Hala Halim speaks with Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, in Cairo, about trauma and witnessing "Naguib Mahfouz has drunk the cup and gone, leaving us behind in the shabby grim presence of worldly power, but he's left his wisdom, his writings, his inward testimony, the wisdom of great literature": words of homage with which Nadine Gordimer -- the South African 1991 Nobel literature laureate -- concluded the inaugural annual Naguib Mahfouz Memorial Lecture she gave on 3 December at the American University in Cairo (AUC). The lecture marked the beginning of a week-long programme, organised by AUC Press, celebrating the life and work of Mahfouz, Egypt's 1988 Nobel literature laureate who died last August. Comprising screenings of cinematic adaptations of his novels and a documentary exhibition, the celebration will culminate on 11 December, his 95 birth anniversary, with the award ceremony for the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. Entitled "Witness: the inward testimony", Gordimer's lecture posited, in face of world catastrophes and mass destruction, the task of literature as witness. In contrast to the photographed or filmed image of catastrophe and the expert analyses that follow, said Gordimer, witness literature gives access to "the enduring significance that is meaning" through the imaginative empathy of inward testimony. Maintaining that exposure to harrowing experiences does not of itself qualify for writing if the proclivity is absent, she cited a range of canonical modernist writers to modulate on the "duality of inwardness and the outside world" as an existential prerequisite for witness literature. Expressing the reservation that she was not allocating attainment of Truth as the purview of the witness writer, Gordimer reaffirmed that the task was the pursuit of questions, not least about the roots of terrorism and a world order in which a "cosmic gap" exists between the prosperity of the US and "the poorest of the world population". Such a task, rather than undermine "aesthetic liberty", she continued, was premised on it, in that form and style needed to be fashioned anew "to contain the event before and after the event". Giving her testimony about the "inspiring aesthetic liberty" she found in her writing as witness to the apartheid regime in South Africa, Gordimer rounded off her lecture by eliciting from the Mahfouz corpus the search for Zaabalawi, in the short story by that title, and the book that the pharaoh decides to write in Khufu's Wisdom, read as emblematic of writers' calling for "inward testimony". After the lecture, as well as the following day at a seminar for AUC faculty and students, Gordimer took questions. In response to questions about the parallels between South Africa under apartheid and Israel, Gordimer drew out from the South African experience both the risks that a minority of white Afrikaners had taken in combating apartheid and the tolerance of the black population, the majority, who did not slice throats or engage in civil wars. However, she designated the parallel drawn between Israel and apartheid South Africa a "mistaken comparison" because, in her view, the latter situation was based on skin colour whereas in the Palestinian-Israeli context the issue centres on possession of land regardless of race, or even religion. Asked to comment on the fragmentation that increasing identity politics has wrought, Gordimer acknowledged the complexities of shuffling many identities but asserted that to become fully human one must resist being "boxed" in and strive instead towards internationalism. Current South African writing, the subject of another question, now released from the restrictions of censorship was, she said, mostly turned towards the past as people work through the experiences of the apartheid era and it is mainly in the theatre that the contemporary experience is represented. In an interview with Gordimer I ask her to comment on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which has been cited as a possible means of working through the Iraqi trauma and which formed the model for a similar commission in Morocco that a political commentator recently recommended as a way to address police brutality and human rights infringements in Egypt. "It was a very good idea because we had come together after centuries of great conflict," she says, and the TRC offered an opportunity for perpetrators who had acted out of political belief to voluntarily admit and express regret for their violent acts and be accepted. But the TRC as a model, she suggests, is more suitable in contexts where there has been a tremendous political change. Building on the questioning in the discussion of the privileging of word over image as witness in the contemporary world, I cite Susan Sontag's essay "Regarding the Torture of Others" about the photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib Prison. Gordimer says she agrees that the political picture has an immediacy that politicians cannot deny, but that the deepest level of interpretation and "illumination", as distinct from "information", is more suited to literature. When I broach the Israeli-South African analogy drawn by Edward Said and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others, Gordimer reiterates her rejection of the parallelism. Whereas there had been no whites originally in South Africa, she responds, "one cannot deny that Jews came from there [Palestine] originally and that there was an exodus," adding that it makes her unpopular if she says "we can't all go back to where we were 1000 years ago." She is keen to emphasise that "Israel was created in order that the West should get rid of the Jews", going on to assert that "the actual wall [Israel is building] is a terrible thing" and that "the only solution is to ensure a Palestinian homeland." She emphasises, though, that Hamas must acknowledge "that Israel has a right to exist". She also expresses her condemnation of Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Picking up Gordimer's appeal to internationalism, I ask how she conceives of a new cosmopolitanism critical of globalisation's pitfalls, given the absence or weakening of socialism and of projects such as pan-Africanism and the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Movement. For Gordimer, what limits cosmopolitanism is that it "refers to worldliness in a city sense", whereas internationalism "is bigger and more complex". In her view, we should be promoting "the kind of thing that globalisation is supposed to be standing for" if it were not "confined to capitalism and dominated by the big powers... accommodating the world to their own needs. We must reform globalisation... and look at different efforts to reunite the world." As I ready to leave, Gordimer stops me saying she has something to add. Egypt, she says, "doesn't think of itself as part of Africa", its orientation being towards the Middle East. Her parting plea is for more "solidarity" between the north and south of the continent, in terms of cultural exchange as much as trade.
