‘Once Upon a Time’ by Nadine Gordimer: A Fairy Tale for Peace
Rizzardi, B. (2019). Le Simplegadi, (19), pp.43–52.
The article is an analysis of “Once upon a Time: a Fairy Tale of Suburban Life” by Nadine Gordimer as a peace fairy tale. The book, published under apartheid, aims to connect different communities and show privileged white people the realities of the system that they live under. The fairy tale tells a story of a white family that wants to keep feeling peaceful in their home and therefore continuously instals protection mechanisms against the outside world. To protect themselves from the disruption of riots and “coloured people”, they install barbed wire. Their child, after hearing “Sleeping Beauty”, tries to be the prince and climb across the wire, resulting in his death.
The article shows that the family’s fairy-tale-esque existence depends on “protection” and a continuous fear of “the other”. The irony of the thing aiming to keep black people out leading to the death of the white child shows the roles of good and evil intersecting and being reversed. Not only is this piece a critique of apartheid, it also opposes the use of securitisation to secure peace, as well as the process of securing peace for one group by othering another. The intense fear of others (often based on stereotypes) is what grounds harm in the story. The dead child is then used to illuminate the ultimate cost of this violence of exclusion. The piece also shows us how peace for one group at the cost of another cannot exist and can never be a comprehensive form of peace.