In seeking to account for the complexity of identity, Stuart Hall observes that ‘identities are about using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are” or “where we come from”, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves’. Hall and Du Gay are, of course, referring to the necessity of considering ‘roots’ as ‘routes’ to identity formation; that is, of thinking of identity not so much as static, but as evolving. The latter bears notable significance for (auto)biographical writing as a narrative mode that, for the most part, traces the evolution of a singular subject and concerns itself with the ways in which that subject becomes who they are. Moreover, this notion of identity as bearing the imprint of both how one is interpreted and how one might choose to represent oneself provides a useful lens for considering the (auto)biographies of Es’kia Mphahlele: Down Second Avenue (1959), Afrika, My Music (1986) and Chabani Manganyi’s Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele (1983). These texts are implicated in the long-reaching tradition of life writing in South Africa – which dates as far back as the nineteenth century – and inasmuch as they present us with the subjective memories of Mphahlele, these memories are forged in the crucible of the country’s divisive history in ways that invite scrutiny for several reasons. Amongst these reasons is, first, the fact that Mphahlele would, in his adult life, be forced to endure the pain of displacement caused by exile, where exile is easily legible as a form of displacement or, as I refer to it here, unhoming.