Throughout the course of a semester in 2003 I had my preconceived views on identity (especially those focusing on the process of self-formation in a literary text) challenged, almost on an everyday basis. I have always tried to keep an open mind; however, I felt that the scholarship I encountered in a graduate level class, taught by Professor Maryemma Graham, as well as in the other two classes I was taking at the time (namely a course on modern American poetry and the graduate introductory seminar into American Studies) had pushed my understanding of one’s cultural identity and its rendering in a written work (a novel, a poem, a play) to the limits. I struggled and continue to struggle with conflicting views on the (re)presentation of one’s identity in an autobiographical act, particularly if language is key component to the realization of one’s self (or selves).
How does the autobiographing self carry itself across language as the primordial medium of self-realization, without coming off as a repetitively tricky, or even an engagingly manipulative voice?
Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts has made me think of at least one way to approach this pending question. Kingston was born and raised in an oral tradition, which influenced the choice behind her autobiographical act and the text it produced. These two (the act and its product) can be conceptualized as a spoken rather than a written performance, since Kingston attunes her voice to suit the timbre of her mother’s autobiographer, a teller of “talk-stories”.
In her essay on Kingston’s family narrative, critic Kathryn VanSpanckeren reads Kinston’s narrative “as a recasting…of a three-thousand-year-old literary tradition.” She examines Kingston’s “presentation of her work as nonfictional ‘memoirs’”, i.e., VanSpanckeren sees this conscious choice on Kingston’s behalf as being in tune with the principals of the classical Chinese canon, thus enabling the author to display her Asian heritage while foregrounding her pastiche of miscellaneous “taking stories”.
What VanSpanckeren leaves out of her singular analysis of Kingston’s autobiographical narrative is the underlying power language possesses amidst the work’s thematic density. As she carefully notices the narrative’s voicing of multifarious voices and issues pertinent to Asian and Asian-American women’s writing and women’s writing and writing in general, at the same time she does not address the importance of language in a multicultural self-actualization. Without acknowledging the role that language plays in Kingston’s performance as an autobiographer, we cannot fully encompass the author’s own understanding of the act of self-invention, as one which is guided by the dialectics of the individual’s relationship with his or her culture.
It is language that Kingston turns to in her autobiography, no matter how compromised or compromising it may be, in her search for a possible reconciliation with her family and her culture, and with her own self, something that she has done since childhood. Identity in Kinston’s heroines’ culture is not only determined by gender distinctions (Kinston’s female figures live out their lives in an engulfing patriarchy); it is also purposefully linguistic.
For both mother and daughter, language is a mode of existence, a principal act of the self-being. As Maxine approaches adulthood, her adult self emerges in her own performance of “talking story” on the pages of her autobiography, language becoming a part of her “doings”, too. Therefore, in her clearly ontogenetic casting of her self, to begin in life is to begin in language. For Kingston, there seems to be no life or language for the autobiographical self outside culture. Having her speech understood by others, she (her entire composite female self) can make her self break free of the conforming isolation that silence, solitude and unspoken of realities impose on her identity, and thus on the identities of other Chinese-American daughters.
Let us consider Kingston’s account of her list. The list is comprised of things untold, unsaid to her mother, secret, repressed, guilty questions about her cultural heritage. Her “narrative program” (confronting her mother with one item from the list a day), can be read as an act of resistance to the self-inventing practices that otherwise guide her autobiographical act. However, the list continues to grow as she tells it, the pain in her throat eventually bringing her closer to her mother. Maxine seems to be “condemned” to a life of a perpetual storyteller, almost a crazy woman unable to explain herself to her listeners.
Whether we accept to look at Maxine’s list as a prototype of Kingston’s autobiographical act or not, we come to an ending of reconciliation, discovering, together with Kingston’s self, a sameness in the character of the mother and daughter as they embark on the final act of “talk-story”, now a collaborative venture. The language exhibited here allows the self to join the community of others in an act of discourse where sameness and difference co-exist, almost peacefully. That is to say, “Only when she turns to her mother’s stories and joins in talking story does she finally come to her own way of articulation. The narrator now willingly “translates” her mother’s stories, but in her own words.”
Coming full circle, Kingston’s autobiographic palimpsestic self carries itself across language with more grace and dignity than any we have encountered so far in our readings. Her product, the beautifully poetic cultural narrative as it grows out of a composite self’s individual story, resounds both in theme(s) and gesture the irreducible connectedness between the self and language in our cultural existence, a relationship which builds its strength on planes of mutual interdependency.
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