Native Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

This essay considers two autobiographies, My Place by Australian writer and painter Sally Morgan (1951-) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by the American abolitionist and ex-slave Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897). The argument is that these texts resemble, illuminate and confirm one another, despite huge differences between their origins in space and time. To study these books together shows that not only are novelists revisiting the fugitive narratives, but autobiographers are, too. The comparison also convinces me that fugitive narratives, or at least some such narratives, are not written from a viewpoint of the "quintessentially 'other'" as William L. Andrews proposes; instead they occupy an intimate, intermediate position which I call a "thou" position. My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl exhibit a striking likeness, namely, a common origin in struggles to retrieve repressed memories from personal silences and install them in the center of public memory. The repressed memory on the private side in both is childhood sexual abuse. On the public side in both is a half-remembered national atrocity, chattel slavery in America and slavery in all but name over aboriginal people in Australia. The American memory gap erases the positive accomplishments of Reconstruction, and elides the daily business of slaveholding and maintaining the ideology of slave-owners from history. Anglo-Australians similarly elide Aboriginal people's labor from their origin myths about their pastoral wealth. The autobiographies considered here disclose close links between those family secrets sexism protects and public atrocities racism excuses. In stories like these, which are between domestic and national crimes, aporias and displacements are rife because the authors struggle against the dominant public narratives. Though all autobiography has rifts and discontinuities, fugitive narratives arguably have more due to the circumstances from which they spring. Autobiography which aims to overturn a repugnant ideology must expose dirty secrets, secrets every ideology has. As Pierre Machery observes in A Theory of Literary Production, "an ideology is made of what it does not mention; it exists because there are things which must not be spoken of" (132). The act of writing to impugn ideology resembles psychoanalysis because such writing tries to analyze the political unconscious. An autobiographer in so doing probes taboos like an analyst. To decode her culture's dreams, she has to pry open ideological silences, those aporias in public discourse, and gouge out new pathways. (Aporia comes from the Greek a, not, and poros, passage or ford. An aporia marks the end of the road, hence a logical impass.) Morgan and Jacobs arrive at repeated aporias; they count on sympathy to fill in where narrative falters. They want readers to realize that sexual abuse and political injustice are alike. They expect readers might make the cognitive leap the analogy involves because that ideology which shields the patriarch in his homestead resembles the historiography that masks him and his in national myths. Patricia Williams observes: "Self possession in the full sense of that expression is the companion to self-knowledge. Yet claiming for myself a heritage the weft of whose genesis is my own disinheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox" (Signs 6-7). In other words, the impasses that confront an autobiographer whose own body is supposed to be "illegitimate" cast doubt equally on claims to descent and the ability to bear witness. To complain is to risk making yourself a spectacle and confirming the ideology which occludes you; even to tell the facts dispassionately requires a novelist's skill. William L. Andrews frames the problem of finding the right rhetorical stance for a fugitive narrative in terms of the self and its others: During the ante-bellum era, when black narrative in the United States developed into a highly self-conscious and rhetorically sophisticated tradition, black writers who aimed at a serious hearing knew that the authority they aspired to was predicated on the authenticity that they could project onto and through a text. …