“Dual Fatherhood” in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract

Miehyeon KimIn this essay I use Hortense J. Spillers's theory of dual fatherhood to examine the complications for identity and identification under the tensions between white patriarchal power and one's own father for the male minority in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. While the minority fathers can play a formative role in developing their sons' identity, their subordinate status in relation to white patriarchy complicates their sons' psychological development. Dual fatherhood poses the two fathers in relation to each other, and the difference Macon Dead in Song of Solomon and Henry Park in Native Speaker find between their own fathers and the abstract white authority creates their desire to assume the white father's image, while it becomes the basis for their otherness. For Macon, who has witnessed his father brutally murdered by a group of white men, literacy and legal ownership of property become the symbols of power and the keys to freedom. Henry Park, conscious of his father's marginal position as an immigrant, is drawn to a Korean American politician named John Kwang, who offers him a way out of his father's parochial world and apolitical position in American society. While Morrison sees that African American cultural practices and collective efforts can open a way for African American sons and daughters to creatively engage in the language, and free them from the discourse of legitimacy and authority, Lee shows that lack of communication among the family members in the Korean American family intensifies Henry's isolation and desire for the ideal image of the father. Native Speaker and Song of Solomon show that language is not a cultural gateway to filter and justify those who belong and those who do not. Language, to Lee and Morrison, is where we can work to reinvent ourselves out of the discourse of legitimacy and authority and the paradox of dual fatherhood.