Nadine Gordimer speaks about her role as a writer and social activist
The written word has always been powerful, but as a writer gains prominence the power of the author’s persona often augments the power of the words. The most coveted honor for any writer worldwide is the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is the high brow equivalent of an Oscar, and an instant ticket to international recognition. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who received this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature this year, has been making headlines around the world.
Our very own Naguib Mahfouz, though always popular, became a local hero when he received his Nobel in 1988.
Nadine Gordimer is no exception.
The South African received her Nobel Prize in 1991 and the spotlight was immediately pointed at her. She’s an accomplished, to say the least, novelist, essayist, playwright, and political activist to boot.
Gordimer was born in Springs, Gauteng, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. Her parents, Isidore and Nan Gordimer, were both Jewish immigrants, her father having emigrated from Latvia, and her mother from London. Most of her works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country.
As a Goodwill Ambassador, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has described her as a “champion of the disenfranchised.
Fifteen years after being honored with a Nobel, an octogenarian who can only be described as spry, she hasn’t lost her passion for the causes she has lent her influential voice to.
On a visit to Egypt earlier this month, to give the Naguib Mahfouz Memorial Speech at the American University in Cairo, she spoke to The Daily Star Egypt about her role as a writer and an activist:
The Daily Star Egypt: What came first, writing or activism?
Nadine Gorimer: The activism has nothing to do with my innate ability to write; that has always been there for me all my life.
I’ve been writing since I was nine years old. First and foremost, [I’m] a writer because that’s the only thing I know how to do. But like all of us I’m a human being. I’m a citizen of my own country and of my own people, and as a citizen you have, I think, human responsibilities.
You cannot say, “I’m a writer, I’m going to live in my ivory tower.
But it’s nothing compared to the responsibilities I had under apartheid [a system of racial segregation that was enforced in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. South Africa had long been ruled by whites and apartheid was designed to form a legal framework for continued economic and political dominance by people of European descent] to oppose the racist system. That’s where my real activism came in.
After winning the Nobel Prize you come under a spotlight, and now, for instance, you are a Goodwill Ambassador for the UNDP. How does that affect your role as a social advocate?
I’ve been involved in this in my own way. Being a writer is a very private thing. it’s just you and your writing materials. When you get the Nobel Prize you become a public figure whether you like it or not, and it has some very funny results.
You get invited from Australia or Timbuktu or somewhere to open a conference on saving whales, or heavens knows what. And I think they sometimes don’t even know [who you are]. They see you as a Nobel Prize winner, but they don’t know whether you’ve got it for medicine, physics, peace or literature, you just get invited.
My friend, the wonderful American writer Susan Sontag, said to me, ‘Nadine, you just have to say thanks, but no thanks.’ And I’ve learned to do that.
You’ve discussed several issues that plague South Africa – unemployment, lack of housing, refugees fleeing from bordering countries. Which social causes have to put your efforts behind today?
In the Middle Ages, we had the Plague and it was carried by rats on ships, but travel was very limited. We are in 2006, we all travel all the time all over the world, and we have the ‘New Millenium’s Plague’ – that’s what I call it – and that, of course, is AIDS.
If you have something you really care about you have a voice that you can now use. HIV/AIDS is an example. Two years ago I began to question myself because, first of all I’m connected with International PEN [a worldwide association of writers that exists to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere, to fight for freedom of expression and represent the conscience of world literature], which has done wonderful things over the years in getting writers out of prison.
But we’ve never done anything for HIV/AIDS. The assumption, I suppose, is that it’s a medical problem. But it isn’t. It’s a human problem as well. And certainly there has to be a number of writers who have fallen victim to it.
At home in South Africa, and everywhere in the world, these musicians gives these wonderful concerts, these ‘big gigs’, where they get a huge popular audience of young people together, [and] they make money for HIV causes. And I thought, what have we writers done? The answer is nothing.
As individuals, I’m sure we’ve all given money to various causes, but we hadn’t done anything as a group of artists. Well, I thought, what’s the good of running on about this, do something. Then I had the idea, a small idea it seemed to be, to put together a book of very good short stories – not about AIDS, not about HIV – from famous writers to put it together.
They wouldn’t be paid, and I would find publishers that would get no royalties.
So I wrote to 20 writers, some of whom I knew as my close friends, and others I didn’t know except for their work – it had to be people who wrote short stories, because some wonderful novelists don’t write short stories. So I found my few names that I picked out, wrote to them. I didn’t get one refusal.
I found my own my own publishers in London and New York who said yes they would take only production costs, not profits. It started to be offered to other publishers and is now published in 15 editions – 2 English and 13 in a variety of languages.
The result was “Telling Tales, an anthology that brings together, unprecedented, 21 of the most well-known names in world literature, including five Nobel winners – Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hanef Kureishi and Margaret Atwood, to name a few. The stories are not about HIV or AIDS, but several are about conflict and death. Woody Allen’s contribution, a previously-published piece from the [**ITALICS**] New Yorker [**ITALICS**] is a humorous account of a financier whose son was rejected by a prestigious Manhattan preschool.
The beauty of Gordimer’s concept is that while a music ‘gig’ raises a bundle of money, it’s usually a single event. The collection of short stories, on the other hand, can continue to raise money as long as it stays on bookstore shelves.
How much money has the booked raised so far?
It’s quite astonishing because it’s making quite a bit of money, which is all going to the Treatment Action Campaign [an organization that raises money for HIV/AIDS in southern Africa].
I don’t know the exact amount [of money that was raised] but the first lot was from was from America and Canada together was $1 million; from Italy 45,000 euros. So as you can see they’re doing pretty well.
I think [an Arabic edition] is in the process of being negotiated.
Going back to the many requests for your time, why did you accept the invitation to be the guest speaker for the Naguib Mahfouz Memorial?
Well, I’m very honored to do so, because I happen to, not just regard, but to know that Naguib Mahfouz has been one of the great writers of our contemporary time. I have been reading him for a very long time, and wrote the preface to his work “The Echoes of an Autobiography.
And because Naguib Mahfouz was pleased with what I had done, and because -when I was in Egypt not two years ago- I had the great good fortune to spend a couple of hours of him in his house.
So when I was asked to write the introduction to the Omnibus edition of his three early Pharoanic novels
[which were recently translated into English and will be published by Random House in New York] I was delighted to find some Naguib Mahfouz novels that I had not read, and immediately put everything aside and said yes.
So, as you can see, that my great interest and my reverence for everything that he wrote or was, made me happy to accept the honor of this invitation.
