[May 19th marks the 100th birthday of Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural representations of Malcolm, leading up to a special weekend post on what we can learn from Malcolm here in 2025!]
On the inevitable
limits of autobiography, and why this one is especially vital nonetheless.
For
whatever reason I haven’t written a lot in this space about The
Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), but I have dedicated a number of
posts to the genre
of life writing overall, and I hope every time I’ve done so I’ve made clear
how much mythmaking
is inevitably part of such texts. From St.
Augustine to Richard
Wright, Ben
Franklin to James
Frey, and everywhere in between, any act of autobiographical writing—while without
question engaged with identity in real and meaningful ways—entails a good bit
of storytelling, of the crafting of a narrative that (like all narratives)
features choices of what is included and what is excluded, what is emphasized and
what is minimized, and perhaps most of all what is intended for an audience and
for what reasons. None of which is meant as a criticism necessarily, but I
would be highly critical of anyone who argued or implied that in reading an autobiographical
work we are definitively learning about the life or identity of the person in
question—which doesn’t mean we can’t learn such things from them (and lots of
other things), just that we do so as we always do as readers of a text, through
analysis and interpretation and critical engagement.
All of which
is not only true of, but also in one important way exacerbated in, Malcolm
Little’s autobiographical book. Because despite its title the Autobiography
isn’t exactly a piece of autobiographical writing—the young African
American journalist and future novelist Alex Haley served as its
ghostwriter, authoring the book out of a series
of conversations and collaborations with Malcolm over the last few years of
Malcolm’s life. That Haley would go on to write his own very complicated piece
of autobiographically inspired fiction, Roots
(1976), adds one further layer to the questions of the Autobiography’s
genre. But even without that additional detail, the very nature of the Autobiography’s
dual and in at
least some important ways dueling authorships—a subject that, to his
credit, Haley did not shy away from addressing, especially in the
Epilogue he appended to the book when it was published a few months after Malcolm’s
assassination—forces any reader to think critically about what is and is not
part of the book, about the motivations of each of these distinct authors and voices,
about all the layers that are inevitably part of the genre but that, again, are
taken to another level by this uniquely composed autobiographical work.
So maybe
we can’t be sure that we’re learning precise or at least simple truths about
Malcolm X when we read his Autobiography—but along with all the things
we can still learn about the man and his perspective, identity, and story, there
are of course lots of other meaningful lessons to be drawn from this monumental
work. I think it’s quite telling, for example, that when Eric Holder was ending
his tenure as the first African American U.S. Attorney General in early 2015, he
recommended that “every American” read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Holder makes that case through Malcolm’s own evolutions, arguing, “To see the
transition that that man went through…from petty criminal, to a person who was severely
and negatively afflicted by race, to somebody who ultimately saw the humanity
in all of us.” I would agree, but I would also complement that perspective with
an emphasis on the layers of American history that the book forces us to examine,
many of them the worst of our prejudices and discriminations and white
supremacist violences and their effects. Malcolm’s own voice throughout his
public activist life demanded that we look long and hard at the worst of us,
and I believe his complicated and crucial book does the same.
Next
MalcolmStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Representations or other sides of Malcolm X you’d highlight?
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