Living in Hope and History Read Free Page A

such an orthodoxy as ‘apartheid’ or, more accurately, ‘anti-apartheid’ fiction. In the long struggle against apartheid, it has been recognized that an oppressed people need the confidence of cultural backing. Literature, fiction including plays and poetry, became what is known as ‘a weapon of struggle’. The current debate among us now is between those who, perceiving that the cost was the constraint of the writer’s imaginative powers within what was seen narrowly as relevant to the political struggle, think the time has come for writers to release themselves if they are to be imaginatively equal to the fullness of human life predicated for thefuture, and others who believe literature still must be perceived as a weapon in the hands and under the direction of the liberation movement come to power in a future democracy.
    The revolutionary and writer Albie Sachs, with the undeniable authority of one who lost an arm and the sight of one eye in that struggle, has gone so far as to call, if half-seriously (not even the car-bomb was able to damage his lively humour), for a five-year ban on the slogan ‘culture is a weapon of struggle’. But, of course, there are some writers who have been—I adapt Seamus Heaney’s definition to my own context—‘guerrillas of the imagination’: in their fiction serving the struggle for freedom by refusing any imposed orthodoxy of subject and treatment, but attempting to take unfettered creative grasp of the complex ‘states of things’ in which, all through people’s lives, directly and indirectly, in dark places and neon light, that struggle has taken place.
    Since I am bound to be taken to account about this in relation to my own fiction, I had better answer for myself now. As a citizen, a South African actively opposed to racism all my life, and a supporter and now member of the African National Congress, in my
conduct
and my
actions
I have submitted voluntarily and with self-respect to the discipline of the liberation movement.
    For my
fiction
I have claimed and practised my integrity to the free transformation of reality, in whatever forms and modes of expression I need. There, my commitment has been and is to make sense of life as I know it and observe it and experience it. In my ventures into non-fiction, my occasional political essays, my political partisanship has no doubt shown bias, perhaps a selectivity of facts. But then, as I have said before, and stand by: nothing I write in such factual pieces will be as true as my fiction.
    So if my fiction and that of other writers has served legitimately the politics I believe in, it has been because the imaginativetransformations of fiction, in the words of the Swedish writer Per Wastberg, ‘help people understand their own natures and know they are not powerless . . .’
    â€˜Every work of art is liberating,’ he asserts, speaking for all of us who write. That should be the understanding on which our fiction enters into any relationship with politics, however passionate the involvement may be. The transformation of the imagination must never ‘belong’ to any establishment, however just, fought-for, and longed-for. Pasternak’s words should be our credo:
    When seats are assigned to passion and vision
    on the day of the great assembly
    Do not reserve a poet’s position:
    It is dangerous, if not empty
.
    â€”1988

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

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    A few months ago I was a participant in an international gathering in Paris to evaluate the status of the artist in the world. There we were on an elegant stage before a large audience; among us was a famous musician, a distinguished sculptor, several poets and writers of repute, a renowned dancer-choreographer. We had come together literally from the ends of the earth. At this stately opening session we were flanked by the