A World of Strangers by Nadine Gordimer

In their different ways, and in their one country where they pursued them, both Cecil and Steven were people who had not found commitment. Theirs was a strange freedom; the freedom of the loose end. They made the hour shine; but now and then they leapt up in half-real, half-mock panic and fled--perhaps, at that very moment, something better was waiting, somewhere else?

I respected this; for hadn't I, for my reasons, felt myself a stranger, uncommitted, in my own world in England; and wasn't that the reason why, in this African country, I had come to feel curiously at home, a stranger among people who were strangers to each other?

Toby Hood is an Englishman who travels to South Africa to take up an open position managing a small publishing company in Johannesburg. He doesn't have much going on in England, and his curiosity makes him open to this unfamiliar country, which is so like England in some ways and completely strange in others. In South Africa, he makes immediate friends on both side of the color barrier. On one side, there's Cecil Rowe, a beautiful divorcee with whom Toby falls in love. Cecil is used to fine English tastes and moves in upper-class Anglo circles, but lacks the wealth to keep herself and her son Keith (lol) out of precarity. On the other side, there's Steven Sitole, a charismatic African who invites Toby into a world of townships, jazz, and associations with Indian gangsters. Steven fascinates Toby, who envies the kind of freewheeling life that Steven seems to lead.

It's not unheard of, but it was interesting to read Gordimer writing from a first person perspective here. It made the novel much warmer than many of hers, and it's easy to see (this is her second novel) how she moved away from the kind of intimate realism of A World of Strangers toward something that was simultaneously colder and more cynical. The novel presents a very simple double life: Toby wants to be at home both among his fellow Anglos and Black South Africans, as well as those like Anna Louw, an Afrikaaner activist who has given up connections and privileges to fight for people like Steven. And why shouldn't he? Of course, it isn't possible, as Toby is often reminded--by Cecil, describing her disgust with her own servants, or by his landlady, who tearfully and frightfully expels him when she finds out he has invited over "kaffirs." The whole thing is, as surely Gordimer means it to be, faintly ridiculous; do these people really think they can live separately as an empowered minority in a black country forever? We can see, as she cannot, how Cecil's isolation and lack of stability is downstream, at least in part, from living in a country where she fears and despises most of the people on the street.

A World of Strangers is good in a realistic kind of way, but it doesn't measure up to Gordimer's later masterpieces. I detect a kind of hopefulness and optimism in it that I think she loses later on, perhaps as she became more cynical about the possibility of political rapprochement between white and black South Africans. You can see, for instance, how much more open to Toby the people in Steven's world are than the Anglos would be to someone like Steven. There are some intimations of tension between Toby and Steven's people, and certainly the suggestion that the life Toby is leading is impossible in the long run. But there's little of the sense you get in later Gordimer that one's race will win out, that the ties of racial identity are in some sense insuperable, at least by individual effort. But I suspect some that find Gordimer chilly might actually find A World of Strangers more palatable.

My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

For months when they talked after love-making it was of the remote places they would like to go together. Islands off this or that continent. Forests in the mountains. Nothing but gulls or owls. Like all lovers, they did not know they were trying to prolong by transformation into words, into the future tense, the physical illusion of personal freedom that fades as the lulled and sated senses come back and will relay the knowledge of time passing with traffic: work, loss, hunger and pan, pacing out there in the street: other people.

One day, Will meets his father by happenstance at a movie theater. His father's not alone; he has a woman with him, a white woman. Only recently have colored South Africans like Will and his father, Sonny, been able to legally patronize white theaters; for both father and son it is a kind of provocation. But for Will, it's also a realization that his father is not all that he seems. Sonny is a former teacher who has become a powerful leader and orator among those in what they call "the struggle"; part of his appeal has always been his upstanding character and the support of his stalwart wife, Aila. But Will clocks immediately what Sonny is doing at the theater, hiding an affair that has come to be the center of his life. As time passes, Sonny's attachment to the white woman, Hannah, will quietly and subtly--because in Gordimer's books, politics and power move glacially, and the explosions are usually off-screen distractions--compromise his position within the movement. But more importantly, it will compromise his position with his son.

It's interesting that Gordimer titles this My Son's Story. If anything, it ought to be called My Father's Story. It is, at heart, Sonny's story, and it alternates between the icy third person that is Gordimer's trademark and a fiery first-person from Sonny's perspective. These sections, where Sonny fulminates against his father, are the best parts of the book, and something I can't remember seeing in anything else that Gordimer's ever written. Sonny's anger at his father's infidelity and betrayal grows all out of proportion, and we can see, in subtle ways, that he lets it cloud his judgment, never quite understanding what others are saying. When he sees in his mother's expression and actions a recognition of his father's infidelity, is he right? Or does he see what he wants to see in order to make a closer ally of his mother? At the novel's end, the Sonny-narrator tells us that he has filled in the gaps of what he does not know; the third-person sections are him, too. Of course, that brings up several Oedipal questions about what it means for Sonny to describe the physical intimacy between his father and his father's lover.

One thing I liked about My Son's Story is that we get moments of anti-Black racism crisply and clearly. That's not actually the case in most of her novels, which I think present racism as something structural that happens at a deeper level. She's not often interested in the racists and bigots as much as the people fighting them. But here we see Sonny and his family move to a white neighborhood, trying to heighten the contradictions of South African society. And for a while, their presence is tolerated, until Aila is arrested for keeping a cache of weapons, and the neighborhood becomes a mob, which burns down the family's house. We are expecting, perhaps, the book to move toward a final confrontation between Will and his father, for the son to explode. But the destabilizing force turns out to be Aila, as well as Will's sister Baby. As things fall apart, we see a deeper source of Will's resentment and envy: the expectation that he of all the family will live the "normal life" that is the reward of political struggle, a struggle which he is not permitted to enter. It's a hard thing, perhaps, to bear the rewards but none of the sacrifices. The novel, then, is Will looking at himself through his father's eyes; that's why it's My Son's Story and not My Father's.

A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer

If she had no passport, no money, few marketable qualifications, in a country more concerned with shoring-up repressive regimes than providing so much as working space for those whose professional skills were to oppose them, she had the qualification of tragedy. There is no-one so safe, so secure, so frivolous or hard-headed as to be able to be unaware of that. Leonie knew Americans would be impressed, even intimidated by her presentation: a white widow and her fatherless black child, the black husband assassinated before the wife's eyes by a racist regime. The namesake's small black hand in her mother's white one: the shame of the slave yard, of the years of the Klan, the centuries-long march before Washington had been reached, the bullet that lodged in the dream of Luther King--this simple sight brought it all to them. For them, Hillela came straight from the kitchen where Whaila died on the floor. It was all of her they need to know. She began there. It was the signature of her life; what she had been, what she was, and would be.

Hillela Capran is, effectively, an orphan; her mother has left her to be raised by two sisters in alternation--proud, priggish Olga and progressive Pauline. Her father is away somewhere in Rhodesia. And yet, from this circumstance, Hillela grows up headstrong, confident, even sure of herself. She often takes what she wants, including the love of her cousin Sasha, with whom Pauline finds her in bed one day. This moment ushers in Hillela's long, not very bitter exile. From Pauline's house she makes her way to a beach camp outside of South Africa that's home to political refugees, to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, to other parts of southern Africa. She marries an activist with ties to Mandela's ANC and has a daughter with him, whom they name for Winnie Mandela (her less known first name--Nomzomo). When he's killed by an assassin--just on the other side of the refrigerator door from her--her exile grows, expands: Eastern Europe, London, America.

The title, A Sport of Nature, refers to a Latin term meaning a "spontaneous mutation," a kind of creature or form of life whose appearance cannot be explained by its genetic material. Again and again, the novel suggests that Hillela will become an internationally known figure, whose life is being reconstructed from primary sources, though it seems equally likely for being a terrorist as for being a diplomat. Only later in the novel do we discover that Hillela becomes the second wife of an African general, later the president of his unnamed state--though apparently it's supposed to be a fictionalized Kenya. How does Hillela become this person, who consorts with ANC freedom fighters and posh diplomats both? As the title suggests, nothing in her background suggests it. She certainly doesn't get it from Olga, and not from Pauline, either, whose progressive values are of the "work within the system" variety, even as she opens her home to dissidents en route to their escape from the apartheid regime. Hillela is not even like Sasha, her cousin, whose bitter hatred of apartheid lands him a lengthy jail sentence.

It's not clear that Hillela has values at all, not in the way we typically think of them. She's motivated by something deeper, and more sensual, in every sense of the word. We are told that her "skill is men," meaning her flirtations, her provocative sexuality, come in handy for her dissident associates--but the sexuality precedes the dissidence. Her association with the ANC emerges from her relationship with her first husband, Whaila, and not the other way around. Her love for Whaila, and her desire for a family wit him, serve in place of a conscious principle:

Our colour. She cannot see the dolour that relaxes his face, closes his eyes and leaves only his mouth drawn by lines on either side. Our colour. A category that doesn't exist: she would invent it. There are Hotnots and half-castes, two-coffee-one-milk, touch-of-the-tar-brush, pure white, black is beautiful--but a creature made of love, without a label; that's a freak.

Gordimer was a political novelist, but A Sport of Nature may be her most political novel. Those of us who are not South African may forget, or be ignorant of, her long association with Mandela and the African National Congress; famously, she helped write and revise Mandela's fiery speech that dared a judge to put him to death, before his life sentence. A Sport of Nature doubles as a kind of history of the anti-apartheid movement: there's the ANC, the SWAPO, the SACP, the MK, and every other acronym under the sun. Mandela is here, and several other figures whose names are less familiar to foreigners like me, like Oliver Tambo. It's a far cry from the abstract crisis of July's People--this is real history, recorded by a person who lived it. This is true for better and for worse, perhaps mostly worse, as the novel seems at times too granular. But as the novel's only fictional creation, Hillela hovers above it all, a character of power and individuality that, as far as I've read, is unmatched in Gordimer's fiction. Perhaps she was Gordimer's way of imagining a personality that might cut through the various contradictions and tensions of apartheid, a white woman freed from belief, led to the life of liberation by feeling only.

Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer

Then the trial was over and he got six years. He was sent to the Island. We all knew about the Island. Our leaders had been there so long. But I have never seen the sea except to colour it in blue at school, and I couldn't imagine a piece of earth surrounded by it. I could only think of a cake of dung, dropped by the cattle, floating in a pool of rain-water they'd crossed, the water showing the sky like a looking-glass, blue. I was ashamed only to think that. He had told me how the glass walls showed the pavement trees and the other buildings in the street and the colours of the cars and the clouds as the crane lifted him on a platform higher and higher through the sky to work at the top of a building.

In "Safe Houses," one of the better stories in South African writer Nadine Gordimer's collection Jump, the protagonist is a member of a revolutionary cell who has recently returned to his hometown under an alias. He lives a transient life, sleeping on couches and never staying too long in one place, knowing that if he does he'll be discovered. He begins an affair with a woman he's met on a bus, a wealthy woman whose life in a gated suburb is immured from the dangers of revolutionary activity, as well as the very problems that revolution seeks to fix. She's married; she has her secrets, too. These are the protagonists of Gordimer's fiction, those who have chosen lives of secrecy and alienation in the name of justice. Oddly, their actual convictions never seem of great importance; the decision always lies somewhere in the past, so concrete and unchangeable that the beliefs that made it necessary have become almost beside the point. In the title story, a former military parachutist idles in a spare condo he's been placed by the operatives who have needed his services. It actually wasn't clear to me which side he had worked for--the white regime or its revolutionary opponents--but it almost doesn't seem to matter.

These characters have their Black analogs, too: In "Amnesty," a young woman eagerly awaits her husband's return from Robben Island, the famous South African political prison where Mandela and his associates were imprisoned for decades. When he returns, she barely recognizes him; their young son looks at him and says, "That's not him." For Black Africans, there often is no other choice than to enter into these kind of non-lives: in the affecting "The Ultimate Safari," a group of displace Mozambicans make their way to asylum through the dangerous, lion-filled Kruger Park in South Africa. They starve and shiver, just yards away from the lighted camps of white trekkers. One of Gordimer's great gifts is an ability to write with immense empathy, an empathy perhaps counterintuitively drawn from a political cynicism which wards off condescension and sentimentality.

Such cynicism is on full display in "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight," which is one of the bleakest short stories I think I have ever read. It's about a young white servant girl who falls in love with her family's Middle Eastern lodger. She fights passionately for him to be accepted by her family, and the owners of the estate who employ them, with a fair amount of success. She becomes pregnant by him, but--spoiler alert--when he sends her off on an airplane to meet his family for the first time, the bomb he's placed among her luggage explodes: "Vera was chosen. Vera had taken them a, taken the baby inside her; down, along with her happiness." "Some Are Born to Sweet Delight" is a darker version of Gordimer's novel The Pickup, one which suggests that the immense forces of political depredation really can't be dented by the minor things of life, like love and motherhood.

The "shocking twist" of the story really does shock; it's one of those great final moments that makes the whole story look different, in hindsight. Elsewhere, the trick fails to come off, as with "The Moment Before the Gun Went Off," wherein we learn, in the story's final line, that the Black worker the Boer farmer has accidentally shot and killed was in fact his own son. Overall, I don't think short fiction plays to Gordimer's strengths. Her work is rather chilly and aloof; it's only over the course of many pages of a novel, I think, where one begins to see something like human life behind the veil of words. The best stories here, like "Sweet Delight" and "Safe Houses," share the best qualities of her fiction, but others are uncharacteristically slight, too attached to the idea of a single effect, and lack the knotty richness of her novels.

The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer

If we don't get out of here soon she won't stand it much longer, this dusty hell of my place. She'll go back there. The big trees round her cottage. The grass a black man came to cut. Her kind; that Cafe. The beautiful terrace for lunch on Sunday. Permanent Residence: so many applications, so many ways, any kind of way, tried, for that status anywhere. Anywhere but here. If she had been one of the ways snatched at when he gave his smile in response to her attraction to him that day in the garage (or was it only on the street), if she had failed him, failed the influence he had counted on through her secure status of birth, whiteness, family position, money, if it didn't achieve any right for his Permanent Residence in her country--she had come (didn't she say it) all the way with him; the way of refusal, failure, buried back here in the cursed village in the sand, his home, that claimed him. Love. He had to believe in it, existing in her.

Julie Summers is a white South African, the daughter of a rich businessman who rejects her parentage, at least symbolically, by hanging out in a cafe with a group of mixed-race bohemians. One day, when her car breaks down in the middle of the street, she takes it to a garage, where an Arab man going by Abdu fixes it for her. Julie, intrigued by the handsome mechanic, finds ways to keep Abdu in her company, and eventually this relationship becomes physical, romantic. Her friends are tolerant of her "pickup," if distantly amused by it. It's less funny to her father, though his circle, too, is tolerant of Abdu in their way: they don't need to be dismissive or defensive when it's clear to everyone that Julie and Abdu do not belong together, their worlds do not overlap, and eventually their relationship will founder against this fact and disintegrate. When Abdu--real name Ibrahim--is tracked down at last by the immigration authorities and expelled, Julie insists on traveling with him to his unnamed home country.

Before leaving, Julie and Abdu-Ibrahim visit with Hamilton Motsamai, the brilliant black lawyer from Gordimer's novel The House Gun, and it seems as if The Pickup will be, like that other novel, a book about the ways South Africa's racial fault lines are exposed by the political process, only with immigrant experiences added to the familiar black-white divide. But The Pickup actually reminded me most of July's People, another Gordimer novel about upper-class whites cast into an unfamiliar and disorienting cultural universe. Most of the book takes place not in South Africa but the unnamed Arab country of Ibrahim's birth, as Julie struggles to fit into his wary family, teaching English to members of the small desert village Ibrahim has struggled all his life to escape.

Honestly, I find this ability of Gordimer's incredible. What other white writer can write so empathetically and imaginatively about what it would be like for white people to live under the kind of circumstances that people of color--black Africans in July's People and Arab immigrants in The Pickup--have endured so long? There's no hedging, no tone-deafness, no heavy-handed clash of cultures. July's People ends with an image of tremendous ambiguity, as the white housewife who has been hiding in her former servant's traditional village heads to the sound of an incoming helicopter, not knowing if it holds her salvation or certain death. But The Pickup--spoiler alert--ends with Julie refusing to emigrate with Ibrahim to the USA, choosing to stay with his family. Who else could imagine the circumstances in which a white woman chooses to stay with a traditional Muslim family, rather than, as Ibrahim constantly expects, returning to the life of racial privilege available to her? Or who else could imagine it so convincingly? It's hard for me to describe it without making it seem congratulatory--great job, white lady!--but to make such a choice really seem true, both character and author really do have to reject everything that is familiar and safe.

Among other things, The Pickup reveals the difficult and complex demands the world places on "third world" emigrants. What Julie experiences as a kind of personal reformation, Ibrahim experiences as a familiar but tedious period of waiting, of suspension: the endless paperwork, the fruitless interviews at consulate after consulate, the greasing of palms, not even being able to choose which country one would wish to emigrate to, even before the dreary work of finding work and housing begins. What Ibrahim learns is that "the world," whatever that might be, belongs to others. Julie is "not for him," in the sense that she is made for someone else, belonging to somewhere else, but when the two make love, they conceive of it as a different kind of country, one to which they both belong. Amazingly, The Pickup was published in September of 2001, which means that things have only gotten worse since then. There are more refugees, more emigrants, and fewer places for them. But unlike Gordimer's apartheid-era novels, which express a kind of knowledgeable pessimism about race relations in South Africa, Julie's final choice in The Pickup seems, to me, to hold a grain of optimism.

The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

It is not only the man on the sofa who is the victim. Harald and Claudia have, each, within them, now, a malignant resentment against their son that would seem as impossible to exist in them as an ability to kill could exist in hm. The resentment is shameful. What is shameful cannot be shared. What is shameful, separates. But the way to deal with the resentment will come, must come, individually to both. The resentment is shameful: because what is it that they did to him? Is that were the answer--Why? Why?--is to be found?

"Something terrible happened," begins Nadine Gordimer's novel The House Gun. That something, as Harald and Claudia Lindgard are about to learn, is an act of terrible violence: their son Duncan has shot his roommate to death using the gun kept in the house to ward off intruders. The facts, such as they are, will follow: Duncan walked in on Carl, with whom he had a brief sexual relationship, in the middle of having sex with his current girlfriend, Natalie. The shooting took place the following day; the gardener found the gun tossed into the garden. There's never any real doubt that Duncan has committed the act, but whether he is guilty--what even it means to be guilty; whether the impulse to kill comes from the parents, or without, from social contagion; whether Natalie's cruelty and Carl's thoughtlessness are part of that guilt--is a question that must be worked out over months at trial. The only sure thing is that Duncan's life, and the life of Harald and Claudia, has been forever transformed: "The old Gregorian," Gordimer writes, "cannot register this day."

Duncan's lawyer is Hamilton Motsamai, a proud, talented lawyer--a black lawyer. The House Gun was, as far as I know, Gordimer's first novel after the end of apartheid in South Africa, and one of the many questions that hang over the novel is whether the nation is capable of change, capable of reconciliation. Motsamai's position as Duncan's lawyer represents a great reversal; had the shooting taken place only a few years earlier, it would have been unthinkable. Harald and Claudia's mild liberalism is tested: Motsamai seems capable, sure, but will a black man be as persuasive to a judge? Their awareness of this reversal is so shameful that only such a crisis can really bring it to the surface; the conviction, deep down, that it ought to be one of them in the seat of the accused and one of us in the position of the defense attorney.

The gun itself is in image of a great rot at the heart of South African society. Novels like July's People show that Gordimer was, I think, a pessimist about apartheid; they suggest that racial liberation will only be bought at the price of enormous violence. The race war imagined in July's People never came to pass, but The House Gun refutes the idea that the country's transformation was a non-violent one. The "house gun" is the logical endpoint of a society in which violence is endemic. That violence, fostered by racial inequity, manifests in the form of the gun, and though it was purchased for self-defense, such violence cannot be contained; it ends with whites shooting whites. This possibility is a theme teased by Motsamai in his defense, and developed by the judge, though whether it helps us understand what Duncan has done is never totally clear. When violence is everywhere, who can say where any particular act began?

The mystery at the heart of the act is also at the heart of The House Gun. Duncan, Harald, and Claudia, all watch as Motsamai puts forth a theory of Duncan's mental state that will exonerate him. Harald sees that what Motsamai does is a performance, really, a narrative whose artificiality is substituted for that which is unexplainable. Gordimer shows how deep our motivations are, how primal, how little we understand them, and how they intersect with the dangerous forces that lie outside of us. The long climax, in which the judge patiently elaborates on the evidence in preparation for the ruling he is about to give, kept me enthralled as much as it does the people in the courtroom--a kind of heightened attention that Gordimer tells us resembles Simone Weil's definition of prayer--but while we crave for the judge's sentence to make human behavior explainable, we remain suspicious that it is really beyond our understanding and our judgment.

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself--who wouldn't make the world over if it were to be as easy as that. To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomach to ignore--dead and hidden--whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognize that. Up at the compound, Jacobus and his crowd. The thousands in that location. Face down under the mud somewhere, and cows trample and drop their pats overhead, the dry reeds have fallen like rushes strewn to cover, it's all as you said when you suggested: Why not just leave it as it is?

The Conservationist begins with a body. An unknown black man is found in one of the pastures of the farm belonging to Mehring, a wealthy businessman in the metal industry. Mehring's hard-working foreman Jacobus discovers the body, but it's the Boer police who respond by burying the man in Mehring's pasture, supposedly until they can come get it later, but they never do.

Mehring is a "master of the universe" type--a man whose wealth is so large he can do basically whatever he wants. He has bought the farm principally as a love nest, but also to scratch a kind of itch that only the rich who live lightly on the land can have. His wife has left him and moved to America, his son doesn't want to come home, and his mistress, a leftist radical, has fled to Namibia. Mehring can fly to Japan at a moment's notice on the flimsiest of pretexts, but he has no home in South Africa the way that Jacobus and the rest of his crew do.

Even as he buys it, he knows the farm will fail to grant him any kind of meaningful tenure on the land--like the protagonists of July's People and Burger's Daughter, Mehring has an instinctive sense that the time of white supremacy in South Africa is close to an end, and he will soon be dispossessed. So it's no surprise that the farm seems to refuse his attempts to cultivate it. Fire breaks out, then a flood, and at the end of the book the body of the dead man, the symbol of the trauma that will not remain hidden forever, floats up through the mud to the surface. At the end, while Mehring imagines his own death, unloved and unremembered, Jacobus and the others rebury the murdered man--a stranger, but a black stranger--in a ceremony of remembrance and love. In doing so they make it clear that no matter whose name is on the deed, the farm belongs truly to them.

The Conservationist is a bit more experimental than the other novel's I've read of Gordimer's. Mehring's sections are mostly stream-of-consciousness, hopping from one thought to another and dismissive of chronological time (when does the mistress flee back to Namibia, exactly?). It works, especially as an image of a man who has everything but cannot escape the insecurity of his own inner world. But I much preferred the straightforward sections among Jacobus and the other workers on the farm, or the Indian shopowners along the country street, whose stories are told with a working-class realism that contrasts the rootlessness and aimlessness of Mehring's narrative.

Like July's People and Burger's Daughter, The Conservationist is deeply skeptical about any kind of racial reconciliation in South Africa. None of these books present an image of white, colored, and black South Africans being able to communicate with each other in a meaningful way, and each has a kind of apocalyptic vision of a South Africa that is reclaimed by indigenous people, probably violently. Of course, Gordimer lived well into the 21st century and wrote several books after the end of apartheid. I'm very curious to read one of those books--did Gordimer still believe in the revolution to come? Who's in the helicopter at the end of July's People--and does Mehring ever get chased off "his" farm?

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.

July's People by Nadine Gordimer

When it all happened, there were transformations of myth or religious parable.  The bank accountant had been the legendary warning hornbill of African folk-tales, its flitting cries ignored at peril.  The yellow bakkie that was bought for fun turned out to be the vehicle: that which bore them away from the gunned shopping malls and the blazing, unsold houses of a depressed market, from the burst mains washing round bodies in their Saturday-morning garb of safari suits, and the heat-guided missiles that struck Boeings carrying those trying to take off from Jan Smuts Airport.  The cook-nanny, Nora, ran away.  The decently-paid and contented male servant, living in their yard since they had married, clothed by them in two sets of uniforms, khaki pants for rough housework, white drill for waiting at table, given Wednesdays and alternate Sundays free, allowed to have his friends visit him and his town woman sleep with him in his room--he turned out to be the chosen one in whose hands their lives were to be held; frog prince, saviour, July.

How would apartheid end?  It must have seemed both impossible and inevitable, until it did.  And when it did end it came in political shape, in the form of legislative repeal, bilateral conferences, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Successes like that one led to the (pretty misbegotten) conception of the 90's as the "End of History," a terminus achieved by liberal democracy.  But it might have been otherwise, and Nadine Gordimer's July's People offers a vision for one such end: a violent overthrow of white society by native South Africans.  They storm banks; they kill white Afrikaners; they shoot down planes to prevent escape.  In this scenario Maureen and Bam Smales escape, along with their three children, into the bush, under the protection of their longtime servant July, who takes them to his native village.

In the village, everything is turned upside down for the Smales.  Once they lived in a posh Johannesburg house; now they sleep in a hut on the seats removed from their Jeep-like Bakkie.  Their youngest child begs to be taken to a movie--how to explain to him what has happened to the world?--and their oldest absconds from them, drifting so far into the world of her new friends that Bam and Maureen cannot follow her.  But the most difficult change is the reversal of roles between the Smales, especially Maureen, and July.  July has been well-treated, well-paid, cannot complain, and his protection of the Smales is in recognition of it.  But he is in charge here, and both he and his (former?) employers struggle to understand the new nature of their relationship.  Is it right for Bam to be angry, when July takes the bakkie without asking?  Does it even belong to Bam anymore?  Is it July's?  The car itself is not so important, but it is the center of the new ambiguity, which is deeper and stranger than any party has expected.  The questions run deeper than, who is in charge: Who is July when he is in charge?  And who is Maureen when she is not the master?

It is July, not Maureen, who insists past the point of reasonableness that their relationship remains unchanged.  There is a fear in him: by accepting the change in South Africa, will he ally himself with the people who would turn the Smales in, or murder them?  To whom is July now responsible?

But as magnetic and mysterious as July is, July's People is about whites.  It is about white liberal South Africans, like the Smales, who have always been in favor of political equality for black South Africans.  Yes, there's a measure of old-fashioned liberal pigheadedness that the turmoil cures them of, but for the most part, both Bam and Maureen see the inequity of South African society clearly.  In fact, that's the root of their sympathy and kindness toward their servant.  But seeing clearly does not extricate them from the system itself.  They don't question the reasonableness, or the moral rectitude, of the revolution, but they don't know what to do when it puts them in the crosshairs.  How can a white person be, Gordimer asks, when the roots of inequity are so deep that their very existence perpetuates it?  Gordimer strips the novel of the kind of hopey-changey centrist pap that dominates our own discourse about political equality, and replaces it with lucid fear, even despair:

The humane creed (Maureen, like anyone else, regarded her own as definitive) depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human beings.  If people don't all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation the same way, what claim can there be for equality of need?  There was fear and danger in considering this emotional absolute as open in any way; the brain-weighers, the claimants of divine authority to distinguish powers of moral discernment from the degree of frizz in hair and conceptual ability from the relative thickness of lips--they were vigilant to pounce upon anything that could be twisted to give them credence.  Yet how was that absolute nature of intimate relationships arrived at?  Who decided?  'We' (Maureen sometimes harked back) understand the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in master bedrooms, and motels with false names in the register.  Here, the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in a wife's hut, and a backyard room in a city.  The balance between desire and duty is--has to be--maintained quite differently in accordance with the differences in the lovers' place in the economy.  These alter the way of dealing with the experience; and so the experience itself.  The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff.

July's People is about a race war, a phrase you see these days only on the scummiest parts of 4chan.  And it's easy to see how a right-winger might respond to a book like this: Even a liberal thinks that race war is inevitable, and their ready to betray their own, even give up their own lives.  But Gordimer rejects the easy partisanship of racist "brain-weighers" in favor of a more honest, and complicated perspective.  How can we achieve political equality when our understandings of the world are so different?  She's speaking about the great divide in the way she and July think about love and marriage, but she might as well be speaking about other kinds of desire and other kinds of duty.  How can the Smales accommodate July's desires, July's duties, when they can't conceive of them, and ow can July, when power is thrust upon him, accommodate theirs?

July's People is a big old shrug of a novel, as certain that South Africa's problems are intractable as it is that Maureen, at the novel's end, will rush toward the coming helicopter not knowing if she's headed toward rescue or death, just because the state of uncertainty is untenable.  It's easy to be shaken by it, especially in these times of ethnonationalist revanchism.  But it's worth remembering that, as far as we have yet to go, apartheid ended not with the bang of a plane being shot down, but with a whimper.