Feminine Plural

Life-Writing: Theory and Practice

On its website, the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing provides a useful definition of ‘life-writing’ which neatly highlights the plurality of this genre-defying form. It is worth quoting in full:

Life-writing involves, and goes beyond, biography. It encompasses everything from the complete life to the day-in-the-life, from the fictional to the factional. It embraces the lives of objects and institutions as well as the lives of individuals, families and groups.

Life-writing includes biography, autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals, anthropological data, oral testimony, eye-witness accounts, biopics, plays and musical performances, obituaries, scandal sheets, and gossip columns, blogs, and social media such as Tweets and Instagram stories. It is not only a literary or historical specialism, but is relevant across the arts and sciences, and can involve philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers and anthropologists.

But life-writing is more than just these kinds of written materials: it can be about love and loss; it can be about family, friendship, marriage, children; it can show how history might be captured in an individual life, or how an individual life is representative of its times. Life-writing has to do with the emotions, it has to do with memory, and it has to do with a sense of identity. Life-writing is vital form of cultural communication.

Writers and researchers are increasingly recognising how much of writing is life-writing, including poetry and fiction. Life-writing is also an integral part of studies relating to the Holocaust, genocide, testimony and confession, and gender and apartheid.¹¹

The breadth of focus of this ‘vital form of cultural communication’, which deals with ‘emotions’, ‘memory’, and ‘identity’, is what has always attracted us to the study of women’s life-writing. Our research has brought us into contact with writers, artists and academics who have helped us discover new ways of expressing ourselves, through their own multiple varieties of expression. Part of our aim in publishing the present volume of essays is, therefore, to share some of the most exciting and audacious Luso-Hispanic women writers with an Anglophone readership. We are also keen to foreground ways of reaching an understanding of writing which is personal, subjective and originates from a specific community that is radically different from our own. The emphasis on decolonial criticism and methodologies in Chapters 16 (María Battle and Georgina Robinson) and 17 (Anélia Pietrani) reflect this desire to level hierarchies. Therefore, we are wary of imposing Western feminist theory on our contributors, and the writers and artists they address.

Indeed, one of the major drivers behind this volume is the fact that theories and studies of women’s life-writing barely exist in the Luso-Hispanic world. Moreover, the neat, umbrella term ‘life-writing’ does not exist per se in Portuguese and Spanish and other formulations such as ‘literary non-fiction’ are still relatively new: ‘não-ficção literária’ or ‘no ficción’.¹² Scholars might follow Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘l’écriture de soi’ [self writing] and refer to ‘la escritura del yo’ or ‘a escrita de si’, use the designation ‘narrativas de vida’ or ‘historias de vida’ (commonly used for oral history).¹³ Far more common, is the practice of limiting discussion to sub-categories such as ‘autobiografia’, ‘biografia’, ‘autoficción’/‘autoficção’, ‘ensaio’, and so on. In many academic volumes on the topic, the focus is predominantly on life-writing by men, read through male French theorists.¹⁴ That is why, rather than revisit the usual suspects, we decided to highlight, right from the beginning of this volume, theories forged by two Latin American women that exemplify the practice of feminine plural writing: firstly, ‘autohistoria-teoría’ [autohistory-theory], developed by Chicana lesbian-feminist poet, scholar and activist Glória Anzaldúa (1942–2004), and, secondly, ‘escrevivência’, invented by Brazilian author, poet and critic Conceição Evaristo in 1994.

Among many other liberating feminist formulations and ideas, and embedded in Indigenous Mexican mythology, Anzaldúa devised the decolonial concept of ‘autohistoria-teoría’, further defined as: ‘a term I use to describe the genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir; […] a personal essay that theorizes’.¹⁵ According to Zeynep Gulsah Capan, in her writings:

Anzaldúa combines autobiography, poetry, historical narratives and myths. She not only moves seamlessly between these ‘genres’ but also between languages (English and Spanish) and also different variations of the languages. Thus, her writing itself is an act of questioning and transforming the boundaries and categories of ‘genres’. She uses the term autohistoria-teoria to describe this genre of writing that presents a non-linear history and includes personal narratives, factual accounts, myths and poetry.¹⁶

This re-writing of history, blended with myths and poetry, foregrounding the self as part of a genealogy and a community, rooted in the experiences of the present, is a powerful way of destabilising colonial, patriarchal authority.

Evaristo’s works, both poetry and prose, all describe the world from an Afro-Brazilian perspective, usually a female one, in lyrical, impactful language. She developed the concept of ‘escrevivência’ in 1994, when writing her master’s thesis, emphasising that it was nothing to do with autofiction:

Percebi que existia uma fusão no ato de escrever: o sujeito escrevia-se ao ver-se e vivendo. Então surge essa aglutinação de escrever vivendo, que resulta em ‘escrevivência’. […] Quando penso em ‘escrevivência’, penso na imagem das mulheres escravizadas na ‘casa grande’, a ‘mãe preta’. […] A escrita das mulheres negras quebra com este passado e a ‘escrevivência’ retoma esse momento histórico como memória e ancestralidade. A nossa ‘escrevivência’ não existe para adormecer a ‘casa grande’, mas para acordá-la do seu sono injusto. Pensar a autoficção é pensar um texto que se esgota em si mesmo, o sujeito angustiado às contas com as suas dores, enquanto no exercício da ‘escrevivência’ há uma fusão entre o sujeito individual e o coletivo.¹⁷

[I realised that fusion took place in the act of writing: the subject wrote themselves (escrevia-se) as they saw themselves (via-se), and through living their lives (vivendo). That’s how the word came about, blending together writing, seeing oneself and living into ‘escrevivência’. When I think of ‘escrevivência’ I also think of the enslaved women who lived in the ‘big house’, the wet-nurse. Black women’s writing establishes a break with that past and ‘escrevivência’ harks back to that moment in history, recognising it as a memory and part of our ancestral heritage. Our escrevivência is not a lullaby for the children in the ‘big house’, but a cry to wake them from their unjust slumber. Autofiction is a text that exhausts itself, the anguished subject coming to terms with their sorrows, whereas ‘escrevivência’ operates a fusion between the individual subject and the collective.]

Thus, ‘escrevivência’ can be seen as a decolonial tool which situates Black women’s lives and voices as the protagonists of narrative, blending the acts of listening, watching and living into writing, as this quotation from her 2022 novel Canção para ninar menino grande [Lullaby for Grown-up Children] shows:

Imaginem perseguir uma escrevivência. Agarrar a vida, a existência, e escrevê-la em seu estado de acontecimentos. […] Capto como testemunha ocular ou como ouvinte a dinâmica de vidas que se confundem com a minha, por algum motivo. […] Eis o motivo de minha preocupação em escutar todas. São muitas, plurais e diversas as vozes que me provocavam a escrevivência.¹⁸

[Imagine pursuing escrevivência. Grabbing hold of life, of existence, and writing it like a state of happenings. Like an eye-witness or a listener, I capture the dynamics of lives which become mixed up with my own, for whatever reason. That’s why I am so concerned to listen to all of them. They are multiple, plural and diverse, the voices which provoked me to escrevivência].

Both ‘autohistoria-teoría’ and ‘escrevivência’ are forms of life-writing which embrace community, assertiveness, genealogy and plurality. Another writer suspicious of the category ‘autofiction’, Begoña Méndez, has created a new genre: ‘autocienciafiction’. In her parodical Autocienciaficción para el fin de la especie (2022) [Autosciencefiction for the End of the Species], she uses other ‘voices’ to explore her own identity.¹⁹

Two inspiring initiatives, developed by academics based in the UK, which actively embrace women’s life-writing in its plurality and diversity, engaging with communities and building resources for lasting impact, are the therapeutic and artistic project ‘A Museum for Me’ and the online archive of texts and videos ‘CartasVivas’. The ‘A Museum for Me’ project developed through dialogues between human rights researchers, museologists, NGOs, artists and community-based activists in Colombia and the UK. Participants used craft kits to make their own museum, telling their own story and negotiating trauma without the need for words:

In ‘A Museum for Me’, victims and survivors of the armed conflict take centre-stage; their representation (or indeed, invisibility) is scrutinised and re-cast; gendered or identity-based forms of violence – and resistance – are revealed; and stories of the silenced are communicated gently or broadcast loudly, through myriad, life-affirming, cultural and social forms of truth-telling and creative peace-building.²⁰

The ‘CartasVivas’ [Livingletters] project involves searching through archives (public and personal) for letters written by influential women ‘who played a key part in the twentieth century or actively participated in the social and literary world of Spain and Latin America’, which are then read aloud and brought alive by actors, on film.²¹ The videos are free to access, preserving the women’s words for posterity and providing a rich archive of testimonies. The project is ongoing and ‘alive’, inviting visitors to contribute their own, or their relative’s ‘cartaviva in the shape of a diary, a memoir, a collection of letters or poems’.²²