African autobiography: the contribution of women.

The history of literary criticism of autobiography shows that definitions of the genre are based on analyses of the literary characteristics of autobiographical writing by men and Western women. This study seeks to present other examples of literary autobiographies that show the need to rethink such definitions. It focuses on three autobiographies by women that provide examples of different literary forms in the African context written in Arabic, French, and English. These autobiographies are similar in presenting the interaction between the private and the public by means of juxtaposing life experiences and national, social, or political commitment and differ in terms of their literary and linguistic forms. The works discussed include Hamlat taftish (1992; The Search [1992]) by the Egyptian Latifa al-Zayyat which presents the relationship between intimate experience and the political context. The Senegalese Mariama Ba writes the autobiographical Une si longue lettre (1979) using novelistic techniques and emphasizing the relation of the private with the social. The coloured South African writer, Bessie Head, in her autobiography, A Question of Power (1992), and in the collected fragments of her writing on personal issues in Mackenzie's Bessie Head: A Woman Alone (1990) mixes the personal with race issues.