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 3 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Has having two languages used for public discourse been much of a problem for -- Oh, we've got many languages. We have 11 official languages, believe it or not. It's been a difficult question, and we've taken a lot of advice from India, where of course they've got even many more. You have to have a lingua franca, and that, obviously, more and more came to be accepted as English. Because, first of all, it's a route to the outside world, and secondly, it's very much the language of commerce. Where you work, you have to know the language of the boss set. But a certain section of Afrikaners are extremely heartsick because we used to have two official languages, Afrikaans and English. Everything, all government notices, public announcements, even in the South African Airways, on the planes it was all Afrikaans and English, and the others didn't exist. And it's a complicated situation. For instance in schools, what about the medium of instruction? So it depends now on where people live, the different provinces. If, in that province Setswana, the language Setswana is the predominant one of the people, then English and Setswana will be the medium of instruction in the schools. If it's in a Zulu-speaking area, it will be Zulu and English. And in some areas, where it's not English but Afrikaans that is spoken, it will be the local African language and Afrikaans. It's complex, but as long as you have got one lingua franca, like English, which is everywhere, it seems possible to solve it. For instance, in court, and in Parliament, we've got members of Parliament who we've never had before, and some of them, if they choose to speak in their own language, their own African language, they have a right to do so, and have an interpreter. It's complex but it can be managed. In addition to the language issue, as a citizen living in South Africa, as you go about your typical day, what are some of the things that strike you as being different from before? Well, a lot. First of all, Johannesburg. It used to be that blacks came in, they serviced the city, they did the work, and then they went home and the city emptied at night. And indeed, until the pass system was abolished, they weren't allowed to even be in the city at all after a certain hour, 9 or 10 o'clock, or they could be arrested. Now they have virtually moved in to make it their city. Johannesburg in the central district is totally changed. It looks now like other African cities. Full of street trading, the sidewalks are full of people, selling things, styling hair, frying sausages, everything's going on in the streets. It is, of course, hugely untidy -- but of course it was not geared to deal with this type of population. It was built for the whites, the minority. Now everybody is using it. There is no more separation of transport. The buses are open to everybody. And since the black population is so overwhelmingly greater than the white, the city looks black. You see a very small amount of white people moving around. If you go out to these small shopping centers, there you see all the better-off, the wealthy whites. But you also see the new class of elegant black women and black men who are eating in restaurants, shopping in shops and so on. So it's moving to normalcy along the lines of economic class. Of course people say the city is filthy. The city is very dirty. But we just haven't got a cleaner system yet, trash collection that can keep up with it. But it is an African city and that is what it always should have been, not this beautiful tidy place where no black could sit down in a fast-food joint. That's gone. And I'd rather have a few dirty cottages and rubbish in the back than have what it was before. It sounds very alive now. It is. Let me ask you a different question. In "Writing and Being," you write about your childhood in South Africa, and feeling like you were living in such a remote place, at the bottom of the map. Has this changed? It changed long ago for me. You know, I was brought up in that little mining town, and you take your values from your parents, what else? They're your role models, aren't they? Then you come to the stage, where if you have any intelligence at all, you're beginning to think for yourself, and have some revelations. And you begin to question your values. If you live in a place where there are very strange things that you see going on around you, you begin to ask yourself: Do I go to this convent school, as I did, and there were only white kids there? Do I go to the cinema and we're all white? Do I use the library, and no blacks do? Is it really because they don't read or they can't read? Is it really because they wouldn't like to go to the movies? And as you begin to ask yourself these questions, you realize this isn't natural. And also I think in my case, reading was important. I read a lot. There were parallels coming up in what I read. For instance, I read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." And the way that people in Chicago's stockyards were living, this was like the black mineworkers at home. So I began to say, "Well, why?" It seems like books saved you, to some degree. Books, I think, saved me, perhaps from growing up thinking that the way that people among whom I lived, that it was the only way to live. Books open a whole world for you. Were books ever shielded from you, because of the political environment? Only in the sense that what was not in the library, obviously, I couldn't read. But I had to give credit to my mother, that she read to us until I was 6, when I could read myself, and she made us members of the local library. It wasn't a rich family, we didn't have a lot of books. It wasn't an intellectual family. And you must remember there was no television, there were fewer openings to the world. I don't suppose very many books by black writers were available at that time. There were very few, anyway. They were not being published. You've also written, I think in "Writing and Being," that you grew up fairly near Desmond Tutu. And yet there was not a chance in the world of you ever bumping into each other. No, not a chance. When I came back after I got the Nobel Prize, he was at the airport to meet me. Of course he had his [Nobel Peace Prize]. He's a wonderful man. He was someone who -- twice I can think of -- during a very difficult time in the early '80s when there was a problem that my black friends and confreres were being worked upon by certain elements who said, well, this is a time to withdraw from friendships and relationships, working with whites. And Tutu was someone that I could go and talk to about this. Do you see him often? Not often, because my goodness, as you know, the Truth Commission is [keeping him very busy] and before that he moved from Johannesburg. He moved to Cape Town when he became archbishop. So in that way I saw less of him. But he is really wonderful. You've said you will never write your autobiography. No, never. Never? No. Two things. First of all, although some people's lives are remarkable, from my point of view very often this means the writer has run out of creativity. No new ideas come, so you tell your own story. That's one reason. The other reason is that I'm much too secretive. My private life belongs to me. I want to keep that to myself. Does it surprise you how much readers seem to care about the private lives of the writers they admire? It doesn't surprise, but I'm finding it, shall we say, regrettable. Getting back to Johannesburg, was it important for you as a young person, a person who wanted to be a writer, to go to the city? You described it as a kind of an alluring Bohemian environment. Yes, I think that was very important. Also, that was the first time that I began to live in a small way in the real South Africa. In other words, to live among black people and to discover there were young blacks who -- heaven knows, they had a much more difficult life than I had -- were interested in the same things. We were experimenting with writing or with painting or with something. I had much more in common with them than I had with conventional white South African life in my own mining town where I came from. Did you go there shortly after university, when you were still young? No, I didn't go and live there. I was going back and forth because from the time I was a little child my grandparents lived in Johannesburg. It was a great treat to go to grandmother's and grandfather's flat, going by tram into the city, having tea and cakes in some smart restaurants, going to the zoo, going to the pantomime there. It was the day of big cinemas. We had the organ coming up from the floor and they would play. So it was a big treat. And then as I grew older, in the mining town, the world of ideas didn't seem to exist there. There were just people who gossiped about one another. The world of ideas was only explored through books. I couldn't talk to anybody about them. That happened in Johannesburg. But I didn't go to live there. Even when I went for my brief time at university, it was only one year. And I only went to live there when I was 25 years old and married, because I married someone [who lived there] and then I moved to the big city. Some observers -- and I don't know if this is true or not -- have noted that you, unlike some writers of your generation, never left South Africa. You didn't move to London, or to Europe in general, to continue your writing. No. There was a brief period when things looked so grim in South Africa, from the point of view of any change coming ... We did think for a time of going to live in another African country. We thought of going to live in Zambia, we had certain friends there, we would go quite often. But in the end we did not go. But I didn't consider going to Europe. I belong in Africa. Was it hard for you to sit down and write after winning the Nobel Prize? No. People keep talking about that, and they ask it about others like Derek Wolcott. "How do you survive?" I don't understand this. The Nobel Prize is not going to help you to write the next book and it's not going to heal you. I was fortunate, perhaps. I was halfway into a new novel when I received the prize. So once the initial hoo-hah was over, I went on and wrote my book. People seem to think that the writer has in his mind, "Now I have won the Nobel Prize, I must be very careful, I must produce something marvelous." But I don't know of any writer who thinks like that. This is a public relations view, really. I guess people wonder about being able to bear up under the suddenly great expectations. No, I think this is a judgment from outside. It's something that certainly isn't true for me, and I'd be interested to know how others feel about it. What is a problem vis-à-vis your writing is that you then have so much attention, you're asked to do so many things. Everything from opening conferences on how to save the whale to you name it, anything under the sun. It's really quite a problem, how to deal with this, because writing is a solitary occupation. You cannot be constantly going around speaking on platforms even if it's a cause that you believe in. So you have to learn to say, "Thanks, but no thanks." On the other hand, it does give you a voice and a little push to promote things that you do believe in. Now you feel you can do something about it, that your voice might help. Speaking of awards in general, I think it was Woody Allen who said that he pays no attention to the praise he gets because if he did that, then he'd have to pay attention to the criticism. Is there a strong critical community in South Africa? Not really. It's generally accepted there is only one, it's a Sunday paper, that has any serious criticism. The so-called book pages in local papers, it's incredible what they review, what they think is a book. You know, "How to Build Your Own Sailing Vessel," things like this. "Chicken Farming for the Beginner." Gardening books, instead of being on the gardening page. Anything between covers is a piece of literature. Well, how do I think about criticism? There are perhaps one or two people in different parts of the world whose opinion I really value. So I would care very much what they say. But for the rest, it doesn't really matter. I know what I was trying to do. I know where I've succeeded, and I know where I've failed. I think every writer must be his or her own most stringent and absolutely unforgiving critic. SALON | March 9, 1998