Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

Chapter 7: Textual Memories: Autobiographical Writing in a Time of Uncertainty

The birth of the “new South Africa” brought with it a proliferation of commentaries and essays, autobiographies, memoirs, personal reminiscences, and realist documentaries that explore the quandaries of social institutions and individuals as they attempt to deal honestly and forthrightly with the multiplelegaciesoftyranny,repression,andrebellion.AsAtholFugardargued, “[After 1994] I felt free to tell personal stories that I would have thought of as an indulgence during those years of apartheid.1As a kind of first-person narrative convention, these ”mementos” have entered the public discourse as fact-based stories that reflect their particular time and place in history. Autobiographical writing in the aftermath of historical trauma is a cultural manifestation of the personal need to rid oneself of the burden of history, or a kind of therapeutic undertaking designed to reconcile oneself with the past.2 Yet individual memories only become meaningful when they become social, that is, when they are shared and cross over into the realm of collective-cultural remembrance.3 The truth-telling impulse inherent in such witness literature reflects the collective engagement of writers committed to the process of putting the past into proper perspective in a “drama of selfdefinition ,” or the textual creation of the “new South Africa” through firstperson testimonials.4 One of the great attractions of all writing—fictional, historiographical, autobiographical—isitsabilitytoresistthetemptationtoconformtocurrent 7 Textual Memories Autobiographical Writing in a Time of Uncertainty 163 164 textual memories fashion. Writing provides an imaginative space for the freedom of expression where it is possible to entertain alternatives to the status quo. Thus, literature and other kinds of creative writing can sometimes lead, rather than follow, historical trends, introducing new ideas and ways of thinking from which subsequent political developments can emerge.5 This prescient quality of imaginatively producing the future before it actually comes into being is present in fiction writing, plays and theatrical performances, visual arts and film.6 If national state-crafting occupies the center stage in mapping the transition to parliamentary democracy in post-apartheid South Africa, then autobiographiesandpersonalmemoirsarelocatedonthemargins .Autobiographies occupy the uncertain “in-between” place between the “self-fashioning” and “truth-telling”builtintopersonalnarratives.Theyofferaglimpseatthehuman geographies of storytelling. The power—and hence the value—of autobiographies is that they work to recuperate hidden voices, whether pushed out of sight or erased. Personal memories cut through place and take unexpected detours. They can escape memorialization and ossification. Autobiographies can be the residue that remains after official memory has obliterated alternative histories.7 Yet valorization of autobiographical writing is not without its limitations. One must take care in looking to personal, “I-witness” accounts to provide a privileged route to the recovery of historical truth. There is a difference between autobiographical remembrance and historical memory. One way to grasp this distinction is to distinguish between the personal act of remembering (autobiography) and the shared activity of memorializing (writing history). Autobiographical writing exemplifies the uncertainty of memory. As a particular type of recollecting the past, it only offers fragments of a dispersedmemory ,condensingtimeintomemorableepisodes,imposingsilences on uncomfortable truths, and erasing that which is deemed irrelevant. If sites of memory evolve with the passage of time despite our expectations of durability, autobiographies that valorize, commemorate, or celebrate events and places prove even more porous. “I-witnessing” dispenses with the conventional protocols of truth-telling, substituting instead subjective remembrance for historical accuracy, anecdote for empirically grounded evidence, and opinion for analysis.8 Because it is constructed by looking backward, textual memories 165 memory is always open to revision and embellishment. Because “I-witness” accounts about “what really happened” can easily slip into what might have happened or what should have happened, one must remain vigilant about the reliability of autobiography as a key to “truth” and historical accuracy.9 The idealized formulation of the classic autobiography—the retrospective , chronological narration of a coherent subject reflecting on past events with which the writer was intimately connected—has come under intense scrutiny in recent years. The theoretical debates surrounding life-writing as a literary form have resulted in a destabilization of the categories of fact and fiction, thereby calling into question the reliability and accuracy of autobiographical memory.10 On the one hand, some argue that memory and history almost always stand in an adversarial relationship to each other. For example , poststructuralist theorists such as Paul John Eakin have gone so far as to argue that all self-narration, including autobiography, is a kind of fabrication or fiction.11 Because...