The Individuated Collective Utterance: Lack, Law and Desire in the Autobiographies of Ellen Kuzwayo and Sindiwe Magona

Abstract

This article signposts the discussion of autobiographical selfing through figures of cultural memory that are a function of double consciousness and double temporality. Two exemplary autobiographies, one by Ellen Kuzwayo and one by Sindiwe Magona, are shown to evince complex ontological formations between which the gap in representing the self of experience and the writing self is radically repeated in the multiplicity of individual articulation of collective agency. The paradox of individual-collective articulation bespeaks the “gap” of writing in double temporality. The article explores that “gap” between Darstellung and Vertretung1 on the premise that it evocatively refers to the slippage or instability of “Truth” written from the exergue of margins of the borderline texts of remembrance in the autobiographies of two black women. For these women’s writing runs parallel – and gives testimony – to their central involvement in the urban township communities as social workers and mothers or, if you will, private and public figures. In this politicised private-public dialectical movement, the autobiographies under discussion take on a Kafkaesque dimension of what Deleuze & Guattari (1986) consistently call a “minor literature”. The article ultimately brings to view the extent to which the mark of history as a territorial machine is inscribed upon the body of the autobiographical subject, and how it produces a representational crisis that unwittingly provides – rather than strictly regulates – the conditions of possibility for even more radical memoric testimony to history and becoming in self-writing.