Nadine Gordimer Interview (page: 7 / 8) Nobel Prize in Literature	Print Interview

What do you think someone can learn about you by reading your writing? Or are you detached from your writing, so that it would be very difficult for someone to know about the writer?

Nadine Gordimer: I can't see the point. I'm not interesting. Whatever interest there is in me is in my work, and it's not about me, except insofar as my breadth of experience obviously has enabled me to carry on with it for so long.

You think you're not interesting? People would love to read your autobiography.

Nadine Gordimer: I'd never write an autobiography. Why should I? My private life belongs to me and the people with whom I've lived it.

Many readers see strains of feminism in your works such as The Pickup. Is it feminism or is it just the case of a strong female protagonist?

Nadine Gordimer: Well what's the difference? Isn't that what feminism is? How should I put it?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I am often getting into trouble with feminists because I don't belong to feminist organizations. And I'm indeed a feminist, as I am a humanist. I believe that everybody should have the same rights, whether you're black, whether you're white, whether you're any mixture, whether you're male or female. And obviously women have been and are still very much, how should I put it, deprived of their full rights, many of them. So naturally I'm on that side. Women should be paid the same as men. They should have the same opportunities, all these things. They should have the same authority in their family in all kinds of decisions. Insofar as that's concerned, indeed, I'm a woman, therefore I am a feminist. When it comes to the arts, I have a different view. For instance, the idea that there are associations of women writers. To put it quite bluntly, you do not write with your genitals, you write with what's up here. So why must there be this distinction? You don't have associations of men writers. God knows it's coming, I'm sure of it. We certainly have associations that have homosexual writers, lesbian writers. Then it'll be writers with blue eyes or writers with black eyes, you know. When is it going to stop? We all are writers, and we are influenced perhaps by our sex, which is so interesting, and especially since for millennia, for recorded time, they've had different roles. When you think that now we've got women, even from the last big war, women in war. We have women pilots now. We have women presidents in Germany and so on. But this is on the ability, which has been denied for too long, and which I think was inferior to that of men, because look how women were kept at home and not allowed to follow their education or talents and so on, their educational possibilities. So we've had to come through all that and I'm all for it, just as I am for blacks or for anything involving race, color, sex. Hard enough to be human without dividing it up that way.

How is your process different, writing a short story as opposed to writing a novel?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nadine Gordimer: Sometimes a story occurs to me. And a story is like an egg. It's complete. There's a shell, the white and the yolk. Well now, a short story comes to me complete, the beginning, the end, and how I'm going to get there. A novel is different. A novel I always know the beginning and I think I know the end. And then it goes in stages, it develops. I do not have it complete at the beginning. Theme I have, yes. Characters, not all of them, others may come along as I'm writing. So it's a completely different thing.

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What was the impetus for the stories in Beethoven Was One Sixteenth Black?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, how could I say? Because that consists of stories written over three years so there were many impetuses.

Did you write them all in sequence, or in between writing a novel?

Nadine Gordimer: I think in between times, I wrote a novel, yes. When I'm writing a novel, occasionally an idea comes for a short story. I jot down two words or something, three or four words, and come back to it maybe when the novel is finished, but I don't usually interrupt the novel to write a story. But both forms, they are very different and both appeal to me as something that I want to do.

Did you write today? Can you tell us what you're working on now?

Nadine Gordimer: I did write today. But mostly I was having to do some research as background to check on certain dates that I think I muddled up in what I wrote yesterday and the day before. Because if a piece of writing has a sense of time and sequence in the lives of the people, you want to be sure you've got it straight.

Was it a short story?

Nadine Gordimer: I never tell what I'm writing. I never discuss it, no.

We had to ask. A few years ago, you put together the anthology Telling Tales, as a response to the HIV-AIDS crisis in South Africa. How do you see that situation today?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, to get to the beginning, I don't live in an ivory tower. I am very concerned about AIDS, and although I know Thabo Mbeki and I respected him for many things he did, I've never understood and I still don't understand his attitude of AIDS, his disbelief of how it exists and where it came from. So now, what do you do? I'm not a politician. What can I do about AIDS? Talk about it as we are doing now? You know, tut tut. But then I thought, look what the musicians do, especially the jazz musicians. Look at these great gigs that we're having everywhere. First of all, they made money for people who were supporting people who have AIDS, or for prevention. And secondly, they were rousing people's attention to this. But I thought, where do we register?

For instance, the wonderful international organization to which I belong, PEN. Many people don't know this, but they have been wonderful for two generations now, over writers who are in prison and taking care of their families and keeping in touch with them and agitating to get them out and sometimes successful. But not a word about AIDS. It's considered, first of all, this has got nothing to do with them. Has nobody who was a writer ever got AIDS? So I said, "There's no good carrying on about this. Do something. " I went, well okay. We can't have gigs. We haven't got that enormous access to people.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. What about a collection of writings? Which would not be about AIDS, but which will be attractive writings, which will make a lovely Christmas or birthday present, and the money would go to -- I chose ours, the Treatment Action Campaign. So I wrote to writers, 20 writers -- no, 19 because I'm the 20th -- and some of whom are my close friends, and others I knew wrote really good stories. You know, not all novelists write good stories as well, but the ones that I chose indeed do, or did. A couple of them or less have died now. And told them, "Please, a story. Don't sit down and write something about people getting AIDS. Just choose one of your best stories please, and send it to me and I'm going to find a publisher for a book. And these stories will be collected there, and the proceeds -- the royalties -- will go indeed to organizations that are dealing with people who are HIV positive and all have AIDS. I got a wonderful response. No refusal from anybody, which was really great. And then I thought, now the stories are going to come. All the stories are absolutely outstanding. I happen to have a couple of favorites among them, but they're all very good. And then I spoke to my own publishers and I sent the material to them. They agreed to publish, taking only production costs and no share of any royalties. It's now in 15 languages worldwide. So in a small way, it doesn't do what a big gig does, but it has reached people and it has brought in quite a bit of money.

Why did you decide to do it at that time?

Nadine Gordimer: Because the musicians were doing something. The writers were not even opening their mouths, not even PEN. So what's the matter with us?

Telling Tales was published in 2004. How do you see the AIDS crisis now in South Africa? Where do you think that we'll be in five or ten years?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, I was just hearing today, again, on the news, we seem to be the worst affected in the world. So it's a terrible crisis, and I don't know, we seem not to be dealing with it. So it's very, very troubling.

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