‘THE HISTORICITY OF TEXTS AND THE TEXTUALITY OF HISTORY’: A NOTE ON WHY READING ZIMBABWEAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY SHOULD BE HISTORICISED

Abstract

Historical consciousness has always been at the centre of autobiographical narration and, through historical consciousness; the public experiences of narrating a subject are brought into the private act of narrating the self. There is, therefore, a thin line dividing history and fiction in autobiography and this demonstrates how autobiography is situated in history. This article argues that the demarcation of history and fiction by traditional scholars has to be revised in the wake of the realisation that the historian also makes use of metaphor and point of view in writing what is supposedly an objective ordering of events. Given this argument, the article proposes that the reading of Zimbabwean autobiography should be ahistoricised undertaking since the location of the autobiographical subject in the historical and political spectrum of Zimbabwean national experiences is critical to our understanding of the relationship between narrative and the context of its production. It further argues that the telling of one’s story in autobiography is a performance of historical identities, which makes the historicity of autobiographical texts central to our understanding of autobiographical subjects. It concludes that apprehending the historicity of a text and the textuality of history are necessary since autobiographical subjects congeal around history and the discursive background matters.