Speaking: Nadine Gordimer

 

"I don’t make such judgments about people. After all, I’m a white colonial woman myself, of colonial descent. Perhaps I know us too well through myself. But if somebody is partly frivolous or superficial, has moments of cruelty or self-doubt, I don’t write them off, because I think that absolutely everybody has what are known as human failings. My black characters are not angels either. All this role-playing that is done in a society like ours—it’s done in many societies, but it’s more noticeable in ours—sometimes the role is forced upon you. You fall into it. It’s a kind of song-and-dance routine, and you find yourself, and my characters find themselves, acting out these preconceived, ready-made roles. But, of course, there are a large number of white women of a certain kind in the kind of society that I come from who . . . well, the best one can say of them is that one can excuse them because of their ignorance of what they have allowed themselves to become. I see the same kind of women here in the U.S. You go into one of the big stores here and you can see these extremely well-dressed, often rather dissatisfied-looking, even sad-looking middle-aged women, rich, sitting trying on a dozen pairs of shoes; and you can see they’re sitting there for the morning. And it’s a terribly agonizing decision, but maybe the heel should be a little higher or maybe . . . should I get two pairs? And a few blocks away it’s appalling to see in what poverty and misery other people are living in this city, New York. Why is it that one doesn’t criticize that American woman the same way one does her counterpart in South Africa? For me, the difference is that the rich American represents class difference and injustice, while in South Africa the injustice is based on both class and race prejudice."

-- Nadine Gordimer, speaking in a 1983 interview with The Paris Review.

 

Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She was the first, and still only African woman to be a Nobel laureate in literature; she was the third African overall to win. (JM Coetzee brought the continent's tally to four in 2003.) Gordimer's collected short fiction, Life Times, was published last year. She's also written fourteen novels, the first of which was published in 1953 and the most recent in 2005, as well as three essay collections. Gordimer was born in 1923 in Springs, South Africa. She now lives in Johannesburg. For decades, she has been particularly committed to anti-apartheid, HIV/AIDS, and anti-censorship activism.

Comments

[Stefania]

"Why is it that one doesn’t criticize that American woman the same way one does her counterpart in South Africa?"
I think that literature, among other disciplines, should ask itself that question. American authors (well, western authors to be honest) should ask themselves that question.

[Anna Clark]

word.