The Necklace: South African Poetry During the Apartheid Years

It deals with policy formulation and backroom bargaining and uses trade union jargon, local language transposed into English, settler ironies, and nationalist slogans. It is a Henry Jamesian enterprise where society and marriage, politics and landscapes, mix without obscuring the pattern. The Conservationist , which won the Booker Prize for , evokes the sterility of the white community.

Mehring, the Afrikaner antihero whose farm is as barren as his life, conserves both nature and the apartheid system, the one to keep the other at bay.

MOTHER OF THE NECKLACE KILLINGS IS DEAD

In his moral vacuum, Mehring sees Africa returning to the possession of the blacks. Using Zulu creation myths, she looks in a new way at nature in South Africa, leaving her white predecessors in art and literature behind. The Conservationist is a novel of ironies.

Mehring is not a male chauvinist Boer; he is tolerant but no liberal, a financier using his farm as a tax-deductible expense. His leftist mistress travels round the world on his money. He likes to be seen as a country gentleman, but sexually he is a colonialist as we see when he picks up a coloured girl and takes her to an old mine property, only to be surprised by the mine guards. He identifies with the nameless black man under the reeds, burying him in a coffin.

Yet the corpse haunting Mehring and his house a symbol of South Africa is the claim on Africa by those who possess no land at all. Its minute details and documentary precision form an intricate web of meanings where each stone, egg, and piece of marble carry symbolic implications.

She avoids explanations and leaves the reader free to interpret. Gordimer never claimed to portray him — although his daughter recognised their lives — but to convey the hidden truth behind a public person. The challenge to the writer is to penetrate official lies and facades, to see beyond and behind, with an intuition and insight unhampered by social conventions or family discretion. In the latter, Gordimer catches both the unexpected moment when the revolutionary spark ignites and the daily routine when internal dissension rocks the upper reaches of the anti-apartheid movement.

About to enter a political collective struggle, he is caught between one state and another to come; he is himself the transition. Through him, and others, Gordimer enters into a dialogue with the future, with the absent forces that are to rule our lives in years ahead. Gordimer reveals situations when reality suddenly takes another course and we are caught in our roles and expectations, in the traps of skin colour, class, family, and the body itself. She is drawn to those who try to escape from the trap: What makes the suburban housewife become an underground agent, the lawyer to sacrifice his life for a future not his, the young architect to hide a black freedom fighter?

How do faithfulness and betrayal interact in an erotic and political context? It is a parable of the future: Instead there was the free election of , the country narrowly drawing back from the brink of civil war. Having stayed with Nadine Gordimer and her husband for several weeks at that time, I remember the joy, the laughter, and the hunger to see all and hear all of the miracles around us. Like A Guest of Honour , it is novel as history.

Hillela is a despised daughter who enters palaces and presidencies through her political and sexual alliances. She marries an unscrupulous West African politician who becomes president of an African country and so attends the installation of the first South African black president a thinly disguised Nelson Mandela. The finale is a vision of the future, but the focus is on Hillela as an honoured guest of a country where she was once a rebellious little white nobody.

Gordimer took political and literary risks in this brutal fairy-tale of the dreadful year , but she was right in predicting that liberation was only a few years away. Behind the most intimate relations, as well as the most public, there is the same search for an identity, a self-confirmation, and a wish to belong and exist.

For Gordimer, the novel and the short story are instruments to penetrate a society that defends itself against scrutiny, hides in censorship and hypocrisy, refuses to recognise its history, and thus produces a grammar of lies where capitalism, liberalism, and Marxism mean the same thing: Her characters live in the shadow of violence, threatened by unpredictable brutality.

Races and classes, conventions and codes ferment in a decoction of final showdowns and a mysteriously glimmering hope of unexpected mergers and elective affinities outlined in the sands of the future. Unsentimental and diagnostic, she reports from the heart of darkness.

In a country that for so long feared new thoughts and orientations, Gordimer has scraped away the many layers of prejudice and egoism; she has dug out the fragile roots of a common fate and made us glimpse the brilliant colours of a world untainted by apartheid. A white murderer may now be defended by a black lawyer; in fact, it is this highly educated black man on whom two intelligent, well-read parents depend for the survival and sanity of their souls and for the redefinition of meaning in their lives.

Their son has killed a man he loves, out of jealousy. Natalie, the mistress who is the impetus for the murder, is self-destructive and rebels against every form of personal dependence. It is a fable of violence and the search for new forms of freedom; it is also courtroom reportage. Had not the house gun been around, as it generally is in white families, no murder would have happened.

This, in turn, evokes reflection on the fact of the general rise of violence in the world. The gun bought like any commodity in many countries — in the United States, Great Britain, France, or Japan — serves domestic violence and often falls into the hands of a child, with tragic consequences. Like The Conservationist , it stands stylistically apart from many of her other works. Who is the subject of this tragedy? Where are our edges? Gordimer is not afraid to present women of extraordinary intelligence and utmost delicacy of feeling as well as their vulgar counterparts.

Vera wants someone who is committed to matters she thinks are important. She finds in work a defiant independence, which earlier she has experienced in her erotic life. Her foremost responsibility is with the liberation struggle and with her own sense of self. Becoming free, Vera locks herself out from most of what other people want their freedom for. In the end, she persuades herself that only without Bennet can she become a genuine human being. She suffers pangs of conscience because, in his uninvolved innocence, he cannot understand her rebellion.

She is looking for a combat-free zone on a battlefield. In her comradeship with those who are risking their lives, Vera gets closer to her black colleagues than she does to her husband. Does freedom consist in losing the past bit by bit? Why is there always someone who cannot afford to remember and others who are incapable of forgetting, however much they want to? Nadine Gordimer has never written an autobiography or produced testimonies.

She works in the imaginative dimension, always on an expedition into the mysteries of human experience. Today, Nadine Gordimer lives and writes in a half-formed society of a kind almost never before seen on earth. Black and white have agreed to bring about a multiracial democracy by their faith as much as by their work. There are no neutral zones where people can rest unobserved. In a land of lies, everyone lives a double life. Only love, the erotic dimension, stands for a sort of liberty, the glimpse of a more truthful existence.

Thus, every meeting becomes instrumental or absurd.

In many of her stories, Gordimer reminds us that the future of South Africa is not only a question of votes for all but one that requires immense effort to create a civil spirit, allowing people to look each other in the eye. She is a moralist of a kind Alfred Nobel would have approved. She finds an uncommitted life not worth living. Her revolutionaries or human rights lawyers may have agonising personal problems, but they do not give up. In her later novels, there are people with energy and vision, as well as those who see nothing clearly — the former women, the latter often men.

The simple vernacular, with few polysyllabic words or use of extended imagery befits the performative existence such protest poems enjoyed: We are going to experiment and probe and not give a damn what the critics have to say. The township is inseparable from the violent history of white supremacy, meaning that the decision to write in the language of the white oppressor is politically significant. Ndebele summarises this phenomenon: The language Serote choses to write in is inseparable from the political concerns of his community, thus the very form of the poems are inseparable from the historical moment of their composition.

The relationship between white poets and the English language is more subtle than the overt politicisation of the linguistic choices of the Black Consciousness poets. The quintessentially English proverb has been destabilised, suggesting that the language is incapable of explaining the realities of the white community in South Africa.

The choice of proverb explores the sense of alienation felt by many of the white population: Like Serote, de Kok portrays the English language as incapable of describing white South African life and as incompatible with its emerging literary identity.

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In this sense, it is impossible to disassociate either de Kok or Serote from their communities when regarding their linguistic choices. Both utilise the language of the colonial oppressor to comment on their own communities, but manoeuvre English away from colonial, canonical forms to a more appropriate idiosyncratic South African vernacular.

As I have demonstrated, the issue of race permeates the linguistic and formal choices of South African poets, who also navigated a geographically racialized locale where the physical separation of the white and non- white communities deepened the racial binaries in society. Townships and the urban dominated the Black Consciousness poets while white poets focused on more rural aspects of South African life.

Thus it is apparent that the geographic landscapes are inseparable from the communities that inhabited them. The city is depicted as a living being: The black community is depicted as having a complicated relationship with the city.

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At once the source of their livelihood, it is also the site of some of the most oppressive privation and danger which is seen in the constant undermining of words and phrases that evoke life and hope. This uncomfortable dislocation could be seen as comment on the sense of white disbelonging in the South African landscape. In many ways, trench warfare is a fitting allegory for the colonial struggle, exemplifying the stasis of social and physical mobility facing the South African communities.

This immobility and lack of cultural engagement with other locales renders the racialized poetry as inherently limited. In other words, in order to reconcile the social divides of the country, the geographic divides have to be readdressed physically and in art. Similarly, de Kok cannot speak for the entirety of the white community if the geographic exploration of her work centres on the rural and speaks only of ambivalence rather than the deep sense of patriotic South African pride that many white South Africans do enjoy. Despite the premise that Black Consciousness artists were seeking to promote potential liberation in the future, Ndebele bemoans the potentially damaging preoccupation with political concerns within the movement.

The extent to which their poetry aided the emancipation of the black community is debatable, due to its inherently self- promotional and militant nature which served to reinforce the racial and social binaries already rampant in society.

The relationship between Black Consciousness poets and their communities is therefore difficult to establish, as so much of their work was written in the idiom of the political rally and with the agenda of militant liberalisation of the black self. The absence of introspection determines that it is difficult to understand the personal and more sensitive elements of the community.

Both poets are inherently limited in their poetic scope due to the socio-economic-spatial restraints on their communities, resulting in a stunted poetry that cannot speak for the entirety of either society.