Introduction: Fractured Experiences and Porous Narratives

Abstract

A recent study of Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Autobiography offers a window through which most notable writers from South Africa use self-representation to question and define notions of self, how they relate earlier to later selves and to others, thereby constituting collective and personal identities (Coullie, Meyer, Ngwenya & Olver 2006: 1). The volume foregrounds auto-/biographers' acts of narration through the genre of the interview and projects these as critical moments at which writers reflect on their creative reflections. However, the overarching reliance is on South African writers with very few from other countries from southern Africa, a fact that makes the volume less representative of the creative output of the region that defines its scope. It is for this reason that the two special issues for which we write these two introductions, analyse southern African autobiographies, memoirs and biographies as creative verbal acts that can stand on their own, outside the lives of their composers. Whether it is biography, memoir or autobiography, writing cannot be taken for granted. The ideological imperative for male and female authors to create their own texts in which they reconstruct their own countermemories arise from the realisation that [t]o write is to claim a text of one's own; textuality is an instrument of territorial repossession; because the other confers on us an identity that alienates us from ourselves, is crucial to the discovery of our selfhood. The text is the in which the will see itself reflected (Gikandi 1992: 384). The struggle to represent the selves is performed in physical as well as other multiple spaces. Gikandi suggests that have the capacity to misrepresent us. This notion rests on the assumption that the self does not have problems in representing itself to itself, and also to its other selves. But can we always assume that pure identities can be recuperated from and through the zone of textuality without necessitating a preliminary critique of selves? Can we rely on the belief that others cannot to some extent, truly, and adequately, represent others without othering them? Is a narrative merely a mirror through which the subject self is unproblematically reflected? Is it not possible that even when the self appears to be speaking, what people and readers hear may in fact be a voice spoken to by the position the voice occupies within the larger discursive symbolical economy? Rethinking the processes by which identities are constituted through auto/biography and memoirs force us to acknowledge the limits of our own modes of memory. For example, in an interview with M.J. Daymond on Autobiography and Writing Fiction Doris Lessing (2006: 231-242) discusses her nagging awareness of big gaps [in her] memory that are a product of selection and ordering of events. She tells the reader of her interview that [t]he similarity between novels and autobiographies is that ... you cannot conceivably write all your memories because there'd be millions of words and readers would be asleep within the first chapter. So then you have to choose and this is what, after all, you sometimes do with a novel--cutting, cutting. So I found myself shaping it in a way, and life isn't terribly shapely. (Lessing 2006: 233) In autobiography writing there is material that is consciously left out as unnecessary although readers might in other situations have found interesting that which has been excluded from that narrative. Es'kia Mphahlele complicates our understanding of autobiography writing by suggesting that even those materials that are consciously used to produce autobiography are never merely the faithful reproduction of all the selected aspects of a writer's life. He says in his interview with Manganyi that [t]here is no way that you are going to capture everything that happened in your life. …