Autobiography of the oppressed / marginalized.

[Cell_B]

Countless people have suffered at the hands of other persons due to caste, gender, race, their sexual preference, etc. Society itself has also been the oppressor, with laws that are blatantly unfair and anti-human. I'd like everyone to list such works. The only requirement is, it should be an autobiography and not fiction, and the book should be in English - either written in English, or written in some other language and later translated into English. (If an English translation is not available, there is no way we can later discuss it).

E.g.: "The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass".

Now just write the names of those autobiographies that you have read, or have heard about it.

[Pecksie]

I usually prefer memoirs to autobiographies. A very good memoir written by a victim of child abuse is Andrea Ashworth's "Once in a House on Fire". Andrea was born in a working-class English home and suffered abuse at the hands of an abusive stepfather, while her passive mother just neglected her. However, she has managed to write a very beautiful book out of her experience.

Not so long ago, I read the autobiography of black South African Miriam Matabane, dealing with her life under apartheid. But the writing (with which her brother Mark Matabane helped) wasn't good, and I felt the whole book was predictable and simplistic, as illustrated by her description of the USA (where she had never been) as a paradise... I felt that the complexity of the issues she dealt with, such as getting pregnant in her teens, was not adequately portrayed...

[aeroport]

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs
Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave by Aphra Behn
^she isn't the one being oppressed here necessarily, but it is supposed to be autobiographical.

[Cell_B]

I need some more names please, and not slave narratives. I want to know what other experiences people have had, apart from slavery.

[islandclimber]

I don't like non fiction all that much, but I have read a few interesting auto-biographies from the categories you are talking about..

but of course there is "Night" by Elie Wiesel.. A WWII concentration camp survivor...

and then "Left to Tell" and I can't remember the name of the lady who wrote it, but it is a pretty horrific account of the genocide in Rwanda in 1993.. she spent 90 something days with several other women hiding in a bathroom.. and had almost her entire family brutally murdered.. it was pretty awful to read..

and then from Rwanda also is "Machete Season"... if you want the perspective of those perpetrating genocide and crimes against humanity, well here is a depressing book.. it is interviews of several men who have been imprisoned for there part in the killings... pretty awful and terrifying too..

[JBI]

Much of Primo Levi's work, especially "If This is a Man".

[Etienne]

Solzhenitsyn, obviously.

Pierre Vallières' Nègres blancs d'Amérique (American White Niggers) which is about oppression of French Canadians from the perspective of someone jailed for life because of his "activism" for the cause of Quebec.