In the heart of the country: the auto/biographies of Ayesha Dawood and Fatima Meer

ABSTRACT

South African struggle auto/biography has been a male-dominated genre in which the political has correspondingly dominated the personal. These life narratives have presented the formation of relatively coherent, autonomous selfhoods constructing a stable narrative of anti-Apartheid political history. Male struggle auto/biography hassince the 1980 s been counterbalanced by female auto/biography, existing in the margins of social and historical discourse. In the post-2000 period, a number of struggle auto/biographies have been published which appear to shift the prevailing norms of the genre to highlight the relationality of subject constitution, in which the family has been presented as the most significant matrix of self-formation. The proposed paper considers the curious case of two recent auto/biographies that position eros at the heart of activist self-realisation. Inextricably connected romantic and political relationships are tracked in the life narrative by Zubeida Jaffer, Love in the Time of Treason: The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood, and Fatima Meer’s Memories of Love and Struggle. The article questions the significance of the foregrounding of intimacy in the constitution and the representation of the female (activist) subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-apartheid life narrative
• Zubeida Jaffer
• romantic love
• subject formation
• relationality
• feminism

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the A. W. Mellon funded project, Rethinking South African Literature(s), housed in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape, for generously facilitating the completion of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Love in the Time of Treason has been published internationally under the title, On Trial With Mandela: The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood.

2. Fatima Meer’s autobiography was begun in 2000 when she was working on posthumously publishing her husband, Ismail Meer’s, autobiography. Ill health in 2002 prevented further work on the manuscript until 2006 when Meer resumed work with the help of a research assistant. In 2007, Meer’s daughter, Shamim Meer, began assisting her mother to complete the autobiography since she remained wheelchair-bound and incapacitated as a consequence of repeated strokes. Shamim Meer intermittently worked on her mother’s autobiography after her death in 2010, with the bulk of the work done from 2015.

3. For a fuller presentation of South African women’s life narratives with extracts from the most significant examples, see Judith Lütge Coullie (2001).

4. Govender’s Love and Courage does not highlight romantic love as the two life narratives under consideration do. It seems to circle instead around the love for children, especially Govender’s eldest daughter, who seems to have the most significance in the family.

5. The Treason Trial was the court proceeding of 156 organisers of the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955. The trial lasted from the end of 1956 till 1961, when all charges by the apartheid state had to be dropped for lack of sufficient evidence against the accused.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

F. Fiona Moolla

F. Fiona Moolla is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is the author of Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel & the Idea of Home (2014, James Currey), and the editor of Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms (2016, Wits University Press), among other academic and non-academic publications. She currently heads a project on romantic love in African and South African literature and culture.