LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Nadine Gordimer : Trying to Change South Africa With Power of Written Words

It has been 40 years since the white Parliament passed the infamous laws creating “grand apartheid.” During that same year, the New Yorker published a short story by an unknown 26-year-old South African.

That story launched a writing career that has reached a vast international reading audience, angered successive white South African governments and earned the author regular mention as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Through a body of work that includes such novels as “Burger’s Daughter” and “July’s People,” and the short-story collection “Six Feet of the Country,” Nadine Gordimer has painted a subtle, yet powerful portrait of the effect of apartheid on the people who live in South Africa.

Gordimer, 66, still writes regularly on her manual Hermes typewriter, working in a study of the suburban Johannesburg home she shares with her husband, an art gallery owner. Her 17th book, a novel called “My Son’s Story,” is due out this fall. She spends more time these days encouraging young artists through the Congress of South African Writers, a mostly black organization of 5,000 writers that she co-founded in 1987.

She is a small, gray-haired woman, only 5 foot 1 and 90 pounds, and a picture of solemn concentration as she talks about her work and her life, even as the family German pointer snores peacefully at her side. Playwright Athol Fugard calls her “fiercely uncompromising, uncomfortably uncompromising for a lot of people.”

Her country has changed radically in a matter of months this year and, for the first time, Gordimer says she has begun to feel more at home in this nation that has been her lifelong home.

The African National Congress is legal again, after 30 years of waging a guerrilla war from exile. Nelson Mandela, the man Gordimer considers her political leader, is free and meets with President Frederik W. de Klerk. And hardly a week goes by that Gordimer doesn’t greet an old friend who has returned from exile to rejoin the legal political process.

Gordimer joined the ANC the other day with her usual sense of quiet purpose. She walked into a building near downtown Johannesburg, feeling a special warmth in the rooms where she and her friends once met secretly. Then she filled out a single-page form, pulled 12 rand (about $5) from her pocketbook and became a card-carrying member.

It was the kind of simple scene that she might have used for one of her own characters: the life-affirming act of a novelist who sees the future of which she dreamed coming true.

“I had waited a very long time. It was really quite moving,” Gordimer said the next day. “I had been in and out of that office for years. It was such a nice, familiar place for this kind of commitment to happen.”

Question: Must a writer in South Africa today be politically active?

Answer: I’m not by nature a political person at all. In the early ‘60s, I couldn’t even get up on a platform and express an opinion about literature . . . . I was petrified. And I think if I had lived in another country, I would have remained like that . . . .

My whole lifetime here, there has been this enormous struggle coming toward the climax it reached in the past decade or so. And to stand aside from that and say, “No, I’m not going to pass an opinion on detentions. I’m not going to take part in any type of protest against what happens here. I’m not going to speak about anything.” Whether this is out of reticence or out of fear of the danger, I don’t think you can work here. I don’t think you have a right to.

Q: What is the burden of a white person, and particularly a white artist, in South Africa?

A: If you’re a writer, you really need to be left alone. So the burden is that you really can’t be left alone. Whatever you do here, even if you just belong to a writers’ organization, it’s all intensely politicized because culture is intensely politicized . . . . It is a burden. I feel ashamed saying so, because then you look at other people who really sacrifice all kinds of personal fulfillment in order to bring about change.

Q: Is art itself a way to bring about change then?

A: That’s a delicate matter. All literature is . . . trying to make sense of life . . . . And if there’s any honesty in a writer at all, any self-searching in your society, it’s going to be a (social) critique . . . .

You get involved in your society. You cannot just be a writer. You have to be a citizen as well. But I think it’s terribly important not to become a propagandist, even for the cause that you believe in most. If you’re going to produce anything worthwhile, you must retain the freedom to write about that society, warts and all . . . .

This does not mean you have to say you have . . . an “evenhanded” approach. I don’t think, in a society like ours, if you’re honest and have any moral sense at all or any decency, you can look at apartheid . . . in an evenhanded way. If there’s anything I am absolutely sure about in my life, it is that racism is evil . . . . Nobody can defend it. It’s pure evil. Therefore, how can you have an evenhanded view of people who practice racism against those who try to abolish it. So I think you keep your principles--more than your principles, you keep your strong passionate convictions--about what is wrong. But in your writing you must be free to show that even those who have passionate convictions have human faults.

Q: Have writers had any influence on South African society?

A: I think South African fiction writers have had some influence . . . . But one must be modest about it. In how many countries do writers have any real influence? You now have this extraordinary happening in that (Vaclav) Havel is president of a country. But . . . it’s very rare. In most countries, intellectuals have no influence whatever on governments . . . .

I think we have helped in the struggle to the extent that we have been able to express the unspoken resentments, frustrations, fears, hates, loves of South Africans, who because of the kind of climate of intimidation here have feared to say these things openly . . . .

And maybe some whites have been stirred by our writings to examine their own lives and have doubts about the way they’ve been acting. But . . . it’s a small influence.

But abroad, I think we have done quite a lot, because . . . in scenes of violence on a TV screen or in a newspaper report, people’s lives are shown at that point. You don’t know what happened before or what goes on afterward. Whereas in a novel, in stories, you have a deeper view of people’s lives. You see what happened after the riot, what happened after they went home, what happened to the parents when the child fled the country, went to Swaziland and they didn’t hear of their child for two or three years . . . . All these things are the result of apartheid and what it does to people here. But you can’t see them in a newscast.

So I think those of us who are read overseas have really had the opportunity to show the people more of a totality of what apartheid means in human terms.

Q: What’s your feeling about the changes occurring inside South Africa today? What do they mean for blacks in South Africa and why are they, as many say, not enough?

A: Of course they’re not enough. Now, one cannot say that the unbanning of the liberation movements is insignificant. It was an enormous thing. I heard about it . . . . I’ll never forget the morning. . . . My two comrades in COSAW (Congress of South African Writers) and I had been out . . . in Soweto.

. . . . We went to the room where Raks Seakgwa (COSAW regional organizer) lives. He has an enormous TV, which I haven’t got. So we sat in his room there and watched . . . the speech. It was extraordinary because Raks spent five years on Robben Island (prison). And the other young man, . . . as recently as 1988, spent a year in solitary confinement in detention. And they’re such extraordinary young men because they seemed to have no bitterness; they accepted it as their part in the struggle for freedom . . . .

So . . . to hear the unbanning of the ANC . . . was for me extraordinary--and very humbling. They were absolutely bowled over. They couldn’t believe it. So you can’t say that this is nothing.

(But) now all the awful things are happening. You see (President Frederik W.) de Klerk maneuvering toward a new dispensation here with, from the point of view of many white people, the most extraordinary concessions to black majority rule. But I don’t think they quite realized what this would bring about, because it’s brought about the resurgence of white Afrikaner fanaticism, racist fanaticism . . . . (This is) something that dampens one’s euphoria . . . .

But to look on the good side, the level at which Nelson Mandela and his group have been received in the outside world is something that, of course, should have happened long, long ago. When you think how many years the ANC was totally ignored by the West, I think it’s terribly important that the West should give full support to Mandela and the ANC . . . .

Q: How has Mandela changed the attitudes of whites?

A: There’s something about the charisma of Mandela. Everybody fell in love with Mandela. (They said:) “If we have to have a black man, let it be Mandela.” But what they have to realize is what he’s said time and time again--that he’s not a savior standing alone. If you accept Mandela and respect Mandela, then you must accept the African National Congress . . . whether you like it or not. And I think that’s a move that still has to be made among whites.

Q: What were your feelings about joining the ANC?

A: It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever belonged to a political party. I think it’s very important that whites who subscribe to the idea of a non-racial future for South Africa should become signed-up members of the ANC.

Q: Do you think De Klerk is serious about reform?

A: His record isn’t very good. He was on the right wing of the Botha government. But I think he’s a very intelligent man. He’s proving that every day. You listen to his speeches and you see how he deals with things. He’s highly intelligent, and he seems to be a worldly man. And God knows we haven’t seen many worldly men among the Afrikaner presidents.

I think he’s just seen what I like to call the forces of history . . . . I think he’s realized that this country cannot carry on the way it was. Of course, they will try desperately to hang onto (giving) whites . . . the final word in everything, and this is something we have to push against all the time . . . .

Q: Does the suggestion that there are political divisions among blacks in South Africa, and even within the ANC, worry you?

A: Why should the world expect there to be absolute unity in the black population? Where else is there? . . . . It will be the same as it is everywhere else in the world. There’s no unity in the Labor Party in Britain, no real unity among the Republicans or among the Democrats in the United States. And obviously if you’re going to have a multiparty democracy, you’re going to have that here . . . .

Q: Some artists worry that the ANC is not committed to freedom of expression. What will happen to artistic freedom under a black-ruled government in South Africa?

A: No one can guarantee anything. Are we going to have a ministry of culture? In one way, I want that, because it could encourage young artists. If you have a ministry of culture, then there’s government money to spend on the arts. But one always fears if you have a ministry of culture then decisions about what is culture will be made at the ministerial level.

The general feeling, in the ANC and elsewhere, is that we’ve had enough of censorship and want to have complete freedom in the arts and freedom to re-examine anything in our own lives and our own society--anything at all . . . .

Q: What do you think the future holds for South Africa?

A: I’m inclined to be optimistic, based on a lifetime of knowledge of the character of blacks in South Africa . . . . But through all the terrible years of the struggle and the repression, so many terrible things have happened.

I think it distorts people’s character. It certainly brought about a tolerance of violence, and a feeling that violence is part of our ordinary lives. It’s a danger . . . . There are these constant distortions of people’s normal feelings and reactions . . . . There seems to be no end to the horrors that this policy can bring about.

On the other hand, there are so many encouraging signs within this awful matrix. So many people--black and white--working together . . . . These things are happening, but they tend to be overshadowed by the horrors.

Q: For you, how is life today different from a year ago or even 30 years ago?

A: . . . . I really feel--and this is truly a novelty in my adult life--that there is something I can openly identify with. I feel so grateful that I’m still here. That at least I’ve stayed to see the changes that have come about.

I must keep reminding myself that in terms of the law, almost nothing has happened. But the fact is the liberation movements have been unbanned, the fact is that Mandela and the others are now people whose opinions matter a great deal in national life, at all levels . . . .

It’s difficult for Americans to understand how you could live your whole life without belonging to a political structure, without saying I’m a Democrat or I’m a Republican. Truly, people like myself have always felt that there was nothing here we could officially belong to. You were always on the side of the forbidden.

Q: How have the distortions brought on by apartheid been reflected in your art, and in the art of South Africa?

A: It has provided a tremendous pressure, obviously. But it’s in the nature of art to resist those pressures. This is true of everybody who practices in the arts in this country. It doesn’t really matter whether they are black or white or what they are. The distortions are there (but) I think that art exposes them. If art doesn’t expose them, if it just gives in to them, then it loses its validity as art.