“A Little Yellow Bastard Boy”: Arthur Nortje’s Mulatto Manhood

Abstract

In American fiction, the theme of the mulatto man’s ambivalence to his white father—a filial investment offset by passionate hatred—dates back to Richard Hildreth’s The Slave. The male mulatto character names whiteness as visible common ground with his father and attempts to bridge the racial gap. In the face of his father’s rejection, however, whiteness becomes a means of retaliation that is often futile. The mulatto embodies bastardy (already a gendered concept) because he is refused recognition by his “real” white father. But the mulatto still experiences the full weight of symbolic white fathers through patriarchal laws such as apartheid and Jim Crow. When read in the context of segregation, the mixed race son of the white father presents a distinctive character— one that ultimately exhibits unrequited love and violent hatred for the father he cannot “own,” imitate, become, or conquer.

He knew the hardships and squalor of ghetto existence on the fringes of society and never gave up trying to achieve the full stature of manhood.

—Dennis Brutus, “In Memoriam: Arthur Nortje”