Alex Tischer's
British Literary Crusade
A blog delving into British texts from the last 200 years
CoolIn Nadine Gordimer’s “The moment before the gun went off”, the reader is suspended in time right before and after a gun was shot and a bullet hit Lucas’s brain. The gun misfired from Marais Van der Vyver’s truck as it was going over a pothole. Lucas, who we will later find out is Van der Vyver’s son, is a black farm hand while Marias is the white owner of the farm in South Africa during the apartheid era. Marias’s inner thoughts are explored in detail as he quickly realizes the effects and possible interpretations of the accident that just occured on his hands. Van der Vyver knows that questions will be asked, “there will be an inquiry”, and that he will be blamed for “killing” his black farm hand, molding into the image of a racist white man that the apartheid movement of South Africa is looking to vilify. The truth is that Lucas wasn’t murdered, and Marias had no ill intent, but Van der Vyver knows his image is as good as gone in the eyes of his constituents as well everyone else who will read the scalding headlines to come. His problem is that he is stuck between two lies. He doesn’t want to expose his nefarious activities with a black woman that eventually birthed Lucas, as that would ostracize him from his white friends. At the same time, he is being vilified for “murdering” a black farm hand by the black community, and thus lies his conundrum. My favorite line from the short story is “How could they know that they do not know”, as it is a universal perspective on fault. There are some things that people accuse others of when they don’t know the full story, but they don’t know that they don’t know. The parallels to our current protests over the killing of George Floyd to the expected outcome of the killing in this book are chilling. “When the police stations burn with all the evidence of what has happened now, and what the law made a crime in the past”, Gordimer writes in this story. The Minneapolis 3rd Precinct station was burned down last week in the riots, and millions of Americans are showing their anger and noncompliance with current police and government officials. A scathingly relevant story and a searing new perspective on blame, Nadine Gordimer makes us all think before we accuse, regardless of what race or ethnicity you are. Cool links to check out - https://www.npr.org/2014/07/14/331421120/writer-nadine-gordimer-captured-apartheids-contradictions https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/31/rebel-radical-relic-nadine-gordimer-is-out-of-fashion-we-must-keep-reading-her
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