Living in Hope and History Read Free

responsibility of what we know. What we know beyond surface reality has to become what—again in Serote’s words—‘We want the world to know’; we must in this, our inescapable relation with politics, ‘page for wisdom through the stubborn night’.
    At its crudest and most easily identifiable, the stubborn night is politically-inspired censorship, and yet, in some countries where no writer is locked up or his writings banned, and censorshipis minimal and open to challenge by the law, fiction remains threatened by the power of the lie. Orwell alerted us to the insidious destruction of truth in the distortion of what words mean; but 1984 passed years ago, and he is remembered more for the cute cartoon movie of an
Animal Farm
than for a prophetic warning about the abuse of language. Harold Pinter spoke recently of ‘a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies. The ruthless and cynical mutilation and degradation of human beings, both in spirit and body . . . these actions are justified by rhetorical gambits, sterile terminology and concepts of power which stink. Are we ever going to look at the language we use, I wonder? Is it within our capabilities to do so? . . . Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality—to distort what
is
—to distort what
happens
—because we fear it? . . . I believe it’s because of the way we use language that we have got ourselves into this terrible trap, where words like freedom, democracy and Christian values are still used to justify barbaric and shameful policies and acts.’
    The writer has no reason to be if, for him or her, reality remains outside language. An accurate and vital correspondence between what is and the perception of the writer is what the fiction writer has to seek, finding the real meaning of words to express ‘the states of things’, shedding the ready-made concepts smuggled into language by politics.
    All very fine in theory, yes—but how would you refer, in a novel, to the term ‘final solution’, coined by the Nazis; the term ‘Bantustans’, coined by a South African government in the sixties to disguise the dispossession of blacks of their citizenship rightsand land; the term ‘constructive engagement’ coined by the government of the U.S.A. in the seventies in its foreign policy that evaded outright rejection of apartheid—how would you do this without paragraphs of explanation (which have no place in a novel) of what their counterfeits of reality actually were?
    The false currency of meaning jingles conveniently in our vocabularies; but it is no small change. It becomes accepted values, for which writers bear responsibility. Every fiction writer has to struggle to expose them by discarding them, for the reader, in favour of the reality of the ‘states of things’, since generally journalism—supposed to be ‘fact’ as opposed to ‘fiction’—won’t. Here, on the primal level of language itself, by which we became the first self-questioning animals, able to assess our own behaviour, is where fiction finds its footing in relation to politics.
    My own country, South Africa, provides what can be cited as the paradigm of problems of the full development of the relationship: the wild affair between fiction and politics, with its embraces and repulsions, distress and celebration, loyalty and betrayal. Perhaps echoes of the debate at present in progress over what post-apartheid fiction will be, ought to be, have relevance for the outside world. Of course, the very term ‘post-apartheid’ fiction reveals the acceptance that there has been