Decolonizing African Autobiography

Abstract

Despite Western autobiographical theory's ongoing efforts to render it impossible, African autobiography—and autobiography in general— thrives. Examining the process of decolonization in African autobiography, this essay traces a discursive shift from tragedy to comedy in three African autobiographies by explaining how these texts negotiate the challenging terrains of history, language, genre, modernity, and colonialism. Camara Laye's haunting The Dark Child tragically narrates his discursive alienation from African society, while the other two—Dugmore Boetie's Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost and Buchi Emecheta's Head above Water—comically challenge Western autobiographical discourse by denying the possibility of verifying autobiographical truth or by contesting the Western success narrative. Thus, in its analysis, this essay seeks to avoid a crippling essen- tialism by approaching Africans texts both as specific, localized narratives and as a part of an emerging global discourse of noncoercive knowledge. If one looks at the history of post-Enlightenment theory, the major problem has been the problem of autobiography: how subjective structures can, in fact, give objective truth. During these same centuries, the Native Informant . . . was unquestioningly treated as the objective evidence for the founding of so-called sciences like ethnography, ethno-linguistics, comparative religion, and so on. So that, once again, the theoretical problems only relate to the person who knows. The person who knows has all of the problems of selfhood. The person who is known, somehow seems not to have a problematic self. . . . Only the dominant self can be problematic; the self of the Other is authentic without a problem, naturally available to all kinds of complications. (Spivak 66)