History and Intertextuality: A Transnational Reading of Eudora Welty's Losing Battles and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother

Abstract

Eudora Welty's 1970 novel Losing Battles, the story of a family reunion set in the impoverished northeast Mississippi hill country of the 1930s, and Sindiwe Magona's 1999 novel Mother to Mother, the fictional confession of the mother of one of the South African boys who murdered Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl in 1993, have their transnational confluence in their respective nations' historic battles for civil rights. Welty (white, American, born in Mississippi in 1909), and Magona (black, South African, born in the Xhosa village of Gungululu in 1943), are writers impassioned by the mystery of human relationships, and both sought to escape the deadening terrors of white supremacy that characterized segregation and apartheid. Welty was of the race and class of the hierarchical powers, yet her life, writing, friends, and actions demonstrate that she opposed the Jim Crow politics of the 1950s and 1960s and yearned to live in a more democratic society. Magona completed her schooling through correspondence courses, despite three children and degrading work as a domestic, and as a single mother managed to leave South Africa in the early 1980s to study at Columbia University and later to work in New York. The destructive, de-humanizing rule of apartheid South Africa under which Magona lived is comparable to the oppressive, racist Mississippi of Welty's lifetime. Reading fiction of familiar contexts and conflicts, such writings as by Welty and Alice Walker (Meridian, for example), alongside South African women's writing by Magona (Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night, Push-Push! and Other Stories, as well as Mother to Mother), Nadine Gordimer (Six Feet of the Country and July's People) and Lauretta Ngcobo (And They Didn't Die) raises a number of questions. What can be gained by transnational intertextual readings? How does reading fiction grounded in history differ from reading the historical records of those times? What role does collective and individual memory play in answering critical questions within the texts and for the reader? Mother to Mother, Magona's oral and epistolary novel, and Welty's Losing Battles, also oral and epistolary, both illustrate Elizabeth Long's thesis in The American Dream and the Popular Novel that are an especially fruitful mode of access to the subjective dimension of collective life in part because they explore the meeting places of self and society, of inner desires and external constraints (3). Julia Kristeva's addition of a psychological aspect to Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas of heteroglossia and dialogism and her redirection of intertextuality away from source and influence studies so as to create the more complex textual interaction of transposition create a space for the reader as subject in the critical engagement of a transnational reading of multiple texts (Allen Intertextuality 53-55). The polyvocality of Losing Battles and Mother to Mother attracts such an intertextual reading and brings to mind Bakhtin's first published essay Art and Answerability (sometimes translated Art and Responsibility) in which he notes that the connection between art and life is made only where a perceiving human being makes it(Clark 56). Welty and Magona make such perceptions, and in reading these two novels intertextually, so can their readers. From the mid 1950s through 1970, Welty spent time nursing her aging mother, earning money by lecturing and teaching, and writing the reunion story that would become Losing Battles. But during all this time, racial atrocities were close at heart: Freedom Riders in Jackson jailed for six months (1961), riots and deaths at the University of Mississippi when federal courts ordered the enrollment of James Meredith (1962), boycotts of Jackson stores (1962-1963), integration battles at Jackson's Millsaps College, including Welty's insistence on open admission for her lecture at the Southern Literary Festival (1963), the assassination of Medgar Evers (1963), and the 1964 disappearance of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi (Marts 286-313). …