ABRAHAMS, Peter (Henry) 1919-

PERSONAL: Born March 19, 1919, in Vrededorp, South Africa; son of James Henry and Angelina (DuPlessis) Abrahams; married Dorothy Pennington, 1942 (marriage dissolved, 1948); married Daphne Elizabeth Miller (an artist), June 1, 1948; children: (second marriage) Anne, Aron, Naomi. Education: Attended St. Peter's College and Teacher's Training College. Hobbies and other interests: Gardening, tennis, walking, conversation, reading, travel.

ADDRESSES: Home—Red Hills, P. O. Box, St. Andrew, Jamaica, West Indies. Agent—Faber & Faber Ltd., 3 Queen Sq., London WC1N 3AU, England; and 50 Cross St., Winchester, MA.

CAREER: Began working as a tinsmith's helper at the age of nine; attended schools between periods of working at jobs such as kitchen helper, dishwasher, porter, and clerk; failed in his attempt to start a school near Capetown for poor Africans; worked for a short time as an editor in Durban; in 1939, to reach England, he took work as a stoker, and spent two years at sea; correspondent in Kenya and South Africa for the London Observer and the New York Herald Tribune (New York and Paris), 1952-54; commissioned by British Government in 1955 to write a book on Jamaica; immigrated to Jamaica in 1956; regular radio news commentator in Jamaica, 1957—; editor of the West Indian Economist, Jamaica, 1958-62, and radio commentator and controller for the "West Indian News" Program, 1958-62; full-time writer, 1964—. Radio Jamaica chairman, set up a new ownership structure, making major interest groups into shareholders, 1978-80.

MEMBER: International PEN, Society of Authors, Authors League.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Song of the City, Dorothy Crisp (London, England), 1945.

Mine Boy, Dorothy Crisp (London, England), 1946, Knopf (New York, NY), 1955, reprinted with an introduction by Charles R. Larson, Collier Books (New York, NY), 1970.

The Path of Thunder, Harper (New York, NY), 1948, Chatham Bookseller, 1975.

Wild Conquest (historical fiction), Harper (New York, NY), 1950, Anchor Books, 1970.

A Wreath for Udomo, Knopf (New York, NY), 1956, Collier Books (New York, NY), 1971.

A Night of Their Own, Knopf (New York, NY), 1965.

This Island Now, Faber (London, England), 1966, Knopf (New York, NY), 1967, revised edition, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1985.

The View from Coyaba (historical fiction), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1985.

The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the 20th Century, Ian Randle (Kingston, Jamaica, West Indies), 2001.

OTHER

Here, Friend: Poems, [Durban, South Africa], 1941.

A Blackman Speaks of Freedom (poetry), Universal Printing Works (Durban, South Africa), 1941.

Dark Testament (short stories), Allen & Unwin (London, England), 1942, Kraus Reprint, 1970.

Return to Goli (autobiography), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1953.

Tell Freedom (autobiography), Knopf (New York, NY), 1954, published as Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa, Knopf (New York, NY), 1969, abridged edition, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1970.

Jamaica: An Island Mosaic (travel), Her Majesty's Stationery Office (London, England), 1957.

(Editor) Souvenir Pictorial Review of the West Indies Federation, 1947-57, Edna Manley (Kingston, Jamaica), c. 1958.

(With the staff of Holiday magazine and others) The World of Mankind, Golden Press (New York, NY), 1962.

(With others) History of the Pan-African Congress, Hammersmith Bookshop, 1963.

The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 2000.

Contributor to Modern African Prose, edited by Richard Rive and to Schwarze Ballade, edited by Janheinz Jahn. Also author of radio scripts for British Broadcasting Corp. during the 1950s. Contributor to Holiday and Cape Standard. Abrahams's books have been translated into numerous languages, including French and Russian.

ADAPTATIONS: Abrahams's novel Mine Boy was adapted as a play; the novel Path of Thunder was made into a movie and a ballet in the Soviet Union.

SIDELIGHTS: Peter Abrahams's writings provide insight into the racial and political troubles of his native country, South Africa. Although the author left South Africa when he was only twenty years old, that country has continued to dominate his imagination and his poetry, prose, and novels.

Abrahams's father was Ethiopian, while his mother was of mixed French and African ancestry. This put him in the legal category "Colored," a term referring to the descendants of blacks and early white settlers. His first book was published at a time when nearly all the novelists in South Africa were white. The Colored people had traditionally remained aloof from blacks, but Abrahams was unusual in that he took political sides with black South Africans. Abrahams also stood apart by being one of South Africa's first non-whites to make a living as a writer. And whether using fiction or autobiography, his focus has remained on the nonwhites' struggle for respect and political power. In the book Peter Abrahams, Michael Wade wrote that "Peter Abrahams is a novelist of ideas. He writes about the machinery of politics and power, but he uses his considerable grasp of this area of activity to serve his central interest, which is the problem of individual freedom in contemporary affairs."

Abrahams grew up in the slums of Johannesburg, where illiteracy was common. He didn't learn to read until he was nine years old, but thereafter immersed himself in books. He sought out British classics, including Shakespeare, and found works by black American authors in the local library. At the age of eleven, he started writing short stories. His earliest successful poems were published Bantu World, a white-owned newspaper aimed at black readers. These poems were later collected in Here, Friend and A Blackman Speaks of Freedom.

While attending St. Peter's, Abrahams became interested in the Pan-Africanism and the ideas of Marcus Garvey. He also made friends who initiated him into Marxism. For the next few years he wrote short stories, sketches, and poems and engaged in political activity. Abrahams's youthful short stories and sketches, collected under the title Dark Testament, "express with uncontrolled emotion the feelings of loneliness and despair of the young writer and intellectual in the context of political struggle," according to a writer for Dictionary of Literary Biography. "Given his color and the rarity of left-wing writers of fiction in South Africa in the late 1930s, it is not surprising that Abrahams felt isolated. But another conflict was also palpable: between Abrahams's simultaneous attraction to and distrust of strong ideological frameworks. This tension was to become a distinguishing mark of his literary career."

In addition to his writing, Abrahams worked in trade unions in Johannesburg with the Trotskyite Max Gordon, then moved to Cape Town for a while before going on to Durban. There he came under Stalinist-Communist influences. His political activities drew unfavorable attention from the authorities, and Abrahams eventually decided to leave the country. He went into exile by signing on as a crewmember of a freighter bound for England. In his autobiographical Return to Goli, he explains, "I had to escape or slip into that negative destructiveness that is the offspring of bitterness and frustration." He later moved to France, and then to Jamaica, which became his permanent home. After immigrating, he only returned to South Africa as a visitor.

Abrahams's early novels were influenced by Marxist thought, and are less concerned with politics than with issues of race and economics. The terrible consequences of urbanization and industrialization are exposed in Song of the City and Mine Boy, which trace the lives of young black workers as they move from country to city or in the diamond mines. In both novels, whites oppress and mistreat non-whites. Mine Boy stands as "the highest achievement" of the early phase of Abrahams's career, suggested the Dictionary of Literary Biography writer. "With it he staked his claim to a permanent place in South Africa's literary history on three solid and impressive grounds. First, he presents objective urban reality from a black point of view; second, for the first time in a South African novel, a convincing account of the state of mind of urban blacks is presented; and third, he is the first South African novelist to pose a possible solution to the continuing crisis of black experience in the industrial city." In The Path of Thunder, another early novel, Abrahams turns to the theme of interracial love, exploring its impact on a young Colored schoolteacher and an Afrikaner girl. Their passionate affair ends tragically when her community discovers they are lovers.

Two years later Abrahams moved in yet another direction, this time reconstructing the era of the Afrikaner migration or "Great Trek" in Wild Conquest, an historical novel in which he makes an effort to be fair to all the major ethnic groups in South Africa—Bantu, Boer and Briton. Abrahams's fiction became more political after these early works, all of which were written in the 1940s. A Wreath for Udomo, published just before Ghana attained its independence, was an attempt to predict what might happen when independent black African nations were confronted with the choice between the financial advantages of collaborating with the white regimes in southern Africa and the moral imperative of opposing them by actively supporting black liberation movements.

While Abrahams always felt strongly about the problems of non-whites in Africa, when writing his early works he restrained his anger toward the government. In Return to Goli, he explains that he had "purged himself of hatred," since "art and beauty come of love, not hate." Believing that love was necessary to over-come racial prejudice, Abrahams frequently incorporated mixed-race love affairs in his early novels. These relationships and their resulting children represented a new order, where the individual would not be judged by his color. In An African Treasury, Abrahams claims that this perception comes from tribal Africa, where "the attitude to colour is healthy and normal. Colour does not matter. Colour is an act of God that neither confers privileges nor imposes handicaps on a man. . . . What does matter to the tribal African, what is important, is the complex pattern of his position within his own group and his relations with the other members of the group. . . . The important things in his life are anything but race and colour until they are forced on him."

And yet at the same time, Abrahams felt that the great influence of African tribalism on contemporary blacks was a handicap. He embraced Western culture, because, as he wrote in an issue of International Affairs, "The true motive forces of Western culture are to be found in the first place in the teachings of the Christ who taught a new concept of men's relations with their God and with each other, a concept that cuts across tribal gods and tribal loyalties and embraces all men in all lands offering them a common brotherhood." In his novel A Night of Their Own, Abrahams emphasizes the common goals of South African Indians and blacks. Both groups work together to change their tyrannical government. While the setting is fictional, Abrahams tied it to contemporary issues by dedicating the book to imprisoned South African activists Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela.

Although critics have frequently praised Abrahams's handling of political issues, his characterizations have not been as well received. In the New York Times Book Review critique of A Night of Their Own, Martin Levin said, "What is rich in this novel is the complexity of its political climate," but added that "what snarls matters is the author's tendency to spell out his characters' thinking." In The Writing of Peter Abrahams, Kolawole Ogungbesan voiced a similar concern: "The tone of [A Night of Their Own] is uncompromisingly noble and determinedly serious, making the characters' gestures as stagey as their dialogues. But the cumulative effect is powerful."

In This Island Now, Abrahams turns from his early call for a pluralistic society to insisting that blacks first establish their own identity, socially and politically, as free men. He also stops looking to Western civilization for solutions. The plot concerns a left-wing black leader who rises to power on a fictional island. But according to Ogungbesan, "There is no doubt that the physical terrain of This Island Now is largely that of Jamaica as described in [Abrahams's] essay, The Real Jamaica, . . . [with] the political terrain of Haiti." New York Times Book Review contributor Peter Buitenhuis commented, "As an analysis of this kind of political process, [This Island Now] throws light on the motivations of black leaders who have risen to power in recent years in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Unfortunately [Abrahams's] attempt to make this material into a novel has not been too successful. He has tried to embody each interest—political, journalistic, financial, etc.—in a different character, and as a result, the book is overpopulated and over-schematic." But Ogungbesan felt the book's strengths and weaknesses are inseparable, and that it must be regarded as a purely political work. He remarked, "The book is a serious political novel precisely because it avoids the easy banalities that its theme . . . might provoke. . . . Abrahams is so pre occupied with the political conflict that everything else recedes to the background."

The View from Coyaba is the work that reflects Abrahams's thorough disenchantment with what he calls "destructive Westernism." Some critics, however, find Abrahams's work closer to a tract or treatise than a novel. While Times Literary Supplement contributor David Wright considered the book "highminded, sincere, committed," he thought that "as a philosophic and humane survey of the history of black emancipation since the British abolition of slavery, his book may be recommended; as a novel, not." Judith Wilson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, agreed in finding The View from Coyaba "unmistakably didactic fiction." However, she found that "the originality of Mr. Abrahams's message, its global sweep and political urgency exert their own force. . . . Peter Abrahams challenges us to rethink a large chunk of modern history and to question many of our current ideological assumptions." But Andrew Salkey in World Literature Today never questioned whether the work is a true novel, as Abrahams has produced, he stated, "the most dramatically resonant writing I have read in many years. . . . It is not only a composite novelistic picture, but also a reverberating metaphor."

Reflecting on Abrahams's prose style, an essayist for Contemporary Novelists noted that the author has "always written in a simple, direct prose style which wavers between superior reportage and maudlin romanticizing. He is at his best when transcribing newsworthy events which have a basis in fact; his autobiographical and travel writings, for instance, are superb. However, he has a regrettable tendency to sentimentalize personal relationships between men and women, especially if they are of different races, as they so often are in his novels." Abrahams is better when writing of exciting events, such as intense political debates, savage frontier battles, or impromptu labor strikes, according to the essayist. At such times Abrahams "can carry the reader along swiftly and persuasively, building up a spell-binding momentum."

Abrahams's books do not point to any definite means of eliminating racism, but they do contain hope that conditions will improve. Ogungbesan affirmed, "Himself such an incurable optimist, all his books are open to the future, based on his belief that change is inevitable, a natural process. This is why the image of the day assumes such symbolic significance in his novels. The implication is that although the black people in South Africa are passing through a long night, their ordeal will not last for ever: after the night inevitably comes the dawn. Abrahams thinks that it will be a glorious dawn if the whites and the blacks can cooperate peacefully to work towards that day."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Abrahams, Peter, Return to Goli, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1953.

Barnett, Ursula A., A Vision of Order: A Study of Black South African Literature in English (1914-1980), University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1983.

Bock, Hedwig, and Albert Wertheim, editors, Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction, Hueber (Munich, Germany), 1986.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 4, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1975.

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 117: Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, 1992, Volume 225: South African Writers, 2000.

Ensor, Robert, The Novels of Peter Abrahams and the Rise of Nationalism in Africa, Verlag Die Blaue Eule (Essen, Germany), 1992.

Gakwandi, Shatto Arthur, The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa, Africana (New York, NY), 1977.

Heywood, Christopher, editor, Perspectives on African Literature, Africana (New York, NY), 1971.

Hughes, Langston, editor, An African Treasury, Gollancz, 1961.

Larson, Charles R., The Emergence of African Fiction, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1972.

Lindfors, Bernth, Early Nigerian Literature, Africana Publishing, 1982.

Ogungbesan, Kolawole, The Writing of Peter Abrahams, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1979.

Tucker, Martin, Africa in Modern Literature: A Survey of Contemporary Writing in English, Ungar (New York, NY), 1967.

Wade, Michael, Peter Abrahams, Evans Brothers (London, England), 1971.

PERIODICALS

Black American Literature Forum, spring-summer, 1987, Cynthia Hamilton, "Work and Culture: The Evolution of Consciousness in Urban Industrial Society in the Fiction of William Attaway and Peter Abrahams," pp. 147-163.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, spring, 1990, Serge Menager, "Peter Abrahams, Icare Metis," pp. 91-100.

Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Volume XI, number 1, 1968; December, 1969, Michael Wade, "The Novels of Peter Abrahams," pp. 54-60.

English in Africa, October, 1989, Jean-Philippe Wade, "Peter Abrahams's The Path of Thunder: The Crisis of the Liberal Subject," pp. 61-75; November, 1997, Catherine Woeber, "A Long Occupation of the Mind: Peter Abrahams's Perspective on His Education," pp. 87-104.

English Studies, number 50, 1969, Hena Maes-Jelinek, "Race Relationships and Identity in Peter Abrahams's 'Pluralia,'" pp. 106-112.

Entertainment Weekly, April 21, 1995, p. 49.

International Fiction Review, number 13, 1986, Bernth Lindfors, "Exile and Aesthetic Distance: Geographical Influences on Political Commitment in the Works of Peter Abrahams," pp. 76-81.

Journal of Southern African Affairs, Volume 2, number 2, 1977, Chukwudi T. Maduka, "Colonialism, Nation-Building and the Revolutionary Intellectual in Peter Abrahams's A Wreath for Udomo," pp. 245-247.

Library Journal, May 1, 1991, p. 89; July, 1992, p. 119.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 14, 1985.

New Statesman, February 22, 1985.

New World Quarterly, Sylvia Wynter, number 3, 1967, "The Instant Novel Now," pp. 78-81.

New Yorker, September 25, 1965.

New York Times Book Review, April 11, 1965; September 24, 1967; April 2, 1972; May 26, 1985.

Observer, February 17, 1985.

Obsidian, numbers 1-2, 1980, Paul A. Scanlon, "Dream and Reality in Abrahams's A Wreath for Udomo," pp. 25-32.

Presence Africaine, 83, number 3, 1972, Kolawole Ogungbesan, "The Political Novels of Peter Abrahams," pp. 33-50.

Pretexts, summer, 1990, Stephen Gray, "The Long Eye of History: Four Autobiographical Texts by Peter Abrahams," pp. 99-115.

Publishers Weekly, September 29, 1989, p. 60; January 10, 1994, p. 43; January 23, 1995, p. 58.

Research in African Literatures, summer, 1980, Kolawole Ogungbesan, "A Long Way from Vrededorp: The Reception of Peter Abrahams's Ideas," pp. 187-205; number 3, 1990, Jean-Phillipe Wade, "Song of the City and Mine Boy: The 'Marxist' Novels of Peter Abrahams," pp. 89-101.

Southern African Review of Books, June-July, 1989, Cecil Abrahams, "The Long Journey Home: A Portrait of Peter Abrahams," pp. 7-8, Michael Wade, "The View from Pisgah? Peter Abrahams at Seventy," pp. 9-10.

Times Literary Supplement, March 25, 1965; October 20, 1966; March 22, 1985.

Vandag, April, 1947, Oliver Walker, "Peter Abrahams: Coloured Omen," pp. 23-26.

West African Review, March, 1952, Cyprian Ekwensi, "Challenge to West African Writers," pp. 255, 259.

World Literature Today, fall, 1985.

World Literature Written in English, November, 1974, p. 184-190; spring, 1988, Michael Harris, "South Africa Past and Future in Peter Abrahams's Wild Conquest," pp. 1-11.

Zagadnienia Rodzajow Literackich, number 24, 1981, Chukwudi T. Maduka, "Limitation and Possibility: The Intellectual As Hero-Type in Peter Abrahams's A Wreath for Udomo," pp. 51-60.

Zuka, May, 1968, Primila Lewis, "Politics and the Novel: An Appreciation of A Wreath for Udomo and This Island Now by Peter Abrahams," pp. 41-47.