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'An African Childhood': Representing the Self in Alexandra Fuller's ‘An African Childhood’: Representing the self in Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Lauren Liebenberg’s The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam, and Dominique Botha’s False River Carla Eloise Chait A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. Johannesburg, 2017 Declaration I declare that this dissertation is my own work. It is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not previously been submitted for a degree or examination at any other university. ________________________________ Carla Eloise Chait 14 February 2017 ii Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Dr Michelle Adler and Prof. Chris Thurman, for their astute guidance and warm encouragement during the writing of this dissertation. I am grateful for the financial assistance from the National Research Foundation and the University of the Witwatersrand Postgraduate Merit Award. And thank you to my parents for their endless love and support. iii Contents Introduction 1 Section 1: Representing the land 8 Chapter 1: ‘No home’: Representing the land in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight 8 Chapter 2: ‘A shadowy otherworld’: Representing the land in The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam 30 Chapter 3: ‘Our place of origin’: Representing the land in False River 52 Section 2: Representing the child 74 Chapter 4: ‘A kid in war’: Representing the child in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight 74 Chapter 5: ‘Only a child’: Representing the child in The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam 96 Chapter 6: ‘A credulous Gretel’: Representing the child in False River 117 Conclusion 138 Works Cited 148 iv [T]he ‘self’ can only exist conceptually as a representation. (Jay, “Being in the Text” 1046) Introduction In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2010), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson trace the literary representation of the self from medieval religious autobiographical narratives of self-effacement through to the rational Enlightenment self and the individuation of nineteenth-century selfhood. The sovereign, Cartesian self of the nineteenth century is characterized by Smith in “Self, Subject, and Resistance: Marginalities and Twentieth-Century Autobiographical Practice” (1990). Disconnected from bodily desire, this essential self is knowable and definable, and its agency expressed through language. The life of the self becomes “an instantly accessible world,” Smith writes. “Life can be narrated, represented, and that representation, like the self controlling it, is coherent, unified” (11). This is the self of patriarchy and imperialism: a white male hegemonic discourse. The traditional autobiographical ‘I’ is a masculine construct of unequivocal consciousness and self- referentiality, and the essential self of woman is conceived and represented as the negative of man. Smith and Watson limit their focus to the development of life narratives in Western culture, but recognise a history of self-representation beyond this, citing both oral traditions of self- narration in indigenous American, African, and Australian cultures, and histories of self- inscription in China, Japan, India, North Africa, and Islamic-Arabic literature. Even within the limits of the Western literary history that the critics outline are indications of anti-hegemonic discourses, such as the nineteenth-century slave narratives, and a history of women’s self- representation – although Smith and Watson classify these as marginal voices. With social, psychoanalytical, and philosophical developments, however, “the architecture of [white male hegemonic] selfhood” – what might be referred to as the centre – “collapsed into a pile of twentieth-century rubble” (Smith 12). The Subject of Postmodernism lacks a stable, all-knowing centre. Here, the self is always becoming, in a dialogue between the individual and his/her inner and outer worlds. This notion of selfhood is understood within multiple subjectivities, where the person reads what Paul Smith refers to as “ideological scripts […] in order to insert him/herself into them – or not” (xxxv). The self engages with various discourses in various ways, continually constructing and re-embodying an essence. In The Limits of 1 Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001), Leigh Gilmore refers to the “knowing self” (148). Claiming an absolute identity, the sovereign self writes off all other kinds of emerging knowledge. The knowing self doesn’t ask ‘Who am I?’ or tell ‘Who I am,’ but explores how ‘My life can be represented through me.’ If the coherent and unified self is a fiction, then so too is its gendered identity “[d]iscursively constructed rather than biologically given,” although the deconstruction of a patriarchal centre was not accompanied by a challenge to the representation of female selfhood until late in the twentieth century, Smith notes (15). The texts that I will examine in this study are Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2002), Lauren Liebenberg’s The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (2008) and Dominique Botha’s False River (2013). These texts can be positioned theoretically between the centre – white writing – and the margin – women’s writing. In my analysis I will consider how race and gender inform identity and the authors’ representation of the self; how Fuller, Liebenberg, and Botha employ and/or undermine essentialisms of the self in their representation. The self to be examined is the narrating ‘I’ in each text. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight has been marketed as a memoir, although in “Writing home: inscriptions of whiteness/descriptions of belonging in white Zimbabwean memoir-autobiography” (2005), Ashleigh Harris argues that Fuller’s text tends towards autobiography. Harris refers to The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992) to distinguish between the genres, quoting that memoir is “a form of autobiography that gives particular attention to matters of contemporary interest not closely affecting the author’s inner life,” whereas the generically autobiographical self is written “to explain and justify as well as to inform [and is] often confessional” (108). Harris contends that Fuller represents a personal story of the self with the historical moment as background, an argument that I will explore in my analysis of the text. When Lauren Liebenberg was asked by Janet van Eeden in an interview for Litnet if The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam is autobiographical, she responded, “No, it’s definitely not autobiographical! It did, however, begin with my own memories, which gradually drifted into borrowed memories, interwoven with a little wistfulness on my part” (“Lauren Liebenberg”). On the book’s inner cover, all characters and events are qualified as fictitious, but in her Acknowledgments section, Liebenberg recognises her “own extraordinary and wonderful family, who are, it must be said, such fertile ground!” (n.p.) “[I]t’s as though,” Liebenberg tells van Eeden, “I sought to evoke a rather sepia-tinted portrait of the past” 2 (“Lauren Liebenberg”). Because Liebenberg’s writing of the fictitious eight-year old narrator, Nyree O’Callohan, is drawn from her own nostalgic memory and experience of growing up in 1970s Rhodesia, I would classify The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam as a semi- autobiographical novel. Baldick defines the autobiographical/semi-autobiographical novel as a fiction whose setting and characters are based on the author’s own life. False River, after the Dictionary’s definition, is “a kind of autobiography in the form of a novel”: classified as a novel on the front cover; described as a “novel […] based on true events” in the blurb; narrated by Dominique Botha; and dedicated by the author to her parents, siblings, and husband who appear as characters in the text (Baldick 30). Lisa Visser notes that False River has been described variously as ‘fictional memoir’ and ‘non-fiction novel’ (“An intimate relationship”). In conversation with Michiel Heyns at the Cape Town launch of her debut, Botha responded to these attempts to classify her text, referring to the fallibility of memory and the impossibility of relating ‘the whole truth’ of the past. Botha suggests that “these discrete entities,” of genre, are “far more of a continuum,” and also that False River “becomes fiction anyway for people that stand outside the immediate circle of intimates who understand the story” (qtd. in Visser “An intimate relationship”). A similar argument is made by Paul Jay, who suggests that the attempt to differentiate between autobiography and autobiographical fiction is “pointless. For if by ‘fictional’ we mean ‘made- up,’ ‘created,’ or ‘imagined’ – something, that is, which is literary and not ‘real’ – then we have merely defined the ontological status of any text, autobiographical or not” (Being in the Text 16). With the collapse of the ideological truth of essential selfhood, the basis of self- representation – the master discourse of autobiography – was threatened. In The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (1980), William C. Spengemann recognises the now-tenuous association between autobiography and autobiographical representation. “The connections between autobiography and what it appears to describe have become increasingly problematical,” Spengemann notes, “and the differences between autobiography and other written forms correspondingly indistinct, until there no longer seems to be anything that either is or is not autobiography” (188). Gilmore defines the autobiographical ‘I’ as the “rhetorical surrogate” of the self (88). The autobiographical ‘I’ is the author’s literary construct of the self, as are the other selves who are voiced in the author’s fiction, so that the self who writes the text is the only self that is reflected in the text. 3 I will approach my analysis of the self in each of the texts of this study as representational, rather than as defined by generic truth or fact.
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