Having celebrated her 90th birthday last week, Nadine Gordimer can look back on an illustrious career spanning nearly eight decades. Recognised with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, she has been influential in shaping the literary landscape.
With her writing and activism she has brought worldwide attention to the horrors of apartheid. But she is wrongly considered a political writer.
Her primary concern has always been with the personal. It is by focusing on the private lives of individuals that she has illustrated the broader implications of the politically charged situations she has been witness to. She has continued to do so after 1994, turning to contemporary themes of a post-colonial society in a globalised world.
Born on November 20, 1923, in Springs, which used to be the centre of the gold-mining industry, to parents of Jewish British and Latvian descent, Gordimer is a self-declared atheist.
She and her sister, Betty, were brought up thinking of Britain as their home country, an illusion Gordimer pierced in her teenage years. She described the awakening in her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), the only one she admits to being partly autobiographical.
She started publishing stories as early as 1937. Through her writing she began to break out of what she called the colour cocoon. Her early reading and education gave her the impression that great literature was written out there, in the Western world, not in her own home country.
She recognised that there was something amiss with this portrayal and made a conscious choice to use her own world as a source of inspiration for her stories.
Reading such authors as Katherine Mansfield and Pauline Smith helped her identify her precarious position as a white writer in Africa, and from the outset she began to examine and subvert colonialist and apartheid perspectives.
In his controversial Gordimer biography, No Cold Kitchen (2005), Ronald Suresh Roberts noted that “from inside a heritage of homage to Europe, Gordimer emerged as the twentieth century’s foremost white Afrocentrist”.
In the 1950s, Gordimer got involved in the making of the famous Drum magazine, working alongside and making friends with black fellow writers, and starting to publish on a regular basis.
She dedicated herself to exposing the injustices of segregation laws and to bringing about change. Her novel, The Conservationist, was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize in 1974. Other accolades followed.
But over the years, Gordimer’s writing has acquired a reputation for being difficult. This is mostly an exaggeration and if one is prepared to take up the challenge, the rewards are plentiful.
Her writing can be inspiring and, at least in my case, life-changing.
My passion for South African literature was triggered at an Austrian university with Gordimer’s short story, The Moment Before the Gun Went Off. It set me on a path which ended with a permanent relocation to Cape Town. Reading her work since 1994 is like looking through a kaleidoscope of contemporary South Africa.
With every turn, she approaches her topics with new psychological and historical insights.
At the core of each story is the universal human condition, the aspect of Gordimer’s work countless readers across the globe have been able to connect with.
Her continuing commitment to her country and the life around her is not only exemplified by her writing, but also by her activism.
Whether it is the environment, the threats to the written word, the Burmese junta, the embargo on Cuba, or more recently and locally, the threat to freedom of speech, Gordimer is often the first to take up a cause and fight with any means available to her.
She has sometimes in the past been accused of turning a blind eye to the wrongdoings of the ANC.
But when I interviewed her two years ago, she had no qualms about criticising the government’s abuse of power or expressing her disappointment with the handling of education in the country.
At the time, she was actively petitioning against the Secrecy Bill, adamant that we had to keep the protest going, to, as she said, “throw another log in the fire!”.
During our conversation, I asked her what made her truly happy. Her reply has stayed with me: “I have been unbelievably lucky by having 48 years with the love of my life, and I have that to treasure. Sometimes it is painful to do so, but other times… it’s there, I had it.”
Her husband, Reinhold Cassirer, died in 2001. Since then, all her books carry his life dates and the dates of their relationship on their front pages. They were married for nearly half a century.
May we all follow her example and keep the fires burning.
* Szczurek is a writer, editor and literary critic based in Cape Town. Her doctoral thesis was published as Truer than Fiction: Nadine Gordimer Writing Post-Apartheid South Africa.