armaments: ‘Pope Leo found the pontificate most powerful and it is to be hoped that if others made it great in arms, he will make it still greater … by his goodness and other virtues.’ A papal post-blessing on the arms trade. We certainly do not have that, but we still have with us protagonists of war who claim God’s or Allah’s blessing for their sides in conflict. God is useful.

In the mind and spirit, the values and actions of Erasmus, God is paramount.

While taking the great risk of criticising and castigating as a departure from that faith the outward pomp of church practices, Erasmus’s concept of the relation of the ruler to the ruled is measured by the founding religious principle of the power of ultimate morality coming from on high. That authority is Christianity, of course, through God’s endowment of Christ to the world. Erasmus’s enterprise was the regeneration of Christendom. Neither Erasmus nor his direct opponent in the view of human conduct, Machiavelli, considers the power of other faiths over the human condition. Here, neither the man of transcendent religious values nor the cynical pragmatist offers much relevance to the world we are attempting to create now, where the validity of many different faiths, held by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others, has to be recognised as an absolute human right, honoured and respected equally if there is to be survival of anything like what we call civilisation. As I write of civilisation, this morning, comes the news of attacks on the underground transport system that takes the people of London to work every day. So far, about forty reported dead and over seven hundred injured. There is immediate debate of whether the source of this savage show of destructive power is religious fervour against Britain’s involvement with the United States’ war in Iraq and its aftermath, or whether it is directed at the G8 summit as a ghastly alternative form of protest to that of concerts demonstrating with music and song the failure of the rich countries to ‘make poverty history’. Either/or; there is a connection in the state of our present human condition.

‘How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live.’

If Machiavelli confronts us with some home truths about how we live in our own times, Erasmus offers the possibility of how we ought to live. It is natural to be drawn to him on the positive side of the relevance of these thinkers to our times. Machiavelli determined it was the foremost duty of princes to make war. Erasmus determined it was the foremost duty of princes to avoid war. We know there is no question of which is the only future for humankind in our era, since we have means of destruction unknown to past ages.

Erasmus was so brilliant that it is difficult to single out one quality, one advocation from another in his grasp of the moral complexity of human affairs. That he was virtually the inventor of the concept of arbitration is perhaps, for us, his most relevant. Whether domestically in a trade union dispute with the bosses or the conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, the solution we look to, strive for now in desperate pursuit of peace and justice is arbitration. His presence surely sits with sessions at the UN, with the commissions on human rights. We share with him in our time his restless preoccupation with the welfare of society, measure this against the professed ideals of those responsible for it.

Erasmus’s lifelong great enterprise in the regeneration of Christendom was not, is not, fundamentalism in the sense we know and fear it today. His early support for the young Luther ended significantly in his rejection of Luther on grounds of the need for a humanistic intellectual culture as well as, and within, return to the basic faith of Christ’s life and teaching. How relevant to our age when we experience that vital movements for change we support can become in turn oppressive.

His belief in a humanistic culture included educational methods we’re still trying to advance today — he would applaud computer competency for the young, but as a writer who saw literature as a basic component of humanist culture would deplore the decline of reading. In an age of specialisation such as ours, his intellectual sweep is challenging. He was not content to be the subject of academic debate; his dazzling use of satire (In Praise of Folly) as a non-violent cauterising of hypocrisy made him a best-seller centuries before ours. The great scholar and philologist didn’t refrain, either, from controversial opinions on such apparently diverse matters as the correct pronunciation of Greek, ‘abstinence from meat’, and sharp observation on Christian marriage.

About the latter, he of the glorious open mind might just have been biased, as a homosexual. But that’s an aside.

Machiavelli and Erasmus, contentious beings — aren’t they both men of our time?

2005

Witness: The Inward Testimony

HORROR was written on the sun.

William Plomer, Turbott Wolfe

The prophetic words of the poet William Plomer.

The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part of the unspeakable horrors of a past war. The world has come to coexist in, witness the horrors of Twin Towers New York, Madrid bombings, London Underground train explosions, the dead in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Darfur, Sri Lanka … the list does not close.

What place, task, meaning will literature have in witness to disasters without precedence in the manner in which these destroy deliberately and pitilessly; the entire world become the front line of any and every conflict?

Place. Task. Meaning.

To apportion these for us, the world’s writers, I believe we have first to define what witness is.

No simple term.

I go to the Oxford English Dictionary and find that definitions fill more than a small-print column. Witness: attestation of a fact, event, or statement, testimony, evidence; one who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation.

Television crews, photographers, are pre-eminent witnesses in these senses of the word, when it comes to catastrophe, staggeringly visual. No need for words to describe it; no possibility words could.

First-hand newsprint, elaborately descriptive journalism becomes essentially a pallid after-image. Television made ‘personal observation’, ‘attestation of a fact, event’ a qualification of witness not only for those thousands who stood mind-blown aghast on the scenes of disaster but everyone worldwide who saw them all happening on television.

The place and task of attesting the fact, event, or statement testimony, evidence — the qualification of one who is or was present and is able to testify — this is that of the media. Analysis of the disaster follows in political, sociological terms, by various ideological, national, special or populist schemas, some claiming that elusive reductive state, objectivity. And to the contexts — political, sociological — in this case, according to the dictionary there must be added analysis in religious terms. For number eight in the list of definitions cites: ‘One who testifies for Christ or the Christian faith, especially by death, a martyr.’ The Oxford English Dictionary, conditioned by Western Christian culture, naturally makes the curious semantic decision to confine this definition of the term witness to one faith only. But the perpetrators of terrorist acts often testify as witness, in this sense, to another faith — a faith which the arrogance of the dictionary does not recognise: to the faith of Islam, by death and martyrdom.

Such attacks may be against an individual; one was threatened against Salman Rushdie. One almost took the life of the great writer in whose name we have the honour of gathering today — Naguib Mahfouz.

Harold Pinter in his Nobel Prize speech 2005 spoke these words:

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable almost naked activity … The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds … You are out on your own, on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

Naguib Mahfouz never constructed his own protection, took the risk of the writer’s naked activity, refusing the lie, even when writing of politicians, in the times he lived and wrote through.

Place; task; meaning.

Meaning is what cannot be reached by the immediacy, the methodologies of expert analysis. If witness literature is to find its place, take on a task in relation to the enormity of what is happening in acts of mass destruction and their aftermath, it is in the tensions of sensibility, the intense awareness, the antennae of receptivity to the lives among which writers experience their own as a source of their art. Poetry and fiction are processes of what the Oxford English Dictionary defines the state of witness as ‘applied to the inward testimony’ — the individual lives of men, women and children who have to reconcile within themselves the shattered certainties which are as much a casualty as the bodies under rubble in New York, Madrid and the dead in Afghanistan.

Kafka says the writer sees among ruins ‘different (and more) things than others’ … it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.’¹²⁵

This is the nature of witness that writers can, surely must give, have been giving since ancient times, in the awesome responsibility of their endowment with the seventh sense of the imagination. The ‘realisation’ of what has happened comes from what would seem to deny reality — the transformation of events, motives, emotions, reactions, from the immediacy into the enduring significance that is meaning.

If we accept that ‘contemporary’ spans the century in which all of us here were born, as well as the one scarcely and starkly begun, there are many examples of this fourth dimension of experience that is the writer’s space and place attained.

‘Thou shalt not kill’: the moral dilemma that patriotism and religions demand be suppressed in the individual sent to war comes inescapably from the First World War pilot in W. B. Yeats’s poem: ‘Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love.’¹²⁶ A leap from murderers’ row that only the poet can make.

The Radetzky March and The Emperor’s Tomb — Joseph Roth’s peripatetic dual epic of frontiers as the Scylla and Charybdis of the twentieth-century breakup of the old world in disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — is not only inward testimony of the ever-lengthening host of ever-wandering refugees into the new century, the Greek chorus of the dispossessed that drowns the muzak of consumerism. It is the inward testimony of what goes on working its way as a chaos of ideological, ethnic, religious and political consequences — Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia — that come to us though the vision of Roth.

The statistics of the Holocaust are a ledger of evil, the figures still visible on people’s arms; but Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man makes extant a state of existence that becomes part of consciousness for all time. Part unavoidably of the tangled tragic justifications made behind the violence perpetrated in the Israeli — Palestinian conflict.

The level of unflinching imaginative tenacity with which the South African poet Mongane Wally Serote witnessed the apocalyptic events of apartheid amid which he was suffering and living goes into territory beyond the concepts of justice. He writes: ‘I want to look at what happened;/That done,/As silent as the roots of plants pierce the soil/I look at what happened … /when knives creep in and out of people/As day and night into time.’¹²⁷

In an earlier age, Conrad’s inward testimony finds that the heart of darkness is not Mistah Kurtz’s bedecked river station besieged by Congolese, but back in the offices in King Leopold’s Belgium where knitting women sit while the savage trade in natural rubber is efficiently organised, with a quota for extraction by blacks that must be met, or punished at the price of their severed hands.¹²⁸

These are some examples of what Czeslaw Milosz calls the writer’s ‘fusing of individual and historical elements’¹²⁹ and that Georg Lukács defines as the occurrence of ‘a creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it … the duality of inwardness and the outside world.’¹³⁰

No writer sums up the lifetime experience of the creative memory which ‘transfixes the object and transforms it’, the long journey of the writer, the impossibility of escaping, as Mahfouz reveals exquisitely in Dream 5 of his late work The Dreams.

I am walking aimlessly without anywhere particular to go when suddenly I encounter a surprising event that had never before entered my mind — every step I take turns the street upside-down into a circus. The walls and buildings and cars and passers-by all disappear, and in their place a big top arises with its tiered seats and long, hanging ropes, filled with trapezes and animal cages, with actors and acrobats and musclemen and even a clown. At first I am so happy that I could soar with joy. But as I move from street to street where the miracle is repeated over and over, my pleasure subsides and my irritation grows until I tire from the walking and the looking around, and I long in my soul to go back to my home. But just as I delight once again to see the familiar face of the world, and trust that soon my relief will arrive, I open the door — and find the clown there to greet me, giggling.

There’s no respite for the great writer to evade searching the meanings behind the circus that is the world, the ‘nauseating age of slogans’ a father speaks of in the days of the Sadat regime, the era of Mahfouz’s The Day The Leader Was Killed, and which applies as aptly to our own. An era when ‘Between the slogans and the truth is an abyss’ literature must struggle out of, bearing inward testimony.

I have spoken of the existential condition of the writer of witness literature in the way in which I would define that literature. The question raises a hand: how much has the writer been involved in his or her own flesh-and-blood person, at risk in the radical events, social upheavals for good or bad ends — the threats to the very bases of life and dignity? How much must the writer in the air or on earth be at risk, become activist-as-victim? No choice of being just an observer. In other terrible events — the wars, social upheavals — like anyone else the writer may be a victim, no choice. But the writer, like anyone else, may have chosen to be a protagonist. As witness in her or his own person, victim or protagonist, is that writer not unquestionably the one from whom the definitive witness literature must come?

Albert Camus believed so.

Camus believed that his comrades in the French Resistance who had experienced so much that was physically, mentally both devastating and strengthening, appallingly revealing, would produce writers who would bring all this to literature and into the consciousness of the French as no other form of witness could. He waited in vain for the writer to emerge. The extremity of human experience does not make a writer. An Oe surviving atomic blast and fallout, a Dostoevsky reprieved at the last moment before a firing squad; the predilection has to be there, as a singer is endowed with a certain kind of vocal cords, a boxer is endowed with aggression. Primo Levi could be speaking of these fellow writers as well as of himself, as an inmate of Auschwitz, when he realises that theirs are stories each to be told ‘of a time and condition that cannot be understood except in the manner in which … we understand events of legends …’¹³¹

The duality of inwardness and the outside world: that is the one essential existential condition of the writer as witness. Marcel Proust would be regarded by most as one among great writers least confronted by public events. But I accept, from Proust, a signpost for writers in our context: ‘the march of thought in the solitary travail of artistic creation proceeds downwards, into the depths, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along which we are free to advance — towards the goal of truth’.¹³² Writers cannot and do not indulge the hubris of believing they can plant the flag of truth on that ineluctable territory. But what is sure is that we can exclude or discard nothing in our solitary travail towards meaning, downward into the acts of terrorism. We have to seek this meaning in those who commit such acts just as we do in its victims. We have to acknowledge them. Graham Greene’s priest in The Comedians gives a religious edict from his interpretation of the Christian faith: ‘The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly.’ And another of his characters, Dr Magiot, avows, ‘I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.’ There are many, bearing witness in one dictionary definition and another who remind the world that the United States of America, victim of ghastly violence, has had on its hands the water of indifference to the cosmic gap between its prosperity and the conditions of other populations — a recent survey showed the richest 10 per cent of 25 million (plus) Americans had a combined income greater than the combined income of the 43 per cent poorest of the world population.

Georg Büchner’s character in the play Danton’s Death makes a chilling declaration: ‘Terror is an outgrowth of virtue … the revolutionary government is the despotism of freedom against the tyranny of kings.’

Where does the despotism of terrorism begin to grow in our contemporary world; why? And where will it end? How? This is the mined territory of meaning, in the crisis of the present, from which the writer’s responsibility cannot be absolved. ‘Servitude, falsehood and terror … Three afflictions are the cause of silence between men, obscure them from one another and prevent them from rediscovering themselves.’¹³³ That is what Camus found in that territory. It is a specification within Milan Kundera’s credo: ‘for a novelist, a given historical situation is an anthropological laboratory in which he explores the basic question: What is existence?’ And Kundera goes on to quote Heidegger: ‘The essence of man has the form of a question.’¹³⁴

Whether this question is unanswerable, just as final truth is unattainable, literature has been and remains a means of people rediscovering themselves. Which may be part of the answer to terrorism and the violent response it evokes. Literature has never been more necessary, vital, than now, when information technology, the new faith, has failed to bring this rediscovery about.

Is there inevitably a loss of artistic liberty for the writer in inward testimony as witness?

A testy outburst not from a writer, but a painter, Picasso, replies, vis-à-vis their creativity, for artists in every medium. ‘What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet … quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it.’¹³⁵ Neither can the art. And there emerges Guernica.

Witness literature is not anathema to, incompatible with experiment in form and style, the marvellous adventures of the word. On the contrary, when writers, as André Pieyre de Mandiagues asks, ‘have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measures, must it not be recited, spoken?’

There is no style and form ready-made for witness literature. If it is to be a poem, it has to be found among all the combinations of poetics, tried or never tried, to be equal to the unique expression that will contain the event before and beyond the event; its past and future. As Yeats did with his pilot at war. If witness is to be a story or novel, that final demand — the expression of the event before and beyond the event — is the same. Among all the ways of plumbing meaning, existing and to be, this has to be discovered. Julio Cortàzar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Kenzaburo Oe, Octavio Paz, José Saramago, Günter Grass, Naguib Mahfouz, … these are writers who discovered it unsurpassably for their own people, own countries, and by the boundlessness of great writing, for the rest of us who see the same responsibility of discovery to be pursued in our own countries.

I have had my own experience as that of a writer given evidence of a disaster which seemed to exceed all measure. In South Africa racism in its brutally destructive guises, from killing in conquest to the methodology of colonialism, certified as divine will by religious doctrine, took the lives of thousands of Africans and stunted the lives of millions more; systematically. I grew up in the Union that came out of wars for possession between the British and descendants of the Dutch, the Boers. The Africans had already been dispossessed by both. I was the child of the white minority, blinkered in privilege as a conditioning education. But because I was a writer — for it’s an early state of being, before a word has been written, not an attribute of being published — I became witness to the unspoken in my society. Very young, I entered a dialogue with myself about what was around me; and this took the form of trying for the meaning in what I saw by transforming this into stories based on what were everyday incidents of ordinary life for everyone around me: the sacking of the back-yard room of a black servant by police while the white master and mistress of the house looked on unconcerned; later, in my adolescence during the Second World War, when I was a voluntary aide at a gold mine casualty station, being told by the white intern who was suturing a black miner’s gaping head wound without anaesthetic, ‘They don’t feel like we do.’

As time and published books confirmed that I was a writer and witness literature, if it is a particular genre of my circumstance of time and place, was mine, I had to find how to keep my integrity to the Word, the sacred charge of the writer. I realised, as I believe many writers do, that instead of restricting, inhibiting, coarsely despoiling aesthetic liberty, the existential condition of witness was enlarging, inspiring aesthetic liberty, breaching the previous limitations of my sense of form and use of language through necessity: to create form and sense anew.

Aesthetic liberty is an essential of witness literature if it is to fulfil its justification as meaning. And the form and use of language that will be the expression for one piece of work will not serve for another. I wrote a novel in the 1970s; it was, in terms of witness literature, an exploration of inward testimony to revolutionary political dedication against apartheid, invoked as a faith like any religious faith, with edicts not to be questioned by any believer, and the consequences of this, the existential implications handed down from father to daughter, mother to son. Witness called on aesthetic liberty to find the form and language, in order for the narrative to be fulfilled in meaning. Modes of lyricism and irony that had served best for some of my other fiction would not serve where a daughter’s inner survival of personality depended on fully recovering her father’s life of willing martyrdom, his loving relationship with her and its calculating contradictions in the demands his highest relationship, political faith, made upon her; his actions, motives, other personal attachments, which the condition of revolutionary clandestinity perforce made a mystery. A novel where, indeed, actual documents must be encompassed to be deciphered in terms of inward testimony. Through aesthetic liberty I had, so to speak, to question this story in many inner voices, to tell it in whatever I might hope to reach of its own testimony submerged beneath public ideology, discourse and action.

This is the search for Zaabalawi.

In his short story of that name the genius of Naguib Mahfouz sends a man to seek the saintly sheikh, Zaabalawi; everywhere to find always he has just missed the one who has the answer to the questions of being, personal, political, social, religious — the inward testimony. Zaabalawi knows the human mystery is revealed not alone in high places — he frequents Cairo bars, and the man is told he will be found at a particular haunt. Wearily waiting there for hours, the man falls asleep. When he wakes he finds his head is wet; others in the bar tell him Zaabalawi came while he was sleeping and sprinkled water on him to refresh him. Having had this sign of Zaabalawi’s existence, the man will go on searching for him all his life — ‘Yes, I have to find Zaabalawi.’ Yes, we writers have to find the inward testimony our calling, literature, demands of us.

A writer who did is Naguib Mahfouz.

In Khufu’s Wisdom, an early novel in which Mahfouz’s brilliant creativity was already evident, Pharaoh Khufu leaves the palaces of worldly power and takes to the pyramid he had built as his tomb; there, he has decided to write ‘a great book guiding the souls and protecting the people’s bodies with knowledge’.

Naguib Mahfouz has drunk the cup and gone, leaving us behind in the shabby grim presence of worldly power, but he’s left his wisdom, his writings, his inward testimony, the wisdom of great literature.

2006

Desmond Tutu As I Know Him

I am an atheist. But if anyone could have launched me into the leap of a religious faith — any denomination — it would have been Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Being so respectful of others’ rights, even those of unbelief, he has never tried, on the occasions in my life when I have turned to him for personal but secular counsel. I am a Jew; for me, to be born Jew as to be born black are existential states not religiously determinate, and neither a matter for pride or shame, whatever the world tries to make of this. We are simply of the great human tribe.

If Desmond hasn’t caused by his matchless example as a man of faith to lead me to find my own humble way to one, he certainly has influenced my life. Truly vitally, in the complex and often confusing, dismaying choice of reactions and attitudes called upon for response in the second half of the twentieth century and the new millennium in our country, South Africa.

First impressions: he is not a man of whom that of one’s first meeting is going to have to be revised as one gets to know him. He has no façade. The open interest, the fellow warmth that radiate from him then are what he is. As he has risen to the Himalayas of public life, become world famous, this hasn’t been blunted in any way. I’d call his lack of self-consciousness one of his inherent gifts; the others have been developed by the exercise of character, the spiritual and intellectual muscle-building he has subjected and continues to subject himself to in service of the human congregation. He’s taken on no less than that.

His playfulness I recognised early as deeply serious. When he danced down the aisle after giving his sermon during our worst of times, it was not to be dutifully seen as symbiosis of conventional Christian forms of worship and traditional African forms. It was the assertion of sacred joy in life, the unquenchable force that no apartheid oppression could get at within people.

His playfulness was serious, for all of us; his sense of humour was directed often against himself.

He won’t mind if I have my particular memory of the splendid occasion when my husband Reinhold Cassirer and I were fortunate to be invited to the ordination of Desmond Tutu as Bishop of Johannesburg. We sat in St Mary’s Cathedral following the ceremonial process, the display of robed dignitaries, our spirits uplifted by the choir and awaiting in anticipation the speech of the newly mitred bishop. Such ceremonies are transformational; the individual enters with one public identity and emerges with another, whether the endowing authority is a religious one, such as this occasion, or a secular one, the induction of a president. Bishop Desmond Tutu smiled, but not down, on us all as if we’d just arrived at the door of his house in Orlando. After the formal acknowledgement to those who had received him into high office, he told us, ‘In our hotel this morning Leah said, I’ve woken up in bed with a bishop!’

Anti-apartheid activities brought me into contact with Bishop Tutu in the years that were to come. The recognition he gave to the smallest effort as much as the largest initiative against the dehumanising apartheid regime made me aware of hasty judgemental dismissals I held against the effectiveness not only of some others, but of my own efforts. His own boldness was never punitive; the power he always has had is to make it impossible for any group, any formation, any persons not to recognise their responsibility for what they do to demean and brutalise others.

What is a man of the world? What do we mean by that designation? Usually it implies sophistication, a certain easy ambiguity in matters of money, friendships and sexual love. Desmond Tutu is not morally ambiguous in any of those designations. But he has shown me there is another definition to be entered in the human dictionary. He is a man of the world in a different way.

We had a parental bond in that our sons, his Trevor and our Hugo, were schoolmates at Waterford-Kamhlaba School in Swaziland. As it turned out, there came another bond in our personal concern about a mutual friend, one both respected and highly expected — by those of us looking ahead, then, to who would take leadership positions after the end of apartheid — as a young man qualified by courage, intelligence and integrity in the liberation movement. The secret love affair of the man was suddenly no secret. It was news, printed in and heard on the media. When I came to Desmond with my concern that what was to me a private matter, as the law provides, between consenting adults, was being regarded as a betrayal of political morality and integrity, I was very uncertain of what Desmond’s attitude would be.

I found in him analysis and understanding of human sexuality. Not a judgement of its urges as sin. An acceptance that the unfortunate occurrence of submitting to such an urge while this causes pain and betrayal in the context of marriage, responsibility for which cannot be denied, must be borne; in the nature of humankind the happening is not decisive in the complete character of the individual. Desmond Tutu didn’t give in to disappointment in the behaviour of the individual, I think, because in his fearless dedication to truth he allows himself no illusions. He did not condemn; he said he wished the man had come to him. I do not know what he would have done for him; I only know the capacity Desmond Tutu has to make one deal with oneself.

Came the 1980s and a crisis in the milieu of the Congress of South African Writers, of which I was among the founders. The Congress had for some hard years proved itself in actions to defend freedom of expression, not alone against the banning of books but in support of those of us who were detained, arrested on treason charges, their typewriters seized, their employment as teachers, journalists, forbidden. With our extremely limited funds, we hired legal representatives for them, alerted the world to the enforced stifling of their talent and had examples of their banned writings published abroad. But the political attitude towards the efficacy of what might be called fringe movements against apartheid, movements in the arts, was changing. The black consciousness movement was in the forefront of the growing decision that any cooperation with whites, whatever their anti-apartheid record short of underground revolutionary activity, ran counter to the apparent evidence that such concessions were part of the failure of liberalism to deliver the goods — freedom could be grasped only by black solidarity in all aspects of public life. Our Congress was headed by a black president, our editorial board and trustees were black and white Africans who were close as colleagues and comrades who trusted one another in common cause. But the pressure on the black writers was strong; they withdrew from the Congress and the choice was to carry on as a white organisation or close down. There was anger among some white members; they wanted to continue as such. For myself, I saw that the move on the part of our president and other black colleagues was necessary at this urgent final phase in the freedom impetus, psychologically and tactically. But I felt abandoned, confused; if I could have no part as a writer in the freedom movement in which I was active in other ways, as a citizen, my usefulness seemed truncated.

I went to Desmond. He is such a good listener. You don’t sense him having snap reactions, making judgements, while you come to him in the full tide of your problems. He wants all the details, even those you think don’t matter; he knows better. He is the man of wholeness. I wish I could recall his exact flow of words. He told me that my position was not useless. It was the right one; on the one hand I recognised the need for those blacks who saw withdrawal from white cooperation as necessary to go it alone, to attain freedom; on the other hand I had taken my right to refuse to belong to a segregated organisation. That was my usefulness to the freedom movement. With this counsel I was enabled without any resentment to continue the personal relations my black writer comrades never ceased to maintain with me.

Desmond Tutu’s supreme achievement so far has been the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That scarcely requires stating. I recall what I wrote near the beginning of the chance to pay tribute: ‘His boldness was never punitive; the power he has always had is to make it impossible for any persons not to recognise their responsibility for what they do to demean and brutalise others.’ Was this not the principle of the Commission? Its faith? It did not offer dispensation for confession but reconciliation with the victim by total public admittance of responsibility for terrible acts committed. A much more difficult attempt at resolution of crimes against humanity than a Nuremberg. The truth is harsh, shocking, terribly wonderful: Desmond has never accepted the evasion that truth is relative, for himself. At the Commission I understood that he extended that ultimate condition to our people and our country as the vital necessity for living together in survival of the past. The acceptance of that, he has taught, has to come from within.

When placing the TRC as his greatest achievement I added the proviso ‘so far’. Desmond Tutu continues to be a bold and zestful force in our society, our country, completely unfazed if the convictions his human conscience and care demand, mean that his interventions may be unwelcome to the government. He gives his full support in the many initiatives it takes to create fulfilment of the needs of a free people still feeling the wounds of the past. But the other honest test of loyalty to a regime surely is to have the guts (Desmond often favours colloquial language!) to speak out when its actions are deficient. A vital example is his outspokenness on the devastation of HIV/Aids among our people and its consequences for the country’s development. He has not been afraid to come forth and say that the level of official response, turning away from leadership of the tremendous effort needed to combat the threat, is low and seems deliberately blinkered. Whatever else happens in our country that may require to be faced by us without compromising the truth, Desmond Tutu certainly will be there to turn us towards problems we have to solve if we care for one another and our country. I know it’s been a blessing for me — from whatever chance or good source that directs human destinies — to have lived along his seventy-five years in the same time and the same country as this splendid life-enhancing personality.

Tutu.

2006

Lust and Death: Philip Roth’s Everyman

Nor dread nor hope attend/A dying animal …/Man has created death.

Philip Roth quotes not these lines from Yeats but those of Keats as epigraph to his latest novel: ‘Here where men sit and hear each other groan;/Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;/Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.’

For three of the world’s best novelists, Fuentes, García Márquez and Roth, the violent upsurge of sexual desire in the face of old age is the opposition of man to his own creation, death.

The final kick of the prostate, my old physician friend called it. But it cannot be summed up, so wryly and glibly, when it is the theme of contemporary fiction by these writers from the two Americas. García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Fuentes’s Inez, Roth’s Human Stain and The Dying Animal and now Everyman have in common in their wonderful transformations the phenomenon — presented as similar to that of adolescence — of late sexual desire. The last demanding exuberance in the slowly denuded body, when ‘to think is to be full of sorrow’: the doubt that comes about the unquestioned superiority of the rewards of the intellect. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal claims the phenomenon as the undeniable assertion of ‘erotic birthright’, and this holds good for Philip Roth’s unnamed — perhaps because he is, Roth forces us to admit — Everyman.

His story begins when he is dead. But we recognise him immediately: he’s in a cultural profession (if a doubtful one), advertising, with an avocation as an amateur painter; he’s been married several times; he has adult progeny with whom he is in various states of lack of relationship. He’s the man Roth has long chosen to take on our human burdens, as a writer has always to select particular beings from among us for attention. The Cultural Journalist in the grave has been a resident in a retirement village for several years before his death. The relatives, an ex-wife, etc., are at the graveside. It has been the decision of his most-loved child, Nancy, to bury him in a half-abandoned Jewish cemetery although she knows he was an atheist: he loved his parents and he will be close to them in their graves.

Roth takes the writer’s free acknowledgement of many literary modes while unceasingly experimenting with his own. From the graveside nod to Dickens, the man unseen there is tracked back to life and even before his individual conception. Here, the chronology of living isn’t that of a calendar but of cross-references; soon we’re at an earlier graveside. After a re-creation of the Cultural Journalist’s childhood as he waits for one of the medical ‘interventions’ that maintain his geriatric body, he turns back the pages of self to the day of his father’s funeral. It is in the same cemetery, the old Jewish one founded by immigrants. That day, as he watches, his father’s jewellery store is vividly present. It opened in 1933 with an immigrant’s audacity as the only capital: ‘Diamonds — Jewelry — Watches’. In order to ‘avoid alienating or frightening away the port city’s tens of thousands of churchgoing Christians with his Jewish name, he extended credit freely … he never went broke with credit, and the goodwill generated by his flexibility was more than worth it’. A good man, as his son recognises.

Perhaps it’s possible to be good only in a life with a number of limitations? So much is intriguing, left for the reader to ask himself or herself in Roth’s writings. The reason to risk opening a store in the bad times of the Depression ‘was simple’: he ‘had to have something to leave my two boys’. This, in Roth’s context, is not sentimental; it’s an unstated principle of survival with connotations waking the reader to the unending presence of the immigrant, generation after generation, country to country, Jew, Irishman, Muslim, no roots but shallow ones scratched into someone else’s natal soil.

If descriptive amplitude went out with the nineteenth century, Philip Roth, who strides the whole time and territory of the word, has resuscitated it — in description revved with the power of narrative itself. This father’s graveside is — for the canny reader, not the son — a post-premonitory experience, intended to lead back to the graveside at which Roth chose to begin the son’s life, a tug at the lien between the son and his antecedents ignored by him. He has never before witnessed the Jewish Orthodox ritual whereby the mourners and not the cemetery professionals literally bury the coffin. What he sees is not a symbolic sprinkling of a handful of dust, but the relatives and friends heaving shovels of earth to thud on the coffin, filling the hole to obliteration. As he becomes ‘immersed in the burial’s brutal directness’ what comes to him is not reverence but horror. ‘All at once he saw his father’s mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils and closing off his ears … He could taste the dirt coating the inside of his mouth well after they had left the cemetery and returned to New York.’ The taste of death.

‘Professor of Desire’. One may so name Philip Roth, writer, without disrespect and in admiration, with an epithet that was the title of one of his earlier novels. Roth has proved by the mastery and integrity of his writing the difference between the erotic and the pornographic, in our sleazy era of the latter. The premise of his work is that nothing the body offers is denied so long as it does not cause pain. With rather marvellous presumption he seems unknowingly to have written the Kama Sutra of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He asserts the joy of loving sexual intercourse, the splendid ingenuity of the body. His men are not disciples of de Sade, though it may be difficult to accept (in The Dying Animal) the man licking a woman’s menstrual blood off her legs as not exploitation of the privacy of a bodily function, quite different from the evocation of ‘the simplicity of physical splendor’ which is manifest in sexual desire, and beautifully celebrated for all of us in his latest novel.

If Portnoy has never been outgrown, only grown old, he is, in his present avatar, an everyman whose creator makes the term ‘insight’ something to be tossed away as inadequate. What Roth knows of the opposition/apposition of the body and the intellect is devastatingly profound and cannot be escaped, just as Thomas Mann’s graffiti on the wall of the twentieth century cannot be washed off: ‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ Roth has dealt with this other great theme in human existential drives — politics — as searchingly as he has sexuality. Roth’s people, whether politically activist or not, live in our world — and the bared-teeth decorum of academe is its gowned microcosm — terrorised by fear of the Other abroad and state authoritarianism at the throat at home. His superbly matchless work, The Plot Against America, has the power of political fantasy moving out of literature into the urgent possibilities of present-day reality. With that novel he conveyed the Then in the Now. Hero-worship of Charles Lindbergh makes it feasible that he becomes President of the United States, despite his admiring embrace of Hitler; Bush never embraced Nazis, but the enthusiasm he elicits, through instilling fear in Americans who voted him into power and whose sons have come back in body bags along with the gruesome images of Iraqi dead, is no fantasy. And Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism foreshadows the fundamentalisms that beset us in 2006.

One comes away from the strong political overtones in Everyman with the open truth that subservience, sexual connotations aside, is a betrayal of human responsibility. The strength of resistance derives from even further back within us than the drive towards freedom. Terminal Everyman’s memory of a sensuous experience, relived, invokes the glory of having been alive even while ‘eluding death seemed to have become the central business of life and bodily decay his entire story’.

Was the best of old age … the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow’s shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells … and he hustled to his feet … and went lurching through the low surf … into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future.

Another ecstasy. Not to be denied by mortality. Philip Roth is a magnificent victor in attempting to disprove Georg Lukács’s dictum of the impossible aim of the writer to encompass all of life.

2006

Faith, Reason and War

Although I was involved in the struggle against apartheid as an active supporter of the banned African National Congress, I should like to concentrate on another aspect of war: that of the war against writers. War against the word. My own personal experience as a writer and the continuing war, much graver, deadly, as it threatens the very lives of journalists and writers in current conflicts. Recently, journalists have been taken hostage in wars in a number of countries, particularly that of international involvement in Iraq. Before this, a journalist was killed in one of these countries after an unspeakable ordeal as hostage.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech last year, laureate Harold Pinter said ‘a writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed.’ There is, of course, a long history from ancient times of action against writings judged as religious heresy. The Catholic proscribed list continues to exist. But in modern times the banning of books generally has been on grounds of sexual explicitness, while heresy has been invoked as a transgression against political correctness. Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley’s Lover come to mind immediately on the first count — sex — and may I be forgiven for recalling a personal experience as a footnote among the fate of many books banned on the second ground, political heresy. On this ground the South African apartheid regime banned three of my novels in succession.

Works banned on political counts, preventing their distribution and sale, and more drastically those outlawed by public burning, apparent acts of reason, are in fact actions perpetrated by faith of another kind — not religious but ideological. An ideology passionately held becomes a faith by which its adherents live and act. Hitler’s purity of race, Stalin’s pursuit of elimination of a class — only two examples of the means of eliminating freedom of expression in the name of political ideologies, exalted to a faith. Each self-appointed as salvation against the existence of the other in humankind. Faith and reason: one had become accustomed to acceptance that these apparent opposites were in fact one, a symbiosis in the bannings of literature decreed by oppressive political regimes. You have only to read the country-by-country reports by PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee.

Then came an action against a writer inconceivable in modern times: our time. An edict of death was pronounced on a writer. Salman Rushdie. The grounds were religious heresy in a novel. ‘I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until religion came after me’, Salman Rushdie says. ‘Religion was part of my subject, of course … nevertheless … I had to confront what was confronting me and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. At that time it was difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms.’¹³⁶ The faith that authorised this assault was a religious one: Islam. Nothing on the scale of a death fatwa has been invoked in respect of other writers who have been declared offenders on charges of religious or political heresy, sexual explicitness, though banned or imprisoned. Actions outrageous enough. The death sentence pronounced upon Rushdie was indelible writing on our wall by the hand of fundamentalisms that in our contemporary world threaten and operate not only against freedom of expression, but in many other areas of contemporary life.

How is one to approach, not specific conflict-by-conflict, depredation-by-depredation, the causes deeper and beyond these acts of fundamentalism in its hydra-head manifestations? And what guidance can one contemplate towards a possible solution? Amartya Sen offers a convincing analysis, with the consequence of a guidance for us to consider, in what he cites as

the miniaturization of people … the world is frequently taken to be a fixed federation of ‘civilisations’ or ‘cultures’, ignoring the relevance of other ways in which people see themselves, involving class, gender, profession, language, science, morals, and politics. This reductionism of high theory can make a major contribution, if inadvertently, to the violence of low politics … people are, in effect, put into little boxes … ignoring the many different ways — economic, political, cultural, civic and social — in which people relate with one another within regional boundaries and across them … the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of powerful categorisation.¹³⁷

Isn’t this one of the answers to the fundamentalists of faith and reason? As amply evidenced in his other writings, Amartya Sen is the last economist who could ever be accused of bypassing the fundament of the gap between rich and poor. This, his other aspect of human order, is a revelation of some of the methodology that maintains the great divide.

2006

Naguib Mahfouz’s Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

‘What matters in the historical novel is not the telling of great historical events, but the poet’s awakening of people who figure in those events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical realities.’¹³⁸

Naguib Mahfouz adds another dimension to what matters. Reading back through his work written over seventy-six years and coming to this trilogy of earliest published novels brings the relevance of re-experience of Pharaonic times to our own. The historical novel is not a mummy brought to light; in Mahfouz’s hands it is alive in ourselves, our twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the complex motivations with which we tackle the undreamt-of transformation of means and accompanying aleatory forces let loose upon us. Although these three fictions were written before the Second World War, before the atom bomb, there is a prescience — in the characters, not authorial statement — of what was to come. A prescience that the writer was going to explore in relation to the historical periods he himself would live through, in the forty novels which followed.

Milan Kundera has spoken for Mahfouz and all fiction writers, saying the novelist doesn’t give answers, he asks questions. The very title of the first work in Mahfouz’s trilogy, Khufu’s Wisdom: it looks like a statement but it isn’t, it’s a question probed absorbingly, rousingly, in the book. The fourth dynasty Pharaoh, ageing Khufu, is in the first pages reclining on a gilded couch as he gazes into the distance at the thousands of labourers and slaves preparing the desert plateau for the pyramid he is building for his tomb, ‘eternal abode’. Hubris surely never matched. His glance sometimes turns to his other provision for immortality: his sons. And in those two images Mahfouz has already conceived the theme of his novel, the power of pride against the values perhaps to be defined as wisdom. King of all Egypt, north and south, Khufu extols the virtue of power. Of the enemies whom he has conquered, declares: ‘… what cut out their tongues, what chopped off their hands, but power … What made my word the law of the land … made it a sacred duty to obey me? Was it not power.’

1 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Merlin Press, London, 1965.

His architect of the pyramid, Mirabu: ‘and divinity, my lord’. The gods are always claimed for one’s side. If the Egyptians both thanked and blamed them for everything, in our new millennium warring powers each justify themselves with the claim, God is on their side.

Mahfouz even in his early work never created a two-dimensional symbol, however mighty, always has taken on the hidden convolutions in the human personality. For Khufu, contemplating the toilers at his pyramid site, there’s ‘an inner whispering … Was it right for so many souls to be expended for the sake of his personal exaltation?’ He brushes away this self-accusation and accepts a princely son’s arrangement for an entertainment he’s told includes a surprise to please him.

There is that intermediary between divine and earthly powers, the sorcerer — representative of the other, anti-divinity, the devil? The surprise is Djedi, sorcerer ‘who knows the secrets of life and death’. After watching a feat of hypnotism, Khufu asks whether the man/woman has the kind of authority over the Unseen as over the mind of created humans: ‘Can you tell me if one of my seed is destined to sit on the throne of Egypt’s kings …’ What’s unspoken is that this is not an audience-participation TV show but a reference to the greatest political question of the times, succession to the reign of the Pharaoh.

The sorcerer pronounces: ‘Sire, after you, no one from your seed shall sit upon the throne of Egypt.’

Pharaoh Khufu is sophisticatedly sceptical. ‘Simply tell me: do you know whom the gods have reserved to succeed them on the throne of Egypt.’

He is told this is an infant newly born that morning, son of the High Priest of the Temple of Ra. Crown Prince Khafra, heir of the Pharaoh’s seed, is aghast. But there’s a glimpse of Khufu’s wisdom, if rationalism is wisdom: ‘If Fate really was as people say … the nobility of man would be debased … No, Fate is a false belief to which the strong are not fashioned to submit.’ Khufu calls upon his entourage to accompany him so that he himself ‘may look upon the tiny offspring of the Fates’.

Swiftly takes off a narrative of epic and intimacy where Mahfouz makes of a youthful writer’s tendency to melodrama, a genuine drama. The High Priest Monra has told his wife that their infant son is divinely chosen to rule as successor to the God Ra. The wife’s attendant, Sarga, overheard and she flees to warn Pharaoh Khufu of the threat. Monra fears this means his divinely appointed son will therefore be killed. He hides mother and newborn with the attendant Zaya on a wagon loaded with wheat, for escape. On the way to the home of the High Priest Khufu’s entourage encounters Sarga in flight from pursuit by Monra’s men; so Khufu learns the facts of the sorcerer’s malediction and in reward orders her to be escorted to her father’s home.

When Khufu arrives to look upon the threat to his lineage he subjects the High Priest to a cross-examination worthy of a formidable lawyer in court.

‘You are advanced in both knowledge and wisdom … tell me: why do the gods enthrone pharaohs over Egypt?’

‘They select them from among their [the pharaohs’] sons, endowing them with the divine spirit to make the nation prosper.’

‘Thus can you tell me what Pharaoh must do regarding his throne?’

‘He must carry out his obligations … claim his proper rights.’

Monra knows what he’s been led to admit. There follows a scene of horror raising the moral doubt, intellectual powerlessness that makes such over-the-top scenes undeniably credible in Mahfouz’s early work. Obey the god Ra or the secular power Khufu? There comes to Monra ‘a fiendish idea of which a priest ought to be totally innocent’. He takes Khufu to a room where another of his wife’s handmaidens has given birth to a boy, implying this is his son in the care of a nurse. With the twists of desperate human cunning Mahfouz knows so instinctively, the situation is raised another decibel.

Monra is expected to eliminate his issue. ‘Sire, I have no weapon with which to kill.’ Khafra, Pharaoh’s seed, shoves his dagger into Monra’s hand. In revulsion against himself the High Priest thrusts it into his own heart. Khafra with a cold will (to remind oneself of, much later) has no hesitation in ensuring the succession. He beheads the infant and the woman.

There is another encounter, on the journey back to Pharaoh’s palace, another terrified woman, apparently pursued by a Bedouin band. Once more compassionate, he orders that the poor creature with her baby be taken to safety — she says she was on her way to join her husband, a worker on the pyramid construction. Mahfouz, like a master detective-fiction writer, lets us in on something vitally portentous his central character, Khufu, does not know; and that would change the entire narrative if he did. The woman is Zaya. She has saved the baby from Bedouin attack on the wheat wagon.

Mahfouz’s marvellous evocation, with the mid-twentieth-century setting of his Cairo trilogy¹³⁹, of the depth of the relationship between rich and aristocratic family men and courtesans, pimps, concurrent with lineal negotiations with marriage brokers, exemplifies an ignored class interdependency. His socialist convictions that were to oppose, in all his work, the posit that class values, which regard the lives of the ‘common people’ as less representative of the grand complex mystery the writer deciphers in human existence, begins in this other, early trilogy. The encounter with Zaya moves his story from those who believe themselves to be the representatives of the gods, to the crowd-scene protagonists in life. The servant Zaya’s desolation when she learns her husband has died under the brutal conditions of pyramid labour, and the pragmatic courage of her subsequent life devotedly caring for baby Djedef, whom she must present as her own son, opens a whole society both coexistent with and completely remote from the awareness of the Pharaoh, whose desire for immortality has brought it about. The families of his pyramid workers have made in the wretched quarter granted them outside the mammoth worksite Pharaoh gazed on, ‘a burgeoning low-priced bazaar’. There Djedef grows to manhood. Zaya, one of Mahfouz’s many varieties of female beauty, has caught the eye of the inspector of the pyramid, Bisharu, and does not fail to see survival for herself and the child in getting him to marry her. Mahfouz’s conception of beauty includes intelligence; he may be claimed to be a feminist, particularly when, in later novels, he is depicting a Muslim society where women’s place is male-decreed: a bold position in twentieth-century Egypt, though nothing as dangerous as his criticism, through the lives of his characters, of aspects of Islamic religious orthodoxy that brought him accusations of blasphemy and a near-fatal attack by a fanatic.

Djedef chooses a military career; his ‘mother’ proudly sees him as a future officer of the Pharaoh’s charioteers. While his putative father asks himself whether he should continue to claim this progeniture or proclaim the truth? But that once again would be a different novel and the one whose heights Mahfouz is mounting will not have the pyramid inspector determine a route.

Pharaoh Khufu has been out of the action and the reader’s sight; it almost seems the author has abandoned the subject of Khufu’s wisdom. But attention about-turns momentously. As Djedef rises from rank to rank in his military training, Pharaoh has the news from his architect: the pyramid is completed, ‘for eternity it will be the temple within whose expanse beat the hearts of millions of your worshippers’.

Fulfilment of Khufu’s hubris? Always the unforeseen, from Mahfouz. Khufu has gone through a change. He does not rejoice, and when Mirabu asks, ‘What so clearly occupies your mind, my lord?’, comes the reply, ‘Has history ever known a king whose mind was carefree … is it right for a person to exult over the construction of his grave?’

As for the hubris of immortality: ‘Do not forget the fact that immortality is itself a death for our dear, ephemeral lives … What have I done for the sake of Egypt … what the people have done for me is double what I have done for them.’

He has decided to write ‘a great book’, ‘guiding their souls and protecting their bodies’ with knowledge. The place where he will write it is the burial chamber in his pyramid. If the wisdom claimed for the Pharaoh in the book’s title has appeared to be intended to be ironic, it now proves to have been the counter-line of tension only a writer of subtle strength may hold between himself and the reader.

There are more changes of identity, outward ones.

The first notes in Mahfouz’s recurrent theme of that other power, sexual love, life-enhancing or destructive, is heard in army commander Djedef’s passion for a peasant girl who really is a princess.

Crown Prince Khafra’s professed love for his father is really an impatience to inherit the throne.

Mahfouz puts Khufu’s wisdom to what surely is the final test of any such concept: attempted parricide. The horror is foiled only by another: Djedef killing Khufu’s own seed, Crown Prince Khafra. What irony in tragedy conveyed by vivid scenes of paradox: it is the sorcerer’s pronouncement that is fulfilled, not the hubris of an eternal abode. Djedef of divine prophecy is declared future Pharaoh with the seemingly unattainable princess as consort, after a moving declaration by a father who has seen his own life saved — only by the death of his son. He calls for papyrus: ‘that I may conclude my book of wisdom with the gravest lesson that I have learned in my life …’ Then he throws the pen away. With it goes the vanity of human attempt at immortality; Khufu’s wisdom attained.

The second novel of the trilogy opens in Hollywood if not Bollywood flamboyance with the festival of the flooding of the Nile. The story has as scaffold a politico-religious power conflict within which is an exotic exploration of that other power, the sexual drive.

This is an erotic novel. A difficult feat for a writer; nothing to do with pornography, closer to the representation of exalted states of being captured in poetry. The yearly flooding of the Nile is the source of Egypt’s fertility, fecundity, source of life, as is sexual attraction between male and female.

There are two distractions during the public celebration before the Pharaoh; omens. A voice in the throng yells ‘Long live His Excellency Khunumhotep’; the young Pharaoh is startled and intrigued by a woman’s golden sandal dropped into his lap by a falcon. The shout is no innocent drunken burst of enthusiasm for the Prime Minister. It is a cry of treason. The sandal isn’t just some bauble that has caught the bird of prey’s eye, it belongs to Rhadopis.

The Pharaoh, ‘handsome … headstrong … enjoys extravagance and luxury and is rash and impetuous as a raging storm’, intends to take from the great establishment of the priesthood, representative of the gods who divinely appoint pharaohs, the lands and temples whose profits will enable him to ‘construct palaces’.

His courtiers are troubled: ‘It’s truly regrettable that the king should begin his reign in confrontation.’

‘Let us pray the gods will grant men wisdom … and forethought.’

His subjects in the crowd are excitedly speculating about him. ‘How handsome he is!’

His ancestors of the sixth dynasty, ‘in their day how they filled the eyes and hearts of their people …’

‘I wonder what legacy he will bequeath?’

A beautiful boat is coming down the Nile from the island of Biga. ‘It is like the sun rising over the Eastern horizon.’

Aboard is ‘Rhadopis the enchantress and seductress … She lives over there in her white palace where her lovers and admirers compete for her affections.’

No wonder Mahfouz later wrote successful film scripts; already he knew the art, the flourish, of the cut. If the technique was to serve him for films, the close-ups of the courtesan and her sumptuous ambience as she wields erotic power through the relations not only of men with her, but of men with men, their dealings in financial and political power, forecast the woman Zubayda (in the Cairo trilogy), whose influence on the life of Cairo during the thirties and forties of British occupation in forms it took during peace and war, even after Egyptain independence in 1922, is so vividly created.

Rhadopis of Nubia is the original femme fatale. The ravishing template. Not even descriptions of Cleopatra can compare. The people gossip: enthralled, appalled, ‘Do you know that her lovers are the cream of the kingdom’; spiteful, ‘she’s nothing but a dancer … brought up in the pit of depravity … she’s given herself over to wantonness and seduction’; infatuated, ‘her wondrous beauty is not the only wealth the gods have endowed her with … Thoth [god of wisdom] has not been mean with wisdom and knowledge’; sardonic, ‘To love her is an obligation upon the notables of the upper class, as though it were a patriotic duty.’

Mahfouz is the least didactic of writers. He’s always had nimble mastery of art’s firm injunction: don’t tell, show. Overhearing the talk one’s curiosity is exhilaratingly aroused as if one were there among the crowd, even while unnoticingly being informed of issues that are going to carry the narrative.

Prime Minister Khunumhotep favours, against the Pharaoh’s intent, the case of the priests’ campaign to claim their lands and temples as inalienable right. The bold challenge of calling out his minister’s name on a grand public occasion has hurt and angered the Pharaoh; his Chamberlain Sofkhatep and courtier Tahu are concerned. There’s juxtaposed another kind of eavesdrop, on an exchange between these two which goes deeper than its immediate significance, dispute over the priests’ possessions.

Tahu urges Pharaoh, ‘Force, my lord … Do not procrastinate … strike hard.’

Sofkhatep, ‘My lord … the priesthood is dispersed through the kingdom as blood through the body … Their authority over the people is blessed by divine sanction … a forceful strike might bring undesirable consequences.’

Here is a palace revolution in place of one of succession — Khufu’s seed — and it carries the ancient and ever-present (in our present) opposition of force versus wisdom, religious causes versus secular humanism. Pharaoh chillingly responds, ‘Do not trouble yourselves. I have already shot my arrow.’ He has had brought to him the man who cried out, told him his act was despicable, awed him with the magnanimity of not ordering him punished, declaring it ‘simple-minded to think that such a cry would detract me from the course I have set upon … I have decided irrevocably … that from today onward nothing would be left to the temples save the land and offerings they need.’

Something that does distract the young Pharaoh from problems of his reign is the fall from the blue — the gold sandal. Sofkhatep remarks that the people believe the falcon courts beautiful women, whisks them away. Pharaoh is amazed: the token dropped in his lap is as if the bird ‘knows my love for beautiful women’. The gold sandal is Rhadopis’s, recognised by Tahu. He seems perturbed when Pharaoh asks who she is; a hint dropped of a certain circumstance that will give him an identity rather different from official one of courtier. He informs that she is the woman on whose door distinguished men knock. ‘In her reception hall, my lord, thinkers, artists and politicians gather … the philosopher Hof has remarked … the most dangerous thing a man can do in his life is set eyes upon the face of Rhadopis.’

Pharaoh is intrigued and will set his upon that face. Of course he cannot join the men, however highborn, who knock on the Biga Island palace door. It seems odd and amusing that there is no rivalry for her bed and favours shown. Is Mahfouz slyly exposing another side of that noble quality, brotherhood — decadence? They share her. There is music and witty exchange, she may dance or sing for them if the mood takes her and there’s informed political debate in this salon-cum-brothel before she indicates which distinguished guest she will allow to her bed at the end of the entertainment.

If kingly rank had not proscribed Pharaoh from joining the brotherhood he might have gained political insight to the issues facing his kingdom. Aside from the demands of the priests, there is a rebellion of the Maasaya tribe, and from the aristocratic company comes the familiar justification of colonialism which is to be exposed with such subtlety and conviction in Mahfouz’s future fiction.

One of Rhadopis’s admirers questions ‘Why the tribe should revolt’ when ‘Those lands under Egyptian rule enjoy peace and prosperity. We do not oppose the creeds of others.’

The more politically astute supporter of the imperial-colonial system: ‘The truth is that the Maasaya question has nothing to do with politics or religion … they are threatened with starvation … and at the same time they possess treasure [natural resources] of gold and silver … and when the Egyptians undertake to put it to good use, they attack them.’

There’s argument, for and against, over the priests’ demands and Pharaoh’s intransigence.

‘The theocrats own a third of all the land in Egypt …’

‘Surely there are causes more deserving of money than temples?’

The ironic dynamism of the story is that it is to be how the ‘cause’ of young Pharaoh’s desire to build palaces and acquire a woman whose extravagance matches his — political power and erotic power clasped together — contests the place of ‘most deserving’.

Yes, it’s Milan Kundera’s maxim, the novelist asking questions, not supplying answers, that makes this novel as challengingly entertaining as the conversation in Rhadopis’s salon. House of fame, house of shame? As she becomes Pharaoh’s mistress and obsession, is she the cause of his downfall, his people turning against him, their worshipped representative of the gods, because of his squandering of the nation’s wealth on a courtesan? Or is Pharaoh a figure of the fatality of inherent human weakness? Is it not in our stars — fall from the sky of a gold sandal — but in ourselves, the Pharaoh himself, to fulfil personal desires? And further: isn’t it the terrible danger in power itself that it may be used for ultimate distorted purpose? Dictators, tyrants. Mahfouz sets one’s mind off beyond the instance of his story.

Rhadopis herself. Beginning with the introduction as prototype Barbie doll as well as femme fatale, the young Mahfouz achieves an evocation of the inner contradictions of the kind of life she lives that no other writer whose work I know has matched. Zola’s Nana must retire before her. On the evening at the end of the Nile festival, Rhadopis’s admirer-clients knock on her door as usual. The class-based denial of the existence of any critical intelligence in menial women, including prostitutes, is always an injustice refuted convincingly by Mahfouz’s women, whether serving in that category or another. After dancing suggestively at the men’s request, ‘sarcasm overcame’ her dalliance. To Hof, eminent philosopher among them: ‘You have seen nothing of the things I have seen.’ Pointing to the drunken throng, ‘… the cream of Egypt prostrating themselves at my feet … it is as if I am among wolves.’ All this regarded amid laughter, as her titillating audacity. No one among these distinguished men seems to feel shame at this degradation of a woman; no one sees it as a consequence of the poverty she was born into, and from which it was perhaps her only escape. This night she uses the only weapon they respect, capriciously withholds herself. ‘Tonight I shall belong to no man.’

A theatrical ‘storm of defiance’ is brewing in her as she lies sleepless. It may read like the cliché passing repentance of one who lives by the sale of her body. But the salutary mood is followed next night by her order that her door should be kept closed to everyone.

That is the night Pharaoh comes to her. No door may be closed to him. He is described as sensually as Mahfouz does his women characters. The encounter is one of erotic beauty and meaning without necessity of scenes of sexual gyration. It is also the beginning of Pharaoh’s neglect of the affairs of state for the power of a ‘love affair that was costing Egypt a fortune’. The price: Prime Minister Khunumhotep has had to carry out Pharaoh’s decree to sequester temple estates. Pharaoh’s choice is for tragedy, if we accept that the fall of the mighty is tragedy’s definition, as against the clumsy disasters of ordinary, fallible people. Rhadopis, in conflict between passion for a man who is also a king and the other, epiphany of concern for the Egyptian people of whom she is one, uses her acute mind — after all, let’s remind ourselves she was perforce wily in her former precarious life — to devise a means by which Pharaoh may falsely claim that there is a revolt of the Maasaya tribes in the region of the priests’ lands and summon his army there to overcome the real rebellion, that of the priests. The intricate subterfuge involves the ruthless exploitation of an innocent boy — also in love with her — by Rhadopis’s resorting to her old powers of seduction to use him as messenger.

Tragedy is by definition inexorable as defeated Pharaoh speaks after the priesthood has exposed his actions to his people and the mob is about to storm the walls of his palace. ‘Madness will remain as long as there are people alive … I have made for myself a name that no Pharaoh before me ever was called: The Frivolous King.’

An arrow from the mob pierces his breast. ‘Rhadopis,’ he orders his men, ‘Take me to her … I want to expire on Biga.’

We hardly have been aware of the existence of Pharaoh’s unloved wife, the queen; how impressively she emerges now with a quiet command, ‘Carry out my lord’s decision.’

Mahfouz’s nascent brilliance as, above all political, moral, philosophical purpose, a story-teller, is in the emotional pace of events by which this story meets its moving, questioning end, with the irony that Rhadopis’s last demand on a man is to have the adoring boy messenger find a phial of poison with which she will join Pharaoh in death, final consummation of sexual passion. For the last, unrequited lover, asked how he obtained the phial, Mahfouz plumbs the boy’s horror in the answer: ‘I brought it to her myself.’

What was the young writer, Mahfouz, saying about love?

The Nile is the flowing harbinger of Egypt’s destiny in the scope of Mahfouz’s re-imagined pharaonic history, starting with Khufu’s Wisdom, fourth dynasty, continuing with Rhadophis of Nubia, sixth dynasty, and concluding with Thebes At War, seventeenth to eighteenth dynasty.

A ship from the south arrives up the Nile, at Thebes. On board not a courtesan or a princess but the Chamberlain of Apophis, Pharaoh by conquest of both the north and south kingdoms. Again, through the indirection of an individual’s thoughts, anticipation is roused as one reads the musing of this envoy: ‘I wonder, tomorrow will the trumpet sound … will the peace of these tranquil houses be shattered … Ah, how I wish these people knew what a warning this ship brings them and their master.’ He is the emissary of an ancient colonialism. Thebes is virtually a colony of Apophis’s reign. The Southerners are, within the traditional (unchanging) justification of colonisation, different. The classic example for that and all time: darker than self-appointed superior beings — in this era the Hyksos of the north, from Memphis. Compared with these, a member of the Chamberlain’s mission remarks, the Southerners are ‘Like mud next to the glorious rays of the sun’. And the Chamberlain adds ‘… despite their colour and their nakedness … they claim they are descended from the loin of the gods and that their county is the well-spring of the true pharoahs’. I wonder what Naguib Mahfouz, looking back to 1938 when his prescient young self wrote his novel, thinks of how we now know, not through any godly dispensation, but by palaeontological discovery, that black Africa — which the Southerners and the Nubians represent in the story — is the home of the origin of all humankind.

After this foreboding opening, there comes to us as ludicrous the purpose of the mission. It is to demand that the hippopotami in the lake at Thebes be killed, since Pharoah Apophis has a malady his doctors have diagnosed as due to the roaring of the animals penned there! It’s a power pretext, demeaning that of the region: the lake and its hippos are sacred to the Theban people and their god Amun. There is a second demand from Pharoah Apophis. He has dreamt that the god Seth, sacred to his people, is not honoured in the south’s temples. A temple devoted to Seth must be built at Thebes. Third decree: the governor of Thebes, deposed Pharoah Seqenenra, appointed on the divide-and-rule principle of making a people’s leader an appointee of the usurping power, must cease the presumption of wearing the White Crown of Egypt (symbol of Southern sovereignty in Egypt’s double crown). ‘He has no right … there is only one kind who has the right’ — conqueror Apophis.

Seqenenra calls his Crown Prince Kamose and councillors to discuss these demands. His Chamberlain Hur: ‘It is the spirit of a master dictating to his slave … it is simply the ancient conflict between Thebes and Memphis in a new shape. The latter strives to enslave the former, while the former struggles to hold on to its independence by all means.’

Of the three novels, this one has the clearest intention to be related to the present in which it was written — British domination of Egypt which was to continue through the 1939–1945 war until the deposing of King Farouk by Nasser in the 1950s. It also does not shirk the resort to reverse racism which inevitably is used to strengthen anti-colonial resolves. One of Seqenenra’s military commanders: ‘Let us fight till we have liberated the North and driven the last of the white with their long dirty beards from the Land of the Nile.’ The ‘white’ are Asiatic foreigners, the Hyksos, also referred to as ‘Herdsmen’ presumably because of their wealth in cattle, who dominated from Northern Egypt for two hundred years.

Crown Prince Kamose is for war, as are some among the councillors. But the final decision will go to Queen Tetisheri, Seqenenra’s wife, the literary ancestress of Mahfouz’s created line of revered wise matriarchs, alongside his recognition given to the embattled dignity and intelligence of courtesans. Physically, she’s described with characteristics we would know as racist caricature, but that he proposes were a valid standard of African beauty, ‘the projection of the upper teeth that the people of the South found so attractive’. A questioning of the validity of any people’s claim to an immutable aesthetic standard of human form … Scholar of the Books of the Dead and books of Khufu’s teaching, Tetisheri’s was the opinion to which ‘recourse was had in times of difficulty’: ‘the sublime goal’ to which Thebans ‘must dedicate themselves was the liberation of the Nile Valley’. Thebes will go to war.

Crown Prince Kamose is downcast when told by his father that he may not serve in battle, he is to remain in Seqenenra’s place of authority tasked with supplying the army with ‘men and provisions’. In one of the thrilling addresses at once oratorical and movingly personal, Seqenenra prophesies ‘If Seqenenra falls … Kamose will succeed his father, and if Kamose falls, little Ahmose [grandson] will follow him. And if this army of ours is wiped out Egypt is full of men … if the whole South falls into the hands of the Herdsmen, then there is Nubia … I warn you against no enemy but one — despair.’

It is flat understatement to acknowledge that Seqenenra dies. He falls in a legendary hand-to-hand battle with javelins, the double crown of Egypt he is defiantly wearing topples, ‘blood spurted like a spring … another blow scattering his brains’, other blows ‘tipped the body to pieces’ — all as if this happens thousands of years later, before one’s eyes. It is not an indulgence in gore, it’s part of Mahfouz’s daring to go too far in what goes too far for censorship by literary good taste, the hideous human desecration of war. The war is lost; Kamose as heir to defeat must survive by exile with the family. They take refuge in Nubia, where there are supporters from among their own Theban people.

From the horrifyingly magnificent set-piece of battle, Mahfouz turns — as Tolstoy did in War and Peace — to the personal, far from the clamour, which signifies it in individual lives. Kamose leads the family not conventionally to the broken body but ‘to bid farewell to my father’s room’. To ‘face its emptiness’. With such nuance, delicacy within juggernaut destruction, does the skill of Mahfouz peretrate the depth of responses in human existence.

And the emptiness of that room will become of even greater significance. Kamose has Seqenenra’s throne taken from the palace to the Temple of Amun, where the body of Seqenenra lies. Prostrate before the throne, he speaks: ‘Apophis shall never sit upon you.’

Ten years have passed. The story is taken up again along the Nile. A convoy of ships is pointing north, now, from Nubia to the border with Egypt, closed since the end of the war. The sailors are Nubian, the two commanders Egyptian. Beauty and rightfulness go together in early Mahfouz’s iconography. The leading commander has ‘one of those faces to which nature leads its own majesty and beauty in equal proportion’. Here is Isfinis, a merchant bringing for sale the precious jewels, ivory, gold and exotic creatures that are the natural resources of Nubia. The convoy lands first at Biga, that island from which Rhadopis’s siren call once sounded, where now the merchant bribes the local governor with an ivory sceptre in exchange for intercession to be received by the Pharaoh Apophis.

Isfinis is not a merchant and Isfinis is not his name. His purpose is not business but justice; we overhear him saying to his ‘agent’, courtier Latu, ‘If we succeed in restoring the ties with Nubia … we shall have won half the battle … the Herdsman is very arrogant … but he is lazy … his only path to gold is through someone like Isfinis who volunteers to bring it to him.’ So this merchant must be disguised Kamose, Seqenenra’s heir, come for retribution?

Mahfouz is the writer-magician, pulling surprise out of the expected. No, Isfinis is Ahmose, Seqenenra’s grandson, last heard of going as a child into exile with the defeated family.

A royal vessel sails near the merchant convoy and a princess with her slave girls is amazed at the sight on the merchant’s deck of an item of cargo never seen before. It is a pygmy. Her Pharaonic Highness sends a sailor to say she will board the merchant ship to look at the ‘creature’ — if it is not dangerous.

Isfinis presents the pygmy with a show of obsequiousness: ‘Greet your mistress, Zola!’ A wryly mischievous scene of the cruel sense of absolute superiority in race, hierarchy of physique, follows.

The princess asks, ‘Is he animal or human?’

Isfinis: ‘Human, Your Highness.’

‘Why should he not be considered an animal?’

‘He has his own language and his own religion.’

To her the pygmy is like anything else the merchant might offer, something to own or reject; ‘… but he is ugly; it would give me no pleasure to acquire him’. From some other examples of the merchant’s wares she picks a necklace; it’s simply assumed he will have to come to the palace to be paid.

The satirical social scene explodes as Latu cries angrily, ‘She is a devil, daughter of a devil!’

In this tale of doubling-up identities Isfinis/Ahmose realises that this woman he’s attracted to is the daughter of the ‘humiliator of his people, and his grandfather’s killer’.

On land, the merchant takes lodgings at an inn among fishermen. In the bar (as later, the Cairo trilogy) inhibitions dissolving in drink mean people reveal in banter the state of the country. It’s serious social criticism and delightful entertainment, at once.

‘You’re certainly a rich man, noble sir … but you’re Egyptian, from the look of you.’

Isfinis/Ahmose: ‘Is there any contradiction between being Egyptian and being rich?’

‘Certainly, unless you’re in the rulers’ good graces’; this bar ‘is the refuge of those who have no hope … The rule in Egypt is that the rich steal from the poor but the poor are not allowed to steal from the rich.’

Mahfouz has the rare gift of rousing a subconscious alertness in the reader: a kind of writerly transmission so that one moves on for oneself, as if before he does, to how things will develop and why. Nothing is an aside. A man bursts into the inn’s rowdiness to tell how someone the locals know, Ebana, has been arrested on the pretext that she attacked a Herdsman officer who was soliciting her. When Isfinis hears the woman will be flogged because she’s unable to pay a fine, he insists on going to the court to do so. The apparently irrelevant good deed that a man principled against injustice may casually settle with cash. But perhaps one has been prompted. Who is this woman?

And indeed her presence is invoked in context of Isfinis’s mission when, at another of the progressively hierarchal meetings that must precede granting of audience with Pharoah Apophis, the judge from the woman’s trial happens to be present, and he remarks superciliously of the merchant, ‘It seems he is ever ready with himself and his wealth, for he donated 50 pieces of gold to save a peasant woman charged with insulting Commander Rukh.’

And Princess Amenridis — she’s there too, sarcasm her form of baiting flirtation, ‘Isn’t it natural that a peasant should roll up his sleeves to defend a peasant woman?’ Echoing tones of Rhadopis; but the courtesan was arming herself against her vulnerability as a despised woman, while Amenridis is amusing herself by taunting a man beneath her class, albeit attractive. Mahfouz hasn’t cloned from a previous creation, he’s making a statement that the caprice of the privileged is not the need of the dispossessed.

Merchant Isfinis, ready to produce a bribe of the Governor’s choice, reveals the splendour of objects he wants to offer before Pharoah Apophis. The Princess enjoys making a sensation by saying, of the merchant, to the judge, ‘I am in his debt.’ She relates how she was drawn to the merchant’s convoy by the weird sight of the pygmy and picked out from his other wares the necklace with its emerald heart she is now wearing.

The Governor joins the mood of repartee and innuendo: ‘Why choose a green heart … pure white hearts, wicked black hearts but what might be the meaning of a green heart?’

The Princess: ‘Direct your question to the one who sold the heart.’

Isfinis: ‘The green heart is the symbol of fertility and tenderness.’ The Beatrice and Benedict volley will develop into the taming of the shrew, this arrogant beauty who privately wishes ‘she might come across such a man as this merchant in the body of her own kind … instead she had found it in the body of a brown-skinned Egyptian who traded in Pygmies’.

The — blessed or cursed — complication of sexual attraction along with the imperative will to political power causes Isfinis ‘out of beguilement and tactics to keep in with those who can take him to Pharoah’, to decide he can’t ask payment for the green heart.

A sharp-minded reader is required to follow the shifts in identity of protagonists in this marvellous chronicle; and he/she will be rewarded by zest of entering the stunning agility of the author’s mind. Ebana was, indeed, no simple incident illustrating Isfinis/Ahmose’s compassion. She is the widow of Pepi, the courtier killed with Seqenenra ten years ago, since when she has concealed herself among the poor fisher community of enemy territory, Memphis. Pepi had named their son Ahmose, after the grandson of Seqenenra, born the same day. It is more than coincidence; this other Ahmose is also twinned in bravery and dedication with Ahmose-disguised-as-Isfinis, to win back for Thebes the double crown of Egypt.

The dynastic Ahmose hears through Ebana that the fishermen’s quarter is full of former owners of estates and farms, dispossessed by Apophis. He tells them — and lets on to the reader for the first time — the true purpose of his ‘trade mission’ is to link Egypt to Nubia by getting permission to transport these men ostensibly as workers to produce the treasures of Nubian resources for Memphis’s acquisitive taste. ‘We shall carry gold to Egypt and return with grain and men … and one day we shall come back with men only …’

Eros, too, is relentless; while Ahmose is engaged in planning this great campaign an ‘invading image’ causes him to shudder. ‘God, I think of her … And I shouldn’t think of her at all.’ Amenridis, daughter of the enemy, the Pharoah Apophis.

The day of his reception by the Pharoah brings another emotional experience Ahmose cannot let disempower him: the garden of the palace usurped by Apophis was his grandfather Pharoah Seqenenra’s where in childhood he would play with Nefertari — now his wife, whom Mahfouz knows, in his skill at conveying the unstated merely by an image, he does not have to remark that Ahmose is betraying.

In the palace Apophis falls to the trap of demeaning himself by discarding his crown and putting on his head the vanity of a fake, bejewelled double crown the merchant presents him with along with the gift of three pygmies. They are to amuse him; or to remind of something apposite to His Majesty, in guise of quaint information. ‘They are people, my lord, whose tribes believe that the world contains no other people but themselves.’

The scene of greedy pleasure and enacted sycophancy is blown apart by the charging in of Apophis’s military commander Rukh, the man who brought Ebana to court accused of insulting him. He is drunk, raging, and demands a duel with the Nubian trader who paid gold to save her from flogging.

Ahmose is strung between choices: flee like a coward, or be killed and his mission for his people lost. He’s aware of Princess Amenridis regarding him with interest. Is it this, we’re left to decide, which makes him accept Rukh’s challenge? As proof of manhood? For the public the duel is between class, race: the royal warrior and the peasant foreigner. Commander Rukh loses humiliatingly, incapacitated by a wounded hand. Whatever Ahmose’s reckless reason in taking on the duel, his present mission is fulfilled; the deal, treasures to Pharoah Apophis in exchange for the grain and workers, is granted. He may cross the border for trade whenever he wishes.

Aboard his homeward ship in what should be triumph, Ahmose is asking himself in that other mortal conflict, between sexual love and political commitment, ‘Is it possible for love and hate to have the same object?’ Amenridis is part of the illicit power of oppression. ‘However it be with me, I shall not set eyes upon her again …’

He does, almost at once. Rukh pursues him with warships, to duel again, and, ‘This time I shall kill you with my own hands.’

Amenridis has followed on her ship and endowed with every authority of rank stops Rukh’s men from murdering Ahmose when he has once again wounded Rukh. Ahmose asks what made her take upon herself ‘the inconvenience’ of saving his life.

She answers in character: ‘To make you my debtor.’

But this is more than sharply aphoristic. If he is somehow to pay he must return to his creditor; her way of asking when she will see again the man she knows as Isfinis. And his declaration of love is made, he will return, ‘My lady, by this life of mine which belongs to you’.

His father Kamose refuses to allow him to return in the person of Merchant Isfinis. He will go in his own person, Ahmose, only when ‘the day of struggle dawns’.

Out of the silence of parting comes a letter. In the envelope is the chain of the green heart necklace. Amenridis writes she is saddened to inform him that a pygmy she has taken into her quarters as a pet has disappeared. ‘Is it possible for you to send me a new pygmy, one who knows how to be true?’

Mahfouz discards apparent sentimentality for startling evidence of deep feeling, just as he is able to dismantle melodrama with the harshness of genuine human confrontation. Desolate Ahmose: ‘She would, indeed, always see him as the inconstant pygmy.’

The moral ambiguity of a love is overwhelmed by the moral ambiguities darkening the shed blood of even a just war. The day of struggle comes bearing all this and Kamose with Ahmose eventually leads the Theban army to victory, the kingdom is restored to Thebes.

Mahfouz, like Thomas Mann, is master of irony, with its tugging undertow of loss. Apophis and his people, his daughter, have left Memphis in defeat. It is a beautiful evening of peace. Ahmose and his wife Nefertari are on the palace balcony, overlooking the Nile. His fingers are playing with a golden chain.

She notices: ‘How lovely. But it’s broken.’

‘Yes, it has lost its heart.’

‘What a pity!’ In her innocent naivety, she assumes the chain is for her.

But he says, ‘I have put aside for you something more precious and beautiful than that … Nefertari, I want you to call me Isfinis, for it’s a name I love and I love those who love it.’

‘Are you still writing?’

People whose retirement from working life has a date, set as the date of birth and the date of death yet to come, ask this question of a writer. But there’s no trade union decision bound upon writers; they leave practising the art of the word only when their ability to transform with it something of the mystery of human life, leaves them.

Yes, in old age Naguib Mahfouz is still writing. Still finding new literary modes to express the changing consciousness of succeeding eras with which his genius created this trilogy and his entire oeuvre, novels and stories. In the rising babble of our millennium, radio, television, mobile phone, his mode for the written word is distillation. In a current work, The Dreams,¹⁴⁰ short prose evocations drawing on the fragmentary power of the subconscious, he is the narrator walking aimlessly where suddenly ‘every step I take turns the street upside-down into a circus’. At first he ‘could soar with joy’, but when the spectacle is repeated over and over from street to street, ‘I long in my soul to go back to my home … and ‘trust that soon my relief will arrive’. He opens his door and finds — ‘the clown there to greet me, giggling’. No escape from the world and the writer’s innate compulsion to dredge from its confusion, meaning.

2007

Experiencing Two Absolutes

‘The moment when I am no longer more than a writer, I shall cease to write.’

The little strip of planet Earth where two peoples of common ancient origin, Israelis and Palestinians, contest to live — but not together.

I went there not at the invitation of the Israeli government. I was invited by Israeli writers to an international festival of writers. I accepted because the quotation above, by Albert Camus, is my credo. I believe that the writer within integrity to his/her creativity has a responsibility as a human being for recognition of oppression perpetrated against people, whoever they are, in the society in which the writer has his/her being. Just as the opera singer has particular qualities of the vocal cords, the writer has an insight bringing the responsibility to bear particular witness to the writer’s time and place. I want to testify that writers, rejecting political correctness and using the gifts of insight witness, may dredge up some of the truth, beyond the surface of information, about their society and country.

‘Witness: The Inward Testimony’ was the subject of the address I gave. It had, of course, particular reference and relevance to the place, Israel, and the Israeli writers among those present. In the depths of profound confusion, while peace talks as the foundation of justice for both peoples flounder and revive, I found there are two absolutes: for Israelis, the right of Israel to exist, denied by Hamas and jihad Palestinians; and the return of the occupied territories to Palestine.

Among Israeli writers, including the vociferous Amos Oz, renowned internationally for his brilliant novels and bold, critical publication of possible solutions for two-state justice, every Israeli writer I met was against the occupied territories and the harsh measures used against the Palestinian inhabitants. I was informed by people at conference sessions that the majority of Israelis are against their government’s policies of occupation. A minority spoke to me in defence of the occupied territories as acquisitions of the 1967 changes to partition lines in divine accord with biblical prophecy.

I had made arrangements before leaving South Africa to visit East Jerusalem, the Palestinian sector. A car from the Palestinian Authority picked me up at a curiously named no-man’s-land, the American Colony Hotel. I was received by Professor Sari Nusseibe, a fellow writer whose work I know. I talked with a gathering of students, many of them aspirant writers, answering their questions about the pressures of political conflict on the freedom of expression. But literature did not turn out to be the portent of this occasion for me. I was taken to the faculty which houses a unique documentation, for which ‘museum’ is not the right word. The smiling director was himself a prisoner of Israel for seventeen years of Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Not only had he assembled the minute scraps of testimony scribbled on shreds of paper or cloth that were smuggled out of prison, and photographs of men under merciless interrogation; he has a library of written accounts by ex-prisoners whom he seeks out to set down living memories of pain and humiliation under interrogation. No doubt there are the same kind of memories of suffering among Israeli prisoners interrogated by Palestinians.

The inhumanity of humans towards humans knows no boundaries.

Al Quds University is close to what is referred to as the Jerusalem suburb, Abu Dib, through which the wall that divides Palestine from Israel has part of its monumental path. The wall defies any conventional image. I stood beside one of its gigantic convolutions across streets and houses. It is as high as a wall from floor to ceiling in a one-storey house. I was with a doctor at the entrance to his home. The wall slices toweringly across his and a neighbour’s garden and their street. His clinic is a few blocks away, on the other side of the wall. He has to drive (I was with him) several kilometres to the nearest gate and checkpoint to cross and reach his clinic back near the very point he set out from. He told of critically ill patients on the east side of the wall whose life-saving treatment was available only at a specialised hospital on the west side, on occasion someone dying while guards delayed perusal of medical documents that authorised the crossing. In Israel, I was told by friends that nevertheless there are times when the ‘unconscious’ patient and the attending ‘doctor’ are let through. They are suicide bombers coming to explode murder among the Israeli men, women and children in public places.

Meanwhile, I watched children coming through the gate from their school on one side of the wall to reach their homes on the other side. The everyday disruption of Palestinian lives is inconceivable, even as you experience some small part of it.

Through my friendship with the late Edward Said, outstandingly brilliant intellect of our time, dedicated proponent of Palestine complete with just borders, and his wife Miriam Said, I was enabled to be received in what is known as the heart and mind of the occupied West Bank, Ramallah. Despite my participation in the International Festival of Writers, boycotted by Palestine, I was warmly welcomed by Dr Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary of Al Mubadara, ‘the Palestine national initiative for the realisation of Palestinian national rights and creation of a just, durable peace’ — a group whose members were assembled. They drove me about Ramallah, informing me of what I was seeing again as the results of occupation. Around a table for lunch at Al Mubadara, I learned first-hand about the political standpoint, tactics and work of the Palestine Initiative. They reject the Hamas denial of the right of Israel to exist, while pursuing a non-violent but inexorable struggle against the present and ongoing occupation of Palestine.

Dr Barghouti is a member of the Palestine parliament who achieved second place behind Mahmoud Abbas in the 2005 elections, focusing major attention on the demand to end further construction of Israel’s wall and the dismantling of its existence. He talked about customary rhetoric among political leaders, encouraging colleagues to speak. I heard how the Palestine Initiative, while ineluctably dedicated to a Palestinian state on acceptable, just frontiers, is also concerned with internal Palestinian divisions. ‘Just’ being under endless disagreement, where both Israel and Palestine each believe they have an ancient right to the entire territory, even while bitterly recognising, force majeure of the contemporary world, that would only be achieved by unspeakable bloodshed in a horrific war.

I left for the Other Side with a huge poster: ‘40 years under occupation’, reproducing coloured maps, green for Palestine splattered with red spots indicating Israeli ‘colonies’, incredible rearrangements, swaps of bitterly disputed territory, from 1948 to present — with a final blank map for the future, bearing only a question mark. There are some extraordinary responses to the blank map of the future. Returning from occupied territory to the conference in Jerusalem, the car in which I was transported plunged into a deep, long tunnel off the highway. My Palestinian escort told me this was one of those envisaged by Israel to connect, along 1967 lines, the far-flung pieces of Palestine that Israel recognises, without using the highways that lead through Israeli territory.

The question mark remains.

It hangs over peace negotiations — that vital base for the answer an outsider who believes in justice surely must support: two fully independent states on agreed, realistic frontiers. Israeli and Palestinian poets and fiction writers bear their particular responsibility of inward witness, not for the television and newsprint immediacy of the day, but in lasting works that bring up from beneath the news something of the contradictions of the human condition, enduring, living in hope, a time and place.

2008

The Lion in Literature

I am black: hasn’t a black man eyes? Hasn’t a black man hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a white is: if you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a black wrongs a white, what is his humility, his revenge? If a white wrongs a black, what should his sufferance be by white example, why revenge? The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’

You will have no difficulty in recalling a different version of this monologue.¹⁴¹ In fact, the two will be playing along in your mind, as in mine, as the same text in two voices; and it is the volume they create together that will be what I shall be venturing to put before you.

Colonialism was not only the conquest of land and the dispossession of peoples; it was also, as Edward Said has established with his term Orientalism, a representation of peoples through literature written by others. In his work Culture And Imperialism, he writes, ‘I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between different individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires — British, French, American — in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced.’ Jane Austen and the British Empire, Flaubert and the Middle East, Conrad and Kipling in Africa — even Thomas Mann and the Death in Venice that Mann assumes to be an infection from the tainted Other, the Orient — these are some examples of the literary concept of the Other, in the culture of domination. ‘Texts are protean things,’ Said says, ‘they are tied to circumstance and to politics large and small …’

Imperialism was the big one. In his book entitled Orientalism he focuses mainly on the phenomenon of Orientalism as applicable to the Middle East and Far East, but we can recognise it as just as valid for Africa and even the way Africans were seen in the African diaspora, that ironic form of reverse colonisation by Africans in the home countries of the old colonial masters. Africa, Africans were, existed, as literary exoticism — half attraction, half contempt for the Other — that formed an ethos which inspired, accompanied and supplied self-righteous justification, even for slavery, in a worldwide conquest by dominant powers. To turn Rabbie Burns’s famous dictum on its head: for Africa it was not a matter of ‘Would the Lord the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us’ but would whatever gods may be give us the gift to see ourselves as we know ourselves to be, and to make the world recognise this reality.

It has been a long haul, and I am not going to roll-call all the great names in Africa and her diaspora who have achieved it. ‘Being you, you cut your poetry out of wood.’ That is Gwendolyn Brooks’s metaphor for the process. Thinking of his appropriate metaphor for the beginning of the African story, Chinua Achebe recounts a proverb: ‘Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.’

Africa was slow, perhaps, for many reasons, to produce her own historians in the strict sense of history as a separate literary discipline — the pace has accelerated, and in the case of South Africa is really only beginning, not only with the rewriting of school history books, but in dramatic resuscitations in drama and dance, as well as novels, of the past that was buried under colonial versions. But in fiction as prose and poetry, haven’t Africa’s pride of lions produced their own historians? Haven’t they established incontrovertibly literature as what Edward Said calls ‘a form of political memory’: the past and present as created by Africans themselves, their characters and lives, their view of self and their regard on the world, fully emerged from the regard of the world upon them? Africa is no longer the world’s invention, but herself, confident of this whether on the African continent or in its diaspora.

How strong is that confidence? How deep does it go? Is it by now, the twenty-first century, become so firm a foundation that we, of Africa, are ready to take up a reconnection with the literary culture of the outside world on a new basis, on our terms? The African Literature Association was created and has met through the crisis years of African cultural identity to defend and nurture the creativity on which that identity depended. I ask myself, is it not time to lift the horizon of that splendid identity and accept that literature, the illumination of the human imagination, has no frontier guards, no immigration laws, thank whatever gods may be. All literature belongs to all of us, everywhere. Once free of censorship, it is pure intellectual freedom, any limitations to be overcome by translation. And this conference is dealing with the highly important practicalities of relations between translators, publishers and critics. Why do we not glory in this freedom, take advantage of it? A positive globalisation among some dubious ones.

This call is redundant, yes, even absurd, in our gathering here — all in this company of literati have read, all their lives, world literature. But I raise the question before you out of serious concern in a wider context. I must speak now about the situation in South Africa, which is the one I know intimately, but I more than suspect, from my reading of critical and literary journals in other countries, that something like prevails in the United States.

Young black readers and, most important, aspirant writers confine themselves to reading African and African-American writers. The lion’s African story, it goes without question, is the one that must take first place; therein emerges the ethos of the people and the land. But to find writings from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Arab countries, India, the Far East, etc. ‘irrelevant’ is to re-enter — voluntarily, this time! — a cultural isolation formerly imposed by the arrogance of imperialism. The same principle applies to any African writing that is not more or less narrowly contemporary; except for some student painstakingly assembling a thesis at a university, I have found no young reader/writer in Southern Africa who has heard of, let alone read, in the canon of African literature, Olaudah Equiano;¹⁴² even Plaatje¹⁴³ is just a name to them, if respected at a distance.

Internationally, the range of reading might — it is just beginning to — include one or two of the Latin American writers, principally because our country’s government has begun to break the North — South axis and promote trade, investment and exchange of technological skills South — South with Latin American countries; trade followed the Bible and gun in colonial times, now cultural exchange follows the opening up of trade. (Although, in the case of music, between Latin America and Southern Africa, the happy exchange preceded trade as a move in globalisation.)

I should like to give account of a recent gathering in Johannesburg where the self-limitation of literary experience was explicitly evidenced in all its manifestations and even delusions. On Writers’ Day there was a celebration held at Windybrow Cultural Centre, appropriately an old mansion, once the grand home of a colonial mining magnate, now the fine shabby complex of two theatres, music, drama and film workshops, in an area that has ‘gone black’ since the end of apartheid and racial segregation. There were readings of poetry and prose by young rap and other poets, and by a few old hands such as once-banned Don Mattera and myself, but the main dynamism was the discussions started in the audience. That audience was overwhelmingly young, about 150 black men and women, and, as usual, there was a vivid articulacy of complaints from them.

Some of these were of a politico-social nature about which we all share concern in the new dispensation of South Africa from which we expect so much. Libraries are still almost exclusively in the areas where whites and the new black affluent class live. The paucity of libraries, the total absence of school libraries — except for a dusty shelf of Teach Yourself Accounting, How-To-Do-It books — is unchanged in what are and will long remain the areas where the greatest concentration of black citizens live. This was one of the valid answers given from the floor to why there is a poor reading culture in our country, stemming from the basic reason, high illiteracy and semi-literacy, and culminating in the lack of access to books. But challenges came from those of us on the platform who mingled with the audience. The plaintiffs were all fully literate and claimed to be reader/writers: What — on the premise that you cannot be a writer unless you are a reader, that is our only true schooling — did they read?

The responses were alarmingly uniform: they read African literature from the African continent, mainly from South Africa. We were celebrating Chinua Achebe’s seventieth birthday as a focus of Writers’ Day 2000, but few had read more of his work than Things Fall Apart, which had been a set work in high schools. Only one mentioned Wole Soyinka, one other, Toni Morrison, another Fanon; Mahfouz was an unfamiliar name to them. The assertion was: we want to read about ourselves, our lives. Don Mattera countered with the discovery of oneself to be found in Dostoevsky. The riposte was: too far away and long ago. The director of Windybrow, Walter Chakela, a poet and playwright who runs workshops that have discovered and nurtured new talent among the young and unknown, and whose own plays bring to life and light African heroes both of the distant past and the recent one of apartheid, stunned the vociferous with the quiet announcement that he had begun to think as a poet, to range mentally in the imagination, from having to learn Wordsworth at school. He spoke of the identification with the intimacies of human feeling which are to be found in contact with great creative minds in all kinds of eras, countries. Finally, the audience was in rejection and derision of the fact — a litany — that Shakespeare was ‘stuffed down’ their necks at school; and what did Shakespeare know about them?

And so now you, who have been patient, know why I quoted my version of a Shakespearean discourse.

Shakespeare — why Shakespeare? Because in Shylock’s speech any of these children of apartheid with their history of racism in their veins will find, here in the experience of another race, their people, themselves: hasn’t a black man eyes? Hasn’t a black man hands? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if, as many young people struggle within themselves against the acid desire for revenge upon those who oppressed their parents and destroyed their childhood, they come to read these lines: ‘The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction’ — will they not find something of their secret selves?

In the end it is a self-deprivation to approach literature, as Caryl Phillips says of history, through the prism of your own pigmentation.

That’s what whites did, first.

Rightful pride in African literature should not create a literary ghetto. Surely there have been enough ghettoes. It’s the end of Orientalism; for in African literature, Indian literature, Arabic literature, the Euro-American, Western world now begins to find something of itself. So surely the time has come for African literature to connect, beyond exclusive discourse at scholarly level about itself, its achievements, its problems, with the world of literature, the expansion of literary consciousness to which it belongs. Surely young people from among whom are our hopes for new African writers, should be urged to read widely, to set aside the dominant criterion of ‘relevance’ that belongs to the era when it was an essential element of consciousness-raising tactics of politics against racism. The struggle against racism is not over, as we well know, around the world, but if literature is to be the political memory of the present and future in which young people will live out their lives, should it not reflect, and reflect upon, between literatures, what Achebe calls ‘preliminary conversations … participations in a monumental ritual by millions and millions to appease a long and troublesome history of dispossession and bitterness, and to answer “present” at the rebirth of the world?’

The lion’s telling of his story has another, cogent, urgent, reason for identification with the literatures of that world.

In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, signified God’s Word, the Word that was Creation. Its secular transformation came to us when it was first scratched on a stone tablet or traced on papyrus, and when it travelled from parchment to Gutenberg. That was the genesis of the writer, of literature.

In literature now we are indivisibly in a situation that did not exist when the lion’s telling began. It did not exist when Langston Hughes, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Es’kia Mphahlele, Ngûgĩ wa Thiong’o, Agostinho Neto, Kofi Awoonor began to write. But all literatures are conjoined today under threat of the image against the Word. We are certainly aware of that rival, self-appointed, but with plenty of independent popular corroboration. From the first third of the twentieth century the image has been challenging the power of the written world as a stimulation of the imagination, the opening up of human receptivity. The bedtime story of middle-class childhood has been replaced by the hours in front of the TV screen; in shack settlements all over the poor countries of the globe there is the battery-run television where no single book is to be found. We already have at least one generation grown that looks instead of reads. Yes, TV images are accompanied by the spoken Word, but it is the picture that decides how secondary the Word’s role shall be. The story-telling of the TV medium is the Big Picture; even in documentaries the spoken word is an accessory consisting generally of the most banal and limited vocabulary. Anyone who has run workshops for aspirant writers will know, as I do, how the mini-series vocabulary is often all that aspirants can command to express what are often original ideas. I am still waiting for some proof that, as has been claimed, TV has encouraged reading.

‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Whoever it was — a public relations savant, no doubt — who came up with the adage, the rejoinder is: ‘For how long?’

The image disappears from the screen; to recall it you have to have an apparatus, a cell, a battery, access to an electric power connection. The written word is simply there, in your pocket. The book in your hand can be read on the bus, in bed, in a queue, on a mountain-top, beside a stream, in a traffic jam. The American writer William Gass argues our case for us:

We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together through many adventures and a long time. Words on a screen have visual qualities, to be sure, and these darkly limn their shape, but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be gone. Off the screen, they do not exist as words. They do not exist to be reseen, reread, they only wait to be remade, relit … I cannot argue in their margins …

And the lions of our African literature are confronted suddenly, just as other literatures, with another, the latest factor in the threat to debase the written word, this time presented by information technology as, indeed, an advancement in the dissemination of literature. Although it seems something of a gimmick, so far, with one thirty-page novel (Stephen King’s) written ‘for’ and ‘published’ on the internet, and one can hardly imagine Soyinka’s The Interpreters let alone War and Peace republished in this way, there is every likelihood that at a certain broad level there is going to be a public deprived for a lifetime — because it is going to be told by international websites what it needs, what cultural fulfilment is; deprived of the pleasures and intellectual fulfilment I have described and quoted. People are going to ‘read’, not books, but texts passing on a screen, soon to be available like telephone messages to appear on the matchbox screens of mobile phones.

So the mobile phone, Kindle, and other devices become the paperbacks of the future — rivalling, anyway, the printed volume’s portability? And the beguilement (or shall we say the corruption) of the writer to ‘publish’ in this ephemeral way cannot be discounted. Apparently the money is good; better and quicker than royalties. The seduction of the image, away from the printed word, has extended, in one instance already, to the very process of writing becoming an image. An American actor-turned-writer has fitted a tiny special camera to his computer and written his science fiction novel watched by a webcam. The linkage of his study at home to the internet by this means will bring him $2 million as a deal with a software company promoter. The reader as voyeur.

Vast advances in IT communications are an information revolution that has great possibilities for social development if well used, which means made economically available to the millions in the world, the underdeveloped and developing world whose lives will otherwise be bulldozed by the financial oligarchy of globalisation. But in literature, technology cannot ever replace with the image the illumination that comes from the written word, self-contained, self-powered, in print on paper, infinitely accessible for rumination on and return to, between hard or soft covers.

First it was the book of the movie.

Now it is the book of the website.

This is the lion’s problem just as it is that of the rest of the world’s literature.

2006