Nadine Gordimer

In her works, Nadine Gordimer gives a harsh view into the world of Apartheid-era South Africa and all of the backwards realities that come with it. She not only gave light to the patronizing racism that seemed to permeate every otherwise rational person that appeared in her tales, but the sheer wall that being anything less than a white, middle-to-upper class male presented all around you. Her empathetic use of character, as a white woman writing these stories, truly puts the reader directly in the shoes of someone struggling just to make ends meet in a world that keeps crumbling under its own weight. Most disturbing, though, is the fact that she tends to use nameless characters to represent a whole rather than a single scenario - the true horror of Apartheid doesn't become so apparent until you realize that no one was safe from it, not even those who thought they had all the power.

The most striking story, in my opinion, was "Six Feet of the Country." To me, it's easy to make deep parallels between Apartheid and the United States pre-civil rights movement. In a nutshell: white people were in control and veritably drunk with power, everyone else pretty much bowed to them, then a bunch of oppressed people and some of the free ones spoke up, blood was spilled, laws were signed and now the problem's on the long road to being solved. I guess it didn't occur to me until our discussion of "Six Feet" that Apartheid was swallowing the nation whole. Those with no power were too frightened to do anything but submit, and those with power were too blind (and too busy mocking those with no power, the poor devils) to see that they were being slowly choked to death right next to their complacent brothers. But even deeper, there was certainly an issue with sexism - a common theme in both "Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants" and "Amnesty" was that even given some semblence of power, as in the case of "Good Climate", women were largely treated as pawns in the man's game of power struggle. You may be able to help run a gas station or teach children and help maintain a farm, but it's the men who are in control. They're the ones fighting for freedom, making the money, taking your purity then going right back out on the warpath. And what if you were a good, intelligent woman like in "Amnesty" or "Six Feet"? Well, you got to take care of everyone and get called ignorant for doing so. Not a huge payoff. The other facet of Gordimer's works that make them so genius are her metaphors. Every one of her stories spins a binding tale, but even the smallest shrug of the shoulders represents something monumental in the struggle with Apartheid. All of her stories have a common theme of powerlessness, but she takes an interesting turn and chooses to represent this crushing feeling in the interactions of her characters. A good example of this is in "Good Climate", when the nameless con-man seems to drift in and out of the narrator's life, only stopping to have a drink with her, take advantage of her to make her feel young once more, and then walk out the front door just like that with a bit of "borrowed" cash. Even more striking is a quote from "Six Feet", when Petrus "just kept on looking at me, out of his knowledge that white men have everything, can do everything; if they don't, it is because they won't." This heartless man of a narrator will barely pick up the phone to help a man that's relying on him to see a dead relative rest in peace, and yet even he knows, however sarcastically, that he has no power in the large scope of things.

Apartheid was an all-encompassing evil that no one in South Africa was unaffected by. It brought out the worst in people, and yet it brought out some beautiful, poignant works that we can still study and feel that same terrible feeling in the pit of our stomach that these very men and women dealt with for decades. In that respect, I learned a lot from Nadine Gordimer, and would definitely read more of her works. To be put in the shoes of these three flawed but very human narrators and glimpse at what the world was like in Apartheid-era South Africa is jarring, to say the least; it leaves a strange, empty feeling that there's only worse things deeper down, but you have to keep digging. It's cliche, but to say we should be grateful for the lives we live today is a vast understatement, and so I guess the only thing left to do is keep digging and hope we learn something on the other side.