White Writing Black: Cross-border Criticism

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Chapter Two RE-MEMBERING IDENTITY

Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.
Homi K Bhabha

Introduction

In this chapter I elaborate on the problem of authority (introduced in Chapter One) in relation to both the autobiographical subject and text. This I do as a preliminary to tracing the shift from Humanist to a « new humanist »1 ideology in local autobiographical criticism; this shift marks the struggles of the subject to assert him/herself anew in a contemporary critical environment that has eroded the authority of the « I ». In conclusion, I shall examine the inscription of colonial autobiographical criticism, and its displacement, in a local criticism whose condition is, as argued, one of crisis.
The method I shall use is, broadly, that described by Fran~oise Lionnet as « non-coercive », a reading practice that « allows text and reader to enter a dialogue that does not follow the usual rules of linear, agonistic, and patriarchal discourses » (1989:28).2 In South Africa today critical discourse inscribes indeterminacy; in the interregnum, old boundaries blur and new languages, forms and identities emerge. In this liminal space and time, heteroglossia, hybridity and miscegenation are key terms which autobiographical criticism marshalls as it negotiates a way forward in its encounter with the imperatives embedded in the autobiography it reads and consequently rewrites. Autobiography that is counterhegemonic sets up a self that contradicts the ideology of separation, apartness and inferiority. Since its condition is one of postcoloniality, it is what Lionnet describes as « h~terogeneous and heteronomous » (1989:8). This multivalent, « plural » self denies polarised and polarising notions of identity, culture and race.
It does this, moreover, within a local and pan-African tradition that sets specific tasks for writing in general, and autobiography in particular. As recently as 1991, it was claimed that [francophone] African autobiographical narrative functions as a collective voice as it recreates an individual yet representative life. Mimetic discourse is its deliberate strategy. With or without overt messages, it provides an eyewitness account to history. The African writer has inherited, in a way, the role of the traditional storyteller. Unlike this ancestor, however, his or her book has the potential of reaching a larger audience.
(Larrier 1991:83)
Significantly, the written text is seen as instrumental in « building a nation ». In the present context, « nation » signifies not a totalised oneness, fixed boundaries, or a myth of origins, but rather heterogeneity, liminality (the politics of thresholds), and conceptual indeterminacy.3 The narration of the « I » corresponds with the narration of a new nationhood. While memory, « re-membering » or « putting together … the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present » (Bhabha 1986:xxiii), is integral to the process of redefining and reconstructing the nation, so, too, is « forgetting to remember »:
Being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering the nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of other contending and liberating forms of cultural identification.
(Bhabha 1990:311)
Even though the writer may use mimetic discourse as a « deliberate strategy », as Larrier suggests, the critic will examine what is refracted as well as what is reflected in the text and its aporia where « forgetting » may operate unconsciously in the production of genuinely liberating autobiographical writing.
While the acculturated genre of autobiography has achieved a special status in black South African writing, it is a relative newcomer in an emergent body of writing in English4 that, by the 1950s, already included a substantial body of journalism, critical essays, adapted traditional forms such as plays, short stories and poems, and appropriated literary forms of the novel and biography. The documentary impulse prevails in fictionalised forms, as fact and fiction are blended to produce « faction » that closes the gaps of colonial .history . R R R Dhlomo’s novella, An African Tragedy, appeared in 1928, and Sol T Plaatje’s Mhudi (written some ten years before) in 1930. Pre-dating both, however, is John Knox Bokwe’s biography, Ntsikana, The Story of an African Convert (1914). These texts emerged within a published local corpus of black writing in English that dates from the establishment of mission stations in the early nineteenth century. Tiyo Saga’s translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1868) was the predecessor of a number of texts that emerged from the mission presses of Lovedale (1826), and later Mariannhill (1882) and Morija. As early as 1862, Soga began writing journalism (Mphahlele 1992:38-48). All this was in addition to folktales, traditional songs and praise poems in the vernacular that were transcribed into writing after the arrival of European missionaries and settlers.
As Mphahlele points out, writing before the 1950s was the product of educational institutions, mass media, a changing rural landscape, regulatory legislation, and urbanisation. This writing was concerned with « historical events; it was in effect a dialogue of two selves, the dramatisation of a dual personality – the traditional and the Christian » (1992:48). Mphahlele makes two important points. The first concerns history.
Th~re is a connection, as Georges Gusdorf has suggested, between the emergence of autobiography as a genre and peoples’ emergence from a « mythic framework of traditional teachings » to the « domain of history » (1980:30). Colonialism signifies the moment of disruption, and resistance signals the entry into history and the regaining of a people’s identity (Serote 1989:16).5 Mphahlele’s second point concerns the effect of colonialism on the indigenous subject, the « fracture of consciousness » that Fanon discerns in the Negro who « is forever in combat with his own image » (1986:194). Black writing was, from its beginnings, inscribed with certain central features of postcoloniality: the irruption of colonial culture into traditional life and the subsequent splitting of the self (and therefore the production in autobiographical writing of a hybrid identity). In a recent collection of essays, Perspectives on South African English Literature that recall and replace the Perspectives on South African Fiction of a previous literary and political era), various tasks are defined for postcolonial writing. Mphahlele advocates reconstruction, particularly of the originary myth,6 « a process of reassembling the fragments of Africa into a whole and single consciousness » (1992:57).
In the same way as Mphahlele’s Africanist emphases subvert postcolonial critical notions (of hybridity and ambivalence), so do certain emphases in A E Voss’s argument where writing is defiantly posited as a means of « knowing ‘what happened’. This will mean a reordering of the past ». Autobiography is singled out as being of especial importance in this process (Voss 1992:8). The notion that autobiography serves as source material for human history originated with Wilhelm Dilthey in 1883,7 and was developed in 1907 by Georg Misch whose Geschichte der Autobiographie, « demonstrated the value of autobiography as an ‘instrument of knowledge »‘ (Spengemann 1980:193). More recently, William Spengemann has proposed the category, « historical autobiography » whose origins he locates in « the climate of opinion regarding the self that prevailed from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment » (1980:xv). In the present study, this form will be approached instead as a complex socio-cultural product in a postcolonial context. In Don Mattera’s Memory is the Weapon, history, or what happened, is given a privileged task: there is a « history which South Africa ha[s] to know », a history that only those who were witnesses, who were « there at the time » can tell (1987:14). For critics such as Mphahlele and Voss the relationship between writing and the emergence of a post-apartheid national identity and culture is self-evident. So, too, is the limited relevance of postmodern problems relating to textual authority, history and identity.

The Author, Authority and Authorisation

The theorisation of autobiography in postcolonial contexts inevitably and increasingly incorporates and dismantles postmodern principles and procedures. Notions of textual authority, history, truth, realism, referentiality and factuality occupy, together with fictionality, facticity,8 and historicity, the critical terrain. The problem of fictionality is, indeed, central to contemporary studies of autobiography. Robert Elbaz argues that « through the processes of mediation (by linguistic reality) and suspension (due to the text’s lack of finality and completion), autobiography can only be a fiction » (1987:1). The implications of this position were discerned seven years earlier by Michael Sprinkler, whose « Fictions of the Self:- The End of Autobiography » claims that « no autobiography can take place except within the boundaries of a writing where concepts of subject, self and author collapse into the act of producing a text » (1980:342). Clearly, the conquest by graphos of autos and bios can have little currency in a context where autobiography has be~n assigned an historical task.
Nevertheless, postmodern doubts and disturbances cannot be wished away. For this reason, the terms of the « contract »9 entered into by author and reader become increasingly complex. While the pact rests on the assumption that the bios is represented as truthfully as possible in the writing, precisely because it is representation in writing, autobiography can never be entirely referential of a life. Moreover, as Sidonie Smith argues, the process of writing involves selection:
Because the autobiographer can never capture the fullness of her subjectivity or understand the entire range of her experience, the narrative « I » becomes a fictive persona. In fact, as Louis A Renza notes: « The autobiographer cannot help sensing his omission of facts from a life the totality or complexity of which constantly eludes him – the more so when discourse pressures him into ordering these facts. »
(Smith 1987b:46-47)
Memory constructs a life from certain events that are themselves confluences of fragments. This realisation is clear in Mphahlele’s admission in Down Second Avenue:
« No use trying to put the pieces together. Pieces of my life. They are a jumble » (DSA 74- 5).
Feminist autobiographical criticism such as that of Lionnet, Smith, and Stanley is useful in that it deals with questions of authority, identity and truth, as readings of the (gendered) « other » are negotiated in a postmodern critical context. This criticism deploys, as it deconstructs, poststructuralist positions in addressing the problem of truth in autobiography:
A concern with auto/biography shows that « self’ is a fabrication, not necessarily a lie but certainly a highly complex truth: a fictive truth reliant on cultural convention concerning what « a life » consists of and how its story can be told both in speech and, somewhat differently, in writing. But this does not mean that such writings have no points of connection with the material realities of everyday life: it rather emphasises how complex this relationship is and that neither realism nor a total rejection of it will do.
(Stanley 1992:242-3)
Feminist analysis recognises the political claims of bias. More specifically, it acknowledges the right to recognition of the individual bias. For the critic, this entails an awareness of the embeddedness of « realist facticities » in the « narration of a life » (Stanley 1992:244).
The emphatic privileging of bias over graphas is relevant in South Africa, where the connection between autobiographical writing and the « material realities of everyday life » of black people is an overtly political one. Moreover, Stanley’s recognition of the claims of realism in a postcolonial context empowers both the writer and her writing.
In the cause of women’s autobiographical claims, Stanley gives political resonance to questions of identity and referentiality, questions that are raised in Philippe Lejeune’s seminal formalist essay « The Autobiographical Contract » (1975):
An author is not just a person, he is a person who writes and publishes. With one foot in the text, and one outside, he is the point of contact between the two. The author is defined as being simultaneously a socially responsible real person, and the producer of a discourse. (Lejeune 1982:200)
The social responsibilities of Lejeune’s « real person » are confined within the parameters of Europe, as he points out. They have little in common with the responsibilities set out for and by the black autobiographer. Lejeune confines his theorising to post-1770 European writing, suggesting criteria that may be « anachronistic or irrelevant outside this area [Europe] » (1982:192). The disclaimer is an interesting one, since it raises many of the concerns that currently preoccupy postcolonial criticism regarding « time » and « place ». These concerns are foregrounded in an emergent body of criticism, that of post-apartheid South Africa. Voss, for example, raises the question of relevance, based on his recognition that South African society does not « synchronise » with other societies (1992:8). Lejeune’s phrase, « outside Europe », inscribes the self/other dichotomy of a cultural narrative whose founding premiss is a spatial notion of a Europe that is separate from the world that lies beyond its own perimeters. This model has been rendered invalid, and is broadly contested from within Europe, or « the West », itself. Standing Lejeune on his head, the « other » « writes back » to Lejeune’s « this area » – the imperial centre – thus reclaiming, redefining and reconstructing the self in postcolonial spaces. There are no boundaries here, no « inside » or « outside », but only shifting liminalities, or thresholds. Nevertheless, Lejeune’s insights and tentative disclaimers, his concern with the reader’s role and of « historically variable » conditions that inform the « contractual product » (1982:220) that is autobiography, resonate anew in the current context.
Questions of referentiality and identity are increasingly the preoccupations of studies centred in local academic institutions, in particular those with colonial affiliations. An important intervention was made in 1984 when J M Coetzee, in his inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town, addressed the question of « Truth in Autobiography »:
There is a sense in which, going over the history of his life from a specific point in time, the time of writing, an autobiographer can be said to be making the truth of his life. The gaps and evasions, perhaps even the lies, are then elements of the life-story, elements of the making of the story, elements of the maker of the story. (1984:4)
In describing the autobiographer’s « story » as being « written within the limits of a pact, the pact of autobiography, one of the many pacts negotiated over the years between writers and readers » (1984:5), Coetzee brings Lejeune’s contractual trope to bear on local autobiographical critique, foregrounding facticity. Coetzee’s critique is, moreover, embedded in a tradition that privileges the individual and the personal, evidenced in Lejeune’s use of what is taken to be a self-evident category, « personal writing » (1982:192). Yet it swerves from this by appropriating Lejeune’s phrase, « producer of a discourse », and refracting Pierre Macherey’s insights regarding literary production. It proceeds to focus on the not-said in a text, the silences that are produced by the subject in ideology who cannot stand outside of him/herself. The notion of identity as unified, actual and self-determining is questioned. In short, the « I » that signifies the protagonist in the graphos subverts the author, or the actual « I » of the bias. As a product of the contract between author/narrator/protagonist and reader, autobiography is not a ding-an-sich, an entity whose truth awaits the reader who sees, through the supposedly transparent medium of writing, a putative « thing in itself as it really is ». Poststructuralist insights subvert positivist methods of investigation, and reading itself is seen as an activity that constructs rather than discovers, the self, and therefore, the « truth ».
It is, however, important to bear in mind that poststructuralism itself is a « symptom and a product » (Young 1990:1): the challenge to « the sovereign self of Europe » by « Europe’s other » (the colonised world) is a challenge also to the grounds of Western knowledge (Young 1990:17). There is a necessary connection between postcolonial writing and poststructuralism. Central to this connection is the issue of power: the decentring of « Europe » and the empowerment of its « others ». Autobiographical criticism negotiates a course with texts and in a context where hegemonic certainties crumble as new and buried « truths » emerge and new identities are constructed. The autobiographical texts examined in the chapters that follow simultaneously construct and deconstruct history and identity, and establish truth claims as these very claims are undermined. This is evident, for. example, in the contradiction between the disclaimers uttered by the subject, and the documentati9n of his life that follows, in Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue. The effect of his first words, « I have never known why … « , is reinforced by (the already quoted) « No use trying to put the pieces together. Pieces of my life. They are a jumble. » (DSA 74-75). Mphahlele proceeds to explain and document in a chronological account, his life. Yet, side by side with his realist account are attacks on the realist fallacy, and an implicit exposure of the inadequacies of correspondence theory.
Autobiographical writing itself provides the clue to the critic, for while it is clear that the insights of poststructuralism should not – and cannot – be discounted, they need to be deployed with circumspection if they are not to function in such a manner as to reinstate the power of the « self’ or same (« Europe », or « the West »), thus condemning the struggling « other » to a position of marginality and political powerlessness. The claims of counterhegemonic writing cannot be disposed of as mere chimerical longings. Ex nihil nihil fit, and the historic task of autobiographical writing will have been dismissed in the interests of the status quo.
The dualistic thinking that opposes poststructuralism and black writing is not only ignorant of the historical origins of the former, but also creates a stalemate. Local theorisation should be guided by the implicit claims of autobiographical writing. Ellen Kuzwayo asserts, in Call Me Woman:
I was born on 29 June 1914, the only child of Phillip Serasengwe and Emma Mtusi Merafe, born Makgothi. My place of birth was the farm of my maternal grandfather, Jeremiah Makoloi Makgothi, in Thaba Patchoa in the district of Thaba’Nchu in the Orange Free State.
(1985:55)
When the author constructs the narrator in this manner, she creates the sense that the protagonist is a « real person », whose life-history is « legally verifiable, a matter of record » (Lejeune 1982:200). This kind of claim is exemplified in Peter Thuynsma’s identification of the autobiographical narrative with the cry: « I AM! » (1990:10). Consequently, the critic must deal with the truth-claims of narratives that set out to counter certain falsifications produced by the hegemonic narrative. It is crucial, for example, that Kuzwayo establish the facts of her « birthright » if she is to counter the history that depicts her as having no legitimate claim to land or culture. According to Spivak, postmodern discourse results in « epistemic violence » where it undermines the capacity of the text to « answer one back » (1985:131). Integral to the act of answering back is the claim to identity and authority, one that Kuzwayo overtly and uncompromisingly makes in her declaration, « I am the author of this book » (1985:55). Because answering back can occur only in a context where colonial authority is resisted by a subject whose renaming of him/herself « I » constitutes an act of reclamation, critical discourse must avoid setting itself up as a form of colonial authority, one that pre-empts, moreover, the very act of reclamation.
It is significant that postmodern influences that occur in the (white) writing of J M Coetzee preclude the possibility of the subaltern subject’s answering back, thus foreclosing the subject’s renaming of him/herself. Coetzee examines the process of distortion and domination in Life & Times of Michael K, where the phenomenon of official identity-construction is addressed. The « story » of K’s life is constructed severally by institutions and individuals, each of which inscribes the narrative. The official version that appears in the « register » is as follows:
Michaels is an arsonist. He is also an escapee from a labour camp. He was running a flourishing garden on an abandoned farm and feeding the local guerrilla population when he was captured. That is the story of Michaels.
(1983:179-180)
Coetzee’s protagonist suffers the erasure and falsification of his identity. This results in the paralysis of radical doubt, a sense of the futility of telling his story at all, since it is inevitably « always a story with a hole in it; a wrong story, always wrong » (1983:150). In this, the narrative expresses something of the postmodernist tenet that « autobiography (like fiction) is an act of ceaseless renewal: the story is never ‘told’ finally, exhaustively, completely » (Elbaz 1987:13).
Clearly, however, while doubt may plague, it neither paralyses nor silences the black autobiographer who is driven by a compulsion to speak, to declare « I AM » in order to counter erasure and misrepresentation. As suggested in Chapter One, this paralysis is not a feature of African American autobiography. It is absent also from autobiographies that emerged in contexts similar to the South African one. These forms are concerned to reconstruct identity (and, in certain cases, to reclaim a land) where identity has been assaulted and fractured by dominant cultures.

CONTENTS
TITLE
DECLARATION
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
SUMMARY
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE White Writing Black: Cross-border Criticism
CHAPTER TWO Re-membering Identity
CHAPTER THREE The Hybrid « I » of Peter Abrahams’s Tell Freedom
CHAPTER FOUR The Ambivalent Self: The Case of Es’kia Mphahlele
CHAPTER FIVE Noni Jabavu: « Person-of-People » Between Two Worlds
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
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