The Ultimate Safari (Criticism)

Criticism

Mark White

White is the publisher of the Seattle-based literary press, Scala House Press. In this essay,White argues that Gordimer's decision not to reveal the race of the narrator in "The Ultimate Safari" resulted in the creation of a more empathetic character with whom her white American and British readers could identify.

The art of "writing in voice," or "writing in character," is a common literary technique that has been used by countless writers over the years. In one of literature's most famous examples, Herman Melville adopts the persona of Ishmael, an itinerant seaman, in Moby Dick, and in two of the more popular examples from the late twentieth century, Alice Walker, in The Color Purple, adopts the voice of Celie, an uneducated, abused southern girl, and Arthur Golden writes from the perspective of a Japanese geisha in Memoirs of a Geisha.

While it is not at all uncommon for a writer to take on the character of someone outside his or her own economic and social status, as Walker did, what is far less common is for a writer to adopt the character of a different ethnic background or race, as was the case with Golden. And least common of all — perhaps because of the highly contentious and politically charged nature of black-white relationships — is when a white writer adopts the voice of a black character, as Nadine Gordimer does in her short story "The Ultimate Safari."

In "The Ultimate Safari," Gordimer, a white South African writer well into her sixties when the story was published, takes on the voice of a young nameless black refugee girl from Mozambique. While Gordimer had written from a black perspective several times throughout her career, what sets this particular story apart is the fact that through most of its telling, the reader is not made fully aware of the narrator's race. While the few details of the story's setting and the narrator's circumstances that are offered from the outset hint strongly that she is black, it is not until the story's final scenes that the girl's nationality and race are confirmed. Gordimer's conscious manipulation of these facts is one of the techniques she uses that ultimately gives this story its poignancy. By keeping the reader uncertain about the girl's background, Gordimer effectively holds out the possibility in the reader's mind, on some level, that the narrator could be "the girl next door" and not simply another distant and nameless African refugee. While this may seem insignificant to the overall meaning of the story itself, in light of the fact that the vast majority of the story's readers at the time of its publication were not only white, but also non-South African, this technique effectively helped Gordimer to maximize the empathy the story's readers felt for the character and effectively contributed to her agenda of enlightening the world to the dehumanizing effects of her country's system of apartheid.

Throughout most of her fifty-year career, Gordimer has used her writing to explore, expose, and oppose South Africa's long-standing system of racial segregation known as apartheid. With the major exception of her early autobiographical work, The Lying Days, nearly all of Gordimer's fiction in some way addresses apartheid, so much so that fellow writer and the Vice-President of International PEN Per Wästberg, writing on the official Nobel Prize web site, calls Gordimer "the Geiger counter of apartheid."

Officially struck down in 1992 after nearly 50 years as the government's official policy of racial segregation, apartheid — the Afrikaner word meaning "separateness" — was a system of laws that effectively stripped all South African blacks of their citizenship rights and was instrumental in maintaining white control over the majority black population. However, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as countries across Africa regained their independence from Europeans, the South African government, fearing that their recently liberated neighbors such as Zimbabwe and Mozambique would encourage liberation movements in its own country, responded by financially and militarily supporting the efforts of rebel groups to destabilize those countries. These desperate measures to protect the apartheid system, which often took the form of military raids into the rural border areas, resulted in the long-term displacement and deaths of millions of southern Africans over the years, with an estimated million deaths accounted for in the Mozambique civil war that was fueled by South Africa. Fleeing from their war-ravaged homes, many villagers who survived the war in Mozambique ended up as refugees in any number of the South African refugee camps.

A related piece of historical information that should also be kept in mind when reading "The Ultimate Safari" is that, because of her public opposition to the government, coupled with the overtly political themes of her work, many of Gordimer' stories and novels were banned in her own country at the time of their publication; as a result, the first readers to most of Gordimer's work were usually not South African but rather British and North American. "The Ultimate Safari," in fact, was first published in the British literary journal, Granta before being published in book form by American publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in the collection Jump and Other Stories. It is with these facts in mind that the techniques Gordimer uses in "The Ultimate Safari" can be best understood.

"The Ultimate Safari" is written in a deceptively simple style. The story's first two sentences — "That night our mother went to the shop and she didn't come back. Ever." — not only set the mysterious and foreboding tone of the story that is about to be told, but they effectively announce Gordimer's style as well. The sentence structure and diction are simple, yet not so simple as to indicate that the narrator is a person of lesser intelligence or capabilities. The narrator speaks in plain, everyday English; there is nothing remarkable in terms of vocabulary, syntax, or dialect that would indicate her to be anything but an English speaker of ordinary intelligence and sensibilities. She does not speak in dialect; she could be from any number of English-speaking locations. And Gordimer leaves few idiosyncratic clues that give her racial, cultural, or ethnic identity away.

Aside from knowing that the story's author is South African, there is little to indicate at the outset of the story that the narrator herself is from the region. She tells us immediately of "the war" and of "the bandits," and she references her "village" and the "bush" — both of which would hint at an African setting of some kind — but because the overall tenor of the narrative voice is anything but African, it is easy to overlook these clues at first reading. As the story progresses, the girl gives us further clues as to the setting with her description of the "dried mealies" her grandmother boils for her and, most importantly, her family's journey through Kruger Park, one of South Africa's popular game parks. Within a few pages, then, we have come to understand that she is in fact from southern Africa, but the overriding sense, as indicated by her narrative voice, is that she is a proper English-speaking girl, and the reader can't help but wonder, on some level, what this girl is doing wandering as a homeless refugee in South Africa.

Of course, since Gordimer writes in English, and her audience mostly comprises English readers, her stories must also be written in English. It would make no sense whatsoever were "The Ultimate Safari" to be written in the girl's native tongue. But when taking on the voice of a character, especially when that voice's "true" voice is non-English, the writer usually provides the reader with early clues as to the narrator's background — whether explicitly through a remark by the narrator or implicitly through his or her choice of diction.

In the case of Moby Dick, for instance, the book's very first sentence — "Call me Ishmael." — announces the identity of the narrator, and very shortly thereafter Ishmael describes his background and the reasons for his pending journey. In The Color Purple, Celie speaks in a southern black idiom that leaves no question as to her racial or regional identity. In Gordimer's story, until the final scenes in the refugee camp, the narrator provides few clues as to her race or ethnicity. It is in the refugee camp that the narrator finally confirms that she is of African descent, even if the details as to which tribe she belongs are left out. "The people in the village have let us join their school," the narrator says,

"I was surprised to find they speak our language; our grandmother told me, That's why they allow us to stay on their land. Long ago, in the time of our fathers, there was no fence that kills you, there was no Kruger Park between them and us, we were the same people under our own king, right from our village we left to this place we've come to."

Yet even here, when she references "our language," the possibility still exists that she is referring to English, and that perhaps this narrative is taking place in a world turned upside down, in a mythical future where the (white) English-speaking families are forced to wander the continent as refugees, and where their land has been carved into artificial political boundaries that separate people of the same tribe and ethnic backgrounds from one another. This possibility is eliminated, however, in the story's final scene when the narrator describes the "white people" who have come to film the refugee camp (implying, of course, that the refugees are not white), and we are told with certainty what her nationality is when a reporter asks of her grandmother, "Do you want to go back to Mozambique — to your own country?"

While Gordimer has always been committed to her writing as a form of art, and not simply as a tool to advance her politics, she has also always been unapologetically committed to using her writing to advance her antiapartheid stance. With her readership being made up of mostly, though not exclusively, British and American whites, and by giving the narrator many of the qualities that a typical young white English or American girl would have — she is observant, articulate, intelligent, selfless, and emotionally even-keeled — Gordimer created a character with whom readers could empathize, but not necessarily pity. Ultimately it is not pity that Gordimer wants to elicit from her readers, but rather she wants her readers to come to a profound understanding of the human toll of apartheid. Holding off until the last possible moment before revealing the girl's race has the effect of giving her white audience every possible reason to feel for the girl as "one of us," rather than reasons to feel sorry for the miserable conditions of yet another poor anonymous black African. In other words, by effectively creating a character who closely resembles her readers, or who at least resembles people with whom her readers were familiar, Gordimer gave her audience the vicarious experience of what it was like to be, or know, a refugee, even if for a brief amount of time.

It should also be noted that, in order for the story to pass as a work of art, and not merely political propaganda or journalism, its narrator must remain true to her character. The fact is that most ten-year-old girls, regardless of their backgrounds, would not necessarily consider their race or ethnicity to be important in the telling of their stories. Race, nationality, and ethnicity are adult constructs that children become aware of to varying degrees over time, so Gordimer's decision not to have her narrator discuss those issues was as much a decision to create a believable character as it was to create an empathetic one. However, the effect of that decision, regardless of its design, was to create an empathetic narrator.

In one of her more famous essays, "Living in the Interregnum," Gordimer paraphrases Mongane Wally Serote, a black South African poet: "Blacks must learn to talk; whites must learn to listen." By taking on the voice of a young black refugee girl, and by offering her readers the possibility that her voice was not simply "black" but also "universal," Gordimer not only created a black voice that whites could more readily listen to, but she also opened a window for her readers into one of the ugly rooms of apartheid.

Source: Mark White, Critical Essay on "The Ultimate Safari," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2004.

What Do I Read Next?

• Gordimer's essay collection The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988) includes the often-quoted essay "Living in the Interregnum," in which she discusses the role of revolution in the South African political context, and the responsibility she felt as a writer to come to terms with it.
• To fully understand Gordimer's fiction, one must understand her political convictions and how they have affected her growth as a writer. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer, published in 1990, gives a good background to Gordimer's evolution as a political thinker and as a writer just prior to her writing of "The Ultimate Safari."
• Of the many novels that Gordimer has written in her career, The Burger's Daughter is considered one of her best and was one of her most controversial at the time of its publication. Banned by the South African government, The Burger's Daughter follows the story of Rosa Burger, the daughter of a martyred revolutionary leader, as she tries to pursue an apolitical existence of her own.
• Gordimer's story collection Selected Stories (1975) offers the full range of Gordimer's style and subject matter. Although some of the stories are thirty years older than "The Ultimate Safari," the collection provides a good overview to the evolution and breadth of Gordimer's writing.
• Like "The Ultimate Safari," J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize – winning novel, The Life and Time of Michael K (1983), tells the story of a black family displaced by war. Coetzee, along with André Brink and Gordimer, has long been considered to be one of South Africa's leading white intellectuals and opponents of apartheid.