"our Now, their Then" : Claiming the Past and Contesting Posterity in Magona’s To My Children’s Children

Arijita Santra

doi:10.25159/1753-5387/21846

Authors

Arijita Santra University of Johannesburg https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3043-1107

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/21846

Keywords:

Magona, autobiography, identity/selfhood, race, gender, class

Abstract

The 2023 publication of a selection of Sindiwe Magona’s essays, titled I Write the Yawning Void, is significant for a number of reasons, not least of which are her reflections on the writing of her two-volume autobiography, To My Children’s Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992). Of significance also is how the title of the selection not only frames the book as a whole but speaks broadly to the act of writing, particularly Black South African autobiographical writing of the 1980s and 1990s, as “writ[ing] the yawning void.” Against this background, the aim of this article is to revisit the first volume of Magona’s autobiography in the context of its reception around the time of its publication and, in the light of Magona’s reflections, to proffer some thoughts on how it may be read post-apartheid. The second volume, Forced to Grow, is also on the horizon of my discussion. In her selection of essays, Magona sets a new agenda for reading her autobiography today by setting up the tension between “our Now,” by which she refers to the active present in which she lived and later wrote about, and “their Then,” which is the past-ness of that present which the title of To My Children’s Children anticipated, by projecting its address and, thus, meaning to the future. In this sense, both the autobiography and the essays operate in the space between memory and forgetting and between historicity and presentism. It is in these spaces that I locate my re-reading of To My Children’s Children in this article.

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