On Hillela's Racial Integration In A Sport Of Nature

A Sport of Nature(1987),as a long novel written by South African Nobel Prize Winner Nadine Gordimer in the middle period of her writing life,runs through the past and future of South Africa in 1980 s,and is strongly characterized with“prophetic realism”.In this novel,the protagonist Hillela is born in a Jewish white middle-class family and she is exposed to be exiled out of her assigned white community for her inadvertent violations of dispensation and regulations under apartheid.Then she launches her transformative course from an innocent girl for individual boundlessness to a new white woman committed to black liberation and from an afflicted exile to a sophisticated First Lady of a black President as a result of her integration into a community shared by the blacks and whites.Her legendary metamorphosis is at some point of ritualized significance to the white society in South Africa,and it is also in a symbolized dimension prophetic of the victory of the black liberation struggle,the abolishing of apartheid and democratisation procession in South Africa.Ritual studies theorists are of a sure view that,with their age increasing and activity alternating,any individuals in a society will embody physical and psychological changes so that their personal lives pass through a series of “rites of passage”.Of a particular concern,within the liminal period in the rite of passage,the ritual subjects will be placed on the margin of social structure for their entry into the communitas in which structures and categories can be examined,countered and deconstructed,leading to the ritual subject's liminality such as in-betweenness,hybridity and indeterminacy.This thesis intends to recruit the analytical framework of “rites of passage” to expound upon the transformation of the protagonist with a minute focus on its liminality for the following explorations: how Hillela separates from white liberals' dilemma and eschews the assigned white community entrenched in racist ideology;how she has a successful passage of the liminal period as a consequence of the re-examination and deconstruction of racist discourse,additionally ripping away the hypocrisy of apartheid;and how she manages to integrate into a shared community and the construction of a white woman with an indispensable and inevitable trend.The first chapter focuses on the process in which the protagonist is separated from her assigned white community for the avoidance of its encoding.Hillela'sinstinctive desire was triggered by her aunt's reminiscence of her mother and the picture and love letters left by her mother,bringing to its fruition her admiration and appreciation of mother's individualism for freedom and love.The innocent and straightforward girl had in no way come to terms with apartheid-ridden order and prohibitions in South Africa and so incurred her dropout and Olga's dislike,leading to her awakening of racial consciousness.Hillela did perceive that Pauline was also absorbed in her white identity and given interests notwithstanding her mania for black liberation.She took the initiative to leave aunts' white community following a quasi-incestuous act with her cousin.Her departure,therefore,lied in her instinctive desire in conflict with the norms and codes under apartheid.The second chapter delves at length into the protagonist's liminality in a nomadic state.She was thrown into a liminal space or a third space and broke the geographical boundaries.It also allowed her to crave for aggregation into the blackness in the ensuing association with the black revolutionaries and perception of the indispensability of the blackness for her organic body.Her hybrid identity gave rise to the deconstruction of the signifier of racial difference and maintained the accommodation of racial conflicts.Attentive to her intuitive agency and long-held empiricism,she had often been fraught with an indeterminacy resulting in her reflection on the past.The third chapter plumbs in great detail upon the reading on the protagonist's incorporation into the shared community and her becoming a new white woman for the post-apartheid era.Hillela grew addictive to her own alcheringa for individual utopia and became disillusioned in the wake of the first black husband' assassination.She turned to be self-reflective and dedicated herself to the black liberation cause through epiphany.Furthermore,she joined hands with her second husband,the black General for the winning of state power and eventually became President's wife.At the same time,Hillela realised the negotiation between her inherent consciousness of individual liberty and the desire for Self,and her destiny was made to be inextricably bound up with the cause of the black liberation,having arrived at the interracial integration.As a representative of white racist dissenters,Hillela departs from the racist order by virtue of her nature,integrated into a community shared by the whites and the blacks,and reaped the victory of “a sport of nature” by means of the nature against South African grain,the artificiality of apartheid.In this sense,through thewriting of A Sport of Nature,Nadine Gordimer looks forward to a resolution for the transformation of the whites ready for post-apartheid society and her humanistic reflection on how the whites can fit into the shared community,which could be of a great significance to the interregnum of South Africa.