Complementary Oral and Written Narrative Conventions: Sindiwe Magona's Autobiography and Short Story Sequence, 'Women at Work'

Abstract

In her autobiography, Sindiwe Magona positions her created and creating self as liminal, carefully exposing ways in which her narration draws on two sets of narrative conventions - those of Xhosa orature and those of western writing - and the resultant text is dialogic. In the 'Women at Work' sequence of stories, this cultural mix is still present, but the conventions are used to complement rather than interrogate each other, and are consequently less exposed. For example, each of the individual life-story monologues in the sequence is 'spoken' in the mode of the dramatic monologue of western literature, but the presence of orature is also to be discerned in the consistent structural and thematic use of one character as an audience-figure during each monologue. The sequence also reveals the continuing presence of oral tales in, for example, the basic character triad of protagonist-helper-villain, while the larger, unfolding story explores the possibilities of social (and ultimately political) coherence for the characters who tell their stories. Magona's 'interdiscursive' writing, and the cultural continuities it suggests, is an indication that certain currently powerful assumptions in postcolonial criticism, which arise from its almost exclusive focus on writing, need to be revisited in the light of the sustained and sustaining presence of orature.