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Nadine Gordimer

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Nadine Gordimer
File:Gordimer.gif
Born (1923-11-23) November 23, 1923 (age 101)
Springs, Gauteng, Johannesburg, South Africa
OccupationPlaywright, Novelist, Political Activist
NationalitySouth African

Nadine Gordimer (born 20 November 1923) is a South African writer, political activist and winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature. Her writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. She also joined the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She has recently been active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Early life

She was born in Springs, Gauteng, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg, the daughter of Isidore and Nan Gordimer. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants, her father a watchmaker from Lithuania near the Latvian border, and her mother from London. Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents. Her father's experience as a Jewish refugee in czarist Russia helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid.

Conversely, Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa led her to found a crèche for black children. Gordimer also experienced government repression firsthand, when as a teenager the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.

Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because of her mother's "strange reasons of her own" (apparently, fears that Gordimer had a weak heart). She began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of fifteen. Her first published work was a short story for children, "The Quest for Seen Gold," which appeared in the Children's Sunday Express in 1937; "Come Again Tomorrow," another children's story, appeared in Forum around the same time.

Gordimer studied for a year at Witwatersrand University but did not complete her degree. Instead, she continued to write, publishing mostly in local South African magazines. She collected many of these early stories in Face to Face, published in 1949. In 1948, she moved to Johannesburg, where she has lived ever since.

In 1951, the New Yorker accepted Gordimer's story "A Watcher of the Dead", beginning a long relationship. Gordimer, who has said she believes the short story is the literary form for our age, has continued to publish short stories in the New Yorker and other prominent literary journals.

Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953. In 1954, she married Reinhold Cassirer, a highly respected art dealer who established the South African Sotheby's and later ran his own gallery; their "wonderful marriage" lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. It was her second marriage and his third. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955, and is today a filmmaker in New York, with whom Gordimer has collaborated on at least two documentaries. Gordimer also had a daughter during this time.

Political and literary activism

The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre spurred Gordimer's entry into the anti-apartheid movement. Thereafter, she quickly became increasingly active in South African politics, and was close friends with Nelson Mandela's defense attorneys (Bram Fischer and George Bizos) during his 1962 trial. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Gordimer was one of the first people he wanted to see.

During the 1960s and 1970s, she continued to live in Johannesburg, although she occasionally left for short periods of time to teach at several universities in the United States. She had begun to achieve international literary recognition, receiving her first major award in 1961. Throughout this time, Gordimer continued to demand through both her writing and her activism that South Africa re-examine and replace its long held policy of apartheid. During this time, the South African government banned three of her works, along with works by other anti-apartheid writers.

In South Africa, she joined the African National Congress when it was still listed as an illegal organisation by the South African government. While never blindly loyal to any organization, Gordimer saw the ANC as the best hope for reversing South Africa's treatment of black citizens. Rather than simply criticizing the organization for its perceived flaws, she advocated joining it to address them. She hid ANC leaders in her own home to aid their escape from arrest by the government, and she has said that the proudest day of her life was when she testified at the 1986 Delmas treason trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists. (See Simon Nkoli, Mosiuoa Lekota, etc.) During this time she also regularly took part in anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa, and traveled internationally speaking out against South African apartheid and accused other nations of discrimination and political repression.

During this time, she won numerous literary awards. Literary recognition for her accomplishments culminated with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, which noted that Gordimer "through her magnificent epic writing has — in the words of Alfred Nobel — been of very great benefit to humanity".

Into the 1990s and 21st century, Gordimer has been active in the HIV/AIDS movement, which is a significant public health crisis in South Africa. In 2004, she organized about 20 major writers to contribute short fiction for Telling Tales, a fundraising book for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for government funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. On this matter, she has been critical of the current South African government, noting in 2004 that she "approves" of everything President Mbeki has done except his stance on AIDS.

Gordimer's resistance to discrimination extends to her even refusing to accept "shortlisting" in 1998 for the Orange Prize, because it is an award that recognizes only women writers. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government. In 2005, when Fidel Castro fell ill, Gordimer joined six other Nobel prizewinners in a public letter to the United States warning it not to seek to destabilize Cuba's communist government. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer has also been active in South African letters and international literary organizations. She has been Vice President of International PEN.

Work and themes

Gordimer has achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as well as the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. Virtually all of Gordimer's works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices. Her characterization is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs.

Her first published novel, The Lying Days (1953), takes place in Gordimer's home town of Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town near Johannesburg. Arguably a semi-autobiographical work, The Lying Days describes is a bildungsroman, charting the growing political awareness of a young white woman, Helen, toward small-town life and South African racial division.

In her 1963 work, Occasion for Loving, Gordimer puts apartheid and love squarely together. Her protagonist, Ann Davis, is married to Boaz Davis, an ethnomusicologist, but in love with Gideon Shibalo, an artist with several failed relationships. Ann Davis is white, however, and Gideon Shibalo is black, and South Africa's government criminalised such relationships.

Gordimer won the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel, The Conservationist, which explores Zulu culture and the world of a wealthy white industrialist through the eyes of Mehring, the antihero. Per Wästberg described The Conservationist as Gordimer's "densest and most poetical novel". Thematically covering the same ground as Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1977), the "conservationist" seeks to conserve nature to preserve the apartheid system, keeping change at bay. When an unidentified corpse is found on his farm, Mehring does the "right thing" by providing it a proper burial; but the dead person haunts the work, a reminder of the bodies on which Mehring's vision would be built.

Gordimer's 1979 novel Burger's Daughter is the story of a woman analyzing her relationship with her father, an anti-apartheid martyr. Written in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising, the novel was shortly thereafter banned by the South African government. Gordimer described the novel as a "coded homage" to Bram Fischer, the Communist lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists.

In July's People (1981), Gordimer imagines a bloody South African revolution, in which white people are hunted and murdered. The work follows Maureen and Bamford Smales, an educated white couple, hiding for their lives with July, their long-time former servant. The novel plays off the various groups of "July's people": his family and his village, as well as the Smales. The story examines how people cope with the terrible choices forced on them by violence, race hatred, and the state.

Gordimer's most recent novel, Get a Life, written in 2005 after the death of her longtime spouse, Reinhold Cassirer, is the story of a man undergoing treatment for a life-threatening disease. While clearly drawn from recent personal life experiences, however, the novel also continues Gordimer's exploration of political themes. The protagonist is an ecologist, battling installation of a planned nuclear plant. But he is at the same time undergoing radiation therapy for his cancer, causing him personal grief and, ironically, rendering him a nuclear health hazard in his own home. Here, Gordimer again pursues the questions of how to integrate everyday life and poltical activism.

Recent Events

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Gordimer was the subject of a 2006 biography by Ronald Suresh Roberts, which she repudiated after its publication.

Gordimer was robbed on October 26, 2006 by four black men in her home in the Parktown suburb, then assaulted after she refused to hand over her wedding ring. Gordimer and her domestic worker were locked in a storeroom during the daytime attack. Gardimer later said the four men responsible were products of a society grappling with the legacy of South Africa's past, and suggested that providing education, training and employment was the way to reduce crime, not recruiting more police.

Bibliography

Fiction
Short story collections
Plays
Essays
Other works
Adaptations of Gordimer's works
  • "The Gordimer Stories" (1981-82) - adaptations of seven Gordimer short stories; she wrote screenplays for four of them
Edited works

Honors

Further reading

Brief biographies

Critical studies

  • Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (1986)
  • John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer
  • Andrew Vogel Ettin, Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer (1993)
  • Dominic Head, Nadine Gordimer (1994)
  • Christopher Heywood, Nadine Gordimer (1983)
  • Rowland Smith, editor, Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer (1990)
  • Barbara Temple-Thurston, Nadine Gordimer Revisited (1999) ISBN 0805746080
  • Kathrin Wagner, Rereading Nadine Gordimer (1994)
  • Louise Yelin, From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer (1998)

Short reviews

Speeches and interviews

Biographies

  • Ronald Suresh Roberts, No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer (2005)

Research archives

Notes

  1. ^ Per Wästberg, Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience, April 26, 2001. (Nobel Prize article.). Cite error: The named reference "Wastberg" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  2. ^ "A Writer's Life: Nadine Gordimer", April 3, 2006, Telegraph.
  3. ^ Nadine Gordimer, Guardian Unlimited (last visited Jan. 25, 2007).
  4. New Yorker, June 9, 1951.
  5. The W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award.
  6. The Late Bourgeouis World, was her first personal experience with censorship; it was banned in 1966 by the South African government. Burger's Daughter, published in June, 1979, was banned one month later; Gordimer wrote an account of the censorship in "What Happened to Burger's Daughter or How South African Censorship Works". The Publications Committee's Appeal Board reversed the censorship shortly thereafter, determining that the book was too one-sided to be subversive. Gordimer responded to this decision in Essential Gesture (1988), pointing out that the board banned two books by black authors at the same time it unbanned her own work. July's People was also banned under apartheid, and faced censorship under the post-apartheid government as well: In 2001, a provincial education department temporarily removed July's People from the school reading list, describing it as patronizing and offensive.
  7. ^ Donald Morrison, "Nadine Gordimer", Time Magazine 60 Years of Heroes (2006) Cite error: The named reference "Morrison" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  8. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991, Nobel Prize Laureate biography.
  9. ^ Agence France-Presse, Nobel laureates join battle against AIDS, Dec. 1, 2004. Cite error: The named reference "AIDS" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  10. Gordimer and literary giants fight AIDS, iafrica.com, 2004 Nov. 29.
  11. Nadine Gordimer and Anthony Sampson, Letter to The New Review of Books, Nov. 16, 2000.
  12. Christopher S. Wren, "Former Censors Bow Coldly to Apartheid Chronicler", New York Times, Oct. 6, 1991.
  13. Judith Norman, "Special Commissioned Essay on The Lying Days".
  14. The Conservationist was a co-winner with Stanley Middleton's novel Holiday.
  15. Brief biography of Bram Fischer, Bram Fischer Human Rights Programme, Wits School of Law (2005; last visited 2007/4/4).
  16. Rachel Donadio, "Nadine Gordimer and the Hazards of Biography", New York Times, Dec. 31, 2006.
  19. "Gordimer's sorrow for men who robbed her". Guardian Unlimited. November 2, 2006.
  20. Nadine Gordimer awarded Legion of Honour, Mail & Guardian Online, April 1, 2007.


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