Social conflict, literature common theme in stories

By Sori Siregar

JAKARTA (JP): The Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer from South Africa made an interesting statement about literature and social conflict.

In an interview with the online magazine The Atlantic Unbound in May 2000 she said: "The way people abroad understood South Africans' ordinary lives came from fiction, and from the theater as well, because our theater began to penetrate the rest of the world".

For this reason she has given credit to the writers and artists of her country. When apartheid was still being enforced in South Africa, there was so much information about it, such as TV reports about riots and people being killed.

But one thing was clear, the outside world did not know anything more than what the headlines told them. They did not realize what the lives of people were like before the riots and they also did not know what happened afterward; what occurred after people saw the bodies of their loved ones lying dead.

It is here that the South African writers, including Nadine, played their roles. Based on that reality, Nadine states modestly that the writers in her country were an arm of the liberation struggle, because they made the world realize what was behind the headlines -- how people really lived under apartheid.

The Nobel Prize winner's statement reminds me of a similar remark made by our Indonesian author, Seno Gumira Ajidarma, who said earlier, "If readers can't get the true information from newspapers they can get it from literary fiction".

Seno's statement came after a question about the stories in his collection called Eye Witness. All the stories in the collection, which were written during the New Order era, are about the suffering and plight of the East Timorese, when the area was still part of Indonesia. And it should not be forgotten that Seno is the only Indonesian writer who wrote about them with sympathy and full comprehension, while other writers remained silent.

A similar sympathy has also been expressed by Seno in his short stories about the victims of the May riots in l998. He consistently speaks about those who are treated unfairly by the ruling elite. Up to now, Seno seems to stand on the front line for those sorts of stories. At the same time, Seno also produced works which were based mostly on contemplation and imagination.

Social conflict as a reality is one of the ingredients taken by writers to show their concern about their surroundings. And, although any writing always bears the individual marks, sound and motion of the writer, he is in fact not trying to put his own self into words, but to create a piece of literature.

The writer, whoever he or she is, is offering the readers not a reality, but a reaction to whatever reality has been experienced.

Social conflict

Social conflict as the main theme can easily be found in the work of a number of Third World writers coming from places like Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia; where people are still struggling against oppression, injustice, poverty and violence. As a matter of fact, there is a need for this social conflict-based writing.

How much this kind of literature can influence people is another matter.

The influence, if any, may come very slowly. But Nadine Gordimer is of the view that writers such as Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre in France and Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass in Germany have had an influence on what really counts, and that is a change in people's perception that has lead to changes in their governments' policies.

How about others? This may be difficult to answer. But does it really matter whether literature influences people?

Most writers -- no matter whether they base their work merely on imagination or contemplation or whether they prefer to write about their reactions to realities they have experienced -- are of the opinion that literature should influence readers, at least it should enrich their soul. This is the idealistic background for an author to write. In the last few decades in Latin America, many writers have felt obligated to educate their readers and affect social change, and much of the fiction of the time became more and more didactic.

But there are writers who insist that a preoccupation with social problems is shortsighted, that it is the experiment of the literary avant-garde that would bring recognition to literature. It is understandable why many poems of Rendra and Taufiq Ismail are often cynically called "pamphlet poems" or propaganda by certain writers. Actually, what matters is not the social problems or the conflicts and themes selected by authors or poets, but how they are written.

It is no surprise that contemplative poets like Goenawan Mohamad also wrote Zagreb and If We Were in Sarajevo, reflecting his concern over the tragedy in the Balkans.

Basing writing on contemplation and imagination does not necessarily mean that social problems or conflicts have to be neglected by writers. We should realize that genuine writers or poets will never present reality as a direct reality as it is lived but will present it as the imagined reality of art.

In truth, a lot of writing about social problems or conflicts is created from excellence, and then revised into greatness. Nadine Gordimer cited Tolstoy's War and Peace as an example. This is also true of many other literary works and writers who choose to move others with their words.