Francesco Gissi
In this
paper I try to show the interrelation in My son’s story between social
solidarity in the development of the family and political struggle and self, in
an uncertain identity.
I begin
presenting the distinction of social solidarity as defined by Durkheim in The Division of Labour in
Society (1893): Solidarity is
social cohesion based upon the dependence individuals have on each other.
Mechanical solidarity comes from the homogeneity of work and purpose between
individuals, most commonly in preindustrial societies and in the novel, common
to the race movement. Durkheim’s work points out correctly that those societies
tend to be ruled with repressive sanctions, and there’s prevalence of penal law.
This is why it has been a question of sociology how and why this type of
authority works in nominally modern societies like South Africa in apartheid.
Organic solidarity, on the other hand, comes from interdependence of highly
specialized work in industrial societies. In colonial structures hegemony of
one group breaks or devalues solidarity bonds between oppressed individuals by
ideological assertions of superiority of race, unequal distribution of self-esteem,
wealth and power.
There came a point, not
possible to determine exactly when, at which equality became a cry that
couldn’t be made out, had been misheard of misinterpreted, turned out to be
something else-finer. Freedom. That was it. Equality was not freedom; it had
been only the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who
wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom.
(24)
Sonny has
already constructed a family, yet he falls so in love that he starts needing
Hannah. Being in the same movement, their dependency and exalted love in
the struggle are almost one and the same. Disruption of social norms and family
becomes less important when a common purpose and common transgression are in
order. This corresponds with mechanical solidarity in the movement, where individuals
matter less. Sonny’s identity, as a teacher, was always aligned with knowledge.
One could also point out the kind of knowledge of ‘in-betweenness’ that
coloured identity means for Sonny (Sakamoto, 6). Now this knowledge is being
used for action and his self-esteem in a position of power grows, he has
respect, he’s in love with a blond woman; a mark of possessing the location or
symbol of sex, wealth and power. He therefore feels he has escaped solitude.
Evidently, as he had a family and cared for his students, this escape is from a
social solitude, the solitude of marginality.
Joy. That was what went with it. The light of
joy that illuminates long talk of ideas, not the 60-watt bulbs that shine on
family matters. (65) Sonny: “You’re the only friend I’ve ever had” (67) There
grew in him a defiant desire to be seen to belong together (72)
They are
both working for freedom. Work, that’s supposed to be normal and unheroic, is
for them exceptional.
The nature of work she did develops high
emotions. It arises from crises. It deals only with disruption,
disjunction-circumstances in people’s lives that cannot be met with the
responses that serve for continuity (89)
With this
exceptionality comes a recasting of morality: “All I have had was the
courage to be a victim” (129) “Better to be vile than esteemed,
when not to be receives reproach of being.” However, Sonny says: “There’s no
freedom in working for freedom” (96). One can understand this better if we use Isaiah
Berlin’s concept of negative and positive freedom. In his activities, Sonny
fights for both positive freedom, of education, of being enabled to pursue
certain goals, and negative freedom, that is, freedom from constrains. He lacks
negative freedom to pursue romantic love. Meanwhile Will and Baby have too much
negative freedom, as their father leaves home and pays little attention to care.
Will is put in a position of equality after he is in the know. When Baby cuts her wrists, she had showed the
symptoms of adolescent solitude (sexual promiscuity, drugs, self-denigration,
self-harm) and therefore doesn’t know what to do. In this position one should
provide care and authority, where as they “discussed what she wanted to do”
(78). This lack of authority is to be expected from the situation because a) The
movement is working to defy authority and in these cases all authority is under
suspicion and b) Sonny has lost the moral legitimacy to take the role of father.
Also, Aila is put in a position where her role as a women and wife is challenged
because his husband has stopped working as such. She cuts her hair and joins
the revolution, breaking the closest circle. However, their children make her
still a mother and a woman. By the point a husband for Baby has been found,
Will’s role has also changed. The contradiction is thus twofold, on the one
hand Sonny says:
Marriage, these days. In
their circumstanses, the instabiliy, exile, no home-what for? Marriage implies
certain social structures, and we’re busy breaking up the existing ones (175)
And on
the opposite side we have Will, who studies economics, a grounded, useful study,
for their home. Economics, we know, comes from the greek oikos-nomos (the
law of the house). It is, as well, the exaltation of organic solidarity
in society. Economics then celebrates the order of interdependence. Will then
has the role of grounded, non-revolutionary man. He has no charismatic
authority. He has pragmatic knowledge needed in societies that seek stability.
My mother would like to see
me-at least one of her children-’settled’ with a conventional domestic life,
nearby. And hang liberation, eh. (…) She, too, has a role for me: tame Will
keeps the home fires burning while noble Sonny and Baby defend the freedom of
the people. I said to her when I brought the results of my first-year studies-distinctions
all the way-What am I doing this for? Who’s going to employ a business school
graduate in a revolution? (…) -We’re going to need qualified people. Bush
fighters won’t win the economic war.- (…) You’re valuable Will.” (186-187)
At the
same time Sonny loses ground in the movement and with it comes a loss of authority.
As his new self was based in such a role, his radical descent inside the
movement brings about a questioning of self:
Self, self; since when was
he obsessed with self (191) With Hannah there was the sensuality of commitment;
for commitment implies danger (…) In this freak displacement, the biological
drive of his life, which belonged to his wife and the children he’d begotten,
was diverted to his lover. He and Hannah begot no child; the revolutionary
movement was to be their survivor. The excitement of their mating was for that.
But Aila was the revolutionary, now. (241-42)
As it is
said, “Something bigger than self saves self” (243). The problem then is how
and why save self, for it would not do to save it for selfish reasons. Both romantic
love and education, unless used like he had done and is now unable to, are
primarily individual more than social. Now that he’s come back from homo
faber to homo sapiens, he has the problem of reflection to deal
with.
A prisoner of conscience,
you sit in detention, on trial, convicted for the liberty of all your people.
That conscience takes precedence over any conscience about a wife and family
left to shift for themselves, and over any woman you have need of. (157)
Then the
result of the movement, of action, becomes crucial. Near the end of the novel
Sonny had been to Lusaka to visit his grandson, Will takes him back to their
home, that has been burned by revolutionary
whites. They enter Will’s room:
Your room, he said, making
a claim for me, my life, against destruction, making sure I wouldn’t forget.
But there were no categories of ownership of even usage left. What had been the
kitchen, the sitting-room, the places for sleeping were all turned out, flung
together in one final raid, of fire and water, the last of the invasions in
which our lives in that house were dragged and thrown about by hostile hands.
(273) He (Sonny) went poking at rubble with his foot and dirtying his fingers
tugging away wet remains as if there were bodies to be found and rescued. He
was breathing fast and loud in anger or close to tears; or both. Sick, sick,
they’re sick he kept hammering at me. (273-274) We emerged and our
people who had dared to come out were still there, staring. Their eyes fixed
him. Their fear held them. I saw what it was-they expected him to have brought
something out of what was destroyed. Something for them. He grinned and his
whole face drew together an agonized grimace of pain and reassurance, threat
and resistance drawn in every fold of skin, every line of feature that the
human face could be capable of conveying only under some unimaginable inner
demand. (274)
Sonny has
tried to find meaning in the past and the past is not dust. His face becomes
the face of colonial trauma, the “unimaginable inner demand” to overcome the
past and make a future. At the same time there’s resistance. There’s freedom
lost and gained. In gaining the freedom they sought, Sonny has lost the home he
made in the movement, and the place of family, their old home -“This is my
father’s house” (272) says Will- has been destroyed in the process.
The novel
ends with a poem where a bird “Dashes in swift through the bars, breaks its
neck/Against stone walls.” Such ending can only point out to failure. However,
Will also says: “What he did- my father-made me a writer. Do I have to thank
him for that? Why couldn’t I have been something else?”
it is his father’s authority and passion for Shakespeare that informs Will’s
eventual authorship (Jacobs, 39). In this way, the political circumstances that
first elevated Sonny and then questioned him at the end created a space for
Will. But he laments “why couldn’t I have been something else?” because like
any writer, he is in the paradox of writing alone and from his interior self,
but doing it so others can read him and maybe understand him. Where’s the
solidarity of the writer? As to the conclusion, one can and should celebrate
the victory of anti-apartheid, while at the same time saying ‘we are not there
yet’. This ‘not yet’ is identity being created. The truth of the novel, like
Sonny, lies likely in an uncomfortable in-between, where acting for and relying
on others saves one self. Perhaps, then, Sonny’s mistake was not acting for and
relying on the closest circle, that is stronger, and when broken, leaves one in
the unknown, with only ashes to dig.
Works cited
Gordimer, Nadine. My son’s story.
Jacobs, J.U. Nadine Gordimer’s intertextuality:
Authority and authorship in My son’s
Story. Web, 17th November, 2013. http://www.jstor.org