MUDASIR AHMAD BHAT (Enrolment No

CRITIQUE OF APARTHEID: A STUDY OF

THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF Doctor of Philosophy IN ENGLISH

BY MUDASIR AHMAD BHAT (Enrolment No. GH-9660)

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROF. MUNIRA T.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH (U.P.) INDIA 2019 Dr. Munira T WOMEN’S COLLEGE Women ’s College ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY Mobile: +91 9897502975 ALIGARH- 202002 Phone Off. : 0571- 2403541 E-mail ID : [email protected]

Certificate

Certified that Mr. Mudasir Ahmad Bhat has completed his Ph.D. thesis entitled, “Critique of Apartheid: A Study of Select Novels of Nadine Gordimer” under my supervision. He has completed his thesis according to ‘2009 UGC Regulations’. To the best of my knowledge, his work is original and worthy for submission for the award of Ph.D. degree.

Dr. Munira. T

Professor of English, Women’s College, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

ANNEXURE-I CANDIDATES’S DECLARATION

I, Mudasir Ahmad Bhat, Department of English, certify that the work embodied in this Ph.D. thesis is my original work carried out by me under the supervision of Prof. Munira T., Women’s College, Aligarh Muslim University. The matter embodied in this Ph.D. thesis has not been submitted for the award of any other degree.

I declare that I have faithfully acknowledged, given credit to and referred to the researchers wherever their works have been cited in the text and the body of the thesis. I further certify that I have not wilfully copied paragraphs, text, data, result, etc., reported in the journals, books, magazines, reports, dissertations, thesis, etc., or available at web-sites and included them in this Ph.D. thesis and cited as my own work.

Date: ……………….. Mudasir Ahmad Bhat ......

MaulanaCERTIFICATE Azad Library, FROM Aligarh THE Muslim SUPERVISOR University

This is to certify that the above statement made by the candidate is correct to the best of my knowledge.

Prof. Munira T. Women’s College A.M.U, Aligarh-India

(Chairman)

ANNEXURE-II

COURSE/ COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION/ PRE-SUBMISSION

SEMINAR COMPLETION CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that Mr. Mudasir Ahmad Bhat (GH-9660), Department of English, has satisfactorily completed the course work/comprehensive examination and pre-submission seminar requirement which are part of his Ph.D. programme.

Date: ……………… (Chairman)

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

ANNEXURE-III

Title of the Thesis: Critique of Apartheid: A Study of Select Novels of Nadine Gordimer Candidate’s Name: Mudasir Ahmad Bhat

The undersigned hereby assigns to the Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh copyright that may exist in and for the above thesis submitted for the award of the Ph.D. degree.

Signature of the Candidate Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University ......

Note: However, the author may reproduce or authorize others to reproduce material extracted verbatim from the thesis or derivative of the thesis for author’s personal use provided that the source and the University’s copyright notice are indicated.

U R K U N D

Urkund Analysis Result

Analysed Document: 4094 THesis Mudasir Ahmad Bhat GH9660 English AMU.docx (D60313365) Submitted: 12/5/2019 7:19:00 AM Submitted By: [email protected] Significance: 4 %

Sources included in the report:

My Thesis Ultimate.docx (D49323946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid https://www.jyu.fi/viesti/verkkotuotanto/kp/sa/soc_racism.shtml https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/english-assets/migrated/honors_files/N%20MARCOUX.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Africa 22420e86-2c13-4ae8-aab1-be2f7c3987ab https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/73484/12/12_chapter%20-%20v.pdf https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/download/31423/25503 https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/31423/25503 https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/ newlits/37.4erritouni.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/269753352_Dialogue_with_the_Future_and_the_Political_Prophesy_in_Nadine_Gardi ner%27s_Novels https://www.ajol.info/index.php/jh/article/download/153031/142623 https://journals.openedition.org/ces/pdf/439 https://journals.openedition.org/ces/439 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/145055425.pdf Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Instances where selected sources appear:

Dedicated

To my Brother

Abdul Hamid Bhat

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Who always stood alongside me through thick and thin

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious and the Most Merciful. All praise and thanks to almighty Allah Who enabled me to put in my best efforts to complete this work.

I owe my sincere thanks to my supervisor Prof. Munira T. for her proficient supervision, patient reading, meticulous checking, suggestions and corrections during the course of my research. Her motherly affection, endless help and encouragement for the successful completion of this thesis is unique and will always be remembered. She has guided me with her scholarly observation and I could not have wished for a better mentor.

I owe all my success to my dearest parents Gulam Nabi Bhat and Khurshee Begum, who always wished to see me touching great heights. Their unconditional love and morale-boosting always pulled me up whenever I felt dejected and despondent during my tenure at Aligarh Muslim University. My sincere thanks to my family members, whose special prayers were with me all the time and who always pushed me forward whenever I tried to step back. Without them this thesis would have been incomplete.

I wish to acknowledge Prof Mohammad Rizwan Khan, Chairman, Department of English for his constant support and guidance. I am highly obliged to my teachers Prof Iffat Ara, Department of English, AMU, Mr. Fayaz Sultan, Assistant Professor Department of English, Islamic University of Science and Technology, Pulwama Kashmir, Mr. Jan Mohd Bhat, Assistant Professor Department of English, Govt. Degree College Pulwama, Prof Mohd Asim Siddique, Department of English, AMU and Prof Seemin Hassan, Department of English, AMU who have always been a source of inspiration for me.

During the tenure of my PhD, I visited many libraries and received generous support everywhere. My special thanks to the staff of Maulana Azad Library,Maulana AMU, Aligarh Azad forLibrary, procurin Aligarhg some Muslimimportant University books related to my thesis.

There is a long list of friends who were always associated with this thesis either with their intellectual thoughts or their wonderful companionship. Some of them deserve a special mention, Dr Imtiyaz Dar, Mr. Nisar Falahi, Mr. Zaheer Bhat, Dr Riyaz Wani, Mr. Irshad Parray, Maulana Ahmad Raza, Mr. Bilal Ahmad Dar, Dr Javid Bhat, Mr. Peer Mohd Ashraf, Dr Tufail Habib and Mr. Faizan Ahmad.

I owe my sincere gratitude to my friends Mr. Mohd Rafiq Wani, Mr. Aijaz Ahmad Sheikh, Mr. Gowhar Dar, Mr. Bhagirath Khuman, Mr. Aadil

Zaffar and Dr Irfan Dar who have been generous enough in encouraging me and helping me to finish my thesis with their timely help. I have also been lucky enough to be in their company.

My special thanks to my childhood friends and well-wishers Mr. Riyaz Bhat and Mr. Feroz Dar. Sincere thanks also to Rabiya Ahmad, research scholar from University of Kashmir for her companionship when I needed it the most.

Last but not the least, I would like to express gratitude to my fellow Research Scholars Mr. Firoj Ahmad, Mr. Ahmad Abdullah, Mr. Sajad Rasheed, Mr. Ummer Bashir and Mr. Nadeem Khurshid.

Mudasir Ahmad Bhat

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This study is an attempt to study Nadine Gordimer's select novels and understand her abhorrence towards apartheid and the role played by her in taking South Africa out of the racial quagmire. The following novels have been included in the study: The Lying Days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958), Burger’s Daughter (1979), July’s People (1981) and My Son’s Story (1990). The introduction of this thesis attempts to describe the historical background of the study. An idea of South African history is essential because Gordimer’s literary corpus is entwined with the history of South Africa and she has been called as the ‘apartheid historian’. Initially a detailed description is given about the ideology of Apartheid and the way it started spreading its roots in South Africa. Some of the important laws passed during the period of apartheid which curtailed the rights of blacks also find depiction in the introduction of the thesis. Resistance on the part of black South Africans and various organisations is also dealt with in the introduction. It also talks about Indian stand against racism and the role played by India to get apartheid dismantled in South Africa. Besides this, it provides a brief description about South African literature and the various writers who were eye witness to apartheid and made it as the central theme of their writing.

Gordimer has won world wide attention as a critique of apartheid. Several books as well as a number of essays and articles have been written on her. In the “Review of Literature” section, major critical works on Nadine Gordimer have been reviewed with the aim to show that the present study is significant in its own way as Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University each text-based chapter meticulously and minutely explores Gordimer’s stance on apartheid. Articles by various writers are analyzed to bring out the true personality of Nadine Gordimer. Review of literature makes it clear that critics have thoroughly studied Nadine Gordimer. Yet, no in-depth and exclusive study of Gordimer’s novels has been attempted so far. This research aims to study not only the way Nadine Gordimer portrays apartheid as a coercion happening in her country under the government-mandated system of apartheid but also the amount of allegiance and appreciation she had for her own native land, its culture and people and its struggle to realize its new democracy despite being aware of the position she occupies as a

Abstract privileged white. Postcolonial concepts have been applied to her works to prove that apartheid is a kind of ‘internal’ colonisation where white coloniser subjugates the black colonised. The documentation of the study is done in accordance with the MLA Eighth Edition.

The first chapter “Dismantling Apartheid: The Vision of ‘a natural writer”” studies Gordimer and the era she lived in. The chapter begins with the contribution made by her to South African literary corpus and the way African literature is used as a weapon for social awareness. Gordimer regarded protest literature as the best way to give voice to the voiceless and believed that when everything is gagged, literature works. The chapter also endeavours to answer the questions about why Protest literature became a main tool for anti-apartheid resistance efforts? And why Gordimer decided to stay in South Africa instead of going on exile like many South African writers of her age? The chapter also shows racism as the ugly face of colonialism as advocated by Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized. Apartheid is a kind of ‘internal’ colonization which segregates the society and partitions it on the basis of binaries like superiority- inferiority, civilized-uncivilized, powerful-powerless, black- white etc. Through Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks, it is shown how the world differentiates people on the basis of colour and due to colour of one’s skin, he or she is rendered strange, an object of derision, and an aberration. This chapter also highlights Gordimer’s stance on feminism. Though some critics put her into the spectrum of feminist writers and believed that if Gordimer had not been a writer of South Africa living under such a political turmoil, she would have been definitely a feminist writer for most of her works contain female protagonists but she refused to be called a feminist and emphasised that feminism has no role to play in South African politics.Maulana Another Azad important Library, aspect which Aligarh the chapter Muslim studies University, is the current status of racism in the world. Is this game of power still prevalent in the world or has it diminished or vanished altogether? The study answers such questions as well.

In the second chapter entitled “Consciousness of History and Political Activism: The Lying Days”, Gordimer’s first novel The Lying Days is analysed. The study concentrates on the various issues that were prevalent at that time. It shows the preconceived notion of whites that they are unsafe among blacks and the way the white children are nurtured at a very little age to keep blacks at arms length. The chapter also studies the different kinds of injustices done towards Jews despite their

Abstract neutral role during the period of apartheid. In this chapter, Gordimer’s realistic depiction of history is also seen. She gives a detailed description about the ways in which apartheid started and the ill intentions of Daniel Francois Malan through which he came to power. Therefore it also shares insight into some of her personal accounts and discusses the novel from the autobiographical point of view. The focus of the study in this chapter is on looking at the response and resistance to apartheid as advocated by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality. Nadine Gordimer presents her main characters as rebellions who try to defy apartheid with utmost audacity to eliminate this menace from South Africa. That is why Helen Shaw, the central character of the novel transgresses racial, sexual and familial boundaries to work for the equal rights of people irrespective of race. She wants to break all the laws which are hindrance in her relationship with the native people.

In the third chapter entitled “Collective Attempt at Liberty from Discrimination and Violence: A World of Strangers” there is a discussion on how being liberal was not encouraged during apartheid in South Africa. The study deals with one of Gordimer’s famous novels A World of Strangers. The study examines multi-racialism, liberalism and radicalism as a valid political stand to combat the political programme of the apartheid-torn state. The novel was written at a time when South Africa had not seen the barbaric and shocking phases of the Soweto revolts and liberal ideology and multi racialism was seen as an important way to counter apartheid. Various organisations who had taken a firm stand against apartheid also believed that apartheid could be countered most effectively by cross-racial or multi- racial fronts. Gordimer too believed that to get rid of the pain of apartheid both blacks and whites need to be interdependent for their calm and comfortable survival. The chapterMaulana thus highlights Azad Multiracialism Library, Aligarh and liberalism Muslim as aUniversity peaceful way of protest against apartheid and deals with the troubles of the liberal community who worked for the elimination of racial discrimination in South Africa. The novel was banned by the South African government for exposing the violence and hostility of apartheid and accurately portraying the reality of South African society. This chapter gives a realistic depiction of the society and politics of the time through the analysis of the novel.

In the fourth chapter titled “Black Consciousness and Political Commitment: Burger’s Daughter” Gordimer’s perception about Black Consciousness Movement

Abstract and the way it restored in blacks a sense of pride in being Black is highlighted. Through the character of Baasie who acts as a mouth piece of Gordimer, she reminds whites of their whiteness and the ways in which they are privileged. She maintains that the mindset of the blacks has to change and they need to shed their slave mentality. Till such time, political change will remain just a myth. The thrust of this chapter is to highlight how her characters struggle to maintain their self-identity in the wake of tyranny and suppression. Another important aspect that the chapter highlights is the differentiation between South Africa and other countries like France. Rosa Burger who is the central character of the novel moves to France and finds it free from the mundane conflicts of South Africa. The life she lives there is free from suffering which apartheid had showered upon black South Africans. Gordimer here contrasts the disturbing and stressful life of South Africa with calm and composed life of France. The chapter also examines how communists audaciously fought against the apartheid policy and faced brutal consequences. It shows how they had no selfish interests in their struggle. Lionel Burger, who is the father of Rosa Burger is a communist who is based on Bram Fischer. Fischer, was an anti-apartheid activist, advocate, and leader of the South African Communist Party. He led the resistance for Mandela and the other accused during the Rivonia Trials. At a very young age he was brutally affected by the apartheid laws which made him fight hard to become powerful in South Africa.

The title of the fifth chapter is “Racial Tensions and Interdependencies: July’s People”. It presents Gordimer as a prophet through a futuristic novel July’s People. Prophetic vision is a part of Gordimer’s literary corpus. She had a gifted creativity and foresight. The chapter highlights Gordimer’s belief that apartheid will soon crumble in SouthMaulana Africa andAzad there Library, will be reversal Aligarh of power. Muslim As a University seer, she predicts the ill consequences of apartheid if not removed on time and portrays an imaginary situation which can result in the case of civil war in South Africa. The study therefore is about the changing power relationship between whites and blacks and Gordimer’s vision in a pre-apartheid era, about post-apartheid era. The chapter also deals with unjust living standards as advocated by Frantz Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon differentiates between the places where whites and blacks live and Gordimer does the same in the novel in July’s People. The chapter also studies how through linguistic imperialism, the central character of the novel July is forced to

Abstract learn the language of his masters. This develops a sense of inferiority complex thereby causing ‘cultural cringe’ within him and Maureen Smales as a colonizer justifies the stance of a typical imperialist.

In the last chapter “Politics of Race and Gender: My Son’s Story”, Gordimer campaigns against the human rights violations and racial discrimination which she believed could be countered through revolutionary means. The chapter analyzes the novel My Son’s Story in detail. The primary focus of the chapter is to show how coloureds were equally discriminated as blacks during the apartheid period. My Son’s Story is about coloured identity of an apartheid-torn coloured family and their active involvement in the freedom movement. It traces the lives of activists like Sonny who is the central character of the novel and his family and shows how apartheid forces such people to act differently in society. The chapter thus portrays how political commitment affects and transforms the lives of colored South African people. Sonny, is the victim of what post colonial writers call “Double consciousness” where the colonized wants to adopt the colonizer’s life style and his culture. He desires to imitate the white cultural norms, that is why he shifts to a place where only whites live and adopts their cultural instincts. Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘Mimicry’ and ‘Hybridity’ is applied to show how as an inferior colonized he simply mimics or imitates the superior colonizer and immerses himself in the white man’s culture. The chapter also attempts to highlight how there is a reversal of roles based on gender. Sonny’s role in the novel is overtaken by his wife Aila. Therefore Gordimer transforms the male centred text into a ‘womanly’ space.

Finally, the conclusion sums up the findings of the thesis and indicates the scope for further research on Nadine Gordimer’s and her writings. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Abstract

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Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

CONTENTS

Introduction 1-19

Review of Literature 20-32

Chapter 1: Dismantling Apartheid: The Vision of ‘a

natural writer’ 33-57

Chapter 2: Consciousness of History and Political Activism:

The Lying Days 58-75

Chapter 3: Collective Attempt at Liberty from Discrimination

and Violence: A World of Strangers 76-91

Chapter 4: Black Consciousness and Political Commitment:

Burger’s Daughter 92-109

Chapter 5: Racial Tensions and Interdependencies: July’s People 110-126

Chapter 6: Politics of Race and Gender: My Son’s Story 127-144

Conclusion 145-153

Bibliography 154-168 Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Since 1948 South Africa had achieved notoriety for its policy of apartheid or racial segregation. Freedom of movement, freedom of speech and Personal freedom were drastically curtailed during that period. South Africa and apartheid are seen as synonymous. In fact “apartheid had made it impossible to even speak of a South African culture or society without defining it in terms of racial discrimination” (Padhi and Dash 6). Before 1946, the term ‘apartheid’ was an unknown term. There were elections to be held in the year 1948 where General Jan Christian was expected to be re-elected. On March 29, Dr. Daniel Francois Malan made a campaign speech in which, for the first time, the word ‘apartheid’ was proposed as a policy of race relations. A part of his speech was:

The [Nationalist] party, therefore, undertakes to protect the white race against any policy, doctrine or attack which might undermine or threaten its continued existence. At the same time the party rejects any policy of oppression and exploitation of the non-Europeans by the Europeans, as being in conflict with the Christian basis of our national life and irreconcilable with our policy. The party believes that a definite policy of separation (apartheid) between the White races and the non-White racial groups, and the application of the policy of separation also in the case of the non-White racial groups, is the only basis on which the character and the future of each race can be protected and safeguarded and in which each race can be guided so as Maulanato developAzad Library, its own national Aligarh character, Muslim aptitude University and calling. (qtd. in Tiryakian 685-686)

Thus the word ‘apartheid’ was used by Prime Minister Malan, “as the policy to ensure the safety of the white race and of Christian civilization” (Padhi and Dash 216). Dr. Malan was hostile to black Africans and he devised the word ‘apartheid’ to get support of white voters. He instilled in the white voters a fear of the Africans. As a result, the Nationalist Party adopted a tough attitude towards non-whites in order to get the majority of votes and thus come out triumphant. Therefore it was apartheid

Introduction which won the election of 1948 for the Nationalist Party, which according to Edward A. Tiryakian was “fought over the Native question, and apartheid as a political slogan” (691). Gwendolen M. Carter also believes that, “the unexpected political success which first brought the present Nationalists into office in 1948 resulted from the appeal of their slogan, ‘apartheid’” (301). The word ‘apartheid’ “has been attached to Nationalist ideology and theories ever since” (Roberts 54). In this way the majority blacks comprising nearly eighty five percent of the total population were subjugated by the minority whites through most reprehensible tactics.

Apartheid was not actually a new policy. It dates back to the days of colonial rule when the Dutch first settled at the Cape in the year 1652 and their establishment of a fort at Table Bay which was the beginning of the miseries for the local inhabitants as they were denied access to grazing pastures and water resources. Nelson Mandela says in his autobiography that “apartheid was a new term but an old idea” (104). Therefore the word ‘apartheid’ was just a modification of a policy as old as the Dutch settlement in South Africa. The modification widened the gap between the blacks and whites, the black men would not vote on the same roll as whites. They would not do the same jobs. They would live in different areas from the whites and every law that could be devised to keep the races totally apart would be enacted and enforced. They attended different schools, churches, cinemas, beaches, clubs etc. They walked through separate doorways and used separate telephone booths and taxi stands. They went to separate hospitals and were buried in separate grave yards. There were even different hours for blacks and whites at libraries, zoos, art galleries, museum and the public gardens. They were barred from their usual activities like jogging, playing etc as Patrick Duncan says “if you are black, in South Africa, and are a cyclist, youMaulana can be assaulted Azad just Library, because Aligarh you are black Muslim and a University cyclist” (74). All facilities for whites were vastly superior to those of blacks. There was separate provision for different groups on trains. Whites travelled first class and blacks travelled third class, “not only were the trains segregated, but the ticket offices and the bridges leading to the appropriate sections of the platform were also segregated” (Roberts 62). Nelson Mandela says:

It was a crime to walk through a Whites Only door, a crime to ride a Whites Only bus, a crime to use a Whites Only drinking fountain, a crime to walk on a Whites Only beach, a crime to be on the streets

Introduction

after 11 p.m., a crime not to have a pass book and a crime to have a wrong signature in that book, a crime to be unemployed and a crime to be employed in the wrong place, a crime to live in certain places and crime to have no place to live. (139)

The main features of the apartheid policy were not just to deprive black South Africans of all their rights but also to maintain economic privilege at the expense of discrimination on the basis of race and color. Central features of the apartheid ideology according to Margaret Roberts were “separate development of the different groups; preservation of white Afrikaner identity; white political domination; exploitation of cheap black labour; or the maintenance of the capitalist system” (54). Apartheid denied the aspirations of the African people to single nationhood and liberation and created a situation which endangered the good relation between whites and non-whites around the globe and the greatest danger created by it was an irreconcilable division which split the human races into two camps– the paler haves and the darker have-nots. Apartheid deprived blacks from receiving anything better than what was received by whites. Proponents of apartheid tried to eradicate the ‘black spots’ that is groups of non whites living on land of their own which was surrounded by white-owned land. This directly meant the removal of black freedom. Apartheid influenced religious matters as well. Although under Islamic law a mosque may neither be sold nor be abandoned, the South African government took over the mosques at various places of South Africa like Piet Retief, Porter Elizabeth etc. The sole purpose was to separate the races. There was the Church Clause law which gave government the power to prevent Africans from attending the church of their choice. Thus authorities did not hesitate to interfere with religion in the most high-handed manner.Maulana There was Azad a lack Library,of personal Aligarh freedom of Muslim movement. University Poverty and ignorance prevailed on a large scale. Black South Africans faced cruelty from all quarters even in the field of employment. There was a system of Wage-Laborers, under which the laborers were either born on the farm, or moved to it from elsewhere, or were contracted by recruiting agents and were brought to the farm. Besides the system of Wage-Laborers, there were many other systems like Unpaid Labor system and The Squatting system, which further reinforced the agony and sufferings of these destitute laborers. Under these systems, the laborers and their children were compelled to labor for up to six months for no reward except the right to stay in the farm. Most of these

Introduction laborers were born on their farms and many of these families had been on that land for generations longer than the white owners. The farms were as brutal as African prisons. Farmers recruited convicts in jail to be their laborers. For example, if a person was facing an imprisonment of three months or less, he was asked that he would be released on probation and enter into an approved contract to work for a farmer for the unexpired portion of his or her sentence and the one who was serving a sentence of one or two years may be invited after completion of half of his sentence to work for a farmer. Millions of black Africans who included thousands of boys and girls below the age of ten were picked up from their homelands and made to work on less than even starvation wages as “the average wage of a white worker was more than 5 times that of the African in manufacturing industries” (Padhi and Dash 49). Thus due to apartheid the whites “earned large profits from the exploitation of African’s [Black Africans] whose land and natural resources were taken from them and who toiled at poverty level wages, providing the cheap labour on which South Africa’s economy depended” (Padhi and Dash 36). The most important aim was to deprive the blacks of basic human rights, as Lennox S. Hinds observes, “[t]he wages and working conditions of black workers under apartheid are themselves so horrendous as to constitute human rights violations” (20). Therefore apartheid “blunts and corrupts some of the finest instincts in man” (Duncan 19).

During the period of resistance from the black South Africans and many other political prisoners, there was a heavy holocaust. Thousands of individuals died in custody after gruesome acts of torture by the brutal police who “used a variety of weapons: batons, teargas, whips, dogs, and guns” (Hinds 23) over the black people and was thus the main proponent of apartheid as Duncan says “. . . if you are black, and you valueMaulana your life, doAzad not criticize Library, the Aligarhpolice. And Muslim when the University police strike at a man to defend their good reputation, do not try to intervene, if you are black” (76). During apartheid the intensity of police raids was prevalent to the extent that each and every African was made a suspect. This created an atmosphere of fear and terror. Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela in this context says:

Detention means that mid-night knock when all almost is quiet. It means blinding torches shone simultaneously through every window of your house before the door is kicked open. It means the exclusive right the Security Branch has to read every letter in the house, no matter

Introduction

how personal it might be. It means paging through each and every book on your shelves, lifting carpets, looking under beds, lifting sleeping children . . . It means you no longer have the right to answer your telephone call come through . . . It means your seizure at dawn dragged away from little children screaming and clinging to your skirt, imploring the white men dragging mummy to leave her alone. (qtd. in Banerjee 5-6)

Thus the “police terror was the most vindictive means of repression” (Banerjee 22). Many individuals, who were caught while raising anti-government slogans, were sentenced to death, banished, or imprisoned for life, like Nelson Mandela. The penalties imposed on political protests, even non-violent protests, were severe. During the state of emergency, which continued from time to time until 1989, anyone could be detained without a hearing by a low-level police official for up to six months. Thousands of blacks were killed during Sharpeville massacre of 1960 by the racist regime when it fired cold-bloodedly on a large crowd of unarmed blacks protesting against apartheid. The massacre is akin to that of Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919, when people on that day had been shot without any warning. March 21, the day of the Sharpeville massacre, is commemorated as Human Rights Day. The Soweto Uprising of 1976 is the bloodiest event in the history of apartheid. On that day a large number of black Sowetan students started massive protests in Soweto when it was decided that ‘Afrikaan’ along with English will be medium of instruction in all the black schools of South Africa and their own native African language will be only allowed to give religious instructions, music and physical education. The incident caused heavy damage resulting in hundreds of causalities.Maulana Hatred Azad and abhorrence Library, wasAligarh prevalent Muslim to the University extent that in order to determine whether the family was black, white or colored, different strategies were adopted. A vast building was built at Pretoria to carry records of the genetic inheritance of every single human being in the country. Besides this,

[P]encils were pushed into people’s hair, to judge whether the crimp exceeded the maximum permitted degree for ‘Europeans’. Angles of noses were taken. Clothes were removed for the tints of unexposed skin to be assessed. Relations long since dead, were discussed, to determine whether the family was ‘coloured’ or not. (Duncan 18)

Introduction

Many acts were passed which aimed to further fortify the process of apartheid and enlarge the system of segregation. According to Nelson Mandela, apartheid, “represented the codification in one oppressive system of all the laws and regulations that had kept Africans in an inferior position to whites for centuries” (104). The blacks have been barred by these various acts and residentially they have been “restricted to ‘locations’, now called township, situated apart from towns, separated by a buffer zone. Some lived in shacks; some lived in rented accommodation. Others lived in single-sex hostels, either for males or females, without their families” (Roberts 60). The acts passed shored up the antipathy on the basis of race in many spheres of life, for example, blacks were forced to live in separate areas, went to separate schools and universities, used separate buses and trains and there was little social mixing, social relations and inter-marriage between blacks and whites. Apartheid according to Margaret Roberts meant the thousands of laws passed between 1948-1988 which determined, “who could live, work, eat, travel, play, learn, sleep and be buried, where and with whom” (54). In South Africa the blacks are the rightful nationals of their motherland, yet they were forcefully transferred to semi-fertile or almost barren regions covering only 13% of the country’s land area. While the rest of the territory comprising the lands for agricultural prosperity and mining areas for precious metals like gold, diamond etc belonged to the white oppressors. The Bantu Trust and Land Act of 1936 provided them the land that was unproductive and infertile and the rest of the territory comprising the best agricultural and mining areas belonged to the whites. With the enactment of apartheid laws, racial discrimination was institutionalized. Race laws touched every aspect of social life. Prohibition of Mixed Marriage Act of 1949 forbade marriages between Europeans and Non- Europeans. The act made it illegal in South Africa for any white person to have sexual Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University intercourse with any non-white. Thus persons of different racial groups were denied the right to marry each other and also deprived of the right to cohabit. With the Population Registration Act of 1950, families were torn apart when husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters were differently classified with all the ensuing consequences to their personal, economic and political lives. The Population Registration Act has been called the mother of apartheid laws. In 1951, under the Bantu Authorities Act ‘homelands’ were established. These homelands were independent states to which each African was assigned by the government according to the record of origin. The idea was that they would be citizens of the homeland,

Introduction losing their citizenship in South Africa and any right of involvement with the South African Parliament. Separate Amenities Act of 1953 aimed to provide separate facilities for the different racial groups. It legalized unequal amenities for Europeans and non-Europeans in trains, buses, waiting-rooms and other public places. A number of notices were put up at places warning people’s entry into those places. One of the notices at Sunnyside poultry farm at Grasmere, near Evaton read “NATIVES, INDIANS AND COLOUREDS if you enter these premises at night you will be listed as missing. Armed guards shoot on sight. Savage dogs devour the corpse. You have been warned” (qtd. in Duncan 77).

In 1953, the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act were passed, which empowered the government to declare stringent states of emergency and increased penalties for protesting against or supporting the repeal of a law. The penalties included fines, imprisonment and whippings. Bantu Education Act of 1953 made access to higher scientific studies impossible for Africans and difficult for coloreds. Although mother tongue was introduced in schools yet introducing mother tongue in schools was not basically an advantage for the Blacks as, “it was perceived to be myopic and unable to capture some of the scientific concepts as well as lacking the standard orthography” (Mhlauli et al. 205) therefore it “was a plan to subjugate the Blacks and render them inferior economically, politically and socially through education” (Mhlauli et al. 205). Thus apartheid was prevalent in South Africa from “kindergarten to the university level” (Banerjee 15). The Immorality Act of 1957 outlawed sexual relation between white and colored people. The law defined white persons as “any person who in appearance obviously is or who by general acceptance and repute is a white person” (qtd. in Banerjee 38) and defined colored persons as “any personMaulana other Azad than a Library, white person” Aligarh (qtd. in Muslim Banerjee University38). The law made it an offence for a white person to have intercourse with a black person. Extension of University Education Act of 1959 intended to eliminate all non-whites from all white universities and establish separate racial universities and schools. There were only three universities available to Africans. In these universities, no scientific education was provided. Group Areas Act of 1966 aimed to create separate group areas in towns and cities for whites, Africans and coloreds. It gave power to government to move people around for racial reasons, homes were destroyed and the right to property subverted. People lost all their savings through forced sales under this act and the

Introduction government itself was the buyer. Group Areas Act along with population registration act according to Mandela formed “the cornerstones of apartheid” (114).

There was discrimination in labor system as well. The various labor laws which discriminated against Africans and other non-whites included The Wage Act of 1925 and 1957, The Native Labor Act of 1953 etc. These laws dealt with the trade unions, collective bargaining, minimum wages and other conditions of employment and highlighted the key features of apartheid which was discrimination on the basis of labor. The Bantu Building Workers Act of 1951 extended discrimination on the basis of labor to the building industry by prohibiting Africans from performing skilled work connected with the building trade in the white urban areas. It barred Africans from the more skilled mining jobs. The passing of Mines and Works Act of 1971 granted the certificates of competency for a number of skilled mining occupations to the whites and the coloreds only.

There was no representation of the black majority in parliament and the political opposition was restricted by the South African government. The blacks had no authorized political voice; they were not allowed to join political parties containing white members. Separate Representation of Voters Act of 1956 and promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1956 snatched all political rights from Africans which converted them into foreigners in their birth land. There were also ‘Pass laws’ which controlled the movement of Africans throughout South Africa. Africans were not allowed to enjoy freedom to move and reside in any part of the country. They were required to carry ‘pass books’ containing fingerprints, photos and information on access to non-black areas. It was actually a pass or identity proof which must be produced on demand, failure of which could constitute an offence. Thus Africans Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University were not allowed to enter white areas without permission. Racism was prevalent to the extent that in hospitals the blood donated by black people was not used for white patients rather it was stored separately and labeled according to the donor’s race. Blood of black people on white patients was not supplied however blood from whites was used on black people. Therefore whites tried their utmost to rule over blacks by acting as their trustees or guardians and took measures to ensure that their own, more civilized standards were not swamped by greater black numbers.

Introduction

According to Ahmed G. Ibrahim, “oppression and suppression lead to resistance” (334). The blacks of South Africa tried their best to show restrain and resistance against this suppression and struggled for their freedom. They were fighting for the establishment of majority rule in South Africa. Black resistance was a great threat and obstacle to the plans of Nationalist Party. This resistance witnessed protests by black South Africans especially by urban blacks. What fueled this resistance were the various laws passed by the Nationalist government to limit the rights of blacks in every walk of life. The brutalities which were enhanced by various laws forced the blacks to resistance in the form of boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. Historic Freedom Charter in Kliptown was established which collected grievances and demands. Its objectives were expressed in its declarations, one of which states that:

South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people . . . the rights of the people shall be the same regardless of race, color or sex . . . all apartheid laws and practices shall be set aside. (qtd. Mhlauli et al. 206)

Some of the organizations took a firm stand against the system of apartheid when they realized that “South Africa is the only place in the world where by law, your entire life depends upon the colour of your skin, where the blacks are not allowed to live, whenever they desire, and there they have to face discrimination in all spheres of their lives” (Banerjee 40). African National Congress was an anti-apartheid organisation, whose central focus remained on its opening declaration that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, blacks and whites. It contributed a lot in its struggle against apartheid, “since the day of its formation on January 8, 1912, the Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University ANC’S immediate objective was national liberation of blacks from Apartheid, and through that, the establishment of a united non-racial South Africa” (Padhi and Dash xi). They urged whites to show equal participation as the blacks to avoid the country’s ultimate ruin. Being an ardent enemy of apartheid, they indulged in guerilla attacks inside South Africa and were “the main guerrilla group opposed to white minority rule” (Banerjee 46).

Black Consciousnesses Movement was another organization which was started in 1969 and was soon banned in 1977. It was primarily developed by black students.

Introduction

They wanted to operate as a group in order to get rid of the shackles that bound them to perpetual servitude. Its aim was that blacks which included Africans, Indians and coloreds had to liberate themselves psychologically and shed the slave mentality induced by racism and white liberalism. It believed that inferiority complex is a great barrier to liberation. According to David Hirschmann its wish was “psychological liberation of the black man from the confines of centuries of racism and paternalism” (5). Its main focus remained the rejection of all Eurocentric values.

The United Democratic Front is a political movement which ideologically bears resemblance with the African National Congress. It was formed in 1983 as an alliance of civic associations, trade unions, women, student and religious organizations and other democratic organizations. They opposed the new constitutional proposals of 1983. They outlined a strategy of organizing, mobilizing and educating to create unity among its followers and to represent their views and aspirations. A large number of its leaders were detained, its meetings were banned, its funds were blocked but the organization remained firm in its belief and views against apartheid. The central aim of The Pan Africanist Congress was the achievement of Africanist socialist democracy that is the government of the Africans by the Africans and for the Africans. The Pan Africanist Congress talked about “mental revolution” which meant the Africans have to upgrade their mental thinking and stop believing that they are inferior and whites are superior. They claimed Africa for Africans unlike African National Congress who claimed South Africa for all. Many of its leaders got killed in Sharpeville incident.

The main aim of the South African Communist Party of 1921 was to establish a socialist South Africa. Its intention was to overthrow the colonialist state of white Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University supremacy and establish an independent state of national democracy in South Africa. It along with African National Congress formed a military organization ‘Umkhonto we Sizwe’ (Spear of the Nation) to carry on the struggle for freedom and democracy by new methods mostly through violence and started many guerilla wars against the government. According to Padhi and Dash:

[N]obody can dispute the leading role of the ANC and its military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe inside South Africa. The repeated and heavy blows which have been struck against the enemy from one end of the

Introduction

country to the other have been delivered by Umkhonto and nobody else. In the military field there was only one organization doing the fighting, and that was the ANC. (80)

The Commonwealth was an organization made up of fifty four states. It was an outcome of decolonization and had self-determination as its central aim. Its concern was to help and extend political freedom to all the people of South Africa. The main focus of commonwealth leaders was to bring change in South Africa and to peacefully dismantle apartheid. There were also some organizations which worked in support of people of Indian origin like the Natal Indian Congress which was formed by Mahatma Gandhi in 1894. It developed a strong resistance against the atrocities being done to the people of Indian origin. Another organization which also worked for the upliftment of Indians was the South African Indian Congress operated from 1920’s to the mid 1960’s and became in its later years a member of the African National Congress and formed alliance with it. The principal aim of it was to free the Indians living in South Africa from the clutches of colonialism and apartheid and to ensure that they too enjoy human rights.

The continued racial discrimination and exploitation of the African majorities on their own soil by the illegal regime in South Africa was a blot on civilization. Apartheid that was “a ‘Black Spot’ on the world’s conscience” (Padhi and Dash 6) had become an international issue and citizens of all nations were concerned about it. Most people were familiar with the meaning of apartheid whether through television, images, newspaper reports or general reading. It was the policy of apartheid that had brought South Africa into international disgrace and “South Africa was for many years seen as a threat to regional and world peace” (Taylor et al. 2). The world Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University community didn’t remain a mute spectator to the oppression that was being perpetrated in South Africa. The United Nations always opposed apartheid and “in a series of unanimous resolutions the UN condemned apartheid as a crime against humanity and recognized that the elimination of apartheid was of vital concern to the international community” (Padhi and Dash xiv). The United Nations, Non Aligned Movement, Commonwealth, The Organization of African Unity and several other international organizations of African unity and bodies had also been in the fore front of the movement to have apartheid system dismantled. These anti-apartheid movements outside the country gathered world attention and therefore South African

Introduction government received tremendous pressure from all over the world to end the apartheid policy. The Nordic countries like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway etc also provided moral and financial support to the African National Congress in order to end this menace. Individual countries also expressed their condemnation of apartheid and the illegal South African government. South Africa became infamous throughout the world as one of the countries that has practiced racism despite criticism from all over the world including isolation from participation in world affairs and politics.Therefore the deteriorating situation in South Africa caused concern not only in that country but in the whole world.

The role played by Nelson Mandela to bring apartheid to its end is extraordinary and can never be forgotten. He was a stalwart critique of apartheid regime and “has come to be seen as the personification of reconciliation, goodwill, forgiveness, and acceptance” (Teeger and Seroussi 67). He was a central figure in the struggle against South Africa’s atrocious and restrictive racial regime. According to Andrew Tzvi Farkash, “Mandela and the ANC are dominantly associated with resistance to apartheid” (17). Mandela along with his wife Winnie Mandela faced persistent brutalities by the government in power, however they faced these atrocities with grit and courage without an ounce of fear. Nelson Mandela has been an inspirational figure for anti racists and is the embodiment of hope and chivalry. According to Brojendra Nath Banerjee, “in a world being increasingly torn apart by turmoil and tension, Mandela represents a focal point of hope. Mandela’s selfless devotion to the cause of freedom has won him a place among the greatest leaders of our times” (97). He emerged as a revolutionary figure despite the fact that he lived in white dominated customs and the culture as he himself says, “The education I received was Maulana a British education, Azad Library,in which British Aligarh ideas, Muslim British cultureUniversity and British institutions were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture” (Mandela 13). He served twenty seven years in prison before he became the first black president of South Africa in the year 1994 shortly after the fall of apartheid.

India too was extremely concerned about apartheid and made every effort to work against it. During the racist regime in Africa, the Asians especially Indians suffered discrimination on the basis of race and their condition was extremely miserable. So, India demanded equal treatment for Indians in South Africa. Their

Introduction average earnings were half of what the whites got. They were also subject to social, educational and residential segregation. There used to be different flat rentals for Indians. According to Anil Sooklal, “the apartheid policy has affected the Hindu community more so than any other religious group in the country” (81). That is why India became an ardent critique of racist regime of South Africa in general and racial segregation done to Indians in particular. It played a significant role in the formation of UN special committee against apartheid in 1962. It believed that the apartheid which subjugated the black Africans politically and economically for the benefit of the white minority was repugnant to the conscience of mankind and displayed great support and solidarity with South Africa to end the menace in the country. Rajiv Gandhi, then prime minister of India made a five day tour to the African countries like Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola and Tanzania in 1986. Besides discussing measures to strengthen bilateral relations with these countries, Rajiv Gandhi reaffirmed India’s solidarity with black Africans in their struggle against apartheid in resounding terms. He assured them that the sacrifice of Nelson Mandela, his wife Winnie Mandela and thousands of South Africans who faced prison, batons and bullets wouldn’t go in vain. The Indian government recognized Nelson Mandela as a symbol of peace and love and bestowed on him the Jawaharlal Nehru award for peace and international understanding in1979. India supported African National Congress believing that it was the only voice of South Africans and provided financial support to it. In 1974 India refused to play South Africa in the Davis cup final and thus earned worldwide attention. There are thousands of people of Indian origin in South Africa. Mahatma Gandhi worked and lived in South Africa for some years and started a strong resistance movement against apartheid. India was one of the first countries to highlight the plight of non-whites in Africa. Mahatma Gandhi started Satyagrah Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University against the white regime in the beginning of the twentieth century. Because of the entire measures taken by India, it was finally in 1990 that a number of changes took place in South Africa. Political prisoners like Nelson Mandela and Ahmad Kathrada were released and the ban on African National Congress, The Pan Africanist Congress, The South African Communist Party and other organizations was lifted. The Africans were permitted political activities and South Africa visited India to play cricket.

Introduction

Women in South Africa continued their struggle through decades shoulder to shoulder with men. They had to suffer a lot and sacrifice greatly. The racist government compelled women to carry a pass which was described by women as a badge of slavery and shame. Only with this pass, they could live in South African towns and get jobs. They were not paid equally as men and were supposed to “do all of the domestic work and assume child care responsibilities in their own homes, after long hours of work” (Nolde 210). Thus the jobs they did were simply an extension of their domestic work at home. South African women were always at the forefront and fought side by side with men for liberation and human dignity. The women were the worst victims of apartheid primarily being black and also being a woman. They were triply marginalized, that is they experienced three kinds of oppression based on race, gender and class. They were forced to go to white areas as domestic servants. Many a times they were not allowed to work with their husbands. Thus children also became the worst victims of this policy who grew up in the absence of their parents and lived a life of frustration and poverty. The government particularly wanted to keep black women out of cities, because if black children were born in cities they may be considered to have a legal right to remain there. If a black woman who had the right to live in a city married a man who did not, she lost the right. Black women were legally minors who had to be under the guardianship of a man. A woman could not marry without the consent of her guardian. Also, they could lose property when their husbands died because they were legal minors. In short they were treated as commodity and had less social values.

Apartheid is one of the main themes in South African literature. It gave solid themes to the blacks as well as the liberal white writers. The literary writers of South Africa highlightedMaulana the miserable Azad and Library, pathetic Aligarhconditions Muslimof African University black people who were engulfed in chaos, confusion, violence and conflict. Some of the best literature in the history of South Africa is based on the apartheid system. Writers who were eye witness to it and whose central focus remained on the theme of racial segregation in South Africa include Alan Paton, Herman Charles Bosman, Peter Abrahams, Dan Jacobson, Athol Fugard, Ruth Miller, Dennis Brutus, Can Themba, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink and Breyten Breytenbach. Living in a country like South Africa which “carries a history of extreme political conflict and unrest” (Teeger and Seroussi 72) and which has been a “highly stratified society plagued by deep

Introduction social problems” (72) almost all these writers felt the need to record the brutal history of their mother land and the terrible experiences of the people thereby condemning the system of apartheid because it was one of the greatest evils carried out by man on man. Therefore, the major works of these writers reflect the political, economic and social circumstances that were prevalent in South Africa during apartheid. Some of these writers like Athol Fugard, Andre Brink, Alan Paton were imprisoned and a few of them were forced to go into exile as they raised an ardent voice against the apartheid regime. Besides this, some of their works were barred from being read in Africa. Among all these writers it was J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer who brought Nobel Prize to the country. J. M. Coetzee instead of giving the realistic picture of the system of apartheid, talked about its horridness on the human psyche and focussed on the impact of colonialism on the people of South Africa. Writers like Nadine Gordimer repeatedly made the themes of displacement, alienation, exploitation and injustice a focal point of their writings. With grit and courage she challenged the racist government of her age and rejected the belief that the whites were born to rule and command and the development and progress of other races depended on them.

Nadine Gordimer expressed the frustration, anger and the terrible memories of the historical incidents in her writings. Being an eye witness and keen observer of apartheid, Gordimer has given a lucid picture of the society she lived in through her works which comprise twenty one collections of stories, fifteen novels, three collections of essays, a play and numerous lectures and speeches . She demonstrated through her works against the injustice done to black South Africans and wrote “for those who live[d] in segregation in the apartheid ridden South African country” (RoshanMaulana 217). Hence, Azad her Library, writing touched Aligarh the Muslim post-colonial University issues on cross-racial relationship, exploitation of marginal people, struggle for identity, and various apartheid acts. Love also remained one of the dominant themes of her writings. Her aim was to break the cross-racial boundaries which restricted love between whites and non-whites. As a political activist and a devoted supporter of the African National Congress, she preferred to stay in the country in order to expose the evils of slavery, racism and colonialism through her writings instead of bidding good bye to her country under the prevailing circumstances. Despite being white and unaffected by the policy of apartheid, she took a firm stand on the side of blacks. Nadine Gordimer

Introduction was a warrior in the sense that she too toiled hard for the eradication of apartheid even though apartheid laws did not affect her personally. Thus her role to put an end to apartheid was tremendous.

Although apartheid is abolished, yet the various laws passed during its tenure have a great effect upon the various social and economic strata of life in South Africa even today. The majority of white people in South Africa have higher standard of life as compared to blacks. All the industries and the big corporations in the country are owned by whites. Most of the privileged jobs are done by whites hence blacks are economically marginalized. Thus discrimination in South Africa is still prevalent as Morve Roshan K says, “some South Africans have a standard of living equal to that of the world’s wealthiest nations yet millions more South Africans live in utmost poverty” (222). The various downtrodden and impoverished places, townships, slums and other informal settlements in South Africa are overcrowded by blacks where as the places which are extremely advanced and enriched with every sort of facility are inhabited by whites. Thus the geographical separation of people still exists in South Africa. The various strategies that were used during apartheid era to segregate the blacks and suppress their voices are still rampant as Andrew Tzvi Farkash says “the system that imprisoned Mandela still exists today; it is merely cloaked” (18).

This research endeavours to study Gordimer’s representation of apartheid through select novels written during that period. The thesis is divided into six chapters excluding ‘Introduction’ ‘Review of Literature’ and ‘Conclusion’. The introduction as seen above is an attempt to describe the historical background of South Africa and the ideology of Apartheid. In ‘Review of Literature’ comprehensive overview of prior research regarding the topic is given to develop a fair idea about the current study and Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University what it is going to be examined. The first chapter studies Gordimer as a staunch critique of apartheid through the various issues which she makes as the focal point in her works. In the second chapter, Gordimer’s first novel The Lying Days is analysed. It concentrates on the various issues prevalent at that time like interracial relationship and political activism and depicts how the novel presents the realistic depiction of history. Gordimer’s second novel A World of Strangers is analyzed in the third chapter to show multiracialism, multiculturalism and liberalism as a strong tool of resistance to apartheid. Chapter fourth shows how Gordimer presents Black Consciousness Movement as an important tool to maintain self-identity in the wake of

Introduction tyranny and suppression through the novel Burger’s Daughter. Another important issue which the chapter deals with is the political commitment of Communists in the freedom struggle against apartheid policy and its brutal consequences upon them. In the fifth chapter Gordimer’s prophetic vision is presented through her futuristic novel July’s People. It also highlights unfair living standards of blacks as advocated by Frantz Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth. The final chapter deals with issues like colored identity and reversal of roles based on gender through the novel My Son’s Story. The conclusion sums up the findings of the thesis and indicates certain other areas for further fruitful research.

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Introduction

REFRENCES:

Banerjee, Brojendra Nath. Apartheid: A Crime Against Humanity. B. R. Publishing

Corporation, 1987.

Carter, Gwendolen M. “Can Apartheid Succeed in South Africa?” Foreign Affairs,

vol. 32, no. 2, 1954, pp. 296–309.

Duncan, Patrick. South Africa’s Rule of Violence. Methuen and Co Limited, 1964.

Hinds, Lennox S. “Apartheid in South Africa and the Universal Declaration of

HumanRights.” Crime and Social Justice, no. 24, 1985, pp. 5–43.

Hirschmann, David. “The Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa.” The

Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 1990, pp. 1–22.

Ibrahim, Ahmed G. “The Crisis of Race Relations in South Africa.” Pakistan

Horizon, vol. 21, no. 4, 1968, pp. 332–336.

K, Morve Roshan. “Contextualizing Racial Discrimination and Coloured

Consciousness in South Africa.” International Journal of

Multidisciplinary Educational Research, vol. 3, no. 10, 2014, pp 210-

223. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Abacus, 1994.

Mhlauli, Mavis B. et al. "Understanding Apartheid in South Africa through the

Racial Contract." International Journal of Asian Social Science, vol. 5, no. 4,

2015, pp.203-219.

Introduction

Nolde, Judith. "South African Women Under Apartheid: Employment Rights with

Particular Focus on Domestic Service and Forms of Resistance to

Promote Change." Third World Legal Studies, vol. 10, 1991, pp. 203-223.

Padhi, Bishnupriya, and Gopabandhau Dash. Dismantaling Apartheid in South Africa:

Impact of International Diplomacy. New Horizon Publishers, 2004.

Roberts, Margaret. “The Ending of Apartheid: Shifting Inequalities in South

Africa.” Geography, vol. 79, no. 1, 1994, pp. 53–64.

Sooklal, Anil. “A Hindu on Apartheid.” International Journal on World Peace, vol.

8, no. 2, 1991, pp. 81–86.

Taylor, Rupert et al. "Projecting peace in apartheid South Africa." Peace & Change,

vol. 24, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1-14.

Farkash, Andrew Tzvi. "The Ghosts of Colonialism: Economic Inequity in Post-

Apartheid South Africa." Global Societies Journal, vol. 0, no. 3, 2015, pp. 12-

19.

Teeger, Chana, and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi. “Controlling for Consensus:

Commemorating Apartheid in South Africa.” Symbolic Interaction, vol.

Maulana30, no. 1, 2007, Azad pp. Library, 57-78. Aligarh Muslim University

Tiryakian, Edward A. “Apartheid and Politics in South Africa.” The Journal of

Politics, vol. 22, no. 4, 1960, pp. 682–697.

Review of Literature

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Literature review is a piece of work which talks about what important authors think about a topic. Andrew S. Denney and Richard Tewksbury in their article “How to Write a Literature Review” define it as a “comprehensive overview of prior research regarding a specific topic” (218). Thus the major works which have been published related to the topic are reviewed, which is called review of literature. It helps to understand the topic thoroughly and do extensive research through various sources like journal articles, books, magazines, newspapers etc. It shows the amount of in depth reading the researcher has done on a particular research topic. Thus, a good research is based on literature review and therefore lays a foundation for authentic research. For review of literature, it is not necessary to read everything. Relevant books can be consulted and the main ideas of the author should be the centre of attention. Some of the important books and articles related to the topic of this research are reviewed below.

The book entitled South Africa’s Rule of Violence is written by South African anti-apartheid activist Patrick Duncan. It was published in the year 1964 by Methuen & Co Limited. The main aim of the book is to promote human rights in South Africa. The book depicts the ill consequences of apartheid upon the white people in general and black people in particular of South Africa. Patrick endeavours to investigate the impact of apartheid and racism on mental health and self-esteem in Black South Africans and the role of racial identity in this relationship. The book gives documental proof of the brutalities and the cruelties which the people of South Africa underwent Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University during apartheid system. They were thrown into the fire, served jail sentences, and suffered great hardships and were separated from their families and friends. Apartheid according to the author is a menace which must be put to end at any cost. The author records in this book all those incidents which left people of South Africa shell- shocked during the period of apartheid. The records here are based upon press reports. Patrick Duncan has collected records since 1948 and has travelled many places in order to gather information for this book. The book is an analysis of the violent repression of political protest in the country. The author pays tribute to what he calls “much criticized” news paper of that age ‘English Press’ of South Africa. The book

Review of Literature shows the increased stress, anxiety, depression, sadness and negative effect of racial discrimination. Apartheid has created a feeling of inferiority among blacks and has been psychologically devastating for the people of South Africa. Divided into fifteen chapters, the book gives references of various daily, weekly and fortnightly newspapers to highlight the violence by the police and the prison wardens against all those powerless non-whites who were under their control. Besides providing a historical background of apartheid, the book also talks about the violence on the farms which were fully controlled by white farmers and hardly any powerless non-white laborers had any control over it. Thus the author artistically depicts the violence in the name of white supremacy on the farms with the help of incidents recorded in the newspapers of the age. Besides, this book also records the violence by the ordinary white people against non-whites and thus highlights the system of apartheid which bewildered many people and limited the rights of Black South Africans in every field of life. Through complex representations of violence and scenes of interrogation each chapter attempts to portray the anguish and suffering of South Africans and foregrounds the enduring ramifications of apartheid. The author has extracted the sworn statements from the press reports to enhance the authenticity of the book. Patrick Duncan’s stubborn independence of mind and his accurate and original commentary on history makes this book a valuable addition to the literature of South Africa’s liberation and the author himself claims that, “all records used in this book are true.”

The research paper titled as The Claustral World of Nadine Gordimer by Eugene Goodheart was published in the magazine Salmagundi. The writer presents a broad description about the conflict of blacks and whites. It is a clear picture of how Nadine GordimerMaulana demonstrates Azad the Library, subjugation Aligarh of blacks Muslim by the whites. University The focus has been laid upon the mental setup of western world, who treat black people as rubbish and worthless. The author of the paper has illustrated through her several novels (most of them set in South Africa) that Nadine Gordimer gives voice to the voiceless and dispels the wrong perception that Occidentals are superior to Orientals. He further presents the African world and through it presents the inward and outward mental setup of the South African people. Central to the paper is the vision that the novelist Nadine Gordimer carried throughout her literary endeavor. It is fit to mention that the age she lived in was craving for peace and harmony and Nadine Gordimer tried her

Review of Literature best to provide the same through her writing. Apartheid according to her was the dominant institution in the country and the paper talks about Nadine Gordimer’s depiction of the consequences of apartheid in the lives of blacks and whites through her narrative. Her novels are a true description of what she thought about the apartheid movement, its impact and repercussions. Dwelling deep into the psyche of the novelist, the writer has tried to trace out Nadine Gordimer’s take on ill and bad effects of apartheid on one side as well as the positive and optimistic aspect on the other.

The research paper titled African Landscapes: The World of Nadine Gordimer written by John Cooke talks about the numerous young pre and postwar writers who produced the various novels and short story collections and depicted the various issues of the age they lived in. Nadine Gordimer according to the author is the only writer of the age who represented the sense of disillusionment of the age. In the whole corpus of African literature, Nadine Gordimer stands out as a topographer, as someone who captures every pulse of his native land. Within the corpus of African writers, Gordimer alone continued writing from within South Africa because of her preference for private subjects. She developed a new world view, uniting her private vision with a new historical perspective. To Gordimer according to the writer the dominant characteristic of a colonial society is that it is relatively unexamined, a condition necessitating a distinctive type of literature. The world of Nadine Gordimer is full of vibrant characters pulsating with life and whim. So Nadine Gordimer’s canvas is dabbed with the shades of both the private world of the pulsating characters of her novels and the disarray of the world in which her characters live in.

The book Apartheid: A Crime Against Humanity is written by Brojendra Nath Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Banerjee. It was published in the year 1987 by B. R Publishing Corporation, Delhi and is divided into six chapters covering various South African challenging issues. It shows how black South Africans are treated as aliens in their own motherland and deprived of all the basic human rights including political rights by the white minority. The author provides a detailed description about the role played by Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie Mandela to fight against the devastating effects of apartheid upon the black Africans. Nelson Mandela according to author represented as the symbol of mankind’s struggle against oppression. The world community did nothing to understand the pain and agony of black South Africans and put an end to this cancer

Review of Literature of apartheid rather they according to the author collaborated actively with the racist regime in various fields. Although international community including the western countries condemned racial antipathy in South Africa but they failed to put pressure on South Africa’s racist regime to give up its ways. The book talks about P. W. Botha’s (the then prime minister) racist government. His government continued to deny the basic human rights like the right to vote and other fundamental rights. Under his regime the various proposals put forward by the constitution were mere fraud and reflected no change whatsoever in the system of apartheid. Throughout South Africa, there had been a massive wave of rejection of these proposals from blacks, colored’s and Indians. Under his power South Africa rushed towards unprecedented political crisis. According to the author, during the white supremacy in Africa, Asians also became victims of apartheid and suffered bigotry and hatred at the hands of white people. They were also subject to social, educational and residential segregation. Brojendra Nath Banerjee in Apartheid: A Crime Against Humanity also depicts South Africa’s military attacks inside Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia which according to the author was barbarous, cowardly and unprovoked acts and a blow to peace efforts in the region. It also talks about various sanctions imposed against South Africa by the various countries of the world. The various sanctions inflicted against them were ruled out by Ronald Reagan - An American politician who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Reagan believed that apartheid is morally wrong and politically unacceptable. Talking about the interconnection of the frontline states with South Africa Reagan said “South Africa is like a zebra. If the white parts are injured the black parts will die soon”.

The article “Apartheid and Politics in South Africa” is written by Edward A. Tiryakian. It wasMaulana published Azad in The Library, Journal of Aligarh Politics inMuslim the year University1960. The central focus of the paper lies in the relation between apartheid and politics. The paper talks about the 1948 election in South Africa and the election campaign performed by the two opposite political parties, United Party and National Party. According to the author, the 1948 elections were fought and won on the issue of apartheid and it marked a milestone in the history of the Union of South Africa and rendered United Party, “torn between a progressive and a conservative wing”. Therefore the author believes that in the absence of the ‘apartheid’ slogan in 1948, United Party would probably have returned to power. Thus in the article, Tiryakian give a well-defined

Review of Literature background to the 1948 elections and provides the tabular figures of the 1938 and 1943 elections (both were won by United Party) and 1948 elections which was astonishingly won by Nationalist Party.

“The Ending of Apartheid: Shifting Inequalities in South Africa” is another important article written by Margaret Roberts. It was published in the year 1994 in the journal Geographical Association. In this article the author says although apartheid is believed to be over but the permanent scars left by it on the grounds of social, political and economic bases during the period of apartheid still exist. The author explores these issues and tries to find out whether apartheid is really dead or very much alive. The article gives different layers of meaning to apartheid and focuses on all its aspects. It highlights the various laws passed during the period of apartheid for the preservation of the identity of white people of South Africa. The laws mentioned in the article which restricted most of the rights of the Black Africans are The Population Registration Act of 1950, The Black Land Act of 1913, The Development and Trust Act of 1936, The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, The Self-Governing Territories Act of 1988 etc. According to the author, for many people everything associated with apartheid has gone, the laws connected to it have gone, the public amenities people use are now all mixed and they can sit next to people from different groups in the cinema, in a cafe, or on the beach. There is mixing of groups in the schools. However, for the poor black South Africans living in the townships or in the homelands, little has changed. They remain poor and are hard hit by recession, inflation, and unemployment. Their homes remain inadequate and schools overcrowded. Thus the ending of apartheid has changed nothing in their lives.

The book Dismantaling Apartheid in South Africa: Impact of International Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Diplomacy is written by Bishnupriya Padhi and co-authored by Gopabandhau Dash. It was published in the year 2004 by New Horizon Publishers. The book gives detailed description about apartheid and the various ways apartheid was dismantled. It deals with the origin, growth and manifestation of apartheid policy and brings together some observations on race, class, geographical space and the role of the state. The book attempts at analysing the long struggle against apartheid by blacks and their support and sympathy by international communities. It also makes a thorough study on the various organisations like African National Congress, United Democratic Front, Black Consciousness Movement etc who had contributed a great deal towards

Review of Literature the struggle against apartheid. Besides this it also endeavours to make a thorough study on the role played by various international organisations like United Nations and Commonwealth to make South Africa apartheid free country.

The article “Contextualizing Racial Discrimination and Coloured Consciousness in South Africa” is written by Morve Roshan K. It was published in the journal International Journal of Multidisciplinary Educational Research under volume 3 in the year 2014. The author shows that the discrimination in South Africa is based not only on race but also economically, politically, culturally and socially. He points out that the emergence of African literature is often seen as an outcome of this discrimination and believes that the act of writing is also a sort of resistance against the rulers or against those systems where evil prevails. Morve Roshan K shows through this article the disastrous consequences of rambunctious apartheid and Nadine Gordimer’s role to understand the questions of how South African people are living with acute discrimination under apartheid acts. Gordimer through her writing shows her anger, frustration, disappointment, and dissatisfaction for living in a country which breathes under the regime of apartheid. Thus the writer through her works like My Son’s Story, Burger’s Daughter and The Lying Days shows the amount of loyalty and love Gordimer had for her native land, its culture and its people. That is why her works deal with the themes of displacement, alliances and alienation.

The book The Dialectics of Apartheid: A Reading of Nadine Gordimer’s Novels from a Postcolonial Perspective is written by Indrani Rengasamy. It was published in the year 2010 by Lap Lambert Academic Publishing. The book endeavors to highlight Nadine Gordimer’s determination and resolution in getting rid of the terror, tension, bloodshed, danger and violence in South Africa. It shows Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Gordimer’s deep rooted concern for humanity which was chained in racial bonds. According to the author, she was a white South African whom apartheid and its brutal laws did not affect to that extent yet she was on the side of blacks and raised a staunch voice for them. Thus according to Rengasamy, Gordimer represents the sympathetic whites’ point of view. Nadine Gordimer talks about marginalization in terms of not only blacks and whites, but also women and men and the marginalization among whites. The author includes ten novels for this study. She shows how despite being a white writer Nadine Gordimer reflects the characteristics of post colonialism in her works. Rangasamy believes that as a post colonial writer, Gordimer can be regarded

Review of Literature as an ardent anti-colonial writer who holds a strong grudge against the colonizers and sympathizes with the colonized. Theme of identity crises in South African literature and censorship laws which banned works in support of blacks is intensively exemplified by the author. In the concluding chapter of her book Indrani Rengasamy also highlights Gordimer’s style. According to her, Gordimer has written in two different styles, one, highly readable, and another, very complex as she preferred a sophisticated style to lend voice to the humble blacks.

“Politics of Power: A Post Colonial Reading of July’s People” is a must-read article written by Khondakar Md. Hadiuzzaman, co-authored by Md. Abdul Karim Ruman. It was published in the Dhaka Commerce College Journal under vol.vi in the year 2014. The authors analyze the novel July’s People from both colonial and racial perspectives. The central focus of the article is to show how power circulates and how it affects the relationship in a multi-racial society. The authors prove their point using the novel July’s People as the primary source. The Smales family is forced to migrate soon after the beginning of civil war. The authors endeavor to show how power inversion affects the once powerful white Smales family while living in the black community and how Smales position of dominance and July’s position of subservience, which is master-slave relationship, gets all together reversed. According to the author, this impact of power reversal leads Smales family to lose their self- image as independent, gracious, powerful, and liberal citizens. The author also talks about the symbolic significance of the novel. The novel according to the author has many symbols in it for example the figure of gun which symbolically suggests power and authority. Thus the author believes that the overall impact of inversion of the colonial and racial power in July’s People is negative, horrifying, and pessimistic. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University “Apartheid Inequality and Postapartheid Utopia in Nadine Gordimer's "July's People"” is another important article relevant to the title of this thesis written by Ali Erritouni. It was published in the journal Research in African Literatures, under Vol. 37 in the year 2006. The author analyses the novel July’s People both from dystopian as well as utopian perspectives. According to the author, as a dystopian novel, July's People draws a grim picture of South Africa in order not only to expose the social and economic consequences of apartheid, but also to open up utopian horizons beyond it. Through the character of Maureen, Ali Erritouni criticizes white liberals for their dual policies and shows how their liberal bent of mind changes due to reversal of power. In

Review of Literature the article, the author also views Nadine Gordimer as a prophesier who through her novel July’s People has envisioned about post apartheid South Africa where blacks will withstand white South Africans. The article also talks about the cultural relationship between various classes in South Africa.

The article “Multi-racialism, or A World of Strangers” is written by Stephen Clingman. It was published in the journal Salmagundi in the year 1984. In the article Clingman uses the historical approach to analyze the novel A World of Strangers and says that it gives us “history from the inside” of the world in which it was written. The article provides a detailed description about the history of apartheid and shows how the concept of multiracialism started through congress alliance during1950’s. Here Clingman aims to show how this novel was generated out of all those social, political and cultural movements which took place during the initial stage of apartheid. According to the author, as an ardent critique of apartheid Gordimer wished to end the apartheid system in South Africa through multiracialism philosophy by bringing people of various races on a single platform and make them stand as one. The author depicts the novel from the realistic perspective and calls it a work of ‘classical realism’. According to Clingman, Nadine Gordimer through the novel shows the ambiguities of being a European in Africa. Toby Hood the central character of the novel lives a private life in Johannesburg and is determinant to have nothing to do with South Africa’s racial politics therefore remains neutral throughout the novel. That is why Clingman calls it a ‘liberal novel’.

The article "The irony of apartheid: A Study in Technique and Theme in the Fiction of Nadine Gordimer." is written by Brighton J. Uledi-Kamanga. It was published in the Journal of Humanities under volume 5 in the year 1984. Uledi- Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Kamanga has made a thorough study on Nadine Gordimer’s works by numerous articles and some books as well. In the current article, the author shows Nadine Gordimer’s use of irony not only in her short stories but also in her novels. The author proves his point through A World of Strangers, The Conservationist, The Lying Days and other works. The attempt to change the system made by various liberal, radical and revolutionary characters of Nadine Gordimer in her novels during forties proves to be futile. That is why Uledi-Kamanga claims the works to be ironical. Thus the article is an attempt to show the note of irony in the select novels of Nadine Gordimer.

Review of Literature

Kolawole Ogungbesan’s article “The Way out of South Africa: Nadine Gordimer’s ‘The Lying Days’” published in Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory in the year 1977 talks about how the novel The Lying Days is an outcome of the situations when the Nationalist Party won the election of 1948 raising race issue and shows the direction towards which South Africa began to move after their victory through its central character Helen Shaw. Kolawole Ogungbesan calls it a ‘realist novel’ for its realistic depiction of its era. According to the author twentieth- century literature is mostly concerned about the theme of ‘Self’ and Nadine Gordimer’s first novel The Lying Days is also about the quest for self-identity. The article shows how Helen Shaw rebels against patriarchy on one hand and racial segregation on the other. Nadine Gordimer according to the author has projected herself in the novel and calls it her autobiographical work.

Toshiko Sakamoto’s article "The Colonial Daughter's Narrative: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days" was published in the journal Studies in English Literature in the year 2002. It highlights the issues of race, gender and sexuality in Nadine Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days and shows how these subjects have been politicized in South Africa. Sakamoto represents these issues as the critique of her society. The family of Helen Shaw who is the central character of the novel represents the patriarchal situation of settler communities in South Africa who are considered as what Sakamoto calls the ‘colonized Other’. The author calls her ‘colonial daughter’ for being the product of colonial history of South Africa. Through Helen the author highlights the approach of whites towards apartheid as she belongs to a white community. Sakamoto shows how she rebels against the patriarchal and imperialist structure of her colonial society and finally shows Helen’s liberal Maulanamindset and Azad her belief Library, in multiracialism Aligarh and Muslim multiculturalism. University

The article "Treatment of Cross-Racial Relationship in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story" is written by Surekha Dangwal published in the edited book of Nandita Sinha in the year 2005. The writer depicts how South Africa’s long history of foreign occupation gave rise to the protest literature highlighting the significance of cross- racial relationship as an important tool to counter apartheid. Surekha Dangwal through the novel My Son’s Story shows the active involvement of coloured community in the freedom struggle. The novel’s central character Sonny, is used by the writer to show how apartheid can be defied through cross-racial and cross-cultural

Review of Literature front. According to Surekha, for a nation like South Africa, it is necessary for the people of different races to stand on the same level, only then will the country prosper.

The article "Sexual Identity of White heroines in Black South Africa: Nadine Gordimer’s take on the Apartheid struggle" is written by Sharanya Ganguly. It was published in Quest Journal: Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science under volume 5 in the year 2017. The paper highlights how apartheid had a great influence on the relationship of man and woman. Through two significant novels Burger’s Daughter and A Sport of Nature, the author deals with the treatment of sexuality and its impact on the lives of two white heroines of these novels. The article also shows how their search for identity and the importance of the self is influenced, overshadowed and eclipsed by their political motives. According to the author, discrimination on the basis of race and gender and anti-apartheid struggle can never go hand in hand.

The book entitled The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside is another must-read book written by Stephen Clingman. It was published in the year 1986 by The University of Massachusetts Press. The book was originally written as a doctoral thesis, submitted at Oxford University in 1983. It is a great source of information about Gordimer and her literary corpus in which the author deals with the central themes and developing consciousness of history through her novels. Stephen Clingman has made a historical analysis of her works very accurately. According to Clingman, through her minute observation of the society she inhabits, Gordimer provides an extraordinary and unique insight into historical experience in the period in which she has been writing. Clingman reads her novels in relation to the historical and Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University social background of that era and provides an important and informative tour through the career of Gordimer whose novels reflect the disorder and turmoil of South African history. According to Clingman, the 'evolution' of a writer can be traced effectively in the novels of Gordimer. The book shows how Gordimer’s intellectual world expanded beyond national confines. She according to the author of the book has moved from political ignorance to a profound politicality, from aspects of a racist mental world to one approaching a revolutionary alignment.

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The article “Equality or Unity? Black Consciousness, White Solidarity, and the New South Africa in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter and July’s People” is written by Edward Powell. It was published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, under Vol. 14 in the year 2017. The author endeavors to show the ways Black Consciousness Movement affected Nadine Gordimer and all those white liberals who aspired to see a race free country. Through the novels Burger’s Daughter and July’s People the author shows how for Gordimer the movement was necessary for black liberation, as she believed that if whites were to have a place in a post- apartheid South Africa, then they had to join blacks in a “hybridized cultural expression”.

Stephen Gray’s article “Gordimer's "A World of Strangers" as Memory." ” is one of the important article relevant to the title of this thesis. It was published in the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, under Vol. 19 in the year 1988. The author studies Gordimer’s 1958 novel A World of Strangers from historical perspective. According to him rereading the novel today is indeed like reclaiming a past unknown, it is one of the important novels of Nadine Gordimer which tells us how things in Johannesburg really were at the time of writing this novel. The author also differentiates Gordimer's version of the 50’s landscape with that of the current landscape (80’s) of South Africa. Stephen Gray further tries to show in the article that many of the historical events like the demolition of Sophiatown, Sharpeville massacre, the Treason Trial, the outlawing of black resistance in the form of the ANC and PAC are quite accurately foreseen by Gordimer in the novel.

Sheila Roberts in her article “Nadine Gordimer’s 'Family of Women’” which Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University was published in the journal Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, in the year 1983 analyses Gordimer’s works from the feminist perspective. The article shows how Gordimer’s female characters are troubled about their moral position as citizens living under apartheid than about their position as women relating to men. Most of Gordimer’s novels contain female protagonists and through her writing she shows that her women characters can think as men do, work and manifest an equal physical courage like men, and are by no means 'second-class' citizens. Sheila Roberts thus believes that had Gordimer not been a South African writer living under such

Review of Literature political turmoil she might well have written novels that allowed her to be classed among contemporary feminist writers.

The book entitled Nadine Gordimer is written by Judie Newman. It was published in the year 1988 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Newman in the book makes an in depth study on Nadine Gordimer and appraises her works from the perspective of race and gender. Newman argues that though Gordimer’s frequent argument was that any feminist activity should remain subordinate to the struggle against apartheid, but she herself is doubly marginalised for being a white on one hand and a woman on the other. Besides, the author of the book also shows how her writing offers an important contribution to the post modernist reassessment of narrative poetics, and a conscious challenge to European conceptions of the novel. The novels which Newman includes in her study are The Late Bourgeois World, A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People and A Sport of Nature.

Thus the books and articles reviewed above provide the interpretation of the title of this thesis as it is very much important to get the background information of the topic while working on it and also helps to realize how people are interpreting it today. Therefore according to Andrew S. Denney and Richard Tewksbury literature review is all about the reader’s “understanding of what is already known about the topic, what is not yet known, and therefore a good idea of what exactly the current study is going to examine.” (221)

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Review of Literature

REFRENCES:

Denney, Andrew S., and Richard Tewksbury. "How to Write a Literature

Review.” Journal of Criminal Justice Education, vol. 24, no. 2, 2013, pp.

218-234.

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Chapter 1

Dismantling Apartheid: The Vision of ‘a natural writer’

Nadine Gordimer through her writing explores the effects of apartheid upon both whites in general and blacks in particular. Like most South African writers, she also deals with the themes of violence during the colonial rule. Her works mainly focus on the theme of apartheid and the tensions created by it. Gordimer was born in the year 1923, the same year when African National Congress established some new strategies to fight against racial segregation before real apartheid came into being. During that time, diamond and gold were discovered in South Africa and mining towns were established very quickly. She was born in one such mining town called Springs near Johannesburg which was “an unattractive, conventional, racially segregated and intellectually provincial place” (Barnard 938). Her parents were Jews. As she suffered from a heart problem, she was home tutored up to the age of sixteen and remained confined to her home with books as her only companions. Rita Barnard calls her an “autodidact” for “she did not finish high school and attended university for only one year, without finishing a degree” (939). During these years she was kept unaware about what was happening in the country on the basis of race. She recalls her childhood in an interview with Jannika Hurwitt:

When I was eleven – I don’t know how my mother did this – she took me out of school completely. For a year I had no education at all. But I read tremendously. And I retreated into myself, I became very Maulanaintrospective Azad Library, . . . then Aligarhshe arranged Muslim for me Universityto go to a tutor for three hours a day . . . It was such an incredible loneliness. It’s a terrible thing to do to a child . . . I spent my whole life, from eleven to sixteen, with older people, with people of my mother’s generation . . . I was a little old woman. (132-33)

With the passage of time she got intensely interested in solitary reading and writing and started writing at a young age. She calls herself a ‘natural writer’ and says “I am really what is known as a natural writer. I’ve been writing the way people who have a voice sing, from a very young age without any self-consciousness, without saying to

Chapter 1 myself, ‘I am going to be a writer’” (Loercher 96). By ‘natural’ she means that she began writing as a child, when she didn’t know what apartheid was. She states “I started to write at fifteen the way other kids dance and sing” (Boyers 194). When Gordimer grew up, she tried to escape from the clutches of family bindings. The outside world she witnessed was full of tension, arrests, imprisonments and violence everywhere. She started writing against this mayhem created by the apartheid government. Her works record the historical incidents and thus carry a great significance in the history of South African literature. She started her writing career with short stories. Some of her initial stories include “The Quest for Seen Gold” and “Come Again Tomorrow”. Gordimer’s literary corpus comprises of twenty one collections of stories, fifteen novels, a play, three collections of essays and several lectures and speeches. Some of her prominent short story collections are Once Upon A Time (1989), Jump: and Other Stories (1991) and Loot and Other Stories (2003). The three collections of essays are The Black Interpreters (1973), The Essential Gesture: Writing Politics and Places (1988) and Writing and Being: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1995). Although she was an accomplished short story writer yet she says “I don’t consider myself a short-story writer primarily – whatever other people may think – because I really do want to write novels” (Ross 37). Her gossamer of fiction includes The Lying days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honor (1970), The Conservationist (1974), Burgers Daughter (1979), July’s People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Son’s Story (1990) and None to Accompany Me (1994). Some of the novels written after the end of apartheid include The House Gun (1998), The Pick Up (2001), Get a Life (2005) and No Time Like the Present (2012). The list of prizes that Gordimer has been conferred over the years testifies to her status as a writer. At Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University the apex is the noble prize for literature in the year 1991. The list goes on with Booker Prize in the year 1974 for her novel The Conservationist, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Premio Malaparte, the Nellie Sachs Prize and the Grand Aigle d’Or. Some honorary titles bequeathed on her as a writer of high stature include a member of the Orden del A´guila Azteca (Mexico), an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (Britain).

Chapter 1

African literature is a literature of national consciousness reminding one of the discrimination and injustice being done by the colonizers. It is used as a weapon of social awareness. Gordimer’s definition of African literature is:

[T]hat African writing is writing done in any language by Africans themselves and by others of whatever skin color who share with Africans the experience of having been shaped, mentally and spiritually, by Africa rather than anywhere else in the world. One must look at the world from Africa, to be an African writer, not look upon Africa from the world. Given this Africa-centred consciousness, the African writer can write about what he pleases, and even about other countries, and still his work will belong to African literature. (“The Interpreters” 9)

Gordimer believes that when citizens of any nation can’t express their political opinions they are bound to look for some other alternatives and believes that literature especially protest literature is the best way to break the silenced voice. In societies like Africa, where there is no freedom and writers have to undergo severe censorship and where it is very difficult for the literary writings to overcome restrictions, Gordimer has something to suggest:

Any government, any society - any vision of a future society - that has respect for its writers must set them as free as possible to write in their own various ways, in their own choices of form and language, and according to their own discovery of truth. (“A Writer's Freedom” 49)

She says that although some black South African writers are very disturbed about the Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University question of languages and prefer to write in their own mother tongue and not in English language which remains confined to their own country yet:

Black writers in South Africa are the ones who are making a real and successful attempt to bring the idea of literature close, from 'out there' above the heads of ordinary people. They are doing so, of course, by taking literature into the political struggle as a psychological support and weapon. (“From Apartheid to Afrocentrism” 49)

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Gordimer believes that to make the South African literature successful and progressive both black and white writers have to write, keeping race bar at bay. She believes “If there is to be a real South African literature . . . South African writers, black and white, will have to find an African consciousness for themselves beyond consciousness of division” (“From Apartheid to Afrocentrism” 50). According to Stephen Gray, “her concern has always been that the literature should flourish despite the climate of repression that has created daily struggle with censorship, banning of books and people, intervention, and financial hardships” (263).

Apartheid which Gordimer calls “fragmentation of a society” (qtd in Smyer) means racial discrimination and the term ‘racial discrimination’ means, any distinction, on the basis of race, descent, color, national or ethnic origin. Race is not simply characterized on the basis of color but facial features, a person’s characteristics and even one’s shape and size of skull. Apartheid therefore according to Gordimer is:

[A]bout the body. It’s about physical differences. It’s about black skin, and it’s about woolly hair instead of straight, long blonde hair, and black skin instead of white skin. The whole legal structure is based on the physical, so that the body becomes something supremely important. (Smith 304)

It has been the primary issue of most of the African works in general and South African literature in particular. In the countries like South Africa where there is a chaotic political history, it becomes inevitable for writers to mingle their creative abilities and social circumstances and produce works of enduring nature. The impact of apartheid wasMaulana felt in the Azad writings Library, of all those Aligarh who faced Muslim it and Universityalso in those who were associated with it. During apartheid, almost all writers took the challenge of writing about it. Some of the well-known writers of that age were Alan Paton, Herman Charles Bosman, Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Can Themba, Ruth Miller, Dennis Brutus, Mphahlele and Alex La Guma. Other writers like Ngugi wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Peter Abrahams also addressed the racial atrocities of the whites. However many of the South African writers decided to leave South Africa after the continuous brutalities by the government in power. Ezekiel Mphahlele who is a distinguished personality in the field of world black

Chapter 1 literature came back to South Africa after twenty years of exile. According to Gordimer these writers left the country “because as an African intellectual there was no place for them here, no suitable job for them, and no possible life for them at all” (Terkel 24). This tension between belonging and not belonging, home and exile can be clearly seen in the novels of Nadine Gordimer. She personally had a great regard for all of the South African writers whether black or white who wrote about the experience of living in a racially segregated society in their writing because she believed “a writer has a voice” and says “you can’t live in a country like mine and not speak out” (Marchant 253). She praised J. M. Coetzee for giving insight into South Africa’s oppressive apartheid regime during the same political turmoil under which she herself wrote. Gordimer while eulogizing him says “he's a wonderful writer and marvellous things are going to come from him” (Boyers 189). She also calls Alex LaGuma as a “wonderful black novelist” (Boyers 189). Ezekiel Mphahlele who “deals with the problem of social fragmentation in relation to South African culture as a whole” (Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer 207) is the one whom Gordimer admired the most. In an answer to the question “what writers currently, do you especially admire, in South Africa, or on the continent as a whole?” Gordimer says, “[a]mong black writers, there is one who is particularly well-known, Ezekiel Mphahlele” (Boyers 189). Peter Abrahams was another eminent literary figure of that time. He was the first colored novelist of South Africa.

As a writer one is bound to write inside of his/her experience in a society living under oppression and political turmoil. South African writers also took literature not as an art but as a political tool and became ‘protest writers’ who wrote for freedom and equality in their country which was reeling under racial antipathy. ProtestMaulana literature became Azad aLibrary, main tool Aligarhfor anti-apartheid Muslim resistance University efforts. Gordimer however regarded herself a writer first and then a political activist. She says that any involvement of politics in her works is because of the politicised country in which she lived. The experience of coercion under apartheid provoked almost all South African writers to write and felt the immediate need to convey the wishes of people to the society. They took it as their social responsibility towards their country and tried to find possible solutions out of it. Gordimer too according to Dagmar Barnouw, believed that “South Africa's problems have been articulated most fully by its creative writers - not by its politicians, journalists, historians” (Barnouw 255). They echoed

Chapter 1 the repressed voices of the natives and remained mainly focussed about apartheid to get rid of the trauma that it had left in their minds. As a result, many writers were forced to leave the country and many faced imprisonments. Nadine Gordimer as an exception refused to go on exile because of her sense of belonging and believed that fight against any political crime and oppression needs an unremitting effort from within the country. She says that “it’s a terrible deprivation when people have to go into exile for political reasons” (288). She thus remained committed to black liberation and upliftment of marginalized Blacks. Though her daughter settled in France, and her son in New York, Gordimer remained in South Africa to become the voice of marginalised sections of society. That is why she was able to give firsthand information of the injustices done to the natives. She says:

There are some whites who, one way or another, are looking for ways to prepare themselves, to live differently under a black majority government in a non-racial state. They believe in a non-racial state and they think that the way toward it is through black liberation. I'm one of them. (Boyers 197-98)

As a staunch critique of apartheid, she primarily wrote against the apartheid system and criticized the perpetrators of it which resulted in the ban of many of her books that lasted for many years. Despite the ban on her novels, Gordimer succeeded in showing the injustice and maltreatment of the natives. She wrote as if censorship did not exist at all and found her readers very much eager to listen. She says “it’s not worth the fuss that there is when a book of mine is banned” (Gross 310-11). Right from her childhood she was an eye witness to the menace of apartheid and as a teenager she saw how her own home and her servant’s home was raided by police Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University time and again. Such incidents inspired her to start her writing career at a very early age and write against the injustices being done to the South African natives at the hands of whites.

Gordimer gives a deep and unique insight into the historical experience of the period in which she was writing. Her novels when read from the new historical perspective carry a great significance in the understanding of South Africa. Many critics call her writings a true and realistic history of South Africa. Infact Gordimer's works cannot be understood fully without relating it to the South African context.

Chapter 1

While history of South Africa gives dates and details of events, acts and laws passed, its literature provides records to show how the daily lives of people were affected by all those events and how that lead to the psychological and physical trauma of men and women. Gordimer believes that fiction presents history as historians cannot; she says “the historian can tell you the events and can trace how the events came about through the power shifts in the world. But the novelist is concerned with the power shifts within the history of individuals who make up history” (Clark 224). She thus is of the opinion that a particular piece of literature can present more vibrant and accurate history than historians. That is why her writings can be seen representing a history of the problems that South Africa faced throughout the gory period of apartheid. Nadine Gordimer is known as the ‘apartheid historian’ as she presents a vivid picture of her time with much subtlety than any historian could have presented. Her works reflect that area of darkness when apartheid marked one of the bloodiest periods in world history. Some of the historical references are clearly seen in her first novel The Lying Days where National Party’s victory in the general election of 1948 and its effect upon the people through the central character Helen Shaw is depicted. The novel also talks about the various acts passed during apartheid which limited the equal rights of blacks like Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949), the Population Registration Act (1950), and the Group Areas Act (1950). Thus, “it is clear that The Lying Days is motivated by the general historical moment of its production” (Clingman, “History from the Inside” 170).

Gordimer belonged to the continent which was called a ‘dark continent’ or ‘heart of darkness’ for it was a savage and mysterious place for Europeans. As a writer, she took the responsibility on her shoulders to break the myth of African primitivismMaulana which Azad was soLibrary, prevalent Aligarh at that timeMuslim that almostUniversity all of the young generations were brought up in the belief that Africa had no past. Their future looked bleak due to decades of colonialism which was a way to maintain uneven privileges of economic and political power of the colonizers to highlight their superior position. According to Edward Said colonialism highlights "domination and inequities of power and wealth" (Culture and Imperialism 19). In a system of Colonialism, a dominant minority subjugates the subordinate majority. The subjugation can be in the form of repression of natives, exploitation of land and natural resources or injustice on social, political and on economic basis. This widens the gap between the colonizers

Chapter 1 and the colonized. Natives are rendered rootless having no origin at all. The situation takes a flip where the settler or colonizer operates as a majority while the oppressed colonized is in the place of the minority. Racism is the ugly face of colonialism. Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized states that:

Racism appears, then, not as an incidental detail, but as a consubstantial part of colonialism. It is the highest expression of the colonial system and one of the most significant features of the colonialist. Not only does it establish a fundamental discrimination between colonizer and colonized … but it also lays the foundation of the immutability of this life. (118)

Racism can result in violent and drastic acts like hatred, exploitation, denial, mass murder etc. It is an instrument of power, which first emerged in the 19th century and it simply refers to the idea that human beings are divided into separate races. Racism is a way of “dividing humanity as well as geographical units under the skin colour” (K Morve 219). In his essay "Racism and Culture" Fanon talks about two types of racism ‘vulgar racism’ in which a native is considered as inferior on biological terms like they have smaller brains and are not too intelligent, where as a white man is considered as a symbol of beauty and superiority. It asserts that blacks have no place in society and need to be excluded so that the culture of dominant white race can remain without any threat.

Apartheid is a kind of ‘internal’ colonization where whites subjugate blacks on all fronts political, economic and social. A full control and power privilege is given to them to rule over blacks who are considered as the ‘Other’. It was the darkest period in the SouthMaulana Africa Azadn history Library, which lasted Aligarh almost Muslimforty years University and witnessed all kinds of turmoil, bias, bloodshed etc. The whites tried to dehumanize the natives through negative stereotypes like ‘other’ ‘Sin is Negro as virtue is White’, ‘Negro is evil’, ‘Negroes are savages, idiots and illiterates’ etc. In the chapter ‘The Fact of Blackness’ Frantz fanon gives his personal experience of how he felt when in France white strangers pointed out his blackness, and was called by stereotypical and derogatory phrases such as “dirty nigger!” or “look, a Negro!” etc. Such experiences of life made him see the different attitude of the world towards blacks. He says:

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In America, Negroes are segregated. In South America, Negroes are whipped in the streets, and Negro strikers are cut down by machine- guns. In West Africa, the Negro is an animal. And there beside me, my neighbour in the university, who was born in Algeria, told me: “As long as the Arab is treated like a man, no solution is possible. (Black Skin White Masks 85)

This shows how blacks are seen as the ‘Other’ in society. The whites are superior, civilized, and blacks are inferior and uncivilized. Racism thus is a part of colonialism which segregates the society and divides it on the basis of binaries like superiority- inferiority, civilized-uncivilized, powerful-powerless and many more. Some of the prominent binaries which Gordimer deals with are white-black, master-slave, powerful-powerless, ruler-ruled. Edward Said in his magnum opus Orientalism also gives a detailed analysis of stereotypes which the Occident give in their representation of the Orient. He says, “the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation. These are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced” (58). Said shows how the Occident (west) define the Orient (east) as uncivilized and under privileged and call them the ‘Other’. The 'Other' is basically a negative term set up by a colonizer’s own dominant image against the colonized. Through these stereotypes they try to maintain their dominant power over these countries. Power is also one of the dominant themes of Gordimer. She shows how black man’s identity is defined in negative terms by those who are in power and how they are placed at the mercy of whites. The blacks lose their sense of identity through the violence committed by whites. In her novel July’s People, she shows what happens to a colonizer when he is deprived of power and how he faces an identity crisis in the absence of power which ultimately leads to his alienation.Maulana Gordimer Azad also Library, highlights Aligarh what can Muslim be called asUniversity ‘linguistic imperialism’ through which she shows how colonized are bound to accept the language of the colonizers without which they will never be accepted on equal terms. For example, July in July’s People while working with the white Smales family feels as if he can’t exist without being able to learn and speak in their language and thus feels bound to adopt their language. He not only loses his linguistic identity but also his cultural originality. He starts understanding himself in relation to whites and develops a sense of inferiority complex. Thus Gordimer shows how the colonizers impose their

Chapter 1 dominant culture upon the blacks and denigrate their culture and values. The culture of the natives is not only suppressed but also obliterated completely.

As a resident of South Africa, Gordimer had a firsthand knowledge of apartheid and its brutal plans. Hence, she was able to portray very minutely the violence because of racism and made it one of the predominant themes of her works. Frantz Fanon talks about the theme of violence in his book The Wretched of the Earth (1961) which can aptly be applied to the fiction of Gordimer and the system of apartheid as a whole. Fanon highlights the way out from colonialism. He called colonialism as a mental illness in both colonizer and colonized which can only be cured by “violence”. Fanon believed that colonized peoples had no other option but to equally attack back at colonizer’s physical and emotional acts of violence with a violence of the same magnitude. He says that “no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them” (The Wretched of the Earth 20). Thus he believes that the native’s violence can unify the people and free them from inferiority complex and despondency and therefore takes violence as a way of liberation from colonization.

South Africa faced various revolutions and one of them was the bloodiest Sharpeville Massacre which “looms in South African history as the 1919 Amritsar shootings do in Indian history” (Roberts, No Cold Kitchen 241). These revolutions led to the Black Consciousness movement. With its rise, the white ego was slowly minified and sidelined as “irrelevant by black activists intent on seizing their destiny in their own hands” (Gross 16). That is what made Anthony Trollope say “South Africa is a country of black men, - and not of white men. It has been so; it is so; it will continue to be so” (qtd. in Davidson 322). It was a movement started by the black Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University anti-apartheid activists who excluded the support of white liberals in their efforts to eradicate apartheid. It was actually a realisation by the blacks to work as a whole and operate as a group in their struggle against apartheid. The Movement held the white supremacy responsible for apartheid. Gordimer came to know about the movement through Bettie du Toit who was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa. Bettie believed that “no one could assess black needs but blacks themselves; no one could decide for them how they could free themselves from white oppression: only they knew what it really was” (qtd. in Roberts, No Cold Kitchen 356). Gordimer talks about Black Consciousness movement and the way it countered the long list of

Chapter 1 intensely racist laws which restricted the black community from enjoying equal rights in society. According to Stephen Clingman, Gordimer “was at least able to present its [Black Consciousness movement] tone and tenor with great accuracy” (The Novels of Nadine Gordimer 208). Character of Baasie/Zwelinzima in Burgers Daughter is a mouth piece of the Black Consciousness Movement. Gordimer is very sympathetic in her portrayal of black South Africans in her writings. She has depicted them as highly cultured and sophisticated. She also represents the white consciousness in South Africa that is why all her white characters are not liberals, some are quite conscious of their positions as whites.

Gordimer attempted to depict the reality of her society as opposed to the white lies. She believes that a writer represents his society. She is of the opinion that a writer chooses his:

Plots, characters, and literary styles; their themes choose them. By this I mean that themes are statements or questions arising from the nature of the society in which the writer finds himself immersed, and the quality of the life around him. In this sense the writer is the voice of the people beyond any glib political connotations of the phrase. (“The Interpreters” 17)

In an interview with Stephen Gray, Gordimer said “I’m reckless when I write, and I always have the feeling that, oh well, it doesn’t really matter, I’m going to do it. It’s got to be done completely or not at all” (Gray 270). Therefore she makes it clear that she writes what she sees as truth without caring for personal consequences. As a writer, she believes that one needs to be honest. She portrays very keenly the paresthesiaMaulana of apartheid Azad by Library, representing Aligarh its effect Muslim on both herUniversity black as well as white characters. Her works present very realistic depiction of alienated world of alienated individuals, wedged in blood-spattered revolutions, grisly massacres and brutal laws and acts which sternly segregated the races as “them” and “us”. Some critics call Gordimer an “interpreter” or “the conscience” of South Africa (Clingman, “History from the inside” 1) for constantly exploring the lives and experiences of the oppressed. Her novels thus are ardent critiques of Apartheid. Gordimer further believed that writer’s freedom “is his right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his society” (“A Writer's

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Freedom” 45). By ‘private view’ she means to say that “[a]ll that the writer can do, as a writer, is to go on writing the truth as he sees it” (“A Writer's Freedom” 45). She feels that a “writer must never let herself become a propagandist. Propagandists have a place; agitprop has a place. But I’m not that person” (Terry Gross 311). She thus provides a real and authentic picture of a place and a vivid description about the South African society and landscape; its scorching heat, its raucous towns and above all its multi-racial tensions. Apartheid had a great damaging effect on social, physical and mental health. It resulted in both physical and Psychiatric illness because of police repression and torture. Gordimer who is acknowledged by Ileana Dimitriu as “an uncompromising anti-apartheid spokesperson” (“Postcolonialising Gordimer” 159) goes deep into the problem and tries to search out the root cause of such problems. Her writings highlight both the psychological and physical effects of apartheid upon a racially torn society where blacks are deprived of their rights from their parents due to political obligations for example her novel The Lying Days “depict the intricate inner lives of individual characters” (“The Civil Imaginary Dimitriu” 30).

Multiracialism and liberalism have been the predominant themes of Gordimer’s early fiction. Liberalism at that time in South Africa advocated multiracialism which brought “together whites and non-white groups who [were] willing to interact with one another despite legalised inequality in apartheid system” (Shigali153). As a part of multi cultural society, Gordimer represents the multi cultural reality of the society of South Africa. She highlights the multi-racial country which according to her “has been highjacked [sic] by the government” (Jeyifo 925). Her novels deal with the troubles of the liberal community who worked for the elimination of racial discrimination in South Africa. Although Gordimer rejected liberalism for Maulanashe might beAzad tainted Library, with white Aligarh capitalism, Muslim by saying, University "I am a white South African radical. Please don't call me a liberal” (qtd. in Dimitriu, “The Civil Imaginary” 31), yet liberal humanism is the keynote of her first two novels A World of Strangers and The Lying Days. In these novels, the characters who belong to different races, try to mingle with each other and minimize the intensity of ferocity among them despite the demarcation by apartheid laws. The creative depiction of the relationship between the white and black characters depicts her inner longing of togetherness irrespective of colour even in frustrating situations. Gordimer considers liberalism as a peaceful way of protest against apartheid. She believes that to get rid

Chapter 1 of the pain of apartheid both blacks and whites need to be interdependent for their calm and comfortable survival. Maureen and Bam in The Lying Days after their shift in roles from master to servant, surrender and want to be in good relation with their black servant July at the end of the novel. Gordimer thus believed that to live in tranquillity in South Africa people from different races should share their love for each other. She personally took some important steps to minimize the difference between blacks and whites. From her very early age, she started meeting with some progressive writers and personalities of that time and tried to search the way out of apartheid. Such activities were later on banned and the government charged some of Gordimer's associates for their anti-government activities. Gordimer then realized that liberalism had its limitations and announced herself to be a radical, “I used to regard myself as a liberal, but I now regard myself as a radical” (Cassere 56), “by radical” she says, “I mean someone who believes in black majority rule” (qtd. in Roberts No Cold Kitchen 161). Gordimer says:

I don’t think there is much we can do now. The blacks have to do it for themselves. Liberals offered them the hand of friendship but it was an empty hand because the liberals have no power . . . In a way, people like me are redundant. We are, or we will be, rejected. (qtd. in Roberts No Cold Kitchen 359)

In an interview with Margaret Walters Gordimer says:

[M]any blacks felt that liberals had sold them down the river. If you don’t succeed, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve done. If you don’t succeed, then you don’t count any more. It does seem indeed that Maulanaliberalism Azad did Library, not achieve. Aligarh We know Muslim that it Universitydidn’t achieve the end of apartheid in South Africa; indeed, things just simply got worse during 60’s 70’s. It didn’t meet the historical demands of the time. (291-92)

Thus it can also be said that through these themes Gordimer shows the failure of liberalism as an ideology and as a means of resistance to racism. It can also be said that through the use of liberal humanism, Gordimer shows how the whites try to overcome the guilt of being the advocates of the racist regime.

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Gordimer has refused to be labelled a feminist writer and says feminism has no role to play in South African politics. She says “I am not a feminist. And I don’t see myself in that spectrum at all. I’m a woman, and obviously what I write is influenced by the fact that I’m a woman” (Walters 295). She primarily focuses on racism and not on feminism. She states that she is simply “a writer who happens to be a woman,” thus refusing, “publicly and officially, to assume what a feminist critic assumes to be the duty of a woman writer” (Driver 33). When asked in an interview with Biodun Jeyifo about her “rejection of a feminist label, even though you do write powerfully and consistently about female characters” Gordimer replied “but my books are not "women's books."”(927). Therefore she confirms that she is not a feminist writer. Though she never called herself a feminist writer yet, “Gordimer's portraits of women are generally much more vital and memorable than those of men” (Roberts 54). While writing in a male dominated society she highlights the experience of women in that society. Some critics believe that if Gordimer had not been a writer of South Africa living under such a political turmoil she definitely would have been a feminist writer for most of her works contain female protagonists. As Sheila Roberts says, “had she not been a South African writer and one who possesses a highly informed political sense, she might well have written novels that allowed her to be classed among contemporary feminist writers” (45). Gordimer shows how her female characters are doubly marginalized on the basis of race and gender. Her characters are her mouth pieces. She herself was doubly marginalized as on the one hand, the blacks distanced from her for her being white and on the other, while taking a stand to support blacks, she alienated herself from her own community. But as a writer she remained committed to her writing and became a vociferous voice of the voiceless. Her commitment towards writings was what Jean Paul Sartre calls ‘literature engage’. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Nadine Gordimer clearly clarifies that she is apolitical and a staunch radical. She says South Africa has never seen a government meant for equality of all. There “has always been a government in which the majority of the people were voiceless” (Cassere 56). In an interview with Claude Servan Schreiber in the year 1979 she says, “because the society in which I live is so permeated with politics, my work has become intimately connected with the translation of political events of the way politics affect the lives of people” (114). Thus she believes that it is intense political circumstances that have changed the personal lives of people. Therefore she clarifies

Chapter 1 that she is a radical. Though politics was not primarily the main concern of her works, yet she couldn’t avoid it from giving a political tinge for it affected the personal lives of people. Gordimer’s political activism however has nothing to do with her art. She says, "I was writing before I knew what politics was”. She developed her political awareness during her school days in Springs, South Africa and it was then that she began to notice the detrimental and degrading condition of natives. It later became the subject of her writings. She says thus:

[T]he real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics. (Hurwitt 138-39)

Most of the black South African writers primarily wrote autobiographies to get themselves rid of the pain that apartheid had left in their minds, and then later on experimented with new forms of writing. Autobiography was the appropriate genre for them. This is how they challenged the racist and patriarchal structures that fix them as generic beings. Many works of Gordimer too are regarded as autobiographical by critics. Through her characters she records the feelings, pain and sufferings that she herself went through. The representation of her own life is the representation of the lives of all white women in general and black women in particular. Her works are marked by a sense of alienation and pain that she experienced during the different stages of her life. Some of her novels which mark an autobiographical strand include The Lying Days, where the protagonist Helen Shaw Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University bears close resemblance with her. Like Helen, Gordimer also grew up in a mining town, attended the University of the Witwatersrand and at a young age explored the social worlds of Johannesburg. According to Suresh Roberts, “like Helen’s, Nadine’s childhood world was also the four walls of the home, more or less; a domestic pinpoint of existence, a world in which a ringing doorbell is an event” (54) and like Gordimer Helen “rebels against the confines of the small-town mentality” (Dimitriu 40). Helen like Gordimer also had a Jewish background. Rosa burger in July’s People also represents Nadine Gordimer. Through her, she affirms her own commitment to remain in South Africa and be eye witness to racial antipathy and become a staunch

Chapter 1 critique of it. She too did not flee from the oppressive white governments and seek refuge in any other country.

Prophetic vision is a part of Gordimer’s contribution to the South African literary corpus. She had a gifted creativity and foresight. Her far-sightedness can clearly be seen in her novels like July’s People, A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, A Sport of Nature and she was admired by The Royal Swedish Academy on the realization of her prophetic vision. She is presented as a seer who predicts the ill consequences of apartheid if not removed on time and portrays an imaginary situation which can result in the case of civil war in South Africa. As a humanist, she foresees South Africa free from any racial antipathy and full of love and harmony. Gordimer imagined post apartheid South Africa and worked hard to achieve it. She was hopeful that South African Blacks would overpower whites in their struggle for equal social, political and economic rights and free themselves from apartheid and live equally with other communities in the country. Her novels contain a utopian vision of a multi-racial, multi-cultural and unified country. In her novel July’s People she predicts about the time when things will get topsy-turvy and power will be in the hands of the Blacks with Whites, playing a subordinate role. She warns whites to be prepared for such a possibility with a U-turn of situations. In The Conservationist Gordimer also imagines the barren future of whites. Gordimer’s prophetic ability gives her free will to express the outcomes of brutal laws of apartheid in a country where freedom of expression was gagged. Some other visions of future South Africa which she prophesised include the role which women will play in putting an end to apartheid that is why most of her works have female central characters like Rosa Burger, Vera Stark, Hillela, etc who face the agony of apartheid with utmost gritMaulana and courage. Azad Multi Library,-racialism Aligarhand multi- culturalismMuslim University will pave the way for a race free South Africa as depicted by Toby’s liberal bent of mind and multi- racial attitude in A World of Strangers which can counter the racial segregation in Johannesburg. To get rid of the apartheid one needs to be more radical than liberal. Thus she claims herself to be a radical. This point of view is made clear in Burgers Daughter.

Nadine Gordimer’s subject matter has primarily been the effect of apartheid and the upheaval created by it in the lives of South Africans. She courageously took the themes of injustice and challenged the racist government. “Her fiction brings us to

Chapter 1 the wall that separates white and black, white and white and to the threshold at which momentous change is imminent” (Goodheart 117). As a proud African, and a staunch anti-apartheid writer, Gordimer did not choose to go into exile and took every pain and stress to stay in South Africa. She is of the opinion that “I simply wrote about South Africa because that is my home; it’s the thing I know; because I have always lived here” (Terkel 13). She could have easily joined the oppressor for she was of their race however she did not prefer to do that and took a firm stand against the menace of apartheid. In an interview with Claude Servan, Gordimer says

I am often asked: “if you did not live in South Africa, where would you choose to live? In England probably?” naturally I feel comfortable in England. I could use my own language, the one in which I work, which for a writer is of primary importance. However I do not belong more to England than I do to France, which I love and where my daughter lives. I belong completely to my country. (114)

She explains that her affiliation with South Africa is not that of a ‘writer’ but of a ‘Person’. She pledges that:

I have no religion, no political dogma-only plenty of doubts about everything except my conviction that the colour bar is wrong and utterly indefensible. Thus I have found the basis of a moral code that is valid for me. Reason and emotion meet in it and perhaps this is as near to faith as I shall ever get. (Ross 34-35)

As a white, she showed to the world that the notion that whites are born to rule and demean other races is fallacious. Her spirit of writing made her endure all the Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University adversities which came her way. Living under racially torn society like South Africa, forced her to become a staunch voice against the wall which separates the people of different races despite living on the same piece of land. Gordimer wrote for the rights of the underprivileged from her childhood and said:

I don't write about apartheid. I write about people who happen to live under that system. I'm not a propagandist, I'm not a reporter. I am a natural writer. By that I mean that I began writing as a child, when I didn't know what apartheid was. Not only didn't I know what it was but

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apartheid was not officially formulated yet. I was obviously living in a society of intense racial prejudice, but I did not know. I simply accepted that that was the way of the world. I am not, you see, a writer who has been made by my situation. (Boyers 210-211)

Gordimer believes in equality of everyone irrespective of caste, color or religion. Though being a Jew and a white, she believes that she is no more superior to blacks and says thus, “for me, being Jewish is like being black: you simply are. To want to deny it is disgusting. It’s a denial of humanity. There's no shame in being black and there’s no shame in being Jewish” (Lazar 163-64). She sees no difference between the people of different races and says:

I don’t see any difference between black and white people. I choose the people that I like, and I have a certain standard of behaviour that is general, no matter what color or creed or anything else. But, it doesn’t work in a society where, in the general frame work, people are judged by the color of their skin. (Terkel 20)

She considers color bar as a taboo and freedom from it as a second birth as she says:

I think that people like myself have two births, and the second one comes when you break out of the color bar. It’s a real rebirth when you break out of your background, the taboos of your background, and you realize that the color bar is not valid, and is meaningless to you. (Terkel 16)

Thus Gordimer is deeply concerned with the transformation of society and believes “both men andMaulana women, Azad black andLibrary, white, Aligarh equally significantly Muslim University involved in the processes and events of politics and equally caught in the dilemma of the moral validity of action” (Roberts 56). Suresh Roberts believes that “Gordimer saw the 1994 Mandela election as her personal liberation from the status of the colonial” (622) and for her the end of the apartheid was “like being born into a new world” (Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer xii).

After apartheid the process of building a new nation started with great fervour. Writers started exploring new ways and policies to connect the nation together and made an attempt to forget their past experience of living under racial injustice and

Chapter 1 political tyranny and to reconstruct a “new nation”. Gordimer’s post apartheid novels reflect on the problems which act as hindrances in this process and thus helps in building a new nation with a new identity. The end of apartheid was however not the end of colonial rule in South Africa, western ideologies are still ingrained in the minds of the colonised people. Although British imperialism in South Africa ended in the year 1910 when the Union of South Africa was formed, it did mark the end of colonial age but it did not bring any change for the blacks who formed the majority of South African population. The ideological colonization of the human mind which post colonial literature deals with still exists in the form of apartheid which reduced blacks to mere beasts and whites to a ‘civilized community’.

Though Colonialism has ended, yet the remains of tyranny still persist. Even though apartheid has ended, but racism continues. Frantz Fanon is of the opinion that the end of colonialism is not simply a political and economic change, but psychological change too. The social and economic gap between blacks and whites is wide. The discrimination in South Africa has diminished but not ended. According to Morve Roshan K, “some South Africans [mostly whites] have a standard of living equal to that of the world’s wealthiest nations yet millions more South Africans live in utmost poverty” (222). Blacks are ill treated and ill represented in every field of life and are forced to be aliens in their own homeland where whites impose upon them their language, culture and customs. European imperialism seems to have been replaced by American imperialism’. Incidents of racial discrimination still haunt the world. Ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar government is a reality in the twenty first century. The government does not recognise them as an ethnic group. Thousand of Rohingya Muslims have been butchered and millions renderedMaulana homeless. Azad Similarly Library, the invasion Aligarh on Afghanistan, Muslim IraqUniversity and Gaza can also be termed as racism. Currently the military occupation of these countries and the cultural occupation of far wider spheres has made it obvious that the end of apartheid was hardly the last reel of colonialism. The invasions show that the game of power has not vanished from all over the world. Both the perpetrators and the victims do not easily forget the past. The atmosphere of violence, hunger and neglect continues to haunt them. The repercussions of repression are felt in the inferior economic and social life of the colonized. The past blunders are telling upon the present generations. Although South Africa now has a democratic government and universal suffrage allowing all

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South African citizens the right to vote and hold political office, yet the country’s economy, civil service, and military remain largely dominated by the white minority, forcing continued compromise and power struggle.

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

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Lazar, Karen, and Nadine Gordimer. “‘A Feeling of Realistic Optimism’: An

Interview with Nadine Gordimer.” Salmagundi, no. 113, 1997, pp. 149–165.

Loercher, Diana. “South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer: Novelist with a conscience.”

Conversations with Nadine Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and

Marilyn Dallman Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp.96-100.

Gordimer, Nadine. “From Apartheid to Afrocentrism.” English in Africa, vol. 7, no. 1,

1980, pp. 45–50.

Marchant, Peter, et al. “A Voice from a Troubled Land: A Conversation with Nadine

MaulanaGordimer.” AzadConversations Library, with Aligarh Nadine GordimerMuslim, editedUniversity by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990,

pp. 253-263

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Earthscan Publications, 2003.

Roberts, Ronald Suresh. No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer. STE

Publishers, 2005.

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Roberts, Sheila. “Nadine Gordimer’s 'Family of Women’.” Theoria: A Journal of

Social and Political Theory, no. 60, 1983, pp. 45–57.

Ross, Alan. “Nadine Gordimer a Writer in South Africa.” Conversations with Nadine

Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour,

University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 33-42.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1994.

Schreiber, Claude Servan. “Nadine Gordimer: A White Africa Against Apartheid”

Conversations with Nadine Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and

Marilyn Dallman Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 108-

121.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.

Shigali, Hellen Roselyne L. "Africa-Centred Consciousness versus Liberalism in

Selected Novels by South African Nadine Gordimer." International Journal of

Language and Linguistics, vol. 5, no. 3, 2018, pp. 148-154.

Smyer, Richard I. "Africa in the Fiction of Nadine Gordimer." ARIEL: A Review of

International English Literature, vol. 16, no.2, 1985, pp. 15-29.

Terkel, Studs.Maulana “Nadine Gordimer” Azad Library, Conversations Aligarh with Muslim Nadine Gordimer University, edited by

Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, University Press of

Mississippi, 1990, pp.12-32.

Gordimer, Nadine. “The Interpreters: Some Themes and Directions in African

Literature.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 1970, pp. 9–26.

Chapter 1

Walters, Margaret. “Writers in Conversation: Nadine Gordimer.” Conversations with

Nadine Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman

Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 285-298.

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Chapter 2

Consciousness of History and Political Activism: The Lying Days

The Lying Days is a first-person narrative of Helen Shaw's quest for self identity from childhood to womanhood, from a small mining town of South Africa through university and the city of Johannesburg and finally to Europe. It is a semi- autobiographical bildungsroman novel loaded with insight into human nature. The novel artistically captures the realistic moments in the lives of human beings. It is Gordimer’s first novel and was written when the author was still in her twenties. Divided into three parts ‘The Mine’, ‘The Sea’ and ‘The City’, The Lying Days highlights the three different stages in Helen Shaw’s life who is the central character of the novel. The first stage shows Helen’s life under industrial situation, the second stage shows her “apolitical white escapism” (Shabanirad 120) and finally the third stage, “is about Helen's life in Johannesburg, her emotional and intellectual maturity, and her attempts to fashion a way of life different from that offered by her parents” (Ogungbesan 46). At the age of eight, Helen becomes aware about the black township near her white settlement. She realises the inequality created by people on the basis of race and decides to leave her home and settle in Johannesburg. Here she witnesses the tensions and chaos after the victory of the Nationalist Party in elections. She sees another face of the world torn apart by violence unlike the cosy and comfortable world of her parents where she was brought up.

The title of the novel is taken from W. B. Yeats’ collection of verses “The ComingMaulana of Wisdom Azad with Time” Library, as an epigraph:Aligarh Muslim University

Though leaves are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;

Now I may wither into the truth.

The title thus sums up Helen’s physical and psychological growth from childhood to maturity.

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From her childhood days at the mine, her sexual development at Natal, her relationship with Joel Aaron, her days at the University, her friendship with Mary Seswayo, her love affair with Paul Clark, the events of the year 1948 to her final decision of leaving South Africa, there is a continuous development in Helen’s consciousness as she develops from innocence to maturity. The Lying Days therefore is a story of gradual and painful awakening which follows “Helen's quest for liberation from the shaping influence of the 'Mine'; [and her] search for personal autonomy” (Dimitriu 41). Thus The Lying Days is a progress of Helen Shaw from ignorance to knowledge.

The important stage in Helen's life begins when she decides to join the University against her parents will. Her life at the University broadens her vision and enhances her political and social awareness. According to Kolawole Ogungbesan:

The University is a typical background in which Miss Gordimer has examined the relationship between the races in her society – the borderland or frontier where black and white meet virtually as equals, although she realizes that it is impossible to be equals in an unequal society. (Ogungbesan 51)

When Helen was a young girl, her mother avoided leaving her alone in the house “because there were native boys about” (4). She tries to influence Helen’s mind by saying that she is unsafe among the black people. However her perception changes when she leaves home and discovers that they are harmless. Helen realises that there is something mysterious associated with blacks of which the whites are unaware. In the company of Mary, she realises this fear of mysteriousness and enjoys her company.Maulana She learns Azad about Library, the backwardnes Aligarhs of Muslim the black University people when she encounters the poverty of the location where Mary lives. When Helen along with her other friend, drop Mary off to her home, Helen gets a chance to take an elaborate look at the native township. She observes:

And all around, like a child’s revenge of muddy footprints and dirty words scratched on a wall, the natives had fouled the niggling benefits of the white people’s civilization. The siding was littered with bitten- out hunks of stale bread swarming with ants, filthy torn papers and rags clung to the boles of the gum trees, and the smell of stale urine,

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which had been there as long as I could remember, came up from the weeds along the road. (186)

Helen feels ashamed of the mess. This makes her a more ardent critique of the world she is living in and she embraces the other. She begins to feel ashamed of being a white and believes that justice does not exist for the natives. Helen’s feeling of responsibility towards the natives is akin to Gordimer’s own sense of responsibility to her society as a writer. Mary Seswayo, her first friend in the university is a black girl whom Helen meets in a cloakroom. Nadine Gordimer here refers to the University Education Act which was framed in the year 1959 with the intention to eliminate all non-whites from all white universities and to establish separate racial universities and schools. Helen’s meeting with Mary further alienates her from her family. Gordimer gives a detailed description about the racial descrimination even at places like school where uniform makes them look alike irrespective of caste and colour. Helen is shocked at such occasions and she sees how rare it is to find a place where a black girl can wash her hands in the same place as a white girl. Helen is told by her mother to use only those public amenities meant for whites so that she can stay away from the places which are meant for blacks. Her parents don’t want her to make black or coloured friends. This shows their racist bent of mind. Helen realizes that the house in which Mary is living is in a dilapidated condition and not feasible for studies and so she decides to bring her home against her parents wish:

Why shouldn’t Mary Seswayo come and work here for a week or ten days? no one would disturb her, she would bother no one . And there was the playroom . . . that had been used to store my toys and was now a place for things that had no place. She could sleep there; it was Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University neither inside the house nor out. I could clear it up and put a bed in. (186)

Helen’s decision enrages her mother and her attitude towards Mary is not good at all. Despite Helen’s assurance that she is as good as any white “she’s as clean as a white person and she’d do her own room and so on. It’s just to give her somewhere to work” (188), her mother is reluctant to keep her at her home saying, “Where will she wash? And where’s she going to have her meals? That’s something. I don’t fancy her using my bath (188). Helen’s mother is annoyed that Mary has come to her house.

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“[h]er eyes searched me, shocked, and her nostrils widened, her mother settled in a kind of distressed anoyance” (201). Helen observes the racist approach towards her friend Mary, which makes her feel unpleasant from the inside.

Mary represents the masses of black South Africa who were marginalised in all aspects of life during apartheid. Through her, Gordimer tries to give the real depiction of an apartheid torn South Africa. Mary is presented as a very shy girl which makes it difficult for her to interact “an obstinacy of shyness made it very difficult to talk to her” (126). Helen realises it is the colour bar that results in her shyness while talking with people and mingling with other classmates in the university. She can’t use places like the lavatory or sit in the places which are meant for whites only. Helen says:

[B]ecause she was black she couldn’t even go to the lavatory if she wanted to. There simply was no public cloakroom for native men or women in the whole shopping center of Johannesburg . . . [her] flat was nowhere near a native bus route, she could not travel on a European bus, and if she went home by train . . . there would be a dangerous walk between the halt and her home at the other end. (167)

Through her, Gordimer shows how apartheid policy intrudes into the personal lives of people by restricting them from doing what they want to. As a black person, Mary is very conscious of her position among whites in the university:

But no airiness could take from that quite, serious little figure the consciousness of privilege that sent it, alone, down the corridors and down the flanking steps and through the gardens out into the street; Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University into Johannesburg, to be swept aside with errand boys and cooks and street cleaners, still alone. (128)

The novel presents Helen’s experiences of race and interracial relationship from childhood to political activism. While living in the Mines before she leaves her home, Helen is unaware about the life of natives across the boundaries which separate them. When Helen comes close to Joel Aaron whom she meets in the train, she realizes the other side of the world. Joel introduces Helen to new interests, new friends and above all new ideas. As a guiding light, he helps her to explore the

Chapter 2 realities of life. Thus according to Ileana Dimitriu, “The Lying Days is about the search for truth in the process of growing up” (33). Through Joel's intervention, “Helen learns about the fine dividing-line between social complication and idealism” and her relationship with him helps her to “liberate herself from feeling trapped by the people and places in her life” (Dimitriu 43). The difference in the family background makes it difficult for them to develop a successful relationship. She observes her family’s attitude towards Joel who is looked down upon by Christians. She understands how deep the roots of racism are and how even Jews despite their intelligence and neutral mindset are subject to bigotry. She recognizes the difference in lifestyle of Jews and her own family:

It was not spring in the Aarons’ house. The air of a matured distilled indoor season, an air that has been folded away in cupboards with old newsprint and heavy linen, cooked in ten-years’ pots of favourite foods, burned with the candles of ten-years’ Friday nights, rested in the room with its own sure permeance, reaching every corner of the ceiling, passing into the dimness of passages, with the persistence of a faint, perpetual smoke. (108)

As an emigrant, Joel’s community in the novel is treated in postcolonial terminology as ‘diasporic community’ for he is an outsider. The experiences of these communities have attracted the attention of many recent post colonial writers. Going back to the history of its usage, it can be seen that the term ‘Diaspora’ was first applied to the Jewish community, who were discriminated and oppressed throughout the world. The term started later on to be used in many contexts. Diaspora according to Pramod K Nayar, “suggests an individual’s linkage to the former home and the Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University present one, to a culture left behind and to a culture now adopted” (166). Post colonial writers predominantly deal with ‘Diaspora identities’ and highlight how those who live in Diaspora share an emotional connection with their ancestral places. Diaspora communities face tremendous identity crises for they are excluded from feeling that they belong to the ‘new country’. Their culture is demeaned and they have according to John Mcleod, “experiences of feeling rootless and displaced” (216). They feel a kind of an ‘inferiority complex’ and ‘dependency complex’.

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Gordimer’s ancestors were Jews. Her father immigrated to Africa when he was thirteen. Gordimer records in the novel how Jews as immigrants are marginalised through the character of Joel. Helen’s mother does not treat him well and most of the time tries to keep him at arm’s length. While talking to him, her father uses phrases like “an outsider” “your people” “the customs of your people” (115) making sure that he feels like an outsider. Helen later on breaks up with Joel because he comes from an altogether different culture with a different religious belief. Through Helen-Joel relationship, Gordimer reveals her affinities for the Jews. She herself was distanced from her Jewish community by her mother and was sent to a convent school.

Helen’s relationship with Paul is the focal point of the novel. The relationship provides her “contact with the reality she had missed both in Atherton and at the university” (Green 547). Paul Clark comes from Rhodesia and works in the Native Affairs Department. Helen likes him because Paul is deeply commited to fight against the atrocities of apartheid as Helen says, “I loved Paul and part of my loving him was my belief and pride in the work he had chosen” (300). She further says:

The job that Paul did first interested then excited me. There was nothing romantic about it, except that it was poorly paid, a vocation rather than a profession. Yet it was the only kind of job, unless one was a priest working in a location mission that could bring a white man deep into the life that went on behind the working faces of the Africans who surrounded us . . . as a welfare officer, Paul entered into the gamut of the African's lives. (239-240)

Paul is presented by Gordimer as a revolutionary and visionary figure who struggles hardMaulana to see an apartheid Azad -Library,free South Africa.Aligarh He Muslimis perturbed University by the disgraced life of blacks. He does not consider his job at the Native Affairs Department merely as a means of livelihood but as a responsibility to serve his community. His frequent visits to Sophiatown to persuade those husbands who are not on good terms with their wives are not part of his job. Paul is passionately involved in the movement. He sacrifices his private life for the public cause. Gordimer here refers to Nelson Mandela who in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom reveals his first time experience in a national campaign. He wonders how much one has to sacrifice his personal life for the struggle, “a man involved in the struggle was a man without a

Chapter 2 home life. It was in the midst of the Day of protest that my second son, Makgatho Lewanika, was born” (111). Paul like Nelson Mandela adopts the Gandhian philosophy of ‘ahimsa’ and tries to be a passive rebel, “I saw him sitting over books and tracts about the methods of passive resistance that Gandhi and Nehru had used in India” (299). He faces every obstacle with grit and courage and is enraged when Helen talks about the futility of the department’s work:

Paul had made up his mind to do the impossible. I watched him and it was in his face and the way he walked and the way he performed the most trivial of daily actions . . . If I railed, as I did, against the maddening futility of much of the department’s work, he would fly to defend it from what he sarcastically called the easy attack of ignorance. (300)

In the company of Paul, Helen gains political consciousness. He is committed to his work despite disillusionments. And it is his commitment to the cause that make him a source of joy for Helen.

Gordimer believes that fiction projects more history than any historian. The Lying Days records the various historical facts of that time. When the novel was written, The Nationalist Party ruled South Africa which introduced apartheid and discriminated against the blacks through various laws and acts. The novel provides a true and realistic scenerio of the age by realistically depicting the poor and detrimental condition of blacks and highly sophisticated life styles of whites. The transition of 1948 has made a major contribution to the thematic tension of the novel. According to Dorothy Driver, in the novel Gordimer attempts to “document the kind of SouthMaulana African lifeAzad in literature Library, that Aligarh has not beenMuslim documented University before” (31). Paul gives Helen the historical background of the time when The Nationalist Party implemented the plans of apartheid. He tells her how they legalized apartheid through various laws and acts against blacks and snatched their rights from them and how they won 1948 elections by raising race issue. He calls the perpetrator of apartheid as ‘bad Malan’. Prime Minister Daniel Francois Malan hatred of the blacks was to the extent that “If there was a shortage of meat: Malan doesn’t think we need to eat . . . if there was no house for a man and his family: Malan wants us to live like animals on the veld. In parliament cabinet ministers spoke of them as “kaffirs” (260). With the

Chapter 2 coming of the Nationalist Party into power, there was a ban on mixed marriages with the passing of The Mixed Marriage act of 1949. Gordimer gives a glimpse of it in the novel also when Paul meets the desolate coloured woman who is married to a white man who “had never heard of the ban” (261). She is separated from her husband for violating the law of the Nationalist Party and Gordimer calls it shameful:

When the Nationalists introduced the ban on mixed marriages and also made it punishable for white and black men and women to cohabit, there was something shameful in the manner in which the police hunted up their prosecutions, shining torches in upon the little room where an old coloured woman lay asleep with the old white man with whom she had lived quietly for years; prying and spying upon what has always been the right of the poorest man to sleep in peace with his woman. (261)

Thus the novel is a realistic projection of the atrocities committed on the blacks. It:

[E]xplores the effects of the Nationalist Party’s election victory of 1948 by focusing on questions of urban and domestic space: it records the lack of adequate houses for black workers, the active development of new suburbs and apartment blocks for whites, and, most sinisterly, the invasion of peoples’ domestic privacy through the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) which banned cross-racial marriages and the Immorality Act (1950) which criminalised sexual relationships across the color line. (Shabanirad and Dadkhah 120)

Gordimer was primarily concerned about the ill effects of apartheid upon Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University blacks of which she was an eye witness. This made her a staunch critique of it. According to Dorothy Driver, “Gordimer would have been a different kind of writer in a country in which she was not constantly faced with the fact of apartheid” (31). In a collaborated work with David Goldblatt, Gordimer says that “[w]hat white South Africans have done to black South Africans seeps like an indelible stain through fiction and photographs. The repression and tragedy of black lives is there; we did not have to look for it, only to let it reveal itself as honestly and deeply as we could” (33).

Chapter 2

The Lying Days like most of her novels presents the pathetic treatment of blacks at the hands of whites. It shows the condition of South Africa during 40’s and 50’s due to rise in industrialisation and the Nationalist Party’s ascension to power. Nationalist government was a very important political power during Helen’s growing up years. Helen manages to escape the claustrophobic mine life, to search for her self- identity, thereby breaking the racial and sexual stereotypes of her conventional life. Therefore it is the “mining town with its mean and bigoted attitudes that leaves its indelible imprints on her wherever she journeys” (Dimitriu 40). The novel shows the political effect upon human beings which affects their relationship by dividing them on the basis of race. Racial segregation affects the personal relationship of Helen with Joel, Mary and Paul. Her relationship with Joel breaks because he comes from a different religion and culture and her relationship with Mary breaks because “it is impossible to operate a decent personal relationship in a society that is opposed to a liberal way of life” (Ogungbesan 51). Through Helen’s relationships with these people, Gordimer chooses love as a way out of the society which is divided on the basis of race and class. Her relationship with them shows how even love fails to integrate people who are divided on the basis of race. Therefore, because of her failure in love, “Helen earns our pity and compassion because of the injury inflicted on her through not being truly loved enough” (Ogungbesan 55).

The Lying Days presents the protest era when South Africans tried to resist the system of apartheid and highlights the changing patterns of response and resistance to it. Apartheid therefore clearly represents Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘power’. According to Foucault, “where there is power, there is resistance” (95). Nadine Gordimer who is “almost alone of the writers” who continued writing against apartheidMaulana “from within Azad South Library, Africa” Aligarh (Cooke 533) Muslim presents University her main characters as rebellious figures who try to defy apartheid with utmost grit and audacity to get rid of this menace from South Africa. That is why Helen Shaw transgresses racial, sexual and familial boundaries to work for the equal rights of people irrespective of race. She wants to break all the laws which are a hindrance in her relationship with the native people.

Like A World of Strangers, during the days of writing of The Lying Days, liberal humanism was the pervading spirit to oppose apartheid. ‘Liberal novel’ was considered as an important weapon in resistance against the system of apartheid

Chapter 2 which affected everyone in society. Helen tries to be liberal in the novel. In Johannesburg, she mingles with and is attracted to students with a liberal bent of mind. Infact Helen loves Paul because he possesses a liberal ideology and lives the liberal agenda. Although Gordimer herself rejected liberalism “for fear of being tainted with white capitalism" (Dimitriu 31) by saying, “I am a white South African radical. Please don't call me a liberal” yet “In The Lying Days, multiracialism and liberalism were still confident beliefs and dominant ideological weapons against apartheid” (Sakamoto 20).

In South Africa, white settlement and colonization were mostly masculine projects. In her works written during apartheid, man and woman relationship is generally characterised by discrimination. Gordimer's female characters are more politically involved in the struggle against apartheid in her fiction. According to Sheila Roberts, her “women characters can think as well as her men do, work as well as they do, manifest an equal physical courage, and are by no means 'second-class' citizens” (56). Though Gordimer refuses to be called as a feminist yet there are many occasions where she shows a deep and clear interest in feminist issues. She uses realistic images to show women as oppressed beings. Feminist theorists are also concerned about Frantz Fanon’s concept of ‘Other’ and relate it to the woman as oppressed ‘Other’ by focussing on the difference on the basis of race and gender. In a patriarchal society, man as a colonizer marginalises women to the position of ‘Other’ – the colonized. Helen too is marginalised to the position of ‘Other’ despite being a white and a part of colonial system which subjugates the natives. In her family, Helen is treated not less than a colonised ‘Other’. According to Toshiko Sakamoto:

Her family becomes the very barrier which prevents her from Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University succeeding in all her relationships with Others . . . leave Helen caught within both the public barriers of apartheid and the private barriers of the family. The family constitutes itself as a site of values which oppresses women within the family because the family itself is where all apartheid ideas about race, gender and sexuality converge. (28)

In her relationship with Joel, Helen believes that “Joel never handles me with love” rather looks at her with "that deeply desired, faintly insulting recognition of the pure female, discounting me, making of me a creature of no name" (200). Helen’s

Chapter 2 unsuccessful relationship with Joel, Mary and Paul shows how she is socially marginalised in her contact with the world she lives in. The more apartheid restricts her, the more she feels a need to make connection with them. Helen’s escape from her parental home is an escape from patriarchal culture for she does not want to be what Coventry Patmore calls ‘The Angel in the House’. Gordimer was very much concerned about gender issues but choose not to be labelled as a feminist writer.

Though British imperialism ended in South Africa yet its influence continued in another form called apartheid till the first democratically elected government came to power in1994, which officially marked the end of apartheid. During this period a large number of indigenous people were dominated by the minority European immigrants. The novel shows the discrimination of blacks at the hands of whites and highlights their poor condition during the apartheid period. The blacks were excluded from every kind of right in the society. As Helen grows up she witnesses a vast difference between the whites and blacks standard of living and she says:

But in South Africa there is one difference; a difference so great that the whole conception of charity must be changed. The people among whom Paul worked were not the normal human wastage of a big industrial city, but a whole population, the entire black-skinned population on whose labor the city rested, forced to live in slums because there was nowhere else for them to live, too poor to maintain themselves decently because no matter what their energy, their skill, their labor was not allowed value above subsistence level. (240)

At another occasion she feels for the injustice being done with the people in the townshipMaulana for they areAzad not provided Library, adequate Aligarh facilities: Muslim University

The young boys kicking a stone along the gutter because they have no ball and know no game. The schoolteachers and young clerks borrowing books from the little library (a charity handout of the discarded books of white people) and reading in the paper of the plays they can never see, the concerts they can never hear. (266-67)

Helen is one among those colonial white women who is emotionally detached from a society of colonial whites and physically barred from black Africa. She doesn’t

Chapter 2 understand South African indigenous languages and Michael Andindilile opines, “Helen suffers from both linguistic and cultural alienation. The apartheid system condemns her to the status of an outsider despite being surrounded by indigenous African languages and cultures.” (7) Although she attempts to cross over the social barriers in South African society and remains committed to fight against apartheid yet she is depicted as the ‘Other’. Toshiko Sakamoto calls Helen Shaw a “colonial daughter” because she is “product of South Africa's colonial history” (16). She is presented as a colonial daughter who is doubly colonized “in one direction by her sex, another by her colour” (Visel 33).

“[T]he apartheid ideology demanded a consciousness in individuals of their racial separateness” (Shabanirad and Dadkhah 118), that is why Gordimer’s first novel is a bildungsroman novel which shows growth in Helen both physically and psychologically from her childhood to a mature woman. In the novel, the “protagonist Helen Shaw undergoes an inner transformation prompted by her increased awareness of external circumstances” (Heffernan 93). Helen is not able to maintain her relationship with her parents living in a gold mining town in Johannesburg because of their racial mindset. She thus moves from “complete dependence on her parents, through increasing conflict with them, to complete independence” (Lomberg 3). She sees the “white corrugated tin fences” (Gordimer 6) which marks the boundary line between the area where whites live and the rest of the mining town. This captures her attention. She initially witnesses how the mine in the novel is owned by a white man and the whites are in full power to treat poor black Afrikaner, coloured, Indian workers as their subordinates. The beginning of the novel therefore “deploys a complex web of differential relations” (Heffernan 93) between, Indians, natives, Afrikaans, JewsMaulana and between Azad masters Library, and servants Aligarh in the Muslim shape of mine University managers and workers. She sees how the black housemaids are supposed to take care of white children in the mine. The narrator says:

There were children on the Mine, little children in pushcarts whose mothers let their nurse girls take them anywhere they liked; go down to the filthy kaffir stores to gossip with the boys and let those poor little babies they are supposed to be taking care of breathe in heaven knows what dirt and disease, my mother often condemned. (8)

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When Helen leaves Atherton for the university in Johannesburg, she works as a rebel against the spirit of the mine. Thus “the mine shapes social psychology of Helen's life, in which the 'colonial mentality' defines and attenuates interpersonal relationships” (Dimitriu 41). What perturbs her more is the hot and cold relationship with her parents and psychologically distressing environment of her hometown. It is Helen’s commitment and dedication to work for the native that makes her leave home and join the Native Affairs Department as Toshiko Sakamoto says, “Helen’s ambivalent and contradictory self placed between her parents and Paul, puts her in a dilemma between the desire to be a daughter of her parents and to be an independent woman.” (30). By deciding to leave her home, she rejects the norms of the society in which she had grown up. Her decision to go to university, “as a metaphor reflects spatial movement and the possibility of new knowledge” (Sakamoto 19). She leaves university without completing graduation and joins the Native Affairs Department, for the upliftment of natives. Helen’s awareness of her position in society forces her to search for her self-identity. Her consciousness makes her determinant “to look at the world herself and make her own judgements about it” (Lomberg 4). She faces the world of racism and tries to identify her Self with this world. After leaving her family she realises what Frantz Fanon says in his book The Wretched of the Earth “this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species” (38-39): one white, and the other, black and coloured. According to Fanon the blacks were interpreted by whites by terming them as the ‘Other’ despite being the ‘original inhabitants’. They were called so to socially label them as removed and inferior individuals who are there to fulfil the needs and interests of white colonizers. She realises there is a line of demarcation between the colonizer and the colonized ‘Other’. The colonizer is superior in every aspect of life and the colonized is considered a savage. During Helen’s walk through Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University the mining village, she is surprised to see the damaging condition of blacks who work for the whites. Helen describes the condition of natives:

There were dozens of natives along the path. Some lay on the burned grass, rolled in their blankets, face down, as if they were dead in the sun. Others squatted and stood about shouting, passed on to pause every few yards and shout back something else. . . Saw dust on the floor showed pocked like sand and spilled out onto the pavement,

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shaking into the cracks and fissures, mixing with the dust and torn paper, clogged here and there with blood. (9-10)

While living in the black township Helen witnesses consistent curfews and ban on public gatherings. In an attempt to defy the ban on public meetings at Atherton “eighteen natives were killed, thirty wounded. Two of the dead had suffocated in the burning cinema, sixteen were shot by the police” (329) Gordimer shows what colour bar has done to the humans who live under the same sky. She says:

I was accustomed to seeing Africans in ill-fitting clothes that had belonged to white people first, but these people were in rags. These were clothes that had been made of the patches of other clothes . . . the children were naked beneath one garment cast off by a grownup; streaming noses and gray bellies . . . Some of the people stared curiously through the smoky confusion as we passed, and children yelled, Penny! Penny! jeeringly . . . the awfulness of their life filled me with fear. (174-75)

The novel is the only autobiographical fictional work which explores Gordimer’s experience in the mining town of Springs and her relationship with her mother. When asked in an interview with Margaret Walters about the autobiographical elements in The Lying Days, she replies that “The Lying Days is my only autobiographical book, and it did have a strong autobiographical basis” (287). Like Helen Shaw, Gordimer herself grew up in a mining town, as she reveals the same in an interview with Studs Terkel:

Well I was born there. It was a town in the gold mining area, the Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University richest gold-mining area in the world: Witwatersrand. I was born in one of the small towns there, a town that existed for the mines, that existed to cater to the needs of the mine. (13)

Like Helen, Gordimer too attended the University of Witwatersrand and explored the social worlds of Johannesburg when she was young. Helen like Gordimer is white in colour who witnesses the growing mayhem and violence between blacks and whites and takes responsibility on her own shoulders of doing something for the blacks. She represents her own struggle in South Africa where she

Chapter 2 tried to enter the world of blacks while remaining a member of the dominant white minority. Like Helen, Nadine Gordimer also faced a lot stress for being white and for being excluded from the blacks due to the Black Consciousness Movement. That is why she had decided to leave South Africa. Helen’s exile in the end can be seen as a reflection of Gordimer’s own dilemma whether to leave South Africa or not when apartheid had engulfed it. Helen claims that “I'm not running away from now because I know I'm coming back'”. This ambiguous statement according to Toshiko Sakamoto shows “Gordimer's own tensions and resolutions surrounding her difficult position” (32-33). Thus The Lying Days is Gordimer’s exploration of her personal life in which Gordimer tries to search her own voice.

Helen is filled with depression when she sees Paul deeply involved in progressive activities. She realises that their personal lives are deeply involved with their professional lives. She gets doubtful whether there is any future for her or not. She wants Paul to give up his job to which Paul tells her “if that job tires you . . . if you’re that bored, you can change it. The department will go on without you” (290). Her relationship with Paul begins to break. She realises that their marriage is impossible and finally reaches the conclusion that she can’t sacrifice her personal life for an uncertain future. She thus quits in the end and leaves her country:

Then he must accept what he does now for what it is. My job is this that and the other. It will not give a single African an education, a skilled job, a voice in the way his people are to be disposed of, or even the right to build a house for himself when he hasn't anywhere to live. (293)

Helen Maulanafeels that she Azad is excluded Library, from Aligarh her society Muslim and considers University her stay there as irrelevant.Thus Helen finally makes up her mind to leave Paul and the country too when she sees the riots and mayhem in the country. She is traumatized by apartheid and can’t bear the psychological and physical barriers which exist in South African society because of apartheid. She realises that apartheid is the central problem of South Africa in her time and quits in the end. Similarly Gordimer and other writers of her age were also confronted with a similar notion and most of them decided to leave their country. But Gordimer stayed on.

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REFRENCES:

Gordimer, Nadine. The Lying Days. Bloomsbury, 2002.

Driver, Dorothy. “Nadine Gordimer: The Politicisation of Women.” English in Africa,

vol. 10, no. 2, 1983, pp. 29–54.

Shabanirad, Ensieh, and Mahtab Dadkhah. "A Foucauldian Study of Space and Power

in Two Novels by Nadine Gordimer." GEMA Online® Journal of Language

Studies, vol. 17, no 4, 2017, pp. 113-127.

Goldblatt, David, and Nadine Gordimer. “Lifetimes Under Apartheid.” World

Literature Today, vol. 87, no. 2, 2013, pp. 32–37.

Dimitriu, Ileana. “The Civil Imaginary in Gordimer's First Novels.” English in Africa,

vol. 29, no. 1, 2002, pp. 27–54.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove

Weidenfeld, 1963.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality vol.1. Translated by Robert Hurley,

Pantheon Books, 1978.

Sakamoto, Toshiko. "The Colonial Daughter's Narrative: Race, Gender and Sexuality

in NadineMaulana Gordimer's Azad The Library,Lying Days Aligarh." Studies inMuslim English Literature,University vol. 79,

no. 1, 2002, 15-36.

Andindilile, Michael. “‘Imagine Someone Speaking as They Speak’: Linguistic

Divide and Convoluted Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nadine Gordimer’s

Apartheid-Era Work.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013, 1-21.

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Visel, Robin. "Othering the Self: Nadine Gordimer's Colonial Heroines." ARIEL: A

Review of International English Literature. vol. 19. no. 4, 1988, 33-42.

Heffernan, Julián Jiménez. “‘Empty About Me’: Gordimer between the Singular and

the Specific.” English in Africa, vol. 37, no. 2, 2010, pp. 91–110.

Lomberg, Alan. “Withering into the Truth: The Romantic Realism of Nadine

Gordimer.” English in Africa, vol. 3, no. 1, 1976, pp. 1–12.

Ogungbesan, Kolawole. “The Way out of South Africa Nadine Gordimer’s ‘The

Lying Days’.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, no. 49,

1977, pp. 45–59.

Terkel, Studs. “Nadine Gordimer.” Conversations with Nadine Gordimer, edited by

Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, University Press of

Mississippi, 1990, pp.12-32.

Green, Robert. “From ‘The Lying Days to July's People’: The Novels of Nadine

Gordimer.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 14, no. 4, 1988, pp. 543–563.

Roberts, Sheila. “Nadine Gordimer’s ‘Family of Women’.” Theoria: A Journal of

Social and Political Theory, no. 60, 1983, pp. 45–57.

Mcleod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Viva books, 2018. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Nayar, Pramod K. Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Walters, Margaret. “Writers in Conversation: Nadine Gordimer.” Conversations with

Nadine Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman

Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 285-298.

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Cooke, John. “African Landscapes: The World of Nadine Gordimer.” World

Literature Today, vol. 52, no. 4, 1978, pp. 533–538.

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Chapter 3

Collective Attempt at Liberty from Discrimination and Violence: A World of Strangers

A World of Strangers is Nadine Gordimer's second novel and the first one to be banned by the South African government. In it, Gordimer highlights multiracialism and liberalism as a peaceful way of protest against apartheid and also distinguishes between the superficial lives of whites and real lives of natives through the eyes of the central character of the novel Toby Hood. Toby is sent to South Africa to manage the Johannesburg branch of the publishing firm of Aden Parrot. He goes to South Africa with a sense of ecstasy because he would be able to collect data about the minorities living there. Here Toby realises how apartheid has kept people of different races apart despite living in the same community. He tries to remain politically neutral in such an environment where being neutral is not encouraged and accepted. Stephen Clingman believes that “he [Toby] comes to South Africa dedicated to neutrality and strict non- involvement” (“Multi-racialism” 44). Toby Hood is a mouthpiece of Gordimer. In South Africa, he realises that he will no longer conspire with whites in implementing apartheid. This is similar to Nadine Gordimer’s early anti-apartheid stand, which she maintained throughout her literary oeuvre. Gordimer like Toby was facing a kind of dilemma during the time of writing this novel. Search for self identity or to live a private life, this is what kept haunting her throughout the course of her writing career. As Sibila Petlevski points out “she strongly believes that the tension between standing apart and being fully involved made her a writer” (287). Toby observes two types of Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University people in South Africa:

I’ve always thought that there are two kinds of people, people with public lives, and people with private lives. The people with public lives are concerned with a collective fate, the private livers with an individual one. (122)

Toby along with his bosom friend Steven identifies himself among those people who want to guard their private lives. He goes against his parents liberal views and feels himself incapable of standing for them. He says:

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I had no intention of becoming what they saw me as, what they, in their own particular brand of salaciousness, envied me the opportunity to become – a voyeur of the world's ills and social perversions. I felt, as I had so often before, a hostility, irritation, and resentment that made me want to shout, ridiculously: I want to live! I want to see people who interest me and amuse me, black, white, or any colour. I want to take care of my own relationship with men and women who come into my life, and let the abstractions of race and politics go hang. I want to live! And to hell with you all! (36)

Thus he clarifies at the very beginning that he does not want to be a voyeur but still by being objective and detached he shifts his role as a voyeur merely observing the events. Stephen Clingman feels that Toby “indulges in a kind of amoral voyeurism, merely observing the world in which he finds himself” (“Multi-racialism” 54). Toby can be seen determined to live a private life at the very beginning of the novel and although he himself witnesses the huge social division in Johannesburg, yet he feels reluctant to lessen the situation. Thus he comes to South Africa dedicated only to neutrality and strict non-involvement. Stephen Clingman says "Toby's quest for personal enjoyment overrules any qualms of conscience" (“Multi–racialism” 45). He tries to keep himself apart from South Africa’s racial politics. His parents wanted him to join politics like them but he says “I told them all that I would be going to Africa as a publisher's agent, to visit bookshops and promote the sale of books. I didn't want to investigate anything; I didn't want to send newsletters home” (36). Thus according to Uledi-Kamanga “Toby's apolitical individualism is partly a rebellion against his politically-conscious parents, and partly a result of genuine belief in the sanctity of theMaulana individual” Azad(The Female Library, Character Aligarh 192). Muslim University

English women novelists of Gordimer’s era were mostly concerned about domestic violence and other issues. However Gordimer’s life in unusual political and social circumstances made her revolve her writings around the themes of oppression, suppression, segregation, injustice and freedom struggle. She demonstrated against human rights violation through her writings. As a first woman writer of South Africa, she opened up a window to the world so that human rights violation could be clearly seen on humanitarian basis. Her humanism made her speak against racial segregation

Chapter 3 even under the most adverse circumstances. According to Indrani Rengasamy, she wrote when:

The outside world had no means of knowing about the atrocities taking place in South Africa. When the world did not understand the pain in the dark continent, her works bore the torch in whose light the world understood the struggle that was ripping South Africa. (173)

South Africa is the locale of Gordimer’s many works. It is the main setting around which most of her works hinge. Her novels can be read keeping the South African social and political background in mind. A World of Strangers was written when apartheid was at its initial stage and it evolved out of the political, social, and cultural circumstances of the 1950’s that Gordimer experienced personally. When she was writing the novel, it was a time when the macabre incidents like Sharpeville massacre were yet to take place. At that time South Africa had not yet plunged into barbaric and shocking phases of the Soweto revolts and liberal ideology and multi racialism was seen as being capable of countering apartheid.

The Freedom Charter allowed people from different races of South Africa to assemble and thus made a famous statement “South Africa belongs to all who live in her – Black and White” (qtd. in Clingman, “Multi-racialism” 35). Multiracialism was considered as a positive idealism and a soft attack against the system of apartheid. The concept was primarily followed by the congress government of that time as they believed that apartheid could be countered only and most effectively by the cross- racial or multi-racial front. That is why large number of blacks along with a good proportion of coloureds and whites tried their utmost to defy the unjust laws of apartheid.Maulana Thus they Azad aimed Library, to bring aAligarh multi-racial Muslim society University and laid much emphasis upon maintaining the relationship between people belonging to different races. Clingman talks about how multi-racialism became a political programme of the fifties.

On a political level multi-racialism was firmly ensconced as the official ideology of the Congress Alliance. For it was the Congress Alliance which virtually constituted the opposition to apartheid in the 1950s, and the Alliance was par excellence a multi-racial movement under the banner of multi-racialism. Essentially, what the idea of

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‘multi-racialism’ involved was the belief that a rampantly segregationist apartheid could be countered only and most effectively by a cross-racial or multi-racial front. . . . The Defiance Campaign of 1952-3, which . . . marked the culmination of the phase initiated by the Programme of Action, also embodied a ‘multi-racial’ aspect. Alongside the far greater numbers of blacks who volunteered to defy the ‘unjust laws’ of apartheid appeared a smaller proportion of ‘coloureds’ and Indians, and also a few whites. (Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer 45-6)

Therefore the novel endorses a multi-racial and multi-cultural way of life adopted by the Congress Alliance of the 1950s.

Many black and white writers started writing for a magazine called Drum which realistically reflected the scenario of the age. Although Drum is usually seen as a main focus of black opposition in the late 1950s, creating a vital vent for black journalists and writers yet it made it possible for all the writers from all races to stand on a single platform and to find a proper solution to apartheid. A World of Strangers embodies this period of South African history in which Gordimer shows how despite living under the same sky blacks and whites are strangers to each other and this segregation can be countered through cross-racial front. That is why she makes use of it in the novel and depicts it as a strong weapon to oppose apartheid.

However by the time the novel got its final shape, the destruction of Sophiatown under various laws and acts especially Group Areas Act had already begun which led to large scale holocaust. This diminished Gordimer’s optimism and made her veryMaulana angry as she Azad had aLibrary, great desire Aligarh to see a Muslim race free UniversitySouth Africa. She predicted the fatal consequences of racial segregation and totally blamed the whites for it. In an answer to the question where do whites fit in the new Africa of the future? She replies:

The white man who wants to fit in the new Africa must learn a number of hard things. He'd do well to regard himself as an immigrant to a new country; somewhere he has never lived before, but to whose life he has committed himself. He'll have to forget the old impulses to leadership, and the temptation to give advice backed by the experience and culture

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of Western civilization -Africa is going through a stage where it passionately prefers its own mistakes to successes (or mistakes) that are not its own. (qtd. in petlevski 290)

Toby tries to be friendly with the blacks in spite of the laws, and believes that establishing contact across the racial barrier is a way to subvert the racist system. He understands that whites exploit South Africa to gratify their personal desire. Through him, Gordimer shows how liberal bent of mind and multi-racial attitude can counter the racial segregation in Johannesburg. In South Africa he moves freely and associates himself with other people irrespective of caste, creed and colour. His initial role in South Africa remains neutral as he refuses to get involved in the anti-apartheid struggle and therefore makes sure that his position is that of a mute spectator. He desires to “let the abstractions of race and politics go hang” (36). He enjoys his friendship with many black boys and at the same time falls in love with a white girl named Cecil Rowe. His friendship with Steven Sitole who is a black is deep-rooted. He finds solace and home like feelings in his company. Through these associations, “Toby enjoys the best of both worlds -- black and white -- without being politically committed to either” (Uledi-Kamanga, “The Irony of Apartheid” 4). Toby as a spokesperson of Nadine Gordimer is reluctant to live in a racially torn society. This is akin to Gordimer’s firm stand against the menace of apartheid. Through the novel Gordimer shows the roles that whites can play in the freedom struggle of South Africa. He tries to bridge the gap between whites and blacks and make them stand on a single platform, free from any kind of hatred and abhorrence. In this sense, the title of the novel is ironic; it is no longer the world of strangers for an English man Toby who is easily able to mingle with different races of South Africa with ease rather it is a worldMaulana of strangers Azad for the Library, people who Aligarh are living Muslim in South Africa University as strangers.

Toby is a lovable figure who sympathizes with the blacks. He is a liberal humanist and represents the border between blacks and whites. At the death of his friend Stephen, no one among the whites share his grief. For Steven’s death, Toby feels a personal responsibility. Cecil Rowe is quite astonished to see Toby eating with blacks. She can’t love him because she feels he is incapable of loving anyone. He visits parties of mixed races which “makes him see how much colour and social barriers count for keeping both the white and the black people far away from knowing

Chapter 3 each other” (Mazhar 89). Toby is puzzled to see the vast differences between blacks and whites. In South Africa he:

[B]reaks down with shame and embarrassment at noticing the indignities which the blacks suffer: Toby discovers hypocrisy in the white class and a huge social and economic void through his oscillation between the rich white class and poor black South Africa. (Mazhar 96-97)

Seeing the rift between the races he wonders what to write to his family in England about the life in South Africa. He says:

Could I tell them how pleasant it was to be lulled and indulged at The High House? Could I explain the freedom I felt where I had no legal right to be, in that place of segregation, a location? I supposed that to have a ‘life out there’, a real life in Johannesburg, you’d have to belong in one or the other, for keeps. (203).

Toby’s open mindedness and liberal thoughts are altogether changed soon after his arrival in South Africa. According to Indrani Rengasamy:

Gordimer shows that life in South Africa has awakened in Toby a new awareness without which he would have been ignorant and innocent. The new excitement is his education. Life in South Africa educates him; he understands that the behaviour of the white girl has sucked all normality out of the room in which he sat between two non-whites. (90) Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Thus Toby’s European idea gets shattered when he sees the South African reality where racism and political conflict are alive. Life in South Africa educates and awakens him to realise the unpleasant side of human nature. He is baffled at the huge differences that exist between the two races. Therefore a drastic change can be seen in the character of Toby, who feels completely detached at the very beginning of the novel and feels completely contrary to it at the end. Thus he is transformed from “an ‘armchair strategist’ into one who enters the fray” (Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer 61).

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Stephen Clingman, drawing on Roland Barthes’s categories, describes the novel as a work of ‘classical realism’, and classifies it as a ‘realist novel’. A realistic novel represents familiar things as they are as if the novel is a transparent window on the world and this novel is realistic is clear from the ban on it which lasted almost twelve years, as telling the truth was considered an offence by the state. The novel was banned by the South African government for exposing the violence and hostility of apartheid and accurately portraying the reality of South African society. In their treatment of people and society, most of the South African writers were political unlike Nadine Gordimer who as a detached observer depicted the real complexities of society. A World of Strangers accurately distinguishes between the superficial lives of whites and real lives of natives through the central character Toby Hood. Toby’s rich friends at the Alexander and his poor black friends in the Locations make him realize the difference on the basis of race. He realises “the white environment is linked to power, falseness, and alienation, while the townships are symbolized by squalor, but also by reality and community” (Port 10).

Most of the events and incidents are true to life and characters in it are based on real-life people. The figure of Anna Louw, for example, is based on Bettie du Toit, who was, a banned Afrikaner trade-unionist, and ex-member of the Communist Party. Steven Sitole in the novel lives in the House of Fame; in real life Can Themba, a friend of Gordimer and member of the Drum called his home in Sophiatown The House of Truth. The central character of the novel, Toby is based on Anthony Sampson, Gordimer’s friend from England who was the editor of the Drum and had come to Johannesburg for some publishing work. The novel depicts some realistic incidents which actually happened in the past. For example Sampson talks about his narrowMaulana escape during Azad the raidLibrary, in Johannesburg Aligarh in Muslim his book UniversityDrum: A Venture into the New Africa. This refers to Toby’s narrow escape when his friend Steven was killed during a police raid. Besides, the novel also gives realistic depiction of black world of Johannesburg, the street life of Alexandra Township, of the parties and shebeens of Sophiatown. Sophiatown during 1950’s was a town of mixed races where parties and police raids were quite often happening and it is the same place where Toby meets Steven in the novel. Sophiatown was considered as a ‘black spot’ in a ‘white area’. The main aim of the apartheid government was to bulldoze Sophiatown and build a white suburb in its place and therefore to replace blacks within western townships,

Chapter 3 which was later named as Soweto. The main thrust was to object against the owning of houses and land by blacks and to take most part of the land under their control. Blacks were forced to build their own homelands in the black regions which were called Bantustans. The most highly affected street of Johannesburg was Toby Street. Therefore the name Toby Hood. Toby says “I was told that no one walks in the streets here, at night,’ I said. She [Anna Louw] said candidly, ‘it’s not so much that we’re in danger, but that we’re so terribly afraid” (80). Thus A world of Strangers according to Gray “is one of the few works to tell us how things in Johannesburg really were” (16).

Stephen Gray values the novel as a historical record. He believes that the novel records the past real historical events and incidents. Thus according to him, “rereading the novel today is indeed like reclaiming a past unknown” (12). Stephen Clingman on the other hand is of the opinion that the novel “stands in the best possible position to give us a "history from the inside" of her world” (“Multi- racialism” 32). The consistent police raids at the shebeens and one of such raids when Toby and Steven flee through the window is similar to the incident in which the editor of Drum magazine, Anthony Sampson escaped from the writer and journalist Can Themba’s House, when it was raided by the police. Nadine Gordimer has taken the epigraph of the novel from the poem “Ode to Walt Whitman” written by Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. The poem presents the images of attack over non English speaking Federico García Lorca during his first ever trip to New York. The ode has great relevance to the novel A World of Strangers. Toby during his first ever visit to England also encounters something of the same despondency and estrangement in South Africa. The novel can be traced from the historical perspective in another senseMaulana as well for Azad example Library, through Aligarh the narration, Muslim it becomes University clear that the roots of Toby’s history are there intact, too. His ancestors belonged to South Africa. Toby had his grandfather buried in the Boer war at ‘Jagersfontein’. The place is now under the settlement of blacks, “you know, I believe my grandfather may be buried there,’ I said. ‘He fell in the Boer war at a place called Jagersfontein” (72).

Gordimer was predominantly concerned about analyzing the 'European experience' in relation to the African cultural and social context. Through Toby, she shows the ambiguities of being a white among blacks or a European in Africa. A World of Strangers talks about the amalgam of various cultures that co-existed in

Chapter 3

South Africa when apartheid was at its initial stage and registers “deeply the mood of discovery, for whites, of the black social world around them” (Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer 53). Toby “observes the massive social divide of Johannesburg, separating black and white into the "world of strangers”” (Clingman, “Multi- racialism” 44). He moves without an ounce of fear among the shebeens of Sophiatown, despite the days of apartheid in Johannesburg as he believes “in freedom of association” and “rejects politics in general” (Uledi-Kamanga, “The irony of apartheid” 3). Thus through the novel Gordimer attempts to bridge the social gap between whites and blacks through the character of Toby. Before leaving for Johannesburg, his mother and uncle who were politically active had tried to convince Toby to work for the cause of black liberation during his stay there. However Toby seemed reluctant for he wanted to be “politically unengaged” which makes him move “with equal ease among the privileged whites and the intellectual and artistic element among the township blacks” (Port 6).

A World of Strangers depicts a world divided into two by racial differences, and shows the protagonist Toby’s advancement in the process of inter-racial encounters. Gordimer depicts the two different sides of Johannesburg and gives a hint about the thematic intention of her upcoming literary writings. While in Johannesburg Toby encounters the two sides of the society, on the one hand he meets the wealthy whites like Hamish Alexander and his wife Marion who lives in The High House and Cecil Rowe with whom he develops a relationship and on the other hand Anna Louw, a poor black attorney from the Legal Aid Bureau fighting for social and political justice in South Africa and Steven Sitole a black boy with whom he develops a deep rooted bond. Toby gives a detailed description of the living standard of the The High House Maulanawhen he visits Azad there: Library, Aligarh Muslim University

The car dropped me at the front door, which was open. . . the entrance hall led away down a few broad shallow steps to the left; i got the impression of a long, mushroom-coloured room there, with gleams of copper and gilt, flowers and glass. In the hall there was a marquetry table under a huge mirror with a mother-of-pearl inlaid frame. Further back, the first steps of a white staircase spread in a dais; carpet seemed to grow up the stairs, padding the rim of each step like pink moss. An African appeared soundlessly; I followed him soundlessly . . . past the

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mirror, that reflected three new golf balls and a very old golf glove, sweated and dried to the shape of the wearer's hand on the table below it, and through a large living room full of sofas and chairs covered in women's dress colours, that led to a veranda. (48-49)

Therefore The High House where his rich white friends live, symbolises the upper strata of life and the places like Sophiatown which is packed with living spaces of the blacks and where the consistent police chasing takes place symbolises the lower strata or marginalised section of the society. In The High House and The Township, Toby “finds the line of demarcation that exists between the lavish white life and the poor blacks” (Mazhar 91).

Unlike most of the white men, Toby as a stranger visits South Africa unprejudiced and unbiased with an open mind. He goes to South Africa and realises that the political situation in South Africa distances people and keeps them as strangers and “the people to whom South Africa is home are strangers to each other” (Uledi-Kamanga, The Female Character 195). As Toby moves from one world to the other he says "I felt myself suddenly within the world of dispossession, where the prison record is a mark of honour, exile is home, and family a committee of protest, that world I had watched from afar, a foreign country since childhood” (265). Toby’s life is spent in the black world of shebeens, filthy townships, covered by disillusioned and depressing poverty. He realises that in a multi-racial country like South Africa, different colours symbolize different identities and the absence of a common identity makes South Africa A World of Strangers. He comes to know that skin colour has dominated the lives of South Africans to the extent that the centre of all human sociological and political interaction is determined by the colour of their skin. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Gordimer makes a distinction between two different lives in a society where one life is marked by extravagance and lavishedness and the other one in the filthy pit of blacks. Toby plans to have lunch with Steven, “could we have lunch together, Friday, perhaps?’ He laughed at me in a leisurely fashion. But where can we go together for lunch, man?" (112), but forgets that he can’t go to any restaurant because of his colour. Steven cannot visit Toby’s flat because blacks are not allowed to go to white areas. When Steven visits Toby at his office, he is not greeted well by the whites working there. Miss McCann a white typist is aghast and hands over her resignation to Toby, which he accepts without knowing the reason. Toby realises that there is

Chapter 3 nothing new in this or any incident of this kind. What happens in the office is a minute realistic picture of apartheid-ridden South Africa. Cecil who is a friend of Toby is quite surprised at how he can eat and shake hands with blacks. When Toby explains to her his affection for Sitole, she says, “You know, I can’t imagine it - I mean, a black man next to me at table, talking to me like anyone else. The idea of touching their hands” (263). She doesn’t like to be in the company of Toby, she tells him “You’re like a clam. I told you, I feel you watching me and keeping yourself to yourself . . . Like an enemy” (261). What burns her inwardly is that despite being a white, Toby is opposing the stand taken by whites against blacks. She regards blacks as subhuman, and therefore unfit for human interaction with whites. Cecil is one of those white characters of Gordimer who blindly subscribes to racial prejudice whereas Toby displays a mode of devotion intolerable to the society around him.

Steven Sitole deals with insurance and tells Toby the various reasons that compel blacks to insure every stuff they posses unlike the whites “Fire, funeral, accident, loss- all that stuff. Of course, we're not like you people, mostly we insure against things we're sure will happen, funerals mainly. Yes, I exploit the poor simple native, and in return he gets a lovely funeral" (95). Anna Louw an Afrikaner activist who works “for the Legal Aid Bureau, which you may know handles the legal troubles of people who can’t afford to go to law through the usual channels” (70) is a bosom friend of Toby. She is deeply “concerned to bridge the gap between the two worlds without any illusions or favour” (Clingman, “Multi-racialism” 57). Anna is married to an Indian “I was married to an Indian. He gave me this, too; isn’t it beautiful?’ she showed me the white Kashmir shawl she was wearing” (125), however the marriage ultimately fails because the racist society meddle into the personal lives of the Maulanacouple. She Azadlives in Library, a much harder Aligarh world Muslimthan liberals University because she is a black rights lawyer. Yet, “the novel shows a deep admiration for her courage and clarity, and her unceasing attempt ever to widen this zone and make it more genuinely habitable” (Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer 54). She is committed to help the under privileged blacks and believes that “[n]ot only are they poor, they’re also the most ignorant of their rights” (71) for which she ends up by being arrested on political charges. Anna is called by Toby as a “real frontiersman who had left the known world behind and set up her camp in the wilderness” (175). According to him, she occupies the “black and white society between white and black” (175). Thus for

Chapter 3 being a black rights lawyer she cannot escape an intrusion from the political situation in her personal relationship.

Toby’s attitude towards women remains static throughout the novel. He views them as mere objects of desire and not as equal partners. For example Toby feels reluctant to share his resentment and disturbance with his lover Cecil about the incident of racism in the office when his employee decides to quit the job for bringing a black man in the office. When Toby sees the beautiful Indian girl singing at a club run by Indians he sees her as a mere ‘creature’ made to please. While making love with Cecil, Toby forces Cecil to leave the light on “she argued about the light, but I wanted to see her face, to know what she was feeling. (Who knows what women feel, in their queer, gratuitous moment?” (155). Here Gordimer shows how female sexuality represents the ‘other’ for Toby, who tries to maintain his control over it through the wrong use of technology. While talking about his thoughts about marriage he says “for me, the exoticism of women still lay in beauty and self-absorbed femininity, I would choose an houri rather than a companion” (261). Thus he reduces women to exotic other who is made for personal use. Through this static approach to sex when women are viewed as mere objects of gratification, Gordimer shows how politics of power and sex are interwoven in South Africa and foresees that sexism can beget racism.

Toby’s deep-rooted friendship with Steven Sitole is possibly because of the fact that both were of a similar bent of mind, that is they both wanted to be politically unengaged which is evident during their first meeting when Steven says ‘‘I don’t want to be bothered with the black men’s troubles’’ and Toby comments, ‘‘We did not understand each other; we wanted the same thing’’ (102–3). According to G. D. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Ingoldby, “Toby finds a reflection of himself in the young negro [Stephen Sitole]” (14) and like Toby, Steven also “avoids involvement with a collective fact, he swaggeringly upholds his ideal to live ‘a private life’” (Ingoldby 15). Toby sees “in Steven a reflection, a mirror-image, of himself” (Port 18) for his neutral approach. Steven Sitole attracts Toby for his generosity and amiableness. That is why some critics regard Steven as the hero of the novel. They both forget all the laws of apartheid which separates them and prefer to spend time in the company of each other. Their friendship is inveterate to the extent that it is Steven who decides which car Toby should buy and finalizes his decision of buying a car. Steven dies during a

Chapter 3 raid by the police on an Indian club, when the car crushes leaving Stephen dead. Toby takes permission to see him. "He was broken, that was all. He was still himself. He looked as if he had been in a long and terrible fight, and had lost" (251). His death saddens Toby as much as it does the other people who know him,

Steven had died like a criminal, but he was buried like a king. All the hangers-on, the admirers, the friends, and acquaintances of his gregarious life came, as one of them expressed it to me, to see him off. There was a band in the funeral procession . . . there were orations in three languages, there were wreaths three feet high. And he was not a film star, or a politician, or anyone known at the distance of fame; all these people had known him as one of themselves. (254-55).

Keeping the colour bar aside Toby feels his loss and says “he was me, and I was him” (240). Toby's commitment is “increased in proportion to the depth of his understanding: and in a very direct way he has had to ingest meaning of the "world of strangers" through the death of Steven Sitole - a death for which he feels a personal responsibility.” (Clingman, “Multi-racialism” 49). After Toby’s death he withdraws from the sybaritic world of his white associates at the Alexanders’ High House. He says:

I had not been to the Alexanders’ for weeks. I couldn’t go there any more, that was all. Steven’s death had provided a check, a pause, when the strain of the kind of life I had been living for months broke in upon me . . . I went to Sam’s house because there I could sit in silence, the silence of my confusion, and they would not question me. (257-58) Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Soon after the death of Steven, Toby develops friendship with Sam Mofokenzazi – a sober and dedicated fellow. It is a friendship “which is graver, and more considered, and full of a deep new dedication. The start of this friendship marks the climax of the novel” (Clingman, “Multiracialism” 46). A typical liberal assumption is found in Toby and Sam’s friendship. The friendship highlights that Toby has stepped out of his position as a stranger in South Africa. Sam is consistently portrayed in the novel as a ‘decent bourgeois’. The friendship between Sam and Toby is meant to transcend all ideology and is loaded with the symbolic weight of the novel. At the end of the novel when Toby leaves for Cape Town on a business trip, he

Chapter 3 promises to be the godfather of Sam’s baby when he/she is born. The child here has a symbolic significance and represents the fertility of the future in a really integrated society based on respect and human commitment. While leaving, Toby clasps Sam’s hands promising to come back to which Sam replies “who knows with you people, Toby, man? May be you won’t come back at all. Something will keep you away. Something will prevent you, and we won’t” (266). This ending of the novel carries many significations. Through Sam, Gordimer here hints towards future South Africa when apartheid will restrict liberal minded people like Toby to make another such arduous journey and be one with everyone in the multi-racial country irrespective of colour. Thus Nadine Gordimer here foresees the macabre consequences of apartheid.

Although Toby comes to South Africa with a liberal and neutral bent of mind yet there is that tinge of ‘Europeaness’ in him. He prefers to perform all those things which a typical European prefers to do like horse riding, thus he tries to build European ideals in an alien African environment. He does so because he suffers from cultural alienation. It too has some colonial roots as Brighton Uledi - Kamanga believes that alienation “results from the whites ' attempt to carve out an exclusively European community in an environment that is inherently African” (Uledi-Kamanga, The Female Character 82). Thus through him, Gordimer shows the white man’s aim to go beyond the limits of his own world and demean the blacks racial and cultural identity. Although Toby calls himself a man with no ‘colour prejudice’, yet he looks at the natives in animal imagery. In a shop where he takes tea he continuously glares at an African waiter for his unpleasant ‘sweaty monkey-face’ with ‘innocent ancientness’. He says “his was the sweaty monkey-face that I associate with the new- born babies I’ve been unable to avoid seeing; the sweat made it interesting by creating planes and highMaulana lighting creasesAzad Library, that gave itAligarh that same Muslim innocent Universityancientness” (18). Besides this, in his approach towards blacks he notices difference in his contact with them, “ [t]hose other faces, dark faces, other hands, dark hands, emerging from the same old coat sleeves, made a difference” (84). Thus although Toby’s overall attitude in the novel remains neutral yet he looks at South Africa and its people (blacks in particular) through Eurocentric lens.

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REFRENCES:

Gordimer, Nadine. A World of Strangers. Bloomsbury, 2002.

Gray, Stephen. "Gordimer's" A World of Strangers" as Memory." ARIEL: A Review

ofInternational English Literature, vol. 19, no. 4, 1988, pp. 11-16.

Ingoldby, G. D. “Fortnight.” Fortnight, no. 133, 1976, pp. 14–15. JSTOR, JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/25545970.

Mazhar, Syeda Faiqa. A Study of the Theme of Borderland in Nadine Gordimer’s

Fiction. 2007. University of Bedfordshire, PhD dissertation.

Clingman, Stephen. “Multi-Racialism, or A World of Strangers.” Salmagundi, no. 62,

1984, pp. 32–61.

Uledi-Kamanga, Brighton J. "The Irony of Apartheid: A Study in Technique and

Theme in the Fiction of Nadine Gordimer." Journal of

Humanities, vol. 5, no. 1, 1991, pp. 1-15.

Port, Cynthia. "Disruption, Quotation, and Narrative Ethics in Nadine Gordimer's A

World of Strangers." Safundi: The Journal of South African and

American Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-21. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Rengasamy, Indrani. The Dialectics of Apartheid: A Reading of Nadine Gordimer’s

Novels from a Postcolonial Perspective. Lap Lambert Academic Publishing,

2010.

Petlevski, Sibila. "Bringing European ideas back to African reality." Studia Romanica

et Anglica Zagrabiensia, vol. 42, 1997, pp. 285-298.

https://hrcak.srce.hr/120304

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Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. The

University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

Uledi-Kamanga, Brighton. The Female Character and the Theme of Identity: A Study

in the Fiction of Nadine Gordimer and Bessie Head. 1984. Dalhousie

University (Canada), PhD dissertation.

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

Chapter 4

Black Consciousness and Political Commitment: Burger’s Daughter

Burger’s Daughter, Gordimer’s seventh novel, and the one she holds in “the highest regard” (Green 558), was published in 1979. The novel marks Gordimer’s “attempt to ‘enter’ the world of black experience in South Africa while remaining, as she must, a member of a dominant white minority” (Green 545). Burger’s Daughter was banned for a short time upon its publication in 1979 as it according to Gordimer, “flagrantly crossed the line to illegality” (Hurwitt 142). It is considered as one of the most powerful political novels in the whole literary corpus of Nadine Gordimer. As a typical historical novel, it follows the attempts of Rosa Burger, the daughter of a martyred anti apartheid white leader of the South African Communist Party, to pursue an apolitical existence. Trying to escape the psychological influence of her father Lionel Burger, she finally realizes that South Africa is where her destiny lies. When the novel starts, her activist mother is detained and Rosa is waiting in front of the prison door to deliver some things to her. The novel thus begins with this unpleasant picture of a fourteen year old little girl waiting outside the prison, wearing school uniform holding a quilt and a water bottle for her detained mother. Her father is a staunch anti apartheid activist who helps the relatives of those who are arrested on one pretext or the other. He is imprisoned time and again and dies in the prison. He shares the cause of the blacks with determination, brings both blacks and whites to his home and therefore defies apartheid quite valiantly. The novel was written at that period in South African history when repression by the whites towards blacks was at its peak, Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University civil liberties had diminished and there was an increase in barbaric police brutalities. In Burger’s Daughter, Gordimer feels that apartheid is “the dirtiest social swindle the world has ever known” (Gordimer 349). The elements of cruelty, suffering and guilt echoes in the name of Rosa’s ‘virtual’ brother, Baasie who later calls his real name as Zwelinzima which means ‘Suffering Land’. His character highlights the agony of blacks at the hands of whites. Baasie was brought by Rosa’s father into the household because he was politically quite an active member. The duo had a great affection for each other.

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One of the important incidents which had a significant impact on Gordimer was that of Sweto uprisings and Burger’s Daughter is the only novel which most aptly deals with this theme. Written after the Sweto uprisings, the amount of tension created by Gordimer in the novel can be comparatively seen larger than her other apartheid novels, as the civil liberties decreased due to the tightening of apartheid policy. Anti apartheid activists started working as underground workers. The Black Consciousness Movement which was formed with the purpose of creating awareness among the people about the way out of racial segregation was destroyed by the government. The teachers were quite dissatisfied with the wages they were provided and the education system was crumbling. On June 16, 1976, thousands of school children came out against apartheid in Soweto. The police opened fire upon the protesters and killed almost twenty five students and wounded many more. The protest later on spread throughout the country and continued till 1977. This grisly and bloody Soweto revolution has been dealt in detail by Gordimer in Burger’s Daughter.

The story is set in South Africa ruled by the white minority, which is employing increasingly prejudiced policies in order to retain its hegemonic position. The black majority is becoming more prepared in its action against apartheid under the flag of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and other banned organisations like the African National Congress. The novel also talks about the consequences of the Black Consciousness Movement on the lives of whites, blacks, radicals and liberals. Biko defines it as follow:

Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life . . . Its essence is the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression - the blackness Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University of their skin - and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It is based on a self- examination which has ultimately led them to believe that by seeking to run away from themselves and emulate the white man, they are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black. This philosophy of Black Consciousness therefore expresses group pride and the determination of the black to rise and attain the envisaged self. (qtd. in Fatton 78).

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Biko believed that the black man has been reduced to “an obliging shell” and “looks with awe at the white power structure and accepts what he regards as the ‘inevitable position’” (qtd. in Powell, "Equality or unity?" 5). The mission of the Black Consciousness Movement according to Edward Powell was to “restore in black people a sense of pride in being black, which would prompt them into actively pursuing their own liberation” (2). It aimed to cut down all the affiliations with whites because it held the white people responsible for racism. This rejection came as a blow to all those white people who worked for the upliftment of blacks and opposed the policies of apartheid. Gordimer also regarded Black Conscious Movement as a healthy development and an essential step towards black liberation. According to Edward Powell she, “sympathized with the movement’s searing critique of liberal whites, who were accused of paternalism, complacency, and a lack of genuine commitment to pursuing meaningful change in South Africa” (3).

Rosa Burger is also quite astonished to learn through her telephonic conversation with Baasie about the role played by blacks for blacks for their freedom struggle. The conversation gives a new angle to the liberation struggle of South Africa. Her earlier view that Black African’s need white South Africans in the struggle for race equality is altogether shattered:

Everyone in the world must be told what a great hero, he was and how much he suffered for the blacks. Everyone must cry over him and show his life on television and write in the papers. Listen, there are dozens of our fathers sick and dying like dogs, kicked out of the locations when they can’t work anymore. Getting old and dying in prison. It’s nothing. I know plenty blacks like Burger. It’s nothing it’s us, we must be used Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University to it, and it’s not going to show on English television. (328)

The scene when Rosa receives a horrible nocturnal phone call from Baasie marks the turning point in the novel and the conversation shatters Rosa’s “sense of self” (Barnard 945) and prompts her to return to South Africa. Baasie reminds her of her whiteness and the ways in which she is privileged, even as someone whose family suffered by their participation in the struggle. Baasie tells Rosa on the phone “I’m not ‘Bassie,’ I’m Zwelinzima Vulindlela . . . . You know what my name means, Rosa? . . . Zwel-in-zima. That’s my name. ‘Suffering land’” (326). By explaining the origins of

Chapter 4 his name, Baasie wants to make it clear to Rosa that she never understood his identity. His name, ‘suffering land’ conveys the agony felt by his family in South Africa and Baasie here intends to reveal the racial and cultural differences between the two of them. When Rosa asks him the purpose of his calling he cuts her off “I’m not your Baasie, just don’t go on thinking about that little kid who lived with you, don’t think of that black ‘brother’, that’s all” (330). Rosa identifies the rise of Black Consciousness in Baasie.

Baasie makes a contrast between the Lionel Burger’s heroism and the thousands of blacks who sacrificed their lives on daily basis and highlights the brutal reality of blacks both outside and inside the prison:

Blacks must suffer now. We can’t be caught although we are caught, we can’t be killed although we die in jail, we are used to it, it’s nothing to do with you. Whites are locking up blacks everyday . . . Who cares whose ‘fault’— they die because it’s the Whites killing them, black blood is the stuff to get rid of White Shit. (330)

Rosa who always identified him as part of the family, explains to him how she has been vigorously trying to aid the anti-apartheid activists. But for Baasie, whites that fight against apartheid and whites that support it are two sides of the same coin and courageously replies back:

So what is that for me? . . . Whites are locking up blacks every day. You want to make the big confession?—why do you think you should be different from all the other whites who’ve been shitting on us ever since they came? . . . they die because it is the whites killing them. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University (330)

Gordimer pictures the signs of Black Consciousness Movement through the character of Baasie who turns hostile towards the very family that had looked after him for a long time. As he grows up, Black Consciousness Movement grows up within him. At a meeting he can’t tolerate people praising the contribution of whites like Lionel for their anti apartheid stand. He says that his father Isaac Vulindlela who also was an activist is sidelined. What pinches Baasie inwardly is the manner in which his father has been forgotten for his sacrifice and Lionel Burger has attained too much fame

Chapter 4 because he is a white man. He asserts “Whatever you whites touch, it’s a take over . . . Even when we get free they’ll want us to remember to thank Lionel Burger” (329).

Baasie’s words make Rosa aware of the hypocrisy she has reluctantly adopted. Rosa realizes she lacks a kind of political education that possibly could have helped her to carry on her father’s mission and serve people of her country instead of fleeing to France. Returning to South Africa with a new mindset, Rosa re-finds her community. Apparently, her life is much as it was, but everything has changed as she has changed. She realises her responsibility and continues her profession at Baragwanath hospital where she serves black children who are injured by gunshots from police firing during Soweto riots, “I am teaching them to walk again, at Baragwanath Hospital. They put one foot before the other” (344). Besides this, she further continues her work of carrying secret messages even in prison when she is detained.

Like her father, Rosa initially had a belief that the whites and blacks were united in the freedom struggle and that there was more to the movement than racialism. Though there were movements like Black African Movement, Black Consciousness Movement and many more who primarily talked about blacks only yet she believed in black-white brotherhood. Gordimer here shows how Africa’s future relies on the wholehearted participation of the whites and every ethnic group who must join hands to eradicate Apartheid. Thus in Gordimer’s fiction according to Sharanya Ganguly:

Sexuality and bodily union, resentment, conflicting ideologies, friendship, betrayal among the races all serve as a symbol for this Maulanacombined Azad struggleLibrary, for Aligarh the future Muslim of South University Africa, where black and white individuals not only complement each other they make the purpose of the Anti-Apartheid movement complete. (“The humanist approach” 215)

Rosa is considered as one of the promising students in the school but she has to often leave early “in order to take comforts to her mother” (5) when she is detained. Rosa had to fit in her studies the other works assigned to her by her parents. According to the headmistress she is “one of the most promising seniors in the school

Chapter 4 in spite of the disadvantages - in a manner of speaking - of her family background” (5). The other girls on the other hand:

In her class seemed unaware of what had happened. They did not read the morning newspapers, listen to the news on the radio, nor were they aware of politics as something more concretely affective than a boring subject of grown-up conversation, along with the stock market or gynaecological troubles. (5)

Gordimer shows how apartheid restrains the meritorious students like Rosa from excelling in life. She demonstrates through her writing that apartheid is not something that oppresses non- whites only, but tremendously effects the white people as well. Burger’s Daughter deals with this theme where Rosa Burger’s life is made very miserable by apartheid.

Nadine Gordimer’s characters are often seen in a dilemma when they have to choose one of the two public or private ways of living life. According to Robert Boyers, “Gordimer's novels are remarkable - all of them - for their conviction that characters are inevitably caught up in a process that carries them in particular directions without altogether controlling what they become (“Public and Private” 65). Rosa is her father’s name bearer and descendant. She constantly thinks of herself as free from all the social roles assigned to her. However she is caught between the private and personal ways of life. Through Rosa, Gordimer shows how public events affect private lives of those who fight for some cause and when a family gets engaged in the freedom struggle, how then it becomes mandatory for every member to become part of it. She highlights how difficult it is to live a private life when you belong to a family who is Maulanaassociated with Azad politics. Library, Toshiko Aligarh Sakamoto Muslim is of the opinion University that:

Rosa’s uncertainty about her existence reflects not only the burden of social contradictions caused by the divisiveness of apartheid, but also the inadequacy of her father’s philosophy to deal with such an extremely difficult and insurmountable reality of her society. (267)

The novel focuses on the dilemma that Rosa faces when she is bound to inherit political commitment and ideology of the party from her parents. According to Sheila Roberts:

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What makes Burger’s Daughter an extremely moving and memorable book is Gordimer's intricate but compassionate unraveling of Rosa's dilemma between trying to live publicly as the daughter of Lionel Burger, one-time political activist, and privately as an individual who would like to avoid the conformity, predictability and, ultimately, the restrictiveness of following in her father's footsteps. (168)

Rosa is shown as a calm and cool character unlike her parents who are struggling to bring an end to racism. There are three epigraphs at the beginning of each part of the novel. “To know and not to act is not to know” (217) is the epigraph of the second part and it is the most important one. To know and not to act is what Rosa does. She is quite aware about the wretched condition of blacks. Everyone expects her to take the same responsibility left unfulfilled by her father. However she does not want to put her freedom at stake and is thus unwilling to sacrifice her individual life over the public one. She does not want to follow in her father’s footsteps. She wants to live an oppression free life unlike her parents and move away from the tradition in which her parents were killed. In a meeting where she is supposed to speak, everyone expects her to make a political speech, yet she has no personal history of being overtly political. It is only her name which makes people look at her that way. She often remains as a mute spectator on such occasions. She finds it very difficult to bridge the gap between blacks and whites who live a different life standard. At Fats' place where she is invited by Marisa Kgosana to spend an evening, she realises white-black distinctions:

The roaming children, wolverine dogs, hobbled donkeys, fat naked babies, vagabond chickens and drunks weaving, old men staring, Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University authoritative women shouting, boys in rags, tarts in finery, the smell of offal cooking, the neat patches of mealies between shebeen yards stinking of beer and urine, the litter of twice-discarded possessions, first thrown out by the white man and then picked over by the black . . . No electricity in the houses, a telephone an almost impossible luxury . . . The dining room "suite", the plastic pouffles, hi-fi equipment, flowered carpet, bar counter, and stools covered in teddybear fur were the units of taste established by any furniture superman in the white city. (148-49)

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Besides this, she minutely observes the blacks like Duma Dhladhla rejecting the class analysis of South Africa and highlights their state of marginalisation. Duma remarks angrily to Orde Greer that:

This and this should happen and can’t happen because of that and that. These theories don’t fit us. We are not interested. You’ve been talking this shit before I was born . . . And where is he? And where am I? When I go into the café to buy bread they give the Kaffir yesterday’s stale. When he goes for fruit, the Kaffir gets the half rotten stuff the white won’t buy. That is black. (161)

He goes on to criticise the white liberals saying “whites don’t credit us with the intelligence to know what we want! We don’t need their solutions” (162). The young man views that, "We must liberate ourselves as blacks, what has a white got to do with that" (158)? For him all whites are the enemy, and their contributions to the black cause, even their deaths, are not relevant.

Rosa concludes that the whites are responsible for everything the blacks suffer. Witnessing the incidents around her, she is able to understand the sad condition of South Africa. Once, she finds a dead man on a park bench. The picture is quite horrible, yet everyone is self contained without caring for the others pain. Nobody cared to know about the incident. This indifference towards the dead body symbolises the “heartlessness of the city” (74). Besides this, Gordimer here intends to show how the Africans ignore the sufferings of other people in their own country. This can even be extended to signify how the rest of the world ignores what is going on in South Africa. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Rosa is eyewitness to the sufferings which blacks had to undergo and is herself in constant fear that she can be detained at any time. She is “sick of courts, sick of prisons, sick of institutions scrubbed bare for the regulation endurance of dread and pain” (66). She grows up in the backdrop of daily arrests, trials, detentions and deaths. The bitter experience of her life hardens her. Her personal tragedies, her father’s death does not bother her. After the death of her parents in prison, she is pressed with the weight of her parent's work and the knowledge that she does not know. She remains firm in her stand. According to Lorraine Liscio, through the character of Rosa, Gordimer shows the role played by women in anti apartheid

Chapter 4 activities, these “women understood the inequity of black oppression and tried to effect some change” (Liscio 249). Rosa is perplexed to see the attitude of black radicals and decides to flee to France. She knows that it would be very difficult for her to travel because she is Burger’s daughter. She is looked with suspension as her identity is based on her father.

France is quite a different place for her. In France she lives a quite sensuous life free from the mundane conflicts of South Africa in company of her father’s first wife Katya. Katya unlike Lionel wants to live and says that a life without hunger and hurting is the “biggest luxury” (254). She remains devoid of conflicts and believes that one should seize the day. She views life as a pleasure and pure freedom. Lionel on the other hand considers struggle as a part of life. Ivy who is running a take-away lunch shop and Dick who is deaf and has skin cancer are quite contrary to the character of Rosa. Despite spending most part of their life in prison, they see a hope in future and believe that South Africa too like Angola and Mozambique will soon find freedom from atrocities. Dick lives with a hope to witness it. Rosa on the other hand runs away from their lives that don’t have any other option except a hope for a better tomorrow.

In France, Rosa explores new areas of pleasure, food, nature, sports etc and the people she lives with are “people with nothing to hide from, no one to elude, careless of privacy, in their abundance: letting be” (224). In the company of Bernard Chabalier who is a school teacher currently working on a book, she experiences a rebirth of sexual experiences. The life she lives there is devoid of any responsibility and suffering which apartheid had showered upon her. Under the shade of Bernard Chabalier, she lives a happy and blissful life and witnesses the other side of her life. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University She finds France violence free and everyone’s sensual attachment with one another. In the shape of Katya, she gets another good host and an affectionate companion. Gordimer here contrasts the disturbing and stressful life of South Africa with calm and composed life of France.

After Rosa’s return from France, Gordimer refers to the historical Soweto riots incident triggered, with “the revolt of schoolchildren and students on the issue of inferior education for blacks” (365). The riots killed many students and several were injured. Rosa is also detained without any charges “A few white people are detained,

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Chapter 4 arrested, house-arrested or banned on I9th October 1977, and in the weeks following. The Burger girl was one” (365). However the imprisonment does not dampen her down, rather she remains firm in her stand and courageously faces what can be called as a toughest phase in her life. Flora once visits prison with fruits for Rosa. She reports that Rosa is more active and energetic than ever, “She's all right. In good shape. She looked like a little girl . . . she's somehow livelier than she used to be” (373). The novel ends with a letter written in a prison in Pretoria that Madame Bagnelli receives from Rosa. She passes through continuously changing situations and finally chooses the best choice for herself.

`The novel is thus a bildungsroman novel. It is Rosa who takes charge of her family when her mother is arrested and plays “her mother's role in the household, giving loving support to her father, who was all too soon to be detained as well” (6). She often brings comfort to her mother in prison despite being in menstrual pain. Rosa is thus an intelligent and responsible girl as far as political matters are concerned. Her life is suffocated by responsibilities. Parents and family play a crucial role in the development of personality, identity and character but as far as Rosa is concerned her “search for identity and the importance of the self is influenced, overshadowed and eclipsed by her parents and their political motives” (Ganguly, “Sexual Identity of White heroines” 29). She is used as a “device to enable [her parents to] receive visits in the prison and communicate important messages to the outside world” (Ganguly, “Sexual Identity of White heroines” 29). She is thus “given firsthand experience to serve the struggle and learn the intricacies of prison communication” (Ganguly, “Sexual Identity of White heroines” 29). While playing this role she is used as a “sexual object”, in order to convince the prison guards: Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University On the night before the day itself finally arrived I washed my hair; before leaving for the prison I trickled perfume between my breasts and cupped some to rub on my belly and thighs. I chose a dress that showed my legs, or trousers and a shirt that emphasized my femaleness with their sexual ambiguity. Scent me out sniff my flesh. (63)

The novel shows the psychological impact of apartheid upon Rosa when all the ecstasies of childhood are snatched away from her. Her choices are made limited by the continuous imprisonment of her parents and psychological pressure from the

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Chapter 4 apartheid ridden society. She grows up in a household where discussions on arrests, imprisonment, bails, and political problems always intercept her ears. The word ‘Burger’ in Afrikaans means solid citizen. So Burger’s family is surely the solid citizen of the country who is dedicated to bring freedom to themselves and their fellow citizens.

In Burger’s Daughter, Gordimer uses the technique of interior monologue which she had previously used in The Conservationist where she shows its central character Mehring’s sense of alienation and dilemma of survival in the black world. Here in Burger’s Daughter, she uses the same technique to show Rosa’s physical and mental changes from childhood to adulthood. Lionel Burger is sentenced to life imprisonment and before that he gives a two hour long speech to the gathering at the court. He becomes a kind of a mouth piece of Gordimer to highlight the discrimination done with the blacks. He says, “when as a medical student tormented not by the suffering I saw around me in hospitals, but by the subjection and humiliation of human beings in daily life I had seen around me all my life.” (19). He ridicules the whites and says that they “worship the God of Justice and practise discrimination on grounds of the colour of skin; profess the compassion of the Son of Man, and deny the humanity of the black people they live among” (19). He explains how a white man has created a capitalist society and exploited the blacks to fulfil his own means:

The white man had built a society that tried to contain and justify the contradictions of capitalist means of production and feudalist social forms. The resulting devastation I, a privileged young white, had had before my eyes since my birth. Black men, women and children living Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University in the miseries of insecurity, poverty and degradation on the farms where I grew up, and in the "dark Satanic mills" of the industry that bought their labour cheap. (20)

Lionel as a communist further talks about their party’s desire to bring peace and unity in the country:

What we as Communists black and white working in harmony with others who do not share our political philosophy have set our sights on is the national liberation of the African people, and thus the

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abolishment of discrimination and extension of political rights to all the peoples of this country . . . That alone has been our aim . . . beyond . . . there are matters the future will settle. (20-21).

Rosa too shares all her past memories with Conrad with whom she lived after her parent’s death. Now all attention falls upon her. She remembers her childhood miseries and the brutal incidents of Sharpeville massacre when:

Blacks were shot by the police, when people were detained, when leaders went to jail, when new laws shifted populations you'd never even seen, banned and outlawed people, those were your mournings and your wakes. These were the occasions you were taught . . . and poor little ingrown miseries. (47)

She recounts Sipho’s personal account of how the brains of the dead men were collected by a black policeman:

Sipho said how when the police were loading the dead into vans he had to ask them to take the brains as well - the brains of a man with a smashed head spilled and they left them in the road . . . they sent a black policeman to pick up the brains with a shovel. (39)

For Rosa, "what happened at Sharpeville was as immediate to me as what was happening in my own body" (112). Rosa also recounts the time which she spent with her auntie Velma Nel. Here she realises the typical bourgeoisie life lived by Velma in a big hotel earned by them which is quite contrary to the Lionel’s life style. She gets a glimpse of the world full of discrimination, hate and anger. The family is reluctant to accept her blackMaulana brother Baasie Azad in Library, their family Aligarh and so he Muslim is sent to Universityhis grandmother’s place. Baasie with whom “Rosa had often shared a bed when they were little . . . they scuttled wildly together from that particular breed of dog and fought for the anchorage of wet hair on Lionel Burger's warm breast in the cold swimming-pool” (50). Once on the way, Rosa encounters a donkey-cart coming from the opposite side. She sees the horrible scene of driver’s ruthless whipping of the donkey. Rosa remembers her father Lionel who had a great attachment with animals. The man is beating the donkey because of his own suffering, of which she has no experience, and as a white South African, she is "accountable for him, to him, as he is for the donkey" (210). She feels

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Chapter 4 the pain of the donkey, “I didn't see the whip. I saw agony” (210). Symbolically, in the words of Richard Peck, in the misery of the donkey, “Rosa sees all of the agony of the land” (Peck 32) and perceives animals and blacks in a similar predicament. Rosa thus feels the pain and distress of blacks who have been whipped for decades under the banner of apartheid.

Leaving aside the white family of Burgers’, Gordimer’s portrayal of black characters are comparatively sympathetic and often admirable. Marisa Kogsana, who is an anti apartheid activist and an essence of blackness is shown as vital and magnanimous when compared to her opposite Brandt Vermeulen, who is an essence of whiteness. He is shown as hypocritical, violent and cruel on various occasions in the novel. One such occasion was when Rosa goes to him for some work related to her passport, she recalls cruel and inhuman attitude of this man.

He gave me an informal luncheon-type address on the honourable evolution of dialogue, beginning with Plato . . . and culminating in ‘the Vorster initiative,’ the dialogue of peoples and nations. With me he has self-engaged in that responsibility on the human scale; for him his afternoons with Rosa were ‘Dialogue’ in practice. Others, less fastidious-minded than he, pursue the human scale in the rooms supplied with only the basic furnishing of interrogation, winning over enemies brought out of solitary confinement to stand on their feet until they drop, kicked, beaten, doused and terrorized into submission. (195)

On the contrary, It is through Marisa that Rosa realizes Lionel’s vision of the future: “Through blackness is revealed the way to the future” (132). Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Her characters also represent the various historical figures and the various historical incidents associated with them. Rosa Burger is based on Winnie Mandela. The three important historical incidents which Rosa witnesses while growing up are, The Treason Trials, Sharpeville Massacre and Soweto Riots that make her in the end to choose the ideology of her father. In an interview with Stephen Gray, Gordimer calls the novel as “an historical critique” (182). She had a deep vision into the historical experience of the individuals. She gives a clear and apt picture of the society she lived in. Gordimer’s reference towards these historical events is actually a symbol of man’s inhumanity to man, in the form of oppression, degradation and

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Chapter 4 exploitation. She wrote the novel as a tribute to all those South African communists who lived a very horrible life under the fear of apartheid. She says, “[f]or me it’s the only novel of mine that has a purpose outside simply writing it. It is for me a kind of homage to that group of early communists” (Boyers, et al 200). She depicts the life of deprivation which the communists lived in during the period of apartheid. It is a tribute to white leaders who had no selfish interests in fighting for the marginalised people. The communists participated with the members of African National Congress to end apartheid. Though they vary in their ideologies but the aim was common to end apartheid. Nelson Mandela in his autobiography talks about the distinction between the two:

The ANC, unlike the Communist Party, admitted Africans only as members. Its chief goal was, and is, for the African people to win unity and full political rights. The Communist Party’s main aim, on the other hand, was to remove the capitalists and to replace them with a working-class government. The Communist Party sought to emphasize class distinctions whilst the ANC seeks to harmonize them. (350)

Mandela further eulogizes communists and says that “for many decades Communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals” (350).

Gordimer shows how the communists like Lionel Burger and Cathy Burger meet a gruesome fate while fighting with racial segregation in their country. Besides this, Gordimer shows how even their children were deprived from their basic amenities of their lives like health, education etc. Rosa in order to meet her father in the prison oftenMaulana had to ignore Azad the Library,menstrual periodsAligarh for Muslimthe sake of University the role assigned to her. Even a passport is denied to her because of her communist background. According to P. Nagaraj, in Burger’s Daughter the reader finds Communists failing to provide humanistic concern to the people among themselves and the novel “projects the pathetic picture of the children of Communists despised and victimized for their parents’ political agenda, suffering without proper education and treatment” (14-15). Stephen Clingman observes that Lionel Burger is based on the South African Communist Party leader Bram Fischer and Gordimer herself confesses that “. . . Lionel Burger is Bram Fischer. I knew Bram Fischer; I admired him tremendously

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Bram Fischer was given life sentence by the apartheid government for his involvement in anti-government activities. Like Baasie, a black boy in Burger’s Daughter who grows up in Burger’s family, Fischer too had in his family a niece of a black servant. Rosa is born in May, 1948, the same month when the first Nationalist government came to power. Thus Rosa’s entire life parallels the various stages in the period of the apartheid regime from its inception to the publication of the novel. This gives the novel an allegorical or symbolic significance.

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REFRENCES:

Gordimer, Nadine. Burger’s Daughter, Bloomsbury, 2000.

Barnard, Rita. "‘The Keeper of Metamorphosis’: Nadine Gordimer." Development

and Change, vol. 46, no. 4, 2015, pp. 934-948.

Boyers, Robert, et al. “A Conversation with Nadine Gordimer.” Conversations with

Nadine Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman

Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 185-214.

Boyers, Robert. “Public and Private: On Burger's Daughter.” Salmagundi, no. 62,

1984, pp. 62–92.

Fatton, Robert. Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological

Resistance to White Supremacy. State University of New York Press, 1986.

Ganguly, Sharanya. “Sexual Identity of White heroines in Black South Africa: Nadine

Gordimer’s take on the Apartheid struggle.” Journal of Research in

Humanities and Social Science, vol. 5, no. 6, 2017, pp. 27-33.

Ganguly, Sharanya. “The humanist approach in Nadine Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature

and Burgers Daughter: Beyond politics of Colour and Religious Dogma.” Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Lapis Lazuli: An International Literary Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 2017, pp. 206-

227

Gray, Stephen. “An Interview with Nadine Gordimer.” Conversations with Nadine

Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman

Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 176-184.

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Green, Robert. “From ‘The Lying Days to July's People’: The Novels of Nadine

Gordimer.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 14, no. 4, 1988, pp. 543–563.

Hurwitt, Jannika. “The Art of Fiction LXXVII: Nadine Gordimer.” Conversations

with Nadine Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn

Dallman Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 127-160.

Liscio, Lorraine. “‘Burger’s Daughter’: Lighting a Torch in the Heart of

Darkness.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 1987, pp. 245–261.

Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom, Abacus, 1995.

Nagaraj, P. “Dramatization of the Political story of Apartheid in Nadine Gordimer’s

Novels” Journal of English and Literature (JEL), vol. 2, no. 1, 2012,

pp. 12-16.

Peck, Richard. “One foot before the other into an unknown future: The dialectic in

Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter.” World Literature Written in English,

vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp. 25–43.

Powell, Edward. "Equality or unity? Black Consciousness, white solidarity, and the

new South Africa in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter and July’s

MaulanaPeople." The Azad Journal Library, of Commonwealth Aligarh Muslim Literature University, vol. 14, no. 4, 2017, pp. 1-18.

Powell, Marilyn. “Nadine Gordimer: An interview.” Conversations with Nadine

Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman

Seymour, University Press of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 229-238.

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Roberts, Sheila. “Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer; A Soldier's Embrace by

Nadine Gordimer.” World Literature Today, vol. 56, no. 1, 1982, pp. 167–

168. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40137154.

Sakamoto, Toshiko. "The Politics of Place and the Question of Subjectivity in Nadine

Gordimer's Burger's Daughter." 立命館言語文化研究, vol. 13, no. 4, 2002,

pp. 261 277.

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Racial Tensions and Interdependencies: July’s People

July’s People, gives a fictitious account of the black revolution movement against the whites in South Africa during apartheid. The novel was written in the year 1981, thirteen years before the official demise of apartheid. Though written in pre- apartheid era, it predicts about a post-apartheid world. The novel foretells the inevitable downfall of South African whites and the emergence of new political and social realities that would force whites to search for new identities. July’s People is Gordimer’s first novel which is explicitly set in the South African future. It talks about a time not very far in the future when things will turn topsy turvy and blacks will start ruling over the white oppressors. Gordimer believes that blacks will come out victorious from their struggle and whites will find themselves in a subordinate position, ruled by blacks. In the novel, the society which witnessed apartheid and its brutal laws is destroyed by South African black militia with the help of neighbouring countries:

It’s a war. It’s not like that, any more . . . the blacks have also got guns. Bombs (miming the throwing of a hand grenade). All kinds of things. Same as the white army, everything that kills. People have come back from Botswana and Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia, from Mocambique, with guns. (Gordimer 142)

The resistance causes a holocaust in which homes and government buildings are burnt Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University and destroyed. The novel is about the Smales family which consists of five members including Bam, his wife Maureen and their three children Victor, Gina and Royce who live in Johannesburg. Bam is a famous architect and Maureen, a housewife and a former ballet dancer. When the black revolution hits South Africa, the Smales start feeling unsafe. They decide to flee from their homeland Johannesburg with the help of their black servant July, who offers to shift them to his own village. The hapless family accepts the offer. The white Smales’ family is saved from death, only by the ingenuity of their servant July, who has been working for them for the last fifteen years. The family shifts from a bourgeoisie class to an utterly new lifestyle, shunning

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Chapter 5 their belongings and their upper social strata of life. “Their new life is a far cry from and is starkly contrasted to the sumptuous life they have led before the war undermined the props that supported their privilege” (Erritouni 69-70). The Smales find it very difficult to adjust themselves in utterly unhygienic and impoverished conditions. The family faces many difficulties in adjusting themselves to their new roles and giving up their habits. Nadine Gordimer here “evokes brilliantly the stunning contrast between the privileged existence they have left behind and the sordid life they must now live in a damp and crowded hut in an African village” (Cronin 208). After the end of civil war in the novel, Gordimer shows how whites find themselves in a similar kind of situation or feeling of deprivation as blacks did for many years during their period of dependency, that is, without the modern day comforts. Gordimer highlights the problem of social fragmentation in relation to South African culture as a whole. She is of the opinion that the healthy common culture is quite impossible when the menace of apartheid is prevalent, which isolates whole communities and does not let different races grow closer even when they want to make social intercourse possible. Through July's People, Gordimer “tries to articulate what it will be like for a decent white couple to experience the transformation into “blacks,” harried from their home and bereft of accustomed physical and psychological supports” (Green 560). Therefore the initial part of the novel focuses on the master and servant relationship and the black subservience under white masters and the second part talks about their shift from war torn home to the servant July’s home in Johannesburg, which metaphorically means inversion of power.

Nadine Gordimer comes from a place where there is a system of rigorous social divisionMaulana maintained Azadand regulated Library, by the Aligarh apartheid Muslim state in the University interests of white power. Gordimer was closely associated with the black social world and presented its tone and tenor with great accuracy. July’s People has made a powerful contribution towards the understanding of poverty and lifestyle in rural areas of South Africa. In it, she revisits the past. There is an autobiographical touch as Maureen Smales comes from a mining town background which is very similar to that of Gordimer’s own past. Gordimer was born at Springs - an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. She revisits the past in another sense as well, for she deals with similar kinds of themes and settings that she dealt with in her earlier stories where she highlights the master-

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Chapter 5 servant relationship as in July’s People. Gordimer thus wrote the history of the victims and the marginalized.

During apartheid which “ultimately limited South Africa’s prosperity and risked creating an unstable nation isolated from the rest of the world” (Padhi and Dash 6), the relationship between master and servant was quite bleak. It actually violated the laws of peaceful co-existence of man and man. The bourgeoisie whites were dependent on the blacks whom they forced to do menial jobs on low wages and never treated them equally. In July’s People the revolutionary blacks replace the whites and rule over them. Master-servant relationship takes a flip, as Paul Rich says in his article “Apartheid and the Decline of the Civilization Idea: An Essay on Nadine Gordimer's "July's People" and J. M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" that July’s People is a study of:

The changing power relationship between white and black as the structural underpinnings of white rule are removed, leaving the former white employers very much at the behest of their former servant, who now has almost the power of life and death over the fugitive Smales. (Rich 375)

When Maureen realizes that she is subservient to July or in other words blacks, she inwardly bursts for she loses her powerful position. Through the master and servant relationship in July’s People, Gordimer’s main aim was to create shock in the minds of white readers. She showed through this relationship that the day will not be faraway when things will be reversed and victimizers will be at the mercy of the victims and thus Gordimer here “evokes the grimy details of their subsistence in ramshackleMaulana penury, Azad depending Library, on July'sAligarh charity Muslim as he University once depended on their liberality” (Moss 394).

Right from her childhood Gordimer was quite vigilant about the racial injustice in her country. She was concerned about social and political issues, and wrote on a wide range of themes like oppression, exploitation and state-sponsored terrorism etc. She acted as a spokesperson of the oppressed people. There were various incidents like Sharpeville riots, Nelson Mandela’s arrest, killings and arrests of some of her best friends etc. which forced her to raise a staunch voice against apartheid and its various laws. According to Indrani Rangasamy:

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Gordimer repeatedly took up the themes of exploitation and injustice and challenged the racist government. She had the courage to talk about the delusions of ‘the white man’s burden’. She attacked the false assumption of whites that they were born to rule and the other races were at their mercy for development. (11)

July’s People also discusses about the crisis of an individual in the midst of social and political upheaval. In it Gordimer is:

Anxious to plumb the painful depths of the violence done to individual human identity by the apartheid system and wishes to highlight the cruelty of it all through July's tormented mutations, caught as he is between his conflicting roles as Johannesburg servant and as dominant male in his own village society, where he is the father of a family and his mother's only provider. (Cronin 208)

July’s People talks about the features of white bourgeoisie culture in South Africa and the relationship based on culture between the various classes of South Africa. As a realistic novel, it shows how apartheid laws directly affect the stress- filled life of black servants working under the tyrannical rule of white masters. The primary focus of the novel is to show the transformed identities when the black revolution takes place. The novel begins with an epigraph from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms”. The epigraph according to Anita Ostrom suggests, “the loss of previous identities as well as the absence of new identities among the protagonists in July’s people” (3). According to Ali Erritouni the epigraph suggests,Maulana “[t]he Azad past of Library, South Africa Aligarh is defunct; Muslim however, University attempts to transcend it towards a better future must face a recalcitrant interregnum” (69). Robert Green believes that the epigraph “alludes to the novel’s location in a moral and political intermission, during which customary relationships have been overthrown and new ones are still embryonic” (562). Thus the novel talks about the socio-political tensions in South Africa during the old system of racial segregation which was about to end and the future racial equality which struggles to take place; the interval between these two events is what Antonio Gramsci called “interregnum”. The novel highlights how South Africa during apartheid had degenerated into dystopia and as a

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Chapter 5 dystopian novel, “July's People draws a grim picture of South Africa in order not only to expose the social and economic consequences of apartheid, but also to open up utopian horizons beyond it” (Erritouni 69).

Nadine Gordimer in July’s People primarily focuses on the experience of being a white liberal during the apartheid movement. Liberals were those blacks and whites who actively participated to obliterate the system of apartheid and provided equal rights to blacks in every field of life. The deep understanding of the novel gives a notion that Gordimer seems to warn white racists in general and white liberals in particular about their ill fate if apartheid is not ended as soon as possible. July’s People is a scathing commentary on white liberals. The Smales claim to be liberals and believe that their treatment towards their servant July was comparatively better than the other whites. Their claim of being liberal is quite evident in their lifestyles. Smales family live a sumptuous life with pomp and show and extravagance. Before the revolution their life was based on ownership and many other costly possessions while as an indigent July lives in a hut which is highly dilapidated and stinking all around. July’s home, “was not a village but a habitation of mud houses” (Gordimer 15).

Frantz Fanon illustrates and differentiates the living conditions of both whites and blacks living in colonies in his book The Wretched of the Earth. According to him the place where settlers reside is a strongly built town embellished with all sort of precious things like their streets are covered with asphalt and other costly items. Their town according to Fanon is a “well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers' town is a town of white people, of foreigners” (39). On the other hand: Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village,

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a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs. (39)

Gordimer too mentions the unjust living standards of whites and blacks in July’s People. She gives a detailed description about condition of hut in the very initial pages of novel:

She slowly began to inhabit the hut around her, empty except for the iron bed, the children asleep on the vehicle seats – the other objects of the place belonged to another category: nothing but a stiff rolled-up cowhide, a hoe on a nail, a small pile of rags and part of a broken Primus stove, left against the wall. The hen and chickens were moving there; but the slight sound she heard did not come from them. There would be mice and rats. Flies wandered the air and found the eyes and mouths of her children, probably still smelling of vomit, dirty, sleeping, safe. (4)

July is underpaid by the so called liberal whites and is not allowed to go on leave even once in a year. During their life in the city, they were against the ideas of apartheid and in fact joined many political groups with the hope of demolishing apartheid laws. Yet after their arrival to July’s village, their liberal bent of mind changes and they are reluctant to lose their possession. Maureen’s previous life style and social status is completely altered. According to Ostrom, Maureen “considered herself to be liberal in her previous life, but now she seems to have difficulties in adjusting to a new social order in a different social context and also to a changed power structure where July is in command of their life (13). Thus July’s People depicts a worldMaulana where the Azad traditional Library, roles andAligarh rules haveMuslim been overturned,University where relationships have become undefined, where even vocabulary and language has been questioned.

July takes the Smales family to his village against his wife Martha’s wish; she was quite reluctant to receive them as she believed that their arrival could add more burdens to their poverty-stricken family as they may have to feed more children. Besides this, it was a challenging task to keep the white men at home due to black revolution. However Martha remains devoted to her agrarian work and pays less heed to the black revolution. Smales family also treated their black servant decently and did

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Chapter 5 not associate themselves with the white South Africans, however “[a]s long as July was obedient and vulnerable, they felt outraged by the racism of apartheid, but as soon as his relationship with them entails material equality, they resent him” (Erritouni 71). As time passes, July tries to maintain his sense of self-identity and tries to be superior to the white family. His attitude towards Bam and Maureen changes altogether. This is seen when he comes back to the hut with groceries. He does not seek permission for his entry as he usually did in the city where he had “the habit of knocking at a door, asking, The master . . . I can come in?” (Gordimer 65) and was trained “to drop the ‘master’ for the ubiquitously respectful ‘sir’” (65). Power to talk courageously or make effective use of language gives July a sense of superiority over the one he talks to. Thus in July’s People,“Gordimer expresses the ability of the subaltern July to "speak back" by creating a reversed relationship between July, the servant, and his white master and mistress, Bam and Maureen Smales” (Deyab 348). July uses his language not of a servant but that of master. He takes their keys and drives their car without their permission; this shows how “his authority gradually increases” (Ostrom 10). And his refusal to “ask for permission to use the car indicates rejection of the Smaleses' previous status as white bosses and a reminder to them that the old order is defunct” (Erritouni 72). The keys here are the symbols of transference of power.

Though Smales survive now under the mercy of black people yet they act as if they were the owners of everything as before. Maureen tries to maintain that sense of superiority over July which she did when July was working as her servant even in his village but ends up being unsuccessful after several attempts. Racial trait thus resides deep inside her despite dependency over the powerless black man. What frustrates and hauntsMaulana them moreAzad is Library, that despite Aligarh being most Muslim intellectual University persons in the black community where they reside now, still they have to be dependent on those whom they once regarded as what Marxist critics called ‘lumpenproletariat’. It becomes very difficult for Maureen to adjust to the reversed situation and she becomes insane because it is hard for her to accept a life without superior racial identity and power. She is not able to fit into the distressed condition of rural South African village. When Bam’s gun is stolen from the hut, she is quite enraged and blames July for stealing it. She loses her temper and starts a verbal brawl with July and argues with him that either Daniel (July’s friend) or he must have taken the same and demands the return

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Chapter 5 back of the weapon. July is deeply embarrassed by the accusations. What July says in response is the most important part of the novel. He proves his own dignity and self- respect when in a burst of sheer fury and frustration he responds for the first time ever during his tenure as a servant of Smales. He says “I must know who is stealing your things . . . You make too much trouble for me. Here in my home too . . . Trouble, trouble from you. I don't want it any more. You see?" (Gordimer 184-85). This shows to what extent the situation has changed and symbolically shows the powerlessness of once powerful masters. Another important thing in this episode is that July communicates in his own language because he wanted to retain “his power and authority of her” (Ostrom 11) and “through his language he proves that he is a man and that he belongs to his own people and not to the Smales” (Ostrom 12).

There is a shift of linguistic power as well. Earlier in the novel it can be seen that Maureen despite being close to July does not know his name. It was she who assigns him a name ‘July’ instead of calling him by his real name ‘Mwawate’. By doing so the author shows how whites try to impose their own language on the natives and thus make them feel that their language and culture is inferior. Frantz Fanon is of the opinion that “[e]very effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognize the unreality of his "nation"” (236). July is colonized as he is forced to develop a sense of inferiority complex thereby causing ‘cultural cringe’ within him and Maureen Smales is a colonizer who justifies the stance of a typical imperialist. For a colonizer, a colonized can never redeem himself and be equal to a colonizer. July while living in their company at their home had learned some broken English which helped him to communicate with his masters easily “often Bam couldn’t followMaulana his broken Azad English, Library, but he and Aligarh she [Maureen] Muslim understood University each other well” (16). Soon after their migration Smales are bound to learn the native language to survive in the black world and to communicate effectively with the native people. Thus the power is linguistically transferred. Author Abdul Karim puts it thus “whereas earlier July had been content to communicate with the Smales by a minimal series of monosyllabic English answers, here he reclaims the agency of native language in order to assert his new authority over them” (139). Unable to speak and understand the dominant tongue, they are rendered powerless.

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Nadine Gordimer also makes uses of certain symbols in the novel. Bam possesses a gun and bakkie which he carried with him when they migrated to Johannesburg. Bakkie is a

small truck with a three-litre engine, fourteen-inch wheels with heavy- duty ten-ply tyres, and a sturdy standard chassis on which the buyer fits a fibreglass canopy with windows, air-vents and foam-padded benches running along either side, behind the cab. (Gordimer 6)

They migrate with these two symbols of white oppression. Symbolically these things suggest power, authority, superiority and much more. As the plot moves it can be seen that these things are taken over by July. The transfer of ownership symbolically suggests the changeover of ruling power. Bam often deals with July from a racist and capitalist perspective. This is evident when he is reluctant to share the gun and the bakkie with him. Bam says “I would never have thought he [July] would do something like that [taking the car]” (71). They do so probably because of the fact of losing their ‘white dignity’. The bakkie serves “as a symbol of his previous social position” (Ostrom 6). According to Mohammad Deyab the car suggests “the power of mobility and economic exploitation of Blacks at the hands of whites” (343- 344).

When July returns back with the bakkie, Bam and Maureen get angry “Bam had not greeted him [July]. Maureen was unbelieving to see on the white man’s face the old, sardonic, controlled challenge of the patron. – And where were you yesterday? What’s the story?” (65). Maureen further tells him angrily later in the novel that Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University You’ll profit by the others’ fighting. Steal a bakkie. You want that, now. . . You want the bakkie, to drive around in like a gangster, imaging yourself a big man, important, until you don’t have any money for petrol, there isn’t any petrol to buy, and it’ll lie there, July, under the trees, in this place among the old huts, and it’ll fall to pieces while the children play in it. Useless. Another wreck like all the others. Another bit of rubbish. (187)

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Later in the novel when the gun is stolen Maureen curses July and believes that he will never prosper in his life. This shows Maureen’s fear of losing her previous possessions (which signify her upper social status) and “it seems as though Bam's last symbol of authority has been taken from him” (Cronin 208). July tells Maureen and Bam that he will himself drive the bakkie and will tell people that the bakkie now belongs to him at which Bam laughs, saying that no one would believe to which July replies courageously "the white people are chased away from their houses and we take. Everybody is like that, isn't it?" (16), reminding him that being a white their life is in danger and he is their only saviour. When July takes control of the Smales most important property like the bakkie and keys, Maureen becomes:

Conscious of the subtle changes which are taking place in their relationship with July who, by and large, continues to play a version of his old Johannesburg role as their house servant, providing them with whatever minimal comforts the local stores can turn up. (Cronin 208)

Gordimer also wants to reflect on the fact that Smales’ dependence on gun and bakkie shows their excessive inclination towards the peace disturbing items and murderous mindset. This becomes very clear when Bam goes for hunting and kills a piglet with his gun:

Bam . . . shot it through the head. Its young bones were so light that the snout smashed. It was horrible, the bloodied pig-face weeping blood and trailing blood-snot . . . The shattered pig-face hung to the ground, dripping a trail all the way back to the huts, where his function as a provider of meat settled upon him as a status. (94) Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University The experience of killing brings to light the white Smales family’s inner characters and reflects their way of thinking and therefore shows their violent bent of mind.

The relationship between July and Smales in the city was quite satisfactory, they had nothing to complain. July was considered as very reliable and Smales were happy with his subordinate role in the home. This is evident when July tries to present himself to Maureen as her ‘boy’- a derogatory white South African term for a male servant but Maureen refuses to call him by this derogatory epithet. However soon after their possession is snatched, the relationship as a master and servant takes the

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Chapter 5 opposite shape and the couple lose their sense of self identity as Hadiuzzaman and Abdul Karim Ruman says:

The impact of power-reversal and consequently the material deprivation and difficulty of adjusting to dependency on their former servant July also leads to Bam's and Maureen's losing their self-image as independent, gracious, powerful, and liberal citizens . . . [they] lose a sense of each other as husband and wife . . . [and] sense of personal identity. (136)

While failing to live as a master, Maureen Smales loses her role as a mother, a wife and white liberal. She fails to live up to the expectations of her husband. She is not able to provide her children motherly affection. It is Bam along with his children who have to take care of all the household chores. At the onset of the novel Maureen is introduced as a white liberal woman bearing a great affection for the black people in distress. However soon after the inversion of power she loses her liberal mindset and becomes inwardly jealous and an ardent critique of blacks:

They [the children] looked to their mother but her expression was closed to them. Even her body – so familiar in the jeans as worn as the covering of a shabby stuffed toy, the T-Shirt stretched over the flat small breasts that were soft to lie against. (176)

Maureen is replaced by her children who take the responsibility more seriously than their mother did. Gordimer here prophesises that these will be the children in post-apartheid age who will be taking a leading role in the new era. She hopes for their positive futuristic roles as civilized members of the society. The Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University children receive considerable attention from the author. She sees in them a new life, a new beginning and a new future free from any brutal mentalities and racial antipathies. Gina is a character in the novel who is free from any racist mentality. She is easily able to adjust herself in the black community. In fact she has many black friends, unlike her mother who has only one black friend Lydia, with whom she fails to communicate and who is being treated as a mere servant and not a friend. Gina is shown as amiable and sociable who is racially unbiased. She grows up in a tradition which is completely opposite to her own yet she succeeds in absorbing the African identity, culture and tradition as a colonial free girl. She learns their language quickly,

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Chapter 5 copies their behaviour and fits into their culture with ease. She often goes to the home of her black friend Nyiko and enjoys a mutual world of childish sisterhood and pleasure. The two are shown in such a way as if they belong to the same cultural heritage. Her hold over the local language is to the extent that she even sings a lullaby in the language of the villager. According to Ali Erritouni, “Gina’s metamorphosis into an African girl, immersing herself in African language, manners, food and perceptions, so much so that her new world has become the yardstick through which she perceives the rest of the world” (78). Similarly Maureen’s son, Victor is also of a mentality similar to Gina which is evident during Bam’s confrontation of July when she finds bakkie missing. Victor empathises with July and says that July wants to show it to “the black children who watched the hut from afar” (17). Thus he wants Bam to allow July to show his bakkie to the other children of the village who don’t have any such kind of facilities in their possession. Besides this, during their life in the city, possession seemed to be their main concern. However soon after their arrival in July’s village “their interest in possessions seems to vanish . . . [and they] adopt the activities of the village children” (Ostrom 19). Thus through “the Smales's children” who “intermingle with the other villagers' children and consume their habits and traditions” (Abdulatif 77), Gordimer tries to highlight that all the children born after the end of the apartheid regime will not be infected with the racial and social prejudices of their parents. Therefore July's People “stands as a testimony to Gordimer's staunch commitment to postapartheid South Africa” (Erritouni 81).

Gordimer speaks for and on behalf of the subaltern blacks and represents the sympathetic white point of view despite being a white writer. The subaltern is a concept of Antonio Gramsci which means of ‘inferior rank’. Gordimer through the novel shows thatMaulana if the oppressed Azad Library,are given theAligarh chance Muslimto speak or University raise their voice, they will be in a position to take themselves out from this detrimental condition. July’s People is a perfect example of what may happen in South Africa if the black nation (as a whole) will revolt against the white minority. Thus according to Mohammad Deyab, “Gordimer's July’s People may be viewed as a positive reply to Spivak's well-known question "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (342). Unlike Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, July’s People does not aim to muzzle their voice. The Blacks in the Heart of Darkness are shown as marginalised who stand on the periphery. Kurtz is able to maintain his power and grip on them and therefore subdues

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Chapter 5 their voices. July on the contrary is shown as a man who admits "I am big man; I know for myself what I must do. I’m not thinking all the time for your things" (86). When he replies back to Maureen with great courage and guts despite knowing she is his master, he proves that subaltern are not passive they have the capability to hit back verbally. Through the character of July, Gordimer “attempts to recover his silenced voice in such a way that makes him visible, and empowered” (Deyab 342). In other words, she empowers the oppressed blacks who have been the worst victims of apartheid and demonstrates artistically that whites have wronged blacks for a long time and it is time now to counter attack them. At the very beginning of the novel, Gordimer dares to show the crumbling of white rule, which was a challenging task at the time when blacks were reeling under oppression.

In the relationship between Maureen and Bam, Maureen is depicted as an independent woman who often raises questions regarding her status and takes her own decisions. The reason behind her losing of her role as a mother is because of her growing independence. When July gives Maureen’s clothes to a woman for washing, Maureen says, "I can do it myself, -- they had so few, they wore so little; the children had abandoned shoes, there was no question of a fresh pair of shorts and socks every day" (32). Maureen wants to be independent, this is obvious when she decides to work in the fields with other women of July’s village but is restricted by July from doing so. According to Iman Abdulsattar Abdulatif, she prefers to do so because “she cannot establish a [superior] role within her family members or with the village people. She then tries hard to attain a parallel role with the other women villagers” (72). Denying Maureen work with the other women in the village clearly shows the shift of power. Maureen has to take permission from July despite him being her servantMaulana to carry out Azad any work. Library, Women Aligarh were the worst Muslim victims University of the apartheid system. They were deprived of all rights and were supposed to do menial jobs on low wages. Nadine Gordimer was eye witness to it that and gives some instances of it in her novel. According to Andre Brink, “the black women in July's People fulfil the most menial of functions, working in the fields, fetching and carrying, washing and cooking and cleaning (both for their own families and for the whites in their midst), bearing children, submitting themselves to the comings and goings of their men” (168). For Maureen, Bam after migration loses his identity. “She looked down on this

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Chapter 5 man who had nothing, now” (Maureen 176). Bam loses respect of Maureen because he is now no longer in a position to help her financially and be her protector.

Some critics have favoured the Smales family arguing that they too have been depicted as victims of apartheid. They believe that apartheid also inflicted equal sufferings on the whites. The ending scene of the novel in which Maureen goes out in search of July and wants him to forget all the skirmishes of the past and begin a new life, she tries to convince him that she still has liberal views (as she had at the very beginning of the novel). In other words she tends to diminish the gap between a colonizer and a colonized. Her intention to put July under her control changes altogether. She tells him “[y]ou know quite well what I mean . . . For what’s happened. It’s different here. You are not a servant” (87). Through this reconciliation, Gordimer hints at the end of apartheid.

Gordimer’s works have attracted the attention of admirers from all over the world for the prophetic nature of her vision and the formal and technical mastery of her writing. Her novels give an acute and unique insight into historical experience in the period in which she was writing. They end “with a vision, and it might properly be called an historical vision” (Clingman 13). According to Indrani Rengasamy, “[a]s a keen observer of political life in South Africa, Gordimer turns a visionary in predicting the political events. She forewarned about the possible outcomes of the cruel laws of apartheid” (107). Gordimer as a prophet or a seer had great creativity and foresight. Her far-sightedness is clearly visible in July’s people. In the novel, Gordimer turns towards the future and thus envisions the present through the lens of the future. She prophesises that after the black revolution, the blacks will emerge victorious. She foresees the inevitable collapse of white rule and believes that the Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University victimizers will soon be at the mercy of the victims. In the final scene when Maureen chases the helicopter, it suggests Maureen’s search for self-identity. Maureen fails to live in the present and she anxiously waits for some glimpses of hope to come in the future. According to Iman Abdulatif, “[h]er determined running symbolizes not only her strong selfhood that she must find, but a future reconciliation between her own race and the blacks as well” (79). Maureen’s escape while seeing the helicopter hovering over her, shows her rebellious nature, she runs because she wants to rid herself of the brutal policies of apartheid. Thus at the end of the novel, Maureen flees headlong towards an undefined place and the novel ends without telling the readers

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Chapter 5 what will happen to her when she runs. It is also not made clear as to who were in the helicopter, whether they were the black revolutionaries or white soldiers? Thus the ending of the novel leaves a note of suspense:

She runs: trusting herself with all the suppressed trust of a lifetime, alert, like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of young, existing only for their lone survival, the enemy of all that would make claims of responsibility. She can still hear the beat, beyond those trees and those, and she runs towards it. She runs. (Gordimer 195)

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REFRENCES:

Gordimer, Nadine. July’s people. Bloomsbury, 2005.

Erritouni, Ali. “Apartheid Inequality and Postapartheid Utopia in Nadine Gordimer's

‘July's People.’” Research in African Literatures, vol. 37, no. 4, 2006, pp. 68–

84.

Cronin, John. “Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly

Review, vol. 71, no. 282, 1982, pp. 207–208.

Clingman Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. The

University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

Öström, Anita. "Life in the Interregnum: July’s People: Nadine Gordimer’s July’s

People." Högskolan i Gävle, 2011, pp 1-25.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove

Weidenfeld, 1963.

Deyab, Mohammad. "The Subaltern can Speak in Nadine Gordimer's July's People

(1981)." International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. vol. 5, no.

6, 2010, pp 341-349. Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Hadiuzzaman, Khondakar Md. and Abdul Karim Ruman. “Politics of Power: A

Postcolonial Reading of July’s People” Dhaka Commerce College Journal,

vol. vi, no. 1, 2014, pp 133-140.

Padhi, Bishnupriya and Gopabandhau Dash. Dismantaling Apartheid in South Africa:

Impact of International Diplomacy. New Horizon Publishers, 2004.

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Abdulatif, Iman Abdulsattar, “Understanding the Selfhood in Nadine Gordimer's

July's People” Al-Ustath , vol. 2 no. 209 , 2014, pp 69-84.

Brink, André. “Complications of Birth: Interfaces of Gender, Race and Class in

‘July's People.’” English in Africa, vol. 21, no. 1/2, 1994, pp. 157–180.

Rengasamy, Indrani. The Dialectics of Apartheid: A Reading of Nadine Gordimer’s

Novels from a Postcolonial Perspective. Lap Lambert Academic Publishing,

2010.

Green, Robert. “From ‘The Lying Days to July's People’: The Novels of Nadine

Gordimer.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 14, no. 4, 1988, pp. 543–563.

Rich, Paul. “Apartheid and the Decline of the Civilization Idea: An Essay on Nadine

Gordimer's ‘July's People’ and J. M. Coetzee's ‘Waiting for the

Barbarians.’” Research in African Literatures, vol. 15, no. 3, 1984, pp. 365

393.

Moss, Rose. “World Literature Today.” World Literature Today, vol. 56, no. 2, 1982,

pp. 394–394.

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Chapter 6

Politics of Race and Gender: My Son’s Story

South Africa during apartheid had mainly two groups of people those who worked for their personal interests and acquired wealth and power and those who were committed to the community they lived in. Sonny the central character of the novel My Son’s Story is one such man who is ‘coloured’ and works for the sake of his ‘race’. The novel depicts his life and the circumstances under which his family live. Sonny, a teacher along with his wife Aila, son Will and daughter Baby, live a pretty happy life before a peaceful protest march is lead by him along with a group of black schoolchildren. He joins the movement to fight against the discrimination being done to the coloured people. Meanwhile he loses his job which results in distress for his family. He is imprisoned time and again for his political involvement, participation in illegal gatherings and promotion of boycotts and thus prison becomes his second home. Hannah Plowman, a white human rights activist, visits him in the prison which results in a strong emotional attachment between them culminating into an extramarital affair. This shocks everyone in the family. His wife Aila along with his daughter Baby also get involved in the movement later on. Thus the novel traces the lives of activists and shows how apartheid forces such people to act differently in society.

The title of the novel My Son’s Story is ambiguous. The word ‘My’ seems unclear. As the story moves forward the reader starts pondering whose story is this? Is it the storyMaulana by the fatherAzad about Library, his son? Aligarh Or is it the Muslim son’s story University about the father? Such questions keep rising in the reader’s mind. The answers to these questions are quite evident in the end of the novel where Will says "What he did - my father - made me a writer. Do I have to thank him for that? Why couldn’t I have been something else? I am a writer and this is my first book – that I can never publish” (277). This makes it clear that it is the son who narrates the story about his father and in the meantime tells his own story about how he became an author. Thus the novel is actually his father's story filtered through the son's eye. The narration is both in first person and in third person, ‘I’ the voice of the son and ‘He’ the voice of both son and author.

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Sonny was considered to be an exceptionally intelligent child in the family. He was able to get education despite being coloured which gained him access to a status superior to that of one usually enjoyed by his race:

The boy was the first in the family to leave earth, cement, wood, kapok behind and take up the pen and the book. He was the first to complete the full years of schooling. Sonny became a teacher. He was the pride of the old couple and the generic diminutive by which they had celebrated him as the son, the first-born male, was to stay with him in the changing identities a man passes through, for the rest of his life. (5- 6)

It is education that helps him to think beyond and makes him an ardent revolutionary. Sonny feels that the racial bar won’t provide him the opportunities which the so called superior race enjoys. He is enraged and unhappy at the same time for he is not able to:

Belong to whatever cultural circles the town had - the amateur players’ theatre, the chamber music society . . . He could not belong to the Sunday bird-watchers’ group, although he was interested in nature and sometimes took his children by train to the zoo in the city . . . He could not belong to the chess club . . . He could not afford to buy many books. (16)

Sonny sees discrimination against blacks in every field of life. When he observes the treatment being done to the blacks, he starts a protest march and thereby becomes a full time activist. Sonny works for the upliftement of blacks and coloureds and thus Gordimer here blurs the distinction between blacks and coloureds. Though Sonny Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University initially believed that they belong to two different cultural slots, yet it was later in the name of politics and because of growing repression against both the races that they began to consider themselves as two sides of the same coin and both the races worked jointly to eradicate apartheid policies. The novel primarily revolves around apartheid and its contradistinguishing policies. In fact apartheid in the novel is a “constant presence—a main character, so to speak, as well as force—in the lives of Coloured, Black, White, and Asian. It categorizes, defines, and controls everything” (Kala 13). Almost every character in the novel is shown working against it starting with Sonny's students who also join the resistance movement. They react to the killings of young

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Chapter 6 people and uneven authoritarian voice by saying, "WE DON'T WANT THIS RUBBISH EDUCATION APARTHIED SLAVERY POLICE GET OUT OUR SCHOOLS" (25-26). Thus Gordimer at the very outset gives readers a hint that the novel is going to deal with racial discrimination.

Nadine Gordimer highlights how racism exists even in places like schools, theatres etc. The family while going to watch movies notice how they are not allowed to enter the theatre for they may get together with the people of white race:

The blacks were accustomed to closeness. In queues for transport, for work permits, for housing allocation, for all the stamped paper that authorized their lives: loaded into overcrowded trains and buses to take them back and forth across the veld, fitting a family into one room, they cannot keep the outline of space – another, invisible skin – whites project around themselves, distanced from each other in everything. (110)

Sonny whom Gordimer calls the “lover of Shakespeare” “never had the right to enter the municipal library and so did not so much as think about it while white people came out before him with books under their arms” (12). This shows how despite being an intellectual and a voracious reader of Shakespeare, he didn’t have privilege to read him. The scene is quite sensitive and emotional as it develops a lot of sympathy for Sonny. He keeps thinking about the library and its significance for him. On the contrary, whites who don’t have any interest in reading or in Shakespeare can easily access the books in the library. Besides this, Gordimer shows how they don’t have access to even passports, “Sonny applied for a passport so that he might have a chanceMaulana to visit her Azad [Aila] Library,sometime; seeAligarh Baby, andMuslim his grandchild. University But the passport was refused” (262). This injustice represents the injustice with his community as a whole. Surekha Dangwal in her essay “Treatment of Cross-Racial Relationship in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story” opines that Sonny’s “marginalization is significant. His ultimate condition speaks to the utter sufferings of the black community” (139).

During the uprising, the gulf between them started widening, blacks started shifting from their residential areas to the ‘whites only’ places. Trucks started:

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[C]arting away people and their possession and by bulldozers pushing over what had been their homes. Shopkeepers who were not really black but not white, either, were being moved out of the shops they had occupied for generations in the white towns. (32)

The humiliation suffered at the hands of whites was horrible and unbearable. Black people approached Sonny to form a local committee and Sonny was elected as a regional executive and was considered among the best speakers in the ongoing struggle who could address gatherings at weekends. Now his “profession becomes the meetings, the speeches, the campaigns, the delegations to the authorities” (Sinha 58). He was predominantly concerned about ‘upgrading’ the living conditions in the ghetto where their kids were brought up and where they were supposed to live and die. Blacks lived in separate townships, slums and ghettoes far from white areas. Sonny and his family too lived there. They were treated as animals, “the place where they confine us. Zoo. Leper colony. Asylum” (40). There were no lavatories for them:

If – as always – the children needed to go to the lavatory, the parents trotted them off down to the railway station, where there were the only toilets provided for their kind, although the department store had a cloakroom for the use of other customers. (11-12)

They were supposed to do tedious jobs on low wages, as the narrator Will says “the people in his [Sonny] community were underpaid, too. As an adult he earned less than a white teacher with the same level of qualification” (23).

Sonny was determined to work for his community. He “didn’t feel himself inferior . . . [and] took little notice of the humiliations and slights that pushed and Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University jabbed at him the moment he ventured outside the community” (23). Gordimer compares him with Sebastian as “the arrows did not penetrate his sense of self” (23) while fighting for equality. Sonny realises that his community is considered as inferior and is “disqualified for the birthright of the cinema, the library, the lavatories and the coat-of-arms” (22). They can’t even think about leaving their homes without carrying passbooks with them which identified them as to which racial group they belong to:

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With that strain of pigment went more interdictions, a passbook to be produced tremblingly before policemen, dirtier work, even poorer places to live and die in. Better to keep them at a distance, not recognize any feature in them. (22)

Sonny, a man of principles believed in himself and stuck to his ideals with dedication. He fights for black freedom and political rights and fights hard to dismantle apartheid during that period, when apartheid laws were crumbling. Sonny raised the black issues through his writings in various magazines and newspapers also. He kept fighting for black rights through his frequent visits to them. This made him a staunch critique of white power. Sonny’s arrival from Lusaka visit disturbs him when he finds his home in flames but he remains undefeated and says:

We can’t be burned out, he said, we’re that bird, you know, it’s called the phoenix, that always rises again from the ashes. Prison won’t keep us out. Petrol bombs won’t get rid of us. This street – this whole country is ours to live in. Fire won’t stop me. And it won’t stop you. (274)

Sonny’s people too believed in him and looked at him with a hope, “he did things for other people the way he did for us – his family that was it; to give came to him naturally, as it came to them to take” (18-19).

Through the novel Gordimer campaigns against the human rights violations and shows how racial discrimination can be countered through revolutionary means. It also shows how the life of the individuals is filled with trauma for being part of the struggle. While fighting for justice Gordimer makes use of the ‘binary system’ to Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University highlight this trauma and plight which revolutionists have to undergo. Binarism is a post colonial concept in which a pair of opposite ideas or concepts exist simultaneously. Binaries show the domination of one thing over another. Some of the predominant binaries which post colonial writers mainly deal with are master and servant, civilized and uncivilized, superior and inferior etc. Loyalty and betrayal is one such example which exists simultaneously in My Son’s Story. Sonny is very determined and loyal to fight against apartheid, but he betrays his wife by developing an extramarital relationship with a white woman. He surrenders to bodily desires and betrays his pledge to fight against the system which divides people on the basis of

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Chapter 6 race. His fascination for Hannah is his tragic flaw leading to his downfall. This fascination destroys him and he is looked upon by everyone with suspicion. However the blame falls equally upon the society for as a caged bird he strives to be a free human being. Surekha Dangwal says that Sonny’s loyalty to Hannah “at the expense of his family and the resistance indicate the conflict and dilemma of cross-racial relationship” (140).

Another example of binaries in the novel is that of personal and political. As a school teacher and as a coloured, Sonny and his family could have easily lived a comfortable life but they sacrifice their personal life over a political one. The novel thus shows how political commitment affects and transforms the lives of colored South African people. Sonny, the father, transforms himself from a schoolteacher to a revolutionary leader. Baby, the daughter, and Aila, the mother, can’t escape themselves from getting involved in the struggle against apartheid in the later part of their lives. In this way the whole family fights against apartheid. According to R. M. Kala, “the story focuses on family matters and political affairs and portrays the incredibly complex ways these two "worlds" are intertwined” (11).

The ‘coloured’ was a new invention by the whites which primarily aimed at dividing blacks and preserving the white race. The novel deals with a coloured identity of apartheid torn coloured family and their active involvement in the freedom movement. ‘Coloured’ was one of the four classified racial groups along with whites, blacks and Indians. In the South African context the term ‘coloured’ was applied to the one who is of mixed race, half-breed, half-caste, or mulatto between black and white ancestors. Gavin Lewis is of the opinion that the term ‘coloured’ is a new invention by whites and says that it is: Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University An attempt by the white supremacist state to divide blacks and to preserve white “racial purity” by treating Coloureds as a separate, coherent, and homogeneous “race” apart from both Africans and whites with a few more privileges than the former and much fewer than the later. (qtd. in Sakamoto 313).

The Population Registration Act of 1950 which aimed at classifying every citizen according to his or her race and ethnic group, defined ‘coloured’ as a person who is not a white person or a native. These coloureds were later further divided into seven

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Chapter 6 sub categories: Cape Coloured, Malay, Griqua, Chinese, Indian, other Asiatic, and other coloured

The choice of a coloured central character in this novel is very important. Through the novel, Gordimer abandons the universal belief that only people of same race can write about themselves authentically as compared to the other races. Prior to 1990, she has been blamed for failing to represent the experience and inner life of coloured people living in South Africa. However she succeeded to counter the fault of being biased towards coloureds and therefore wrote her My Sons Story, which is the first novel where the protagonist is a coloured male. Here Gordimer succeeds in speaking in the voice of a non-white South African. Though they enjoyed a comparatively more privileged position than blacks yet they too were considered as marginal in their relationship with whites and therefore occupied what Hommi Bhaba calls in his book The Location of Culture “in-between” (2) or “borderline” position (1). They tried to adopt the ‘Englishness’ on one side and on the other side strove to be resistant. Bhabha observes that, “these ‘inbetween’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood . . . that initiate new signs of identity” (2). According to John Mcleod, this ‘in-between’ position is used “as the starting point for creating new, dynamic ways of thinking about identity” (216). Sonny uses this ‘in- between position’ to fight for the blacks and therefore refuses the privileges which he could have enjoyed as a coloured. Though he shifts from one part of his country to another for the betterment of life and to serve his community and create new ways of thinking about the dismantling of apartheid yet, as a migrant and belonging to inferior race, he faces lots of difficulties. John Mcleod has the following to say about the difficulties faced by migrants under such circumstances: Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University But diaspora communities are not free from problems. Too often diaspora people have been ghettoised and excluded from feeling they belong to the ‘new country’, and suffered their cultural practices to be mocked and discriminated against. (208)

Some of the elite and self interested political organisations of the coloured communities tried to cross the colour line and became one with whites. Such people were termed as ‘Play Whites’. They believed that they were superior to blacks (though not equal to whites) because they shared the white blood. Van der Ross who

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Sonny, the protagonist of the novel is a victim of what post colonial writers call as “double consciousness” where the colonized wants to adopt the colonizer’s life style and his culture. My Son’s Story also depicts the love and appreciation Sonny has for white life. According to Jorshinelle T. Sonza:

He isolates his family from the veld where the proletarian blacks are. He imprisons his children within the safe confines of his bourgeois world by keeping them busy with more up-scale white, middle-class activities - ballet for his daughter and tennis for his son - instead of allowing them to play with the poor blacks. (108)

Sonny had a great aspiration and dream to live in the ‘whites-only’ area. He shifts from his hometown to what Gordimer calls a “grey area” where “people of our kind defied the law and settled in among whites” (14). It is a place where white people usually come and reside to upgrade their life standard. Gordimer does this as a part of resistance program and the migration of Sonny suggests, what R. S. Malik and Jagdish Batra say “politically antagonistic views with the establishment in [her] home country” (148). His son Will also craves for the lavish life which the whites live. That is the reason he often goes to the cinema “to bunk study and to sit in the maroon nylon velvet seat of a cinema in a suburb where whites live” (3). While comparing his previous houseMaulana with the houseAzad at Library, ‘whites-only’ Aligarh area heMuslim calls it asUniversity a ‘ghetto’ or a ‘hovel’. Sonny says:

It’s a really nice house. Three bedrooms, a sitting room, another room we can use for your sewing and my books-imagine! I’ll be able to have a desk. We’ll do up the kitchen, I’ll build you a breakfast nook. And there’s a big yard. A huge old apricot tree. Will can make a tree-house. (41-42)

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Migration of Sonny’s family makes them in post colonial terminology as ‘hybrid’. As a 'Coloured' and a ‘hybrid’, he had access to both white and black society. Hybridity according to Homi Bhaba is simply cultural mixing where one’s culture can be adopted by people of different cultures. It thus leads to ‘Mimicry’. Hybridity and Mimicry come naturally with the migration of people. Mimicry "is an exaggerated copying of language, culture, manners, and ideas” (Huddart 57). Pramod K Nayar defines it in his book Post Colonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed as “the disciplined, conscious imitation of the white man by the colonized and supposedly subservient native” (28). Homi K Bhabha suggests that the inferior colonized simply mimics or imitates the superior colonizer and immerses himself in the white man’s culture. He wants to be like colonizers but is not so which Bhabha calls “not quite, not white” (131). Thus the colonized appears to have adopted the white man’s authority but in effect fractures and disrupts it. Sonny as a ‘mimic’ is affected by the culture of whites and so he tries to imitate white cultural norms. His ambition to live an equally extravagant and lavish life as whites do, represents the desire of coloured community as a whole to live among the whites. Even though Sonny hates the policy of whites yet he admires their life standard.

My Son’s Story studies the theme of home and exile. Coloureds like blacks as the marginalised section in South Africa lived an alien and exiled life in their own country. The dislocation from one part of the country to another took away from them a sense of home and belonging. ‘Dislocation’ which is a post colonial term is one of the main problems faced by the natives. It refers to the process of changing places either unwillingly or by choice. It leads to deprivation from the sense of integrity and wholeness. The indigenous cultures are literally dislocated if not annihilated. Sonny while shiftingMaulana also Azadfaces the Library, identity crises Aligarh as Will Muslim says "We University didn't have any particular sense of what we were" (20). Gordimer thus presents coloured race as a representative of the marginalised section of the society in the form of Sonny who have been forced to be an alien in his homeland.

Will records his father’s struggle with utmost accuracy which is akin to Gordimer’s own representation of the struggle against the true forces of society. She demonstrates that the black voice can be heard. However Gordimer’s attitude towards her own race is a bit antagonistic. Critics blame her for taking sides with the blacks and neglecting her own race in her works. However she is firm in her stand which is

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Chapter 6 quite evident throughout her literary corpus. Gordimer makes all her characters fight for their birth right. Through the involvement of the whole family in freedom struggle, Gordimer refers to Black Consciousness Movement. The ideology of Black Consciousness Movement which was started by black students held that blacks (by which they mean blacks, Indians and coloureds) need to liberate themselves psychologically from the slave mentality which they have been trapped in because of racism and white liberalism. The Black Consciousness Movement according to Bishnupriya Padhi and Gopabandhau Dash, “played a vital role in shattering the long period of political passivity” (90). In My Son’s Story, Nadine Gordimer shows the profound discontent against whites especially in the young generation. Baby decides to join the military wing of the resistance. Aila’s part of resistance movement also belongs to that period of history. When Aila is arrested, she is charged under the Internal Security Act with many offences. She is accused of being a member of Transvaal Implementation Machinery, for performing terrorist activities in the region. She is also charged of being a messenger between Umkhoto we Sizwe in the neighbouring countries and a cell in the Johannesburg area. Besides this, she is blamed of having hidden terrorist arms on the rented property where he is also accused to be residing illegally. Sonny’s formation of an organisation stems from Biko’s establishment of South Africa Students’ Organisation in 1969. Biko like Sonny also believed that blacks are suppressed through their easily acceptance of second class status by whites and takes a step to liberate them both mentally and physically. Stephen Biko had a tremendous role to play in the formation of Black Consciousness Movement. As a keen and chivalrous anti-apartheid activist and a writer, he believed “that only overcoming fear of death will free them to oppose the apartheid regime as one must” (Eckstein 8). It can be clearly seen in the novel that Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University Sonny possesses one of the books of Biko. Thus the novel shows consciousness among blacks and their attempt at liberation from racial supremacy.

Hannah, Sonny’s white mistress, is the main reason of discord in their lives. It is her intrusion that ruins their lives and splits them apart, “because of Hannah, Aila was gone. Finished off, that self that was Aila. Hannah destroyed it” (243). Aila says “only, because of what I was in with, with him, and so afraid of – for her – there seemed to be some kind of space around her that kept us off – him and me – and that I held my breath for fear of entering” (59). Hannah too is the symbol of the colonizer.

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To enhance her status in the society, she leaves Sonny to do refugee work and after a short time, all connection with her ceases. She creates a void which the family fails to fill. Will believes that Hannah is the main hindrance in his father’s commitment against the system of oppression. He believes that Sonny’s relationship with blonde Hannah is actually a part of apartheid which aims to make them realize their status “It’s an infection brought to us by the laws that have decided what we are, and what they are - the blonde ones” (14).

Despite being the reason of disaster in Sonny’s life, yet she is considered as one of the lovable figures in the novel. She too desires to help those people who are oppressed by unjust state laws even though she is white. Hannah symbolizes all those white people who worked laboriously in the black freedom struggle. Through her character, Gordimer tries to create a kind of awareness in the white ruling community that they too can actively participate in the resistance movement for the smooth running of their country. She appears to be spokesperson of Nadine Gordimer who expresses her desire to reflect the insightful awareness about equality. She finds her soulmate in Sonny. What attracts Sonny most about Hannah is that she does not want to expel Aila from Sonny’s life. He realises that she is the one who is “in the battle, for whom the people in the battle are her only family, her life, the happiness she understands” (67). Gordimer presents her as a ‘sexual being’ and therefore the pleasure in their relationship rises from both the sexual fulfilment and a partnership in their political struggle. The love affair between Sonny and Hannah Plowman is an important episode in the novel in another sense as well. Both of them belong to two different races. The interracial relationship was considered as a daring political act for any writer as there was a ban on mixed marriages due to Prohibition of Mixed MarriagesMaulana Act, 1949. Azad Sonny’s Library, relationship Aligarh with Muslim Hannah isUniversity one such daring act by Nadine Gordimer. Thus the novel holds a great historical significance as well.

Sonny loves Hannah to the extent that the phrase “needing Hannah” is repeated like a refrain to highlight his reliance on Hannah. Hannah’s company offers Sonny more delight than Aila’s company, and his release from prison brings him the new kind of joy “the light of joy that illuminates long talk of ideas, not the 60-watt bulbs that shine on family matters” (65). For Sonny, according to Nandita Sinha, Hannah is an “exciting partner intellectually, challenging his thoughts, [and] contributing to his ideas” (59). Through this relationship Gordimer shows how

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Chapter 6 apartheid includes the personal lives of the colonized people and shows how interracial love affairs end in tragedy. According to Nandita Sinha, another important aspect which the relationship reflects through the character of Hannah is the “despair at the way apartheid brings about a rift in even the most meaningful relationships, an unbridgeable divide between black and white” (102). The triangular relationship between Aila, Sonny and Hannah creates a great amount of turmoil in Sonny’s life. The couple fail to cooperate. Sonny is not able to have a proper sexual relationship with his wife after he began to make love to Hannah. As a result, his sexual strength gets crumpled. Their failed sexual relationship reflects their diminishing intimacy:

The first time he had to make love to his wife after he had begun to make love to Hannah . . . he trembled with sorrow and disgust at himself after he withdrew from her body . . . He wanted to get up out of that bed and house and go to Hannah . . . the act drained him, in shame. Sometimes he felt a final spurt of anger, towards Aila, sperm turned to venom. (69)

Hannah finally decides to leave Sonny and acquires a respectable job at the United Nation as the High Commissions’ regional representative. She is jubilant when she receives the offer but is worried and quite hesitant to disclose it to Sonny. She is sure that he will dislike it “she would have to tell him, anyway, now. The High Commission wanted an answer. She didn’t know whether to tell him before love making or after” (201). The news hurt Sonny inwardly for he felt that he was deserted by the one whom he loved very passionately “Sonny only smiled, the smile that lingered and turned into that painful grin of his he couldn’t relax . . . he sank beside her. They were stretched out like two figures on a tomb commemorating a faithful life Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University together” (203).

Hannah’s decision to leave Sonny takes the family in another direction. This drift makes Aila stronger and she along with her daughter acquires the power from this triangular relationship. Sonny loses his power and Aila is empowered in the sphere of politics and gender. The central authority in the novel is slowly seized by Aila which was initially in the hands of Sonny. She starts dominating the novel and “Sonny gets defocused and Aila becomes the centre”, in this way Aila changes “from a tamed, domesticated woman to a revolutionary” (Karmakar 213). Aila’s

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Chapter 6 metamorphosis from a house wife into a full fledged revolutionist is clearly evident through the narration of Will. Her rise astonishes both Will and Sonny, “difficult to follow you, Aila. You leave so much out.” (241) “but Aila was the revolutionary, now” (242). Thus Aila takes up an “active part in a society in the throes of turbulent change, without losing anything of her womanliness” (Sinha 95).

Aila was initially regarded as an incomplete character creation by Gordimer for she is projected as a politically uninvolved wife of a revolutionary. However by the end of the novel, she emerges as the dedicated fighter for freedom. She is able to reach to a status where she takes her own decisions. Will says she “is quite self- assured about the whole business, for once she’s taken on responsibility for something all by herself, she’s the one who’s given approval in this matter of his daughter’s future” (169). In the police station she courageously sits “between police officers with her head up, composed, a smile and lift of eyebrows for Sonny and Will in the front row of the public gallery” (243). Aila resists her husband for betraying her. While she successfully finds a new direction in her life, Sonny loses almost all essence of existence and supremacy. Unlike him, Aila succeeds in her mission commendably though she finally goes into exile yet “her name would be honoured, from now on, in the movement inside and outside the country – where she could still be active” (262). Will too feels that Sonny is powerless as he says, “Sonny is not the man he was’; someone has said that to me: his comrades think it’s because Aila’s gone. But I’m young and it’s my time that’s come, with women. My time that’s coming with politics” (276). Aila courageously crosses the rigid boundaries of class, race, gender and politics. Although the novel revolves around racism and its brutal effects upon the coloureds, it is a story about gender relations within the domestic structure. Sonny’s perceptionMaulana about women Azad wasLibrary, that they Aligarh are mere Muslim ‘sexual being Universitys’, this is clear when Will picks up a woman at the beach for sexual experience and describes her in terms of male power and supremacy:

I went down to Durban on the motorbike and picked up a girl on the beach the first day. It was easy. Some of the beaches are open to all of us now. So I’ve lived with a woman for six days, fucked her and slept in the same bed with her, and don’t want ever to see her again. (136)

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Besides this, Baby’s exile in the end also shows her liberation from subjugation. Sonny’s inability to recognize the worth of Aila for what she was and what she becomes in the end shows ‘male prejudice’ towards their female counterpart. In his relationship with Hannah, politically she has been shown as much stronger and dedicated to her revolutionary work. This is clear during police firing at the cleansing of the graves ceremony for nine youngsters who have been shot by the police. He avoids to helping a man who is hit by a bullet and protects Hannah instead. Therefore passion for Hannah erodes his political will and her safety makes him uncaring of anything else. Ileana Sora Dimitriu opines:

Sonny becomes so enamoured with Hannah that he suffers the total disintegration of his personality. His "needing Hannah" becomes a leitmotif, almost as limiting to thought as the cliches "happy for battle" and "sermons in stones". His "needing Hannah" invades and poisons his personal life. (Dimitriu 68)

Hannah on the other hand is able to maintain her political stability. She loves Sonny very much, but remains someone “for whom the people in the battle are her only family, her life, the happiness she understands” (67). She breaks the gendered reading of political struggle. Thus the female members in the novel in the shape of Aila outstrip the male members in the revolution and political struggle. According to Nandita Sinha:

Through the character of Aila, Gordimer lauds all those unassuming women who sacrificed their personal happiness for the cause or who were forced to take up unexpected roles due to the pressures of the Maulanapolitical environment. Azad Library, (95) Aligarh Muslim University

From the feminist perspective it can be said that Aila’s decision to become a revolutionary is actually her marital estrangement. When Sonny expresses his anger at Aila for not discussing with him before making her decision to join freedom struggle, Aila is straightforward “I don’t know whether I wanted to” (240). Sonny too realises in the end that he is no longer of much importance in the movement as is his wife Aila and the reason behind it which he confesses is his preoccupation with a white woman. He admits that “there is no place for a second obsession in the life of a revolutionary”

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(263). Thus the novel expresses its feminist message and in this way Gordimer “transforms the male-centred text into a more "womanly" space” (Sonza 107).

Aila is shown not only as a superior figure to Sonny but also to Hannah. Hannah quits in the end but Aila remains firm in her stand. Thus she is shown as more successful as a revolutionary than Hannah. Gordimer here shows how a white woman surrenders her privileged position to a black woman and in this way for the first time she “valorizes the black woman's participation by providing it the centrality it deserves” (Sonza 107). According to Indrani Rengasamy, “through the characterization of Aila, Gordimer asserts that the black woman will not be cowed down by apartheid law” (73).

The novel was written when Apartheid was at its last stage under the continuous pressure of world opinion. That is why the atmosphere created by Gordimer in the novel is full of hope and optimism. Sonny is hopeful to see change. According to Nandita Sinha:

For Sonny, the old structures are changing, so that now it is much more than a matter of being willing to die for one’s freedom, it is a matter of feeding, housing and educating people, of giving generations of uprooted people and refugees somewhere to live. (114)

It is what Clingman calls “history from the inside” which records hope of the people of that era. It is the last novel that was written during the apartheid period. Blacks were optimistic about the fruitful outcome of their long freedom struggle. The rift between blacks and whites started diminishing and both worked laboriously together for liberation. Many laws and acts which ruined blacks throughout the apartheid Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University period were comparatively less effective now. Gordimer also sees a kind of positive hope in the novel and hints at it in the novel, “in the liberated South Africa both black and white could live in harmony” (Dangwal 141). The white is someone who is superior and desirable while the black is considered as inferior and therefore untouchable, yet Gordimer makes them come close like two poles of a magnet at many occasions in the novel. For example Sonny’s shift along with his family to a white suburb area is one such daring act. There was an opposition to the policies of apartheid throughout the world. This allows Sonny and Hannah to carry on their

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A black child with his little naked penis waggling under a shirt clung to the leg of a professor. A woman’s French perfume and the sweat of a drunk merged as if one breath came from them. And yet it was not alarming for the whites; in fact, an old fear of closeness, of the odours and heat of other flesh, was gone. One ultimate body of bodies was inhaling and exhaling in the single diastole and systole, and above was the freedom of the great open afternoon sky. (110)

Thus the novel according to Toshiko Sakamoto, “is an attempt to construct a possible future for the society, one of cultural plurality, and to shape a new reality for a more liberated society” (328).

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REFRENCES:

Gordimer, Nadine. My Son’s Story. Bloomsbury, 2003.

Sakamoto, Toshiko. "Colored Odentity and Cultural Transformation in Nadine

Gordimer's My Son’s Story." Ritsumeikan Language and Culture Research.

vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 313-330.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2015.

Dangwal, Surekha. Appendix. Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story: A Critical Study,

by Nandita Sinha, Asia Book Club, 2005, pp. 135-143.

Huddart, David. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 2006.

Dimitriu, Ileana Sora. Nadine Gordimer after Apartheid: A Reading Strategy for the

1990’s. 1997. University of Natal, PhD dissertation.

Nayar, Pramod K. Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Eckstein, Barbara J. “Nadine Gordimer: Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1991.” World

Literature Today, vol. 66, no. 1, 1992, pp. 6–10.

Kala, R. M. My Son’s Story: Nadine Gordimer. University of Delhi, 2013.

Karmakar,Maulana Goutam. Azad "Notion Library, of Space Aligarh as Knowing Muslim one’s University Place in Gordimer’s My

Son’s Story.” Research Journal of English Language and Literature, vol.2,

no. 4, 2014, pp 211-213.

Malik, R. S. and Jagdish Batra. A New Approach to Literary Theory and Criticism.

Atlantic Publishers, 2014.

Mcleod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Viva books, 2018.

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Padhi, Bishnupriya, and Gopabandhau Dash. Dismantaling Apartheid in South Africa:

Impact of International Diplomacy. New Horizon Publishers, 2004.

Sinha, Nandita. Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story: A Critical Study. Asia Book

Club, 2005.

Sonza, Jorshinelle T. “‘My Turn, Now’: Debunking the Gordimer ‘Mystique’ in ‘My

Son's Story.’” Research in African Literatures, vol. 25, no. 4, 1994, pp. 105–

116.

Rengasamy, Indrani. The Dialectics of Apartheid: A Reading of Nadine Gordimer’s

Novels from a Postcolonial Perspective. Lap Lambert Academic Publishing,

2010.

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CONCLUSION

This study on Gordimer’s select novels has led to certain findings and the conclusion aims at a final evaluation of Gordimer’s ideology of critiquing apartheid through her select works. The study seeks to explore how Gordimer’s works represent an individual’s identity crisis in apartheid-ridden South Africa. Through the novels, she demonstrates that apartheid is devastating, and violently toxic. She has constantly stressed in her interviews that as long as any sort of racism exists in any nation, the struggle to end it should be the primary aim of the citizens of that nation. That is the reason why her novels directly or indirectly address the catastrophic effects of apartheid upon her white and coloured characters in general and black characters in particular. Her works attack different problems faced by both whites and non-whites in the changing political scenario of South Africa. Gordimer mainly deals with apartheid related themes like marginalization, violence, resistance, self-identity, colored identity, linguistic imperialism, psycho-political development, reversal of power, liberalism, multi-racialism etc. All these are the issues that the thesis tries to study. Through the depiction of such themes, she shows how it leaves individuals in a state of dilemma whether to live a private life or a public one. The tension between getting fully involved or standing apart is what gives birth to a writer and for Gordimer the tussle between the personal and the public made her a writer. The study aims to show how the personal lives of her characters are affected by political happenings. Nadine Gordimer’s characters are often seen in a state of dilemma when they have to choose one of the two - public or private ways of living life. Rosa Burger in Burger’s Daughter is caught in such a conflict. Through her, Gordimer shows how Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University public events affect private lives of those who fight for a cause.

Gordimer wanted to see her country ‘peaceful’. For her, peace did not mean absence of war but the notion of justice. She believed in the future of South Africa and was quite optimistic that justice would soon prevail. She desired to see the dismantling of apartheid and the empowered blacks to live a free life without restrictions from any segregationist policy. In July’s People, Gordimer imagines what might happen if there was rebellion and revolution in the streets of South Africa. In a U-turn of the master-servant relationship, the white family has to unlearn its

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privileges and learn what it means to be dependent on one whom they considered inferior and uncivilized. She here challenges the reckless confidence of white South Africans and recreates the African National Congress’s slogan that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. In other words she expresses the ability of the subaltern to speak back.

Shift of roles in July’s People is actually a result of the resistance and reaction on the part of blacks against apartheid. The reaction brings everything in question including the familial relationship between husband and wife. In the chapter based on the novel My Sons Story, it can be seen that the female mistress who is at the marginal position gains control of the situation over her male counterpart and he is transformed into the cornered and abandoned man. Men-women relationship in Gordimer's fiction is generally characterised by inequality for men trying to subdue women as inferior beings. However her women characters become more politically involved in the struggle against apartheid as compared to their male counterparts. My Son’s Story shows the reversal of roles based on gender. It talks about gender relation within the domestic structure where Sonny the central character of the novel loses his power and Aila, his wife is empowered in the sphere of politics and gender.

Being liberal was not encouraged in South African society. Liberalism was an attempt at liberty from racial supremacy. Gordimer’s treatment towards liberals was somewhat harsh. She shows how liberals faced a sort of dilemma. On the one side they feared that if they joined the struggle against apartheid, they would lose the privilege of being white and on the other hand if they worked as liberals they would be part of an oppressive system. They were therefore forced either into silence or exile. Through their sufferings, Gordimer creates a kind of awareness that they are Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University part of the tyrannical forces of apartheid and that their ancestors obliterated the culture, land and people and caused disaster in South Africa. She dislikes being called a liberal saying writing as a liberal and writing about liberalism are not the same. Double standard of white liberals is thus exposed by Nadine Gordimer through her writing. While going deep into the innermost recesses of their minds, it can be seen that white liberals didn’t treat blacks equally though making tall claims of their liberal attitude towards blacks. Maureen Smales in July’s People claims to be a liberal but her biased attitude towards blacks speaks something different about her personality. In the novels The Lying Days and A World of Strangers, Gordimer endeavours to show

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Conclusion liberalism as a strong tool of resistance to apartheid but ends up showing the failure of liberal attitude. Gordimer gives much preference to Black Consciousness Movement over liberalism which aimed at liberating blacks psychologically from slavery. She stressed that blacks need to build their own images instead of depending on whites. She was not only the first major South African writer to provide a critique of liberalism, but also the first to demonstrate the psychological repressions implied by colonialism.

Another important issue which Gordimer touches from the point of view of a communist is the colonial experience in the apartheid rule. The blacks during the period of apartheid were forced to submit themselves to European superiority. The whites hardly cared for their social and economic well being. All their rights were snatched away from them in their own homeland under the banner of various apartheid laws. These laws divided people into different races such as white, black, coloured, and Indian communities. The introductory chapter highlights the various laws and shows how racist minority monopolized economic wealth, while the vast majority of the oppressed, the blacks were damned to poverty. Most of her characters experience feelings of terror, violence, danger, and bloodshed as a response to these laws passed during the period of apartheid. Gordimer’s characters therefore according to Michael Andindilile in “apartheid-era fiction have been cast as victims of imperialism due to divisive policies” (5). The study aims to study the way apartheid government in South Africa through these laws reduced blacks to what Marxist critics call as ‘lumpenproletariat’ and created a sense of fear in them.

Through this research, it is shown how Gordimer’s works come out with a solution to the various problems created by apartheid. That is why she constantly dealt Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University with themes like Black Consciousness Movement, multi-culturalism, multi-racialism, interracial marriage, etc. to get rid of the menace of apartheid and thus pave a path towards racial harmony. She showed through her novels how blacks and whites need to stand on a single platform to end apartheid in the country. Gordimer stressed that they are incomplete without each other. Toby in the novel A World of Strangers develops a relationship with both blacks and whites keeping race bar at bay and believes that establishing contact across racial barriers is a way to subvert the racist system. Love can also be seen as one of the central themes of her novels for she wanted to break the cross racial boundaries. Gordimer therefore believes that there is

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no other choice for both black and white people in the country except to live together in peace and harmony.

The study holds Gordimer’s concern for her people and their various issues. The most important feature of Gordimer’s works is humanism. Through her works she tried to bring out the needs and problems of society in different dimensions. She stressed time and again that blacks are not born low, they need to be acknowledged and respected. They should be given every right to question their marginalisation. Gordimer emerged as a humanist as she sensitively responded to the suffering of the blacks in the apartheid regime. She showed how all her characters who speak for natives like Helen Shaw, Toby, Lionel Burger, Sonny, etc. suffer the same plight as the blacks. All her works revolve around one theme that is her love and affection for humanity. She became the voice of blacks at a time when apartheid laws had reduced them to mere beasts and when most of the other writers went on exile, Gordimer as an exception remained in the country despite threat to her identity as a white South African. For her, writing is a journey. It is a discovery of life or an attempt to discover what human life is all about and this discovery can be made possible from within the country where problem lies not outside it. She preferred to stay back in the country getting firsthand knowledge about the trauma of apartheid. Indeed it was an audacious choice.

Today, Gordimer’s novels share the status of historical documents for the period of apartheid. A literary historian can derive much material from her works. According to Robert Green, "when the history of the Nationalist Governments from 1948 to the end comes to be written, Nadine Gordimer's shelf of novels will provide the future historian with all the evidence needed to assess the price that has been paid” Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University (Green 563). Gordimer believed that pen has the power to break the silence and a factual depiction of large number of historical, political and social events could break the barricades of oppression and subjugation. Her works serve as a source of great historical information for the people of current generation and many generations to come regarding the racial antipathy under the apartheid government in South Africa. Stephen Clingman is the leading critic of the historical and political dimensions of her work. He examines Gordimer's work within a historical framework and traces Gordimer’s political development. As a follower of the policies of African National Congress, it can be seen that Gordimer has politicians as most of the central

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Conclusion characters of her novels. These characters are based on her own observations and modelled on real individuals like Lionel Burger who is based on Bram Fischer an anti-apartheid activist and leader of the South Africa Communist Party. The central character of the novel A World of Strangers Toby is based on Anthony Sampson, Gordimer’s friend from England who was the editor of the Drum magazine. Through the portrayal of real figures, she pays tribute to such valiant and brave personalities for their dedication and sacrifice in the freedom struggle. Therefore her commitment to society is enormous.

Quest can also be seen as one of the important themes of her writing. Most of her characters successfully take themselves out from ignorance to knowledge or in another sense from darkness into light, thereby understanding the reality and taking up the responsibility to make South Africa apartheid-free. That is why most of her novels fall into the category of bildungsroman novels. The novel The Lying Days is, “a story of Helen's quest for liberation . . . [and] search for personal autonomy” (Dimitriu 41). From her early days at the mine, her sexual development at Natal, her relationship with Joel Aaron, her days at the University, her friendship with Mary Seswayo, her love affair with Paul Clark to her final decision of leaving South Africa, Helen progresses till she develops the maturity of consciousness. Thus according to Ileana Dimitriu, “The Lying Days is about the search for truth in the process of growing up” (33). Rosa Burger in Burger’s Daughter also tries to overcome her marginalisation and recover her own identity. Her journey to France opens her eyes to the hypocrisy she has reluctantly adopted. She returns to South Africa with a new mindset. The novel traces the psycho-political development of the central character of the novel during the process of freedom struggle. Toby, at the end of the novel A world Maulana of Strangers Azad feels SouthLibrary, Africa Aligarh is no longer Muslim ‘stranger’ University to him and the novel ends with an embrace from his South African black friend. Thus Gordimer’s novels lead to an exploration of the self and “persistently depict individuals gaining the "background of self-knowledge" which helps them to change and to challenge apartheid” (Cooke 535).

Gordimer’s characters like Maureen who runs away from the cruelty in her country as it has created havoc in her life and Rosa Burger, who, on the other hand comes back to her country torn by apartheid so that she may contribute in the liberation of the black community, symbolically shows how whites too were fed up of

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racial discrimination and wanted to live a discrimination-free life. They too wished to rid themselves of the brutal policies of apartheid and to find some source of rebirth. Rosa Burger arrives back from France and works in the hospital to help crippled people walk again. This symbolically means that Rosa strives to make South Africa a nation with a new identity. Helen Shaw in The Lying Days also feels that she is excluded from her society and considers her stay there as irrelevant. She too decides to leave the country when she sees riots and mayhem everywhere. She can’t bear the psychological and physical barriers created by apartheid. She realises apartheid as the huge central problem of South Africa in her time and quits in the end. Therefore according to Dorothy Driver, “Gordimer urges the fictional selves of her characters, male, female, black as well as white, into a state of preparedness for the 'new era' with a dedication so fierce that it almost dispels the tones of disillusionment and near- cynicism that characterise her voice” (30).

Anti-apartheid movement was so much ingrained in Gordimer’s mind that readers can hardly imagine her writing on any other issue other than apartheid. After the demise of apartheid, there was uncertainty as to what the position of this writer would be in the post-apartheid era. However Gordimer through her writing still depicted the permanent scars it left on South Africans and changed her focus to the problems which the post-apartheid democratic society underwent. Her processes of building a new nation with new identity did not stop till her last breath. Through her post-apartheid novels she depicts South Africa as a country based on mutual understanding and represents the changing scenario of South Africa. She started to explore new ways and policies to connect the nation together and attempted to forget their past experience of living under tyranny of apartheid. However, for her the end of apartheid doesMaulana not mean the Azad end of Library, racism. Racism Aligarh is still Muslim prevalent University in different forms not only in South Africa but throughout the globe. Traces of colonialism and racism are prevalent even today in many self-claimed powerful democratic countries of the world. Nelson Mandela, in the final page of his autobiographical work, in this context avers:

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have

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not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning. (611)

The impact of Gordimer’s works can be summed up through her belief that one commits evil because he is capable of it. He causes suffering to others knowing that he is causing it. That is the reason Gordimer spent her whole life in South Africa and remained an eyewitness to the brutalities of apartheid. The study of her works reveals her unchanged powerful stand against the system of apartheid and the perpetrators of it. She represents the voices of those occupying the position of margins. Gordimer thus:

Contributes to the eventual demise of apartheid and the dissolution of the unjust colonial regime in her country. While apartheid sets up artificial barriers and divisions among people, Gordimer's novels cultivate a common concern among people across the boundaries of nations, race, and gender: that is, the evil inflicted upon Africans and colored people in South Africa by the white government. (Cheng 53)

She internationalised the issue of apartheid through her works and made people all over the world aware of the racial antipathy and its horrible consequences upon the people of South Africa. For her, living in a country like South Africa, one can’t sit in an ivory tower and say I am a writer; rather he needs to be active. He can’t live as a white South African in South Africa and not take part in protests. She believed that as a writer and as a white South African, she had a special responsibility. Thus Gordimer’sMaulana antiAzad-apartheid Library, stand Aligarh and her determinatioMuslim Universityn to stay in the country shows the roles that whites could have played in the struggle against apartheid.

There is a lot of scope for more research on Nadine Gordimer’s literary corpus. Her stature as a writer is such that there cannot be an exhaustive research on her. There will always be something left to be explored and researched. Further studies can focus on Gordimer’s narrative technique, stylistics, her influence on other writers, or a comparative analysis can be done with any other writer sharing similar kinds of themes and issues. Furthermore existential, feministic and eco-critical

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perspectives can be traced in her writing. Research can also be undertaken on her short stories.

Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University

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