Anti autobiography of miss

Summary

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a 1974 film adapted from the 1971 novel of the same name that was written by Ernest J. Gaines. The film offers a view into the history and experience of Black people from 1860 to 1962 through the eyes of Jane Pittman. A then 50-year-old Cicely Tyson portrayed the lead character from the age of 23 to 110 a role for which she became the first Black person to win a lead actress Emmy Award. (Sidenote: If you thought Ms. Tyson was slaying in her 90s check out the film to see an example of her slaying from back in the day playing a character half her age.)

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Show Notes

I loved Cicely Tyson and liked The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman but I want to go ahead and get the things I disliked out the way. Most of my issues with the film were related to visual production. To begin with, I am not the biggest fan of movies from the 1970s because some of the acting can be over the top. I felt that was the case to a degree with some of the supporting and minor actors in the movie. Also, most films from that decade have a certain look and color that I find off-putting.

Made for television, the movie’s makeup and effects were probably considered cutting edge in the 1970s but aren’t very impressive now. Tyson was already a mature woman when The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was made but still looked very young so it was necessary to use makeup to show her aging. But, the texture of Jane’s skin when she is old appears plasticky, not in a static plastic surgery way but more so that it just looked unrealistic. And her appearance is especially distracting for a Black woman because most Black women even when very old don’t wrinkle in this manner. Their skin tends to be loose and soft looking with maybe crow’s feet around the eyes and lines in the forehead but not deep laugh lines or lines in the cheeks. (My sweetie pie great-great-aunt is coming up on 102-years-old and doesn’t hav

I suggested ‘anti-memoirs’ as your theme because I saw it used in connection with your new book, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. It makes me think of André Malraux’s Antimémoires, from 1967, where he begins by asking, “What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.’ What does anti-memoir mean to you?

There are certain things people expect from reading a memoir and those often are not the same things I expect when I read an anti-memoir. I’m making a general statement here, but I think readers – perhaps especially in America – tend to expect a narrative arc, which to me is quite a vague term for something which goes more or less smoothly from A to B. And on the way from A to B you have – and, again, I’m generalizing – to find something new. There has to be some element of change; there has to be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ – an epiphany. But to me, all these things are artificial. Life is lived in a much messier way. Our experience of life is messier than an arc with a before and after. I hesitate to call my book a memoir because it doesn’t fit that mould.

Anti-memoirs are books that – to borrow a phrase from Crabcakes by James Alan McPherson – work to ‘de-self’ the writer. Anti-memoirs, for me, are about de-selfing. You have to take yourself out of it, while still writing about things you’re concerned with and want to write about. So in the end, an anti-memoir is not really about the author – it’s more about the reader. The reader isn’t going to read these books and think to herself ‘Oh, this is a great narrative’. Rather, she’ll say ‘That’s something I’ve thought, too’, or ‘That’s how I feel’. That’s what I find in the books I’ve chosen.

Marco Roth has a good definition for the anti-memoir: ‘Is it possible to write a memoir about how you mistook your own life,’ he asks, ‘about what you didn’t yet know or failed to see, and when you didn’t know it? About how your character and judgments were for

1This paper will explore the ways in which Ernest J. Gaines uses fiction in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman to write a history of the African Americans from 1861 to 1961. The “Introduction” sets the novel going, but its direction has already been given in the unusual dedication to his grandmother, stepfather and aunt “who did not walk a day in her life but who taught me the importance of standing” (Gaines iv). The significance for Gaines is that what happened a hundred years ago is part of his present-day lived life. The nineteenth-century novel was possessed by history, and white nineteenth-century novelists found their great subject in the war of European nations that was fought between 1799 and 1815. But that was not an American war nor was it an African American war. For Gaines, the war that makes the great turning point of a nation and a people is the American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865. It resulted in a moment of history after which life would not be the same.

2However, one of the main points that Gaines makes about that great turning point in history is that everything changed and nothing changed. And his main fictional device to establish that truth is to tell the history of the hundred years since Emancipation as the story of one woman. Her autobiography becomes an ethno-biography, and her story is one dedicated to all those about whom her story might be told, and the first names that we are given to whom this story relates are the names in the book’s dedication. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is to be a relation about relations; however, I do not think that we need to detail the actual lives of Julia McVay, Ralph Norbert Colar and Augusteen Jefferson to begin a reading of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Their lives make moving and instructive tellings, tellings that can be found in Mary Ellen Doyle’s Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. But if we do not digress into history and i

Reviewed by Ona Gritz

"This monster, the body, this miracle, its pain…"

How fitting that Jennifer Bartlett has chosen a quote by Virginia Woolf as an epigraph for Autobiography/ Anti-Biography, her daring and beautiful new collection of poems. Bartlett is a poet like no other, her voice uniquely her own, but if any foremother's influence can be felt it's Woolf's. It's there in the internal quality of the narrative, its music and intimacy, and in a grammar and logic that is intuitive rather than linear; deeply personal yet—to me, and certainly to others with physical disabilities—bone-deep familiar.

As is suggested by the title, the book is divided into two distinct sections. It is in the first, Autobiography, that Bartlett openly explores disability, grappling not so much with her body's limits and imperfections as with the limited, imperfect (able-centric) world she/we must move through.

a movement spastic
               and unwieldy

is its own lyric and
the able-bodied are

tone-deaf to this singing

Tone-deaf to this singing! The disabled reader knows the heartbreaking accuracy of these words. The able-bodied world is so rarely attuned to our beauty or to the richness of our lives, and one of the many ways Bartlett's poems serve us is by naming this lack and placing it, rightly, outside the self and onto the callous and unthinking observer.

…the critic of the world watches

o stupid, stupid world

so that, the mother might
          say your child must be angry

because you are disabled

so I told her, your child
must be angry

because you are a bitch… …and the children grow up
knowing this is ordinary

What these powerful poems bring into question is our acceptance of such cutting and blat