In Our Time - Writing and Political Oppression

Episode Date: April 8, 1999

Melvyn Bragg examines how two writers’ work have been shaped by political oppression and explores whether writers have a political role in modern society. The connection between writers and politics has its roots in classical times, but in the 20th century the writer has been called on as the witness with increasing frequency and intensity. And many times the price of articulation has been severe. In the century in which saw the execution of writers such as Ken Saro Wiwa in Nigeria in 1995, and a fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie, Melvyn Bragg talks to two writers who between them experienced exile, censorship and the manipulation of authoritarian states - Ariel Dorfman from South America and Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize winner from South Africa, to discuss the writing of fiction and political oppression. What, if any, is the writer’s political role in our world today?With Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist; Ariel Dorfman, South American journalist, scholar and author of Death and the Maiden.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Yenki, Anna Hymusiloista. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in this century in which we've seen the execution of writers such as Ken Sarawiwa, Nigeria in 1995 and a fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie,

we turned to two writers of the century, Nadine Geli. Gordimer and Ariel Dorfman to discuss the writing of fiction and political oppression. What, if any, is the writer's political role in our world today. Nadine Gordimer is the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist. With three novels banned by the South African government, her writings have charted the changes in South Africa's social climate for nearly half a century with passion, commitment and precision. With her last two novels to accompany me and the house gun, now it's in paperback, she has written about a society after apartheid.

Although a paid up member of the ANC, she denies being a political writer. The South American author-journalist and scholar Ariel Dorfman is best known in this country for his play, Death and the Maiden, which is later turned into a film by Roman Polanski. The subject of his work is often the terror of dictatorship, political oppression, and the despair of exile. He was up until 1973 in the Marxist government of President Salvador Allende in Chile,

but was exiled following the coup by General Pinochet. He lives in America. His latest novel, The Nanny and the Iceberg, has just been published. Ariel Dorfman, would you say that your writing has been shaped by, not just by politics, but by political oppression? Of course. It has been because I haven't chosen to do this.

I haven't chosen to be exiled several times. Before General Pinochet, I was exiled over and over again for different reasons as a baby, as an adolescent, etc. So I didn't choose to have the men in the shadows, as I call them, constantly persecuting me. I didn't choose that. I didn't choose the fact to have my friends murdered and tortured. I didn't choose exile.

That was chosen for me. But, you know, it was chosen for many other people in the century, people who were much less fortunate than I was. But that doesn't mean that I was only shaped by the politics of this because many of my obsessions come from way before General Pinochet, my obsession with memory, my obsession with the relations between men and women, my obsession with how you can be humorous in difficult circumstances, my obsession with children and what they have to teach us,

all of those are things that go all through my work and that of course been accentuated. In some sense, they've been restricted by General Pinochet or by political compression. In other sense, they've been opened up because he matured me. I mean, you could say, in Spanish we say, no maduro a gulpis. He made us ripe by beating us, you know,

like a fruit that you beat. and I think that that's how political I've been. I've been political in spite of myself at times. Can you work out that part of the strength of your writing that comes from a reaction to what was happening to politically? I'm trying to isolate that, if that's possible. Well, you can isolate it in some sense, but what is most political in my writing

is the sense that I am the depository for the dead. There are dead people who speak through me. I know this sounds as if it's sort of an imaginary thing, but it's true. In other words, I am a burial ground because we haven't been able to bury them in the earth. I am a therapy ground. In other words, I understand that my writing has to do with the healing of individual human beings in as much as I ask them very challenging questions about their human condition. And because writers always work with language.

And dictatorship, what it does it restricts language terribly. So what writing always does is it questions the language, it changes the language. It makes us more human and I think that that's the most political thing that can happen. Nadine Godem, you have quite sternly rejected the description of political writer. Do you feel as vehemently as Ariel? Oh, you can see my head nodding away in vehement agreement. I could. I was just letting the listeners have in on this. Because this is something that we have to battle against all the time.

To me, a political writer is one of... of two persons. Someone who is a good journalist who's analyzing politics day to day, or someone who is writing propaganda for a particular political party or cause. I'm not demeaning this kind of work. It has to be done, but it is not our work as writers with the imaginative powers. We live within the same events, but we write about them. They come to us at a different level. They go through some kind of transformation. But I would agree entirely with Ariel and back up what he said about the way you are formed indeed by the political context within which you live, that you act and react within that.

And while he was talking, I was thinking of what Gunther Grass said to me last year when we were talking on the same kind of subject. He said, my life and my writing have been shaped by the situation to which I was born and which I've lived, mainly by the war and after the war by its consequences, which are still with us. And I think that there are many other writers who are of the same generation or younger who have the same experience. It's the consequences of these conflicts which we see working out still

every day in new conflicts. We live with them and we are a kind of vehicle through which they are transformed into not into dates and into events but into how people have reacted to them, how people have been

shaped and in some cases distorted by them. It's very interesting that both of you react to strongly against the idea of being a political writer as if It's just the very word political, as if somehow that word is a soiled word in your minds, that word is a false word, that word is a treacherous word, because it's undeniable that both of you write about political situation inside a political context and the drive in the works. As I've read your books, the drive comes out of the engagement of the characters, fictional and autobiographical, with the politics of the time. So is it the word itself as much as the context? It's not the word.

it's the matter of intention. To be a political writer means you're wanting to persuade somebody of the rightness or wrongness. You're wanting to influence? Oh, no. Oh, absolutely not. You don't want to persuade someone that apartheid is a bad thing when you're right?

I don't have to. No, but you don't want to. I don't want to? You don't want to? No, because I have, like all of us, we are not, as I think Camus said, the day that I am only a writer, I will cease to write. If you live in a situation of conflict, you're also a human being, you have responsibilities toward your society. As a citizen.

But as a citizen, you have, I think, an obligation to take up a political stand, and I certainly have done so. But I'm not allowed this to influence my writing, and I can give you a good example of this. A novel of mine called None to Accompany Me, which is written after the end of Aparthe. published after 1994. In it, there are characters who come from the liberation movement that I have been an active supporter of the African National Congress. So some of my characters are African National Congress people who have come back from exile.

And there was within our country quite a lot of rivalry and dissension between those who fought from within and those who came from without. Now, if I were, quote, unquote, a political writer, I would have been afraid to show that there was any dissension within the party that I belong to. But my characters there are shown, as we say, warts and all. The conflict is there. I was not, I thought if I'm going to be reproached by my ANC colleagues, that's too bad, because this is me. This is me as a writer, telling the truth, seeing the truth, as I see people react. to one another. Well, I get a distinct feeling from your fiction that I know where you stand

politically as an author and through your characters, but maybe I'm misreading a book. Ariel, are you saying that you in your writing are not putting a political point of view? Of course, I'm not denying, I agree that you're a fiction writer's not at issue. But it is interesting that you're so very strongly saying, I don't want to change. Your writings cries out, Ariel, saying, look, up with this, I can't put this. People are being torture, depressed, they're disappearing, and I'm speaking for them, I'm speaking out of, and underneath that again, another subtext is this must change. Is this not part of our intention? First, first, I think that my writing is very moral. It deals with moral issues. The second thing is, writing is the realm

of freedom. And what happens with political writing as it's defined in general, that's what I dismiss, is the idea that you know ahead of time, everything. You know who's right, you know who's right, You know who's wrong. You know where you stand in relation to those things. What I love about my own work, not the fact that I love my work, but I love about doing that work, is that I do not know where the story is going to take me. And the freedom of those characters, as the freedom of Nadine's characters, I mean, you know, knowing her position, I have no idea what those characters are going to do.

Now, a bad political novel tells me what they're going to do. I know ahead of time because they've decided ahead of time. I can give you an example from my latest novel The Nair in the Iceberg, all right? I decided that I wanted to do something which was entirely comical, epical. I wanted to take this iceberg that the Chileans took to Seville.

They carved an iceberg trying to show people how modern they were, you know, and how cool and calculating they were in this underdeveloped country and take it across the Atlantic to Seville in 1992 to celebrate Columbus's 500 years, you know? And they did this delirious thing. So if I had been one of these very, very political writers,

I would have written a diatribe against the iceberg because of modernization and all that. You know, that I'm against this globalization process. But I found myself, as I wrote the novel, through this protagonist, this 23-year-old virgin who can't make love because his father is sort of in front of him all the time. He's a don't-clim figure of the father. I found that what I had done was I was falling in love with the iceberg.

I was free to let the iceberg inspire me and take me wherever I wanted. Now, if you would say, is this an Ariel Dorfman novel? No, an Ariel Dorfman, he writes about torture, right? And when I did Death on the Maiden, I took Paulina, who is as close to my heart as any character it could possibly be. And yet, she is the one who does terrible things on there. So people have criticized me saying, why do you show the sort of progressive, the victim, hurting others, right?

Why don't you show the doctor hurting others, right? And I refused to let Polanski agree we wouldn't have any flashbacks showing torture. So I don't think that anybody, I don't think the torture is going to stop torturing because they've seen death in the maiden. Believe me, they'll do it for some other reason. But a lot of women have come up to me and said, thank you for putting things in such a way in that play or in that movie so that I can begin to work out my dilemmas. Now, that's very political because it's one by one by one. people change, they become more human. Right. Well, let me try another tack, Nadine.

Do you think that the writer has the power, maybe not the intention, but the power to change society politically? I think that that's something that one really ponderes over. And you've got to look for examples. In modern times, I can only think perhaps of France, where the generation of Jean-Poucartre and Camé, who perhaps had influence, could have influence on policy because that's what it really amounts to.

Can writers influence government policy? The answer I would say is no. We don't. I think that our influence is something very, very slow, not at all obvious. And here again we come back to the whole question, difference between propaganda and writing, not telling people what they ought to think,

but making them think. In other words, I feel that for me, my fiction is asking questions. They're questions that I don't answer in the books and can't answer, because there are so many answers to human life. The only thing consistent about us is our inconsistency. Ariel, what do you think of this? Do you think the writers have power to change society?

I have at my fingertips, a very good reply you once gave. I've been there, rather you made it yourself. Well, I have no idea what I said then, but I'll say something perhaps inconsistent now. I think that in our times, particularly, where you have the mass media,

giving answers that are snappy answers, closure, happy endings, you know, where you have the mass media doing this, what writers can still do is to embrace ambiguity, ambiguity in the sense of define, challenging, the readers to become, in some sense, the text

and to ask themselves all those questions. So I love ambiguity. I think it's one of our great, great weapons. We play with reality. We remind people, by the way, and this is a good thing, we remind people of what society could be like. We could have a relationship with one another with the freedom that we have in relation to the texts. Think of that. Think of utopia in that sense.

What you did say was that writers change people and people can change society. Oh, thank you. That was a very good answer. It was a very good answer. Just keep it bearing in mind next time. You're encapsulated what I said. Can I just come in for one second? Because while you've both been talking, you've both been very heavy against political writing,

and you've used propaganda as a dirty word, and the expectation. But there's a sense in which animal farm, to my view, is a great novel. And there's no doubt where that's going. There's no doubt what that message is. There's no doubt also there's a work of fiction. Dickens, in my view, is maybe our greatest, in England,

let's be bold, our greatest novelist. In many of his novels, there's no doubt where he's going. There's no doubt what his intention is, is to do away with this, to do away with that. So it isn't quite cut and dried, is it? Well, it's to do away with it by showing what it is. That is the point. By showing how it affects people, how it affected people in England in the 19th century, I can think now of my own country, of South Africa,

to fulminate about apartheid and quote all the do. different laws is one thing. But to take up an individual life and show how this person lives, you don't have to say it was a potter that caused this, that it's racism that's operating against this person. It comes from inside the individual. And that, I think, is what we do, that any factual account of what happened cannot do. Let me come in yet another way, Ariel. You were active in politics. Oh, very much so.

I ended as government until 1973. Do you think you've been more effective since your exile from politics and since, as it were, your writing career took off? Well, I mean, I always have an active role in relation to human rights. I haven't stopped that. And since General Pinochet has been in the news,

I've been taken away from the film I was writing and a novel I was beginning. And I've had to spend some time on that. And I think that's totally legitimate. And I think, by the way, there is a place for propaganda. There's a place for songs that people have to march to. Well, I haven't denied that. Exactly, you know.

And by the way, you know, I think that Dickens does something fantastic in that sense. He does denounce things. He changes child labor laws. And Upton Sinclair changes the way in which food is processed in the United States. And John Steinbeck changes the way in which the Oklahoma people are treated in California. So you do have that, you know. And very often it is that joy in that. But I think the reason why the Grapes of Wrath continues with us

is not because, after all, those people aren't treated that way anymore. It's because it's an epic about how human people survive. Oh, those people are treated like that anymore, except not in that particular context. Exactly. Well, then you use it again, over and over again, right? In my case, you know, what I'd like to do is I think writers can see certain things in a broader context that other people who are closer to the events supposedly can't. So I can show the consequences for Chile of the fracture of a country.

The Chile doesn't want to look at itself. I show them a mirror of that. But it's not a sort of a realistic mirror in which I show details or factual details. I show something, for death and the maiden is what didn't happen in Chile. Not what did happen in Chile. It's a trial that didn't happen in Chile.

And in widows, what I did in widows is I took bodies that had not appeared yet. Not one body had appeared. If I had been factual about things, if I had wanted to be political, I would have written about the missing and how they were hurt and all that. Instead of which I created a magical circumstance

where bodies begin to appear in the river and you don't know where they're coming from. They come from the land of the dead. So it's imagination really which we're playing with and which has so many possibilities. An aspect that we haven't looked at and that is allied to the perception that we are political writers,

do writers somehow are they prophetic? Prophetic in the sense that they find a way to make people conscious of things that would not reach them in other ways. Now, we have in South Africa at the moment, you know, it's just finishing off its main work, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When did you write Death in the Maiden the play?

I wrote Death in the Maiden in 1990. In 1990. Yes. So that's some years ago now. Yes. Now. And the Truth and Reconciliation Commission started only just over a year ago.

The things that are happening that I have witnessed, going to sessions of it, people are confronted with those who tortured them. Now, these are then recounted in the newspaper reports and in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. How many people in the world will read that and therefore will understand what was going on? But the play, which was written eight years or whatever before, Death in the Maiden, Here you have this woman confronted with the man who indeed tortured her, but it has gone through the process of the imagination, and it reaches people in a way that they understand

and that will move them and touch them. But no newspaper report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will. So to me this is one of the ways in which writing, in which art generally does influence people. Is that why you, although offered it several times, turned down any public participation in politics, in South Africa. Although you were active with the ANC,

so I'm making a fine distinction here. And the only time that I could have moved into politics was just before our first free elections in 1994 when I was one of the people nominated to stand for Parliament, the idea that filled me with horror and terror. And I was very honoured, but said, thank you very much, but I'm a writer.

But it was a very, in one way, It was a strong political act to stay in South Africa during that regime. A lot of your friends left to work in other countries. A lot of them moved out of writing and worked in less challenging areas. You had three books banned. So in that sense, you were a political figure, aren't you? Well, it wasn't a political act to stay in South Africa. Very many white people stayed in there and did nothing to promote change in any way.

but I didn't stay under those circumstances. I did what I could, according to my lights and according to the amount of courage that I could summon. But to talk about these banned books and to move to censorship, which is another part of the political writing, you had three books banned, and I'm sitting as a man who had watched his own books being burned. On television.

On television. So do you think that there should be any sort of censorship at all, Nadine? This is a terribly difficult question. Under our new constitution, there is no censorship at all. But we have two problems. The one is the question of hate speech or hate writing. And the other is a question of real pornography, because especially vis-à-vis children and perhaps more in the visual arts rather than in literature.

But by and large, I am still totally against censorship. Once you have lived for years under conditions of censorship and you now have complete freedom, you do not want to see this come back. I think there are other ways perhaps to deal with hate speech. But there was a suggestion that when the founding of the Congress of South African writers, it was founded in that way because had Penn been founded,

the local branch of Penn being founded there, everyone would have had to be taken in, including hate speech, racist, writers and this was a way to avoid it and so that was a form of censorship is that so? I don't quite understand. Well, the pen, that the, implied that when you had the founder of the Congress of South African writers, you could exclude certain writers from that. Well, yes, we would exclude, the way you would exclude somebody who'd written Mancumph, you know.

We had people of that kind of people. But it is a problem, isn't it? I mean, once you start drawing the line, where do you stop drawing the line? Because that's not censorship. I can only say that we were at war. then. We really were. I've got absolutely no answer to this, but I'm sitting with two people who've lived through it,

so I'd like to know you. Well, that is my answer. Don't you start and stop drawing a line? I, in fact, I even think in relation to pornography and to hate speech, there should be no censorship whatsoever. It's very difficult for me to say this, because, you know, what I'm doing is I'm saying, you people can say horrible things about me,

and you can say horrible things about people who are defenseless to it, but I think it's much more dangerous to start drawing the line, because once we say that disagree with them, then generally what happens is they are the ones who have the arms and they decide that we can't speak at all. And I'm more worried about the self-censorship that is occurring around the world today, which I think has to do with the fear that people have got. I think that censorship begins when a husband tells a wife not to speak so loudly because

the neighbors are going to hear them about their dissident. You know, they'll have a little boy. Keep quiet and at school don't tell them what we think in the home, you know. That's what I worry about because I think that's where the real censorship comes out when you bring people up in fear. That's why I love literature because it's against censorship in that. But where does this happen? It happens everywhere.

You seem to me to be talking about the past. No, I'm talking about everywhere. In what country? In every country. Really? This comes from a speech that I gave at the UN General Assembly about the fact that censorship starts in fact when we do not allow the others who are around us the freedom to speak as they want.

I think that's what I've discovered in my country. Maybe it comes really from the fear that I see in the... Which country are you talking about? Chile. Chile. I'm not being... In that sense. Let's choose an extreme example.

If somebody in my country, in South Africa, stands up and says, all blacks should be killed, or they should have been killed, all whites should have been killed, I mean, that is the epitome of hate speech. Yes. It's very difficult to know how to deal with that.

But I agree with you that censorship is not the answer. The answer is indeed to give an answer, to counter this racism with an answer. I really believe, I mean, I'm very extreme in that sense. I believe it's very dangerous to start drawing that line because I know who's going to draw the line finally, and it's not going to be us. It's going to be them. Them meaning I've been with them. Nadine has seen these people for 40 years in her country. I've seen these people over 17 years in my country. Chile is still with strong bouts of tremendous self-censorship, you were there with me, Nadine.

You saw how scared people were. It's true. How tremendously full of fear they were. When we were there with Nadine, we saw the most amazing thing, Nadine, remember when we went to the tomb of Ayende? Yes. And that man who was speaking to Ayende, because the body was there, and he began to

speak against Pinochet, and his sister covered his mouth. She did with her own hands. With her own hands. She covered his mouth. And that's what happens. That's those are the forms of censorship that remained because, you know, you abolish the laws and then they keep on working inside the people's minds.

Do you feel both of you, we're coming to the end of the program now, but do you feel both of you having lived in what for British people would be considered extreme political situations and having in different degrees, but with great similarities participated in these situations? Do you think that that pressure is, in a curious way, an enabler of, that's what it's a decision? simplest, better, more profound, more important writing?

Absolutely no. And indeed, one of the most distressing and ire-raising questions that comes up to us, what in South Africa, what are you going to write about now that a partate has gone? What are you going to write about in Chile once, you know, Pinochet is not there, as if the world stops, as if people don't move into new situations, new experiences, new frustrations. I know that in my own country, in South Africa, in our country, there is now so much to write about. I'm really waiting with a great sense of excitement to see how people are going to interpret the changes that they're living through. Mainly black people, among my

friends and comrades who have moved out of the ghettos into town with an idea that this is going to be just wonderful. And of course, there are all sorts of tensions different to social relationships as they didn't have before, you could now be white and have a black boss telling you what to do in my local post office, the young Afrikaans girl at the counter,

the postmaster is a black man. You can imagine what this means in South Africa. There's such a wealth of human material that is there to be interpreted and written about. We write in spite of dictatorship, not because of dictatorship. I mean, do you think Dostoevsky would have written

worse or better if there hadn't been the Tsar? he would have found other things to do. I mean, in that sense, you know, it's just that what we do is, given the extreme circumstances and that we cannot escape the political realities that we live in in these forms of oppression, we learn from them.

So we are survivors of the dictatorship, and I think that our work, Neidine's in mind, but certainly that's of thousands of other people, you know, is the proof that the dictator finally is not strong enough to stop us. Well, thank you very much, Nadine Gondima and Ariel Dauphan. Thank you for listening.

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