Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

There is nothing without failure, until the day the Future is achieved.  It is the only success.  Others--in specific campaigns with specific objectives, against the pass laws, against forced dispossession of land--would lead to piecemeal reforms.  These actions fail one after the other, they have failed since before we were born; failures were the events of our childhood, failures are the normal circumstances of our adulthood--her parents under house arrest, my father dead in jail, my courting done in the prison visiting room.  In this experience of being crushed on individual issues the masses come, as they can in no other way, to understand that there is no other way: state power must be overthrown.  Failure is the accumulated heritage of resistance without which there is no resolution.

In one scene in Burger's Daughter--Nadine Gordimer's novel about a South African woman struggling with the burdensome legacy of her father, a white Marxist leader who died in prison--the protagonist, Rosa, sees a black African man beating a donkey.  She is outraged, upset, but refrains from intervening, though she knows she could:

I had only to career down on that scene with my car and my white authority.  I could have yelled before I even got out, yelled to stop!--and then there I would have been standing, inescapable, fury and right, might, before them, the frightened woman and child and the drunk, brutal man, with my knowledge of how to deliver them over to the police, to have him prosecuted as he deserved and should be, to take away form him the poor suffering possession he maltreated.  I could formulate everything they were, as the act I had witnessed; they would have their lives summed up for them officially at last by me, the white woman--the final meaning of a day they had lived I had no knowledge of, a day of other appalling things, violence, disasters, urgencies, deprivations which suddenly become, was nothing but what it had led up to: the man among them beating their donkey.

This moment stood out to me because it resonates with so much of what we have seen in America in the last few years.  (Not that it didn't exist before, but now we, or just I, am seeing it.)  It resonates with moments that seem to occur every few months, when a black person is killed, maimed, or just humiliated at the hands of a policeman or a white busybody with a cellphone or a gun.  Like Rosa's imagined intervention, in each moment a white person manages to "sum up" a person's entire life, to reduce them to a final moment.  Eric Garner sold cigarettes illegally; Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were "no angels."  These narratives, selected and fashioned by white violence, become "the final meaning" of other "violence, disasters, urgencies, deprivations" in which the narrative is not interested.

For Rosa, who is aware of the immense difference in power she and the man possess, the moment encapsulates the intractable difficulty of white allyship, white radicalism, in South Africa.  Her father, whose stature among South African radicals is so great many call him "our Lenin," failed to recognize any tension or difficulty at all, and that's part of his legacy: in his house and life black Africans moved freely with whites.  He was able to, she explains, because of his Marxism; he believed that the central problem in South African life was that the wealthy crushed both black Africans and poor whites, and denied that racism is something that was "bleached into the skin."  Burger's Daughter, in fact, can be read as a long meditation on just that question, a question that dogs leftists in the United States today: Is racism merely the window dressing, the "superstructure," of economic oppression, or does it have its own material existence?  At a party in Soweto, a black radical obliquely dismisses Lionel Burger's legacy: "Our liberation," he says, " cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time be slaves."  In this formulation there is no room for Rosa, or for Lionel, and Rosa is not so sure the man is wrong.

Rosa, no less empathetic than her parents, suffers from crises of conscience that her father waved away.  His legacy has become a burden that she could never fulfill, even if she wanted to, even if she weren't ambivalent where he had certitude, and even if she weren't a "named" person, watched by the government for signs of sedition.  "I don't know how to live in Lionel's country," she writes after meditating on the man beating his donkey.  Later, she makes her motivation more personal and more plain: "I wanted to know how to defect from him."  In the end she makes a pact with an Afrikaner nationalist, who helps her procure a passport.  She goes to France, where she stays with her father's first wife, a radical-turned-libertine, and eventually to England, where she runs into an old friend, an African man who lived with the Burgers as a child and was called Baasie--"Bossy," until his father was killed by the police.  She's thought about him often, wondering if he was even alive, but her delight is tempered by his own bitter memories:

Tell them how your parents took the little black kid into their home, not the backyard like other whites, right into the house.  Eating at the table and sleeping in the bedroom, the same bed, their little black boss.  And then the little bastard was pushed off back to his mud huts and tin shanties.  His father was too busy to look after him.  Always on the run from police.  Too busy with the whites who were going to smash the government and let another lot of whites tell us how to run our country.  One of Lionel Burger's best tame blacks sent scuttling like a bloody cockroach everywhere, you can always just put your foot on them.

This moment is searing, accusing, shocking.  It's utterly convincing as rhetoric--it's hard to imagine Gordimer could write that perspective so convincingly unless, like Rosa, she possessed a deep-seated fear that it's all true, that white radicalism is still, at its heart, whiteness.  And so what is a white to do?  Ironically, it's this speech that compels her out of her paralysis, and sends her away from her new French lover, back to South Africa, where she works not as a seditionist but a physical therapist.

When I remember Burger's Daughter, I'm going to remember those two moments: the man beating his donkey and the sharp-toothed accusations of Baasie.  There's a lot strung between those two moments, though, nearly 350 dense pages that can often feel talky and motionless.  Rose-twitter DSA folks who are already fluent in the language of 20th century Marxism will have a leg up, because a lot of the book is taken over by jargon-laced argument between various radicals.  Rosa's experience in France, among fun-loving aesthetes who consider themselves more or less above politics, I found rather boring.  I really missed the urgency of July's People, a shorter book with similar themes, the sense it gives of hurtling toward doom.  Burger's Daughter, on the other hand, wants to capture something of the endless waiting of racial radicalism, the sense that every step forward is essentially a failure, until the real Revolution occurs.  For that reason it can feel, as it means to feel, stuck in the mud.  But every now and then it looks something difficult and terrible straight in the face, and for that it's worth reading.