I’m reading Gordimer again. It’s been years, more than thirty. Some writers we relegate proudly to the shelf. We kid ourselves into believing we’ve heard them out, that their voices, as significant as they once were, were only of a certain place and time. Apartheid? That’s history. Leaving aside that it isn’t, there’s something to this, isn’t there? We’ve got to move on to other voices, voices that we think speak more directly to now, to whatever current mess we’re in, don’t we?
And yet the other day something—an unshakeable sense of doom?— compelled me to pull My Son’s Story off the shelf. A novel, a made-up story, that once meant so much to me, about a country in moral free fall. There’s an inscription in my copy. This might be part of the reason I’ve stayed away so long. I’d known the inscription is in there, on the first blank page, not the title page, even if I’d forgotten the exact words. Now I’ll quote this old tenderness. God knows I wish I’d taken the words in at the time they were written. I know I didn’t. To Sweet P, My friend in Washington with whom I spend every waking and sleeping moment with—and still can’t get enough. December 1990. Embarrassing as this is to relate, the inscription is a permanent part of the book, and I couldn’t re-read Nadine Gordimer without reading Liz first. (We still talk. She’s an ER doctor in Seattle and the best in the business.)
Liz bought me the book because the two of us were heading to Namibia the following year. Namibia, a former satellite territory of South Africa. It was in Namibia, which did not gain independence until 1990, that some of the very worst atrocities of apartheid were carried out in relative obscurity. The country is enormous, the size of Texas and Oklahoma put together, and yet only had, at that time, roughly 1.3 million people. It consists largely of two deserts, the Namib (the oldest in the world) and part of the Kalahari. I’ll spare you the travelogue, but it’s a place I dearly love.[1] Liz and I went to Namibia together, as volunteer teachers, but were stationed 8 hours apart, Liz in the north, me in the south, and we couldn’t handle the distance. (Not to suggest I was ever a particularly good boyfriend; I wasn’t.)
In any case, though apartheid was officially over in Namibia, the vestiges of it of course remained then—and remain now. Most starkly: housing. In the town I lived in, there was a white dorp and two locations, one for Black people, and the other for “coloured” people, i.e., those who in the warped logic of apartheid were deemed one step closer to being white. Did I read Gordimer’s novel before I left for Namibia? Or did I read it while I was in southern Africa? I forget. It’s beat up and sun-faded enough to suggest I read it in the desert. So, while I may not have paid enough attention to the inscription, the novel itself, at the time, floored me. Apartheid officially ended in Namibia in ’90. In South Africa, de Klerk was still in power. It would take another four years before a newly released Mandela would be elected president. My Son’s Story was published squarely in the moment when the South African state had begun it’s long, bloody teeter toward dissolution.
To return briefly to my unshakable sense of doom. Enthusiasms is supposed to be a (relatively) politics-free space. I respect that. But I’ll say that I think we’re no longer in a world of politics as we used to conventionally define it. And we got to talk about it. We can’t not talk about it. We got to talk about it. Cue Nadine Gordimer. How do you write fiction when the[2] good guys and the evil guys are so fucking distinguishable? What does Gordimer do? She says screw the evil guys. We know them. We know who and what they are. It’s the good guys, the good men and women, she’s riveted by, the wounded, the warped, the compromised, and above all, the human, good ones.
My Son’s Story is about an anti-apartheid leader. Low-level guy. We’re not talking here about Mandela or Tutu or Walter Sisulu. No, this is about a man in the trenches. Sonny is a former schoolteacher who once led his class out into the veld for a protest and was promptly fired. A man who served time in prison for some cooked-up crime or another. He’s also a flawed husband with a wife, Aila, and two children, Baby and Will, named after Shakespeare. Sonny—the human being, not Sonny the beloved, respected struggle leader who did time—falls in love with a white activist. But in apartheid South Africa an affair with a white woman can’t be simply an affair or a love story or whatever you want to call it. Like it or not, the domestic can’t be separated from the national, and Sonny’s life and the life of his family are so tangled up in the political moment there’s no escaping—for anybody, including his lover, Hannah. The book is a personal tragedy brought on by a decades-long crime against humanity. Here’s Gordimer on Sonny and his sacrifices to the movement and its top leadership:
His life belonged to them. What had he kept back of it—abandoned a career he loved, given up the forming of minds of a future generation for the bubble reputation (curse learning by rote) of a popular platform, left the cozy circle of family for the existence under surveillance, the prison cell—the entire containing structure of his emotions to that he was defenseless, anyone could enter him, anyone take possession there. If he was responsible to the struggle, then the struggle was responsible for him. Sonny became ‘Sonny.’ He had no existence without it.
She’s so fierce. Remarkable to think I could quiet a voice just by leaving it on the shelf for thirty-plus years. In Red Cavalry, Issac Babel once wrote, or rather he put these words into his character’s mouth: “In a revolution, a mother is a minor episode.” Babel knew this was a damned lie, and so did the dying character who said it. And so does Gordimer. Mothers, wives, husbands, daughters, sons, lovers—are never incidental, no matter how utterly righteous the cause, and that’s what makes My Son’s Story so vital, so painful, now and forever.
[1]Plug alert: I wrote a novel set just after Namibian independence The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, (Little Brown, 2006.) See also Katie Crouch’s outstanding Embassy Wife, set in contemporary Namibia (FSG, 2021).
[2] Insert any qualifier you like.
Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of eight books, most recently the novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, named a best book of 2025 by the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune, and the story collection, Maggie Brown & Others. He's been called “a master of the short story” by the New York Times. His collection of essays, Am I Alone Here? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and his second non-fiction book, Still No Word from You, was a finalist for the Pen Award for the Art of the Essay. Peter’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic, Harper’s, Granta, and received four Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at Dartmouth College, and lives with his family in Norwich, where he’s a volunteer firefighter.
