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

Abstract

This article focuses on representations of mothers and daughters in autobiographical texts by contemporary British Caribbean women writers. It examines the ways in which the texts under discussion subvert generic conventions, blurring the boundaries between autobiography and biography, fiction and ‘truth-telling’. It traces the ways in which the ‘I’ in these selected works shifts and splits between the mother and daughter, further problematising issues of authenticity and secure self-hood already identified by critics of the autobiographical genre.

The autobiographies are marked by journeys from the Caribbean to America, to Britain and back to the Caribbean: in each location black female identities of these autobiographical subjects are invented and reinvented both to resist and to ‘bear witness against the racism, sexism and classism’ of the cultures and institutions they encounter. Through their destabilising narrative structures, the authors return to and revise the thematic and structural preoccupations of migrant and postcolonial writing: conditions of loss, fragmentation, estrangement and alienation are expressed within the framework of lasting mother–daughter bonds.

These texts are used to suggest that the reclamation of the black female subject depends not only on the authority of self-inscription but on what Carol Gilligan calls an ‘ethic of care’, which binds women to each other and to those they seek to protect. The stories and selves that emerge from these narratives are simultaneously secured and liberated by the strong, though not unproblematic bonds within which they are inscribed.

Keywords:

• auto/biography
• Caribbean
• daughters
• life-writing
• memory
• motherhood
• self-hood

Notes

¹The term ‘auto/biography is taken from Laura Marcus's study of the same title. She writes that ‘[r]ecounting one's life, inevitably entails writing the life of an other or others’ (273–4). Conversely, the biographer's task necessarily involves some identification with her subject.

²See Louise Carpenter's use of the term in ‘Who Are You Calling a Bad Mother?’, The Observer, 13 April 2008.

³An interview with Jenni Murray, Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 25 October 2004.

⁴An interview with Jenni Murray, Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 25 October 2004.

⁵See, for example, the first person narrator G in George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin (1979), Mohun Biswas, protagonist of A House for Mr Biswas (1969), Tee in Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey (1970), and Beka in Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb (1982).

⁶Interview with Jenni Murray, Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 1 April 2008.

⁷See, for example, T. L. Broughton (1991), ‘Women's Autobiography: The Self at Stake’, p. 77.

⁸Rachel Manley's autobiographies also describe an upbringing of privilege, though her work includes a critique of that class: Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (1997) and Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (2000).

⁹Talawa theatre group was founded in 1982 by Yvonne Brewster and actors Mona Hammond and Carmen Munroe. The name derives from the Jamaican word ‘tallawah’, meaning small but formidable.

¹⁰See also Doreen Lawrence's 2006 autobiography: And Still I Rise: Seeking Justice for Stephen, London: Faber, p. 19.

¹¹Interview with Jenni Murray, 25 October 2004.

¹²Carpenter, ‘Who Are You Calling A Bad Mother?’.

¹³Boyce Davies (1994), Black Women, Writing and Identity, p. 23.