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Nadine Gordimer Retrospective: Review of Life and Works
Lecture 6https://nadinegordimer2015.wordpress.com/
Course code: 140359
Derek Barkerwww.derekbarker.info
StructureDiscussion of political contextKey events: •1960 Sharpeville riots•1976 Soweto uprising•Summary of first five chapters of July’s people (1981)
Shareville and Sowetohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2EvZ8cYcC8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyicKHs_cSg
ContrastsWhile I go through the summary of the first five chapters, make mental notes about contrasts between•City and country•Rich and poor•Adult and child perceptions•Black and white
SummaryJuly's People, Nadine Gordimer's novel about the situation of whites in South Africa during the end of apartheid, opens with a close third-person narration following Maureen Smales' point of view. Maureen wakes when July brings tea to their hut. At first, she confuses him with a servant in a hotel.
SummarySoon she remembers she is in a mud hut with a sack as a door. July has brought tea in pink glasses on a tray, with an open can of condensed milk that has been specially opened for the white couple. However, both Bam and Maureen refuse milk, although they accept tea.
SummaryJuly surveys the hut, where the Smaleses' three children sleep on car seats taken from their vehicle. Encouraged that everyone is all right, he leaves. Maureen immediately slips into confused memory, remembering the only other time she has stayed in a round mud hut, when on vacation with her father, who worked in a mine.
SummaryThe huts are called rondavels, and the mud and thatch insulate against the heat for at least part of the day. The floor is dung and mud, crisscrossed with chickens and ants. Maureen and Bam sleep on an iron bed frame with the springs covered with a tarp from the vehicle. Maureen and Bam had fled the city for three days and nights.
SummaryMaureen and the three children hid on the floor while the car turned and wove at July's orders. It now takes several days of real sleep and peace for Maureen to surface fully into consciousness. She remembers not the suburban home they fled, but her beautiful childhood home and familiar knickknacks.
SummaryThe shapes of pigs outside and voices calling in native African languages pull her back to the present. She looks at her children, all three of whom smell of vomit and are surrounded by flies.
SummaryChapter two opens with a description of the vehicle in which they have spent so much time, a yellow back roads truck called a "bakkie." Maureen recalls that Bam bought it as a present to himself, an indulgence to use while hunting.
SummaryGordimer says that the nature of an emergency is that you do not know what will happen, and so you cannot guess what will be useful: "The circumstances are incalculable in the manner in which they come about, even if apocalyptically or politically foreseen, and the identity of the vital individuals and objects is hidden by their humble or frivolous role in an habitual set of circumstances."
SummaryThe circumstances that did occur began with repeated strikes that became a way of life. Black workers were hungry and angry but did not return to work, and riots became commonplace. Newspapers did not report accurately or completely due to government censorship, and a march into the center of Johannesburg was stopped violently.
SummaryBam listened to his bank accountant, who warned his customers to take money out of their accounts in cash. Maureen withdrew the contents of her savings account as well, and the money lived in paper bricks in their home.
SummaryBut the banks stayed open and the rioting blacks ran out of ammunition. White mercenaries were flown in to preserve order. Order was restored, deliveries resumed, stores re-opened. The Smaleses had always intended to leave South Africa, where they felt like they were "born white pariah dogs in a black continent,"
Summaryand had tried to salvage their reputations and consciences by being liberal, having political views that supported the blacks, and tried to "slough privilege" completely unsuccessfully. They were considered white and therefore against the blacks.
SummaryWhen the tide turned and black revolutionaries incited riots that took over the cities, the suppressed and angryblacks massacring whites, the yellow bakkie provided an escape route. The banker had provided warning, Maureen remembered.
SummaryJuly, the servant who had lived in their yard since they were married, stayed loyal to the Smaleses. He led them out of the city. Maureen returns to the present moment as she bathes her children, and then herself. She smells bad. July brings them food: porridge, spinach, and fruit. The family has always ended a meal with fruit, and Maureen is touched by July's attempt to preserve routine.
SummaryReality reaches Maureen, and she tells July that they will cook their own meals. July brings firewood and at dusk comes to see if they can start their own fire. He also brings goat's milk, although he is not sure that Gina will like it. July's son tags along, listening as his father tells Maureen to boil the milk.
SummaryThe bakkie, which had been hidden in the bush, is moved to a group of abandoned huts. The headlights are off for this operation, as everyone is afraid that the black nationalists who are fighting the whites will discover the refugee family and punish them and the village.
SummaryJuly guides Bam's driving from the road, as he had on the journey from the city. Maureen cannot believe they escaped, that July stood in their living room and offered his village as a refuge, that the truck had not broken down,
Summarythat July had always found petrol and water to keep them going and guided them the six hundred kilometres to his village. Maureen knows it is a miracle, but the whole event still terrifies her, as does the present. She knows the tap water will run out soon and the children will have to drink from the river.
SummaryThe village is tiny, and the only residents are July's extended family. Maureen knows that if anyone tells a roving army band that a white family is in hiding there, they will all die. If anyone discovers the bakkie, they will all die.
SummaryWhen she expresses this fear to July, he laughs at her. He is ruler of the village, and he has told them that the Smaleses gave him the truck. They know that in effect they have, although they return to it for the dwindling supplies left inside.
SummaryIn the confusion of fleeing, Victor had packed an electric racecar set, and he begs to set it up to show off to the black children. Victor insists that his mother must tell the black children not to touch it, and she laughs at him "as adults did, in the power they refuse to use."
SummaryMaureen tells Victor she cannot speak to the black children, and he becomes sullen. Royce keeps asking for Coca-Cola, unable to accept or understand their present situation.
SummaryAs Maureen boils water for the next day, she asks Bam what they will do if one of them falls ill. He does not answer. Maureen thinks of the truck as a landlocked ship that will soon be taken apart for scrap and rusted to uselessness, unless they travel home shortly.
SummaryMaureen is introduced to July's wife at the beginning of chapter three. The two women have no common language, but Maureen tries to convey her gratitude for their protection through July. An old woman is present, someone's mother, and this woman demands something of July in their native language.
SummaryOver the years, Maureen has sent many presents to July's wife. She sent practical things, such as night gowns and handbags. Seeing July's wife now, in her mud hut, with pink glasses displayed as prize possessions, Maureen realizes how distant their lives have been. Her gifts were useless to July's wife.
SummaryMaureen recalls July's town woman, Ellen, a cheerful, well educated woman who knew that she had no claim on July's but who slept with him, ironed for him, and basically lived in the Smaleses' yard with him. Maureen could understand that woman, in a way that she could never understand July's wife.
SummaryLight shines in through the only window in the hut, where July's youngest child rests, sated on milk. Maureen realizes how distant she is from anything familiar, and that she has no idea what the routine of life is like in this new place.
SummaryThe fourth chapter switches to July's wife's perspective. She complains to him, demanding to know why he has brought such dangerous intruders to the village, people who can't even take care of themselves. When July had arrived with them, she had not protested.
SummaryShe allowed July to take the second bed, the stove, the beautiful pink cups, her mother's hut, and to give all these possessions to these strangers. However, July had known that his authority was temporary.
SummaryHe had spent the past years in town. When in the village, his orders had been obeyed because he brought goods, presents, food, and money. But he was staying too long, and his wife was used to ruling the village.
SummarySurrounded by other females, July's wife criticizes him, saying that the white people are used to living with room after room to spread out in, and hot water, and how could all of those rooms, all of that space, all be gone? She does not believe his stories of looting and murders and riots.
SummaryJuly's wife asks why Bam has a gun, why they don't go to their own place, where whites live, take their money and go? July answers that there is nowhere to go, that everywhere is chasing and killing the whites. July's wife asks why they don't go overseas, the only word in the conversation that is in English.
SummaryJuly tells her the planes and the airports are blown up, destroyed. His wife laughs at him, at the thought of destroying something so big, so distant, as airplanes. When July insists, she becomes fearful of the reprisals that the whites will exact upon the blacks for their resistance. July suddenly realizes that the Smaleses, for all their white skin, are powerless and helpless.
SummaryJuly compares the group of women listening to his explanations to a court with a short attention span as July's wife orders some girls to get water and his mother leaves to pluck a chicken. His mother yells at him from the door, criticizing the chicken he killed.
SummaryJuly's wife thinks about Maureen, who is the first white person she has ever touched. July's wife tells him that Maureen is ugly and has weird hair. Half-longingly, July recalls their groomed appearances in town. July's wife stops her child from eating bird droppings and reminds him there will be no more money.
SummaryShe thinks that there will also be no more letters full of awe-inspiring facts and dreams that she could never follow, not even now that the whites had come to her. In the fifth chapter, Bam tries to be useful. He repairs farm equipment and rigs up a water tank to collect rainwater. He listens to the radio religiously, trying to catch every news announcement..
SummaryThe suburb across the valley from theirs has been torched, and the U.S. Congress debates airlifting its nationals out of the country. Bam arranges stones as a foundation for his water tower, built using an abandoned water tank that no one had touched for years
SummaryMaureen thinks about the sheer space all around them. Her children cannot comprehend how far they are from a real town and ask to go to a film. The African desert confines Maureen, scary in its "boundlessness," and she only walks as far as the river, and that only rarely. There is no work Maureen can do.
SummaryJuly comes to ask for their clothes, so that the women may wash them. Maureen refuses, but July says that he will not carry water and fuel to heat the water, so they must give him their clothes. Maureen insists that she pay for the service, and July accepts this and tells her there will be soap.
SummaryMaureen knows the soap must be stolen from their house in town. She watches with amazement as the money she gives July is carried around by the villagers. It seems worthless paper to her, but they have seen how it transforms into pink teacups and bicycles and treasure it.
SummaryWithout work or even recreation, Maureen hoards the one book she had brought. For awhile, she does not read it, afraid to begin it because once it finishes she will have nothing to look forward to. But she does. She begins reading, and finds that the pleasure is lost because pretending to be somewhere else has lost all of its appeal:
Summary"She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon's shape." There's nothing to pretend when everything is so foreign, so unimaginable.
SummaryMaureen begins to explore her surroundings, venturing into the dark huts searching for decorations. She finds a brass plaque nailed to the wall dedicated to "boss boy." This is a term used by the white boss for the African he relies upon the most, and for the first time Maureen considers the derogatory connotations of that name.
SummaryShe remembers walking with the African servant, Lydia, who was her friend and nanny, chewing gum together and holding hands. Lydia and Maureen joked and teased each other, and Lydia carried Maureen's school case on her head. A photographer captured that moment for Life magazine, and when Maureen saw it as an adult she suddenly realized how odd it was that Lydia had always taken Maureen's case.
Homework Read the rest of the novel and begin thinking about your review
