Read Online No Time Like the Present: A Novel by Nadine Gordimer - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nadine Gordimer
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say something that might be of interest to her, in their language.
His isiZulu, taught—passed on—to him by Jabu so that he could speak to his daughter in her other heritage, and in linguistic aspect of intellect as one a little less inferior in his efforts to communicate sociably with his students invited home, who were voluble in up-to-date hip-hop English—this also wasn’t isiZulu usage familiar to this woman, Wethu. So he was experiencing in himself: class difference could take over from colour in what’s going to be made of freedom.
Steve had the shed of the empty chicken run pulled down and a room with a bathroom built in its space by a friend of Peter Mkize, a construction worker at a white consortium who had taken the chance of setting himself up independently as a builder. The house owner approached through the estate agent had no objection to the improvement of the amenities of his property. Wethu’s all-purpose tears again; Steve had gently to return the pressure of his hand to that of hers wringing his in gratitude. May God bless you. May God bless you.
A room in a yard.
It was the year the Holy Father decided to appoint their most progressive teacher, loved by the children, to direct the junior school.
Why did she give up teaching?
It was also the year she completed with high marks the correspondence courses as preliminary study for a degree in law.
Look at this without any quick answer of unquestionable certainty ready to slip off her tongue. There was the attempt at objectivity they had learnt necessary in examining a choice between decisions to be taken in the revolutionary cadres.
What the reasons could be, and these were with them in the times of silence which keep the balance of living together in the tenderly joyous interpenetration of love-making, and the need to be a self. Whatever that identity may be, or in the process of becoming. She was the child of a rural ghetto, daughter of an Elder in a Methodist church, she is the woman—wife, that legal entity—to a man of the pallor of colonialism. Which of these identities, or all, make hers. The books her father had brought her to read, from childhood; their text contained more than messages she was to spell out by stringing disparate underlined words. The reading habit he’s nurtured (another identity); while reading as a student she’d smoked good Swazi marijuana but given up that as a cadre with the need of a clear head. One among books she and Steve buy as presents for each other and the bookshelves they’d put up in the house, is by an Indian, Amartya Sen, and these ideas of who you are, made up of the activities, genre of work, skills, shared interests, environments you are placed and place yourself in, are his definition of identity. Multiple in one. That’s who you are. It’s something her own life, Steve’s life, fits. But so far the most definitive self comes from the Struggle. Whatever that means now.
It’s not something to talk about even to him. It’s not left in the bush camp or the desert or the prison, it’s the purpose of being alive; still a comrade. And it’s law that confirms or denies it. There’s the Constitution to make freedom possible.
So she’s going to become a lawyer. He’s aware it is not a choice enticed by money although teachers are poorly paid as if they owe a special tithe to the country’s development. She’ll be somebody’s articled clerk for some time, earning peanuts. A kind of pupil herself, again; didn’t the devout Elder, her Baba, send her away to get something better than apartheid education, something of freedom, over the border.
Whenever she arrived on a visit to that definition of home as where you come from, no matter home has become somewhere quite else, the women looked at the flat stretch of cloth between her hips; and then towards her mother: what was she saying to the daughter about this. All that should be said again and again. When are there going to be more
His isiZulu, taught—passed on—to him by Jabu so that he could speak to his daughter in her other heritage, and in linguistic aspect of intellect as one a little less inferior in his efforts to communicate sociably with his students invited home, who were voluble in up-to-date hip-hop English—this also wasn’t isiZulu usage familiar to this woman, Wethu. So he was experiencing in himself: class difference could take over from colour in what’s going to be made of freedom.
Steve had the shed of the empty chicken run pulled down and a room with a bathroom built in its space by a friend of Peter Mkize, a construction worker at a white consortium who had taken the chance of setting himself up independently as a builder. The house owner approached through the estate agent had no objection to the improvement of the amenities of his property. Wethu’s all-purpose tears again; Steve had gently to return the pressure of his hand to that of hers wringing his in gratitude. May God bless you. May God bless you.
A room in a yard.
It was the year the Holy Father decided to appoint their most progressive teacher, loved by the children, to direct the junior school.
Why did she give up teaching?
It was also the year she completed with high marks the correspondence courses as preliminary study for a degree in law.
Look at this without any quick answer of unquestionable certainty ready to slip off her tongue. There was the attempt at objectivity they had learnt necessary in examining a choice between decisions to be taken in the revolutionary cadres.
What the reasons could be, and these were with them in the times of silence which keep the balance of living together in the tenderly joyous interpenetration of love-making, and the need to be a self. Whatever that identity may be, or in the process of becoming. She was the child of a rural ghetto, daughter of an Elder in a Methodist church, she is the woman—wife, that legal entity—to a man of the pallor of colonialism. Which of these identities, or all, make hers. The books her father had brought her to read, from childhood; their text contained more than messages she was to spell out by stringing disparate underlined words. The reading habit he’s nurtured (another identity); while reading as a student she’d smoked good Swazi marijuana but given up that as a cadre with the need of a clear head. One among books she and Steve buy as presents for each other and the bookshelves they’d put up in the house, is by an Indian, Amartya Sen, and these ideas of who you are, made up of the activities, genre of work, skills, shared interests, environments you are placed and place yourself in, are his definition of identity. Multiple in one. That’s who you are. It’s something her own life, Steve’s life, fits. But so far the most definitive self comes from the Struggle. Whatever that means now.
It’s not something to talk about even to him. It’s not left in the bush camp or the desert or the prison, it’s the purpose of being alive; still a comrade. And it’s law that confirms or denies it. There’s the Constitution to make freedom possible.
So she’s going to become a lawyer. He’s aware it is not a choice enticed by money although teachers are poorly paid as if they owe a special tithe to the country’s development. She’ll be somebody’s articled clerk for some time, earning peanuts. A kind of pupil herself, again; didn’t the devout Elder, her Baba, send her away to get something better than apartheid education, something of freedom, over the border.
Whenever she arrived on a visit to that definition of home as where you come from, no matter home has become somewhere quite else, the women looked at the flat stretch of cloth between her hips; and then towards her mother: what was she saying to the daughter about this. All that should be said again and again. When are there going to be more
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