“Ten dams for one delta seen from space”: envisioning environmentalism in Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life

ABSTRACT

While South African environmental activism has progressed and blossomed substantially since the 1990s, there still is no popular unified environmental movement. Some critics, such as Carl Death argue the lack of unification makes it difficult to address environmental grievances. Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life responds to this environmental problematic. Weaving in and out of the Bannerman family's thoughts, Get a Life explores what ecology and environmentalism can mean in South Africa when it is visualized from a suburban, middle-class, well-meaning male point of view. This paper examines the way the novel portrays vision, omission, and invisibility. By exploring Get a Life's motif of vision, I show that the three visions portrayed (above, below, and on the ground) all highlight distance—distance that makes it difficult to overcome borders and imagine communities, even as the ecologist voices concerns about problematic land redistribution and the effects of consumer capitalism. Privileging the visual makes black communities, and the environmental violence they suffer, invisible. Get a Life imagines a complicated terrain for South African environmental activists to navigate, in which every environmental impulse is haunted by histories of uneven development and bears global connections without critical reflection.

KEYWORDS:

• Gordimer
• ecocriticism
• vision
• environmentalism
• South African fiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Dominique Bourg Hacker

Dominique Bourg Hacker is a PhD degree candidate in English literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, focusing on contemporary African and Caribbean literature and ecocriticism.