In this essay, Nigerian author Chika Unigwe discusses the challenges involved in writing the biographical novel The Black Messiah (currently published only in Dutch translation as De zwarte messias), ...which imaginatively retraces the life of Olaudah Equiano. Unigwe’s first attempt to reimagine Equiano took the form of a children’s book in the late 1990s. This project immediately drew her attention to the two primary, antithetical difficulties of writing biographical fiction: on the one hand, one needs to rely on historical information to recreate the past accurately but, on the other, fiction — being art — cannot impart a great deal of such information without becoming too didactic.
Unigwe abandoned this early project but eventually took it up again in the form of an adult novel. Some of her creative choices in writing this book were guided by the imaginative spaces left in Equiano’s autobiography — for example, he hardly mentions his white wife and remains vague about his time as a plantation overseer. This prompted a series of questions for Unigwe to explore: how did a black man experience an interracial marriage in the eighteenth century? How did Equiano handle “stubborn” slaves as an overseer? How could a twenty-first century writer recreate Equiano’s state of mind without judging him by contemporary standards? There were additional challenges too. One pertained to the type of language to be used to recount Equiano’s story, another to the constraints involved in writing about a real figure, many aspects of whose life and death are on the historical record. Ultimately, Unigwe tried to find a balance between fact and fiction, history and imagination, so as to highlight the magnitude of Equiano’s accomplishments, while also exploring him as a human being whose story remains particularly relevant today.
While saving women and children first is standard practice at times of historical upheaval, during the Holocaust women and children were often killed first, and pregnant mothers and small children ...were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival at the Nazi camps. This fundamental reversal of traditional values has not yet been granted enough attention, which is why this study examines two narratives that tell the survivor's story through the lens of motherhood and the woman's body. Valentine Goby's Kinderzimmer (2013) draws on archives and survivors' testimonies about a 'children's room' located in Ravensbrück between September 1944 and March 1945. Goby's narrator is modeled on Madeleine Roubenne, a French survivor, yet, interestingly, Goby rewrites Roubenne's story into a more 'successful' version of motherhood. The short story 'Little Red Bird' (2004), written in Yiddish by Jewish-Canadian author, Chava Rosenfarb, who is a Holocaust survivor herself, alludes to the Little Red Riding Hood and follows an Auschwitz survivor obsessed by her inability to bear children, which she attributes to being haunted by the ghost of her five-year-old daughter killed in Auschwitz. The story stages the destructiveness of PTSD through Manya's obsession with motherhood that results in her fantasy of stealing a baby from a maternity ward and her failure to assist her dying husband. Both narratives thus testify to the intrinsically gendered character of Holocaust experience and problematize gender in the context of Holocaust through examinations of (non-)motherhood and the female body. While for Rosenfarb's narrator, surviving means to counter the effects of Nazi policies that specifically targeted women for their reproductive capacities, for Goby's narrator foster motherhood enables survival. Both texts are thus read here in the light of the complicated re-gendering and cathartic/pathological aspects of motherhood brought about by Holocaust trauma.
Regardant les questions de témoignage, de confession, de traumatisme, de sexualité et de violence dans les œuvres (semi-)autobiographiques, ce livre explore la co-construction d'identités ...personnelles et collectives par des femmes écrivains à l'ère des médias et de l'autoreprésentation. À une époque où la littérature française est souvent accusée d'être égocentrique et trop narcissique, Mercédès Baillargeon avance que l'autofiction des femmes a été reçue avec controverse depuis le tournant du millénaire parce qu'elle perturbe les idées reçues à propos des identités nationale, de genre et de race, et parce qu'elle questionne la distinction entre fiction et autobiographie. En effet, ces écrivaines se distinguent du reste de la production française actuelle, car elles cultivent une relation particulièrement tumultueuse avec leur public, à cause de la nature très personnelle, mais également politique de leurs textes semi-autobiographiques et à cause de leurs « performances » comme personnalité publique dans les médias. On y examine donc simultanément la façon dont les médias stigmatisent ces écrivaines ainsi que la manière dont ces dernières manipulent la culture médiatique comme une extension de leur œuvre littéraire. Ce livre analyse ainsi simultanément les implications textuelles et sociopolitiques qui sous-tendent la (dé)construction du sujet autofictionnel, et en particulier la façon dont ces écrivains se redéfinissent constamment à travers la performance rendue possible par les médias et la technologie. De plus, ce travail soulève des questions importantes par rapport à la relation complexe qu'entretiennent les médias avec les femmes écrivains, en particulier celles qui discutent ouvertement de traumatisme, de sexualité et de violence, et qui remettent également en question la distinction entre réalité et fiction. Cet ouvrage contribue à une meilleure compréhension des rapports de pouvoir mis en jeu dans l'autofiction, tant au niveau de la production que de la réception des œuvres. Privilégiant l'autofiction comme phénomène principalement français, cet ouvrage s'intéresse à la valeur politique de ce genre semi-autobiographique par-delà sa mort annoncée avec la disparition de la littérature engagée de l'après-guerre et des avant-gardes des années 50-60, dans le contexte français et francophone actuel, traversé par une crise des identités, le multiculturalisme et une redéfinition du nationalisme à travers l'écriture. Looking at questions of testimony, confession, trauma, sexuality, and violence in (semi-) autobiographical works, this book explores the co-construction of personal and collective identities by women writers in the age of self- disclosure and mass media. In a time when literature is accused of being self- centered and overly narcissistic, women's autofiction in France since the turn of the millennium has been received with controversy because it disrupts readily accepted ideas about personal and national identities, gender and race, and fiction versus autobiography. Through the study of polemical writers Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume, and Nelly Arcan, Mercédès Baillargeon contends that, by recounting personal stories of trauma and sexuality, and thus opposing themselves in opposition to social convention, and by refusing to dispel doubts regarding the fictional or factual nature of their texts, autofiction resists and helps redefine categories of literary genre and gender identity. This book analyzes concurrently the textual and sociopolitical implications that underlie the (de)construction of the autofictional subject, and particularly how these writers constantly redefine themselves through performance and self-fashioning made possible by media and technology. Moreover, this work raises important questions relating to the media's complicated relationship with women writers, especially those who discuss themes of trauma, sexuality, and violence, and who also question the distinction between fact and fiction. Proposing a new understanding of autofiction as a form of littérature engagée, this work contributes to a broader understanding of the French publishing establishment and of the literary field as a cultural institution, as well as new insight on shifting notions of identity, the Self, and nationalism in today's ever-changing and multicultural French context.
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