Marching Away from Pretoria

BURGER'S DAUGHTER is a call to arms. Forget the news stories, the polemics, the neatly rhymed slogans about apartheid. Nadine Gordimer's story of a white revolutiohary's daughter struggling with her heritage and her conscience i not only a stunning literary coup, but a relentless portrait of how apartheid poisons whites and blacks in South Africa.

But the book is no political tract, no sterile self-righteous condemnation of oppression. Rather, Burger's Daughter is an intensely personal vision of political commitment--and its costs. Through the character of Rosa Burger we sense the emotional toll of living in a country with epic conflicts, a frontier where every action must be extreme: either gutless capitulation or heedless defiance. There is no middle ground in a country where there are still heroes.

Rosa's father is one of those heroes and Burger's Daughter centers on Rosa's struggle with the demands of her father's legacy. Lionel Burger was a Communist revered for his devotion to the revolutionary cause and his humanity to all races. After he dies in prison, Rosa is expected by both her father's compatriot and by the South Africa police--who have kept her under surveillance since childhood--to carry on his work. Yet Rosa stays aloof from the underground, flinching at his friends' silent demands, stupefying the police and shaming herself.

The conflicts did not always exist for Rosa. Since childhood, she has routinely subordinated her life to what she calls the Future--the utopia of a South Africa without apartheid or capitalism. Her parents ask her for sacrifices as calmly as one would ask for directions. Rosa fakes a romance with a political prisoner to smuggle messages, hides excruciating cramps from her first period to bring her mother a quilt in prison, watches her parents and her brother die stoically.

Rosa begins to resent the constant need for discretion--the daily hardening to face surveillance or arrest. She knows the policeman who trails her, picks out the government's spy at a political meeting, stares down the agent who watches her as she finally flees the counry. Her discretion is so instinctive that she insulates herself from all human contact, passing through lovers with the self-possession noted approvingly in a school report written during her father's arrest.

Her escape to France, at the cost of a tacit bargain with the police to shun political activity, demonstrates the emotional cost of such vigilance. Running to the warmth and decadence of a small French village, she seeks out her father's first wife, Katya, to learn how to say no to the Future. Katya left Lionel and South Africa's demands, seeking refuge in France. She tells Rosa:

"That's what I love--nobody expects you to be more than you are, you know. That kind of tolerance--I didn't know it existed. I mean if you're not equal to facing everything there...you're traitor. To the human cause, justice, humanity, the lot--there's nothing else."

France--its tolerance, shallowness, luxury--seduces and shocks Rosa. She gazes at the flamboyant prostitutes with mingled horror and awe of the country girl whisked to the big city. But only in France, away from the inbred defences against vulnerability, can she fall in love, giggle like the young girl she never was, laugh and cry unselfconsciously.

Gordimer's prose, brutal in its precision and sensuousness, conveys Rosa's struggle with an immediacy that makes detachment impossible. She bombards us with images harsh and lush; passion for the country whose policies she hates scorches the pages, evoking South Africa's beauty, sordidness and terror. She moves from the overripe living room of an apartheid apologist to the stinking hut in a black township, from the lucid vigor of South Africa to the luxury of the Rivieva. Her prose mimics the near-cryptic, emotionally loaded economy of poetry, with all its symbolic richness. Reading this book is almost like plowing through about 400 pages of poetry, too-as difficult and rewarding. Gordimer's structure demands ingenuity and patience. It's choppy--long descriptions interspersed with telegraphic bits of interior monologue and haphazard conversation. She switches perspectives to let Rosa explain how she sees herself and how she believes others see her. The reader has to fit it all together, compose a life out of these poetic fragments.

Gordimer's compassion and outrage color one of the central images of the book--the beating of a donkey.

"I saw the infliction of pain broken away from the will that creates it; broken loose, a force existing of itself, ravishment without the ravisher, torture without the torturer, rampage, pure cruelty gone beyond control of the humans who have spent thousands of years devising it."

The donkey's silent writhing drives Rosa from her country. The beating captures in one unbearable moment the essence of South Africa for Rosa Burger--her implication as a white in blacks' suffering. As a white spectator, she is powerless to stop the donkey's suffering or those of the blacks in her country.

"I had only to careen down on that scene with my car and my white authority...they would have their lives summed up for them officially at last by me, the white woman--the final meaning of a day they had lived I had no knowledge of, a day of other appalling things, violence, disasters, urgencies, deprivations which suddenly would become, was nothing but what it had led up to: the man among them beating their donkey. I could have put a stop to it, the misery; at that point I witnessed. What more can one do?"

Rosa's frustration is the white man's burden in South Africa. Their guilt, anger and fear creates an emotional chasm between races far more disturbing than the state-imposed physical separation. Blacks reject the whites who rejected them, and both are disenfranchised.

The most poignant reminder of this racial gulf is the wrenching reunion between Rosa and her black childhood friend Baasie in London. After meeting at a party and exchanging social inanities, Baasie calls Rosa in the middle of the night. Raging, he taunts her for her pride in Lionel, reminding her that anonymous black men are killed every day, and they are no less heroic than her father. She counters brutally until they fall tidily into the roles apartheid has prescribed for them--bitter black, guilty white.

Baasie's hostility jolts Rosa from her comfortable daydream, forcing her to confront the question she has fled: whether to fight or capitulate. Rosa, the reluctant dissident, is not larger than life. She is not like her singleminded father, who chose his path without regrets or soul-searching. Rosa must find her own way to fight. Her heroism is more moving because it is more human, because her conflicts--both selfish and unselfish--mirror our own.

Burger's Daughter tells how one woman carves out a personal moral vision and finds the conviction and the courage to act on it. It does not preach; it inspires. Rosa decides to return home and make her father's cause her own. She concludes:

"No one can defect. I don't know the ideology: It's about suffering. How to end suffering. And it ends in suffering...Yes, it's strange to live in a country where there are still heroes. Like anyone else, I do what I can. I am teaching them to walk again, at Baragwanath Hospital. They put one foot before the other."

Inspiring as Rosa's choice is, Burger's Daughter is not primarily a call to follow her path. Gordimer is far too subtle for that--for her, Rosa's commitment is a "holy mystery," one she penetrates with her imagination, but cannot share. Rosa chooses action, but she accepts suffering and self-denial. Burger's Daughter provokes outrage and fear, and then leaves us hanging, torn between activism and knowledge of its costs