BIOGRAPHY
Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in Springs,
Transvaal, South Africa, and died at 91 in Johannesburg, its largest city.
Her parents were Jewish; they had fled from pogroms in
Eastern Europe, but she wasn’t educated religiously. Nevertheless, her parents
sent her to a catholic school, although, after a time, she left school and was
raised a home because some heart problems her mother thought dangerous.
At home she read a lot, and from a very young age, she started to
write stories.
Later, she studied Law at Witwatersrand University,
but only for a year, and so she didn’t complete her degree. But there she
started to mix with Black people and to understand their situation, the meaning
of segregation and later of apartheid.
When she was 25, she moved to Johannesburg. She
married a dentist with whom she had a daughter. They got divorced and she got
married again in 1954 to an art dealer. This marriage lasted until her husband’s
death. They got a son.
But she didn’t stop writing or trying to publish her
stories, and in 1949, she published her first collection, Face to Face.
Then, two years later, the magazine The New Yorker issued one of her stories
and she continued publishing there for a long time. Although she also wrote
some novels, she said that the 20th century literary genre par
excellence was the short story, because it’s a way to see an event “by the
light of a flash”, and because every short story is “a discrete moment of
truth”.
She was an activist against the apartheid and some of
her books were banned in South Africa. In 1960, they arrested her best friend, and
the police shot Black people during a pacific demonstration in Sharpeville, a
“Black location”. From that moment, she became firmly committed
to Mandela’s African National Congress. She helped Mandela in his 1962 trial
when he delivered his famous three-hour speech, “I Am Prepared to Die”.
In post-apartheid times, she was active in movements
related to AIDS, and she was vice-president of International PEN.
As a curiosity, she rejected being nominate for the
Orange Prize in 1998… because it was only for women.
Also, when asked about Isreali policies, she always
said that they didn’t have anything to do with the apartheid system, and thus she was
criticised for this opinion.
SUMMARY
The Amateurs is one of Gordimer’s
first stories. It was published in the collection Face to Face. It has, like
much of her narrative, some autobiographical details. Nadine, as a teenager,
played the part of Gwendolen of The Importance of Being Earnest, by
Oscar Wilde, in an amateur company.
In the story, a group of white do-gooders went to a
Location, that is, a Black people slum (later called “townships”) to perform the
Oscar Wilde’s play. At the beginning, they could’t find the place where they had
to play, but they felt that was a poor quarter. Then came a boy, a policeman, who
led them to the right place. There was a bit of misunderstanding because it
was thought that it would be a concert, instead of a play. All in all, they were
placed in a poor room (not exactly a dressing room) where that could get dressed
and put on their make-up. As they had seen what kind of audience they were
going to have, they became aware that it would be a difficult play for them,
that they wouldn’t understand anything, and so it wouldn’t be necessary to dress
up too much.
In the first act, most of the spectators were
teachers, or clerks or civil servants. As the actors and actresses realized they
didn’t grasp the subtility and the irony of the text, they began to act out
more histrionically in order to elicit more laughter from the audience.
The first act finished, the people who were outside the
hall because they weren’t invited or because they didn’t feel like going in, entered
the house and filled it up. Now there were all kinds of people there, even
babies, and sitting even on the floor. So, there was a full house, although
some people didn’t pay much attention to the play. The actors and actresses
went on overdoing voices and gestures, and thus throwing away the spirit of the
play.
At the end of it, they collected a very long round of applause,
and a girl from the audience gave the players a moving speech thanking them and
telling the Location youth to follow the example of the performers to improve
their behaviour and to be useful to their community.
The company of actors and actresses left the place
with mixed feelings: happy because they had made some people happy, and sad
because they think they had betrayed the piece and cheated the audience.
It’s important to note that at no point does the
narrator mention the characters’ skin colour. Nor can we find any hint about
the time period when the story is set.
QUESTIONS
-Why do you think the narrator didn’t mention skin
colours?
-In your opinion, is it so difficult to understand The
Importance of Being Earnest? Do you need to have a higher education to
enjoy some works of art?
-Overdoing the performance, did they cheat the
audience? Or were they being only didactic?
-Oscar Wilde said: “It is the problem of slavery, and
we try to solve it by amusing the slaves”. And “Philanthropic people lose all
sense of humanity. It’s their distinguishing characteristic”. In your view,
philanthropy has good, or bad effects, on the people who get its “benefits”?
-Do you agree with Gordimer’s opinion about the Orange
Prize and about Israeli politics?
VOCABULARY
props, drain, wash, knobkerrie, lean-to, straggling,
shrilly, bustle, sideburn, drawing room, pouter-pigeon, long-hipped, colour
bar, belched, hamming, splurged out, knocked up, tittered,