Writing the Interregnum: Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People

A writer who has charted the historical journey of South Africa from its apartheid years to freedom and democracy, Nadine Gordimer has written at length about the significance of the interregnum in her fictions and essays. Her quintessential interregnum novel, July’s People, examines in meticulous detail the assumptions and misunderstandings that underlie the colonial hegemony of apartheid. The novel is a vivid, detailed study of inverted subject positions in a crisis situation. Putting a white family’s survival into the hands of their black servant in an imagined moment of revolution, it explores the possibility of a meaningful cross-racial connections while exposing the illusory nature of trust and dependency between the races. The novel makes abundantly clear that both whites and blacks living in the interregnum of apartheid have become entrapped within a system that perpetuates structures of material inequalities and personal injustices. The sympathetic white liberals are particularly censured for their complicity in the structures that hold blacks in servitude to the whites. The novel’s intention is ultimately to formulate a destabilization of an accustomed world to make the emphatic point that whites have to redefine themselves to prepare for radical changes if they wish to share in the new collective life of a future with the black race. By reversing the relationship of dependency between mistress and servant, the novel forces a rethinking about the underlying inequalities and internalized codes that define and sustain the interregnum.