Nadine Gordimer

AnaMarie Mehmel

Professor Benander

World Literature III

18 April 2011

            When I first read Nadine Gordimer’s “Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants” I was not impressed with her. Yet, after reading her stories “Amnesty” and “Six Feet of the Country” my opinion changed. I even reread “Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants” again and liked it a little bit more than before.

            “Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants” is about a white woman who works in a gas station with a bunch of black mechanics. She believes because she is white that she is better than them and even acts as if she is the boss when really the head mechanic Jack is the boss; but, because Jack pities her, he allows her to think whatever she wants. She is nice person for the most part, but she is also a ditzy, self important racist imbecile. I call her an imbecile because she allows this con man into her life and gives him whatever he wants. She doesn’t know this guy from Adam, but she still lets him wrap his tentacles around her. Dumb! Gordimer uses this story as a great example of how colonization is taking over the Africans until they are reduced to terror and meekness. That is exactly who the narrator acted with the con man. He terrified her and she did nothing about it. That is wrong. She should not have let him take her freedom from her, if only for a short time. Yet, sometimes it cannot be helped. Africans did not choose to have their country torn apart by the Europeans, and neither did the narrator ask to have the con man invade her life. I think she was too trusting, but also so lonely that she was looking for companionship in the wrong places.

I liked “Amnesty” better. This story struck a chord in me. The narrator just wants to have her man home with her, raising their children, which is what every mother wants right? Yet, she does not get those desires. Her man leaves her to fight against colonization. Now do not get me wrong, I am not saying that the man was in the wrong cause what he was fighting for was a noble and worthy cause. However, I do not see how he could not have fought and married the narrator like he promised. Is one promise worth the price of another? I truly would like to know. I think he could have fought with her by his side against the apartheid. She was as worthy of freedom as he but all she was to him was a quick tumble. She was ignorant to him, but that was not something she could help. She did everything she could to better herself and all for him only for him to knock her up again then leave. Yet, it is important to note that in African culture women who have children are true women and have true strength. In America, being a single mom is an admirable role women play, and that is what the narrator does, but most important is that she is raising the future of her people in every sense of the phrase. While her man is fighting for the country, she is fighting to keep the people alive so that there is a purpose to a country. 

Yet, it is so depressing that her man could not man up and marry her especially after getting her pregnant.

            Gordimer’s “Six Feet of the Country” was a sad story too. It is about a man only tries to help his black servants when it is convenient from him to do so. He was a man who believes that he is so superior than anyone else, even his own wife was less than him because she tried to make the lives of the blacks a little bit better.  He is one of those men who would cut his nose off to spite his face. He could not comprehend in his sick, dense, little mind that helping others because it was that right thing to do was a good, better way than waiting for a reward that was not earned. The narrator was a completely narrow minded. His wife was portrayed as less than a woman because she did not have kids and her husband did not want her, but I believe she is a powerful important figure. It is people like her who do the dirty work that make life for people like the narrator easy. It is not fair of course, but when is life ever fair?