Postcolonial Life-Writing

Postcolonial Life-Writing offers a sustained critique of this increasingly visible and

influential field on cultural production.
Bart Moore-Gilbert considers the relationship between postcolonial life-writing
and its western analogues, identifying the key characteristics that differentiate the
genre in the postcolonial context. Focusing particularly on writing styles and
narrative conceptions of the Self, this book uncovers a distinctive parallel tradition
of auto/biographical writing and analyses its cultural and political significance.
Original and provocative, this book brings together the two distinct fields of
Postcolonial Studies and Auto/biography Studies in a fruitful and much-needed
dialogue.

Bart Moore-Gilbert is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths, Uni-

versity of London. His publications include Kipling and ‘Orientalism’; Postcolonial
Theory: Contexts, Practicesp; Politics, Writing India: British Representations of India 1757–
1990; and Hanif Kureishi.
POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of
Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by
specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously
(or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-Anglophone as well as
Anglophone colonies and literatures. The series will also include collections of important essays
from older journals, and re-issues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to
invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Caroline Rooney
or Donna Landry at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at
Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature.
The series comprises three strands:

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new research

intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include:

1 Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye

Brenda Cooper

2 The Postcolonial Jane Austen Edited by You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

3 Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style Denise Decaires Narain

4 African Literature, Animism and Politics Caroline Rooney

5 Caribbean–English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition

Tobias Döring

6 Islands in History and Representation Edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith

7 Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India,

1822–1922 Anindyo Roy

8 Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging to Us’
Evelyn O’Callaghan

9 Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body Michelle Keown

10 Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South

African Fiction Sue Kossew

11 Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to

Independence Priyamvada Gopal

12 Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire Terry Collits

13 American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination Paul Lyons

14 Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in

Contemporary Fiction Susan Y. Najita

15 Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place Minoli Salgado

16 Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary

Vijay Mishra
17 Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan
Narratives in English Neelam Srivastava

18 English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics Pramod K. Nayar

19 Decolonising Gender: Literature, Enlightenment and the Feminine Real

Caroline Rooney

20 Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography David Huddart

21 Contemporary Arab Women Writers Anastasia Valassopoulos

22 Transnationalism in Southern African Literature: Modernists, Realists, and

the Inequality of Print Culture Stefan Helgessen

23 Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire Ben Grant

Postcolonial Literatures makes available in paperback important work in the field. Hard-
back editions of these titles are also available, some published earlier in the Routledge Research
strand of the series. Titles in paperback include:

1 Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique Benita Parry

2 Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye

Brenda Cooper

3 The Postcolonial Jane Austen Edited by You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

4 Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style Denise Decaires Narain

5 African Literature, Animism and Politics Caroline Rooney

6 Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire Terry Collits

7 Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African

Fiction Sue Kossew

8 Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging to Us’
Evelyn O’Callaghan

9 Islands in History and Representation Edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith

10 Caribbean–English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition

Tobias Döring

11 Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in

Contemporary Fiction Susan Y. Najita

Readings in Postcolonial Literatures offers collections of important essays from journals or

classic texts in the field. Titles include:

1 Selected Essays of Wilson Harris Edited by Andrew Bundy

Postcolonial Life-Writing
Culture, politics and self-representation

Bart Moore-Gilbert
First edition published 2009 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2009 Bart Moore-Gilbert
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Moore-Gilbert, B. J., 1952-
Postcolonial life-writing : culture, politics, and self-representation /
Bart Moore-Gilbert. – 1st ed.
p. cm. – (Routledge research in postcolonial literatures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Autobiography. 2. Commonwealth literature (English)–History and
criticism. 3. Authors, Commonwealth–Biography–History and criticism. 4. Self
in literature. 5. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 6. Commonwealth countries–
In literature. 7. Postcolonialism in literature. 8. Biography as a literary form.
I. Title.
PR9080.5.M66 2009
820.9'35–dc22
2008052260

ISBN 0-203-87624-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-44299-0 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-44300-8 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-87624-5 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-44299-2 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-44300-5 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-87624-4 (ebk)
In memoriam Edward W. Said, 1935–2003

‘Speak Truth to Power’

Contents

Acknowledgements x
Introduction xi

1 Centred and decentred Selves 1

2 Relational Selves 17

3 Embodied Selves 34

4 Located Selves 51

5 Working the borders of genre in postcolonial life-writing 69

6 Non-western narrative resources in postcolonial life-writing 91

7 Political Self-representation in postcolonial life-writing 111

Notes 131
Select bibliography 156
Index 167
Acknowledgements

Many people have aided me in this project. I’d particularly like to thank Nadje
el-Ali, Suad Amiry, Santiago Borja, Sophia Brown, Anthony Carrigan, Assia
Djebar, Alan Downie, Peter Dunwoodie, Nelida Fuccaro, Sara Suleri Goodyear,
Anna Hartnell, Jane Hiddleston, Philip Holden, Stephanie Jones, Debra Kelly,
Javed Majeed, Mairi Neeves, Sarah O’Mahoney, Brett St Louis, Julia Watson,
Gillian Whitlock and Amina Yaqin. Caroline Rooney has proved an exception-
ally supportive and informed series editor. Without Beth Jackson’s editorial assis-
tance with the footnotes, the text would have been unconscionably delayed.
Belinda Moore-Gilbert also helped with checking references at a crucial stage.
I’m extremely grateful to both Sally Knyvette and Bernadette Buckley for check-
ing the index with me, and to the latter for devoting holiday time to getting her
hands dirty in ‘the filthy workshop of creation’.
Successive cadres of MA students at Goldsmiths have sharpened my thinking
by vigorously debating the issues addressed here on my ‘Postcolonial Life-Writing’
module. I would also like to thank the College for granting me a sabbatical
between October–December, 2007; the AHRC for a matching term’s leave,
January–March, 2008; the Department of English and Comparative Literature
for providing additional financial support; and a final massive thanks to Maria
MacDonald for abundant help with the boring bits.
Introduction

This text aims to provide the first detailed investigation of the distinctive proper-
ties of postcolonial life-writing as a branch of auto/biographical1 literatures. In
doing so, it also seeks to promote closer connections between two sub-fields of
cultural criticism, Postcolonial and Auto/biography Studies, which have hitherto
insufficiently engaged with each other. This lack of sustained dialogue is surpris-
ing given how much postcolonial life-writing has flourished since the decolonisa-
tion of European empires. As far back as 1973, the eminent Auto/biography
critic James Olney described African examples as already ‘plentiful’2 and demand
for such work shows no sign of diminishing. To cite just one recent instance,
Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) sold 700,000
copies within months of publication.3 However, there has long been a market for
such texts. One precursor form of postcolonial life-writing, the slave narratives of
figures like Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant and Olaudah Equiano (whose
Interesting Narrative (1789), discussed in Chapter 1, went through nine editions in its
author’s lifetime alone), began to circulate from as early as 1770. This is roughly
the same moment as Rousseau’s Confessions, widely regarded as the inaugural
instance of western autobiography in a recognisably modern form. Life-writing
became an increasingly popular genre in the Indian sub-continent in the nine-
teenth century and by the end of the Second World War, a considerable number
of auto/biographies had been written by colonised subjects across many other
regions of the European empires.4
Auto/biography Studies has thus far paid little detailed attention to this rich
body of work. Adopting Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s division of the critical
formation into three periods,5 one can detect some interest in non-western auto-
biography in the first phase, which lasts roughly from the late nineteenth century
to the Second World War. Georg Misch’s A History of Autobiography in Antiquity
(1907), notably, discussed a range of examples in the classical period, concluding
as follows: ‘In the literature of various races, not only European … there appear
at a certain stage of development writings of the autobiographical type, and the
tendency to self-portrayal.’6 Yet Misch is adamant that ‘a history of auto-
biography, since it has to deal with the more complicated phenomena of mental
life, cannot reach back to the primitive peoples’.7 This judgement rests not, as
one might expect, on questions of ‘literacy’ or the transmissibility of cultural
xii Introduction
artefacts, but on the issue of sophistication of consciousness which, Misch implies,
belongs only to the ‘advanced’ peoples. In any case, his work did little to redirect
fellow-critics in the West away from their customarily parochial geo-cultural
focus. Indeed, in the second phase of Auto/biography Studies, which lasts until
approximately 1980 and is dominated by figures like Georges Gusdorf and Roy
Pascal, there is something of a disavowal of Misch’s catholic tastes and compara-
tive cultural relativism. Gusdorf’s seminal essay, ‘Conditions and Limits of Auto-
biography’ (1956), insists that the genre ‘expresses a concern peculiar to Western
man’ and that it is ‘the late product of a specific civilisation’.8 The ‘unconscious-
ness of personality’ allegedly characteristic of ‘primitive’ societies and their lack of
a proper sense of historical temporality, within which the development of self-
reflecting individuals can be charted, are Gusdorf ’s primary explanations of why
autobiography emerged in the West rather than elsewhere. Pascal’s Design and
Truth in Autobiography (1960) operates within similarly ethnocentric conceptual
parameters:

It is beyond my scope to suggest why autobiography does not come into

being outside Europe, and the existence of a work such as Bàbur’s memoirs
of the sixteenth century, which would occupy a significant place in the history of
autobiography had it belonged to Europe, makes one hesitate to generalise.
But there remains no doubt that autobiography is essentially European.9

While this argument is transparently circular, it is equally clear that only the non-
European provenance of the Moghul Emperor’s text disqualifies it from belonging
in the genre.
One might infer from such readings that autobiography in the non-western
world is a secondary and belated practice, which seeks merely to replicate the
norms and conventions of the genre as it has developed in the West. As such,
Gusdorf claims that its emergence elsewhere attests to the success of the West’s
imperial project. Indeed, he somewhat ominously suggests that the genre has
‘been of good use in [the West’s] systematic conquest of the universe’; in the
course of this process,

[it] has communicated to men [sic] of other cultures; but those men will
thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality
that was not their own. When Gandhi tells his own story, he is using Western
means to defend the East.10

This blatantly ignores Gandhi’s explicit disavowal that – despite his title, An
Autobiography (1927–29) – he is deploying the genre as conventionally understood
in the West,11 a position embraced by many other postcolonial life-writers, as will
be seen.
The third phase of Auto/biography Studies begins with texts such as Philippe
Lejeune’s ‘Autobiographical Pact’ of 1975 (but not translated into English until
1982), Paul de Man’s ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ (1979), William
 Introduction xiii
Spengemann’s The Forms of Autobiography (1980) and Olney’s landmark edited col-
lection, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980). For much of this period,
too, postcolonial life-writing remained largely invisible within the sub-field.
Lejeune, de Man and Spengemann address the western canon exclusively. By
contrast, Olney’s volume includes discussion of contemporary African American
writing (while only cursorily acknowledging slave narratives), thus making ethni-
city an issue in mainstream Auto/biography Studies. However, it offers no
engagement with more recent postcolonial life-writing, a surprising omission
given Olney’s own ground-breaking work on African autobiography. Indeed, his
introductory essay rather sneers at Misch’s misdirected interest in non-western
analogues of the genre.12 The continuing influence of Gusdorfian perspectives on
the early part, at least, of this most recent phase of Auto/biography Studies is
evident in Richard Coe’s When the Grass Was Taller (1984), an examination of
childhood autobiography, which asserts that

the Childhood [sic] is a genre which presupposes a sophisticated culture. It is

inconceivable among primitives; even in the contemporary Third World, it
emerges only in imitation of culturally more advanced models. It demands a
sense of form, and the intellectual ability to adapt the ill-balanced and mis-
shapen material of experience to the harmony of literary expression without
overmuch distortion of the original truth … It demands self-knowledge; it
demands also the most delicately graded sense of values relating the individual
to the community.13

It is perhaps redundant to detail how much of this account is structured by the

language of stereotype and ideas of cultural/racial hierarchy which are alike
anathema to Postcolonial Studies.
In that field, engagement with auto/biographical forms has been both more
long-standing than in Auto/biography Studies and, as one might expect, more
serious and sympathetic. These genres play no role in Edward Said’s analysis of
the discourses shaping imperial relations in Orientalism (1978), widely acknowl-
edged as the founding text of modern Postcolonial Studies. However, they were
already being studied in one precursor formation, Commonwealth Literary
Studies,14 culminating in the ambitious preliminary attempt by Doireann Mac-
Dermott to survey the varieties of ‘Commonwealth’ auto/biography.15 Since
then, there have been further regional studies of the genre as it has developed in,
for example, Australia, the Caribbean and North Africa.16 Cross-regional com-
parative work has also flourished. For example, Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter
Ruhe analyse Anglophone and Francophone autobiographical writings, pre-
dominantly fictional in kind, from the Caribbean and Maghreb.17 Drawing on
feminism and ‘Black Studies’, by contrast, Françoise Lionnet has investigated
correlations between African American and postcolonial women’s life-writing,
again predominantly of fictional kinds.18 Gillian Whitlock, in turn, has provided a
substantial feminist-inflected comparison of non-fictional life-writing by colonial
and postcolonial women.19 Equally notable are the emerging explorations of
xiv Introduction
more specific aspects of the field. For example, both Javed Majeed and Philip
Holden examine nationalist autobiography in the (former) British Empire, which
they see as structurally linked to larger questions of political self-representation.20
More recently, Whitlock addresses autobiographical representation in non-tradi-
tional forms and media in a framework which extends from the postcolonial
context to the contemporary non-West more widely.21 Also worthy of mention,
though his strategic aims are tangential to both my project and much of the work
surveyed above, is the work of David Huddart, who argues that autobiography is
a central explanatory category for postcolonial theory.22
Despite these considerable achievements, much remains to be done to provide
a convincing general account of postcolonial life-writing as well as to effect a
satisfactory dialogue between the sub-fields of Postcolonial and Auto/biography
Studies. A number of obstacles to achieving these aims present themselves in the
work of postcolonial colleagues described above. One is that the focus of much of
the material discussed in the previous paragraph has been on fictional auto/bio-
graphy (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of this apparently oxymoronic conjunction
of genres). Where this is not the case, the critics concerned have tended to limit
themselves either to men’s or women’s writing, rarely considering them together.
Finally, the geo-cultural and historical range of many of my predecessors is often
too limited both geographically (especially in the case of work confined to one or
two regions) and historically (the emphasis is overwhelmingly on the period since
1960) to support convincing generalisation about the distinctive attributes of
postcolonial life-writing as a specific sub-genre of auto/biographical writing.
These are all problems which I will address in the course of this monograph.
Nor has there been an adequately rigorous theorisation either of postcolonial
life-writing or of its relation to auto/biographical writing in the West. The
reluctance to theorise the specific properties of the former field is understandable.
The difficulty of defining the larger generic field to which it belongs is evident
from the beginnings of modern Auto/biography Studies. Thus, in 1907, Misch
complained that the genre ‘defies classification’.23 Seven decades of institutional
criticism later, Olney despaired that: ‘There is no way to bring autobiography to
heel as a literary genre with its own proper form, terminology,
and observances.’24 The problem has been exacerbated by the advent of post-
structuralism, which not only threatens ‘the end of autobiography’,25 but of genre
itself as an analytical category.26 The key question these debates raise for my
strategic project is this: without a stable set of definitions of autobiography as
practised in the West, how can its postcolonial analogues be distinguished gener-
ically? The task is further complicated by the heterogeneity of contexts and cul-
tures from which postcolonial life-writing has emerged, not to mention the range
of sub-forms it operates within – from autobiography as conventionally under-
stood, through memoir, to testimonio, diary, email and blogging. (This poses the
further danger of flattening such sub-generic diversity to fit a single totalising
model.)
However, similar problems have attended efforts to define ‘the postcolonial
novel’ or ‘postcolonial poetry’ – without preventing some convincing taxonomies
 Introduction xv
of these equally elastic and fissile genres.27 Moreover, considerable work has in
fact been done in the past two decades within Auto/biography Studies itself
towards addressing the challenge identified by Misch and Olney, on the one
hand, and post-structuralism, on the other. Gender perspectives have perhaps
proved most productive in renewed attempts to elaborate a poetics of auto-
biography. Following Estelle Jelinek’s edited collection, Women’s Autobiography:
Essays in Criticism (1980) – another landmark in the emergence of the third phase
of Auto/biography Studies and widely cited as the inaugural text of its kind28 – a
large body of feminist work has sought to anatomise the specificities of women’s
life-writing and to demonstrate how those properties led to its critical margin-
alisation relative to the male tradition. This project has proved enormously suc-
cessful, making women’s life-writing far more visible than was the case in the first
two phases of Auto/biography Studies and rendering the third much more sen-
sitive to the relationship between gender and genre. Thus, as Debra Kelly sug-
gests in her recent study of North African autobiographical discourse, there may
be considerable mileage for postcolonial colleagues in adapting some of the
insights and techniques of feminist inflections of Auto/biography Studies to our own
purposes. ‘Of particular relevance,’ Kelly argues, ‘is the analysis of the alternative
and diverse practices of women writers that call into question the assumptions
made by Western male autobiography and by histories of the development of the
genre written by male critics.’29
Nonetheless, while I’m grateful for such leads and intend to follow them up
(and extend them), such a methodological template poses potential problems for
my project. Kelly ultimately rationalises its advantages by claiming that: ‘Women
share many of the characteristics of the colonized subject … to the extent that
some commentators have spoken of the need for a “self-decolonization” of the
female subject.’30 However, leaving aside the vexed issue of the comparability of
these two social constituencies – and, indeed, the compatibility of feminist and
postcolonial critical practices31 – western feminist inflections of Auto/biography
Studies have often proved no more open to postcolonial life-writing than the male
critical tradition. Thus, whereas contemporary African American women’s life-
writing is addressed by Jelinek’s volume, its postcolonial analogues are not. And
while subsequent collections like Domna Stanton’s The Female Autograph (1984) and
Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck’s Life-Lines (1988) each include a single chapter
on postcolonial women life-writers, Janet Gunn’s Autobiography (1982), Sidonie
Smith’s A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography (1987) and Shari Benstock’s anthology,
The Private Self (1988), ignore them. It was not until Smith and Watson’s landmark
collection, De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography
(1992) that western feminist auto/biographical criticism began to acknowledge
postcolonial women’s life-writing in any sustained way. However, the volume’s
scope is much wider than its main title might suggest, including considerable and
sympathetic attention to autobiographical work by western women colonisers.32
And in its treatment of issues relating to the Self-representation of non-dominant
ethnicities, the focus is as much on writing from US-based minorities (Chicano,
Native American and African American) as postcolonial constituencies. Moreover,
xvi Introduction
some of the conclusions drawn about the latter field are debatable, if not dama-
gingly essentialising. For example, in an otherwise acute piece on Leila Khaled,
which remedies her earlier monograph’s oversights, Janet Gunn argued that
‘Third World autobiography’

differs in two respects from mainstream Western autobiography, both male

and female. First it involves an unmasking or what I have called a denos-
talgizing of the past; second, it orients itself toward a liberated society in the
future. In the first respect, it is a form of resistance literature; in the second, it
is a form of utopian literature.33

While there are suggestive ideas here, to which I will return (see Chapter 7
especially), Gunn’s generalisation rests on a single text by a Palestinian revolu-
tionary. Certainly, Khaled’s predicament, her motive for telling her story, her
choice of form and conception of audience, are not necessarily representative of a
good deal of postcolonial life-writing, let alone of ‘Third World autobiography’,
as will be demonstrated.
The limited impact made by this strand of Smith and Watson’s volume on
subsequent feminist work in Auto/biography Studies is evident in more recent
critical overviews of the genre. Despite the many invaluable functions it per-
forms – and recognition of the theoretical importance of greater attention to
issues of ethnicity – Laura Marcus’s Auto/biographical Discourses (1994), for example,
finds minimal space for analysis of examples of postcolonial life-writing or the
discourses surrounding it. Linda Anderson’s Autobiography (2001) discusses only two
postcolonial texts in a sub-section towards the end of her book. Perhaps more
surprisingly, in view of the lead given both by De/Colonizing the Subject and the
similar emphasis on postcolonial women’s experience in their subsequent edited
collection, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998), Smith and Watson’s latest
survey of the field, Reading Autobiography (2001), is barely more forthcoming than
Marcus and Anderson. By its own admission, it offers only ‘a glimpse at practices
of life narration outside the West’.34
One might consider this minimal attention to postcolonial life-writing justifiable
in view of the vast range of other work which each of these three texts has to
cover in considering auto/biographical genres across their historical range. On
the other hand, feminist interventions within Auto/biography Studies might be
deemed to contribute to the problem of the continuing relative critical invisibility
of postcolonial life-writing. This is particularly true in relation to writing by men.
Of the work cited in the last two paragraphs, only Anderson offers any engage-
ment with male writers, albeit that her discussion of Ondaatje and Naipaul is
extremely compressed. Yet there is no theoretical justification for this omission,
especially insofar as part of the feminist project is to critique patriarchal discourse,
particularly its representations of women. The lacuna is especially surprising given
that, like Buchi Emecheta’s Head Above Water (1986), much postcolonial women’s
life-writing is animated not so much by a wish to escape the oppressions of (neo)
colonialism as those of an indigenous patriarchy which seeks to (re)position
 Introduction xvii
gender identities within coercive discourses of tradition and authenticity, whether
or not as part of the struggle against foreign domination.35 (As will be seen, these
and more ‘modernist’36 forms of patriarchy are consistently reproduced, as well as
contested, in life-writing by postcolonial men.) Seen alongside its relative neglect
of postcolonial women life-writers, then, one might even be tempted to argue in
Spivakian terms that the consolidation of the feminist Subject of a revised Auto/
biography Studies, which the critics I’ve mentioned have laudably done so much
to accomplish, has been achieved partly at the expense of the widespread occlu-
sion of contributions made to the genres of life-writing by the (formerly) colo-
nised.37 Thus, there is considerable justification in Linda Warley’s complaint,
made long after the feminist reconstitution of Auto/biography Studies was
underway, that ‘theoretical formulations of the poetics of autobiography by and
large continue to ignore post-colonial writings … Displaying an all too familiar
geographic and ethnocentric bias, [auto/biographical] theory is made in the West
and it speaks of the West.’38 Drawing on Warley’s argument, I will attempt in
particular to demonstrate that greater attention to male postcolonial life-writing
might have provided some feminist critics with pause for thought before claiming
certain attributes of western women’s life-writing as specific to that sub-genre.
However, with these cautions in mind, the interventions within Auto/biography
Studies described above have, as Kelly suggests, much to offer the critic interested
in the strategic issues addressed by this volume. If feminism challenges the con-
flation of male subjectivity with ‘the human’,39 postcolonialists question the
equally common, if often only implicit, historical equation of the (theoretically
ungendered) western Self with ‘the human’. Equally, if feminist critics critique the
traditional supposition that autobiographical writing is a male (as well as middle-
class and heterosexual) preserve, so postcolonial frameworks can interrogate the
idea that it is also a distinctively western cultural practice.40 Above all, in seeking
to identify those aspects of women’s life-writing which have traditionally pre-
cluded such work from serious critical attention within the traditionally male-
dominated formation of Auto/biography Studies, feminist critics provide tem-
plates for defining what is sui generis about its postcolonial equivalents. The dif-
ference of women’s life-writing from canonical western male autobiography has
been asserted in three distinct areas, which I will consider in turn in relation to
the postcolonial field. These are: first, thematics of subjectivity; second, issues
of form; and third, questions surrounding the social function/cultural politics of
life-writing.
In terms of the thematics of subjectivity, I am guided by Marcus’s argument
that ‘the gender [im]balance of autobiographical history cannot be corrected
simply by adding more women to the list; basic suppositions about subjectivity
and identity underlying autobiographical theories have to be shifted.’41 In seeking
to avoid a reinscription of patriarchal ideas about women’s difference grounded
in essentialist ideas about the ‘nature’ of gender, feminist auto/biography critics
have tended to assert the distinctiveness of women’s ‘subjectivity and identity’ on
the basis of the specific modes of socialisation and cultural insertion of each sex.
Work as varied as Nancy Chodorow on the social reproduction of gender, Judith
xviii Introduction
Butler’s on its performativity and the psychoanalytically-inflected French philoso-
phy of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva has all proved influential
in critiques of the assumptions governing the ‘nature’ of personhood in traditional
Auto/biography Studies.42 As a result, three aspects of women’s subjectivity in
particular have been identified as the source of important differences of emphasis
between auto/biographical writing by western men and women.
First, it is regularly argued that women’s life-writing is characterised by a
rejection of the model of sovereign, centred, unified Selfhood allegedly con-
structed in western male autobiography. From its first phase until well into the
third, Auto/biography Studies has represented the Subject of canonical auto-
biography ‘as the whole and coherent human being who underwrites … the
possibility of knowledge about the self ’.43 By contrast, women’s life-writing is
widely deemed to promote models of dispersed and decentred subjectivity. Thus,
Sidonie Smith proposes that women writers look ‘to the politics of fragmentation’
as a means to counter masculinist notions of Selfhood.44 Second, feminist critics
repeatedly claim of canonical autobiographers that a primary concern is the
establishment of an autonomous personhood which is clearly marked off from the
author’s circumscribing social world. By contrast, women’s life-writing is often
presumed to offer a more dialogical conception of Selfhood as something which is
essentially social and relational. Leigh Gilmore usefully summarises this line of
argument as follows (while also warning against the dangers of reification):

men are autonomous individuals with inflexible ego boundaries who write
autobiographies that … place the self at the center of the drama. Women, by
contrast, have flexible ego boundaries, develop a view of the world char-
acterized by relationships … and therefore represent the self in relation to
‘others’.45

Third, critics like Shirley Neuman suggest that: ‘Bodies rarely feature in [cano-
nical male] autobiography.’46 By contrast, while recognising the dangers of con-
firming patriarchal stereotypes which equate Woman with Body, many women
life-writers – and their critical advocates – have insisted on the constitutive role of
a (reconceptualised) discourse of embodiment to women’s subjectivity. As Hélène
Cixous, for example, argues: ‘By writing her self, woman will return to the body
which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the
uncanny stranger on display … Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.’47
Such strategic claims invite the question of whether there exist conceptions of
Selfhood within the postcolonial domain which are specific to the cultures
involved, such that what Smith and Watson, following Paul Smith, call the
‘ideological “I”’48 of postcolonial life-writing might be deemed to differ in sig-
nificant ways from its western counterparts. To find answers, it is necessary to
return to a line of inquiry which has been theoretically available to Auto/bio-
graphy Studies since Misch alerted his readers to ‘potentialities of human nature
that are in strange contrast with our European attitudes toward the individual
self ’.49 In the first instance, such differences might be understood to originate in
 Introduction xix
material and historical particularities of social arrangements in non-western cul-
tures which subtend the socialisation and cultural insertion of its subjects. Thus,
the formation of selfhood in a culture with an enlarged and more plastic con-
ception of (extended) family is, in principle, likely to differ in terms of its patterns
of individuation and psychic development to what characterises the western
bourgeois nuclear (or single-parent) family. Conversely, in a context like the
Caribbean, where the plantation economy fatally undermined the institution of
family among the enslaved, one might anticipate a more radical deviation from
the normative conceptions of Selfhood and identity-formation in the West.
Indeed, such factors lead Sandra Pouchet Paquet, for example, to argue for the
existence of a specifically ‘Caribbean architecture of consciousness’.50
Some non-western cultures clearly articulate ideologies, epistemologies and
cosmogonies which are often strikingly at odds with the norms of, notably, the
secular post-Enlightenment West. This is the thrust of the critique by Wole
Soyinka (see Chapter 4) of George Thomson’s writing on Greek drama, in the
course of which the Nigerian writer insists that his colleague’s conception of tragic
interiority ‘betrays a Eurocentric conditioning or alienation’:

To describe a collective inner world as a fantasy is not intelligible [in the West
African context], for the nature of an inner world in a cohesive society is the
essentialisation of a rational world-view, one which is elicited from the reality
of social and natural experience and from the integrated reality of racial
myths into a living morality.51

There is much one might want to question here; for example, whether West
African society was ever as cohesive as Soyinka implies; whether men and women
experience that ‘collective reality’ in the same way; how the collective inner world
is accessed or mediated; and what Soyinka means by ‘racial myths’. However, the
essential theoretical point is that any auto/biographical writer working within an
epistemology of ‘collective inner worlds’, partly derived from specific ‘racial
myths’, is likely to have a different conception of psyche and Selfhood to what
usually obtains in the West, which one might also expect to be reflected in his/
her life-writing.
It is therefore no surprise, perhaps, that a variety of postcolonial commentators
have attempted to ‘provincialise’52 western paradigms of Selfhood and psychic
development – and thereby, by inference, of western auto/biographical sub-
jectivity. While one might assume that Soyinka would be at least somewhat sym-
pathetic to a figure like Jung, given the latter’s interest in ideas of the ‘collective
unconscious’, this is not the case. For the Nigerian writer, Jung’s model of psychic
economy is compromised disastrously by being predicated on a racial schema
which is the product of colonial histories.53 Freud’s work has been subjected to
similar critique by Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks (1952) famously claimed
that the conditions of Antillean society meant that ‘the Oedipus complex’ had no
writ there.54 Ashis Nandy, meanwhile, has described Freud’s work as ‘the West’s
major ethnopsychology’, clearly relativising its applicability to the Indian context
xx Introduction
which is the focus of his voluminous work.55 More recently, Gayatri Spivak has
argued that the ‘regulative psychobiographies’ elaborated in both western psy-
choanalysis and feminist revisions of that body of work cannot be applied
unthinkingly to subaltern women in the (former) colonies.56
To this extent, one might assume that postcolonial auto/biographical sub-
jectivity can be relatively easily distinguished from its western analogues.
Throughout its history, indeed, postcolonial life-writing has sometimes advanced
conceptions of personhood which are highly culturally specific. For example, it
has been argued that Equiano’s sense of Selfhood is predicated on the Igbo con-
cept of chi, familiar to readers of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958).57 Equally, the
model of personhood in Gandhi’s An Autobiography is profoundly influenced by
Hindu beliefs in karma, transcendence of ego and the cyclical reincarnation of
souls. The ‘regulative psychobiography’ which underpins Kamala Das’s My Story
(1976) is equally indebted to (while in some respects also resistant to) Hindu tra-
dition, as Shirley Lim argues.58 The idea of chi makes a powerful return in Buchi
Emecheta’s Head Above Water, surviving the writer’s translation from Lagos to
London unscathed. However, such explicit articulations of (mono-)culturally spe-
cific conceptions of Selfhood are in fact relatively rare within postcolonial life-
writing, in European languages at least (Gandhi wrote in Gujarati). Even authors
whom one might expect to elaborate such paradigms of personhood often do not
do so. Indeed, the model elaborated in Soyinka’s Aké (1981) in many ways, iro-
nically, conforms to the typology offered by Coe’s When the Grass Was Taller,
despite its invocation of the mythopoesis of Ogun (see Chapter 4).
This pattern does not, however, necessarily support Gusdorf ’s argument about
the essentially derivative nature of non-western life-writing, even in its plotting of
autobiographical subjectivity. Rather, the postcolonial sub-genre marks its differ-
ence from canonical western norms, in the first instance, by endorsing all three
thematics of subjectivity identified by feminist critics in women’s life-writing (the
important qualifications to this pattern will be discussed in due course). However,
the first twist in the argument is that these thematics are equally characteristic of
male postcolonial life-writers. Chapter 1 will demonstrate that decentred models
of personhood can be traced back to the precursor forms of male postcolonial life-
writing, including Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, beginning with its apparently
radically contradictory Self-description on the title page. Equally, if postcolonial
women life-writers share the conviction of many western counterparts about the
relationality of auto/biographical subjectivity – as their equally recurrent focus on
mother/daughter relationships, for example, suggests – Chapter 2 will argue that
male colleagues, too, often stress comparably important and explicit links between
themselves, their immediate circles and society more broadly. This is particularly
obvious in the writing of self-conscious nationalists, where the author may seek to
make himself representative of, or spokesman for, the collective to which he
belongs – even as he characteristically stresses his ‘unique’ personal qualifications
for doing so. ( I don’t wish to imply, however, that postcolonial women focus only
on the domestic sphere and their male colleagues only on the public, thus
repeating the kind of gender distinctions used in traditional Auto/biography
 Introduction xxi
Studies to discriminate against women’s life-writing.) As Chapter 3 will argue,
much the same argument can be made about the crucial role of embodiment in
male postcolonial auto/biographical subjectivity, from Equiano to Said, as fem-
inist critics have offered in relation to women’s life-writing.
However useful the taxonomies of auto/biographical Selfhood provided by
feminist critics may be in the first instance, it is also further necessary to recognise
that each thematic of subjectivity is often inflected quite differently in the post-
colonial context by writers of both genders. For example, if feminist criticism of
women’s life-writing characteristically ascribes the dispersal of the Subject to the
specific patterns of cultural insertion and socialisation of western women, the expla-
nation is sometimes quite different in postcolonial life-writing. There, decentred
subjectivity is often represented as one effect of the material histories and relations
of colonialism, in which new and occasionally radically conflicting identities are
inscribed in palimpsestic fashion on the subaltern, sometimes by force. Equally, in
the context of debates about the relationality of auto/biographical Selfhood, it is
extremely rare to find contemporary western women’s life-writing espousing
nationalism as an axis of (self-)identification. In relation to issues of embodiment,
finally, it is even more unusual to find any discussion of ethnicity as a dimension of
western women’s auto/biographical subjectivity, whereas in postcolonial life-writing
by both genders, this is a standard issue.
Such postcolonial inflections of these three thematics of auto/biographical
subjectivity need, however, to be complemented by attention to other dimensions
of personhood which have played little part in feminist reinterpretations of life-
writing. For example, almost nothing has been made of the constitutive impor-
tance of geo-cultural location to the formation of identity in western women’s
autobiography, with the limited exception of working-class writing.59 By contrast,
imperialism and its contemporary successors are nothing if not projects for phy-
sically restructuring the world and redistributing its populations, as a consequence
radically altering the affective and psychic connection of innumerable subjects to
their places of origin or affiliation. Indeed, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989)
argue, postcolonial literature in general is in large measure distinguished by its
degree of engagement with issues of (dis)location: ‘It is here that the special post-
colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or
recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place.’60 In
keeping with such perspectives, Chapter 4 will therefore explore the thematic of
place and displacement as this bears upon the construction of postcolonial auto/
biographical subjectivity.
The issue of the distinctiveness of postcolonial life-writing needs, however, to be
extended beyond consideration of thematics of subjectivity to questions of style.
Again, feminist interventions within Auto/biography Studies offer productive
pointers in this regard. As Chapter 5 will demonstrate, it is often argued that
western women’s life-writing can be differentiated from its male equivalent by the
degree of its formal experimentations with the genre of autobiography as tradi-
tionally conceived. This may seem counter-intuitive, given the hand-wringing
about definitions in Auto/biography Studies mentioned earlier. However, among
xxii Introduction
traditional liberal-humanist male critics, at least, there has been little challenge to
Lejeune’s influential anatomy of the genre ( largely adopted from Misch61) as ‘a
retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own exis-
tence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his
personality’.62 Further, Lejeune asserts, the genre is characterised by a ‘pact’
between author and reader, whereby the latter can assume that the ‘author
(whose name designates a real person) and narrator are identical’.63 Rather, the
hand-wringing arises in respect of the bewildering variety of writings which
nonetheless conform to these basic criteria. By contrast, subversion of these fun-
damental rules is sometimes seen as characteristic of women’s life-writing. As
Benstock puts it: ‘Writing that works the borders of definitional boundaries bears
witness both to repressive inscription under the [patriarchal] law of genre and to
the freedom and dispossession of existence outside the law.’64 Women’s life-writ-
ing questions Lejeune’s ‘pact’ at several levels (not least its implicit masculinism –
in translation at least). For example, the emphasis on relationality of personhood
in women’s life-writing necessarily erodes the boundaries between autobiography
and biography. Equally, women life-writers deploy other genres, notably fiction
and historiography, to a degree which threatens to take their work altogether
beyond the boundaries of autobiography as traditionally conceived.
However, Chapter 5 will suggest that a similar degree of inter-generic traffic
and experimentation characterises postcolonial life-writing, by men and women
alike. Here I will also suggest that historiography and fiction, the first two genres I
examine, operate in strategically distinctive ways vis-à-vis their roles in western
women’s life-writing. If marshalling the conventions of historiography reinforces
the emphasis on the social dimensions of Selfhood in both western women’s and
postcolonial life-writing, in the latter case it also remedies the deficiencies of
western historiography or contests its conception of (parts of ) the non-western
world as being without, or even outside, history.65 In the case of fiction, post-
colonial life-writing also deploys the genre to challenge the epistemological status
of authorial/autobiographical identity as outlined by Lejeune, and thereby to
contest the wider truth claims conventionally made by, and on behalf of, cano-
nical autobiography. However, it is further deployed to foreground some writers’
conviction of the essentially constructed and provisional nature of postcolonial
identity as a result of the erasure or disruption of foundational affiliations by
colonialism. To complement such arguments, I will then go on to consider the
relationship to postcolonial life-writing of travel writing, a genre which has played
little part in feminist critical analysis of generic experimentation within women’s
life-writing. Postcolonial authors at times use travel-writing to challenge the reso-
lution of conflicts of identity which is traditionally understood to structure western
male autobiography, thereby in the end producing a stable subject position
through which the Subject accedes to full self-knowledge. However, if they
employ the genre to stress instead the processual and unfinished nature of identity-
formation, in the manner often claimed for women auto/biographers, postcolonial
life-writers also use travel-writing as a counter-discourse, in a way which exceeds
the ambitions of their western counterparts. For instance, the genre provides the
 Introduction xxiii
grounds both for auto-ethnographical challenges to western representations of the
non-West and for an ethnography of the West itself.
Some of these stylistic attributes might be deemed to provide strong evidence
against Gusdorf ’s strategic position that non-western autobiographical writing
can only be imitative of what already exists in the West. Conversely, however, it
could be argued that historiography, fiction and travel-writing are themselves all
originally western forms which, like autobiography, are now being used to
‘defend’ the non-West. To further develop my counter-argument to Gusdorf,
therefore, I will explore in Chapter 6 the way that certain examples of post-
colonial life-writing, at least, can be distinguished from their western analogues
(both masculine and feminine) by their incorporation of non-western narrative
modes and linguistic resources. To this extent the sub-genre often works in the
same way as postcolonial fiction and poetry, drawing on local forms, metaphors,
tropes and discursive traditions as well as hybridising the languages of the former
coloniser by integrating indigenous tongues into their standard forms. Given the
crucial role of narrative and language in the formation of subjectivity, I will sug-
gest that the ‘ideological “I”’ of some postcolonial life-writing is further con-
stituted differently to its western analogues by virtue of such features. For
example, the deployment of indigenous narrative templates which emphasise
spatial relations over temporal ones, or which privilege non-linear temporalities,
has important implications for conceptions of Selfhood, notably in respect of its
positioning in the social world and development in time. By contrast, while
French theory has elaborated theories about écriture féminine,66 there has been no
serious suggestion in feminist inflections of Auto/biography Studies that women
life-writers draw on narrative forms and language(s) which are exclusive to
women as a collective, in the way that certain forms of masquerade or Yoruba
are the properties of Soyinka’s community, for example.
The third main issue which establishes the specificity of women’s life-writing in
the eyes of feminist critics concerns the cultural politics and social functions of the
sub-genre. According to many observers, as Chapter 7 will show, canonical
autobiography is a conservative form, not least because of its complicity in the
marginalisation and ‘Othering’ of women. Conversely, life-writing has been
claimed to play an important part in the emancipation of women and in the
articulation of their continuing needs and demands as unequal citizens in patri-
archal society. For Julia Swindells, for example, women’s life-writing character-
istically ‘moves beyond the life-story of the key individual, and focuses the use of
autobiography as part of a political strategy to produce change’.67 Again, post-
colonial life-writing offers clear parallels in this regard, as a number of chapters
below will demonstrate. Thus, in her attempt in 1984 to define ‘the peculiarities’
of ‘Commonwealth’ auto/biography, MacDermott concluded that much of it
could be described as ‘protest literature’.68 But once more, there are sometimes
important differences of emphasis between the two sub-genres in this regard.
Many postcolonial life-writers write from a context of deep political dis-
empowerment in which the political rights enjoyed by most western women
simply do not exist. While some write in exile from dictatorship, others are
xxiv Introduction
prevented from writing, even incarcerated, by repressive regimes and others still
live under extreme and constant existential threats to their personal security in a
situation of ongoing colonialism (see Chapter 7). In terms of women’s experience
more particularly, there is simply no contemporary western analogue to the more
extreme forms of material deprivation and patriarchal oppression suffered by
large numbers of women in the non-western world – nor for the sanctions often
endured there for advocating women’s rights (see Chapter 3).
Before proceeding to more detailed and nuanced investigations of aspects of
the debate which has been set up here in preliminary fashion, a number of cau-
tions are necessary. In the first place, it is important to recognise that the term
‘women’s life-writing’, the body of work on which my comparative investigation
primarily relies, is as homogenising and totalising as ‘Woman’, and does not do
justice to the multiplicity of sub-forms which exist in the contemporary West. This
is a danger which some feminist critics themselves recognise, as in Regenia Gag-
nier’s warning that much feminist Auto/biography Studies is premised on the
study of class-specific modes of women’s life-writing.69 Equally, I do not wish to
suggest that postcolonial identity always over-rides issues of gender (or class),
thereby creating a binary opposition between postcolonial and western women.
Indeed, as suggested earlier, the primary target of many postcolonial women life-
writers is often (indigenous) patriarchy rather than (neo-)colonialism. Nonetheless,
readers will have to forgive a certain level of generality if I am to accomplish my
aims within the space of a single monograph.
Second, I do not wish this monograph to be understood as a hostile account of
the ethnocentricity of Auto/biography Studies, whether in its mainstream versions
or feminist revisions. While criticism will be offered where necessary of the neglect
of postcolonial texts and perspectives in that critical field, it is crucial to recognise
that Postcolonial Studies also has much to learn from this adjacent sub-discipline.
As a token of this recognition, I will reconsider the generic identity of Frantz
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the only serious competitor to Said’s
(1978) Orientalism as the foundational text of modern Postcolonial Studies. While
primarily read as a work of political philosophy and psychoanalytic critique, it
also describes some of the existential trajectories and experiences through which
Fanon came to understand himself as a human being and colonial subject, thus
providing some of the material grounds of the cultural and political theory for
which he is best known.70 As C.L. Innes points out, in Black Skin Fanon ‘ask[s] the
question constantly “Who am I?”’71 Indeed, insofar as it provides a template for
so much subsequent postcolonial life-writing in relation to both theme and form, I
will use it as a touchstone in order to set the terms for particular debates in the
chapters which follow. To this extent, critical approaches established in Auto/
biography Studies potentially enable new readings of this canonical text of post-
colonial theory. Thus, while Anjali Prabhu, for example, usefully explores ‘some
significant ways in which the narrative shifts in this text operate an aesthetic and
ethical pressure on salient understandings of hybridity’, she misses the opportunity
to demonstrate how Fanon’s experimentation with auto/biographical genres itself
dramatises that pressure.72
 Introduction xxv
Above all, perhaps, it is important not to go to the other extreme from Gusdorf
and claim that postcolonial life-writing is a completely independent form, which
exists in binary opposition even to its western male equivalents. If colonialism
imposed new, at least partly westernised, identities on so many of its subjects, no
postcolonial author considered in this monograph wholly disavows the influence
of western culture on his/her formation. That most of my chosen texts are written
as a matter of choice in languages enforced by colonialism, albeit in sometimes
hybridised forms, is testimony to this fact and should make one hesitate to pro-
pose any Manichean division between postcolonial life-writing and its western
analogues. Indeed, some cultural nationalists might argue that this aspect of the
sub-genre alone carries Gusdorf ’s argument. Thus, Ngugi, for example, insists
that: ‘Language carries culture, and culture carries … the entire body of values
by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.’73 Conse-
quently any narration of Self in European languages could be deemed a form of
subservience to and reproduction of western cultural authority.74
Language aside, there is certainly evidence of the explicit inspiration provided
by western models for some postcolonial life-writing. Thus, R.C.P. Sinha begins
his study of Indian autobiography in English by asserting that while the genre
pre-dates contact with Europe, its ‘full flowering … take[s] place only after the
coming of the English to India’.75 Such perspectives have been seconded by cer-
tain postcolonial life-writers themselves. For example, Mulk Raj Anand’s preface
to his Autobiography (1985) argues that:

In the Bri Hadaranyaka Upanishad the sage enjoins the disciple to ask ‘Who am
I? Where have I come from? And where am I going?’ But the inquiries into
the self soon become the search for Atman, the higher Self. And it was
ordained that the ego is not a free agent. Introspective analysis was discounted.
Anonymity prevailed.
Only after the impact of the West did we begin to marvel at finding our-
selves on the earth earthy [sic]. Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru wrote auto-
biographies, with much honesty, courageously facing the fact [sic] about their
lives, including facts about their sensual desires.76

Similar inferences might be drawn from V.S. Naipaul’s comments on Nirad

Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951, discussed in Chapter 5):
‘No better account of the penetration of the Indian mind by the West – and
by extension, of the penetration of one culture by another – will be or now
can be written.’77 Indeed, it could be argued that even Said’s Out of Place (1999;
see Chapter 7) is in many ways a fairly conventional autobiography, both for-
mally and, in certain respects, in its thematics of subjectivity (although I will argue
that the significance of such examples is more complex than one might assume
from a Gusdorfian perspective). Moreover, the material conditions of the pro-
duction and circulation of postcolonial life-writing bind it to the West in ways
which inevitably influence its modes of Self-representation. Indeed, most of the
texts I examine were first published in the West, many postcolonial life-writers
xxvi Introduction
have been located there for substantial lengths of time and the majority of their
readers are, in all probability, westerners. Any attempt to challenge Gusdorf ’s
argument must take these factors on-board.
Finally, it is necessary to signal that in a book of this length, with so much basic
ground to map, I can make no claims to definitiveness or comprehensiveness. My
argument relies on relatively few examples. These have been chosen to reflect the
wide variety of periods and locations within which postcolonial life-writing has
been practised, rather than to establish a canon. The relatively small number of
texts further reflects a conviction that it is better to accord a few works the kind of
space and attention that close, theoretically informed, reading demands than to
attempt something more wide-ranging but inevitably more superficial. Further,
the overwhelming majority of chosen works are either by writers or academics
who are thereby not necessarily representative of postcolonial life-writing – or
experience – as a whole (who is?). My justification in this respect is that in
attempting to establish for the first time a reasonably detailed poetics of the sub-
genre, I am more likely to succeed by using writing that is self-conscious about its
relationship to the genres within which it chooses to situate itself than is the case
with the memoirs of professional politicians, for example. Whatever other interest
this latter work might hold, literary skill and self-consciousness are, with some
notable exceptions, rarely among their attributes.
I therefore offer this monograph not as a conclusive set of answers to the
questions I pose, but rather as a series of intellectual provocations to colleagues in
the sub-fields of both Postcolonial and Auto/biography Studies. My hope is that
they will find signposts here for further and perhaps more detailed investigations
of particular aspects of the debate or raise issues that I have been unable to con-
sider because of constraints of space – or have simply overlooked! Whether sub-
sequent critics will even ask the same questions, let alone arrive at the same
answers, remains to be seen. Nonetheless this book will serve its purpose if it
generates greater critical engagement with a sub-genre which has so far been
insufficiently recognised for its distinctive contribution both to postcolonial litera-
ture and to auto/biography, as well as for the degree to which its poetics requires
rethinking of some of the conceptual frameworks which characterise the two critical
formations surrounding those fields.
1 Centred and decentred Selves

Turning to the first thematic of subjectivity identified in the Introduction, feminist

critics within Auto/biography Studies have persistently complained that male
colleagues have traditionally promoted a normative view of autobiographical
Selfhood as centred and unified (as well as ‘sovereign’). Sidonie Smith, for
example, claims of canonical autobiography that it is presumed historically that
‘the teleological drift of selfhood concedes nothing to indeterminacy, to ambi-
guity, or to heterogeneity’.1 There is ample evidence to support such arguments
across the history of the critical field. Thus, more than a century ago, Misch
argued that: ‘In this single whole all [elements of the personality] have their
definite place, thanks to their significance in relation to the whole.’2 At mid-
century, Gusdorf insisted that the task of the autobiographer was ‘to reconstitute
himself in the focus of his special unity and identity across time’ in order to
express the ‘mysterious essence of his being’.3 Such perspectives persist into the
most recent phase of the critical field, despite the advent of post-structuralism.4
For example, Spengemann asserts that the genre provides the ‘ground upon
which conflicting aspects of the writer’s own nature might be reconciled in
complete being’.5
For many women critics, such a model of Selfhood is clearly gendered. Mary
Evans, for instance, argues that the ‘project of masculinity emphasizes … the
completed self ’.6 Indeed, its privileged status is often invoked to explain why
women’s life-writing has traditionally been marginalised within the male-dominated
formation of Auto/biography Studies. In turn, feminist critics have claimed that
women life-writers tend to construct more dispersed and decentred models of
auto/biographical subjectivity ‘as the means to counter the centrifugal power of
the old unitary self of western rationalism’.7 Further, Brodzki and Schenck claim
that the postmodernist decentring of the subject in Roland Barthes’s auto-
biography ‘can be said to have something in common with the strategies of some
women autobiographers dating as far back as the fifteenth century’.8 Comparable
arguments have been extended to minoritarian women’s writing in the West. For
instance, Lee Quinby suggests that such work tends to construct ‘a subjectivity
that is multiple and discontinuous’ in order to resist the ‘modern’s era’s dominant
construction of individualized selfhood’.9 Equally, Françoise Lionnet argues that
postcolonial women’s life-writing generally promotes ‘the creation of a plural self,
2 Centred and decentred Selves
one that thrives on ambiguity and multiplicity, on affirmation of differences, not
on polarized and polarizing notions of identity’.10
While such positions represent the prevailing pattern of claims about this
aspect of Selfhood in women’s auto/biographical writing, some feminists have
nonetheless cautioned against premature celebration of the ‘death of the Subject’
in relation to female experience. Thus, Linda Hutcheon warns that ‘those radical
postmodern challenges are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which
can afford to challenge that which it securely possesses’.11 Such doubts have fed
into feminist revisions of Auto/biography Studies. For example, Gilmore argues
that ‘[M]any women autobiographers tend to attribute to speech, presence, poli-
tical enfranchisement, and cultural authority the same tonic effects contemporary
critics associate with the (more or less) free play of signifiers.’12 This suggests that
to appropriate the speaking positions, narrative modes and paradigms of Selfhood
associated with the hegemonic regime of social power advances claims to equality
for those traditionally denied full subjectivity (and therefore humanity) by the
established institutions of cultural authority – which include both autobiography
as a genre and the critical field associated with it. This stance is echoed by bell
hooks with respect to minoritarian constituencies in the West. While by no means
wholly unsympathetic to postmodernism, she asks: ‘Should we not be suspicious
of postmodern critiques of the “subject” when they surface at a historical moment
when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time?’
[sic].13 A similar suspicion of the over-valorisation of fragmented subjectivity in
relation to some postcolonial women’s life-writing is expressed by Kateryna
Longley who sees it as a wholly negative consequence of colonialism in relation to
Aboriginal women.14
Postcolonial life-writing more broadly demonstrates the same mixed attitude
about the centred Subject. This is illustrated, for example, in the contradictory
accounts of Caribbean subjectivity provided by John Thieme and Sandra Paquet.
In Thieme’s view, ‘[T]he fragmentary, heterogeneous nature of the society pre-
cludes the possibility of … a unitary Cartesian self.’15 For Paquet, by contrast, it
is precisely such factors which under-write the ‘diaspora quest for wholeness’ in so
many Caribbean life-writers.16 This ambivalence in fact extends back to the ear-
liest theorisation of postcolonial subjectivity in Black Skin, White Masks. On the one
hand, Fanon suggests that the appropriate response to the psychic disintegration
inflicted on so many colonial subjects is to resist it through a strategy of Self-
reconstitution as a whole being. Assaulted by racial discourses which fracture him
into a ‘triple person’, Fanon claims: ‘I [must] put all the parts back together.’17
On the other hand, he denies that wholeness can be recovered by an appeal to
essences, especially racial ones: ‘Negro experience is not a whole, for there is not
merely one Negro, there are Negroes.’18 Consequently, Fanon refuses to disavow
the western influences in his formation; instead he celebrates ‘the zebra striping of
my mind’.19
In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore some ways in which more
recent postcolonial life-writing by both women and men engages with such
debates. In doing so, I hope to determine whether the sub-genre can be
 Centred and decentred Selves 3
differentiated from both its canonical and women’s equivalents in the West on the
basis of this aspect of auto/biographical subjectivity.

The centred Self: Sally Morgan, My Place (1987)

There can be little doubt that the narrator of My Place aspires to the kind of
unified, centred and ‘sovereign’ Self which many feminist critics have identified as
characteristic of canonical male western autobiography. This aspiration begins in
early life, during which Sally already feels ‘that a very vital part of me was miss-
ing’.20 The text focuses primarily on her quest for that ‘missing part’, so that after
journeying back to grandmother Daisy’s ancestral homelands, she at last under-
stands the place of her Aboriginal ethnicity within the ‘jigsaw’ of her identity
(MP : 232): ‘How deprived we would have been if we had been willing to let
things stay as they were. We would have survived, but not as whole people’ (MP :
233; my emphasis). This aspect of the text has elicited strong criticism. Eric
Michaels has questioned whether such an apparently Eurocentric model of sub-
jectivity is appropriate for the representation of Aboriginal personhood.21 Other
commentary has claimed that it embodies the class ideology of bourgeois indivi-
dualism in mainstream Australian mythography, which celebrates the continent as
a land of opportunities available to anyone willing to conform to its supposedly
ethnically neutral values of hard work and self-improvement. Morgan’s fellow-
Aboriginal author Mudrooroo Narogin, for example, summarises the ‘plotline’ as
follows: ‘Poor underprivileged person through the force of his or her own char-
acter makes it to the top through own efforts … the concerns of the Aboriginal
community are of secondary importance.’22
However, such interpretations of this model of auto/biographical Selfhood
seem reductive in the light of Longley’s reading of the fractured experience
of Aboriginality within which Morgan’s formation as a subject must be con-
textualised. As Carolyn Bliss argues,23 My Place represents the predicament of
those of mixed-race descent, more specifically, as one of psychic and cultural
amputation. This is explained largely in terms of the policies of forced assimila-
tion inaugurated with the grotesquely misnamed Aborigines Protection Act of
1905, extended and strengthened in 1936. Such legislation promoted the sep-
aration of mixed-race children from their mothers (whether ‘full-blood’ like
Sally’s great-grandmother Annie, or, themselves of mixed descent like Daisy) in
order to ‘redeem’ them through adoption by white families or incarceration in
missions and children’s homes. (According to Russell West, between 10 and 30
per cent of all mixed-race children were removed from their mothers in the
period 1905–65.24) Daisy and Sally’s mother Gladys thus both belong to
‘the stolen generations’, the belated subject of a major government inquiry in the
1990s. Only after the findings were published in 1997 did mainstream Australian
society begin to face up to issues which My Place had addressed ten years earlier,
on the eve of the bicentennial celebrations of Britain’s invasion of the continent
(and two decades after Aboriginals had so belatedly acquired citizenship rights in
their own land). To this extent, as Anne Brewster argues, Morgan’s text, like
4 Centred and decentred Selves
much Aboriginal life-writing, constitutes ‘a counter-discourse to … white Australian
nationalism’.25
In polemically pursuing claims for restitution, both psychic and material, the
genre has sometimes been criticised for its stylistic naivety,26 a charge also laid
against Morgan. Carolyn Bliss, for example, complains about her ‘artless primer
prose’.27 My Place is, however, a good deal more artful than such comments
suggest, a fact recognised by Elvira Pulitano, who notes that Morgan’s narrative
‘operates on multiple levels’.28 This is especially the case in its treatment of
Sally’s aspiration to wholeness/unity of Selfhood. Thus, the issue of psychic
amputation is broached with great delicacy in the opening chapter, in a manner
which demonstrates the integration of a seemingly unself-conscious diaristic rea-
lism with allegory and symbolism which characterises Morgan’s whole narrative.
Visiting her father in hospital, the 5-year-old is repelled by the disabled veterans
of the Second World War. Nonetheless, Sally’s intuitive sense of her own lack
of ‘wholeness’ is figured in both an unconscious identification with them (she
wonders how she would cope without one of her own limbs) and her bodily ‘dis-
ease’ during the visit. As she arrives, she catches glimpses of her ‘distorted shape’
(MP : 11) in the chrome fittings of the hospital. The protagonist is self-conscious
about her height, dislikes her ‘monkey’ limbs and feels ‘wrinkled inside’ (MP :16).
Three particular aspects of such ‘dis-ease’ are flagged in this scene as obstacles
which she must overcome if her quest for unified Selfhood is to succeed. First,
again providing a link with the veterans, Sally feels physically immobilised during
much of her visit. Second, her ‘colour’ is emphasised by the sterile whiteness of
the ward: ‘I was a grubby five-year-old in an alien environment’ (MP : 11).
Finally, Sally must overcome her fear of falling ‘in pieces on the floor’ if she dares
to speak (MP : 12).
The crucial link between silence/concealment and trauma is further developed
in this opening scene. It is initially adumbrated in relation to Morgan’s father, Bill
Milroy, who is exceptional among the patients in being physically ‘in one piece’
(MP : 284). Yet Sally already senses that ‘the heart had gone out of him’, leaving
only an empty ‘frame’ (MP : 12). Indeed, Morgan’s investment in traditional ideas
of the whole/centred Self can be explained partly in terms of Sally’s developing
awareness of the consequences of her father’s psychic fragmentation. His mind
‘broken’ by his experiences as a prisoner-of-war, Bill Milroy is prone to alcoholism,
depression and violence against his family. While the explanation for these facts
emerges later, his trauma is signalled at the outset by his inability to communicate
during his daughter’s visit.
The silence of father and daughter suggests a comparable psychic abjection
( later, Sally describes herself as ‘a crazy member of the family who didn’t know
who she was’ [MP : 141]). However, whereas Bill’s trauma derives from an
inability to escape his memories, Sally’s arises from being cut off from her past, so
that her narrative becomes a process of ‘re-membering’ an amputated identity.
The aetiology of her trauma is again revealed with discreet symbolism. Despite
the temperate climate of Perth, she must sleep under a ‘mound of coats’ to sup-
plement her bed-clothes (MP : 13). When her grandmother wakes her to listen to
 Centred and decentred Selves 5
the ‘special bird’ which represents Daisy’s Aboriginal affiliations, it is a struggle to
peel these ‘layers’ off. The clothing under which Sally is buried has traditionally
signified the culture of the coloniser, in Australia as elsewhere. (One of the earliest
examples of Aboriginal writing is Bennelong’s 1796 letter to Lord Sydney’s stew-
ard, requesting clothes from London.29) Even in Arthur and Daisy’s youth, shirts
remained prized objects of Aboriginal aspiration (MP : 182). Indeed, when the
adult siblings argue, Daisy disparages her ‘blackfella’ brother by commenting that
he does not ‘dress decent’ (MP : 147). This early incident in Sally’s life therefore
foreshadows the process of ‘dis-covering’ which she must go through to reconnect
with her Aboriginal heritage. The young girl has been assimilated to the domi-
nant culture to such an extent that on this first encounter with the totemic bird,
she seeks ocular verification of its existence. Conversely, the distance she travels
towards integrating her different ethnic identities into a single new whole is
measured by the fact that when the ‘special bird’ returns at the end of the text,
Morgan no longer needs such material corroboration: ‘“Oh, Nan,” I cried with
sudden certainty, “I heard it, too. In my heart, I heard it”’ (MP : 358).
Sally’s potentially tragic predicament of disinheritance ironically derives from
the fact that the ‘cover-up’ of her cultural heritage is effected in the first instance
by her mother and grandmother, owing to fear of being open about their mixed
origins (MP : 163). Mother and grandmother, too, have suffered the psychic
amputation which such self-repression entails. Thus, after their trip to the Pilbara,
Gladys comments: ‘All my life, I’ve only been half a person. I don’t think I really
realised how much of me was missing until I came North’ (MP : 233). Silence
and disguise, crucial weapons in the battle for survival, can also, as Sally even-
tually persuades her mother, lead to extinction of cultural identity. In a sense
Gladys’s silence hitherto is the very theme of the narrative she finally agrees
to tell, which turns on her anxiety that the kind of separation which she and
Daisy both endured was still possible in Sally’s childhood. Despite his own expo-
sure to Jewish suffering during the war, which initially leads him to overlook
Gladys’s ‘colour’, Bill Milroy soon reverts to the prejudices of mainstream Aus-
tralian society. He tries to expel Daisy from the family and prevents Gladys from
leaving by reminding her that if she does, he – as a ‘proper’ (white) Australian –
will get custody of the children. As Joyce Zonana argues, Morgan’s family life
thus ‘offers a parable of the relations between white men and black women in
Australia’.30
Morgan’s investment in a traditional model of unified Selfhood can, then, be
understood primarily as a means to mitigate the psychic fracturing experienced
by Aboriginals which Longley invokes. This is enforced by the strategies of stra-
tification and division which structure both the discursive regimes and material
structures of colonialism. For example, Arthur recalls that when he arrives at the
Swan mission, the children so recently torn from their mothers are further seg-
regated by gender and shade of skin colour (MP : 184). Equally, Morgan advo-
cates traditional auto/biographical sovereignty of Self to counter the historical
status of Aboriginals as objects to be possessed. Daisy asserts that in her youth,
‘we was owned, like a cow or a horse’ (MP : 336). Gladys laments that even in
6 Centred and decentred Selves
‘care’, ‘when I was sick, I belonged to the Native Welfare Department’ (MP :
250). But Morgan inflects a potentially conservative emphasis on Self-possession
by reconfiguring the idea of ‘ownership’ to include connotations of ‘owning up’ in
two distinct senses. First, it expresses the need for mainstream society not only to
acknowledge its responsibility for the current predicament of Aboriginals, but also
to recognise the role of the latter in the building of modern Australia. As Arthur
argues, ‘no-one can say the blackfella didn’t do his share’ (MP : 211). On the
other hand, it also requires mixed-race, assimilated urban-dwellers like Sally to
acknowledge their Aboriginal communities of origin.
This embrace of ‘sovereign’ Selfhood is emphasised by Morgan’s deployment
of the conventions of crime fiction. At one point, Gladys comments to Sally that
‘you’re like a bloody detective’ (MP : 238). As Sheila Collingwood-Whittick
argues: ‘Proleptic hints of the otherness which Morgan will later have to integrate
into her perception of her self are regularly posted in the early part of My Place.’31
Entering adulthood, Sally awakens to the fact that her identity has been con-
structed on the basis of ‘a little white lie’ (MP : 135), a term which in this context
has bitterly ironic connotations. After Sally realises that Daisy is part-Aboriginal,
the protagonist proceeds like a private investigator, sifting truth from falsehood,
following chance leads, interviewing material witnesses, researching in archives
and visiting crime-scenes. This structure provides much of the narrative tension of
the text as well as metaphorising the dynamic of Sally’s identity-formation. This,
after Arthur’s first visit of her adult life, Sally acknowledges that: ‘We were very
confused, we knew that the small pieces of information we now possessed weren’t
the complete truth’ (MP : 158). Through her own agency, she cumulatively adds
missing pieces to the ‘jigsaw’, generating an increasingly synoptic overview of
events, so that by the end of the text, the overall contours of her identity, at least,
are clear. For example, speaking to Billy in Pilbara provides ‘one more precious
thing that added to our sense of belonging … It was like all the little pieces of a
huge jigsaw were finally fitting together’ (MP : 232).
However, as West argues,32 in deploying the conventions of the detective
genre, Morgan reworks them from a postcolonial (and gendered) perspective. In
doing so, she further inflects the traditional idea of ‘sovereign’ autobiographical
subjectivity, not least in questioning her status as the subject of a social system
ultimately governed by an alien Sovereign. Most obviously, Sally does not repre-
sent the officially sanctioned (white) system of law and order. Indeed, she positions
herself explicitly in opposition to it when she attempts to research her family his-
tory in the Battye archives. Here, she finds access blocked by police authority,
which is keen to preserve the public (mis)perception of its role as ‘Protectors of
the Aborigines’, rather than acknowledge its instrumentality in the destruction of
Aboriginal society and culture. As this suggests, Morgan is also therefore a victim
of the crimes she is investigating. Further, and equally uncharacteristic of the
genre, what is being investigated is less the actions of individual suspects (Howden
Drake-Brockman is, in any case, long dead), than a collective crime perpetrated by
a social and ideological system, colonialism itself. Finally, of course, the crime in
question is real, not fictional.
 Centred and decentred Selves 7
Despite Morgan’s aspiration to a traditional model of unified and ‘sovereign’
autobiographical Selfhood, this is not definitively achieved. This is partly because,
further contradicting the conventions of the detective genre, certain ‘secrets’ are
never resolved, including the fate of Gladys’s sister and the identity of their father.
Arthur confidently hints that this is Howden Drake-Brockman and there is cor-
roboration in the resemblance between the photograph of the land-owner and
Gladys. This challenges the surviving Drake-Brockmans’ ascription of paternity to
‘Maltese Sam’, who has, conveniently, long disappeared. Daisy, however, takes
the truth to her grave. Consequently it also remains unclear whether Gladys is the
incestuous product of a liaison between Drake-Brockman and his daughter Daisy.
To this extent, Morgan is in the end unable to reclaim the whole history, even of
her immediate family, and is thereby frustrated in her quest for full belonging.
Yet Morgan not only comes to disavow the importance of legitimation through
the paternal line but, more radically, to disown essentialist conceptions of
belonging founded on blood genealogy. Early in her quest, Sally asks: ‘What did
it really mean to be Aboriginal? … What did it mean for someone like me?’ (MP :
141). Despite the success of the trip north, the answer appears to be contingent
and provisional. Morgan asserts her Aboriginality through discursive processes of
‘owning up’, in which performative autobiographical acts of narrative confession
play the constitutive part. After Arthur’s recollections, for example, she asserts:
‘I’ll put it all together, because we’ve got bits and pieces all over the place’
(MP : 165).
As this collective focus suggests (see also Chapter 2), insofar as Morgan seeks to
establish a unified and ‘sovereign’ Self in My Place, this is not in order to reaffirm
all the values traditionally associated with this thematic of subjectivity, especially
as conceived of by Gusdorf. Instead, the trope is primarily put in the service of a
sustained critique of colonial discourse and contemporary Australian racism
which, Arthur argues, continues unabated (MP : 212). The terms in which this
critique is framed could hardly be more emotive and powerful. Thus, despite
Sally’s initial disavowal of the link (MP : 105), the Australian Aboriginal experi-
ence becomes implicitly associated with the Holocaust. Further, it is compared
with the worst excesses of American slavery. Such parallels are the more effec-
tively drawn by being only hinted at in small symbolic details. For example, the
Holocaust is invoked when Gladys describes how stolen children were roughly
loaded on a cattle-truck before being taken away (MP : 264), slavery in the ‘slave
cap’ of the black doll offered to Gladys (MP : 261) and names given to Aboriginal
workers, like ‘Old Pompee’ (MP : 326).
As has been seen, at the outset of the text, Morgan fears that speaking in her
own voice would reduce her to ‘pieces on the floor’. By the end, the effectiveness
with which she has uncovered and learned to articulate that voice constitutes a
vindication of the politically progressive potential of a strategic embrace of cano-
nical models of autobiographical Selfhood in the postcolonial context. In keeping
with her ethics of integration (stylistic, psychological, and political), Morgan seeks
to make not only herself – and her family and the people to which they belong –
‘whole’ by dealing with past traumas. Perhaps more remarkably, in seeking to
8 Centred and decentred Selves
expand the text of ‘Australianness’ to include Aboriginality, she offers the chance
of healing to her people’s oppressors. As Daisy argues, mainstream Australia’s
failure to properly integrate Aboriginals and their particular civilisational values
means that ‘the white man’ suffers from a comparable degree of psychic and
cultural amputation to his victims, such that he is ‘only livin’ half a life’ (MP :
344). If this suggests a further revision of the norms of the detective genre, in that
Morgan seeks reconciliation rather than retribution for the collective crimes
committed against Aboriginals, My Place nonetheless distinguishes crucially
between integration and assimilation as the path towards this.
The wider political allegory implicit in Morgan’s discourse of integration per-
haps remains the best defence against what Graham Huggan warns is one possi-
ble danger faced by those who write of ‘the stolen generations’. This is that they
‘run the risk of being stolen all over again’33 by being pressed into the service of a
project of reconciliation which simply reinscribes the old colonial doctrine of
assimilation. Morgan demonstrates the crucial difference between that and her
conception of true integration in the lessons Gladys Corunna draws from her
daughter’s search: ‘I suppose, in hundreds of years’ time, there won’t be any black
Aboriginals left … as we mix with other races, we’ll lose some of the physical
characteristics that distinguish us now’ (MP : 306). This suggests that the broader
cultural and ethnic differences represented by ‘physical characteristics’ will be
sublated through a process of dialectical progression, resulting in the material as
well as psychic synthesis of a new and more inclusive Australian identity. Thus, if
the physical markers of Aboriginality are to disappear (a prospect that many
readers may feel uneasy with), the implication is that mainstream Australian eth-
nicity will thereby also be changed in crucial ways: ‘I like to think that, no matter
what we become, our spiritual tie with the land and the other unique qualities we
possess will somehow weave their way through to future generations of Australians’
(MP : 306, my emphasis).

The decentred Self: Equiano, The Interesting Narrative

(1789)
Reading My Place alongside Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative makes even
more shocking Morgan’s account of the predicament of Australian Aboriginals in
the early/middle twentieth century, in that so many events and situations she
describes are directly comparable to Equiano’s experiences one hundred and fifty
years earlier. The convergence between the two writers is further evident in their
use of life-writing as an instrument to both protest against such abuses and to
advance the reclamation of personhood deformed by colonialism. However, the
two texts differ in important respects, notably in terms of their protagonists’ life-
experience. Equiano is not only male but, to use the term of My Place, ‘full-blood’.
He also claims34 to have been involuntarily transported across the globe from his
native land to an entirely new culture, where he is legally a chattel.
Nonetheless, Equiano faces a similar range of options to Morgan in terms of
his identity-construction as an auto/biographical Subject, ranging from an
 Centred and decentred Selves 9
affirmation of ‘native roots’, to complete assimilation to the dominant formation.
So enthusiastically does Equiano pursue the latter option, according to some
critics, that he ends by embracing a singular British identity. Tanya Caldwell, for
example, argues that he ‘takes every opportunity to repudiate any fundamental
difference between himself and the culture in which he developed as a self-conscious
being’.35 Certainly, as one might expect of a vulnerable abducted boy, Equiano
sets himself urgently to the task of learning the values and customs of his captors.
One haunting example of Equiano’s ensuing identification with the dominant
occurs in Guernsey, where he becomes dazzled by the ‘rosy’ complexion of
his hosts’ daughter Mary. In a passage which anticipates the description in My
Place of Daisy’s friend Nellie, who takes peroxide baths in the hope of ‘whitening’
herself (MP : 337), Equiano records: ‘I therefore tried oftentimes myself if I could
not by washing make my face of the same colour as my little play-mate … but it
was all in vain; and I now began to be mortified by the difference in our com-
plexions.’36 It is a measure of how far he has internalised such values that by the
time he encounters his first fellow-black in England, Equiano ‘turned a little out
of his way at first’ in what seems to be a gesture of embarrassed disavowal
(I N: 85).
This pattern continues into adulthood, when the narrator regularly conceives
of England in highly idealised terms as home. Thus, Jesús Benito and Ana Man-
zanas insist that Equiano ‘never thinks of Africa as his final destination’.37 Indeed,
the adult protagonist at times resembles a quintessentially imperial Englishman.
On the voyage to establish plantations on the Musquito Coast (to be worked by
slave labour which he has himself helped procure), for example, the author pro-
selytizes like a missionary to the Indian prince. Later, he aligns himself with one
hero of colonial exploration in employing ‘a stratagem … [ he] had read in the
life of Columbus’ (I N: 208) to quell a riot. Elsewhere, Equiano proclaims the
virtues of trade with Africa not simply as a means of providing an alternative to
the slave trade, but of assimilating Africans to the superior civilisation represented
by ‘British fashions, manners, customs, &c.’ (I N: 233) which he appears to have so
readily absorbed.38 It is therefore little surprise that he is regarded as belonging to
the dominant ethnicity by other subalterns. For example, when questioned about
his religious backsliding, the Indian prince retorts to Equiano: ‘How comes it that
all the white men on board … swear, lie and get drunk, only excepting yourself?’ (I N:
204; my emphasis).
Some commentary sees Equiano’s turn to autobiography as further evidence of
his assimilation to the cultural dominant. For example, Caldwell argues that by its
very nature as a (supposedly) exclusively western form, autobiography ‘denies the
black author any access to an authentic African self ’.39 Certainly, the designation
of Equiano as ‘the black Christian’ (I N: 92) perhaps inevitably invokes the pro-
tagonist of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), locating Equiano squarely within a
metropolitan Protestant tradition of spiritual self-inquiry.40 While Adam Potkay
acknowledges that Equiano provides one or two ‘twists’ to the rules of spiritual
autobiography, he detects no real contestation in his primary conception of
the genre as ‘a theological quest’, which determines the author’s vision of
10 Centred and decentred Selves
belonging: ‘His final home, in The Interesting Narrative, is thus Christianity and its
exegetical methods.’41 One might, then, legitimately infer that the author’s
apparent endorsement of the ideology of the genre and obedience to its ‘rules’
illuminate a broader pattern of acceptance of the norms of the dominant culture
which is symbolised by the highly conventional bourgeois persona who gazes out
from the engraving at the front of his text.42
However, to over-emphasise such evidence of Equiano’s assimilation to Brit-
ishness is to simplify the protagonist’s negotiation of his autobiographical identity.
As Geraldine Murphy suggests, The Interesting Narrative is both ‘written within and
against the terms of the dominant culture’.43 The complexity of Equiano’s for-
mation as an ethnic subject, in particular, is apparent even in the incidents
already described. Once over his surprise at the black youth’s over-enthusiastic
approach on the Isle of Wight, Equiano and his ‘fellow-countryman’ become
‘very happy in frequently seeing each other’ (I N: 85). Moreover, even as the
Indian prince reads Equiano as ‘white’, he sharply distinguishes his interlocutor
from the latter’s fellow-adventurers. Between them, these incidents suggest on the
one hand Equiano’s continuing identification with his culture of origin and, on
the other, a widespread perception of his outsider status vis-à-vis mainstream
white society, patterns which persist throughout the text.
Equiano’s assimilation to Britishness is partly frustrated by the discrimination
he experiences from other Britons. Some of those he encounters are aggrieved
precisely by the degree of his apparent assimilation. For example, Captain Doran
threatens violence because Equiano ‘talked too much English’, a complaint
repeated in Savannah (I N: 94, 159). Long after manumission, Equiano is
reminded that his ‘blackness’ leaves him vulnerable to rejection, for example, when
he applies to serve as a missionary in Africa. Despite an excellent reference from the
former Governor of Cape Coast, and his knowledge of ‘the manners and customs’
of his homeland, ‘some certain scruples of delicacy’, as Equiano puts it – with
scrupulous delicacy (I N: 223) – lead the Bishop of London to decline him. How-
ever, even more benevolently disposed whites often insist on Equiano’s difference.
For instance, after encountering Daniel Queen, from whom he receives Biblical
instruction, Equiano is not recognised simply as a co-religionist but distinguished
as ‘the black Christian’ (IN : 92; my emphasis). Similarly, when approached to help
return poor blacks to Africa, it is Equiano’s ‘difference’ that clearly helps earn
him consideration. Thus, while the author considers himself ‘almost an Englishman’
(I N: 77) within a short period of being abducted, he is never allowed fully to
become one, whether by those sympathetic or antipathetic towards him.
Benito and Manzanas argue that as a consequence of such experiences,
Equiano ‘maintains a detached and ambivalent position towards whites’.44 The
author’s sometimes hostile attitude to the dominant ethnicity is marked from the
outset. In Africa, he asserts, ‘whiteness’ is synonymous with deformity. Describing his
first encounters with Europeans, Equiano deploys the kind of counter-stereotyping
which characterises later postcolonial writing. In particular, he constructs his
captors as potential cannibals.45 Deep anger understandably informs his descrip-
tions of the slave economy in the West Indies (and the version of Christianity to
 Centred and decentred Selves 11
which it pays lip-service). Despite the risk of alienating contemporary British
‘moderates’, Equiano comes close to legitimising insurrection against plantation
slavery (I N: 111–12; compare 139–40). Further, while clearly represented as a
better place for a black man than the West Indies, Equiano’s sometimes disobli-
ging experiences in London encourage him to consider seriously settling in
Turkey (I N: 179, 181). Indeed, the necessity of the proposed Sierra Leone expe-
dition demonstrates, pace Caldwell, that freedom for blacks cannot be achieved
‘within English traditions and institutions’.46
On the other hand, Equiano’s consistent awareness of his culture of origin also
prevents complete assimilation to the dominant ethnicity. At the end of the text,
significantly, he insists that he can still speak his mother tongue (I N: 222). The
affective power of his putative memories of an African childhood supports the
author’s claim that all the adversity he experienced thereafter served only to
‘rivet’ them in his mind (I N: 46; the image has nicely ironic connotations in this
context). Throughout the text, chance incidents reinforce these links to his past.
For example, Queen’s readings in the Old Testament ‘tended to impress our man-
ners and customs more deeply on my memory’ (I N: 92). Indeed, at the climax of
his conversion crisis, Equiano suddenly remembers his mother (I N: 191). Con-
tradicting Caldwell, the writer’s unwillingness to disavow his non-European
identity is explicitly marked from the first lines of the text, which insist that he is a
‘stranger’, a self-positioning immediately reinforced by Equiano’s heavily ironic
comment that ‘did I consider myself a European, I might say my sufferings were
great’ (I N: 31). When he assumes responsibility during the shipwreck on the
Bahama banks, he describes himself as ‘a kind of chieftain’ (Equiano’s family was
aristocratic), not a ‘kind of captain’ (I N: 151). Even late in his narrative, Equiano
continues to define himself not as an Englishman or Briton, but as ‘an obscure
African’, ‘a black man’ and an ‘oppressed Ethiopian’ (I N: 229, 232). In the course
of negotiating over the Sierra Leone expedition, Equiano also explains why he
has not, hitherto, considered Africa as his desired final destination. He is under-
standably fearful of getting entangled once more with slavers if he was to go
‘home’. It is an index of his continuing identification with Africa that in the end
Equiano is nonetheless prepared to face this and other dangers to return.
To some critics, therefore, Equiano’s embrace of ‘Britishness’ is to be under-
stood as primarily strategic, reflecting his self-confessed propensity to ‘stratagem’
(for example, I N: 125, 180, 208). Clearly, it ensures his greater utility – and
therefore better treatment – at the hands of his masters. Later, it is a crucial element
in his attempt to enlist sympathy for the cause of abolition. In this respect, the
more Equiano can close the gap between ‘Africanness’ and the self-identifications
of his audience (for example, by stressing the parallels between his culture of
origin and those of Jews, Greeks and Highlanders – which align him progressively
more closely with his readers), the more not only the slave trade, but the system
of slavery itself, seem not just inhumane but ‘un-British’. Equiano’s appropriation
of the form of spiritual autobiography can be seen as consonant with this larger
strategy. Against Caldwell and Potkay, it could be argued that Equiano disrupts
generic rules, ‘converting’ the form to radical new uses. His opening address ‘to
12 Centred and decentred Selves
the Lords Spiritual and Temporal’ indicates the dual focus of the text which fol-
lows. This is maintained to the last chapter, which is as much concerned with
material matters of economy and politics as it is with spiritual ones. Indeed, in
questioning Equiano’s adherence to the norms of eighteenth-century spiritual
autobiography, Susan Marren makes the point that commerce succeeds where
Christianity signally fails to secure Equiano’s freedom.47 Moreover, despite the
seeming importance of the conversion scene in Chapter X, the question must be
asked, from what is Equiano being converted here – and to what? Whether or
not he fully understands the meaning of his early baptism, he is clearly a ‘proper’
Christian at least from the time of his friendship with the Miss Guerins. In any
case, it is difficult to appreciate what is damnable about Equiano’s life between
his baptism and Chapter X ( let alone before; as Douglas Anderson notes, some-
one who has been abducted and enslaved is clearly more sinned against than
sinning48). The redundancy of the conversion episode, structurally crucial to
conventional spiritual autobiography, is further suggested by the fact that
Equiano is again given what appears to be the same ‘Guide to the Indians’ which
he received on baptism. That the conversion may be no more than a token ges-
ture of generic conformity might also help explain the uncharacteristic stylistic
flatness of this part of his narrative, about which critics have complained since
Mary Wollstonecraft’s early review of the text.49
That Equiano is using the sub-genre of spiritual autobiography subversively is
supported by other evidence in the text. For example, while expressly forbidden
to do so, he continues to write his journal during the voyage to the Arctic (I N:
173). Consequently, Self-narrativisation becomes implicitly associated with rebel-
lion against (white) authority. Equiano’s revisionary impulses are further signalled
in his adaptation of the text of Paradise Lost, which adapts Beelzebub’s rebellious-
ness to speak to the issue of contemporary slavery (I N: 112). William Mottolese
argues that in another such example of inter-textual appropriation, Equiano’s
narrative ‘mimics and subverts’ the ‘Guide to the Indians’ itself, redirecting it
towards a domestic British audience. The first part of its full title (which Equiano
never divulges) is The Knowledge and Practice of Christianity Made Easy to the Meanest
Capacities, a phrase which might as easily describe his own text.50 Appreciation of
Equiano’s subversive energies, rather than innate racism, might just explain why
he was not accepted as a missionary to Africa. Indeed, such qualities lead some
critics to the opposite extreme from Caldwell’s assertion of the author’s full
assimilation to white culture. Robin Sabino and Jennifer Hall, for example, argue
that Equiano’s ‘world view remained Igbo throughout his life span’,51 notably in
relation to his reliance on the traditional idea of chi to understand his life-trajectory.52
William Samuels asserts that such evidence supports the argument that the
author adopts ‘the mask of a docile slave’ in order to consolidate a ‘“single
self ” … an idealized African identity that Equiano wishes to reclaim’.53 Others
also contend that The Interesting Narrative is organised by a model of unified
Selfhood, even when they disagree with both Caldwell and Samuels as to the
orientation of Equiano’s self-identification. For example, Carretta argues that the
text constructs ‘an integrated essential self abstracted from the disparate and
 Centred and decentred Selves 13
sometimes conflicting particular details’ of his life.54 Helen Thomas, by contrast,
suggests that Equiano ‘achieved a creolised (re)construction of “himself ”’ based
on the principles of ‘synthesis’ and ‘fusion’.55 Against such readings, I would
argue that the model of Selfhood which he elaborates differs quite radically from
the emphasis of My Place on integration of personhood. At the very end of the
text, Equiano states that his ‘life and fortune have been extremely chequered’ (I N:
236). The image of the chequer-board figures a model of hybrid identity in which
his ethnicities remain consciously juxtaposed but distinct, rather than – as is the
case with Morgan – becoming ‘miscegenated’ into a new, unified whole figured in
the image of the ( largely) resolved ‘jigsaw’.56
This is consonant with the narrator’s painful predicament throughout The
Interesting Narrative (as well as helping explain its sometimes disjunctive form57). On
the one hand, Equiano must assert his similarity to the dominant in order to
advance the argument that the enslavement of Africans is barbaric. On the other,
he must assert his difference from that dominant in order to support his authority
as a witness to the horrors he has experienced. Equiano’s emphasis on this duality
of being is in fact registered on the very title page of his text,58 which reads: The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written
By Himself. There is much to note here. First, Equiano’s use of his African name is
a deliberate act of (af )filiation in which he first proclaims his identity as a ‘stran-
ger’ to his metropolitan audience. Its significance in this context is suggested by
Carretta’s observation that: ‘Outside of his autobiography, the author of The
Interesting Narrative almost never called himself Equiano.’59 Elsewhere, the author
explains how he resisted the Latin slave name first given him by Lieutenant
Pascal, before physical coercion obliged him to adopt it, becoming the name ‘by
which I have been known ever since’ (I N: 64). However, Equiano does not take
the opportunity offered by writing his life-story to disavow it definitively. This
may be partly for commercial reasons (Equiano would have been a name
unknown to the public) but also, perhaps, because of its connotations (Gustavus
Vassa being the Swedish monarch who led his subjugated people to indepen-
dence). Nonetheless, the conjunction ‘or’ equally signifies disjunction between the
identities implied by Equiano’s African and European names, posing them as
distinct, if not as alternatives. Finally, the ascription ‘Written By Himself ’ (con-
trast the implications of the consistent first-person voice in My Place), while not
unprecedented in eighteenth-century autobiographical texts ( Vico, for example,
uses an identical sub-title), foreshadows the disjunctive narrative perspective of the
text which shortly ensues. Its opening pages, with their symptomatic slippage
between first and third person in the account of Africa, in turn set the terms for
what follows, allowing the author to embrace both his ‘original’ and acquired
ethnicities without subordinating either. Like Fanon, then, Equiano clings to the
‘zebra striping’ of his identity and in doing so, contravenes one of the primary
strategies of traditional spiritual autobiography, the attainment of unity of per-
sonhood. There could scarcely be a stronger disavowal than Equiano’s of the
anti-Manichean thrust of Augustine’s conception of personhood in Confessions,
widely recognised as the founding text of spiritual autobiography: ‘You gathered
14 Centred and decentred Selves
me together from the state of disintegration in which I had been fruitlessly divided.
I turned from unity in you to be lost in multiplicity.’60

Conclusion
The texts considered in this chapter indicate the complex relationship of this first
thematic of subjectivity in the postcolonial life-writing vis-à-vis its inscriptions in
western autobiography. On the one hand, there is a distinct pattern, across the
geo-cultural and historical range of the sub-genre, of the decentred model of
identity found in Equiano. For example, towards the end of Out of Place (1999, see
Chapter 7), Edward Said proclaims: ‘I occasionally experience myself as a cluster
of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so
many attach so much significance.’61 Conversely, the centred and unified con-
ception of auto/biographical subjectivity elaborated by Morgan is also widely
apparent. Thus, Sindiwe Magona’s To My Children’s Children (1991) reflects the
epistemology of personhood in traditional Xhosa culture, where individual as well
as social Being is figured in terms of ‘connectedness and oneness’.62 As the com-
parison between Morgan and Equiano further suggests, one should also be cau-
tious of assuming that there is ‘progress’ from ‘naïve’ models of centred
personhood towards more ‘modern’ conceptions of decentredness, in the way
Majeed asserts is the case with the evolution of Indian nationalist auto-
biography.63 My own analysis suggests that this trajecory does not apply to post-
colonial life-writing more generally. Rather it corroborates Whitlock’s argument
that ‘[ T ]he hybrid and the syncretic always coincide with identifications that
pursue authentic, continuous, and homogenous self-identities.’64
The cultural/political meanings of these contrastive models of Selfhood are
equally complex. Some might see the reproduction of models of the centred Self
found in canonical western autobiography as evidence in support of Gusdorf ’s
conviction of the ‘belated’ nature of non-western auto/biography. Equally, the
decentred Self of much contemporary postcolonial life-writing might be con-
sidered to be imitative of postmodernist elaborations of ‘the death of the Subject’.
Both accounts are too simple. As the example of Magona suggests, the inscription
of the centred Self at times reflects an emphasis characteristic of a variety of non-
western cultures. Thus, Léopold Senghor, the theoretician of African négritude,
claimed that the African philosophy of Being is grounded in the principle of
‘synthesis’. For the African writer, accordingly, ‘Man is therefore a composition of
mobile life forces which interlock: a world of solidarities that seek to knit them-
selves together.’65 Conversely, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative obviously long pre-
dates postmodernism. Neither this, nor later postcolonial texts featuring a
comparable model of Selfhood, celebrate decentredness in the abstract philoso-
phical terms which characterise postmodernist discussions of personhood. Rather,
as already suggested, they reflect the material effects of the histories of colonial-
ism, which often enforced fragmentation and multiplicity of identity on sub-
jectivities that – as Senghor suggests – had hitherto been centred, if not
foundationally rooted, by indigenous cultural tradition.
 Centred and decentred Selves 15
Further, one could argue that both models of Selfhood, far from being evi-
dence of a complicitous assimilation to the cultural dominant, are at least poten-
tially politically oppositional. Paul Smith observes of postmodern debates about
the Subject that, with the exception of feminist contributions, ‘all the discourses I
have focused on presume and construct their appropriate “subject” in a way
which ultimately leaves little room for consideration of resistance.’66 By contrast,
the attributes of decentredness enable the (post)colonial life-writer to evade the
fixed identities through which (neo-)colonial stereotype, in particular, seeks to fix
the (post)colonial subject in an inferior relation to the ‘centre’. As Whitlock
argues, ‘thinking in terms of origins and authenticity, centre and periphery, and
the separation into consistent and homogenous identities are fundamental to
colonizing discourses.’67 (The same might be argued about certain ‘indigenous’
discourses which seek to fix its subjects in particular identities, as is often the case
with nationalism in respect of women, for example.)
However, Whitlock’s argument needs refinement insofar as deployment of a
centred and unified conception of auto/biographical Selfhood could be inter-
preted as having equal oppositional potential to its decentred analogues.68 In the
first place, such a model of subjectivity could just as well be understood as a
riposte to colonial discourse, which historically sought to deny (post)colonial sub-
jects membership of humanity on the basis of their supposed lack of the unified,
centred and sovereign subjectivity characteristic of canonical autobiography. In
this context, the appropriation of the constructs which underpin the West’s
dominant economy of self-representation is a significant gesture of resistance.
Here one might adapt Jeanne Perreault’s argument about recourse in western
women’s autobiography to the centred Self: ‘Feminist [and, by implication, post-
colonial] gestures towards cohesion may be grounded in the desire for a “point of
departure” and indeed, a point of arrival, that embrace a process of transformation
as a revolutionary concept.’69
Consonant with this argument, both texts provide clear evidence that the
fracturing experience of colonialism on (post)colonial subjectivity can be turned to
advantage. Whether through synthesis of aspects of ‘native’ and colonial cultural
identities in order to construct a new, integrated, personhood (Morgan), or by
emphasising a disjunctive conception of Selfhood which refuses sublation of its
different elements into a single new whole (Equiano), postcolonial life-writing
expresses its subjects’ agency and capacity for self-renewal. Further, and as is
typical of the sub-genre as a whole, both Morgan and Equiano eschew the
temptation of constructing a singularised conception of identity based on what
Edouard Glissant calls ‘a single, unique root’.70 Whether figured as ‘weaving’
(Morgan), ‘chequering’ (Equiano) or ‘striping’ (Fanon), postcolonial auto/
biographical identity rarely seeks to utterly disavow the effects of colonialism on
its constitution.
Nonetheless, there is a powerful strain of melancholia in both Morgan and
Equiano. As has been seen, her failure to get Daisy to reveal all means that Sally
is condemned to some measure of continuing ‘amputation’. Equally, The Interesting
Narrative supports Rushdie’s reminder that hybrid identity is not only a means to
16 Centred and decentred Selves
‘straddle two cultures’, a posture which Morgan arguably achieves, but also
involves the danger of ‘fall[ing] between two stools’.71 Texts considered later in
this monograph suggest that one should beware of too hastily concluding that
either model of identity is innately empowering. For example, Nawal El Saadawi
(see Chapter 3) and Shirley Lim (Chapter 4) seek to escape the highly restricted
and static models of female identity enforced in their respective natal cultures. By
contrast, V.S. Naipaul (Chapter 5) consistently despairs at the seeming impossi-
bility of grounding Caribbean identity in terms solid and stable enough to pro-
vide security and self-esteem. Like Naipaul’s A Way in the World, Said’s Out of Place
(Chapter 7) offers a more radical version of the decentredness found in Equiano,
who always seems in control of the relationship between the twin aspects of his
identity. For Said, Lim and Assia Djebar (Chapter 6), no less than Naipaul,
decentredness is productive, both psychically and creatively. However, it also has
the potential to cause the severest existential discomfort, as is suggested by Said’s
depressions, Djebar’s self-doubts, Naipaul’s oscillations between self-aggrandisement
and self-loathing, or Lim’s mental breakdown soon after arriving in the United
States from Malaysia.
In its divided and ambivalent relationship to the conception of Selfhood char-
acteristic of canonical western autobiography, postcolonial life-writing offers
many parallels with its western women’s analogues. As has been seen, feminist
criticism is split over whether women’s life-writing does, or should, embrace both
models of Selfhood. Nonetheless my analysis suggests that the dilemma between
embracing models of centred or decentred subjectivity is not confined to women
life-writers in the postcolonial context. The fact that male colleagues also employ
both models of Selfhood (as will be seen in Chapter 2, C.L.R. James is directly
comparable to Morgan in his conception of personhood, as Brendan Behan is to
Equiano) complicates western feminist claims about the gendered particularity of
this thematic of subjectivity. The strategic question of the derivativeness or
otherwise of postcolonial life-writing cannot be settled, therefore, without investi-
gation of other aspects of auto/biographical subjectivity. This will be the task of
the next three chapters.
2 Relational Selves

In both texts analysed in the previous chapter, the achievement of individual

Selfhood, whether understood as centred or decentred, is not their protagonists’
sole, or perhaps even prime, objective. Thus, Equiano constructs himself even on
his title-page in a representative role as ‘the African’. Equally, Morgan increasingly
de-centres herself to make room for other first-person family voices, which com-
prise nearly a third of My Place, thereby shifting it away from individual towards
collective auto/biography. Indeed, the privileging of the latter focus is implied in the
epigraph: ‘How deprived we would have been if we had been willing to let things
stay as they were. We would have survived, but not as a whole people. We would
never have known our place’ (MP : n.p.). The addition of the indefinite article ‘a’
suggests a crucial change of emphasis from the source of the epigram in the text
itself, which reads: ‘We would have survived, but not as whole people’ (MP : 233).
Such preoccupations point to a second thematic of auto/biographical sub-
jectivity, which will be the focus of this chapter. Auto/biography Studies has tra-
ditionally advanced a view of autobiographical personhood as monadic and
autonomous. For example, Gilmore argues that historically the canonical Subject
is deemed to be ‘contained within a set of boundaries that distinguish it from
everything else around it’.1 There is considerable support for such interpretations
within the history of Auto/biography Studies. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, Misch proposed that the objective of the autobiographer is to ‘stand as
an I, or, more exactly, as an “I”-saying person, over against other persons and living
beings’.2 During the second phase of Auto/biography Studies, Gusdorf corrobo-
rated this argument. The ‘conscious awareness of the singularity of each indivi-
dual life’, which he saw as the primary impulse animating the genre, could not
exist if ‘the individual does not oppose himself to all others … does not feel
himself to exist outside of others, and still less against others’.3 Such attitudes are
repeated among male critics in the most recent phase of the critical field, despite
the advent of postmodernism.4 Thus, Olney, in recognising in women’s life-writing
‘a quite different orientation towards the self and others from the typical orien-
tation to be found in autobiographies by men’, reinforces the perspectives of his
predecessors about this aspect of canonical autobiographical subjectivity.5
For many feminist critics, this conception of the autonomy of autobiographical
identity is as clearly gendered as the emphasis on unified and centred Selfhood
18 Relational Selves
which traditionally accompanies it in Auto/biography Studies. By contrast, they
have almost unanimously argued that subjectivity in women’s life-writing is pri-
marily relational rather than monadic. For example, Brodzki and Schenck assert
that ‘Self-definition in relation to significant others, is the most pervasive char-
acteristic of the female autobiography.’6 Indeed, Mary Mason proposes that what
she calls the ‘grounding of identity through relation to the chosen other’7 char-
acterises women’s life-writing from its origins at the turn of the fifteenth century
with The Book of Margery Kempe. Complementing the initial focus of attention on
the auto/biographer’s communion with God and/or family relationships, recent
feminist criticism has explored the concept of relationality in terms of gender as a
collective identity. For instance, Perreault suggests that much contemporary wes-
tern women’s life-writing demands recognition of ‘who and what is meant by that
written “I” as an element in the “we” of feminist communities’.8
Comparable arguments are often made about minoritarian women’s life-writing
in the West. Thus, Lourdes Torres claims of US Latina work that: ‘The subject
created is at once individual and collective.’9 Postcolonial women’s life-writing
is often held to demonstrate similar, or even enhanced, attributes of relationality.
Equally, Doris Sommer asserts that in Latin American women’s testimonio, the
autobiographer never considers herself as ‘one isolated being’ but as representa-
tive of a community.10 Indeed, according to Longley, ‘it is impossible to think of
autobiography as an individual activity in traditional Aboriginal society’ (an
argument confirmed in the case of Morgan).11 Furthermore, the emphasis on
relationality in these different branches of women’s life-writing is recognised as
having important formal implications for traditional understandings of the genre.
In the first place, the emphasis on relational or collective identities erodes the
traditional boundary between autobiography and biography, which Olney claims is
one that ‘every writer on autobiography would feel it necessary to maintain’.12 Issues
of multi-authorship in women’s ‘life story’, more specifically, create what Carole
Boyce Davies describes as a ‘scandal’ for traditional theories of autobiography as
an individual performance, such as Lejeune’s.13
In emphasising the relational dimensions of women’s life-writing, however,
some observers caution against the same dangers of reification which attend dis-
cussions of the issue of (de)centred subjectivity. Thus, Regenia Gagnier complains
that Woolf ’s conception of autobiography is limited by middle-class values of
individualism and detachment which over-ride her identification with women of
different classes.14 In the postcolonial context, moreover, women’s life-writing
does not embrace relationality as a matter of course, or sometimes limits its
operations. For example, Mary Seacole (see Chapter 5) barely mentions her par-
ents, husband or daughter. In Head Above Water, Buchi Emecheta’s identification
with fellow-Nigerians in London is severely circumscribed by issues of ethnicity
inflamed by the Biafran war, which pitted Emecheta’s Igbo East against the
Hausa North and Yoruba West. Equally, her work reflects deep tensions within
London’s black community between those of Caribbean and African origin.
Among some (post)colonial societies, furthermore, women may be marginalised
and anonymised by an indigenous patriarchy to an extent that a fiercely
 Relational Selves 19
individualistic conception of autonomous Selfhood becomes – strategically and
temporarily, at least – legitimate, even necessary. For example, Merle Hodge
argues that: ‘From the very beginning of West Indian history the black woman
has had a de facto “equality” thrust upon her – the equality of cattle in a herd.’15
Equally, Shirley Lim (see Chapter 4) suggests that to be able to write auto/bio-
graphically, a postcolonial woman ‘may have to develop the “consciousness” of a
gap between [her]self and others’; only thus can she escape ‘the rule of her com-
munity’ and the ‘doubly colonial world’ to which her gender may be confined.16
This is the case not only with Lim, but with writers as diverse as Emecheta,
Sindiwe Magona and Nawal El Saadawi (see Chapter 3).
In the rest of this chapter, I apply feminist debates about this second thematic
of subjectivity to postcolonial life-writing by men, in order to explore whether it
conforms to the patterns of (non-)relationality detected in both canonical auto-
biography and its female analogues. Having considered the sometimes contra-
dictory evidence which C.L.R. James and Brendan Behan provide, I will then
explore its implications for the primary strategic issue of my text, the question of
the specificity of postcolonial life-writing. In this respect, I am again prompted by
Fanon, whose Black Skin adumbrates what Edouard Glissant calls a character-
istically postcolonial ‘poetics of relation’17 on a number of levels. Perhaps the
most striking axis Fanon conjures is the assertion that the black man ‘must be
black in relation to the white man’.18 This might seem both an unfortunate
illustration of Fanon’s tendency to masculinism (although in this particular
instance it may be primarily a problem of translation19), as well as unwittingly
supportive of Gusdorf ’s argument about the secondary and dependent nature of
non-western life-writing. (This argument will be contested in due course.) None-
theless, it usefully raises the theoretical issue of whether (post)colonial subjectivity
is necessarily constructed along this relational axis, as a consequence of the
material histories of colonial acculturation, thereby inflecting established concep-
tions of auto/biographical representations of personhood. However, as one might
expect of a thinker steeped in psychoanalytic thinking and immersed in issues of
language and ideology, Fanon’s conception of relationality goes much deeper,
deriving in the last instance from what he considers to be the inalienably social
character of Selfhood: ‘Hence we are driven from the individual back to the
social structure.’20 Thus, while deeply preoccupied by his individual experience
and formation, Fanon is also concerned with the predicament of the Antillean,
even of the colonised subject as a whole.

Self and nation: C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963)

In certain respects, the centred and sovereign Self ostensibly constructed in
James’s text, like Morgan’s, corresponds to what is widely considered to be the
normative model of the Subject in the western canon of autobiography. Unity
of Being characterises those figures whom James most admires. Of William
Hazlitt, for example, he comments that ‘he is not a divided man … He takes
his whole self wherever he goes’21. By contrast, despite inspiring James as a
20 Relational Selves
cricket and music critic, Neville Cardus is represented as ‘a victim of … that
division of the human personality, which is the greatest curse of our time’ (BaB:
196). Like Augustine’s Confessions, Beyond a Boundary represents James’s trajectory
towards self-knowledge and psychological maturity in terms of a progression from
division to integration of Self. James acknowledges that, as a boy: ‘Two people
lived in me: one, the rebel against all family and school discipline and order; the
other, a Puritan who would have cut off a finger sooner than do anything con-
trary to the ethics of the game’ (BaB: 28). Nonetheless, the author suggests, he
had already intuited the principles of synthesis and holism which were to become
the hallmark of his later conception of personhood: ‘Somehow from around me
I … selected and fastened on to the things that made a whole’ (BaB: 18). Anna
Grimshaw argues that Beyond a Boundary ‘completed the search for integration
which James had begun … some sixty years before’.22 So important did the
principle of unity of Being become for its author that she explains her subject’s
defection from the revolutionary Marxism, in which he was active for over two
decades, in terms of James’s increasing conviction that it ‘separated essential
aspects of his being’.23
Consonant with the argument of feminist critics discussed above, James’s
autobiographical Self apparently displays a characteristically masculine tendency
not just towards acquisition of ‘sovereignty’ but to monadism and isolation (com-
pare N.C. Chaudhuri, see Chapter 5). This appears to be corroborated by the
neglect in Beyond a Boundary of the author’s immediate ‘Others’. Confined largely
to the first three chapters, James’s birth family makes a brief reappearance at the
end, where his unnamed second wife (Constance Webb) and son are introduced,
only to be summarily dismissed. ‘I do not feel inclined to go into all that here,’
James comments laconically (BaB: 254; neither his first nor third wives are men-
tioned at all in the narrative). Aside from Learie Constantine, furthermore, few
personal friends are given much attention. Such factors invite one to (mis)read
Beyond a Boundary in the same way as Morgan’s My Place (or even Equiano’s Inter-
esting Narrative), as a record of the process by which a talented individual(ist) from
the margins secures a position of social distinction by conforming to dominant
norms and values.
James’s apparent investment in a conventional model of sovereign, monadic
Selfhood might be read as one symptom of his well-nigh total assimilation to
western culture. Farrukh Dhondy proposes that he was ‘the only intellectual of
the black diaspora unequivocally to espouse and embrace the intellectual, artistic
and socio-political culture of Europe’.24 Ultimately simplistic though Dhondy’s
interpretation is, a selective reading of Beyond a Boundary certainly provides evi-
dence to support it. Recounting his immersion in the public-school ethos of his
schooling and devotion to British writing, from school-boy yarns to classical fig-
ures – notably Thackeray – James describes himself as: ‘A British intellectual long
before I was ten, already an alien in my own environment among my own
people, even my own family’ (BaB: 18). If he later became a ‘declared enemy of
British imperialism’ (BaB: 45), the terms in which his enmity were framed were
nonetheless heavily indebted to the western Marxist thought he first encountered
 Relational Selves 21
in England and developed in the US. Marxism also enabled James to theorise his
early intuitive grasp of the all-important principles of holism and integration. In
one letter, he quotes Marx’s dictum that: ‘The truth is in the whole.’25 However,
as the same letter’s reference to ‘the incomparable Hegel’26 suggests, it is to
Marx’s predecessor that James ultimately looks for the synthesising, dialectical
method which was to underpin his political and intellectual projects, including his
life-writing. James’s recourse late in life to the autobiographical mode in Beyond a
Boundary might be considered in turn as evidence of a retreat to his early pattern
of positive identification with the culture of the coloniser, after he became dis-
illusioned with revolutionary Marxism. Gestures towards the same Puritan tradi-
tion of spiritual autobiography drawn on by Equiano (and, later, Emecheta) can
be detected in James’s acknowledgement of how he ‘worshipped at the shrine of
John Bunyan’ (BaB: 20). Early in life, James not only considered it his ‘moral and
religious duty’ to improve himself (BaB: 21), but embarked on a consistent process
of self-examination which, arguably, culminates in Beyond a Boundary.
However, James’s apparent investment in such a model of autobiographical
Selfhood cannot be seen unproblematically either as a function of his gender or as
a sign of his assimilation to the dominant in the terms Dhondy proposes.27 As
with Morgan, his conception of personhood operates in the first place as a critical
response to the psychologically fragmenting forces of colonialism. Paul Buhle
argues that because of its particular histories, during which it fell successively
under Spanish, French and British rule, together with the importation of large
numbers of African slaves and Indian indentured labourers, ‘perhaps more than
any other Caribbean society [ James’s home island of Trinidad was] the victim …
of multiple identities’.28 (See also the discussion of the implications of this argu-
ment for Naipaul in Chapter 5.) But while deprecating the fracturing effects of
racial theory on identity, of which Morgan and Equiano also complain, James’s
conception of Selfhood is further mobilised against the threat posed to individual
psychological integrity by both the capitalist and totalitarian systems dominant in
the mid-twentieth century. According to Grimshaw, James believed that ‘never
before had the individual personality been so fragmented and restricted’.29 Con-
versely, Brett St Louis rightly suggests that James’s high valuation of classical
Greece derived in large measure from his conviction of its commitment to the
psychic wholeness of its citizens. Thus, James ‘grieves the loss of the integrated
personality that was not an accident of Greek antiquity, but a result of its direct
democracy that cultivated individuals who understood and exercised their rights,
liberties, freedoms, and possibilities in relation to their community’.30
More importantly for the focus of this chapter, the Self constructed in Beyond a
Boundary is not set ‘over against’ its ‘Others’ in the terms described by Misch,
Gusdorf and Olney, any more than Morgan’s. For James, integration of Self is the
desired effect and goal of the individual’s integration into society. This underpins
his distinctive conception of ‘personality in society’ (BaB: 3, my emphasis), a theme
announced on the first page of the text, where it is also dramatised. Like some of
the nineteenth-century ‘condition of England’ novels which he so much admired,
Beyond a Boundary begins with a panoramic long-shot of the community in which
22 Relational Selves
the boy James is situated, before narrowing its focus to the protagonist. He is first
glimpsed perched on a chair, which enables him with equal facility to reach for
the bookshelf and look out of the window onto the cricket ground opposite. Inner
and outer, ideational and material, private and public worlds are thereby related,
if not seamlessly conjoined, as are the principles of self-reflection and social (inter-
action). Instead personality is the effect of the system of relations embodied in all
forms of social organisation in which the individual is involved. This includes
sport, James’s organising metaphor in Beyond a Boundary for conceptualising Car-
ibbean society. He was therefore to dismiss the argument that Garfield Sobers,
possibly the most talented cricketer of the post-war era, was anything other than

the most typical West Indies cricketer that it is possible to imagine. All gen-
iuses are merely people who carry to an extreme definitive [sic] the char-
acteristics of the unit of civilization to which they belong and the special act
or function which they express or practise.31

This fundamentally relational conception of personhood has crucial implica-

tions for James’s conception of autobiographical form, involving the necessity of
going ‘beyond the boundaries’ of the genre as conventionally understood. James’s
Preface asserts that what follows is ‘neither cricket reminiscences nor auto-
biography’ (BaB: n.p.) and justifies his hybrid, ‘in-between’ mode of writing on the
basis that: ‘To establish his own identity, Caliban … must himself pioneer into
regions Caesar never knew’ (BaB: n.p.). This foregrounds not only the text’s
unconventional style but offers an explanation for it in terms of both the relation
between James as an individual and his representative identity as (rebellious) Car-
ibbean archetype, and between the author and the coloniser (in the manner
Fanon describes). Autobiography may have provided James with a preliminary
‘grammar’ in which to articulate his Self, much as Caliban was taught by Pros-
pero to express himself; however, in keeping with his dissident forerunner, James
subverts its rules to the extent that what the Preface describes as ‘the auto-
biographical framework’ (BaB: n.p.) becomes severely attenuated in the service of
exploring those social relations which structure James’s own formation.
Most obviously, the revisionary nature of Beyond a Boundary is represented in its
concern to provide a gallery of portraits (or group-portrait) of cultural figures and
cricketers, many of whom James did not know personally, who contributed to his
intellectual and political development. Pre-eminent among them, although in this
case someone he did know, is Learie Constantine, who is given such emphasis
that James at one point admits: ‘Biography is my subject’ (BaB: 134). Further
contrary to what one might expect, the ‘Epilogue and Apotheosis’, moreover,
provide no summative account of James’s reflections on his life and experience,
but focuses instead on the Melbourne Test match between Australia and the West
Indies in 1961. In turn, despite the apparent influence of Bunyan, the text lacks
the kind of intimately self-reflective ‘conversion’ scenes found in Equiano which
might explain, for example, James’s decisive turns to and from Marxism/Trotskyism.
A further deviation from generic norms is the inclusion of an index, which pushes
 Relational Selves 23
his text towards historiography rather than personal narrative. His apparent
desire to diminish the subjective aspects of his writing is reinforced in remarks
about another genre on which he draws. ‘Any extended cricket analysis which is
not based on historical facts or the techniques of the game,’ James states dis-
missively, in asserting the difference between his own text and run-of-the-mill
cricket reminiscences, ‘tells us more about the writer than what he is writing
about’ (BaB: 171).
Thus, as Ato Quayson argues, even insofar as Beyond a Boundary can be under-
stood as an autobiography, it offers an ‘explicit collocation of the individual per-
sonality with an entire historical process’.32 This gives James’s text its epic scope,
sweeping from ancient Athens, through Victorian Britain to the contemporary
Caribbean, as the author seeks to establish his conception of the relationship of
the general to the particular, including his individual Self. The economy with
which this objective is accomplished derives primarily from the author’s focus on
the game of cricket. For James, as Aldon Nielson argues, cricket is ‘a dramatic
spectacle in which the dialectical relations between the one and the many are
continually re-enacted’.33 It therefore provides rich matter for reflection on the
wider problems of ‘relationality’ which interest James as an historian, cultural
theorist and political philosopher as well as autobiographer. In the first place,
cricket embodies the same system of morality and laws which both constrain and
enable the individual in relation to social structures of more obvious kinds. Fur-
ther, it demands the co-operation between the members of the team towards a
collective goal, which for the writer is the very essence of meaningful social
organisation (BaB: 197).
Within the conditions of Caribbean life more specifically, these aspects of the
game also enable it to become a medium for anti-colonial politics. James
describes how, through the influence of Constantine, he became increasingly
aware of the gap between the theoretically meritocratic ideals of cricket and the
actuality of its manipulation as a social institution to preserve white privilege and
power. This disjunction provides the site for nationalist sentiment to develop, a
gathering mobilisation in which James eagerly participated once he reached
England. Despite being a product of colonial acculturation, cricket offered itself
as the basis of an independent national culture partly because of its mass audience
and partly because of its integrative dynamic. Even during colonial times, James
shows, the otherwise stratified classes and racial groups in Trinidad came together
to play, although the different clubs still reproduced these inherited social divi-
sions in respect of their membership. Inter-island and international competition
nonetheless steadily broke down these stratifications, providing the basis for the
emergence of a common sense of ‘West Indianness’, which reached its apotheosis
with the appointment of Frank Worrell as the first black captain of the West
Indies. In this development, Beyond a Boundary suggests that James, as editor of The
Nation newspaper, plays a direct, significant and representative role, thereby also
enhancing his personal feelings of belonging after many years in exile.
However, cricket further illustrates James’s conception of nationalism as merely
a stage in the larger dialectic of human development towards a culture of
24 Relational Selves
‘universal’ relations which would make such particularist forms of identification
redundant. As Grimshaw argues, James ‘understood the movement of the modern
world to be one of increasing integration’.34 One symptom of this was the writer’s
enthusiastic support for a West Indian Federation, which partly explains James’s
focus on cricket as the prime pan-Caribbean cultural practice (at least in its
Anglophone parts) rather than on calypso or Carnival, as one might have expec-
ted from a specifically Trinidadian nationalist. Influenced by both Marxism and
Pan-Africanism, James further proposes a model of international relations which
seeks to sublate the old binaries of coloniser and colonised into a new synthesis.
Cricket is particularly useful to James’s argument insofar as it symbolises the cul-
ture shared (increasingly, at least theoretically, on equal terms) between former
masters and bondsmen.
This multiplicitous emphasis on integration (compare Morgan) in turn suggests
that Beyond a Boundary may in fact be more structurally coherent as an auto/bio-
graphical text than might seem on first reading James’s Preface. In the course of
exploring his social concerns, the sources of the ideas and structures of feeling
which define James’s particular ways of seeing and being also emerge very clearly.
For example, his personal investment in cricket is related to its promise to bring
to an end what he describes as the ‘war between English Puritanism … and the
realism of West Indian life’ (BaB: 21), which raged within him during early life. In
this light, the generic disjunctions become less glaring. Thus, the ‘Epilogue and
Apotheosis’, which initially appears to have little bearing on the author’s own
development, can in fact be read allegorically as heralding the emergence of the
social conditions necessary for the very possibility of an auto/biography like
Beyond a Boundary. It is only once the West Indies has ‘made a public entry into the
comity of nations’ (BaB: 261) that James can complete a text which is at once
linked to the historical traditions and conventions of western autobiography while
simultaneously radically questioning them. (Indeed, it is only at this moment of
decolonisation that James can assert a Self which is ‘sovereign’ in political as well
as epistemological terms.) Equally, only at this particular conjuncture can James’s
formation in Beyond a Boundary be read in representative terms as an allegory of
the growth of Trinidad, the West Indies and, indeed, the whole colonial world,
towards independence and thence to the genuine integration implied in the con-
cept of the ‘comity of nations’. These are clear manifestations of the ‘connected
pattern’ (BaB: 7) which James’s text seeks to construct at the formal as well as
thematic level. Like Grimshaw, St Louis judges the quest for synthesis a success,
arguing that, it ‘seamlessly combines [ personal] memoir and West Indian social
history’.35
This does not mean that James’s project is without contradictions. In the first
place, integration of Self is achieved partly by significant omissions, not just in
James’s personal, but public life. Grant Farred suggests that James’s barely
acknowledged American sojourn (1938–53) was nonetheless ‘crucial to his con-
ception of Beyond a Boundary’.36 Indeed, he goes on to argue that the unified Self-
hood that James so assiduously constructs is compensation for a life of often
severe dislocation and upheaval. The society into which James wishes to insert his
 Relational Selves 25
integrated Self is also curiously incomplete. He makes strenuous efforts to pro-
mote cultural practices (auto/biographical writing as well as cricket) capable of
relating to and integrating the variety of communities of which the Caribbean is
comprised. He is not perhaps entirely successful in terms of racial groups (the
overwhelming majority of cricketers he discusses are black Caribbeans), even if his
awareness of the racially-mixed character of the region, and Trinidad more spe-
cifically (where 40 per cent of the population is of East Indian origin), means that
he explicitly eschews the foundational identity offered by negritude. More proble-
matic still is James’s treatment of gender. At the time Beyond a Boundary was written,
cricket was a game played almost exclusively by men. Roughly half the popula-
tion of the Caribbean, therefore, are positioned as passive onlookers (at best),
rather than active participants in James’s model of national culture, just as some
of the women he was intimately involved with play no real role within his account
of his formation. Nonetheless, it is clear that James consistently aspires to forms of
relation with a variety of ‘Others’, which leads him to go ‘beyond the boundaries’
which canonical autobiography and traditional Auto/biography Studies alike char-
acteristically police. As James argued of Walt Whitman, his ‘passion to identify
himself with his fellow countrymen did enable him to create a new social medium’.37

Self and class (and sexuality): Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

(1958)
While nation is the collective axis with which James is primarily concerned in
terms of his development as an auto/biographical Subject, Beyond a Boundary also
engages with ideas of class affiliation. Cricket is thus represented as a social form
which potentially transcends class as well as racial polarisations in the name of a
new national community-in-the-making. In Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy (1958),
these axes of self-identification are reversed in terms of their importance. The text
elaborates a process whereby what initially seem to be the impregnable claims of
nation on the individual are increasingly complicated by Behan’s awareness of
solidarity with some social fractions within the home of the empire which has for
so long oppressed his country. Indeed, barely a third of the way into his narrative,
this leads him to an apparent outright disavowal of the commitments which gal-
vanised him to participate in a terrorist campaign on the British mainland: ‘I’d
sooner be with Charlie and Ginger and Browny in Borstal than with my own
comrades and country-men any place else.’38
Behan’s self-construction at the outset of the text, which opens in November
1939 with his arrest in Liverpool as a 16-year-old Volunteer on a sabotage mis-
sion,39 situates him squarely within a family tradition of involvement in Irish lib-
eration politics (his father was imprisoned for IRA activities, his maternal uncle
wrote Eire’s national anthem and a grandmother and two aunts were jailed in
Britain on terrorist charges soon after his arrest). While on remand, Behan for-
tifies himself by remembering the sacrifices of previous ‘martyrs’ to the cause and
singing nationalist songs. Equally, when charged, he frames his defiance explicitly
in the discourse of ‘speeches from the dock’ (BB : 4) made by earlier generations
26 Relational Selves
of activists captured by the British, being particularly inspired by the example of
the ‘Invincibles’. Moreover, in representing British atrocities in Ireland after the
First World War as being of a piece with the Amritsar massacre (BB : 2), Behan
aligns himself with a world-wide nationalist struggle against imperialism. Indeed,
his preliminary counter-discursive invocations of British colonial writers like Rider
Haggard and Kipling (BB : 82–3)40 align Behan with much of the new post-
colonial writing emerging at the same time as Borstal Boy, as decolonisation
accelerated in Africa and Asia.
Even at this early stage, however, there are signs of conflict within Behan’s
nationalist identifications. He thus expresses strong hostility towards those who see
Irish nationalism as inseparable from Catholicism. While taking comfort from
religious services (when allowed to attend them), Behan is unable to forgive the
Church for its hostility to the IRA (he follows his father, along with many others
opposed to the Irish Free State’s ‘appeasement’ of Britain over Ulster, in being
excommunicated for belonging to the organisation). These fissures in Behan’s
sense of ‘Irishness’ are exacerbated in other ways. He comes to recognise both the
intractable difference of Northern Irish Catholics like Lavery (BB : 184–7) and the
antipathy towards ‘Dublin jackeens’ like himself of rural ‘Culchies’ such as Parry
(BB : 258). He is further unsettled by growing awareness of his difference from
Irish emigrants settled in England, especially those within the hierarchy of the
penal establishment. Father Lane and Warder Mooney exemplify a disorienting
dis-identification with Ireland among some emigrants which is echoed by certain
prisoners of Irish extraction, notably Dale. Insofar as these prisons are metonyms
of the British state, Behan is eventually forced to acknowledge the complicity of
some of his fellow-countrymen in the system of imperialism from which his nation
supposedly continues to suffer: ‘And some of the worse [sic] bastards running it
are the Irish’ (BB : 301).
Nationalism is compromised primarily, however, because of Behan’s increasing
identification with his fellow-prisoners along the axis of class. He brings with him
from Ireland an already well-developed sense of class identity, inherited from his
painter father. In a letter, Behan recalls a school-teacher debating a book entitled
Could Ireland Become Communist? and comments: ‘For giving a very definite answer
in the affirmative, I got a kick in the neck.’41 At CID headquarters, Behan claims
that he has come to fight for the Irish Workers’ and Small Farmers’ Republic,
making a clear distinction between ‘the left-wing element in the movement’, and
the ‘craw-thumpers’ who ‘would be hopping mad at me giving the impression
that the IRA was Communistic’ (BB : 4–5). That his political philosophy is as
much socialist as nationalist in character is further indicated by recurrent praise
for the Spanish Republican cause, for which Behan had once hoped to fight.42
However, the fact that he comes from the hard streets of Dublin’s North Side
appears to be the determining factor in an increasing sense of solidarity with his
fellow-prisoners:

I had the same rearing as most of them; Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester,

Glasgow, London. All our mothers had all done the pawn – pledging on
 Relational Selves 27
Monday, releasing on Saturday. We all knew the chip shop and the picture
house and the fourpenny rush of a Saturday afternoon, and the summer
swimming in the canal and being chased along the railway by the cops.
(BB : 232)43

Such sentiments pose two particular problems for nationalist ideology. In the first
place, it challenges the discrimination traditionally insisted upon between ‘poli-
tical’ prisoners and common criminals, a distinction which his fellow-IRA detai-
nee Lavery is keen to enforce (BB : 187). Much more damagingly, however, Behan’s
solidarity with his fellow-inmates might be understood as fraternisation with the
enemy, if not ‘a sort of ’igh treason’ (BB : 11).
In fact, Behan never abandons belief in the nationalist cause. Rather, he comes
to question the IRA’s strategy of armed struggle at a time when Nazism was the
more pressing enemy. However, Behan’s shift from nation to class as his primary
axis of self-identification is confirmed as he works through successive stages of the
prison system. In Walton jail, the carceral regime is mapped primarily in terms of
empire, reinforcing his sense of ‘Irishness’. For example, the Governor’s office
‘was a sort of viceregal apartment’ (BB : 48) and Behan ridicules the man himself
as ‘this tired old consul, weary from his labours among the lesser breeds, admin-
istering the King’s justice equal and fairly to wild Irish and turbulent Pathan’
(BB : 82). Borstal, by contrast, is conceived essentially in class terms, where
national identity is less of an issue. The timbered building reminds Behan of ‘a
Tudor great house’ (BB : 203); the Governor is known to all as ‘the Squire’ and
runs his institution on the lines of a public school, with ‘Houses’ (ironically, Behan
is assigned to St George’s), a Matron and dormitory captains. Here, he learns
more sophisticated forms of class-analysis, primarily through Tom Meadows, who
lauds the class-consciousness and organisation exemplified by Robert Tressell’s
Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Nonetheless, Behan increasingly demurs from
Meadows’s cold objectivity towards their fellow-inmates, whom the latter dis-
misses as ‘lumpen proletariat’ (BB : 336). Against such perspectives, the protago-
nist protests that ‘the blokes are only working-class kids the same as ourselves’
(BB : 294), an identification reciprocated by many of the English Behan encoun-
ters. While there are moments when he is taken to task for his IRA membership,
Charlie sets the prevailing tone of solidarity among his fellow-prisoners, even in
Walton: ‘I don’t care, Paddy, if you were in the IRA or what you were bleedin’
in. You’re my china, Paddy’ (BB : 63).
Class identification, however, is only one reason for Behan’s attraction to
Charlie, which soon develops into a clearly homoerotic relationship. The homo-
social world of prison in turn becomes a powerful vector for Behan’s progressive
disenchantment with an Irish nationalism which polices sexuality in coercive
ways. Behan’s can be seen as ‘problematic’ from the outset of the text. Contra-
dicting the self-disciplining discourses of nationalist mythography, he is unable to
subdue his erotic urges while on remand. After first being interrogated, Behan
masturbates in his cell, wondering guiltily what previous ‘martyrs’ would have
thought of him doing so. One could argue that Behan’s sexuality is only
28 Relational Selves
channelled towards other males because of the prison environment. His immedi-
ate appreciation of Charlie’s ‘long dark eyelashes’ (BB : 10), however, seems too
spontaneous to be explained in this way. Such evidence of Behan’s ‘unruly’
sexuality is perhaps supported by the letter ‘from a boy in Dublin’ (BB : 2) found
on him at the time of his arrest. Despite Behan’s disclaimers, it seems especially
significant in the absence of any equivalent from his alleged girl-friend, Shiela
[sic]. The letter’s contents are not spelled out, but one might infer that Behan’s
homosexual orientations precede his incarceration in English institutions. If het-
erosexuality is strictly policed within nationalist discourse (Shiela reminds Behan
tartly that he is a Volunteer when he makes unwelcome advances [BB : 66]),
homosexuality is an affront to the discourses of ‘Mother Ireland’ and the maiden
Erin. Indeed Colbert Kearney describes it as ‘an obscene insult to the good name
of republicanism’.44 The Belfast IRA man Lavery reminds Behan unambiguously
that: ‘The prisoners … talk about things, aye, and do things … that the lowest
ruffian in Ireland, Catholic or Protestant, wouldn’t put his tongue to the mention
of ’ (BB : 186).45 From the orthodox nationalist point of view, the scandal of
Behan’s same-sex relationships is, of course, compounded by the fact that his
objects of desire are English. Charlie is not only like ‘a typical English boy in
an advertisement’ (BB : 164), however, but a member of the colonisers’ armed
forces, an identity which is reinforced each time he dons his uniform for official
occasions.
The increasing complexity and hybridity of Behan’s (self-)identifications, remi-
niscent of Equiano’s decentred model of subjectivity, is partly suggested in the
rich range of inter-texts which Borstal Boy draws on. These suggest a multiplicity
of national, ethnic and class affiliations which progressively undermine singular-
ising notions of unified personhood and national belonging alike. These include
not just the Irish tradition of prison narratives represented by ‘martyrs’ like Tom
Clarke (BB : 42, 64),46 but British works as diverse as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
(written in Bedford jail and another link with Equiano, as well as James) and
Woolf ’s fictional biography of the bi-gendered Orlando (which furnishes Behan’s
densely teasing epigraph). Perhaps the most significant inter-text, however, is
Behan’s fellow-Dubliner and co-exile, James Joyce, first mentioned after Behan is
beaten up for taking Father Lane to task (BB : 68) and later the subject of Behan’s
prize essay at the ‘Eisteddfod’. There are certainly enough specific echoes of A
Portrait of the Artist to justify seeing Behan’s text as ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young (ex-)Nationalist’. Specific echoes include the Christmas sermon in Walton
(compare Chapter 3 of A Portrait) and Behan’s revelatory experiences on the sea-
shore at Hollesley Bay (compare Chapter 4 of A Portrait). Borstal Boy, too, describes
the formation of an artist’s mind, in the process of which Behan repeats the lesson
that Stephen draws: in order to succeed, he must escape the nets of nationality
and religion. In exile, moreover, Behan often survives through the silence (BB :
13, 221) and cunning (BB : 348–9) which Stephen advocates. Nonetheless, while
this might seem to be evidence of Behan’s turning away from the kinds of rela-
tionality described earlier, he represents such strategies as ultimately political in
nature and collectively-oriented: ‘I thought it better to survive my sentence and
 Relational Selves 29
come out and strike a blow in vengeance … than be kicked to death or insanity
here’ (BB : 131).
Above all, Behan’s affinities with Joyce’s cosmopolitan conception of a
decentred, postnational, but still relational conception of identity can be traced in
the linguistic hybridity which does so much to reflect the protagonist’s shifting
negotiations with various collectives. At one point, he refers to Poynings’ law of
1495, which ‘forbade the native Irish to keep up their own language and customs’
(BB : 283). This perhaps explains Behan’s pride in his Gaelic, expressed not only
in songs but also diction like ‘airt’, ‘shoneen’, and ‘garsun’ (BB : 3, 199, 122). But
he also brings with him distinctive versions of Irish English, whether ‘corruptions’
like ‘eejit’ (BB : 171), proverbs and sayings such as ‘he’d mind mice at a cross-
roads’ (BB : 180) or ‘short and sweet as an ass’s gallop’ (BB : 135). Onto this is
grafted the more particular class dialect of Dublin’s North Side, which he distin-
guishes from what he dismisses as ‘Abbey Theatre bogman [country] talk’ (BB :
97).47 This is especially apparent when Behan slips into interior monologue, as if
to suggest that this is his authentic ‘voice’:

Yous have enough songs out of yous about the boys that faced the Saxon foe,
but bejasus, when there’s one of them there among you, the real Ally Dally,
the real goat’s genollickers, yous are silent as the tomb.
(BB : 85)

It might be considered symptomatic of Behan’s ‘hunker-sliding’ (BB : 118) towards

sympathetic identification with England, therefore, that towards the end of the
text he uses not the first-person, but third-person, plural formulations like ‘As they
say in Irish’ (BB : 327) to preface certain instances of ‘native’ language use.48
Certainly, his language becomes inflected by a new range of class-specific ‘Eng-
lishes’ acquired from fellow-prisoners. Shortly after his arrest, Behan boasts that:
‘I speak it like a native, English, in two days and a bit’ (BB : 15). Soon afterwards,
he describes them smoking ‘as Charlie said, “like lords’ bastards”’ (BB : 29). From
Charlie, Behan also picks up ‘Cockney’ rhyming slang, often abbreviated, as in
‘china’ (‘china plate’/mate) or ‘flowery’ (‘flowery dell’/cell). Onto this in turn Behan
grafts aspects of dialect from other parts of Britain, often rendered phonetically in
order to bring out their distinctive accents.
However, at least to some extent, Behan’s linguistic shifts must be understood
as a defensive form of mimicry, making him less vulnerable among English pris-
oners whom he fears initially will prove ‘very nationalistic’ (BB : 70). In this sense
it can be understood as a stratagem of self-concealment of the kind which some
critics argue was favoured by Equiano. Conversely, in contrast to Equiano, one
might claim that Behan ‘displaces’ standard English as deliberate strategy of cul-
tural/political self-assertion which is consonant with his continuing nationalist
affiliations. His unorthodox English usage, notably a flagrant disregard for the
‘rules’ of grammar and syntax, is clearly subversive of the cultural authority
represented by the official English of the prison system (itself a metaphor of
colonial rule), in a manner which foreshadows the experimentations of
30 Relational Selves
postcolonial writers. Like contemporaries such as Achebe, moreover (Things Fall
Apart was published in the same year as Borstal Boy), Behan asserts resistance
through appropriation of the master-texts of the colonising culture. A particularly
striking example of this comes in his performance of Hardy’s Under the Greenwood
Tree, during which Behan sings the Christmas carol to ‘the air of the “Famine
Song”’ (BB : 88). He ‘translates’ other passages from the novel into Irish English
(BB : 80–1), to the extent that, Kearney argues, ‘even Hardy’s prose is colo-
nised’.49 Behan’s affiliations with postcolonial discourse are also reinforced
through associations with Caliban, another colonial subject who has had his
island usurped. Behan is linked to Caliban in being an object of ‘reform’ within a
comparably ‘benevolent’ carceral regime. They also share both a proclivity for
‘sweet airs that give delight’ (Behan is forever singing traditional Gaelic songs)
and cursing. Behan’s curses are as inventive and pointed as his predecessor’s: ‘If
you’re half right it’s too good for you, you jackamanape’s scourings of a lock
hospital piss pot’ (BB : 260; compare 82, 96, 297).50 Once again, such language
constitutes a form of cultural ‘disobedience’ which expresses resistance just as
obviously as Behan’s sexual ‘deviance’ and political ideology.
The complexity of the author’s (self-)identifications thus powerfully challenges
narrowly conceived models of the relation between individual and collective in
some anti-colonial discourse. As John Brannigan argues: ‘[ Irish] Nationalist nar-
ratives of imprisonment tend to suggest the unequivocal identification of the
individual with the nation.’51 However, Behan’s deviation from this model does
not amount to his full assimilation to English culture. If his early release signals
that the British state no longer considers him a threat, Behan is nonetheless
deported and forbidden to return to the United Kingdom. The final scene, which
finds him all alone on Irish soil once more, just as he was when he arrived in
England on his sabotage mission, might seem to affirm Behan’s final embrace of a
masculinist and monadic conception of self-sufficiency, signifying his achievement
of autobiographical maturity. In this respect, the changing conception of Selfhood
which accompanies Behan’s trajectory through the prison system appears to have
come full circle. In Walton, as an apparently freelance and independent Volun-
teer, he is placed in solitary confinement, which largely suits his initially solipsistic
sense of autonomy and difference. In Feltham, he shares a cell with others, before
moving into a crowded dormitory in Borstal. These increasingly populated scenes
of confinement allegorise his gradual opening up to the principle of relationality
as a precondition of personal growth and development as he moves towards
something resembling a normal society in Suffolk.
In this light, however, the ending is more complex and melancholy than an
initial reading might suggest. When the Irish immigration officer comments that it
must be wonderful to be free, Behan retorts ambiguously: ‘It must’ (BB : 372). If
his physical liberty is restored, it is by no means clear that Ireland will offer him
the intellectual and emotional (and sexual) freedoms paradoxically available in a
carceral bastion of the empire which continues to prevent the reunification of his
homeland. Just as his homeland appears in a ‘haze’ (BB : 371), so Behan’s corre-
sponding inner uncertainties arise primarily from an intuition that he is now cut
 Relational Selves 31
off from precisely those solidarities and axes of identification which were so
instrumental in his formation.

Conclusion
The texts analysed here suggest that postcolonial life-writing stands in a complex
relationship to western women’s auto/biography in respect of this second the-
matic of subjectivity, too. While both sub-genres contrast with the canon in terms
of their construction of an auto/biographical Self which is fundamentally rela-
tional, this is sometimes conceived in rather different terms in the two sub-genres.
Thus, James and Behan to some degree corroborate the argument of feminist
critics that intimate varieties of inter-personal relationships are less important in
the construction of male auto/biographical Selfhood than is the case with women
writers. For example, Behan greets the news of Charlie’s death in the war with
brief and stoic under-statement. James offers even less insight into his affective
life, a paradigm equally evident in texts from Claude McKay’s A Long Way
from Home (1937) to Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951; see
Chapter 5). However, there are important exceptions to this pattern. Thus,
whereas feminist critics have pointed to the importance of the mother–daughter
relationship as a prime instance of the characteristic relationality of women’s life-
writing, a corresponding father–son axis can be found in some of its male
equivalent, for example, Said’s Out of Place (see Chapter 7) and Hanif Kureishi’s
My Ear at his Heart: Reading My Father (2004).52 V.S. Naipaul, too, devotes con-
siderable, if ambivalent, attention to his father in Finding the Centre (1984; see
Chapter 5), a relationship which the author has since excavated in greater
detail.53
The general absence or marginalisation of immediate ‘significant Others’ in
male postcolonial life-writing is, however, often compensated for by identification
and solidarity with a variety of groups in relation to which the writer constructs
his sense of Selfhood. As the example of James suggests, this is perhaps most
strikingly evident in political claims to representativity and relationality at a
national level (an issue which will be returned to in Chapter 7). Spectacular
examples of such claims include Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame
Nkrumah (1957) and Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew
(1998), in which auto/biographer and nation are breathtakingly conflated. As has
been seen, class is a further important axis of individual/collective (self-)identification
in male postcolonial life-writing and racial/ethnic collectives another. Thus, the
final chapter of McKay’s A Long Way from Home is entitled ‘On Belonging to a
Minority Group’, as if to suggest that, despite his scepticism about ‘Negro politics’
as constituted at the time of writing, he remains willy-nilly bound within this axis
of (self-)identification (not least by the gaze of others).
While engaging with collective identities based in gender and – to a lesser
extent – class,54 western women’s life-writing rarely espouses those associated with
nation to the same degree as its postcolonial analogues. Although not an auto-
biography, Woolf ’s Three Guineas (1938) sets the pattern in this respect, with the
32 Relational Selves
narrator’s famous declaration that: ‘As a woman I want no country. As a woman,
my country is the whole world.’55 Woolf is equally little interested in ethnicity or
race as grounds for solidarity, whether among women or between the genders. In
this respect, minoritarian and postcolonial women’s life-writing often converges
far more closely with its male analogues than with western women’s life-writing.
For example, Hertha Wong claims that while Native American women’s life-
writing has powerful elements of relationality, ‘instead of identifying as a (uni-
versal) woman, a Native woman is far more likely to identify herself by tribal,
national, or cultural affiliation’.56 Such collective (self-)identifications are also
widely found in postcolonial women’s writing considered in this volume, as the
examples of Morgan and Amiry (Chapter 7) suggest, although often, as with
Behan, in qualified form (see, for example, the work of Lim and El Saadawi,
discussed in Chapters 3 and 4). There is therefore some justice in Lionnet’s
observation that in postcolonial life-writing as a whole, ‘the individual necessarily
defines him – or herself with regard to a community’,57 whether of ethnic, racial
or national kinds. Indeed, the Indian critic G.N. Devy has asserted that:

if a [postcolonial Indian] writer cannot relate himself meaningfully to his

culture, his society, the whole purpose of writing an autobiography is lost.
Such a book … cannot succeed in creating organic links with the society
which should be the aim of an autobiography.58

However, as suggested in the introduction to this chapter, one should not

characterise all postcolonial life-writing, even by women, as inevitably relational
or seeking representativity at this level. While Olney was, laudably, one of the first
westerners to recognise non-western life-writing, like Lionnet, he has an unfortu-
nate tendency to essentialise it in this respect. Thus, he argues that, like western
minoritarian life-writing, it ‘renders in a peculiarly direct and faithful way the
experience and vision of a people, which is the same experience and the same
vision lying behind and informing all the literature of that people’.59 This is
unconvincingly homogenising. Many postcolonial politicians do not narrate
themselves in the grandiose fashion of Nkrumah and Lee. For example, in the
epilogue to the autobiography he published at a moment of powerful nationalist
upsurge in India, Nehru insists that: ‘I often wonder if I represent anyone at all.’60
Equally, while writing of his father – and also partly corroborating Fanon’s
argument, cited at the outset of this chapter, insofar as he constructs himself in
axial relation to the metropolitan centre – Naipaul’s autobiographical texts (see
Chapter 5) offer no sympathetic negotiation whatsoever with the collective iden-
tities represented by nation and ethnicity (or, indeed, class). Instead, emphasising
both the ‘cruelty of extended-family life’, and what it sees as the vacuity of deco-
lonisation politics, A Way in the World (1994), in particular, charts the process
whereby Naipaul learns to ‘belong to [him]self ’.61
Such examples of non-relationality should not necessarily be dismissed as
reactionary deviations from the norms of male postcolonial life-writing, any more
than Lim and El Saadawi can be castigated for their strategic and occasional
 Relational Selves 33
embrace of individualism. Parallel with some western women colleagues’ evasions
of the essentialising terms of patriarchal discourse, the postcolonial writer’s
embrace of autonomy and singularity could be interpreted in the first place as a
riposte to the tendency in colonial discourse to stereotype subject peoples as
homogenised and indistinguishable collectives (for example, ‘the wily Oriental’ or
‘the noble savage’). Conversely, however, it could be understood as an attempt to
escape the sometimes coercive emphasis on collective identity within ‘indigenous’
social groups to which the writer is affiliated, whether clan, class, ethnic group or
the nation itself, of the kind Lim and El Saadawi describe. Such pressures
underlie the impatience of some minoritarian and postcolonial writers with what
has been described as ‘the burden of representation’.62 To this extent, however,
paradoxical though it may seem, even the apparently detached and monadic
subject constructed in the life-writing of a figure like Naipaul supports Robert
Fraser’s contention that, in the postcolonial context, ‘to separate questions of
personal and political identity is essentially impossible’.63
As with Chapter 1, the texts considered here provide mixed evidence in rela-
tion to the strategic issue of the distinctive identity of postcolonial life-writing in
terms of this thematic of subjectivity. However, analysis of James and Behan
suggests reason for scepticism towards reifying claims that relationality is a special
characteristic of western women’s life-writing. Conversely, the parallels between
the two sub-fields in this respect also make distinguishing sharply between them
problematic. The major difference appears to consist not in terms of the discourse
of relationality itself but in the different degrees and kinds of relation espoused by
western women authors, on the one hand, and their postcolonial colleagues –
male and female – on the other. Investigation of further thematics of subjectivity is
therefore required to advance the project of establishing a poetics of postcolonial
life-writing.
3 Embodied Selves

For James, West Indian nationalism is expressed in significant measure through

the medium of the Body. Insofar as cricket is a physical contest, it allows a dis-
tinctively Caribbean identity to be asserted through the particular styles in which
West Indians play the game, notably in batting and bowling. Equally, Behan’s
rebellion against nationalism, in the name of other kinds of community, is often
expressed through (the erotic energies of ) his body. To this extent, embodiment is
clearly an important thematic of some auto/biographical subjectivity, even if it is
one which, feminist critics have complained, has been largely ignored within
mainstream Auto/biography Studies. Sidonie Smith, for example, suggests that in
their concern to promote a putatively universal Subject, male critics have his-
torically conceived of auto/biographical Selfhood ‘irrespective of or despite the
bodily surround’.1 Gilmore claims that this emphasis derives from canonical
autobiography itself, where the Body is ‘so frequently absent’ as a subject of
investigation; insofar as it is present, she argues, corporality ‘has functioned as a
metaphor for soul, consciousness, intellect, and imagination’, rather than a
material and cultural reality.2 Feminist critics often explain this in terms of the
genre’s roots in the confessional tradition of Christianity, which privileges the life
of the Spirit over that of the Body, a dualism inherited by secular philosophy
from the time of the Renaissance. Thus, for Descartes, according to Shirley
Neuman, the Self is represented as something ‘whose whole essence or nature is
only to think, and which, to exist, has no need of space nor of any material thing
or body’.3
Lack of attention to embodiment as a dimension of identity is certainly evident
in Auto/biography Studies throughout its history. Misch does not mention it,
emphasising instead qualities like the subject’s ‘clarity of consciousness’ and
arguing that a text becomes canonical only when it represents ‘the contemporary
intellectual outlook’.4 Gusdorf follows suit. While stressing that the genre ‘recom-
poses and interprets a life in its totality’, he focuses exclusively on autobiographical
truth conceived ‘as an expression of inmost being’, and of the ‘spiritual capacities of
the writer’.5 The third phase of Auto/biographical Studies is similarly unforth-
coming in this respect, whether in its humanist or post-structuralist inflections. One
searches in vain through the work of critics as diverse as Olney, Spengemann and
Sprinker for any detailed engagement with issues surrounding the Body.
 Embodied Selves 35
Feminist auto/biography critics suggest that the historical occlusion of this
thematic of subjectivity, too, is clearly gendered in its causes and implications,
providing a further explanation for the historical marginalisation of women’s
life-writing. Thus, for Mary Mason, the emphasis on spiritual and intellectual
transcendence of the Body in canonical autobiography ‘does not accord with the
deepest realities of women’s experience’.6 Conversely, Gilmore asserts, female
auto/biographers ‘have found the body to provide rich grounds for thinking
through the relationship between identity and representation’.7 This is primarily
because, as Fedwa Malti-Douglas puts it, for feminists, the Body is ‘a physical
reality that in itself possesses no necessary moral or social meaning but is then
invested with a moral value. This investment, in turn, dictates social conclusions.’8
Such perspectives have been applied across the historical range of western
women’s life-writing, leading Sidonie Smith to claim that ‘[S]ome kind of history
of the body is always inscribed in women’s autobiographical texts.’9 These argu-
ments have been extended to minoritarian women’s life-writing in the West.
Thus, of Asian American women’s work, Shirley Lim (see Chapter 4) observes
that ‘to recognize a material self is to begin to write politically’.10 In turn, they
have been applied to its postcolonial analogues. For example, John Beverley
argues that by virtue of its oral qualities, ‘something of the experience of body
itself inheres in [Latin American] testimonio’.11 Similar patterns have been detected
even in the precursor forms of postcolonial women’s life-writing. For example
discussing The History of Mary Prince (1831), Paquet reminds one that at the centre
‘of Prince’s public account of self is the body of a female slave’.12
As Lim’s comment suggests, important political, as well as psycho-affective,
capital has been claimed for this emphasis in women’s life-writing. In particular, it
allows women writers to revalue the female Body so often demeaned in patri-
archal culture and, more specifically, in canonical autobiography (for example, in
Rousseau’s construction of Zulietta). The agency this focus implies is, significantly,
recurrently expressed in a preoccupation with the bodily attribute of ‘voice’, the
claiming of which – as was seen in Morgan’s case – has become a signature of
feminist mobilisations across the globe. Nonetheless, Neuman cautions that the
attempted recuperation of the female Body in women’s life-writing risks rein-
scribing the patriarchal synecdoches of femininity, namely ‘birth, belly and
body’.13 The same caution holds true for postcolonial counterparts, especially in
view of the characteristically demeaning sexualisation of the female ‘Other’ in
colonial discourse.14 Such dilemmas are also, however, widely apparent in male
postcolonial life-writing, perhaps unsurprisingly given that colonial (and con-
temporary) raciology recurrently constructs the non-western Man in ways parallel
to patriarchy’s conception of the female Body. Whether as a source of labour, in
terms of sexual performance, or even as the figure of the non-human, such dis-
course traditionally (mis)represents the colonised male, in particular, in terms of
his deviation from those qualities which underwrite the West’s characteristic self-
image – notably Mind, Reason and Spirit. Like their women counterparts, male
postcolonial life-writers have chosen to negotiate the risk in different ways, as I
will demonstrate.
36 Embodied Selves
Fanon once again formulates the theoretical parameters for postcolonial life-
writing (by both genders) in this respect. Noting that ‘the corporeal schema’ is
discursively constituted by a ‘historico-racial’ one,15 Fanon anticipates the feminist
argument that the Body is a construct as much as a material object and therefore
subject to change and reappropriation. Consequently, while he repeatedly shows
how the ‘Negro’ is oppressed in and because of his Body, he also hails that Body
as a potential site of resistance, pleasure and Self-revaluation. In doing so, Black
Skin also anticipates feminist auto/biography criticism in its rebuttal of the tradi-
tional Christian and Cartesian dualism of western culture (and, by implication, of
canonical autobiography). Instead, he asserts that: ‘[ F ]or us the body is not
something opposed to what you call the mind. We are in the world. And long live
the couple, Man and Earth.’16
In this chapter I analyse two examples of postcolonial life-writing by authors of
different genders in the light of these debates. I will consider whether they treat
the Body to a different degree or in different ways to what is claimed in relation
to canonical autobiography and assess the extent to which such variations can be
mapped in the gendered terms elaborated by feminist revisions of Auto/bio-
graphy Studies. I will further consider whether postcolonial women’s life-writing
represents the Body in the same way as western women colleagues or if it instead
reflects aspects of experience which are specific to the different material and social
contexts of the postcolonial world. Such analysis will then be used to shed light
on the larger strategic question which animates this book, the differences of
postcolonial life-writing from its western analogues.

Gandhi, An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments

with Truth (1927–29)
More than any other text analysed in this book, perhaps, Gandhi’s An Auto-
biography engages with bio-mechanical aspects of the author’s existence, ranging
over themes as diverse as sexual (in)activity, personal hygiene, physical exercise,
labour and diet. Many chapters focus on issues of ingestion, digestion or, indeed,
defecation (at one point, Gandhi describes the pain caused during evacuation by
anal fissures, at another an attack of dysentery during which he suffered ‘thirty to
forty motions in twenty-four hours’17). Despite the abundance of such material,
his text has tended to be read as a classic example of spiritual autobiography
which turns from engagement with its author’s identity-formation in a specific
historical world, towards elaboration of abstract truths applicable to humanity as
a whole. Thus, the Indian critic K. Chellappan argues that An Autobiography dra-
matises Gandhi’s experience of ‘the essential anguish of the eternal Self ’,18 an
emphasis also commonly offered by western commentators. Jeffrey Meyers, for
instance, suggests that: ‘Constantly seeking the path of salvation, Gandhi medi-
tates on his sense of moral weakness and the stages of his spiritual development,
his conversion experience and awareness of grace.’19
Such approaches view Gandhi’s conception of the Body as simply a particu-
larly obdurate aspect of individual identity which must be overcome if the author
 Embodied Selves 37
is to achieve ‘true’ Selfhood (or transcendence of it). Through learning to school
the physical appetites which link him to the animal world, it is implied, his proper
identity as a mahatma (‘great soul’) emerges like a butterfly from its ugly pupa.
However, the relationship of issues of embodiment to autobiographical Selfhood
in Gandhi’s text is more complex than these readings suggest. From his Intro-
duction, which flags the text’s subsequent engagement with ‘non-violence, celib-
acy and other principles of [bodily] conduct believed to be distinct from truth’ (A A: 15,
my emphasis), Gandhi is evidently seeking to rethink the oppositional relationship
between the realms of Spirit and Body which so often shape readings of An Auto-
biography. For example, the suspicion of conventional western medicine, which
becomes increasingly marked as his text proceeds, is driven by Gandhi’s percep-
tion that it damagingly separates these two aspects of identity in its diagnostic
procedures. Moreover, insofar as his body is the laboratory within which the vast
majority of Gandhi’s ‘experiments with truth’ are conducted, there is a strong
suggestion that some kinds of ‘truth’ can only be reached through the Body. For
example, as Joseph Alter observes, Gandhi argues that ‘brahmacharya and ahimsa
would have no meaning in the absence of the body’.20
There is certainly a strong personal and psychological dimension to Gandhi’s
thematic investment in the Body in An Autobiography. Perhaps the clearest analogue
of the ‘crisis’ scenes of western spiritual autobiography is the early account of the
night of his father’s death, of which the author comments: ‘It is a blot I have
never been able to efface or forget’ (A A: 44). The moment is made traumatic not
simply because of Gandhi’s loss of his parent, but by the fact that the writer is
making love to his wife in an adjoining room when death occurs: ‘I saw that, if
animal passion had not blinded me, I should have been spared the torture of
separation from my father during his last moments’ (A A: 44). The fact that Kas-
turbai is pregnant compounds Gandhi’s sense of guilt, which is further intensified
when the child dies a few days after birth. As Erik Erikson’s magisterial psycho-
biographies of Gandhi make clear, this event is central to the development of
the author’s personality and helps to account for the obsession with Bodily self-
discipline which often takes centre stage in An Autobiography.21
However, the importance of the Body in An Autobiography extends to the fact
that it is not simply Gandhi’s private property, an aspect of personal identity or
the avenue to a particular individual’s enlightenment. It is also a socialised inter-
face between those domains and the broader cultural forces shaping the writer’s
world, in relation to which he takes on progressively more public and repre-
sentative roles (compare Chapter 2). The intimate link between individual body
and the wider ‘Body Politic’ is indicated in Gandhi’s acknowledgement that it is
primarily his experiments with the former ‘from which I have derived such power
as I possess for working in the political field’ (A A: 14). These experiments respond
in considerable measure to Gandhi’s growing awareness through corporeal
experience of his status as colonised subject. His sense of the humiliating injustice
of foreign rule is initially expressed in shame at his feebleness compared with the
‘white body’ of colonial authority (A A: 34). Time and again in his early life,
Gandhi is physically reminded of that feebleness. His first meeting with a British
38 Embodied Selves
administrator after returning to India from London ends with him being man-
handled out of the office (A A:103). In South Africa, Gandhi suffers colonial vio-
lence more persistently and directly, whether in being barged off the pavement by
a white security guard, hauled out of coaches and trains to make way for racial
‘superiors’, or pelted with stones, brickbats and rotten eggs by a settler mob on his
return to Natal in 1897. The writer experiences other modes of physical con-
straint and surveillance, for example, when he is variously prevented from tra-
velling to the Transvaal (and later to the Punjab) by the imperial system of
permits familiar from Morgan and Equiano. The physical regulation of subject
bodies is more graphically evident in Gandhi’s multiple experiences of imprison-
ment. And as his engagement in the Zulu ‘rebellion’ (and later the Amritsar
protests) makes plain, colonialism’s ultimate sanction when faced with resistance is
the destruction of the bodies of its subjects.22
Conversely, Gandhi’s elaboration of distinctive forms of mass anti-colonial
politics also derives in significant measure through mobilisation of the Body.
Oppressed by his cowardliness, the adolescent Gandhi allows himself to be tem-
porarily persuaded that ‘meat-eating was good, that it would make me strong and
daring, and that, if the whole country took to meat-eating, the English could be
overcome’ (A A: 35). From the outset, then, An Autobiography conjoins ‘reform’ of
Gandhi’s individual body with the struggle against foreign domination. Indeed,
his desire for mastery of bodily appetites provides a template for developing the
self-control and self-discipline necessary not just to attain self-rule in the political
sphere, but to remain worthy of it. As Parama Roy argues, diet is the ‘terrain on
which his politics would be inaugurated’.23 Experiments in this sphere prepare
the ground for the vow of brahmacharya taken in South Africa, which is in turn ‘a
preliminary as it were to Satyagraha’ (A A: 291), both there and in India. Thus,
the adoption of fasting as a technique of individual bodily purification evolves
into one of Gandhi’s most effective weapons of anti-colonial resistance, although
within the time-frame covered by An Autobiography it is still being used primarily to
resolve disputes of a more local nature. The doctrine of non-violence is a further
illustration of how Gandhi’s concern with the Body inflected his political praxis.
In stark contrast to the physical excesses of colonial power, illustrated in its repri-
sals against the Zulu ‘rebellion’ and the Amritsar protests, for Gandhi, one ‘truth’
of politics is that care for the bodies of opponents is no less an obligation than for
those of his supporters (compare Morgan’s forgiving attitude to ‘white’ Australia).
However, the Body is also mobilised in Gandhi’s critique of traditional Indian
society. If he soon abandons his early flirtation with meat-eating, he never loses
the desire for ‘reform’ of his native culture. This episode is symptomatic in that
the perceived need for change arises from the apparent deficiency of ‘the Indian
Body’ and the discursive regimes which surround it. Indeed, the author’s first
public act of rebellion against tradition is provoked by his caste community’s
prohibition on travel overseas, an injunction with ironic parallels to colonial
restrictions on the circulation of subject bodies.24 Gandhi’s critique of ‘the Indian
Body’ often brings him into conflict with institutionalised religion. Indeed, the
worst derelictions of basic hygiene are often associated with high-caste Hindus.
 Embodied Selves 39
During the plague in Rajkot, for example, Gandhi draws a disobliging contrast
between the latrine arrangements of ‘the upper ten’ (A A: 165) and those of the
poor. He is particularly disgusted by the disregard for sanitation in the holy places
of Benares, seeing this is a clear example of a degenerate deviation from ‘true’
Hindu law. Out of his first experience of a Congress meeting, which demonstrates
that even among the more progressive elements of Indian society there was ‘no
limit to insanitation’ (A A: 212), emerges Gandhi’s decision to make the cleaning
of communal latrines a key symbol of his political programme.
The Body also provides the grounds on which Gandhi articulates his most
radical critique of indigenous ‘biopolitics’ and perhaps his most fundamental
conflict with institutionalised religion. In Bihar, for example, Gandhi is strictly
forbidden to draw water at a well for fear that he may compromise customary
law. He fulminates against religious sanction for such practices: ‘If untouchability
could be a part of Hinduism, it could but be a rotten part or an excrescence’ (A A:
136). Outraged by such prohibitions, he welcomes a family of ‘untouchables’ to
the ashram at Sabarmati, despite the risk that he will lose the support of upper-
caste patrons. Increasingly, however, Gandhi poses the problem not only in
spiritual or ethical, but in macro-political terms, seeing analogies between the
caste system and colonialism, with ‘the upper ten’ exercising equivalent controls
over the lowest orders of Indian society through the medium of the Body.
Equally, the caste system exemplifies for Gandhi the divisions in Indian society
which allow colonialism to more easily maintain control. As with hygiene, how-
ever, the issue also becomes central to the ‘reform’ of Gandhi’s private life as well.
At one point he employs an ‘untouchable’ cook to prepare his meals and even
‘inter-dines’ with this servant. Later, he humbles himself by ‘scavenging’ the
latrines alongside those who traditionally perform this function.
A further aspect of Gandhi’s life which vividly illustrates the intersection of
public and private concerns on the site of the Body is the issue of gender politics.
Gandhi represents himself at the outset of the text as a willing beneficiary of the
traditional system of patriarchy in which he has been brought up, primarily
because it allows him to indulge ‘the [male] passions that flesh is heir to’ (A A: 25).
In order to do so, Gandhi confesses, ‘I had to make good my authority as a hus-
band!’ (A A: 27). The writer unflinchingly describes a whole range of behaviour
designed to enforce his mastery over Kasturbai and his enjoyment of her body. It
is ‘lustful love’, he remorsefully explains, which leads to his failure to educate his
wife. Conversely, it is also largely through the medium of his own body that
Gandhi seeks to dissolve his patriarchal authority and to provide an example to
others in this regard.25 Through the experiment of brahmacharya, for example, he
‘realized that the wife is not the husband’s bondslave, but … an equal partner’
(A A: 39). As a result, he comes to condemn a variety of social practices which
seek to repress women specifically through control of their bodies, from the gen-
eral Hindu system of child-marriage to his native Kathiawad’s ‘peculiar, useless
and barbarous Purdah’ (A A: 28).
As part of this process, Gandhi increasingly seeks to incorporate the ‘feminine’
within his changing conception of Selfhood. This, too, is substantially achieved
40 Embodied Selves
through bodily practices. One example is the theme of nursing which runs
throughout the text, from the boy Gandhi’s administration of massages and
changes of dressing to his dying father, to the performance of ambulance duties in
both South Africa and England, and his care for his sick wife and children in later
life. Another is the assumption of a variety of domestic duties, from cooking to
laundry to dressmaking, which are also conventionally coded as ‘feminine’ activ-
ities. The principle of non-violence could be interpreted as another aspect of the
incorporation of the ‘feminine’ as part of both Gandhi’s personal philosophy and
political programme, in contrast to the emphasis on violent ‘manliness’ among
many fellow-nationalists. Indeed, Gandhi once claimed that ‘woman is the incar-
nation of ahimsa’.26 Yet this project is not without contradictions. For example,
celibacy is imposed on Kasturbai without any consultation (A A: 197). Arguably
this desexualises his wife in a way entirely consonant with the prescriptions of
patriarchal Hindu tradition. Equally, Gandhi’s usurpation of certain ‘feminine’
roles – he at one point displaces his sister from care of her dying husband, at
another he sends away a qualified female nurse during a plague outbreak – is not
compensated for by the promotion of women to roles of any significance in his
political movement, despite the influence on him of the British Suffragettes.27
Indeed, they play the subordinate role typical in anti-colonial nationalism more
broadly.
As such evidence suggests, the Body is a crucial site on which Gandhi, repeat-
edly drawing on his own personal experience, mobilises criticism of aspects of
both colonial and indigenous Indian culture. Conversely, however, anticipating
C.L.R. James, the Body is also represented as a site on which the author
proposes that a ‘reformed’ East and West can work out a more productive rela-
tionship than has been the case under colonialism. This is consonant with the
broader syncretic and internationalist vision represented by the writer’s attempts
‘to unify the teachings of the Gita, The Light of Asia and the Sermon on the
Mount’ (A A: 78). Further, many aspects of Gandhi’s programme of ‘reform’ of
‘the Indian Body’ (including his own) are strongly influenced by his experiences in
the West. As the author points out, despite his parents’ strict vegetarianism (which
he wilfully flouted during his early experiments as a carnivore), Hindu tradition as
he understood it as a young man did not proscribe meat-eating. Indeed ‘the
Manusmriti [Hindu Law as codified by Manu] seemed to support it’ (A A: 47).
Thus, Gandhi’s abstinence from meat on arriving in England should perhaps be
seen primarily as a personal mark of filial respect for his mother’s wishes
rather than an affirmation of Hindu/Indian identity. It is only on visiting a
restaurant in Farringdon, where he purchases a copy of Salt’s Plea for Vegetar-
ianism, that Gandhi claims ‘to have become a vegetarian by choice’ and decides to
make the spread of the movement his ‘mission’ (A A: 59). His preliminary con-
victions confirmed by texts from a variety of other western authorities, Gandhi
commences his life-long experiments with diet. South Africa reinforces the lessons
of his ‘English experiments in vegetarian cookery’ (A A: 96), sometimes in unex-
pected ways. For example, denied curry powder and tea and forced to eat his
evening meal early while in prison, Gandhi decides thereafter to take no food
 Embodied Selves 41
after dark and to substitute cocoa or water for the signature drink of his
community.28
This signals complex issues around Gandhi’s identity. Paradoxically, it is lar-
gely through insertion in the alien cultures of England and South Africa that he
gathers the resources to ‘become Indian’. These resources extend well beyond the
realm of the corporeal. For example, on arrival in Britain, he confesses to having
only ‘a nodding acquaintance with Hinduism’ (A A: 79); hitherto he has identified
himself primarily by caste position and family status, together with some identifi-
cation with the region of Kathiawad. It is in London that Gandhi first encounters
‘the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth’, in the form of Edwin Arnold’s
translation of the Bhagavad Gita (A A: 76). Introductions to Madame Blavatsky and
Annie Besant further stimulate Gandhi’s ‘desire to read books on Hinduism’ (A A:
77). Discovering that Gandhi has not read the history of India, Frederick Pincutt
persuades him to begin the task, ironically with Kaye and Malleson’s classic
account of ‘the great rebellion’ against British rule in 1857. In London, further-
more, Gandhi meets fellow-exiles from all parts of the sub-continent at the National
Indian Association, an institution which, as the name suggests, fostered a political
and supra-regional sense of identity. It is through his time in South Africa, above
all, that Gandhi forges a conception of India as a collective identity and develops
the sense of ‘national self-respect’ (A A: 139) which thereafter leads him towards
the Indian National Congress.
Gandhi’s definition early in his text of religion as a process of ‘self-realization’
(A A: 45) deploys a term which corresponds with some definitions of the purpose
of western autobiography. But while this might seem conclusive evidence to
support Gusdorf ’s argument about the ‘belated’ nature of An Autobiography and,
by extrapolation, of postcolonial life-writing more generally, the truth is more
complicated. As was seen in the Introduction, Gandhi denied writing an
autobiography as traditionally conceived in the West. As was also seen there,
one way this deviation is achieved is through his use of ‘regulative psychobio-
graphies’ drawn from Indian traditions of religious narrative. Such inter-texts
have radical implications for western ideas of (autobiographical) self-realisation.
Indeed, Gandhi ends his text with a quite contrary emphasis: ‘I must reduce
myself to zero’ (A A: 454). In a text which is sub-titled ‘Experiments with Truth’,
one of the most striking is the attempt – like Equiano – to fuse a religious
narrative with one which so consistently engages the temporal, material world.
A crucial aspect of this hybrid project is Gandhi’s refusal to erase the Body,
whether as a medium of spiritual enlightenment or the vessel of political being in
the world. Julie Codell rightly claims that, to the end of his text, Gandhi
‘remained committed to … the bodily’.29 Joseph Alter argues that Gandhi
thereby turned Hindu scripture upside down ‘and made the fact of his “being
here” into a kind of embodied, politicized moksha’.30 However, this concern with
the Body makes Gandhi’s text equally revisionary in relation to canonical auto-
biography. If his work has no precedent among the shastras, it is in this respect
equally unprecedented in the western cultural tradition which colonialism
imposed on India.31
42 Embodied Selves
Nawal El Saadawi, A Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of
Nawal El Saadawi (1999)
Thematics of the Body are as crucial for El Saadawi as for Gandhi (who is cited
as an inspirational anti-colonial fore-runner in A Daughter of Isis32). Like her pre-
decessor, the Egyptian feminist writer seeks to break down the binary oppositions
between Mind and Body endemic in patriarchal culture around the world.
Although she views western medicine more positively than Gandhi, El Saadawi,
too, insists that physical and mental health are inter-dependent.33 For example,
her own illnesses are demonstrated to occur at moments of intense emotional
suffering, usually related to her position as a female subject. The traditional bin-
aries are further undermined by El Saadawi’s treatment of memory, which often
operates corporeally in A Daughter. Thus, once, in exile in North Carolina, the
author declares that: ‘My body remembers the smell of dust, the touch of the
earth under my feet, the glare of the sun hurting my eyes’ (DI : 30). Equally,
intellection is often mediated somatically. Even when too young to know exactly
what ‘spinster’ and ‘divorcee’ mean, El Saadawi realises that something is ser-
iously amiss with her aunts according to prevailing social norms: ‘I understood
everything. It went through my body with a shiver’ (DI : 39). For each writer,
furthermore, the Body is a site on which political relations are mediated. El
Saadawi, too, traces the oppressions of colonialism and traditional feudal society
on the bodies of the non-western poor. Adopting a class perspective consonant
with her family nickname, ‘Warwar the slave girl’, she observes that the peasants
in her home village ‘died of diarrhoea, of respiratory or of gastro-intestinal
infections’ (DI : 72). As with Gandhi, therefore, the Body in A Daughter represents
an interface between the public domain and individual subject-formation. Thus,
her increasing realisation that ‘sickness and poverty are linked to politics’ (DI :
291–2) underpins El Saadawi’s decision to become a rural doctor.
Yet there are crucial differences between An Autobiography and A Daughter in
their treatment of the Body. In part, these derive from the divergent social and
ethical-religious norms of the authors’ respective cultures of origin. Primarily,
however, they ensue from the different gender of each writer. While Gandhi
provides some insight into such issues in India, El Saadawi provides a much fuller
account of how non-western women are sometimes socially positioned and
exploited by indigenous discourses and practices surrounding the Body, particu-
larly in traditional rural areas at the time she was growing up. Thus, the midwife
‘would let out a screaming “yoo-yoo” if her eyes fell on a penis’ or ‘become as
silent as the dead if all she could find was a cleft’ (DI : 20). If such ‘lack’ portends
the inferior status to which infant girls will be assigned in traditional society, their
bodies are also, in one crucial respect, ‘excessive’. This engenders perhaps the
decisive psychosocial event in El Saadawi’s life, her circumcision:34 ‘When I was six,
the daya (midwife) came along holding a razor in her hands, pulled out my clitoris
from between my thighs, and cut it off ’ (DI : 11). The event is so traumatic that
the author is unable to acknowledge it openly for thirty-five years. Indeed this trau-
ma’s persistence can be read in the very brevity and simplicity of El Saadawai’s
 Embodied Selves 43
description of her own experience compared with the space afforded to Sittil
Hajja’s visceral account of the assault she endures:

Um Mahmoud … together with four other women, took hold of me, tied me
up as though she were trussing a chicken, covered my head with a shawl and
pulled my thighs wide apart so she could tear off my surface below … her
finger going through it like a nail cutting into my flesh with a burning pain.
(DI : 27; compare 32–3)

Still bleeding on the jolting donkey-ride to her wedding feast, within a matter of
hours the 10-year-old Sittil Hajja must endure the additional pain of defloration.
Circumcision is represented as the most spectacular form of patriarchal vio-
lence against the bodies of some rural Egyptian women of a certain generation, at
least.35 But it is only one such example. El Saadawi also describes the tradition of
husbands beating wives on the wedding night to enforce their authority. The
mere advent of suitors requires the depilation of every part of the female Body,
including the pubic region, by means of a low-tech equivalent of waxing, so
exquisitely painful that El Saadawi contemplates suicide. Failure to produce a
male heir, or the reproduction of too many female children, even infertility, are
further pretexts for male violence. Thus, Aunt Rokaya is beaten daily because she
cannot bear a child (her husband never entertains the possibility that he is the
‘problem’). Rape is also a constant threat and its victims are rarely considered
innocent, even by other women. Thus, when Shelabaya is impregnated against
her will, the girl is sent back to probable death at the hands of her father by
Nawal’s aunt while the perpetrator, her uncle, remains unpunished.
Aside from the clitoris, according to A Daughter, indigenous patriarchy organises
in particular relation to two further facets of the Body. The first is the voice,
perhaps – as suggested earlier – the most potent vessel and symbol of agency and
subjectivity in postcolonial literature. Symbolic of the vocal restraint expected of
women36 is Aunt Rokaya; even among her own sex, she would ‘lift the hem of
her black tarha and dab her eyes, her mouth concealed behind it as she mumbled’
(DI : 45). Like the ‘dumb, lifeless dolls’ (DI : 44) which the child El Saadawi is
given as part of her socialisation, the females of her family are often condemned
to dumbness. Grandmother Amna, for example, presides over ‘the dead silence’
of the Shoukry household in Cairo and her daughters die ‘surrounded by silence,
without a sound, without anyone hearing of their death’ (DI : 37, 106). The
repression of Egyptian women is further mediated through the economy of the
gaze. With the qualified exception of peasant society, which demands their labour
out of doors, women in A Daughter are often required to be invisible, unless
within designated domestic spaces: ‘Everything in a woman’s life was seen as
shameful, even her face. She often hid it behind a piece of material, or the edge
of her shawl, or behind the shutters of her window’ (DI : 10). Conversely, the
woman’s gaze is required to be averted, a ‘properly modest’ girl aspiring to the
condition of a ‘blind kitten’ (DI : 104). Thus, on her wedding night, Nawal’s
mother lies with ‘her eyes closed, being impregnated with her first child, without
44 Embodied Selves
taking off her clothes or opening her eyes’ (DI : 22). By contrast, the male gaze is
often represented as an offensive weapon in A Daughter. Even as a school-girl, El
Saadawi records, men ‘never stopped gazing at me, with a stare that was like an
arrow going through my chest’ (DI : 100). It is no surprise, therefore, that she
recurrently invokes the inspirational figure of the blind writer Taha Hussayn
(1889–1973), whose desirably liberal attitudes are implicitly linked to his necessary
exclusion from the prevailing gendered scopic regime.
Yet if the Body is the locus for patriarchal domination in A Daughter, as it is for
colonial domination in Gandhi, it is also the site on which both female (and anti-
colonial) resistance can be mobilised. The text suggests that El Saadawi’s experi-
ence of circumcision is decisive in shaping many of the writer’s personality con-
tours and life-choices, especially in kindling the anger which shapes her future
politics. That anger, significantly, ‘accumulates in the body’ (DI : 206), engender-
ing a rebelliousness which is marked early in the author’s life. When her relatives
pray for her transformation into a boy, for example, El Saadawi bridles: ‘I hoped
that God did not have the power to change me into a male like my brother’ (DI :
44). Instead, she seeks to add the social power enjoyed by males to her femininity.
Thus, resenting the dolls her father buys, she prefers to play with her brother’s
pistols. When suitors call during puberty, El Saadawi resists through the Body,
blackening her teeth with egg-plant, feigning clumsiness, even spilling boiling
coffee over one visitor. She also pretends to be sick in order to skip school classes
in domestic economy. Later in life, by contrast, she exploits her ‘unfeminine’
physique (the adolescent El Saadawi is tall and well-built for her age) to physically
strike back at a variety of male harassers.
Further, A Daughter explicitly challenges the prevailing discursive regimes sur-
rounding the embodiment of Egyptian women on the very grounds on which
these discourses are constituted. In the first place, as a testimonio, it seeks to break
the silence enjoined on her gender, using one individual voice in a relational and
representative manner (see Chapter 2) to speak up about the true condition of
many members of her sex. Like Morgan’s My Place and Assia Djebar’s Fantasia
(see Chapter 5), A Daughter restores voice to those whom history has silenced, by
weaving first-person accounts of others, notably relatives like grandmother Sittil
Hajja, cousin Zaynab and aunt Fatima, into her own (DI : 26–7, 32–4, 129, 239).
Equally, El Saadawi’s text interrupts the prevailing scopic economy in two prin-
cipal ways. The first is by making visible that which patriarchy attempts to con-
ceal. Thus, the author describes her work as an attempt ‘to discover what is
buried deep down inside me, to reveal what is hidden through fear of God, the
father, the husband, the teacher … through fear of the nation to which we
belong’ (DI : 15). This includes her physical desires, ‘unfeminine’ anger and pro-
fessional ambitions. To this end, she aspires to having ‘eyes like the eyes of Zarq’a
Al-Yamama [a noted female military scout of pre-Islamic times] able to see what
remained concealed from others’ (DI : 209).
As one might also infer from this comment, however, El Saadawi is equally
concerned to appropriate the patriarchal gaze in order to reverse it. Like Gandhi,
she is sometimes deeply critical of the complicity of traditional religion in the
 Embodied Selves 45
deformation of many Egyptian women, physical and emotional. As soon as she
has learned to write her mother’s name, the author’s father replaces it with his
own, describing the new conjunction as ‘God’s will’. The author comments: ‘That
was the first time I heard the word God … I could not love anyone who removed
my mother’s name from next to mine, who abolished her as though she did not
exist’ (DI : 1). This foreshadows the constant struggle against institutionalised
religion which, despite a brief period of spiritual fervour, characterises El Saada-
wi’s subject-formation. Her critique has several strands. Perhaps most radically,
she challenges the authority of the Koran itself, in a manner reminiscent of
Gandhi’s critique of certain Hindu shastras. For example, she deprecates the verse
which values males twice as much as females and the text’s failure to address her
sex, or even mention individual historical women. She also satirises the teaching
that in paradise a man will enjoy seventy-two virgins, while ‘a woman is promised
no-one except her husband, that is if he … is not too busy with the virgins who
surround him’ (DI : 4). Equally, El Saadawi turns her critical gaze on clerical fig-
ures such as her paternal uncle, Sheikh Muhammad, who self-servingly cite such
scriptural authority to enforce their gender privileges. In El Saadawi’s account,
the combination of sacred text and cleric engender the kind of fatalism repre-
sented by Aunt Rokaya, who concludes the account of her violent marriage with
the following homily: ‘Everything comes from God, we praise and thank ye, God,
for the sweet and the bitter’ (DI : 45).
El Saadawi’s piercing gaze clearly challenges the economy of traditional patri-
archy, as does her articulation of a critical voice. Her disregard for custom in
these respects has led to accusations that she is therefore not ‘properly’ Egyptian,
even an agent of the West. Like Behan, she is certainly ambivalent about
nationalism. At its best, it is represented as a deeply unifying discourse, both
socially and psychically (not least because it can break down the barriers ‘between
body and mind’ [DI : 229]). She also embraces nationalism insofar, as has been
seen, El Saadawi posits a direct link between (neo-)colonialism37 and the degra-
dation of the Egyptian Body which concerns her as a doctor: ‘People become sick
because they are poor … People become poor because we are colonized, and …
our resources are taken away from us.’38 At Helwan school, she is a ring-leader in
the protest against colonialism and at university supports the underground in the
occupied Canal zone. During the Suez Crisis, she volunteers as a doctor when
Egypt is attacked by the combined Anglo-French-Israeli forces. Her later opposi-
tion to the Camp David Accords, in which Sadat reached what she sees as a
demeaning accommodation with Israel which rewarded Zionist aggression, might
be seen as a further example of El Saadawi’s principled nationalism, which led to
her imprisonment in 1981.
However, while asserting pride in her country early in A Daughter, El Saadawi
claims that even as a child, she ‘would not believe in a country which robbed me
of my pride and freedom’ (DI : 6–7). In marked contrast to Gandhi, El Saadawi
does not view nationalism as necessarily beneficial to women. At many nationalist
demonstrations, she notes, she is the only woman present. In the era of Egypt’s
technical independence, moreover, there are few signs of an improvement in the
46 Embodied Selves
condition of her sex. Her own efforts to better its lot are met with consistent
official resistance, even persecution: ‘Every time we started something, a maga-
zine, an association, a cultural society, a publishing project … they would close it
down’ (DI : 12). More specifically, echoing Behan’s rejection of the conflation of
Eire with Catholicism, El Saadawi disavows narrowly Islamic models of Egyptian
national identity. While Muslim Brotherhood activities are viewed sympatheti-
cally when directed against British occupation and the puppet King Farouk, her
sense of the multiplicity of Egypt’s religious heritage is too strong for an unqua-
lified endorsement. Just as Gandhi seeks to bring Islam, Christianity and Hindu-
ism into dialogue, so A Daughter stresses the common ground between Islam,
Judaism and Christianity. Thus, the references to ‘our Prophet Moses’ (DI : 26),
for example, speak to a multi-cultural inheritance which contradicts the idea of
Egypt as exclusively Islamic. It is this vision of her nation, perhaps, as much as El
Saadawi’s critique of Islamic teaching itself, which led to her being placed ‘on a
fundamentalist death list’ (DI : 12) in 1992.
El Saadawi has been further criticised because of her allegedly unreflective
endorsement of feminist ideas originating in western culture. As Fedwa Malti-
Douglas argues: ‘Her anti-patriarchal discourses … are perceived as fanning the
flames of Western anti-Arab attitudes.’39 One can certainly detect the influence of
western literary feminism in A Daughter of Isis. There are obvious parallels with
Jane Eyre, which El Saadawi studies at secondary school. These include the figure
of the rebellious female protagonist; the sometimes dismal boarding institution
which the author attends, similarly leavened by the affection of selected school-
friends; and her quasi-orphan status in the homes of a variety of uncaring rela-
tives in Cairo, where she identifies most with servants like Sa’adeya. Above all,
perhaps, the iconic figure of the blind reformer Taha Hussayn has affinities with
Rochester as a symbol of a desirably reformed masculinity. Further, the ambiva-
lent relationship between El Saadawi and her favoured, but less talented, brother
Tala’at recalls George Eliot’s feminist treatment of the rivalry between the Tulli-
ver siblings in The Mill on the Floss (El Saadawi studies Eliot alongside Jane Austen
and the Brontës).
However, allegations of El Saadawi’s Eurocentrism and attendant hostility
towards Egyptian Islamic tradition require qualification (not least because of the
homogenised and stereotypical version of western feminism which is usually used
to beat the author with). In the first place, she emphasises that Muslim women
are not the only ones oppressed by patriarchal religion. For example, her Chris-
tian school-friend is not spared the devastating experience of circumcision.
Equally, El Saadawi suggests that the culture of the large Jewish community in
Egypt is deeply masculinist because of its religious traditions. Thus, she argues
that the treatment of the ‘contamination’ of menstruation in the Koran is ‘inno-
cent … in comparison with what was said about it in the Torah’ (DI : 65–6). Nor
is she uncritical of the position of women in western culture. In one interview El
Saadawi has claimed that ‘all women are circumcised. Internationally, nationally,
everywhere’40 – whether physically or psychologically, whether by patriarchy,
religion or, indeed, capitalism. Although this argument is not fleshed out in A
 Embodied Selves 47
Daughter, it is hinted at in the representation of the principal western character
who makes an appearance. Miss Hamer, El Saadawi’s primary school head-
mistress, is no less repressed – or repressive (she is a great enthusiast for corporal
punishment) – than her Egyptian counterparts.
Further, as Amal Amireh demonstrates, El Saadawi has been highly critical of
some strands of western feminism for their ‘focus on issues of sexuality and
patriarchy in isolation from issues of class and colonialism’.41 In A Daughter, the
author’s circumspection is suggested in her decision to align herself primarily with
an autochthonous genealogy of empowered early Egyptian and Arab women
rather than western figureheads like Jane Eyre. One example already alluded to is
Zarq’a Al-Yamama, invoked on several occasions in A Daughter of Isis. Elsewhere
El Saadawi dreams of ‘reciting line after line of poetry as though I was al-Khansa’a
[a pre-Islamic woman poet of the Hejaz]’ (DI : 209). As her title suggests, the
author also summons the ancient Egyptian goddess (of healing, among other
qualities) as a symbol of the empowerment to which she aspires. Indeed, from the
outset, El Saadawi positions herself as ‘a descendant of Isis or her mother Noot’,
who enjoins her daughter to work for the well-being of the people as a whole (DI :
4). But El Saadawi is also inspired more immediately by the women of her family,
for example, her widowed grandmother, Sittil Hajja, the daughter of the equally
formidable ‘Woman from Gaza’. Neither conforms to the model of the obedient,
serf-like female widely prized in traditional culture at the time of writing,
although Sittil Hajja, in particular, is represented as complicit in many of the
customs and attitudes which demean her sex. Nonetheless, she stands up to the
village headman when required and strikes the village guard who beats El Saa-
dawi’s father for no reason. (‘The woman from Gaza’, in fact, pays with her life
for daring to humiliate the village headman.)
Moreover, both Taha Hussayn and each of El Saadawi’s parents clearly illus-
trate the author’s conviction that a critique of the deforming social consequences
of custom and institutional religion for many women – and for their bodies more
particularly – can arise from within Egyptian culture itself rather than being
necessarily dependent on ideas, feminist or otherwise, imported from abroad.
(More specifically, Hussayn’s use of autobiography in An Egyptian Childhood [1926–
27] to advance such ideas is probably El Saadawi’s primary inspiration in A
Daughter.) Thus, while her father is a devout Muslim, ‘the Prophet was not a
model for him in everything’ (DI : 5). Not only does he take only one wife, he
treats El Saadawi’s mother with sufficient consideration that the author claims
only to remember one serious quarrel between them. If the Egyptian woman is to
be redeemed from her degraded condition, A Daughter suggests, this can be
achieved only through disciplining of the male Body, which her father’s life
represents in a qualified way. Conversely, El Saadawi’s feminist programme pro-
mises redemption for Egyptian men from a patriarchy which enslaves them, too.
(Compare Morgan’s attitude to ‘white’ Australia, and Gandhi’s to the colonisers.)
As Malti-Douglas argues, El Saadawi’s writing demonstrates how ‘the rituals of
blood and shame imprison men’42 as well as women. As an 11-year-old, the
author plays the part of Isis in a school play, bringing the stricken body of Osiris
48 Embodied Selves
back to life. The image symbolises the author’s ambition for the resurrection of
the whole Egyptian Body politic, irrespective of gender, through elaboration of a
new regime of the corporeal.

Conclusion
As the texts discussed make plain, some postcolonial life-writing by both genders
makes the Body a central element in the construction of auto/biographical iden-
tity. Consonant with feminist perspectives, moreover, such work characteristically
represents the Body as much as a discursive as a material aspect of subjectivity. A
particularly striking example of this conjunction occurs in Soyinka’s Aké (see
Chapter 4), where the youth’s initiation ceremonies involve the inscription of his
identity as a member of the Yoruba community through the scarification of his
body. Some interpretations of Gandhi lend support to the feminist argument that
the Body in male autobiography primarily represents an obstacle to the more
important processes of spiritual growth and intellectual development. However, in
keeping with the positions of critics like Lim outlined at the beginning of this
chapter, one could more credibly argue that Gandhi in fact represents the
(reformed) Body not only as a crucial aspect of individual personhood, but as a
key site of political mobilisation. In this respect, An Autobiography anticipates
Fanon’s Black Skin, which famously ends: ‘O my body, make of me a man who
always questions.’43 However, this conception of the Body as a locus of resistance,
as well as abjection, extends back to the precursor forms of male postcolonial life-
writing. Thus, Equiano’s engraved portrait in the frontispiece of his text embodies
his equality with the reader, notably by virtue of its direct (even challenging) gaze.
This is aimed at precisely those white readers who are traditionally privileged in
scopic terms and anticipates the demand throughout the subsequent narrative
that such recognition be extended to Equiano’s ‘sable brethren’.44
The treatment of the Body in postcolonial women’s life-writing, by contrast,
suggests a complex relationship to its western women’s equivalent in this respect.
At times, their approach appears to be complementary. Thus, unlike male post-
colonial life-writers, whose treatment of Bodily abjection is almost exclusively
conceived in relation to the coloniser, women colleagues as diverse as El Saadawi,
Lim and Emecheta identify indigenous patriarchy as the immediate, if not prime,
cause of their subjection. At other times, however, the relationship between
postcolonial and western women’s life-writing may be disjunctive. If both con-
stituencies recognise that the Body may be a site of resistance, the modes and
degree of female abjection that they respectively discuss are often quite different.
Aspects of the condition of some Egyptian women, as described by El Saadawi,
are almost unthinkable for the vast majority of their western counterparts.
Indeed, from Prince’s History to Daughter of Isis, (post)colonial women’s life-writing
demonstrates that the bodily oppressions suffered by women vary markedly
according to ethnicity, history and geo-cultural location. Thus, the fact that Mrs
Wood is one of Prince’s most vicious owners supports the argument of many
postcolonial feminists that there is no ‘universal Woman’s Body’, in the name of
 Embodied Selves 49
which western feminism has sometimes been accused of mobilising prematurely,
not least by El Saadawi herself.
As indicated earlier, there are certainly dangers in the emphasis often placed
by postcolonial life-writers, male and female, on the Body as a dimension of
subjectivity. Parallel with the ‘impossible position’ in which Neuman sees patri-
archal discourse positioning the would-be western woman auto/biographer,45 this
emphasis risks re-inscribing the negative vision of the Body of the (post)colonial
subject in western discourse – and, more specifically, in canonical autobiography
(a notable example being the deviant sexuality and animality which Rousseau
foregrounds in his representation of the masturbating ‘Moor’). Consequently,
whereas some postcolonial writers endorse the feminist strategy of revaluing, or
re-inscribing, the Body, others marginalise or efface it altogether, particularly its
sexual dimensions. Among postcolonial women life-writers, Nayantara Saghal’s
Prison House and Chocolate Cake (1954), for example, is silent on such matters,
though they are repeatedly addressed in the extensive body of fiction for which
she is better known. Such discretion has long been a feature of the women’s tra-
dition. Thus, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole (1857; see Chapter 5) maintains
a studied silence about the author’s body (with the exception of consistent self-
mockery about her girth). Instead, she constructs her identity in asexually mater-
nal terms, as the ‘Mother’ of British troops in the Crimean War (whose trauma
sometimes also emphatically de-masculinises them). Such reticence can be
understood as a powerful form of cultural resistance to colonial discourse and, by
extrapolation, to its successor regimes. For example, Seacole’s silence about her
own sexuality needs to be placed in the context of her knowing awareness of
conventional western stereotypes about her ‘hot-blooded’ Creole lineage.46 Con-
versely, she shows no such compunction in her depiction of white women, notably
Lola Montez, whom she meets in Panama. As well as their propensity to drun-
kenness, dishonesty and violence, Seacole particularly emphasises their sexual
licence. In this respect, too, she is also implicitly ‘writing back’ against colonial
discourse, which tends to construct a binary opposition between the angelic pro-
priety of white women in the empire and their ‘improper’ native counterparts,
male and female.47
Male postcolonial life-writing also sometimes severely circumscribes or repres-
ses discussion of the Body. Equiano’s silence about his sexuality, like Seacole’s, is
framed in terms of a self-conscious rebuttal of stereotypical metropolitan ideas
about Black males. At the outset of The Interesting Narrative, he is at pains to
describe the orderly regulation of sexual relations in traditional African society,
insisting that ‘incontinence’ outside marriage is almost unknown..48 By contrast,
Equiano emphasises the violent and animalistic sexual behaviour of slavers and
masters towards their chattels. However, it is perhaps in McKay’s A Long Way from
Home (1937) that the political significance of autobiographical silence about Black
male sexuality is most explicitly spelled out. For McKay, the prurient interest of
mainstream white society in the ‘bugaboo of sex – the African’s sex’ is something
he simply refuses to indulge: ‘I think the Anglo-Saxon mind becomes morbid
when it turns on the sex life of colored people.’49 Such discretion is all the more
50 Embodied Selves
striking in the context of McKay’s close relationship with the Irish-American
literary entrepreneur Frank Harris, whose autobiography My Life and Loves
(1922–27) had become notorious for its boasting about matters sexual.50
The texts considered here once more provide mixed evidence in relation to the
strategic issue of the distinctiveness of postcolonial life-writing from its western
equivalents. Analysis of Gandhi and Behan suggests some reason for scepticism
towards claims that a preoccupation with embodiment is a distinctive property of
western women’s life-writing. One might, conversely, argue that the specificity of
postcolonial life-writing in this respect is partly registered in a consistent pre-
occupation with ‘colour’ as a metaphor of the ethnic/racial and cultural differ-
ences which partly determine the (post)colonial world. As Sidonie Smith remarks,
in her discussion of Woolf ’s autobiographical ‘A Sketch of the Past’, the text
‘never mentions the colour of the skin that needs escaping’.51 Thus, there is
nothing in western life-writing, by men or women, to compare to Fanon’s trau-
matic chance encounter with the white child in Black Skin (anticipated in McKay’s
experience and repeated in Emecheta’s), in the course of which ‘the crushing
objecthood’ of ‘inferior’ racial identity is experienced through the child’s sponta-
neous focus on Fanon’s ‘blackness’.52 In turn, however, the many parallels in
relation to their treatment of aspects of this thematic of autobiographical sub-
jectivity also make it difficult to distinguish sharply between postcolonial life-
writing and its western women’s analogues. Investigation of further dimensions of
subjectivity remains necessary, therefore, in order to help settle the question of
the distinctiveness of postcolonial life-writing.
4 Located Selves

In both An Autobiography and A Daughter, the Body is often conceptualised in terms

of specific locations and topographies. Thus, Gandhi’s bodily ‘experiments’ vary
considerably depending on whether he is in London, South Africa or India. The
link between aspects of embodiment and ‘place’ is equally strong for El Saadawi,
whether in the recurrent association of femininity with the kitchen, or the
remembered smells of Cairo which plague her in exile. To this extent, these texts
corroborate the insights of recent materialist-feminist work in the field of ‘critical
geography’. Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography (1993), Doreen Massey’s Space,
Place and Gender (1994) and Linda McDowell’s Gender, Identity and Place (1999)
exemplify its focus on the ways that women’s subjectivities are partly determined
by their insertion within a variety of socio-spatial locations. In descending order
of scale, these range from global diasporas, through nation spaces, cities and rural
areas to domestic dwellings and, indeed, the Body.1 As McDowell argues, in such
work, ‘place’ is not conceived simply as ‘a set of co-ordinates on a map’ but must
also be understood as a conjunction of ‘practices that … result in overlapping and
intersecting places with multiple and changing boundaries, constituted and
maintained by social relations of power and exclusion’.2 Nonetheless, while ‘place’
is never limited to geo-spatial co-ordinates in feminist ‘critical geography’, it is
rarely entirely divorced from them.
Somewhat surprisingly, such work appears to have had little impact on feminist
inflections of Auto/biography Studies. While Sidonie Smith observes that ‘bodies
locate us topographically, temporally, socioculturally as well as linguistically in a
series of transcodings along multiple axes of meaning’,3 little work has been done
on ‘place’ as a thematic of subjectivity in feminist analysis of the canon. On the
face of it, this is a surprising omission, given that it offers another potential
avenue to decentre the canon’s putatively ‘universal’ Subject, which by implica-
tion transcends the particularities of socio-geographical location as well as time.
As was seen in the last chapter, according to Neuman, the canonical Self is
represented as something ‘whose whole essence or nature is only to think, and
which, to exist, has no need of space nor of any material thing or body’.4 How-
ever, the same lacuna is also evident in discussions of western women’s life-
writing, with the limited exception, as noted in the Introduction, of working-class
texts. Thus, one searches in vain in the indices of the feminist overviews of the
52 Located Selves
field provided by Marcus and Anderson for categories such as ‘place’, ‘space’, or
‘(dis)location’ in relation to the female writers they discuss.5
Instead, such critics tend to conceive of ‘location’ in primarily figurative terms.
For example, Nancy Mairs suggests that: ‘The body is itself a dwelling place …
Through writing her body, woman may reclaim the deed to her dwelling.’6
Among colleagues, there has been much comparably metaphorical discussion of
the ‘siting’ of women life-writers in terms of ‘a standpoint, a terrain, an intersec-
tion, a network, a crossroads of multiply situated knowledges’.7 Such analysis is,
however, overwhelmingly directed towards discussion of discursive spaces denied or
aspired to by female auto/biographers. For example, Brodzki and Schenck assert
‘the imperative situating of the female subject in spite of the postmodernist cam-
paign against the sovereign self ’.8 Yet as Brodzki makes clear, this strategy is not
conceived within a materialist epistemology, despite its implicit critique of post-
structuralist assertions about ‘the death of the subject’. Indeed, she claims – in
terms which are both essentialising and idealist – that ‘The autobiographer is
always a displaced person; to speak and write from the space marked self-referential
is to inhabit … no place.’9 In similar vein, Benstock defines the key issue posed by
her edited volume as follows: ‘how is the “self ” opened to question in the self-
positioning act of writing?’10 This attests to the methodological preponderance of
post-structuralism in her collection of essays. As one contributor, Felicity Nuss-
baum, explains, such theory characteristically ‘redefines the individual as a position,
a locus where discourses intersect’.11
The politics of enunciative sites are, of course, a key issue in all forms of cul-
tural production, including auto/biography.12 However, too narrow a focus on
such a conception of ‘location’ downplays at least equally important material
kinds of ‘place’ in the narrative construction of subjectivity. To this extent, fem-
inist interventions within Auto/biography Studies have largely replicated the
silence on such issues of male critics as dispersed (geographically and temporally),
as Misch, Gusdorf and Weintraub. As has been seen, both Misch and Gusdorf
offer geo-cultural explanations for the growth of the genre ‘proper’ in the West;
and Misch expends considerable energy on non-western life-writing of the classi-
cal period. But neither explores in any detail the constitutive role of specific geo-
cultural locations in the formation of the canonical writers they discuss.13 They
focus instead on what Gusdorf calls ‘interior space’,14 an emphasis repeated by
Weintraub, whose insistence on the transcendent ineffability of Selfhood necessa-
rily diminishes not only the importance of the Body, but of ‘place’ understood in
the ways defined above.15 While Spengemann indeed considers (western) national
traditions of autobiography, in practice, he is equally little interested in the spe-
cific ways that concrete geo-cultural locations inflect individual autobiographical
subjectivities.16
The main exception to this general pattern is the third feminist overview of the
genre identified in the Introduction, Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography.
This clearly recognises that in some life-writing, ‘geographical location strongly
inflects the story being told’.17 This is illustrated with brief reference to immigrant
life-stories, narratives of city dwelling and prison testimonies. Further, Smith and
 Located Selves 53
Watson argue that an emphasis on socio-spatial location characterises some min-
oritarian and postcolonial women’s life-writing. For example, among Aboriginal
authors, ‘physical displacement and cultural dislocation’ are accepted as contexts
within which the life-writers from the community characteristically negotiate their
identity (a thesis confirmed in earlier discussion of Morgan). Nonetheless, Smith
and Watson conclude that this thematic of subjectivity is ‘as yet rarely studied by
critics who tend to see [socio-spatial location] as a backdrop’ to more important
dimensions of the subject’s formation.18
By contrast, from within Postcolonial Studies, Edward Said proclaims that: ‘If
there is anything that politically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism,
it is the primacy of the geographical in it.’19 Consequently, Warley argues, ‘the
forgetting of the locatedness of the subject speaks of an imperialist assumption of
centrality that has never been possible for the post-colonial [life-]writer.’20 Such
arguments recognise that colonialism was uncompromisingly an enterprise of
material expansion and displacement across the globe, which involved the pene-
tration and restructuring of the cultural as well as physical spaces inhabited by
pre-conquest populations. The redistribution of indigenous inhabitants to exploit
their land and resources, the creation of new administrative units, notably nation
states, as much as the imposition of alien languages and value-systems, had pro-
found consequences for subject peoples’ understanding of their identities. In the
case of Palestine (see Chapter 7), for example, the creation of the State of Israel in
1947–48 created 750,000 refugees, whose diasporic descendants now number
some five million, many of whom are keen to return to the homeland from which
they were ethnically cleansed.21 In its contemporary guise of globalisation, colo-
nialism continues to be responsible for the creation of millions of political and
economic refugees (throughout 2006, the Iraq War alone produced nearly
100,000 new refugees every month, reaching a total of 1.8 million between the
outbreak of hostilities in 2003 and the end of 200622). To these can be added
huge numbers of migrants who move country for less immediately pressing reasons,
such as to improve their education or economic opportunities. This pattern reflects
the continuing structural inequality of social and economic provision between ‘the
West and the Rest’ within the the neo-colonial system of globalisation.
In its concern with this thematic of subjectivity, Black Skin once more offers a
template for later postcolonial life-writers, male and female. As previously stated,
Fanon is clearly interested in both Black and colonised experience in general, and
in promoting a reconceptualised ‘universal’ humanism (or, as he puts it sympto-
matically, ‘restoring man to his proper place’23). Nonetheless, he consistently
locates the evolution of his thinking in terms of the specific existential experience
of both his (‘French’) Caribbean origins and subsequent life in Lyons (indeed,
Black Skin barely alludes to other European colonialisms). Early on, Fanon pro-
claims that ‘my conclusions are valid only for the Antilles’ and, towards the end,
insists that his whole inquiry is framed partly in immediate relation to ‘the lives of
the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Gaude-
loupe’.24 In between, he insists repeatedly that the geo-cultural particularities of
the non-western world undermine the false universality of western psychoanalysis
54 Located Selves
and Marxism alike. (While deploring western Marxism’s sublation of race into
the class dialectic, he nonetheless commends its scrupulous attention to class dif-
ferences, for example between the colonised doctor from Guadeloupe and the
dock-worker of Abidjan.25)
In the light of these debates, I will now compare two examples of postcolonial
life-writing which offer divergent conceptualisations of the relation between geo-
cultural (dis)location and auto/biographical identity. The comparison aims fur-
ther to demonstrate how the issues in question are inflected by the gender and
ethnicity of their authors, as well as the cultural norms of the societies from which
they both derive and travel to. In conclusion, I will explore how this segment
of analysis bears on the larger strategic concern of this monograph with the
distinctiveness of postcolonial life-writing.

Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981)

The importance of ‘place’ to Soyinka’s autobiographical identity is foregrounded
in the very title of his text, Aké being an abbreviated, familiar rendering of
Abeokuta, the small town in which the author was brought up and educated until
the age of 11. The mutually constitutive relationship between location and Self is
explored from a variety of angles. For example, on the one hand, places are often
‘selved’ in the text, especially in the earlier part of the boy’s life. Thus, as part of
the process by which Aké acquires an ‘extended persona’26 in Wole’s conscious-
ness, even the rock where he regularly seeks sanctuary is strongly anthro-
pomorphised. Jonah is ‘solitary and private’ like himself and later the older child
grieves ‘the passing of a unique confidant, the loss of a replete subsuming pre-
sence’ (A: 64). Conversely, the unruly Paa Adatan is conceived as part of the local
nigerian landscape, in terms of ‘a rugged terrain which had to be captured, then
secured tree by tree, hill by hill, boulder by boulder’ (A: 114). More significantly,
Soyinka’s growth as a Subject is indexed in terms of his increasing consciousness
of being ‘situated’ in a variety of senses. At its simplest, and consonant with Tim
Cribb’s suggestion that the author’s recreation of his past is framed largely ‘within
the perceptual range’ of a growing child,27 Soyinka’s cognitive development is
initially plotted partly in terms of learning to navigate his body within its
immediate physical surroundings: ‘I knew where to go whenever the sounds from
an event carried into the house’ (A: 36). Wole matures partly by progressively
more ambitious explorations of physical space, a process through which change
and temporality also come to impinge on his consciousness. For instance, after his
first solo expedition outside the family compound, which takes him all the way to
Ibara, the child feels ‘markedly different from whatever I was before the march’
(A: 50).
A further stage in his developing Self-consciousness is represented by Wole’s
coming to appreciate that ‘places’ are locations inscribed with social meanings
and circumscribed by discursive as well as material boundaries. One of his first
lessons in this regard is that the human world is partitioned from that of ‘spirits
and ghommids’ (A: 2), the walls of the parsonage constituting the immediate
 Located Selves 55
border between the two orders of existence. While the supernatural entities will
tolerate humans entering their domain of bush, such hospitality is clearly boun-
ded. As Eniola recalls, ‘we were to stay off any area beyond the rocks and that
clump of bamboo by the stream’ (A: 6). Within the human realm, Wole further
begins to understand, ‘place’ demarcates social difference, establishing complex
sets of insiders and outsiders in relation to whom the boy must also locate himself
as a Subject. ‘Home’, for example, is partly defined by its exclusion, except under
extreme duress, of government officials, notably Tax Inspectors. The child initi-
ally begins to situate himself in class terms by virtue of the fact that visiting tra-
ders from Isara are confined to the back-yard of the family home. Perhaps the
most forceful and tragic example of Soyinka’s growing appreciation that ‘place’ is
discursively as much as physically constituted involves the outcast Sarowanke.
Initially tolerated, her makeshift dwelling beneath the communal mango tree is
destroyed once the ‘madwoman’ falls pregnant, demonstrating that domestic and
public spaces must be kept rigorously separate.
As one might infer from this example, a further important aspect of Soyinka’s
identity-formation involves the realisation that ‘place’ is also gendered. This
begins with the child’s perception that his parents have separate bedrooms, to
which the male and female children have varying degrees of access at different
stages of their lives. Outside the home, similar distinctions obtain, although in
ways which complicate the traditional (western) binary coding of the domestic
sphere as feminine and the public as masculine. For example, a significant pro-
portion of economic activity, represented by the shops and market stalls in
Abeokuta, is conducted by women, even if the political sphere of the Akala’s
palace remains male-dominated, at least until invaded by the irate women traders
towards the end of the text. (Insofar as their revolt is also implicitly directed
against the British, by virtue of their guaranteeing the Akala’s position, women in
fact penetrate deep into the wider public sphere of nationalist struggle.) If the
streets of Abeokuta are gender-neutral in everyday life, on certain occasions they
become explicitly masculinised, notably during the egungun rituals when women
must remain indoors for fear of nuisance. Another resolutely masculine formative
sphere are the locally-staffed single-sex secondary schools Wole attends, where
regular corporal punishment and the intimidation of older ‘papas’ enforce a
system of patriarchal discipline reminiscent of colonialism itself, with its male
District Officers and policemen. Similarly, Isara, his father Ayo’s birth-place, is
experienced primarily as a male sphere by the growing child. Here traditional
norms of masculinity are enforced through activities like hunting – from which
women are excluded. The initiation ritual which the child undergoes here speci-
fically performs Wole’s insertion into Ijebu manhood; taken from his mother to
an exclusively male hut the night before the ceremony, during the scarification
itself Soyinka is enjoined not to betray his gender by crying like a girl.
As this suggests, ‘place’ also grounds the various geo-cultural systems among
which Wole must locate himself. Isara represents one pole of identification. In this
‘second home’, where he is initially gently mocked for being too ‘English’ (A: 135;
compare Equiano), Soyinka takes ‘several steps into the past’ (A: 66–7), discovering
56 Located Selves
that his identity is deeply shaped by the values of traditional life. Indeed, by
naming the grandfather who performs his initiation a supplementary ‘Father’, the
boy proclaims a filiation which is returned in the promise that ‘Ogun protects his
own’ (A: 140). At the opposite extreme are the specifically colonial locations which
the child enters only once during the narrative, when he stumbles into the police
post during his solo expedition through Abeokuta. On the same journey, Wole
passes the ‘Residency’, a forbidding building guarded by constables, which houses
the District Officer (whom the boy encounters for the first time in the flesh
towards the end of the text). Set ‘well back up a hill, part hidden by trees’ (A: 13),
its position reflects the initial remoteness of colonial rule from the child’s
immediate everyday concerns.
Mediating between these geo-cultural poles is Abeokuta and, more specifically,
the cluster of buildings in the compound round the church, which Soyinka has
described elsewhere as ‘a sort of semi-hermetic … Christian conclave’.28 Corre-
sponding to Mpalive-Hangson Msiska’s description of Soyinka’s family as being
‘part of the modernizing class of the mission-educated élite’,29 his parents’ nego-
tiations with the modernity represented by colonialism are conducted in both
material and ideological terms. Thus, while water is still stored in calabashes half-
buried in the garden, the arrival of the radio and telephone figure the increasing
connectivity between the minute particularity of ‘local’ life and the global econ-
omy and polity. For example, the radio brings news of the Second World War,
the transformative and (dis)integrative effects of which are also felt in the presence
of Congolese troops in Abeokuta and the departure of Uncle Dipo to fight in
Burma.
In Aké, colonialism clearly transforms traditional identities associated with
‘place’ to a significant degree. This process can be seen in its hybridisation of
nature itself. Thus, bougainvillea, originally from the Pacific, grows in Essay’s
garden and his orchard also boasts the pomegranate, introduced to the region by
a previous bishop. Substituting for the Edenic apple in local eyes (A: 3), it sym-
bolises the temptations of foreign knowledge which will eventually lead to Wole’s
departure from Abeokuta. A more explicit example of the impact of colonialism
on the social meanings of place comes when Paa Adatan draws his cutlass and
scrapes a boundary across the earth in front of Wild Christian’s shop to keep
away German soldiers whom he fears may mount a surprise attack: ‘If they try
cross this line, guns go turn to broom for dem hand’ (A: 110–11). Once again,
Wole is reminded not only of the crucial importance of borders, but that they are
contingent and, because primarily discursive, subject to change.
However, this process works both ways. Despite its obviously sympathetic orien-
tations to British rule, the parsonage compound is as much the site of hybridisa-
tion of the alien culture as the converse. As Derek Wright argues, Soyinka
thereby represents ‘the colonial impingement as an assimilation or translation into
another order of experience instead of an obliteration of one culture by
another’.30 An obvious example is the ‘wild’ Christianity of Wole’s mother. Only
on the anniversary of the missionaries’ arrival does she actually proselytise on the
streets. The rest of the year, her faith accommodates a good deal of traditional
 Located Selves 57
metaphysics. For example, on the family visit to Isara, her dread of poisoning is
an implicit acknowledgement of the power of traditional ‘magic’. (Essay, too,
relies on all manner of ‘medicine’ from Isara in the parsonage.) Similarly, the
presence in the Reverend Kuti’s household of uncle Sanya, despite his strong links
to local cults, represents the characteristic tolerance of the Christian community.
Consequently Wole is not forced to ground himself within any singular cultural
identity. Indeed, selecting as he pleases from each tradition, he also proves himself
capable of rebellion against both (whether by refusing to prostrate himself before
the Odemo or by stealing the collection money). This pattern is reflected more
widely in his family. While ‘Wild Christian’ occasionally denounces ‘superstition’,
she also plays a prominent part in the revolt against the tax regime which is
imposed, the women believe, by the government in Lagos (A: 182). Indeed, her
sister-in-law Beere provides perhaps the most damning criticism of colonial racism
when she furiously demands of the District Officer why Japan and not Germany
was made to suffer the Atom Bomb: ‘I know you, the white mentality: Japanese,
Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman’ (A: 224).
The largely benevolent nature of these varied lessons about the discursive
meanings of ‘place’ and their relationship to Self are responsible for the affirma-
tive tone of Soyinka’s reconstruction of his younger life. Neither tradition nor
colonialism, the familiar or the foreign, weigh upon the child in oppressive ways,
the kindliness of ‘Father’, for example, being anticipated in the kindness of the
white policeman who rescues the lost child at the beginning of the text. Biodun
Jeyifo argues that Soyinka’s text cannot be read as a Bildungsroman because it
expresses none of the disillusion which characterises that genre; and Ato Quayson
insists on ‘the essential humour and lightheartedness of the narrative’.31 While Aké
certainly contains abundant affirmative and comic qualities, these are partly
offset, however, in its framing of the narrative of childhood, where the mature
writer meditates on the changes that time has wrought on his former home and,
by implication, insofar as ‘place’ has been so closely linked to personhood, him-
self. If modern Abeokuta seems shrunken so, too, the older Soyinka seems
diminished, the expansively open and physically active boy transformed into a
comparatively immobile adult observer.
The melancholy derives primarily from the fact that the text’s representation of
‘location’ is inflected by its antithesis. The reasons for Soyinka’s displacement are
never specified, any more than the motivation for his return. However, Aké plots a
trajectory of increasing separation, physical and affective, from Soyinka’s initial
grounding in a specific quarter of Abeokuta in pursuit of successively more
ambitious educational opportunities. This suggests complex issues around the
naming of Soyinka’s text. By choosing Aké for his title, Soyinka appears to wish to
construct a relational Self of the kind discussed in Chapter 2, which recognises the
determining influence on his formation not just of ‘place’, but also of the com-
munity he grows up in. However, this idea is complicated by the process of indi-
viduation which the child Wole enthusiastically embraces. As has been seen,
even at primary school, Wole seeks out private places of sanctuary, notably
Jonah, causing his mother anxiety that he spends too much time alone. Wole is
58 Located Selves
particularly disturbed by his experience of ‘the communal mat’ (A: 83) on which
the children of the house and their symptomatically unnamed troupe of ‘cousins’
sleep: ‘I would wake up in the night after a violent struggle with pythons that had
tied up all my limbs, suffocating under slimy monsters from a mythical past,
unable to utter the scream for help which rose in my throat’ (A: 84). Such early
experiences of feeling stifled by the collective partly impel Wole’s restlessness to
leave home. Travelling has been associated with agency, freedom and individua-
tion ever since the narrator’s first solo expedition beyond the walls of the family
house. Government College in Ibadan is therefore welcomed as ‘another liberating
step’ (A: 153) in his quest for autonomy.
Nonetheless, a relational Self is clearly implied in the sense of loss inscribed in
the adult Soyinka’s perspective on the Abeokuta of his childhood. This is not
simply a response to the physical decay of the place over time: ‘An evil thing has
happened to Aké parsonage. The land is eroded, the lawns are bared … on a
depleted landscape, full of creaks, exposed and nerveless’ (A: 3–4). It is also the
consequence of his perception of the town’s increasing insertion into the ‘space/
time compression’ which characterises globalisation.32 The Abeokuta to which
Soyinka returns is now the site ‘of a global waste industry’ which has severely
compromised its former identity; instead of the ‘hundred varieties’ of cultural
forms of his childhood, Soyinka now finds that homogenisation and ‘identicality’
reign (A: 157–8). Swamped by the ersatz products of an unequal world trading
system, the original character of the town is almost effaced: ‘Along the same
midnight walk of Dayisi the guitarist now darts the young hawker, releasing into
the faces of passers-by through his finger on the caller’s button, the dulcet chimes
of Made-In-Hong-Kong doorbells’ (A: 150). Even the most basic signifiers of cul-
tural difference, such as food, have been distorted. For example, the traditional
milk-curds have given way to fake ice cream, exciting Soyinka’s withering disgust:
‘The quick-profit importer of instant machines is content to foist a bed-pan slop
of diabetic kittens on his youthful customers and watch them lick it noisily, biting
deeper into the cone’ (A: 156). In place of the former emphasis on the mutual
hybridisation of local and foreign cultures has come a grovelling mimicry of an
‘instant-culture’ (A: 157) with no affiliations to ‘place’. Thus, Dayisi’s distinctive
‘juju-band’ rhythms have ceded to ‘yet another local imitation of foreign pop’ (A:
157). Given Soyinka’s emphasis on the corporeal inscription of cultural difference
during his initiation process, the more recent surrender of the Nigerian Body to
the influences of globalisation is particularly telling. Representative of this process
are the girls bleached by skin-tone creams who gather in the ‘neighbourhood’
McDonald’s or, with hair sizzled straight congregating over their Kentucky fried
chicken.
Such perspectives raise the issue of whether the displaced adult Soyinka has
himself escaped the deleterious influences of globalisation. After all, the very
conceptual tools which enable him to identify Abeokuta’s diminished place within
the world system are gained through his own experience of separation from his
natal town. Indeed, James Gibbs suggests that Aké is ‘the work of a man under
attack for being “too European” in the eyes of some of his countrymen’.33 If this
 Located Selves 59
is the case, a defence could be mounted for Soyinka partly on the ‘site’ of lan-
guage. This may seem an unpromising claim, given his choice to write in the
language of the former coloniser, as well as that of the prevailing forces of glo-
balisation. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the author is not conforming to the
‘rules’ of these hegemonic versions of English any more than Behan. From his
youth, Soyinka paradoxically experiences Standard English as an alienated form of
the ‘proper’ version spoken at home. Thus, on meeting the white policeman at
the end of his first solo journey from the parsonage, Wole comments that it was
‘difficult to understand him all the time but by straining hard, I could make sense
of his questions’ (A: 46). From later in his childhood, Soyinka nostalgically
remembers the ‘strange language’ of the choir he temporarily joins, ‘a mixture of
English, Yoruba and some celestial language that could only be what was spoken
by those cherubs in the stained-glass windows’ (A: 152; compare the school song,
A: 22). Soyinka’s continuing loyalty to the hybridising dynamic of his childhood
culture is reflected in the adult author’s replication of such linguistic experi-
mentation. Thus, the writer peppers his discourse with translated Yoruba meta-
phors: ‘You are going to eat the cane tonight’ (A: 65). Conversely, Yoruba diction
is also often left untranslated: ‘New Year was palm wine, ebiripo, ikokore’ (A: 67).
This register is leavened with the reported ‘pidgin’ speech of characters like Paa
Adatan, leading Robert Fraser to argue that ‘despite the fluency of the English
medium in this book, the norm is not perceived to be English, but Yoruba’.34 Yet
it is more complicated than this. Like Behan, who draws on a comparably wide
linguistic range, Soyinka leavens his writing with neologisms such as ‘resorb’ and
‘motorped’ (A: 79, 168) and recondite diction such as ‘ghommids’ (A: 2). Also like
Behan, Soyinka’s discourse is often encased in a poetically flighty syntax which
corresponds to ‘the language of the cherubs’ – or the artist.
Thus, if it is possible to read Aké as in part reflecting an alienation from birth-
community which exceptional educational achievement and colonial accultura-
tion so often entails in the postcolonial context, it could be argued by contrast
that Soyinka remains loyal to the traditions of his youth. For example, his tra-
jectory corresponds closely to the ‘regulative psychobiography’ enacted in Yoruba
mythopoesis. Claimed for Ogun by his grandfather, as has been seen, Soyinka
reaffirmed this identification the year after winning the Nobel Prize (and three
years after the publication of Aké).35 Thus, in an important sense, the much-tra-
velled adult Soyinka continues to claim perceptual and affective roots in the
value-system associated with the Yoruba deity. Paradoxically, the significance of
this lies in the fact that Ogun represents both the integrity of autochthonous tra-
dition and the principle of change and adaptation. Thus, Derek Wright sees Ogun
as ‘the god of transition, the archetypal crosser of boundaries’.36 In similar vein,
Msiska comments that: ‘For Soyinka, Ogun is the god of all spaces of transition,
the in-between spaces that need to be inhabited, transgressed and overcome as
one moves between one mode of existence and another.’37 As this suggests, for
Soyinka displacement is not necessarily the antithesis of spaces of filiation. Rather,
it can provide a new location from where inherited identities and values can also
be preserved and reaffirmed. If, as Louis James argues, ‘the place [Aké] …
60 Located Selves
underlies the boy’s opening consciousness’ [sic], it continues to ground the mature
writer in crucial ways.38

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces:

Memoirs of an Asian American Woman (1996)
There are considerable areas of overlap between the life-writing of Soyinka and
Lim in terms of the role ascribed to issues of place and displacement in the for-
mation of postcolonial subjectivity. Both texts provide a detailed account of
childhood in a colonial location which is conceived, especially early in life, as an
integral aspect of their authors’ identity. Comparable to the ‘selving’ of place in
Aké, the child Lim experiences Malacca ‘not as a town but as a familiar spirit, a
space extending from the family, and familiarity encompassing territory’.39 In
both works, moreover, the birth-place is being increasingly transformed by the
politics of decolonisation and intimations of globalisation. This entails similar
dilemmas for both autobiographical Subjects in terms of the contrasting attractions
of traditional culture and a modernity imposed from abroad. Further Aké and
Among the White Moon Faces alike stage their protagonists’ increasing dislocation from
their cultures of origin in pursuit of educational opportunity, in the context of
which dynamic the early growth of a future writer’s mind is carefully elaborated.
Yet there are also significant differences between Lim and Soyinka’s treatments
of both the cultural politics and psycho-social effects of (dis)location. In the first
place, she is a good deal more conflicted about her native culture and place of
birth, an ambivalence in which gender issues play a crucial role. In her Chinese-
Malayan community, girls are valued little more than in El Saadawi’s village on
the Nile:

Girls were interchangeable. They fetched, obeyed, served, poured tea,

balanced their baby brothers and sisters on their hips while they stood in the
outer circles of older women. Unnecessary as individuals, girls need concern
nobody, unlike sons, especially first sons, on whose goodwill mothers measured
their future.
(AWMF : 14)

If there is also an echo here of the rivalry with an older brother in A Daughter of
Isis, Lim’s early development is structured by comparable negotiations with – and
subsequent rejection of – ‘the only one shape’ (sic; AWMF : 99) available for
females in her culture. This process is signalled in the (Self-cancelling) question
which the author constantly asks of herself as a girl: ‘How can I prove that I am
not who I am?’ (AWMF : 43).
Lim’s gendered sense of dislocation is exacerbated by the affective and gender
economy of her particular family, where she is the only girl among several male
siblings. In striking contrast to Soyinka’s affectionate narrative of a largely
untroubled domestic life, Lim’s portrayal of Malacca is coloured by deep personal
unhappiness about her relationship with her parents. In describing them as
 Located Selves 61
having ‘unwittingly mutilated me’ (AWMF : 20; compare 303), Lim corroborates
El Saadawi’s conviction that female circumcision does not have to be a physical
operation. Lim also anticipates El Saadawi’s strong attachment to her father and
acknowledges crucial paternal support for her educational ambitions. None-
theless, she deplores Baba’s unfaithfulness, gambling and violent rages (she is
often thrashed when she disappoints his expectations, locking her into a pattern of
abuse which the author is courageous enough to admit reproducing when she, in
turn, becomes a parent). Baba’s violence towards his wife, moreover, leads to the
decisive event in Lim’s early life, her mother Emak’s abandonment of the family
(when the author was 8) for a new life in Singapore. Lim’s ensuing trauma is
never fully healed. Indeed it is exacerbated during one adult visit to Singapore
when Emak insists that Lim call her ‘auntie’, so as not to put off a new lover. In
the US, the author suffers a breakdown which is connected directly to unresolved
feelings about her mother (AWMF : 224–5). Such conflict underwrites Lim’s later
restless efforts to ‘unbecome’ Emak (AWMF : 223) as she searches for a more
sustaining ‘family’ in the United States. This quest embraces – with varying
degrees of satisfaction – volunteer host families, shared student houses, the aca-
demic community and the feminist movement – before she finally achieves the
grounding of marriage and motherhood. These, it could be argued, constitute for
Lim her most vital claim to ‘being at home’ in the US.40
Furthermore, in strong contrast to Soyinka’s unquestioning assumption of an
essential rootedness and belonging in his birthplace, Lim represents herself as
already displaced in other important ways, before migrating to the United States.
Unlike Abeokuta (where only the temporary presence of Congolese soldiers and a
tiny Hausa quarter disturbs its ethnic homogeneity), Malacca is to a significant
degree the product of a variety of diasporic communities. Friends with names like
De Souza reflect the history of Portuguese colonialism. Lim’s grandfather lives on
Heeren St, evoking the subsequent era of Dutch power. British colonialism brings
in its wake not only a new material infrastructure symbolised by the Indo-Gothic
railway hotel where Lim has her liaison with a predatory English lecturer, but
large numbers of Indians and Chinese, creating a far greater degree of cultural
hybridity than in Soyinka’s childhood home-town. Lim celebrates this fact in
various ways, not least in her recollections of the striking ethnic diversity of her
lovers and friends. Equally, while she is baptised as a Catholic, she frequents
Hindu temples and her family also observes many Confucian customs and rituals.
Later, she enthusiastically anticipates that independence will dispense with
colonial racial hierarchy and usher in ‘a multiracial, multicultural, pluralistic
democracy’ (AWMF : 175).
However, Lim insists equally on the negative aspects of such hybridity. Her
sense of dislocation while growing up derives substantially from belonging to the
Chinese diaspora which migrated to what is now Malaysia in the wake of Britain
taking control of the peninsula. Her grandfather, a penniless labourer, comes in
pursuit of precisely the kind of life-opportunities that Lim herself will later seek in
America. As a member of the Malay-assimilated peranakan fraction of this dia-
spora, Lim suffers more specific kinds of psychic/affective displacement. Many
62 Located Selves
Chinese-Malays, especially during periods of nationalist agitation, regarded per-
anakans disapprovingly as a group which had lost touch with its roots. One of
Lim’s earliest memories is that ‘Chinese-speaking Malayans called me a “Kelang-
kia-kwei” – or a Tamil devil – because I could not or would not speak Hokkien’
(AWMF : 23; compare 182). Conversely, Baba insists that English be spoken at
home once Emak flees, cutting his daughter off from her maternal Malay. Thus,
despite her deficiencies in Hokkien, Lim records, ‘The Malay-speakers placed me
as an ancestral talker’ (AWMF : 24). The existential ‘confusion’ which this liminal
linguistic-cultural location engenders is partly reflected in the multiplicity of
names Lim is given – Agnes and Jennifer, in addition to Shirley and her Chinese
ones (compare Equiano’s multiple namings) – which bespeak ‘too many identities,
too many languages’ (AWMF : n.p.).
Lim’s psychic/cultural dislocation is exacerbated by contact with colonial cul-
ture, despite her growing love for the English language, in which she increasingly
feels most ‘at home’. Whereas Soyinka’s childhood experience of colonialism is
essentially benevolent, providing new cultural elements to be absorbed relatively
unproblematically into his psycho-social repertoire, Lim’s exacerbates her angst in
important respects. This is partly because her exposure to its influence is far more
direct and extensive than Soyinka’s. While her father buys her British comics and
books as a child, the writer’s primary engagement with colonialism comes in a
series of expatriate-run educational institutions which are sometimes hardly more
palatable than Miss Hamer’s establishment in A Daughter of Isis. While on the one
hand welcoming school as a relief from problems at home and appreciating that
it represents the best avenue of escape from the single gender ‘shape’ which her
community enforces, Lim is sometimes as damning as Ngugi41 about the emo-
tional ‘damage of colonial education’ (AWMF : 126). Seduced into longing to be
like the privileged British boarders at her convent, she is further alienated from
her ‘home’ culture by ‘a pedagogy of terror’ (AWMF : 105). As curious and
independent-minded as El Saadawi, however, Lim bridles increasingly against the
conformism and obedience demanded by the nuns, in a relationship which alle-
gorises the struggle for autonomy of her country. The same pattern of conflict is
observable during her undergraduate education, where British culture is dangled
before students as an impossible object of desire, full communion with which they
are in the end denied by virtue of being racially Other.
Yet whereas Abeokuta becomes progressively more hybrid as it is incorporated
within the system of globalisation, to the extent that Soyinka bewails the degree of
erosion of its traditional culture, the opposite dynamic is observable in Lim’s
Malacca – causing the writer no less regret. For Lim, the price of Malayan inde-
pendence is regression towards mono-culturalism. Even as a child, the future
author senses that the Chinese diaspora is often regarded by indigenous Malays
as at best temporarily resident aliens, if not positively unwelcome outsiders. When
decolonisation approaches, the community comes under increasing pressure to
prove its right to a place to the soon-to-be-independent nation, enabling Lim’s
father to begin a new career as translator of attestations to nationality and citi-
zenship rights. Such legal documents count for little. After independence in 1957,
 Located Selves 63
increasing violence against those of Chinese origin culminates in the expulsion of
Chinese-majority Singapore in 1965 from the Federation and the massacres in
mainland Malaya of 13 May 1969. These developments are major factors in
enhancing Lim’s sense of dislocation, reinforcing – although not precipitating –
her decision to ‘translate’ herself to the United States.
More explicitly than is the case with Soyinka, displacement thus becomes as
much a positive as negative condition in Lim’s writing, representing an opportu-
nity to escape not only the deteriorating political situation, but the psychic dis-
locations engendered by Emak’s disappearance, the family’s increasing poverty,
and an initially detested step-mother – as well as to fulfil educational ambitions.
This is consistent with a pattern observable earlier in the text. The child Lim
keenly feels the pain of eviction from the security of grandfather’s house, which
represents her most powerful early idea of ‘home’, and subsequently from Baba’s
shop-house, a dislocation violent enough to render Malacca a ‘foreign town’
(AWMF : 68). Nonetheless, she quickly begins to associate such displacements with
autonomy and liberation: ‘I began to value … my home which was not a home’
(AWMF : 138), precisely because of the uncustomary freedoms it allows her as a
teenage girl. To escape her new step-mother, for example, Lim cycles unsu-
pervised ever further from the family dwelling, before graduating to the greater
mobility offered by motor-bikes. Later, she is attracted to Iqbal, her first serious
lover, because of his ‘openness of movement’ (AWMF : 191), signified above all by
his studies in California.
Lim’s life-writing differs from Soyinka’s not only by virtue of the attention she
gives to the motivations leading to her displacement from her home-town but to
the process of adjusting to the new milieu in which she finds herself. In certain
ways, Lim’s migration involves a radical ‘translation’ of her subjectivity. ‘I have
become transformed’, she announces at the outset of her narrative, reviewing her
life at the time of writing (AWMF : 20). The psychological as well as physical
distance travelled from her culture of origin and the identities enforced there is
suggested in Lim’s sub-title. These are not the ‘memoirs of a Malay(si)an woman’,
but of an ‘Asian American’ one. In some ways, her narrative reads like a classic
American immigrant narrative of successful assimilation into the melting-pot of
popular myth, represented by her marriage to a Jewish liberal professional. Fur-
ther, their production of an ethnically hybrid child generates stereotypically
aspirational daydreams that he may become the country’s President. Consonant
with such narratives, in which talent and hard work are the primary motors of
social integration and success, Lim rises seemingly inexorably from teaching in an
obscure Community College in the Bronx, to a professorship at the University of
California. Her later accounts of a jet-setting international academic life measure
how far Lim has transcended her initial self-image on arrival in the US: ‘I was a
true immigrant, shabby, unrooted, poor, and perpetually afraid of losing my way’
(AWMF : 208).
Also typical of such narratives of successful assimilation is Lim’s enumeration of
the advantages which the US offers in comparison to her country of origin. First,
she represents it as more genuinely multi-cultural than a Malaysia which is
64 Located Selves
becoming ever more narrowly reconfigured in the interests of its dominant eth-
nicity (AWMF : 339). This plurality is especially accessible along the axis of
gender. Many of the women Lim meets combine in communities inconceivable in
an increasingly ethnically divided Malay(si)a, such that ‘across these divisions of
white middle-class women and myself, for example, or young Chicanas and
myself now, a rare yet common ground is visible’ (AWMF : 233; compare 313).
Her first experience of such networking comes when Lim works as a women’s
dorm counsellor at Brandeis. As she settles into her role, she at last finds relief
from the chronic feelings of isolation which characterised her initial period in
Boston, finding a ‘home’ in relationships of mutual care and service. The faculty
world Lim later enters also provides further sustaining networks of women, with
Lim’s turn towards feminism as such being propelled by participation in a
summer school led by Nancy Miller.
Yet all this by no means implies either Lim’s total assimilation to American
culture nor the negation of her Malay(si)an past. After all, barely a third of the
text addresses life after arrival in the US. (Intending initially to return to Malaysia
as ‘the native daughter made good’ (AWMF : 248) to teach in its universities, Lim
decides to settle in the US only after meeting her future husband.) Soon after
arriving in America, Lim alludes to her ‘other psyche’ (AWMF : 221), which is
rooted in Malaysia. This aspect of her subjectivity is represented in the powerful
dreams of ‘home’ Lim remains prey to and the intensely felt absence of Iqbal. For
a while she devours science-fiction, until she realises that: ‘All the books were
about aliens … alien languages … disasters at work in alienness’ (AWMF : 230).
But Lim’s sense of estrangement in America never entirely disappears, as is evi-
dent from her description of Malay(si)a at the time of writing as ‘a parallel uni-
verse played out … in journeys home … and in a continuous undercurrent of
feelings directed to people I have known, feared, loved and deserted for this
American success’ (AWMF : 20–1, my emphasis).
Thus, while Lim is physically ‘translated’ to what is in some ways a spectacu-
larly different world, and certainly changes significantly as a result, there are also
strong psychic continuities between the two phases of her life and in her identity.
In the United States, as much as in Malay(si)a, Lim’s characteristic ambivalence
derives from her occupation of an ‘in-between’ position, neither fully belonging,
nor wholly an outsider. Thus, on arriving in the US, Lim finds that she must ‘play
the roles set out for me’ (AWMF : 209) as surely as in her natal culture. Conse-
quently, while academic life provides the feminist support described above, it is
also often no less patriarchal than Malay(si)a, where a junior lectureship for which
she is supremely qualified is given instead to an ethnic Malay male. She notes
acerbically that (temporary) composition instructors in the US tend to be women,
while the full-time literature faculty is as male-dominated as was the case at uni-
versity in Kuala Lumpur. Rendered ‘seriously invisible’ by ‘institutionalised
neglect’ (AWMF : 217), she can barely fend off another predatory lecturer who
advises her that she should get married rather than pursue graduate studies. Even
at Brandeis she is sometimes condescended to on the grounds of her ethnicity.
Philip Rahv, for example, complains to the aspiring young author that: ‘There
 Located Selves 65
are no good immigrant writers, they write only sociology. And all this attention to
black writers!’ (AWMF : 212). There is therefore some justice in Lim’s occasional
explicit comparisons of the US education system to the one she experienced in
colonial Malaya (AWMF : 272).
Other aspects of American life prove equally alienating. Thus, if Lim is
strongly critical of the effects of British colonialism, she is also uneasily aware of
the negative influence of US power around the world. She arrives for graduate
studies at the height of the Vietnam protests and remains troubled about the geo-
political role of her adopted homeland long afterwards, citing American inter-
vention in El Salvador as another instance of its malign influence. Further, dis-
placement teaches her a good deal more about the sometimes negative
consequences of class identity, replicating Behan’s trajectory in Borstal Boy.
Although her grandfather is wealthy and her feckless father leads the family into
poverty, Lim has little class-awareness as such while growing up; even her distaste
for Ah Peng is largely personal. In America, by contrast, she comes to recognise
class as a powerful, if often unacknowledged, presence deforming social relations.
From disputes with neighbours in the gentrifying part of Brooklyn where she and
Charles buy their first home, to encounters with elderly working-class males able
to attend Community College only in retirement, Lim comes to appreciates that
gender and race are not the only social fault-lines in her new homeland. Equally,
she remains sceptical about the emphasis on individualism in the US. While
appreciating that her birth community was often stifling, she recognises that it
prevented the atomisation which is the reverse side of the medal of American
individualism. Neither social system, in the end, seems fully satisfactory (AWMF :
231).
To this extent, it could be argued that patterns of affect and behaviour
acquired in her natal culture remain decisive in Lim’s identity. Pace the author’s
occasional tendency to construct herself as a multiple and divided being, prey to
‘super-fragmentation’ (AWMF : 239), one might suggest that her ambivalence
about ‘place’ in fact expresses the existence of a consistent ‘unmovable self ’
(AWMF : 20, my italics) throughout both strands of her narrative. As with
Soyinka, the continuity of Lim’s identity between childhood and adulthood, as
well as before and after displacement, is further illustrated in the author’s lan-
guage-use. In the prologue, she discusses the ‘pidgin’ which arose in Malaya at
the confluence of cultures which constituted the colony during her childhood,
generating ‘a pattering patois which was our very own’ (AWMF : 13). While it
would be incorrect to describe Lim’s autobiographical discourse as ‘pidgin’, it is
certainly characterised by the inflection of the Standard British English learned in
colonial institutions with a variety of other languages, ranging from Bahasa Malay
(for example, pisang emas, nyonya, pintu pagar) to both Standard American English
(for example, stoop and math) and slang (schleppers, teeter-totter). The sig-
nificance of this pattern is complex. On the one hand, one might argue that the
Americanisms are evidence of Lim’s increasing assimilation to a new identity.
Indeed, during one visit to Singapore, a visiting Australian academic thinks of
Lim as American and asks her to check idioms in his translation of some stories
66 Located Selves
set in New York. On the other hand, despite Lim’s argument that little of the
polyglossic features of Maly(si)an culture appear in her memoir,42 her discourse is
sufficiently mixed as to be consistent with the hybrid(ising) cultural dynamics in
which she grows up (compare Soyinka). To this extent, one might conclude that
Lim remains a ‘resident alien’ in crucial subjective-affective respects long after
acquiring citizenship rights in the U.S.
One might wish to suggest that Lim resolves the dilemma which her language-
use reveals about her identity through defining herself as ‘Asian American’, a
newly-emerging category with which she is increasingly taken after reading
Maxine Hong Kingston. By means of this term, she can at last ‘place Malysia side
by side with the United States’ (AWMF : 334). The lack of hyphen might be
deemed to signify a dualistic model of hybridity already encountered in Equiano,
in which neither term is dominant, rather than either a more chronic form of
disjunctive decentredness or synthesis into a unified new identity of the kind ela-
borated by Morgan. As Lim suggests elsewhere, however, a further interpretation
is possible, whereby her hybrid language expresses a desire for her writing, at
least, to be located nowhere specific, but to be seen rather as a form of ‘flight
from territorialisation’,43 if not her true home.44 This supports Jeffrey Partridge’s
argument that instead of embracing either or both of the national-cultural iden-
tities available to her, Lim instead ultimately locates herself in relation to a
‘transnational aesthetic’.45 ‘How strange to be a poet without a country!’ Lim
exclaims at one point (AWMF : 277–8). More explicitly than Aké, therefore, Among the
White Moon Faces in the end prioritises the productive contradictions of displacement
over the security of roots in specific locations, old or new.

Conclusion
The texts discussed in this chapter demonstrate the crucial role that issues of
‘place’ can play in the constitution of postcolonial subjectivity, irrespective of the
gender of the writers concerned. Indeed, the recurrence of the word in titles as
diverse as Morgan’s My Place, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s No Place Like Home (1995)
and Said’s Out of Place (see Chapter 7) suggests that in the postcolonial context
auto/biographical Selfhood can scarcely be conceived separately from socio-spa-
tial concerns. Yet as both Aké and Among the White Moon Faces suggest, feelings of
being ‘at home’ or of displacement can be as much subjective and psychological
as a function of the material (dis)location of the Subject. Soyinka experiences
some measure of alienation in the places most familiar to him. Conversely, in
some measure, Lim comes to feel ‘at home’ in her apparent homelessness.
The relationship between (dis)location and Selfhood in postcolonial life-writing
is therefore often fraught and contested. On the one hand, a secure socio-spatial
affiliation is often represented as crucial to security and stability of identity. There
is thus an implicit regret throughout Aké for the loss of organic relations to the
environment which Soyinka grew up in. A similar tone is struck in Nehru’s Auto-
biography. On returning to the homeland he has dreamed of so intensely during his
years abroad, Nehru experiences ‘an exile’s feeling’46 because his country has
 Located Selves 67
changed so profoundly in his absence. By contrast, an organic, uninterrupted
relation to familiar places can also be the source of deep oppression. Sometimes,
this is a consequence of colonialism and its aftermath, at others of indigenous
social structures and value-systems. Whether confined to the Reservation (as is the
case with some of Morgan’s extended family) or Bantustan (some of Magona’s
relatives in To My Children’s Children), or traditional female spaces in the village (El
Saadawi’s experience for much of her childhood) or confined to their homes by
outside forces (Suad Amiry, see Chapter 7), innumerable (post)colonial subjects
have been involuntarily tied to filiative locations they would rather escape or
enlarge. Others, by contrast, are transported to alien locations where they are
involuntarily fixed in place, whether through plantation slavery (Equiano and
Prince) or colonial imprisonment (Behan and Gandhi), with potentially equally
deleterious psychic consequences.
As the latter examples suggest, dislocation is an equally ambivalent predica-
ment in postcolonial life-writing. On the one hand, voluntary displacement is
characteristically represented as liberating, for reasons which can be inferred from
the preceding discussion. For Claude McKay, for example, displacement opens
up a new personal ethic: ‘Go, better than stand still, keep going.’47 This antici-
pates the ‘nomadism’ and ‘deterritorialisation’ widely celebrated as characteristic
of (post)colonial and, more particularly, of diasporic, experience.48 Conversely,
voluntary forms of displacement can also prove traumatic, as Nehru’s experience
attests. The same conflicting pattern can be found in representations of involun-
tary dislocation. From James’s traumatic deportation from the US (on which he
is, symptomatically, almost silent, although it is clearly one of the elements in his
turn from Marxism to nationalism – and from ‘straight’ to cultural politics), to the
varieties of exile anatomised in Palestinian life-writing (see Chapter 7), involun-
tary displacement can prove profoundly challenging, if not catastrophic, for a
sense of Self. However, even such dreadful experiences are often reconfigured as
positive in their consequences for the (post)colonial Subject’s identity-formation
and sense of personhood. A spectacular instance of this attitude is the provi-
dentialism widely expressed in precursor forms of postcolonial life-writing. Like
many slave narratives, Equiano ostensibly plots his disastrous start in life in terms
of the happy outcome that Christian salvation promises. At the opposite end of
the historical spectrum, there is an unexpected echo of this structure of feeling in
Said’s Out of Place, where the pain of exile is transmuted into something enabling,
even liberating: ‘My search for freedom … could only have begun because of that
rupture, so I have come to think of it as fortunate.’49 Such examples corroborates
Glissant’s argument that ‘uprooting can work toward identity, and exile can be
seen as beneficial’.50 Yet, as the work of Soyinka and Lim illustrates to different
degrees, even when exile is embraced in this positive fashion, it does not neces-
sarily undo what Paquet calls ‘a consciousness of lineage in territory as a dis-
tinctive marker of individual identity that is coexistent with journey in space [sic]
and/or consciousness beyond regional space’.51
This thematic of subjectivity provides a clear contrast to those discussed in
previous chapters in terms of the strategic concern of this monograph with the
68 Located Selves
specificity of postcolonial life-writing. In each of those cases, the sub-genre provides
important inflections of the thematics defined by feminist critics as distinctive of
western women’s life-writing. Nonetheless, it was also observed, there is also
considerable overlap between the two sub-genres in all three instances. However,
if the thematic of (dis)location appears to at last open up blue water between
them in terms of the construction of autobiographical subjectivity, as well as
between postcolonial life-writing and the western canon, the strategic issue of its
specificity requires investigation of further elements of the sub-genre, notably its
forms and styles. In the next two chapters, therefore, I will analyse aspects of
these in comparative relation to both women’s life-writing and the western canon.
5 Working the borders of genre in
postcolonial life-writing

As suggested in the Introduction, autobiography has always proved difficult to

classify in anything approaching watertight theoretical terms. Nonetheless, as the
existence of the canon suggests, there has been broad agreement in practice about
what is and is not included in the genre. Further, as has been seen, Misch’s early
definition of ‘the autobiographical pact’ was resurrected and refined by Lejeune
towards the end of the second phase of Auto/biography Studies and broadly
disseminated during the 1980s in the Anglophone world, where it remains extre-
mely influential. Thus, while lamenting the often slippery variety of their objects
of study and debating the hierarchy of sub-forms which constitute their objects of
study, for most of its history, critics in the field have operated within parameters
consonant with what Derrida describes as the fundamental ‘law of genre’, namely
that ‘genres are not to be mixed’.1 However, as Marcus, Gilmore and Anderson
variously suggest, as the third phase of Auto/biography Studies develops, post-
modernism poses radical problems for the idea of genre, including auto-
biography.2 The same can be claimed of the effects of feminist interventions in
the critical field. If, as has been seen, thematics of subjectivity constitute one
important focus for its contestations of the cultural politics of the canon and its
formation, issues concerning the forms and borders of auto/biography have
proved equally fertile.
In the view of many such critics, the conception of autobiography as a properly
coherent genre with its own protocols and boundaries rests on three principal
premises. First, the text in question must conform to the terms of the ‘auto-
biographical pact’. Second, it must demonstrate the integrity of its Subject’s
Selfhood. For example, Misch argues that ‘from this element of unity proceed the
substantial merits of the genre’.3 Gusdorf concurs, asserting that the auto-
biographer ‘strains toward a complete and coherent expression of his entire des-
tiny’.4 However, generic integrity is enforced as much by aesthetic consistency as
psychological ‘continuity’.5 Thus, according to Olney, the genre has been con-
sidered to be properly literary largely insofar as it conforms to the traditional
criteria of ‘wholeness, harmony, and radiance’.6 If ‘stylistic harmony’ is crucial in
this regard, this is guaranteed above all by the all-important convention of what
Gusdorf calls ‘fine logical and rational order’ in the formal arrangement of the
development of the protagonist’s subjectivity and identity.7
70 Working the borders of genre
In the view of many feminists, such positions are, once more, clearly gendered,
further helping to explain the relative marginalisation of women’s life-writing in
the critical history of the field. Thus, Estelle Jelinek argues that the qualities of
‘harmony and orderliness [and] unidirectionality’ prized by male colleagues in
securing the aesthetic unity of the genre, rather ‘betoken a faith in the continuity
of … their own self-images’.8 Because of the different nature of their subjectivity
and ‘the multi-dimensionality of women’s socially conditioned roles’, according to
Jelinek, their life-writing is often ‘disconnected, fragmentary, or organised into
self-contained units’.9 However, later critics have expressed concern that such
arguments might reinforce patriarchal stereotypes about the ‘nature’ of femininity.
Consequently, they have instead attributed to women’s life-writing a program-
matic desire to subvert not so much its ‘internal’ rules of organisation but the
‘external’ borders which separate it from other genres. Thus, Liz Stanley asserts
that a crucial characteristic of women’s life-writing is its desire to ‘experiment at
the boundaries between different writing forms’.10
For other critics in turn, this subversiveness extends beyond an exaggeration of
the inter-generic ‘contaminations’ which in fact characterise all genres,11 to a
questioning of the very identity of autobiography as a separate and distinct mode
of writing. In these debates, the law of genre is often represented as an instance of
‘the law of the father’, insofar as the canons which anchor such generic rules were
traditionally dominated by male authors, chosen by critics who were also, his-
torically, overwhelmingly male. Consequently, Sidonie Smith, for example,
argues that the ‘progressive’ woman auto/biographer ‘refuses to obey the prohi-
bitions of the father’s culture’.12 Gilmore spells out the potential implications of
such disobedience in asserting that if ‘autobiography itself seems closed to
women’s self-representation, then women may choose forms other than straight-
forward, contractually verifiable autobiography for self-representation’.13 Such
claims are supported by the analysis in Chapter 2 of the ‘relational Self ’ pro-
moted in women’s life-writing. As has been seen, this perforce erodes the tradi-
tional distinction between autobiography and biography which, as noted earlier,
Olney argues that every critic in the field should be keen to maintain. As will
shortly be seen, similar strategic assaults on the traditional identity of the genre
have also been effected by western women writers who erode the boundaries
between autobiography on the one hand and, on the other, fiction and History.14
Comparable arguments have been extended to minoritarian women’s life-writing.
Torres, for example, claims that it ‘tend[s] to mix genres in a manner we have
not seen in mainstream autobiographies’.15 In turn, Lionnet asserts of post-
colonial women’s life-writing that it is characterised by ‘the métissage, or braiding,
of cultural forms’, a strategy which ‘help[s] change the form of the genre as well
as relations of power in society’.16
With a view to complicating the gendered nature of the positions elaborated by
such critics, however, in the first two sections of this chapter, I will analyse some
ways in which male postcolonial life-writing, too, challenges traditional concep-
tions of autobiography’s generic identity by engagement with the genres of fiction
and History. I will then explore postcolonial life-writing’s negotiations with a
 Working the borders of genre 71
further genre, travel-writing, which has thus far played little part in such discussions
about its women’s analogues – with a view to differentiating between the two
fields of writing in this respect. Once more, Fanon’s Black Skin provides a template
for later postcolonial writers (of both genders) in its renegotiation of generic rules
and form. At once ‘a clinical study’, a tract of political philosophy and ‘the sum of
the [existential] experiences … of seven years’ of the author’s life, its discourse
ranges between the modes of scientific analysis, confession and poetry, and
between the oral and the literary – all within a structure which is sometimes
highly fragmentary and imagistic.17 This extraordinarily hybrid form, reinforced
by its multiplicity of styles, is perhaps the principal reason why Black Skin has
rarely been studied under the rubric of autobiography, even within Postcolonial
Studies. Nonetheless, it clearly anticipates the sometimes radically experimental
stylistic properties of ‘autobiographics’/‘autogynography’/‘autography’.

Fiction
The relationship between fiction and autobiography has long been a matter of
debate. Thus, while Richard Steele complained in The Tatler in 1709 that ‘the
word Memoir is French for a novel’, Anatole France defended his use of an alias in
his ‘autobiographies’ on the grounds that it gave him ‘a much wider freedom to
talk about myself … The fictitious name [Pierre] did not disguise me.’18 Within
Auto/biography Studies, the boundary between fact and fiction has also been
investigated persistently. For example, as far back as Misch, memory has been
viewed as a mode of creation, even invention, rather than as something which
offers unproblematic access to past ‘realities’.19 The more it is claimed as a literary
mode of representation in the second phase of the history of the field, moreover,
the more foregrounded has been autobiography’s reliance on such ‘fictive’ devices
as the ‘emplotment’ of the protagonist’s trajectory in relation to particular
moments of crisis (which function as ‘dramatic climaxes’), its use of figurative
language and self-conscious manipulation of ‘narrative voice’. Thus, as Pascal
suggests, there is inevitably some measure of conflict between ‘design’ and ‘truth’
in canonical autobiography which is generally the work of writers/critics who are
highly self-conscious about matters of form.20 More radical claims have been
made in the third phase of Auto/biography Studies, even by liberal-humanist
critics. For example, in asserting the right of autobiographers ‘to present them-
selves in whatever form they may find appropriate’, Spengemann proposes that
texts such as Dickens’s David Copperfield and even Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter should
be reclassified as autobiographical.21
While many might find Spengemann’s argument strained,22 he is nonetheless
correct in attributing an enhanced accommodation of issues surrounding ‘fictive-
ness’ within contemporary Auto/biography Studies partly to ‘changing ideas
about the nature of the self ’.23 In the wake of post-structuralism, moreover, the
claim that Selfhood – and reality itself – are always constructed, if only insofar as
they are mediated in language, has further eroded older truth claims made on
behalf of the genre. Thus, de Man famously concluded in 1979 that: ‘The
72 Working the borders of genre
distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either or polarity but one
that it is undecidable.’24 Such leads have proved productive for some feminist
colleagues. For example, Mary Evans asserts that since, from a postmodernist
perspective, ‘the “whole” person’ can only be understood as a ‘mythical construct
of our society and our social needs’, the autobiographical Self which replicates it
is necessarily an aesthetic and performative rendition of an ideological fiction.25
Nonetheless, the generic identity of autobiography continues to be advocated
in large measure on the basis of its empirical rather than aesthetic or psycholo-
gical truth claims. If Gusdorf argues influentially that ‘the truth of facts is sub-
ordinate to the truth of the man’,26 simply ‘making it up’ is widely deemed to
disqualify the writer accused of doing so from writing autobiography ‘proper’ on
generic as well as moral grounds. While one should discriminate both wilful lies
and subjective conceptions of truth from fiction as such,27 the latter remains
clearly excluded, in the eyes of many critics, by virtue of the terms of Lejeune’s
‘pact’, which insists that the narrative is by and about ‘a real person’.28 Further-
more, the considerable continuing investment in retaining fact/fiction distinctions
in relation to the genre can be deduced from sometimes heated controversies over
the truth status of particular texts. For example, as Anderson points out, reaction
to suggestions that the self-styled Holocaust survivor Binjamin Wilkomirski had
invented the narrative recounted in Fragments (1995) demonstrated a fear not just
that the events described had been thereby diminished, but that autobiography
had also been brought into disrepute as a genre.29 Postcolonial life-writing has
not been immune from such controversies, as furores over the veracity of texts
ranging from Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and The History of Mary Prince to Nobel
Prize-winner Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), Said’s Out of Place (see
Chapter 7) and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone illustrate.30
In the rest of this section, I will explore issues surrounding the fact/fiction
border-line in relation to V.S. Naipaul, with particular reference to Finding the
Centre (1984) and A Way in the World (1994). This choice is governed primarily by
the fact that these works exemplify the pressure which the deployment of fictional
resources places on traditional conceptions of auto/biographical boundaries to a
greater degree, perhaps, than any other text considered in this volume. In ana-
lysing them, I further aim to complicate arguments about the distinctiveness of
women’s life-writing in its troubling of this boundary.
One factor underlying the permeability of the fact/fiction distinction in Car-
ibbean life-writing31 is no doubt the fact that, as Sandra Paquet suggests, the
dominant tradition of the genre, in the Anglophone parts of the region at least,
has been furnished by creative writers – from Claude McKay and C.L.R. James
through Edgar Mittelholzer, Michael Anthony and George Lamming to Naipaul
himself and Jamaica Kincaid.32 However, the explanation seems more compli-
cated than this, since the same holds true in other parts of the postcolonial world.
One might frame an alternative line of inquiry with John Thieme’s observation
that Caribbean autobiographies are relatively thin on the ground (he was writing
in 1984) and that where they do exist, they tend to focus primarily on the early
part of the protagonist’s life. He relates both patterns to the difficulty of
 Working the borders of genre 73
producing fully-achieved self-portraits in a culture characterised on the one hand
by chronic cultural fragmentation33 and, on the other, by the imperative in adult
life to identify with a collective destiny.34 While one might question aspects of
Thieme’s argument, his invocation of social factors seems a useful initial context
within which to approach the traffic between fact and fiction in Naipaul’s
autobiographical writings.
The closest that Naipaul has (thus far) come to writing an autobiography as
traditionally understood is, perhaps, his ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’. In the
Foreword to Finding the Centre, in which this was republished simply as the first of
‘two narratives’ (the sub-title of the text as a whole), however, Naipaul insists that
it is ‘not an autobiography, a story of a life or deeds done’ (FC : 9). Instead he
prefers the description ‘personal narrative’ (FC : 9). In part, this discrimination is
justified on the grounds that the piece is limited to reconsideration of his begin-
nings as a writer. Nonetheless, it broadens out from this to become, among other
things, a tribute to his journalist father who not only encouraged his son’s
aspirations but himself had ambitions as a writer. (To this extent, it conforms to
the pattern elaborated in Chapter 2, being as much a biography as an ‘auto-
biography’.) Inasmuch as his father is so central, it might even be understood as
the ‘prologue’ to the autobiography that Seepersad Naipaul never wrote, despite
the younger Naipaul’s encouragement. (In this respect, one might also compare
‘A Prologue’ to Jamaica Kincaid’s later, equally fictionalised and apparently
oxymoronic, Autobiography of My Mother.)
The reasons behind Seepersad’s inability to narrate himself as a Subject are
disquieting and affecting in equal measure and shed light on Naipaul’s own
‘refusal’ of autobiography as conventionally understood and, more specifically, its
traditional investment in fact/fiction distinctions. This failure is structurally linked
in the text to the moment when Naipaul’s father suffers a nervous breakdown.
According to his mother, from whom the younger Naipaul gets the story, See-
persad ‘looked in the mirror one day and couldn’t see himself. And he began to
scream’35 (FC : 70). On one level, the breakdown is attributed to personal cir-
cumstances, notably the older Naipaul’s career problems and increasingly unsuc-
cessful efforts to either individuate himself within, or free himself from, his
oppressive extended family. However, behind this personal dimension to his
father’s existential void, Naipaul implies the influence of a much wider predica-
ment of cultural ‘vacancy’ (FC : 64) which afflicts every Caribbean subject,
including any would-be autobiographer (FC : 9, 28). In essence, this is a function
of the artificial and fragmented nature of the New World of which Trinidad forms
part (and which C.L.R. James addressed in a quite different way, as seen in
Chapter 2).
A Way in the World insists that the overwhelmingly constructed nature of the
Caribbean as a consequence of colonialism extends even to its ‘natural’ environ-
ment (compare Soyinka’s treatment of landscape in Aké). Thus, on a trip to the
uninhabited north-easternmost tip of the island, the unnamed first-person narrator
(henceforth ‘V.S. Naipaul’ to preserve the element of undecidability in that nar-
rator’s identity, which also has crucial implications for the text’s generic identity)
74 Working the borders of genre
remarks on some rare remnants of indigenous vegetation. These contrast with the
imported ‘coconut, mango, breadfruit, bamboo’ covering the rest of the terri-
tory.36 The artificial character of the human environment of the Caribbean is
equally striking, and is represented as a consequence of the loss of its ‘original’
inhabitants, a cultural/historical rupture provoked by the extirpation of Trini-
dad’s aboriginal cultures. Moreover, even the later Spanish period in Trinidad’s
history is largely ‘burnt away’ (a recurrent phrase) or exists overseas, notably in
the archives of Venezuela and Seville (with limited, and by implication, inferior
copies in Trinidad). Such ‘absences’ are in equal measure responsible for the
lack of ‘reality’ (WW : 209–11) which confounds the quest to ground Caribbean
identity.
The wave of ill-synthesised migrations from Africa, India, the South Seas and
China (symbolised in the tree species Naipaul identifies), as well as Europe, out of
which the modern island society has emerged, fails to fill this void. With no
foundational culture of his/her own, the ‘floating’ Trinidadian Subject is, more-
over, hard-pressed to anchor a sense of Selfhood in relation to any of his/her
available cultures of origin. While brought up as a Hindu, ‘V.S. Naipaul’ remarks
recurrently on the debased understanding of traditional religion which char-
acterises his community.37 A similar dislocation characterises the Black popula-
tion, large sections of which, in the narrator’s eyes, invest in an essentially
mythical Africa to ground their identity (compare FC : 51–3). The Trinidadian
Subject is therefore suspended between dying or invented traditions, on the one
hand, and, on the other, a colonial modernity which alike have their origins
elsewhere, thereby requiring ‘foreign witness’ (WW : 77) to validate ‘Caribbean-
ness’. This conflicting matrix of identifications makes ‘finding the (psychic) centre’
both an urgent and impossible existential task which can all too easily lead to the
kind of crisis experienced by Seepersad. The blankness he sees reflected in the
mirror symbolises a wider ‘lack’ in Trinidadian self-image which pre-empts tra-
ditional conceptions of ‘sovereign’ autobiographical personhood. This parlous
existential predicament also helps explain the younger Naipaul’s experimental
mode of writing the Self in A Way in the World, insofar as he seeks not so
much to capture ‘presence’ but its lack. More particularly, it underwrites his
predilection for negotiating his own sense of fracture (WW : 73), even ‘nonentity’
(FC : 34) by means of a fragmented, and mutually destabilising, mixture of fiction
and non-fiction.
Such inter-generic negotiation is anticipated by In a Free State (1971) where
(seemingly) non-fictional autobiographical fragments provide the prologue and
epilogue to three fictional pieces, with which they share an interest in the themes
of travel, displacement and cultural re/dislocation which characterise so much of
the writer’s later œuvre. In this instance, Naipaul’s distribution of non-fiction and
fiction appears to retain some confidence in the separability of the two. But on
closer inspection, even here the division is less clear-cut than one might suppose.
This is largely because one cannot be sure that prologue and epilogue are,
indeed, non-fictional. Anticipating his subsequent auto/biographical writing,
Naipaul scrupulously evades the terms of Lejeune’s ‘pact’ by refusing to let their
 Working the borders of genre 75
narrating ‘I’ (or ‘I’s, since there can be no assurance even that the first-person
narrator in these parts of the book is one and the same) be named – either by
‘himself ’ or an interlocutor.38
However, such generic undecidability is markedly enhanced in A Way, beginning
with the very identification of the work. Published in Britain with the sub-title ‘a
Sequence’, a descriptor with no specific generic indicators, it was simultaneously
published in the United States with the sub-title ‘A Novel’ (it is hard to believe
that this would have been done without Naipaul’s authorisation). Even the British
paperback, however, also describes it as ‘fiction’ (on the back-cover of the
Minerva edition). The problem of generic identity is also more acute than in In a
Free State partly because the apparently autobiographical sections are now dis-
tributed piecemeal among the seemingly non-autobiographical ones. The table of
contents reinforces this epistemological uncertainty, with one ‘autobiographical’
section described as ‘History’ and three others, despite being more ostensibly
‘historical’, each sub-titled ‘an unwritten story’. Moreover, in A Way, the two cate-
gories each play on the distinction between them which is in theory preserved in
the earlier text. For example, the traffic between fiction and non-fiction continues
within the opening ‘autobiographical’ narrative, ‘An Inheritance’, which is described
as a ‘Prelude’. This invites comparison with Wordsworth’s poem not just as a medi-
tation on the ‘growth of an artist’s mind’, but as a highly artificial literary construct.
Consequently, as Stephanie Jones comments, ‘The book’s fusion – or corruption –
of these given genres [confuses] hard definitions of fact and fiction.’39
The concept of ‘fact’ comes under severe pressure for other reasons. If one
compares the fourth apparently autobiographical section of A Way, ‘On the Run’,
with the travel piece ‘The Crocodiles of Yamossoukrou’, the second ‘personal
narrative’ in Finding the Centre, one finds certain ‘facts’ in the earlier piece heavily
(cavalierly?) amended. The ‘Phyllis’ of ‘On the Run’ is clearly based on the
‘Andrée’ of the former work, now amalgamated with aspects of her friend ‘Arl-
ette’. ‘Phyllis’ is now given a husband, the refugee Keita, a ‘character’ who is
quite unrelated to either woman in the earlier narrative. Moreover, in the final
‘autobiographical’ section of A Way, ‘Home Again’, much of the fate of ‘Blair’ is
clearly simply invented. ‘V.S. Naipaul’ refers to ‘the version of his death I carried
in my imagination’ and conceives of it in terms of ‘some Edgar Allan Poe story’
(WW: 367), ending with ‘a fanciful picture of the ceremonial return of Blair’s
body to Trinidad’ (WW : 369). Such moments perhaps substantiate ‘V.S. Nai-
paul’s’ conviction that memory is essentially a creative act (WW : 30), but they
also encourage the idea that fact and fiction segue into each other in this text
not so much in a ‘sequence’, but in an epistemologically dizzying, tail-chasing
‘whirligig’ of ‘revolving doors’ of the kind de Man describes.40
In A Way, ‘fact’ is further compromised in a quite different way. While ‘V.S.
Naipaul’ draws heavily in the text on archival investigation, much of it apparently
executed in person, the three sections of the ‘sequence’ which address the history
of the New World are presented as treatments for plays or films. The point seems
to be not simply that much of Trinidad’s past can now only be imagined, or that
archives are comprised simply of verbal and therefore partly fictive artefacts, or
76 Working the borders of genre
that history has to be narrativised and to that extent also begins to merge into the
domain of the fictive. It is a reminder that the ‘real’ history of the New World has
been shaped by fable (WW : 210) to an extraordinary extent, from Walter
Raleigh’s feverish imaginings of El Dorado to Francisco Miranda’s Enlightenment
dream of a just new society – quasi-Orientalist fantasies which have their analogue
in contemporary revolutionary projects of the kind described in ‘New Clothes’.
A Way thus proposes that Caribbean subjectivity is chronically suspended
between the ‘real’ and the fictive, domains which cannot, in any case, be easily
isolated from each other or distinguished in themselves. As a consequence, the
traditional homology proposed (for much of the history of Auto/biography Stu-
dies) between unity of genre and unity of autobiographical Self breaks down.41
Equally, Naipaul’s work calls into question Lejeune’s fundamental premise that
autobiography is defined by being by and about the same ‘real’ person. Despite
my invocation of de Man, these deviations from the rules of genre do not derive,
however, simply from abstract philosophical conundrums which might find in
Naipaul evidence of typically postmodern and Eurocentric epistemological
doubts. Rather, they respond to the concrete historical-cultural predicament of
parts of the New World as Naipaul sees it. Indeed, to the extent that the traffic
between fact and fiction in his autobiographical writings anticipates such experi-
ments in Caribbean women life-writers like Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid,
gender may not be, as claimed by Lionnet and Gilmore, the prime factor in
respect of this aspect of their ‘autobiographics’.42 Instead, explanations are per-
haps more convincingly sought by contextualising all three writers’ work within
material and psychic problematics entailed by their Caribbean culture of origin.
However, while the troubling of borderlines between fiction and autobiography
may be particularly evident in Caribbean life-writing, it can also be found in
other parts of the postcolonial world, though not always for directly comparable
reasons (space constraints prevent me from pursuing this argument on the present
occasion). Notable examples range from the series of autobiographical texts pro-
duced by Mulk Raj Anand, beginning with Seven Summers (1968), through Nawal
El Saadawi’s Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1957) and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy
(1998).43 As the example of El Saadawi suggests, all this is not to deny that
gender plays some role in such interrogations of the genre as traditionally
understood. In the next chapter there is another striking example of the diverse
motivations behind such experimentations in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia (1985, sub-
titled in French editions ‘a novel’), which demonstrates how gender can also play
its part in such generic self-attributions. Equally, as will also be seen in the next
chapter, Sara Suleri’s description of Meatless Days as ‘these quirky little tales’44
suggests a comparably gendered desire to trouble the distinctions which Lejeune
and others draw between autobiography and fiction.

History
If Naipaul ‘works’ the traditional boundary between autobiography and fiction,
he also, as has been seen, troubles the borderline between the former genre and
 Working the borders of genre 77
historiography. There has been intense debate about the latter relationship in
Auto/biography Studies, which offers a divided view of this conjunction. From its
beginnings, some have seen it as a close and productive one. Thus, for Misch, as
‘personal history’, autobiography exists at one end of a spectrum which encom-
passes more public forms of History and to some extent provides their founda-
tions; he therefore approvingly quotes Herder’s dictum that ‘a Library of Writers
on Themselves’ would form an excellent ‘contribution to the history of man-
kind’.45 In the second phase of the field, Gusdorf described the autobiographer as
the ‘historian of himself ’, who locates his account of ‘private motives’ in relation
to ‘the objective course of events’.46 At the cusp of its third period, Weintraub
once more insisted that autobiography is, in these respects, at least, ‘an historical
genre’.47
Conversely, however, Marcus suggests that since its inception Auto/biography
Studies has also expended considerable effort on ‘the project of “rescuing” auto-
biography from incorporation into history and history-writing’.48 Throughout its
existence, critics have insisted that History focuses on collective experience, often
in time-frames which exceed individual life-spans, while autobiography is regar-
ded as the record of more private domains of self-reflexive analysis and feeling.
Thus, Misch in fact relegates sub-genres like memoir to second-class status within
the hierarchy of autobiographical modes because their authors are ‘merely
observers of the events and activities of which they write’.49 Similarly, Gusdorf
deprecates the fact that memoir ‘is limited almost entirely to the public sector of
existence’ and Weintraub distinguishes sharply between the res gestae of the
Emperor Augustus and the ‘ideal type’ of Augustine’s Confessions which focuses
primarily on ‘character, personality, self-conception’.50 Equally, Olney describes
as ‘naïve’ the idea that an autobiography can approach the condition of an
‘objective historical account’.51
Historical Studies has been equally divided about the connection between the
two discourses. According to Misch, historians have long used autobiography in
their researches, a tendency which became entrenched in the nineteenth century
when the genre ‘acquired a fixed place among the sources of … social history’.52
Modern historians have been rather more sceptical. Indeed, Gandhi speaks for
many such figures, ironically, when he complains of the ‘inadequacy of all auto-
biography as history’.53 Such attitudes are apparent even among some of those
seeking to promote new kinds of History ‘from below’ (this movement seeks to
make traditionally marginalised groups – what Swindells calls the ‘silenced voices
of the past’54 – more prominent as historical agents). Thus, Jerry White complains
that ‘the autobiographical mode reinforces a superficial historical consciousness
and by doing so actually distorts reality.’ Since autobiography is full of ‘immanent
biases and distortions’, it lacks sufficient ‘critical understanding’ to explain the
larger historical forces which shape individual lives.55
Feminist Historical Studies has taken a rather different view. In aiming to
expose the traditionally gendered nature of History,56 many women historians,
according to Sue Morgan, embrace the task not just of ‘democratising the vision
of who [ but] what constitutes historical discourse’.57 Three aspects of this
78 Working the borders of genre
initiative are especially germane to present discussion. First is the strategic erosion
of established distinctions between the public/political and private/personal
spheres, such that the former becomes ‘deprivileged as the main arena of
authentic historical activity’.58 Second is the critique of the supposed ‘objectivity’
of History such that it is seen instead as ‘a self-aware reconstruction of the past
circumscribed by the subject position, theoretical intent and historical/political
context of the writer’.59 Finally, feminist History questions the traditional primacy
of archival material because it disproportionately reflects the power and interests
(and legacies) of the dominant gender. Instead it stresses the importance of sources
such as ‘oral testimonies’, as a means of correcting all three biases in traditional
(male) historiography.60
Feminist Auto/biography critics have widely seconded the objectives and
methods of their historian colleagues, proposing that women’s life-writing should
be considered not just as legitimate historical evidence but also as a form of
(counter-) History.61 Such arguments have been extended to western minoritarian
women’s life-writing, whose subjects have also traditionally been marginalised
within mainstream History if not excluded from it altogether.62 Thus, Anne
Goldman proposes that ethnic American women’s life-writing reconceptualises
traditional relations between History and ‘personal life history’ such that the
former becomes ‘the twin to life history, not the master narrative engineered to
supplant it’.63 The same has been argued for some strands of postcolonial
women’s life-writing, notably the sub-genre of testimonio.64 For example, Longley
argues that Australian Aboriginal women’s writing provides ‘a primary historical
record’ which urges ‘a revision of all Australian history to incorporate crucial
Aboriginal histories’65 (an argument confirmed in relation to Morgan in Chapter 1).
The convergence of History and postcolonial life-writing will be investigated in
the rest of this section with particular reference to Nirad Chaudhuri’s The Auto-
biography of an Unknown Indian (1951). The choice is governed primarily by the fact
that it exemplifies the pressure which History puts on traditional conceptions of
autobiographical boundaries to the same degree, perhaps, as is the turn to fiction
of writers like Naipaul. To this extent, it also offers particularly appropriate evi-
dence to reconsider some of the claims made by certain feminist critics about the
generically subversive role of History within women’s life-writing.
An initial impression of Chaudhuri’s Autobiography might suggest that the gen-
eric affiliation claimed in the title is perversely inappropriate. The ostensibly
autobiographical portion of the book does not begin until a quarter of the way
into the work. It is seemingly unconscionably delayed by detailed preliminary
investigation of the social environment in which Chaudhuri’s first twelve years are
to pass. This first quarter of the text is therefore aptly described as ‘more an
exercise in descriptive ethnology than autobiography’ (AUI : 129). Equally, the text
does not end with any summary of the self-understanding arrived at by the close
of the relatively short period of life (twenty-five years) on which it concentrates
(compare James’s ‘Epilogue and Apotheosis’). Rather it closes with a lengthy
chapter entitled ‘An Essay on the Course of Indian History’, in which the narra-
tor is reduced to no more than a speck against the ‘large historical perspectives’
 Working the borders of genre 79
(AUI : 513) elaborated there. Further, even within the more personal narrative
sandwiched between these respective exercises in ethnography and historical
reflection, there is a clear departure from the terms of Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical
pact’ insofar as the first-person narrative voice takes the plural form ‘we’ as often
as the singular ‘I’ – whether in relation to Chaudhuri’s family, Bengalis or Indians
more generally. Despite this first-person voice, moreover, the text often appears
to aspire to the ‘objectivity’ more commonly associated with traditional History
than autobiography. Thus, while Chaudhuri apparently reproduces verbatim his
youthful essay on ‘The Objective Method in History’ only as a yardstick by which
to measure his later deviation as an historian from its prescriptions, The Auto-
biography ends with an affirmation that the conclusions drawn ‘stand clear of sub-
jective and passing clouds’ (AUI : 513). Consonant with the relative marginalisation
of autobiographical matter, in turn, there is little insight into the development of
Chaudhuri’s affective life (compare James). Close relations often remain unin-
dividualised by name and it is not until three-quarters of the way into the text
that we are introduced to a personal friend of any importance, apparently con-
firming feminist claims about the monadic nature of male autobiographical
subjectivity.
Yet Chaudhuri partly redeems his text as autobiography – a term he uses
insistently to describe it (AUI : 22, 129, 198, for example) – precisely through
extensive attention to those aspects of his formation which explain how he
became ‘endowed with the consciousness of history’ (AUI : 268).66 This is repre-
sented as the most important aspect of his development as a self-reflective being,
attention to which is traditionally conceived as one of the key demands of the
genre. The Autobiography therefore provides a detailed conspectus of Chaudhuri’s
historical studies.67 Two works encountered at university are especially important
in understanding how his own text might also be read as History. The first is J.R.
Green’s Short History of the English People (1874), which has more recently been
claimed as one inspiration for contemporary western ‘history from below’.68
Indeed, Chaudhuri’s text anticipates many features of such historiography, not
only in his focus on the ‘lives of the obscure’ (most obviously he represents himself
as ‘an unknown Indian’) but also in both his stress on his specific geo-cultural (and
class) ‘situatedness’ (see also Chapter 4) as an historian and his conception of
appropriate source material. Eschewing the (colonial) archive which Naipaul
favours, he draws instead on the indigenous resources of individuals’ memory (his
own, pre-eminently, which is constantly cross-checked against that of relatives),
family, clan and village oral history (AUI : 15, 85, 132), material culture (consider
his descriptions of the evolution of family houses) and folk culture. To this extent,
Chaudhuri’s intention is clearly in part to write a ‘History of the Bengali/Indian
People’, using a – for the time – highly unusual methodology partly elaborated in
response to local conditions, both sociological and historiographical.
The second key figure is Edward Gibbon, first cited as early as the Preface to
The Autobiography, whose magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) is
in many respects the polar opposite of Green’s work in its conception of History.
Insofar as Chaudhuri’s text is ‘history from below’, it provides an implicit critique
80 Working the borders of genre
of the latter’s lack of interest in social history, let alone ‘the common man’.
Instead, Gibbon’s preoccupation is with ‘great men’ (overwhelmingly western)
represented through a ‘drum and trumpet’ focus on war and politics. None-
theless, Gibbon’s historiography clearly significantly influences his successor’s,
most obviously in terms of the latter’s ‘thematics of decline’. Thus, Chaudhuri
pays close attention to the decay of his class, the East Bengal squirearchy which is
progressively and unwillingly urbanised as the nineteenth century progresses.
These themes are subordinated to discussion of much grander kinds of failure,
however, including the decline not just of Britain as a great imperial power
comparable to Rome but of the West as a whole, which is depicted in Spengle-
rian terms (AUI : 405). The idea of decline receives its most extensive elaboration,
however, in relation to modern Indian civilisation which, according to Chaud-
huri, reached its high point in the ‘Indian Renaissance’ of the last half of the
nineteenth century. Bengali humanism, An Autobiography argues, achieved its gains
‘mainly based on the formula of a synthesis of the values of the East and the
West’ (AUI : 182; compare 231). By the time of Indian independence, however,
this great cultural revolution has, in Chaudhuri’s eyes, dissipated into the ‘deca-
dence’ (AUI : 364) of a chauvinist variety of nationalism (compare Behan) which is
not dissimilar from the Nazism so recently defeated in the Second World War.
The bitterest fruit of this particularism is what might be called ‘partitionism’,
which is expressed not simply in the erection of new political borders which
sunder Chaudhuri’s beloved birthplace from independent India, but an increas-
ingly communalist mentality within the new rump nation (compare Lim’s account
of independent Malaysia).
Nonetheless, Chaudhuri’s thematics of decline exceed Gibbon’s remit by virtue
of the self-consciously situated character of Chaudhuri’s account. Thus, a con-
siderable portion of the Autobiography is devoted to a personal narrative of
Chaudhuri’s own gradual disaffection with modern Indian nationalism, set within
a memoir of key events and public figures in twentieth-century Indian history to
which the writer was sometimes directly linked (for example, for a while he was
secretary to the brother of S.C. Bhose, who led the Japanese-armed Indian
National Army against the British). Further, there are clearly private dimensions
to Chaudhuri’s ‘thematics of decline’. These include the collapse of his mother’s
mental health and Chaudhuri’s own failure to become a professional historian.
‘Plucked’ from the MA, he spends much of his adult life in a variety of dispiriting
occupations, from private secretary to jobbing journalist.
In offering a personal as well as traditionally Historical account of the ‘the-
matics of decline’, Chaudhuri is evidently influenced by a different text of Gib-
bon’s. Among the many ‘autobiographical masterpieces’ (AUI : 129) cited in The
Autobiography, Gibbon’s is described as ‘a great favourite’ (AUI : 359). Unfinished
in six drafts on the historian’s death, Gibbon’s Autobiography, edited and published
in 1796, became one of the most widely admired examples of the genre in the
nineteenth century. Gibbon’s account of his intellectual development is similarly
overshadowed by premonitions of apocalyptic civilisational decline. The specific
reason, in Gibbon’s case, was the French Revolution, watched with increasing
 Working the borders of genre 81
alarm from Lausanne while Gibbon was working on his autobiography and which
engendered a comparable revolution in his political sympathies to Chaudhuri’s.
From Chaudhuri’s later perspective, the overthrow of the ancien régime has obvious
parallels with the end of the British Empire; and Gibbon’s personal testimony of
revolutionary fanaticism provides a model for the narrativisation of Chaudhuri’s
own experience of the chauvinism of twentieth-century Hindu revivalism.
Thus, while Indian history is the principal theme of The Autobiography, the
author nonetheless gives himself considerable discursive space. From this angle,
Chaudhuri’s ‘testimony’ can legitimately be seen ‘as a contribution to con-
temporary history’ (AUI : vii). In explaining that the relationship is indeed con-
junctive rather than disjunctive, the author offers perhaps the most breath-taking
claim about the autobiographer’s representativity in all of postcolonial life-writing.
Unashamedly echoing Louis XIV’s claim that ‘l’état, c’est moi ’, Chaudhuri asserts
that, for all his untypicality, ‘l’Inde, c’est moi ’ (AUI : 470). The conjunction he
claims further allows him to boldly reverse the perspectival positioning of History
and autobiography as traditionally conceived. The autobiographical elements are
often presented in conformity to the objectivity advocated by historiographers like
Ranke, or from what Chaudhuri calls a position of ‘estrangement’ (AUI : 261).
Conversely, not only is history personalised in An Autobiography, but the style of
History is foregrounded, in conformity with Gibbon’s insistence that ‘style is the
image of character’.69 In praising Green’s discourse, Chaudhuri stresses its
‘Keats-like delicacy’ (AUI : 334). If a self-conscious artistic ‘delicacy’ (the range
and variety of his diction being particularly remarkable) is one hallmark of
Chaudhuri’s own style, so is the inter-subjective, empathetic, Keatsian ‘negative
capability’ which characterises so many of his engagements with the historical
personages encountered in his narrative.
To this extent, Chaudhuri’s text mounts a critique of generic ‘partitionism’
which resonates with his broader hostility to a variety of divisive particularisms
within contemporary India. It thereby constitutes a direct challenge to the form as
well as the perspectives of contemporary nationalist historiography, or what
Chaudhuri terms – with a contemptuous irony worthy of Gibbon – ‘the Clio of
the Bazaars’ (AUI : 357). Above all, Chaudhuri accuses such work of the cardinal
sin of forgetfulness, specifically in relation to the contributions made by both
Muslims and the British to Indian culture. In one of his most heartfelt declama-
tions, the author asserts that at a time ‘when most of my fellow-students and
teachers appeared to think that history existed only for the sake of exalting Indian
nationalism’ (AUI : 342), ‘historical’ as well as moral rectitude required him to
honour the contribution of non-Hindu communities to his country.
The Autobiography thus offers not just an accommodation between the seemingly
antithetical historiographical methods of Green and Gibbon but a broader
negotiation between the discourses of History and autobiography. Nonetheless,
Chaudhuri’s generic experimentations might be understood to be framed through
recourse to western templates, supporting Ruvani Ranasinha’s judgement that he
exemplifies ‘the process of affiliation [to the West] in an extreme form’.70 To this
extent, he might thereby also be understood as conforming to Gusdorf ’s
82 Working the borders of genre
argument about the non-western life-writer’s inability to escape the terms of
colonial modernity. However, according to Chaudhuri, synthesis is a constitutive
element not just of Bengal Renaissance humanism which, as its name implies,
modelled itself on western precedents, but of traditional Hinduism itself (compare
Soyinka’s childhood Aké ). It is this which distinguishes it from the narrow, exclu-
sionary forms of contemporary Hindu revivalism which, ironically, make the
latter little more than a simple imitation of the grosser forms of European nation-
alism. For example, Chaudhuri claims that ‘Hinduism, as we have known it
during historical times, has always been an admixture of foreign … and indigen-
ous’ (AUI : 204). Elsewhere he insists: ‘“Synthesis” was our magic word. This
tendency was reinforced in us … by our belief that the Hindu outlook on life was
“synthetic”’ (AUI : 336). To this extent, Chaudhuri’s experimental traffic between
traditionally distinct genres is at least as much an affirmation of (post)colonial
difference as ‘a derivative discourse’,71 or what Naipaul called an unparalleled
example of ‘the penetration of the Indian mind by the West’.72 In this respect, it
is also significant that, paradoxical as it may seem, The Autobiography supports the
argument of Chapter 2 that postcolonial subjectivity is characteristically con-
structed between individual and collective historical experience. If Naipaul undoes
the homology traditionally proposed between unity of genre and unity of auto-
biographical Selfhood, Chaudhuri undoes the equivalent homology between unity
of genre and the singularity of that Selfhood, not just through his use of the first
person plural, but in his (C.L.R.) Jamesian attention to the social grounds from
which individuals and their personalities emerge.
This troubling of borderlines between History and autobiography is widely
observable across the range of texts studied in this monograph. Some even
describe themselves (partly) as Histories, notable examples being James’s Beyond a
Boundary and Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures (see next section).73 Moreover,
even when such authors disclaim expertise as historians, they often demonstrate a
clear understanding of what is at stake in historiography, as is the case with
Claude McKay.74 Their engagements are not, however, necessarily consonant
with traditional forms of History but rather reflect a range of emphases and
techniques more commonly associated with what Samuel calls ‘people’s history’
or ‘history from below’. Thus, while several figures work to challenge the dominant
historiography of (neo-)colonialism (Gandhi, James, Soyinka, Morgan, Djebar,
Allende, Behan), others provide a critique of nationalist élite historiography
(McKay, Behan again, El Saadawi, Suleri, Djebar).
Insofar as these two branches of historiography are largely the preserve of male
writers, moreover, the women life-writers concerned provide specifically gendered
counter-narratives which seek to write subaltern women, in particular, back into
hegemonic versions of History. Nonetheless, to the extent that the inter-generic
traffic I have described in Chaudhuri’s autobiographical writings offers parallels
to those of western and postcolonial women life-writers alike, gender is clearly not
the only explanation for the experimental hybridisation of auto/biography and
History in this context. Instead, it is equally likely to be found by contextualising
all such writers’ work within both the traditionally anti-individualist ethos of their
 Working the borders of genre 83
cultures of origin and their efforts to rewrite the received terms of historiography
to open it up to a range of traditionally marginalised Subjects which includes, but
is not confined to, women.

Travel-writing
The preceding two sections of this chapter offered two examples of ways in which
the borders of autobiography are ‘worked’ in postcolonial life-writing in a manner
comparable to western women’s life-writing. To try and distinguish between the
sub-fields in relation to this strategy, therefore, I will now explore a third inter-
generic conjunction, the axis between autobiography and travel-writing. As sug-
gested earlier, this relationship has not been the subject of detailed investigation
among feminists who have sought to reconstitute Auto/biography Studies from a
gendered perspective,75 perhaps because the mainstream critical tradition has
historically declared travel-writing outside its purview.76 However, the two genres
have clear affinities. Like autobiography, according to Patrick Holland and
Graham Huggan, travel-writing is often animated by the desire to achieve self-
understanding.77 Both genres also traditionally involve personal quests, whether
literal or metaphorical (the trope of life as a journey of exploration is a staple of
autobiography), usually narrated in the first person.
Nonetheless, there are important differences, too. Insofar as travel-writing
expresses the quest for self-understanding, this is characteristically pursued in
terms of an investigation of Self in alien surroundings. Moreover, too much self-
reflection entails the danger of ‘immobilising’ the traveller’s journey and narrative
momentum, as well as potentially diminishing proper attention to those alien
surroundings. As these competing priorities might suggest, travel-writing exists
along a continuum between an outer- and inner-directed narrative ‘I’/eye. Hol-
land and Huggan illustrate this difference of emphasis through comparison of two
leading contemporary exponents of the genre, Bruce Chatwin and Redmond
O’Hanlon. They argue that: ‘In Chatwin’s narratives the traveller is primarily an
observer, hiding behind the eccentricities of the characters he observes; in
O’Hanlon’s, the traveller himself is the greatest eccentric.’78 To the extent that
the narrator is self-effacing, on Chatwinian lines, travel-writing might, indeed, be
seen as having ‘an antiautobiographical aspect’.79
It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that mainstream Auto/biography Studies
has been neglectful of the genre, particularly in view of the fact that travel as a
dynamic in the formation of personhood plays little part in itself within canonical
autobiography (with the limited exception of Rousseau’s Confessions). By contrast,
postcolonial life-writing engages to a very significant degree with both travel and
its effect on the constitution of subjectivity, not least because of the substantial
psychic and affective implications of (dis)location (see Chapter 4). Many of the
texts considered in my text conform to this pattern, involving most conceivable
motives for – and modes of – travel. Some of the life-writers already mentioned
spend long periods travelling (Equiano, for example, passes more than ten years
at sea,80 McKay many months wandering in Europe, Naipaul equivalent periods
84 Working the borders of genre
gathering material). Others journey abroad to live there temporarily (Gandhi
passes several years in South Africa, as Nehru and Behan do in Britain and El
Saadawi in the United States) or permanently (Said, Emecheta), whether volun-
tarily or not. Others undertake crucial journeys of ‘return’ either within their
homeland (Morgan, Magona, Amiry) or back to it from abroad (Lim, Said).81 As
also indicated in Chapter 4, others, by contrast, bewail the inability to travel in
certain circumstances (Said, Amiry, El Saadawi), seeing this as a constriction on
their personal development or even a threat to their identity.
The remainder of this section will focus on Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful
Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857), which provides a particularly inter-
esting example of the conjunctions between autobiography and travel-writing for
a number of reasons. These include the author’s gender (it was very rare for
women of any ethnicity to travel so widely and write about it in the nineteenth
century); her ‘in-between’ ethnicity (she was born of a Jamaican mother and
‘Scotch’ father); the early date of composition compared with the other texts
considered in this chapter; and the purpose and nature of her travels. Above all,
Seacole anticipates the interest in the inter-relationship between travel and the
quest for identity which characterises a good deal of subsequent postcolonial
writing.
To this end, Seacole self-consciously manipulates the conventions of auto-
biography and travel-writing both in concert with and against each other, in a
manner parallel to the experimentations of Naipual and Chaudhuri with the
respective genres just considered. The very first sentence of her text appears to
promise autobiography (if not a novel): ‘I was born in the town of Kingston, in
the island of Jamaica, some time in the present century’ (WA: 11). This is the
seemingly unproblematic opening gambit of a Subject desiring to initiate ‘the
story of [her] life’ (WA: 128). Perhaps not coincidentally (Seacole was already in
her thirties before Emancipation was proclaimed in Jamaica), it is also consonant
with the conventions of slave narrative, echoing the opening of The History of Mary
Prince, for example. Such a beginning is certainly unusual in travel-writing, though
this kind of information might emerge later in the narrative. However, the very
next sentence of Wonderful Adventures sets limits to the extent of autobiographical
matter which will be divulged: ‘As a female, and a widow, I may be well excused
giving the precise date of this important event’ (WA: 11). This anticipates a teas-
ing pattern of self-censorship which frustrates the reader’s desire for material that
might be expected in an autobiography. Thus, her shadowy husband’s rapidly
diminishing role is perhaps symbolised in the way his name contracts from ‘Mr
Seacole’ to ‘Mr S’. Perhaps most intriguing in this respect is ‘the little girl’ (also
Mary) who accompanies Mrs Seacole throughout her travels to Central America
and thence to the Crimea. The reader might suspect that the girl is, in fact,
Seacole’s daughter – and remain baffled by her unwillingness to clarify the rela-
tionship. Wonderful Adventures subverts the conventions of autobiography in a
number of other ways. For example, the title appears to promise a view of the
subject from the outside, if not an actual biography. Significantly, when Seacole
begins to get to know another nurse in the Crimea, she describes them as
 Working the borders of genre 85
exchanging ‘biographies’ (WA: 82). This emphasis is reinforced by Seacole’s per-
sistent citation of testimonials and references from others, shifting her text towards
‘biography’ insofar as she deploys them primarily to ‘let another voice speak for
me’ (WA: 96) rather than to vindicate herself.82
However, such refusals of aspects of autobiographical convention do not
necessarily confirm the text’s identity unambiguously as travel-writing. For
example, in contravention of its norms, this ‘female Ulysses’ (WA: 11) does not
return to her point of departure; rather, like Equiano, she settles finally in Eng-
land. Moreover, while one sees little of Seacole in Jamaica, the birth-place to
which she journeys back intermittently during her early sojourns in Central
America, and while most of the action takes place ‘abroad’, Seacole is curiously
selective in the range of travel experience she shares. There is little on her initial
trips to London, less on her voyages to other Anglophone Caribbean islands and
the barest mention of trips to the more exotic locations of Haiti and Cuba. These
are no sooner alluded to than dropped without explanation: ‘But I hasten onward
with my narrative’ (WA: 14). This clearly suggests that the description of ‘alien
surroundings’ which constitutes conventionally the principal object of traditional
travel-writing is not the prime concern of her text.83
While Seacole’s refusal to describe her ‘first impressions of London’ (WA: 13)
might be understandable, given the metropolitan location of her target audience,
comparable omissions are less explicable. En route to the Crimea, for example,
Seacole explicitly disavows what is expected of a travel-writer: ‘I am not going to
risk the danger of wearying the reader with a long account of the voyage to
Constantinople, already worn thread-bare by book-making tourists’ (WA: 76). As
her ship crosses the bay of Trafalgar, she complains of being woken at ‘an
unreasonable hour … and expected to be duly impressed’ (WA: 76). The ironical
reference to ‘book-making tourists’ might suggest that Seacole is, paradoxically,
deploying a standard trope of the genre, presenting herself as a disillusioned
(because belated) kind of anti-travel writer precisely in order to reinforce the
authority of her accounts of alien surroundings when she does provide them. The
grumpy persona she sometimes adopts in both Panama and Turkey – ‘I do not
think that Constantinople impressed me so much as I had expected’ (WA: 78) –
anticipates the jaundiced narrators of more recent postcolonial (and other) travel-
writing, including Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness and Caryl Phillips’s The European
Tribe. Yet in the end, Seacole’s reticence seems to have more to do with a genuine
fear of boring her readers, implying that they are not expecting travel-writing as
conventionally understood any more than she intends to provide it.
Nonetheless, Wonderful Adventures certainly conjoins both genres in pursuit of its
author’s quest to achieve greater self-understanding.84 Seacole is especially pre-
occupied by issues surrounding her ethnic/national affiliations, a problematic
sharpened by the wide range of ethnicities and nationalities with which her travels
bring her into contact. Indeed, this preoccupation is announced in the first voyage
described in any detail before her Panama travels. During her early visit to
London, Seacole and her companion are assailed by street urchins who make fun
of their ‘colour’. The narrator laughs the episode off in a gesture which might be
86 Working the borders of genre
understood as designed to flatter the target audience of a book written to re-
establish her fortunes after the disasters of the Crimea (compare Equiano’s ‘scru-
pulously delicate’ manipulation of his readers’ self-image). Nonetheless, it is
clearly significant in being the first time that she recalls her identity being publicly
brought into question.
That this issue still plagues her is suggested at the very beginning of the text,
where Seacole describes herself as ‘Creole’. This descriptor is deeply ambiguous:
as Sarah Salih has demonstrated,85 it then referred variously to both ‘whites’ and
‘blacks’ born in the Caribbean and, in Seacole’s use, to mixtures between the two
races. While she defiantly rejects the demeaning alternative term ‘mulatto’, the
apparent confidence of the affirmation ‘I am a Creole’ (WA: 11) thus conceals an
apparently unstable foundation for identity in national/ethnic terms. This
becomes further evident not only in her ambivalent account of stereotypes about
Creoles, but in the slippery meanings of ‘home’ in the first chapter. On the one
hand, Seacole recalls that ‘I never followed with my gaze the stately ships home-
ward bound [to England] without longing to be in them and see the blue hills of
Jamaica fade into the distance’ (WA: 13). Conversely, two paragraphs later, she
describes how, after her first two trips to London (where she stays three years in
total), ‘I again started homeward’ (WA: 13) to Jamaica. Her self-identifications
within Jamaica appear to be equally fluid (or contradictory) into adulthood. On
the one hand, she is seen as a fit wife for the respectable Mr Seacole (in real life,
supposedly, Admiral Nelson’s godson86). On the other, the British colonial class
from which her husband (and father) comes is described unambiguously as
comprised of ‘strangers’ and ‘foreigners’ (WA: 58–9).
These twin aspects of Seacole’s national/ethnic identity pull her in different
directions during her travels. At times, she proudly affirms her identification with
‘Blackness’, not least in Panama where she is complimented patronisingly by a
‘benevolent’ Yankee who praises her in spite of her ‘colour’. Her stinging
response not only contradicts her objective status as ‘an unprotected female’ (WA:
40; compare 78) but as a member of a putatively inferior race. Equally, she con-
sistently takes the side of Panama’s blacks against its (overwhelmingly American)
white population, for example, when she supports the local alcalde’s decision to
free a female slave accompanying an American woman in transit to California.
And she is scarcely persuaded to give up her berth on the ship taking her back to
Jamaica from Navy Bay, even when ‘little Mary’ is spat upon by the white
American child.
If she reserves her strongest criticism for the United States, Seacole can also be
a stern critic of the racial politics of imperial Britain from the perspective of a
raced subaltern – despite her evident self-interest in flattering its amour propre. Like
Equiano, she reminds her target audience unambiguously of past misdemeanours
towards ‘those poor mortals whom you enslaved’ (WA: 21). Perhaps the most
disillusioning moment in her whole travels comes when she is rebuffed in her
attempts to find work in the Crimea through official channels in London: ‘Was it
possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here?’ (WA: 73).
The critique of Britain’s racially-based conception of its superiority is extended in
 Working the borders of genre 87
Seacole’s role as an ‘historian’ of the Crimean war (WA: 128; compare the pre-
vious section). In this respect, Wonderful Adventures provides an at times deeply dis-
obliging picture of imperial incompetence. For example, she stresses that the
British army fails completely in its assault on the Redan in Sebastopol and that
the situation is saved only by a French counter-attack. Indeed, there could barely
be a more biting denunciation of one period of British military inactivity, which
she ascribes to the temporary absence of her patron, the Times war correspondent,
W.H. Russell (WA: 139).
Nonetheless, while never disavowing her ‘black’ identity, and while sometimes
ironical about or directly critical of ‘civilised England’ (WA: 45), Seacole’s travels
often prompt an equally strong articulation of her affiliation to Britishness. For
example, in both Panama and the Crimea, she calls her establishment ‘The
British Hotel’. In Panama, she confesses to having ‘a prejudice against our cousins
across the Atlantic’ (WA: 21; my emphasis), the pronominal shift aligning her with
her target audience against American racism. However, while such sentiments are
understandable, given her own direct experience of slavery, at times, Seacole’s
affirmation of Britishness is itself expressed in worryingly imperialist terms (com-
pare Equiana). In Panama, she excoriates the local population (with the exception
of the escaped black slaves from North America, to whom she attributes what
saving graces New Granada can boast) for their idleness, cowardliness and dis-
honesty. Once in Turkey, moreover, she indulges in Orientalist stereotypes about
the dirt, disorder and despotism of the non-western world – while reserving an
imperially ‘primitivist’ admiration for the North African zouaves in the French
army, on account of their unquestionable ‘manliness’. This pattern is reinforced
by Seacole’s hierarchisation of European ethnicities. Greeks, Maltese and Spanish
are all stereotyped mercilessly as inferior groups to the British, French and,
interestingly, the Russians (perhaps not only on account of their courage but
because they make no comment on her ‘complexion’). One particularly interest-
ing example is ‘Jew Johnny’ (with characteristic ‘British’ ineptitude, Seacole finds
his real name is too complicated to master). He is constructed as the traveller’s
‘faithfullest servant’ (WA: 84), a trope which recurs in colonial literature from
Aphra Behn to Kipling and Conrad. To this extent, Seacole appears to use
travel-writing in normative ways for the time.
Seacole’s complex matrix of self-identifications is reflected in the ambivalent
cultural politics of Wonderful Adventures as travel-writing. To some extent, the text
operates counter-discursively. For example, her journey is not from the centre to
the periphery and back but largely between peripheries ( Jamaica, Panama, the
Crimea) through a centre (London) which is, however, not given significant dis-
cursive space. Insofar as the metropolis does appear, moreover, it is constructed
in terms of a somewhat disobliging counter-ethnography which emphasises the
ironical tone of terms such as ‘civilised’ in Seacole’s descriptions. However, while
its gendered perspective is certainly unusual, like many of the most famous tra-
velogues of the nineteenth century, to some extent Wonderful Adventures constructs
Seacole in the image of male imperial explorers. For example, in both her
ethnographic rendering of the ‘manners and customs’ of Amerindians and
88 Working the borders of genre
‘promontory’ descriptions of the local landscape as she prospects for gold in
Panama, Seacole approximates closely to the ‘capitalist vanguard’ model of
nineteenth-century European travel-writing analysed by Mary Louise Pratt.87
Indeed, in Said’s Orientalism, on which Pratt draws, such work is assigned a major
role in constructing the contemporary non-West in ways which enable and legit-
imise imperialism.88
Seacole’s autobiographical negotiation between Britishness and her ‘black’
identity remains equally ambiguous. On the one hand, Wonderful Adventures offers a
mobile and plural model of personhood which varies with location and situational
requirements. In this reading, ‘Creole’ stands for a comfortable kind of hybridity
or ‘in-between’ position vis-à-vis the different races of her parents. Consonant with
this interpretation, Salih argues that once arrived in the Crimea, Seacole’s pre-
occupation with questions of national/ethnic affiliation gives way to self-identifi-
cation in terms of gender.89 But there is strong evidence against this reading, not
only in Seacole’s repeated references to her origins and ‘complexion’ in the
Crimea but, above all, when the war ends and the time comes to leave. Seacole
clearly laments that she had ‘no home to go to’ (WA: 164). At this moment, as at
other times, her elaboration of ‘travelling subjectivity’ expresses a liminal sense of
identity which is the source of considerable anxiety. As with her rebuff in London,
which reduces her temporarily not just to tears but to immobility, she can take no
interest in the bustle of departure, identifying instead with those fixed forever in
the cemeteries near Spring Hill.
While this incident once more suggests the propensity of the hybrid, in Rush-
die’s terms, to ‘fall between two stools’ (compare Lim) rather than to ‘straddle
cultures’ (compare Equiano), Seacole’s predicament is by no means unproductive
and only very rarely compromises her agency. Indeed, Seacole anticipates the
paradigm of subjectivity represented in travel-writing by O’Hanlon which, Hol-
land and Huggan argue, is ‘less concerned with recuperating, or reinventing a
single self than with following the trajectory of a series of selves in transit’.90
Equally, parallel to the challenges offered by Naipaul and Chaudhuri to tradi-
tional conceptions of autobiographical subjectivity, Seacole interrogates the gen-
eric convention that such texts end with the establishment of a stable, complete
and ‘sovereign’ Self. To this extent, she produces a generically hybrid (or formally
‘Creole’) text which at once reaffirms and troubles the conventions and bound-
aries of both canonical autobiography and the (imperial) travel-writing of her
time – from the gendered as well as ‘raced’ perspective of what she describes,
foreshadowing Chaudhuri, as ‘an unknown Creole woman’ (WA: 70). Such a text
might best be described neither as autobiography nor as travel-writing but as
what Pratt calls ‘autoethnography’, an enabling, counter-discursive practice of
self-representation characterised by ‘partial collaboration with and appropriation
of the idioms of the conqueror’.91 If there is nothing to compare with this in
western women’s life-writing, the same pattern is observable in other texts con-
sidered in this monograph, albeit to a lesser degree. As has been seen, Equiano uses
travel to provide both autobiographical material, an ‘insider’ ethnography of his
West African community and an at times highly disobliging counter-ethnography
 Working the borders of genre 89
of the West. Gandhi’s travels generate a similarly complexly layered narrarive
project, as do Lim’s.

Conclusion
While the three genres under consideration in this chapter have been considered
separately for analytical purposes, it is important to note that they sometimes
occur together and, indeed, in combination with other genres. Thus, Chaudhuri’s
later considerable body of auto/biographical work, for example, could equally be
studied under the rubric of travel-writing by ‘a nomad of the industrial age,
wandering from pasture to pasture’ (AUI : 262). Conversely, Mary Seacole desig-
nates herself as ‘the historian of Spring Hill’ (WA: 128), a title also conferred in
the Preface to her text by the noted Times reporter of the conflict, W.H. Russell.
As such, her work might therefore be considered alongside – and in opposition
to – mainstream historiography of the Crimean War. Equally, the second ‘per-
sonal narrative’ in V.S. Naipaul’s Finding the Centre could easily have been analysed
within the framework of travel-writing and much of his A Way in the World, as
noted earlier, as a mode of historiography. At times, the degree of such inter-
generic traffic threatens to undo altogether the rules and borders of auto-
biography as conventionally understood. Thus, of Chaudhuri’s text, one critic
comments huffily that it is no more than ‘a book of erratic [ Historical] essays’.92
The decision to publish A Way in the World with the sub-title ‘a novel’ (in the US,
at least) also suggests a wilful refusal to adhere to the rules of autobiography as
traditionally conceived. Similar inferences might be drawn from the title of Sea-
cole’s text, which could as well be shelved in the travel as autobiography section
of a bookshop. Furthermore, as has been seen, such ‘working’ of generic bound-
aries has important implications for hegemonic conceptions of autobiographical
subjectivity as ‘real’, singular and unified/‘sovereign’. While there is not space to
consider the relationship between travel and the Body in detail, travel certainly
foregrounds issues of embodiment, in relation to diet, physical comfort and
health. Further, as Seacole’s early visit to London indicates, estrangement from
‘home’ also enforces the bodily/cultural differences represented by ‘colour’, with
sometimes powerful consequences for self-image – an experience corroborated by
Fanon’s painful encounter with the white child on a train.
This pattern apparently overturns Gusdorf ’s argument about the inherently
imitative nature of non-western life-writing vis-à-vis the canon. Equally, these
formal attributes require reconsideration of some of the claims made about the
specificities of western women’s life-writing. Conversely, however, the fact that a
comparable pattern of inter-generic traffic occurs in such work, in respect of fic-
tion and History, if not travel-writing, should make one circumspect about over-
emphasising the formal distinctiveness of postcolonial life-writing in this regard.
Moreover, insofar as travel-writing is, belatedly, being considered as an auto-
biographical form, at least by western women critics outside Auto/biography Stu-
dies,93 it is probably only a matter of time before it, too, is adduced within
feminist inflections of the critical field as further evidence of the experimental
90 Working the borders of genre
nature of women’s life-writing. As has been suggested, there are sometimes
important differences in the socio-cultural explanations for each sub-field’s
engagements with fiction and History and significant variations in the ways these
genres are deployed. Nonetheless, insofar as each of the three genres under dis-
cussion here might themselves be deemed western cultural forms, Gusdorf ’s
argument about the secondary and imitative nature of non-western life-writing
cannot as yet be fully refuted. This strategic objective, together with the sub-
sidiary objective of distinguishing women’s and postcolonial life-writing at the
stylistic level, therefore, demands investigation of further aspects of form, which
will be the task of the next chapter.
6 Non-western narrative resources in
postcolonial life-writing

Given constraints of space, this is not the appropriate place to debate in detail
whether the genres considered in the last chapter have long-established, inde-
pendent equivalents in the non-West. In any case, the texts under consideration
in this monograph show little evidence of drawing on such putative equivalents,
for example, the fiction of Murasaki Shikubu (The Tale of Genji), the historiography
of Ibn Khaldun (The Book of Evidence) or the travel-writing of Ibn Battuta (The
Journey). A more immediately productive approach to defining the formal distinc-
tiveness of postcolonial life-writing may lie instead in attention to other aspects of
its narrative articulation. It has long been observed of postcolonial literature
generally that when it uses genres – and even languages – which clearly derive
from the West, it can nonetheless often be distinguished from its metropolitan
counterparts by virtue of a consistent deployment of non-western narrative
resources and linguistic elements within those imposed/inherited cultural forms.1
The same phenomenon of hybridisation will now be explored within postcolonial
life-writing more specifically. The more this process can be demonstrated to be at
work, the more difficult it is to sustain Gusdorf ’s argument about the simply
imitative and secondary nature of non-western auto/biographical writing.
Equally, it should allow clear water to emerge at last between postcolonial life-
writing and western women’s auto/biography at the level of form. While it has
long been claimed both that western women use language in specific ways and
that they have – or aspire to – writing styles which are sui generis,2 at present, they
enjoy neither a language, nor – pace critics like Elaine Showalter – a repertoire of
cultural texts entirely of their own in the way that aspects of the language and
narrative traditions drawn on by Soyinka, for example, are the property of the
Yoruba people to which he belongs.
Some critical work has already been done from this angle, both on life-writing
considered in this book and elsewhere. One important example is Gandhi’s Auto-
biography which, as was seen in the Introduction, Gusdorf adduces as prime evi-
dence of the ‘mimic’ nature of non-western autobiographical writing. Both Pilar
Casamada and Javed Majeed demonstrate the influence on Gandhi’s writing of a
range of indigenous Indian texts, notably the Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana; these,
Majeed argues, provide ‘regulative psychobiographies’ in terms of which Gandhi
constructs autobiographical Selfhood. Indeed, he concludes that ‘Indian-derived
92 Non-western narrative resources
notions of text and performance’ outweigh the influence of western templates in
An Autobiography (as he argues they also do in comparable work by Nehru and
Iqbal).3 Drawing on such analysis, one might even infer that the ‘experiments’ to
which Gandhi’s sub-title alludes extend from abstruse philosophical issues of
‘truth’ to exploration of the possibilities of culturally-specific conceptions of
autobiographical form. This would certainly account for the author’s explicit
disavowal that he is using the genre as conventionally understood in the West.
Indian autobiography in English has proved an equally rich field of investiga-
tion in this respect, squarely contradicting G.N. Devy’s splenetic claim that it ‘has
not inherited anything from the rich Indian heritage’.4 As the last chapter argued,
Chaudhuri argues that ‘synthesis’ is emblematic of Indian tradition. Further, as
suggested in the Introduction, Shirley Lim makes a similar case to Majeed in
respect of Kamala Das’s My Story (1976), arguing that the author’s Self-concep-
tion is plotted in terms of the contrastive psychobiographic models represented in
Hindu tradition by Kali and Krishna respectively. To this extent, Das demon-
strates ‘the ideological interpenetrations of the Hindu worldview with a feminist,
although not necessarily wholly Westernized text’.5 Secular forms of traditional
narrative have proved equally productive as a template for life-writing in the sub-
continent. For example, Ganeswar Mishra claims of Prafulla Mohanti’s My Vil-
lage, My Life (1973), that the author ‘retains in his work much of the folk narrative
form’ typical of his region of India.6
Devy further claims that ‘a genuinely Indian autobiography can be written in
Indian languages alone’,7 implying that (post)colonial Selfhood must be articu-
lated in an indigenous mother tongue to be authentic (compare the inferences to
be drawn from Ngugi’s discussion of language noted in the introduction). How-
ever, in the first place, this ignores the predicament of those postcolonial subjects
who have no choice but to write in English. As Jamaica Kincaid comments: ‘Isn’t
it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime [colonialism]
is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?’8 Beyond the Car-
ibbean, other factors sometimes enforced the use of English. Thus, Bharati
Mukherjee comments that: ‘I was born into a class that did not live in its native
language.’9 Further, Devy ignores the fact that English has been increasingly
recognised since Independence as one Indian language among others – especially in
the South of the sub-continent (a situation widely paralleled in other parts of the
decolonised world). In this regard, it bears some comparison with Urdu, the lan-
guage which developed through hybridisation by Hindi of the Persian which
Mughal conquest imposed on India in the (western) early Modern period.
Salman Rushdie recognises that in the eyes of many, work in English ‘will
never be more than a post-colonial anomaly, the bastard child of Empire, sired
on India by the departing British’.10 Nonetheless he asserts (contentiously) that
English-language literature in India is ‘proving to be a stronger and more
important body of work than most of what has been produced in the sixteen
official languages of India, the so-called “vernacular languages”’.11 Rushdie
defends the use of English as a literary medium not simply because of the quality
of work produced in it, or the number of English-speakers in the sub-continent,12
 Non-western narrative resources 93
or the fact that its lack of a regional base actually makes it more ‘Indian’ than a
language like Tamil. In English, he claims, ‘we can find … a reflection of other
struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between cultures and within
ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies.’13 However, Rushdie also
argues that ‘we can’t simply use the language the way the British did … it needs
remaking for our own purposes.’14 Such ideas have long been anticipated among
postcolonial writers. As Achebe argued half a century ago, English could already
by the 1950s be considered a ‘world language’, available to all who wished to use
it, insofar as it was prepared to pay the price of ‘submission to many different
kinds of use’.15 The trajectory of the English language’s ‘submission’ in post-
colonial life-writing more specifically has already been studied by several critics.
As has been seen, Robert Fraser has asserted of Soyinka’s indigenisation of
Standard English in Aké, that the linguistic norm is not English, but Yoruba. And
Gillian Whitlock draws similar conclusions from studying the ‘Arablish’ of Salam
Pax’s The Baghdad Blog.16
In the rest of this chapter, I propose to look at two further examples of the sub-
genre which use non-western narrative resources and are also characterised by
linguistic experimentation and hybridisation. My strategic aim is to demonstrate
formal properties which distinguish postcolonial life-writing from both its canoni-
cal and western women’s analogues. Once more, Fanon provides a useful point of
reference for these discussions. A Caribbean Subject like Kincaid, Fanon had only
French and Creole, itself a heavily hybridised, language, to choose between for
Black Skin. He certainly recognises the huge capital which accrues to the colonial
subject by virtue of ‘his mastery of the French language’;17 conversely, anticipat-
ing Ngugi, he also acknowledges that to speak a language ‘is to take on a world, a
culture’.18 Nonetheless, he sees little future in attempting to produce a Creole
literature in the Caribbean, partly because of the opprobrium the language
attracts in both white colonial and metropolitan culture. Further, he suggests that
Creole too closely resembles the ‘pidgin-nigger’ spoken by colonialists them-
selves.19 Therefore, to make the colonised ‘talk pidgin is to fasten him to the
effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of
an appearance for which he is not responsible’.20
Yet, on occasion, Fanon does draw on ‘dialect’, for example, using untranslated
diction like ‘toubab’, or uses ‘a local figure of speech’.21 Equally, his articulation of
metropolitan standard French is often highly ‘deviant’. The French editor of Black
Skin was constantly obliged to ask for clarification of its phrasing and diction.
Describing Fanon’s language as ‘most unsettling’, Francis Jeanson also describes a
letter in which his author asserts that ‘once liberated from its conventions, lan-
guage was for him the ultimate resource’.22 Black Skin also foreshadows debates
over the use of non-western narrative resources in later postcolonial life-writing. It
complains that: ‘The folklore of Martinique is meagre, and few children in Fort-
de-France know the stories of “Compé Lapin,” twin brother of the Br’er Rabbit
of Louisiana’s Uncle Remus.’23 Yet if Fanon does not draw extensively on what
he represents as a heritage withering under the pressure of policies of colonial
assimilation, a burden perhaps felt more heavily in the French Empire than the
94 Non-western narrative resources
British, he nonetheless has recourse to ‘the oral tradition of the plantation’,
notably in the opening pages of the text and those passages which are highly
interpellative, whether of himself or his audience.24 In both these respects, then,
Fanon anticipates the attitudes and strategies of later postcolonial life-writers.

Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (1985)

Fantasia (1985) is a complex articulation of aspects of Djebar’s life, the historio-
graphy of colonialism in Algeria (compare Chaudhuri) and a collective auto/bio-
graphy of a broad range of predominantly indigenous women from the French
invasion of 1830 to the 1980s. More particularly, the author seeks to understand
the process of her own identity-formation in relation to recent (post)colonial his-
tory and the experiences of the generation of women (including relatives) who
participated in the War of Independence (1954–62). In the Algerian context,
however, the access of women to auto/biography is fraught. According to Djebar,
even relatively class-privileged and well-educated females have to negotiate ‘two
absolute rules’ of traditional culture: ‘one, never talk about yourself: and two, if
you must, always do it “anonymously”.’ As for speaking anonymously, she goes
on exasperatedly, ‘one must never use the first person’.25 This suggests that in the
eyes of the majority of Algerian society, no less than in El Saadawi’s Egypt, auto/
biography is a solecism as potentially serious for women as appearing in certain
contexts without a veil.
The weight of this prohibition has profoundly influenced Djebar’s career. Per-
haps most obviously, it motivated her use of a nom de plume.26 Born Fatma Imal-
hayère, her pseudonym signifies ‘she who consoles’ (in Berber-inflected ‘dialect’) +
‘intransigence’ (in standard Arabic).27 This collocation of apparently conflicting
meanings and languages reflects a pattern of dualities in Djebar’s work which
speaks to the ‘interior warfare’28 she has sometimes experienced in relation to her
identity (compare the young C.L.R. James). But while a nom de plume provided
Djebar with sufficient sense of security to embark on writing fiction, a radical
enough move for an Algerian woman in the 1950s, it soon threw up intractable
problems. Coming to realise that ‘for a woman to write, inevitably meant to write
about oneself ’,29 Djebar attempted a more confessional register in her fourth
novel, Les Alouettes Naïves (1967). However, the effort proved so traumatic that she
published nothing further for many years, ploughing her energy into film instead.
She has explained this long silence partly in terms of a frustrated quest for auto-
biographical modes appropriate to her particular cultural predicament (WoA:
168–9).30
The choice of linguistic medium and narrative form posed particular difficul-
ties. Educated in French-medium institutions from primary level, Djebar
describes herself as ‘writing classical Arabic poorly, loving and suffering in my
mother’s dialect’.31 Apart from limited competence in its written forms, classical
Arabic entailed other complications. As the official medium of government and
law, Djebar sees it as complicit in the cultural/political marginalisation of
Algeria’s Berber-speakers, the section of society she identifies most closely with.
 Non-western narrative resources 95
Further, as both the instrument of the (technically) secular Algerian state and a
badge of the Islamist opposition movement of the 1980s (and since), the standard
forms of Arabic are also implicated in the oppression of women. In Women of
Algiers in their Apartment (1980), Djebar therefore draws an important distinction
between standard Arabic and what she calls ‘colloquial Arabic … feminine
Arabic … underground Arabic’ (WoA: 1). Indeed, two decades on, standard
Arabic seems to her ‘more and more a masculine language’.32
Aside from her greater familiarity with its written forms and its ‘neutrality’ in
the cultural/political conflict between Arabic and ‘dialect’, French offers Djebar
other clear advantages as an auto/biographer. These include the possibility not
only of more easily preserving her anonymity among potentially hostile mono-
phone local constituencies but also greater scope to address issues of sexuality and
desire, both positive and negative. For example, Djebar considers that rape can
be discussed frankly in French, whereas it is sanitised by euphemism in local lan-
guages.33 Like Ngugi, Djebar is nonetheless troubled by certain implications of
writing in the language of the recent colonising power, notably possible compli-
city in reaffirming its project of acculturation. Above all, she fears that her
translations into French of the testimony of ex-combatants of the War of Inde-
pendence will result in new kinds of effacement, comparable to their veiling (and
silencing) in conservative Islamic society. This anxiety is expressed in an apology
to one interviewee: ‘I have captured your voice; disguised it with my French
without clothing it. I barely brush the shadow of your footsteps!’ (F : 142).
Like many postcolonial writers, Djebar partly mitigates her concerns by
reworking the standard forms of the colonisers’ language, in the manner that
Achebe and Rushdie advocate. As early as 1968, she was arguing that it was the
duty of the North African writer to ‘arabise’ French; more recently, she has
described her French as ‘deviating slightly’34 from the norm (compare Fanon).
The most obvious sign of such ‘deviation’ in Fantasia is the frequent incorporation
of Arabic and ‘dialect’ diction. In the original French edition, no glossary of such
words is provided (in contrast to the Heinemann translation for the Anglophone
world – which is, however, far from comprehensive). As a result, the average
western reader is reminded of the material differences of the world Djebar
describes, while any quasi-colonial pretension to total mastery of its culture is
frustrated (compare the effect of Soyinka’s partial translations of Yoruba).
The choice of narrative form is equally problematic. Like many writers con-
sidered in this text, Djebar betrays unease with autobiography as traditionally
understood. Thus, she describes Fantasia as no more than a ‘preparation’ for an
autobiography than a fully achieved example of it35 (compare the implications of
Naipaul’s ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’). One might infer that her unease with
the genre derives from similar reasons to those informing her disquiet about using
French, namely that it is the cultural form of an imposed and alien culture.
However, Djebar’s citations of both Augustine and Ibn Khaldun (F : 47, 111)
suggest that she also attaches herself to what she regards – in an implicit riposte
to Gusdorf and Pascal – as a long non-western tradition of Self-representation.36
Like many other postcolonial life-writers, moreover, Djebar addresses these
96 Non-western narrative resources
anxieties in part by experimenting with the conventions of the genre, notably by
inflecting it, sometimes radically, with non-western narrative resources.
Perhaps the principal example is Djebar’s importations into her work of aspects
of the musical traditions of the Maghreb, which she researched extensively in the
period during which she ceased to write. Such interests are reflected thematically
throughout ‘the Algerian Quartet’. For instance, in Women of Algiers, Sarah works
at an institute of musicology. Here she studies ‘the haoufis of Tlemcen, women’s
songs of time gone by’ (WoA: 16; the gendering of this popular musical form is
important, and is re-emphasised later when it is glossed as ‘a kind of popular,
feminine poetry that is sung’ (WoA: 154)). Similarly the unidentified first-person
narrator37 of So Vast the Prison (1995; the title is taken from a traditional Berber
song38) conducts research in indigenous music and is particularly fond of ‘the
popular laments of Abou Madyan, the saint of Béjaia’.39
When she returned to writing, Djebar began to incorporate musical terms and
structures derived from her researches. In Fantasia, the influence of local musical
forms is particularly pronounced. The most significant model is the nouba, the
conventions of which Djebar had already drawn on extensively in her film La
Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978; the first feature film by an Algerian
woman).40 According to Tony Langlois, this (now) characteristically maghrebian
form belongs to the repertory ‘known collectively as andalouse’,41 which was
brought to North Africa as a result of the expulsion of Muslims from Spain
between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Pre-eminent in prestige among the
various forms of the andalouse, the nouba is composed of ‘five sections of intro-
ductory pieces, overtures, song series, solos and finales, arranged in a traditional
sequence of rhythmic patterns’.42 Although, strictly speaking, the term for a spe-
cific musical form, the nouba has acquired other connotations which bear upon its
deployment in Fantasia. In the first place, it has come to signify ‘public celebra-
tion’ in the vernacular (WoA: 199). This communal dimension is further empha-
sised by its etymology, which, according to Réda Bensmaïa, derives from the
Arabic nowba, meaning ‘taking turns’.43
Understood in these various ways, the nouba offered means of unblocking Dje-
bar’s impasse after Les Alouettes Naïves.44 Most obviously, perhaps, by virtue of the
‘lengthy narrative songs sung by a single performer’,45 which are a feature of the
nouba, Djebar is in theory licensed to include her own ‘solitary song’ (F : 217)
while still ostensibly respecting cultural tradition. The same holds true of the ex-
combatant women whom she interviews. Moreover, insofar as their individual
contributions both aggregate and seemingly seep into each other (distinguishing
who is speaking within the different ‘movements’ of the sub-sections entitled
‘Voice’ and ‘A Woman’s Voice’ is sometimes difficult), their combined voices
equate to another feature of the nouba, the ‘chorus’. In this capacity, the women
provide a communal commentary on the tragedy of contemporary Algeria.
The impress of the nouba is further apparent in the structure of Fantasia. One
might argue that the three Parts into which the text is divided correspond to the
‘three rhythms’ according to which the form is traditionally arranged.46 But its
influence is perhaps paramount in Part Three, the five ‘movements’ of which
 Non-western narrative resources 97
conform to the pattern described by Langlois. With the exception of the fifth,
which is composed of two, each ‘movement’ is in turn split into six sub-sections.
These are distributed evenly between autobiographical reflections, the testimony
of ex-combatants, and authorial commentaries on the implications of that testi-
mony for Djebar herself, the women themselves and modern Algeria more
broadly. The effect is at once rigorously precise and seemingly improvisatory,
fragmentary and accumulative, so that distinct – though not necessarily harmo-
nious – patterns of ‘character’, tone, ‘voice’ and theme emerge out of the inter-
play both between each sub-section within a given ‘movement’ and across the
‘movements’ which comprise the ‘suite’ as a whole. This arrangement appears to
be deliberately anti-syntagmatic, in that the ‘voices’ in any particular ‘movement’
could be switched to their corresponding position in other ‘movements’ with little
loss of coherence. The same applies to Djebar’s self-reflections, which have the air
of arising spontaneously out of successive interviews, which could themselves be
fairly arbitrarily switched around the text.
Insofar as these sections are not ordered chronologically, this aspect of her text
clearly conflicts with the conventions of mainstream western autobiography,
which emphasises the progressive development of the personality concerned.
Indeed, the ‘Fifth movement’ of Part Three ends with a sentence which is a direct
echo of that with which Part One begins. This recursive, anti-linear trajectory is
further evident in relation to the accounts of the ex-combatants’ experience which
in many respects seems to repeat that of their nineteenth-century forebears,
described in Parts One and Two of the text. This powerfully suggests the stasis
inflicted on Algeria by the long (anti-)history of colonialism. Further, while the
idea of a ‘Finale’ conventionally signifies closure, this expectation is flatly contra-
dicted (compare James’s anti-epilogue). Not only is Tzarl-rit glossed with quite
incompatible definitions (F : 222), but the late introduction here of a wholly
new protagonist (the nineteenth-century French political exile Pauline Rolland)
suggests a desire at once to return to the text’s beginnings and to open out to
new thematics – in particular the possibility of transnational alliances between
marginalised women.
Within these complex formal arrangements, Djebar pursues her inquiries into
identity in relation to herself, Algerian women as a social group and, indeed, the
modern nation to which they belong. In respect of herself, as Jane Hiddleston
ably argues, Djebar ‘shuttles between a series of provisional identity constructions
and a more uneasy sense of the impenetrability of singular existence, and this
sense is heightened in turn by the chaotic mass of influences that drift around the
intractable core’.47 Such ideas could be extended to other axes of self-identification,
however. At the collective level, what emerges is the internally differentiated
nature of Algerian women as a group. While the ex-combatants have much in
common – as indicated by the anonymising titles which frame their testimonies –
their experience of both the War of Independence and its aftermath is often
highly particularised. If Djebar refuses to sublate such differences under the sign
of ‘Woman’, still less does she invoke the unifying category of ‘national identity’
to smooth over such differences. It is clear that while such women played a vital
98 Non-western narrative resources
role in the anti-colonial struggle, their participation has been marginalised – to
some extent during the war, but more especially since – by a variety of patri-
archal belief-systems, both secular and religious. If modern Algeria has been torn
apart by ideology and history (compare El Saadawi’s account of Egypt), Djebar
implies that its wounds cannot be sutured without fundamental changes to ensure
the greater equality of women as agents within the national culture.
In all three areas, then, Djebar can be understood as trying ‘to grasp the traces
of some ruptures’ of identity (WoA: 1; compare Naipaul), rather than offering
some falsely consoling resolution of them. This pattern is reinforced by the text’s
own lack of resolved or integrated identity at a number of levels. Rather than
confining itself to any single genre, individual autobiography co-exists with col-
lective auto/biography, historiography and fiction in a manner which is mutually
interruptive (compare Chapter 5). Equally, oral and written and literary and
musical forms are juxtaposed rather than synthesised. Such disjunction is evident
even in Djebar’s deployment of musicological templates. Thus, her adaptation of
the nouba operates mainly in relation to the second half of the text. In seeking a
term which also embraces the material in Parts One and Two, however, Djebar
selects the term fantasia, a term which ostensibly indicates a wish to identify her
text primarily in relation to a western musicological model. This might suggest
that, despite their many affinities,48 the text is conceived in a strikingly different
way to Djebar’s earlier film La Nouba.
Christopher Field describes the fantasia as a ‘composition whose form and
invention spring solely from the fantasy and skill of the author … its formal and
stylistic characteristics may consequently vary widely from free, improvisatory
types to strictly contrapuntal and more or less standard sectional forms’.49 In the
first instance, therefore, Djebar’s title perhaps intends in the first instance to
foreground the individual, autobiographical aspects of the book by stressing the
creative subjectivity of its author, as against the communal focus and connotations
of the nouba. It also suggests a greater acknowledgement of the cultural influences
of the West than her film. More specifically, Djebar cites Beethoven’s experiments
in the genre. His Opus 27 Sonatas are sub-titled quasi [like/almost/more or less]
una fantasia (F : 111). This suggests, however, that they are not fully representative
of the genre but perhaps even subversive of it. This is corroborated in two prin-
cipal ways, each of which also bears on Djebar’s deployment of the form. To
begin with, as Field suggests, with Beethoven, ‘the term is associated for the first
time with the idea of large-scale unification of multi-movement works’.50 Perhaps
more radical still was Beethoven’s introduction of the voice, since traditionally an
‘essential of the fantasia is its freedom from words’.51 Thus, Beethoven ‘broke
most strikingly with tradition by introducing a chorus into a form that had been
instrumentally conceived for some 300 years’.52
If Djebar is to this extent drawing on a western template, then it is with one
which is itself transgressive and revisionary, albeit of western tradition. Consonant
with this, she in turn challenges Beethoven’s revision of the form in two main
ways. First, as was argued earlier, her text does not move definitively towards
‘large-scale unification’ of its disparate ‘multi-movement’ parts, whether within
 Non-western narrative resources 99
Part Three or the text as a whole. Second, Djebar introduces not only the idea of
a ‘chorus’ but, insofar as her ‘voices’ are in the first instance those of individuals,
the ‘solo’. Absent from Beethoven’s fantasias, this is, as has also been seen, a
characteristic element of the nouba. However, if this suggests a desire on Djebar’s
part to ‘interrupt’ the fantasia by bringing it into conjunction with an Algerian
musical form, the converse is also true. One explanation for Djebar’s ‘interrup-
tion’ of the conventional nouba is her perception of the immobilising rigidity of
Algerian tradition, which has particularly negative consequences for women
(compare El Saadawi). ‘Masculine’ cultural forms like the nouba are not immune
from this conservatism and may even exacerbate it. Thus, Hadi Bougherara
comments on the ‘rigid and austere protocol’ of a form largely unchanged since
its emergence in ninth-century Andalusia, and Mahmoud Guettat sees it as
tending to the ‘sclerotic’ by the second half of the twentieth century.53 Con-
sequently, when Sarah stumbles upon a singer performing al fresco in Women
of Algiers, she is startled by his unwonted willingness to experiment with ‘the
Andalusian song, unchangeable when others sang it’ (WoA: 26).
Arguably, then, Djebar seeks to ‘stretch’ the form of the nouba just as much as
the fantasia. Like the singer whom Sarah encounters, she employs it ‘without
following traditional modulations’ (WoA: 26). For one thing, Djebar ‘translates’
the nouba into literary terms; for another, in doing so, she is not entirely faithful to
the established form. For example, Part Three of Fantasia is, strictly speaking,
composed of six rather than five ‘movements’. And, as has been seen, the ‘mood’
of the Tzarl-rit is deeply ambiguous, in contradiction of the all-important unity of
mood traditionally assumed to characterise the nouba.54 Further, while the ‘solo’ is
a constituent element of the form, Djebar’s use of it for detailed auto/bio-
graphical self-expression is unprecedented. However, perhaps the most significant
innovation is Djebar’s adaptation of what is traditionally an exclusively masculine
and class-specific performative form. Historically the composers, singers and
orchestra were made up entirely of men and it was generally performed for
wealthy patrons to express ordinary women’s experience. To this extent, Djebar is
self-consciously interrupting the gender economy which distinguishes the nouba
from the haoufi and which traditionally accords the former greater prestige.55
However, a further twist in this complex of cultural (self-)identifications is that
the term fantasia also occurs in one of the colonial texts Djebar engages with most,
Eugène Fromentin’s Une Année dans Le Sahel (1858), which provides the epigraph
for her text. In the course of his Algerian travels, Fromentin stumbled on an
example of ‘the ravishing spectacle of what is called [qu’on appelle] an arab fanta-
sia’.56 Djebar’s translator, Dorothy Blair, asserts unequivocally that her title is
‘derived from the Arabic fantaziya [meaning ostentation]’.57 If fantasia had, indeed,
already passed into Arabic (in the way that, conversely, the word ‘algebra’, for
example, has passed into English), this suggests a tail-chasing process of mutual
hybridisation or appropriation which helps illuminate the unresolved ‘traces’
which complicate the cultural identity of both Djebar and her text.58 Fromentin’s
usage is certainly much more specific in purview than the western musical term
would suggest, meaning something like a local fair, composed of ‘a riding festival,
100 Non-western narrative resources
followed by a night-time dance with Homeric feasts’.59 The equestrian spectacle,
more precisely, signifies a display of martial skills, designed to ‘compensate the
veterans who no longer make war, or the young people who have never done
so’.60 If Fromentin nonetheless plays on the conjunction between fantasia in its
western sense (at one point he uses the term ‘prelude’ to describe the opening of
the festival61) and its Arabised equivalent, fantaziya, perhaps Djebar does, too. Her
text may be seeking not just to adapt the conventions of the fantasia as a western
musical form but thereby to ‘stage’ qualities of ‘cavalcade’ corresponding to Fro-
mentin’s description of the Hadjout festival. From this perspective, the gathering
‘movements’ in Part Three of her text are perhaps analogous to successive waves
of riders showing off their skills, accompanied (and interrupted) by individual
singing and communal celebrations.
In contrast to Fromentin, however, for whom the festival stages only token
resistance in the form of a commodified spectacle (at least for alien observers like
himself ), Djebar’s conception of fantasia/fantaziya is directly linked to the project
of cultural decolonisation, which she describes as still unachieved.62 Its attainment
involves, first, the resuscitation or reinvigoration of local cultural forms, including
the fantaziya and nouba (according to Guettat, the tradition was actually in danger
of disappearing by the time of Algerian independence63). The second involves a
critique of colonial cultural forms and systems of representation. Thus, Djebar
clearly deprecates the ‘Orientalist’ tradition, perhaps most obviously in her cri-
tique of the ‘superficial Orient’ (WoA:137) constructed in Delacroix’s celebrated
painting, ‘Women of Algiers in their Apartment’ – the title of which she (re-)
appropriated for the first text in the ‘Algerian quartet’.
Nonetheless, while Djebar clearly intends Fantasia to be counter-discursive in
this respect, it would be wrong to understand the text as an act of ‘nativist’ dis-
avowal – whether of western fantasia and autobiography, or the wider metropoli-
tan culture these genres seemingly derive from. Not only is Djebar indebted to
French culture for giving her a language and forms to write in/against, but she is
clearly influenced by a range of very specific western precedents. For example,
her reworking of Delacroix has parallels with Picasso’s, on which she comments
approvingly. If the latter restores movement to the immobilised bodies in Dela-
croix’s canvas (WoA: 149), Djebar’s work can be understood as recuperating their
silenced voices. Metropolitan writers have provided equally productive models for
her. Thus, she observes of the work of Marguerite Duras, with which her own has
sometimes been compared: ‘I am touched by this disembodied voice that is on the
verge of self-decentring’ (WoA: 182). Further, she even expresses gratitude to ‘Orien-
talists’ like Fromentin (F : 226) himself, for providing templates for her text.64
Indeed, several of the features which Donadey detects in Djebar’s ‘arabisation’ of
French are, in fact, anticipated by Fromentin.65
The title of Djebar’s text therefore involves such complex significations in terms
of the author’s relations to both western and ‘indigenous’ culture that one could
argue that both its author’s cultural identity and its own are thrust into a dizzying
aporia or mise en abyme. If fantasia is a term which has been rearticulated into Arabic
as fantaziya before being ‘retranslated’ by Fromentin, this does not thereby efface
 Non-western narrative resources 101
the western-derived connotations of the term. However, the origins of those con-
notations, in turn, do not, in Djebar’s view, compromise its appropriateness for
the (re)affirmation of a local identity nor, more specifically, one which pursues the
anti-colonial struggle by cultural means. This explains Djebar’s wariness of cul-
tural ‘nativism’, the extreme (and usually masculinist ) nationalist argument that all
foreign influences must be extirpated if an indigenous culture is to be resurrected
or constructed (compare Behan and El Saadawi). As one element of the andalouse,
the nouba’s cultural purity is already compromised by the Spanish (and Jewish)
influences at its origins. A national culture built on these and other (notably
Turkish) imported forms cannot, therefore, ground its members’ identities in any
foundational way.
Djebar insists paradoxically that Fantasia is ‘openly autobiographical’.66 None-
theless, the text poses a radical challenge to the conventions of western auto-
biography. For example, her use of a pseudonym flouts the conditions of
Lejeune’s ‘pact’ (of which she is well aware),67 quite as much as Naipaul’s (see
Chapter 5). Equally, her attempt to recuperate the silenced voices of female ex-
combatants erodes the boundary between autobiography and biography (see
Chapter 2). Further, she ‘works the borders’ of the form by incorporating histor-
iography wholesale, in the manner of Chaudhuri (see Chapter 5). In turn, the
paratactic structure of Fantasia rejects the coherent, linear progression of main-
stream western autobiography. More broadly, the multiplicitous nature of the
‘traces’ of Djebar’s (and Algeria’s) identity undermines the traditional unity of
Selfhood and text, as well as ‘nation’. Such ideas are compromised above all by
Djebar’s ambiguous existential and cultural positioning between French and
Algerian cultures, which are shown to have already hybridised each other to a
considerable degree by the time she began to write.

Sara Suleri, Meatless Days: A Memoir (1989)

In Boys Will Be Boys (2003), Sara Suleri Goodyear’s ‘elegy’ for her father,68 the
author describes an occasion when her younger siblings acquired a pair of pet
rabbits. To Suleri’s chagrin, both turned out to be male, so that ‘we never had a
bunch of baby rabbits hopping round the garden: a regret for me, who even then
was obsessed with things small’.69 The ‘obsession’ with scale is more broadly
conceived in Suleri’s earlier auto/biographical text, Meatless Days (1989), on which
this section of the chapter will focus. Here, the idea of ‘the unswerving truths of
size’ (MD : 73) is explored in relation to topics as diverse as the (diminishing)
dimensions of Pakistan and the giant proportions of Tom, who makes Suleri feel
Lilliputian (MD : 79). However, scale is also an issue in relation to Meatless Days
itself, which could justifiably be described as an auto/biographical ‘miniature’ –
certainly when compared with the sprawling works of, for example, Montaigne,
Gandhi or Isabel Allende. The concept of ‘miniature’ has important implications,
not least because it is one of the ways through which a (partly) postcolonial
identity is asserted – in relation both to Meatless Days and to Suleri’s constitution
as an auto/biographical Subject.70
102 Non-western narrative resources
In repeatedly invoking (and enacting) ideas of ‘miniaturism’, Meatless Days can
be linked to two ‘indigenous’ cultural forms in particular. The first is the heritage
of Mughal painting, which is alluded to during Suleri’s meditation on the run-up
to Independence in 1947. For Muslims especially, she suggests, the prospect of
Partition required the realignment of ‘spatial perspective with something of the
maniacal neatness of a Mughal miniaturist’ (MD : 74). One can fairly assume that
Suleri was well acquainted with such work. The main museum in Lahore (the
capital of the Mughal empire under Akbar from 1585 to 1598), to which she
refers on more than one occasion (MD : 55, 153), boasts an important collection
of ‘miniatures’.71 The genre appears to provide a template for Meatless Days partly
because it offers a strong tradition of portraiture (amply represented in the
Lahore Museum collection). Alongside images of individuals, the Mughals com-
missioned a considerable amount of group portraiture, of the kind Meatless Days
also attempts. While certainly rarer, the tradition also includes notable instances
of self-portraiture, a further aspect of Suleri’s text.72
In a short discussion like this it is impossible to adequately summarise the sty-
listic qualities of the genre over its centuries of evolution and diversification.
Developed out of a history of book illustration, Mughal ‘miniatures’ were often no
more than a few inches square, even once they had developed into a free-standing
cultural form. Despite this, their density of signification is often remarkable. Mir
Sayyid Ali, the greatest painter at Akbar’s court, described his conception of
‘miniature’ thus: ‘In every grain [of rice] a hundred ass-loads are contained; a
whole world can be encompassed easily within a single heart.’73 One painting in
the Lahore Museum, entitled ‘The Construction of a Palace’, illustrates some-
thing of Ali’s ambitious aim. With its grand subject-matter and ample cast, its
epic quality is enhanced rather than diminished by its drastic compression,74
which is achieved through what Som Verma describes as the genre’s distinctive
emphasis on accurate detail and precision of execution.75 Indeed, given its
dimensions, the abundance of subject-matter in Mughal painting is often aston-
ishing, confirming Milo Beach’s argument that ‘attention to descriptive detail
[often] extends far beyond narrative necessity’.76
One could argue that in her own auto/biographical ‘miniature’, Suleri achieves
similar feats of compression. Within less than two hundred pages, she manages to
distil a complex self-portrait, the group biography of a ( large and diverse) family
and a considerable range of Pakistani history (compare Djebar). This is accomplished
in part by a similar ‘exquisite precision’ (MD : 29) of descriptive detail, for exam-
ple, in the account of Irfan’s childhood accident with boiling water: ‘He clutched at
his groin, and everywhere he touched, the skin slid off, so that between his fingers
his penis easily unsheathed, a blanched and fiery grape’ (MD : 11). Time and
again, in a few beautifully exact brush-strokes, Suleri constructs dramatic scenes
in which not only event but character is anatomised with a sometimes cruel
sharpness and insight. Compression is enhanced by other techniques discernible
in Mughal ‘miniature’. Comparable with its allegorical iconography, for example,
Meatless Days figures the decline of Pakistan through consistent parallels with the
disintegration and dispersal of Suleri’s family – and vice versa (compare Chaudhuri).
 Non-western narrative resources 103
As Suleri’s allusion to Mughal painting suggests, it offers lessons not just about
scale, but perspective. In the essentially two-dimensional arrangement of ‘The
Construction of a Palace’, no hierarchy of ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ orders
the visual ‘reading’ of the work. Consequently, as Milo Beach asserts, ‘no single
detail or episode dominates. Visual interest is evenly distributed over the entire
surface of the work.’77 Equally, the lack of perspective in such work means that
the eye is not led to ‘read’ its parts in any particular order, nor is any vantage
point especially favoured. Comparable claims might be made about Meatless Days.
In contrast to traditional autobiography, it does not ‘foreground’ the progressive
development of a privileged Self, in relation to which events and other persons
are arranged as ‘background’. Instead, narrative attention is ‘evenly distributed’
between Suleri herself, family members and the seemingly inexorable degenera-
tion of the new nation. Nor is the text organised round moments of crisis, on
which the ‘plot’ turns, of the kind one finds in Augustine’s or Rousseau’s Confes-
sions. The deaths of Mairi and Ifat and Suleri are clearly critical but they have
already happened when the narrative opens and do not dominate the text in
terms of the narrative space they are accorded. Equally, with the possible excep-
tion of the ‘framing’ chapters, Suleri’s ‘tales’ could be read in any order without
materially affecting their meaning (compare the paratactic structure of Fantasia).
In Boys, Suleri confesses that ‘my instincts have never led me to chronology’ (B:
38). This is reflected not only in the recursive temporality of Meatless Days, but in
the fact the chapter primarily devoted to Suleri’s mother (who died first) comes
after Ifat’s.
Suleri’s allusion in Boys to ‘Mughal-like curlicues of great intricacy’ (B: 35)
suggests other ways in which her earlier text might be compared to the tradition
of ‘miniature’. Under Akbar and Shah Jehan, in particular, Mughal painting was
characterised by ‘dazzling ornamentation’,78 a description which could just as
well be applied to the profusion of metaphors, metonyms and conceits in Meatless
Days. In relation to her first bereavement, for example, Suleri muses: ‘It reminds
me that I am glad to have washed my hands of my sister Ifat’s death and can
think of her now as a house I once rented but which is presently inhabited by
people I do not know’ (MD : 42). Such startling figurative language in part
accounts for the semantic density of the text. Further, the idea of ‘curlicues of
great intricacy’ applies to Suleri’s syntax. This sometimes strains under the pres-
sure of containing the dissemination of images, yet through that straining multiplies
connotation:

So Tom’s story can never begin back yonder, in his neck of the woods: it has
to be here, with travel-ache already over, when I have washed my hands of
sequence and can glance at its swarming tiny autonomies in order to hiss,
‘Down, wantons, down.’
(MD : 76)

The unusual semantic compression of Suleri’s writing perhaps derives equally

from a second and perhaps more important non-western narrative model
104 Non-western narrative resources
discernible in Meatless Days. This is the ghazal, often considered to be the pre-
eminent form in classical Urdu literature, which D.J. Matthews and Christopher
Shackle describe as ‘a short love-poem in which the two halves of the first couplet
and the second line of the remaining couplets rhyme’.79 Suleri demonstrates close
familiarity with the tradition, alluding to recent exponents of the form like Iqbal
(MD : 121, 184) and Faiz (B: 50, 57). Boys regularly quotes their ghazals in the
original (among those of other poets – and other Urdu poetical forms) as epi-
graphs to its chapters. However, Suleri reserves her greatest admiration for
Gha-lib – the nom de plume of Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (1797–1869), widely
regarded as the finest ghazal poet in Urdu. In a rapturous account of her dis-
covery of Gha-lib, Suleri describes him as ‘the master poet’ (MD : 99; compare 82)
and he is similarly praised in Boys (114, for example). Gha-lib’s work certainly
seems to inspire some of the most distinctive qualities of Meatless Days.
It is not difficult to find reasons for Suleri’s affinity with Gha-lib. He, too, wrote
a memoir, Dastambu (‘A Posy of Flowers’) which Ralph Russell argues was con-
ceived ‘primarily as a literary work’80 (and another possible template for Meatless
Days). In it, Gha-lib expresses a number of preoccupations which concern Suleri,
too, including some regret for not having a child.81 Both writers are extremely
liberal in matters of religion82 and share what Aijaz Ahmad calls a ‘psychology of
ambivalences’83 towards the cultures that most influence them. Thus, Gha-lib
expresses a love–hate relationship with both Mughal culture and the British raj;
Suleri is comparably equivocal in relation to Pakistan, Britain and the United
States in turn. Further, Gha-lib considered himself to be living in an era of con-
tinuous political crisis, culminating in the dissolution of Mughal rule after ‘the
Mutiny’ of 1857. A similar sense of living under the shadow of recurrent political
upheaval is evident in Meatless Days (compare Chaudhuri in Chapter 5 and Amiry
in Chapter 7). As Suleri’s description of Pakistan as a country ‘where history is
synonymous with grief ’ (MD : 19) suggests, for both writers, public and private
griefs intertwine. The often elegiac tone of Suleri’s text has its analogue in
Ahmad’s description of Gha-lib’s work as ‘a poetry of losses and consequent
grief ’.84 Conversely, however, Russell remarks on the latter’s ‘sense of humour
which was his main shield against the afflictions of life’.85 Suleri herself stresses
her predecessor’s ‘mischievous’ qualities (MD : 99), which provide a precedent for
her own sometimes ‘nervously comic’ (MD : 27) tone. For example, when Ifat
dies, she is buried in the space which Suleri’s father planned one day to occupy.
‘Children take over everything’, the author observes, with her trademark laconic
wit (MD : 18).
The ghazal has much in common with the tradition of ‘miniature’ painting. It,
too, derived originally from Persia (Gha-lib wrote with equal facility in Persian)
and for a long period was also associated primarily with the court (the poet was
for a time advisor to the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, ‘on matters of
versification’86). In terms of style and technique, the ghazal is another art-form in
which issues of scale are crucial. While, in theory, there is no limit to the number
of couplets, Russell states that a ghazal ‘rarely comprises less than five couplets or
more than twelve’.87 The longest of Gha-lib’s poems in the Matthews and Shackle
 Non-western narrative resources 105
anthology is sixteen couplets, with several composed only of two. In what Ahmad
calls ‘so small a [poetic] unit’,88 economy and concentration of meaning are at a
premium. Consequently, Gha-lib’s work is always highly condensed, in a manner
which Suleri imitates. Further, the influence of the ghazal would help explain the
fragmented structure of Meatless Days. Ahmad suggests that the form can be highly
discontinuous at the thematic level:

The ghazal is a poem made up of couplets, each couplet wholly independent

of any other in meaning and complete in itself as a unit of thought, emotion
and communication. No two couplets have to be related to each other in
any way whatever except formally … and yet they can be parts of a single
poem.89

Consequently, Russell argues, the ghazal’s ‘close unity of form’ can stand ‘in
startling contrast with a complete disunity of content’.90
One might argue that like the ghazal, Meatless Days is composed of what, as has
been seen, Suleri calls ‘tiny autonomies’ (MD : 76). The first narrative, ‘Excellent
Things in Women’, was conceived and published independently91 and the
remaining chapters stand as almost equally self-sufficient entities. Within each
one, moreover, thematic transitions are often abrupt, even sometimes startling
(see, for example, the sequencing of paragraphs on 34–6, 38, 73–6, 101–2). Suleri
comments ruefully on her ‘merely indifferent talent for construction’ (MD : 73;
compare 79). But as a comment about her disjunctive portrait of Tom suggests,
this apparent artlessness is quite deliberate: ‘Perhaps I should have been able to
bring those bits together, but such a narrative was not available to me, not after
what I knew of storytelling’ (MD : 37). In any case, despite the tendency of ghazal
to fragmentary structure, Adrienne Rich detects a ‘gathering, cumulative’ effect in
Gha-lib’s poems.92 This is also true of Meatless Days, both within and between the
different chapters. Such an effect is evident at both the level of theme (recon-
stituting the vanished family past, the decline of Pakistan) and that of image and
motif. For example, ‘meatless days’ at first seems to signify simply the days of the
week chosen by Pakistan’s early rulers to conserve the national supply of livestock.
The signification of this leitmotif becomes expanded and complicated by a pro-
cess of association in later chapters. For example, Nuz describes meat as some-
thing ‘you bury in your body’ (MD : 33). Later, in a dream, Suleri figures her
mother as ‘hunks of meat’ (MD : 44) and slips one of her mother’s bones under
her tongue. Through this linkage of meat–burial–mother, the title of Suleri’s
text perhaps comes to figure the (endless) period of mourning occasioned by the
disappearance of her mother and sister.
Meatless Days corresponds in other important ways to the conventions of ghazal.
Ahmad claims of the form that ‘personality [is] kept rigorously out of the poetic
substance’.93 This sheds light on the relatively detached, even impersonal, narra-
tive voice which Suleri employs, whether describing a simple meal with her sister
in the United States or her deepest griefs, for example the deaths of Ifat or her
first paramour, T.K. (MD : 43, 62). Dadi, by contrast, is condemned for excessive
106 Non-western narrative resources
and self-dramatising lamentation for her daughter-in-law’s death (MD : 16).
However, while the impersonality of the ghazal might suggest that it cannot be
described as a properly autobiographical form, it is nonetheless common for poets
like Gha-lib not only to use the first-person in their ghazals, but to apostrophise
themselves (usually by their pen-name) in the last couplet of their poems.94 It is
perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that Suleri reserves perhaps the most confes-
sional and self-revealing section of Meatless Days, ‘Saving Daylight’, for the
conclusion of her text, a link reinforced by the attention she draws there to the
stage-name adopted in her acting days (MD : 179).
Reinforcing Suleri’s characteristic detachment as an auto/biographical persona
is her resolute intellectualism, again anticipated by Gha-lib. Ahmad emphasises
his ‘extremes of verbal ingenuity and obscurity’ while Matthews and Shackle
draw attention to the ‘verbal brilliance and rhetorical tricks’ which subtend his
‘growing tendency towards obscurity and allusiveness’.95 Such comments could
apply equally well to Suleri. The elusiveness of both writers’ work is primarily
a function of their tendency to abstraction. At one point, Suleri describes Gha-lib’s
language as being like ‘geometry’ and praises his ‘mathematical ingenuity’ (MD :
99). According to Ahmad, his poetry typifies the Urdu tradition by always moving
away from concreteness: ‘Meaning is not expressed or stated; it is signified.’96
Suleri argues comparably that ‘revelation must be a hiding’ (MD : 176) – and
perhaps, one might infer, vice versa. One demonstration of this comes in her
account of things which made her mother squeamish: ‘Chopping up animals
for God was one. She could not locate the metaphor and was uneasy when
obeisance played such a truant to the metaphoric realm’ (MD : 4). Conversely,
however, Matthews and Shackle highlight Gha-lib’s often ‘idiomatic use of lan-
guage’.97 This also has parallels in Suleri’s work, without necessarily making it
any less defamiliarising, or challenging for her readers: ‘In Pakistan, of course,
there is no spring but only a rapid elision from winter into summer, which is
analogous to the absence of a recognizable loneliness from the behaviour of that
climate’ (MD : 6).
Despite these signs of the influence on Meatless Days of both the heritage of
Mughal ‘miniatures’ and the ghazal, it would be incorrect to infer that Suleri
simply reaffirms either cultural practice as templates for her own writing. Instead,
one might argue that she reconfigures both from a gendered perspective (com-
pare Djebar’s reconceptualisation of the nouba). Both artistic traditions were
largely the work of men. Verma suggests that there were few women painters in
the Mughal ateliers.98 Neither anthology by Ahmad or Matthews and Shackle
includes women writers. Nor are representations of women in either form
unproblematic from a contemporary gendered perspective. In ghazals, women are
all too often figured as nightingales or roses rather than fully human beings.99
Conversely, as Beach comments of Mughal portraiture, ‘studies of particular
women are almost unknown’.100 Several of the female portraits in the Lahore
Museum have flat, featureless, or decoratively abstract backgrounds, enhancing
the idealised quality of their subjects. If, as Suleri claims, metaphorically at
least, ‘there are no women in the third world’ (MD : 20),101 this is partly the
 Non-western narrative resources 107
responsibility of cultural traditions like the ghazal and Mughal ‘miniatures’.
In place of the types such work characteristically offers, Suleri paints highly
individualised portraits of real women ‘living inside history’ (MD : 34).
However, as is the case with Djebar, the provenance of Meatless Days at the
level of narrative form is not exclusively non-western.102 The text clearly expres-
ses Suleri’s weariness with being made to perform as an ‘otherness machine’
(MD : 105). Instead, she presents herself as, culturally speaking, a ‘two-faced thing’
with ‘ambidextrous eyes’ (MD : 77, 92). This is particularly apposite in relation to
her conception of herself as a woman writer. In the absence of an indigenous
‘female tradition’ to look back to in Mughal miniature and the ghazal alike, Suleri
appears to draw particular inspiration from two figures in western culture. The
first is Jane Austen, a great favourite of Suleri’s ( Welsh) mother, who for many
years worked as a lecturer in English literature in Lahore.103 Aside from a shared
preoccupation with the (often stifling) condition of women in their respective
cultures, and a predilection for narrative irony, both writers share a fascination
with ‘scale’. Austen famously described her writing as ‘the little bit (two inches
wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush’.104 This suggests that Suleri
may have learned as much from Austen as from indigenous cultural traditions
about the scale of her canvas and the corresponding virtues of precision and
economy of narrative description (although Austen’s works are characteristically
much longer than Suleri’s).
Equally important to Suleri’s feminist writing project is Virginia Woolf. In one
conversation, her half-sister Nuz invokes To the Lighthouse (1928) for the insight it
offers for their own home life (MD : 153). Suleri’s large and sometimes chaotic
family, dominated by an egocentric father, and held together primarily by a
deeply sympathetic, self-effacing and enigmatic mother, has obvious parallels with
the Ramsays. Mothers and children die off-stage in each text, exposing the ‘ter-
rible dependencies’ (MD : 151) of bereft patriarchs. There is even a direct, paro-
dic, echo of Mr Ramsay’s failure to get beyond the letter ‘R’ in his philosophical
systemising (MD : 23). Both families progressively disintegrate against the back-
ground of war and ensuing political and social changes. Within this reconfigura-
tion of elements of Woolf ’s text, Suleri’s role perhaps most closely approximates
to the artist Lily Briscoe. Just as one of the central themes of To the Lighthouse is
Lily’s production of a portrait of Mrs Ramsay (a mother-figure to Lily), so Meatless
Days is at one level a portrait of Mairi Suleri. In Boys, the earlier text is described
as ‘largely an elegy for her’ (B: 16). And just as Lily seeks to preserve her personal
independence from importuning men, so Suleri finally decides to leave her
homeland to escape the pressure to marry (B: 45).
The parallels between Suleri and Woolf extend to issues of form, To the Light-
house being as recursive and fragmentary in structure as Meatless Days. In both
texts, coherence is to a considerable degree the effect of leitmotif. The narrative
perspective in To the Lighthouse is often equally impersonal and multi-perspectival.
It might be argued further that Suleri’s difficult syntax is as much the product of
a Woolf-like struggle with the ‘male sentence’, as of the author’s desire to inflect
the coloniser’s language from a postcolonial standpoint. One imagines that the
108 Non-western narrative resources
author of A Room of One’s Own (1928) would approve the assertion of the female
author of Meatless Days that to be ‘engulfed by grammar after all is a tricky pro-
spect, and a voice deserves to declare its control in any way it can, asserting in the
end it is an inventive thing’ (MD : 155). Equally, the often-remarked-upon ‘poetic’
style of Woolf ’s prose has obvious parallels in Suleri’s.
As this might suggest, western poetry is another important axis to consider in
terms of Suleri’s self-identifications. As an adolescent, one of Suleri’s favourite
writers was Wallace Stevens (B: 119), whose affinities with Gha-lib, notably his
abstraction, playfulness and wit, are remarked on by Ahmad.105 Another impor-
tant intertext is Wordsworth, on whom Suleri wrote part of her doctoral dis-
sertation. His poem ‘We are Seven’ (alluded to in B: 120), in which the ‘maid’
stubbornly insists that she retains her full complement of siblings, though two lie
buried in the church-yard, resonates poignantly with Suleri’s project. (Counting
her half-sister Nuz who also dies prematurely and her adopted sister Shahida,
there are also seven Suleri siblings.) Such inter-texts, together with the influence
of Gha-lib, underwrite one of Suleri’s most radical challenges to autobiography as
conventionally understood. Lejeune’s ‘pact’ insists that it is a prose genre, a posi-
tion seconded by critics such as Spengemann, who specifically excludes ‘lyric
poetry’ from the genre, despite his claim that the supreme impulse and form of
autobiography is ‘poetic self-expression’.106
In Boys, Suleri laments that ‘we Orientals all look alike to the rest of the world’
(B: 87; my emphasis).107 The deployment of non-western narrative resources
within her auto/biographical writing can be seen to respond to this perception in
a complex way. To some extent, at least, it reaffirms the partly postcolonial dif-
ference of Suleri’s identity, by distinguishing her narrativisation of the auto/bio-
graphical from its mainstream western counterparts. But this is perhaps
subordinate to her more urgent task, which is to do justice to the human com-
plexity and individuality of those she writes about, especially women. In doing so,
like Djebar, Suleri redeems her subjects from the condition of the anonymous or
typical, to which they are so often consigned in both ‘indigenous’ and colonial
patriarchal traditions of representation.

Conclusion
This discussion indicates that postcolonial life-writing sometimes draws heavily on
indigenous narrative resources and hybridises to a significant degree the standard
forms of metropolitan languages handed down by colonialism. While the two
examples considered above are both by contemporary women life-writers (to
provide a balance to the preponderance of male texts discussed earlier in this
volume), this pattern is established very early in the women’s tradition. Thus, The
History of Mary Prince (1831) corroborates the assertion that it ‘was taken down
from Mary’s own lips’.108 Not only does the structure of the narrative reflect the
sometimes digressive structure of orature, but the text also incorporates Creole into
its narrative discourse.109 The same pattern of linguistic hybridisation is easily
found in male writing, as has been seen. Constraints of space preclude more
 Non-western narrative resources 109
detailed discussion of other kinds of indigenous narrative resources, notably those
supplied by the oral tradition, which has only been touched on here. In texts as
diverse as Sindiwe Magona’s To My Children’s Children (1990) and Isabel Allende’s
Paula (1995), this particular resource plays a crucial role in the narrative construction
of subjectivity.110
Such templates have important implications for the thematics of postcolonial
subjectivity. Not only do they ‘indigenise’ the individual identities concerned,
sometimes making them geo-culturally, even ethnically, specific, they also at times
invoke quite different conceptions of Selfhood to what is normative in the West.
As Lionnet suggests, hybridisation of language undermines the traditional western
model of unified subjectivity by foregrounding ‘the double consciousness of the
postcolonial, bilingual, and bicultural writer’.111 Orature, by contrast, is intrinsi-
cally a dialogical form, emphasising the relationality of personhood in a perfor-
mative way. Certain aspects of non-western form also imply a sometimes radically
different relationship of autobiographical subjectivity to temporality. The recur-
sive character of some such work (both that influenced by orature, as well as
Djebar and Suleri, for example) suggests less a preoccupation with the develop-
ment of the Subject in historical linear time than with its ‘location’ in a variety of
discursive and material relationships and positions (compare Chapter 4). Like
Suleri, Bharati Mukherjee draws on the Mughal tradition of painting,112 which
particularly emphasises the spatial relations of its Subjects; like Suleri, Isabel
Allende references the traditions of fresco, with similar implications for the
constitution of auto/biographical subjectivity.113 This desire to conceive auto-
biographical identity in spatial rather than temporal terms is, however, neither
gender-distinctive nor historically-specific. As has been seen, it extends from
Equiano’s image of the chequer-board to Morgan’s of the jigsaw puzzle as
metaphors of Self.
However, one should not assume that a refusal to draw on indigenous
narrative forms, or the use of standard English in postcolonial life-writing, is
necessarily evidence to support Gusdorf ’s strategic claims about the secondary
and imitative nature of non-western life-writing. As Fanon suggests, in certain
contexts, at least, and in certain periods, ‘indigenous’ resources are far harder to
access than in others. Thus, in the French Caribbean, which he describes as
having experienced ‘the death and burial of its local cultural originality’114 (in a
chapter symptomatically entitled ‘The Negro and Language’), the life-writer, at
least in Fanon’s predicament, is represented as being obliged to use what
colonial culture made available: ‘It was only with the appearance of Aimé Césaire
that the acceptance of negritude and the statement of its claims began to be
perceptible.’115 If the situation Fanon describes threatens to render the Caribbean
life-writer, linguistically speaking, ‘a complete replica of the white man’,116 the
operationality of racial discourse is nonetheless often stymied by perfect replica-
tion of the coloniser’s language. Even without discounting the pressures to con-
form to publishers’ demands and expectations (the Europhone arms of which
industry are overwhelmingly located in the West),117 this may shed a more
sympathetic light on figures like Naipaul. Instead of seeing his lapidarily (or,
110 Non-western narrative resources
depending on one’s point of view, sometimes stiltedly) correct English as evidence
simply of abject assimilation to the norms and values of the standard forms of
metropolitan culture, it is possible – theoretically at least – to argue that he is
enacting Rushdie’s conviction that: ‘To conquer English may be to complete the
process of making ourselves free.’118 Equally, in the context of Doran’s threats
against Equiano for talking ‘too much English’ (I N: 94), the ‘white’ discourse of
The Interesting Narrative can be seen as defying the expectation that its author
should discourse in what Fanon calls ‘pidgin-nigger’. And, as Lyn Innes suggests,
Seacole’s emphasis on ‘correct’ expression of the Queen’s English turns the tables
on many of those who consider themselves her racial/cultural superiors, precisely
by emphasising their own ‘broken English’.119
7 Political Self-representation in
postcolonial life-writing

Attempts to constitute autobiography as a literary mode in the first two phases of

Auto/biography Studies were governed by the predominant systems of aesthetic
criticism, from genre theory itself to New Criticism. In contrast to a nascent
Marxist literary criticism, these generally divorced literature ‘proper’ from poli-
tics, which was deemed to threaten the instrumentalisation of a supposedly
autonomous and sacrosanct aesthetic sphere. For Auto/biography Studies, the
effects of these emphases were profound. As was seen in Chapter 5, Misch hier-
archised autobiographical forms according to their inverse proportion ‘worldly’
preoccupations.1 Despite claiming that autobiography expresses a concern which
has been of good use in colonialism, Gusdorf also draws a distinction between
canonical ‘masterpieces’ and the memoirs of ‘heads of government or generals,
ministers of state’, largely on the basis that the latter aim simply to provide
‘posthumous propaganda for posterity’.2 As seen in the previous chapter, for Spen-
gemann, writing at the beginning of the third phase of Auto/biography Studies,
‘poetic self-expression’ represents the supreme development of the genre after
successive stages of historical self-exploration and philosophical self-scrutiny.3
Such criteria shed further light on the exclusion of women’s life-writing from the
canon and its marginalisation within traditional Auto/biography Studies. As Sau-
ling Wong suggests, the traditional privileging of the private/personal over the
public/political domains is inimical to the sub-genre’s preoccupation with a variety
of woman-centred engagements of instrumental kinds.4
As a result of these emphases in mainstream Auto/biography Studies, some
feminists regard canonical autobiography as a conservative form with what Evans
calls ‘a deep commitment’ to prevailing social orders.5 However, others strongly
disagree. Swindells, for example, suggests that even in the canon, ‘the auto-
biographer’s voice is often … oppositional, heretical or radical’.6 Consequently,
many colleagues have insisted that auto/biography has progressive political
potential. At the opposite extreme to Evans, Whitlock claims that the genre is
‘fundamental to the struggle among individuals and groups, to the constant
creation of what it means to be human and the rights that fall from that’.7 Fem-
inist Auto/biography Studies has identified the political purchase of women’s life-
writing, more specifically, in a number of areas. First, it emphasises the agency
involved in appropriation of this hitherto privileged and exclusive cultural form,
112 Political Self-representation
which thereby offers women the opportunity to transform themselves from objects
of representation to Subjects of self-representation.8 However, mindful that an
unthinking insertion in this traditionally patriarchal genre might constitute the co-
option – if not deformation – of the subjectivity of women, Gilmore locates their
resistant agency above all in experimentations with established rules of the genre,
as discussed in Chapter 5.9
From this perspective, issues of women’s discursive representation and location
in patriarchal cultures are inevitably political and contemporary women’s life-
writing is thereby willy-nilly connected to the public sphere.10 As Chapter 4 sug-
gested, one should not underestimate the importance of finding new discursive
locations for hitherto marginalised auto/biographical Subjects, or the critique of
patriarchal representations which arises from their investment. Nonetheless, one
needs to draw a distinction between the cultural politics of contemporary western
women’s life-writing and more concrete political programmes and mobilisations.
Thus, whereas Sidonie Smith celebrates the emergence of new ‘standpoint epis-
temologies’ which the experimental nature of contemporary women’s life-writing
makes available,11 Maroula Joannou has analysed Suffragette auto/biography as
a specific instrument in early twentieth-century agitation for votes for women.12
Such emphases impact upon established conceptions of autobiographical form in
sometimes unexpected ways. For example, according to Lejeune, autobiography
is defined by its retrospective gaze. By contrast, life-writing which embraces the kind
of politics represented by Suffragism looks forward as much as it does to the past,
to a future where its aspirations will be realised.13 In turn, similar arguments have
been made in relation to both western minoritarian and postcolonial women’s
life-writing.14
Once again, Fanon’s Black Skin anticipates many claims about the political
potential of the genre. On the one hand, it persistently seeks new discursive posi-
tions in the postcolonial context to release the colonised from their psycho-affective
sense of ‘crushing objecthood’.15 To this end, Fanon seeks forms of ‘recognition’
which will fully acknowledge both his own humanity and that of those he speaks
for. But this is not a passive process of ‘bondsman’ waiting for the ‘master’ to
become enlightened. Fanon’s discursive politics segue into a demand for more
concrete forms of action by virtue of his perception that, faced with a recalcitrant
‘master’, the colonised must ‘fight for his freedom’.16 There is thus a clear con-
tinuity between this aspect of Fanon’s auto/biographical work and the call for
armed revolution against the colonial polity in The Wretched of the Earth. In this
respect, Black Skin is ‘future-oriented’ in the manner discussed above. Indeed,
Fanon insists that both his personal ‘disalienation’ and its collective equivalent will
only be achieved by a refusal to accept the present as ‘definitive’.17
In the rest of this chapter, I will explore some of these issues in relation to two
examples of Palestinian life-writing. This raises important conceptual problems in
relation to the critical frameworks employed in this text. Most obviously, the case
of Palestine reminds one graphically that much of the world is not yet post-
colonial, even in the technical sense of being formally independent. Indeed, in
many respects – according to the evidence of Palestine life-writing – Palestine is a
 Political Self-representation 113
classic (as well as, in some senses, unique) example of ongoing ‘settler colonialism’
in which are visible many of the ideologies and techniques of conquest and
repression which characterised earlier phases of western imperialism. This
includes the wholesale theft of the indigenous population’s natural resources
(notably, in the case of the Occupied Territories, Palestinians’ best agricultural
land and water; compare ‘settler’ Kenya, South Africa or Australia); the violent
political repression of that population, including systematic assassination of its
political leaders (and targeted violence against outsiders attempting to alleviate
the suffering of ordinary Palestinians18); the denial of basic human rights to the
subjugated;19 the physical redistribution of the population, notably by means of
the ‘apartheid (separation)’ wall and ‘defence’ infrastructure,20 and the transfer of
large numbers of the invaders’ population into the conquered territories, a prac-
tice forbidden in international law by the fourth Geneva Convention (1949),
which Israel signed up to in 1951.21
Palestine and Palestinian life-writing, more specifically, are under-developed
fields of inquiry within both Postcolonial and Auto/biography Studies. While
Israel–Palestine is occasionally fleetingly alluded to as a site of colonial contesta-
tion within the former field,22 it is little short of astonishing that so little sub-
sequent critical work has built on the foundations provided by Said’s The Question
of Palestine (1979), published more than a generation ago. If I may myself be
autobiographical for a moment at this late stage of my book, I too have been
responsible in allowing Palestine and the cultural-political issues it raises to
remain largely invisible in my field,23 principally because of what I now regard as
unfounded anxieties about being misunderstood as anti-Semitic, a change which
the Zionist lobby seeks programmatically to confuse with legitimate criticism of
Israel as a colonial polity. What follows is therefore in part an attempt to remedy
the defects of my earlier (minor) contributions to defining the contours of Post-
colonial Studies. Ironically, perhaps, the situation is marginally better in Auto/
biography Studies. The past twenty years or so have witnessed several engage-
ments with life-writing by Palestinian women. Stanton’s Female Autograph initiated
this project by including a short commentary on one example of such work,
which was reproduced in her collection of essays.24 As indicated in the Introduc-
tion, Janet Gunn provides a substantial discussion of Leila Khaled and, more
recently, Whitlock analyses ‘Saoud’s’ Burned Alive in the context of her important
discussion of ‘tainted testimony’.25
Perhaps more ironically still, postcolonial life-writing itself has contributed to
the general occlusion of Palestinian concerns. The process begins with Fanon’s
Black Skin, which is heavily indebted to Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) and
other anti-anti-Semitic writings for its anatomy of the psychopathologies of (post)
colonialism. Like Césaire, Fanon constructs his conception of the colonial pre-
dicament of the Black man partly by analogy to the traditional position of Jews in
European society, a strategy structured by deep sympathy for the appalling fate
which that eventually entailed in the Second World War. Conversely, Black Skin
demonstrates an already well-developed interest in the Arab, both in metropoli-
tan France (‘with his hunted look, suspicious, on the run’26) and elsewhere,
114 Political Self-representation
identifications which were to famously lead Fanon to participate in the armed
struggle for Algerian independence. Despite this, and his solidarity with other
colonised peoples, including the Vietnamese, Black Skin makes no mention of
Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants, nor of the price they paid for the establishment
of the Jewish State. Instead, he approvingly anticipates the emergence of a new
kind of Jew in Israel.27
If this founding text of Postcolonial Studies allows its sympathy with (post-)
Holocaust Jewry to over-ride any acknowledgement of the renewed colonial pre-
dicament of many Palestinians after the collapse of the British Mandate, later
postcolonial life-writing at times explicitly endorses Zionist mythography. The
prime example in this monograph is Among the White Moon Faces, which records
Shirley Lim’s argument with her nominally Muslim boyfriend Iqbal about the
significance of the June 1967 War, when Israel launched a surprise simultaneous
attack on a number of its neighbours and occupied East Jerusalem, the West
Bank and Gaza. While contentiously claimed as a pre-emptive war (illegal under
international law28), the Israelis used the occasion to prosecute their strategic
ambitions – stymied in the conflict of 1947–48 – of conquering all that remained
of former Mandate Palestine.
Lim’s grasp of events so far from Malaysia is clearly shaky (for example, she
describes the conflict as ‘the Seven Days’ War’29 – adding an extra twenty-four
hours to Arab resistance to Israel’s Blitzkrieg). Rather than seeing it as an act of
Israeli aggression, as Iqbal suggests is the case, Lim comments: ‘I was convinced
that the efforts to destroy the Jewish date [sic] were anti-Semitic and historically
related to the Holocaust.’30 As she readily admits, however, her emotional
identification with Israel owes less to an understanding of what was actually at
stake in the region than to her own ethnic-cultural position in Malaysia: ‘The
hostility I felt at his criticism of Israel was strangely personal, as if it threatened
my own being.’31 As Chapter 4 suggested, even as a member of the highly-
assimilated peranakan diaspora, Lim feels under increasing pressure within a
Muslim-Malay-dominated society which will eventually carry out its own pogroms
against her community – events with implicit parallels to those leading up to the
Holocaust.
Yet the fundamental incoherence of Lim’s stance on Israel–Palestine is evident
in the disconnection between the last sentence quoted and what immediately fol-
lows: ‘The prospect of studying with Irving Howe at Brandeis appealed to me as
a strenuous counter-Americanism to Iqbal’s Berkeley laissez faire.’32 It is impos-
sible to disentangle this. Brandeis, while ‘a college that was homogeneously Anglo
American and Jewish [sic]’,33 is here linked to ‘counter-Americanism’. Asymme-
trically, ‘Berkeley laissez faire’ (whatever that means) becomes associated with
anti-Semitism, on no stronger grounds, apparently, than Iqbal’s years of study
there. Perhaps more significantly, Lim makes no retrospective adjustment to her
interpretation as a jejune MA student of the Israel–Palestine problem. A number
of explanations for this offer themselves (though all must remain speculative),
including a continuing conviction of the rightness of her original position, her
marriage to a (secular) Jew by whom she falls pregnant, formation in academic
 Political Self-representation 115
life in Brandeis or her life-long location within what has remained a predominantly
pro-Israel US academy.
Palestinian life-writing can thus be understood in the first instance as an
attempt to mitigate the invisibility of Palestinians in accounts as diverse as Fanon’s
and Lim’s, as well as across postcolonial literature34 and swathes of western
regimes of representation. Since 1948 – and more particularly since 1967 – the
sub-genre has flourished in direct proportion to Israel’s ever-tightening stranglehold
on Palestinian lives and resources. One might even argue that it has become the
major branch of contemporary Palestinian literature, at least in the eyes of those in
the West. This is no doubt partly because there is a greater demand for it there
than for Palestinian fiction or poetry. Many Palestinian life-writers, including
Amiry,35 also write in English with an eye on international audiences because
therein lies the only possibility of influencing the international public sphere to
bring pressure on Israel to give up its territorial gains of 1967 and to redress the
depredations it has inflicted on Palestinians since 1948.
Indeed, as the analysis below will demonstrate, the claims made in Palestinian
life-writing for Fanonian forms of recognition are often negotiated at the most
basic existential level, below the radar of debates about basic individual rights, let
alone collective emancipation. For example, Ghada Karmi records how, even by
the early 1950s, ‘When people asked me where I came from and I answered,
“Palestine,” they would respond with, “Did you say Pakistan?”’36 Equally, many
of Edward Said’s American friends ‘assumed that being Palestinian was the
equivalent of something mythological like a unicorn’.37 It is out of this predica-
ment of being a ‘non-person’,38 that Palestinian life-writing so often emerges in
the first instance. Further, it characteristically reflects the bitter truth of Nietzs-
che’s dictum that ‘we become conscious of ourselves only after certain injuries
have been inflicted’.39

Edward Said, Out of Place (1999)

A preliminary reading might suggest that Said’s text itself seems ‘out of place’
alongside the substantial critical and political engagements with issues of coloni-
alism – and its effects in Palestine more specifically – on which his public profile
largely rests. It offers no sustained critique of post-1948 Israel–Palestine, nor any
practical programme for nation-building of the kind encountered in the life-writ-
ing of Gandhi or C.L.R. James, for example. Instead, Out of Place can be read as a
seemingly unexceptional, even rather traditional, example of literary auto-
biography written by an intellectual located since the age of 15 in the West and
conversant with the conventions of the genre as it developed there – in which the
political dimensions of the idea of ‘self-representation’ are also, as has been seen,
generally ‘out of place’. As Tobias Döring reminds us,40 Said’s debut academic
monograph was Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), a text in which
he demonstrates familiarity with canonical western autobiographical texts like
Rousseau’s Confessions and Newman’s Apologia. Conforming to Said’s description
of such work, his own text might also be interpreted initially as primarily ‘a
116 Political Self-representation
chronicle of states of mind … an attempt to render the individual energy of one’s
life’.41 Much of the ‘energy’ of Said’s memoir is devoted to exploring ideas
around being ‘out of place’, as his subject-formation unfolds, in what appear to
be essentially existential and psychological terms.
A good example of the seemingly non-political meanings of being ‘out of place’
is the author’s uncomfortable relationship with his body, an element of auto-
biographical identity whose importance was calibrated in Chapter 3. In contrast
to the material analysed there, however, Said’s body does not allegorise issues in
the public domain through its inscription with specifically ethnic or national sig-
nifications. Rather, it bears primarily moral meanings once the author discovers
that, for his father, Body and character are interchangeable (OP : 50). Wadie’s
attempt to mould the latter aspect of his son’s identity is often pursued through
attention to the child’s supposed physical shortcomings. Through a process of
‘virile bullying’ (OP : 56), which encompasses work on posture, canings, regimes of
exercise and a humiliating system of surveillance to inhibit masturbation, the boy
is conditioned to ‘proper’ manliness as Wadie understands it. Rather than
strengthening Said’s sense of Self, however, such measures make him ‘even more
awkward and uncertain’, not only of his moral but physical identity (OP : 67). As
this suggests, the writer’s early feeling of being ‘out of place’ can in large measure
be attributed to a particular family’s inter-personal dynamics (compare Lim). The
insecurity engendered by the recurrent tension between son and mother, for
example, is not linked directly to Hilda’s experience of, or attitude towards,
colonialism – whether British, American or Israeli – but arises from an ambivalent
personality which is, seemingly, inconsistently sensitive to the child’s emotional
needs.
The apparently self-absorbed (even, at times, self-pitying) focus on the travails
of a misunderstood prodigy is perhaps what led one reviewer to describe Out of
Place as ‘a mostly apolitical childhood narrative’,42 an interpretation Said himself
has seemed to legitimise. In ‘Between Worlds’, for example, he describes the text
as ‘a memoir of my early – that is, pre-political life’.43 However, in the Preface to
Out of Place, Said acknowledges that ‘my political writings about the Palestinian
situation … must surely have fed into this memoir surreptitiously’ (OP : xiii). At
the very least, Out of Place anatomises the affective ground from which the adult
Said’s political engagements grow. Thus, family relationships which seem to con-
stitute a rigorously private space of identity-formation are connected, in the first
instance, by metaphorical association, with the varieties of colonialism by which
Said will later become so preoccupied. For example, the kind of violent discipline,
which Said receives from his father is paralleled in the British-run GPS (Giza
Preparatory School), which provides his ‘first extended contact with colonial
authority’ (OP : 42). Elsewhere, the author describes his relationship with his mother
as like a ‘colony to a metropole’ (OP : 60). Many of the principal factors which
contribute to Said’s sense of being ‘out of place’, however, derive more obviously
and directly from the colonial milieu in which he grows up. One illustration of
this is Said’s chronic discomfort about his name, the most basic marker of
identity. Christened after the Prince of Wales, son of the ‘King-Emperor’ George
 Political Self-representation 117
V, ‘Edward’ (the name is often placed in inverted commas, as if constantly pro-
visional, if not under the threat of erasure) co-exists uneasily with the Arab family
name (the genealogy of which Said is in any case radically uncertain about, given
that his paternal grandfather’s surname is Ibrahim). A motif of the early part of
the text is Said’s coveting of the apparently solid identities conferred by more
‘natural’ names. For example, at GPS, one trigger of his sense of exclusion is a
conviction that, in contrast to his own, the ‘enviably authentic names’ of the
English children who predominate there ‘were just right’ (OP : 39, 42).
The tension between the influences of the West and the pull of ‘indigenous’
identifications which this exemplifies is familiar from many texts studied in this
monograph. As in Aké, Among the White Moon Faces and Fantasia, for example, it is
particularly evident in the issue of language. Said attributes his ‘primal instability’
(OP : 4) in part to the fact that he is unsure whether English or Arabic is his
mother tongue. Hilda speaks both to him during infancy, peppering each with
diction from the other. Symptomatically, Said’s tongue becomes one of the
bodily/moral organs with which his parents become most concerned (OP : 68).
Even when he appears to have resolved the dilemma, it returns to haunt him.
Thus, having decided that Arabic is indeed his ‘mother tongue’ (OP : 82), he feels
bound to conceal this fact in order to press his claims to belonging at CSAC
(Cairo School for American Children). The effects of Said’s western education,
furthermore, tend towards the disorientation experienced by Lim and Djebar
than the enthusiastic hybridity of Soyinka. Thrown off-balance by these conflicting
(self-)identifications, the child Said yearns for a stable identity of the kind dis-
cussed in Chapter 1, wishing that ‘we could have been all-Arab, or all-European
and American, or all-Orthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian, and so on’
(OP : 5). To a considerable degree, Out of Place is the narrative of how Said learns
to overcome his need for such a singular and rooted identity and, more specifically,
to appreciate that being Palestinian need exclude none of these identities.
The link between the apparently exclusively personal sphere of experience on
which Said primarily focuses and the formation of his later political persona is
also evident in the growing theme of rebellion as the text unfolds. Growing into
adolescence, Said becomes increasingly aware of a turbulent ‘underground’ Self
(OP : 284) which is largely repressed at home and derided at school. Initially, the
author ‘derived no strength, only embarrassment and discomfort’ (OP : 90) from
what his family name represents. Gradually, however, this aspect of his identity is
accommodated. As Bryan Turner suggests: ‘“Said” is “Edward’s”’ Other, the
person for whom Out of Place provides a journey of discovery and recovery.’44
This process is plotted in terms of a progressive revaluation of that marginalised
side of himself. Indeed, it comes to provide the grounds for resistance (‘under-
ground’ connoting the kind of guerrilla strategy which characterises his rebellion)
to the parental regime which seeks to turn him into the mimic Englishman
‘Edward’, meekly accepting his place in ‘a mock little European group’ (OP : 75).
It also anchors his revolt against the system of colonial discipline associated par-
ticularly with the aptly-named Victoria College in Cairo. Forbidden to speak
anything but English there, ‘Said’ increasingly asserts himself as a refractory
118 Political Self-representation
presence: ‘What I had formerly hidden at CSAC became a proud insurrectionary
gesture’ which pits the author ‘against a wounded colonial power’ (OP : 184, 186).
This ‘underground Self ’, first coded ethnically as an ‘Arab identity’ (OP : 90), is
slowly reconceptualised as a specifically Palestinian one. Progress towards the goal
of national identification is slow and uneven. As one would expect of a young
child, at the outset of the text, issues of ethnic affiliation are not much on Said’s
mind. Of his mother, for example, he comments: ‘I hadn’t then any idea … who,
in a national sense of the phrase, she was’ (OP : 5). The author’s slow political
awakening also owes something to one of the defining initial characteristics of the
family home, its exclusion of political debate. Thus, even the Second World War
barely impinges: ‘The political, to say nothing of the military, meanings of our
situation, were beyond me at age six and a half ’ (OP : 26). The arrival of Pales-
tinian refugees in Cairo after the nakba is initially represented as a problem which
does not hugely concern the immediate family, although Wadie provides
employment for some of them. Celebrating his twelfth birthday in Jerusalem in
November 1947, Said still has little idea about ‘our conflict with the Zionists and
the British’ (OP : 107). Moreover, when the family leaves Palestine for the last
time the following month, there is no hint of coercion, although serious violence
had by this time already erupted. Indeed, during July 1948, as the nakba reaches
its climax, the Saids are found on a luxury liner en route to New York (where
Wadie is bound for medical treatment), seemingly oblivious to events in their
homeland. Once arrived in America to study, it is therefore little surprise that the
adolescent Said is initially not much preoccupied by the fate of the people with
whom he comes to identify most passionately in later life.
Nonetheless, the seeds of Said’s future national identifications are sown early in
his life. As waves of Palestinian refugees arrive in Cairo after 1948, Said’s aunt
Nabiha takes responsibility for their welfare and she discusses their plight on visits
to the Saids. Later, Said looks back on her commitment as a crucial stage in the
reorientation of his identity. While ‘a scarcely conscious, essentially unknowing
witness’ (OP : 114) of the effects of the nakba, Said slowly overcomes his parents’
prohibition on discussing the events. Increasingly irritated by what he discovers in
the US about Truman’s support for Zionism, Said is radicalised by the Suez war
of 1956 (despite the destruction of the family business during the Egyptian
nationalist riots of 1952) and takes his first tentative steps as a political essayist on
behalf of the Arab cause. The Six-Day War proves decisive in his trajectory
towards new (self-)identifications: ‘I was no longer the same person after 1967; the
shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started … I subsequently
entered the newly transformed Middle Eastern landscape as part of the Palesti-
nian movement’ (OP : 293). Thus, as well as being an account of the forma-
tion of a gifted artistic and critical temperament, Out of Place is also clearly the
narrative enactment of Said’s ‘growing sense of Palestinian identity’ (OP : 195). To
this extent, the text is consonant with the many postcolonial writings, fictional as
well as non-fictional, which plot the formation of the individual protagonist in
allegorical relation to the emergence of collective national aspirations to an
independent identity.
 Political Self-representation 119
Arguably, the indirectness of Said’s approach to the Israel–Palestine problem
in fact enhances the political charge of Out of Place. It is in the ‘curiously unre-
markable’ (OP : 20), even banal, detail of diurnal existence described so fully
(even, at times, tediously, for example the interminable summer holiday in
Ramallah), that the western reader gains some measure of the scale of what has
been lost by so many Palestinians through the willed effort of Zionism. It is in this
sense, too, that Said can claim the kind of representativeness discussed in Chapter
2. Despite his minority religious confession, his privileged class position, the fact
that he inherited his father’s US citizenship, the family’s voluntary removal to
Cairo in 1929 (well before the establishment of the Jewish State), and his excep-
tional cultural capital and celebrity in the West, Said’s experience of rupture is
only too typical of his people, even if it is also less dramatic in origin than that of
the hundreds of thousands who were ethnically cleansed at the point of a bayonet.
Alon Confino comments, in an otherwise perceptive article, that ‘Said is the only
person who is represented as out of place, with the exception of Palestinian refu-
gees.’45 If this is a criticism, it is to miss the whole point of Out of Place as a
representative narrative of the material and affective experience of exile of a
people.
The claim that Said’s memoir is ‘mostly apolitical’ is further contradicted by
attempts to discredit the narrative. The most notorious of these was offered by
Justus Weiner, an American Jew who emigrated to Israel and ‘settled’ in Jer-
usalem in 1981 and, at the time of writing his piece, worked for the Israeli state.46
Weiner’s response to Said’s earlier fragmentary accounts of his life (his piece
actually anticipates Out of Place47), published in the far-right organ Commentary
(which had already defamed Said as ‘the Professor of Terror’ in 198948), is
articulated in essentially the same terms which have shaped much Zionist dis-
course about Palestinians. By basing his critique on the assertion that Said was
never a ‘proper’ resident of Jerusalem, Weiner seeks to ‘empty’ the city of one
more Palestinian with claims to belonging there (one thing Weiner does not con-
test is that Jerusalem was Said’s place of birth). He thereby attempts to perform
something like a discursive equivalent of the ethnic cleansing of the capital of
Mandate Palestine which began in 1947–48 (Said’s cousins are driven out of West
Jerusalem one by one) and which has gained renewed momentum since the Israeli
conquest of East Jerusalem in 1967, to make room for the likes of Weiner. The
result is that the proportion of Arab inhabitants of Jerusalem has fallen catastro-
phically in the past four decades, as the Jewish State seeks to make the capital it
claims correspondingly Jewish. Thus, on his return visit Said can barely recognise
the Talbiyah where he spent parts of his childhood at his aunt’s home.
Despite the pain clearly expressed in such episodes, several critics have com-
mented on Said’s refusal to simply bewail the past. In this regard, Out of Place is
consonant with remarks he makes in Reflections on Exile: ‘What has been left behind
may either be mourned, or it can be used to provide a different set of lenses.’49 In
counterpoint to the sense of loss implied in Said’s ‘crippling sense of estrange-
ment’50 (not only in America but sometimes in Egypt, too), Out of Place constructs
a space from which a new category ‘Palestinian’ can emerge in a willed act of
120 Political Self-representation
resistance to ‘a condition legislated to deny dignity – to deny an identity’51 to
those like himself. To this extent, the experience of Said reconfigures the nakba
into something much more positive and enabling. Equally, as Chapter 1 argued,
Said’s search for a Palestinian identity is premised on a critique of traditional
ideas of the ‘solid’ or sovereign Self. While some might see Said’s conception of
subjectivity as too postmodern to provide a sufficiently stable basis either for
Palestinian identity to ground itself, or for political action in its name, it could be
argued conversely that the writer enlarges the possibility of solidarity by affirming
hybridity and multiplicity as the ‘essence’ of the category ‘Palestinian’ (compare
Chaudhuri’s conception of ‘Indianness’). In this sense it is counterposed against
both the ‘extraordinary homogenizing power of American life’ (OP : 233) and the
racial discourses of Zionism, on the one hand, and, on the other, by implication
at least, the singularisation of identity represented by Egyptian nationalism
(compare El Saadawi) which emerged in part as a reaction to the establish-
ment of the state of Israel. Prior to this event, Said suggests, the Levant – from
Lebanon to Egypt – was an extraordinarily diverse and variegated inter-weaving
of cultures, including Jewish ones (compare El Saadawi and Djebar). Indeed, in
Said’s own case, it is remarkable how important Jewish intellectuals, notably
Auerbach and Adorno, are to his self-conception as a spokesperson for the
Palestinian cause.
To this extent, Said insists that ‘Palestinian’ is a contingent identity. The theme
of the fictions of genealogical filiation is announced in the very first sentence of
the text: ‘All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story,
character, fate, and even a language’ (OP : 3). Later we see Wadie energetically
engaged in the ‘practice of self-making’ (OP : 10), a description which applies
equally to the Self constructed in Out of Place. Later, Said comments on the ‘con-
trived’ nature of each ‘regulated prerehearsed scene, which we performed’ (OP :
75–6) in the family films his father takes, creating different versions of ‘Edward’.
The text suggests that similar processes apply for nations and peoples, with Khalil
Raad’s photos, ‘arranged’ with an ‘even more demanding rigor’ than his father’s,
providing the ‘richest archival resource’ (OP : 76–7) for future generations of
Palestinians to anchor their identity within. Later, Said refers to Khalil Beidas,
whose novels ‘contributed to the construction of a Palestinian national identity,
particularly in its encounter with the incoming Zionist settlers’ (OP : 114; my
emphasis).
Thus, the photographs which illustrate Out of Place perhaps work in a more
complex way than Döring suggests. While lending documentary ‘authority’52 to
Said’s personal narrative of his heritage, the pictures also suggest that Palestinian
identity is something enacted, not given or simply there to be recorded. The
example of the young Said and his sister Rosy in Palestinian dress, taken in Jer-
usalem in 1941, a photograph on which Döring does not comment, is a good
example of this emphasis. The portrait is clearly posed, in an artfully arranged set
(the blank backcloth strongly suggests it was taken in a studio) replete with ethnic
signifiers, as a (parentally-guided) performance of affiliation rather than being simply
a mechanical reproduction of filiation. This is all the more obvious given its
 Political Self-representation 121
juxtaposition on the same page with the relatively naturalistic photo of the two
children in westernised attire on their Egyptian apartment terrace. Such a plastic
and multiplicitous conception of Palestinian selfhood remains true to the spirit of
the plurality of identities, ethnic and religious, which historically constituted
Palestine. Said’s version of national allegory is clear, as Out of Place thereby pro-
motes not just a conception of autobiographical Self in which this variety of
identities ‘require no reconciling, no harmonizing’ (OP : 295; compare Chapter 1)
but, by implication, also imagines a Palestinian polity based on the same dynamic
principles.
Much has been made of Said’s emphasis on the importance of being ‘out of
place’ in order to perform ‘secular’ intellectual work (compare Chapter 4), both
in this memoir and earlier writings, notably Representations of the Intellectual (1994).
This has led Turner to claim that Out of Place is primarily an allegory of the con-
ditions desirable for the modern intellectual to operate effectively, if not, as
Confino claims, a ‘parable for the modern, or postmodern condition’.53 In a text
which lays such stress on plurality of identity, these interpretations are certainly
legitimate and they further reinforce another key lesson of Said’s criticism, that
the meanings of texts depend in part on when, where and by whom they are
read. Within the context of this monograph, however, Said’s attachment to being
‘out of place’ primarily represents the performance of political solidarity and
affiliation (see Chapter 2). For Said cannot claim to have solved ‘the enigma of
arrival’ – or to have found any secure kind of ‘home’ (contrast Lim) – as long as
the vast majority of his fellow-nationals remain in exile or under a brutal and
illegal military Occupation.

Suad Amiry, Sharon and My Mother-in Law: Ramallah

Diaries (2003–4)
There are many convergences between Said’s text and Amiry’s. For example,
both were explicitly written ‘as a form of therapy’54 to mitigate traumatic events
(in Said’s case, the diagnosis of leukaemia, in Amiry’s the Israeli re-invasion of
Ramallah, in 2001–2). In each, furthermore, trauma is expressed partly in the
theme of sleep/lessness. If Said’s chronic insomnia is connected only implicitly to
the fate of Palestine since 1948, Amiry’s hypersomnia is linked directly with the
recent history of her nation. Sleep proves a particularly useful way to kill time
during the curfews which are such a regular feature of the illegal Occupation by
Israel since 1967 of what remained of the former British Mandate. (This rump is
theoretically comprised of modern-day east Jerusalem, the West Bank and –
though it features only marginally in Sharon – Gaza, all of which fell under
either Jordanian or Egyptian control after 1948: the rash of illegal settlements
peopled by nearly 450,000 ‘settlers’, most either Zionist or religious fundamen-
talists, has severely diminished this territory).55 If the motif of sleep/lessness rein-
forces the thesis of Chapter 3 about the somatic effects of psycho-social realities,
both texts also reaffirm the argument of Chapter 4 concerning the role played
by issues of (dis)location in postcolonial subjectivity. Thus, both authors undertake
122 Political Self-representation
a pilgrimage to their ancestral family home in what is now Israel, although in
Amiry’s case the experience is so painful that the attempt is aborted. Like Said,
Amiry speaks for and to (sometimes critically) the collective to which their authors
belong. This is consonant with the engagement of both writers at a high level in
Palestinian politics. Said served on the Palestinian National Council, while Sharon
both alludes to Amiry’s involvement in aborted 1990 peace negotiations in
Washington and describes her appearance on a CBS current affairs programme,
to explain to a US audience the effects on Palestinians of the ‘apartheid (separa-
tion)’ wall. At the same time, Said’s and Amiry’s texts demonstrate their atypi-
cality as Palestinians in certain respects, both authors being academics from
wealthy backgrounds (Amiry’s mother even insists on weekly grocery deliveries to
Amman from her home city of Damascus!), as well as secular and leftist.
However, there are also important differences between Out of Place and Sharon
which derive in the first instance from the different life-experiences of each writer.
While, as has been seen, Said was born in Jerusalem and belonged to an already
voluntarily expatriated family, Amiry was born outside Palestine, as a con-
sequence of her family’s expulsion from Jaffa during the 1948 ethnic cleansings.56
Equally, while she also studied in the West, Amiry returned to the illegally
Occupied territories to help rebuild Palestinian society, partly through lecturing
in the Architecture Faculty at Birzeit University and partly through work for
RIWAQ, an organisation dedicated to the conservation of what remains of
Palestine’s architectural heritage. In contrast to Said’s account of the psychologi-
cal and cultural consequences of exile far from Palestine, Amiry is thereby able to
offer a vividly material account of everyday life in the West Bank under the
jackboot of Occupation.
In the fashion of testimonio, Sharon pulls no punches in detailing the mechanisms
by which Israel seeks to subjugate the West Bank and prosecute its aim of making
a Palestinian state an impossibility (SMM: 194) by creating apartheid-style Bantu-
stans separated by endless checkpoints (over 300 at the time Amiry was writing, in
an area the size of Greater London). To use the title of one of Assia Djebar’s
autobiographical works, the region has been transformed into ‘so vast a prison’
and Amiry’s account of incarceration during endless curfews (at one point the
West Bank is under lock-down for 36 consecutive days) invites comparison with
texts like Behan’s Borstal Boy (see Chapter 2), Soyinka’s The Man Died (1972) or
Ngugi’s Detained (1981) as examples of postcolonial prison autobiography. The
casual brutalities of Occupation are often most tellingly revealed in passing
details – references to the gratuitous shooting of a horse by a vindictive Israeli
soldier, a premature birth induced by spiteful delay of the mother at a check-
point, the looting and vandalism during Israeli raids on private homes, the bela-
ted issue of out-of-date gas-masks by the military authorities to Palestinians when
the region becomes vulnerable to Saddam’s rockets. The illegal Occupation
deforms every aspect of life, notably through the system of permits determining
nationality, residency, travel, even marriage rights, which inevitably recall the
‘pass’ laws of apartheid-era South Africa. Amiry’s experience of the injustices and
humiliations which this regime engenders includes being turned back from her
 Political Self-representation 123
own wedding party when an Israeli (woman) soldier tears up her permit to travel,
leaving her husband stranded on the other side of the Jordan (Israel generally
forbids Palestinians marrying Palestinians-in-exile from bringing their spouses to
live on Israeli-controlled land).
Ultimately, as Sharon repeatedly demonstrates, the illegal Occupation rests on
brute force. A colleague is badly beaten by the Israeli army for allegedly
encouraging a demonstration and a policeman acquaintance is shot in (the back
of ) the head by Israeli soldiers. Amiry visits the hospital in Ramallah where Jad is
presumed to lie only to find a mass pit dug for 29 victims of the first two days of
the 2001 re-invasion, whom the Occupation army will allow neither to be
restored to their families nor buried in the cemetery. Amiry is herself often in fear
of her life and actually comes under fire when approaching Nablus to assess the
damage done to the town’s architecture during an Israeli blitz. The affective
consequences of such oppression are potentially devastating, even for someone as
relatively empowered as Amiry. The seemingly inevitable internalisation of these
material realities is expressed in her constant struggle against ‘the mental and
psychological barriers, checkpoints and separation walls I had personally built in
and around myself and my life, in besieged Ramallah’ (SMM: 189). Fittingly the
text ends with a visit to the zoo in Qalqiliah, which becomes a potent metaphor
for the general predicament of Palestinians under Occupation.
Amiry’s account further differs from Said’s because of her gender. Sharon’s cri-
tique of the illegal Occupation from a female perspective opens up a Palestinian
women’s sphere of experience largely absent from Out of Place. For example, the
brief lifting of curfew involves a riotous (and poignantly hilarious) rush through
the supermarket to buy enough to last until the next time women are allowed out
to forage for their families. The particular vulnerability of women during the re-
invasion becomes further apparent in Amiry’s accounts of the predicament of her
widowed mother-in-law and her own parlous situation during her husband
Salim’s absences. This suggests that Occupation is experienced differently
according to gender. Stranded in her apartment immediately next to Arafat’s
compound, Um Salim is simply too vulnerable to be left alone to the mercy of the
Israeli army, despite the danger that her property will be ransacked. Braving the
encircling Israeli tanks and trigger-happy squaddies, Amiry steels herself to bring
her mother-in-law safely to her own home.
As this episode suggests, Sharon also demonstrates how Amiry’s gender opens
avenues of resistance denied to male Palestinians, who can move around even less
easily in such circumstances. Indeed, many of Amiry’s acts of subversion take
place in the absence of Salim, who is occasionally represented as being more
respectful towards the Occupation forces (perhaps unsurprisingly, given that one
in four of all Palestinian males have at some time in their life been imprisoned by
the invaders). The illegal Occupation is represented not only as racist but deeply
patriarchal. Thus, Amiry speculates that she is not at first summoned to sign the
anti-PLO statement required of male academic colleagues because ‘being a
woman helped me not to be taken seriously’ (SMM: 29). Nonetheless Israeli
patriarchy offers Amiry numerous opportunities to express a resistant agency. The
124 Political Self-representation
very first page of the text describes her uncooperative attitude towards security
officers at Lod airport. Insisting that she has simply been to Britain to go dancing,
because the innocent truth that she was visiting friends would entail hours of
intrusive interrogation, Amiry is threatened with arrest. She responds by threa-
tening to make a scene in an arrivals hall full of unthinking foreign tourists
‘coming to enjoy the sun and beautiful, relaxing shores of Israel’ (SMM: 10). On
another occasion she convinces Captain Rafi to hand over her ID card by
threatening to throw a hysterical fit in his office. Nonetheless, despite these illus-
trations of one of ‘the weak points’ (SMM: 29) of the Occupation regime, Amiry
reminds her readers that Palestinian women (and children) often pay the ultimate
price for Israel’s territorial ambitions. While en route to rescue Um Salim, she
unnerves herself by remembering one woman shot dead by Occupation forces as
she was leaving Ramallah hospital and another in Bethlehem shot in cold blood
as she opened her door to Israeli soldiers.
Exceptionally effective as Amiry is at evoking the crushing burdens under
which Palestinians have to live as the result of the illegal Occupation, like Said,
she is by no means an unreflecting nationalist. Indeed, it is remarkable how often
her humanity and common sense over-ride what one might assume to be the
‘politically correct’ line among Palestinian activists towards the history of ethnic
cleansing, deportation and Occupation suffered by their people. For example, her
memories of childhood visits to Jerusalem revolve not around iconic symbols of its
Arab identity like the Dome of the Rock, but Zalatimo’s ice-cream parlour.
Equally, her mournful anticipation of the visit to the family home in Jaffa is
interrupted by anxieties as to whether her guide, the newly-met Salim, will still
find her attractive. Further, Amiry frankly admits the strain which solidarity with
her mother-in-law entails while Salim is away. Just as Israel (re-)invades Ramal-
lah, so the frail, forgetful and fastidious Um Salim ends by ‘occupying’ Amiry’s
home, adding a new level of inconvenience and disruption to the military
Occupation.
Amiry also admits discomfort with certain political commitments demanded of
her. For example, she eventually agrees to sign the document disavowing the
PLO in order to be allowed to remain in the Occupied Territories with her hus-
band. This might be regarded initially as evidence of Amiry’s self-interest over-
riding more pressing considerations, or even complicity with Israel. However, her
confession is not only a symptom of honesty but reveals the limitations of certain
male forms of resistance. By refusing to concede to Israeli blackmail (which in
any case makes the signing of such documents morally meaningless), certain of
her fellow-academics find themselves expelled from their homeland and thereby
prevented from helping their people. Amiry also expresses impatience with the
political (non-)process being conducted by male colleagues, notably in the Pales-
tinian Authority run by Yasser Arafat (compare Said’s OP : 214). At one point she
even speculates whether he and Sharon are colluding to prevent much-needed
reform of the Authority (SMM: 180). On occasion, indeed, the policies of the
Palestinian Authority and Occupation regime are shown to mirror each other
(SMM: 107). Further, Amiry makes no bones about recognising the existence of
 Political Self-representation 125
‘progressive Israelis’ (SMM: 192), one of whom helps get her work published. To
this extent, while it is well aware of the role played by Israeli women conscripts in
the oppression of Palestinians, Sharon also reiterates Shirley Lim’s arguments
about the potential of solidarity between women of different ethnicities to transcend
narrow racial and national categorisations of belonging (see Chapter 4).
At times, moreover, Amiry turns a disobliging eye on Palestinian society more
generally. While acknowledging the role of blackmail, bribery and coercion as
powerful strategies of Occupation, she is clearly disappointed by the degree of
collaboration evident among certain Palestinians. Immediate neighbours, includ-
ing Rami and Um Zahi, collude with the invaders simply out of spite towards
their community, or for personal gain. Amiry also decries the divisive effects of
the Palestinian gender economy, relations within which are sometimes tellingly
compared to the unequal relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. Dr
Hisham appears to typify the chauvinism of many West Bank males, such that the
demonstration organised on International Women’s Day is directed as much at
Palestinian men as the male Israeli soldiers who intervene so brutally to suppress
it. Amiry comments with biting irony: ‘It is the one day when it is difficult to define
who the enemy is. It is also the one day when Palestinian men see Israeli soldiers
beat up and shoot at Palestinian women but won’t do much about it’ (SMM: 92–
3). The issue of gender inequality feeds into Amiry’s disquiet about the religious
radicalisation of Palestinian society. While she is willing to identify herself as
Muslim for strategic purposes, for example, to convince the stricken Israeli whom
she drives to hospital that even Muslims might be human (SMM: 114), Amiry is
dismayed when Um Zahi adopts the hijab as the price of reconciliation with her
collaborationist husband.
Formally, too, Out of Place and Sharon differ significantly. As suggested in the
previous section, in some ways Said’s text can be construed as a classical example
of intellectual autobiography. By comparison, Amiry prefers a form moulded
equally by the well-established conventions of the diary/journal and the dis-
tinctively contemporary mode of email (her Preface describes how the original
material was partly reorganised for the British edition). Rather than focusing
primarily on the writer’s formation as an individual (although one learns a good
deal about her background, personality, feelings and emerging attitudes), Sharon is
more interested in testifying to the realities of life in illegally Occupied Palestine.
Drawing on these forms, Amiry accrues the benefits of an immediacy and spon-
taneity (particularly evident in those entries in the present tense) which lend eye-
witness authority to her reportage. One of her themes is ‘breaking news’ (SMM:
145) and the slippage between the journal form and journalism itself is especially
marked in her discourse.
Auto/biography Studies has traditionally patronised the diary and journal as
secondary modes (partly because they are considered to be particularly
‘female’).57 However, consonant with her connections to Palestinian writers like
Emile Habibi and Raja Shehadeh58 and familiarity with other Arab authors as
diverse as the medieval poet Antar and Amiry’s contemporary, Fatema Mer-
nissi59 – as well as western authors, notably Kafka (SMM: 24) – Sharon is more
126 Political Self-representation
subtle and self-conscious than one might anticipate from a journal/email corre-
spondence conducted under such difficult circumstances. Thus, the seeming dis-
organisation of the text in ‘spatial’ terms (the entries sometimes jump abruptly
from place to place) contrives to reflect the geographical dislocations historically
enforced on Palestinians. The temporal disjunctions work equally effectively. The
dates of entries move backwards and forwards, sometimes in dramatic transitions.
While also dramatising the disruptiveness of the illegal Occupation, this arrange-
ment further serves to remind how little has changed in the more than forty years
since Israel’s initial invasion of the West Bank, in pursuit of its ambition to own
all of Mandate Palestine (and, sometimes, more60). In a sense, then, it does not
matter in what order one reads the narrative (compare Djebar and Suleri), since
the patterns of public events and private life repeat themselves ad nauseam under
Occupation. Further, the forms which Amiry employs could be argued to lend
themselves to the project of cultural/political resistance in a more specific sense,
by circumventing the regime of censorship which subtends the Occupation. A
diary can be hidden with relative ease, thus escaping Israeli incursions into the
home and email can similarly elude such searches (as well as physical restrictions
imposed on Palestinians), although it is by no means invulnerable to electronic
surveillance and interference.
Also contrastive to Out of Place is Amiry’s devastating use of the weapon of humour
as a mode both of self-defence and offence. Tonally, Said’s text is comprised in
equal measure of willed optimism and melancholy, which is partly the effect, no
doubt, of the medical diagnosis which provided its immediate stimulus. By con-
trast Sharon is a consistently funny book, despite its sometimes horrendous content.
From the bathetic conjunction in the title, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law announces
its characteristically satirical register. Amiry has a brilliant eye for farce, not only
the black farce to which everyday life under Occupation is so often reduced, but
for the often ‘absurd’ mechanisms of oppression themselves. One instance is
Amiry’s attempt to get her dog vaccinated. Alienated by the sexist Palestinian vet
in Ramallah, she seeks help from a sympathetically represented female Israeli in
the illegal settlement of ‘Atarvut’, one of a ring of fortified suburbs designed to
cut the whole of Jerusalem off from what remains of Palestinian territory. Nura’s
documentation, her owner discovers to her chagrin, gives her dog greater free-
dom of movement under Occupation than she enjoys herself. Another example
occurs when her obstinate mother-in-law dithers over what colour dresses to take
with her as the clock ticks rapidly towards the next curfew and trigger-happy
Israeli squaddies gather outside. Finally, there is the hilarious imagined con-
versation with George Bush, in which the characteristic obtuseness of the most
fanatically pro-Israel US President in recent history is brilliantly mocked.
Such aspects of the text contribute to what one might call Amiry’s innovative
construction of a ‘Palestinian Absurd’. Like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the Pales-
tinians wait interminably in Sharon for deliverance. The two-part structure of
Amiry’s text, in which ‘nothing happens twice’, is a further parallel with Beckett’s
play. The temporal circularity and thematic repetitions of Amiry’s text, and its
often inconsequential reported conversational exchanges, offer further points of
 Political Self-representation 127
comparison, as does the emphasis on solidarity and endurance in the face of an
incomprehensibly arbitrary, unjust and absurd predicament. The ‘legal illegals’
(SMM: 33; these include Amiry, initially at least) described early in the text per-
haps inevitably invokes the unsurpassed example of Israeli legal double-think, the
category of ‘present absentees’ – in other words those who should have (been)
disappeared during the ethnic cleansings of 1948 onwards but unaccountably
were/did not and remain within Israel with minimal legal status or rights.61
However, as with better-known examples of the ‘Absurd’ mode, humour tends to
reinforce the seriousness of what is being written about, making Sharon a ‘tragi-
comedy’ (SMM: 81). The British ‘Absurdist’ Harold Pinter (in recent years a
noted advocate of Palestinian rights) has said of The Caretaker, one of his early
‘comedies of menace’ – and a text which itself revolves around the theme of
‘occupation’ – that: ‘[It] is funny, up to a point. Beyond that point, it ceases to be
funny and it is because of that point that I wrote it.’62 The same is true of Sharon,
where the ‘absurdity of the situation’ (SMM: 114) in no way diminishes the horror
of the endless cycles of Israeli land-grabs, assassinations, arrests, curfews and
economic strangulation. These are, after all, ‘war diaries’ (SMM: ix) in the
manner of Victor Klemperer and as such attest to experiences of fear, violence
and disruption – as well as steadfastness and optimism – which are unimaginable
for most modern western civilians.
In its mixture of tragedy and sometimes farcical comedy, its resolutely honest
eye for both human virtue and foible, including Amiry’s own, its commitment to
a better future and its ultimate refusal to allow its author’s soul to be ‘occupied’,
Sharon at times invites comparison with Kafka (SMM: 72), an author much
admired by Pinter, too. Pinter’s observation on Kafka’s work applies equally well
to Amiry: ‘The nightmare of that world is precisely its ordinariness. That is what
is so frightening and strong.’63 As this suggests, like Said, Amiry claims some
affiliation to Jewish tradition, albeit a different one to that represented by Zionist
philosophies of supremacism and annexationism. In this respect, in its quiet way it
perhaps more closely resembles great war narratives like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
or Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, the unfinished and often strikingly comic
epic by a Russian Jewish émigrée about the early days of the Nazi Occupation of
France. If Némirovsky depicts some Germans and collaborators, at least, in a
rounded, even positive way, Amiry has equally large sympathies. The nuanced
representation of ‘enemies’ like Captain Rafi and Rami supports her thesis that
this later Occupation has ‘ruined the spirits of both Israelis and Palestinians’
(SMM: 11; my emphasis). That Némirovsky’s masterpiece remained uncompleted
because of her transfer to Auschwitz, however, is a chilling reminder of the vul-
nerability of such generosity to realpolitik and of the wilful carelessness of human
life which Occupation and deportation inevitably involves.

Conclusion
These examples of Palestinian life-writing clearly have objectives which in part
severely complicate traditional conceptions of autobiography as a primarily
128 Political Self-representation
literary mode. As the controversy over the truth claims of Out of Place suggests,
the sub-genre has potentially powerful political resonances. Given the ever-
deteriorating situation of Palestinians, economically, politically and in terms of
the most basic human rights, both Palestinian life-writing and its study have a
particular urgency, constituting what Sidonie Smith calls, in another context, a
‘revolutionary gesture against amnesia’.64 If this gesture is performed in relation
to Palestine as a collective entity, however, it also confirms Hertha Wong’s
caution against assuming that foundational and singularising myths of com-
munity always over-determine individual autobiographical subjectivity in non-
mainstream versions of the genre65 (compare Chapter 2). While Palestinian life-
writing echoes Robert Fraser’s argument that the more oppressed a people, the
more difficult it is to abstract the individual life from group history,66 it also
emphasises the individual as much as the collective, as if to counter the anon-
ymising (and dehumanising) perception in Zionist discourse and much of the
western media of Palestinians en masse as faceless, whether in the guise of
‘terrorists’ or victims. The contrast between Said’s embrace of the classical con-
ventions of autobiography and Amiry’s of the contingent forms of diary, email
and journal points to the broad range of sub-forms across which Palestinian life-
writing operates. These also include memoir (for example, Ghada Karmi and
Karl Sabbagh), testimonio (Leila Khaled, ‘Souad’) and ‘poetic’ autobiography
(Mourid Barghouti). Such diversity also symbolises the variety of Palestinian
identities constructed therein, not only in terms of religious confession and
gender, but also of class, political affiliation and (dis)location. Equally, across its
range, the sub-genre emphasises the performative construction of different and
new Palestinian identities as much as the recuperation and preservation of
common and older ones.
Extrapolating from the example of Palestinian life-writing, the larger sub-field
of postcolonial life-writing to which it belongs is clearly concerned – like its con-
temporary western women’s and minoritarian equivalents – with discursive forms
of cultural politics. In Fanonian terms, it gives voice and agency to the colonised
to advance the project of release from the burden of ‘crushing objecthood’.
However, these are often secondary to more obviously material forms of politics
less commonly addressed in western women’s life-writing, at least since the time of
the Suffragettes. This instrumental use of autobiographical forms for concrete
political objectives is evident right back to the precursor forms of the sub-genre.
For example, Equiano’s text is designed to mobilise its readers against the slave
trade, as Prince’s is against slavery itself. This emphasis is equally marked
throughout the colonial period.67 Thus, Majeed draws explicit links between
performative acts of Self-representation in Indian nationalist autobiography and
its demands for emancipation from British rule. The pattern persists even in the
era of technical decolonisation. Thus, Longley observes of Aboriginal women’s
writing that it is often ‘passionately polemical in its impulses’,68 as the discussion
of Morgan in Chapter 1 confirms. Indeed, as suggested in the Introduction to my
text, from the time of Commonwealth Studies, postcolonial life-writing has often
been seen as a branch of ‘protest writing’69 rather than literature ‘proper’.
 Political Self-representation 129
Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that both the politics of postcolonial
life-writing and its effectiveness are contested. In the first place, some postcolonial
life-writers, notably – in the context of this monograph – V.S. Naipaul, dis-
avow decolonisation politics. Even amongst authors who are leaders of
nationalist struggles, there is sometimes a disavowal of the idea that their auto-
biographical texts are in any way representative. As seen in Chapter 2, Nehru, for
example, disavows any claim to the representativity of An Autobiography. As has
also been seen, Lim’s political investments might be considered reactionary,
even colonial-identified, at least in respect of Palestine. Such ambiguities haunt
postcolonial life-writing from its precursor forms. Thus, Yolanda Pierce accuses
Equiano of using the conventions of captivity narrative in a conservative way,
to embrace uncritically the values of his captors, notably the ideology of ‘the
self-made man’.70 As Chapter 1 demonstrated, Narogin levels similar charges
against contemporary writers like Morgan. Indeed Whitlock warns that recent
testimonial life-writing from the non-western world can not only give voice to the
marginalised but also be co-opted as propaganda to support the West’s current
neo-colonial adventures. For example, she analyses the way that Afghan
women’s memoirs have sometimes been used to legitimise western intervention
in that country, demonstrating that ‘a cynical and highly politicized manipulation
of life story is more than incidental to the war on terror’.71 Equally, Huggan
warns that western publishing houses can exploit postcolonial life-writing just
as surely as other forms of postcolonial literature, marketing as an exotic
commodity, thereby strengthening the reach and prestige of a globalised, neo-
colonial economy rather than posing any serious challenge to it.72 Nonetheless, as
Huggan also acknowledges, producers (and, one might add, consumers, even
publishers) of such work can also play the market against itself,73 allowing mar-
ginalised or subjugated voices ‘to speak of a future’ where their aspirations for
recognition, even liberation into full human and political rights, will eventually be
realised.
It is perhaps fitting to end this text with a chapter about postcolonial life-
writing’s concern with concrete and compelling issues of political as well as
personal emancipation and independence. In this preoccupation, the sub-genre
once more demonstrates its own relative autonomy from its western analogues,
as it has done, sometimes unevenly, in relation to the four thematics of sub-
jectivity and two major aspects of style discussed in Chapters 1–6. Mary Sea-
cole, in any objective sense one of the least empowered figures studied in this
text, nonetheless speaks for postcolonial life-writers, of both genders, before and
since, when she asserts that ‘unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in
my own way, I cannot tell it at all’.74 As is characteristic of post-colonial writing
as a whole, part of seizing the initiative to tell her own story involves ‘speaking
truth to power’ in the name of a better, more just world. Insofar as such texts
do so, and to the degree that it also speaks of and to collective identifications
of varying kinds, it supports the call made in Black Skin for the urgent develop-
ment of a more inclusive and extensive conception of ‘the human’ than has
been typically constructed in the western Enlightenment. Indeed, in final rebuttal
130 Political Self-representation
of Gusdorf, one might conclude that whereas canonical autobiography may have
articulated perspectives which have been of good use in ‘western man’s’ systema-
tic colonisation of the rest of the world, so postcolonial life-writing may prove
equally useful in teaching the West a more credible and creditable conception of
its place in the contemporary world.
Notes

Introduction
1 I use this latter term as shorthand for ‘autobiographies and biographies’. I use ‘life-
writing’ to describe work which is autobiographical without necessarily observing the
classical rules of the genre, as is often the case in the Self-narration of western women
and postcolonial subjects (see further below). Perceived important differences between
autobiographical writing by (western) men and women have led some feminist critics to
promote new terminologies to describe the latter. Thus in 1984, Domna Stanton
coined the term ‘autogynography’. See ‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’ in
Stanton (ed.) The Female Autograph (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1984): 5–22.
In 1994, Leigh Gilmore offered ‘autobiographics’ to describe not only differences in the
ways that women write their life-experiences but the techniques necessary to properly
appreciate such work. See Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-
Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). The following year, Jeanne
Perreault proposed ‘autography’ as a further alternative. See Writing Selves: Contemporary
Feminist Autography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Such initiatives
underwrite my preference for the term ‘postcolonial life-writing’ rather than, following
earlier postcolonial critics, ‘post(-)colonial autobiography’ (see below). The gendering of
terms like ‘autogynography’ in any case precludes their adaptation to postcolonial life-
writing by men. By ‘postcolonial’ in relation to life-writing, I mean work which recog-
nises the impact of colonialism (especially its European forms), including its precursor
and successor formations, in the constitution of the auto/biographical subjectivity of
the colonised and their antecedents/descendants.
2 James Olney, Tell Me Africa: An Approach to African Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1973): 26.
3 www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/31/boy-soldier-defends-his-b_n_84195.html.
4 See Margaretta Jolly, ed., The Encyclopedia of Life-Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical
Forms (London: Routledge, 2001).
5 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 113ff.
6 Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E.W. Dickes (1907; Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), vol. 1: 6.
7 Ibid.: 18.
8 Georges Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, in James Olney (ed.)
Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1980): 29.
9 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1960): 22. Compare 180.
10 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 29.
132 Notes
11 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev
Desai (1927–29; London: Penguin, 1982): 14.
12 James Olney, ‘Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and
Bibliographical Introduction’, in Olney, Autobiography: 8.
13 Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984): 40. I’m grateful to Sarah O’Mahoney
for drawing Coe to my attention.
14 See, for example, R.C.P. Sinha, The Indian Autobiographies in English (New Delhi: S.
Chand, 1978).
15 Doireann MacDermott (ed.) Autobiographical and Biographical Writing in the Commonwealth
(Sabadell, Spain: AUSA, 1984). MacDermott usefully raises the issue of the poetics of
‘Commonwealth’ life-writing but does not get beyond preliminary remarks about lan-
guage, community and politics, issues which my text will address in detail. I also survey
a greater geo-cultural range than the Commonwealth and analyse works translated into
English.
16 See, for example, John Colmer, Australian Autobiography: The Personal Quest (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1989); Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural
Identity and Self-Representation (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Debra
Kelly, Autobiography and Independence: Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing
in French (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).
17 Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds, Postcolonialism & Autobiography: Michelle Cliff,
David Dabydeen, Opal Palmer Adisa and Postcolonialisme & Autobiographie: Albert Memmi, Assia
Djebar, Daniel Maximin (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998). The historical and geographical
remit of these volumes is narrower than mine. It is disappointing that no real com-
parisons are drawn between rather than within the Caribbean and Maghreb. Perhaps most
problematic is the editors’ conception of postcolonial life-writing as a sub-set of post-
modernism. See their ‘Preface’ to Postcolonialism: 1. To the extent that the latter can be
understood as a distinctive discourse of the West (in Fredric Jameson’s famous for-
mulation, it is ‘the cultural logic of [an American-centred] late capitalism’), this threa-
tens to relegate ‘postcolonial autobiography’ to a renewed relation of dependency on the
dominant centres of cultural power.
18 Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1989); Lionnet, Postcolonial Representation: Women, Literature, Identity
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). These texts consider neither male post-
colonial life-writers, nor antecedents to contemporary postcolonial life-writing, with the
exception of a rich but problematic essay on Augustine in the former volume.
19 Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell, 2000).
20 Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity,
Masculinity and the Nation State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).
21 Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007).
22 David Huddart, Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2007). Con-
straints of space unfortunately forbid discussion of shorter pieces on postcolonial auto/
biography for the moment.
23 Misch, History, vol. 1: 4.
24 Olney, ‘Autobiography’: 4. Compare William Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980): xii. Perhaps the most influential con-
temporary definition of autobiography, Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’, is
primarily a theory of reader/author relations. See ‘The Autobiographical Contract’
[more widely translated as ‘Pact’]’, trans. R. Carter, in Tzvetan Todorov (ed.) French
Literary Theory Today: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 192–222.
25 See Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ (1979) in Trevor Lynn Broughton,
ed., Autobiography: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge,
 Notes 133
2007), vol. 1: 264–74; compare Michael Sprinker, ‘Fictions of the Self: the End of
Autobiography’, in Olney, Autobiography: 321–42.
26 The classic post-structuralist treatment of genre is Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Law of
Genre’, trans. Avital Ronelle, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980): 55–81.
27 See Robert Fraser, Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 2000); and Rajeev Patke, Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
28 See Stanton, ‘Autogynography’: 7; compare Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck,
‘Introduction’, in Brodzki and Schenck (eds) Life-Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988): 12.
29 Kelly, Autobiography: 34.
30 Ibid.: 47–8.
31 For an overview of debates on these two issues, see Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Post-
colonialism (London: Routledge, 1998) and Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, eds., Feminist
Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). Some postcolonial women life-
writers, including Buchi Emecheta and Nawal El Saadawi (see Chapter 3), criticise
western feminism’s supposed focus on sexual and individual freedoms in isolation from
larger political issues. See Paquet, Caribbean: 179; Barbara Harlow, ‘From the Women’s
Prison: Third World Women’s Narratives of Prison’, in Smith and Watson, Women:
456; and Julia Watson, ‘Unspeakable Differences: The Politics of Gender in Lesbian
and Heterosexual Women’s Autobiographies’, in Smith and Watson, Women: 398–9.
This supports Whitlock’s warning in The Intimate Empire against any too hasty embrace
of models of ‘a transhistorical female experience’ (2000: 3).
32 Such work sometimes ignores the fact that colonial women autobiographers often
‘Other’ the non-western subject (female as well as male) to the same degree as their
masculine equivalents. See, for example, Abdulrazak Gurnah, ‘Settler Writing in
Kenya: “Nomenclature is an uncertain science in these wild parts”’, in Howard Booth
and Nigel Rigby (eds) Modernism and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000): 275–92. Such patterns challenge aspects of the strategic argument about ‘inti-
macy’ in colonial and postcolonial women’s life-writing elaborated in Whitlock’s Inti-
mate Empire.
33 Janet V. Gunn, ‘A Politics of Experience: Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live: The Auto-
biography of a Revolutionary’, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the
Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1992): 77.
34 Smith and Watson, Reading: 3.
35 See Margot Badran, ‘Expressing Feminism and Nationalism in Autobiography: the
Memoirs of an Egyptian Educator’, in Smith and Watson, De/Colonizing: 270–93.
36 On this distinction, see Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Identity and its Discontents: Women and the
Nation’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 20(3) (1991): 429–43.
37 I’m drawing on the argument of ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperial-
ism’, where Spivak makes a more general argument about the emergence of the wes-
tern feminist subject at the expense of the colonised. See H.L. Gates, ‘Race’, Writing, and
Difference (London: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 262–80.
38 Linda Warley, ‘Locating the Subject of Post-colonial Autobiography’, Kunapipi, 15(1)
(1993): 23.
39 See Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fiction of Self-
Representation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987): 15, 17.
40 Misch finds abundant autobiographical writing in ancient Assyria and Babylon. See
History, vol. 1. Richard Bowring traces the long history of women’s autobiographical
writing in the East in ‘The Female Hand in Heian Japan: A First Reading’, in Stanton,
Female: 55–62. Equally, Badran argues that: ‘Recording one’s life story is a centuries-
old practice in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab and Islamic worlds.’ See ‘Expressing’:
274. Compare Hertha D. Sweet Wong, ‘Plains Indian Names and “the Autobiographical
134 Notes
Act”’, in Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters, eds, Autobiography and
Postmodernism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994): 212–39; and
Kristin Brustad et al., ‘The Fallacy of Western Origins’, in Broughton, Autobiography, vol.
3: 375–93. In more recent reflections on his famous essay, Gusdorf disarmingly admits
he was then uninterested in ‘distant antecedents and foreign lands’. See Les Écritures de
Moi: Lignes de Vie (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991): 16 (my translation). However, this entails
no retraction of his original arguments; ibid.: 48.
41 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press, 1994): 220.
42 For an overview of such influences, see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, ‘Introduction:
Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices’, in Smith and Watson
(eds) Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
1998): 3–52. The arguments of French feminism that biology influences the psycho-
sexual constitution of men and women have been less sympathetically received. See
Sidonie Smith’s account of Cixous in Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Auto-
biographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1993): 163ff. Since ‘postcolonial’ is only ever a cultural rather than a biological category,
no essentialist explanation of the differences in its conception of autobiographical Self-
hood is tenable.
43 Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988):
104. Compare Misch, History, vol. 1: 7. The idea of auto/biographical unity of Self-
hood has been severely complicated by the advent of postmodernist thinking. See
Chapter 1.
44 Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity: 155. Counter-positions to this argument and those relating to
other thematics of subjectivity will be discussed in Chapters 1–3.
45 Gilmore, Autobiographics: xiii.
46 Shirley Neuman, ‘“An Appearance Walking in a Forest the Sexes Burn”: Auto-
biography and the Construction of the Feminine Body’, in Ashley et al., Autobiography: 293.
47 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), trans. K. and P. Cohen, in Elaine
Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds) New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester,
1980): 250.
48 See Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography: 61–3.
49 Misch, History, vol. 1: 19.
50 Paquet, Caribbean: 8.
51 Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995): 34.
52 I take this concept from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s relativisation of western historiography
in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (London: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
53 Soyinka, Myth: 34–6.
54 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks, trans. C.L. Markmann ([1952] London: Pluto,
1986): 152.
55 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (1983) in Exiled at Home (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1998): 55 (my emphasis).
56 Gayatri Spivak, ‘The Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic’; in
Elizabeth Weed (ed.) Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge,
1989): 227. On the postcolonial critique of western psychoanalysis, see Mrinalini
Greedharry, Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).
57 See, for example, Paul Edwards and Rosalind Shaw, ‘The Invisible Chi in Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 19(2) (1989): 146–56. (See also Chapter 1.)
58 Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘Terms of Empowerment in Kamala Das’s My Story’, in Smith
and Watson, De/Colonizing: 346–69.
59 See, for example, Linda Anderson’s discussion of Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a
Good Woman (1986) in Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001): 110ff.
 Notes 135
60 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989): 8–9.
61 Misch, History, vol. 1: 4–5.
62 Lejeune, ‘Autobiographical’: 192.
63 Ibid.
64 Shari Benstock, ‘Introduction’, in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Auto-
biographical Writings (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988): 2.
65 Hegel is perhaps the most notorious example of this tendency. For a superb discussion
of his (mis)construction of Africa, see Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and
Politics (London: Routledge, 2001): 154ff.
66 For a useful discussion of this concept, see Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London:
Routledge, 1985): 113ff.
67 Julia Swindells, ‘Conclusion: Autobiography and the Politics of “The Personal”’, in
Swindells (ed.) The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995): 205.
68 MacDermott, Autobiographical: 10, 26.
69 Regenia Gagnier, ‘The Literary Standard, Working-Class Autobiography, and
Gender’, in Smith and Watson, Women: 264; compare Germaine Brée, ‘Foreword’ to
Brodzki and Schenck, Life-Lines: ix.
70 Strangely, Huddart does not discuss this most obviously autobiographical theoretical
text in his analysis of the role of autobiography within postcolonial theory.
71 C.L. Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007): 56. While recognising that Black Skin is an ‘often
autobiographical manifesto’, Innes does not explore its poetics in any depth.
72 Anjali Prabhu, ‘Narration in Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs: Some Reconsi-
derations’, Research in African Literatures, 37(4) (2006): 189.
73 Ngugi wa Thiongo, ‘The Language of African Literature’ (1986), in Patrick Williams
and Laura Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993): 441.
74 A quite different problem arises in relation to texts translated from non-European
languages. Nawal El Saadawi (see Chapter 3) observes that 30–40 per cent of any
novel is lost in translation. See Jennifer Cohen, ‘“But Have Some Art With You”: An
Interview with Nawal El Saadawi’, Literature and Medicine, 14(1): (1995): 63.
75 Sinha, Indian: v. Compare G.N. Devy, ‘Romantic, Post-Romantic and Neo-Romantic
Autobiography in Indian English Literature’, in MacDermott, Autobiographical: 63–4;
and Nirad Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951; London: Picador,
1991): 393.
76 Mulk Raj Anand, Autobiography, Part One; Story of a Childhood under the Raj: Pilpali Sahab
(New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1985), n.p.
77 V.S. Naipaul, ‘Indian Autobiographies’ (1965), in Literary Occasions: Essays (London:
Picador, 2003): 143.

1 Centred and decentred Selves

1 Smith, Subjectivity: 8; compare Gilmore, Autobiographics: 185.
2 Misch, History: 7.
3 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 35, 38.
4 The argument that autobiographical Selfhood, of either gender, is sovereign, centred
and unified may seem counter-intuitive. For one thing, Auto/biography Studies
has long explored the split between the narrated and narrating ‘I’ of autobiography
(as have writers like Rousseau). In the wake of postmodernism, moreover, humanist
notions of the unified Self may seem untenable. The unconscious, the workings
of ideology and the constitution of the Subject by/in language are variously held
to undermine the conception of the unitary Self consolidated in the Enlightenment.
Postmodernism therefore clearly poses a challenge to arguments that dispersed
136 Notes
subjectivity may characterise women’s life-writing (and, by implication, its postcolonial
analogues). See Paul Smith, Discerning, Marcus, Auto/biographical (Chapter 5) and
Anderson, Autobiography (Chapter 2). Nonetheless, as Karl Weintraub asserts, one
must beware of anachronism, or at least employ a double optic in addressing auto-
biography which does not frame itself within the terms of such theorisations of the
Subject. He argues that the critic’s task ‘is to come to an understanding of the self-
conception an Augustine, for example, had of himself, and not whether he “correctly”
(to be judged by some modern theory) understood himself ’. See Weintraub, ‘Auto-
biography and Historical Consciousness’ (1979) in Broughton, Autobiography, vol. 1: 249.
Such thinking conserves a place for intentionality (and agency) in auto/biographical
writing which is clearly embraced by most life-writers. In any case, Mary Evans argues
that for all the impact of postmodernism within the academy, belief in the ‘integrated
individual’ remains strong: ‘[The] social expectation – increasingly enforced … is
that we are a “knowable” person [sic], a person with a coherent emotional curriculum
vitae.’ See Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography (London: Routledge,
1999): 23.
5 Spengemann, Forms: 132.
6 Evans, Missing: 83. Compare Gilmore, Autobiographics: 185–6; and Betty Bergland,
‘Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing the “Other”’, in
Ashley et al., Autobiography: 181.
7 Smith, Subjectivity: 155.
8 Brodzki and Schenck, ‘Introduction’: 6.
9 Lee Quinby, ‘The Subject of Memoirs: The Woman Warrior’s Technology of Ideographic
Selfhood’ (1976), in Smith and Watson, De/Colonizing: 299; compare Lourdes Torres,
‘The Construction of the Self in U.S. Latina Autobiographies’ (1994), in Smith and
Watson, Women: 283, 285.
10 Lionnet, Autobiographical: 16.
11 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’ (1989), in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Grifiths and Helen Tiffin (eds) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge,
1995): 130–1.
12 Gilmore, Autobiographics: 75. Compare Smith, Subjectivity: 155–6; Perreault, Writing: 8–9;
Whitlock, Intimate: 5.
13 bell hooks, ‘Postmodern Blackness’ (1991), in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial: 425.
Compare Torres, ‘Construction’: 277; and Wong, ‘Plains Indian Names and “the
Autobiographical Act”’, in Ashley et al., Autobiography: 212.
14 Kateryna Longley, ‘Autobiographical Story Telling by Australian Aboriginal Women’,
in Smith and Watson, De/Colonizing: 371.
15 John Thieme, ‘Appropriating Ancestral Heirlooms: The Quest for Tradition in Derek
Walcott’s Another Life’, in MacDermott, Autobiographical: 215.
16 Paquet, Caribbean: 234.
17 Fanon, Black: 112, 119.
18 Ibid.: 136.
19 Ibid.: 63.
20 Sally Morgan, My Place (London: Virago, [1987] 2001): 106; hereafter cited as MP in
the text.
21 Eric Michaels, ‘Para-ethnography’, Art and Text, 30 (1988): 50; compare Subhash Jair-
eth, ‘The “I” in Sally Morgan’s My Place: Writing of a Monologised Self ’, Westerly, 40
(3) (1995): 69–78.
22 Mudrooroo Narogin, Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (Mel-
bourne: Hyland, 1990): 149. He modifies this criticism on 162–3.
23 Carolyn Bliss, ‘The Mythology of Family: Three Texts of Popular Culture’, New Lit-
eratures Review, 18 (1989): 65.
24 Russell West, ‘Uncovering Collective Crimes: Sally Morgan’s My Place as Australian
Indigenous Detective Narrative’, in Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller,
 Notes 137
eds, Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction (London: Associated
Universities Press, 2003): 281.
25 Anne Brewster, Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (Sydney: Sydney University
Press, 1996): 4.
26 See, for example, Penny van Toorn, ‘Indigenous Texts and Narratives’, in Elizabeth
Webby (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000): 36.
27 Bliss, ‘Mythology’: 65.
28 Elvira Pulitano, ‘“One More Story to Tell”: Diasporic Articulations in Sally Morgan’s
My Place’, in Sheila Collingwood-Whittick (ed.) The Pain of Unbelonging: Alienation and
Identity in Australasian Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007): 52.
29 See Penny van Toorn, ‘Indigenous Australian Life Writing: Tactics and Transforma-
tions’, in Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan (eds) Telling Stories: Indigenous History and
Memory in Australia and New Zealand (Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams, 2001):
4–5.
30 Joyce Zonana, ‘“I was cryin’, all the people were cryin’, my mother was cryin’”:
Aboriginality and Maternity in Sally Morgan’s My Place’, in Elizabeth Brown-Guillory,
Women of Color: Mother–Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1996): 65.
31 Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, ‘Sally Morgan’s My Place: Exposing the (Ab)original
“Text” Behind Whitefellas’ History’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 25(1) (2002): 43.
32 West, ‘Uncovering’: 280–99 passim.
33 Graham Huggan, Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007): 101.
34 The veracity of Equiano’s account of his early life has been disputed since the pub-
lication of the Interesting Narrative. For an excellent overview of this debate, see Anthony
Carrigan, ‘“Negotiating Personal Identity and Cultural Memory” in Olaudah Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative’, Wasafiri, 48 (Summer, 2006): 42–7.
35 Tanya Caldwell, ‘“Talking Too Much English”: Languages of Economy and Politics in
Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative’, Early American Literature, 34(3) (1999): 264.
36 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta
(London: Penguin, [1789] 1995): 69. Hereafter cited as I N in the text.
37 Jesús Benito and Ana Manzanas, ‘The (De-)Construction of the “Other” in The Inter-
esting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’, in Maria Diedrich, H.L. Gates and Carl
Pedersen (eds) Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999): 53.
38 While Equiano’s stance has been criticised, as Geraldine Murphy laconically observes,
‘it is hard to disagree with his judgement … that purchasing British commodities was
preferable to being one.’ See ‘Olaudah Equiano, Accidental Tourist’, Eighteenth-Century
Studies, 27(4) (1994): 561. Initially, at least, Equiano’s entrepreneurship is designed to
gather the wherewithal to purchase his freedom.
39 Caldwell, ‘“Talking”’: 265.
40 Bunyan is also an inter-text in Buchi Emecheta, Head Above Water (Oxford: Heinemann,
[1986] 1994): 15, C.L.R. James and Brendan Behan (see Chapter 2).
41 Adam Potkay, ‘Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography’, Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 27(4) (1994): 677, 92.
42 Potkay specifically endorses Caldwell’s argument in ‘History, Oratory, and God in
Equiano’s Interesting Narrative’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34(4) (2001): 609.
43 Murphy, ‘Olaudah’: 553.
44 Benito and Manzanas, ‘(De-)Construction’: 53.
45 Michael Wiley argues that, given recent historical examples of white cannibalism,
Equiano’s fears are real. ‘Consuming Africa: Geography and Identity in Olaudah
Equiano’s Interesting Narrative’, Studies in Romanticism, 44(2) (2005): 173–5.
46 Caldwell, ‘“Talking”’: 273.
138 Notes
47 Susan Marren, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom: The Transgressive Self in Olaudah
Equiano’s Autobiography’, PMLA, 108(1) (1993): 101.
48 Douglas Anderson, ‘Division below the Surface: Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative’,
Studies in Romanticism, 43(3) (2000): 459.
49 Ibid.
50 William Mottolese, ‘“Almost an Englishman”: Equiano and the Colonial Gift of
Language’, Bucknell Review, 41(2) (1998): 161.
51 Robin Sabino and Jennifer Hall, ‘The Path Not Taken: Cultural Identity in the
Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano’, MELUS, 24(1) (1999): 5.
52 See also Edwards and Shaw, ‘Invisible’.
53 Wilfred Samuels, ‘Disguised Voice in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gus-
tavus Vassa, the African’, Black American Literature Forum, 19(2) (1985): 66. Samuels further
claims that Equiano resembles the African folk trickster Anansi (ibid.: 67).
54 Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (London: University
of Georgia Press, 2005): xviii.
55 Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narrative: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000): 226, 245; compare Mottolese’s emphasis on
Equiano’s ‘syncretic’ identity in ‘“Almost”’: 160.
56 In this respect I differ from Marren, who stresses Equiano’s ‘numerous [unresolved]
contradictions and ambiguities’. See ‘Between’: 96.
57 Anderson, ‘Division’: passim.
58 One might argue that, especially for a reader in 1789, this duality is anticipated in the
engraving of Equiano which precedes the title page, with its distinct signifiers of
‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’.
59 Carretta, Equiano: xvi.
60 Augustine, Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 24.
61 Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta, 1999): 295.
62 Sindiwe Magona, To My Children’s Children: An Autobiography (London: Women’s Press,
1991): 6.
63 Majeed, Autobiography: 3 and passim.
64 Whitlock, Soft: 10.
65 L.S. Senghor, ‘Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century’ (1965), in Williams
and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse: 30–1.
66 Smith, Discerning: 153.
67 Whitlock, Intimate: 6.
68 Similar refinement of Lionnet’s theory of ‘logiques métisses’ in Postcolonial (15ff) is also
required.
69 Perreault, Writing: 9.
70 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1997): 14.
71 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta,
1992): 15.

2 Relational Selves
1 Gilmore, Autobiographics: 127. Compare Evans, Missing: 83; Smith, Subjectivity: 19.
2 Misch, History, vol. 1: 9 (my emphasis).
3 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 29. See also Smith’s analysis of Francis Hart in Poetics: 12; and
Gilmore’s of Weintraub in Autobiographics: 127.
4 The argument that male autobiographical Selfhood is essentially non-relational seems
counter-intuitive. It is a truism of psychoanalytic theory that, irrespective of gender,
individuation and personality development take place in the context of family and
social relationships. The ‘linguistic turn’ in post-structuralism has asserted that the Self
only comes into existence when it is narrativised within a system of language which is
 Notes 139
not the property of the individual. See Paul Smith, Discerning, Marcus, Auto/biographical
(Chapter 5) and Anderson, Autobiography (Chapter 2). In any case, it is difficult to think
of a male-authored example of the genre which contains no account of relations with
‘Others’, whether God, family, colleagues or friends (and enemies) – or, more com-
monly, a combination of these. Equally, the fact that autobiography is generally
designed to be consumed by others inevitably implies some commitment to principles
of relationality. Further, to the extent that such autobiographers become canonical, this
is partly a consequence of their representative and, therefore, relational qualities.
Arguably, however, in canonical autobiography ‘relationality’ is generally less con-
cretely immediate in comparison with women’s writing. In Augustine’s Confessions, the
most significant relationship is the highly abstract one with God. Montaigne has hap-
pily retreated from the world to the privacy of a library, where ‘relationality’ is con-
ceived in the primarily textual terms of an engagement with the great minds of the
past. For Rousseau, the great admirer of Robinson Crusoe, family has less importance
still, as suggested by the subsidiary role assigned to Thérèse and the notorious aban-
donment of his children to the public charge. Curiously for such an otherwise politi-
cally engaged man, there is almost nothing in Barthes’s autobiography on the social
implications of his affective life (aside from his mother) or sexuality, let alone analysis of
how relations in these spheres shaped his personality. Space constraints preclude ana-
lysis of other questions concerning reader relations, specifically the way that life-writing’s
meanings might change according to the kind of readers who consume it, where and
when it is consumed.
5 Olney, ‘Autobiography’: 17.
6 Brodzki and Schenck, ‘Introduction’: 8.
7 Mary Mason, ‘The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers’ (1980), in Smith
and Watson, Women: 321.
8 Perreault, Writing: 2; compare Maroula Joannou, ‘“She Who Would Be Politically Free
Herself Must Strike the Blow”: Suffragette Autobiography and Suffragette Militancy’,
in Swindells, Uses: 31–44.
9 Torres, ‘Construction’: 278.
10 Doris Sommer, ‘“Not Just a Personal Story”: Women’s Testimonios and the Plural
Self ’, in Brodzki and Schenck, Life-Lines: 130. Compare Lionnet, Autobiographical: 36;
Postcolonial: 26, 39.
11 Longley, ‘Autobiographical’: 375.
12 Olney, ‘Autobiography’: 18.
13 Carole Boyce Davies, ‘Collaboration and the Ordering Imperative in Life Story
Production’, in Smith and Watson, De/Colonizing: 7.
14 Gagnier, ‘Literary’: 264.
15 Cited in Paquet, Caribbean: 17.
16 Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘Semiotics, Experience, and the Material Self: An Inquiry into
the Subject of the Contemporary Asian American Woman Writer’, in Smith and
Watson, Women: 445–6.
17 See Glissant, Poetics.
18 Fanon, Black: 110.
19 In the French original, Fanon uses terms like ‘le noir’ and ‘le blanc’ as both generic and
gendered terms.
20 Ibid.: 213.
21 C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Serpent’s Tail, [1963] 1994): 160. Hereafter
cited as BaB in the text.
22 Anna Grimshaw, ‘Introduction: C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the Twen-
tieth Century’, in Grimshaw (ed.) The C.L.R. James Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992): 19.
23 Ibid.: 13; compare Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Verso,
1988): 42.
24 Farrukh Dhondy, C.L.R. James (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001): x.
140 Notes
25 To Constance Webb, n.d. (1944) in Grimshaw, C.L.R. James Reader: 162.
26 Ibid.: 152.
27 Even if James’s Marxism/Trotskyism can be taken as a symptom of ‘assimilation’, in
itself a problematic argument, James’s relationship with both was contestatory, notably
on the grounds of their inattention to race as a category of identity and of their hostility
to popular culture. Similar arguments might be made about James’s nationalism.
Rather than being simply ‘a derivative discourse’ (see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalism and
the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? [London: Zed, 1986]), it has distinctively Car-
ibbean inflections in the same way as the West Indian style of cricket.
28 Buhle, C.L.R. James: 7.
29 Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’: 14.
30 Brett St Louis, Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics: C.L.R. James’s Critique of Modernity
(London: Routledge, 2007): 161.
31 C.L.R. James, Cricket, ed. Anna Grimshaw (London: Allison and Busby, 1986): 218.
32 Ato Quayson, ‘Caribbean Configurations: Characterological Types and the Frames of
Hybridity’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1(3) (1999): 340; com-
pare Anthony Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James
(London: Pluto, 1997): 24.
33 Aldon Nielsen, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction (Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 1997): 182.
34 Grimshaw, ‘Introduction’: 12.
35 St Louis, Rethinking: 3.
36 Grant Farred, ‘“Victorian with a Rebel Seed”: C.L.R. James, Postcolonial Intellectual’,
Social Text, 38 (1994): 30.
37 C.L.R. James, ‘Whitman and Melville’, in C.L.R. James Reader: 209.
38 Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (London: Arrow, [1958] 1990): 121. Hereafter BB in the
text.
39 There is some debate over the target of Behan’s mission and whether it was officially
sanctioned. See Ted E. Boyle, Brendan Behan (New York: Twayne, 1969): 37ff.
40 Kipling is mentioned on 210 in more neutral terms, reflecting Behan’s changing atti-
tude towards England.
41 E.H. Mikhail, ed., The Letters of Brendan Behan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992): 7.
42 Rae Jeffs, Brendan Behan: Man and Showman (London: Corgi, [1966] 1968): 16.
43 Behan describes North Dublin as ‘the last outpost of toughness’ in Hold Your Hour and
Have Another (London: Hutchinson, 1963): 149; however, BB is not above using class
stereotypes to position Behan as ‘better’ than some of his antagonists. See, for example,
pp. 221, 242, 258, 359. For a socialist, moreover, he is curiously affirmative of the
semi-feudal society in Borstal. In some ways that part of his narrative resembles the
nostalgic public-schooldays genre.
44 Colbert Kearney, The Writings of Brendan Behan (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977): 85.
45 Homosexuality was not legalised in Eire until 1993. The banning of Borstal Boy there
for many years can be understood partly in terms of Behan’s sympathetic depiction of
the homosocial carceral worlds through which he moves.
46 Peter René Gerdes suggests that: ‘In proportion to its population Ireland has produced
more prison literature than any other country.’ See The Major Works of Brendan Behan
(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1973): 93.
47 Ulick O’Connor, however, accused Behan of a propensity to ‘“play Paddy to the
Saxon”’. See John Brannigan, Brendan Behan: Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002): 44. It is difficult for a contemporary English reader
to tell how much of Behan’s language is invented. However, Kearney argues that
Behan was ‘an arranger of existing language rather than an inventor’; Writings: 102.
48 Behan later wrote that by the time he left Borstal he had ‘an almost English accent’.
See Confessions: 13.
49 Kearney, Writings: 101. Compare Brannigan, Brendan: 144ff.
 Notes 141
50 By contrast, Margaret Sheridan links Behan’s cursing to the example of the Citizen and
Private Carr in Joyce’s Ulysses. See E.H. Mikhail, ed., The Art of Brendan Behan (London:
Vision, 1979): 87.
51 Brannigan, Brendan: 129.
52 Compare some canonical western autobiography (Edmund Gosse, James Mill, for
example).
53 V.S. Naipaul, Letters Between a Father and Son (London: Little, Brown, 1999).
54 See Gagnier, ‘Literary’, for a discussion of the complex and uneven articulation of class
and gender identities in western women’s life-writing.
55 Cited in Perreault, Writing: 197.
56 Hertha D. Sweet Wong, ‘First-Person Plural: Subjectivity and Community in Native
American Women’s Autobiography’, in Smith and Watson, Women: 170; compare
Quinby, ‘Subject’: 297, 299.
57 Lionnet, Postcolonial: 22.
58 Devy, ‘Romantic’: 65.
59 Olney, ‘Autobiography’: 13. Compare Tell: 26.
60 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography: With Musings on Recent Events in India (Bombay: Allied
Publishers, [1936] 1962): 596.
61 V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World: A Sequence (London: Minerva: 1994): 18, 16.
62 See Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text, 10
(Spring) 1990: 61–78.
63 Robert Fraser, ‘Dimensions of Personality: Elements of the Autobiographical Mode’, in
MacDermott, Autobiographical: 86.

3 Embodied Selves
1 Sidonie Smith, ‘Identity’s Body’, in Ashley et al., Autobiography: 266; compare Shirley
Neuman, ‘Autobiography, Bodies, Manhood’, in Smith and Watson, Women: 416. Such
claims may seem surprising, even in relation to the canonical western tradition, not
least because such autobiographers are often preoccupied by the relationship of the
genre to the ( literal) death of the Subject. See Marcus, Auto/biographical: 208ff. Further,
Augustine’s struggle against the flesh is a major theme up to his conversion. Mon-
taigne’s ‘melancholy’ seems inexplicable without reference to the ‘stone’ which plagued
his everyday life. Rousseau’s encounters with the bodies of others, notably the mas-
turbating ‘Moor’, and the malformed nipple of Zulietta, are decisive in his psycho-
sexual development. See Rousseau, Confessions, trans. A Scholar (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000): 65ff, 311ff. For Barthes, the body is crucial in undoing the binar-
ism characteristic of western thinking. Anticipating Judith Butler, he conceives of the
Body as a site on which social relations are inscribed: ‘The social division occurs within
my body: my body itself is social.’ See Roland Barthes, Roland BARTHES by Roland
Barthes, trans. R. Howard (1975; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977): 124.
Nonetheless, the western canon certainly appears to prioritise other aspects of auto-
biographical Selfhood. For Augustine, the Body is something which must be trans-
cended to achieve spiritual self-realisation. In Montaigne, (the failure of ) the Body is
something to be stoically endured if it is not to distract from his intellectual engagement
with the great minds in his library. For Rousseau, bodily desire is especially dangerous
insofar as it takes him ‘almost beyond the grasp of reason’ and threatens to prevent him
from remaining ‘whole for [him]self ’. See Rousseau, Confessions: 106, 191. Meanwhile,
as Paul Smith notes, ‘the nature and construction of the sexed “subject” [are] a con-
sideration almost entirely absent from Barthes’s work’ (Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988: xxxii). Instead, as with earlier
canonical texts, the focus is on the development of the writer’s mind.
2 Gilmore, Autobiographics: 14, 84.
3 Neuman, ‘Autobiography’: 415.
142 Notes
4 Misch, History: 8, 13 (my emphasis).
5 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 38 (my emphasis), 44.
6 Mason, ‘Other’: 321. Compare Gilmore, Autobiographics: 84.
7 Gilmore, Autobiographics: 84.
8 Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995): 28.
9 Smith, ‘Identity’s Body’: 271.
10 Lim, ‘Semiotics’: 449; compare Nancy Mairs, ‘The Way In’, in Smith and Watson,
Women: 471; and Smith, Subjectivity: 23.
11 John Beverley, ‘The Margin at the Center: on Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)’, in
Smith and Watson, De/Colonizing: 109.
12 Paquet, Caribbean: 41.
13 Neuman, ‘“An Appearance”’: 294; compare Smith, Subjectivity: 12, 16–17.
14 Conversely, Watson suggests that for some postcolonial life-writers, notably Buchi
Emecheta, western feminism’s emphasis on the sexual dimensions of embodiment is
something to be wary of. See ‘Unspeakable’: 398–9. See also the discussion of El Saadawi
below.
15 Fanon, Black: 111, 138.
16 Ibid.: 126–7.
17 M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev
Desai (London: Penguin, [1927–29] 1982): 406. Hereafter cited in the text as AA.
18 K. Chellappan, ‘The Discovery of India and the Self in Three Autobiographies’, in
H.H. Anniah Gowda (ed.) The Colonial and the Neo-Colonial Encounters in Commonwealth
Literature (Mysore: University of Mysore, 1983): 96; compare N. Radhakrishnan, ‘Fore-
word’, in K.D. Gangrade, Gandhi’s Autobiography: Moral Lessons (New Delhi: Gandhi
Smriti and Darshan Samith, 1998): ix.
19 Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Indian Autobiography: Gandhi and Chaudhuri’, in Carol Ramelb (ed.)
Biography East and West: Selected Conference Papers (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1989):
113.
20 Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000): 18.
21 See, for example, Erik Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment (New York: Norton,
1975): 124 ff.
22 Indentured labour in South Africa and the tithe system in the indigo industry in
Champeran are prime instances of the exploitation of the bodies of the colonised, as
labour power.
23 Parama Roy, ‘Meat-Eating, Masculinity, and Renunciation in India: A Gandhian
Grammar of Diet’, Gender and History, 14(1) (2002): 63.
24 The socialised dimensions of individual bodies are particularly well reflected in this
conflict over ‘ownership’ of Gandhi’s body.
25 Contrast Gandhi’s early ‘failures’ with prostitutes (as traumatic as Rousseau’s) in which
he ‘felt as though my manhood had been injured’ (A A: 37).
26 Quoted in Bikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political
Discourse (London: Sage, 1989): 199.
27 See Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001): 323.
28 David Arnold argues that South African prisons taught Gandhi the importance of the
suffering body as political spectacle/symbol. See ‘The Self and The Cell: Indian Prison
Narratives as Life Histories’, in David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (eds) Telling Lives in
India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004): 37.
29 Julie Codell, ‘Excursive Discursive in Gandhi’s Autobiography: Undressing and Redres-
sing the Transnational Self ’, in David Amigoni (ed.) Life Writing and Victorian Culture
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006): 137.
30 Alter, Gandhi’s Body: 43.
 Notes 143
31 For discussions of An Autobiography as an experimental hybrid of eastern and western
traditions in terms of both its thematics of Selfhood and form, see Majeed, Auto-
biography: 217ff; Parekh, Colonialism: 251ff; and Vijay Mishra, ‘Defining the Self in
Indian Literary and Filmic Texts’, in Wimal Dissanayake (ed.) Narratives of Agency: Self-
Making in China, India, and Japan (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 117–50.
32 Nawal El Saadawi, A Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi, trans. Sherif
Hetata (1999; London: Zed, 2002): 223. Cited hereafter in this chapter as DI.
33 Cohen, ‘“But Have Some Art”’: 71.
34 I follow El Saadawi in using this term for a practice sometimes described as ‘clitor-
idectomy’ or ‘female genital mutilation’.
35 According to Rita Stephen, 92 per cent of Egyptian women continue to undergo cir-
cumcision. See ‘Arab Women Writing Their Sexuality’, Hawwa: Journal of Women of the
Middle East and the Islamic World, 4(2–3) (2006): 170.
36 Compare Badran, ‘Expressing’: 276.
37 D.H. Melhem rightly argues that for El Saadawi ‘postcolonial means neo-colonial’. See
‘Nawal El Saadawi’s “Daughter of Isis”: Life and Times via the Plenitude of Her
Writings’, Aljadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts, 5.29 (1999): 12.
38 Cohen, ‘“But Have Some Art”’: 69.
39 Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Writing Nawal El Saadawi’, in Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman
(eds) Feminism Beside Itself (London: Routledge, 1995): 284. Amal Amireh partly blames
western appropriations of El Saadawi for her negative reputation in the Arab world: ‘The
socialist feminist is rewritten as a liberal individualist and the anti-imperialist as a native
informant. This framing often discredits El Saadawi with her Arab audiences.’ See ‘Framing
Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World’, Signs, 26(1) (2000): 228.
40 Cohen, ‘“But Have Some Art”’: 65.
41 Amireh, ‘Framing’: 220.
42 Malti-Douglas, ‘Writing Nawal El Saadawi’: 290. See also Cohen, ‘“But Have Some
Art”’: 67.
43 Fanon, Black: 232.
44 The portrait’s significance as a corporeal representation extends further. First, it serves
partly to authenticate the claim that it is ‘written by himself ’, in the manner of a pho-
tograph, thereby countering any supposition that what follows has been invented for
strategic purposes by a white abolitionist. It also affirms his education and truthfulness
(he is holding a Bible, which associates his text with ‘Holy Writ’) and his respectability
(he is dressed as a member of the British middle classes).
45 Neuman, ‘“Appearance”’: 294.
46 Seacole, Wonderful Adventures: 5.
47 See, for example, Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial
Text (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
48 Equiano, Interesting: 38.
49 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (London: Pluto, [1937] 1985): 88, 76.
50 While McKay’s bisexuality complicates this argument, it does not undermine it.
51 Smith, ‘Identity’s Body’: 288.
52 Fanon, Black: 109–14; McKay, Long: 183; Emecheta, Head: 169–70; compare 29.

4 Located Selves
1 On the Body as ‘place’, see, for example, Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place:
Understanding Feminist Geographies (Cambridge: Polity, 1999): 34. Compare Wendy Har-
court and Arturo Escobar, Women and the Politics of Place (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian
Press, 2005): 2.
2 McDowell, Gender: 4. Mona Domosh and Joni Seager argue that ‘places’ are ‘spaces
that have been invested with meaning’. See Putting Women in their Place: Feminist Geographers
Make Sense of the World (London: Guilford, 2001): xxii.
144 Notes
3 Smith, ‘Identity’s Body’: 267 (my emphasis).
4 Neuman, ‘Autobiography’: 415 (my emphasis).
5 On the very rare occasions to the contrary, for example, Lionnet’s discussion of
Augustine, such analysis has usually been undertaken from a minoritarian/postcolonial
perspective. See Autobiographical: 19ff.
6 Mairs, ‘Way’: 471; compare Smith, Subjectivity: 23.
7 Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998): 19.
8 Brodzki and Schenck, ‘Introduction’: 14.
9 Bella Brodzki, ‘Mothering, Displacement, and Language in the Autobiographies of
Nathalie Sarraute and Christa Wolf ’, in Brodzki and Schenck, Life-Lines: 243–4.
10 Benstock, ‘Introduction’: 1. Compare Smith and Watson’s Reading. Taking their cue
from Audre Lorde’s claim that ‘our place was the very house of difference’ (ibid.: 37),
the authors explore the ‘sites of storytelling’ (ibid.: 58) primarily in terms of institutional
contexts of production and consumption.
11 Felicity Nussbaum, ‘Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces’,
in Benstock, Private: 150.
12 See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Peregrine, [1978] 1991): 20.
13 To some degree, the absence of such a focus within mainstream Auto/biography Stu-
dies can be attributed to the apparently marginal importance which canonical auto-
biographers themselves accord the issues involved. Augustine makes something of his
urgent desire to return to Africa once his mother Monica dies, and of her desire to be
buried there. Montaigne occasionally alerts the reader to his specific regional identity,
for example, in his comments on the distance of Bordeaux from Paris and the peculiar
dialect of his region. Rousseau, too, sometimes discusses his roots in Geneva and is
desperate to return there when he begins to suffer persecution. And, like Montaigne,
Barthes draws attention to his attachment to his natal culture in Aquitaine. However,
to different degrees, all four figures disclaim the importance of their particular geo-
cultural roots and current locations compared to other dimensions of subjectivity. On
his return to Africa, Augustine constructs himself as the spokesman of the Catholic (i.e.
‘universal’) Church in explicit opposition to the regional Christianities of North Africa.
Montaigne positions himself primarily in relation to an equally ‘universal’ classical
culture, a mode of self-identification reinforced by being brought up a Latin speaker.
As he is chased from pillar to post, Rousseau abjures his citizenship rights and prefers
to wander the earth like Cain. For Barthes, the world of ‘text’ into which he dissolves
himself has no particular geographical locus or affiliation.
14 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 32.
15 See Anderson, Autobiography: 4.
16 Spengemann, Forms: 192ff. Olney is a partial exception to this pattern. However, he is
prone to generalisation, even essentialism, which discounts the vast geo-cultural variations
even within Africa. See Tell: 26 and ‘Autobiography’: 14–17.
17 Smith and Watson, Reading: 57.
18 Ibid.: 58.
19 Cited in Innes, Cambridge: 72.
20 Warley, ‘Locating’: 23; compare Whitlock, Soft: 10. Such issues have been more com-
monly explored in postcolonial fiction. See, for instance, Lionnet, Autobiographical and
Lionnet, Postcolonial; and Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial
Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
21 See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
(Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).
22 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6339835.stm.
23 Fanon, Black: 88 (my emphasis).
24 Ibid.: 16 (compare 25), 230.
 Notes 145
25 Ibid.: 151–2, 223.
26 Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981; New York: Vintage, 1983): 149. Hereafter
cited as A in the text.
27 Tim Cribb, ‘African Autobiography and the Idea of the Nation’, in Bruce Bennett,
Susan Cowan, Jacqueline Lo, Satendra Nadan and Jennifer Webb (eds) Resistance and
Reconciliation: Writing in the Commonwealth (Canberra: ACLALS, 2003): 64.
28 Soyinka, in Jo Gulledge, ed., ‘Seminar on Aké with Wole Soyinka’, The Southern Review,
23(3) (1987): 511.
29 Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, Wole Soyinka (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998): 82.
30 Derek Wright, Wole Soyinka Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1993): 141.
31 Biodun Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004): 192; Ato Quayson, ‘Wole Soyinka and Autobiography as
Political Unconscious’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 31(2) (1996): 21.
32 See, for example, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins
of Social Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
33 James Gibbs, Wole Soyinka (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986): 14.
34 Fraser, ‘Dimensions’: 85.
35 Gulledge, ‘Seminar’: 512.
36 Wright, Wole: 12.
37 Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2007): xxxi.
38 Louis James, ‘Wole Soyinka’s Aké: Autobiography and the Limits of Experience’, in
MacDermott, Autobiographical: 114.
39 Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces: Memoirs of an Asian American Woman
(1996; Singapore: Times Editions/Marshall Cavendish, 2004): 35. Hereafter cited in
this chapter as AWMF.
40 See Pauline Newton, Transcultural Women of Late Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): 107; compare Eleanor Ty, The Politics of the Visible in Asian
American Narrative (London: University of Toronto Press, 2004): 91.
41 See Ngugi’s account of his secondary education in ‘The Language of African Literature’.
42 Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘The Im/Possibility of Life-Writing in Two Languages’, in Isa-
belle de Courtivron (ed.) Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003): 44.
43 Mohammed Quayum, ‘Shirley Geok-Lin Lim: An Interview’, MELUS, 28(4) (2003): 85.
44 Compare Sara Suleri’s conception of her writing as a ‘home’ in Meatless Days: A Memoir
(1989; London: Flamingo, 1991): 173. See also Chapter 6.
45 Jeffrey Partridge, Beyond Literary Chinatown (London: University of Washington Press,
2007): 104; compare Ty, Politics: 96.
46 Nehru, Autobiography: 596.
47 McKay, Long: 150.
48 Glissant, Poetics: 12, 33.
49 Said, Out of Place: 294.
50 Glissant, Poetics: 18.
51 Paquet, Caribbean: 260.

5 Working the borders of genre in postcolonial life-writing

1 See Caren Kaplan, ‘Resisting Autobiography: Out-law Genres and Transnational
Feminist Subjects’, in Smith and Watson, De/Colonizing: 117.
2 See Marcus, Auto/biographical: Chapter 6; compare Gilmore, ‘The Mark of Auto-
biography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre’, in Ashley et al., Autobiography:
5; and Anderson, Autobiography: 7–17.
3 Misch, History: 7.
4 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 35; compare Pascal, Design: 22–3.
146 Notes
5 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 35.
6 Olney, ‘Autobiography’: 25. Olney himself partially dissents from this argument.
7 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 43, 41. Again, Gusdorf partially dissents from this view.
8 Estelle Jelinek, ‘Introduction: Women’s Autobiography and the Male Tradition’, in
Jelinek (ed.) Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1980): 17.
9 Ibid.; compare Smith, Poetics: 17.
10 Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992): 13.
11 See, for example, Marcus, Auto/biographical: 7–8, 229–69; compare Swindells, ‘Introduction’,
in Swindells, Uses: 9.
12 Smith, Poetics: 59. Compare Benstock, ‘Introduction’: 2.
13 Gilmore, Autobiographics: 96; compare Smith, Poetics: 53–4.
14 The first letter will be capitalised when referring to texts which narrativise history
( lower case), the latter being understood as the experiences and events which constitute
the past.
15 Torres, ‘Construction’: 277.
16 Lionnet, Autobiographical: 4; Lionnet, Postcolonial: 23.
17 Fanon, Black: 14, 60. The opening page exemplifies this fragmentary tendency even at
the micrological level.
18 Cited in Coe, When: 3 and 5; compare MacDermott, Autobiographical: 8–10.
19 Misch, History: 11; compare Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 42; and Gilmore, Limits: 9.
20 Pascal, Design; compare Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 43 and Evans, Missing: 16, 24.
21 Spengemann, Forms: xii.
22 As Eakin comments, one can conflate these genres only ‘by wilfully ignoring the
autobiographer’s explicit posture as autobiographer in the text’. See Fictions: 4.
23 Spengemann, Forms: xii; compare Eakin, Fictions: 3, 36.
24 de Man, ‘Autobiography’: 266. But one should distinguish between ‘immanent’ and
willed slippage between the two, otherwise the writer is denied any agency.
25 Evans, Missing: 1; compare Bergland, ‘Postmodernism’: 134; and Smith, ‘Performativ-
ity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance’, in Smith and Watson, Women: 108.
26 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 43.
27 Misch argues that ‘lies’ in autobiography paradoxically reveal truths about the ‘spirit’
of the writer which it is the prime preoccupation of the genre to express. See His-
tory: 9. Compare Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 47; and Jean Starobinski, ‘The Style of
Autobiography’, in Olney, Autobiography: 75.
28 Lejeune, ‘Autobiographical’: 192.
29 See Anderson, Autobiography: 132–3.
30 On Menchú and Beah, see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigoberta_Menchu%C3%BA;
and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/31/boy-soldier-defends-his-b_n_84195.
html.
31 It might seem contentious to claim Naipaul as a Caribbean life-writer. However, I do
so because the two texts under consideration focus strongly on his formation there.
32 Paquet, Caribbean: 3.
33 See also the discussion of James in Chapter 2.
34 Thieme, ‘Appropriating’: 215–21.
35 V.S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1984] 1985):
70. Henceforth cited in the text as FC.
36 V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World: A Sequence (London: Minerva, 1994): 70. Henceforth
cited in the text as WW.
37 Compare Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review
of Books Inc., 2000): 7, 10, 13.
38 Symptomatically, Naipaul relates early uncertainties with first-person narrative to his
position as a ‘colonial’ (FC : 11).
 Notes 147
39 Stephanie Jones, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Diaspora in V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the
World’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 35(1) (2000): 87.
40 de Man, ‘Autobiography’: 266. If either of Naipaul’s sub-titles aims to impose aesthetic
unity, it is doubtful whether they succeed. For example, the concept of sequence as
temporal ordering is contradicted by the fact that the second ‘autobiographical’ section
precedes the first in historical time.
41 See Marcus, Auto/biographical: 144–5; compare Gilmore, Autobiographics: 11, 185.
42 See Lionnet, ‘Of Mangoes and Maroons: Language, History, and the Multicultural
Subject of Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng’, in Smith and Watson, De/Colonizing: 321–45. Gilmore,
Autobiographics: 100ff and Limits: 99ff.
43 See Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001):
171–9.
44 Suleri, Meatless Days: A Memoir (London: Flamingo, [1989] 1991): 156.
45 Misch, History: 2.
46 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 35, 36.
47 Weintraub, ‘Autobiography’: 249.
48 Marcus, Auto/biographical: 181.
49 Misch, History: 15; compare x.
50 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 36; Weintraub, ‘Autobiography’: 239.
51 Olney, ‘Autobiography’: 20.
52 Misch, History: 2.
53 Gandhi, Autobiography: 258; compare Nehru’s insistence that the reader who mistakes
his autobiography for ‘a survey of recent Indian history [may] lead him to attach a
wider importance to it than it deserves’; Autobiography: xii.
54 Swindells, ‘Introduction’: 9.
55 Jerry White, ‘Beyond Autobiography’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.) People’s History and
Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981): 35–6.
56 See, for example, Joan Scott, ‘Feminism’s History’, in Sue Morgan (ed.) The Feminist
History Reader (London: Routledge, 2006): 388ff. A parallel move towards an explicitly
‘postcolonial historiography’ began at the same time as feminist historiography. See
Arnold Temu and Bonaventure Swai, Historians and Africanist History: A Critique: Post-
colonial Historiography Examined (London: Zed, 1981); Alessandro Triulzi, ‘Decolonising
African History’, in Samuel, People’s: 286–319; and the work of the Indian ‘Subaltern
Studies’ group.
57 Sue Morgan, ‘Introduction: Writing Feminist History: Theoretical Debates and Critical
Practices’, in Morgan, Feminist: 1.
58 Ibid.: 8.
59 Ibid.: 3. In strong contrast to White, Raphael Samuel urges colleagues to ‘learn from
life histories, whether in the form of oral history or written autobiography’. See ‘People’s
History’, in Samuel, People’s: xxxii.
60 Morgan, ‘Introduction’: 31.
61 See, for example, Joannou, ‘She’: 36.
62 Like Hegel’s Africa, Marx’s rural India is outside historical time. See Said, Orientalism:
153–6. Nirad Chaudhuri provides strong counter-evidence in his stress on the com-
munal History of rural India. See Autobiography: 15, for example. Henceforth cited as
AUI in the text. Compare Ganeswar Mishra, ‘How Does an Indian Village Speak?: A
Study of the Form of Prafulla Mohanti’s My Village, My Life’, in MacDermott, Auto-
biographical: 157–62. Conversely, Claude McKay complains of comparable deficiencies
in recent twentieth-century western History. Reading H.G. Wells’s Outline of History
(1920), he records being ‘shocked’ by the lack of attention to Africa and Africans in this
supposed ‘world History’. See McKay, Long: 121–4.
63 Anne Goldman, ‘Autobiography, Ethnography, and History: a Model for Reading’, in
Smith and Watson, Women: 295.
64 See, for example, Lionnet, Postcolonial: 22.
148 Notes
65 Longley, ‘Autobiographical’: 372 (my emphasis).
66 Compare Weintraub’s account of Gibbon’s Autobiography in ‘Autobiography’: 248.
67 To this degree, Chaudhuri’s text, like Gibbon’s, is also an ‘autobibliography’. Ibid.: 244.
68 See Samuel, People’s: xxvi.
69 Edward Gibbon, Autobiography, ed. M.M. Reese (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
[1796] 1970): 1.
70 Ruvani Ranasinha, South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation
(Oxford: Clarendon 2007): 74; compare 71–2.
71 See Chatterjee, Nationalism.
72 Naipaul, ‘Indian’: 143.
73 James, Beyond: n.p.; Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands,
ed. Sarah Salih (1857; London: Penguin, 2005): 128. Henceforth cited as WA in the
text.
74 McKay, Long: 124.
75 In contrast to Marcus, Swindells and Anderson, who are silent on the issue, Smith and
Watson do consider travel-writing in relation to auto/biography. See Reading: 90–5,
99–105. However, the Subjects discussed are almost all white western males and the
larger implications of the conjunction for the generic identity of auto/biography are not.
76 See, for example, Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 28; Spengemann, Forms: 171. One might
consider that this offers an obvious opportunity to open up Auto/biography Studies
from a gendered perspective.
77 Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on
Contemporary Travel Writing (1998; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000):
12. They argue that contemporary travel writing is partly distinguished by mockery of this
desire, as part of a more general tendency to ironical self-reflexiveness in the genre. In
this respect, as in others, Seacole anticipates some of the ‘comic techniques of con-
temporary travel writing’ as well as the ‘relative lack of introspection’ (ibid.: 17) of the
Chatwinian model.
78 Ibid.: 17. Other parallels between the two genres include the fact that both are plagued
by issues of truth claims (each has been prone to spectacular hoaxes) and problems of
definition so acute that they are sometimes considered to be in terminal crisis.
79 Ibid.
80 Vincent Carretta, ‘Olaudah Equiano: African British Abolitionist and Founder of the
African American Slave Narrative’, in Audrey Fisch (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the
African American Slave Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 47.
81 Majeed provides a masterly analysis of the relations between travel and identity-
formation in relation to Gandhi and Nehru in Autobiography.
82 Compare Equiano’s prefatory material. This device is not unprecedented, even in
canonical autobiography (see Rousseau’s Confessions, for example), reinforcing the
habitual truth claims made by its practitioners and their equally conventional dis-
claimers of vanity as a motivation for writing.
83 Compare Seacole’s suppression of any account of the ‘other lands’ she visits en route
from the Crimea at the end of the text (WA: 187).
84 WA counts as autobiography according to Naipaul’s definition of the genre as ‘a story
of a life or deeds done’ (FC : 9); and as travel-writing by virtue of its emphasis on
‘adventure’ and ‘the manners and customs’ of at least some of the peoples encountered.
To some extent, it also conforms to the ‘trials and tribulations’ model of spiritual
autobiography.
85 Sara Salih, ‘Introduction’, to Seacole, Wonderful: xv–l.
86 Ibid.: xviii.
87 Pratt, Imperial Eyes: 168–9.
88 Said’s critique of the genre in Orientalism has been echoed in many subsequent analyses.
See, for example, Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Govern-
ment (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
 Notes 149
89 Salih, ‘Introduction’: xxix.
90 Holland and Huggan, Tourists: 14.
91 Pratt, Imperial Eyes: 7.
92 Devy, ‘Romantic’ 65.
93 Aside from Pratt, See also Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel
Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991).

6 Non-western narrative resources in postcolonial life-writing

1 See, for example, Ashcroft et al., Empire: 179ff; compare Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and
Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 187ff; Dennis Walder,
Postcolonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 116ff.
2 See, for example, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928) and Cixous, ‘Laugh’.
3 Majeed, Autobiography: 217; Pilar Casamada, ‘The Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi’,
in MacDermott, Autobiographical: 45–8.
4 Devy, ‘Romantic’: 67.
5 Lim, ‘Terms’: 362.
6 Mishra, ‘How Does’: 160.
7 Devy, ‘Romantic’: 64.
8 Cited in Philomena Mariani, ed., Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1991): 227.
9 Bharati Mukherjee, ‘A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman’, in Mariani, Critical: 24.
10 Salman Rushdie, ‘Introduction’, in Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (eds) The
Vintage Book of Indian Writing (London: Vintage, 1997): xii.
11 Ibid.: x.
12 Devy himself estimates that even in 1971, nearly two million Indians had English as
their first language, with a vastly larger number speaking it as a second language. See
In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1993): 99.
13 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: 17.
14 Ibid.
15 Chinua Achebe, ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ (1965), in Achebe,
Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1977): 61.
16 Whitlock, Soft: 4ff.
17 Fanon, Black: 18.
18 Ibid.: 38.
19 Ibid.: 31–2.
20 Ibid.: 35.
21 Ibid.: 26, 164.
22 Francis Jeanson, ‘Préface’ and ‘Reconnaissance de Fanon’, in Fanon, Peau Noire, Mas-
ques Blancs, ed. F. Jeanson (Paris: Seuil, 1965): 234, 12 (my translations).
23 Fanon, Black: 153.
24 Ibid.: 174, 9. The oral qualities of Black Skin are enhanced by Fanon’s method of
composition, which involved dictating to Josie Dublé while ‘he strode up and down
the room like an actor declaiming his lines’. See David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life
(London: Granta, 2000): 134.
25 Djebar, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (1982; London:
University Press of Virginia, 1992): 172. Hereafter WoA in this chapter. Compare
Djebar, Ces voix qui m’assiègent … en marge de ma francophonie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999):
181 (all subsequent translations mine). For more on how this interdiction affects
women writers from the Maghreb, see Badran, ‘Expressing’: 276–7.
26 Compare Sara Suleri’s experience, discussed in the next section. When she wanted to
act, her Pakistani Muslim father insisted she use a stage name to prevent her real one
being ‘sullied’. See Sara Suleri Goodyear, Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003): 99. Henceforth cited as B in the text.
150 Notes
27 Mireille Calle-Gruber, Assia Djebar (Paris: adpf, 2006): 17.
28 Djebar, Ces voix: 112.
29 Calle-Gruber, Assia: 18 (my translation).
30 Compare Djebar, Ces voix: 35–6.
31 Assia Djebar, So Vast the Prison, trans. Betsy Wing (1995; London: Seven Stories Press,
1999): 206. Compare Suleri’s relationship with Urdu and English. See Boys: 69.
32 Djebar, Ces voix: 177. Compare Suleri’s description of Punjabi as ‘a singularly male
language’; Boys: 69.
33 Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, [1985] 1993): 202. Hereafter cited as F in the text.
34 Anne Donadey, ‘The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s
Algerian Palimpsest’, World Literature Today, 74(1) (2000): 27; Djebar, Ces voix: 29.
35 Mildred Mortimer, ‘Entretien avec Assia Djebar, Ecrivain Algérien’, Research in African
Literatures, 28(2) (1992): 203.
36 For readings of Augustine as ‘postcolonial’, see Lionnet, Autobiographical: 19ff; and my
‘The Confessions of Saint Augustine: Roots and Routes of Postcolonial Life-Writing’, A/B:
Auto/Biography Studies, 20(2) (2005): 155–69.
37 Compare Naipaul’s use of this device in A Way in the World.
38 Reproduced on p. 242 of the text.
39 Djebar, So Vast: 72.
40 The best account of Djebar’s use of the conventions of nouba in this film is Réda
Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
41 Tony Langlois, ‘Algeria’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, 2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 2001, vol. 1: 369.
42 Ibid.: 369.
43 Bensmaïa, Experimental: 185; compare Salah el Mahdi, La Musique Arabe (Paris:
Alphonse Leduc, 1972): 11.
44 They had still not been fully resolved in La Nouba, although Djebar describes it with
symptomatic complexity as ‘a “diary” of myself and my relations’ (Ces voix: 100).
For example – despite obvious parallels with Djebar – the principal protagonist is
called Lila.
45 Langlois, ‘Algeria’: 371.
46 el Mahdi, Musique: 12.
47 Jane Hiddleston, Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2006): 69.
48 These parallels operate at the level of theme as well as form. (Indeed, some of the
same women whose testimony is recuperated in La Nouba reappear in the later work.)
49 Christopher Field, ‘Fantasia’, in Sadie, New Grove Dictionary, vol. 8: 545.
50 Ibid.: 555.
51 Ibid.: 546.
52 Ibid.: 555.
53 Hadi Bougherara, Voyage Sentimental en Musique Arabo-Andalouse (Paris: EDIF, 2002):
114; Mahmoud Guettat, La Musique classique du Maghreb (Paris: Sindbad, 1980): 305
(both translations mine).
54 el Mahdi, Musique Arabe: 11–12.
55 See Langlois, ‘Algeria’: passim.
56 Eugène Fromentin, Une Année dans Le Sahel, ed. L. Morel (1858; Oxford: Clarendon,
1911): 199 (all translations mine).
57 Dorothy Blair, ‘Introduction’, to Djebar, Fantasia: (n.p.).
58 Fromentin offers another example of such transfer. The word for money among the
Hadjouts is douro (Une Année: 190). This is either an abbreviated adaptation of the louis
d’or, a French coin of the time, or – more likely – the Spanish coin of that name,
pointing to long-standing economic/cultural flows between Europe and the maghreb.
 Notes 151
59 Ibid.: 186–7.
60 Ibid.: 187.
61 Ibid.: 196.
62 Djebar, Ces voix: 136.
63 Guettat, Musique: 188, 304.
64 Valérie Orlando identifies some striking parallels between his text and Fantasia at the
level of form as well as theme. See ‘Preface: History/Story’, in Fromentin, Between Sea
and Sahara: An Algerian Journal, trans. Blake Robinson (Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press, 1999): ix–xiii.
65 Donadey, ‘Multilingual’: 30ff.
66 Djebar, Ces voix: 51.
67 Lejeune is cited twice in an essay of 1986 in Ces voix: 121, 123.
68 Although Suleri married in 1993, I’ll call her by the name which appears on Meatless
Days, on which this section focuses. Suleri’s father Zia had intended to write an auto-
biography entitled Boys Will Be Boys. See Suleri, Meatless Days: A Memoir (London:
Flamingo, [1989] 1991): 127, 183. Henceforth cited as MD in this chapter.
69 Sara Suleri Goodyear, Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003): 14.
70 As the daughter of a Welsh mother and Pakistani father, Suleri allegorises some con-
ceptions of postcolonial ‘hybridity’. But note her comment that ‘I was never born a
colonized person and do not really know the elation that he [Zia] felt when he hoisted
up the Pakistani flag in London’ (B: 120).
71 The ‘miniatures’ on display in the museum in 1976, the year Suleri left for the US, are
catalogued in Miniature Paintings on Display in the Lahore Museum: Mughal and Rajasthani
Schools (Lahore: Lahore Museum, 1976).
72 See, for example, Plate 26 in Som Prakash Verma, Painting the Mughal Experience (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Compare 77–80.
73 Ibid.: 10.
74 Reproduced between pages 9 and 10 of Miniature Paintings and dated to the early
eighteenth century.
75 Verma, Painting: 5.
76 Milo Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting, The New Cambridge History of India, 1.3
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 16.
77 Ibid.: 18.
78 Verma, Painting: 6–7.
79 D.J. Matthews and Christopher Shackle, ‘Introduction’, in D.J. Matthews and C.
Shackle (eds) An Anthology of Classical Urdu Love Lyrics: Texts and Translations (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1972): 1. Note Suleri’s discussion of the ‘couplet’, or sher, on
B: 69. Suleri herself wrote poetry from an early age, several examples being quoted in
Boys. MD could be described as a series of love-poems to Suleri’s family.
80 Ralph Russell and Khurshidad Islam, ‘Ghalib: Life and Letters’, in Ralph Russell (ed.)
The Oxford India Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2003): 115. Several Mughal emperors also wrote memoirs. Babur’s are mentioned on
B: 44. This non-western tradition of auto/biographical writing may constitute another
prompt for Suleri. Space constraints preclude me from pursuing this here.
81 B: 114. Note, too, the Yeats epigraph on B: 113. Gha-lib’s own children died in
infancy, though he adopted two.
82 See B: 18; compare Ralph Russell, ‘Introduction: Ghalib: A Self-Portrait’, in Russell,
Oxford India: 6.
83 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Introduction’, in Ahmad (ed.) Ghazals of Gha-lib: Versions from the Urdu
(1971; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994): viii.
84 Ibid.: vii.
85 Russell, ‘Introduction’: 15.
86 Ahmad, ‘Introduction’: x. Compare Matthews and Shackle, ‘Introduction’: 10.
152 Notes
87 Ralph Russell, ‘Getting to Know Ghalib’, in Russell, ed., Oxford India: 288.
88 Ahmad, ‘Introduction’: xvii.
89 Ibid.: xvi.
90 Russell, ‘Getting’: 287.
91 Email from Sara Suleri, 8 April 2008.
92 Ahmad, ‘Introduction’: xxv.
93 Ibid. Compare Beach’s stress on ‘emotional understatement’ in Mughal ‘miniatures’;
Mughal: 57.
94 Russell, ‘Getting’: 289.
95 Ahmad, ‘Introduction’: xxxi, xvi; Matthews and Shackle, ‘Introduction’: 7, 32.
96 Ahmad, ‘Introduction’: xv.
97 Matthews and Shackle, ‘Introduction’: 6.
98 Verma, Painting: 10.
99 Russell, ‘Getting’: 291.
100 Beach, Mughal: 95.
101 Compare Suleri’s ‘Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition’,
Critical Inquiry, 18(4) (1992): 756–69.
102 Comparable with the ‘impurity’ of the nouba, both Mughal painting and the ghazal can
be understood as a hybrid of foreign (Persian) and Indian ‘languages’ with the former
also being increasingly influenced by European art. See Verma, Painting: 57. Compare
Beach, Mughal: xxxi; Ahmad, ‘Introduction’: xv.
103 Suleri has followed the same career path, currently working in the English department
at Yale.
104 Jane Austen, Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1932), vol. 2: 469.
105 Ahmad, ‘Introduction’: vii; compare xxiv.
106 Lejeune, ‘Autobiographical’: 192; Spengemann, Forms: 171, xiv–xvi; compare the
highly poetic language of Fanon’s Black Skin. Fanon wrote to Jeanson that: ‘I search,
when I write about such things, to touch my reader affectively … that is to say, his
irrational side, almost bodily.’ See Peau: 12.
107 Compare the phrase ‘we Indians’ in MD : 152.
108 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, ed. Sara Salih (1831; London: Penguin,
2000): 3.
109 Ibid.: 10, 18–19 respectively.
110 However, one should not see orality as exclusively the property of postcolonial life-
writing, for which reason it has not been discussed within the space constraints here.
111 Lionnet, ‘Of Mangoes’: 324.
112 Mukherjee, ‘Four-Hundred’: 27.
113 On the ‘fresco’ as an indigenous cultural form, see Beach, Mughal: 2, 89. Suleri’s
allusions to this ‘public’ form (MD : 172–3) seem significant in the context of her
exposure of family ‘secrets’, as well as herself. See the clues offered on MD : 173. On
Allende’s use of muralismo, see Paula, trans. Margaret Peden (London: Flamingo,
[1994] 1996): 23. Compare her image of the quilt to figure memory on 297 and 308.
Allende claims affiliation to postcolonialism through her ‘tot of Araucan or Mapuche
Indian’ blood (ibid.: 14).
114 Fanon, Black: 18; compare Thieme, ‘Appropriating’: 216.
115 Ibid.: 153.
116 Ibid.: 36.
117 This may explain the comparative rarity of postcolonial life-writing written entirely in
Creole. Rare exceptions include Arnold Apple’s Son of Guyana (1973) and Sistren
Collective’s Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (1986).
118 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: 17.
119 C.L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain 1700–2000 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002): 131.
 Notes 153
7 Political Self-representation in postcolonial life-writing
1 Misch, History: x, 15.
2 Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 28, 36 (my emphasis).
3 Spengemann, Forms: xiv–xvi.
4 Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, ‘Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and
Approach’, in Smith and Watson, Women: 309. Compare Regenia Gagnier’s argument
about the ‘functional’ nature of much working-class writing as a factor in its exclusion
from the canon; ‘Literary’: 264. By contrast, Devy claims that the focus on the indivi-
dual in classical autobiography is intrinsically inimical to the concerns of less privileged
sectors of Indian society. See ‘Romantic’: 65.
5 Evans, Missing: 138; compare Gilmore, Limits: 13.
6 Swindells, ‘Conclusion’: 205.
7 Whitlock, Soft: 10.
8 Smith, Subjectivity: 154.
9 Gilmore, ‘Mark’: 6; compare Gillian Whitlock, ‘Introduction: Disobedient Subjects’, in
Autographs: Contemporary Australian Autobiography (St Lucia, Queensland: University of
Queensland Press, 1996): ix.
10 Gilmore, Autobiographics: 3, 5; compare Gilmore, ‘Mark’: 12.
11 Smith: Subjectivity: 159.
12 Joannou, ‘“She”’: 31–44.
13 Smith, Subjectivity: 157, 162.
14 See, for example, Wong, ‘Immigrant’: 309; Longley, ‘Autobiographical’: 372; Lionnet,
‘Of Mangoes’: 321.
15 Fanon, Black: 109.
16 Ibid.: 219; compare 224.
17 Ibid.: 226.
18 See, for example, My Name is Rachel Corrie: The Writings of Rachel Corrie, ed. by Alan
Rickman and Katharine Viner (London: Royal Court, 2005); The Shooting of Thomas
Hurndall, dir. Rowan Joffe (C4, 2008).
19 For a flavour of these regimes of abuse, consult the websites of Israeli Human Rights
Organisations such as B’tselem and ICAHD.
20 See Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).
This wall was authorised by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002 to physically
separate Israel from West Bank Palestinians, nominally to protect Israelis against the
suicide bombings provoked by the frustrations of Occupation. It has, of course, con-
veniently been used to appropriate substantial tracts of prime Palestinian agricultural
land and the water resources supporting it, thereby cutting off many communities from
their livelihood. Construction proceeds apace, despite the judgement of the Interna-
tional Court of Justice in 2004 that it violates international law insofar as it is built on
Palestinian rather than Israeli land.
21 This Convention was specifically designed to prevent the recurrence of tactics of
population transfer employed by the Nazis. So desperate has Israel been to pursue its
territorial ambitions by creating ‘facts on the ground’, that it has even imported
impoverished Peruvian Indians (hastily ‘converted’ to Judaism) to swell the number of
illegal settlers in Palestine. See Neri Livneh, ‘How 90 Peruvians became the latest
Jewish settlers’, The Guardian, 7 August 2002: www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/
0,10551,770315,00.html.
22 See, for example, Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso,
1992): 18, 32; Thomas, Colonialism’s: 17, 27; Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Prac-
tice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 136–7.
23 See Abdirahman Hussein’s judicious critique in Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London:
Verso, 2002): 229ff of my failure to give sufficient weight to the Palestinian dimensions
and orientations of Said’s thinking in my Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (1997).
154 Notes
24 Donna Divine, ‘“Difficult Journey – Mountainous Journey”, the Memoirs of Fadwa
Tuqan’, in Stanton, Female: 187–204.
25 Gunn, ‘Politics’; Whitlock, Soft: 123–30.
26 Fanon, Black: 91.
27 Ibid.: 188.
28 See Chapter 2, Section 4 of the UN Charter at http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/.
Israel is not, of course, the only State in modern times to have breached this article.
29 Fanon, Black: 195.
30 Lim, Among: 195–6.
31 Ibid.: 196.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.: 246.
34 See my ‘Postcolonialism and “the Figure of the Jew”: Caryl Phillips and Zadie Smith’,
in James Acheson (ed.) The Contemporary British Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press 2005): 108–17.
35 Email to me, 25 Sept. 2008.
36 Ghada Karmi, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (London: Verso, 2002): 210. I’m
grateful to Sophia Brown for drawing this passage to my attention.
37 Edward Said, ‘Between Worlds’, in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural
Essays (London: Granta, 2000): 566.
38 Said, Out of Place (London: Granta, [1999] 2000): 132. Hereafter cited parenthetically
in the text as OP.
39 Cited in Judith Butler, Precarious Lives: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso,
2004): 10.
40 Tobias Döring, ‘Edward Said and the Fiction of Autobiography’, Wasafiri, 21(2) (2006):
74. One similarity with Conrad that Döring’s excellent account overlooks is that Said
also describes his text as a ‘personal record’. See Out of Place: xv.
41 Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1966): 4.
42 Anonymous, ‘Said’s Memoir Takes its Place Amid Attempts to Discredit’, Aljadid: A
Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts, 5(29) (1999): 6.
43 Said, ‘Between’: 568.
44 Bryan Turner, ‘Edward Said and the Exilic Ethic: On Being Out of Place’, Theory,
Culture & Society, 17(6) (2000): 127.
45 Alon Confino, ‘Intellectuals and the Lure of Exile: Home and Exile in the Auto-
biographies of Edward Said and George Steiner’, The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections
on Contemporary Culture, 7(3) (2005): 26–7.
46 See Weiner, ‘“My Beautiful Old House” and other Fabrications by Edward Said’,
Commentary, 108(2) (1999): 23–31. As Alon Confino laconically remarks, ‘This essay tells
us more about Weiner and his like than about Said.’ See ‘Remembering Talbiyah: On
Edward Said’s Out of Place’, Israel Studies, 5.2 (2000): 190. Nadia Gindi (who makes an
appearance as one of Said’s childhood friends in OP) provides a devastating account of
Weiner’s ‘research methods’ in ‘On the Margins of a Memoir: a Personal Reading of
Said’s Out of Place’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 20(1) (2000): 294–5.
47 Weiner’s piece was published weeks before Out of Place (doubtless as a ‘spoiler’). See
www.meforum.org/article/191.
48 Edward Alexander, ‘Professor of Terror’, Commentary, 88(2) (1989): 49–50.
49 Said, ‘Introduction’, Reflections: xxv.
50 Said, Reflections on Exile: 173.
51 Ibid.: 175.
52 Döring, ‘Edward’: 75.
53 Turner, ‘Edward’: 126; Confino, ‘Intellectuals’: 26.
54 Suad Amiry, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2003–4; London: Granta,
2005): ix. Cited hereafter as SMM.
 Notes 155
55 In 2006, Israel unilaterally withdrew its Occupation forces and illegal settlers from
Gaza (while quietly grabbing a much larger acreage of the West Bank in ‘compensa-
tion’ – to little protest from the West (see Chris McGreal, ‘Israel Redraws the Road-
map, Building Quietly and Quickly’, The Guardian, 18 October 2005: 17). Gaza has
been left an anomalous territory without real autonomy. Despite holding democratic
elections, the ‘international community’ has failed to support the wishes of the people
of Gaza to determine their own political future (or to make Israel abide by numerous
UN resolutions, beginning with 194 in 1948, the sanctity of which were also widely
urged by Bush and Blair to justify their aggression against Iraq in 2003). Having
offered so little support to Arafat’s secular Palestine Liberation Organisation, the West
expresses hypocritical outrage that disappointed Gazans turned instead to Islamic
Hamas.
56 For detailed discussions of the strategy of dispersal of Palestinians pursued by Zionist
terror gangs and Haganah regulars alike in 1947–48, see Morris, Birth and Pappé, Ethnic
Cleansing.
57 See, for example, Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’: 35, 42.
58 Sharon’s citation of Shehadeh’s Strangers in the House (2002) is significant, since it, too, is a
personal memoir (by a Ramallah-based human rights lawyer), the title of which invokes
not only the Israeli takeover of Palestine but Shehadeh’s personal conflict with his
father.
59 Mernessi is the author of a celebrated memoir, Dreams of Trespass (1995).
60 For example, the bolan Heights in Syira on the tombstones of many of the funda-
mentalists associated with Sharon’s mentor, former Prime Minister Menahem Begin, is
engraved a map comprising Mandate Palestine and Transjordan (modern Jordan), on
which is superimposed a hand clutching a rifle. These included Eitan Livni, father of
the current Kadima leader Tzipi Livni (who launched the devestating war on Gaza in
December 2008 to shore up crumbling electoral support), and commander of the Irgun
at the time of the terror bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946 which indis-
criminately slaughtered Jews, Arabs and British alike. See Leonard Doyle, ‘Israeli
“ruler-in waiting” Plans to Starve Hamas’ (2006): www.independent.co.uk/news/
world/middle-east/israeli-rulerinwaiting-plans-to-starve-hamas-468293.html.
61 See Nur Masalha, ed., Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees
(London: Zed, 2005).
62 Cited in Michael Billingham, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber, 1996): 129.
63 Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter (London: Nick Hern, 1994): 88.
64 Smith, Subjectivity: 182.
65 Wong, ‘First-Person’: 172.
66 Fraser, ‘Dimensions’: 86.
67 One shouldn’t overlook more private motives for the instrumentalisation of (post)colonial
life-writing. Prince’s History and Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures are in part specifically
aimed at improving their authors’ financial circumstances.
68 Longley, ‘Autobiographical’: 372.
69 MacDermott, ‘Introduction’: 10.
70 Yolanda Pierce, ‘Redeeming Bondage: The Captivity Narrative and the Spiritual
Autobiography in the African American Slave Narrative Tradition’, in Fisch, Cambridge: 83.
71 Whitlock, Soft: 3.
72 Huggan, Australian Literature: passim.
73 Ibid.: 176.
74 Seacole, Wonderful: 128.
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Index

Achebe, Chinua xx, 30, 93, 95 ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ (de Man)

Ahmad, Aijaz 104, 105, 106, 108 xii
Aké: the Years of Childhood (Soyinka) xx, 48, Autobiography of My Mother, The (Kincaid)
54–62, 65, 66, 73, 93, 117 73
Al-Yamama, Zarq’a 44, 47
Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 66 Baghdad Blog (Pax) 93
Allende, Isabel 82, 101, 109 Barghouti, Mourid 128
Alter, Joseph 37, 41 Barthes, Roland 1
Amireh, Amal 47 Battuta, Ibn 91
Amiry, Suad 32, 67, 84, 104, 114, 115, Beach, Milo 102, 103, 106
121–128 Beah, Ishmael xi, 72
Among the White Moon Faces (Lim) 60–66, Beckett, Samuel 126
114, 117 Beethoven, Ludwig van 98, 99
Anand, Mulk Raj xxv, 76 Behan, Brendan 16, 19, 25–34, 45, 46,
Anderson, Douglas 12 50, 59, 65, 67, 80, 82, 84, 101,122
Anderson, Linda xvi, 52, 69, 72 Behn, Aphra 87
Antar 125 Benito, Jesús 9, 10
Anthony, Michael 72 Bennelong 5
Anti-Semite and Jew (Sartre) 113 Bensmaïa, Réda 96
Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Newman) 115 Benstock, Shari xv, xxii, 52
Area of Darkness, An (Naipaul) 85 Beverley, John 35
Arnold, Edwin 41 Beyond a Boundary (James) 19–25, 82
Ashcroft, Bill xxi Bhagavad Gita (Arnold) 41, 91
Augustine 13, 20, 77, 94, 95,103 Bhose, S.C. 80
Austen, Jane 46, 107 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) xix, xxiv,
Auto/biographical Discourses (Marcus) xvi 2, 19, 23, 36, 48, 50, 53, 71, 112–14,
‘Autobiographical Pact, The’ (Lejeune) 129
xii Blair, Dorothy 99
Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical Bliss, Carolyn 3, 4
(Olney) xiii Book of Evidence (Khaldun) 91
Autobiography: (Anand) xxv; (Anderson) xvi; Book of Margery Kempe (Kempe) 18
(Chellappan) 36; (Gibbon) 80; (Gunn) Borstal Boy (Behan) 25–31, 65, 122
xv Bougherara, Hadi 99
Autobiography, An (Gandhi) xii, xix, xx, 36– Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy (Suleri)
42, 48, 51, 91, 92; (Nehru) 66, 129 101, 103, 104, 108
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, The Brannigan, John 30
(Chaudhuri) xxv, 31, 78, 79 Brewster, Anne 3
Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, The Brodzki, Bella xv, 1, 18, 52
(Nkrumah) 31 Brontë, Charlotte 46
168 Index
Brontë, Emily 46 Egyptian Childhood, An (Hussayn) 47
Buhle, Paul 21 El Saadawi, Nawal 16, 19, 32, 33, 42–49,
Bunyan, John 9, 21, 22, 28 51, 60–62, 67, 76, 82, 84, 94, 98, 99,
Butler, Judith xviii 101, 120
Eliot, George 46
Caldwell, Tanya 9, 11, 12 Emecheta, Buchi xvi, xx, 18, 19, 21, 48,
Cardus, Neville 20 50, 84
Caretaker, The (Pinter) 127 Equiano, Olaudah xi, xx, 8–15, 17, 20–22,
Carretta, Vincent 12, 13 28, 29, 38, 48, 49, 55, 62, 67, 72, 83,
Casamada, Pilar 91 85, 86, 88, 109, 110, 128, 129
Catch-22 (Heller) 127 Erikson, Erik 37
Chatwin, Bruce 83 European Tribe, The (Phillips) 85
Chaudhuri, Nirad xxv, 20, 31, 78–84, 88, Evans, Mary 1, 72, 111
89, 92, 94, 101, 102, 104, 120
Chellappan, K. 36 Fanon, Frantz xix, xxi, xxiv, 2, 9, 13, 15,
Chodorow, Nancy xvii 18, 19, 21, 22, 32, 36, 48, 50, 53, 71,
Cixous, Hélène xvii 84, 89, 93–95, 109, 110 112–114, 128
Clarke, Tom 28 Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade (Djebar) 44,
Cliff, Michelle 76 76, 94–101, 103, 117
Codell, Julie 41 Farred, Grant 24
Coe, Richard xiii, xx Female Autograph, The (Stanton) xv, 113
Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila 6 Feminism and Geography (Rose) 51
‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’ Field, Christopher 97, 98
(Gusdorf) xii Finding the Centre (Naipaul) 31, 72, 73, 75,
Confessions (Augustine) 13, 20, 77, 103; 76, 89
(Rousseau) xi, 115 Forms of Autobiography, The (Spengemann) xiv
Confino, Alon 119, 121 France, Anatole 71
Cribb, Tim 54 Fraser, Robert 33, 59, 93, 128
Freud, Sigmund xix
Das, Kamala xx, 92 Fromentin, Eugène 99, 100
Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El
Saadawi 42–48, 51, 60, 62 Gagnier, Regenia xxiv, 18
David Copperfield (Dickens) 71 Gandhi, Mohandas K. xii, xx, 36–42, 44,
Davies, Carole Boyce 18 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 66, 77, 82, 84, 89,
de Man, Paul xii, xiii, 71, 75, 76 91, 92, 101, 115
De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender Gender, Identity and Place (McDowell) 51
in Women’s Autobiography (Smith and Ghàlib 104–106, 108
Watson) xv, xvi Ghana: the Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah 31
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon) ghazal 104, 105
79 Gibbon, Edward 79, 80, 81
Delacroix, Eugène 100 Gibbs, James 58
Derrida, Jacques 69 Gilmore, Leigh xviii, 2, 17, 34, 35, 69, 70,
Descartes, René 34 76, 112
Design and Truth in Autobiography (Pascal) Glissant, Edouard 15, 19, 67
xii Goldman, Anne 78
Detained (Ngugi) 122 Green, J.R. 79, 81
Devy, G.N. 32, 92 Griffiths, Gareth xxi
Dhondy, Farrukh 20, 21 Grimshaw, Anna 20, 21, 24
Dickens, Charles 71 Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw xi
Djebar, Assia 16, 44, 76, 82, 94–102, Guettat, Mahmoud 99, 100
106–109, 116, 117, 120, 122, 126 Gunn, Janet xv, xvi, 113
Donadey, Anne 100 Gusdorf, Georges xii, xx, xxiii, xxv, xxvi,
Döring, Tobias 115, 120 1, 7, 14, 17, 19, 21, 34, 41, 52, 69, 72,
Duras, Marguerite 100 77, 81, 89–91, 95, 109, 111, 130
 Index 169
Habibi, Emile 125 Kingston, Maxine Hong 66
Haggard, H. Rider 26 Kipling, Rudyard 26, 87
Hall, Jennifer 12 Klemperer, Victor 127
Hardy, Thomas 30 Kristeva, Julia xviii
Harris, Frank 50 Kureishi, Hanif 31, 76
Hazlitt, William 19
Head Above Water (Emecheta) xvi, xx, 18 Lamming, George 72
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 21 Langlois, T. 96, 97
Heller, Joseph 127 Lee Kuan Yew 31, 32
Hiddleston, Jane 97 Lejeune, Philippe xii, xiii, xxii, 18, 69,
History of Autobiography in Antiquity (Misch) xi 72, 74, 76, 79, 101, 108, 112
History of Mary Prince, The (Prince) 35, 48, Life/Lines (Brodzki and Schenck) xv
72, 84, 108 Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin xx, 16, 19, 32,
Hodge, Merle 19 33, 35, 48, 60–7, 80, 84, 89, 92, 114,
Holden, Philip xiv 115–117, 125, 129
Holland, Patrick 83, 88 Lionnet, Françoise xiii, 1, 32, 70, 76, 109
hooks, bell 2 Long Way from Home, A (McKay) 31, 49,
Hornung, Alfred xiii 50
Huddart, David xiv Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Huggan, Graham 8, 83, 88, 129 (Beah) xi, 72
Hussayn, Taha 44, 46, 47 Longley, Kateryna 2, 3, 5, 18, 78, 128
Hutcheon, Linda 2
MacDermott, Doireann xiii, xxiii
I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú) 72 McDowell, Linda 51
In a Free State (Naipaul) 74, 75 McKay, Claude 31, 49, 50, 67, 72, 82,
Innes, C.L. xxiv, 110 83
Interesting Narrative, The (Equiano) xi, xx, Magona, Sindiwe 14, 19, 67, 84, 109
8–15, 20, 49, 72, 110 Mairs, Nancy 52
Intimacy (Kureishi) 76 Majeed, Javed xiv, 14, 91, 92, 128
Irigaray, Luce xviii Malti-Douglas, Fedwa 35, 46, 47
Man Died, The (Soyinka) 122
James, C.L.R. 16, 19–25 31, 33, 34, 40, Manzanas, Ana 9, 10
67, 72, 73, 78, 79, 82, 94, 96, 97, 115 Marcus, Laura ix, xvi, xvii, 52, 69, 77
James, Louis 59 Marrant, John xi
Jane Eyre (Brontë, C.) 46, 47 Marren, Susan 12
Jeanson, Francis 93 Marx, Karl 21
Jelinek, Estelle xv, 70 Mason, Mary 18, 35
Jeyifo, Biodun 57 Massey, Doreen 51
Joanna, Maroula 112 Matthews, D.J. 104, 106
Jones, Stephanie 75 Meadows, Tom 27
Joseph, Conrad 87 Meatless Days (Suleri) 76, 101–108
Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (El Saadawi) 76
(Said) 115 Menchú, Rigoberta 72
Journey, The (Battuta) 91 Mernissi, Fatema 125
Joyce, James 28, 29 Meyers, Jeffrey 36
Jung, Carl xix Michaels, Eric 3
Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot) 46
Kafka, Franz 125, 127 Mir Sayyid Ali 102
Karmi, Ghada 115, 128 Misch, Georg xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xviii, xxii, 1,
Kearney, Colbert 28, 30 17, 21, 34, 52, 69, 71, 77, 111
Kelly, Debra xi, xvi Mishra, Ganeswar 92
Khaled, Leila xvii 113, 128 Mittelholzer, Adgar 72
Khaldun, Ibn 91, 95 Mohanti, Prafulla 92
Kincaid, Jamaica 72, 73, 76, 92, 93 Montaigne, Michel de 101
170 Index
Morgan, Sally 3–8, 13–19, 21, 24, 32, 35, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce)
38, 44, 47, 53, 66, 67, 78, 82, 84, 109, 28
128, 129 Potkay, Adam 9, 11
Morgan, Sue 77 Prabhu, Anjali xxiv
Mottolese, William 12 Pratt, Mary Louise 88
Msiska, Mpalive-Hangson 56, 59 Prince, Mary 35, 48, 67, 72, 84, 108,
Mukherjee, Bharati 92, 109 128
Murphy, Geraldine 10 Prison House and Chocolate Cake (Saghal) 49
My Ear at his Heart (Kureishi) 31 Private Self, The (Benstock) xv
My Life and Loves (Harris) 50 Pulitano, Elvira 4
My Place (Morgan) 3–9, 13, 17, 20, 44, 66
My Story (Das) xxii, 92 Quayson, Ato 23, 57
My Village, My Life (Mohanti) 92 Question of Palestine, The (Said) 113
Quinby, Lee 1
Naipaul, Seepersad 73
Naipaul, V.S. xvi, xxv, 16, 21, 31–33, 73, Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, The (Tressell)
72–76, 82, 83–85, 88, 89, 94, 95, 98, 27
101, 109, 129 Ramayana 91
Nandy, Ashis xix Ranasinha, Ruvani 81
Narogin, Mudrooroo 3, 129 Reflections on Exile (Said) 119
Nehru, Jawaharlal 32, 66, 84, 92, 129 Representations of the Intellectual (Said) 121
Némirovsky, Irene 127 Rich, Adrienne 105
Neuman, Shirley xviii, 34, 35, 49, 51 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf) 108
Newman, John Henry 115 Rose, Gillian 51
Ngugi wa Thiong’o xxv, 62, 92, 93, 95, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques xi, 35, 49, 83,
122 102, 103, 115
Nielson, Aldon 23 Roy, Parama 38
Nkrumah, Kwame 31, 32 Ruhe, Ernstpeter xiii
Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua, La Rushdie, Salman 15, 88, 92, 93, 95, 110
(Djebar) 96, 98 Russell, Ralph 104, 105
No Place Like Home (Alibhai-Brown) 66 Russell, W.H. 87
Nussbaum, Felicity 52
Sabbagh, Karl 128
O’Hanlon, Redmond 83, 88 Sabino, Robin 12
Olney, James xi, xiii, xiv, xv, 17, 18, 21, Saghal, Nayantara 49
32, 34, 69, 70, 77 Said, Edward xii, xxi, xxiv, xxv 14, 31, 53,
Ondaatje, Michael xvi 66, 67, 72, 84, 88, 113, 115–126, 128
Orientalism (Said) xiii, xxiv, 88 Salih, Sarah 86, 88
Out of Place (Said) xxv, 14, 16, 31, 66, 67, Samuel, Raphael 82
72, 115–26, 128 Samuels, William 12
Sartre, Jean-Paul 113
Paquet, Sandra Pouchet xix, 2, 35, 67, 72 Schenck, Celeste xv, 1, 18, 52
Partridge, Jeffrey 66 Seacole, Mary 18, 49, 82, 84–9, 110, 129
Pascal, Roy xii, 71, 95 Senghor, Léopold 14
Paula (Allende) 109 Seven Summers (Anand) 76
Pax, Salam 93 Shackle, Christopher 104, 106
Perreault, Jeanne 15, 18 Sharon and my Mother-in Law: Ramallah
Phillips, Caryl 85 Diaries (Amiry) 121–8
Picasso, Pablo 100 Showalter, Elaine 91
Pierce, Yolanda 129 Shehadeh, Raja 125
Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan) 9, 28 Shikubu, Murasaki 91
Pincutt, Frederick 41 Short History of the English People, A (Green)
Pinter, Harold 126, 127 79
Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, A (Smith) xv Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew 31
 Index 171
Sinha, R.C.P. xxv Under the Greenwood Tree (Hardy) 30
Sketch of the Past (Woolf) 50 Une Année dans Le Sahel (Fromentin) 99
Smith, Paul xviii, 15
Smith, Sidonie xi, xv, xvi, xviii, 1, 34, 35, Verma, Som 102
50–3, 70, 112, 128 Vico, Giambattista 13
So Vast the Prison (Djebar) 96
Sommer, Doris 18 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 126
Soyinka, Wole xix, xx, xxiii, 48, 54–62, Warley, Linda xvii, 53
63, 65, 66, 67, 73, 82, 91, 93, 95,117, Watson, Julia xi, xi, xvi, xviii, 52, 53
122 Way in the World, A (Naipaul) 16, 32, 72,
Space, Place and Gender (Massey) 51 73, 74, 75, 89
Spengemann, William xiii, 1, 34, 52, 71, Webb, Constance 20
108, 111 Weiner, Justus 119
Spivak, Gayatri xvii, xx Weintraub, Karl 52, 77
Sprinker, Michael 34 West, Russell 3, 6
St. Louis, Brett 21, 24 When the Grass Was Taller (Coe) xv, xxii
Stanley, Liz 70 White, Jerry 77
Stanton, Domna xv, 113 Whitlock, Gillian xiii, xiv, 14, 15, 93, 111,
Steele, Richard 71 113, 129
Stevens, Wallace 108 Whitman, Walt 25
Suite Française (Némirovsky) 127 Wollstonecraft, Mary 12
Suleri, Sara 76, 82, 101–109, 126 Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader
Swindells, Julia xxiii, 77, 111 (Smith and Watson) xv, 52
Women of Algiers in their Apartment (Djebar)
Tale of Genji, The (Shikubu) 91 94–96, 99
Thieme, John 2, 72 Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism
Things Fall Apart (Achebe) xx, 30 (Jelinek) xv
Third World Autobiography (Gunn) xvi Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole, The
Thomas, Helen 13 (Seacole) 49, 82, 84–9
Thomson, George xix Wong, Hertha 32, 128
Three Guineas, The (Woolf) 31 Wong Sau-ling 111
Tiffin, Helen xxi Woolf, Virginia 18, 28, 31, 32, 50, 107,
To the Lighthouse (Woolf) 107 108
To My Children’s Children (Magona) 14, 67, Wordsworth, William 75, 108
109 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon) 112
Torres, Lourdes 18, 70 Wright, Derek 56, 59
Tressell, Robert 27
Turner, Bryan 117, 121 Zonana, Joyce 5