Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies E-ISSN: 2175-8026 [email protected] Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Brasil Bastos Martins, Anderson A house on sale for a homecoming. The unhomely semantics of post-apartheid South Africa Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, núm. 61, julio-diciembre, 2011, pp. 199-223 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Florianópolis, Brasil Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=478348699008 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2011n61p199 A HOuse ON SALE FOR A HOMECOMING. THE UNHOMELY semANTICS OF POST-aPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA Anderson Bastos Martins Universidade Federal de São João del Rei Abstract This article is a biographical study of Nadine Gordimer through a dialogue staged between three of her characters–Helen Shaw, Rosa Burger and Vera Stark–and one of her essays. The object of the study is to retrace Nadine Gordimer’s steps in her long journey that allowed her to assume and experience not only a nationality but also a sense of belonging to Africa as an African rather than a colonial. Keywords: biographical criticism, nationality, belonging, exile, staying. 1. Introduction Despite a somewhat hurried critical analysis, Nadine Gordimer’s vast writing career has not gravitated solely around the all-imposing theme of racial relations in her home country. And among the various other topics treated by the author in her works, exile, and to a lesser Ilha do Desterro Florianópolis nº 61 p. 199- 223 jul/dez 2011 200 Anderson Bastos Martins, A house on sale for a homecoming... extent, migration should be more carefully discussed by the critics of her short stories and novels. The history of South Africa may be told on the basis of the multiple spatial dislocations and displacements that eventually created the modern Republic. The already complex cultural geography engendered by the several African ethnicities that have occupied the land for millennia was further compounded by the European decision to include the Dark Continent in their imperial enterprise. The ample bibliography on the European presence in the so-called New World has been drawing a detailed picture of the numerous social disruptions imposed by the Empire on its colonies. South Africa’s situation was quite specific in that the closing days of the British administration of the country coincided with the rise to power, in 1948, of the Afrikaners, a minority white group, virulently hostile to the South African British in view of the latter’s victory at the atrocious Second Boer War (1899-1902). The new administration’s ideology and action plans rested upon a project that explicitly turned racism into a state policy in order to exploit economically the black and coloured majority of the population. From then on, the deteriorating state of social fragmentation, a major characteristic of colonial administrations, crystallised, among those who disagreed with the official policies, but could not think of a way to interfere with them, the desire to leave the country. On top of this, the gradual increase in the level of state intolerance of criticism and of opposition movements resulted in the forced exile of a large number of South African citizens. Ilha do Desterro nº 61, p. 199-223, Florianópolis, jul/dez 2011 201 2. Nadine Gordimer’s early confrontation of exile Within artistic and intellectual groups, since they constitute a class in which the denunciation of social injustices is normally expected, a split was slowly established between those who emigrated, whether by force or by choice, and those who opted for staying in the country hoping to find a role for their voices inside the first few manifestations of the resistance forces. Nadine Gordimer was not exempt from the personal conflicts imposed by such a decision. While her work was not deemed particularly subversive–in the very specific meaning that this term takes on under autocratic administrations–, which, at first, spared her some typical difficulties with the state police such as pressure to leave the country, stop publishing or have her production banned,1 it was, nonetheless, driven by the need to represent the farce which the South African society was gradually turning itself into. In the process, however, the author experienced the feelings of impotence before a scenario that gained increasingly repressive and suffocating contours. When asked about the better action to take–leave the country in search of breathable air in which to advance her career or submit to apartheid’s absurdities with the intention of not losing touch with the society on which her fictional work focused–Gordimer invariably pointed to her wish to stay rather than go into self-exile. In spite of this, a considerable portion of her artistic production presents this choice in terms that reveal the high dose of internal conflict occasioned by the very need to make such a decision. In his controversial biography of Nadine Gordimer, Ronald Suresh Roberts transcribes an excerpt from a 1958 letter addressed by the author to her friend Anthony Sampson (1926-2004), a renowned British journalist with a long writing curriculum in and about South 202 Anderson Bastos Martins, A house on sale for a homecoming... Africa, in which she wonders if, after the presidential election which strengthened the power of the political parties behind apartheid, it would not be a good idea to “think again about whether we shouldn’t have some provision, some plan to live elsewhere, eventually” (202). According to Suresh Roberts, Anthony Sampson’s diary contains a note, dated 11 January, 1954, which states that “Nadine Gordimer and her husband-to-be are … going to England in April for a holiday: but I rather doubt whether they’ll come back here for good–though she’s very loyal to S. Africa” (202). Despite the legal battle between the biographer and the biographee, which might render Suresh Roberts’s account rather unreliable, the fragments cited by him corroborate the critical literature which asserts that Nadine Gordimer’s fiction has revealed itself as an attempt to identify a function for the subject/individual who opts for staying in a repressive country and, for this reason, must cope with the dilemma of being a citizen whose background concedes him or her certain privileges under the very regime he or she is opposed to. Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953, that is, its writing period coincided roughly with the dates of Sampson’s diary entry and Gordimer’s letter to him mentioned above. In this book, normally approached by critics as a markedly autobiographical narrative, Helen Shaw, the story’s narrator-cum- protagonist, describes her life since childhood through a text that, gradually, allows its reader to come into contact with the subtle forms in which racial and social prejudices were naturalised by white South African families. The only daughter of a middle-class couple who belong to the administrative cadres of the South African powerful mining industry, Helen grows into a teenage rebel prone to defying her mother’s values. Ilha do Desterro nº 61, p. 199-223, Florianópolis, jul/dez 2011 203 Later on, this domestic non-conformity will be directed against the segregationist social mores that she identifies, albeit tentatively, underneath the surface of protocols which had characterised the employer-employee relationship she had witnessed from childhood. Towards the end of the novel, a grown-up Helen is to spend the night in the port city of Durban as she prepares to leave, the following day, on a sea voyage heading for Europe. In Durban, she goes out to visit Joel, a Jewish friend from her teenage years, who happened to be likewise expecting to board a ship, only, in his case, the destination was Israel. As they recollect a night, not too far back in their past, when she and Joel had driven to a blacks-only Johannesburg township in search of a common friend only to witness first-hand the level of police brutality inflicted on that population, Helen describes her hindsight views of those events and concludes that, as a mere spectator of state repression, from which she was shielded by her skin colour, she was no longer capable of withstanding such duplicity she seemed irrevocably condemned to by her condition. Unable to intervene in the grave political situation of her country, feeling that it was a place where things occurred “around [her], not to [her]” (Gordimer, 359), Helen chooses to live at a distance from the space where her contradiction was situated. After leaving Joel’s lodgings, Helen walks back to the hotel where she was to spend the night before her act of self-exile. In the hotel room, a dilemma settles in which will permeate most of Nadine Gordimer’s later writings. Awake in the middle of the night, Helen comes to the window and holds out her hand to catch the rain that was falling then. She gradually becomes aware of other approaching sounds. She does not comprehend immediately what they were, and the narrative effect of 204 Anderson Bastos Martins, A house on sale for a homecoming... this moment bears a remarkable resemblance to the epiphanies that distinguish the European literary modernism. But it came nearer, clearer, and it was the drowned jingle of a tambourine against small sad voices. I saw in the street below the huddled figures of some little native minstrels, singing as they padded along in the rain.