South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, died Sunday at the age of 90. Gordimer merged the personal and political to create a compelling portrait of the injustice of life under apartheid.
She was born in 1923 to a mother whose family came to South Africa from Britain and a Jewish father who had lived under oppression in his native Lithuania. But she didn't learn her politics at home; rather, as she moved out into the wider world — first at university in Johannesburg — she took in what was happening in her country under the government-mandated system of apartheid.
Neville Hoad, an English professor at the University of Texas in Austin, first read Gordimer when he was a university student in South Africa. "She travelled in social circles in Johannesburg that were very much politically engaged," he says. "But I also think she was an astute observer of, you know, everyday experience in Johannesburg in those years. And if you were paying attention, you couldn't help but notice the injustices of apartheid."
Gordimer's first novel, 1953's The Lying Days, is the story of young woman who, like Gordimer, comes from a small mining town and begins grappling with apartheid when she has an affair with a social worker. Gordimer, who wrote 15 novels, continued to explore the effects of apartheid in books like A World of Strangers, The Conservationist and A Sport of Nature. A passage from that last book, told from the heroine's perspective, reads:
At night I sat out in what the darkness reverted to the miner's garden. ... The frogs throbbing on and the sea hissing. I'd walk down to the beach. Nothing. Nothing but gentleness, you know how the Indian Ocean seems to evaporate into the sky at night. In the middle of my witness of the horror of this country, I experienced the white man's peace. I did.