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361 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
What would you do if you were me? What is to be done?Don't read this if you don't like politics, experimental writing, breaking down academic jargon to the bare necessities, candid displays of brutality and bodily functions of the female sort, and complete and utter lack of book-bound solutions for book-invoked problems. For those of you who require more holistic commitment and saviourless methodologies than the likes of 1984 and Brave New World can offer, read on.
...he won't scruple to invoke Kierkegaard's Either/Or against Hegel's dialectic to demonstrate the justice of segregated lavatories...Don't say I didn't warn you.
The kind of education the children've rebelled against is evident enough; they can't spell and they can't formulate their elation and anguish. But they know why they're dying.That fact is that the majority of people who read this book on Goodreads will be white. There are variations of privilege in being white, but on the whole, should a white person's car stall while in the middle of a white neighborhood in Detroit, they upon asking for help at a nearby house will not be shot in the back of the head. I use this analogy grounded in the United States to explicate the contents of this book concerned with South Africa because while the United States is all I know, it was enough to teach me the difference between my words of understanding and others' lives of being a long time ago. It's a lesson that must be refreshed every time, all the time, for the ideological indoctrination comes in many forms and the books like this that survive them are few.
One of those eager souls who see no contradiction in their protest that they are not at all 'political' but would like to do something effective—something less self-defeating than charity, for what (euphemism being their natural means of expression) they call 'race relations'.The term 'code-switching' focuses on the minority, whatever dialect or modicum of expression that is inherently less powerful due to pomp and circumstance. Those who attempt to refute their physical privilege and the need for 'switching' entirely make the mistake of believing they can prove their claim through living, as if their lives were their own to do with what they will. Death is not an equalizer so long as history chooses the heroes.
I know plenty blacks like Burger. It’s nothing, it’s us, we must be used to it, it’s not going to show on English television.What this book is concerned with is a matter of existing with the least amount of blood on your hands. That's all. That's it. Now, there is plenty of social theory involved in that question, plenty of stories of those who have gone before, plenty of family and friends and peers and privileges to demarcate, explicate, perhaps even the boogeyBOSS of a Cthulhu government that will pull you into confrontation without the need for a single finger of effort on your part. There is the reality, there is the cause, and then there's you, and if you happen to be white in South Africa, not only could you flee through the favor of government that looks like you, your life would be the one applauded.
The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.Congratulations. You have been absolved of your guilt by resembling the powers that be. How does that feel?
There was no way of identifying one’s white face as one that was different from any other, one that should be spared.
I didn't do anything. I let him beat the donkey. The man was black. So a kind of vanity counted for more than feeling; I couldn't bear to see myself - her - Rosa Burger - as one of those whites who can care more for animals than people.
—Sí, fantasías, obsesiones. Son mías. Son la forma en que se me plantea la cuestión de mi propia existencia (p.53)La hija de Burger se me hizo una narración fría, distante, aunque interesante en ciertos momentos, como la propia protagonista de la novela: Rosa Burger.
—[...]Negritud es el hombre negro negándose a creer que el estilo de vida del hombre blanco es mejor para los negros[...](p.173).o
—Nací allí, es mi patria.Esperaba más de la novela, pero supongo que es el tipo de narración que hace Gordimer. Para mí, fue diferente, no solo por la inmensa historia política que hay detrás del personaje de Rosa (revolución, comunismo, socialismo, etc.), sino por la forma en que esta historia está contada. Lo que sí me gustó fue la conciencia femenina de Rosa (las descripciones sexuales y emocionales son muy buenas) y el personaje de Conrad y Bernard Chabalier.
—¿Y eso qué importa? Lo que cuenta es el sitio donde puedes vivir como te gusta. Tenemos que olvidar aquello (p.259).