Women Academics From South Africa

"Breathe. Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching-the first imperative is to breathe. Breathless. Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation-comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe. (beginning of "Keeping Fit")"

"Underground: this time, as at other times, he's aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. ("Safe Houses")"

"It was my mother who had talked under interrogation. I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible."

"What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby's attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere."

"She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn't eat pig."

"propos[ed] a future South Africa, not only on terms of equality of races but of sexes, too”"

"despite the fact that the narrative demonstrates that the voice of the ‘other’ can be heard and imagined, Gordimer’s attitude toward her own whiteness […] is resentful and hostile”"

"“[T]he isotopy of fragmentation constitutes a unifying web structurally present at the level of story, text, and narration”"

"The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand."

"Odd in-between period which sometimes inserts itself into historical time when not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses, the living themselves, become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet. In history, these intervals have shown more than once that they may contain the moment of truth."

"People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well."

"He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer—regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando—shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa."

"big, calm, clever son of Willem Van der Vyver"

"a moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab"

"Bad enough to have killed a man,” he believes they will say to themselves, “without helping the Party’s, the government’s, the country’s enemies, as well"

"city and overseas people"

"He [the victim] was my friend, I always took him hunting with me"

"Afrikaner farmer—a regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando”"

"She avoided walking past the barracks because of the machine guns the young sentries had in place of rifles."

"The ugly mansions of the rich who had fled stood empty on the bluff above the sea."

"She had not kissed on the mouth, she had not sought anonymous lips and tongues in the licence of festival. Yet she had kissed. Watching herself again, she knew that. She did not tell what happened not because her husband would suspect licence in her."

"An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right, as if these were two sides of one face."

"There were two soldiers in front of her, blocking her off by their clumsy embrace(how do you do it, how do you do what you've never done before) and the embrace opened like a door and took her in -- a pink hand with bitten nails grasping her right arm, a black hand with a big-dialled watch and thong bracelet pulling at her left elbow. Their three heads collided gaily, musk of sweat and tang of strong sweet soap clapped a mask to her nose and mouth. They all gasped with delicious shock. She put up an arm around each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro hair on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke."

"When you live in a small town far from the world you read about in municipal library books, the advent of repair men in the house is a festival. Daily life is gaily broken open, improvisation takes over."

"You said: "...and I'm between two girls at the moment.' What exactly had led up to this statement that could have come at any time, that I had been ready for so long I began to forget it would ever come, and that you had been waiting to say for a specific length of time I could not know?"

"How to break in: with a name, a statement."

"The day the cease-fire was signed she was caught in a crowd. Peasant boys from Europe who had made up the colonial army and freedom fighters whose column had marched into town were staggering about together outside the barracks, not three blocks from her house in whose rooms, for ten years, she had heard the blurred parade-ground bellow of colonial troops being trained to kill and be killed."

"I would like to say something about how I feel in general about what a novel, or any story, ought to be. It’s a quotation from Kafka. He said, “A book ought to be an ax to break up the frozen sea within us.”"

"I can’t understand writers who feel they shouldn’t have to do any of the ordinary things of life, because I think that this is necessary; one has got to keep in touch with that. The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner’s or spraying some plants infected with aphids is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back."

"A writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing—he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out. Nothing is worse for this than society. Nothing is worse for this than the abrasive, if enjoyable, effect of other people."

"If somebody is partly frivolous or superficial, has moments of cruelty or self-doubt, I don’t write them off, because I think that absolutely everybody has what are known as human failings."

"Progress is the business of making life more safe and more enjoyable . . . fuller, generally."

"Death is really the mystery of life, isn’t it? If you ask, “What happens when we die? Why do we die?” you are asking, “Why do we live?”"

"it was Proust who said that style is the moment of identification between the writer and his situation. Ideally that is what it should be—one allows the situation to dictate the style."

"there’s a fairly good relationship between black and white writers. Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship, and most white writers feel a strong sense of responsibility to promote, defend, and help black writers where possible."

"in Burger’s Daughter, you could say on the face of it that it’s a book about white communists in South Africa. But to me, it’s something else. It’s a book about commitment. Commitment is not merely a political thing. It’s part of the whole ontological problem in life. It’s part of my feeling that what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that’s what writing is, I think that’s what painting is. It’s seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life."

"the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics."

"(talking about herself while she was in university) My approach to living as a white supremacist, perforce, among blacks, was, I see now, the humanist approach, the individualistic approach. I felt that all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the color bar. In other words, my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action. I didn’t see that it was pretty meaningless until much later."

"It was Sinclair's The Jungle that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory-they're just like blacks here. And the whole idea that people came to America, not knowing the language, having to struggle in sweat shops. . . I didn't relate this to my own father, because my father was bourgeois by then... but I related it to the blacks. Again, what a paradox that South Africa was the blacks' own country, but they were recruited just as if they had been migrant workers for the mines. So I saw the analogy. And that was the beginning of my thinking about my position vis-à-vis blacks. But though I didn't know anything-I was twelve or thirteen, and leading the odd kind of life I did, living in books-I began to think about these things before, perhaps, I was ready for them. When I got to university, it was through mixing with other people who were writing or painting that I got to know black people as equals. In a general and inclusive, non-racial way, I met people who lived in the world of ideas, in the world that interested me passionately. In the town where I lived, there was no mental food of this kind at all. I’m often amazed to think how they live, those people, and what an oppressed life it must be, because human beings must live in the world of ideas. This dimension in the human psyche is very important. It was there, but they didn’t know how to express it."

"after my first trip out, I realized that “home” was certainly and exclusively—Africa. It could never be anywhere else."

"It'll be enough to take your mind off your stomach. - When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead."

"But there's no indemnity. You can't be afraid to do good in case evil results."

"When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like dogs or cats grateful for the sun."

"Our liberation cannot be divorced from black consciousness because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves -"

"The main reason why we're still where we are is blacks haven't united as blacks because we're told all the time to do it is to be racist."

"The blackman is not fighting for equality with whites. Blackness is the blackman refusing to believe the whiteman's way of life is best for blacks."

"Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next."

"The will is my own. The emotion's my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'."

"Communists are the last optimists."

"Conrad went off some evenings for Spanish lessons and sometimes came back with the girl who taught him."