My Son's Story

Commenting on the significance of the title of
Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story.

Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story published in 1990, takes up several issues of the time -
interracial love, adultery and the ongoing revolution to overthrow apartheid in South Africa - and brings them together in an exceptionally well-told story format from the view points of the boy, Will, in first person and his father, Sonny, in third person, perhaps, making the narrative sound patriarchal. Even Malashri Lal in her introduction to the novel calls Will
“ a patriarchal producer of knowledge. “

But whose story is it anyway?
According to Malashri Lal, in her introduction to the book,
“ Gordimer’s choice of a youthful recording voice serves the purpose of placing agency outside the immediate realm of action , and also to subject the agency itself to a critical review.”
The story comes out as Will’s burden which he insists on hiding rather than sharing with the two prime female characters- his mother, Aila and his sister, Baby. Will considers himself a helpless observer. Just as the novel is meant to be Will’s story about Sonny, it is equally Sonny’s story about Will as Will makes it obvious in the end of the novel.
“ – my father – made me a writer. “
These lines bring out Will’s utter frustration at not being able to share anything verbally either with his sister when she started a conversation with him,
“ you never open your mouth, but I suppose you wonder why anyone’d do such a stupid thing.”
Nor does he convey the grievances of his heart to his mother. Hence, after he is left alone in the house with his father he takes to venting out his pent up frustration on the word processor he bought with his own savings.

According to Dominic Head in his essay, My Son’s Story,
“ Will’s reluctance at his ‘enforced’ vocation ( of being a writer ) stems from the appropriation of his personal life for public need: … the avowed impossibility of publication suggests a paradoxical reluctance to make the sacrifice, which has in fact already been made… it also suggests the need to protect the sensitive details of the activism Will has described in his translation of his famil’s ‘reality’ into ‘fiction’. “

According to my own personal view, the title could also stem from the Mother’s (Aila’s) viewpoint rather than just the father, Sonny.
Will being Aila’s baby, as emphasized and proclaimed by Will himself in several parts of the narrative was closer to Aila than he ever was to anyone else in his family.
He felt for her. He was a friend to her in her times of solitude. He was someone she could rely on.
Aila is the only character in the book whose personal story never comes out. As Malashri Lal points out in her introduction,
“ she (Aila) is the only person who knows her own story. Silent, self-contained, assured, she guards her privacy, always. “

The epigraph, the novel begins with,
“You had a Father, let your son say so.”
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 13
Could as well as be from the father’s side as well as the mother’s side.
Therefore, the story becomes a metaphorical narrative constructed by the parents for their children.