Prospero’s Complex Race and Sex in Burger’s Daughter

Abstract Nadrne Gordrmer has remarked that all South African novels, whatever their political intentions, involve the question of racism: “There is no country in the Western world where the creative imagination, whatever it seizes upon, finds the focus of even the most private event set in the social determination of racial laws.” There are those who have argued that the white South African novelist is automatically corrupted by a privileged position, that Gordimer’s audience can only be other privileged whites, and that the products of her creative imagination are therefore intrinsically a part of a racist society. In The Conservationist Gordimer focused upon the disjunction between the internal, subjective reality of her white protagonist and the external reality of political consensus, employing as her principal strategy the translation of political problems into other languages, particularly into sexual terms. In the novel sexual fantasy functions as a surrogate for colonial lusts. The sexual body of woman and the body of a murdered black combine to form one massive image of colonial guilt. As her use of the language <‘f Zulu culture, and Zulu dreams, indicates here, Gordimer is clearly aware of the dangers of solipsistic art, an art which may articulate only the dominating power of the white imagination.