A similar process of naming the self and claiming the space in which one can welcome other dispossessed people occurs in Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. The title of this autobiography, like Lorde’s, is a deliberate act of establishing identity and locating oneself within the context of a community or tribe. As is the case with Lorde’s memoir, the title that Hong Kingston claims for herself and uses to name her text is drawn from the culture of her mother, who told the author a story about a young woman named Fa Mu Lan, a girl who fought in her father’s stead in a battle. Yet Hong Kingston’s memoir of her “girlhood among ghosts” is not just the story of herself. She also uses her autobiographical authority to tell the story of her female relatives, thereby giving them voice and exploring larger archetypes and stereotypes about Asian women. The first line and one of the important quotes from The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston states, “You must not tell anyone…what I am about to tell you” (3). Clearly, the fact that Hong Kingston is telling everyone who reads her text the secret that her mother told her means that her act of writing is intended to “break the circle of shame” and to create a larger understanding of self and other (Freedman, Frey, & Murphy Zauhar 118). Freedman, Frey, and Murphy Zauhar credit Hong Kingston with “fight[ing] the reticence inside the self as well as the oppression outside” (118), an act that has benefits not just for herself, but for other women like her.

Another way in which autobiography is used to create a larger self, inviting the reader to enter into a clearly defined community that the writer has established or named, is to use the self-text to “confront traumatic experiences” (White 107). While these experiences may be highly personal and intense, as in the case of those shared in Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, the sharing of such intimate experiences can serve as a means for people who believed themselves to be  isolated to identify with someone in a similar situation and through that identification, to achieve a sense of relief and belonging. In fact, White claims that one of the reasons why the autobiographical genre has become so popular in recent years is because “others recognize the powerful healing effect that such works can have on an author as well as the reader” (107). She goes on to quote Ellerby, who says, “’The memoir wants to teach us about living through and overcoming adversity. It can demonstrate how honesty can guide us toward transformation, stability, and empowerment (xx)’” (White 107). White concludes, “While articulating the experiences of one person’s life, an autobiography can also help others make sense of their own lives” (White 107). Grealy’s experiences of living as a person with a visible and severe facial disfigurement may seem beyond the frame of reference for many readers, but for someone who has experienced marginalization as the result of a physical disability, the acute description of emotion offered by Grealy might serve as a much-needed salve as the reader senses that he or she is not alone in suffering.

Finally, Malcolm X’s autobiography is another voice from the margins that insists on making space for dispossessed people, namely African Americans. Malcolm X appears to be wholly conscious of a particular duty that he has set for himself in writing his autobiography, which is not only about him, but also about a particular social and political movement, one which has implications that ripple far beyond his own individual life. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the author frequently makes reference to the fact that “history [has] been whitened,” a teaching that he learned from Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. By writing his own history, which incorporates the history of many other African Americans, Malcolm X establishes that he plans to write not only about himself, but to reclaim narrative and social territory for people who, like him, have been pushed to the margins of public life. The act of writing his autobiography is not merely a “literary convention,” but rather constitutes a “cultural activity” (Stone 2). For white readers, the cultural activity or service performed by Malcolm X in The Autobiography is providing an inside view of one aspect of the civil rights movement; for African American readers, The Autobiographydoes the same service, but also, for another community within that broad group, makes human a man who has been embraced by a certain group of people as a “fearless partisan hero” (Stone 250-251). Communities were defined and redefined as the result of Malcolm X’s memoir (Stone 253).

The examples of these four autobiographies, which are not in any way exceptions within the genre, demonstrate how a single individual inscribing his or her own life on the page can move not only himself or herself from the margins of society to a position of authority, but also invite an entire community to follow. While the autobiographical text is fundamentally a narrative by and about the self, its implications are not for the self alone. The autobiographical text is used intentionally to name and define oneself, but the fact that no individual, however marginalized or dispossessed, is never wholly isolated means that the autobiography has the potential to create a larger self, which becomes archetypal or emblematic of an entire community of people. While Grealy, Hong Kingston, Lorde, and Malcolm X would be unlikely to purport that they speak for anyone other than themselves, the critical reception of all four of these works suggests that many people identify with the texts and have been able to reclaim their own social and narrative spaces as a result. Despite the differences in background and the variety of subjects and life experiences portrayed in these four autobiographical works, the function of each is essentially the same. The reader who is engaged by these texts is invited into a community, either one of identification or one of resistance. In this way, the autobiography has the transformative power of creating and redefining not just the self, but also the community.

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Works Cited

Ashley, Kathleen, Leigh Gilmore, & Gerald Peters. Autobiography and Postmodernism.   Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Cosslett, Tess, Celia Lury, & Penny Summerfield. Feminism and Autobiography: Texts,  Theories, Methods.London: Routledge, 2000.

Couser, Thomas. Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography. New York: Oxford  University Press, 1989.

Freedman, Diane P., Olivia Frey, & Frances Murphy Zauhar. The Intimate Critique:

Autobiographical Literary Criticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

Hong Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage, 1975.

Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983.

White, Leah. “Autobiography, Visual Representations, and the Preservation of Self.” Mosaic   37.2 (2004): 107.

X, Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Penguin, 2001.