Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative (McBee)

            I bought the stupid melon while it was on sale. That had to be the only reason. I don't even like cantaloupe. It reminds me of that awful joke that my mom always told me. Well, to be honest, I can't even remember the joke, just the punch line. Something about fruits not being able to elope. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

With the exception of Walt Whitman, no other American writer before Jack London was so concerned with breaking down the barriers between artistic creation, personal myth making, and the practice of autobiography. Autobiographical and self-consciously performative, much of Jack London’s early non-fiction prose is implicitly concerned with the conditions of writing and the political implications of style and form.

The house is a flurry of excitement; my mother has been cooking and cleaning for several days in anticipation. The refrigerator is brimming with South African delicacies—boerewors, biltong, golden syrup, melktert, koeksisters, grenadillatert, Castle Lager, rooibos, vetkoek, beskuit—the food and drink of our communion. These foods make their nostalgic appearance only on special occasions. Each ingredient is imported by a South African shoppie, and sold for three-times what it’s worth, because this is not South Africa.

Autobiographical texts, contemporary scholarship contends, are always are an active re-interpretation of the past as seen from the present—-and thus constantly influenced by conscious and unconscious personal politics. This is especially the case for the life writing of Middle Eastern-American ethnic groups, which are inextricably bound up with the politics of situating themselves in American culture, with rejecting dominant definitions, and with finding towards an individual and collective ethnic self that has its place in the USA.