Autobiography as Mirror and Shadow: The Seductions
of the Self
Marita Golden
Virginia Commonwealth University
I discovered myself as a character and heroine pretty much by accident.
An agent looked at a first novel I had written and after reading it, asked
me why I wasn't writing instead about the quite real and quite compelling
life I was living. A year and a half later when that life began to crumble,
I saw for the first time the narrative and dramatic possibilities imbedded
in a personal experience that I both chose and found myself accepting.
I was a twenty seven year old African American woman who had come of age
in the sixties, been influenced by the political currents of that time,
from the civil rights movement to Black Power to Pan Africanism to Feminism.
One of the members of the first generation of blacks to experience the
society's first significant lurching, often half hearted move towards integration,
I was the first member of my family to gain an undergraduate and graduate
college degree. I attended an Ivy League graduate school, worked in publishing,
began a career in television, then became a free-lance journalist and fell
in love with a Nigerian student whom I married and went to live with in
Lagos, Nigeria. My husbands father had twelve wives and more than sixty
children, a good number of whom had successful careers as farmers, or market
women or village seamstresses or teachers, and businessmen. The progeny
in the Ajiboye clan had studied in London and Bonn as well as attended
universities in Nigeria. They were literate, and illiterate, made yearly
trips to the U.S. and had never been far from the home village of Ijero.
I married into this family not accidentally, I now know in the aftermaths
of my own parents deaths and launched not only a new life but an adventure.
The marriage did not last, more for reasons of tempermental and personality
incompatibility than culture. But when I returned to America I brought
back my son and the seeds of a memoir that has reverberated in many ways
throughout the arc of my writing career. Since Migrations of the Heart
was published in 1983 I have returned to the well of the self specifically
my self again and again for inspiration and ideas for books and essays.
Apparently I just can't get enough of ME but the seduction of the self
as subject and topic and even obsession is not as clear cut and obvious
a process as it may seem. Having written a memoir, a memoir/extended essay,
and a couple of essays about my mother and having just finished a book
about motherhood in which I write about the meaning of motherhood in my
own life, I have discovered that one of the reasons I keep mining my own
life again and again for the texts it can inspire is that in mining my
own life I reach out into the sphere and the landscape of the lives of
others. At its best autobiography or memoir is the creation of a personal
mythology. It is a way to meditate upon and for meaning upon the life already
lived. I have been asked why I wrote about my experience living in Nigeria
in fiction. It never occurred to me to fictionalize an experience so vivid
a nd immediate. I could not have imagined half of what happened to me there.
I had been given not only the outline but the substance of a compelling
story. Fiction I felt would simply not do it justice.. Because I write
both fiction and nonfiction the obvious question is why fiction for some
stories or narratives and fiction for others. The power of fiction for
me is that it isn't real it is made up. I am currently writing a novel
about a family involved in the last thirty years of political change in
American from the civil right movement to the ascension of blacks to congressional
and civic political power and influence. The book was inspired by the life
and death of Ron Brown, former Commerce secretary but the real thrill for
me has been after months of research and interviews to put all that aside
and allow a specific set of characters who have never existed anywhere
before to use, me a a channel to tell a story and become "real"
for me and my readers. I write fiction to create an alternate reality.
I write nonfiction to come to terms with, explore, recreate the reality
I inherited, ended up with, chose, or can't escape anywhere except on the
page. Now back to the point I was trying to make about nonfiction, at its
best a lot less about ego and self exploitation than it is about building
bridges to the lives and histories of others.
When I sat down to begin writing Migrations of the Heart initially all
I could see was barriers. I was twenty nine years old. What wisdom did
I possess? I was an African American woman. Sure Maya Angelou had written
a powerful an classic meditation on her life, but the world wasn't clamoring
to hear the stories of black women and much of my story was to be set in
Africa, a place nobody black or white knew much about or cared about. I
was still deeply wounded from the trauma of divorce and didn't want to
delve into a repository of pain so deep that I sometimes labored under
the illusion that it was entirely original trauma and turmoil, unknown
to anyone else in the world. But after a while, after I re-read Maya Angelou
and Langston Hughes wonderful memoirs and realized that they could not
really tell me how to write my own I began to write. And even in this first
memoir I imagined myself writing for and to an audience of black women
who had been there spiritually with me and who would understand the story
and embrace it. I saw myself not just writing my story but really capturing
and even documenting a pivotal moment in social history. I imagined my
story on a large canvas not a small screen. And so when I wrote about my
parents, the mother who was part of the black migration from the south
and who played the numbers and owned boarding houses and told me one day
that I was going to write books, and the father who told me bed time stories
of Cleopatra and Hannibal and Frederick Douglass and let me ride with him
in his taxi and who did not want me to be w writer but a lawyer because
he wanted me to be financially secure, I wrote about them as thought I
was writing about a hero and a heroine in a novel by Tolstoy or Thackery
or Austen or Hurston or Wright or Baldwin, someone whose appetite for life
was so large that it sparked and satisfied the hunger in other peoples
souls. Even with that first book about myself I did not imagine myself
in a vacuum but rather as part of a community and a continuum. I thing
the best autobiography also interrogates the mythologized , recreated self.
At the conclusion of Migrations of the Heart I ask myself some tough questions
about how and why I loved the man I chose and the meaning of what I sought
and what I gained. The easiest thing to do in memoir is to create villains
and victims, and there are many many best selling well thought of memoirs
that do just that. But when I write about myself I try to write from a
place that positions me both distanced from my text and drenched in it.
The distance allows me to be objective about myself(and it is possible
to do that) and the immersion keeps me hooked into the essence of the fusion
of memory and fact and fiction and forgetting that is the real stuff of
which autobiography is made. I keep writing about myself so that I can
learn more about everybody else. When I wrote Saving Our Sons, which is
a kind of autobiography is my motherhood/raising my son, my son was inevitably
an integral part of the book and in writing about him I "discovered"
him. I chose also to include in that book the voices of other mother and
other sons, so that in this book that takes my son from the streets of
Washington D.C. to the streets of Lagos, Nigeria in a reunion with his
father, the voices and lives and histories of those other mothers and sons
and fathers dialogue with, echo, inform and even shape the voice and reflected
reality of my son and myself
It has been gratifying to know that both Migrations of the Heart have found
a wide and diverse readership that crosses color and gender and age. Migrations
of the Heart is given as a guidebook to black women thinking of marrying
African men ( a use I had not intended ) and it is a part of the syllabai
of literature and Women's Studies and autobiography and even anthropology
classes. Saving Out Sons is used in sociology classes and I've gotten letters
from parents who read it with their sons, and it was shared passed hand
to hand by the women on a floor in the dorms at Virginia Union. I can't
get enough of writing about myself because I have realized how much of
myself is everybody else. In fiction we assume that a good story and unforgettable
characters will hook a broad range of readers. But it is harder to make
the assumption when writing about one's life that it will and can resonate
widely.
Yet the African American narrative of terror and turmoil and loss and redemption
has always resonated in the imagination of American readers. The tradition
of black literature is firmly and solidly built on the slave narrative
a kind of autobiography. Even as we acknowledge that many of the slave
narratives were ghosted and we might say hosted by white writers, it is
symbolically significant that it is in this form that black writing was
gestated. We had no rooms of our own, were not even allowed to learn how
read had no time to write. But we had thoughts and feelings and wisdom
and intelligence and we had most of all our lives. They "belonged"
in one sense to others but it was the striving to make them always belong
to us in the most essential manner that kept us human and gave us a universal,
timeless story. And just as the slave narrative of the past were edited
and shaped to satisfy the cravings of a white audience for terror and drama
and sensations and sensationalism of a kind that was off limits enacted
in the lives of white men and especially women, even today black writers
autobiographies are still shaped largely by white editors and publishing
houses and readers. My own publishers, one of the largest in the world
had one black editor when I signed up with them in 1980 and has one now
18 years later. I have often wondered and I cannot say, how my own rendering
of my life in my books would be different if there had been more African
Americans in pivotal roles shepherding my books into being, if I was writing
for a majority black readership, and critics, if the narrative I write
was not deemed marginal, even as it is accepted.