Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer

South African novelist and short-story writer, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer's works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of Congress of South African Writers, and even at the height of the apartheid regime, she never considered going into exile.

"A line in a statute book has more authority than the claims of one man's love or another's. All claims of natural feeling are over-ridden alike by a line in a statute book that takes no account of humanness, that recognizes neither love nor respect nor jealousy nor rivalry nor compassion nor hate - nor any human attitude where there are black and white together. What Boaz felt towards Ann; what Gideon felt towards Ann, what Ann felt about Boaz, what she felt for Gideon - all this that was real and rooted in life was void before the clumsy words that reduced the delicacy and towering complexity of living to a race theory..." (from Occasion for Loving, 1963)

Nadine Gordimer was born into a well-off family in Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. It was the setting for Gordimer's first novel, THE LYING DAYS (1953). Her father was a Jewish jeweler originally from Latvia and her mother of British descent. From her early childhood Gordimer witnessed how the white minority increasingly weakened the rights of the black majority. Gordimer was educated in a convent school. She spent a year at Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg without taking a degree.

Often kept at home by a mother who imagined she had a weak heart, Gordimer began writing from the age of nine. Her first story, 'Come Again Tomorrow', appeared in the children's section of the Johannesburg magazine Forum when she was only fourteen. By her twenties, Gordimer had had stories published in many of the local magazines. In 1951 the New Yorker accepted a story, publishing her ever since.

From her first collection of short stories, FACE TO FACE (1949), which is not listed in some of her biographies, Gordimer has revealed the psychological consequences of a racially divided society. The novel The Lying Days (1953) was based largely on the author's own life and depicted a white girl, Helen, and her growing disaffection toward the narrow-mindlessness of a small-town life. Other works in the 1950s and 1960s include A WORLD OF STRANGERS (1958), OCCASION FOR LOVING (1963), and THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD (1966). In these novels Gordimer studied the master-servant relations, spiritual and sexual paranoias of colonialism, and the shallow liberalism of her privileged white compatriots.

Occasion for Loving was concerned with the "line in a statute book" - South Africa's cruel racial law. In the story an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman ends bitterly. Ann Davis is married to a gentle Jew called Boaz Davis, a dedicated scholar who has travelled all over the country in search of African music. Gideon Shibalo, a talented painter, is black, he has a marriage and several affairs behind. The liberal Mrs Jessie Stilwell is a reluctant hostess to the law-breaking lovers. Boaz, the cuckold, is on the side of the struggling South African black majority, and Ann plays with two men's emotions.

"She looks at them all and cannot believe what she knows: that they, suddenly here in her house, will carry the AK 47s they only sing about, now, miming death as they sing. They will have a career of wiring explosives to the undersides of vehicles, they will go away and come back through the bush to dig holes not to plant trees to shade home, but to plat land mines. She can see they have been terribly harmed but cannot believe they could harm. They are wiping their fruit-sticky hands furtively palm against palm." (from 'Comrades' in Jump, 1991)

Gordimer won early international recognition for her short stories and novels. THE CONSERVATIONIST (1974) juxtaposed the world of a wealthy white industrialist with the rituals and mythology of Zulus. BURGER'S DAUGHTER (1979) was written during the aftermath of Soweto uprising. In the story a daughter analyzes her relationship to her father, a martyr of the antiapartheid movement. JULY'S PEOPLE (1981) was a futuristic novel about a white family feeing from war-torn Johannesburg into the country, where they seek refuge with their African servant in his village. Gordimer's early short story collections include SIX FEET OF THE COUNTRY (1956), NOT FOR PUBLICATION (1965) and LIVINGSTONE'S COMPANIONS (1971). The historical context of the racial divided society has also been the fundamental basis of her short stories. In 'Oral History' from A SOLDIER'S EMBRACE (1980) the village chief has chosen