T A B L E+T A L K From ennui to wanker: Share your favorite foreign words in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y P.D. James By Jennifer Reese (02/26/98) Stanley Crouch By Jonathan Broder (02/25/98) Martin Amis By Laura Miller (02/10/98) Toni Morrison By Zia Jaffrey (02/02/98) Gore Vidal By Chris Haines (01/14/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S Cave Dweller By Dorothy Allison From the author of "Bastard Out of Carolina," a novel about a rock singer who returns to her Bible Belt hometown (03/09/98)		NADINE GORDIMER | PAGE 2 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "The House Gun" is about a murder committed by the son of elite white parents. And to some degree it's about what happens to them when they're yanked out of their controlled lives and their controlled environment. Is this to some degree a metaphor for what's happened to many whites since apartheid ended? Well, this is something that's got nothing to do with apartheid. It has to do with intimate human relations and how we know each other. It's about how children know their parents and how parents know their children. So that's really the core of the book. Of course, it doesn't take place in a vacuum. It takes place in a particular time, in a particular city. But I see the same thing [the tendency toward wanting to live in a controlled environment] in this country. Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society. Hardly anybody says to me, "How are blacks dealing with change?" They're only interested in how whites are. And after all, whites are a minority. There are huge changes in the lives of blacks as well and even though one would think this is just release and freedom, it brings its problems. And yet your books, perhaps by necessity, are largely about the white experience in South Africa. Perhaps the books of mine you've read, but they're not all about the white experience at all. For instance, "My Son's Story" and "None to Accompany Me" are not. That's true. As far back as childhood, you write in your essay collection "Writing and Being," you tried to identify with non-white South Africans. You write that you were brought up to fear black men -- who, you were led to believe, wanted to rape all young white girls like yourself -- and yet you say that, of course, the blacks had the same fears. They thought young white men were out to get them. With more reality, in the latter case. There were so many backyard relationships that grew up and were never really acknowledged. I think this happened in the South of America, too. Young men having relations with black girls and their family concealing it. What happened, the thing that you mentioned, this was something that I got from my mother and other women. We were taught to be afraid of black men. As if every toothy ugly little white girl was going to be wildly attractive to them. In the new book you refer to whites in South Africa as "the once chosen people," which has a biblical ring to it, and I'm wondering how you mean that phrase exactly. Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks. And look at the whole race purity theory. Is that not one of a chosen people? Why would it be diminishing the race to have a mixture of blood? Why would it be that the dilution of the blood would be such a terrible thing? And yes, you believe that your blood producing a white skin marks you as privileged in some way. God has marked you up as superior. So although they may not have called themselves the chosen people, the way they behaved was as a chosen people. And if the Afrikaners backed this with religious beliefs, which they did, it was still followed by those whites who were not Afrikaner. It was not only Afrikaners who were to blame for racism in South Africa. We were speaking of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee a moment ago, and I can't help but notice that your novel is really about truth and reconciliation. It's about getting to the truth of a shocking story, and it's about the things that hold you afloat -- religion, literature ... Well, not literature. It's rationalism. The wife is a doctor and she's not a literary person at all. Indeed, the religious one, the husband, Harold, is the great reader. What I'm looking at there is, in a terrible crisis, when something terrible happens, what structures are there to support you? If you're religious there are certain ways of dealing with whatever happens. And with birth, with death, with disaster, you turn to God. You pray. And you believe somebody is looking after you from up there. But Claudia does not have any beliefs. She has only her work, her humanism, the idea that life itself is sacred, we mustn't cause pain. But what interested me was that neither of them could really deal with this situation from their different point of view, from the religious one or the rationalist point of view. What happened is so overwhelming that they feel inadequate to it. And they are inadequate to it. Their coming to adjust to it is what you love to call here "a learning process." The couple's black lawyer makes the observation that these two are less resilient than a black couple might have been in the same situation. They haven't been through the same kind of hardships. I think that reflection of his would be very true. Harold and Claudia are middle-class white professionals and typical liberals who say, "I have no race feeling at all," but who didn't do anything, who didn't risk, who didn't put their lives on the line in any way for change. All they did was probably vote against the Nationalist government. But they voted for people who really were so middle-of-the-road that you could not be depicted as overthrowing that government. How do these people find themselves in the position that they are? How do they find themselves now, as you remarked before, dependent upon a black man, their son's life is in his hands, and his reflection on how they deal with it comes from his culture? The way they are unable to deal with it is an indication of what a protected life they've lived. If you're black and you've lived during the apartheid time, you're accustomed to people going in and out of prison all the time. They didn't carry the right documents in their pockets when they went out. They couldn't move freely from one city to another without acting against the law and being subject to imprisonment. So that there's no real disgrace about going to prison, because you didn't have to be criminal to go to prison. And then, when people were in prison, then there was sorrow, there was degradation, it was a common happening. I expect people are more accustomed to it. He's reflecting on how for whites, unless you belonged to the criminal class, this couldn't happen. So that they are much more vulnerable than black people would be in the same position. Speaking of liberal guilt, is there a lot of that among your acquaintances on the left in South Africa? A sense among some of them that they could have done more? Well, now you must draw a distinction between people on the left and liberals. We draw that distinction. F.W. de Klerk is a liberal, because he came to realize that things have got to change. Being on the left is something much tougher in South Africa. And those of us on the left don't suffer from this guilt thing. Because guilt is and was unproductive. It's no good saying, "I feel guilty because I'm privileged or white." You couldn't throw away your privilege, but you could do something active against that. So the left did that. As you know, there was a considerable number, an extraordinarily effective number of people on the left. And especially on the so-called extreme left. You went to prison, you went to exile. We have heroes among whites as we have among the blacks. But the liberals, the people like my couple, who said, "Of course we're not racist" and had no personal involvement, they may feel guilty that they didn't do more. But the next people on the list have got nothing to feel guilty about, because many of them risked their careers, risked their personal safety, they deprived their families of a kind of safety because they were tied up in politics. There were several generations of people who have made this sacrifice from father to son and so on. And I don't think now that many of these liberals feel guilt. They have a very pragmatic attitude. They have adapted to the situation, saying, "We always wanted it to be like this," and they're probably very useful in the transition period. Because they accept the fact that certain privileges aren't ... they haven't lost them, but they're not theirs alone, they're sharing them with other people. How long will this transition period last, do you think? Let's be realistic. The real extent of the transition is going to be a whole generation. If I look now at little kids at grammar school, going to school together, black and white, in what were formerly white schools -- they're now 6 or 7 years old. So it's only when they grow up that you will see whether we really have overcome completely the racial divides. Because that's the first time ever that children have been brought up together to know each other as people, rather than "I'm black, and you're white." And it'll take a generation also in terms of realizing in material terms the differences in people's daily life. We're not going to move 3 or 4 million people out of Soweto -- everybody knows Soweto, but you've got lots of Sowetos all over. White people are not going to move in there. Why should they? They'd have to be extremely idealistic to do so, and the people living there would think they're crazy, because they just want to get out. It's a matter of conditions, living conditions, facilities that people are used to. Libraries and cinemas and shopping centers. It's still the fact that all these millions who live in the ghettos come and buy in town. Over the last few years, they are beginning to change this, to create business and proper shopping malls and things within the townships. But you can see the difference in living conditions, and that'll take a long time to change. It's virtually creating new cities. Johannesburg is no longer a white city. But even in the elite suburbs, black professionals and the new entrepreneurial class, they live there. So you're beginning to see class difference operating within the black community. It's inevitable. You can go to the American South and see similar things. There are black neighborhoods that look like they haven't changed in 100 years. I find that rather depressing. But of course you must remember that here you've got a black minority. Our situation is very different from the point of view of proportional values. Here, we've got a black majority. We have a black native government. There are whites and others -- people of different, black, colored races -- in the government, but it is indeed a black majority government, you've got a black majority population. The biggest difference is that blacks in South Africa all have their own languages. I think this is of tremendous importance. There's something about having your own mother tongue. Black Americans cannot turn to the ear, to the intimate shelter of another language. South African blacks have always had that. And they also had, of course, their own ground under their feet -- they no longer had the title deed to it -- but the earth under the feet and the rivers running and the forests, these were their natural home, their habitat. N E X T+P A G E +| The language issue