Word: apartheid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although she talks about alienation from society and self caused by apartheid, Gordimer scorns an empty, abstract ideal of relevance. "Artists shouldn't talk about apartheid--they have to go deeper," she snorts. The writer can make others feel, and the emotional depth necessary to convey such experience comes from a writer's internal commitment, she says. "Commitment takes over from within--it's the point at which the inner and outer world fuse." Commitment is the process of making moral decisions on grounds frustratingly ambiguous and clouded...
Gordimer says she finds herself testing her commitment and her courage constantly. She talks about the time a prominent white liberal university in South Africa offered her an honorary degree. Although the university had fought against apartheid, it was supported by government funds. Gordimer did not accept the degree. "I received harsh criticism for that. Even friends said I was wrong. But I have to live my life and make these decisions by myself...
...resolution constituted a conscious attempt to equate Zionism with obvious examples of racism. Tiamiou Adjibade, the U.N. delegate from Dahomey, admitted that "in essence Zionism was not related to apartheid", yet in the same breath he linked the two. American publications made the same spurious connection. One letter drew an explicit analogy between South Africa and Israel, terming Jewish fear of anti-semitism a 'red herring...
...render real genocide commonplace. At first glance, statements such as Castro's and those of the U.N. anti-Zionist resolution seem trivial. Though their claims are patently false--the Israeli's have not herded Palestinian Arabs into a Dachau or a Treblinka, nor have they set up their own apartheid system based on the idea that Jews and Arabs are different species of humanity--Israel's attackers seem merely to rewrite history for parochial ends, to falsify terms as part of an easily-recognized scheme. Although they seem trivial, such statements secrete a different, more lethal poison...
BURGER'S DAUGHTER is a call to arms. Forget the news stories, the polemics, the neatly rhymed slogans about apartheid. Nadine Gordimer's story of a white revolutiohary's daughter struggling with her heritage and her conscience i not only a stunning literary coup, but a relentless portrait of how apartheid poisons whites and blacks in South Africa...