Seizing Meaning - Language and Ideology in the Autobiographies of Ellen Kuzwayo and Emma Mashinini

Abstract

Autobiography, in exposing how the meaning of a life is constructed in language and through the writer's interaction with cultural codes, helps in creating the understanding on which a society may be built. But making meaning from within an oppressor's language may imperil as well as empower the subject. The meanings chosen by Kuzwayo and Mashinini as they present ·themselves as wives and mothers in their autobiographies expose the problems of living and writing between two competing but unequally matched cultural codes. Their writing also affords glimpses of how family relationships are being given new force: the creative resistance to hegemony, which Western women writers and theorists have sought in the presentational processes of autobiography, may be seen to be occurring in the life depicted in Black women's autobiographies.

Opsomming
Outobiografie ontbloot die manier waarop die sin van 'n lewe in taal gekonstrueer is. Hierdeur, en deur die skrywer se interaksie met kulturele kodes, dra dit by tot die skep van die begrip waarop 'n gemeenskap kan berus. Om egter betekenis te skep vanuit die taal van die verdrukker, sou die onderwerp tegelyk kon bedreig en bemagtig. Die betekenis wat Kuzwayo en Mashinini kies as hulle hulleself voorhou as vroue en moeders in hulle biografiee, le die probleme van lewe en skryf tussen twee kompeterende, maar ongelyke kulturele kodes bloot. Hulle skrywe gee 'n blik op die manier waarop gesinsverhoudinge nuwe krag gegee word: die kreatiewe teenstand teen hegemonie, wat westerse vroue­skrywers en teoretici najaag in die aanbiedingsprosesse van outobiografieë, tree te voorskyn in die lewe soos uitgebeeld in swart vroue se outobiografieë.