Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
It is exceptional for two writers from the same country to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in quick succession. The news of J M Coetzee winning the 2003 Nobel makes South Africa one of the few countries that has achieved this honour, following the award of the prize, in 1991, to Nadine Gordimer.
It is interesting and even intriguing that the two South African winners are white. I believe there is a psychological element at play here. Nadine Gordimer is a white writer who had the courage to write about the devastating effects of Apartheid on the lives of South Africans. In all her writings she has marshalled a strong opposition to Apartheid.
In 1952 she published The Soft Voice of the Serpent, a collection of short stories which recounted suffering under the racist regime. This collection of short stories was followed in 1953 by a novel, The Lying Days, in which she dealt with the enduring tension in South Africa between personal isolation and a commitment to social justice. In other words, between alienation and fruitless efforts at engagement. This tension, according to critics and literary historians, produced a numbness caused by an unwillingness to accept the situation, the inability to change it, and the refusal of exile.
But Coetzee is different. He won the Nobel (and previously two Booker Prizes) not for his anti-apartheid stand, but, in the words of the Swedish Academy for being "a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel nationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilisation". Coetzee's novels "captured the anguish of inner lives against the backdrop of a changing social order". One sentence arrested me in the Swedish citation: a comment on Coetzee's ability to write fiction that "in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider".
Literature in post- independence Africa has generally been of the serious literary variety. Before the achievement of independence, all anti- colonialist and anti- imperialist writings were received with enthusiasm. Both white and black South African writers, such as Alex Lagumu, Peter Abrahams and Nadine Gordimer, emphasised the dehumanising effect of Apartheid upon black South African .
Several writers, particularly white South Africans, took a leftist position. In fact some of them, like Ruth First, were members of the Communist Party. Others, however, had a different motive for writing. Their business as writers, in the words of Peter Abrahams, was with people, "with human thoughts, conflicts, longings and strivings, not with causes".
Now we come to J M Coetzee and ask where he fits in. On what grounds did he win the Booker Prize twice -- in 1983 and 1990 -- and now the Nobel? After the publication of his novel Disgrace he fell out with the ruling African National Congress. The novel, which won the Booker Prize, gives a bleak, despairing picture of post-Apartheid South Africa. The president, according to the Sunday Times, was enraged by the book's description of the gang rape of a white woman by black men, and by its mention of the violent eviction of white farmers from their land by squatters.
But despite taking offence, President Mbeki rushed to congratulate Coetzee, hailing his award as a triumph for Africa. The president declared "On behalf of the South African nation and indeed the continent of Africa, we salute our latest Nobel Laureate and bask with him in the glory radiating from this recognition." Nadine Gordimer concurred: "It's an honour for the country and it gives some indication of how South African literature has developed, particularly under the difficult conditions we had."
Coetzee did not go to claim his Booker prizes in person at the ceremonies organised for the occasion. Coetzee, remarks the Sunday Times, "is so inward that he's almost autistic. Nobody is taking bets on him turning up to claim his Novel prize in Stockholm."
