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Narrating a White Africa: autobiography, race and history

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01436590500033784

1360-2241

Tony Simoes da Silva,

Philosophy and Social Theory

Abstract The last three decades have witnessed a radical transformation in the political and social make-up of Southern Africa, evidenced especially than in the areas of race and power relations. ‘Narrating a White Africa: autobiography, race and history’ examines the ways in which life-writing forms are being ‘conscripted’ to make sense of the fraught and traumatic political and historical conditions of postcolonial Africa. That in the context of life-writing this occurs through the highly charged notions of intimate suffering and traumatic aftermath highlights the significance of the link between race, identity and history in contemporary memoirs by White African writers. Notes E Shohat and R Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: multiculturalism and the media, London; New York: Routledge, 1994, p 344. JM Coetzee, Boyhood, London: Vintage, 1998; A Fuller, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, London: Picador, 2002. After F Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952; H Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994; T Morrison, Playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, it is wise to consider the White self as anything but a stable construct, hence the qualifying marks. S Nuttall and C. Coetzee, eds., Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p 75. S. Smith & J. Watson, Getting a life: everyday uses of autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996, p 14. See S VanZanten Gallagher, A Story of South Africa: JM Coetzee's Fiction in Context, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991; a more radical stance is taken by G Farred, 2001 . Awarded the Booker Prize and arguably the one work that confirmed Coetzee's Nobel award, Disgrace has been read by some South African critics as a self-indulgent portrait of the place, and function of whiteness in contemporary South Africa. The award might in itself be read as one of the most interesting and unsettling ways in which texts from certain parts of the world have become intrinsic to a reinterpretation of the collapse of the British Empire. For an interesting treatment of this thesis, see G Huggan, ‘The Postcolonial Exotic: Rushdie's Booker of Bookers’, Transition, 64 1994, pp 22 – 29. T Eagleton, “Towards a Science of the Text”. In T Eagleton and D Milne, eds., Marxist Literary Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p 303, pp 296 – 327. The phrase is used by D Pifer, 1994 , as the title of his own memoir of a childhood lived South Africa, prior to his departure for the US. D Pifer, Innocents in Africa, London: Granta Books, 1995. J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands. Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1974: Life and Times of Michael K, London: Secker & Warburg, 1983; Waiting for the Barbarians, London: Secker & Warburg, 1980; Disgrace, London: Secker & Warburg, 1999. The emphasis on the relationship between mother and son is actually a particularly crucial one, in view of the text's concern with masculinity and whiteness, and the way women both challenge and support a manly version of being White. That, however, is not a point I can develop here. W Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, London: Fontana Press, 1992, p 245, pp 245 – 255. K Blixen, Out of Africa, London: Putnam, 1937. A number of other life-writing narratives by White Africans reflect a similar awareness of the way in which whiteness (pre)determines the narrative of Africa as it emerges in R Malan's My Traitor's Heart, 1990; and much of B Breytenbach's work and even D Wylie's Dead leaves: two years in the Rhodesian War, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002. N Miller, Getting personal: feminist occasions and other autobiographical acts, London: Routledge, 1991, p 24. It is worth noting that there is little new in the concept of White people using life-writing to reflect or to document their experiences in Africa, and in this case, in South Africa. In addition to Boyhood and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight these range from aesthetically complex texts such as Coetzee's Boyhood overtly fictionalised sequel to Boyhood, Youth, 2002; D Pifer's memoir, Innocents in Africa, 1994; to the earnestly political and experimental writings of B Breytenbach, especially in Season in Paradise, 1990, Memoir of an Albino Terrorist, 1984, and Dogheart, 1998; G Slovo's bitterly poignant meditation on her childhood, Every Secret Way, 1998, to less ambitious but far more popular works such as R Malan's My Traitor's Heart, 1990; and C Hope's White Boy Running, 1988, to others whose only distinguishing characteristic is their contribution to South Africa's history, such as H Joseph's If This Be Treason, London, Deutsch, 1963; H Suzman's, In No Uncertain Terms: A South African Memoir, New York: Knopf, 1993. J Cartwright, book review of Disgrace, quoted on back cover of paperback version P Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris: Seuil, 1975. L R Anderson, Autobiography, London: Routledge, 2001, p 91. R Gagnier, Subjectivities: a history of self-representation in Britain, 1832 – 1920, New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p 4. L Gilmore, The limits of autobiography: trauma and testimony, Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, 2001, p 22. A similar case might be made with reference to Coetzee's text, as a recent scathing attack on the novelist by G Farred demonstrates: see G Farred, “Bulletproof Settlers: The Politics of Offence in the New South Africa” in Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader, New York and London: New York University Press, 1997. C Achebe, “An Image of Africa: racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,” The Massachusetts Review, 18, 1977, pp 782 – 794; C Miller, Blank darkness: Africanist discourse in French, Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1985; A JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983; R Wheeler, The complexion of race: categories of difference in eighteenth-century British culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Gillmore, 2001, p 27. V.Y. Mudimbe, The invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2187981.stm Conrad's Heart of Darkness, The Massachusetts Review, 18, 1977, pp 782 – 794. R Malan, My Traitor's Heart, London: Vintage, 1991; C Hope, White Boy Running, London: Abacus, 1991. Benjamin, 1992, p 248.