Four Great Women Authors

Instead of my customary chat with you about a single book and author, in honor of women’s month, I want to talk about four great women writers of the past fifty years. Choosing four is both difficult and arbitrary, so instead of choosing authors whom most of you will have heard about and read, writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich, I’ve decided to talk about four whom you will be less likely to have read, but who have written such important works during the past fifty years. I’ve intentionally chosen three foreign born authors and only one American; they are Nadine Gordimer, Penelope Lively, Edwidge Danticat, and Toni Cade Bambara.

Nadine Gordimer certainly belongs on any list of great authors of the 20th century. Born and raised in South Africa, she was without doubt one of the most important anti-apartheid authors of her time. Indeed, although she won both the Booker and the Nobel prizes, her books were banned in South Africa for many years, and she was urged by many to leave her homeland because they feared for her life. Undaunted, she continued to live there and to write, in spite of having to send her books out of the country for publication. She has also written bravely, fearlessly, about changes in Africa since the official end of apartheid, and about the psychological tensions of whites and blacks living and working together. Gordimer has a wonderful mind, and any reader who knows philosophy will see how well she understands and uses philosophy in her novels. My view is that you can begin with any book Gordimer has written, either working back from her latest works published in the 90s, or beginning with early works such as Burger’s Daughter or her Booker prize-winning The Conservationist. She has also written several collections of short stories, and I have yet to find a book of hers that I did not thoroughly (and usually immediately) enjoy. Perhaps my favorite of all is A Sport of Nature, published in 1987; feminism is much more a theme of this novel than of others of hers I recall, and she talks bravely, insightfully, about romantic relationships between powerful, aspiring black leaders and white woman who are dedicated to the eradication of racism while they are themselves targets of suspicion both because of race and gender. In spite of the quality and quantity of her work, in my experience she is still relatively unknown among American readers.

Partly so that it won’t seem that I am concentrating only on older writers, my next choice is a very young author, Edwidge Danticat. Born in 1969 in Haiti, Danticat came to the U.S. when she was twelve years old, but her early works concentrate on her native country. I can still recall the chill I felt both during and after the reading of Krick? Krack! Although the language is beautiful and haunting, the story is about desperate lives lived in Haiti. I have not yet read Danticat’s work directed at young readers, Behind the Mountains, but her other works are almost unbearably sad, and yet told with a grace and beauty that both cuts through and magnifies the sadness. Her second work, The Farming of Bones, shows how well she listened to the stories told to her by her elders, since it is about Haitians living in the Dominican Republic in the thirties and forties. We certainly need to hear the voices of those who have experienced first hand the economic oppression visited upon them by European and American market economies. While it takes a bit of strength to listen to the voice of Danticat, it should also convince us readers how important it is to hear such voices as well as how beautifully they can write.

The third writer whom I wish to talk about today is a writer of almost unbelievable skill. It continues to surprise me how few of my students have heard of this giant. Her name is Penelope Lively, and she continues to write and publish at quite an incredible rate. Born in Cairo in 1933, like Danticat she moved from her birthplace when she was twelve, although she was born of English parents and returned to England because of the intense war actions in Egypt during World War II. She began her writing career by publishing children’s fiction, and did not publish any adult fiction until the 1970s. I did not discover her until the late 90s when I stumbled across her Booker prize winning Moon Tiger published in 1987. Once I had found her, I read up everything I could get my hands on, and not once have I been disappointed. I have used her fairly recent novel, The Photograph, in several of my classes. It was published in 2003. Lively writes about lived time, about the ways in which past and present merge into each other, with perhaps greater skill than any other writer I have read. Martin Heidegger insists that we are beings-in-time, that being in time is one of the universal and necessary conditions of what it is to be human. (He calls these conditions existentialia.) Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant also recognized the incredible importance of temporality in human life, but no one, I think, describes how we live in time with the detail and acuity that Lively does. Moon Tiger begins (and ends) with a woman in her eighties who is living in a rest home, simply another old, dying woman to the staff there. But her daily lived-life has next to nothing to do with that dismal, sedentary existence. It is her past in Egypt and England that occupies all of her waking and dreaming moments. Having lived as a writer who concentrated on political history, she now questions the very meaning of history. Is there such a thing? Can it possibly be written? What has the history of wars or of great political figures to do with the lives of ordinary people, with their histories? Again, I would recommend to you anything she has written, including her skillful and labyrinthian short stories, one collection of which is called Pack of Cards. Just citing a couple other titles will suggest her preoccupation with time and memory: City of the Mind; Spiderwebb, Passing On.

And finally, let me mention one American writer who unfortunately died in 1995. She was only fifty-five when she died, but she will be remembered as one of the most important writers and activists of the seventies and eighties. Her name is Toni Cade Bambara, and I first ran across her by reading a wonderful collection of short stories entitled Gorilla My Love. I used that book in teaching philosophy in literature almost every quarter for several years after I discovered her. Most of the stories are told through the eyes of a street-smart and tough little girl who runs and talks faster than anyone else around her. Bambara writes in the language she learned as a child, and her ear for dialect is truly wonderful. One reviewer of Bambara says of her: “Ms. Bambara grabs you by the throat ... she dazzles, she charms.” Yes, she has lots to tell us, and she does it with dazzle and charm, but also with deep insight and tenderness. During a particularly bleak period for me politically, when it seemed to me that the male-dominated new-left had abandoned the fight, I happened to read Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters. In that novel, strong, black women encounter a kind of cynicism emanating from disenchanted male activists much like what I thought I saw around me, and they react immediately and forcefully. They refuse to hide or deny the sexism they experience in the African-American community, even though they are told that they must keep a united front, that sexism is a problem only among whites. And they also refuse to give up or hunker down or make suspicious deals with The Man. I came out of that reading with a new sense of strength and purpose. Aside from her writing, Bambara was a community activist and freedom fighter all through her life. Both tough and tender, both critical and understanding, she was a fine person as well as a great writer.

There are so many names I have not mentioned: Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Smiley, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, May Sarton, Iris Murdoch and a host of other great women writers. So many voices of so many bright and strong women. They have saved me from despair and pointed out directions for me, and I just plain love reading them.

The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer

I want to talk to you this morning about an author whom you have probably read in the past, but whom you may have forgotten since apartheid ended in South Africa. The author’s name is Nadine Gordimer, and the name of the novel is The House Gun.

In my estimation, Gordimer is one of the giants of the 20th century. Unlike artists who insist that they don’t want their work ‘tainted’ by political content, hinting that such works then become simply propaganda, Gordimer is and has always been a political writer. Indeed, her works were banned in her own country until apartheid came to an end, including the novel that won her the Booker prize in England--a wonderful novel about the colonization and exploitation of Africa, entitled The Conservationist.

Gordimer understands very well that the explo

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itation of Africans did not end with the official end of apartheid; she understands economic imperialism as well as anyone, and she knows that it does not end by government edict. Gordimer is not a writer for those who read simply to be entertained; not only is she tough politically, she also writes dense and complicated prose that requires close attention even of experienced readers. Often enough, her writing is simply page after page of stream of consciousness, the stream varying from character to character. Like a very few writers can do, instead of saying everything as slowly and as carefully as possible, Gordimer is an optimal user of the language, and she says as much as she can as fast as she can and invites her reader to keep up with her. She has an incredible vocabulary, a wonderful understanding of world economies, a fine grasp of (even very esoteric) philosophy, and an awe-inspiring grasp of human psychology.

There is no formula for understanding this novel short of close attentive reading. Two upper middle class white South Africans, a woman doctor and her upper level businessman husband are sailing comfortably along in their lives, drifting from each other (as old couples often do), often enough as bored with themselves as with each other, and despite rather liberal political leanings that make them cluck and shake their heads over events they read about in the paper or catch on the telly, they do very little other than send the occasional check to ‘worthy’ causes. They are above the fray. And then, out of nowhere, they are summoned one day to the police station and told that their precious only son has been charged with murder. Though they know, of course, that there must be some mistake, some confusion, they hurry to his side to rescue him.

I won’t be telling you much of the story if I let you know now that the son confesses to the killing! Apparently, he has killed a young man who lives with him and a group of other young people in a house and cottage rented by the whole group. The gun used in the killing has been located, tossed apparently carelessly into the bushes outside the house. Somehow, a woman with whom the son has been involved is at the center of things, having apparently slept with the murdered man, rather publicly, on a divan in the living room of the house, and now the man is dead.

When they visit the son, full of condolences for him and outrage at the obviously mistaken authorities, he is oddly calm and quiet, not denying the charges, not reassuring his parents of his innocence. And what is even worse, the semi-rich white couple are told to hire a black attorney who is famous for handling such cases. As the story begins to unfold, this clean, white, upstanding couple has to admit first that their son has done the killing (or will not deny it), and, even worse, that he has also been involved homosexually with the man he is accused of killing! What is worse, the charge of murder, or the sordid details of his bisexual life? And which of the parents is to blame for the twisted behavior of the boy?

The father, at least, has the refuge of his childhood Catholicism which he has not discarded despite his wives half amused, half disgusted dismissal of all such superstitious nonsense. Is it her fault, he wonders, that the boy has turned out so? She has been a rather cold mother, occupied so much with her patients and her practice and her (isn’t it unfeminine) lack of spirituality? Both parents ask questions, of themselves, and if not overtly of one another, then in their covert reveries. And this facile and too well dressed African attorney who asks such personal questions, and implies so much with both what he says and what he doesn’t, what are they to make of him?

I think rather than trying to tell you more of the story, I am simply going to read a rather lengthy passage which I hope will give you the flavor of the entire novel and of the questions these people have to ask themselves. The Senior Counsel referred to is the attorney, Hamilton Motsamai. The writing is abbreviated, a kind of short-hand stream of consciousness style, and I think this one passage will give you some feel for the whole and for the attention required by the reader. I only hope I can read it in a way that will carry its sense and its impact.

As you know, Senior Counsel said. But what concern had it been of theirs, except in the general way of civilized people—privately uncertain whether crime could be deterred without the ultimate retribution—dutifully supporting human rights and enlightened social practices where these had been violated in the country’s past. There had been so much cruelty enacted in the name of the State they had lived in, so many fatal beatings, mortal interrogations, a dying man driven across a thousand kilometres naked in a police van; common-law criminals singing through the night before the morning of execution, hangings taking place in Pretoria while a second slice of bread pops up from the toaster—the penalty unknown individuals paid was not in question compared with state crime. None of it had anything to do with them. Murderers, child batterers and rapists; if Dr. Lindgard [the wife] once or twice had professional contact with their victims and related to her husband the damage that had been done, neither she nor he had in their orbit, even remotely any likelihood of knowing the criminal perpetrators. (And perhaps, after all, they ought to be done away with for the general good?)

The Death Penalty. And now, too, it still seemed to have nothing to do with them or with their son. They had been obsessively preoccupied with why he did what he did, how he, one like themselves, their own, could carry out an act of horror—they had been unable to think further, only abstractly, confusedly now and then half-glanced at what a penalty could be, for him. The penalty had seemed to be the prison cell they had not seen, could not see, and the visitors’ room which was the only place of his material existence, for them. Even Harald; who in his religious faith, concerned himself with the act in relation go God’s forgiveness, and committed the heresy of denying that this grace, for the perpetrator, exists: ‘Not for me.’ The Death Penalty: distilled at the bottom of the bottle pushed to the back of the cupboard.

Hamilton Motsamai has left them. Door closed behind him, footsteps became inaudible, car must have driven away through the security gates of the townhouse complex. He was all there was between them and the Death Penalty. Not only had he come from the Other Side; everything had come to them from the Other Side, the nakedness to the final disaster: powerlessness, helplessness, before the law. The queer sense Harald had had while he waited for Claudia in the secular cathedral of the courts’ foyer, of being one among the father of thieves and murderers was now confirmed ... The truth of all of this was that he and his wife belonged, now, to the other side of privilege. Neither whiteness, nor observance of the teachings of the Father and Son, nor the pious respectability of liberalism, nor money, that had kept them in safety—that other form of segregation—could change their status.

Well, a sample at least of this wonderfully complex novel, whether or not my reading did it justice.