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SOUTH AFRICAN WRITERS TALKING: NADINE GORDIMER, ES'KIA MPHAHLELE, ANDRE BRINK

Chairman: The Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University has brought together here tonight André Brink, Nadine Gordimer and Es'kia Mphahlele to talk about the position of the writer in South Africa today. We hope to make this kind of discussion an annual event. This is the first, and I welcome you to it.

All the writers here this evening have suffered under the censorship laws of this country. André in particular, who is to be congratulated on the recent award of the CNA Prize for Rumours of Rain in the English version, is smarting under the embargo of the Afrikaans version, and I'd like to start off by asking him to tell us how he finds this absurd situation affecting him and what he plans to do about it.

André Brink: That's quite a mouthful. I must make clear beforehand that we have no pre-knowledge of these questions being fired at us so I'm as stunned as you are. [Laughter] The first time a book of any writer is banned it does come as a hell of a blow. I don't think one can deny that, especially in a country like South Africa and especially if your writing is restricted to Afrikaans with a very small reading public, so that if a book is banned it means that you are effectively silenced in the language in which you write. It was as a result of the first ban imposed on Kennis van die Aand that, I think, the CNA Award was given to Rumours of Rain\ that ban forced me to explore the possibilities of other markets, forced me to start writing in English so that now I have to write in both. Now suddenly I find that an embargo has effectively been imposed on Rumours of Rain for the last five months - effectively, not legally, because the embargo was there for the first two or three months until a Committee of the Directorate passed the book. Then immediately after that the Directorate appealed against it and the Appeal Board apparently is still trying to formulate its reasons for either letting it through or imposing the baa1 But the point is that this uncertainty makes it impossible, or well-nigh impossible, for booksellers to import the book, which means that I am still effectively silenced in the country.

Now how one reacts to that is not as easy to reply to as it might seem. It is an annoyance; there is a certain feeling of pique, of unhappiness, because one writes from within a certain situation, from within a certain society, and one wants to communicate with that particular society first of all. Whatever other societies in the world may read the book, this is the one that matters most, I think to a writer - the one in which he operates. So one can't deny the fact that there is a feeling of being blunted, of being cut off from the people one would first of all like to reach. On the other hand, in the course of the past 15 years or so that censorship has been a very real living - and deadening - thing in South Africa, one has wasted so much time fighting against it, trying to alter the system, trying to make it easier for certain books to get through, that finally one is forced to come up against the question, "Is it worth it? Is

This Round Table Discussion, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of English in Africa, was held at Rhodes University on 1 7 April 1979, and chaired by Professor André de Villiers.

2 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

it worth wasting one's creative energies by fighting this censorship system or should one just go on writing?" I wouldn't like to speak for my two colleagues here but I have a feeling that most of us share this sentiment: that whatever creative energy we have we'd like to channel in the direction of writing rather than trying to fight a system which is going to be with us for a long time to be. And I think there is this effort, at least, to try and ignore, to try and not waste too much energy and time on censorship as such and rather to concentrate on the next book one would like to write.

Chairman: Nadine, two of your novels were banned and the restrictions on A World of Strangers and The Late Bourgeois World have been lifted, but the book which you edited jointly with Lionel Abrahams, The South African Writer Today, is still banned.2 How do you feel that banning affects you as a writer?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, André Brink has pointed out an aspect of censorship many people don't think about and people who don't write don't even know about, and that is the pre -censorship - the punishment of embargo. I know that every single one of my books has been embargoed. Two were banned but all the others have been under embargo. Andre's broken the embargo record with five months but my record until then was ten weeks. Now this is something that I've described, I think without exaggeration, as evidence that writers are an oppressed group in this country, singled out for a particular form of oppression. I can't think of any other professional group whose capacity for earning a living can be affected in this way: suddenly, what you create and what the world is going to receive from you (and for which you're going to receive in return your living) is taken out of the public domain. This happens before you've had any kind of hearing, before a decision has been made about the alleged subversiveness or indecency or whichever of the 97 définitions it may be (I'm not exaggerating; there are 97) under which your work may or may not be found "objectionable". Before the decision has been made, your work cannot be sold or read by anybody, and the fact that 90% of the time the book may then be released doesn't alter the fact that you've been punished for a decision against you that perhaps will never be made. And if the decision is going to go against you then you have, so to speak, served a sentence in advance. This, I think, is one of the most reprehensible and diabolical aspects of censorship.

Chairman: Zeke, you yourself were actually banned in 1966 and a number of your books remain closed to us here in South Africa, but, with colleagues, you constitute a leading figure in that, can we say, national South African literature which flourishes overseas but which we're not permitted to read here. We can't, for instance, look at the revised edition of The African Image. We can't look at In Corner B, your short stories; we can't look at The Wanderers; and we can't look at the book which you edited, African Writing Today.3 Are you taking any steps to see that we in South Africa can read these books as freely as people overseas can read them? Are you going to apply for a lifting of the ban?

Es'kia Mphahlele: That's quite a dilemma for a person like me or, I think, for any other writer. You ask yourself if you should ask that your banning should be lifted while at the same time other people are being, have been banned. The 1966 banning

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order, for instance, was a blanket banning order which affected quite a number of writers. Then you ask yourself if you should really ask that your books should be unbanned - your books in particular - while other books remain banned. In the con- text in which we are living, with so many tensions and so many arrests and so many other things, is it that important for the banning order to be lifted from the particular books that you have written? I'm in a dilemma here, although I know for my own self that I'd like, of course, to be read. One writes in order to be read. One of the painful things that I experienced when I was abroad was that I was writing outside and the books that I was writing were read by people outside, whereas I was really writing out of my South African experience, out of my African experience. And then I ask myself, "What is the use, if the people you write about don't read what you're writing?"

The best thing might be to touch base again. But then one is up against this whole business: politicians and financiers run our lives, they regulate our movements, they regulate our associations and so on, while literature must go on at the same time, trying to reach out, reach across the kind of artificial boundaries that have been laid down by the financiers and the politicians. So I would simply say that I hope that we can get moving on. They continue to be banned, these books, as André said. Well, the writer must just keep going on and doing the best he can. In the larger context is it that vital that he concentrate his energies on getting his books unbanned, while people are, as I say, being imprisoned, being detained, and all kinds of cruelty is being experienced by them? That is my problem for the moment.

Chairman: André, I believe that a number of Afrikaans writers have more or less come to an agreement that they will not appeal for the lifting of bannings which might be imposed in future. How does this square with the duty which the three of you have talked about of the writer to communicate?

André Brink: Yes, there seems to be an anomalous situation there, up to a certain point. But I think a certain amount should also be expected of the reader. If the reader knows that a certain book has been written and has been published, perhaps he should obtain such a book either by ordering it from abroad or trying to borrow it from somebody. The Russians have two major ways of beating censorship. The one is called Samizdat, circulation underground; the other is apparently called Tamizdat, publication abroad and importing it from abroad. I would suggest that in South Africa, at least, a third possibility is open and that is Lammiesdat, beating Lammie Snyman.4 [Laughter]

Nadine Gordimer: Hear, hear. André Brink: And I think that applies both to the author trying to find ways of

getting through to readers what he has written in whatever way available to him and to readers trying to get hold of these works which, in terms of the law as such, are more or less inaccessible. I think if one really wants a work one can get hold of it.

Now publishers may have had ulterior motives in trying to persuade writers not to appeal against bans, because I think the fight against the ban on Mager sfontein, Magers fontein by Etienne Leroux, for instance, cost about R20 000, which the publisher had to fork out. When my publisher and I took the banning on Kennis van

4 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

die Aand to courts that cost us R13 000 and, again, we didn't get anything in return. So it's a waste of time, it's a waste of creative energy, above all, but it's also a waste of money, and most of that money goes into the coffers of the censor board, of the whole censorship system, so we actually strengthen them by appealing against bans and I think that that is a very iniquitous way of helping them, so there is, I think, a valid reason for not continuing to actively fight bans but to find other ways of com- municating. If writers are no longer trying to appeal to the Board of Appeal against decisions of the Directorate, it doesn't imply simply a matter of lying down and accepting them, it also implies more and more, and I think it will imply more and more for the future, the finding of other means of circulating what one has written. Unfortunately one cannot go too deeply into this because, if one wants to dive into Samizdat and Tamizdat and several other ways of Lammiesdat, then I think the less this is discussed in public the more profitable for both the public and writers.

All I want to try and convey at this stage is that it doesn't mean that writers simply accept the status quo by not appealing against bans. There is a very strong movement afoot to try and explore other avenues of communication, other possibilities than just regular publication. I should add that this should always be the last resort. It could so easily become a new fad, something for any third or fifth rate poet to say - "I'm being circulated in roneo because I want to be dissentient" whereas the real reason might be that he simply can't find a publisher to publish his stuff. [Laughter] But if one can't find a regular publisher and if a privately subscribed publication becomes impossible, then there certainly are other avenues, and I think writers have reached the point where they are prepared to explore them.

Es'kia Mphahlele: I agree with that. Nadine Gordimer: I would like to take up the point about the public. It's always

left to the writers, and sometimes by extension to what one might call intellectuals generally, to take up the cause of censorship, but the public seem to sit back content to have prescribed for them what they may and may not read. It's very difficult to stir any genuine indignation about the deprivation that censorship brings to the reader, not only to the writer, and I do think it's time that some responsibility was taken by the general public, because it's the general reader in the end who suffers much more than the writer. We writers have a special interest, so to speak. We earn our living by the written word, and indeed writing is far more to us than that; it's our form of communication with our society. Writing is the most solitary business in the world and our form of communication is through the written and the published word. But the more general effect of censorship is indeed the deprivation, now for several generations, of readers who are not reading not only the things that South African writers write but also a lengthening list of other books. People simply don't notice. You go to buy a book for a friend for a present; you go to the bookshop; you choose from what is available. You don't know the pre -censorship that has narrowed, partly decided your choice.

Booksellers, out of self-interest and out of necessity, don't order "dubious" books, or they do so in pitifully small quantitities. They don't want to be stuck with them.

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They feel, "So-and-so's last book was banned. Well, I don't think I'll order the new one because maybe it'll go the same way and I'll be landed with a couple of hundred copies I can't sell." That book may very likely not be banned, but the fact is that, out of fear of financial loss, booksellers will not order it, and you will not be able to buy it. I don't know whether concerned people, other than writers themselves, can find some way to participate in action against censorship.

I didn't take to court either of the two bans on books of mine, although at the time there was still the possibility of a hearing in a proper court of law.5 The banning of books by South African writers is the most striking consequence of censorship, but people also need to be alerted to the books by writers who are not South African which they cannot read. If publishers abroad - for whom there is involved no principle of non-cooperation with the censorship system here - were to contest every decision banning a book by a popular writer such as, for example, Kurt Vonnegut (his books are banned one after another), we might get some sign of life from the general public. But Vonnegut 's publishers don't care; this is the big toe of Africa, it's the end of the world so far as they're concerned.

André Brink: I think there is an interesting move afoot among American publishers at the moment.

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, but as you know they don't do very much. They've been talking for two years; we haven't seen anything yet. [Laughter] You and I have both talked to them.

André Brink: But if a big American publisher with a big American author could take to South African courts a ban imposed on that author, then, as a result of the

quite enormous publicity generated in the States itself, something might be achieved in the Une of slowly progressing towards getting assistance. But it's very difficult to get American publishers really so vitally interested, especially when money interests are involved, that they would be prepared to press the loss of several thousand dollars to get a book through which wouldn't mean much to their sales anyway.

Nadine Gordimer: I understood that something quite exceptional happened in the case of African Image, A group of Afrikaans writers requested to have it unbanned, and it was?

Es'kia Mphahlele: It was, the first edition was unbanned. Nadine Gordimer: So here you have the third party entering, successfully? Es'kia Mphahlele: Successfully, yes, successfully. André Brink: That was, I may add, the only success the Afrikaans Skrywersgilde

has had, because that book had been out of print for so long. Es'kia Mphahlele: As soon as the new edition came out it was then banned. Nadine Gordimer: So the unbanning was a mere gesture on the censors' part. Es'kia Mphahlele: You know, I keep wondering about the question, Nadine, that

you touched on about public concern. For one thing, I think it simply seems to be a part of a general malaise that people don't rise up and demonstrate their concern or demonstrate their protest, whatever. This happens in all areas of deprivation: people just sit down and the caravan goes on and nothing happens and one thing comes after

6 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

another. Another thing is, I wonder whether people here in this country really feel they're deprived when a book has been banned; do they really deeply inside them- selves feel they've been deprived of something important if they can go to a drugstore and buy another book? They're quite happy without it. Maybe we're not that important.

André Brink: I think that's one of the main problems, that writing is so often thought of as a luxury, as a sort of cultural appendage without which most people can do. If the public in general could be made more specifically aware of the fact that censorship is not primarily a literary experience, not even a moral or a religious thing, but an extension of a whole political apparatus into the field of literature, into a very vital field of human experience; if they can see the banning of a book as a parallel to the banning of a person, to the imprisonment without trial, to the innumerable ways in which people are being suppressed in a society like ours, then perhaps a slightly larger awareness may evolve from that. On the other hand, a greater sense of despondency and malaise may also enter into the picture because people feel so totally powerless against this enormous structure which they undergo as if it were a fate instead of realizing that all human structures are there to be changed. That may even increase this sense of impotence. Writing is not something esoteric happening in a little corner of an ivory tower somewhere; it is something which crystallizes the experience of an entire people in a very vital way and without which a society cannot really live in a healthy way. If that can be brought across to people, then perhaps more reaction can be expected.

Chairman: You mentioned the lethargy of the audience and suggested that part of the lethargy is itself caused by the cankerous effects of banning and the whole political machine. You've mentioned the attempts by the Gilde, and there are also objections raised by professional associations like the South African Writers and Artists Guild, and PEN - the new PEN, thank God. One would think that the university departments of literature would pay particular attention to this problem. Zeke, you have just returned to South Africa after 20 years in exile. How do you feel about the attention given to South African writing in our schools here and in our universities? Do you think we pay sufficient attention to it?

Es'kia Mphahlele: Sadly, no, I don't think enough attention is being paid to writing done by Africans in this country. All over Africa, in Europe, including England, and the United States, African writing is being studied, being read, and quite intensively. In this corner of the continent, people are not even aware that there are such writers at all. I think also there is a formidable structure in our university curriculum which forbids the study of these works because they are not supposed to be classics. "Are they really good English?" people ask. "Is it really worthwhile reading such literature?" They feel unsafe and they feel that you're selling them short if you try to push the idea that they should read African literature. I'm very distressed by it and it seems it's going to take a long time. I mean, Rhodes is certainly the pioneer in this field, but one would like to think that many more others could. Look at Wits itself, a big university like that and with a tradition, but the English department is as stuffy as you could ever

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imagine [Laughter] in its view of what literature is. They go on the same way they've been going on for years, for decades, and they're not prepared to shift one inch. They want to try to push African literature aside to another Institute so that the Department won't have to deal with it. It is now being taught in Comparative Literature and not in the English department. I made a faux pas when I was giving a talk at the English department last year on the function of literature at the present time. I said that we ought really now to be thinking seriously of what the function of literature is for ourselves - what does it do for us and to us? - rather than simply as an intellectual exercise, which it will always be. And I was asked what I would do in an English department, and I said, "Well, make English literature a Comparative Literature programme rather than an English department programme." And of course I lost out. I knew I'd never get a job there. [Laughter] Yes, one single work by Chinua Achebe will be set but it's an excuse; they do it apologetically and they don't want it to appear too often - that kind of thing. It is distressing that people should grow up in this country, in an African country, as if there's a kind of umbilical cord between the intellectual here and Europe. And if the thing doesn't shake about then it's all right. You're not supposed to shake it and make people be conscious of the fact that they are in Africa. People keep on saying that we're Africans but of course they don't behave as if they are on African soil. Like the Settlers Monument here, I mean, if it's in Africa what has it to do with Africa? It's symbolic of everything that goes on. You look at the architecture ; it's an outrage. [Applause and laughter] I tell you it's an insult to the poetry of architecture, any way you look at it. [Laughter] It has nothing whatever to do with the African soil and this is what aesthetics is all about: aesthetics grows from the soil. Are we always going to continue to avoid our attachment to the African soil, doing things which have nothing whatever to do with our consciousness as an African people?

Chairman: You know, the English department of one university, which shall be nameless, said ten years ago - epoch-making, ten years - that there should be a moratorium on writing by black people [Laughter] , that too much attention was being paid to it. André, Afrikaans literature is of course studied up to the minute in Afrikaans departments. Could you tell us something about the attitudes of Afrikaans academic departments in South Africa to writing in that language by coloured people?

André Brink: The main problem is, of course, that there is so little written in Afrikaans by coloured writers. There literally are about four writers of which only one, Adam Small, is really important. A few others like Philander and, more recently, De Wette are minor poets. The work of Adam Small certainly is studied very, very extensively at practically every single department of Afrikaans in the country. I think that if there had been more black writing in Afrikaans we would have been only too

glad to study that. I've always felt that there is a strange affinity between - I know this may sound strange - but there is a strange affinity between Afrikaner and African in South Africa. They might fight each other like hell, especially on the political front and especially in the context of South African national politics, but I think the Afrikaner has a certain sense of Africa. The unfortunate thing is that the present

8 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

government is coming between the Afrikaner and African, and that is one of the greatest tragedies that is being shaped in Southern Africa at the moment. But to come back to the question: Unfortunately, so very little has been written by blacks - only two works by one particular African author, and very few works by coloured authors - that one can't really base any sort of pattern of observations on that.

Chairman: One of the reasons adduced by those few departments of English at South African universities which do mount courses of study on local writing that I've heard is that more critical awareness of the local product will somehow in the long run be of assistance to the writer. Nadine, have you got anything to say on this point?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, I'm afraid this must be an academic view of writing that I'm not familiar with, but speaking as a writer I know writers don't require or look for or even think about any stimulus of this kind. Stimulus for a writer comes from the life around him. The criticism comes after the writing. We write the work and we put it down there and it's thrown to the wolves or to the appreciative chop-lickers or whatever. There's no awareness, I think, of anything like this at all, and I must say I find it most extraordinary - arrogant and rather stupid. [Laughter]

I wanted to ask Zeke something, please, if I may go back. Don't you think, Zeke, that if we use the English language to write in, even if we've never seen England (either because one is black and one's roots and traditions are here, or because one comes from some mixture of European blood that perhaps has nothing to do with England) - if we use the language, is that cultural line not there for all of us? Do you and I and everybody else using that language - André now has begun to use it for extraordinary reasons that have been forced upon him - not claim the whole line and tradition and development of English literature as our right?

Es'kia Mphahlele: You mean as users of English? Nadine Gordimer: As users of Er>glish. Anybody who uses English, I think, should

feel that he can make free of all the language has to offer. Es'kia Mphahlele: That's true, yes. Nadine Gordimer: Even for a black writer, to whom English may not be a first

language. As soon as you use a language, you appropriate anything that it has to give you. It's a tool.

Es'kia Mphahlele: That is true, yes. Nadine Gordimer: To me it seems appropriate to use that tool to deal with our

situation as Africans, whatever colour we are ... Es'kia Mphahlele: That's right. Nadine Gordimer: . . . but I think that there's a dangerous tendency, very under-

standable among young black writers and also among some young whites, to feel that you've got to deny any English literary tradition - "it's irrelevant" - in order to make contact with your background here. I can't see the necessity. Just as when a musician picks up a violin he has the whole work of all the composers there for him, so we inherit the entire heritage of English literature. It doesn't matter who we are or what colour we are.

Es'kia Mphahlele: Well, you may inherit the culture that comes with the language,

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but if you're using it as a tool to write out of your own cultural experience you are then adding another dimension to what you're doing, not so?

Nadine Gordimer: Quite, exactly. Es'kia Mphahlele: You're adding another dimension and also, as you'll see, you're

using the language in quite a different way from other people will use it who live in England. You're using it differently, because the way you use it is determined by your cultural experience, and it's also determined by your own traditions, that is, your African tradition. I'm sure your African tradition feeds into the language, and the thought that goes into it turns it into a different thing, very often, from the way it's been used elsewhere.

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, of course, you change and adapt it. Es'kia Mphahlele: You change and adapt it. Nadine Gordimer: But you are using the play, the short story, poems, novels, essays

- these are, so to speak, foreign forms. Es'kia Mphahlele: That's right, yes, yes. There is a way in which . . . Nadine Gordimer: The content may be different. Es'kia Mphahlele: The content may be different. But there is a way in which the

very content reshapes the form. It presents a different type of novel, a different type of short story,/ think.

Nadine Gordimer: But do you think that's happened in Africa? I personally don't. I don't think that anything original in innovation and form has emerged.

Es'kia Mphahlele: No, no, it hasn't. But one can see it's striving to be born. I can see it striving to be born. There are ways which you might call a work which is not a novel in the sense in which we understand the novel in the tradition, in the English tradition, simply a narrative. And you see a narrative like, say, Kofi Awoonor's This Earth, My Brother, which is a narrative and it isn't; and yet it moves on, it has reshaped the thing in some ways. I agree with you that one doesn't see it as a fully realized original thing, but one can see it happening.

Nadine Gordimer: Don't you think that it's too young still? Es'kia Mphahlele: That is true, it is too young. Nadine Gordimer: Because there's only an oral tradition in Africa. The whole

business of the written word is so young here, and I think that one should admit it and accept it.

Es'kia Mphahlele: That's true, yes. Chairman: One of the problems faced by our academic departments perhaps is

precisely this. The traditionalists, the supporters of the Great Tradition only, feel critically inadequate to deal with the traditional forms grafted on to English, and oppose the introduction of these into the syllabus for that reason. But on the other hand, or the other side of the coin, isn't there a growing movement - Zeke, I address this to you - amongst African writers calling for a particular African set of critical standards and critical approaches? Could you tell us perhaps something about those?

Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes, we haven't really arrived at what you might call an African aesthetic. This, of course, has to grow, as Nadine suggested, out of what has been

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written and what is being written. There is no doubt about it, that it is in the process of being formed. I think we need to approach literature with a sense of adventure, which means that when you look at a novel which doesn't quite sound like an English novel at all, you've got to find out why and you can explore this. You've got to look at a novel written by, say, Tutuola, with a sense of adventure. And you can explore it and find out what things you find there that you would not find in the Great Tradition. We haven't arrived at any critical standard but we've got to work towards these things, and we're not going to do it if we don't face literature with a sense of adventure.

Nadine Gordimer: But is the Great Tradition . . . how can one talk about the Great Tradition so narrowly, from Spenser to Jane Austen? When you look at the develop- ment of the novel, for instance - the great nineteenth-century development - the tradition comes from France, it comes from Russia, I mean what would the novel be without Tolstoy, without Dostoevsky, without Flaubert? The new modern novel wouldn't exist, so how can the tradition be English? As Zeke suggests, the time has now come for Africa to gush into this stream. It comes from everywhere.

André Brink: I think to a certain extent that offers a reply to the question that you posed a little while ago, Nadine, when you asked whether Africa has yet produced a new form. You're probably quite right in that it hasn't produced something so completely new as to be totally unrecognizable in terms of the traditional English forms, but if you think of what has been written in the last few decades, if you take away Achebe, you take away Ngugi, you take away Awoonor, and Soyinka, and so many of the other African writers, I think then one suddenly discovers that without these works the novel today is poorer as a form, not only as far as content goes but also as a form of expression. If one discovers that then one realizes that, even though no totally new form has been introduced by African writing, at least so many new possibilities have been opened up by what has been published in Africa that a very important contribution has in fact been made.

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, I would agree entirely that what has come in to the novel has been a new metaphysics, a new philosophy, a new sociology, if you like to put it that way, something that people didn't know about at all, and it can only be done through imaginative writing. There I would agree entirely. Just like the South Americans who are now contributing something quite marvellous to the novel,/ think.

Chairman: Can I call you people back for a moment from the continent of Africa to South Africa? Would any of you be prepared to say that being a writer in South Africa today is perhaps different from being a writer elsewhere? To put it in another way: do South African writers have any special responsibility as craftsmen or as interactors with the social situation? Do you feel that you have any real option in choosing what you write about, or do you feel that you are constrained to write about our problems?

André Brink: Well, there are several questions in there. I think it was Brecht who said, "What times are these when to talk about a rose implies treason because it suggests silence about so many other things." In that particular sense I suppose certain

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themes, certain obligations, are forced upon the writer. Even so, it is true that writers in South Africa are writing about an enormous variety of subjects, many of which have nothing to do whatsoever with what is called the South African Situation. In the final analysis, every writer acts on his very, very personal impulses. It was the Swiss dramatist Frisch who said that what makes a writer a human being, a person, is what links him to all other human beings, to humanity as such, but what makes him a writer is specifically that in which he differs from all other people. The impulse is enormously personal.

I think that in South Africa the writer does find himself - or the writer with a social conscience, because I think that is an important category of writer - finds himself in a peculiar situation, but not a unique one. It is a situation which he shares with writers in many other countries, where writers find themselves in a state of siege, where writers experience themselves as an oppressed group, as a group which is threatened particularly by state action, state intervention, state suppression and oppression. And in that sense, there would be a vital difference between a writer operating here, especially if he tries to write from the promptings of a social conscience, and a writer in Sweden or Britain or the United States. Those writers are generally free, although no writer is ever completely free, although every writer experiences certain restrictions, even restrictions simply imposed by form. But those writers are more or less free to write anything they want to. There are no moral, religious or general censorious inquisitions which restrict the field in which they operate. They can write anything; they can use any words; they can describe any experience; and they are free to do so and free to publish it. And in a sense that very freedom limits the efficacy of what they write, because when one is free to say any- thing there is no particular reason why a reader should pay particular attention to what a writer says.

But if a writer is not free to say anything, as is the case in South Africa, then what he says can become - need not become, but can become - something more than just a word. It can become a sort of action in itself, not just a gesture (I think one should distinguish between what Sartre has called a gesture and an act). The very act of writing can become an effective act in the context of a closed society like the South African one, like many third -world societies, like the Russian society and many others one could name. In those societies the writer just has to weigh very, very carefully what he wants to say in order to give it the maximum efficacy within his particular context.

I think it certainly would be true of many black writers in South Africa and it is true of many writers in Russia or Chile or wherever, that the writer literally places his life or his freedom at stake when he publishes something. His public, appreciating this, pays particular attention to what he's said, and extracts the full value of what he reads from every single word. That puts an enormous responsibility on the writer and gives him a magnificent sense of being relevant, of having something to say which elicits a particular response. I think nothing is so deadening to a writer than to write and to

12 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

hear nothing in return. In South Africa you certainly are absolutely convinced that you're going to get some sort of response, whether negative or positive. There is a feedback, and the writer thrives - because he is such a lonely creature - on this idea of communicating, of living in a magnetic field where things come back to him. Even if those things can be absolutely disastrous to his personal experience, to his personal life, his safety, his liberty, it means something to him; it gives a certain validity to what he writes and a certain exhilaration to much of what otherwise would have been pure depression in his existence.

Chairman: Nadine, I remember your saying a couple of years ago, in a talk on the writer's freedom, speaking of the insidious danger of the freedom to do as your friends wish you to, the freedom to do as you ought, to write within the compartment which has been prescribed for you and to accept the boundaries which have almost silently and invisibly grown up around you. Do you recall that talk? It was in Durban, I think.6

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, yes, I do. I think that I gave the example of Fathers and Sons . . .

Chairman: That's right. Nadine Gordimer: . . . how because Turgenev wrote about people - as we would

put it - in the struggle, and didn't present them as absolutely perfect and unblemished and totally heroic, he was then attacked for being reactionary. So I made a plea for the writer to be allowed to interpret his society, warts and all; and not to feel the pressure toward an act of propaganda rather than an act taking the full freedom and danger of writing what he believes in.

I'd be interested to know what Zeke would have to say about this. I see this dilemma very much alive for black writers, particularly young black writers. There is a very important distinction we have to face, one imposed upon us: that all writers in South Africa are an oppressed minority - yes, I stick by that - but that some minori- ties are more oppressed than others. Even though there's a black population majority, writers, black and white, as a group, are a minority. And, within that minority, black writers have a tougher time. They are much more endangered in their person. We all suffer the same censorship laws and banning, but when one sees what happens to black writers - even aspirant writers, people who have just written one or two things - they truly are intimidated before they pick up that pen to write the next poem. I really don't think that white writers are harassed in quite »this way. We are harassed enough, but not in this way, and I think that it has a special and appalling effect on black writers. On the other hand, the general view is that, in the position blacks are in, whatever talent you have has to be at the service of liberating the people, and there- fore all other considerations come second. The black writer is to be the mouthpiece for the great spiritual struggle that is going on, and after that come all the other problems that all writers have, the corporate problems of creativity. So there's this pressure on the one side to conform to what the orthodoxy of the struggle expects you to write, and on the other hand there's the great danger of doing this. A writer needs to be allowed to express the condition of his life and his social struggle in his

WRITERS TALKING 13

own way. Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes, that's very true. The pressures on the black writer are

certainly not anything like the pressures on the white writer. One can see a whole new body of poetry, for instance, coming out of the young black writers, a good deal of it quite good, a good deal of it bad, but they do feel the pressure all the time to say something about their own condition and the things they're going through. Yet at the same time there is a synthesis somewhere between art and an expression of protest or an expression of the condition. One can see it happening. Back in the fifties when we were caught up in a literary renaissance, particularly among short story writers in Drum, we were constantly under pressure from a number of intellectuals who were not writing themselves at all, but were loud-mouthed about what they thought we should be writing. I remember very vividly there was something called a progressive forum, based at Wits. [University of the Witwatersrand] , a Trotskyite group who were always telling us what the writer's responsibility is towards a society. All the same, we

just went on writing. We were suffering enough in the ghetto situation without having to listen to the Trotskyite kind of theories and abstractions, and people went on writing. And we did come through that period, and some people did produce good writing, while at the same time responding to their local experience. And this is what

happened, and I can see that it's going to go on. Through this passage is going to come out some real good writing which, as I say, will reflect a synthesis between art and

opposition, the literature of opposition. We're not the first people to have to go through this. Yeats fought it through,

throughout his life, fought it out and saw it through, and came through at the end with some really good things, even though at the same time he tended simply to dismiss the nationalist cry among his people that he should write the way they wanted him to write. And we're going through this experience ourselves.

Nadine Gordimer: I would say this is a very big difficulty, to achieve this synthesis. Es'kia Mphahlele: It is, it is, as I say. If you look at Staffrider you see quite a

variety of topics there, of themes, and you see quite a sizable number of writers who are moving towards this synthesis. I mean we know they haven't arrived yet, they're still young, but they're moving towards it. It is a difficult thing to arrive at, and it seems to me it has a lot to do with maturity, wouldn't you think?

André Brink: But also the situation as such. Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes. André Brink: I think it is one of the saddest things of the experience of writing in

South Africa, black writing specifically, that so many really great talents felt them- selves forced, and were forced, to carry on fighting to the detriment of the real quality of their writing. Can Themba wrote some magnificent stuff, but if he'd had a little more scope in which to explore his writing as writing and not simply for a particular cause he could have done so much more and left such a greater heritage to other writers after him. Or don't you agree with that?

Es'kia Mphahlele: Can Themba is probably not such a good example. André Brink: No, but I think from that whole . . .

14 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes, from that whole group of writers . . . André Brink: . . . your own Drum group, there would be quite a number of names. Nadine Gordimer: I'm interested in the different weapons they used to express

what was inside them. That fifties group to which you belonged, irony was the over- riding principle in their writing. They all used irony as their weapon. The young black writers today - irony is completely missing from their work - and heroics, the epic mood and mode is the one that they use.

Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes, perhaps this is ... Nadine Gordimer: A change in time . . . Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes, a change in time. The pressures are greater. The pressures of

political authority are certainly more stringent, are greater, than they were in the fifties. In the fifties we were responding to a whole lot of things that were happening politically around us, but at the same time the repression wasn't anything like it has been since Sharpeville, certainly.

Chairman: Wouldn't you say, too, that the young writers today are, because of the situation, unacquainted with a lot of the work of the fifties? Simply by not knowing it, they have no model to work back from.

André Brink: They really have to start from scratch. Nadine Gordimer: I must say, I don't agree. I think by and large the fifties

produced a remarkable, small body of work, but it was small: you can count those books on the fingers of your hand. I simply think the mood has changed so tremen- dously that they haven't felt irony to be the means of expression for what has happened since then. The mood is more desperate.

Chairman: Less subtle. Nadine Gordimer: Yes. Chairman: You know, one of the hoary old chestnuts is that any writing in South

Africa today, whether it's about Wordsworthian daffodils or not, is a political act, even by negation, in a society which limits the vision you're allowed to have and which orders the extent to which you can use words. Which brings me to ask you about protest writing. The usual question posed is whether protest writing as such can be good writing, but in an M.A. thesis recently submitted to Rhodes, a student asked a particularly interesting question. He said, "Shouldn't the question rather be - Does the book produce good protest?" And I'd like to ask you how you see protest writing as achieving its end. What is the function of protest writing? Is it to achieve its end by instrumentality, or by opening the minds of the readers, and if so, what do we do when so few readers read in this country?

André Brink: Well, it really brings into question the whole problem of the efficacy of writing. Are there results? I think it was the painter Jean Arp's father who once painted a courtyard which was full of trees but he painted it without any of the trees in it because he felt that the pure architecture and the symmetry of the courtyard was the beautiful thing that he wanted to capture, and he painted it exquisitely. And then afterwards he looked at his painting and went back to the courtyard and chopped up all the trees. [Laughter] Now can writing have that sort of effect? I think that is really

WRITERS TALKING IS

what your question asks, and I think then that there are different levels of writing. You have protest writing pure and simple, which tries to get a sort of slogan-like communication across as quickly and to as many people as possible, so that people can get this idea, this slogan, into them and have the feeling of a brotherhood of

people sharing a great revolutionary experience. But that is writing directed really towards an aim beyond itself. And if you look at writing which may be very good protest, on the other hand, but which is capable of being judged, or holding its own as

literature, as writing, then what the writer is primarily concerned with is not first of all protest or lack of protest, but the quality of his protest or his lack of protest. You cannot confront a politician, a cabinet minister, with all the array of armies and jails and police at his disposal, with a book in your hand. It is a duel which cannot possibly be fought. These people act in totally different dimensions, so that when the writer uses his writing simply as a revolutionary instrument, it is something different from when he chooses writing as his terrain of fighting. If he does that then he's not interested in the immediate result, in the immediate conversion of a whole people to his point of view. He knows that as he is solitary in sitting here writing, the reader is

solitary in reading this, and what he aims at is a slow, evolutionary mental process in

people's attitudes, in ways of thinking, but it is a slow, slow thing which goes through decades, and sometimes perhaps centuries. If he's interested in immediate political efficacy, he should choose another weapon. He should go on a political platform. He should take up a sword or a gun or something, but if he feels that writing is his terrain, then he should try to do that as well as he possibly can. But he has to recognise that this is a different sort of field of action altogether.

Nadine Gordimer: I think that if you accept that for the writer writing is his

terrain, as you put it very well, because that's what he can do best, the question of

protest writing - what it is, why anybody does it - simply falls away and doesn't exist. Because, to paraphrase "the poetry's in the pity", I think the protest is in the

people. And if you write honestly about the life around you, the protest comes out of that. It's not a goal, on its own. A writer's purpose is to try and express the truth of his society in a particular time and in a particular place, and if protest is arising out of the people, if it's the yeast that is there, if it's bubbling, it will come out in the

writing. Chairman: Nadine, in that same talk in Durban, you talked about the inescapable

connection in the minds of authority in this country between articulateness -

especially on the part of the black writer - and subversion. I wonder whether there's a connection between truth to your vision, as you see it, for the black writer, and the need to put down that vision, not with the subtlety of irony that we were talking about when we referred to the Drum period, but with the, let's say, the hammerblows of the four-letter-word school that appears from time to time in Staffrider with the

sloganeering group that's appearing today, where there isn't time, when the knock on the door comes still more often in spite of the apparent cover-ups in public. Zeke, have you got any comment to make on the protest writer in South Africa? I know it is

very difficult to add to what André I think encapsulated brilliantly.

16 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes, he did that very well. I can only say that in my own ex- perience I also started that way, that what I was writing was vitally important. I was full of myself in thinking that as soon as people read this they'd be fired with some kind of spirit, and I realized my folly later on - that because one is dealing with metaphor and symbols, which are a very indirect way of saying anything at all, people don't get into that kind of mood that you expected. As Nadine put it - if there is protest among the people, where is public protest? If you want to make your writing relevant, then you have to depend on that, if you are true and faithful to your experience. It is simply that the writer is so pressured now, at this time, he's so terribly pressured that he can't, for instance, just go out and demonstrate. There's no public platform for him where he can express the feelings of his people. He thinks that the word, as you said, becomes the action, becomes an act, and so he does this, and one can understand this is happening. We are living in these kinds of times. I think the chaff will sort itself out from the good stuff, with the human experience and so many cycles of the human experience that will happen, it is bound to happen, and that is all I can say about protest.

Chairman: Talking about the sensitivity or lack of attention of the audience, it's perhaps interesting at this point to mention two little things about our gathering here this evening. Eight of our posters advertising this evening's get-together were torn down on this campus and one store in town refused to display these posters on the grounds that they were political. [Laughter] Then it was pointed out, "Yes, it is a South African situation", and, to give him grace, the manager of the store concerned was embarrassed. But he still refused to have them up. Which brings me to the next question that I'd like to raise, and I'd like to start with you, André, and that is - in the South African situation, what do you see it meaning for a writer to say he's committed? What is an engagé writer in South Africa?

André Brink: That's become one of the swear words in South African writing in the last few years . . .

Chairman: That's why I asked the question. André Brink: . . . and I think there'll be as many replies to that as there are writers,

because commitment obviously means something different to the writer in Paris, the writer in Entebbe a few weeks ago, the writer in South Africa. Traditionally it would mean a commitment to the socio-political causes of the day. I think in South Africa it would mean a commitment to the cause of liberation. But I think the writer who is really concerned about his writing is basically committed to something much larger than the ephemeral causes of the politics of his particular situation. It may be a starting point - it very often is - but he is interested in the people behind those politics, in the real people, the human experience which expresses itself among so many other things in terms of politics. And I think above all, in all situations but in a particular way in South Africa, the writer would be committed to those two big final causes summarized by Camus. He would feel an allegiance to truth and he would feel an allegiance to liberty, and in a country like South Africa, where liberty is so often conceived of as separate liberties, it would involve a perception, an exploration of the

WRITERS TALKING 17

way in which that ideal of liberty is thwarted in the society by people, by human action, not only by the particular political measures implemented by human beings, but by those human beings who do such things, who are driven to do certain things. I think the writer would feel an allegiance to try and explore that bit of truth accessible to him. Nobody can see or find the totality of truth, but everybody has access to a little bit via his personal experience. And in a country which has become infamous for its cover-ups, in a country which tries to celebrate the lie at the expense of truth, I think trying to persevere and to bring to light this one bit of truth to which you personally have access in the hope that this may be joined to all those other little bits of truth experienced by your colleagues and by other people in the same situation - in this, I think, lies the experience of being engagé, being committed. So commitment is first of all to the particular actions that are being taken on the socio-political field, but it is really directed at something much larger, much beyond that, so that the essential patterns of human experience, human interaction, human relationships, are explored and portrayed. There may be a little hope that eventually, even after the specific situations change somewhat - or drastically - those patterns will still be a faithful presentation of the truth. Gorki in The Lower Depths uses one character to talk about a mythical land of virtue. This madman believes in a land of virtue which exists somewhere on this globe; he knows it is there, else there wouldn't be any virtue among men. And then one day he finds a scientist who knows practically everything in the world, and who shows him a globe and a map, and with all his scientific instru- ments demonstrates to him that no such country exists. The only thing that this madman can do afterwards is to go and hang himself. I think the writer is the one who doesn't hang himself, but who, for the sake of the possibility that there may be more virtue in the world than he knows at the moment, that there may be more liberty, more justice, more truth than is allowed in his particular situation, is prepared to confront whatever enemies, whatever battalions, are set up against him. [Applause]

Chairman: Nadine, I'm not giving away any secrets and I hope I'm not going to ask you to give away what you plan to say in the future, but I know you're going to be talking in a couple of months' time on commitment and relevance. Would you like to

expand on what André said, or tackle it from a different point of view perhaps? Nadine Gordimer: Well, just to add a word from my own point of view - what

André was saying made me think about a question people often ask, "What is a national literature?" You know it's one of those big abstractions, but I think a national literature is just this: it's these little bits of truth that come together perhaps over generations, that come together in a single generation at a particular crisis in the life of a country or a nation. Writers living very differently, writing very differently, are each exploring a little bit of truth. If this patchwork or jigsaw comes together, it makes a national literature. So, to me, the purpose of a writer - why one becomes a

writer, why one writes - is an attempt to make sense of life. In your particular country, in your particular time, you find distortions - in our country, gross distor- tions - that go through everybody's life, that twist everybody's individual lives, and I

18 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

think much of the impulse to write is to make sense of life in the light of these distor- tions. This is the way that one approaches something approximating the truth.

Chairman: You talk of a national literature. Are there different South African literatures, or is there a South African national literature? We've got literature in English by whites, literature in Afrikaans by whites, literature in both those languages by black people, literature in African languages. Zeke, do you think we can talk of a national literature of South Africa? Are there a number of writers attacking the same or treating of the same kind of problem but from different points of view?

Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes, I think this is happening. I think one can see a number of streams flowing into the same valley, as it were; you have a South African experience out of which people are writing. We have major concerns that a number of writers share, whether they write in Afrikaans or English, whether they are black or white, but there is certainly some major concern in the totality of our writing which is South African. It is South African; it deals with South African man and what is going on between man and society, man and political authority. We're seeing this kind of traffic going on all the time, as a kind of cross-section of all our writings, black and white.

Chairman: To turn for a moment to, on those terms, a very definite South African literature produced overseas - as we said earlier, you've returned recently from 20 years of exile. How does exile affect your writing as a South African?

Es'kia Mphahlele: Again, I can only talk about my own personal experience. When you get into a culture as an exile outside of your own, of course you have to make decisions. One of the most important decisions is whether you are going to strike roots where you are, and become committed to that culture in which you are an exile. But you have a memory out of which you write, and that goes back to where you come from. It's still very strong, and your dreams are about South Africa, and when you sit and think, it is about South Africa. So you've been carrying this along with you all along. You then find yourself in this dilemma: should you strike roots and be committed to this new culture and therefore write out of this present cultural experience, or do you continue writing about home? As long as you hesitate to strike roots in this new culture, you're going to find yourself having to continue to write about home. Now I, for instance, resisted striking roots wherever I went - Nigeria, Kenya, France, Zambia, the United States - because I always felt that one day I'd want to come back home. There are exiles who don't think of that at all; they want to be committed to the new culture they come into. But then they're always outsiders. The problem for me as a writer was that as long as I refused to strike roots, I was going to continue to write about home, but at the same time I was away from home. And that becomes a difficult thing, because if you're writing for an international audience you're judged by standards which you may or may not care for at all, because they're not the standards that come out of your own culture, out of your own milieu. And a writer wants to feel, as André said earlier, that he is in touch with his cultural milieu, that he gets feedback. Well, how do you get feedback when you're writing abroad? What kind of feedback do you have? They read you, crazy people who don't know

WRITERS TALKING 19

what you're talking about because you're talking about home; you're not writing about their own culture.

To give you an example. This novel that has just been published, Chirundu: my agent has been flogging it in the United States for the last five years, and I've been getting letters from publishers who just tell me that they do not understand it and, quite frankly, it is not anything they can sell. The latest letter I showed André [de Villiers] said the novel is too self-contained. Now what does that mean? You get all kinds of things like that, and you know that you're not getting a feedback from your own cultural milieu, and that is a problem for a writer outside. Yes, whom are you writing for? Where is your audience, if you continue to write about your own people? What kind of feedback do you get? Is it from a relevant cultural milieu or not? Or is it just, you know, a disembodied voice floating around, across oceans and mountains and so on. I always envy people who have the courage - or foolhardiness - who

simply decided to plonk themselves in the new culture they found themselves in and absorbed it, soaked it in, and decided to write about it. I could not do that. A number of South African writers can do that: I think Dan Jacobson has planted himself now in

England, but I just couldn't. Nadine Gordimer: Zeke, I think from a subjective point of view it is very interesting

to hear how you feel about it, and obviously one must agree. But objectively I can't

agree, because how is it that we can enjoy a book by Yashar Kemal from Turkey or Gabriel Marquez from Latin America? It's a totally different milieu.

Es'kia Mphahlele: No, I'm talking about . . . if I'm writing about, let's say, an African situation, to me what matters most is what the people think whose culture is reflected in my ...

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, I accept that. Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes. Nadine Gordimer: . . . but I cannot understand why any publisher or any reader

anywhere else should object to a book because it relates to a set of circumstances in a country that is not known to them . . .

Es'kia Mphahlele: Oh yes, I see, yes, that is right. Nadine Gordimer: . . . because it is not known to them, because this would mean

that literature from any part of the world would be inaccessible to any part of the world.

André Brink: This is just a matter of prejudice really. I found that the United States

publishers are very insular, really, in their approach to anything offshore, or even to South American writers. Only the few really greats, like Marquez and one or two

others, Uosa and so on, do manage to get published in the States. Even your top French authors have difficulty in finding publishers.

Es'kia Mphahlele: Yes, that's true, yes. Chairman: On the writer in exile question, André, you're on record in the

press as saying, when you were in Paris, that you were thinking of not returning to South Africa. And I think it's true to say also that you're on record as saying that if the bannings continued you would think of leaving. Are you in a position to talk

20 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

about this with us tonight? André Brink: That's the problem with the Documentation Centre.8 They always dig

up these old pronouncements. When I went to Paris at the end of '67 without any sort of family or other obligations and ties and with every reason in the world to settle in Paris, which I still love above all other cities in the world, I really thought that this was for keeps. But it so happened that 1968 was the year of the student revolts; the entire French society was turned completely upside down by those revolts. The particular sort of socio-political exploration of society and the anguishing soul- searching that was going on in French society, in the people that were very close to me in Paris at the time, forced me to do the same sort of thing in terms of my own relationship with South Africa. I felt that living in Paris would be in a sense marvellous - I had wonderful friends there, I could live perfectly happily there - but my centre of gravity was South Africa. I had the same sort of experience that Zeke just spoke about. I felt that if I believed in any sort of relevance in the writing that I wanted to do, I had to come back and assume the responsibility for whatever I wrote. It's much too easy in a sense to stay out and write from a distance of 10 000 km, and criticise blandly, and not be forced to accept the responsibility, physically and otherwise, for every single word one writes. There was a feeling of being redundant in the marvellous French society in which I found myself. The writer wants to be loved, or - well - hated. He wants to be accepted, he wants to have a society with which he can interact.

As far as that other pronouncement is concerned, no, I no longer stand by it. I don't think I would so easily consider leaving South Africa if the bannings continue, because I now realise that there are other ways of still making oneself heard and read, and I'd rather explore those to the utmost.

Nadine Gordimer: And isn't the key to it that you've made such a tremendous step of changing the language you write in. You now write in a world language.

André Brink: That too. Nadine Gordimer: Surely that's the key. André Brink: Although at the same time I must say that it remains very important

to me to continue writing in Afrikaans as well, and to be known in this country and in other countries as, first of all, an Afrikaans writer. As an adventure, writing in Afrikaans must be almost unequalled in the world because it is so young, it is so malleable, one can still do almost anything with it. You can do a hell of a lot with English, but English has got this enormous heritage within it, and it's very difficult, at times it's even dangerous, to try and deviate a little bit to this side or to the other. In Afrikaans anything is still possible because it is still young. So the exhilaration of this adventure of writing in so young a language is important to me as a writer.

In recent years the Afrikaans language has become more and more identified with a specific political system, but the language is so much greater than that political system; it can take so much more. If a number of Afrikaans writers go on writing more or less dissenting stuff in Afrikaans then I think it becomes a sort of safeguard for the language; then the language needn't disappear with the regime - because all regimes disappear eventually, thank God. [Laughter]

WRITERS TALKING 21

Chairman: Nadine, have you ever considered exile? Nadine Gordimer: Oh, from time to time, but never seriously. Chairman: The three of you are established South African writers with

international reputations. What new directions do you see in South African writing now - here?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, I think the most striking development has been the change in Afrikaans literature within the last, I suppose it's almost a decade now. Afrikaans writers have begun to face - to use a polite euphemism - the subject matter here in a way they didn't before. Do you agree, André?

André Brink: To a large extent, yes, yes. Chairman: Zeke, what do you think of the group for which Staff rider is a

mouthpiece? Es'kia Mphahlele: They're going to go through fire and brimstone for quite some

time, the way I see it. The political authorities are never going to relent. It's going to be watched for a long time. But people write out of an inner compulsion and they will do so and respond to their condition. The only thing that worries me is this: that it may be trapped inside its situation, inside its condition. And so that it may transcend these conditions, as André and Nadine have indicated before, we need to go beyond the image of the instant, with resonances going forward, backward and forward. Our

young writers need a myth; they haven't got it yet. I still think, Nadine, that it matters a lot that they've started something without any knowledge of what's gone before. What has gone before - and I'm talking now of what has appeared in magazines and

journals - all is lost to them. Nadine Gordimer: Yes, that's true. Es'kia Mphahlele: Isn't that so? It's so completely lost to them. They are starting

something quite new, and at a time when the mood has also changed. Maybe they will one day create a myth. They do need it for this kind of resonance I'm thinking of, in their creative work. As I say, we're going to go through fire and brimstone for quite some time, and yet iïStaffrider continues publishing - who knows? - there may be a catchment somewhere ahead of us in time, where it'll spill into and create something bigger than they may even imagine themselves.

They are doing something different with the English language. There is some African song at the back of their minds distilling itself into what they are writing. When a person writes a conversation piece, you hear that African music coming through. It's a residue of their memory. It isn't anything they've heard from their mother's lap; it's something that is accumulated over the many generations, and it comes through, so that when a person writes in English something happens in his mother tongue, in his own mind, and when it gets into print, it sends out something quite different from English English. We're seeing this happening all the time, which is incidentally part of a whole pattern of African literature throughout the continent.

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, I would certainly agree. I happen to believe in a collective consciousness for artists, writers or painters. We draw from other people without them

knowing it, in this subconscious way. But on the one hand you've got the

22 Gordimer, Mphahlele, Brink

phenomenon of drawing on the collective consciousness in very troubled times, which comes out in a magazine like Staffrider, and on the other hand, you have got the English language being bent to express new situations, and to me that's what's impor- tant about it. But I think there's something else we haven't mentioned. Staffrider hasn't sprung from nothing. Staffrider is a kind of logical consequence, not only of the times and of people's will to express themselves, but also of the new spirit of adventure and courage among people interested in writing generally. The new small publishing houses, starting off with Renoster Press, who did Oswald Mtshali's first book of poems, and then Donker, Bateleur, and now Ravan, are constantly bringing out new works by new writers, and taking a chance on them. It takes guts to do this, because there's the financial loss for a struggling little publishing house if something's banned, and there are all sorts of incalculable consequences for the writer himself. As I said before, this is where black writers differ from white. Whereas with a white writer the book may be banned and that's an end of it, if it's a young black writer whose book is banned, especially if it's somebody who hasn't published before, then his life at once comes under scrutiny by the Special Branch. I'm not fabricating this; it is happening all the time. But that there are, at least, publishers prepared to publish their work is giving people a wonderful kind of encouragement. In the last five years, this is the most important thing that's happened in South African writing.

Es'kia Mphahlele: That's very true. This is why I say I take off my hat to people like Mike Kirkwood [director of Ravan Press and editor of Staffrider] who confront this literature with a sense of adventure, looking for new things, and not walking the beaten track, the gold path of literary usage one becomes so accustomed to.

André Brink: I think all one could really say about the future with some certainty is that writing will survive in South Africa, whereas one can't be all that sure about the censorship system which is trying to kill it. [Laughter]

Chairman: Well, on that hopeful note, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming, thank you for listening, and to Zeke, Nadine, André a special thank you for being here.

NOTES

1. After a lengthy embargo by the Department of Customs and Excise, the Publications Committee approved the book. The Directorate appealed against this decision but, on 7th May, the decision was upheld. This meant that for a period of six months the embargo had remained effective, if not legally so, for booksellers did not risk ordering the book until the Directorate's appeal had been quashed.

2. Gordimer's latest book, Burger's Daughter, was the third to be banned. The ban was lifted three months later, on 12 October 1979.

3. Before Mphahlele's personal banning order was lifted in 1978, none of his writing was legally available to South African readers. However, the bannings of these individual works have not been lifted.

4. Judge Lammie Snyman was the Director of the Publications Appeal Board until his early retirement was recently suddenly announced. He has been replaced by an Acting Director.

WRITERS TALKING 23

5. Nadine Gordimer adds: "By the urne Burger's Daughter was banned, I had decided on principle to have nothing to do with the processes of the censorship law, since I am totally opposed to censorship. The Director of the Publications Control Board instituted an appeal; the ban was lifted. Non-cooperation is my attitude."

6. This paper, "A Writer's Freedom", was delivered at the Conference on "Writings from Africa: Concern and Evocation" held by the South African Indian Teachers' Association in Durban, September 1975 ; and published in English in Africa, II, 2 (1975), 45-49.

7. A paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Association of University English Teachers of Southern Africa (AUETSA) in July, and to be published in the next issue of English in Africa.

8. The National English Literary Museum and Documentation Centre, closely associated with the Institute for the Study of English in Africa.