Hybridity in Down Second Avenue by Ezekiel Mphahlele The criticism that Mphahlele's awareness of being a "hybrid" person gives him an inability to "write his story himself" is an invented criticism of literal derivations of the Greek components of the word "autobiography". The textual landscape of Down Second Avenue includes many varied and detailed domains, the rural environment and its multiple dimensions, the city and its multiple dimensions, in the sense that autobiography is part of the genre of biography in the postclassical European tradition , which being accounts of the lives of saints and princes, the criticism is perhaps true to some extent, however, in the aspect of autobiography being the search for identity and hybridity the essence of Down Second Avenue, it is the hybridization of the author's story itself. A genre is works classified in terms of shared characteristics 1If one studies the advent of autobiography as a genre in its own right, it would appear to be a particularly modern form of literature. , a hybrid form of biography. Furthermore, the distinctions between the forms of biography, personal history or diary, and novel are called into question as autobiography is not an account of the accumulated wisdom of a life but a definition of identity. 2The word "hybrid" is usually used in conjunction with genetic analysis of plants. A hybrid in its biological context is sometimes a sterile branch. Hybrid can be defined as “mixed ancestry” as a word; “Hybrid” carries with it both physical and metaphysical denotations. In Down Second Avenue, Mphahlele examines both a hybrid society, that of South Africa in the 1930s and 1950s, and its composite subsocieties, largely hybrid within themselves. Mphahlele's awareness of having mixed ancestry is rooted in more than one dichotomy. His rural identity is opposed to his urban one, his vocation as a teacher/academic is opposed to his employment as a delivery boy, his introspective nature is opposed to his being a member of a gang. His keen understanding of South African society is ironic in his feeling liberated in departing from it. It is in hybridity that Mphahlele's identity lies. Mphahlele sequentially tells the story of his life from his early childhood to his departure from the country to take up a teaching position in Nigeria. Throughout Second Avenue, Mphahlele expresses a feeling of helplessness and sterility until he embarks on leaving the country.