Transculturing Auto/Biography

Forms of Life Writing

Rosalia Baena

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317970064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Rosalia Baena's theoretically challenging, analytical volume of essays, explores the diversity of shapes that transcultural life writing takes, demonstrating how it has become one of the most dynamic and productive literary forms of self-inscription and self-representation.

Expanding much of the contemporary criticism on life writing, which tends to centre on content, the essays highlight that reading contemporary forms of life writing from a literary perspective is a rich field of critical intervention that has been overlooked because of recent cultural studies' concerns with material issues. To read life writing as primarily cultural texts undercuts much of its value as a complex dynamic of cultural production, where aesthetic concerns and the choice and manipulation of form serve as signifying aspects to experiences and subjectivities.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Prose Studies.

Shifting Forms of Sovereignty

Immigrant parents and ethnic autobiographers

William Boelhower

In Mark Mathabane's autobiography Kaffir Boy in America, published in 1989, there is a singularly dramatic moment on the plane which he titles "Panic at the Airport" (Mathabane, 1989: 3). The year is 1978, he is 18 years old, and he is leaving Alexandra, that mile-square South African ghetto he grew up in, to go to the United States. He desperately wants to go but he is also uneasy about leaving his mother, brother, and five sisters behind:

I boiled with impotent rage. Was I doing the right thing in leaving? Shouldn't I stay and fight it out like all the rest? My heart was torn [...].

I left. The instinct to survive, sharpened by years of living under the nightmare of police oppression, without freedom, without hope, told me that leaving was the right thing to do and that someday the reasons would be made clear. But guilt continued to torture my heart

(4—5).

His "burning desire to go to college in America" spurs him forward, that and "the miracle of my being awarded a tennis scholarship by an American college" (6). On the way to the airport, however, his friend, Nditwane, tells him it was "our African gods, the gods of our ancestors... [who] made this miracle possible" (6).

After going through a police roadblock successfully, his friend drops him off at the airport, where he is the only black passenger in sight. He stares his way past "an exasperated policeman" and thrills over "the giddying and unbelievable prospect that in a few hours I would be beyond their reach" (11). Again his rage surges up and he curses the police. He even entertains the idea of tearing his passbook to shreds and throwing it in their faces. "No," he exults, "they had not broken me" (11). Even when he is finally seated in the British Airways jumbo jet, he continues to think of the police: "once they invade one's consciousness it takes forever to get rid of them" (12). It is at this point that we have the scene of panic:

Suddenly I became acutely aware that in a few minutes I would be beyond their reach. With this realization my sense of reality wavered — doubts whirled in my mind that I would not be allowed to go....I had heard of black people at the last minute being hauled off planes and flung into detention to prevent their leaving South Africa and telling the world the truth about black life under apartheid.

I began trembling uncontrollably and my clothes were drenched in a cold sweat. My eyes darted anxiously about the plane. Stricken with anxiety, I felt dizzy and faint. A sharp pain pierced my breastbone....

We taxied down the runway. I scarcely believed it was happening. Tears came to my eyes. The strange symptoms gradually went away... I sighed heavily several times. We were airborne. I was free at last

(13).

I have quoted at length because I find in this scene a principle of distinction that gives Mathabane's narrative a special radiance and helps to define the cultural work immigrant autobiographies do. Essentially, this principle concerns what it means to "[be] in a sovereign manner" or, in Georges Bataille's words, what it means "to have a sovereign existence" (Bataille, 1991: 135, 134). The above scene is a fierce account of a critical moment in the life of a ghetto boy who decides in his heart to make a leap that will carry him beyond his life of poverty and apartheid, but also beyond his family. The force that compels him forward is not reason, but "burning desire" and "the instinct to survive." He rages, exults, trembles, feels guilty, and, of course, sheds tears. The world he knows begins to shift, he feels dizzy and faint, he sweats into his clothes, suffers chest pain. Remember, too, that this intense little drama — "I scarcely believed it was happening" — ends when he is finally airborne.

The narrator himself tells us what this "miracle" is all about: "I was free at last." The scene's heartrending iridescence imbues the rest of the autobiography with its special light. Mathabane's limit-experience is familiar enough and, along with the many variations we can find in other such narratives, it is the defining moment of the immigrant autobiographical wager. But its ordinary extraordinariness also demands that we learn to take its measure. As Bataille reminds us in the preface to "Consumption," volume 1 of his trilogy The Accursed Share, "[T]he object of my research cannot be distinguished from the subject at its boiling point" (1991: 10). The commotion Mathabane recounts gives us a glimpse into the kind of deep subjectivity immigrant autobiographies invest in. He then stakes out its boundaries by posting two queries: "What could I do? There was no turning back" and "Who or what could I turn to when the going got rough?" (Mathabane, 1989: 20). Given this lack of light, the spontaneous flaring up of his own exposed self becomes decisive: "I had nothing left to depend upon but my own determination to succeed." And again, "To me this freedom and opportunity were worth everything, including all the self-doubt, the fears, the risks" (20).

In such circumstances he is willing to spend his own intimacy, even as it is mirrored in another kind of high-flying sovereignty. Waiting to be transferred to Gatwick Airport where he will board his plane for Atlanta, Georgia, Mathabane pulls a well-thumbed booklet from his bag and begins to read. Under the spell of the words, he unwinds this scripture as if by heart: "'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness ...'" (17). As Kaffir Boy in America suggests, in engaging the issue of sovereignty immigrant autobiographers pursue two horizons of sense, one juridical, the other biological. Before returning to the intimate physiology of the latter, I would first like to sketch out the former's commitment to the unalienable rights associated with peoples in constitutional democracies.

In his autobiography Hunger of Memory, first published in 1982, Richard Rodriguez says his father "left Mexico in frustration and arrived in America [with] great expectations... of becoming an engineer" (Rodriguez, 1983: 55). What followed, however, was "a dark succession of warehouse, cannery, and factory jobs." Then fatigue entered his bones and "everything changed" (55). And yet even this defeat is tethered to the values of political democracy as he encourages his son to get an education and speak English at home. Somewhat humorously, it is when an old nun reads to him from the biographies of early American presidents that young Richard "sensed for the very first time some possibility of fellowship between a reader and a writer, a communication, never intimate like that I heard spoken... at home..., but one nonetheless personal" (60).

It is this shared public sphere, in which citizens are united by "common sympathies" (Rawls, 1999: 24), that allows the sophisticated narrator the illusion that he is addressing a general reader — "[s]omeone with a face erased; someone of no particular race or sex or age or Weather" (182). Perhaps Rodriguez is being parabolic in schematizing his public in so abstract a manner. Nonetheless, his appeal to a general reader points to the presence of a shared we-speak in which the higher law of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights extends beyond the narrow political domain to permeate the moral character of the nation's people and its domestic society (Rawls, 1999: 23 — 24). Rodriguez père's "great expectations" hinge on one of immigrant autobiographies necessary truths: namely, constitutional rhetoric as a discursive a priori.

Rights rhetoric is not only an unrevoked part of the ritual of American citizenship, it also comprises the juridical horizon of sense informing narratives like Mark Mathabane's and Richard Rodriguez's. No matter how insistently immigrant autobiographical narrators present us with a dowry of suffering, humiliation and poverty, there is still no rights-free zone in their critical scanning of American society. On the contrary, the gap between expectation and experience tends to increase rather than diminish the critical voltage our rights-sensitive narrators often unleash. As an example of Rawls's "realistic Utopia" (1999: 11 — 12), the United States is founded on the category of the people as the ultimate source of sovereignty. If we keep this in mind, it is easier to understand the potentially allegorical fervor of immigrant autobiographical trajectories.

Autobiographical scrutiny of the national territory, however partial, inevitably gives way to an autopsy of the nation's foundational order. How could it be otherwise if, for example, the immigrant is one of Maxine Hong Kingston's Gold Mountain sojourners in her partially autobiographical account Chinamen (1980), who arrives in New York in a box below ship, and when the smuggler hurries him off on wobbly legs he is confronted with the following sight:

[T]he smuggler said, "Look," and pointed into the harbor. The father thrilled to see sky and skyscrapers. "There." A gray and green giantess stood on the gray water; her clothes, though seeming to swirl, were stiff in the wind.... She was a statue and she carried fire and a book. "Is she a goddess of theirs?" the father asked. "No," said the smuggler, "they don't have goddesses. She's a symbol of an idea." He was glad to hear that the Americans saw the idea of Liberty so real that they made a statue of it

(Kingston, 1980: 52 — 53).

When the father leaves the ship, he enters the Golden Mountain, but the noise and size of New York quickly diminish to Chinatown. Kingston’s own father agrees, “Yes, a magical country....The Beautiful Nation was glorious, exactly the way they had heard it would be” (57).

After 15 years, one Chinaman father finally sends a boat ticket to his wife. When she arrives, he takes her to see the Statue of Liberty. After she sees all the sites, she says, "I have seen everything. Wonderful. Wonderful. Everything's possible on the Golden Mountain" (70). And yet so much depended on 15 years in a Chinese laundry. The cost of exudation raises the notion of expenditure which the Chinaman took for granted beyond the bounds of the money economy. One of the author's grandfathers, a certain Ah Goong, who worked for the railroad in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, concludes, "A man ought to be made of tougher material than flesh. Skin is too soft. Our bones ought to be filled with iron" (134). In effect, scenes of work in immigrant autobiographies are seldom redeemable; more often than not they accumulate a debt for which there is no material equivalent. As the Chinese railroad men burrowed into the mountains with their nitroglycerine, Kingston reports, "Human bodies skipped through the air like puppets and made Ah Goong laugh crazily as if the arms and legs would come together again" (136). Such sequences make immigrant autobiographies sacrificial texts. But if they leave us dispirited as wards of a shared democratic heritage, it is because the spirit of political sovereignty has seduced reader and autobiographical narrator alike into acting as witnesses of the cleavage.

The signature of immigrant autobiography as a text-type lies in still other kinds of juxtapositions. As Eva Hoffman observes in Lost in Translation, first published in 1989, "I keep going back and forth over the rifts, not to heal them but to see that I... have been on both sides" (Hoffman, 1991: 273). The sides in question are Cracow, Poland, and Canada and the United States. As for the rifts, opened in April 1959 when her family left Poland to escape the expanding wave of anti-Semitism, they are more than geographical. At one point the narrator pleads, "Can I jump continents as if skipping rope?" (45). As Lost in Translation repeatedly intimates, the defining mark of immigrant autobiographical practice lies in its attempt to hold the juxtaposed cultures and countries together not only as part of a sequence but also as the natural source of comparison, contrast, and memory. Hoffman explains, the price of emigrations is "being cut off from one part of one's own story" (242). Later, she will insist again, "I've become caught between stories" (268). This splitting leads immigrant autobiographers to structure their texts spatially, around rifts. One must be “constantly on the alert” because all the coordinates have become scrambled (158). Or, as Hoffman says of her father, “The structure of the space within which he moves has changed” or “Everything seems to be open, but where is the point of entry?” (128).

The method-word that functions as a linguistic tic in Hoffman is triangulation. She is always trying to triangulate, not only to "find a common ground" (205), but also "to unravel the new hierarchy and order of things" (135). Because of the rifts caused by immigration, immigrant autobiographers must assume the office of topological hermeneutics. Hoffman characterizes this state of mind as follows: "it is impossible to perceive the meaning of any one thing without knowing the pattern of the surrounding things" (151). For her, narrative sovereignty involves the constant effort to coordinate foreground and background as well as the Cracow of her childhood and the schooling process in Vancouver and various universities in the United States. In Kaffir Boy in America a black American warns Mathabane as they are leaving the plane in Atlanta, Georgia, "You will find a lot of South Africa in this country, brother. Keep your eyes wide open all the time. Never let down your guard or you're dead" (Mathabane, 1989: 23). Narrative sovereignty, in other words, inevitably depends on both the juridical and biological horizons of sense mentioned above.

It is not enough to know the Bill of Rights by heart. When Mathabane first walks into the airport at Atlanta, he stares about him with a sense of childhood wonder, hardly able to believe his eyes: "I felt the difference between South Africa and America instantly. The air seemed pervaded with freedom and hope and opportunity" (24). Later, though, he will conclude, "I had been deceived about the glories of life in America....What did this great American freedom mean?" (72). As he moves through and outside of the academic world, Mathabane begins to experience the subtle tactics of racism and discrimination often suffered by American blacks and is also exposed to scenes of poverty and degradation in Georgia's hinterland. At this point he understands that the country's higher law was mostly an ideal and "not the actual reality" (18). When applied to the people as a political category, sovereignty appeared to be a mere fiction, good for whites but not for people of color. With the limited prospects of political sovereignty in full view, the immigrant autobiographer turns back to another horizon of sense, the biological, which is also an intrinsic category of the people.

The sovereign people

Due to the juridical horizon of sense implemented by a constitutional ethos, the territory of the United States remains an intensely emblematic landscape and symbolic ground for political democracy. More than other text-types immigrant autobiographies cast a critical beam on the civil and political culture of the country, precisely because of the contingent status of their protagonists. And this status recapitulates the deep split that informs the concept of the people as sovereign subject. In effect, the juridical category of the people carries within it a fundamental biopolitical fracture ...