CROSSING  BORDERS:  SENSE  OF IDENTITY AND PLACE IN NADINE GORDIMER’S NOVELS

Abstract

Nadine Gordimer is one of the finest writers in the African literature who has sense of balance between tradition and modernity. Her voice against these issues proves to be a beacon which liberates the voice of the oppressed. Gordimer deals with the problem of belonging to a racially segregated and economically exploited society. The inevitable and constant involvement with her society, which has been fractured by the color bar, makes her fiction a unique testimony of racial discrimination, colored identity, psycho-political development, marginalization, subversion of power and alienation. All these problems are the issues that the thesis endeavored to present. Nadine Gordimer’s capacity is evident in her management of racial story content.

 To use the material of black-white experience needs exceptional skill. She is not guilty of pushing her characters to the sideline to make a political point–which enables her to demonstrate South Africa’s political situation exactly, the country lives through the character’s experience of it.

Hence, her characters think about and bait each other with politics the way people do in ordinary life. Gordimer presents a profound, imaginative consciousness of the insane system of South African society, and celebrates everything that refuses to be contained in its limits. Apart from  her works she was truly a writer who has made a tremendous impact in the mind of her readers and has transcended  the borders and indeed she has very lucid imaginative style. Through her works we come across the existential angst and how really identity, colour and place  is significant in one’s life.

Apartheid,  Marginalization, Alienation, Identity

CROSSING BORDERS: IDENTITY AND PLACE IN NADINE GORDIMERS NOVELS

                 Nice Mary George and Navaneetha.G

INTRODUCTION                                          

African literature, iterary works of the African continent. African literature consists of a body of work in different languages and various genres, ranging from oral literature to literature written in colonial languages (French, Portuguese, and English).African literature of the 1950’s was characterized by its focus on the disruptive effects of European colonialism on traditional African society. As African nations began to emerge from centuries of colonial rule, writers reflected on the imposition of western values on the African people and examined the new conflicts that accompanied independence. Postcolonial literature is that which has arisen primarily since the end of World War II from regions of the world undergoing decolonization. Works from such regions in the 20th and 21st centuries, such as the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria, South Africa, and numerous parts of the Caribbean, for example, might be described as postcolonial. While the field of postcolonial studies only began taking shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numerous fiction writers began publishing works in the decades immediately following World War II. One of the most significant postcolonial novels to emerge in this period was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart  but Nadine Gordimer  had already written one book and several short-story collections, and she was in the process of publishing her second novel. A South African writer of Eastern European origin, Gordimer didn’t personally experience the racial discrimination and violence that arose from decolonization and the institution of apartheid, but she nonetheless spent her career advocating for equal rights in her country.

 Some of her most notable works that deal with postcolonial politics and the stark harms of apartheid include The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughter (1979), and July’s People (1981).TayebSalih’sSeason of Migration to the North (1966) is another significant and early work of postcolonial fiction.

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer, political activist and the recipient of the 1991Nobel Prize . She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".[1]Nadine Gordimer was born into a well-off family in Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. It was the setting for Gordimer's first novel, Thre Lyign Days(1953).From her early childhood Gordimer witnessed the increase of white power at the expense of the rights of the black majority. Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Nadine was noted for her novels such as The conservationist, Burgers Daughters, Julys people etc.Nadine Gordimer’s  fiction and non-fiction represent a history of the problems the South African nation has faced throughout these years. As a novelist Godmier always puts the theme of identity, it is so important to an internally compartmentalized society like South Africa. She also tried to bring out the true life of south African’s   through her novels.For Gordimer the novel occupies an especially important place among her writings and although she started her career as a short-story writer, she soon discovered that the novel gave more opportunities for exploration, more space for the action to develop and, equally important, more depth to the characters. Her first published novel,  The Lying Days (1953), takes place in Gordimer's home town of Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town near Johannesburg. Arguably a semi-autobiographical work, The Lying Days is a Bildungsroman charting the growing political awareness of a young white woman, Helen- toward small-town life and South African racial division.

Gordimer collected the James Tait Black Prize for A Guest of Honour in 1971 and, in common with a number of winners of this award, she was to go on to win the  Booker Prize The Booker was awarded to Gordimer for her 1974 novel, The Conservationist  and was a co-winner with 's  Stanley Middleton’s novelnovel Holiday.  The Conservationist  explores Zulu culture and the world of a wealthy white industrialist through the eyes of Mehring, the anti-hero.The Conservationist seeks to conserve nature to preserve the apartheid system, keeping change at bay. When an unidentified corpse is found on his farm, Mehring does the "right thing" by providing it a proper burial; but the dead person haunts the work, a reminder of the bodies on which Mehring's vision would be built.

Gordimer's   Burger’s Daughter (1979)   novel is the story of a woman analysing her relationship with her father, a martyr to the anti-apartheid movement. In July’s People   (1981), she imagines a bloody South African revolution, in which white people are hunted and murdered after blacks revolt against the apartheid government. The work follows Maureen and BamfordSmales, an educated white couple, hiding for their lives with July, their long-time former servant. The novel plays off the various groups of "July's people": his family and his village, as well as the Smales.  .Gordimer's award-winning 2002 novel, The Pick up considers the issues of displacement, alienation, and immigration, class and economic power, religious faith, and the ability for people to see, and love, across these divides. It tells the story of a couple: Julie Summers, a white woman from a financially secure family, and Abdu, an illegal Arab immigrant in South Africa. After Abdu's visa is refused, the couple returns to his homeland, where she is the alien. Her experiences and growth as an alien in another culture form the heart of the work. Gordimer's main themes are exile, loneliness and strong political opposition towards racial segregation. The essence of identity is explored to the deep and it has made her more specific and unique.She questions the  identity crisis and notion of place in a world of their own land where they are treated as aliens despite the fact that they being the natives, Is not that  pathethic?

Gordimer has created individuals who make their moral choices behind private doors and in the public sphere. She has painted a social background subtler than anything presented by political scientists, thus providing an insight into the roots of the struggle and the mechanisms of change that no historian could have matched.

CONTENTS

 Nadine Gordimer is a  celebrated writer  and Nobel prize lauretea fine descriptive writer, thoughtful and sensitive, Gordimer was noted for the vivid precision of her writing about the complicated personal and social relationships in her environment: the interplay between races, racial conflict, and the pain inflicted by South Africa's unjust apartheid laws.

Nadine Gordimer’s 1979 novel, Burger’s Daughter, makes a valuable contribution to the corpus of prison writing by responding to the socio-historical specificities of the South African prison during the apartheid years. It is a wonderful work both as fiction and memoir – to reinstate women’s roles in the anti-apartheid movement.

It explores how the apartheid regime intended prison not for rehabilitation but as a space of de-activation and invisibility. Prison is, however, a liminal space that is simultaneously conducive to political struggle and de-activation, violence and communities. Her topic was essentially people and apartheid that affected them. She was had really shrewd  insight in the psyche of the black people, which is really evident in her works.

The Conservationist ((1974), which won the Booker Prize for 1974, evokes the sterility of the white community. Mehring, the Afrikaner antihero whose farm is as barren as his life, conserves both nature and the apartheid system, the one to keep the other at bay. Her novelsindeed is a representation not only of a certain group of people “Blacks” but they could be anyone who have been affected with the pangs of angst.

The novel has become a staple of African literature and South African canon alongside Alan patons “Cry, the Beloved Country” and J.M Coetzees “Disgrace”. When She accepted her Noble Prize, MsGordimer said finding common ground between people who spend decades at each others throats would be critical to sewing South Africa together. She understood her work would continue after her own time. The flood that rushers over Mehring’s farm in the “The Conservationist,” returning his land to the black South Africans who first possessed it, still hasn’t come.

Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People is a fictitious account of a black revolt in South Africa. In the novel the blacks in the South African police force refuse to arrest their own people, public services break down, and fighting erupts in the major cities, quickly spreading into the rural areas. July’s People may attract young readers through its themes. A major theme is racial discrimination. South Africa’s policy of apartheid, government-approved and-enforced discrimination, is not dealt with directly. Instead, Gordimer portrays how the policy affects various types of people: liberal, privileged white people, rural black people, and black people forced to split their lives between two worlds, the urban areas where they work and the rural areas where their families are forced to live. This approach opens the novel to themes beyond discrimination to those of initiation, mistaken views of oneself and one’s world, role-playing, and role reversal—all themes relevant to young lives.

A Sport of Nature, her nineth novel  deals with , the emerging black leadership of surrounding states and with the ways in which human beings survive physically, emotionally and morally under, and struggle against, racism and injustice.

In her novels, the political questions are dealt with the greatest honesty. The extent of deracialisation in South Africa can be traced throughout, and in her recent fictional works the question of cross-racial love affair is hardly of any significance in itself.

 Historical transitions are addressed in her novels and herein lies the unique nature of her perspective. Her outlook is positive, progressive, parallel to history and in tune with the times as different from the nostalgic recreations situated in the past.

Gordimer began to realize how blacks were treated, how South African community acted and how she disagreed with the Society and Government. Since the start of her career, Gordimer wrote different books and those are recognized foraparthied oppositions. Her fiction portrayed realities which became true to life, she has shown what life is and has strongly dealt with very pertinent topics of the time like racism, apartheid. Through the literature she discovered life

,not only about the South African people but it is beyond words. She understood love and relationships and she had a wide variety of characters namely Blacks, Afrikaners and they are really strong in action and thought.

Ms. Gordimer did not originally choose apartheid as her subject as a young writer, she said, but she found it impossible to dig deeply into South African life without striking repression. But whether by accident of geography or literary searching, she found her themes in the injustices and cruelties of her country’s policies of racial division, and she left no quarter of South African society .Gordimer’s Nobel Prize put the searchlight on a country in painful transition from an oppressive racism to a turbulent democracy. Nadine Gordimer is the writer that most stubbornly has kept the true face of racism in front of us, in all its human complexities. Her work reflects the psychic vibrations within that country, the road from passivity and blindness to resistance and struggle, the forbidden friendships, the censored soul, and the underground networks. Nadine Gordimer’s great themes are love and politics. Behind the most intimate relations, as well as the most public, there is the same search for an identity, a self-confirmation, and a wish to belong and exist. He enters people’s most intimate regions to show how private life is violated by informers and race registers.

It is her passion for words that made her what she is today and she is now one of the most celebrated and loved writer around the world. Her love for reading made her different from other people. Its life that she has portrayed in her works and human relationships in its every sense of the word it is complex and vibrant. Her works talk about human relationships and its intricacies and its all indelibly connected with the human life.

We can see the  literary genius of Nadine Gordimer’s works  and  lyricism at its best. Her works were a strong voice against the atrocities that those people faced and proved to be a tool to revolt. She was passionate about both her writing career and her activistism. Her writing reflects deeper political understandings and significantly deals with the intolerance that brought about a timultous situation in South Africa. Her works has really progressive outlook for life and dealt with moral and racial issues. She once said “As writers, we are exploring the mystery,the mystery of existence”. Well she really did and won hearts of many.

CONCLUSION

Gordimer is a well-known and acclaimed writer who explores the social effects of South Africa's apartheid system and the consequences of its demise. Although political themes are central to her work, Gordimer focuses on the personal aspect of political turmoil. As a white in South Africa, Gordimer occupies a difficult position in relation to the country's racist institutions. Although opposed to racism, Gordimer benefitted from racist institutions with a privileged place in South African society.

She has been a fervent campaigner against racism in South Africa And has long held an iconic status there as a champion of tolerance, free speech and understanding. From the above writings we witnessed that most of Gordimer’s novels reflect the racism, the conflict that existed in South Africa. When we look at into her works we could understood that several of her works tells stories of ordinary people revealing moral ambiguities and choices.Her characterization is nuanced  revealed more through the choices of her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs. She also reveals the subtle details within the characters names through her works. Her stories concern the devastating effects of apartheid on the lives of South Africans—the constant tension between personal isolation and the commitment to social justice ,the numbness caused by the unwillingness to accept apartheid, the inability to change it, and the refusal of exile. As a whole, Nadine Gordimer’s works create rich imagery of South Africa’s historical development.

REFRENCE  

Primary Source

·         Burges Daughter. London : Bloomsburry, 2000

·         The Conservationist. London : Jonathan Cape, 1974

·         July’s People. New York: Penguin Books, 1982

·         Lying Days.  London : Bloomsburry, 2002

Secondary source

·         www.Wikipedia.com

1.      Nice Mary  GeorgeBertle-7736920650

 Email id - nicemarybertle94@gmail.com

2. Navaneetha-9495268119

Email id – nidhunavaneetha@gmail.com