Nadine Gordimers Re-Visionary Literature: The Conservationist and Julys People

The notion that the world is available for writers to alter at will is quixotic. But that does not mean that texts of the kind we found ourselves drawn into studying are powerless to shape and influence postcolonial destinies. --Jonathan White1

The narcissism of the West is simultaneously revealed and concealed within Nadine Gordimers powerfully terse texts. The bleak yet massive presence of apartheid imposed upon twentieth century South Africa is the master theme in most of her literature, be it fiction or nonfiction. Her Nobel prize-winning work documents the severe subjugation of blacks on the African subcontinent alongside the neighboring Wests democratic freedom, largely represented by white South Africans. The question of Africas political future vis vis Gordimers novels was the impetus of the paper, but the juxtaposition between the ideals of communism and capitalism soon surfaced as I deepened my research. I questioned: Did apartheid begin as a mere ideology of societal/racial control and gradually turn into ever-deepening capitalistic domination once the massive force of slave-like conditions that harnessed

May, 2 hundreds of thousands was in full swing? The seeming marriage between capitalism and politics was too interesting to resist in light of the globalization that is currently being discussed in intellectual, economic, and political circles. As a result, throughout my close reading I focus mainly on Gordimers documenting of apartheid and its increasing collusion with capitalism as the twentieth century wore on. The purpose of this paper is to explicate, first, the effect of apartheid and capitalism on both white and black communities in South Africa, and second, to draw attention to Gordimers revisionist politics that point to colonial Africa, not merely the southernmost tip of the continent. Specifically, I will analyze two key novels, The Conservationist (1974) and Julys People (1981). They represent a progression that mimicked the societal fears and processes swirling within the enclosed country at the time of their creation. Analysis of Gordimers work necessarily involves some type of political reading, however awkward that may become in the realm of the fictional. Indeed, balancing the fictional with reality in criticism can become tantamount to walking a tightrope with no net underneath. Edward Said provides some advice for the hotly contested arena of African literature: True, an ambiance of polemic surrounds this work, but that is only because one cannot look at African writing except as embedded in its political circumstances, of which the history of imperialism and resistance to it is surely one of the most important It is harder to render invisible the politics of African culture. Africa is still a site of contention.2 As the land is perpetually a site of contention, then surely the culture, and therefore the literature, that proceeds forth is such a site. Culture is never complete; it keeps mutating.

May, 3 Gordimers writing is at the cultural axis of the current debate regarding the future of South Africa. It is crucial to note that Gordimers literary politics were prescient during the 1970s through the eighties regarding the liberating political events in 1992. Her major critic, Stephen Clingman, documents in rich detail how her writing developed out of the political events that surrounded her for the vast majority of her lengthy career. However, to give balance to the praise so often heaped on her, a counter-critic, Kathrin Wagner, questions the fame and interest in Gordimers fiction that she does not view as history from the inside, as Clingman famously suggested. Wagner charges that intellectual society outside of South African borders views her work as much more important than those who had been living inside apartheid the decades before liberation.3 An aspect of such critical interest in Gordimer is centered on the color of her skin and the society she is therefore privilege to. There are some critics who claim that she cannot speak for the black subaltern, as she is white. Judith Newman proposes that: There arethose who have argued that the white South African novelist is automatically corrupted by a privileged position, that Gordimers audience can only be other privileged whites, and that the products of her imagination are therefore intrinsically a part of a racist society.4 With a nod to Gayatri Spivaks pointed query, can the subaltern speak in a colonial society/language?, the novels The Conservationist and Julys People give a powerful voice to the subaltern while denying the authors own people their sense of moral superiority as the master race. Indeed, a new dialectic is employed to subsume the old beneath it.

May, 4 Apartheids unimaginable strength demanded a new dialectic not only to detail the horror that became mundane during its tenure, but also to prepare South Africans to embrace the sudden freedom when it came, as Julys People predicted. Unlike the U.S.s racism, in which the Supreme Court held that in Plessy v. Verguson (1896): the Fourteenth Amendments equal protection of the laws was not violated by racial distinction as long as the facilities were equal,5 the South African Nationalist party in 1948 desired an absolute racial distinction between blacks and whites. There would be no feigned equality under apartheidan Afrikaans6 term meaning separateness.7 Soon after, black natives, despite strong resistance, felt themselves being suffocated by acts and laws created against them. This type of government is labeled by Said as paranoid nationalism, where traditions are carried out at the expense of others.8 From 1950 90 apartheid legislation reached out to permanently alter native existence through banning: interracial sexual relations and marriage; the use of public libraries and universities; admittance to entertainment facilities such as movie theaters and public bathrooms; and the mass-movement of natives to Resettlement camps, or Locations, far from major cities and work centers.9 Any black person without a valid pass in his possession was liable to summary arrest.10 Members of the state police force had the right to raid, search, and arrest any black citizen under any pretencemany were tortured in detention.11 The entire social system worked mercilessly against the black man or woman. Meaningful relations between blacks and whites were sundered completely under such conditions. Blacks, during apartheid, were more possessed by whites than they were

May, 5 during the preceding era. Everything about their lives was circumscribed and proscribed by the Nationalist regime. In The Conservationist, the pre-revolutionary operation of apartheid is shown in full. A wealthy, white industrialist, Mehring, owns a 400 acre farm directly outside of Johannesburgan enclave in Africas own deep South12he keeps not for profit or agricultural interests, but for a trysting place with lovers and a tax write-off. The farm, a purchased parcel of land, is significantly located directly beside the Locationa fencedin enclave teeming with 150,000 blacks. It is a space artificially created and bought by the white regime to contain those not allowed to live in the city. Without the pass needed to work, another symbol of capitalism in the postmodern era, the black workers are denied validity.13 Loaded sentences like the following politicize the novel: And the Africans had papers that made them temporary sojourners where they were born.14 Another site in the novel demonstrating the deep entrenchment of capitalism in the apartheid regime, and the certain poverty that meant for the displaced and dispossessed, is the Indian general store. The Indian family must pay off the government periodically to remain, illegally, on their bit of land, also surrounded by a high fence. Mehring frequents the store as he purchases deli meals for weekends on the farm. The general store is constantly peopled with a motley crowd of impoverished blacks, literally in rags, looking over the displayed goods that they cannot afford. It is this fraught site, displaying the learned wants of white privilege that one can possess with money, which demonstrates the triangle of tiered society in South Africa: at the top is Mehring stopping his Mercedes outside the door; then the Afrikaner police and government officials that threaten with expulsion; after the whites is the Indian family,

May, 6 existing separately from the segregation (it seems apropos that they own the artificiallycreated site to buy and sell goods that is located between the farm and the Location), and lastly, the blacks who idly inhabit the store with their 30 cents daily wage, if employed, unable in most cases to buy anything. The novel concentrates itself on Mehring and his view of his city and country domains. The reader is privy to his private monologues, revealing his obsessions, frustrations and weaknesses. The technique of stream-of-consciousness used extensively throughout the text to describe and deepen knowledge of Mehrings character allows the casual reader, whom Judith Newman refers to as a hypocrite lecteur because they only skim the surface of the text, to hear his repetitive thoughts. The monotony conceals the true intent: stream-of-conscious is elected as an inversion of European literary practices to accomplish an African political agendato recognize the (linguistic) codes and then through that subsequent knowledge, be freed of colonial rule. Franz Fanon pushes this reading further, asseverating that it has a dialectical significance today.15 His theory is brought to life in The Conservationist, which uses language to deconstruct racist/capitalistic ideology. The employed stream-ofconsciousness serves to gloss over disturbing details. The horrific is rendered commonplace, echoing the sentiments of the Nationalist Party, which turned a blind eye to the increasing poverty of blacks. Mehrings stream-of-consciousness identifies him with being part of the regime. He is a highly developed and interesting character whose intelligent awareness of the paradoxical reality of South Africa heightens a readers sense of the moral tug in the psyche:

May, 7 Across the empty irrigation ditch and on to the road, he meets the potbellied black brats with tins on their heads, standing aside for him on their way to fetch more water. This is what theyre doing all day, every day. And do you think I dont know?... But the children ignore him as he ignores them. What percentage of the world is starving? How long can we go on getting away scot free?... Soon, in this generation or the next, it must be our turn to starve and suffer.16 Passages such as this explain why apartheid censors banned three of her novels. Mehring is the anti-hero: a handsome, powerful, rich white man in complete control of his city and farm-life who has private fits of conscience at the plight of those that surround him. More subtle and profound than the obvious political commentary the novel makes is the critique of capitalisms effects on whites moral and cultural behavior. Despite his conscience, Mehring cannot help himself from smugly considering as he walks over his farm, My possessions are enough for me. His possessions, the pig-iron his lover repetitively associates him with (pig as icon), are what make him, his wealth and reputation in the eyes of white society, and what ultimately undo him as he loses his grip on reality after the flood. He begins to confront his own death with the irrepressible, rising black body, illegally buried at the beginning of the novel by Afrikaner police in the third pasture. Mehring is only the token master, soon to be forgotten as he surrenders the land when he flees the country as he aided his liberal lover in so doing years before. The intense ambiguity present in Gordimers novels is often couched as a sudden trip abroad that signals an abrupt halt to the particular characters development. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), a bildungsroman, first uses this particular denouement. Such ambiguity is a type of portrayal of not only the grey area that much of life exists in, but also another type of privilege of whites who are able to merely buy an airplane ticket and

May, 8 begin a similar life in London or New York. Even fleeing a worsening situation created by Mehrings own unstable mind, is as simple as purchasing a ticket to freedom. He narcissistically escapes defeat and death, along with the demands of the hundreds of thousands that are dependent on the regime (and therefore him), for sustenance and support. The unraveling of white supremacy, and eventual takeover of the farm, is deftly handled by Jacobus, who manages the farm every day of the year. His thoughts are also a key to his character, as they tacitly defend against Mehrings patronism: Im the one who oils and looks after the tractor, Im the one who looks after all his machines, all his machines, everything, all his cattle, every day. Saturday, Sunday, even Christmas.17 Jacobus is a symbolic representation of a black worker on a white mans farm who is not dependent and knows it. He feigns innocence to achieve his own aims and to make all black lives on the farm bearable. He shrinks when Mehring comes to the farm in the first half of the novel, but after the flood cuts off the roads to Johannesburg for weeks his true ability to handle the farm independently of the master race18 comes to light. He is the clever hero that is not given much to work with who contrasts with Mehrings anti-heroism and weakness. Jacobus is overseer of feeding, housing, and organizing farm-hand work for a handful of black families with many hangers-on, seeking a better life outside of the confines of the Location. But their positions are very far apart, regardless of Jacobus enviable status, as much cultural information is never divulged or explained to him by Mehring. As Fanon asserts, the white master has robbed the black workers on the farm of vital cultural knowledge.

May, 9 A tenet of colonialism (and also extreme capitalism) demands cheap, exploitable workers to simultaneously produce goods and services to maintain white societal standards of living. This can be taken a step further to add that the black natives have been robbed of their land, as previously mentioned, along with basic literacy and a decent wage to vie competitively in a capitalistic society. Thus they are infantilized by white culture in a never-ending round. Jacobus refers to Mehring as his baas (master), and Mehring refers to all workers, regardless of rank and age, as his boys. Mehring never outright mistreats or abuses his farm workers; a benign neglect is more apt. Through such neglect, he becomes a representation of an exclusive societal group of white males and females who passively supported the harsh politics that maintained, protected, and made their privileged lives possible. The Nationalist regime truly regarded itself as the master race, and conditions for those who did not have white skin were harsh. The Conservationist details precisely what standards blacks were allotted. Mere facts become humanized when the novel offers up such anecdotal details as the following: Izak, a black teenager, watches an Indian teenager paint a peace sign on a water-tower and wonders at it. Izak knew that egg It was smart. People wore it like you wear Jesus cross But he did not know what it really meant.19 The black teenager is completely out-of-touch with the sixties counterculture that the other teenage boy is not only very familiar with, but determined to promote by broadcasting it to the neighborhood. Is it possible that Izak himself therefore implicitly understands his lack, that he is not smart, as the egg is smart? Truly a crushing realization for a teenage boy on the verge of manhood.

May, 10 Along with being deprived of culture, life for all blacks on the farm is substandard. Whether in or out of the Location, blacks seldom had enough to eat. Mehring tries to ignore the obvious physical signs of malnutrition in the gaggle of children that watch his luxury car zoom by. The lack of protein in their diet is noted: Many of them had not had any since a calf had broken a leg and been slaughtered two months before.20 Jacobus must ration the bags of mealie-meal,21 a corn meal that comprised their daily sustenance, or Mehring will grumble about buying more than budgeted for. The abundant life of the white master is evident as Jacobus wife, Alina, prepares Mehrings meals. She has no idea which condiment in the refrigerator would be suited for the bag of deli food. Alina has today, as usual, set out tomato sauce, marmalade, honey, mustard, uncertain what category of meal it is that he eats when he comes here. The variety assembled goes further than that: it expresses the mystery of eating habits, unimaginable choices of food not open to her.22 The description of not understanding condiments evokes a lack of cultural knowledge so basic it is almost unfathomable. Common food, a basic human need, is also used to display the victimization of blacks. If The Conservationist proposes the inevitability of blacks being given back their native land, then Julys People takes this notion even further by positioning South Africa in the midst of revolution, a millennium for black control. Whites are fleeing the country in terror, bombs are going off in the major cities, and the international airport has been closed down. One young family of five is whisked away by their long-time servant, July, deep into the bush to his village. Presumably, it was simply a temporary place to escape from being killed.

May, 11 Maureen is the character the novel focuses on. She is a double of July, as their relationship, linguistically and culturally, becomes increasingly more important and even much more interesting than her marital relationship. On their first morning in the native village, living in the mother-in-laws hut, the odd juxtaposition Maureen observes with, July, their servant, their host,23 typifies the paradoxical situation the white family finds themselves in. July occupies an uncanny role that is more indefinable by the day; he further complicates the matter by not overtly acknowledging his dual status to his employers. In contrast, both husband and wife entirely lose the definition of prescribed roles in their privileged lives, which brings out unexpected personality and physical changes that are repulsive to the both of them. The filth of living for weeks in the village, the lack of normal pursuits such as shopping, going to the salon, working during the week, attending international conferences, the lack of privacy, and being surrounded day in and day out by only native blacks begins to alter Maureens view of herself, her marriage, and her loyal servant, July. After weeks in the bush, she finally begins to accept and understand that, she was not in possession of any part of her life.24 The center, the possessions and the possessing of them, has not held. Black revolution has derailed their lives completely. Her husband, Bam, quickly loses his power and status once his cheque-book and prestigious career as architect are suddenly worthless in the new village economy that is thrust upon them. Bam, as he is seen after the precious gun is discovered stolen, is emasculated by losing his possessions: He lay down on his back, on that bed and at once suddenly rolled over onto his face, as the father had never done before his sons

May, 12 She looked down on this man who had nothing, now. There was before these children something much worse than the sight of the womens broad backsides, squatting.25 Left with only shame, as he is undefined as a man without his money, career, vehicle, and gun, he abruptly gives up. Maureen focuses on the lack, the loss of control, and the awful revelation of it to their young children. Her pride is at stake. Critics disagree on the final scene of the novel when the helicopter is heard, which could mean a fleeing from or merely a hailing of before gathering her family to safety. Bams sudden cowardly behavior and the intense scrutiny on the negative lack in her surroundings, nods more to a fleeing from than a gathering towhich has been previously shown to be a consistent theme in other novels. Maureen, like Mehring and other whites, wants out when the true reality of South Africa closes in. Besides the white children who assimilate seamlessly in with similar-aged black children, Maureen and July are the only characters that appear to be infused with power as the full situation unveils itself. Maureens daily voice diminishes in the bush, but her mental acuity and focus strengthen her and prepare her for eventual escape. July, on the other hand, gradually withstands her, displaying through language that does not fear for the first time to lay bare suppressed opinions: Me? I must know who is stealing your things? Same like always. You make too much trouble for me. Here in my home too. Daniel, the chief, my-mother-my-wife with the house. Trouble, trouble from you. I dont want it anymore. You see? His hands flung out away from himself. Youve got to get it back. No no. No no.Hysterically smiling repeating She was stampeded by a wild rush of need to destroy everything between them.26 Maureen is confronted with another man who has spent almost two decades serving and obeying who rejects her and her perceived wants/needs. She identifies Bams shameful

May, 13 behavior and inability to provide, to save them from the situation, as a betrayal. Just as Julys refusal to hunt down the gun, ultimate protector of white power, is a betrayal of their long-time relationship that she arrogantly assumed was based on their mutual regard. Female white mistresses, especially educated, liberal ones that Maureen represents, were as guilty as the masters of unconscious patronism during the colonial/apartheid era. The gun, a potent colonial symbol of domination, is desired by one revolutionary young man who is believed to have run off to fight for/with the Rusias and the Cubas, according to the village chief. A mixing of political and economic realities or threats swirls within the black village in the bush, as they attempt to understand and fight against 350 years of confusing colonial rule. The notion seems to be one of continual conquest: if not the Afrikaner or British, then the Rusias. The stolen gun becomes a point of frustrating climax as July refuses to go look for it; Maureen is stunned by that refusal, along with his subsequent verbal defense as he slips into his native language to excoriate and reject her. On these cultural and societal issues endemic to apartheid South Africa, Clingman gives subtle insight: For there may be a way in which the novel is less interested in the future per se than in its unfolding in the present. On this issue Julys People may be the most deceptive, and deceptively simple, of all of Gordimers novels, and perhaps less genuinely prophetic than The Conservationist. What the novel is apparently doing is projecting a vision into the future; but what it may be doing most decisively is in fact the reverse. For what appears to be a projection from the present into the future in the novel is from another point of view seeing the present through the eyes of the future.27

May, 14 With the understanding of multiple tense-perspectives present in the novel, the twincritique of capitalism and apartheid can be better understood as being fused together. The colonial past/present, leading to the apartheid present, creating the capitalistic present/future are revealed in their inevitable progression. Revolution in the present/future is the shock that will grind the mighty wheels to a halt. My close reading of all of the above remains, but even more provocative than the blatant political revision of South Africa through revolution and violence, is the constant unrelenting critique on white capitalistic culture that Julys People offers. The theme is suggested at the beginning of the text as the reader is confronted with a disturbing quote from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist: The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. I argue that those morbid symptoms not only point to apartheids inhumaneness but also to white egoism resulting from rampant, unchecked consumerism and decadence from wealthy capitalist societies. How are the protagonists relationships influenced by the temptation of possessions28 proffered by capitalism? It can be argued that Maureen deserts her family in the bush in order to reinstate herself within the previous comforting security of capitalism. For example, Maureen and the children are strongly portrayed as consumers of new things. Can it be understood that pre-revolution Bam, as the provider of money, was merely the cash cow that his wife and children milked in an attempt to negotiate happiness in the cultural mores around them? Once he is unable to fulfill his duty, he is rejected. Mehring defined himself by his possessions; Maureen defines herself by

May, 15 things bought or brought to her by the three males who have taken care of her her entire life: father, husband and servant. Maureens children have instilled within them the surrounding cultural currency. They are described at first by being most excited by novelty. Bought items in their lives bring enjoyment, no matter how trivial the object: the children, excited, as it seemed nothing else could excite them, by a new possession. Nothing made them so happy as buying things.29 Once in the bush, not comprehending what has happened at first, they demand Coca-cola instead of water; the solution they keep proposing is to go and buy some, even if a store is no where in sight. It has been their dialectic of privilege throughout their young lives. For white adults in the high socioeconomic class of South Africa, death and sex are economically negotiable also. Death is described as a purchase, a private plane to crash in for Bams older colleague (another type of fleeing). Sex/infidelity is ultimately defined by a monetary exchange: The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff.30 There can be no denying the nod towards Marxism with the repeated, loaded terms of buying, selling, possessions and money that permeate the text. Maureen and Bams world is created and supported by a capitalistic economy that affects the blacks even out in the bush. Julys wife, Martha, reflects, The sun rises, the moon sets; the money must come, the man must go.31 Money is akin to the centrality of the universe. It rules the lives of the blacks and the whites who have agreed or who were forced to follow such economic guidelines.

May, 16 Edward Said elucidates that, Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations.32 In my analysis that focuses on economic privilege and then on the political apartheid buttressing it, encouraging its continuation, my intent is not to focus on the personal politics of the author. Nor is it to merely label my analysis as Marxist in origin. My study aims to draw attention to the critique of the symptoms of capitalistic culture in a globalized economy that is a major theme (albeit overlooked) in Gordimers work, from the sixties through Get a Life (2005). Through the themes of apartheid, critique of capitalism, and human relationships, Gordimers revisionary literary politics are prophetic. Natures cleansing flood in The Conservationist and the violent black revolution in Julys People apply virtually to the whole of Africa. Such fictionalized events were in reality occurring in other colonized African countries while apartheid effectively sealed off South Africa. The power of literature to inspire and mobilize a country, let alone an entire colonized continent is debatable, but certainly the implication of the last sentence of The Conservationist sums up in whose hands the farm, a potent symbol of the agrarian origins of colonized Africa, belongs in: He had come back. He took possession of this earth, theirs; one of them.33 Clingman explains the ideology behind the meaning of: the very last words of the novel, he had come back, are a direct paraphrase of the great rallying cry of the African National Congress in the fifties: Africa! May it come back!34 Fanons third phase of creating a national culture, the fighting phase,35 comes alive in Gordimers rewriting/revision of Africas post-colonial future. The ironic brilliance of

May, 17 this is that twenty years after the publication of this novel those very words transferred from the realm of the fictional into historical fact. The comprehension of the interplay between the ideologies of communism and capitalism led to a richer and more acute critique, in Gordimers fiction of the seventies and eighties, of apartheids morphing into an ultimate political regime of white privilege and economic/cultural advancement at the expense of otherized blacks. Ultimately it was apartheid that was the system of control, but the temptation, as she labels it, of whites to succumb to living off of others and the collusion to protect white economic interests had its death grip on the millions of residents of the labor pools of the Locations. Apartheid has been abolished for over a decade now, but the after-effects of poverty, illiteracy, cultural privilege and control will no doubt haunt the millions who will inhabit South Africa in this century. Nadine Gordimers post-apartheid fiction has come under attack for supposedly not continuing the same strain of excellence that won her several of literatures most coveted prizes. Again, I refute what I consider to be an ignorant assumption from a hypocrite lecteur. A continuation of the same political and cultural critique portrayed in Julys People and The Conservationist is leveled out to her readers. In The Pickup (2001) the vision is brutal: Shame, guilt, fear, dismay, anger, blame, resentment at the whole world and what it isand names come up, namesfor the sight of him as he is going to be. Again. Living in a dirty hovel [with] others of the wrong colours, poor devils like himselfcleaning American shitshe has seen the slums of those cities, the empty lots of that ravaged new world, detritus of degradationdoing the jobs that real people, white Americans, wont do themselves And again: America, America. The great and terrible USA The harshest country in the world. The highest buildings to reach up to in corporate positions Thats where the world is.36

May, 18 The novel is set in a Middle Eastern country and was published in America only weeks before September of 2001. Its prescient tone and theme make the politically aware shudder. The author has lived through apartheid but sees the U.S. lifestyle, capitalistic in the extreme, as toxic. She sees it through the eyes of the subaltern: a living hell.

May 19
1

Jonathan White, ed. Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Knopf, 1993) 239. Kathrin Wagner, Rereading Nadine Gordimer, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 3. Judith Newman, Nadine Gordimer (London: Routledge, 1988) 68. Theodore J. Lowi and Benjamin Ginsberg, American Government: Freedom and Power (New In South Africa, the European languages, Afrikaans and English, are spoken along with many Christopher Heywood, Writers and Their Work: Nadine Gordimer, (Windsor, Eng.: Profile Said, introduction, xxvi. Here is a partial listing of the Acts against blacks, affecting many areas of their lives, during the

Hopkins University Press, 1993.

York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000) 86.

tribal languages, such as Zulu.

Books: 1983) 7.
8 9

Nationalist Partys regime: Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Population Registration Act, Immorality Act, Group Areas Act, Separate Amenities Act, Native Resettlement Act, State-Aided Institutions Act, the Extension of University Education Bill.
10

Nadine Gordimer and David Goldblatt, Lifetimes Under Apartheid, (New York: Knopf, 1986) Gordimer and Goldblatt 114. Biodun Jefiyo, An Interview With Nadine Gordimer: Harare, February 14, 1992, Callaloo 16 Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (London: Penguin Books, 1978) 33. Gordimer 114. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Gordimer 46 47, emphasis mine. Gordimer 80. Gordimer 76. Gordimer 216, emphasis mine. Gordimer 170. Gordimer 145. Gordimer 73. Nadine Gordimer, Julys People (New York: Penguin Group, 1981) 1. Gordimer 139, emphasis mine. Gordimer 145.

64.
11 12

(1993): 922-930.
13 14 15

Penguis, 1967) 37.

May, 20

26 27

Gordimer 151 152. Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (Amherst: Gordimer 105. Gordimer 6. Gordimer 65. Gordimer 83. Said 9. Gordimer, The Conservationist, 267. Stephen Clingman, History from the Inside: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer, Journal of Fanon 41. Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) 230.

University of Massachusetts Press, 1986) 201.

South African Studies 7 (1981): 190.