COMMENTS: Dilemmas of the Afrikaans

...Brink has written that in selecting the essays for his book, he found that "a world where more and more violence is solving fewer and fewer problems makes the writer not less, but more, necessary...

...In other words, in the minds of probably the majority of Afrikaners, the writer is still supposed to exercise the function he had in a society at the very beginning of its evolution...

...and a truly good book will inevitably survive, in spite of all attempts to kill it, just as Madame Bovary survived, or, in our time, Doctor Zhivago...

...The author of such novels as Looking on Darkness, A Dry White Season, and A Chain of Voices, he has twice been awarded the most important South African literary prize, the CNA award—the only author to receive it both for Afrikaans and English work...

...Brink's new collection of critical pieces entitled Writing in a State of Siege, copyright © 1984 by Andre Brink, and published in the United States by Summit Books, with whose kind permission it appears in our pages...

...Politically, the Afrikaner is in power...

...It is not yet a century since the First Language Movement began to promote Afrikaans as a language...

...But these actions appear as the mere symptoms of a much deeper problem, and they are intimately linked with the unprecedented strife and infighting and backbiting rocking Afrikanerdom at the moment—clashing political ambitions, turmoil in the Churches, cultural and industrial conflict, etc...

...When Etienne Leroux dares to reveal some of the flaws and follies of South African society in Seven Days at the Silbersteins, all possible pretexts from the ethical to the linguistic are used in an effort to discredit his work...

...The danger is that once a climate is created in which Afrikaans works can be banned as easily as those in English, the Afrikaans writer may be forced to find other markets, like Pasternak: for the writer does not only write, but writes to be read...

...In this society the Afrikaans writer occupies a strange and important place...

...but that is really only the beginning of the struggle, which is basically a struggle against lies and the denial of justice...

...On the other hand one should have no illusions about the spiritual agony of a writer whose works are kept away from the people for whom he has written in the first place: Nadine Gordimer's banned The Late Bourgeois World should primarily be read by South Africans...

...too long on it...

...And the onslaught is not restricted to the rantings of self-appointed popes of morality, or to an avalanche of letters to the press, but extends to the radio (by refusing younger writers any opportunity of explaining their views), to schools (by forbidding children to read younger writers), to churches (by intimidating printers and publishers...

...The Afrikaans writer has so far been allowed to publish his work in his own country—or some of his work, for the public is not aware, I think, of the formidable and growing power of prepublication censorship applied by most of the larger publishing firms with political affiliations...

...But does that imply that the position of the Afrikaans writer is more safe and secure than that of his black, brown, or white compatriots writing in English...

...Once political supremacy had been achieved, however, the natural differences characteristic of all societies inevitably began to assert themselves...

...Now this is exactly the function of ' which our authorities wish to deprive Afrikaans writers, not realizing that the result would be that blind stampede of springboks into the sea in search of salt evoked in Opperman's moving poem, "Springbokke...

...In the meantime, however, the world has changed utterly and within the international cultural society the writer, including the Afrikaner, has a different function altogether...

...I think—I...

...Of course this may turn the writer into the notorious "gadfly of society...

...A book that fails in its exploration of significant patterns in society and in the relationships of individuals is doomed to die— whether attacked by the puritans or not...

...EDS...

...And if our culture is to flourish—if it is to survive at all—South Africa will have to make room for gadflies and bees in its smug little garden...

...hope—that no really good Afrikaans novel will ultimately fail to find a local publisher...

...In this brand of conservatism, it may be argued, it is simply the immemorial conflict between old and young that is revealed with particular violence and bitterness...

...mythical yolk as the mainspring of their fulminations, the raison d'être of their sound and fury—but is the yolk really concerned with it...

...The Afrikaans writer, on the other hand, still has the uneasy knowledge that although the authorities loathe his guts, no official action has been taken against an Afrikaans book (yet...

...In 1980 he received the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize...

...That is why those in control of State, Church, or organized culture insist that the present is no time to reason why," but simply to do or die," which accounts for the extraordinary vehemence of their reactions...

...If resistance against younger Afrikaans writin were confined to small men and little groups P would, indeed, have been unnecessary to dwel...

...If younger writers dare suggest that morality involves more than "Yes, Baas," marriage, and family prayers, or that love is a metaphysical experience transcending the adoration of a princesse lointaine or some amorous gropings in a farmhouse, or that modern society is urbanized and involves rather more than the traditional afflictions of farmers, or that politics has a larger spectrum than Nationalism, our works are proscribed and their authors ostracized...

...Or are most people simply amused by Christian Cultural Action Congresses and tither gatherings that reveal very little Christian love and only a distorted sense of culture...

...These self-appointed leaders invoke the rtiagic and...

...of course this makes him obnoxious to the conscience of the political leader who works with common denominators rather than with individuals: but that is his duty...

...If the position of the English writer in South Africa is unenviable, it is at least unequivocal: his work is banned...

...And it is a price this young society cannot afford...

...Without that, society stagnates...

...Unfortunately this is happening at a moment when South Africa is particularly vulnerable in the eyes of the world: if Afrikanerdom crumbles, the entire edifice of our society, it is argued, may be ruined...

...In spite of the vicissitudes in the life of a nation it is the duty of the writer to probe beneath the surface, to pose dangerous questions, to discover essential human truths...

...Even though an English writer may be denied a local market he is still affiliated, through language and culture, to a large Anglo-Saxon world in which he is allowed to exercise his true function as a writer...

...But the price will be paid by his country...

...An insidious campaign against liberal trends in younger writers strives to persuade the nation that they are also heralds of communism— and in this way a climate is slowly created in which, it is hoped, this young, flourishing literature can be stifled...

...He is supposed to encourage the solidarity of his people and to promote their group identity—as was expected of Homer or the narrators of the Nibelungenlied, of Afrikaner pioneers, or of the writers of Soviet Russia or Red China...

...The article that follows is taken from Mr...

...During the first half of the century the mere struggle to gain that power kept Afrikaans-speaking people together...

...11] 15...

...If he is good enough, he will survive...

...It is all so unnecessary...

...The matter is not so simple...

...Both artist and scientist belong, as Goethe said two centuries ago, to humanity as a whole...

...Already a danger point is drawing near...

...Not all of it, of course, but if the case of Nadine Gordimer can be regarded as indicative, certainly the most accomplished, the most effective work by an English writer is liable to be banned...

...the first Afrikaans poem of some literary merit was written a mere 60 years ago...

...an Afrikaner was automatically a supporter of the Party and a member of one of the 14 three "Sister Churches" (even though these weird Sisters didn't always reveal much brotherly love...

...From one point of view it seems unnecessary to pay too much attention to some of these "organizations" acting in the name of Christianity or Nationalism or, preferably, both: surely they are no more than the pathetic and desperate crusades of angry old men...

...The English writer banned in South Africa still lives on in an English cultural tradition abroad, however painful the silence imposed on him at home: the Afrikaner may be uprooted more completely...

...At the very least there are no qualms in the minds of the authorities about banning English works: these writers are traditionally regarded as enemies of the Afrikaner—so what else can be expected of them...