‘One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions.’
So writes Salman Rushdie, one of the interpreters of the real thing, while living through the most recent of its traumas; defining a credo for us.
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ibsen began the century with questions we expected Marx and Freud to answer. Proust, Joyce, Kafka, followed by Lawrence, Genet, Mishima, spoke the unspeakable (the names in all categories are representative, not inclusive). Kafka was the one who went furthest, presaging in his story-telling genius what grim history had in store — fascism, Nazism, dictatorship. (Did he miss the return of the religious inquisition in a twentieth-century avatar? I have to reread him yet again. .)
With Thomas Mann’s intuition of politics as the meaning of destiny in our time, literature’s position as both a deeper and higher understanding of human striving than that in which politics operates, changes: literature becomes inexorably a medium through which that political operation is expressed at a deeper and higher level. If destiny is political, politics and literature cannot be kept hierarchically apart.
Would Bertolt Brecht have known that ‘to speak of trees is almost a crime/For it is a kind of silence about injustice’ if he had not formed his creative consciousness in the years of Hitler’s creation, Nazism, and in the imperative of resistance to this fate?
Would 1916 have the resonance, in the history of our era, without Yeats’s poem of that date whose line ‘a terrible beauty is born’ rings on down our years, tolling the awesome pain and exaltation of disparate struggles for freedom. You heard it in India, you heard it, on and on, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in South Africa.
I can speak of literature and politics, pass from one to the other in one breath, so to say, because the former — literature — is created inescapably within the destined context of politics. Even literary style, which Proust defines as ‘the moment of identification between the author and his subject’, is also the identification between the author and this destined political context.
We are not only children of our time but of our place. My own consciousness and subconscious, from which I write, come even in the most personal aspects of mind and spirit from destiny shaped by the historico-political matrix into which I was born. The unspeakable shame and horror of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: this heading to our century stands. Beside it, my personal sense of the defining events of our century is dominated by two: the fall of Communism, and the end of colonialism. And the two extraordinary developments are linked subjectively, even contradictorily, for me, since I was born a second-generation colonial in a capitalist-racist society and as I grew up I looked to the Left as the solution to the oppression of the poor and powerless all around me, in my home country and the world.
Satyajit Ray the Indian film-maker and writer has said, ‘It is the presence of the essential thing in a very small detail which one must catch in order to expose larger things.’
This principle I believe applies beyond art, to the general level of awareness of your world with which you were presented when you opened your eyes. The essential detail that exposes the larger things in my life begins very early. I was taken as a toddler to wave a flag at the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, on his imperial visit to the then British Dominion, South Africa. As I grew, I was told again and again of this momentous occasion, with a sense of values to be inculcated: loyalty in homage to imperial power, white man’s power.
Nobody presented for the formation of my sense of values the fact that Mohandas Gandhi had lived in and developed his philosophy in and through the country where I was born and was to live my life; the man who was to leave behind in that country principles of liberation that were to be fundamental to the struggle for freedom by the black people, my brothers and sisters unacknowledged by the values of the whites who took me to make obeisance to an English prince. The essence of the colonial ethos in which I was brought up is contained in a detaiclass="underline" the flag I was given to wave.
South Africa raised an army to fight Nazism, which it did with distinction; and the same brave white men and women under the command of Prime Minister General Smuts came back to practise racism contentedly at home. In that war, South Africa had suffered neither invasion nor bombardment, but there was a shortage of nurses. As a seventeen-year-old Red Cross recruit, I was sent to a first-aid station at a gold mine in the town where I lived. There I saw the mine’s white Medical Aid worker stitch, without anaesthetic, the gaping wounds black miners had suffered from falling rock underground. He grinned and told me: ‘They don’t feel like we do.’
Not the shootings at Sharpeville in 1960, the deaths in prison by torture and neglect, of Steve Biko and nameless others, or the herding of people from their homes with guns and dogs at their heels in the mass removals of black populations off land whites coveted, in the sixties and seventies, epitomise racism, for me, as does that single utterance at the mine.
It has become a truism to shake one’s head in wonder at the end of apartheid and the emergence of a free South Africa the twentieth century has just seen.
A miracle; and coming to pass at the time when a new miracle is yearningly needed to compensate for the miracle the first quarter of the century promised — now a fallen star, the red star, flickered out.
Human beings will always have the imperative to believe in the possibility of a better world of their own making. In the words of one of the most influential thinkers of the mid-century, Jean-Paul Sartre, socialism was ‘man in the process of creating himself.’ The end of the human’s identity as a beast of burden on the dreadful journey from feudal slavery through wage slavery. The Communist Manifesto, its enactment in the Soviet Union, promised the miracle in what seemed to be the culmination of all the world’s revolutionary attempts to end exploitation, poverty, degradation. It was the Red Flag and not the Statue of Liberty that summoned all to bread and justice, when I was young.
The depth of the sense of abandonment, now, not only among those who were Communists but among all of us to whom the Left, the ideals of socialism remain, although these have been betrayed and desecrated in many countries, as well as in the Gulags of the founding one — it is this sense of abandonment that the collapse of the Soviet Union brings to our century, rather than the disillusion the West would triumphantly claim.
Whatever one’s judgment of its consequences, the most momentous single date in the social organization of our century was unquestionably the October Revolution, as a result of which one-third of humanity found itself living under regimes derived from it. The disintegration of the Soviet world before the end of the same century that saw its beginning: has it brought the triumph of democracy or only the return of the liberalism that failed, after the First World War, to prevent the poor and unemployed of Italy and Germany from turning to fascism as the solution of their circumstances, many of which exist again today?
It is conveniently overlooked that the Soviet Union’s communist army, in the Second World War, was definitive in defeating the Nazis; it is the evil you do that lives after you, not the good. Yet the great positive achievement of our century, the end of colonialism, that has come to realization in contrast to the tragedy of the Russian attempt to improve our human lot, owes much to the thought crystallized in Marx and Lenin, and cast in different lights by Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Fanon — to turn the prism about to reveal only a few of its facets.