Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [87]
Well, of course John did not write in Afrikaans at all, he wrote in English, very good English, and had written in English all his life. Even so, he responded in very prickly fashion to what he saw as an insult to the dignity of Afrikaans.
He did translations from Afrikaans, didn't he? I mean, translated Afrikaans writers.
Yes. He knew Afrikaans well, I would say, though in much the same fashion as he knew French, that is, better on the page than spoken. I was not competent to judge his Afrikaans, of course, but that was the impression I got.
So we have the case of a man who spoke the language only imperfectly, who stood outside the state religion, whose outlook was cosmopolitan, whose politics was – what shall we say? – dissident, yet who was ready to embrace an Afrikaner identity. Why do you think that was so?
My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically.
Was there nothing that drew him more positively to embrace an Afrikaner identity – nothing at a personal level, for example?
Perhaps there was, I can't say. I never got to meet his family. Perhaps they would provide a clue. But he was by nature very cautious, very much the tortoise. When he sensed danger, he would withdraw into his shell. He had been rebuffed by the Afrikaners too often, rebuffed and humiliated – you have only to read his book of childhood memories to see that. He was not going to take the risk of being rejected again.
So he preferred to remain an outsider.
I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner.
You say you were never introduced to his family. Do you not find that strange?
No, not at all. His mother had passed away by the time we met, his father was not well, his brother was overseas, he was on strained terms with the wider family. As for me, I was a married woman, so our relationship, as far as it went, had to be clandestine.
But he and I talked, of course, about our families, our origins. What distinguished his family, I would say, is that they were cultural Afrikaners but not political Afrikaners. What do I mean? Reflect on Europe in the nineteenth century. All over the continent you see ethnic or cultural identities being transformed into political identities. The process starts in Greece and spreads through the Balkans and central Europe. Soon that same wave hit the Cape Colony. Dutch-speaking Creoles begin to reinvent themselves as the Afrikaner nation and to agitate for national independence.
Well, somehow or other that wave of nationalist enthusiasm passed John's family by. Or else they decided not to swim with it.
They kept their distance because of the politics associated with nationalist enthusiasm – I mean, the anti-imperialist, anti-English politics?
Yes. First they were disturbed by the whipped-up hostility to everything English, by the mystique of Blut und Boden; then later they recoiled from the policies that the nationalists took over from the radical right in Europe: scientific racism, the policing of culture, militarization of the youth, a state religion, and so forth.
So, all in all, you see Coetzee as a conservative, an anti-radical.
A cultural conservative, yes, as many of the modernists were cultural conservatives – I mean the modernist writers from Europe who were his models. He was deeply attached to the South Africa of his youth, a South Africa which by 1976 was starting to look like a never-never