Lives in the Making: The Possibilities and Impossibilities of Autobiography with Reference to the Case of Amina Cachalia

Abstract

This article takes the author's recent experiences of working with Amina Cachalia on her memoirs as a starting point for engaging with the knotty problems of the autobiographical genre, especially in its relationship with more orthodox forms of history writing. An examination of South African women's autobiographies and memoirs suggests the existence of different kinds of historical narratives that subvert, either explicitly or tacitly, what Elaine Unterhalter drew attention to as the ‘heroic masculine’ narrative commonly told by male South African autobiographers.

Keywords:

• Amina Cachalia
• South African women's autobiography
• memoir in South Africa
• critique of struggle historiography

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Alan Mabin for several readings of, and many conversations about this paper; Stephan Meyer for a stimulating discussion in Basel and Shireen Hassim for introducing the topic and for general support. She would also like to thank participants in the relevant sessions of the 2011 Biennial Conference of the Southern African Historical Society and the 2011 Conference on the ANC hosted by South African History Online, the Wits History Workshop and the University of Johannesburg. Thanks are also due to the invaluable financial support of the Anderson-Capelli Fund at Wits and the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Fund.

Notes

¹S. Marks, ed., Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women. (Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).

²S. Marks, ‘Changing History, Changing Histories: Separations and Connections in the Lives of South African Women’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 13, 1 (2000), 94–106; 94.

³Marks, Not Either an Experimental Doll, 1.

⁴S. Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence: Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth Century Natal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986).

⁵Marks, Not Either an Experimental Doll, 1.

⁶Marks, ‘Changing History’, 94.

⁷Marks, ‘Changing History’, 97–98.

⁸See for instance, A. Donnell and P. Polke, eds, Representing Lives: Women and Auto/biography. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 2000).

⁹For example: http://www.namasthenri.com/nriof the week/amina.html, accessed 16 March 2011.

¹⁰‘Interview: Amina Cachalia and Rica Hodgson’, Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/Frontline/shows/Mandela/interviews/Cachalia.html, accessed 17 March 2011.

¹¹W. Graham, ‘A Life Worth Celebrating’, http://www.nriinternet.com/Section 3 who/whoAsia/Africa/A-J/Amina_Cacahalia/index.html, accessed 17 March 2011.

¹²‘Amina Cachalia’, South African History Online, http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/cachalia.a.htm, accessed 3 April 2011.

¹³ http://www.radiodaries.org/Mandela/mpeople.html, accessed 17 March 2011.

¹⁴Graham, ‘A Life Worth Celebrating’.

¹⁵P. Ntantala, A Life's Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (Cape Town: David Philip and Mayibuye Centre, 1992), vii.

¹⁶G. Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

¹⁷P. Govender, Love and Courage: A Story of Insubordination (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007).

¹⁸P. Govender, Love and Courage: A Story of Insubordination (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007), 258.

¹⁹S. Smith and J. Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

²⁰See for example, G. Minkley and C. Rassool, ‘Orality, Memory, and Social History in South Africa’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee, eds, Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89–99.

²¹Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography.

²²P. O'Malley, Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa (London: Penguin, 2008).

²⁴Z. Maharaj, Dancing to a Different Rhythm: A Memoir (Cape Town: Zebra Press, imprint of Struik, 2006), 23.

²³Z. Maharaj, Dancing to a Different Rhythm: A Memoir (Cape Town: Zebra Press, imprint of Struik, 2006).

²⁵Z. Maharaj, Dancing to a Different Rhythm: A Memoir (Cape Town: Zebra Press, imprint of Struik, 2006), 79.

²⁶Z. Maharaj, Dancing to a Different Rhythm: A Memoir (Cape Town: Zebra Press, imprint of Struik, 2006), 185.

²⁷Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography.

²⁸This refers to Philippe Lejeune's famous Le Pacte Autobiographique published in Paris in 1975 and cited by almost every scholar who writes on autobiography.

²⁹A. Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Book (New York: Random, 2008).

³⁰M. Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2007).

³¹S. Nuttall, ‘Writing a Life: Notes on Biography-Making’, interview with M. Gevisser in Wiser In Brief: Life/Writing: A Colloquium on Biography, http://wiserweb.wits.ac.za/pdf.20files/wiserinbrief/june 2003.pdf, accessed 1 April 2011, 112.

³²J. Brenner, ‘Life, Death and Portraiture’, in L. Allen and A. Mbembe, eds, The Johannesburg Salon 2010 (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, 2010), http://www.JWTC.org.za/resources/docs/Salon-volume2 of The-Salon-Volume_Two.pdf, accessed 30 March 2011.

³³J. Hyslop, ‘On Biography: A Response to Ciraj Rassool’, South African Review of Sociology, 41, 2 (2010), 104–115; C. Rassool, ‘The Challenges of Rethinking South African Political Biography: A Reply to Jonathan Hyslop’, South African Review of Sociology, 41, 2 (2010), 116–120.

³⁴P. de Man's essay, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ was published in the 1970s. De Man was a close friend and colleague of Derrida's and is cited by most theorists on autobiography – all his work came under scrutiny when posthumously discovered writings showed his anti-Semitic tendencies during the Second World War: J. Derrida, Circumfessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). In 1968 Roland Barthes published an essay entitled: ‘The Death of the Author’, and in 1978 the original French version of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) was published, usually interpreted by the scholarly literature as a significant rupture; a range of Foucault's work is cited in the scholarly literature for his theory of disciplinary discourses and the implication for the existence of the individual author; Lacan is cited for his elaboration of what he had initially called the ‘mirror stage’ in which the subject becomes captivated by its image, for example, J. Lacan, ‘Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, telle qui’ ‘elle nous est révelée dans l’experience psychanalytique’, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 93–101. Bakhtin developed the theories that are applicable here in the 1930s but fell foul of Stalin and his writings were discovered only, for the most part, in the 1970s. His theory of ‘heteroglossia’ (literally ‘different speechness’) is used in the literature to explore how particular linguistic identities are forged in relation to other discourses. For the South African literature see, for example, S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee, eds, Negotiating the Past; S. Nuttall and C-A. Michael, eds, Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (Oxford University Press, 2001); J. Lutge, S. Meyer, T. Ngwenya and T. Olver, eds, Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2006)

³⁵L. Anderson, Autobiography, (London: Routledge, 2010), 70.

³⁶Barthes cited in Anderson, Autobiography, 71.

³⁷V. Woolf. A Room of One's Own (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, 1989), 4. Room of One's Own was first published in 1929.

³⁸L. Anderson, Autobiography, and B. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation (London: Routledge, 2009).

³⁹A. Fanshawe, Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe, Wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Ambassador from Charles the Second to the Courts of Portugal and Madrid, Written by Herself with Extracts from the Correspondence of Sir Richard Fanshawe (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830). This edition was published many years after the first appearance of Fanshawe's memoirs in 1676.

⁴⁰L. Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), 75.

⁴¹G. Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Literature, Culture and Identity – Reading Women's Autobiography (London: Wellington House, 2000), 146.

⁴²Ntantala, A Life's Mosaic, vii.

⁴³Ntantala, A Life's Mosaic, viii.

⁴⁴Ntantala, A Life's Mosaic, ix.

⁴⁵Ntantala, A Life's Mosaic, 230.

⁴⁶D. Stanton, ‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’, in D. Stanton, ed., The Female Autograph (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 3–20. The essay was originally published in 1984.

⁴⁷Ntantala, A Life's Mosaic, 77.

⁴⁸Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 15.

⁴⁹Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 17.

⁵⁰Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 17.

⁵¹Stanton, ‘Autogynography’, 17.

⁵²Ntantala, A Life's Mosaic, 232.

⁵³Gilmore, Autobiographics, 25.

⁵⁴S. Meyer, ‘Sindiwe Magona Interview with Stephan Meyer’, in J. Lutge, S. Meyer, T. Ngwenya and T. Olver, eds, Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 219–230, 220.

⁵⁵Meyer, ‘Sindiwe Magona Interview’, 227.

⁵⁶Meyer, ‘Sindiwe Magona Interview’, 226.

⁵⁷Gilmore, Autobiographics, 80.

⁵⁸A. Wolpe, The Long Way Home (London and Cape Town: Virago Press and David Philip, 1994).

⁵⁹R. First, 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African 90-Day Detention Law (Johannesburg: Penguin Classics, 2006). The first edition was published in 1965.

⁶⁰S. Meintjes, ‘The Other Story’, SAROB, 38, July–August, 1995, http://ucb.uct.ac.za/depts/sarb/xoo6/_Meintjes.html, accessed 31 March 2011.

⁶¹S. Meintjes, ‘The Other Story’, SAROB, 38, July–August, 1995, http://ucb.uct.ac.za/depts/sarb/xoo6/_Meintjes.html, accessed 31 March 2011.

⁶²S. Meintjes, ‘The Other Story’, SAROB, 38, July–August, 1995, http://ucb.uct.ac.za/depts/sarb/xoo6/_Meintjes.html, accessed 31 March 2011.

⁶³Ntantala, A Life's Mosaic, 232.

⁶⁴E. Unterhalter, ‘The Work of the Nation: Heroic Masculinity in South African Autobiographical Writing of the Anti-Apartheid Struggle’, European Journal of Development Research, 12, 2 (December 2000), 157–178, 166.

⁶⁵D. Driver, ‘The Struggle over the Sign: Writing and History in Zoë Wicomb's Text’, Journal of Southern African History, 36, 3 (2010), 523–542, 530.

⁶⁶See Unterhalter's explanation for the necessary tedium of the background struggle story for male autobiography: Unterhalter, ‘Work of the Nation’.

⁶⁷Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life Writing, 124.

⁶⁸Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life Writing, 124.

⁶⁹Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life Writing, 124.

⁷⁰J. Scott, ‘Experience’ in S. Smith and J. Watson (eds), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 59.

⁷¹Unterhalter, ‘Work of the Nation’, 159.

⁷²M. Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London, Berlin, New York: Bloomsbury, 1983), 48.