Six feet of the country, by Nadine Gordimer

Résumé du document

How does Nadine Gordimer denounce Apartheid in this short story? Judging from this text, do you think she uses literature as a political weapon? In "Six Feet of the Country", a short story written in 1956, the South-African white author Nadine Gordimer tells the story of a white man and his wife who have to face the cruelty of Apartheid when trying to help one of their employees to bury his brother worthily. At a time when Apartheid was the norm in the South-African society and racism and discrimination were the only ways to behave towards black people, Nadine Gordimer dares in this text to denounce the cruelty and the meaninglessness of a situation accepted by all parts of the population.

Extraits

[...] It is in my view really important for readers from the 21st century to make the effort to put this short story back in its historical context to understand how daring and provoking it must have been for a white South African woman to criticize so strongly and so clearly the political regime under which she was living. I think Nadine Gordimer chose to use literature to struggle against this discriminating, racist regime because words were for her the only way to fight against it. By making, through her short story, as many people as possible aware of the cruelty and the meaninglessness of Apartheid, she intended to contribute to making things change. [...]

[...] Nadine Gordimer wants her readers to understand that Apartheid is a kind of poison one cannot get rid of whenever one wants. In this way, she points out the ruinous consequences it has on the mentality of both black and white people, and she seems to foresee how difficult it will be to make this situation change. But in feet of the Country”, Nadine Gordimer also uses a different method to denounce Apartheid, letting the reader see its meaninglessness and cruelty through the eyes of the narrator. [...]

[...] But this feeling of inferiority goes even further, and the narrator relates the behaviour of Petrus when he announces to him that the corpse of his brother has already been buried so that it is impossible to get it back: just kept on looking at me, out of his knowledge that white men have everything, can do anything; if they don't, it is because they won't.” (p.13). Lastly, the remark of the narrator, saying “they don't really know how to hand money to a white (p.15) points out the gap ever existing between the black servants and their white bosses, in spite of the efforts of whom their relations go on to be ones of superiority. Because of this feeling of inferiority of the black servants, the white couple does not really know how to behave with them and adopts in return an ambivalent attitude. [...]

[...] Eventually, the reaction of the health authorities when they learn that they did not give Petrus the right corpse, and over all the remark of the mortuary employee at the end of the story saying, when the narrator tries to find the corpse of Petrus' brother again: “there are so many black faces surely one will shows the indifference and the scorn of the South African society towards blacks. Through this short story, Nadine Gordimer intends, in 1956, that is to say at a time when Apartheid was common sense accepted by almost everybody, to make her readers aware of the dangerousness, the cruelty and the absurdity of this regime. [...]

[...] On the other hand, even the subject of the story is used by Nadine Gordimer to denounce the cruelty and the absurdity of the South-African society. The anecdote of the health authorities, when the narrator is asked how it could happen that somebody he does not know was hosted by his employees, is a pretext for the author to criticize severely the mentalities during Apartheid. had to notify the police as well as the health authorities, and answer a lot of tedious questions: How was it I was ignorant of the boy's presence? [...]