In Metaphors of Self James Olney says, “It is the great virtue of autobiography as I see it to offer us understanding that is finally not of someone else but of ourselves” (x). However, what we can expect to understand about ourselves is not always clear, particularly if the autobiographer is of a different race or gender and from a different culture.

This author read the autobiographical narratives by Richard Wright, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and George Lamming for the reason Olney suggests: to understand growing up black, and in this case, male, in a rather universal context. The objective was not to compare these autobiographies, but the extraordinary similarities among them forced me to think about them as one narrative about variations of a collective experience—growing up black and male in the early decades of the twentieth century.

When doing a study of these autobiographies written by black men from vastly different countries and cultural backgrounds, one wonders if race, skin color, the common condition of blackness was basis enough for comparison, particularly when scholars insist that there is no single black experience. The autobiographies, however, suggest that Wright, Lamming, and Mphahlele share two experiences that determine the courses of their lives: They must physically escape oppression and injustice through voluntary exile, and they must escape oppression and injustice through the writing of their life stories. To be black and male in the early decades of the twentieth century in the American South, the Caribbean, and in South Africa, was to suffer in remarkably similar ways.

While there can be no question that the events in these young men's lives are largely determined because they are black, there are, however, disparities in the way in which the writers perceive the significance of being black. For example, George Lamming says that the major difference between the black American and the black West Indian is the American's “highly oppressive sense of being Negro. No black West Indian,” says Lamming, “in his native environment, would have the highly oppressive sense of being Negro … It has to do with the West Indian's social and racial situation. The West Indian, however black and dispossessed, could never have felt the experience of being in a minority” (Pleasures 33).

The black South African shares that oppressive sense of being Negro with the black American but like the black West Indian, the black South African has not felt “the experience of being a minority.” In addition, the black South African has never, as James Baldwin says, “endured the utter alienation of himself from his people and his past” (122). These important distinctions account for the difference between the nature of the South African's rage and struggle for freedom and that of the Black American.

These various perceptions of what it means to be black do not alter the reality that people are colonized because they are African or of African descent. The oppressive influence and societal disruption and discontinuity caused by British and American imperialism and ethnocentrism is perhaps the most crucial similarity in their lives. “Colonialism,” says Frantz Fanon, “has never ceased to maintain that the Negro is a savage; and for the colonist, the Negro was neither an Angolan nor a Nigerian,” (or, I might add, a West Indian or a black American), “he simply spoke of the Negro” (211). The colonial predicament, which includes the negation and destruction of indigenous culture (JanMohamed, “Humanism” 296), links the lives of Mphahlele, Wright and Lamming.

There is no doubt that Wright's experience in the United States parallels that of Lamming in Barbados and Mphahlele in South Africa. In Black Boy, he says, “Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it” (45). Wright's position is further complicated by the fact that the United States was once a colonial culture. George Lamming in the Pleasures of Exile says, “The American Negro is not just colonial vis-a-vis England, but American and Negro up against the monolithic authority of European culture” (30). In other words, Wright is diminished and colonized in a country that still lives under the shadow of its own colonization.

The colonial experience manifested itself in tangible ways for each of these men. For example, poverty was a factor of life for all of them. Mphahlele remembers:

But all in all perhaps I led a life shared by all other country boys. Boys who are aware of only one purpose of living; to be. Often crops failed us. Mother sent us a few tins of jam and we ate that with cornmeal porridge. Sometimes she sent us sugar which we ate with porridge. I can never forget how delicious a dish we had by making porridge out of pumpkin and corn meal. The only time we tasted tea bread was when our mother came to see us at Christmas. On such occasions many other people in the village came to our home to taste these rare things. If hunting was bad we didn't have meat. About the only time we had goat's meat or beef was when livestock died …

(18)

While Mphahlele' impoverishment is expressed by the type and quality of food he had to eat, Richard Wright's poverty involves a lack of food:

Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly. The hunger I had known before had been no grim, hostile stranger; it had been a normal hunger that had made me beg constantly for bread, and when I ate a crust or two I was satisfied. But this new hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent. Whenever I begged for food now my mother would pour me a cup of tea which would still the clamor in my stomach for a moment or two; but a little later I would feel hunger nudging my ribs, twisting my empty guts until they ached. I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life I had to pause and think what was happening to me

(21)

In In the Castle of My Skin (1953), George Lamming simply refers to himself as “G..” The nature of G.'s poverty differs sharply from that of Mphahlele and Wright. He is never hungry, and all his basic needs are met. G., his mother and the mother of his community live on what is essentially a plantation. Mr. Creighton, the British owner, lives on a hill overlooking the village. There are black overseers who supervise the villagers and act as liaisons between them and the landlord. The villagers own nothing save the few possessions in their substandard homes. No resident owns property and the community is solely governed by Creighton. This is made perfectly clear when the entire village is sold. Residents do not have the money to buy “their” houses and have nowhere to go. They are simply turned out like cattle without regard for their well-being. They are pawns that can be moved around freely without consultation or concern for their wishes.

Mphahlele, Wright, and Lamming all have absent fathers. In the narratives, Mphahlele and Wright feel nothing but contempt for their abusive fathers. Each associates his father with an incident that is extremely traumatic. Mphahlele remembers his father's cruelty to his mother:

He limped over to the pot on the stove. In no time it was done. My mother screamed with a voice I have never forgotten till this day. Hot gravy and meat and potatoes had got into her blouse and she was trying to shake them down. … He caught hold of her by the blouse and landed the pot in the middle of her skull with a heavy gong sound. She struggled loose from his grip and fled through the door crying

(28)

Wright associates his father with the hunger that he experiences. “As the days slid past the image of my father became associated with my pangs of hunger, whenever I felt hunger I thought of him a deep biological bitterness” (22).

The departure of their fathers bring not only the hunger but instability into the boys' lives. Mphahlele and Wright live with various relatives (Wright briefly lives in an orphanage) and thus never knows a stable homelife. G., however, has stability but he never knows his father: My father who had only fathered the idea of me had left me the sole liability of my mother who really fathered me” (11).

Perhaps the most significant aspect of these parallel lives is the fact that childhood experiences and living conditions drove each young man to feel an overwhelming need to escape and to write a record of their lives. One might ask why anyone would want to relive, in memory and imagination, such painful events? Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), traces the phases which characterizes the evolution of what he calls the native writer. He says, “In the second phase we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is … Past happenings of the bygone days of his childhood will be brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed estheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies” (222). And in a passage specifically directed to South African writers, James Olney makes some remarks that apply equally to Wright: “For all these writers, the question that insists on being answered in their lives and their autobiographies is what or how they can create in a nation divided and oppressed by apartheid. Exile and literary autobiography have been their typical answers” (42).

Unlike Lamming, Wright and Mphahlele offer caustic indictments of their countries and communities. Wright seems to be more embittered of the two, and the reason for this relates to the differences in the expectations that each man has of his country. For Mphahlele, there was never the illusion of being born into a free society. He knew, as all blacks in South Africa then knew, exactly what constraints would be imposed upon him because of the color of his skin. The constraints were universal in South Africa since the government fully sanctioned and enforced apartheid. This knowledge neither minimized the desire for freedom nor made blacks accept segregation or discrimination readily. However, there was never the confusion about one's status that existed in the United States. Richard Wright was born into a democracy, the “Land of the Free,” and a country which theoretically assured that each citizen that was entitled to certain rights and privileges. At the time the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written, no one envisioned that blacks would ever be more than personal property. However, in time they “legally” won freedom and full citizenship. Blacks should have been able to participate fully in the democratic process, but they were not. Thus, in Wright's narrative, there is a deep sense of disappointment that is not found in Mphahlele's work. Wright, by virtue of his birthright, expects to be treated as an American citizen. He is, instead, treated as a slave.

On the surface Lamming's autobiographical narrative seems markedly different from Mphahlele's and Wright's. There are no passionate denunciations of an unfair or brutal system, and no deeply moving accounts of racial injustice. Racial segregation, as Mphahlele and Wright know it, does not exist in Lamming's predominantly black Barbados, West Indies. What is noticeably absent from In the Castle of My Skin is the overwhelming preoccupation with the race that permeates the other two autobiographies. This does not necessarily suggest that race does not seem to matter in Lamming's society. The history of slavery and the continued presence of the British serve as constant reminders that race matters. The nature of the population and the relative insularity of each island present particular problems for the West Indies. One of the primary problems is addressed in In the Castle of My Skin is that of class conflict. Middle class blacks rather than whites swindle the villagers out of their money and homes. What is seen most often in this narrative is infighting among blacks. What we also see very clearly is the imperialist system which created the peasant class and facilitates its exploitation. Lamming does not exonerate the British simply because they do not figure prominently in the book. Their oppressive influence is always felt.

Although G. does not have to deal with the government-sanctioned form of apartheid, Lamming does not end the story without making clear to the reader that there is a bond between himself as a West Indian and his counterpart in the United States. After a trip to New York, Trumper returns to Barbados with an identity. It is both significant and ironic that Trumper must leave his island and experience prejudice and discrimination in the United States to fully understand what it means to be black. Trumper tells G. that he has to leave the island to “fin' race” and explains that the West Indian's identity crisis, or “angst of identity,” as Michael Gilkes would say, is all a part of a well-designed plan on the part of the British:

“Course the blacks here are my people too; but they don't know it yet. You don't know it yourself. None o' you here on this islan' know what it mean to fin' race. An' the white people you have to deal with won't ever let you know. “Tis a great thing 'bout the English, the know-how.”

(295)

Trumper goes on to say that it is only through suffering overt racial discrimination that one can know “The Race, our people.”

Perhaps the most destructive thing that the Western world did to African people was to impose its world view upon them. In Myth, Literature and the African World. Wole Soyinka says that the African existed within a “cosmic totality” and possessed “a consciousness in which his own earth being, his gravity-bound apprehension of self, was inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon” (3). In the African world, there was no division between the ancestral world and this one and no distinction between the land of the living, the dead, and the unborn. Life was a continuum and everyone was a part of all that is. This world view, or a grieving loss of it, is evident in each of the autobiographies. For example, G.'s description of three women from his village gives evidence of his belief in that world view:

It seemed that they were three pieces in a pattern which remained constant. The flow of its history was undisturbed by any difference in the pieces, nor was its evenness affected by any likeness. There was a difference and there was no difference

(24).

With colonialism comes cultural imperialism The dominating culture becomes the model for the colonial subject who supposedly has no history and culture other than that he has inherited from the empire. Fanon says that “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” (210).

In Down Second Avenue and Black Boy, the cosmic totality becomes only a memory, passed on by ancestors, of life at another time or in another place. The horrors of racial segregation distort every aspect of life for these young men. Mphahlele, when comparing himself and members of his community to the Zulus, says that his people are “detribalized.” Wright wonders if normal relationships among Negroes are possible when one lives under such oppressive conditions.

The events in these three lives invariably led to exile. The stifling conditions caused by the burden of oppression offered no alternative but escape for some people, and that is especially true for Wright, Lamming, and Mphahlele. These autobiographies could not have been written without the objective knowledge acquired by a conception of their worlds, which, as Fanon says, was “discovered under the skies” (222). Toward the end of Tell Me Africa, James Olney describes South Africa as a place where “everyone, but most especially the black man, is caught in a dance where no one is free to act but only to react, and in this dance of death there is no creation but only destruction” (258). Lamming, Wright and Mphahlele had to free themselves from bondage and certain death of the spirit. This “whirling out of the dance” was a positive move, for it activated the creative process in each man. The distance from home gave a different perspective on their lives and experiences. Although Mphahlele, Lamming, and Wright were consistent in their repudiation of cultural and colonial imperialism, they were able to convert these negative forces into the positive act of creating new identities for themselves. These are not colonials writing autobiographies, but free men who able to reflect upon the colonial experience and relate it to the world. As a result, the lives of these men join in a very positive way.

There should be no question about the relationship among Mphahlele, Lamming, and Wright. Their lives are inextricably linked in innumerable ways. The cultural difference do not overshadow or diminish the similarities in their lives. They are sons born to a common mother, for all sprang from the loins of Mother Africa. The vast cultural differences, which seem so striking to us when we initially read their stories, fade as we examine their lives as recounted in their narratives. We see poverty, degradation, and powerlessness, but we also see the triumph and tenacity of the human spirit, the activation of the creative process, and the ability to recreate life—to recapture the essence of that which has gone before. And finally, out of the mire of negativity and hatred grows a deep and abiding love for the places where they were born and a vision of a new and better day.

At the end of Black Boy, Richard Wright captures the peculiar and continuing relationship that each of these writers has to his homeland as well as the hope that seems to linger in their hearts and those of many persons now in exile:

Yet, deep down, I knew that I could never leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South. So, in leaving, I was taking a part of South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom … And if that miracle ever happened, then could I know that there was yet hope in that southern swamp of despair and violence, that light could emerge even out of the blackest of the southern night. I would know that the South too could overcome its fear, its hate, its cowardice, its heritage of guilt and blood, its burden of anxiety and compulsive cruelty

(285).

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

JanMohamed, Abdul. “Humanism and Minority Literature: Toward a Definition of Counter-hegemonic Discourse.” Boundary 2 12–13 (1984): 281–299.

Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. 1953. New York: Schocken Books, 1983.

———. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Allison & Busby, 1984.

Mphahlele, Ezekiel. Down Second Avenue. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.

Olney, James. Metaphors of Self. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

———. Tell Me Africa. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge UP, 1976.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper and Row, 1945.