Relationality

Quintessentially, Relationality in self-life writing is exactly what is sounds like, the narrators concept of the ‘Other’, or his/her relationships, experiences, and contact with another person or groups of people that differ from what the narrator would consider normal. Smith and Watson express the importance of considering relationality when reading autobiographical works by alluding to Paul Eakin’s concept that relationality in self-life writing can not only show the narrator’s life through “the autobiography of the self, but the biography and the autobiography of the other. That is, that the narrator’s story is often refracted through the stories of others” (RA 216). Therefore, relationality can refer the interaction or differences between two groups of peoples, as well as inferring that someone else’s identity and/or part of their autobiography can inadvertently become articulated through the act of self-life writing, even if it is not that person writing their own story. However, the term relationality is typically used to discuss how people view or write about the Other.

The Slave Narrative is arguably the best genre in autobiography when considering relationality. The self-narratives of slaves emanate such a degree of tension between their white masters and their collective identity as slaves. Fredrick Douglass’s slave-narrative is also a trauma narrative in the sense that it was hard for him to recount the horrendous—unspeakable—treacheries he suffered. Douglass wrote “It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it” (Douglass 343). Despite the existence of positive whites figures like the abolitionists in his text, there is always that controlling tension that dominates the text and always juxtaposes white and black, us and them, ‘I’ and Other. This should not be surprising when one realizes that during Douglass life “it was a common saying, even among little white boys, that it was worth a half-cent to kill a “nigger,” and a half-cent to bury one” (Douglass 358). No wonder relationality comes through the strongest in slave-narratives; according to the cultural script of most white southerners, black people were property—not humans—which could be bought and sold, dismissed as animals, raped, and killed as long as it did not off set the economics of the relationship.

Personal Take:

Let us move away from the morbid example of relationality found in slave narratives to a less depressing form of relationality. It is interesting to consider Smith and Watson’s notion that one’s identity or part of their autobiography can emerge through another’s text or oral narrative. Remember that childhood scenario when you were on the school bus and you told someone sitting next to you that Billy kissed Susie, and then they told the two kids in the seat in front of them, and then they passed the news around the bus like a bottle of whiskey being tossed amongst members of a rock band. By the time the wheels of the buss had come to their final halt, half the kids on the bus exited its doors thinking that Billy gave Susie mono, and Susie retaliated by having her older brother beat up Billy. The funny thing is that as adults, we are still often the victims of such gossip, be it by word-of-mouth, literature, or memoirs. Relationality deals with viewing the Other, and thus one must realize that some self-narratives that talk about other people often contain biased, outlandish, or even racial motives in their discussion of other people in their self-life writing. In short, the reader or listener of someone’s life story must be wary of how other people are represented in any form of autobiography.  

-Joe Fleming