Nadine Gordimer: evergreen, ageless and an inspiration to all writers

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/14/nadine-gordimer-margaret-atwood-tribute

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Nadine Gordimer has died. It seems impossible – surely she was ageless, like one of those very old, tiny, trees in the Arctic, gnarled and tough as a nut, but nonetheless evergreen. Despite her minute size, she was a huge presence – a voice of rectitude that spoke above the political din, addressing itself to our common humanity.

She was an inspiration to all writers facing seemingly insurmountable odds within their own societies or facing a choice between risky truth-telling and personal comfort. It's difficult to imagine the history of the South African novel, indeed of the 20th-century political novel, without her.

She was born in 1923, began writing in her teens, and was thus 20 at the mid-point of the second world war and 25 when South African apartheid was first instituted formally. The contradictions – the war fought on the side of the allies against Nazi racism, but then a racist system coming down like a clamp on South Africa – must have been especially galling to the young, politically aware writer that she was.

Her first published novel, The Lying Days (1953), already charts out the territory she was to explore throughout her life: the intersection of the personal and the political, and the way in which individual lives are bent out of shape by external forces.

Her two grandest and most complex works, Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981), were both written when she was in her 50s and had been engaged in the anti-apartheid movement for decades. Both were banned by the apartheid government, as she expected they would be. She knew by then that there were no clear-cut resolutions to unjust situations that have gone on for centuries: scar tissue runs deep, and the political freedom of one set of people is not necessarily going to mean happy times for all. Human beings are human: their motives are mixed, their actions often shoddy no matter what ideologies they purport to embrace, and hunger is an astonishing motivator of behaviour.

In that respect, Gordimer the writer is entirely unsentimental. She doesn't go in for heroes.

But underneath all her work is the question posed in Ursula K LeGuin's well-known story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: if you know that the beautiful manner of living you yourself enjoy is built on a foundation of misery deliberately imposed on innocents, can you in conscience do nothing? Her own answer was always no.

Gordimer was the winner of many literary prizes, the Booker and the Nobel being the pinnacles. But artistic recognition was only one of the achievements that interested her, her role as witness in the fight against the injustices of apartheid weighing arguably at least as much. Oddly to some, Gordimer's intense focus on human rights did not lead her to endorse feminism. Being against discrimination and segregation of all sorts, she could not bring herself to opt for remedial treatment for any one category of people. Thus she refused to accept the Orange prize, since, being a prize for women writers only, she saw it as excluding men. I once spoke with her on the subject, and she was clear: the issues of racial discrimination and freedom of expression were the most important ones for her, so she would put her political energies there.

Her talent, her dedication, her fearlessness, her ferocity: what a large presence she has been, for almost a century; and how greatly her brave, incisive voice will be missed.