Writing for Change in South Africa : THE ESSENTIAL GESTURE Writing, Politics and Places <i> by Nadine Gordimer, edited and with an introduction by Stephen Clingman (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 356 pp.) </i>

What does literature do? What is it for? These splendid essays, selected from 25 years’ worth of sharp, firm responses to the particularly grotesque and challenging conditions for writers in South Africa, do nothing less than answer these huge questions. But they are not bombastic utterances. Nadine Gordimer is an unboastful, honest writer who dislikes cant. One of her mentors, cited with respectful pleasure, is Turgenev, whose “unpretentious essays,” she says, in a phrase that can be reapplied to her own work, “make up a remarkable testament to a writer’s creed.”

Her own creed is simple. Politically, it rests on two absolutes: “Racism is evil”; “Art is on the side of the oppressed.” (If you question the latter, ask yourself, she says, “what writer of any literary worth defends fascism, totalitarianism, racism?”) The writer’s job is twofold. He (or she, but Gordimer, who has other things on her mind than feminism, always says he) has to reconcile his interior, secret, imaginative world with his responsibility to what’s outside, to history. Through this reconciliation (an especially difficult one to make in her country), writing tries to go beyond what has so far been “allowed.”

When Gordimer played truant from school as a child, she needed, like all children, to be told that the world she felt so confined by was not the only possible world, that there might be an existence she did not yet know was “permissible.” That, she insists, is what writing is for: to “explore possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life,” to record “unconfessed history”; in Yeats’ words, “to express a life that has never found expression.”

If writing’s job is to permit or express the impermissible and unexpressed, it follows that although “censorship may have to do with literature, literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.”

Gordimer’s life is spent where a conflict over the right of books to be read (and written) is built into the writer’s life--as it is still in Eastern Europe and in many other parts of the world. In the West, this conflict has just been brought home to us in momentous and horrifying form by the ayatollah’s anathematizing of Salman Rushdie. In the earlier stages of the Muslim vendetta against “The Satanic Verses,” Rushdie had to cancel a visit to South Africa, one of the countries where the book is now banned. Gordimer was among those who spoke out strongly against this curtailing of a writer’s freedom. The case would be close to her heart, since it is the most extreme version imaginable of the perpetual opposition between art and orthodoxy.

That opposition displays similar features in widely variant contexts, whether these be Iranian fundamentalism, apartheid, Stalinism, anti-Semitism or the militaristic variant of Zionism. In the context in which Gordimer writes, the government’s efforts, at once ludicrous and malevolent, to ban, raid, censor, imprison, exile and silence writers who express alternative versions of history to its own, can provide any of them with a South African version of Rushdie’s nightmare.

The essays in “The Essential Gesture” are not only about censorship. They range widely over politics, literature, travel to other African countries and notable individuals. But their essential subject is always the writer’s responsibility. This makes the book at once a life story and a history of South Africa. Stephen Clingman’s clear (if a little too hagiographical) commentary places the essays in a changing context and points up their interesting connections with Gordimer’s fiction. So we move from the liberal, optimistic response to events like the 1957 Treason Trial of Chief Luthulu and other ANC members, to the outrage at the dark acts of the ‘60s, the Sharpeville killings, the banning of the ANC and the trial and life imprisonment of the white Communist Bram Fischer, the inspiration for “Burger’s Daughter.” In the ‘70s, with the “Soweto Revolt,” the essays record the “failure of the liberal ideal” and the changing relations between white progressives and the Black Consciousness movement. More recently, as in her novels, “July’s People” and “A Sport of Nature,” the writing looks, not always hopefully, at the example of other post-colonial African countries and anticipates the implications of revolution in South Africa.

There is a danger for the writer in being always on the side of the angels. Sometimes these essays, speaking of “relevance” and “commitment,” edge toward the worthily pious. Gordimer is acutely aware of the problems in “conforming to an orthodoxy of opposition.” The risk is greatest, she sees, for the black writer, who is expected to adopt the “kit” of “reliable emotive phrases,” partly because “agitprop” has been “the first contemporary art form that many black South Africans feel they can call their own.” But this is a dilemma for white writers too. Gordimer knows that nothing she says in her public speeches “will be as true as my fiction” and that fiction cannot do the job of speeches.

The perils of belonging too much to an ideology of resistance are set against the problems of having nowhere to belong. In many of these essays, Gordimer considers, realistically and penetratingly, changing relations between black and white writers in South Africa, and the inevitable “double alienation” of a writer such as herself, “non-European” and “non-Black.” How the white writers who stay on in South Africa are to accept their future role as the voices of an unwanted and isolated minority is a subject that requires all her honesty and firmness of mind. She can only hope that by continuing to say “we” of white and black writers, she can endorse the possibility of “a single, common, indigenous nature for art in South Africa,” not a falsely imposed or fatally divided culture.

It is also apparent to her that alienation is (up to a point) not a burden but a necessity for the writer. This perception makes her an excellent observer of countries where she is made to feel non-existent: “To be white in the streets of Accra is to feel oneself curiously anonymous and almost invisible; one is aware of one’s unimportance, in terms of what a white face has meant and now means to people.” She records, with wonderful exactness and curiosity, scenes from a world where the white view is irrelevant: the night-time halt of a river boat in the Congo, gorgeous “ladies of joy” in a Brazzaville open-air cafe, lavish erotic designs--symbols of fertility--on Malagasy tombs, a picnic party of women in full Victorian dress (unchanged descendants of pre-1914 refugees from Namibia) eating porridge in the Kalahari desert. Throughout her travels, Gordimer compares the African states (such as Ghana) that are “dedicated to radical change in the life of the masses” and those (such as the Ivory Coast) that have fostered a black elite and are dependent on foreign investments. In these diagnoses of possible African developments, she takes as her motto the messages she spots written up on buses and taxis in Ghana: “It changes,” and “Merci Dieu.” These essays, too, records of a dramatically changing history by a tolerant, flexible, adaptive mind, are sermons on that text: “Merci Dieu, it changes.”