Reverie qua ‘Worldliness’ in the Wilderness Texts: the Autobiographical Fiction of Es’kia Mphahlele and Chabani Manganyi

Abstract

Written from the culmination point of exile in the universities of Denver and Yale, the two fictional autobiographies of Es’kia Mphahlele and Noel Chabani Manganyi mobilize reverie to hold in counterpoise the harsh reality of hostile home and exile. The article argues, through a reading of these texts via ideas of double consciousness and temporality, that we need to interpret reverie at the level of the interpenetration of the subject and object as both counterpoint to and counterpart of the ‘I’ and ‘me’ of fictional autobiography. These fictional autobiographies are framed in the double temporality of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of exile, the most powerful trope of which is the near-escapism of reverie itself in the course of fantasies of violence. The fictional autobiography of exile – what is here called the wilderness text – becomes a line of flight imbued with a worldliness (a being-in-the world) that puts the body at stake as it contemplates and solidifies existing reality by doubling its representational time by means of reverie.