Collaboratively Writing a Self: Textual Strategies in Margaret McCord’s The Calling of Katie Makanya: A Memoir of South Africa

This paper analyzes The Calling of Katie Makanya (1995) by Margaret McCord as a collaborative autobiography. Katie’s motive for wanting her story to be told is not a desire to find her own voice and identity through narration, but seemingly rather to add to and complete the picture presented in the narrative My Patients Were Zulus (1946), written by Katie’s employer and Margaret McCord’s father, Dr. James B. McCord. Moreover, Margaret McCord is portrayed in The Calling of Katie Makanya as finding it problematic as a white woman to write a black woman’s story. Using the theories of Judith Butler, the analyses show that the context of the narrative’s emergence creates a complex framing of The Calling of Katie Makanya. This paper aims to highlight and examine instances where the effects of this complex framing rise to the surface of the text and create tensions in the narrative.