On Autobiographies and Memoirs

The most beautiful parts of an autobiography are usually the parts where the author paints a picture of her childhood. It is suffused with innocence and nostalgia. They are the parts where we see the general, the president, or the billionaire as a vulnerable child, just like any other child—the object of everyone’s affection. We feel like cuddling the child and rubbing its head.

This is why Ake: The Years of Childhood is the sweetest in Wole Soyinka’s long series of autobiographical writing. Isara: A Voyage Around Essay follows closely. By the time you get to Ibadan: The Years of Penkelemes, the writing is more sophisticated, and is even playful and humorous, but it has lost the feel of paradise. The Man Died has its own kind of fame, but it can’t hold a candle to Ake. You Must Set Forth At Dawn is a different animal, a jogging, trumpeting elephant; but you get my drift.

Most of the contentious and disagreeable parts of a memoir or autobiography are the parts narrating events in the adult life of the author. They are the parts people are most familiar with. They are the parts people have opinions about. They are the most divisive parts, casting the protagonist as a hero or a villain. They are also the most tedious parts, the most unreadable portions.

Take a look at Obama’s Dreams from My Father, a riveting narrative of his early years in Honolulu through Chicago until he lands at Harvard, and compare it with The Audacity of Hope, which is just a political biography that at least succeeds in portraying Obama as a brilliant political speech maker and clever writer.

Look at the recently published autobiography by Ibrahim Babangida. You want to hug the little orphan Ibrahim. You share the fears of a child frightened by frequent harmattan fires in Wushishi. You share his fears as he goes to far-away Bida with its imaginary population of ghosts, witches, and wizards. But by the time General IBB emerges...And by the time he disingenuously tries to justify his iniquities, you feel giving him a dirty something.

In Achebe’s There Was A Country, the parts I love best are when he describes his childhood and his time in school, reading English classics and soaking in the mores and folklore of his people. You share the excitement of the child passing through all these and eventually finding himself at a brand-new university set up for bright kids like him. It must have been difficult for him to write the parts around the events of the Civil War. The style is less elegant, less compelling. The unevenness of style is striking.

What lies at the heart of this disparity between these parts in biographies? I suspect that the narrative of childhood is a straightforward story, but relating the events of adulthood is an argument. Stories are more eloquent than arguments.