My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute! (Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)In the final pages of Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter the narrator's autobiographical project takes her to the unmarked grave of the father who abandoned her. The scene which unfolds is only one example of the state of lack which defines the novel: the missing headstone; the missing name; the orphaned narrator and the now voiceless father. Mr. Potter - now dead - has lost the capacity to speak, and so can not assist his daughter in the writing of her life story. However, Kincaid's narrator will not be deterred. She speaks her father's name and then writes it, and in doing so "imagines him whole and complete" (2002, 193). "Writing" the father in order to write the self is the narrator's answer to the challenge of the orphan's autobiography.The genre of autobiography in the hands of an orphan might seem ironic: the writing of history by an individual supposedly without history, or more precisely, without a coherent known or knowable pre-history.Yet, there is logic to the orphan's life writing if one views autobiography as the written record of a self-made life. The autobiography as creative writing, that is, as the creation of oneself through writing, is an exercise in personal agency. One could even say that an orphan is the quintessential autobiographer; a writer without the judging eyes of family, for whom the self, transcribed, is a construct more personal than social. Indeed, the independence inherent in the orphan's life writing can be compared to giving birth not only to a narrative, but also to oneself. For the orphan, autobiography is not, as Michel Foucault suggested, writing, "in order to become other than what one is." (1987, 182). Rather, it is writing in order to become.Like many implicitly retrospective life-narratives, the orphan's autobiography may attempt to resurrect the imagined ancestors of the abandoned child. However, the fissure between the orphan and his or her origins renders the author's account of history incomplete or inaccurate. The success of the autobiographical orphan narrative is thus not only in its engagement in the archeology of one's origins, but also in its emphasis on the creation of a personal history. It is a bildungsroman in the truest sense; a genesis which requires the will of the author to become his or her own creator.This paper explores the genre of the postcolonial orphan autobiography through a reading of Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter and Calixthe Beyala's La petiteslle du reverbere (1998) (The little girl under the street lamp) in order to expose the manner in which states of orphanage and states of colonization coincide. I seek here to demonstrate the manner in which the theme of orphanage dominates the postcolonial space; how it manifests itself within individuals as well as within the state itself. Though the protagonists of these texts are black women - the former an Antiguan and the latter a Cameroonian - the choice to present these narratives together has less to do with gender and is more based on their racial and political commonalities; cultural and historical kinships which also inform the lives of the male characters of these novels. This comparative study is not a creation of the kind of "ethnic absolutism" of which Paul Gilroy warns us, in which race becomes the sole factor in determining similarity of experience (1993, 5). Rather race, history and the geographic link of what Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic create unquestionable links between these orphan narratives. I also situate the works within the context of life- writing so as to consider the theme of literacy in postcolonial literature, the agency displayed by the colonized orphan who becomes a writer and the implications for postcolonial states fully prepared to write their own histories. …