The Embracing ‘I’: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Black Women's Auto/biography

Abstract

This article focuses on representations of mothers and daughters in autobiographical texts by contemporary British Caribbean women writers. It examines the ways in which the texts under discussion subvert generic conventions, blurring the boundaries between autobiography and biography, fiction and ‘truth-telling’. It traces the ways in which the ‘I’ in these selected works shifts and splits between the mother and daughter, further problematising issues of authenticity and secure self-hood already identified by critics of the autobiographical genre. The autobiographies are marked by journeys from the Caribbean to America, to Britain and back to the Caribbean: in each location black female identities of these autobiographical subjects are invented and reinvented both to resist and to ‘bear witness against the racism, sexism and classism’ of the cultures and institutions they encounter. Through their destabilising narrative structures, the authors return to and revise the thematic and structural preoccupations of migrant and postcolonial writing: conditions of loss, fragmentation, estrangement and alienation are expressed within the framework of lasting mother–daughter bonds. These texts are used to suggest that the reclamation of the black female subject depends not only on the authority of self-inscription but on what Carol Gilligan calls an ‘ethic of care’, which binds women to each other and to those they seek to protect. The stories and selves that emerge from these narratives are simultaneously secured and liberated by the strong, though not unproblematic bonds within which they are inscribed.