Twentieth-century critics have opposed the supposed objectivity of the essay to the letter and diary as private, self-expressive, and autobiographical genres. But this was a modern development. From Michel de Montaigne to the early nineteenth century, the essay, the letter, and the diary were more alike and far more closely aligned than they later became, particularly with regard to representations of the self and notions of publicity. For instance, they were all considered forms of address, and means of presenting one’s intellectual physiognomy to others that were likely to be read aloud, shared, and discussed. This chapter therefore explores now-forgotten family resemblances among these genres both in form and function and concludes by showing where they were fused or embedded in one another.

Rooted in automatism, surrealism spawned a new kind of autobiographical writing, beginning in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. This new style of autobiographical writing sprang from a desire to identify a lived experience that comprised both waking life and the rich world of unconscious dreams and images. Functioning like Dorothea Tanning’s mirror-door, her preferred metaphor for painting, surrealist autobiographical writing is rooted in everyday reality, within which surreal experiences may surge. Only the autobiographical mode could encompass the multiple voices of surrealism and provide readers with the chance to discover surrealist principles as the surrealists discovered them themselves. This chapter presents a short history of surrealist autobiographical writing, from Robert Desnos’s Mourning for Mourning (1924) and Liberty or Love! (1927), to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937), Michel Leiris’s Manhood (1939), Leonora Carrington’s House of Fear (1938), The Oval Lady (1939), and Down Below (1944), Tanning’s Birthday (1986), and Kay Sage’s unfinished China Eggs (1955; published in 1996). These texts show artists and writers seeking self-realization through self-knowledge in the hope of fulfilling Rimbaud’s injunction to ’change life’.

The consistent tendency in Caribbean literature towards generic transgression – blurring of generic boundaries – is particularly evident in the genre of life writing, which not only spans fiction, poetry, memoir, auto/biography, essay, and theoretical formulations but also often reimagines the nature of each of these forms of writing. A comparative examination of specific works within the genre reveals a varied terrain between narrations of the individual life and a variety of communities and affiliations. The range includes Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave; different iterations of the autobiographical novel exemplified in Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin; biomythographies such as Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and poetic expressions such as Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’, Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Negus’, and Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. The possible yields of conversation between more traditional forms such as Austin Clarke’s Pigtails ’n Breadfruit and essays and genre-crossing essay collections such as Edward Baugh’s ‘Cuckoo and Culture’ and Samuel Selvon’s ‘Three into One Can’t Go’, further extend the lenses through which Caribbean autobiography may be filtered. This chapter examines multiple ways in which the autobiographical impulse appears in various traditional and crossover genres.

This essay argues that contemporary Caribbean women exploit the malleability of life writing as a genre in a variety of ways that recognize the precariousness of life-making and self-making in the post-plantation Caribbean. While each of the writers discussed here critically refashions life-narrative for their own distinct purposes, they frequently share an interest in filtering personal life experiences through familiar familial and regional histories to emphasize the imbrication of the personal and political. Narrating life-stories is presented in these texts as inextricably linked to the difficult cultural politics of self-making that is so powerfully evidenced from The History of Mary Prince through to the present. While life-writing remains haunted by the region’s violent history, Caribbean women writers continue to excavate that history in order to record, affirm, rescue, restore, and celebrate self and life-making possibilities, however fragmented, precarious, or itinerant.