Nadine Gordimer’s Re-Visionary Literature:

The Conservationist and July’s People

The notion that the world is available for writers to alter at will is quixotic. But that does
not mean that texts of the kind we found ourselves drawn into studying are powerless to
shape and influence postcolonial destinies.

--Jonathan White1

The narcissism of the West is simultaneously revealed and concealed within

Nadine Gordimer’s powerfully terse texts. The bleak yet massive presence of apartheid

imposed upon twentieth century South Africa is the master theme in most of her

literature, be it fiction or nonfiction. Her Nobel prize-winning work documents the

severe subjugation of blacks on the African subcontinent alongside the neighboring

West’s democratic freedom, largely represented by white South Africans.

The question of Africa’s political future vis à vis Gordimer’s novels was the

impetus of the paper, but the juxtaposition between the ideals of communism and

capitalism soon surfaced as I deepened my research. I questioned: Did apartheid begin

as a mere ideology of societal/racial control and gradually turn into ever-deepening

capitalistic domination once the massive force of slave-like conditions that harnessed
 May, 2

hundreds of thousands was in full swing? The seeming marriage between capitalism and

politics was too interesting to resist in light of the “globalization” that is currently being

discussed in intellectual, economic, and political circles.

As a result, throughout my close reading I focus mainly on Gordimer’s

documenting of apartheid and its increasing collusion with capitalism as the twentieth

century wore on. The purpose of this paper is to explicate, first, the effect of apartheid

and capitalism on both white and black communities in South Africa, and second, to draw

attention to Gordimer’s revisionist politics that point to colonial Africa, not merely the

southernmost tip of the continent. Specifically, I will analyze two key novels, The

Conservationist (1974) and July’s People (1981). They represent a progression that

mimicked the societal fears and processes swirling within the enclosed country at the

time of their creation.

Analysis of Gordimer’s work necessarily involves some type of political reading,

however awkward that may become in the realm of the fictional. Indeed, balancing the

fictional with reality in criticism can become tantamount to walking a tightrope with no

net underneath. Edward Said provides some advice for the hotly contested arena of

African literature:

True, an ambiance of polemic surrounds this work, but that is only

because one cannot look at African writing except as embedded in its
political circumstances, of which the history of imperialism and resistance
to it is surely one of the most important… It is harder to render invisible
the politics of African culture. ‘Africa’ is still a site of contention.”2

As the land is perpetually a site of contention, then surely the culture, and therefore the

literature, that proceeds forth is such a site. Culture is never complete; it keeps mutating.
 May, 3

Gordimer’s writing is at the cultural axis of the current debate regarding the future of

South Africa.

It is crucial to note that Gordimer’s literary politics were prescient during the

1970s through the eighties regarding the liberating political events in 1992. Her major

critic, Stephen Clingman, documents in rich detail how her writing developed out of the

political events that surrounded her for the vast majority of her lengthy career. However,

to give balance to the praise so often heaped on her, a counter-critic, Kathrin Wagner,

questions the fame and interest in Gordimer’s fiction that she does not view as “history

from the inside,” as Clingman famously suggested. Wagner charges that intellectual

society outside of South African borders views her work as much more important than

those who had been living inside apartheid the decades before liberation.3

An aspect of such critical interest in Gordimer is centered on the color of her skin

and the society she is therefore privilege to. There are some critics who claim that she

cannot speak for the black subaltern, as she is white. Judith Newman proposes that:

“There are…those who have argued that the white South African novelist is

automatically corrupted by a privileged position, that Gordimer’s audience can only be

other privileged whites, and that the products of her imagination are therefore

intrinsically a part of a racist society.”4 With a nod to Gayatri Spivak’s pointed query,

can the subaltern speak in a colonial society/language?, the novels The Conservationist

and July’s People give a powerful voice to the subaltern while denying the author’s “own

people” their sense of moral superiority as the master race. Indeed, a new dialectic is

employed to subsume the old beneath it.

 May, 4

Apartheid’s unimaginable strength demanded a new dialectic not only to detail

the horror that became mundane during its tenure, but also to prepare South Africans to

embrace the sudden freedom when it came, as July’s People predicted. Unlike the U.S.’s

racism, in which the Supreme Court held that in Plessy v. Verguson (1896): “the

Fourteenth Amendment’s ‘equal protection of the laws’ was not violated by racial

distinction as long as the facilities were equal,”5 the South African Nationalist party in

1948 desired an absolute “racial distinction” between blacks and whites. There would be

no feigned equality under apartheid—an Afrikaans6 term meaning “separateness.”7 Soon

after, black natives, despite strong resistance, felt themselves being suffocated by acts

and laws created against them. This type of government is labeled by Said as “paranoid

nationalism,” where traditions are carried out “at the expense of others.”8

From 1950 – 90 apartheid legislation reached out to permanently alter native

existence through banning: interracial sexual relations and marriage; the use of public

libraries and universities; admittance to entertainment facilities such as movie theaters

and public bathrooms; and the mass-movement of natives to Resettlement camps, or

Locations, far from major cities and work centers.9 “Any black person without a valid

pass in his possession was liable to summary arrest.”10 Members of the state police force

had the right to raid, search, and arrest any black citizen under any pretence—many were

tortured in detention.11

The entire social system worked mercilessly against the black man or woman.

Meaningful relations between blacks and whites were sundered completely under such

conditions. Blacks, during apartheid, were more possessed by whites than they were
 May, 5

during the preceding era. Everything about their lives was circumscribed and proscribed

by the Nationalist regime.

In The Conservationist, the pre-revolutionary operation of apartheid is shown in

full. A wealthy, white industrialist, Mehring, owns a 400 acre farm directly outside of

Johannesburg—“an enclave in Africa’s own ‘deep South’”12—he keeps not for profit or

agricultural interests, but for a trysting place with lovers and a tax write-off. The farm, a

purchased parcel of land, is significantly located directly beside the Location—a fenced-

in enclave teeming with 150,000 blacks. It is a space artificially created and bought by

the white regime to contain those not allowed to live in the city. Without the “pass”

needed to work, another symbol of capitalism in the postmodern era, the black workers

are denied “validity.”13 Loaded sentences like the following politicize the novel: “And

the Africans had papers that made them temporary sojourners where they were born.”14

Another site in the novel demonstrating the deep entrenchment of capitalism in

the apartheid regime, and the certain poverty that meant for the displaced and

dispossessed, is the Indian general store. The Indian family must pay off the government

periodically to remain, illegally, on their bit of land, also surrounded by a high fence.

Mehring frequents the store as he purchases deli meals for weekends on the farm.

The general store is constantly peopled with a motley crowd of impoverished

blacks, literally in rags, looking over the displayed goods that they cannot afford. It is

this fraught site, displaying the learned wants of white privilege that one can possess with

money, which demonstrates the triangle of tiered society in South Africa: at the top is

Mehring stopping his Mercedes outside the door; then the Afrikaner police and

government officials that threaten with expulsion; after the whites is the Indian family,
 May, 6

existing separately from the segregation (it seems apropos that they own the artificially-

created site to buy and sell goods that is located between the farm and the Location), and

lastly, the blacks who idly inhabit the store with their 30 cents daily wage, if employed,

unable in most cases to buy anything.

The novel concentrates itself on Mehring and his view of his city and country

domains. The reader is privy to his private monologues, revealing his obsessions,

frustrations and weaknesses. The technique of stream-of-consciousness used extensively

throughout the text to describe and deepen knowledge of Mehring’s character allows the

casual reader, whom Judith Newman refers to as a hypocrite lecteur because they only

skim the surface of the text, to “hear” his repetitive thoughts. The monotony conceals the

true intent: stream-of-conscious is elected as an inversion of European literary practices

to accomplish an African political agenda—to recognize the (linguistic) codes and then

through that subsequent knowledge, be freed of colonial rule.

Franz Fanon pushes this reading further, asseverating that it has “a dialectical

significance today.”15 His theory is brought to life in The Conservationist, which uses

language to deconstruct racist/capitalistic ideology. The employed stream-of-

consciousness serves to gloss over disturbing details. The horrific is rendered

commonplace, echoing the sentiments of the Nationalist Party, which turned a blind eye

to the increasing poverty of blacks.

Mehring’s stream-of-consciousness identifies him with being part of the regime.

He is a highly developed and interesting character whose intelligent awareness of the

paradoxical reality of South Africa heightens a reader’s sense of the moral tug in the

psyche:
 May, 7

Across the empty irrigation ditch and on to the road, he meets the pot-
bellied black brats with tins on their heads, standing aside for him on their
way to fetch more water. This is what they’re doing all day, every day.
And do you think I don’t know?... But the children ignore him as he
ignores them. What percentage of the world is starving? How long can
we go on getting away scot free?... Soon, in this generation or the next, it
must be our turn to starve and suffer.16

Passages such as this explain why apartheid censors banned three of her novels. Mehring

is the anti-hero: a handsome, powerful, rich white man in complete control of his city and

farm-life who has private fits of conscience at the plight of those that surround him.

More subtle and profound than the obvious political commentary the novel makes

is the critique of capitalism’s effects on white’s moral and cultural behavior. Despite his

conscience, Mehring cannot help himself from smugly considering as he walks over his

farm, “My possessions are enough for me.” His possessions, the “pig-iron” his lover

repetitively associates him with (pig as icon), are what make him, his wealth and

reputation in the eyes of white society, and what ultimately undo him as he loses his grip

on reality after the flood. He begins to confront his own death with the irrepressible,

rising black body, illegally buried at the beginning of the novel by Afrikaner police in the

third pasture.

Mehring is only the token master, soon to be forgotten as he surrenders the land

when he flees the country as he aided his liberal lover in so doing years before. The

intense ambiguity present in Gordimer’s novels is often couched as a sudden trip abroad

that signals an abrupt halt to the particular character’s development. Her first novel, The

Lying Days (1953), a bildungsroman, first uses this particular denouement. Such

ambiguity is a type of portrayal of not only the grey area that much of life exists in, but

also another type of privilege of whites who are able to merely buy an airplane ticket and
 May, 8

begin a similar life in London or New York. Even fleeing a worsening situation created

by Mehring’s own unstable mind, is as simple as purchasing a ticket to freedom. He

narcissistically escapes defeat and death, along with the demands of the hundreds of

thousands that are dependent on the regime (and therefore him), for sustenance and

support.

The unraveling of white supremacy, and eventual takeover of the farm, is deftly

handled by Jacobus, who manages the farm every day of the year. His thoughts are also a

key to his character, as they tacitly defend against Mehring’s patronism: “I’m the one

who oils and looks after the tractor, I’m the one who looks after all his machines, all his

machines, everything, all his cattle, every day. Saturday, Sunday, even Christmas.”17

Jacobus is a symbolic representation of a black worker on a white man’s farm who is not

dependent and knows it. He feigns innocence to achieve his own aims and to make all

black lives on the farm bearable. He shrinks when Mehring comes to the farm in the first

half of the novel, but after the flood cuts off the roads to Johannesburg for weeks his true

ability to handle the farm independently of the “master race”18 comes to light.

He is the clever hero that is not given much to work with who contrasts with

Mehring’s anti-heroism and weakness. Jacobus is overseer of feeding, housing, and

organizing farm-hand work for a handful of black families with many hangers-on,

seeking a better life outside of the confines of the Location. But their positions are very

far apart, regardless of Jacobus’ enviable status, as much cultural information is never

divulged or explained to him by Mehring. As Fanon asserts, the white master has robbed

the black workers on the farm of vital cultural knowledge.

 May, 9

A tenet of colonialism (and also extreme capitalism) demands cheap, exploitable

workers to simultaneously produce goods and services to maintain white societal

standards of living. This can be taken a step further to add that the black natives have

been robbed of their land, as previously mentioned, along with basic literacy and a decent

wage to vie competitively in a capitalistic society. Thus they are infantilized by white

culture in a never-ending round.

Jacobus refers to Mehring as his baas (master), and Mehring refers to all workers,

regardless of rank and age, as his “boys.” Mehring never outright mistreats or abuses his

farm workers; a benign neglect is more apt. Through such neglect, he becomes a

representation of an exclusive societal group of white males and females who passively

supported the harsh politics that maintained, protected, and made their privileged lives

possible.

The Nationalist regime truly regarded itself as the master race, and conditions for

those who did not have white skin were harsh. The Conservationist details precisely

what standards blacks were allotted. Mere facts become humanized when the novel

offers up such anecdotal details as the following: Izak, a black teenager, watches an

Indian teenager paint a peace sign on a water-tower and wonders at it. “Izak knew that

egg… It was smart. People wore it like you wear Jesus’ cross… But he did not know

what it really meant.”19 The black teenager is completely out-of-touch with the sixties

counterculture that the other teenage boy is not only very familiar with, but determined to

promote by broadcasting it to the neighborhood. Is it possible that Izak himself therefore

implicitly understands his lack, that he is not smart, as the “egg” is “smart”? Truly a

crushing realization for a teenage boy on the verge of manhood.

 May, 10

Along with being deprived of culture, life for all blacks on the farm is sub-

standard. Whether in or out of the Location, blacks seldom had enough to eat. Mehring

tries to ignore the obvious physical signs of malnutrition in the gaggle of children that

watch his luxury car zoom by. The lack of protein in their diet is noted: “Many of them

had not had any since a calf had broken a leg and been slaughtered two months before.”20

Jacobus must ration the bags of “mealie-meal,”21 a corn meal that comprised their daily

sustenance, or Mehring will grumble about buying more than budgeted for.

The abundant life of the white master is evident as Jacobus’ wife, Alina, prepares

Mehring’s meals. She has no idea which condiment in the refrigerator would be suited

for the bag of deli food. “Alina has today, as usual, set out tomato sauce, marmalade,

honey, mustard, uncertain what category of meal it is that he eats when he comes here.

The variety assembled goes further than that: it expresses the mystery of eating habits,

unimaginable choices of food not open to her.”22 The description of not understanding

condiments evokes a lack of cultural knowledge so basic it is almost unfathomable.

Common food, a basic human need, is also used to display the victimization of blacks.

If The Conservationist proposes the inevitability of blacks being given back their

native land, then July’s People takes this notion even further by positioning South Africa

in the midst of revolution, a “millennium” for black control. Whites are fleeing the

country in terror, bombs are going off in the major cities, and the international airport has

been closed down. One young family of five is whisked away by their long-time servant,

July, deep into the bush to his village. Presumably, it was simply a temporary place to

escape from being killed.

 May, 11

Maureen is the character the novel focuses on. She is a double of July, as their

relationship, linguistically and culturally, becomes increasingly more important and even

much more interesting than her marital relationship. On their first morning in the native

village, living in the mother-in-law’s hut, the odd juxtaposition Maureen observes with,

“July, their servant, their host,”23 typifies the paradoxical situation the white family finds

themselves in. July occupies an uncanny role that is more indefinable by the day; he

further complicates the matter by not overtly acknowledging his dual status to his

employers.

In contrast, both husband and wife entirely “lose” the definition of prescribed

roles in their privileged lives, which brings out unexpected personality and physical

changes that are repulsive to the both of them. The filth of living for weeks in the village,

the lack of “normal” pursuits such as shopping, going to the salon, working during the

week, attending international conferences, the lack of privacy, and being surrounded day

in and day out by only native blacks begins to alter Maureen’s view of herself, her

marriage, and her loyal servant, July. After weeks in the bush, she finally begins to

accept and understand that, “she was not in possession of any part of her life.”24 The

center, the possessions and the possessing of them, has not held. Black revolution has

derailed their lives completely.

Her husband, Bam, quickly loses his power and status once his “cheque-book”

and prestigious career as architect are suddenly worthless in the new village economy

that is thrust upon them. Bam, as he is seen after the precious gun is discovered stolen, is

emasculated by losing his possessions: “He lay down on his back, on that bed… and at

once suddenly rolled over onto his face, as the father had never done before his sons…
 May, 12

She looked down on this man who had nothing, now. There was before these children

something much worse than the sight of the women’s broad backsides, squatting.”25 Left

with only shame, as he is undefined as a man without his money, career, vehicle, and

gun, he abruptly gives up. Maureen focuses on the lack, the loss of control, and the awful

revelation of it to their young children. Her pride is at stake.

Critics disagree on the final scene of the novel when the helicopter is heard,

which could mean a fleeing from or merely a hailing of before gathering her family to

safety. Bam’s sudden cowardly behavior and the intense scrutiny on the negative lack in

her surroundings, nods more to a fleeing from than a gathering to—which has been

previously shown to be a consistent theme in other novels. Maureen, like Mehring and

other whites, wants out when the true reality of South Africa closes in.

Besides the white children who assimilate seamlessly in with similar-aged black

children, Maureen and July are the only characters that appear to be infused with power

as the full situation unveils itself. Maureen’s daily voice diminishes in the bush, but her

mental acuity and focus strengthen her and prepare her for eventual escape.

July, on the other hand, gradually withstands her, displaying through language

that does not fear for the first time to lay bare suppressed opinions:

—Me? I must know who is stealing your things? Same like always. You
make too much trouble for me. Here in my home too. Daniel, the chief,
my-mother-my-wife with the house. Trouble, trouble from you. I don’t
want it anymore. You see?— His hands flung out away from himself.
—You’ve got to get it back.—
—No no. No no.—Hysterically smiling repeating… She was stampeded
by a wild rush of need to destroy everything between them.26

Maureen is confronted with another man who has spent almost two decades serving and

obeying who rejects her and her perceived wants/needs. She identifies Bam’s shameful
 May, 13

behavior and inability to provide, to save them from the situation, as a betrayal. Just as

July’s refusal to hunt down the gun, ultimate protector of white power, is a betrayal of

their long-time relationship that she arrogantly assumed was based on their mutual

regard. Female white mistresses, especially educated, liberal ones that Maureen

represents, were as guilty as the masters of unconscious patronism during the

colonial/apartheid era.

The gun, a potent colonial symbol of domination, is desired by one revolutionary

young man who is believed to have run off to fight for/with the “Rusias” and the

“Cubas,” according to the village chief. A mixing of political and economic realities or

threats swirls within the black village in the bush, as they attempt to understand and fight

against 350 years of confusing colonial rule. The notion seems to be one of continual

conquest: if not the Afrikaner or British, then the “Rusias.” The stolen gun becomes a

point of frustrating climax as July refuses to go look for it; Maureen is stunned by that

refusal, along with his subsequent verbal defense as he slips into his native language to

excoriate and reject her.

On these cultural and societal issues endemic to apartheid South Africa, Clingman

gives subtle insight:

For there may be a way in which the novel is less interested in the future
per se than in its unfolding in the present. On this issue July’s People may
be the most deceptive, and deceptively simple, of all of Gordimer’s
novels, and perhaps less genuinely prophetic than The Conservationist.
What the novel is apparently doing is projecting a vision into the future;
but what it may be doing most decisively is in fact the reverse. For what
appears to be a projection from the present into the future in the novel is
from another point of view seeing the present through the eyes of the
future.27
 May, 14

With the understanding of multiple tense-perspectives present in the novel, the twin-

critique of capitalism and apartheid can be better understood as being fused together.

The colonial past/present, leading to the apartheid present, creating the capitalistic

present/future are revealed in their inevitable progression. Revolution in the

present/future is the shock that will grind the mighty wheels to a halt.

My close reading of all of the above remains, but even more provocative than the

blatant political revision of South Africa through revolution and violence, is the constant

unrelenting critique on white capitalistic culture that July’s People offers. The theme is

suggested at the beginning of the text as the reader is confronted with a disturbing quote

from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist: “The old is dying and the new cannot be

born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” I argue that

those morbid symptoms not only point to apartheid’s inhumaneness but also to white

egoism resulting from rampant, unchecked consumerism and decadence from wealthy

capitalist societies.

How are the protagonists’ relationships influenced by the “temptation of

possessions”28 proffered by capitalism? It can be argued that Maureen deserts her family

in the bush in order to reinstate herself within the previous comforting security of

capitalism. For example, Maureen and the children are strongly portrayed as consumers

of “new things.” Can it be understood that pre-revolution Bam, as the provider of money,

was merely the cash cow that his wife and children milked in an attempt to negotiate

happiness in the cultural mores around them? Once he is unable to fulfill his duty, he is

rejected. Mehring defined himself by his “possessions”; Maureen defines herself by

 May, 15

“things” bought or brought to her by the three males who have taken care of her her

entire life: father, husband and servant.

Maureen’s children have instilled within them the surrounding cultural currency.

They are described at first by being most excited by novelty. Bought items in their lives

bring enjoyment, no matter how trivial the object: “the children, excited, as it seemed

nothing else could excite them, by a new possession. Nothing made them so happy as

buying things.”29 Once in the bush, not comprehending what has happened at first, they

demand Coca-cola instead of water; the solution they keep proposing is to go and “buy

some,” even if a store is no where in sight. It has been their dialectic of privilege

throughout their young lives.

For white adults in the high socioeconomic class of South Africa, death and sex

are economically negotiable also. Death is described as a “purchase,” a private plane to

crash in for Bam’s older colleague (another type of fleeing). Sex/infidelity is ultimately

defined by a monetary exchange: “The absolute nature she and her kind were

scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master

bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff.”30 There can be no denying the nod towards

Marxism with the repeated, loaded terms of buying, selling, possessions and money that

permeate the text.

Maureen and Bam’s world is created and supported by a capitalistic economy that

affects the blacks even out in the bush. July’s wife, Martha, reflects, “The sun rises, the

moon sets; the money must come, the man must go.”31 Money is akin to the centrality of

the universe. It rules the lives of the blacks and the whites who have agreed or who were

forced to follow such economic guidelines.

 May, 16

Edward Said elucidates that, “Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act

of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by

impressive ideological formations.”32 In my analysis that focuses on economic privilege

and then on the political apartheid buttressing it, encouraging its continuation, my intent

is not to focus on the personal politics of the author. Nor is it to merely label my analysis

as Marxist in origin. My study aims to draw attention to the critique of the symptoms of

capitalistic culture in a globalized economy that is a major theme (albeit overlooked) in

Gordimer’s work, from the sixties through Get a Life (2005).

Through the themes of apartheid, critique of capitalism, and human relationships,

Gordimer’s revisionary literary politics are prophetic. Nature’s cleansing flood in The

Conservationist and the violent black revolution in July’s People apply virtually to the

whole of Africa. Such fictionalized events were in reality occurring in other colonized

African countries while apartheid effectively sealed off South Africa.

The power of literature to inspire and mobilize a country, let alone an entire

colonized continent is debatable, but certainly the implication of the last sentence of The

Conservationist sums up in whose hands the farm, a potent symbol of the agrarian origins

of colonized Africa, belongs in: “He had come back. He took possession of this earth,

theirs; one of them.”33 Clingman explains the ideology behind the meaning of: “the very

last words of the novel, ‘he had come back’, are a direct paraphrase of the great rallying

cry of the African National Congress in the fifties: ‘Africa! May it come back!’”34

Fanon’s third phase of creating a national culture, “the fighting phase,”35 comes alive in

Gordimer’s rewriting/revision of Africa’s post-colonial future. The ironic brilliance of

 May, 17

this is that twenty years after the publication of this novel those very words transferred

from the realm of the fictional into historical fact.

The comprehension of the interplay between the ideologies of communism and

capitalism led to a richer and more acute critique, in Gordimer’s fiction of the seventies

and eighties, of apartheid’s morphing into an ultimate political regime of white privilege

and economic/cultural advancement at the expense of otherized blacks. Ultimately it was

apartheid that was the system of control, but the “temptation,” as she labels it, of whites

to succumb to living off of others and the collusion to protect white economic interests

had its death grip on the millions of residents of the labor pools of the Locations.

Apartheid has been abolished for over a decade now, but the after-effects of poverty,

illiteracy, cultural privilege and control will no doubt haunt the millions who will inhabit

South Africa in this century.

Nadine Gordimer’s post-apartheid fiction has come under attack for supposedly

not continuing the same strain of excellence that won her several of literature’s most

coveted prizes. Again, I refute what I consider to be an ignorant assumption from a

hypocrite lecteur. A continuation of the same political and cultural critique portrayed in

July’s People and The Conservationist is leveled out to her readers. In The Pickup (2001)

the vision is brutal:

Shame, guilt, fear, dismay, anger, blame, resentment at the whole world
and what it is—and names come up, names—for the sight of him as he is
going to be. Again. Living in a dirty hovel [with] others of the wrong
colours, poor devils like himself…cleaning American shit—she has seen
the slums of those cities, the empty lots of that ravaged new world,
detritus of degradation—doing the jobs that real people, white Americans,
won’t do themselves… And again: America, America. The great and
terrible USA… The harshest country in the world. The highest buildings
to reach up to in corporate positions… That’s where the world is.36
 May, 18

The novel is set in a Middle Eastern country and was published in America only

weeks before September of 2001. Its prescient tone and theme make the politically aware

shudder. The author has lived through apartheid but sees the U.S. lifestyle, capitalistic in

the extreme, as toxic. She sees it through the eyes of the subaltern: a living hell.
 May 19

1
Jonathan White, ed. Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993.
2
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Knopf, 1993) 239.
3
Kathrin Wagner, Rereading Nadine Gordimer, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 3.
4
Judith Newman, Nadine Gordimer (London: Routledge, 1988) 68.
5
Theodore J. Lowi and Benjamin Ginsberg, American Government: Freedom and Power (New
York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000) 86.
6
In South Africa, the European languages, Afrikaans and English, are spoken along with many
tribal languages, such as Zulu.
7
Christopher Heywood, Writers and Their Work: Nadine Gordimer, (Windsor, Eng.: Profile
Books: 1983) 7.
8
Said, introduction, xxvi.
9
Here is a partial listing of the Acts against blacks, affecting many areas of their lives, during the
Nationalist Party’s regime: Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Population Registration Act, Immorality
Act, Group Areas Act, Separate Amenities Act, Native Resettlement Act, State-Aided Institutions Act, the
Extension of University Education Bill.
10
Nadine Gordimer and David Goldblatt, Lifetimes Under Apartheid, (New York: Knopf, 1986)
64.
11
Gordimer and Goldblatt 114.
12
Biodun Jefiyo, “An Interview With Nadine Gordimer: Harare, February 14, 1992,” Callaloo 16
(1993): 922-930.
13
Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (London: Penguin Books, 1978) 33.
14
Gordimer 114.
15
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth:
Penguis, 1967) 37.
16
Gordimer 46 – 47, emphasis mine.
17
Gordimer 80.
18
Gordimer 76.
19
Gordimer 216, emphasis mine.
20
Gordimer 170.
21
Gordimer 145.
22
Gordimer 73.
23
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (New York: Penguin Group, 1981) 1.
24
Gordimer 139, emphasis mine.
25
Gordimer 145.
 May, 20

26
Gordimer 151 – 152.
27
Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1986) 201.
28
Gordimer 105.
29
Gordimer 6.
30
Gordimer 65.
31
Gordimer 83.
32
Said 9.
33
Gordimer, The Conservationist, 267.
34
Stephen Clingman, “History from the Inside: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer,” Journal of
South African Studies 7 (1981): 190.
35
Fanon 41.
36
Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) 230.