The Train from Rhodesia
The Train from Rhodesia
Nadine Gordimer 1952
“The Train from Rhodesia” is one of Nadine Gordimer’s earliest stories, first published in 1952 in her collection The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories. The short piece about a train’s brief stop in an impoverished African village exhibits the concise complexity that marks much of Gordimer’s other work. As a native South African of European heritage, Gordimer has focused much of her writing on the injustice of apartheid as practiced in the country. Though not an overtly political story, “The Train from Rhodesia” depicts the prejudicial attitudes that caused apartheid and reinforced it once racial segregation became law. Critics have praised the story for its unflinching yet subtle social commentary, a tactic that allowed Gordimer to publish it in South Africa without it being censored. By presenting characters of both races who are degraded by their belief in racial inequality, the author shows how both black and white South Africans are harmed by apartheid. While readers debate the merits of her detached, unemotional style, many find themselves compelled by her passion. The story has been published in several of Gordimer’s collections as well as in other general short story anthologies.
Author Biography
Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa, a gold mining town near Johannesburg, in 1923. Her parents were Jewish emigrants from London. She began writing at age nine when a heart condition limited her activity. She credits her isolation and her powers of observation for her success as a writer—traits that were evident to her even at this early age. At the private schools she attended, she was confronted with the omnipresence of racial discrimination. Even amidst the Catholic church, blacks were not afforded any semblance of status or respect, and the young intellectual wondered why. Gordimer began publishing stories at age fifteen which were generally concerned with racism and generally published in liberal magazines. With the assistance of Afrikaner poet Uys Krige and Sydney Saterstein, her agent, she soon began to publish in major literary magazines and American literary journals like The Yale Review, Harper’s, Atlantic and the New Yorker. This international recognition gained her a supportive audience during the times in which her own community sought to suppress her. Gordimer attended the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and was married to Gerald Gavronsky in 1949. The couple had one child and divorced three years later. In 1954 she married Reinhold Cassirer, the owner of an art gallery, and subsequently they had a son. In the mid-1950s when she was barely thirty years old, Gordimer had published two highly respected collections of short stories and her first novel The Lying Days.
Much of Gordimer’s work is concerned with how South Africa’s volatile political situation negatively affects the lives of whites. Consistently, she has argued that apartheid hurts everyone, a belief that prompted the South African government to censor books like A World of Strangers and The Late Bourgeois World. The latter was banned for twelve years for portraying a friendship that illustrates what Gordimer called the “cruelty and idiocy of apartheid and the dangers of daily life for blacks.” Aside from the political implications of her fiction, Gordimer is also known for her detached style, in which the narration appears very objective and scenes of great outward emotion are related with a sense of distance from the characters. In recognition for her talent as a writer, Gordimer has won many literary prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1970 for A Guest of Honour, the book many call her best, and the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature. Gordimer often lectures and teaches abroad, but she continues to live in Johannesburg.
Plot Summary
A train is heading toward a small, rural station in Southern Africa. The area around the station is impoverished, as are the people who live there. In the station, the stationmaster, the venders, and the children prepare for the train’s arrival.
The train, from the white, considerably more wealthy area of Rhodesia, approaches the station. A young white woman stretches out of the train’s window to look at a carved lion that an old African man has to sell. The poor villagers flock to the windows of the train, selling items or begging for handouts from the other passengers. Children ask for pennies. Dogs and hens surround the dining car waiting for scraps. One girl throws out chocolates— “the hard kind, that no one liked” —but the hens get them before the dogs do.
The young woman decides the lion is too expensive: three shillings and sixpence. Her husband thinks the price is preposterous also, but his wife urges him to stop bargaining with the old man. She withdraws from the window to sit in the compartment across the train’s corridor. She thinks about the lion she has not purchased and all the other similar carvings she has already bought: bucks, hippos, and elephants. She wonders how these items, which have come to represent the unreality of her honeymoon trip, will fit in at home and what meaning they will take on in her everyday life. She realizes that she has been subconsciously thinking that her new husband was part of this unreality, as if he would vanish as soon as the honeymoon ends.
The bell rings in the station, and the stationmaster prepares the train to leave. As the train starts moving on the track, the old man with the lion runs alongside it, offering the carving for “one-and-six” —only a fraction of what he had asked for before. The husband tosses the money out the window and the old man throws the lion to him. As the train leaves the station, the old man is standing, holding the shilling and sixpence he has picked up from the ground.
The young man enters the compartment where his wife sits, pleased with having obtained the lion figure for so little, and hands it to her. Though she admires its finely crafted features and the ruff of fur around its neck, she holds it away from her. She is dismayed at this purchase because it represents the humiliation her husband has forced upon the old African. She demands to know why he did not pay a fair price for it. He protests that she herself had said it was too expensive. The young woman throws the lion onto the seat in frustration.
A sense of shame engulfs her as she thinks of the price. She feels an emptiness inside herself. She has felt this way before but mistakenly thought it came from being alone too much; now she knows that is not true. The empty feeling is tied up with her new husband and their differing value systems. Her husband is sprawled out on the seat and she remains with her back toward him. The abandoned lion has fallen into a corner.
Characters
Old man
The old man initially tries to sell his carved lion for three shillings and sixpence to the young couple, but fails. Later, he shouts to the young man already on the train that he will sell it for one-and-six. His acceptance of such a low price and his breath, visible “between his ribs,” indicate that he is desperate and probably very poor. His polite manners, his “smiling, not from the heart, but at the customer,” indicate both his dire circumstances and his dependence on tourists like the young couple. Gordimer offers little description, but indicates that he is very old, a man who murmurs, “as old people repeat things to themselves.” Gordimer refers twice to his feet in the sand, thus showing the old man’s connection with the land, which contrasts with the young couple who are enclosed in the train.
Stationmaster
The stationmaster appears briefly in the story. As the train approaches, he comes “out of his little brick station with its pointed chalet roof, feeling the creases in his serge uniform.” His discomfort in the suit represents his attempt to fit in an unnatural role imposed on him by his job. The presence of his barefoot children and wife emphasize the poverty of the small town. When his children collect “their mother’s two loaves of bread,” the stationmaster’s dependence on the benevolence of the train from white, European-dominated Rhodesia is emphasized.
Young man
The young man accompanies the young woman on the train. He is surprised when she declines to buy the lion from the native at the train station. Despite the woman’s decision, he bargains with the
old man “for fun” and then “automatically” accepts the old man’s low offer of one-and-six. He throws the money to the old man and catches the lion as it is thrown to him. Whereas the young woman’s conscience is torn, the young man simply seems to be enjoying his trip. Thus, with “laughter and triumph” he presents the lion to the young woman and is ” shocked by the dismay of her face.” He is finally depicted, “sitting, with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs.” His silence implies an inability to understand the young woman.
Young woman
The young woman is the central character of the story, since it is her thoughts upon which the pathos of the story depends. Upon arriving at the train station, she admires a carved lion but declines to buy it, saying that the old man selling it wants too much money. When she retreats into the train, though, it is revealed that she already owns several similar items and does not know what she will do with them once she is home. The woman becomes upset after her husband buys the lion for a few cents. “If you wanted it, why didn’t you pay for it?” she asks, “Why didn’t you take it decently, when he offered?” This outburst indicates that the woman feels guilty over the patronizing and demeaning way her husband has treated the old man. As the train pulls out of the station, her shame overwhelms her, and they sit in an angry silence. Their relationship has been affected by the racial injustice her husband defines as “fun, bargaining.”
Gordimer reveals the thoughts of only the young woman, thereby focusing the exchange in the train station on the human toll exacted by apartheid. The woman is wealthy enough to travel in style; as a white, she is a beneficiary of the government’s system of racial discrimination. Nevertheless, even as she participates willingly in an unjust society, she tries to appreciate the natives—especially for their fine artistry. When unsettling feelings overcome her, she blames them on “being alone and belonging too much” to herself. The incident on the train, however, makes her realize that she is upset by larger social issues. The starving man was made to beg for a few coins in return for an elaborately and skillfully carved animal. Yet, she remains with her back towards her husband, indicating that she is still unable to discuss the topic; she is too bound by her complicity in society.
Themes
In “The Train from Rhodesia,” a train’s short stop in a poor African village highlights the racial and class barriers that typify South African life in the 1950s. Though only a few pages long, Gordimer’s story encompasses several themes besides racial inequality, including greed, poverty, and conscience.
Race and Racism
In South Africa, apartheid, the legal separation of races, became law in 1947. It is not necessary for Gordimer to mention the race of the characters in the story. Readers in the 1950s understood that the “old native” was black and the rich tourists were white. In a society so harshly divided, Gordimer writes of an instance in which the two races interact, thus revealing the patronizing attitudes of whites towards blacks and the blacks’ virtual enslavement and dependency on the whites. The whites, moreover, are not native to the country; just as the train passengers are merely “tourists” in the village that exists frozen in time before and after the train leaves. The villagers are shown as belonging to the land: “the sand became the sea, and closed over the children’ s black feet softly and without imprint.” In contrast, the white tourists are removed from nature and from the land: in their compartments with “caged faces, boxed in, cut off after the contact of outside,” they are indifferent to those on the outside. The beer drinkers “looked out, as if they could not see beyond” the windows of the train. Some passengers throw scraps of food to the dogs that hover near the train, just as others throw pennies to the children. In this image, Gordimer emphasizes the effect of the whites’ superior attitudes on the natives: it forces them to act like animals. That the young couple has collected tribal art on their vacation further represents their patronizing attitude towards the country’s natives. The tribal objects, which have great symbolic meaning to those who make them, become nothing more than decorations in the houses of the upper, ruling class. The woman wonders “How will they look at home. . . . Away from the unreality of the last few weeks?” To her, a honeymoon journey through Africa seems “unreal,” but to the people who live there, like the barefoot children who live in mud huts, it is very “real” indeed.
Wealth and Poverty
Enmeshed in the law of apartheid is the sharp division between wealth and poverty. While the inhabitants of the small village are so poor that they cannot afford shoes, the woman and man return to the city with bags of souvenirs that they do not know what they will do with. After picking up the coins thrown to him by the man on the train, the old man’s “breath [blows] out the skin between his ribs,” indicating the hunger and malnutrition prevalent in South Africa’s rural areas. The stationmaster’s children are depicted “clutching” a mere two loaves of bread. Meanwhile, the train passengers sit comfortably in their cabins—one woman actually gives her excess food to the dogs, ignoring the children begging at the train’s windows. Desperate to make money, the merchants are reduced to acting “like performing animals, the better to exhibit the fantasy held toward the faces on the train.”
Greed
The man selling the lion initially asks for “three-and-six.” Though probably a fair price, the man on the train balks in an effort to get it for less. Since he and his wife already have several items like it, this bargaining is just a game to him. Thus, the impoverished seller is at the man’s mercy. He needs the money more than the man needs the lion; this discrepancy becomes a prime opportunity for the young man to exhibit his greed. In waiting until the last possible moment—when the train is leaving the station—the man obtains the lion for just a fraction of its original price. He has made the poor man beg for the few coins, and he has received a finely crafted artwork for his wife. He does not recognize his greed: “I was arguing with him for fun, bargaining,” he tells his wife, oblivious to the fact that his “fun” reduced the native to “gasping, his skinny toes splaying in the sand.”
Conscience
The young woman wrestles with her conscience over her appreciation for the lion and her outrage at her husband’s greed in obtaining it. She represents those who are not entirely comfortable with apartheid but benefit from it anyhow. Her initial reaction to the seller’s offer is “No, leave it.” Though she says it is too expensive, it seems likely that she is troubled by the dichotomy of wealth and poverty the train trip has presented to her. She retreats inside the train rather than deal with the poor natives. This action represents many whites’ preference for going along with the travesty of apartheid rather than deal openly with the painful issues of inequality it presents. She feels shameful and sick for exploiting the native Africans, but refuses to explain these feelings to her husband. Previously, she had attributed such feelings to being single and alone. She argues with her husband and they both end up feeling hurt and disconnected from one another. Thus, her conscience has divided them; this event illustrates how apartheid can drive a wedge between all people and even divide families. In the end, the woman rejects both her husband and the lion, which had “fallen on its side in the corner.”
Style
Narrative
“The Train from Rhodesia” begins and ends with the symbol of the train. Gordimer structures her story around this metaphor and uses limited third-person narration to tell it. The narrator reveals only the thoughts of the young woman, thus focusing the story around her perspective, even though the stationmaster and his family are introduced to the reader before the train arrives. The woman’s thoughts are conveyed through interruptions in Gordimer’s detailed narrative. These interruptions reveal her moral questions about her husband’s bargaining for the carving: “Everything was turning around inside her. One-and-six. One-and-
Topics for Further Study
- How would “The Train from Rhodesia” be different if told from the perspective of the old man? The young man?
- Investigate how contemporary South Africa differs from the apartheid South Africa of 1952. Could a situation like that in “The Train from Rhodesia” take place there today?
- Research the art of the indigenous Africans. What were the carved figures like those in the story used for? What were some features common to them and what did they symbolize?
six.” That no one else’s thoughts are revealed by the narrator further emphasizes the psychological distance between the woman and the other characters in the story.
Symbolism and Imagery
In a story so short, images and symbols must be chosen carefully and used efficiently if the story’s themes are to be presented clearly. In “The Train from Rhodesia,” the train itself is the most overt symbol. The train comes from Rhodesia, a privileged British colony in South Africa, and thus symbolizes British colonialism. “Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station,” Gordimer describes it, thus imparting a view that British domination resembles a huge, mechanical, unhealthy, and overbearing beast. The train only stops briefly and few people get on or off, further symbolizing the indifference and lack of understanding inherent in British imperialism. The train moves along “the single, straight track,” emphasizing the “tunnel vision” of the dominant power. The old man and his impoverished neighbors are incidental; the train is merely passing through on its way to another British outpost. As it leaves, it “cast the station like a skin,” an image that imparts the idea that the village was something to be rid of, unwanted and unneeded.
In contrast to the mechanical, manufactured symbol of the train to represent the whites, the
Africans of the small village are identified with images of nature. The villagers are surrounded by “sand, that lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow,” and which closes over the barefoot children’s feet. Furthermore, the stationmaster’s wife is identified with a sheep’s carcass that is hanging over the veranda. This, also, is a symbol of nature, even though it negatively connotes their position in society as nothing more than pieces of meat. Nevertheless, these images reveal that the villagers are an organic part of the environment. When Gordimer describes the old man’s feet “splaying the sand,” she brings to mind a tradition in African art in which exaggeratedly large feet symbolize a connection with the land and the generations of those who have cultivated it. She contrasts this organic connection with the sterile, compartmentalized separation of the British who sit “behind glass, drinking beer, two by two, on either side of a uniform railway vase with its pale dead flower.” Sand connects the old man, the station-master and his children to each other, but the British have no symbol to connect themselves to one another beyond the loud, lumbering train that “heaved and bumped back against itself.” When sand is used as an image for the young woman, however, it symbolizes the shame she feels, which “sounded in her ears like the sound of sand, pouring.”
Historical Context
Legal Separation of the Races
When Gordimer published “The Train from Rhodesia” in 1952, South African society was legally divided along racial lines by apartheid. The all-white National Party won control of the government in 1948 and dominated South African politics for much of the next two decades. Black Africans and other non-whites, including those of mixed-race heritage, were denied the most basic human rights and forced to live apart from whites in substandard living conditions. They were allowed only disproportionately small representation in government, and by 1960 they were denied all representation. This political exclusion insured a monumental divide in the respective standards of living between-whites and non-whites. While whites enjoyed excellent hygiene, health care, food, education and transportation, non-whites, like the old man and the stationmaster’s family in the story, suffered from malnutrition, disease, and severe poverty. In accordance with the Population Registration Act of 1950, all South Africans were divided by their race and treated accordingly. Members of each of the four established ethnic groups (Asian, African White and Coloured, or mixed-race) were strictly segregated in all aspects of their lives. Interracial sex and marriage were prohibited and the Group Areas Act of 1950 divided all cities and towns into segregated districts of both residential and business property.
In order to effect this total division, thousands of Coloureds and Indians were forced out of white areas by the government so that each district would be racially homogenous. Strict laws prohibited non-whites from sharing the same trains, buses, taxis, or even hearses as whites. For these reasons, none of the black Africans boarded the train to Rhodesia in the story. While the white population prospered in wealthy urban areas like Rhodesia, the non-white population suffered economic and political exploitation in the rest of the country, such as the rural area Gordimer describes. Non-whites were only allowed in the all-white districts to work and were required to return directly to their districts afterwards. While white children learned to read at very
Compare & Contrast
- 1950s: Black South Africans cannot vote, represent themselves in government, or live in the same areas as white South Africans.
1990s: Black South Africans participate in the South African government, vote, and maintain the same legal rights as white South Africans, though vast ghetto areas like Soweto still exist. - 1964: Nelson Mandela is arrested by the South African government and imprisoned for treason after nearly two decades of work for the African National Congress.
1996: South African President Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress-dominated parliament approve a new, more egalitarian constitution for South Africa, with former president Frederick W. de Klerk acting as Mandela’s deputy. The new constitution outlaws the death penalty, grants protection to striking workers, and provides greater access to public documents. - 1953: James Baldwin publishes Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Ralph Ellison publishes The Invisible Man, both seminal works on the theme of racial prejudice.
1997: The popularity of Oprah Winfrey’s book club results in the skyrocketing sales of Toni Morrison’s books.
early ages, most black South Africans remained illiterate. In 1953, the white South African government even outlawed missionary schools so that it could control native Africans’ educations.
However, by 1950, resistance to apartheid was growing. At this time, the African National Congress gained members under the leadership of President Albert Lutuli and his companions, Oliver Tambo, and Nelson Mandela. While the white-controlled government sought to crush such resistance movements through violence, surveillance, and sometimes assassination, the African National Congress continued to exist even after it was outlawed and its leaders, including Mandela, were imprisoned. The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 allowed the police to arrest anyone without the right to a lawyer, a trial, or an appeal. These laws were used to punish demonstrators in 1952, when they protested laws that even the South African Supreme Court had declared racist. Leaders of the resistance vowed that the illegal political protests would continue until all of the country’s jails were overcrowded. In response to this, the South African Parliament extended dictatorial powers to Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan in 1953. The resulting police state took the lives of many bright young political leaders and caused guerrilla warfare that characterized South African politics until the early 1990s, when apartheid was dismantled.
Critical Overview
When Gordimer published “The Train from Rhodesia” in 1952, overt criticism of South Africa’s political system by writers often resulted in censorship of their works. Thus, the story was Gordimer’s subtle attempt to illustrate the insidious ramifications of racial discrimination. While she had already published many short stories in literary magazines, her readership was limited to a small audience of liberal, white South Africans. Internationally, her condemnation of apartheid gained her respect, but her second novel, A World of Strangers, was banned by the South African government. Yet even as her critics attacked her politics, others praised her technical mastery of language, her fluid imagery, and natural characterizations. ’ “The Train from Rhodesia” itself, however, received little attention from critics upon its publication.
The volatile racial tensions in South Africa have continued to affect the reception of Gordimer’s literature throughout her career. Many critics have attempted to categorize Gordimer as a political writer, though she has resisted this label. She has always maintained that her writing is first about people and that she seeks to speak honestly and creatively about people’s lives, not politics. Though admitting that writing can have radical effects on people’s lives, Gordimer argues that one should focus on the writing itself when writing, and not think of one’s audience. Intentionally writing propaganda, she says, would destroy the aesthetic merit of her work. Many critics apparently concur, since Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, for “her magnificent epic writing [which] has been of very great benefit to humanity.” A few critics steadfastly maintain that downplaying the politics of her stories is an evasion of her political responsibility. The South African government, however, disagrees; her 1966 novel The Late Bourgeois World was banned for twelve years.
Contemporary scholars respect the strategy of Gordimer’s fiction. According to scholars like John Cooke, who wrote The Novels ofNadine Gordimer: Private Lives, Public Landscapes, and Stephen Clingman, who wrote History from the Inside: The Novels ofNadine Gordimer, Gordimer’s fiction tells the stories of vast social change through the everyday experiences of individuals. Because Gordimer has chosen to write about the small moments in people’s lives, like those in “The Train from Rhodesia,” her writing receives almost a universal warm welcome today. This is in contrast with the 1950s and 1960s, when such “small moments” were sometimes criticized as both didactic and unpolitical. In the 1950s and 1960s, many critics and readers preferred stories that stressed national politicians and prominent leaders over the dailiness of life. Today, in light of the trend towards minimalism in fiction, “small moments” are almost universally acknowledged to be suitable topics for literature. Reviewing A Soldier’s Embrace, Edith Milton writes, “Gordimer is no reformer; she looks beyond political and social outrage to the sad contradiction of the human spirit.”
Criticism
Rena Korb
Rena Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the representative characteristics of Gordimer’s writing that are apparent in “The Train from Rhodesia.”
Nadine Gordimer has been called South Africa’s “First Lady of Letters,” and she is perhaps that country’s most distinguished living fiction writer. The author of many volumes of collected short stories and novels, in addition to numerous lectures, essays, and other works of nonfiction, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. This international recognition of Gordimer’s work not only confirmed her reputation as an artist, but it also stressed the importance of writing about the effects of apartheid on the people of South Africa. The length of Gordimer’s career—she published her first story when she was thirteen, her first book at twenty-six—has allowed her to document the changes in South African society over the course of several generations.
Throughout her career, Gordimer has insisted that because politics affect all aspects of life, her writing always deals either directly or indirectly with political matters. Moreover, she believes that only the truth can help a good cause. More directly, she believes that her writing deals with the truth, thus she makes no attempt to espouse specific political views regarding South Africa. Taking this view, Gordimer often sees herself as isolated between the external world of politics and the internal world of the individual. Her work reflects this sense of detachment, and Gordimer has been admires by some and criticized by others for it. Likewise, some critics feel that Gordimer does not take a strong enough stand against racism, and others feel that she goes too far. The South African government, for example, has banned several of her works, and sometimes prevents others from being published in paperback, which is the only way many black South Africans could afford her novels.
Gordimer’s fiction has been the subject of much commentary in South Africa over the years. One review of A World of Strangers, Gordimer’s second novel, complains that she writes of “the wider and more dangerous pastures of the sociological novel.” A reviewer of her next novel, Occasion for Loving, which concerns an affair between a white English woman and a black South African man, insists that “the theme and incidents of the story will seem less important than those stretches of interior writing in which the author’s still, small
What Do I Read Next?
- A Guest of Honor (1990) by Nadine Gordimer. An idealistic colonel’s discovery of corruption among the leaders of a newly independent African nation results in his assassination.
- “Children of the Sea,” (1993) by Edwidge Danticat. A young couple are separated by a dictatorial regime in Haiti, forcing the young man to make a dangerous boat crossing to the United States.
- “Vengeful Creditor” (1971) by Chinua Achebe. A story about a wealthy Nigerian’s brush with free public education, which makes it difficult for her to find suitable servants to care for her children.
- “Blues Ain’t No Mocking Bird” (1972) by Toni Cade Bambara. A poor, African-American family is approached by a crew of filmmakers who want to shoot footage of their modest home for their project on the government food stamp program.
- “Everyday Use” (1973) by Alice Walker. An African-American family’s successful, college-educated daughter wants possession of the family crazy quilt so she can hang it over her sofa as an example of American folk art.
- Fools and Other Stories (1983) by Njabulo Ndebele, a former leader of the Congress of South African Writers. A collection of stories that explores the lives of South African children growing up in the 1960s.
- Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) by South African writer Alan Paton, a classic novel that follows Reverend Steven Kamalo through the black ghettos of Johannesburg on a search for his lost son.
- Biko by Donald Woods recounts the dynamic life of Stephen Biko, South African Black Consciousness Movement leader, who was battered to death while under police interrogation in 1977.
voice is heard above the sounds of ordinary living and the common day.” It is not surprising that the most passionate analysis of Gordimer’s work and the most hostile reactions generally come from other South Africans or ex-Africans. Gordimer’s position, that of the white South African opposing apartheid—a minority within a minority—has led to strong emotions and occasional suppression.
The Atlantic Monthly has called Gordimer “one of the most gifted practitioners of the short story anywhere in English,” and it was her short stories that first led critics to consider her a major writer. Her talent for short fiction has been compared to that of the poet, particularly for her interweaving of event, meaning, and symbol in a short amount of space. Martin Trump also points out that Gordimer depicts how women as well as Africans have suffered from the inequality present in South African society. Racial inequality, since it permeates all facets of life, is always present in her stories, despite the race and social class of her characters.
“The Train from Rhodesia,” one of Gordimer’s early stories, concerns a young couple on a train stopped at a rural station. The young woman is interested in a carved lion an old black man has to sell but claims the price is too high. Her husband bargains with the vendor and obtains the carving for an unfairly low price, causing his wife to feel humiliated and isolated from him. At first, this story may not seem to deal with the racial problems specific to South Africa—after all, oppressed and impoverished people are taken advantage of the world over. But the inequality that permeates South African society is depicted in the shared humiliation of the old black man and the young white woman. Gordimer explained this relationship in an interview: the young woman “suffered from seeing her husband or lover demean himself by falling into this
“Gordimer has insisted that because politics affect all aspects of life, her writing always deals either directly or indirectly with political matters.”
black-white cliche of beating down the African. . . . She suffered really from seeing herself demeaned through her lover.”
The woman identifies with the black carver and thus rejects, at least for the moment, the typical white world of South Africa. Gordimer achieves this emotional connection in part through symbolism. While she draws distinctions between the white world of the train and the black world of the station, she implies that the black world is more honest. The whites live in a fragile world of their own construction symbolized by the train. Before they buy the blacks’ wares, the whites require them to act “like performing animals, the better to exhibit the fantasy held towards the faces on the train.” Though the black world is filled with “mud huts,” “barefoot children,” and “a garden in which nothing grew,” it is still shown as a place of community. This is in contrast this with the passengers on the train with their “caged faces” and who are “boxed in.” They are willing to donate items to the poor children outside but only those they do not value, such as the chocolate that “wasn’t very nice.”
Such an incident illustrates the unfruitful match between the young man and woman on the train. The couple, presumably on their honeymoon, have been caught up in “the unreality of the last few weeks.” They have bought many animal carvings during their travels, and the young woman wonders how they will fit in at home. The buck, hippos, and elephants (and later, the lion), all ferocious or frightening animals, stand in opposition to the refined world she and her husband inhabit. But after seeing her husband act in such an insensitive, exploitative manner toward the old black man, she knows that nothing she has recently acquired is in harmony with her life and values. Her husband, however, confronted with the dichotomy of the white and black worlds of South African has no problem accepting it.
The emptiness she feels at this realization of the differences between them fills her with a “weariness” and “tastelessness.” The woman has felt this way before, but she has mistakenly thought “it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.” The incident at the train station makes her painfully aware that this “void” has been caused by her alliance with her husband, who argues with an impoverished old vendor “for fun.” Yet she does not voice these frustrations to him. Though the woman does not want to have anything to associate with this emptiness, so that “no object, word or sight. . .might recur and so recall the feeling,” it will clearly not be possible to ignore their basic incompatibility in the future. The man’s failure to understand his wife’s unspoken signals reveals their fundamental inability to communicate. Thus, he misses “the occasion for loving.”
In addition to developing the theme of sterile love through her characters’ actions towards one another, Gordimer also uses sexual imagery and symbolism. As the story begins, the train entering the station represents the potential for a healthy relationship. The train represents the man; it “[flares] out. . . . Creaking, jerking. . . gasping, the train fills the station.” The woman is the station, whose tracks “[flare] out to let it in.” But, like the doubts that have been lurking in the back of the young woman’s mind, there are hints of the impending division: the train behind the engine is a “dwindling body”; the train calls out “I’m coming” but receives “no answer.” The sexual promise of the relationship is snuffed out by the husband’s purchase of the lion. As the train leaves the station, the young woman then feels the “impotence of anger,” and the “heat of shame [mounts] through her legs.” Finally, the train casts “the station like a skin.” Once again it calls “I’m coming,” and receives no reply. Thus, through this metaphor, Gordimer indicates the young couple’s emotional estrangement.
Gordimer’s reputation as a descriptive writer rests not on her portrayal of details such as eye color or hair color but in the layering of telling details. In the 1980s, Gordimer and photographer David Goldblatt collaborated on two books in which selections from her fiction were accompanied by his pictures. Andrew Vogel Ettin finds these artists to be well matched in their interest of social and physical environments. Goldblatt does not illustrate Gordimer’s words per se but shows the backdrop against which her stories take place. Ettin draws particular attention to the final image of the couple in ’ “The Train from Rhodesia” as an example of the “expressive power of the physical”: “Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.” This “caught moment” deserves its place as the pinnacle of the story. It includes many elements central to Gordimer’s fiction: the intrusion of the white world of the train in the black world of the station, the separation of man and woman, and the chance for love destroyed by the racial problems of South Africa.
Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.
David Kippen
David Kippen is an educator and specialist on British colonial literature and twentieth-century South African fiction. In the following essay, he discusses the symbolism of location and geography in “The Train from Rhodesia” and how it underscores the silence and symmetry of the narrative.
In one of the more insightful recent discussions of Nadine Gordimer’s “The Train from Rhodesia,” South African critic Robert Green writes in The Novels of Nadine Gordimer that the story “map[s] out the silence and asymmetry between black and white.” There is much to recommend using these ideas of “silence” and “asymmetry” as points of departure into Gordimer’s story. The building blocks Gordimer selects for her setting—the station, the train, and her principal characters—provide context essential to the story’s action. If the silence between the domains of black and white is most evident in the unfolding of Gordimer’s plot, it is in the construction of setting that the asymmetry Green remarks upon can be most clearly seen. Since the asymmetry between these domains generates the silence which mark their boundaries, it is here, with setting, that I shall begin.
Though it is impossible to date the story’s action with certainty, it is reasonable to assume that it is set sometime between the closing years of the nineteenth century, when the first major train lines linking South Africa with countries to the north
“Where the station is a study in degrees of poverty, the train is a demonstration of the world’s opulence.”
were built, and 1953. However, given the political events of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a later date seems more likely. The exact location of the station cannot be established with any certainty, but Gordimer’s descriptions of the hot, arid, desert-like conditions suggest a setting on either the Little or Great Karoo (Khoisan for “desert”) in the Cape Colony. Gordimer could, of course, have chosen to be more specific about the location and date if she had wished, but it is precisely the approximate nature of these details that gives her story the sense of an endlessly recurring cycle. It is worth observing diat, although her other works generally provide very detailed scenes, here she furnishes only a few details about the station and the train. From Gordimer’s description one might take away the impression that all of South Africa is similarly arid and empty, but this is not so. Though the country’s interior is largely arid, the Eastern and Southern coast are as fertile, well-watered, pleasant and densely populated as the United States’ Gulf Coast. Why, then, does she pick this location? Her decision to place the story’s action in the Karoo is most probably both a strategic move and a practical necessity, for it is in locations such as this one that the disparity between the worlds of black and white are visible in their simplest, most direct relief. This is not to say that there is no disparity in coastal South Africa—the opposite was, and remains, the case—but rather, that the Karoo setting provides an ideal territory for a study in miniature of three tiers of South African society.
In this hierarchy, the polished, well-to-do English-speaking people appear both on top economically and as social transients on the landscape (“settler,” with its implication of transience, is a term of insult to many South African whites). Their presence on the train dierefore provides a setting which is both entirely plausible and a wonderfully ironic commentary on their presence on this landscape. Where the station is a study in degrees of poverty, the train is a demonstration of the world’s opulence elsewhere, a caravan of delights from which the stationmaster’s family is in exile, and from which the station’s blacks are permanently excluded. This fact is mirrored spatially as well, with the passengers up high, reaching down to toss money or examine artifacts.
In a letter of November 5, 1899, a young Winston Churchill, on his way to report on the Boer War (1899-1902) wrote that “railway traveling in South Africa is more expensive but just as comfortable as in India. Lying-down accommodation is provided for all. . . . The sun is warm, and the air is keen and delicious. But the scenery would depress the most buoyant spirits. . . . with the daylight the train was in the middle of the Great Karoo. Wherefore was this miserable land of stone and scrub created?” Churchill’s comments underscore the dichotomy between the harsh, unpleasant conditions outside on one hand, and the train’s self-contained opulence on the other. From the perspective of the station, the train’s call of “I’m coming” represents an unanswerable, false promise. At the story’s end the train removes from the barren station everything it brought. Shedding the station like a snake sheds its used-up skin, it leaves behind only some bread, some pocket-change, an orange and some candies that are “not very nice.”
Gordimer provides little detail about the newly married couple beyond suggesting that they are honeymooning and that they are not themselves from southern Africa. The young wife’s comments about “the unreality of the last few weeks,” the difficulty of finding places “at home” to put the carvings and baskets they have thus far bought on their trip, and the changing meaning of these things “away from the places [she] found them” suggest that the honeymooners are not themselves Rhodesian, but are touring Africa and, like Churchill, will return to Britain when their honeymoon is over. (Rhodesia, which lies directly north of South Africa, was a British colony until November 12th, 1965. The name change to Zimbabwe took place in 1980.)
On the next rung down from the transients on the train is a somewhat cliched depiction of the stalwart Afrikaner family, carving out a niche from the unforgiving country. Like the principal characters the stationmaster remains nameless, but his social rank is nonetheless clearly identified. His uniform is rumpled and creased. His house is made of tin. A sheep carcass hangs in the verandah. His children wander around barefoot. His garden grows nothing. Taken together, these points mean to demonstrate that the stationmaster and his family are from the poorest part of South Africa’s white working class, not coincidentally, the group in the most direct competition with blacks for unskilled positions. (David Harrison writes in The White Tribe of Africa that “between 1924 and 1933 the proportion of unskilled white workers on the railways rose from 9.5. . .to 39.9 % while the proportion of blacks fell from 75. . .to 48.9 %.”)
At this early stage in her career Gordimer fails to get much closer to the station’s black inhabitants than her heroine does. However, the details she provides from a distance demonstrate that their lives of unpleasant, undignified dependency are in as sharp a contrast to the relative well-being of the stationmaster and his family as they are to the idealized, mythical Africa they sell—the Africa of woven baskets, of carved buck, of “lions. . .grappling with strange, thin, elongated warriors who clutched spears and showed no fear.” This is, in the protagonist’s words, “the fantasy” of a world in balance, a world in which blacks live dignified lives in harmony with the world they inhabit, a world in which there is no asymmetry between hunter and hunted or between black and white. But beyond the fantasy they sell is a very different reality, one in which the black majority accommodate themselves however they can while they mourn, mythologize, and commercialize their heritage for British consumption. The station, then, is a self-contained economic world, consisting only of the stationmaster’s house, a goods store, and an adjacent kraal. (Similar to “corral,” the Afrikaans kraal also describes a small group of huts within the wall).
Together, these locations suggest an entirely artificial micro-economy, subject to the passing trains for continuance. The stationmaster and his wife buy goods to sell to the blacks living in the adjacent kraal. The blacks, in turn, have no recourse but to carve and weave artifacts to sell to train passengers in order to buy goods from the station-master’s store. Until the arrival of this particular train, the system remains asymmetrical, static, timeless. This imbalance of power is the principal asymmetry from which all others arise. There is, without truly representative government, no mechanism to allow the blacks at the base of the economic pyramid to invert the structures of power and race, nor is there any incentive for the white minority to let go of their franchise and make the government representative.
The story’s plot sets this stasis in motion. It details how an artfully carved lion reaches across the barriers of race, class and silence that separate the domains, of white and black South Africans—a disarmingly simple theme. However, this simple theme supports a complex and nuanced rising awareness on the part of the female protagonist. Ultimately, her rejection of her new husband powerfully demonstrates the impossibility of living “outside” incompatible ideologies. Though the young woman is certainly not intentionally looking for opportunities to mingle with the natives, the old man smiles “not from the heart, but at the customer.” His carving “speaks” to her in a different language, uncomfortably bridging the chasm of silence between the domains of black and white South Africa. Its mane “tell[s] you. . . that the artist had delight in the lion.” It is this “delight,” by the story’s conclusion, that makes the young woman unable to quell her awareness of the humanity that she and the woodcarver share. The protagonist senses that a moral wrong has been done, but she is certainly unwilling, perhaps even unable, to understand the origin of her disquiet. In a pointed, ironic commentary on the relativity of values aesthetic systems, the woman is outraged, not because her husband meanly cheated another man out of a ridiculously small amount of change, but that he did so for a lion that was pretty, suggesting that the real victim is the undervalued artwork, not the old man standing by the railroad panting. (The lion’s price, whether three-or one-and six shillings is ridiculously low by any standard. Gordimer underscores this by withholding the key word “shilling” until nearly the end of the story, inviting the reader to substitute the basic South African currency unit “rand” in its place.) So threatening are the possibilities in every direction—on one hand, that the carver is as human as she is; on the other, that she can no longer respect her husband—that the protagonist is gradually squeezed into a state of emotional paralysis. Handled by a ham-fisted author this approach would have led the protagonist to buy the lion, make more contact with the man, and reach back across the divide in sudden, blinding self-awareness. But Gordimer avoids such sentimentality, instead following her protagonist from the stasis of the external setting to the paralysis of limited self-awareness while leading the reader along the contours of race, class, and culture that defined South Africa at the outset of apartheid, and, to some measure, continue to define it today.
Source: David Kippen, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.
Nadine Gordimer
In the fllowing essay, originally written as a foreword to her collection, Selected Stories, Gordimer outlines her philosophy of short story writing. “The Train from Rhodesia” is included in the collection.
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Source: Nadine Gordimer, an introduction to Selected Stories, 1975. Reprint by the Viking Press, 1976, pp. 9-14.
Thomas H. Gullason
In the following essay, Gullason discusses the categorization of the short story as a second-class citizen of literature, but offers evidence that as a form it is deserving of much more. By way of example, he discusses Gordimer’s “The Train from Rhodesia.”
. . .What must we do so that the short story can receive the kind of consideration it deserves? We can try to rid the genre of the prejudices that have conspired against it. We can come to it as though it were a fresh discovery. We can settle on one term for the medium, like “short fiction” or “short story.” References to names like “anecdote,” “tale,” “narrative,” “sketch,” though convenient, merely add to the confusion and suggest indecision and a possible inferiority complex. Too many names attached to the short story have made it seem almost nameless. Even the provincial attitude of teachers and anthologists has not helped. Most often students are fed on a strict diet of British and American short-story writers. But the short story is not solely a British and American product; it is an international art form, and Continental as well as Oriental, and other authors should be more fully represented in any educational program. As Maurice Beebe reminds us, “Once translated, Zola, Mann, Proust, Kafka become authors in English and American literature. . . .” Once this philosophy is accepted, the short story will automatically increase in vitality and stature. . . .
A more modern illustration . . . is South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer in her 2400-word story ’ “The Train from Rhodesia” (1949). What one discovers with this example is that even extreme brevity cannot stifle the short story. “The Train from Rhodesia” is a puzzling story, for Miss Gordimer is trying to say far more than she reveals on the surface. One sees that she is in a world of censorship, the possible loss of a passport, and possible imprisonment and therefore sends cryptic notes from underground. Miss Gordimer’s art is the poetic art of ellipsis—much has been omitted; the reader must fill in.
What Miss Gordimer has done is to take a brief space of time and lives and make it suggest a large panorama of feelings and attitudes. For in the story we see the separateness of black and white, and white and white, the world of primitivism (suggested by the hunk of sheep’s carcass dangling in a current of air) and civilization (suggested by the train and its inhabitants), and hunger (suggested by the piccanins and the animals) versus sloth (suggested by occupants of the train, who throw out chocolates). The train expands these various threads. For one, the train is from Rhodesia and is to be burdened with white and native problems. In the opening of the story we hear: the “train came out of the red horizon and bore down toward them. . . .” Before the train stops in the station, it “called out, along the sky; but there was no answer; and the cry hung on: “I’m coming . . . I’m coming. . . .” The last paragraph of the story returns to the train and extends its meaning: “The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer.”
The specific actions lead us to the generalizations made above. The pitiful natives smile not “from the heart, but at the customer.” Their primitive art, like the carved lion, is “majestic,” but they as vendors are bent “like performing animals.” The old vendor who sells his art work to the young husband for one-and-six has his opened palm “held in the attitude of receiving.” The crisis of husband and wife at the story’s end is not resolved; it merges with the tempo—gnarled, fierce, disconnected—of the humanized train which expands and heightens the various estrangements. In one place, the wife reflects: “How will they [the native goods] look at home? Where will you put them? What will they mean away from the places you found them? Away from the unreality of the last few weeks? The man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd. . . somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places.” This private reflection becomes a public estrangement with her husband: “If you wanted the thing [the carved lion] . . . why didn’t you buy it in the first place? If you wanted it, why didn’t you pay for it? Why didn’t you take it decently, when he offered it? Why did you have to wait for him to run after the train with it, and give him one-and-six? One-and-six!” The wife returns to her private world: “She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.” The train’s choric chant at the end—“I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer” —helps to magnify a world of loneliness, separation, and discord.
. . . [This] story defies the rules: Its action is small; its meanings are large. It is a poetic story— even more important, an impressionistic painting, for Miss Gordimer wants us to see and to feel the world of Africa through this one incident. The incident is not closed; there are the after effects, nothing is finished off, the problem still exists. . . .
The novelist has been called the “long-distance runner,” and he is not lonely. The short-story writer has been called a “sprinter,” and he is lonely. Carlos Baker’s reading of Hemingway’s short stories is penetrating, as he uses Hemingway’s own statement to explain the depths of the form. “The dignity of movement of an iceberg,” Hemingway once said, “is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Many of our great modern short-story writers write in shorthand; and one word, a phrase, can raise the short story to a new level of meaning. There is dignity and hidden depth in the short story. It has been in a deep freeze too long. One looks forward to a thawing out period.
Source: Thomas H. Gullason, “The Short Story: An Underrated Art,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall, 1964, pp. 13-31.
Sources
Clingman, Stephen R. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside, Allen & Unwin, 1988.
Cooke, John. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes, Louisiana State University Press, 1985, 235 p.
Ettin, Andrew Vogel. Betrayals of the Body Politic, University Press of Virginia, 1992, 150 p.
Harrison, David. The White Tribe of Africa, University of California Press, 1981.
Trump, Martin. “The Short Fiction of Nadine Gordimer,” in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 17, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 341-66.
Further Reading
Haugh, Robert F. Nadine Gordimer, Twayne, 1974, 174 p.
Haugh discusses the body of Gordimer’s work and her talents as a writer.
Herbert, Michael. “The Train from Rhodesia,” in Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994, p. 937-38.
Includes essays on both Gordimer and “The Train from Rhodesia,” concentrating on their literary significance.
Huggan, Graham. “Echoes from Elsewhere: Gordimer’s Short Fiction as Social Critique,” in Research in African Literature Spring, 1994.
Huggan discusses Gordimer’s works of self-criticism and her conviction that the short story is a particularly relevant and effective genre. This essay focuses on several stories, including “Six Feet of the Country,” “A Company of Old Laughing Faces,” “Livingstone’s Companions” and “Keeping Fit.”
Smith, Rowland. Introduction to Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer, from the Critical Essays on World Literature Series, G.K. Hall, 1990, pp. 1-22.
Smith presents a detailed overview of South African and international responses to the work of Nadine Gordimer, and chronicles how they have changed in the decades she has been writing.
Terkel, Studs. “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer,” in Perspective on Ideals and the Arts, Vol. 12, No. 3, May 1963, pp. 42-49.
An interview with Gordimer in which the author discusses the viewpoint of the young woman in “The Train From Rhodesia.”
Wade, Michael. Nadine Gordimer, Evans, 1976.
Wade examines novels like The Lying Days, A Occasion for Loving and The Conservationist thoroughly, and refers briefly to her short stories.
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