Living in Hope and History (30 page)

Dip a finger in a dark viscous substance and write on the window of our world OIL.

There always has been awe of gold, a mythology of gold as the ultimate in material value; gold as the alchemy in which human fate is bound up. At the end of this century it is oil that should have that significance.

Oil is ominously bound up with our time; it was the base of the Nobel fortune from which came the Peace Prize . . . and undreamt-of means of destruction. It is the ‘why' of many wars of our day; of the huge profit of sanctions-busters who fuel those wars, in every sense, in defiance of sanctions imposed by international treaties and the efforts of international peace-keeping organizations. Repressive regimes go unreproached by democratic countries who are dependent upon them for oil. The horrors of the Nigerian regime, in this very decade, went virtually uncensured until November 1995. Men, women, and children die, for oil, without knowing it. What lit the lamps and brought our ancestors out of darkness, powered the machines and warmed the homes through modern times—this benefice is our pervasive source of bloody conflict, the low-profile version of the other means of human advancement turned to the service of violence, atomic power.

In human relations, the most intimate form, shared by all, has been transformed for us. We have sexual freedom as never
before known to any generation. We have easy means of enjoying sex without conception, democratically available devices for this supplied in vending machines, as for cigarettes or chocolate bars, in the streets of many cities.

We even have routine means of creating conception, if we wish, in laboratories, when couples desire children and cannot achieve this in their own sexual relations.

Homoerotic and lesbian relations are widely tolerated as a right of choice and non-discrimination, if disapproved of by many people. Condemning edicts of certain religious leaders are contested by some of their own followers, just as the edicts against birth control are ignored by them. Abortion, regarded as the democratic right of women to control of their bodies, is contested by many groups on the premise of the right to life of the unborn, but abortion is no longer a taboo subject locked away in the secret which sex used to be.

Yet with sexual freedom granted by Freud, by law, by medical discoveries, we now have the ultimate inhibition: death through sex. AIDS. An incurable disease. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. How did we acquire it? Is it something for which we have no behavioural responsibility? A mutation in that swarming soup of lower life-forms in which we have our existence, but over which we have no control? Something which we then host helplessly in our flesh and blood? Or is it something we have done, brought upon ourselves in the way we have lived?

Inevitably, there are some who see it in moral terms, not only the direct ones of sexual promiscuity (and no-one can say for certain that we have become more promiscuous than previous generations, since perhaps we are just more open to scrutiny on the subject). Have we perhaps abused our other but contingent freedoms—moving about the world taking as our right disregard for the social and sexual mores of other races and peoples, seeing concourse across borders and classes not as an
exchange of cultures but as a sweeping aside of these, since differences are most easily dealt with by dissolving them in respect for nothing, none, neither yours nor mine?

Have we assumed to
act without consequences
, whether trampling monuments or seducing, become mercenaries of moral exploitation disguised as freedom—drive off, hop on the next plane, no care for what you have broken or what, broken in yourself, you take away.

It is human, if primitive, to have an inkling fear that we are somewhere to blame. If medical science is to lift the death sentence of AIDS, shall we in some way be responsible to ensure, in the whole context of our morals and mores, that it shall not reinstate itself?

In what men and women cannot deal with, they traditionally resort to God; I use the singular conveniently for
the gods
, the forms in which highest being is conceived by different faiths.

This resort is surely problematic in the sum of our century. In its mid-decades, the intellectuals of the Western world, particularly France, announced that God was dead. Life had long ceased to be a performance before the judgment of the gods, as it had been in antiquity and later centuries, and we were performing only for ourselves, in lack of faith, without hope of the grace of higher judgment.

This was a Eurocentric, Judeo-Christian point of view; certainly ignored the continued existence, in faith, of the gods worshipped in the religions of the largest section of the world's population, the gods of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and others. Indeed, in the 1960s the young people of the West turned to look for God elsewhere, sought some spiritual authority in so-called conversions to Buddhism whose inspirational comfort was more stylish than ontological, a travesty of the real faith itself.

But it is true that in the nineties the churches of the Christian establishment are often empty; I'm told that in Britain some are
being utilised as concert halls for classical music instead of sermons and prayers. Even in Catholic countries the congregations are mainly old women, except for the extravaganzas of the Pope in St. Peter's in Rome. There seems to be a revival of observance even among liberal-minded Jews, on the evidence of my own country, South Africa; and political change, freedom to gather in common secular purpose where the church was the sole haven under apartheid, has not diminished the high attendance of black South Africans at the churches of many denominations and sects.

Yet in the Judeo-Christian world religion does appear to have a decisive place in sects alone, as an aspect of conservatism: the revived ancient fundamentalism of ultra-orthodox Jews and the new fundamentalism of Born-again Christians in the United States of America, while some African nationalists rally ancestral beliefs against the betrayals by Christianity they have experienced.

It is no break with the history of religion that people of different faiths engage in violent fundamentalist conflict with one another for political as well as religious reasons.

But in the final quarter of our century religious fundamentalism has joined forces with political terrorism in an unprecedented way, taken up terrorist tactics of pursuing its ends anywhere and everywhere, a law unto itself, an international threat to peace and life on street corners, on aircraft, even in schools, far from its country or countries of origin. Muslim fundamentalism, the distortion of a great religion by fanatics aberrant within its hierarchy, incited further by the power-hungry, conducts a campaign that stalks the world. It seeks to sabotage the historical human necessity of initiatives for territorial justice and coexistence between Israel and Palestine—and, again ironically, is to great extent reinforced in this by Jewish fundamentalists. It declares the
fatwa
of death to Muslim writers and academic scholars branded as heretics wherever they may be, and threatens the existence or establishment of democratic secular freedom in a growing number of countries.
The sum of our century includes the looming of a new Inquisition, not, this time, in the name of Christianity.

Our century has been ‘without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record, both by the scale, frequency and length of the warfare which filled it, barely ceasing for a moment in the 1920s, but also by the unparalleled scale, frequency and length of the human catastrophes it produced, from the greatest famines in history to systematic genocide.'

I quote here one better able to judge objectively, perhaps, than I—an eminent historian, Eric Hobsbawm.

It is also the century in which greater technological advance and greater knowledge of human intelligence have taken place in a shorter span than any other century. The conclusion—and our existential conclusion as creatures of our time—is that humankind has not known how to control the marvels of its achievements. What was written in prison by the great leader and thinker, Jawaharlal Nehru, remains for us. He defined this as ‘the problems of individual and social life, of harmonious living, of a proper balancing of an individual's inner and outer life, of an adjustment of the relation between individuals and groups, of a continuous becoming something better and higher, of social development, of the
ceaseless adventure of man.'

Now that the deeds are done, the hundred years ready to seal what will be recorded of us, our last achievement could be in the spirit of taking up, in ‘the ceaseless adventure of man', control of our achievements, questioning honestly and reflecting upon the truth of what has been lived through, what has been done. There is no other base on which to found the twenty-first century with any chance to make it a better one.

—
Jawaharlal Memorial Lecture, 1995

 

 

 

THREE IN A BED: FICTION, MORALS, AND POLITICS

 

[
4
]
‘The whale is the agent . . .'
Harry Levin, ‘The Jonah Complex',
The Power of Blackness
(Vintage Books, 1960), p. 215.

[
7
]
‘My book is going to sell . . .' Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857
, selected, edited and trans. by Francis Steegmuller (Belknap Press, Harvard, 1990), p. 224.

[
8
]
‘undirected play . . .'
Seamus Heaney,
The Government of the Tongue
(Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 96.

[
9
]
‘as not having to do . . .'
From a quote in my notebooks, source not noted.

[
9
]
‘Russia became a garden . . .'
Bely quoted by Peter Levi in
Boris Pasternak
(Hutchinson, 1990), p. 142.

[
9
]
‘We want the glorious . . .'
Quoted by Evgeny Pasternak,
Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years 1930-60
(Collins Harvill, 1990), p. 38.

[
10
]
‘A sincere but perverted . . .'
Claudio Magris,
Inferences from a Sabre
, trans. Mark Thompson (Polygon, 1990).

[
10
]
‘I told him
My Sister, Life . . .' Quoted by Peter Levi in
Boris Pasternak
(Hutchinson, 1990), p. 100.

[
11
]
‘The lie is quite as real . . .'
Magris,
Inferences
, p. 43.

[
11
]
‘We page through
. . .' Mongane Wally Serote, A
Tough Tale
(Kliptown Books, 1987), p. 7.

[
11
]
‘We want the world . . .'
Ibid.

[
12
]
‘a disease at the very centre . . .'
Harold Pinter, broadcast on Britain's Channel 4 programme
Opinion
, May 31, 1990.

[
14
]
‘guerrillas of the imagination . . .'
Seamus Heaney, ‘Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam',
The Government of the Tongue
, p. 73.

[
15
]
‘help people . . .‘
Per Wastberg, addressing PEN International Writers' Day, June 2, 1990.

[
15
]
‘When seats are assigned . . .'
Quoted by Peter Levi in
Boris Pasternak, p. 159

THE STATUS OF THE WRITER IN THE WORLD
TODAY: WHICH WORLD? WHOSE WORLD?

[
19
]
they show both the writer and his or her people
what they are . . . Paraphrased by Vladimir Nabokov in
Nikolai Gogol
(New Directions, 1961), p. 129.

[
20
]
the first congress
. . . Congress of African Writers and Artists, the Sorbonne, Paris, under the auspices of
Presence Africaine
, 1956.

[
25
]
‘imaginary history . . .'
Lebona Mosia, ‘Time to Be Truly Part of Africa',
The Star
, Johannesburg, September 26, 1997.

[
28
]
With the exceptions of the pre-Hispanic civilisations
. . . Octavio Paz,
In Light of India
, trans. Eliot Weinberger (Harcourt Brace, 1997).

[
28
]
‘Every civilisation . . .'
Henri Lopès,
Le Lys et le Flamboyant
(Editions du Seuil, 1997). My translation from the French.

[
29
]
‘What you expect . . .'
Amu Djoleto, ‘A Passing Thought',
Messages: Poems from Ghana
, ed. Kofi Awoonor and Adali-Mortty (African Writers Series, 1971).

REFERENCES: THE CODES OF CULTURE

[
39
]
‘to make the reader . . .' S/Z
, trans. Richard Miller, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974).

[
39
]
As Richard Howard sums up
. . . ‘A Note on
S/Z'
, by Roland Batches, p. X1.

[
40
]
‘To survey his writings . . .'
Harry Levin, ‘From Obsession to Imagination: The Psychology of the Writer',
Michigan Quarterly Review
X11:3 (Summer 1974), p. 90.

[
40
]
to survey his
. . . Harry Levin, ‘From Obsession to Imagination', p. 90.

[
40
]
to make the reader
. . . Barthes,
S/Z
, p. 21.

[
40
]
‘Words are symbols . . .'
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Congress',
The Book of Sand
, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (Penguin, 1979), p. 33.

[
42
]
Italo Calvino wrote
. . . ‘Whom Do We Write For?',
The Literature Machine
, trans. Patrick Creagh (Secker & Warburg, 1987), p. 86.

[
45
]
‘another body of knowledge
. . .' John Berger, ‘An Explanation',
Pig Earth
(Pantheon, 1980), p. 9.

[
45
]
‘She writes the kind of fiction . . .'
Lorrie Moore, review of Bobbie Ann Mason's
Love Life
in
The New York Times Book Review
, March 12, 1989.