July's People

Though not actually about the end of the world in any large-scale sense, Nadine Gordimer's July's People truly is a type of post-apocalyptic tale for two of its primary characters. Maureen and Bam Smale are forced to live in the village of their black former servant, July, following a hypothetical and violent end of apartheid that has left militant black revolutionaries in charge of Johannesburg and the South African government. For the Smale's, this essentially proves to be the complete end of their world. They are unable to return to their lives or even their homes in Johannesburg; that world certainly no longer exists, and would be mortally dangerous to them. At the same time, however, they are completely impotent and unnecessary in July's village; they have no function, no purpose, and are generally regarded with suspicion and fear that they will bring trouble to the villagers. These are the things that, as they become increasingly apparent, drive Maureen to such a point of desperation that she is willing to chase after salvation or death as though they were the same thing.

One obvious and deeply graphic scene that depicts the progression of this desperation in the novel is that in which Bam and Maureen make love, wrestling amongst their children "and the nightly intimacy of cockroaches, crickets and mice feeling-out the darkness of the hut; of the sleeping settlement; of the bush" (Gordimer 80). This is the first time that the couple has had sexual contact in the novel, but even so the animal nature of their passion is already indicative of the desperation of their situation. The hedonism of this scene and of the meat eating scene that comes immediately before it are matched for a reason -- this is a symbolic last...

The rareness of the love making and the style of its eventual accomplishment are signs of the beginning of the end for the couple; a clearer signal of the true extent of the disruption in their lives occurs when they visit the chief. This elder suggests that he will obtain weapons and join the whites in a fight against the revolutionary blacks, who are "not of his tribe." Bam insists that this not be done, but Maureen notes that, "it came lamenting, searching from their whole life across the silent bush in which they had fallen from the fabric of that life as loose buttons drop and are lost" (Gordimer 118). What Bam says is essentially meaningless, and he later learns that he hd no real concept of the chief's true intent or the way things worked in the world now. Bam and Maureen have essentially become obsolete; there I s no black paradise that they are excluded from because of their whiteness, but there is simply no place in the new world order for them -- not even amidst the new conflicts that promise to form.
This is what drives Maureen to such desparation that she runs with complete abandon after a helicopter, a symbol of her old world. The fact that the people in the helicopter could either save her or kill her is unimportant to Maureen, so long as they do not completely ignore her. Either way, she would at least have been noticed in the brave new world in which she finds herself. The novel's ambiguous ending leaves the reader doubtful as to her success in finding this notice.