Autobiography as Archival Act: Reckoning with Personal and Political Pasts in They Called You Dambudzo and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the archival dimension in two autobiographical texts that combine personal memoir with biography. The two memoirs They Called You Dambudzo by Flora Veit-Wild and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller document and examine the lives of loved ones in connection to the authors’ own experiences. Veit-Wild writes about her relationship with canonised Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and Fuller focuses on her mother’s life in Kenya, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and Zambia. The examined texts suggest that the archival act enables a reckoning with complex pasts through the documentation of personal life and the life of others. The analysis of the memoirs suggests that the autobiography as archive can eventually be seen as greater than its separate parts, as going far beyond the individual experiences it portrays. This is particularly important for the personal and socio-political reckoning in which it engages, relating to the colonial and racial past of Zimbabwe.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiography
• archive
• relational writing
• Zimbabwe

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

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Lena Englund

Lena Englund currently works as a senior researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests include southern African writing and autobiographical narratives in all their forms. Her book on contemporary South African autobiography was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.