Pathway under construction, spirituality in unexpected places: Nadine Gordimer’s recent fiction

Abstract

This article explores new tendencies in the more recent post-apartheid writings of South African Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer. The context is the current critical debate on a resurgence of preoccupations with forms of spirituality broadly understood. The concept of secular spirituality (Cornell Du Toit and Cedric Mayson, eds. 2006. Secular Spirituality as a Contextual Critique of Religion. Research Institute for Theology and Religion, University of South Africa, Pretoria), is employed, which – having its roots in Walter Benjamin’s understandings of “profane illumination” – has been retrieved by, inter alia, Heelas and Woodhead (Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, eds. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell), who refer to “spiritual revolution” or “subjective-life spirituality”. The article suggests that postcolonial studies – in its more recent, “less politically driven and more critically reflective phase” (see the introduction to Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds. 2010. Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium. 1–13. London: Routledge) – has become more amenable to explorations of spirituality in representations of the literary imaginary.

Keywords:

• postcolonial liminality
• “secular spirituality”
• Nadine Gordimer
• post-apartheid
• post-ideological.

Notes

1. Most critics who have followed in Scott’s footsteps have chosen to investigate spirituality in relation to indigenous cultures: e.g. Stephanides (2000); Gunner (2004); Muller (2004); and more recently, inter alia, Wenzel (2009) and Mathuray (2009). It is worth noting that the postcolonies have never deserted the spiritual; at the same time, most studies of the spiritual tend to avoid a contemporary resonance and seek analogies of the sacred in pantheons of gods (e.g. Mathuray 2009), in 19th-century forms of indigenous reactions to colonial rule (e.g. Wenzel 2009), or in first-people expression (e.g. Brown 1998).

2. Here we touch upon a “postmodern holism” as sweeping through the global collective consciousness: a centripetal force not primarily concerned with material acquisition, but attempting to unify various forms of spiritual fulfilment, “whether traditional or modern, theistic, pantheistic or atheistic” (Raman 2005, 3). The move from institutional religions to secular spirituality is also linked to a shift in the human and natural sciences “away from canonical meanings and toward indexical, pragmatic solutions” (Bronislaw 2005, 819). Secular spirituality is based on a convergence between the material and the spiritual, the spiritual and the techno-scientific, and “serves as a bridge between faith and reason, nature and grace, science and theology” (Du Toit 2006, 68), thus helping overcome pernicious binaries and reductive dualisms.

3. In a recent book, Terry Eagleton asked: “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” (2009, 140). Whatever one’s response, there has been a “spiritual turn” in recent critical thought signalling the possibility of the spiritual – alongside the usual categories of race, class and gender – as a fresh pursuit of investigation in the humanities and social sciences. We read of a “spiritual turn” in critical realism (e.g. Bhaskar 2000; Hartwig and Morgan 2012); a spiritual recognition in postcolonial studies (e.g. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2009; Brown 2009); a “postcolonial turn” in theology/religious studies (e.g. Sugirtharajah 2006; Kwok Pui-lan 2005); and the “sacral” entering the predominantly secular framework of academic interpretation (Spalek and Imtoual 2008).

4. Examples of influential post-secular theorists include Bauman (1992), who has referred to the postmodern condition as a period of “re-enchantment” that challenges the fetish of modernity and progress; see also Derrida (2002) for his re-engagement with “negative theology” and “the messianic” as crucial underpinnings for deconstructive reasoning. Žižek (2000), Taylor (2002) and Ward (2003) – inter alia – have also engaged with the challenges of the post-secular condition.

5. Julie is struggling to come to terms with a new culture. She has started reading passages from the Koran in English translation (144–145) and is trying to create links with her own life situation. For example, the passage she reads about Job’s sense of abandonment (and subsequent release from despair by divine intervention, which “gave him back his family”, 145) is linked in her mind with Abdu’s being banished from South Africa and his subsequent reunion with his North African family (Abdu “was given back to his family” by Julie, 145). Elsewhere we are presented with the violation of Ramadan celibacy by the newly married couple and how this state of affairs disturbs Abdu’s mother, who was devastated by “the shame and sin of what he had done” (157).

6. It is a motif also pursued by Leila Aboulela (2005) in her novel, Minaret. Like Najwa, who – through her newfound spirituality among like-minded women – finds a sense of meaningful belonging in her newly adopted country, Julie seeks to become part of her new family through an inner circle that is faith-based. And like Najwa, who “moves from a realm of western-influenced privilege into the parameters of the Muslim community” (Ball 2010, 120), Julie has to learn how “to reverse the exilic narrative trajectory of a journey from securely rooted national belonging into marginality, assimilation or hybridity” (120). In Julie’s case, it is a journey from the privileged suburbs of South Africa to an unnamed locality in North Africa: that is, a journey from a western-style individualism to a communitarian life.