English Literature Made Easy

  One major historic uprising that shocked the entire world and stirred Gordimer deeply is the Soweto Students’ drive against ‘ Afrikaans medium decree ’, which forced all black schools to have Afrikaans as the language of instruction. The movement also culminated as a protest against other forms of injustice like Bantu Education and educational segregation. On 16th June 1976 , the protest rally turned violent, and indiscriminate shooting by the police killed more than seven hundred students. The history is known to the world, but what Gordimer offers is the effect of this event on the lives of individuals, which is often slipped or missed out in factual detailing. She wrote in the New York Times about this massacre of young children and how this was only a ‘pretext’ for the white government to show supremacy over innocent black children, the real villain being the system of Apartheid: “The proverbial box of matches in the hand of a child has set the house on fire--the house, in whic

  The Black Consciousness Movement forms the background of Gordimer’s novel Burger’s Daughter . It was very popular amongst the Africans. Due to the impact of the Black Consciousness Movement’s ideology, we find the changed attitude of the blacks towards the whites, which is apparent in the novel. Baasie, Rosa’s childhood companion and a black boy, lives with Burger’s family. But after the death of Rosa’s father Lionel Burger, he leaves their home; now he is a black exile in London. When Rosa joins the French branch of the anti-apartheid movement, she proceeds to London from Paris in order to meet other revolutionaries in exile. In one of the parties Rosa meets Baasie, her childhood playmate. The conversation with Baasie shakes Rosa out of her complacency. There was a change in his identity. He asserts his separate identity. The name he was given ‘Baasie’ means ‘Little Boss’.  Infuriated by Rosa’s easy reassertion of their childhood friendship, Baasie insists on his new identity as

  The novel Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer can be broadly divided into three parts. These three sections are correlated to the Keatsian pattern of a flight into the word of fancy or romance and the ultimate return to reality. The first part is the reality from where the protagonist Rosa takes a flight into the realm of romance (which is the middle part), and then part three is back to reality again. Reality here is the South African reality of apartheid and its resultant revolt, a struggle in which both whites and blacks play equal roles. Both are equal victims of this policy and have their respective grievances. Rosa Burger, the protagonist of the novel, moves away from the associations of her leftist parents to associate with Brandt Vermeulen, a white Boer aristocrat distantly related to Rosa's mother. Vermeulen is a bourgeois white who had respect for Lionel Burger as a person but none for his political beliefs. It is Vermeulen who makes it possible for Rosa to obtain a

  The narrative of Nadine Gordimer’s novel Burger’s Daughter is in two modes of narration ; one is a third person narration by the omniscient author , and the other is by Rosa herself . The latter, Rosa's own narration, is very much in the stream-of-consciousness technique . The double discourse of the private disruptive voice and the public conventional tone informs the narrative structure of the novel. The narration alternates between first person and third person- "My version and theirs". The narration by the omniscient author is like a detached record of the happenings in Rosa Burger's life. The opening is a perfect example of this third person narrative: “ Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. ” But at times, even this detached omniscient authoress penetrates into the labyrinths of Rosa Burger's mind to explore th

  Nadine Gordimer, through the character of Lionel Burger, presents the life of a white liberal . He is the father of Rosa Burger, the protagonist of the novel. He is a man of deep conviction, a man of principles, a man of courage and honour. Lionel comes from a wealthy Afrikaner family. He studied medicine at Cape Town and Edinburgh. His second wife, Cathy Jansen is also actively involved in politics and on several occasions has been to jail. They keep open house and there is a constant stream of visitors. They have a son, Tony and a daughter, Rosa and a black boy Baasie who lives with them. Lionel Burger is the romantic revolutionary figure who, in representing different phases of political engagement, becomes familiar within the national narrative. As a hero of underground politics, Lionel Burger captures the attention of various characters: Rosa, Conrad, Katya, Baasie, the Swedish journalist, Chabalier, whose observations and accounts range from admiration to scepticism. The heroi

  Lionel Burger is the romantic revolutionary figure who, in representing different phases of political engagement, becomes familiar within the national narrative. As a hero of underground politics, Lionel Burger captures the attention of various characters: Rosa, Conrad, Katya, Baasie, the Swedish journalist, Chabalier, whose observations and accounts range from admiration to scepticism. The heroic element is at its strongest when Burger, as anti-Apartheid fighter, is speaking for himself at his own trial. This particular scene arouses in the reader pity and fear, the classical responses to the fate of the doomed hero pushing at his own limits and risking his life in the name of a noble cause. It is one of Gordimer's concentrated single scenes - a symbolic-political scene - which has been noted by Taubmann as exemplary of the novelist's method: "Her work concentrates on a single subject, Africa; and is most powerful in single, exemplary scenes – anagnorisis scenes, reveal

  Conrad is a white student whom Rosa meets at the trial. In the trial scene, Conrad the voyeur is compared to a Chinese mandarin who watches the proceedings through non-committal eyes. It is significant that he is introduced as a character in the very scene in which Burger's trial holds central attention. Occasionally Gordimer, subtly shifting her narrator's voice from observation to character-specific intrusion, makes remarks such as: "But this boy [Conrad] was of interest to no one; let him look at them all if the spectacle intrigued him: revolutionaries at play, a sight like the secret mating of whales". As Rosa withdraws from anti-apartheid politics after her father’s death in prison, she becomes involved with the moody, self-absorbed lover Conrad, who has adopted an egocentric form of individualism. As Dominic Head argues, ‘his egocentric world-view’ stands in contrast to ‘the sterile commitment of the Burger family’. Conrad says, “I don’t give a fuck about wh

  An important perspective - a 'critique' of revolutionary enthusiasm - is provided by Conrad, the prototypical liberated man of the 1960s, whose name is probably meant to suggest that of Joseph Conrad , the author of the psychological abyss. Depicted as Rosa's spiritual twin, Conrad is able to utter words and thoughts that are taboo to Rosa's political conditioning in the world of her father's commitments. Ironically, their sexual relationship lasts only until both of them are capable of articulating the deep, almost incestuous, closeness between them. Rosa tells Conrad: "And you know we had stopped making love together months before I left, aware that it had become incest". Conrad talks to Rosa about his Oedipus complex, thus opening Rosa's eyes to the Electra complex behind the necessary gesture of her being Burger's daughter. Whereas the relationship between Rosa and her father may be described as 'incestuous' in terms of Rosa's

  Bernard Chabalier is the French lover of Rosa Burger. He is the gentle university don. On the French Riviera, Rosa enters into a love affair with Bernard, a member of the French leftist bourgeoisie. Rosa rejects her past and her denomination as ‘Burger’s Daughter’, indulges her sensual desires and becomes the lover to the married Bernard. Rosa is attracted at first to the tapestries, as part and parcel of her assumption of the role of Bernard’s mistress: “Bernard Chabalier’s mistress isn’t Lionel Burger’s daughter; she is certainly not accountable to the future; she can go off and do good works in Cameroun or contemplate the unicorn in the tapestry forest. ‘This is the creature that has never been’ he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis invente.” But soon, Rosa comes to the realization that Chabalier’s mistress is none other than Burger’s daughter and that she cannot deny her Afrikaner heritage. When she looks into

  Burger’s Daughter (1979) is a story about Rosemarie Burger and her politically involved family. Her father Lionel Burger, was a political activist in the South African Communist Party, together with his wife Cathy Burger. Lionel Burger uttered these words at his trial: ‘‘I took up then the pursuit of the end to racialism and injustice that I have continued and shall continue as long as I live’’. He was against the oppression of the blacks and any form of injustice against them. The first example of racial melancholy is portrayed in Burger’s Daughter by the following statement, ‘‘ A thousand black and white people had come to the funeral of Cathy Burger, his wife, and Rosa’s mother, some years before’’ . People from all walks of life came to Rosa’s mother’s funeral. This was a true sign of someone who had worked across racial lines. They came to bid farewell to a political stalwart. Her work for the Communist party and for the previously disadvantaged people of South Africa was ev

  Baasie is the black boy who briefly lived with the Burgers and whom Rosa had always considered as her brother. He was Rosa’s childhood playmate. In later part of the novel we find him a black exile in London. When Rosa proceeds to London from Paris in order to meet other revolutionaries in exile, in one of the parties she meets Baasie. However, Baasie pretends as though he does not know her well. Infuriated by Rosa’s easy reassertion of their childhood friendship, he insists on his new identity as Zwelinzima Vulindlela. He tells her that he is no longer her ‘Baasie’ (little boss). His real name, which Rosa never knew, is Zwelinzima which means ‘suffering land’. He attacks her for posing as different from other whites because of her political commitment. Rosa is shocked to hear him speak against her father- Lionel Burger- who had done so much for him when he was a child. Zwelinzima’s argument is that though there were hundreds of black men, including his father who died in jail, the