Gordimer

**TIDNINGEN**
Nadine Gordimer My son´s story A story about a woman who is not stopped
	As the title says My son´s story is the story of a son, Will. It´s also a story of a traditional, patriarchal black family in South Africa, with the benvolent father, Sonny, the teacher, at it´s centre, at least initially. Hearing Will´s voice describing his father´s life makes it possible to interprete this story as My father´s story as well. If the first part of the book mainly deals with the father and son realation, the second part takes a new directionwith the mother, Aila, breaking up from homelife. The story of the son also becomes the story of the mother. Another aspect of My son´s story is that it also reflects the effects of active political commitment on the family, which makes it possible to title the book My family´s story.
My mother´s story
What emerges in the course of this pathriarchally related story is the story of Aila, the silent nurturing mother, Sonny´s wife. "He married a girl who seemed to have been set apart for him". But Aila carries more strength in her than you might think. "They misstook"..."the gentleness fot what it appeared to be instead of the strenght of will softly gloved". "Though she gave Sonny everything else"..."she kept to herself some fibre of personality as a separate identity". My son´s story, where the My stands for the father, is after all the story of a woman´s quest for her identity. Her story cannot be silenced. Her acceptance of political responsibility and her commitment ends with her imprisonment, which transforms her. Gordimer has always experienced equality with men. She condems women´s exploitation. She gets furious realising that gifted and intelligent women allow themselves to be used by men, expecially the mental abuse, women that give up their personal development because they are willing to subordinate to a man. She gets indignant knowing that women in professions don´t have the same workingconditions and salaries as men. She relates any gender injustice to the larger question of human oppression. She sees the liberation of black women as inseparable from the question of white dominion, but she thinks the feminist battle must come after the liberation from white oppression. The mother Aila is essentially silent, she gains her voice in the political involvement in her own right, she discovers personal vitality in political commitment, in the wider context of the community she relinquishes any close attachment to a man. In the end Aila´s and Sony´s roles are reversed. this is a story about a woman who is not stopped. like Ibsen´s Nora she opens the doorand walks away from marriage, beginning her life.
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My mother´s story