Nadine Gordimer Has Died

I was once jealous of the writer Nadine Gordimer. I was a young, struggling wife and mother ignoring my own writing. I also admired Nadine Gordimer for being a champion of ending apartheid ("apart hate") in her homeland, South Africa.

Nadine Gordimer, a white woman in a white-ruled society, fifteen years older than I, not only wrote. She, with her husband, lived the talk, sheltering ANC members and others being sought by police. 

Years ago, as I grew up into my 40s, I knew enough to avoid jealousies. I did keep my childhood-founded anger toward racism, segregation, and systems like apartheid, the latter so intense in South Africa that blacks had to carry passbooks, into the 1980 or '90s.

Three coincidences (if you believe in those), prompt this post. 

First, I watched "Mandela," the movie, on video on Saturday night. My husband and I visited Robben Island in the past and recognized the movie's scenes of above-ground mining the island's prisoners did. I wondered if a Nadine Gordimer role would be there, but the film kept a closer focus.

Then, late Monday night I caught an outstanding BBC "Hardtalk" interview with Nadine Gordimer.

Finally, this morning's Washington Post informed us of her death. 

Today, I remember how Ms Gordimer spoke on BBC about writing and how I recognized what she said about the writer being in the scene  yet being an observer. Whatever causes us as children to be on the fringes of action can build this skill of observation and analysis of situations. 

As an opera singer has different vocal chords, Ms Gordimer said, the writer about injustice has a different something "in here," she said, indicating her sternum. 

These coincidences give me pause and a positive warning. Any writer with a particular difference of perspective that relates to others' being treated humanely has an obligation to write about it, and this has come home to me again. .

I grew up in a small Southern town in the U.S., a town similar to the one in To Kill A Mockingbird, although maybe a bit larger and greener. I could read at a young age and by the time I was seven and noticed "Whites Only" signs I knew inherently that something was wrong. I did not think "wrong." I knew it. And, I knew it when I saw people of darker skin enter a different door at the movie theater. 

I remember when a housekeeper told my mother that "No," she could not enter our front door, as my mother had asked her to do. "It will be bad for both of us if I do that," was the tense answer, which my mother accepted, with regret. The meat of the answer, fear of reprisals, stuck with me. Whether reprisals would have come, I sometimes wonder. Yet, I knew that there was a well-founded fear of them.  

What used to happen sometimes when I would say "I love the South"--meaning the pace of life that used to be, freedom I had to walk anywhere as a child, and the food and music--is that hearers from other places would think immediately of segregation. I realized that because I heard the huffing noises they made. 

In such cases, I immediately felt their sense of superiority and their judgment. Yet, I know, having lived in New York state and NYC, that racial prejudices exist everywhere; I heard hateful racist terms said by whites "up north" that I had never heard in the South. 

Maybe you are called as a writer to write about difficult subjects that relate to you in strong, definite, clear, and longstanding ways. I hope you will find a way to write about those with your best skills and judgment. We cannot say everything every time. We will overload readers. However, we can say something using the pen, keyboard, and our blogs or other platforms.

For decades I have admired the work and life of Nadine Gordimer. I recommend much more about the life and work of Nadine Gordimer, available here. You can scroll down to watch the BBC "Hardtalk" interview.A link to a BBC radio commentary on the post-Mandela government.