The Essential Gesture

Nadine Gordimer

5 ideas

1. The interregnum and its morbid symptoms

   Gordimer adopts Gramsci's line that 'the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms' to describe South Africa in the early 1980s. The white writer lives in a period where apartheid's order has lost legitimacy but the democratic order does not yet exist. Every private act, from friendship to love to art, becomes distorted by this suspended state and carries a political charge it cannot shed.

2. The writer's gesture is a social transaction

   Gordimer argues that a writer's first obligation is to write as well as possible. But the 'essential gesture' of writing is its relation to society: a work becomes complete only in the transaction with the people it is written among. Under apartheid, artistic integrity alone is not enough, and the writer owes a further responsibility to the struggle over how that society is lived.

3. Caught between two opposing orthodoxies

   The committed writer in a repressive society is squeezed by two demands for conformity at once. One is the state's censorship, and the other is the liberation movement's expectation that art serve the cause in prescribed ways. Reading a writer's choices as a negotiation between these two pressures shows that freedom is lost from both sides, not only to the censor.

4. White commitment requires relearning, not leadership

   Gordimer holds that a white South African cannot earn a place in the future by acting on behalf of black people or directing their liberation. The white person must accept black leadership, relearn their own identity, and join the struggle as a participant rather than a benefactor. Liberal goodwill that keeps whites in the role of dispensers of change reproduces the hierarchy it claims to oppose.

5. The banning and unbanning of Burger's Daughter

   In 1979 South Africa's censors banned Gordimer's novel 'Burger's Daughter', which follows the daughter of a communist activist and reproduces a pamphlet from the Soweto students' uprising. Within months the Publications Appeal Board lifted the ban. Gordimer's account shows censorship calibrated by how many people, and which people, would read a work rather than by what it said.

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