July's People | Nadine Gordimer

Esoteric. The word came ringing in my head with every paragraph and page I weaved through in July’s People (1981) by 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, the late Nadine Gordimer. As I paused to reflect on many a cryptic (I have seen some say ambiguous) sentence or paragraph, often delivered in a dispassionate and detached style, I thought of dynamites in small packages—the book is just 195 pages long, but carries with it enough intellectual heft to test the limits of normal fiction writing.

July’s People confronts inverted realities and the engendered ironies, contradictions, and conflicts. Set in apartheid South Africa, it imagines a violent uprising by black people against the apartheid government. The white and liberal Smales family—Bam, his wife Maureen, and children Victor, Royce and Gina—find themselves having to escape the violence in Johannesburg and take refuge in the rural village of their long-serving servant, July. Issues of race and class conflate as master-servant relations become obsolete.

Gordimer shows us that issues of race in apartheid South Africa were more complex than black and white. Bam and Maureen, white, liberal and against apartheid, still have to escape the black uprising, and yet find refuge among black people. The village chief is more worried about ‘those people from Soweto’—his fellow black people, albeit of different ethnicities—and is ready to receive help from the white government to fight them. While the adult couple struggles to fit in the village—Bam, for instance, avoids gumba-gumba (party) so he doesn’t have to drink the traditional beer that has ‘the same colour when drunk and when vomited’—their children appear to get along just fine with the black children, Gina with Anyiko particularly, whose friendship perhaps embodies the ideal anti-racism proposition. And even though July has served the Smales family for fifteen years, suspicions and misunderstandings still linger between them.

The ending of the story pretty much sums it all: cryptic and open to different interpretations. It comes somewhat abruptly, and leaves one grappling with what exactly is happening. Some may find this a little annoying; others may relish the challenge of figuring it out.

This is a highly nuanced book, and Gordimer uses a writing style that alternates between cryptic prose-poetry and knotty conversations. Rarely is an event, scenario, or twist in the story stated in a straightforward way; Gordimer possessed a great ability to bring these out in a subtle manner, so that they are apparent without being stated. Often, this places demands upon the reader: one has to decipher an intended meaning, which may not always be clear. Reading July’s People, at least for me, became a pseudo-intellectual exercise—one that I somewhat enjoyed, although it felt as if I was in literature class. I would recommend it as a challenging but conscientious and fulfilling read. 

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