Volume 28, Number 13 · August 13, 1981
Fall of a House
By X
July's People
by Nadine Gordimer
Viking, 160 pp., $10.95
Writing in South Africa, in that blighted country whose own rhetoric is fixed in droughty, barren images, one starts with the fact that language can become a kind of sabotage. White or Black or Coloured, English-speaking or Afrikaans-speaking or speaking any one of a dozen native languages, one starts, even in the best of faith, in bad faith. The languages of South Africa have been consonant with race and caste, owner and worker, citizen and servant, for so long that language itself—the language one speaks and writes—is a weapon there, quite apart from those details of identity and ideology with which it happens to coincide. Words smother, sacrifices to apartheid, in the closed context of the expectations they arouse. They can sanction such perverse exaggerations, such profound contempt, that anyone who wants to write in South Africa is left with the home truth that language has lost its metaphoric flexibility and assumed, instead, a kind of brute, synecdochic power. By now, to write in South Africa is by definition political.
Review, 4681 words
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