HISTORY, MEMORY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY AND FICTION1
"In Latin inventio is to find again. It was used in classical rhetoric to described a process by which you find past experiences and rearrange them to given them eloquence and novelty. It's not creating from nothing, it's re-ordering…" —Edward W. Said2
History, memory, autobiography, biography and fiction all intersect in All Under Heaven.
The book follows a historically coherent outline of events occurring in both South Africa and China. We have the framing of the major political movements in China. The 19th century saw crucial changes such as that led by the religious order in 1850-1864, and the restoration of older forms of government in 1898. The 20th century was no less eventful in the history of China, where there was the dramatic overthrow of the dynastic system in 1911, the dismantling of the old political system in the decades that followed, the Japanese invasion of China in 1940, and the victory of the Communist Party in 1949. This is when the People's Republic of China was established, followed by the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Similarly, Accone's narrative follows the major political events in South Africa during the decades related to the founding of Union in 1910, and the entrenching and consolidation of apartheid from 1948 into the early 1970's (Accone is, of course, selective and does not look at some of the other connections between South Africa's liberation history and China, which supported South African revolutionaries such Moses Kotane, among others. For details of Kotane's life and the Chinese connection see, for example, Bunting 1975).
The "architecture of the writing" (to use a phrase of Hofmeyr's in relation to The Lotus People, referred to already)3 reveals a consistent pattern. There are four distinct sections to the book: Sky, Sea, Earth and Fire, which become tropes and metaphors in framing, organizing and ordering the historical and family events and their significance. This is similar to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace, which has sections entitled Fire, Paper, Water, and Earth; both follow the pattern set in Chinese folktale and mythology. We have the impression of the rhythm of a narrative unfolding through time and space - an orderly history, which belies its violence and disruptive nature. There is no epicentre, with the narrative constantly shifting in space and time. The structure of the story is in the form of several narratives, of journeys, of continual movement, of dispersal from one location to another, and the way these intersect and criss-cross.
Medalie rightly points out that the book "shows a profound respect throughout for the pastness of the past, for what one may call its integrity. It is informed throughout by a sophisticated historical consciousness"4.
Memory plays a pivotal role in the construction of the narrative. Accone revives a history stored away in the archives of his family memory. It was his mother Jewel, Accone notes, who "tended the flames of memory". Jewel kept a repository of press cuttings which provided Accone with an invaluable source for his writing. In this it is similar to Hong Kingston's China Men which relates the story of the first Chinese immigrant men in the United States together with autobiographical details and stories passed down the family5.
All Under Heaven bears out Sarah Nuttall's insightful analysis of memory work in South Africa at the present time, and I find her comment on other texts (for example, Mandela's A Long Walk to Freedom and Mamphele's A Life) relevant to a reading of Accone's text in this context. In Accone's text too the historical provides a "narrative frame for remembrance.”6 In “speaking memory” Accone tries to "negotiate or recast the relation between the public and the private”. There is here as well a "choreographing of a political and social script”7 which is interfaced or overlaid with the family and individual history, but also with imaginative recreation of the lives of his ancestors. We have to appreciate, too, the extent to which Accone's text is an attempt at representation of lived reality, and the way he was influenced by other writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston for example, is this process. It is not far- fetched to suggest, with Guy Debord, on whom Accone presented a paper8, that "all that once was directly lived has become mere representation"9.
Accone draws the contours of the historical context, using the historical as a frame for personal remembering and vice versa; indeed Accone shows how historical events affected the trajectory of the family history and presented the context for remembering. Public memory is intertwined with personal memory. This gives credence to Nuttall’s reflective questioning:
…but if collective memory is the outcome of agency, in South Africa, it may often seem that we need to approach the construction of memory from the other way round: Is it less, here, that private memories shape collective remembrance than vice versa? Does the challenge then become how we can create a collective memory that is multiple, flickering with the many meanings that individual experience can collectively bring to it?10
Part of Accone's own intention is to imbue and enhance the collective with individual experience (and thereby rewrite the collective), to write of small events and people rather than of large ones.
Through his creative approach Accone gives depth and variety to public remembering, eschewing the totalising, univocal, generalised, selective and stylised writing of formal, conventional history. This perspective, which undergirds much of post-colonial thinking, has been developed by theorists such as Foucault and Hayden White, among others, who have drawn attention to history as linguistic/textual construction. Accone is quite clear about moving away from dominant, metanarratives. As he notes, "I do not ascribe to viewing history solely through the prisms of great events and important characters. That approach to the stories of humankind visits upon so-called ordinary people what the historian EP Thompson dubbed, unforgettably, 'the enormous condescension of posterity' ". He sees it as a duty to reclaim the hidden and suppressed histories of ordinary people, thereby redefining "history" and historiography and, indeed, "liberating" these very processes:
Most of humankind is anonymous, and even more so in an age where the media give ever greater opportunities to ever fewer people. But lives lived within families and communities, rather than on the national and international stage, have great value. As another of my favourite historians Eric Hobsbawn, notes, ' …collectively…such men and women are major historical actors. What they do and think, makes a difference. It can and has changed culture and the shape of history. 11
Tracing the story of three generations, Accone presents a biographical/autobiographical account of his family's history. The narrative begins at the turn of the century, around 1911, almost a hundred years ago. This is also the time when three brothers from Accone's ancestral family leave China to go to the United States. It is Accone's great-grandfather, Langshi, who plans to come to South Africa. His great-great grandfather was Tian, 75 years old, and still working in the rice fields and as a fish farmer; he also loved poetry and epic novels in Chinese literature. Tian remains in China and sees his son and grandson leave kith, kin and hearth for a distant land.
All Under Heaven may be seen as the story of Accone himself (he is also known as Ah Nung), as he follows principally the paternal and maternal line of his mother, Jewel. He goes back in time tracing the story of the origins of migration of his ancestral family members. Ah Kwok, or Ah Leong (a name he assumes later), becomes Jewel's father and, with Langshi, are the first or original immigrants in the family.
Accone propels his story forward by working as the principal narrator, but by identifying with and foregrounding different protagonists at different stages of the narrative. He tries especially to tell the story from the vantage point of his grandfather, Ah Kwok. He traces Ah Kwok's story from the time he left China as a little boy with his hopes and dreams, through his adult years in South Africa, to the time he died, still in South Africa. The initial story is told through the imagined experiences of a young and impressionable Ah Kwok, who was a eleven years old when he left China with his father Langshi.
Ah Kwok will later marry Gertie (Jewel's mother and Accone's grandmother) when he comes to South Africa and settles here. And we also follow the trail of Gertie's ancestry, and identify closely with her. The parallel history of her family is told largely through her experiences. Most importantly, their stories are Accone’s story, showing that autobiography and biography are intertwined in All Under Heaven.
While the structure and content then charts a broad historical trajectory that follows the lives of his own family against the background of historical events in China and South Africa, Accone has imaginatively recreated the narrative as one would do in a work of fiction, filling out the larger historical facts with small and intimate details, and embedding ethnographic descriptions in a story-telling tradition12
In order to achieve his multiple purposes Accone produces a narrative that is an interesting balance of fact and fiction. As Accone himself notes, "If I had to label my work, I would describe it as creative non-fiction"13. Remembering, retrieving, restoring - are all advanced by Accone's imaginative approach. de Kock draws attention to the interplay of various aspects in Accone's writing:
Accone's art lies in adjusting the scale: rendering intricately embroidered, miniaturised lives against the panoramic contexts in which they are placed …An artist of scale, then, who has rendered small lives as large in impact, and a previously obscure ethnic group central to the South African mosaic, Accone also plays creatively with the proportions of documentary history and imaginative rendering…The story, ostensibly a factual rendering, is imbued with poetic and intuitive moments which break the boundaries of strictly observed biography14
Accone achieves this largely through the verbal texture of his writing and the textual mechanisms he uses. And this 'texture' may be seen in both the evocative descriptiveness and the inventive narrative techniques. de Kock points out that "Not only does All Under Heaven bring into view successive generations and their crossings to and from the Chinese heartland, but it does so in old-Hollywood style, in keeping with Accone's own immersion in film culture. The tone is dramatic, the characters cast in wide-screen cinematic sweep, and the story structured as a series of visually achieved counterpointed journeys."
Steven Connor's general point on postmodern literature's link between text and the world is, arguably, relevant here: "The link between text and world is reforged in postmodernism not by an effacement of the text in the interests of a return to the real, but by an intensification of textuality such that it becomes co-extensive with the real"15. Connor states that such literature denies "the possibility of a clearly sustainable distinction between history and fiction, by highlighting the fact that we can only ever know history through various forms of representation or narrative. In this sense, all history is a kind of literature". We have become more circumspect about both literature's and history's institutionalisation and the over-dependence on the referentiality of a text16.
In his analysis of Accone's writing, Medalie sees the imaginative as integral to producing social history, and suggests that such an approach, rather than casting doubt on authenticity, actually enhances it.
A truly creative rendition of history will bring to light the unpredictability that lies within expected trajectories. All Under Heaven does that and more. It has all the characteristics of a good novel: the drama, the complexity of character and relationships, the dexterous manipulation of time and space, the scrupulous attention to language. But the final product, these novelistic strategies aside, is, of course, not fiction. Darryl has chosen instead to turn the experiences of his family into a work of social history.17
Indeed, Accone uses what he knows of his particular family and that of other families in the South African Chinese context, "embroidering", in his words (and that of de Kock's), his narrative to produce a text that is both chronicle and imaginative rendition. His approach bears out Stephen Clingman's view (Clingman has produced a notable biography on Nadine Gordimer), who stated in the introduction to his evocative biography on Bram Fischer, that in the writing of a life one must hear voices:
Those multiple and varied voices that enter into the self and provide the ground for its own re-articulation and identity. We must delve back in time and space to hear them, to see their presence in the identity they helped fashion, and the way the life both absorbed and transformed them, turning them into a different kind of utterance in the world. We must find those layers, as in a personal archaeology - competing, superimposed, fractured, intersecting - that underlie the visible landscape, that give it its inner shape and deeper modulations.18
In writing "the history of a Chinese family in South Africa" Accone has clearly opened himself to "hearing voices" in many different senses: he produces a text where there is interplay between "received memory,"19 and the memory of his own experiences, and between an imagined and imaginative reconstruction of the nuances of different historical, social and cultural moments, achieved through meticulous research and the use of evocative language.
C. Wright Mills' point (an old one, admittedly, but still valid I think) of the "sociological imagination" seems to me to be relevant here. For Mills the sociological imagination "is a quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities"20; it enables people to "grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society" 21.
In South African literary studies the need to develop a more historical approach has been an important challenge, especially during the apartheid era. Certainly the present moment is a time when both disciplines, literature and history, will gain much from a critical, intertextual approach.
1 This section, with a few aspects from the rest of the paper, was presented at a symposium, "Fact Bordering on Fiction", at the English Department, University of Stellenbosch, in June 2005.
2 Viswanathan, Gauri. [ed]. 2001. Power, Politics and Culture - interviews with Edward W Said. Bloomsbury: London. p456
3 Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2003. "Review: Aziz Hassim, The Lotus People." STE Publishers: Johannesburg
4 Medalie, David. "Speech for the Launch of Darryl Accone's All Under Heaven." 4 May 2004, Johannesburg. p1
5 See Susheila Nasta in Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. Routledge, 2004. p171
6 Nuttall, Sarah and Carli Coetzee [eds]. 1998. Negotiating the past - The making of memory in South Africa. Oxford University Press: Oxford. p77
7 Negotiating the past - The making of memory in South Africa. p76
8 Accone, Darryl. 2003. "Passageways: Revisiting Self, The Society of the Spectacle and Moby-Dick in the wake of September 11." Fourth Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture delivered by Accone at the University of Natal [now University of KwaZulu-Natal], 2003.
9 Debord, Guy. 1957. The Society of the Spectacle.
10 Negotiating the past - The making of memory in South Africa. p88
11 Accone, Darryl. 'A Chinese Childhood in Sixties South Africa.' [in Chinese, translated from English], HK Writer 31, Hong Kong, 2005.
12 For general discussion see Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. p33
13 'A Chinese Childhood in Sixties South Africa.'
14 de Kock, Leon. "Review of All Under Heaven - Writing in the Margin". In Sunday Times Lifestyle, July 11, 2004.
15 Connor, Steven. 1989. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Basil Blackwell: Oxford. p127
16 Walia, Shelley. 2001. Edward Said and the Writing of History. Icon Books: Cambridge, UK. p16
17 "Speech for the Launch of Darryl Accone's All Under Heaven." p4
18 Clingman, Stephen. 1998. Bram Fischer - Afrikaner Revolutionary. Cape Town: David Philip; University of the Western Cape, Bellville: Mayibuye Books; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Prologue.
19 'A Chinese Childhood in Sixties South Africa.'
20 All Under Heaven. p7
