Abstract
Discussions on Arab autobiographical writings have, until recently, been scarce if not absent from existing scholarship in English. In addition to the academic paucity of critical publications focusing exclusively on this literary genre of expression from the region, existing discussions on Arab literature as well as the major theoretical conceptualizations of postcolonial autobiography have largely marginalized Arab(ic) life-writing. However, a modest, yet promising, rise in scholarly interest in Arab auto/biographical expression can be noticed in recent years. Some scholars are highlighting the urgent need for more appropriate critical attention to the fast-growing corpus of autobiographical narratives from the Arab world in a range of cultural media. Joining authors such as Dwight Reynolds (2001), Nawar al-Hassan Golley (2003, 2007), and Valerie Anishchenkova (2014), Tahia Abdel Nasser addresses this under-researched area of investigation making Arab autobiographical writings the focus of her recently published monograph Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles.
Nasser’s book offers a preliminary study of Arab literary autobiography by covering a wide range of linguistic and cultural contexts from within the region that no previous scholarly study has incorporated. In an exploration of the notion of solitude, Nasser provides a nuanced comparative reading of a selection of Arab, Francophone, and Anglophone narratives in different self-reflexive literary forms, including autobiographies, diaries, testimonies, and memoirs. The author examines Arab writers’ experiences and autobiographical “iterations of solitude in moments of deep public involvement” in national movements (p. 153). This ultimately, as she contends, reformulates the role and agency of the individual writer within politically fraught contexts along with the Western conventions of this genre of self-expression. With a particular focus on Arab literary life-writing from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Arab literary autobiographies, particularly from Egypt, Algeria, Palestine, and Iraq, Nasser’s ambitious scope brings together a number of politically committed writers from a range of linguistic and national contexts. She investigates the works of prominent authors with transnational influence such as Taha Hussein, Edward Said, Assia Djebar, Latifa al-Zayyat, Mahmoud Darwish, and Alia Mamdouh, with less academically discussed authors, but influential within their national cultures, including Sonallah Ibrahim, Haifa Zangana, Radwa Ashur, and Mona Prince.
Nasser dedicates much of her discussion to the ways in which writing autobiographically during or on national struggles have enabled Arab authors to rework the conventions of life-writing genres and put pressure on the traditional conceptions of autobiographical subjectivity. She draws attention to the historical and political significance of literary autobiography by going beyond the perceptive dichotomy of the private–personal that has been governing the Eurocentric traditions of the genre. The author argues that participating in and/or attesting to contexts of colonialism, nationalism, and independence movements influences authors’ autobiographical productions linguistically and formally as their articulation of subjectivity becomes predominantly ideological. In six chapters, Nasser traces a number of autobiographical forms that are influenced and shaped by the context of national struggles within which they were iterated.
Nasser’s first chapter brings autobiographical narratives by Sonallah Ibrahim in conversation with those by the founding father of Arab autobiography, Taha Hussein. She argues that both authors’ nonfictional accounts, which narrate the transition from youth and boyhood in colonial Egypt to mature, nationalist commitment in the age of modernity, yield an autobiographical form of bildungsroman that is crafted around anti-colonial struggles. Nasser also addresses Palestinian life-writing, a remarkably growing literary corpus representing the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and its underlying issues of dispossession, displacements, and exile. Looking at autobiographies by Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti, Nasser proposes that the creative articulation of the experience of exile and displacement by Palestinian poets gives way to a lyrical genre of self-expression that intersects poetry and autobiography. Equally, looking at Edward Said’s celebrated memoir Out of Place (1999) in parallel to that of his daughter Najla Said’s Looking For Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab American Family (2013), Nasser explores the effects of exile and displacement on nonfictional articulation of isolation from the native culture and the split sense of subjectivity it entails.
Nasser dedicates three chapters of her monograph, namely Chapters 2, 5, and 6, to a highly under-researched scope of enquiry that is Arab women’s autobiographical narratives. In her analysis of narratives by Assia Djebar and Latifa al-Zayyat, Nasser observes the way both authors’ memoirs predominantly focus on the role and engagement of women during national conflicts. Nasser argues that Djebar’s and al-Zayyat’s feminist perspectives and the nationalist political movements they witnessed influenced the construction of their autobiographical narratives. This influence can be observed in the way both authors link the fate of the modern women to the new nation. Nasser’s book also addresses prison memoirs by Iraqi women, namely Zangana and Mamdouh, through which she argues that the experiences of isolation, violence, torture, and trauma affect the forms and tonalities of autobiographical narratives which visit such experiences.
Moving to contemporary Egypt, Nasser introduces what she terms “Tahrir Memoirs” to describe women’s participation accounts in the recent uprising during which Tahrir Square in Central Cairo that became the symbol of legitimacy and locus of civic engagement. Focusing on the autobiographical project of the late Egyptian author Radwa Ashur, Nasser highlights the focal role of university campuses in shaping the life-writer’s nationalist agenda and in enforcing her revolutionary commitments. The author further extends the discussion on Tahrir and campus memoirs to a brief analysis of Mona Prince’s diary Revolution is My Name (2014). Through Prince’s diary, Nasser highlights women’s active engagement during the Egyptian uprising and the ways in which autobiographical narratives brought to the forefront and memorialized their public visibility and revolutionary agency.
Clearly, Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles constitutes a significant intervention in Arab and autobiographical studies. The original contribution of Nasser’s monograph is not limited to providing a fresh perspective on an “embargoed” genre from the Arab region, to use a Saidian term. An equally significant quality of Nasser’s study lies in her comparative approach through which she draws from the literary traditions of the Global South to analyze Arab literary autobiographical narratives. Referring to prominent Latin American authors, such as Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nasser highlights the potentials of looking comparatively at autobiographical narratives that are framed within national history and (post)colonial struggle within both regions. She stresses the need to look beyond the East/West dichotomy in comparatively approaching Arab literature and start considering possibly richer and timely scopes of analysis “through South–South comparisons” (p. 152), including literary productions from South Asia and Africa. In doing so, Nasser moves away from the East/West paradigm that dominates postcolonial studies as well as the prevailing Eurocentric conceptualization of the autobiographical. Such a comparative framework of associating Arab literature to that of the Global South would indeed open up the critical horizons of postcolonial comparative investigations of Arab literature. It would also lead to the emergence of new critical trajectories that would avoid the risk of exhausting the potentials of both postcolonial criticism and the conceptualization of life-writing genres.