Nadine Gordimer Retrospective:
Review of Life and Works
Lecture 6
https://nadinegordimer2015.wordpress.com/
Course code: 140359
Derek Barker
www.derekbarker.info
Dr.Derek.Barker@gmail.com
Structure
Discussion of political context
Key events:
• 1960 Sharpeville riots
• 1976 Soweto uprising
• Summary of first five chapters of July’s
people (1981)
Shareville and Soweto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2Ev
Z8cYcC8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyic
KHs_cSg
Contrasts
While I go through the summary of the
first five chapters, make mental notes
about contrasts between
• City and country
• Rich and poor
• Adult and child perceptions
• Black and white
Summary
July's People, Nadine Gordimer's novel
about the situation of whites in South
Africa during the end of apartheid, opens
with a close third-person narration
following Maureen Smales' point of view.
Maureen wakes when July brings tea to
their hut. At first, she confuses him with a
servant in a hotel.
Summary
Soon she remembers she is in a mud hut
with a sack as a door. July has brought tea
in pink glasses on a tray, with an open can
of condensed milk that has been specially
opened for the white couple. However,
both Bam and Maureen refuse milk,
although they accept tea.
Summary
July surveys the hut, where the Smaleses'
three children sleep on car seats taken
from their vehicle. Encouraged that
everyone is all right, he leaves. Maureen
immediately slips into confused memory,
remembering the only other time she has
stayed in a round mud hut, when on
vacation with her father, who worked in a
mine.
Summary
The huts are called rondavels, and the
mud and thatch insulate against the heat
for at least part of the day. The floor is
dung and mud, crisscrossed with chickens
and ants. Maureen and Bam sleep on an
iron bed frame with the springs covered
with a tarp from the vehicle. Maureen
and Bam had fled the city for three days
and nights.
Summary
Maureen and the three children hid on
the floor while the car turned and wove
at July's orders. It now takes several days
of real sleep and peace for Maureen to
surface fully into consciousness. She
remembers not the suburban home they
fled, but her beautiful childhood home
and familiar knickknacks.
Summary
The shapes of pigs outside and voices
calling in native African languages pull her
back to the present. She looks at her
children, all three of whom smell of vomit
and are surrounded by flies.
Summary
Chapter two opens with a description of
the vehicle in which they have spent so
much time, a yellow back roads truck
called a "bakkie." Maureen recalls that
Bam bought it as a present to himself, an
indulgence to use while hunting.
Summary
Gordimer says that the nature of an
emergency is that you do not know what will
happen, and so you cannot guess what will be
useful: "The circumstances are incalculable in
the manner in which they come about, even if
apocalyptically or politically foreseen, and the
identity of the vital individuals and objects is
hidden by their humble or frivolous role in an
habitual set of circumstances."
Summary
The circumstances that did occur began
with repeated strikes that became a way
of life. Black workers were hungry and
angry but did not return to work, and
riots became commonplace. Newspapers
did not report accurately or completely
due to government censorship, and a
march into the center of Johannesburg
was stopped violently.
Summary
Bam listened to his bank accountant, who
warned his customers to take money out
of their accounts in cash. Maureen
withdrew the contents of her savings
account as well, and the money lived in
paper bricks in their home.
Summary
But the banks stayed open and the rioting
blacks ran out of ammunition. White
mercenaries were flown in to preserve
order. Order was restored, deliveries
resumed, stores re-opened. The Smaleses
had always intended to leave South
Africa, where they felt like they were
"born white pariah dogs in a black
continent,"
Summary
and had tried to salvage their reputations
and consciences by being liberal, having
political views that supported the blacks,
and tried to "slough privilege" completely
unsuccessfully. They were considered
white and therefore against the blacks.
Summary
When the tide turned and black
revolutionaries incited riots that took
over the cities, the suppressed and angry
blacks massacring whites, the yellow
bakkie provided an escape route. The
banker had provided warning, Maureen
remembered.
Summary
July, the servant who had lived in their yard
since they were married, stayed loyal to the
Smaleses. He led them out of the city.
Maureen returns to the present moment as
she bathes her children, and then herself. She
smells bad. July brings them food: porridge,
spinach, and fruit. The family has always
ended a meal with fruit, and Maureen is
touched by July's attempt to preserve routine.
Summary
Reality reaches Maureen, and she tells
July that they will cook their own meals.
July brings firewood and at dusk comes to
see if they can start their own fire. He
also brings goat's milk, although he is not
sure that Gina will like it. July's son tags
along, listening as his father tells
Maureen to boil the milk.
Summary
The bakkie, which had been hidden in the
bush, is moved to a group of abandoned
huts. The headlights are off for this
operation, as everyone is afraid that the
black nationalists who are fighting the
whites will discover the refugee family
and punish them and the village.
Summary
July guides Bam's driving from the road,
as he had on the journey from the city.
Maureen cannot believe they escaped,
that July stood in their living room and
offered his village as a refuge, that the
truck had not broken down,
Summary
that July had always found petrol and
water to keep them going and guided
them the six hundred kilometres to his
village. Maureen knows it is a miracle, but
the whole event still terrifies her, as does
the present. She knows the tap water will
run out soon and the children will have to
drink from the river.
Summary
The village is tiny, and the only residents
are July's extended family. Maureen
knows that if anyone tells a roving army
band that a white family is in hiding
there, they will all die. If anyone discovers
the bakkie, they will all die.
Summary
When she expresses this fear to July, he
laughs at her. He is ruler of the village,
and he has told them that the Smaleses
gave him the truck. They know that in
effect they have, although they return to
it for the dwindling supplies left inside.
Summary
In the confusion of fleeing, Victor had
packed an electric racecar set, and he
begs to set it up to show off to the black
children. Victor insists that his mother
must tell the black children not to touch
it, and she laughs at him "as adults did, in
the power they refuse to use."
Summary
Maureen tells Victor she cannot speak to
the black children, and he becomes
sullen. Royce keeps asking for Coca-Cola,
unable to accept or understand their
present situation.
Summary
As Maureen boils water for the next day,
she asks Bam what they will do if one of
them falls ill. He does not answer.
Maureen thinks of the truck as a
landlocked ship that will soon be taken
apart for scrap and rusted to uselessness,
unless they travel home shortly.
Summary
Maureen is introduced to July's wife at
the beginning of chapter three. The two
women have no common language, but
Maureen tries to convey her gratitude for
their protection through July. An old
woman is present, someone's mother,
and this woman demands something of
July in their native language.
Summary
Over the years, Maureen has sent many
presents to July's wife. She sent practical
things, such as night gowns and
handbags. Seeing July's wife now, in her
mud hut, with pink glasses displayed as
prize possessions, Maureen realizes how
distant their lives have been. Her gifts
were useless to July's wife.
Summary
Maureen recalls July's town woman,
Ellen, a cheerful, well educated woman
who knew that she had no claim on July's
but who slept with him, ironed for him,
and basically lived in the Smaleses' yard
with him. Maureen could understand that
woman, in a way that she could never
understand July's wife.
Summary
Light shines in through the only window
in the hut, where July's youngest child
rests, sated on milk. Maureen realizes
how distant she is from anything familiar,
and that she has no idea what the routine
of life is like in this new place.
Summary
The fourth chapter switches to July's
wife's perspective. She complains to him,
demanding to know why he has brought
such dangerous intruders to the village,
people who can't even take care of
themselves. When July had arrived with
them, she had not protested.
Summary
She allowed July to take the second bed,
the stove, the beautiful pink cups, her
mother's hut, and to give all these
possessions to these strangers. However,
July had known that his authority was
temporary.
Summary
He had spent the past years in town.
When in the village, his orders had been
obeyed because he brought goods,
presents, food, and money. But he was
staying too long, and his wife was used to
ruling the village.
Summary
Surrounded by other females, July's wife
criticizes him, saying that the white
people are used to living with room after
room to spread out in, and hot water, and
how could all of those rooms, all of that
space, all be gone? She does not believe
his stories of looting and murders and
riots.
Summary
July's wife asks why Bam has a gun, why
they don't go to their own place, where
whites live, take their money and go? July
answers that there is nowhere to go, that
everywhere is chasing and killing the
whites. July's wife asks why they don't go
overseas, the only word in the
conversation that is in English.
Summary
July tells her the planes and the airports are
blown up, destroyed. His wife laughs at him, at
the thought of destroying something so big, so
distant, as airplanes. When July insists, she
becomes fearful of the reprisals that the
whites will exact upon the blacks for their
resistance. July suddenly realizes that the
Smaleses, for all their white skin, are
powerless and helpless.
Summary
July compares the group of women
listening to his explanations to a court
with a short attention span as July's wife
orders some girls to get water and his
mother leaves to pluck a chicken. His
mother yells at him from the door,
criticizing the chicken he killed.
Summary
July's wife thinks about Maureen, who is
the first white person she has ever
touched. July's wife tells him that
Maureen is ugly and has weird hair. Halflongingly, July recalls their groomed
appearances in town. July's wife stops her
child from eating bird droppings and
reminds him there will be no more
money.
Summary
She thinks that there will also be no more
letters full of awe-inspiring facts and
dreams that she could never follow, not
even now that the whites had come to
her. In the fifth chapter, Bam tries to be
useful. He repairs farm equipment and
rigs up a water tank to collect rainwater.
He listens to the radio religiously, trying
to catch every news announcement..
Summary
The suburb across the valley from theirs
has been torched, and the U.S. Congress
debates airlifting its nationals out of the
country. Bam arranges stones as a
foundation for his water tower, built using
an abandoned water tank that no one
had touched for years
Summary
Maureen thinks about the sheer space all
around them. Her children cannot
comprehend how far they are from a real
town and ask to go to a film. The African
desert confines Maureen, scary in its
"boundlessness," and she only walks as
far as the river, and that only rarely. There
is no work Maureen can do.
Summary
July comes to ask for their clothes, so that
the women may wash them. Maureen
refuses, but July says that he will not
carry water and fuel to heat the water, so
they must give him their clothes.
Maureen insists that she pay for the
service, and July accepts this and tells her
there will be soap.
Summary
Maureen knows the soap must be stolen
from their house in town. She watches
with amazement as the money she gives
July is carried around by the villagers. It
seems worthless paper to her, but they
have seen how it transforms into pink
teacups and bicycles and treasure it.
Summary
Without work or even recreation,
Maureen hoards the one book she had
brought. For awhile, she does not read it,
afraid to begin it because once it finishes
she will have nothing to look forward to.
But she does. She begins reading, and
finds that the pleasure is lost because
pretending to be somewhere else has lost
all of its appeal:
Summary
"She was in another time, place,
consciousness; it pressed in upon her and
filled her as someone's breath fills a
balloon's shape." There's nothing to
pretend when everything is so foreign, so
unimaginable.
Summary
Maureen begins to explore her
surroundings, venturing into the dark
huts searching for decorations. She finds
a brass plaque nailed to the wall
dedicated to "boss boy." This is a term
used by the white boss for the African he
relies upon the most, and for the first
time Maureen considers the derogatory
connotations of that name.
Summary
She remembers walking with the African
servant, Lydia, who was her friend and nanny,
chewing gum together and holding hands.
Lydia and Maureen joked and teased each
other, and Lydia carried Maureen's school case
on her head. A photographer captured that
moment for Life magazine, and when
Maureen saw it as an adult she suddenly
realized how odd it was that Lydia had always
taken Maureen's case.
Homework
Read the rest of the novel and begin
thinking about your review