A World of Strangers

"I went to visit Coetzee on the day that Gordimer won, to see if he was grumpy. He wasn’t. But he did say that living in the same country as a writer, you see their faults more clearly. I think that makes sense, particularly with regards to South African literature. Ninety per cent of our readers tend to be overseas. So South African writers who are successful are successful because they’re read out of context or read in an international context. A World of Strangers is Gordimer’s best novel. It’s reminiscent of EM Forster’s Passage to India – it is written in a very British mode. It’s telling that a writer who grew up in a provincial town, the child of Jewish immigrants, adopted an extremely English, refined way of writing about South Africa. It tells you the difficulty of writing about this country. You can adopt entirely urbane voices for writing about it, which don’t quite fit, or specifically African ways of writing about the country, which don’t quite fit either. It starts on the boat ride over, as the protagonist stops at various African ports along the way and has dalliances with various Englishwomen who are voyaging to live with their husbands. The protagonist is going to take over a branch of his family’s publishing company in Johannesburg. In Johannesburg he runs into a few black people and comes to like one and see him as alive – then the same person gets killed in a car accident. There were lots of attempts at coming to terms with new urban life in the 1950s and 60s. This is the most successful literary attempt. First, we learn just how difficult it is to imagine it properly. The peasants he is talking about are actually what he thinks of as British peasants. So it’s Gordimer transferring British class contempt to an African setting. The story of South Africa in the 20th century is in part about repressive urbanisation. In some ways the book is about what happens to people when they come to a big city and how South African black people – who were 98% rural at the beginning of the 20th century – become urbanised, semi-residents of the city, where they had to have a pass and exist on sufferance at all times. It’s hard to see in retrospect. There’s been some interesting work on censorship. The records for those years were well-preserved, so we can tell what they were thinking – and mostly they weren’t really thinking. For example, a book called Black Beauty , about a really beautiful horse, was banned on the basis of the title. In this case, it was probably just the scenes of racial mixing at parties that upset them. Censorship was always quite good for South African writers’ careers. Because most of our readers are abroad, banned writers lost few readers at home and the ensuing publicity increased their audience abroad. Although Gordimer has always been a conventional creature of the left, in her novels she’s quite ironic towards leftists – towards their interest in bridging the gap between the races and wanting to be poor or to look like the poor. She’s even ironic about black leftists. The conflict between her politics and her literary irony makes her writing more interesting. Is possible to be non-political? South Africans are very non-political. We may seem political from overseas but we are a country that’s devoted to money, to escaping poverty, to staying away from poor people and not thinking about them. So day-to-day life is quite non-political. I work at the University of Cape Town. I spend 80% of my time in rooms filled with white people who are not inhibited by political correctness in any way. Surprisingly, these rooms can be much less diverse than in the United States, where the racial figures are obviously much different. In some ways it’s a form of self-criticism because he sees himself as part of this long-standing colonial project, which was political and social but also literary. Writing about the land rather than the people is the oldest trick in colonial writing. I think he was talking about that whole body of work. He talks about the various tricks and evasions in that kind of writing. Coetzee tried not to repeat those tricks or repeats them only in an ironic way."