Nadine Gordimer

July’s People (1981)

 YOU LIKE TO HAVE some cup of tea?—!! ! ! !July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.!! ! !The knock on the door. Seven oʼclock. In governorsʼ residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bossesʼ company bungalows, master bedrooms en suite—the tea-tray in black hands smelling of Lifebuoy soap.!! ! !The knock on the door!! ! !no door, an aperture in thick mud walls, and the sack that hung over it looped back for air, sometime during the short night. Bam, Iʼm stifling; her voice raising him from the dead, he staggering up from his exhausted sleep.!! ! !No knock; but July, their servant, their host, bringing two pink glass cups of tea and a small tin of condensed milk, jaggedly-opened, specially for them, with a spook in it.!! ! !—No milk for me. —!! ! !—Or me, thanks.—!! ! !The black man looked over to the three sleeping children bedded-down on seats taken from the vehicle. He smiled confirmation: _They all right.—!! !—Yes, all right.— As he dipped out under the doorway: —Thank you, July, thank you very much.— (1)!

Some issues for today’s discussion!•  What connection does July’s People have to the

birth of Zimbabwe in 1980 and the end of white minority rule there?!

•  Why does the novel seemingly focus on English-speaking white liberals? How does it test the limits of their liberal beliefs?"‘..the necessity to defend their lives in the name of ideals they did not share in a destroyed white society they didn’t believe in.’!

•  Why are there no Afrikaner characters? No Jewish characters?!

Some issues for today’s discussion!•  Why are the exact location of July’s people and

their ethnic background deliberately obscured?!•  What do July and his people have to lose from a

new, African-led order? Why does July tell Maureen, ‘We can only hope everything will come back all right’ (114)?!

•  ‘He thought of the pass-book itself as finished. Rid of it, he drove the yellow bakkie with nothing in his pockets. But he had not actually destroyed it. He needed someone—he didn’t yet know who—to tell him: burn it, let it swell in the river, their signatures washing away.’ (167-8)!

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Some issues for today’s discussion!•  What tensions does the novel establish

between urban South Africa (Johannesburg) and rural South Africa (the ‘Bantu homeland’; July’s place of origin?!

•  Why is the bakkie—a symbol of mobility (or lack thereof)—so central to the plot of the novel?!

•  What sexual tension develops between July and Maureen?!

Some issues for today’s discussion!•  What does the novel do with the position of

the English language?!–  In terms of communication between July’s people

and the Smales!–  In terms of the chief’s role in the text!– As a ‘national language’ for South Africa!– The Fanagalo pidgin/bridge language (versus the

ballet that Maureen learns and teaches as a child in the mines)!

– As a vehicle for an international discussion of the situation of South African during apartheid!

– Afrikaans only heard but not seen: MARNET!

 …But  they  could  assume  comprehension  between  them  only  if  she  kept  away  from  even  the  most  commonplace  of  abstrac9ons:    his  was  the  English  learned  in  kitchens,  factories  and  mines.    It  was  based  on  orders  and  responses,  not  the  exchange  of  ideas  and  feelings.  (116)  

   She  had  never  been  afraid  of  a  man.    Now  comes  fear,  on  top  of  everything  else,  the  fleas,  the  menstrua9ng  in  rags—and  it  comes  from  this  one,  from  him.    It  spread  from  him;  she  was  feeling  no  personal  threat  in  him,  not  physical  anyway,  but  in  herself.    How  was  she  to  have  known,  un9l  she  came  here,  that  the  special  considera9on  she  had  shown  for  his  dignity  as  a  man,  while  he  was  by  defini9on  a  servant,  would  be  come  his  humilia9on  itself,  the  one  thing  there  was  to  say  between  them  that  had  any  meaning.    (119)  

Overseas

The English word broke the cadence of their language. Overseas. The concept was as unfamiliar to his wife as the shaping of the word by her tongue, but he had carried the bags of departure, received postcards of skyscrapers and snow-covered mountains, answered telephone calls from countries where the time of day was different. —You know about the big airport where the planes fly overseas? It wasn’t working. And before that they shot down a plane with white people who were running away.— (24)

       —Why  is  it  the  whites  who  speak  their  languages  are  never  people  like  us,  they’re  always  the  ones  who  have  no  doubt  that  whites  are  superior?  (54)  

‘Boy’ and ‘master’ !‘…The absurd “boy” fell upon her in strokes neither appropriate nor to be dodged. Where had he picked up the weapon? The shift boss had used it; the word was never used in her house; she priggishly shamed and exposed others who spoke it in her presence. She had challenged it in the mouths of white shopkeepers and even policemen. (85) !

July’s  name    —How  many  you  got  there  by  Mwawate’s  place?—    One  eye  closed,  hands  in  posi=on,  taking  aim.    Of  course,  ‘July’  was  a  name  for  whites  to  use;  for  fiDeen  years  they  had  not  been  told  what  the  chief’s  subject  really  was  called.  (146)      The  moon  in  the  sky  was  a  circle  of  gauze  pasted  up  on  the  aDernoon  blue.    Maureen  Smales—the  name,  the  authority  that  signed  his  pass  every  month—came  back  to  the  gumba-­‐gumba  gathering  to  look  for  July.    For  Mwawte.    He  was  not  there;  they  were  used  to  her,  they  took  no  more  no=ce  of  her  than  of  the  dogs  and  children  who  hung  around  the  drinkers’  mysterious  anima=on,  quarrelsome  happiness  and  resenQul  sadness.  (177)  

Trailer from !The Gods Must be Crazy !

(1981) !            hSp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GorHLQ-­‐jLRQ  

 

! !There was in his dark profile, the thrust of the whites of his eyes suddenly faced and away again, the painful set of his broad mouth under the broad mustache, a contempt and humiliation that came from their blood and his. The wonder and unease of the archetypal sensation between them, like the swelling resistance of a vein into which a hollow needle is surging a substance in counterflow to the life-blood coursing there; a feeling brutally shared, one alone cannot experience it, be punished by it, without the other. It did not exist before Pizarro deluded Atahaulpa; it was there in Dingane and Piet Retief. (76)!

Rondavels

! !She had slept in round mud huts roofed in thatch like this before. In Kruger Park, a child of the shift boss and his family on leave, an enamel basin and ewer among the supplies of orange squash and biscuits on the table coming clear as this morning light came. Rondavels adapted by Bam’s ancestors on the his Boer side from the huts of the blacks. They were a rusticism true to the continent; before air-conditioning, everyone praised the natural insulation of thatch against heat. Rondavels had concrete floors, thickly shined with red polish, veined with trails of coarse ants; in Botswana with Bam and his guns and hunter’s supply of red wine. This one was the prototype from which all others had come and to which they all returned… (1-2)!

the bush

…She could name the variety of thorn-tree—Dichrostachys cinerea, sekelbos—with its yellow tassels dangling from downy pink and mauve pompoms, both colours appearing on the same branch. Roberts’ bird book and standard works on indigenous trees and shrubs were the Smales’ accommodation of the wilderness to themselves when they used to visit places like this, camping out. At the end of the holiday you packed up and went back to town. (179)

The novel’s ending!•  Why does she run?""!

•  Does it matter who is in the helicopter?!

The Ending: From Maureen’s Perspective

!…she could not have said what colour it was, what markings it had, whether it holds saviours or murderers; and—even if she were to have identified the markings—for whom. (193)!

!***!!…She runs: trusting herself with all the suppressed truth of a lifetime, alert, like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of young, existing only for their lone survival, the enemy of all that would make claims of responsibility. She can still hear the beat, beyond those trees and those, and she runs towards it. She runs. (195)!