My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

First published: 1990

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: South Africa

Principal Characters:

• Sonny, a black schoolteacher turned social activist
• Aila, Sonny’s wife, who becomes a revolutionary
• Baby, Sonny’s favorite child, who also joins an extremist group
• Will, Sonny and Aila’s son
• Hannah Plowman, a white South African working for an international human rights group

Form and Content

Set in contemporary South Africa, My Son’s Story is primarily a story about the public and private life of Sonny, originally a schoolteacher with a lovely family. Largely a self-taught black man with middle-class values and aspirations, Sonny, despite his modest and even complacent yearnings (“to improve” himself through literacy in order to gain respect), loses his teaching position when he takes part in his students’ rally. The circumstances, together with his talents in literacy, literature, public speaking, and organizational skills, turn him into a professional social activist. He is recruited by a liberation organization and is paid to move his family into a white neighborhood as part of the struggle against apartheid.

Sonny’s destiny as a professional activist, which has fallen into the hands of the secret police and the judicial system as well as those of his own organization, is compounded by his passionate extramarital relationship with Hannah Plowman, a white woman from a human rights organization who visits him regularly when he is in jail. They are mutually attracted because of the common cause they share; for this reason, Hannah is both a lover and a comrade to Sonny, whereas Aila, whom he married young, is neither. His clandestine affair is discovered by Will, but Sonny manages to manipulate his son, to his chagrin and resentment, into keeping it a secret and therefore becoming an accomplice in the betrayal of Aila. Apparently, however, the secret is by no means impenetrable even to his daughter and his wife. As Sonny devotes himself to his cause and his love, he pays less attention to his family and is surprised by the revolutionary activities of his daughter and, eventually, Aila, both of whom have to go into exile because of their involvement with the freedom fighters. Meanwhile, Sonny’s interracial relationship, though tolerated by his organization, also compromises his professional integrity and gradually estranges him from his colleagues. Hannah, having accepted a senior position offered to her by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, leaves him as well.

Deserted by his mistress, his daughter, and his wife, and to a certain extent rejected by his own organization, Sonny nevertheless continues to struggle, with his energies waning at the age of fifty-two. The saving grace in such an unheroic conclusion of the novel, however, is the fact that Will, through the act of writing (which Gordimer often alludes to as an “essential gesture,” after Jean-Paul Sartre), begins to fulfill the former schoolteacher’s cherished dream of human dignity.

Tracing the development of Sonny’s career and his affair, the novel thus explores the dynamics between political and personal commitment in the psyche of Sonny, and dramatizes the effects of his actions on the members of his family, especially Will, who is represented as an outraged but confused observer and commentator of the aftermath of Sonny’s political and emotional ventures. To a large extent, My Son’s Story is also a novel about Will as a young man coming of age under the shadow of such a father. By the implication of his writing, Will too has become a sort of revolutionary.

Context

Asked whether she sees herself as a female writer or as a writer who happens to be female during an interview published in The Ontario Review, Gordimer replies that she is “not at all conscious of being a female writer” and that there is a kind of writing “which allows the writer to . . . get into the skin of all sexes, all ages.” My Son’s Story, a novel exemplifying this view of writing, ventures across racial and gender bound-aries by focusing on black and male characters despite its author’s being both white and female, but in doing so it also addresses issues relevant to women’s literature.

With the exception of Hannah, who is white, My Son’s Story focuses on black characters. Such a focus reminds readers of the interracial implications of Gordimer’s work—in particular, two more recent novels, July’s People (1981) and A Sport of Nature (1987), in which blacks play a dominant role as characters in the fictional and visionary future of a post-apartheid South Africa. In these novels, Gordimer’s attempt to incorporate and highlight the point of view of blacks and coloreds reflects her commitment, as a white liberal writer and a member of the African National Congress, to the political cause of South Africa at large. Because My Son’s Story refers to the recent past and is preoccupied with the problems and conflicts in which a black activist’s family is entrenched, however, this novel is unlike the other two in that by design it could provoke a different kind of audience or elicit a different kind of response from the author’s regular audience by raising important but unsettling issues about the nature of leadership, the meaning of freedom and liberation for the group and the individual, the dynamics between sexuality and politics, and racial as well as gender and familial relationships.

A thought-provoking issue in the light of the foregoing statements is the problematic nature of the adulterous interracial relationship between Hannah and Sonny. Although the sincerity of their liaison cannot be doubted—and, indeed, from the point of view of the omniscient narrator it can be explained in terms of political circumstances and survival instincts—from Will’s standpoint, the relationship signifies betrayal and undermines the well-intentioned cause to which the activists are committed. Even from the perspective of Sonny, when Hannah finally becomes all too familiar and resembles Aila too much for his taste, the perception that interracial sex can be equated with the interracial politics of freedom begins to sound like romantic wish-fulfillment. The passionately sexual relationship between Hannah and Sonny perhaps embodies the political vision of blacks and whites unified on intimate terms under conditions of contingency; the vision is played out ruthlessly in the novel but is somehow repressed upon Hannah’s departure. Whether such a repressed vision is Gordimer’s or the narrator’s is open to various interpretations.

Another fascinating issue in the novel is the radical turn of the reticent and domestic Aila, which apparently contradicts her submissive and accommodating character. Though surprising, it is already foreshadowed in the case of Baby, who marries a freedom fighter and goes into exile after a perplexing suicide attempt (she cuts her wrist during a party where drugs are used). When Baby is with child, Aila secures a visa and visits her regularly, in the process becoming involved with the liberation movement. Ironically, Aila attains some sort of freedom through exile by leaving her husband precisely at the moment when Sonny, after losing Hannah, begins to turn back to Aila and look upon her as a comrade. Aila’s radical move contains a hint of growth, revolt, and perhaps retribution, and therefore would have merited more attention from the author. Unfortunately, Aila (and to a lesser degree Baby) hardly ever talks in the novel, and the two narrators’ observations on Aila barely scratch the surface of her consciousness. Paradoxically, Aila’s silences have made her all the more significant as a character and as a symbol in this novel about the dynamics between the personal and the political.

Bibliography

Coles, Robert. “A Different Set of Rules.” The New York Times Book Review, October 21, 1991, 1, 20-21. A review of My Son’s Story emphasizing the radical questions that the novel raises about the conflict between the personal and the political, and in particular about the moral weaknesses of public figures.

Gordimer, Nadine. The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places. Edited by Stephen Clingman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. A collection of essays, written by Gordimer over a period of thirty years, examining her life and art, her convictions, her ideas, and her experiences. Their theme is how African and South African history and reality are the inescapable subject of writers such as her.

Gordimer, Nadine. Interview by Paul Gray and Bruce W. Nelan. Time 138, no. 15 (October 14, 1991): 91-92. An interview conducted after Gordimer won the Nobel Prize. Contains important statements about My Son’s Story.

Gordimer, Nadine. Interview by Peter Marchant, Judith Kitchen, and Stan Sanvel Rubin. The Ontario Review, no. 26 (Spring-Summer, 1987): 5-14. Gordimer answers a wide variety of questions raised by the three interviewers.

Packer, George. “Manifest Destiny.” The Nation 251, no. 21 (December 17, 1990): 777-780. A review of My Son’s Story focusing on how individuals must contend with choices and compromises forced upon them by a brutal regime.

Papineau, David. “Of Loyalty and Betrayal.” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4565 (September 28-October 4, 1990): 1037. A review of My Son’s Story discussing the subjective tendency of Gordimer’s narrative technique, linking it to the author’s insistence on the imaginative rather than the political in her writing.

Parrinder, Patrick. “What His Father Gets Up To.” London Review of Books 12, no. 17 (September 13, 1990): 17-18. A review of My Son’s Story focusing on the question of the private realm in Gordimer’s novels.