Setting in Gordimer's July's People

Benjamin Graves '98 UTRA Fellow 1997

Having been "displaced" from the material, bourgeois trappings of their home in
Johannesburg, Bam and Maureen awaken to their new make-shift quarters in July's
village:
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 o'clock. In governors' residences, commercial hotel
rooms, shift bosses' 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, I'm 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 cups of tea and a small tin
of condensed milk, jaggedly-opened, specially for them, with a spoon in it. (1)
Gordimer employs a paradoxical mingling of continuity and change in order to
introduce the Smales' unsettling immersion into a foreign class structure. The fact that
July "began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind" suggests a
static continuity or repetition that belies the radical setting change between affluent
"governors' residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bosses' company bungalows"
and the "aperture in thick mud walls" that now serves as the Smales' front door. The
setting change--an abrupt transition between "the knock on the door" and the nonsequitor that follows ("no door")--not only foregrounds the correspondence between
"place" and the formation of identity, but also introduces the inversion of power that
characterizes the Smales' new dependence upon July. In other words, whereas the
"master bedrooms" of Johannesburg provide a setting in which the Smales exercise
authority over July, their displacement to his village suddenly invests July with a
degree of power over them (a "dialectical" Hegelian inversion, about which more
below). And yet July's broken English in the first line ("You like to have some cup of
tea?") underscores the language barriers that somewhat limit his recourse to power.

"There was complicity growing in the silence": the MasterServant Relationship in Gordimer's July's People
Benjamin Graves '98 UTRA Fellow 1997
Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981)--a novel ostensibly involving a white
middle-class family's flight from riot-stricken Johannesburg into the refuge of their
black servant's native village--takes as its epigraph a passage from Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. "The old is dying and the new cannot be born;
in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms." Gordimer reappropriates Gramsci's "interregnum" in order to suggest the "morbid symptoms" that
shape her novel's setting within the revolutionary moment of early 1980's South
Africa. The relationship between Maureen and Bam Smales and their servant July--a
nuanced relationship of dependence, defiance, communication, and
miscommunication--dramatizes the broader racial, economic, and sexual power
dynamics underscoring white apartheid rule and the resistance to it. Herself a
consistent if increasingly radical critic of apartheid, Gordimer uses the master/servant
relationship in July's People as an organizing motif that allows her to examine the
following themes: 1) the material or economic basis of human interactions and the
construction of identity; 2) the notion of "displacement"--not merely the Smales'
geographical migration but also the process by which the "master/slave" relationship
translates or maps onto comparable relationships of power; 3) the function of
language as both an index of cultural difference and an exercise of power; and 4) the
complicated notion of "complicity" (namely the fear of unknowingly rehearsing the
racist workings of apartheid) that shapes the presence of both Maureen and Gordimer
herself as similarly privileged, white, bourgeois subjects. My interest is to engage the
"master-slave" relationship with the historical moment of revolutionary transition in
which Gordimer wrote, and to try also to put her novel in dialogue with Georg Hegel
and Franz Fanon"s contending interpretations of the "master-slave dialectic."

The Material Basis of Relationships

Benjamin Graves '98 UTRA Fellow 1997
What's telling is the attention Gordimer pays in her introduction to material objects in
relation to the emergence of the Smales' class identity. Even though their living
conditions have been reduced to "thick mud walls" and a ceiling composed of a "sack
that hung over it looped back for air," the Smales cling to the anomalous bourgeois
conventionality of "two cups of tea and a small tin of condensed milk, jaggedlyopened, specially for them, with a spoon in it." The novel's first quarter or so abounds

with description of material objects that function as class emblems indicative of the
Smales' bourgeois privilege. Shortly after arriving at July's village, Maureen sifts
through the family's belongings in search of her shaken class identity:
Picking them up one by one, she went over the objects of her collection on the
bookshelf, the miniature brass coffeepot and tray, the four bone elephants, one with a
broken trunk, the khaki pottery bulldog with the Union Jack painted on his back. (3)
Notice how the "four bone elephants" and the "khaki pottery bulldog" with the "Union
Jack" insignia function as tokens of imperial expansion. Compelled by the possession
of objects (and moreover the "possession" of their servant July), Maureen and Bam
can only define their identities as a series of empty middle class titles that demonstrate
economic advantage: "Maureen and Bam Smales. Bamford Smales, Smales, Caprano
& Partners, Architects. Maureen Hetherington from Western Area Gold Mines. Under
10s Silver Cup for Classical and Mime at the Johannesburg Eisteddfod" (2). Material
objects of course bear centrally upon the narrative's turning points-namely, July
driving away the Smales' "bakkie" (a jeep "bought for pleasure" (6)), and further on,
the disappearance of Bam's gun (142-143). What Maureen and Bam soon realize is
that their First World material advantage fails to translate coherently into the Third
World belief structures of July's village. For instance, their attempts to compensate
July's family for its hospitality with foreign "bits of paper" (28) perhaps demonstrate
the Smales" empty capitalist dependency on systems of currency. Economics not only
structures the formation of identity but the relationships or "exchanges" between
Maureen and Bam, between the Smales and July, and between July and his own wife.
The passage below, in which Maureen contemplates both her crumbling marriage to
Bam and her relationship to July, demonstrates Gordimer's concern for the "economy"
at the heart of human interactions:
The humane creed (Maureen, like anyone else, regarded her own as definitive)
depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate
relationships between human beings. If people don't all experience emotional
satisfaction and deprivation in the same way, what claim can there be for equality of
need? ... Yet how was that absolute nature of intimate relationships arrived at? Who
decided? 'We' (Maureen sometimes harked back) understand the sacred power and
rights of sexual love are as formulated in a wife's hut, and a backyard room in a
city. The balance between desire and duty is-has to be-maintained quite differently in
accordance with the differences in the lovers' place in the economy. These alter the
way of dealing with the experience; and so the experience itself (65 my emphasis)
Questioning society's dubious "belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships,"
Maureen perhaps realizes that human interactions are not absolute but rather
determined by material conditions- "the lovers' place in the economy" (65). My point
is that this passage illustrates Gordimer's sympathy to Marx, who teaches us that one's

"superstructural" consciousness (perhaps the "human creed" Gordimer suggests

above) is neither innate nor autonomous but rather determined by the nexus of
"productive forces" and "means of production" that structure a community's material
and economic base. The master/servant relationship, for example, is primarily an
economic relationship of mutual dependence. The marriage between Maureen and
Bam, much like their relationship to July, is predicated upon a complicated "balance
between desire and duty"-a balance that is to grow increasingly precarious as the
novel progresses. Materially dispossessed, Maureen and Bam come to realize their
own identities only in terms of their lives' vacancy of substantive value and meaning
in the face of economic loss.

A Historical Moment of Social Transformation

Benjamin Graves '98 UTRA Fellow 1997
The salient "material" events here, however, are the historical contexts of social
transformation in late 1970's South Africa that informed the novel's writing. Towards
the novel's opening, an omniscient narrator describes the events that drove the Smales
to flee Johannesburg along with their three children:
Riots, arson, occupation of the headquarters of international corporations, bombs in
public buildings-the censorship of newspapers, radio and television left rumour and
word-of-mouth as the only sources of information about this chronic state of uprising
all over the country. At home, after weeks of rioting out of sight in Soweto, a march
on Johannesburg of (variously estimated) fifteen thousand blacks had been stopped at
the edge of the business centre at the cost of a (variously estimated) number of lives,
black and white. (7)
Although the revolutionary setting that Gordimer describes above is fictional (perhaps
meant to be set a year or two after the book's publishing in 1981), this "chronic state
of uprising...in Soweto" recalls several salient moments of black nationalist
insurgence in South Africa in the mid to late 1970's-namely the Soweto student
uprising of 1976 in Johannesburg. Since 1948, South Africa has borne the rule of the
Afrikaner National Party, whose political policy of apartheid (an Afrikaans word
meaning "apartness" or "separateness") demands the government-sanctioned
segregation of races and moreover severely restricts the political rights of non-whites
to vote, to hold certain jobs, to seek an education, and to own land (African Political
Dictionary 36). In June, 1976-12 years after the sentencing of Nelson Mandela and
one year prior to the arrest and murder of Black Consciousness organizer and activist
Steven Biko-thousands of black students in Soweto (an economically under-privileged
collection of townships within the city limits of Johannesburg) protested against the
compulsory use of Afrikaans by public school instructors and students (Head xvii).

After organizing a "peaceful mass demonstration" on June 16, protesting students

"were met with a hail of bullets" resulting in the death of two (Davies, Omeara,
Dlamini 34). By 1977, approximately 575 non-whites in Soweto had been murdered,
galvanizing many students to leave the country in search of military training to
combat the hand of apartheid (34). Despite its depiction of horror, then, Gordimer's
suggestion of "fifteen thousand blacks" marching on Johannesburg recalls Gramsci's
"morbid symptoms" in that it forecasts the necessary violence of black nationalism's
aspirations for social transformation.

Envisioning a Postapartheid Future

Benjamin Graves '98 UTRA Fellow 1997

The novel's conclusion ambiguously points towards a postapartheid future. The gun
having been stolen into the hands of July's counter-revolutionary (and I would argue,
neo-imperialist) villagers, Maureen hears the distant sounds of a helicopter and runs
toward its promise of a "migration" that parallels the Smales' displacement to the
village at the novel's opening:
Above yells, exclamations, discussions and laughter, she follows the scudding of the
engine up there behind cloud. She is following now with a sense made up of all
senses. She sees the helicopter once again, a tiny dervish dangling out of cover
towards the bush...She runs: trusting herself with all the suppressed trust 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 long 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 toward it. She runs. (159-160)
What strikes me is the relation of this passage to the Gordimer's biographical contextnamely her refusal to consider the alternative of exile. In other words, whereas
Gordimer herself remains immersed in the revolutionary setting of South African
politics, Maureen "runs" away from it-perhaps a subliminal projection of Gordimer's
own occasional aspirations! The final line- "she runs"-perhaps leaves it up to the
reader to decide exactly where Maureen is going, what future she is running to, and
away from what past. What's also unclear is whether the helicopters are governmental
helicopters attempting to re-establish apartheid rule, or insurrectionary black
nationalist helicopters aimed at tearing it down. I myself would hope the latter.