Abstract
One of Nadine Gordimer’s major obsessions has been raising awareness about the unjust and discriminatory policy of apartheid law in South Africa. She has dramatised the history of her country in her fictions to expose more awareness and truth of the unfair political situation of her homeland to the world. This study explores Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People to analyze the effects of an impromptu journey of the Smales, a white family, into their black servant’s hinterland. Apartheid atrocities and racial segregations of the white government of South Africa caused an interregnum of white reign and consequently led to black insurgency, tumult, sudden abandonment of home and therefore displacement of the Smales family. This deracination into the primitive settlement of the black servant July renders the Smales family members to have a nostalgic feeling of returning to their metropolis home, which is a manifestation of their inability to assimilate with and adapt into black culture and standard of living. The aim of this study is to analyze the deep impact of unhomely sojourn on each member of the Smales family and on July, who feels a sense of in-betweenness after his regression from city life style to his village environment that is devoid of the city qualities and values. Even though the Smales family’s authority, power and social prestige are diminished while they are in the black contact zone, they emerge to be the embodiment of the white civilization – modern, secure and hygienic, which are the modes of urban life standards.
Highlights
Nadine Gordimer lived through the system of apartheid in South Africa and she fought to bring about its end
Owing to the wide exposure to racial segregations imposed by the apartheid regime, her novel is an attempt to impart the truth of the unfair political situation of her homeland to the world
The objectives of this study are to show the assimilation of a white family into their black servant‟s indigenous settlement and July‟s adaptation of the social and cultural norm of white urban life
Summary
Nadine Gordimer lived through the system of apartheid in South Africa and she fought to bring about its end In her eighth novel, July’s People, she foresaw an inevitable overthrow of the apartheid law of the white government. Winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, addresses the violence and atrocities of apartheid, duplicity, physical tension and “perversion of normalcy” of the totalitarian state. This is, her favorite theme that as Edward Quinn puts it “has been the dilemma of the apolitical or moderate white person opposed to apartheid but inextricably caught up in its social fabric” Dislocation may be a result of “transportation from one country to another by slavery or ISSN: 1675-8021
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