|
|
 Re: الـصـور لا تــكـذب أبــــداً .....(الجزء الثاني)... (Re: سيف اليزل برعي البدوي)
|
A SPORT OF NATURE'' opens with a girl called Kim discarding her name. On a train coming home from Rhodesia to South Africa, ''she threw Kim up to the rack with her school panama and took on Hillela.'' This is the first stir within the chrysalis of the seemingly ordinary child who will become an African legend, a mythic figure of Nadine Gordimer's Promised Land. The names are carefully chosen. Kim is Ms. Gordimer's witty reference to Kipling's famous tale of colonial life. Her family has also called the child Hillela, a name she has never used, a name meant to honor her great grandfather, a Zionist, who came steerage to Cape Town fleeing the Cossacks in a forgotten pogrom, but the girl Hillela, with no mind for history, simply wants to be different. The change of name is a beautifully observed adolescent gesture, but it is also the first move in a powerful novel of awakening, emergence, and, in so far as fiction can make it possible, a call for a new order.
Nadine Gordimer began to write in a small mining town in South Africa when she was 9. Declared a sickly child, she was taken out of school and so it began - the long energetic career of a fiercely intelligent writer. And a natural one. For though her readers may take special pleasure in her brightness, Ms. Gordimer's true gift for the writing of fiction is what makes us stay the course. ''A Sport of Nature'' is fully a novel, grand-scale, rich and demanding, but it is also a thoughtfully documented history of postcolonial African nations and a consoling fantasy of what could, what might emerge out of the prolonged suffering we witness in our time. Never a polemic, the novel is the mature achievement of the once isolated provincial child, the once politically uninvolved writer of accomplished New Yorker stories. We might say the novelist has evolved, adapted, triumphantly come of age, much like her heroine Hillela. MS. GORDIMER continues to write from South Africa: it is that tortured country she renders for us so precisely - its people (white, colored, black), its landscape (veld, black townships, suburban swimming pools). In ''A Sport of Nature,'' more than ever before, it would seem that Ms. Gordimer would like to record her clarity of mind, her reasonable discourse, along with her skillful make-believe of plot and character. Quite simply, Hillela begins as a charming waif taken in by her aunts -Olga, uppity and English; Pauline, a hard-working liberal. The problem child ends up as the impressive wife of a heroic African president. To begin with, the novel's structure is episodic, forcefully so, not an advance wherein the heroine (Pamela, Moll Flanders) each time chalks up the losses and gains in matters of morals or worldly knowledge.
Hillela, as we might presume from the title, comes into the world ''a departure from the parent stock or type . . . a spontaneous mutation.'' Not spoiled by either Pauline's politically correct leaflets or Olga's ''art dealer's catalogues, giving evidence of the survival of rare and beautiful objects,'' she is a girl without guilt or remorse, without the old responses that should tie her to her culture, for in some way her family cannot perceive, it is not Hillela's culture. Only once in this novel does she say ''My fault,'' confessing that she made love with Sasha, her first cousin, but then - '' 'When they found us,' She gasped, laughing. 'It was like the three bears. Who's been sleeping in my bed?' '' Turned out of the house by Pauline (she of the great social conscience), Hillela takes to the world, a curious and lively place, with healthy self-interest. IT is now, as she disappears from the small domestic novel, that we are drawn into a larger game by a narrative voice, wise, often amused, but driven to record history, public and private. We are to have a guide: the journey is long and Hillela is an original - we cannot recognize her type. She falls in with one man or another, one set or another, passing from the psychiatrist who finds her engaging the minute he sets eyes on her selling ''The World Atlas and Encyclopedia of Modern Knowledge''; passing on to a debonair ambassador, to a tricky journalist with an Irish passport. We see her as a creature of circumstance, but Hillela is never a victim, never used. ''A natural mistress,'' says the ambassador's wife. ''She's a-moral,'' says Pauline, covering herself with a fitting liberal disclaimer, ''I mean in the sense of the morality of this country.''
True enough, but what that judgment - and all the others leveled at Hillela - fails to admit is that the old rules, the old standards, do not apply. Betrayed by the journalist, she remains a political innocent - invulnerable. Her abandonment becomes the occasion for her move into exile. Hillela turns up on Tamarisk Beach, a refugee hangout somewhere on the West African coast. A girl in a tattered yellow bikini, she is somehow inauthentic among the real dissidents - blacks and whites with an international grab bag of ideologies, plotting behind the lines, biding their time between regimes, all fully enlisted in whatever cause. Still unaffected by history, living so completely in the present, she begins to absorb the political lives around her, easily, naturally, much as she has absorbed the lives of her men.
Ms. Gordimer has always written well about ####### -the idle attraction to young girls of Mehring in ''The Conservationist''; the disaffection of husband and wife in ''July's People''; Rosa Burger's love affair that in part sets her free in ''Burger's Daughter.'' Here the sexual dimension is thematically central. Hillela is sexually gifted, endowed, and because she can detect the moral constriction and the flimflam standard of the society she's grown up in, she trusts the sexual encounter as her proving ground. ''Use what you have to love with, you know? You don't have to try to reach him, help him, teach him - you can't lie, or spy or kill, so what could ever be wrong about it? . . . Those others on the beach; they have no home . . . because they are brave and believe in the other kinds of love, justice, fellow man - and inside each other, making love is the only place we can make, here, that's not just a place to stay.''
It is an attitude both advanced and limited, generous and ruthless. Something is missing in this beautiful, unclassified specimen and that is what the rest of ''A Sport of Nature'' is about. How, in fact, this imperfect woman gains her heroic stature, confronting the world with this daring but merely personal view. Through the exiles on the beach Hillela begins to comprehend, almost as an adaptation, not only the South Africa she rejects but the possibilities of other worlds. Incest, betrayal, even ecstasy have not set their mark on her. ''Nothing really terrible's happened to me,'' Hillela says, and close upon that insight comes her attention to political matters. Here Ms. Gordimer unites sexual energy and political energy in the responsive but undeveloped Hillela. Reading ''A Sport of Nature,'' what comes to mind is George Eliot's view of the novel as ''a set of experiments in life.''
And Ms. Gordimer's complicit narrative voice that directs the reader as it directs the plot is close to the directorial voice of Eliot in ''Daniel Deronda,'' a novel that is also made to carry, akwardly and magnificently, its political message. But Ms. Gordimer's intervention, its brightness of tone and emotional control, may be closer still to Eliot's management in ''Middlemarch.'' As we read on, ''A Sport of Nature'' becomes the big 19th-century novel. There is, in fact, the romantic matter of Hillela's lost mother, Ruth, who ran off to the passionate embrace of a Portuguese singer in Mozambique, kept going back ''to wash off the Calvinism and koshering of this place,'' says Pauline. Ruth's meeting with Hillela, the daughter who has evolved beyond giving up life for #######, is an unusually touching, wry scene of discovery. THOUGH there are excesses of pure accumulation, a triple-decker effect that may encourage some readers to go at ''A Sport of Nature'' with blockbuster inattention, Ms. Gordimer is technically nimble, her grand design intricate and satisfying. We are always kept informed about that family back in South Africa, of Sasha, most particularly, first cousin, first love, who takes a more traditional route to the heroic, dedicated to the overthrow of the State. Given all the political import, let it be known that Nadine Gordimer has not lost her satiric powers: the chapter titles are flip - ''Time Out for a Love Story,'' ''The Diplomatic Bag'' and ''Trust Her!'' Olga and Pauline with Continued on page 22 their staked-out positions are comic relief. The Afrikaner politicians in their ''three piece American suits and Italian silk ties'' are sharply seen, for in the end, Hillela's story is not meant to read as tragedy.
Equipped with the beginnings of a new-minted conscience, Hillela falls in love and marries - in Ghana -the exiled black leader Whaila Kgomani in 1965 (Ms. Gordimer keeps exacting time). They name their child for Nelson Mandela's wife. We are now in a world more real than that of comfortable fictional reality. Though we know Hillela becomes the woman photographed at international conferences, captured in rumors, television clips, we do not yet know when her private life became public property, or when she succumbed to what Ms. Gordimer terms ''the tug of history.'' In much of her later work, history, beyond the ephemeral stuff of politics with all its recorded trappings, is a necessary element: in ''Burger's Daughter'' Rosa must fight free of her parents' radical history or lose all sense of her identity. Our Hillela enters history when she becomes Hillela Kgomani and is placed on the big storybook stage. Kgomani is a romantic figure, an idealist nurtured in the Pan-African movement. His wife is prepared, at last, for passionate loyalty, for the idyllic interracial marriage, even domestic bliss, when Whaila is murdered. Earlier, the most fatherly of the exiles has explained to her that ''grief is rot, it belongs with the dead, but tragedy is a sign that struggle must go on.'' THE last 200 pages of ''A Sport of Nature'' are a risk, a fine writer's challenge to the romantic conclusion. We have had the sorrowful burial and the prefiguration of that drama. Lying beside her husband Hillela thinks: ''The stinking fetish made of contrasting bits of skin and hair, the scalping of millions of lives, dangles on the cross in place of Christ. Skin and hair. It has mattered more than anything else in the world.'' After the great sacrifice, we are left with Hillela Kgomani. Will her life become epilogue? We have not been led to expect that, though she is human now - subject to heartbreak like the rest of us. She accepts the political lineage of her husband's name, lecturing (in America), doing good works, photographed with Yasir Arafat, but the long denial of the roles she has been assigned - girl of good family, mistress, revolutionary groupie - has not prepared her to become a keeper of the flame. In a last flutter against the weblike shreds of the past, the new mutant embraces her destiny. Of Hillela, who accumulates commentary, it is said, she ''moves on.'' But now her moves are by choice, with direction: determined by neither circumstance nor #######.
We leave behind the safe berth: really, how could Hillela marry well, live in a brownstone? Plotting in this novel becomes epic. We've known all along that our heroine has somehow attained, beyond her public role, a symbolic stature. ''A Sport of Nature'' concludes in clearly stated counterpoint. Hillela marries yet another black leader - pragmatic, powerful, humane. The happy ending is dreamlike but in no way is this escapist literature: fantasy runs, note against note, with Sasha's imprisonment and trial in South Africa and the bloody fall of that regime, imagined here and imaginable in all its horror to the reader.
But the final frame is operatic - the clock has been set forward, apartheid abolished, a general amnesty declared in South Africa. We are to witness along with Hillela the declaration of the new order, representatives of East and West, the media of course, in attendance. Kim/Hillela, now called Chiemeka - as the president's wife renamed yet again, stately in her native dress, has come home. But in Puccini, in Verdi, such triumphal scenes occur before the tragic fall from grandeur and grace. We can surmise that Ms. Gordimer's spectacular ending, her dream Africa, her play into the future is designed to make the present bearable. What we actually witness is the great moment in which the novelist settles all scores and differences, assembles, at her will, the disparate nations of a free world. ''Hillela is watching a flag slowly climb, still in its pupa folds, a crumpled wing emerging, and - now! - it writhes one last time and flares wide in the wind, is smoothed taut by the fist of the wind, the flag of Whaila's country.'' Grand, stirring. We close the book, rise from our orchestra seats knowing the painful story of South Africa is still with us and more's to come.
For many years Nadine Gordimer has been troubled by the difficulty of writing about her country, her own place - troubled by the difficulty and necessity: history, politics, and ''back there,'' as she calls the old frame of moral judgments and solutions - all large matters for the frail structure of modern fiction, usually so self-conscious and often so dependent on the little stories of our lives. ''The ideal achievement, from the point of view of literature,'' she has written, ''occurs when a man's experience and his talent are equal to each other.'' In ''A Sport of Nature'' she has drawn up the perfect equation: it is only an act of the imagination but a grand one. She has built the ark. SHOCKED BY HER OWN HEROINE
For Nadine Gordimer, the free-willed heroine of ''A Sport of Nature'' represented a challenge - and potential antidote - to the stalemated political attitudes of her South African countrymen.
''Looking around me over my long life in South Africa,'' she said in a recent telephone interview in New York, where she was lecturing and attending a conference, ''it somehow seemed to me ironic that sometimes very unexpected people are the ones who prove adequate to the situation.''
''I've seen so many wonderful people fail at it, particularly people who are in some way liberally committed - who do not go beyond liberalism,'' she said. ''But somebody like Hillela can sometimes see in an instinctive way that so many of these other ways of dealing with the situation -the political ways - just don't work, and can find her own way.''
Ms. Gordimer includes herself in somewhat more traditional antiapartheid ranks - those of South Africans seeking change ''through reason and a strong sense of injustice.''
''I am completely different from Hillela,'' she said, adding that the path chosen by her heroine ''would be quite shocking to moralistic people -including myself.''
Nevertheless, Ms. Gordimer admits that her own strong political activism is, like Hillela's, a product of her personal circumstances.
At home in Johannesburg, where she completed ''A Sport of Nature'' in just over three years, Ms. Gordimer said she pursues a very regular schedule, writing in the morning, working on correspondence in the afternoon, and reviewing the morning's work again before going to bed. But that orderly existence has increasingly given way to what she refers to as ''the necessary life of protest'' against the racial policies of her country's government. And as international condemnations of apartheid have grown, Ms. Gordimer has faced a lengthening list of requests for readings, lectures and other public appearances, especially in the United States and England, where she spends two to three months a year.
''I think if I were a writer in some other part of the world, I would never, ever, appear on any public platform, or on any TV program,'' she said, stressing her belief that a writer's work ''should speak for itself.''
''But in living where I do I couldn't possibly take that position. I can't sit back and say 'I'm sorry, I'm on the last pages of a novel, I will not come to your meeting, or I will not be on your committee, or I will not be involved.' '' MARK A. UHLIG
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/01/home/gordimer-sport.html
|
|
 
|
|
|
|
سيف اليزل برعي البدوي
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست