Nadine Gordimer Analysis

Chapter 2
Political Views of Nadine Gordimer

2.0 Introduction This chapter attempts to explore the political scenario of the times Nadine Gordimer lived and her political views. Gordimer and her White identity, her proclivity towards liberalism and its disavowal later on, portrayal of the attitudes of Black Consciousness and the effects of the same on the ‘white liberals’ are the important areas stressed in the chapter. Another crucial element is, how has her transformed political views been expressed in her fiction.
2.1 Life and Politics of Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer, Nobel prize laureate for literature in 1991, was born in the small town of Springs on the Witwatersrand, where her father, a Latvian-Jewish immigrant, had a jeweller’s and watchmaker’s business. Nadine Gordimer has stated that she writes about people, not ideas; but her work has a large political content. She has not only dealt with her contemporary reality, which was the reality of apartheid, but also her works reflect her being troubled about whether, and how, the races in South Africa can and should live together. In 1959, when she found herself among the liberal minority threatened by two opposing nationalisms—white supremacism and Africanism—she wrote an essay entitled “Where Do Whites Fit In?” In it she asked, “What are we to do? Shall we go? Shall we leave Africa?” Some wanted to leave at that time, she noted, and some “have gone already.” She herself, she said, varying between a desire to be