Your teacher will go through the answers with you.
Activity 3.4 - Read about a famous writer (individual and pair)
As pre-reading activity, think about what you know about Nadine Gordimer. Now read about her, a third famous South African writer. During reading: focus on why she is famous.
Nadine Gordimer
20 November 1923 –
1 Novelist, essayist, screenwriter, political activist and champion of the disenfranchised, Nadine Gordimer was born of immigrant Jewish parents in Springs – a small gold-mining town in South Africa. In Seamus Heaney’s words, she is one of ‘the guerrillas of the imagination’, and became the first South African and the seventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
2 Her father, a jeweller, came from Lithuania (then in Russia); her mother, from England. Nadine Gordimer began to write at the age of nine and her first short story was published in a South African magazine when she was only fifteen. After being educated at the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, she studied at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, for one year.
3 Her first collection of short stories, Face to face, was published seven years later in 1949. Her first novel, The lying days , appeared in 1953. Over half a century, Gordimer has written thirteen novels, over two hundred short stories and several volumes of essays. Ten books are devoted to her works, and about two hundred critical essays appear in her bibliography.
4 Gordimer endured the bleak apartheid decades, refusing to move abroad as so many others did. Her husband, Reinhold Cassirer, is a refugee from Nazi Germany, who served in the British Army in World War II. Her daughter settled in France, her son in New York. She remained inside South Africa out of commitment to black liberation – to be the voice for silenced, black South African writers and also for the sake of her own creativity.
5 She eventually rose to international fame for novels and short stories that stunned the literary world, and resulted in some of her books being banned in her native country. She painted a social background subtler than anything presented by political scientists, thus providing an insight into the roots of the struggle and the mechanisms of change that no historian could have matched. Her work reflects the road from passivity and blindness to resistance and struggle, the forbidden friendships, the censored soul, and the underground networks. She has outlined a free zone where it was possible to try out, in imagination, what life beyond apartheid might be like. She wrote as if censorship did not exist and as if there were readers willing to listen. In her characters, the major currents of contemporary history intersect.
6 In addition to her novels, collections of short stories and essays, Gordimer’s credits include screenplays for television dramas and the script for the film Frontiers. She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for The conservationist and in 1991, the Nobel Prize for Literature.
7 Her works have been translated into more than thirty languages. Her most recent novel, The pickup , published in 2001, was listed for the Booker Prize and won the best book category for the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the Africa region.
8 Nadine Gordimer put the searchlight on a country that had painfully evolved from an oppressive racist state into a model of democracy. But beyond that, she is the writer that most stubbornly has kept the true face of racism in front of us, in all its human complexities.
[http://zar.co.za/gordimer.htm Biographies www.zar.co.za Proud to be South African]
Post-reading:
1. Try to infer the meanings of the following words from the text or use a dictionary to find them: disenfranchised; guerilla; bleak; intersect.
2. Write a paragraph explaining why Gordimer’s work stunned the literary world and yet was banned in South Africa. Use the information in paragraph 5, but write in your own words. Use the writing process and what you learnt about paragraph writing in the previous cycle.
Swap your paragraph with your partner and evaluate each other’s work. Your teacher will ask several of you to read your paragraphs to the class for general discussion and feedback.
A magazine article
Anyone can decide to write a biographical sketch of someone, but the information must be accurate. It is possible to be biased by choosing only negative or only positive facts, but most writers would try to be factual. Now that you have read several biographical sketches of famous South Africans, you are going to research and write one of your own to be published in a magazine.
Activity 3.5 - Write a biographical sketch (individual)
1. You are going to do research on a famous South African with the purpose of writing a one page biography. Here is a list of some South Africans who have died whose biographies might interest you, but you are not limited to this list. You can research any famous South African.
Chris Barnard: famous surgeon who performed the first heart transplant
Miriam Makeba: singer and political activist
Solomon Plaatje: literary pioneer
2. Decide whose biography you are going to write. Make notes of everything you already know about the person. What gaps are there? These are what you need to find out about. Find information in the library or on the Internet. Make notes of your findings.
3. Your biographical sketch should be approximately one page long. Do not simply copy directly from your source. Rewrite the information in your own words. Use the writing process. Pay attention to paragraphing, sentence length and clarity of expression. Edit your work.
Here is a checklist you can use:
| My biographic article: | √ |
| Contains birth date and place | |
| Contains date and place of death (if the person has already died) | |
| Mentions early influences (at least three) | |
| Describes education (and role or significance in later life) | |
| Mentions major accomplishments (including dates) | |
| Explains significance (why this individual is important) | |
| Names contemporaries (at least three individuals along with their occupations/roles) | |
| Has been written and edited using the writing process |
4. Your teacher will take in your article for evaluation.
A poem
The poem in the activity below is a Shakespearean sonnet. The poem starts by reassuring a friend or lover that he or she has not changed or grown any older. The sonnet’s fourteen lines are made up of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet.
Activity 3.6 - Reading a sonnet (pair)
Pre-reading:
Scan to confirm the information above.
During reading:
Listen while your teacher reads the poem, and follow in your books. Then answer the questions below.
Sonnet 104
by William Shakespeare
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For