Nadine Gordimer's role as a white woman writer in South Africa has
elicited a substantial measure of controversy. During the apartheid years,
Nadine Gordimer was one of the most outspoken advocates for racial equality, a
characteristic that turned her into a persona non grata with South Africa's
white leaders. Through
imagination Gordimer explains many complex aspects of human lives. Her novels
shed light on the specific consequences of the historical circumstances of life
in South Africa. Representing
the physical and psychological conditions of her homeland, Nadine Gordimer's
fiction scrutinizes the movement from the repressive, enforced order of
apartheid through the chaotic interregnum. This dynamic motion between order
and disorder reverberates continuously through the recurring images of
disintegration, the psychological development of characters, and the
overarching plot structure of her novels. Turbulence, irregularity, and
unpredictability predominate, but beneath the surface chaos lie complex
revelations about basic human motivations and behavioral patterns. Nadine
Gordimer, whose narratives blurs the boundaries of history and fiction, has
created debate on the issue of the values of the past, national culture and
political situations. This writer is considered by many as an interpreter of
South African reality, and many read her fiction primarily for its vivid record
of life in a controversial country. (Magarey, Kevin. 1974. "Facets of Art
in Nadine Gordimer's Short Stories."
Southern
Review 7: 3-28.)
Nadine Gordimer has for many years been a great and gallant keeper of
the White South-African conscience. She continued to fulfil this role in the
novel My Son’s Story. It tells the story of the effect of apartheid
on one black family in South Africa. The book describes well the complexities
of relationships- between the son, Will, and his father, Sonny; between Sonny
and his wife Aila; between Sonny and his lover Hannah, between everyone and the
political situation at hand. Will, who
is a young man, finds out that his father is having a relationship with a white
woman Hannah. He is a "colored" schoolteacher who has become a hero
in the struggle against apartheid. Throughout the whole book we get to read
about Will's feelings about his father and how horrified he is about him having
another woman. Gordimer very skilfully presents a real
picture of African family in this novel and tries to expose that in South
Africa society is a political situation. To paraphrase, one might say politics
is character –in South Africa. The racial segregation and discrimination, which
could be seen in larger scale throughout the country, also has its
manifestation in Sony’s family which has ravaged all family relationships
thereby disintegrated the bond of love among them. My Son’s Story is set at the
point where the personal intersects the political. This is the inevitable
consequence of life in a country like South Africa, where the personal cannot
be separated from the political. The novel is about love, family and marriage
in the context of the post Soweto society of segregated South Africa in the 70s,
and so, it is both a story of domestic manner (the triangle of two women and a man,
or of father, mother and son) and a political novel of contemporary urban South
Africa. Sony’s journey from a simple teacher to disloyal person of having affair
with a white human rights advocate Hannah Plowman, final revelation of active
participation of Will’s sister and mother in the struggle against apartheid,
etc all can be seen as a consequence of the sustaining upheaval in the African
society that has shattered Will’s conception of life .Both Hannah and Sonny are
concerned about the shape of the new future that awaits the country in the
midst of political turmoil. The political strategies include not only direct
attack on the government, but also building up opposition to its policies,
social military and economic throughout the world. Apartheid permeates Sony and
his wife Aila’s life so completely that they almost come to see it as a part of
the nature of things. Sony becomes the one sent to help people who lived in wretched
conditions in the ghettos. The ugly realities of police state machinery become
evident to Sonny and Will at a very personal level, when Aila is arrested for
her revolutionary activities to help black people under the Internal Securities
Act.
The narrative voice in My Son's Story is
rendered ambiguous by the pronoun of the title, which suggests that the novel
is composed by the father in the voice he imagines for his son. Will,
as a writer, becomes the interpreter of Sonny's life. Interestingly enough, it
may be argued that the main story being told is not "my son's story"
or "my father's story," but that it is "my mother's story"
which silently occupies the text. The narrative technique of the novel has been highly praised
as follows:
“It's
a brilliant device: the novel becomes not a series of internal monologues, but
the effort of the family's most articulate victim to conjecture, to comprehend,
what really happened to them all. It turns a bleak ending into one that
suggests how social as well as personal redemption may lie in acts of
selflessness, empathy and forgiveness. Writing the novel was such an act. I
think Will gives the title to his father, "My Son's Story," because
the voice isn't really his anymore, but Gordimer must also mean it to imply a
larger wrenched-apart family than Sonny's.”(Flower, Dean. 1991. "Not Waving but Drowning" (Review of
My Son's Story).
Will
reveals in the last chapter that he wrote the story in order to understand:
knowledge and acceptance of his destiny comes only through writing his story.
In the last chapter Will himself answers the question of whose story is being
told, linking it to the sense of writing literature: "It's an old story
—ours. My father’s had and mines...” (Gordimer Nadine; My Son’s Story). Will's narrative strategy is Gordimer's evidence
that a writer can penetrate the lives of people who have experiences the writer
cannot share. It enables Gordimer to write from the point of view of a black
character. Gordimer was conscious of her limitations as a white writer, but
through Will she imagines her way into a world which she can only have
experienced tangentially. Gordimer has depicted the mind of a black person from
an inner perspective that makes us consider the South African problem from a personal
as well as a political point of view. Moreover, Will's intimate drama of
personal conflict parallels the public struggle taking place in South Africa;
the tension of black South Africans between public politics, jail, violence,
and committing oneself, at the cost of one's family's peace; between fighting
with the prospect of certain defeat, and not fighting at all.
Conclusion:
The role of literature in a society is that
of a mirror reflecting its politics, values and culture or challenging what it
perceives as its evils. The system of apartheid was one of overwhelming
oppression. Hence, it is not surprising that the literature being written at
that time was a literature of protest. Throughout the apartheid years, most
writers were caught up in the culture of resistance. Black protest described
the terrible conditions blacked lived in and suggested ways of overthrowing the
government, while white protest dwelt on the guilt feelings of well-meaning,
but powerless whites and tried to define what their role should be in a
liberated black south Africa. Nadine Gordimer’s attempt to write about black
African lives is itself a way to cross the colour line, a way to claim a place
for the white people like herself, in the future black-ruled South Africa. When
the white South-African writers like Jack Cope, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer
etc refer to black protagonist, they do so as outsiders with an even more
limited knowledge of the native’s everyday experience than the black writers
have. As a native –born South African, Gordimer takes apartheid as her main
subject throughout her carrier and My
Son’s Story is the best reflection of her ideas. The story finally
indicates that once black and white stand on the same level, only then will
healthy cross-racial relationship became possible.
Works
Cited:
1. Welsh
David. The Rise and Fall of Apartheid,
Jonathan Ball Publishers, Cape Town, 2009
2.
Njabulo S. Ndebele, “
Rediscovery of the Ordinary”, South
African Literature and Culture (Manchester University Press)1994
3. David
Ward, Chronicles of Darkness(Rout
ledge),1989
4. Gordimer
Nadine, The Conservationist(Jonathan
Cape 1974),p 124
5. Flower,
Dean. 1991. "Not Waving but Drowning"
(Review of My Son's Story).
6. Magarey,
Kevin. 1974. "Facets of Art in Nadine Gordimer's Short Stories."
7. Southern
Review 7: 3-28.
8. Pushpa
Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne,ed,Post
Colonial African Writers; Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Fitzroy
Dearborn,1988,p 191
