| Author: |
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Nadine Gordimer
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| Title: |
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None to Accompany Me |
| Moochable copies: |
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No copies available |
| Amazon suggests: |
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| Recommended: |
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| Topics: |
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| Published in: |
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English |
| Binding: |
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Paperback |
| Pages: |
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336 |
| Date: |
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1995-10-01 |
| ISBN: |
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0140250395 |
| Publisher: |
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Penguin Books |
| Weight: |
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1.1 pounds |
| Size: |
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0.76 x 5.12 x 7.82 inches |
| Edition: |
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Reprint |
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| Description: |
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Product Description
In an extraordinary period immediately before the first non-racial election and the beginning of majority rule in South Africa, Vera Stark, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's passionate new novel, weaves a ruthless interpretation of her own past into her participation in the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land. The return of exiles is transforming the city, and through the lives of Didymus Maqoma, his wife Sibongile, and their lovely daughter who cannot even speak her parents' African language, the reader experiences the strange passions, reversals, and dangers that accompany new-won access to power. All must change: Didymus, once a major actor in the resistance, making way for Sibongile's emergence as a political figure; Vera, working through the consequences of a lifetime's commitments to a new kind of relationship with a new man of the times, Zeph Rapulana.
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| Reviews: |
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chris (Japan) (2013/02/10):
In an extraordinary period immediately before the first non-racial election and the beginning of majority rule in South Africa, Vera Stark, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's passionate new novel, weaves a ruthless interpretation of her own past into her participation in the present as a lawyer representing blacks in the struggle to reclaim the land. The return of exiles is transforming the city, and through the lives of Didymus Maqoma, his wife Sibongile, and their lovely daughter who cannot even speak her parents' African language, the reader experiences the strange passions, reversals, and dangers that accompany new-won access to power. All must change: Didymus, once a major actor in the resistance, making way for Sibongile's emergence as a political figure; Vera, working through the consequences of a lifetime's commitments to a new kind of relationship with a new man of the times, Zeph Rapulana.
Nadine Gordimer's novel None to Accompany Me was published in the same year of South Africa's first Democratic election. The fact that these events coincided is an important influence on interpretations of the novel because of the personal and political significance of the event in relation to Gordimer. A preoccupation with the conflicting political parties reverberates in the consciousness of the South African characters who populate the novel because of the radical nature of this changing government. The characters are captured in a state of transformation where they must renegotiate their own sense of national identity. Gordimer lived through the age of apartheid in South Africa. She always renounced it, discussing its inherent flaws and misconceptions in her fiction and nonfiction. The fact that she defiantly chose not to exile herself in the face of political conflict while writing novels which were mainly in opposition to the National Party who enforced apartheid shows her unswerving commitment to an identification with being a South African citizen who works actively against racism. In a society such as South Africa that has a highly turbulent climate of racism Gordimer has found that a sense of "home" is an important component upon which to build an environment of equality. The physical nation is what its citizens have in common and, in negotiating boundaries, mental and emotional divides are laid out as well. Therefore, her emphasis on the importance of the land in her writing, how it is sectioned off, claimed and divided, represents the way South Africans have divided their national identity from having any singular meaning. Gordimer has represented in her fiction the levels of these boundaries between people and she has offered a constructive approach to possibly thinking of South African national identity as inclusive of difference while accepting the pragmatism of boundaries. In her early essays of the 1960s she shows a strong resolution that the inherently racist government would be replaced by a power which enforces greater equality. Yet, she also realized that the most important transformation needed to occur in the minds of the citizens of South Africa. They had to recognize the fact of racial difference but also acknowledge that everyone who lives in South Africa is entitled to equal citizenship.
Due to the governmentally enforced segregation between the different races, citizens found that living in South Africa under apartheid caused a hypersensitive awareness of his or her own race. Gordimer is no exception to this and has spent much of her writing discussing where white people position themselves in relation to black people. She tries to think out how people can change their frame of mind to assimilate to the idea of a South Africa where people have an equal sense of national identity instead of trapping themselves within terms of binaries. She makes this clear in her statement, "If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay in Africa." What she seems to be saying is that to live peacefully in a nation you must accept you are entitled to be a citizen of that nation rather than an outsider who happens to inhabit it. This is a dilemma for white Africans who live under the image of "black Africa". To be African does not necessarily mean that you are black. This is something Gordimer has always vehemently asserted in her writing. It is in the fixed idea of "black Africa" that boundaries within the national identity are laid and Gordimer is committed to writing of Africa as inclusive of all the relations between its people of all colors. Both the National Party and the Inkath Movement stressed physical boundaries between white and black people. The impact they had on South African citizens over the 20th century encouraged the idea of a national identity divided by color. It is only with the end of apartheid and subsequently the first democratic national election that South Africans can evaluate the impact this division has had with hindsight and whether or not they choose to leave it behind.
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| URL: |
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http://bookmooch.com/0140250395 |
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