Scenes of Af/filiation: Family Photographs in Postcolonial Life Writing

Abstract

This essay considers the role of family photographs in postcolonial life writing. Focusing on memoirs by Hanif Kureishi, Michael Ondaatje and Edward Said, this essay examines how photography plays a key role in registering, and at times dramatising, the struggles of postcolonial subjects in writing about their childhoods and familial relationships. I argue that the narrativisation of photography—of taking, posing and looking at photographs—is a significant recurring trope in recent postcolonial life writing, and that the appearance of photographs draws attention to the memory work being performed in life writing texts. In all three cases, the family is imagined as an empire in microcosm, with the author's relationship with his father given particular attention. Finally, I consider how family photographs are implicated in father-son narratives of affiliation and disaffiliation in these memoirs.

Keywords:

• postcolonial life writing
• photography
• Hanif Kureishi
• Michael Ondaatje
• Edward Said

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Notes

[1] As Timothy Dow Adams observes, this claim appears to be refuted by Michael's older brother Christopher Ondaatje, who includes another photograph of their parents in his travel memoir The Man-Eater of Punanai (Adams 128).

[2] In a recent article, Marta Bladek identifies Running in the Family as a ‘return memoir’, a subgenre of autobiography that is ‘organised around the authors’ journeys to places from their ancestral or personal past’ (392). Smaro Kamboureli offers a cogent reading of the text's resistance to unified reading practices and how critics have attempted to come to grips with its generic indeterminacy.

[3] The controversy surrounding Said's contested claims regarding his family residence during his childhood has been addressed elsewhere. Paul Armstrong has examined the controversies and contradictions of Said's persona as a Palestinian public intellectual (Armstrong).