Lana Robison and Dr. William A. Wilson, English
The results of being awarded this grant are: a collection of 600 minutes of tape recording personal narratives of under privileged urban black South African women; 58 pages of transcribed, typed and edited text of interviews with one black South African woman; and an honor’s thesis discussing the power of personal narratives in under-privileged women’s lives. The tapes I collected in South Africa will be placed in the archive’s of the Harold B. Lee Library and will be available to the public for use and research purposes.
The money from this grant allowed me to travel to Cape Town, South Africa where I spent three and a half months interviewing mostly black Xhosa women. My interviewing focused on the life experiences of one 25 year old Xhosa woman, who at the time was a single mother of two children.
I met this particular woman, Bulyewa Julia Mcolo, through my efforts volunteering with a local humanitarian group: SHAWCO (Student Health and Welfare Centres Organisation), a non-governmental organization. As a volunteer for SHAWCO I spent much of my time working at a nutrition center in the heart of one of the largest squatter camp areas of Cape Town. Bulyewa was referred to the nutrition center where I worked because her two children (ages 3 and 18 months) had been diagnosed with Kwashiorkor. Bulyewa became the main focus of my research efforts and my honors thesis contains the transcriptions of our interviews.
In collecting the life experiences and personal narratives of under privileged black women in South Africa, I hoped to demonstrate how these personal narratives act as powerful works of literature. I intended to reveal the potency they have as stories representing a group of people largely marginalized by a dominant culture. I anticipated that these narratives would lend personal and intimate understanding of man “invisible people” and give expression to a group of women whose voices had long been suppressed.
I concentrated on one woman, Bulyewa, and using the interviews I conducted with her as support, I suggest in my honors thesis that personal narratives provide a vital genre of literature that should be included in the current cannon of study.
Personal narratives act as literature because they remind the listener or reader of the human condition. They speak, as do all great works of art, of those things that unite us in our experience of humanity. However, because personal narratives reveal the values of a particular culture or a specific group, they are able to simultaneously reveal those things that make our human experiences uniquely different. In genuine and fulfilling ways personal narratives celebrate the collective without silencing the individual. Personal narratives provide a critical tool in the balancing act of establishing unity amid diversity.
One incident from the interviewing illustrates this point.
Previous to the following statement, Bulyewa relates an experience from her life. Bulyewa tells of the circumstances and feelings that surrounded the death of her fiancee when she was seventeen. At the time of his death her fiancee was the person on whom Bulyewa depended financially, emotionally and intellectually. Her account of the event is powerful and moving. Bulyewa comments on what she learned from that and other experiences in her life. She states:
[I]f you are having a boyfriend nay? Don’t throw the whole of your life in a boyfriend. Because I know that it’s God who give you that boyfriend. Maybe sometime he’s going to take that boyfriend or you life. So you mustn’t [get] close to that boyfriend, or anything else. You must know God can [even] take your kid. So you must say that no, the life of that [person] will depend. So I can talk with you now nay? But tomorrow you hear something …. Maybe I died during the night. That I learn in my life. If you have something, you like it, maybe it’s a dress, or a suitcase or your mother or so on, you know that it’s not yours exactly so you can lose it. I know that. I learn that.
The experience Bulyewa had is a common one: the death of a loved one. Almost every person will have that experience. The accompanying sense of loss and loneliness is generally shared by humanity. Bulyewa’s reaction to the circumstance of losing a loved one, however, reveals cultural differences. She reacts by denying attachment. She equates a suitcase, dress and mother as the kinds of objects that one must avoid becoming attached to. When viewed within the cultural context of her life through other narratives Bulyewa shares, one sees that the idea of not being attached to anything is a cultural value extended to her from her larger cultural circumstance; that of being a poor black woman in South Africa.
One can see through this brief example how personal narratives play a critical role in balancing common experience without losing the color and perspective of the individual. Personal narratives serve to foster cross-cultural understanding and build bridges of mutual tolerance and appreciation.
The narratives I collected in South Africa are not only wonderful and meaningful stories on their own but also reveal the general relevance of personal narratives. I suggest that personal narratives are a critical and necessary form of literature and that their use should be more widespread.
My honors thesis (forthcoming) expands the ideas suggested in this summary and can be referred to for further information.