Nadine Gordimer

The Geiger Counter of Apartheid

In her nearly half century of writing, author Nadine Gordimer has held the mirror up to South Africa, unmasking the apartheid era at the level of the people, with all its uncomfortable amiguities.

"Nothing is as true as my fiction," South African writer Nadine Gordimer has repeatedly said of her work, an allusion to the fact that novels tend to lack the self-censorship of memoirs or non-fiction. Then again, how can you trust a writer who describes her fiction as the truth?

But in the case of Nadine Gordimer, it might be a fitting description of the position the white author has been holding in South Africa for almost a half century now.

The author has amassed a body of work that includes some 13 novels, more than 200 short stories and several volumes of essays that have been translated into more than 30 languages. Most importantly, in her writing Gordimer has always held up a mirror to her native country, depicting an unmasked South Africa with all of its uncomfortable ambiguities.

Nadine Gordimer's works, as her friend and Nobel Committee member Per Wästberg once put it, have "grown into a profoundly psychological and social chronicle of half a century in South Africa. She is both its archivist and lighthouse keeper."

Born in the small mining town of Springs, South Africa, in 1923, Gordimer has recorded the social and political tensions caused by the South African apartheid system from her earliest years. As a teenager, for instance, she witnessed the confiscation of letters and diaries when the police raided a servant's room in her family's house.

Events such as these have been the source from which she has drawn her inspiration ever since she started writing at the age of nine.

Among her earlier works, the novel The Lying Days, published in 1953, was one of the first to receive critical attention. The novel's protagonist is Helen, a white girl growing up in a small colonial town who becomes increasingly sensitive to the social and racial codes governing life in South Africa. Helen's awakening from the naiveté and innocence of a white girl mirrors Gordimer's own political coming of age. Through the years, the author has lobbied tirelessly for racial equality.

Some 40 years after publication of the provocative first novel, Gordimer was honored with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991, the first woman in 25 years to win the Swedish prize.

"A great benefit to humanity"

Nobel jury members described Gordimer as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has -- in the words of Alfred Nobel -- been of very great benefit to humanity."

Even before receiving the world's greatest literary honor, Gordimer had built a solid reputation as one of South Africa's most prolific writers -- one who was on her way, according to fellow writer and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, to becoming one of the "guerrillas of the imagination."

In 1974, Gordimer's book The Conservationist won Britain's Booker Prize. The novel, which is often referred to as her most poetical work, is a parable of the white landowner Mehring, who works to cultivate and protect both his farm and the country's apartheid system. The barrenness of his farm becomes an allegory for the sterility and, as critic Peter Wästberg put it, the "moral vacuum" of the white South African farmer.

While some critics have found an austerity in Gordimer's writings, writer Salman Rushdie has written that her ability to detach herself from the material about which she is writing is one of her greatest virtues. Reviewing her 1984 novella Something Out There in "The New York Times," Rushdie remarked that it was "this quality of subversion, this deliberate use of banality in order to disturb," that set Gordimer's writing apart from that of other literary giants.

"[Her] art lies in the refusal of all exaggeration, all hyperbole. From this refusal springs the story's authority, its unsettling menace," Rushdie wrote.

It's exactly that level of authority in Gordimer's artistry that political leaders in her native South Africa have learned to fear. During the apartheid years, Nadine Gordimer was one of the most outspoken advocates for racial equality, a characteristic that turned her into a persona non grata with South Africa's white leaders.

Many criticized her 1990 decision to join the African National Congress and, especially, her decision to join the radical wing of the party. But in the 1994 elections, Gordimer declined to become a candidate for the ANC despite predictions to the countrary, saying she was an "artist" and not a politician.

In the early 1990s, after the walls of apartheid had begun to crumble -- just as the "physical wall" in husband Reinhold Cassirer's native city Berlin had done only weeks earlier -- Gordimer presented one of her most important works, the novel My Son's Story.

The book is an allegorical account of Sonny, a mixed-race man trapped between his desire to enter the political realm and the obligation he feels to remain a teacher. Sonny, like South Africa at the time, finds himself in flux and has to face questions that will ultimately determine his fate.

Even today, Gordimer continues to document the gaping wounds in the soul of South Africa -- so much so, in fact, that she has earned the reputation of being "the Geiger counter of African apartheid."

And that's a reputation that has created problems for the author in parts of her home country.