Arabic Disclosures: The Postcolonial Autobiographical Atlas

By Muhsin J. al-Musawi

Arabic Disclosures presents readers with a comparative analysis of Arabic postcolonial autobiographical writing.

In Arabic Disclosures Muhsin J. al-Musawi investigates the genre of autobiography within the modern tradition of Arabic literary writing from the early 1920s to the present. Al-Musawi notes in the introduction that the purpose of this work is not to survey the entirety of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic but rather to apply a rigorously identified set of characteristics and approaches culled from a variety of theoretical studies of the genre to a particular set of autobiographical works in Arabic, selected for their different methodologies, varying historical contexts within which they were conceived and written, and the equally varied lives experienced by the authors involved.

The book begins in the larger context of autobiographical space, where the theories of Bourdieu, Bachelard, Bakhtin, and Lefebvre are laid out, and then considers the multiple ways in which a postcolonial awareness of space has impacted the writings of many of the authors whose works are examined. Organized chronologically, al-Musawi begins with the earliest modern example of autobiographical work in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s book, translated into English as The Stream of Days. Al-Musawi studies some of the major pioneers in the development of modern Arabic thought and literary expression: Jurjī Zaydān, Mīkḫāˀīl Nuˁaymah, Aḥmad Amīn, Salāmah Mūsā, Sayyid Quṭb, and untranslated works by the prominent critic and scholar Ḥammādī Ṣammūd, the novelist ʿĀliah Mamdūḥ, and others. He also examines the autobiographies of a number of women, including Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī and Fadwā Ṭūqān, and fiction writers. The book draws a map of Arab thought and culture in its multiple engagements with other cultures and will be useful for scholars and students of comparative literature, Arabic studies, and Middle Eastern studies, intellectual thought, and history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780268201661

Muhsin J. al-Musawi

Muhsin J. al-Musawi is professor of classical and modern Arabic literature, and comparative and cultural studies at Columbia University. He is the author of many books in English and Arabic, including The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).

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ARABIC DISCLOSURES

ARABIC DISCLOSURES

The Postcolonial Autobiographical Atlas

MUHSIN J. AL-MUSAWI

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948632

ISBN: 978-0-268-20164-7 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20163-0 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20166-1 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea behind this book goes back to a question I raised in The Postcolonial Arabic Novel (2003). I could not follow this up for some time, until I gave a seminar on Arabic autobiography in fall 2013. My question, then, is this: How is it possible for us to address postcolonial consciousness without an exploration of what could be read as autobiographical—that is, authorial traces that speak of authors’ intimacies, inhibitions, and concerns, even if some details suffer repression? The case is not necessarily tied to one single issue, for Salāmah Mūsā, for example, refrained for long from mentioning Marx as a major influence. There is always an underlying consciousness that has at its core an issue of identity. Postcolonial consciousness grows or shows in multiple venues and terms of belonging. The recent multiplication of books that recall birthplaces as well as small towns and cities and their social and cultural environs urges such an exploration in space as closely intertwined not only with a Foucauldian technology of the body, consciousness, subjectivity, psyche, commitment, ambivalence, and fluidity but also with a will to act on the formation of a present, which is in turn firmly located in space. This overlooked atlas sets the argument for this book in motion.

I was lucky to have very intelligent graduate students who created a dynamic 2013 class. It was then and in my preparations for the class that I decided to write a book that specifically addresses a postcolonial autobiographical atlas, a reading in spatial thought that gives space some visible attention as synonymous with identity formation on individual, communal, and national levels. Among the group were Angela Giordani, Susanna Ferguson, Orcun Can Okan, Max Shmookler, and a few others. I am grateful for their input and cheerful presence. I have to thank my friends and colleagues Roger Allen and Shawkat Toorawa for their many suggestions and ideas. An almost finished first draft was completed in Tunis in spring and summer 2018, when I was there on leave to make use of a grant from the Institute of International Education, Fulbright Scholar Program. I express my thanks and gratitude to the program. I express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. The ideas presented have benefited from discussions in the University Seminar on Arabic Studies. The cover is a painting by my friend the well-known Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi, whom I thank profusely for this and many other covers for my books.

I cannot thank the University of Notre Dame Press enough, including their editors, staff, and freelancers, especially Wendy McMillen, Matthew Dowd, and Bob Banning, whose attention to production is of the highest standard. Transliteration may seem occasionally uneven: translated material often downplays transliteration. The notes and bibliography follow University of Notre Dame Press style, which varies from standard style in Arabic scholarship in English.

I thank Omar Shafik Alhamshi for preparing the index, and Alexander Abraham Avalade-Ximenes for further proofreading and a careful check.

It would be churlish to end these acknowledgments without due mention of my wife, Bahera, who accompanied me not only in my travels to Tunisia but also in my other autobiographical ventures.

THRESHOLDS

This book focuses on autobiographic space in its postcolonial condition. Its primary concern is with Arab writers whose roles are significantly intertwined with their societies, the history of ideas, and the formation of cultural identity in specific geographies. Its importance for the field of Islamic, Arabic, comparative, political, and anthropological or sociological and cultural studies derives from this position in relation to regions and cultures that are now more than ever at the center of imperial competition and conflict. As a locus for cultural practices, formations, and engagements, autobiographic space or an autobiographic atlas assumes greater implications than the bare narrative of a mind in progress. As a sum total of interstices, space and place present each individual with promises and challenges. Especially in moments of encounter, geography functions as a decisive factor in the makeup of minds and communities.

While the encounter with powers and cultures that define the postcolonial consciousness holds visible importance, micro prospects and challenges present the character in question in action. Every act, speech, enunciation, and desire counts in this makeup that is the concern of this book. In defining a thick locus of implications, this book is also in line with a number of theoretical undertakings. As Jean-François Lyotard argues, A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be.¹ Arabic autobiographies in their spatial formation present such a web. As self-production, each intellectual spreads himself or herself over a vast space of quotes, reminiscences, poetic personas, masks, characters, shadows, and ghosts. Their writings offer a self-produced canvas, but autobiography proper emerges as the attempt to capture all in one sequence, which is never free of holes. Always in control, but also burdened by anxieties, the autobiographer thinks of his canvas as a sovereign space, for as Lyotard explains, No one, not even the least privileged among us, is entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent.² But it is up to readers to explore and find out gaps that disclose what is camouflaged. The reader as explorer plays the role of the detective in the act of collating and surveying details.³

Thus, it is not the intention of this book to survey Arabic autobiographies. It rather draws a map of Arab thought and culture in its multiple engagements with other cultures. Its primary thrust is theoretical: to argue for a narrative or autobiographic grammar with Arabic self-narratives as textual terrains. While Arabic-oriented, it works globally along two lines: a theoretical one that accommodates conceptualizations of self-narrative in relation to shifting categories of center and margin, and a thematic one that selects a number of Arabic autobiographical texts with strong thematic concerns that cut across multiple cultures. Although Europe looms large in early twentieth-century autobiography, there are many instances that recall or remind readers of similar Afro-Asian and Latin American topographical and historical itineraries and contexts, especially writings we associate with societal and cultural transformations. More than historical accounts, these intellectual itineraries speak of the successes and failures of the secular ideology of the Arab nation-state. They convey the struggle of intellectuals—as self-styled leaders—to build an ideal state on the ruins of the past. Probably self-censored at times, these writings serve nevertheless as trajectories for a secular journey rather than one from denial to affirmation. Staunchly established in modernity and its nahḍah (Arab modernizing movement) paradigms, most of these writings are secular itineraries that rarely end in a search for faith. They are the journeys of a generation of Arab intellectuals who are facing many crises, but not the crisis of faith. They provide another look at the making of the Arab intelligentsia—and probably the Afro-Asian and Latin American ones—since the early twentieth century and help us discern not only achievements on the level of education and public service but also the mounting discontent with failures that have been overwhelming and besetting the formation of the nation-state.

In terms of theoretical exploration, this project takes its lead from Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, but it also makes use of Paul Ricoeur’s and Michel de Certeau’s insights, along with the practice of Franco Moretti in his reading of the nineteenth-century European novel. It develops, however, its own method and style to account for a rich corpus of autobiographies and narrative cities and rural areas. Every community, minority, café, street, station, district, and road that happens to draw narrative attention is juxtaposed against other accounts. The Sufis whom early modernists belittle appear differently in post-nahḍah fictionalized autobiographies.

Chapter 1, Theorizing Autobiography, explores and interrogates available theoretical insights that have focused on individual consciousness. It offers examples to expose fault lines in what has been pursued in major writings on autobiographic theory. It lays out a preliminary narrative grammar, an autobiographic grammatica that seeks answers in response to the increasing awareness of visuality that Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy outlines in relation to print. In a series of engagements with print industry, virtual space, and culture industry and photography, narrative typologies unfold as initiations in the geography of being.

Chapter 2, The Autobiographer in Action, continues the discussion of narrative or autobiographical grammar through a number of self-narratives. These provide a number of autobiographical tracks and reflect therefore on the wide prospects of the field as central to the geography and history of communities. The narratives of self-made intellectuals like Jurjī Zaydān, Mīkḫāˀīl Nuˁaymah, and Ḥannā Mīnah are not mere journeys in life; nor are they mere life records. They articulate geography at a moment of colonial and postcolonial engagement whereby culture and politics pose challenges that define a choice, a perspective, and a worldview. To ground these moments in history proper, we recall medieval Arab-Islamic autobiographies to lay down a broad semantic field that allows windows of comparison between medieval and modern or postmodern consciousness in relation to the construction of knowledge, urban space, and the art of narrative. Such a comparative framework debunks in the end the surmise of some Arab intellectuals that Islam negates subjectivity. Many prominent Arabs accepted and even internalized the common platitude of atomization that was part of colonial rhetoric, the reduction of societies and minds to an analogy with the desert, an analogy that was given currency by some European philologists and traditional Orientalists on the eve of imperial conquests. Instead of merely confronting the platitude, this chapter predicates its argument on new theoretical horizons. Autobiography, even an exergue, may give the lie to the centrality of the subject. It is a witness to death, but as text it also heralds a rebirth, which Derrida, for one, follows up as foundational to the birth of the Führer. At this intersection, and in almost all Arabic autobiographies under discussion, there emerge the pulls of history and the Nietzschean decentering of the subject. The tendency to account for a beginning, a career, and an achievement of some sort is propelled by a sense of historical continuity that is synonymous with teleological thought. Gaps and holes question this foundational premise and present disclosure as a gaping wound that can rarely heal. With a penchant to preserve the sovereignty of the subject, total history theory resists Nietzschean genealogy and persists in "the search for an original foundation that would make rationality the telos of mankind, and link the whole history of thought to the preservation of this rationality, to the maintenance of this teleology, and to the ever necessary return to this foundation."⁴ Michel Foucault explains that research in psychoanalysis, linguistics, and ethnology forces this totalization out and history turns against itself to take into account the unceasing effort of a consciousness turned upon itself, trying to grasp itself in its deepest conditions.⁵ This is the intersection and locus where autobiography often works.

This explosive divide can be traced in the autobiographies of two prominent figures who take their village background as springboard for an engagement with rural life. Chapter 3, The Arab Enlighteners, has two parts; one deals with Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s The Days, while the second speaks of Sayyid Quṭb’s autobiography as literary museum. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn recounts how Saʿad Zaghlūl, the leader of the 1919 popular revolution in Egypt, corrects Ḥusayn’s teleological view of history. History is written by the powerful. Other views that are to become central to later scholarship in autobiography, like subjective consciousness or historical sequentiality, lose force in this postcolonial awareness. Both prominent writers have their ghosts and shadow texts. Ḥusayn relies on an Enlightenment discourse in his retrospective self-account, while Quṭb argues for an independent reading of geography as necessarily coalesced in everyday life. Both reflect on education and its institutions and provide a register of childhood readings. From Ḥusayn, we get a portrait of a young writer struggling for emancipation. In Quṭb, we witness a village, rural life, and family and community economies. While Ṭāhā Ḥusayn provides more insights to understand modern Arab intellectual history, Quṭb presents an isotopic space that economists and sociologists need in order to come to grips with rural societies in their exchange with urban centers. In these spatial interstices multiple issues and concerns arise that were to become the preoccupation of Arab modernity advocates, as the next chapter argues.

Chapter 4, Writing Back: The Autobiographer’s Commitment, is also in two parts, which broach the formation of Marxist and socialist thought. In the first part, Autobiography as Act of Protest: The Educational Journey of Salāmah Mūsā, this influential intellectual appears as the most widely read all over the Arab world. His social and political interventions address a rising middle-class readership. He takes the land of Egypt as a starting point to debunk the rhetoric of empire in its own terms. Enamored by and trained in rationalist thought, Mūsā cannot escape the dangers of ideological contamination that his contemporary Frantz Fanon addresses in a number of writings. The national elite remain tethered to the fascination of metropolitan centers while simultaneously arguing against colonial exploitation. Mūsā’s rural background pales in comparison; so does his Zagazig quarter in Cairo. The second part, The Self-Made Marxist Novelist: Ḥannā Mīnah, presents a counter case. The self-made intellectual presents an impoverished background, a series of migrations in search of livelihood under feudal and French exploitation. Misery and adventure, darkness and storytelling, theft and revolt, present Ḥannā Mīnah’s Fragments of Memory as one of the most captivating and informing narratives. An atlas is laid down that maps out a Syrian landscape where humans, and despite starvation, are capable of rising above selfishness for the benefit of a community. In this narrative, women—such as the narrator’s mother and the rebellious Zanuba—appear as dynamic forces. This visible presence against dire circumstances distinguishes the concerns of the following chapter.

Chapter 5, Women’s Voices/Women’s Journeys, has three parts, each dealing with a single autobiography in relation to a wide cultural script. In the first part, Hudā Shaʿrāwī’s Third Space: Identitarian Politics of a Memoir, the issue of sentimental education and the symbolic idyll is raised to connect to its aftermath: the sense of betrayal and loss that marks her memoir. In a privileged but conservative upbringing, the growing adult still reflects on a rooted ancestry as a prop and anchor, albeit with a refocusing of personal concerns to turn them to broad national ones. Egypt as a mother and nation, and women as a historical bloc, emerge in these memoirs and memos as signifiers of a cultural register with a growing sisterhood among women intelligentsia. The second part, "The Palestinian ‘I’ in Fadwā Ṭūqān’s A Mountainous Journey, takes the issue of subjectivity, sisterhood, and homeland further. Writing back as a recognized Palestinian poetess, Ṭūqān operates on a linguistic space as the canvas to lay bare an unfolding life in triple restrictive environments. Home is a prison whose only window is her affectionate and highly educated brother, the poet Ibrāhīm. Through him her talent gets access to poetry and the Arabic linguistic treasury. Through her readings she aligns with slave singers of classical times like Danānīr and contemporary women poets like Rabāb al-Kāẓimī, whose father, the poet ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Kāẓimī, was exiled from Iraq and given asylum in Egypt. Her third struggle is against the British occupation and Zionist onslaught. The three drives are defined spatially in a journey that is described as mountainous and difficult. Throughout, an architectural analogy is drawn that makes use of an Ottoman house and the ancient solid city of Nablus to present an unfolding split self that gives birth to her poetry of paradox. In the third part, Reclaiming Pre-Islamic Ancestry: Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī’s A Daughter of Isis," al-Saʿdāwī places her selfhood in a pre-Islamic Pharaonic deity, with Ṭāhā Ḥusayn as an intellectual father. Less poetic than Ṭūqān but more ideological, she offers a postcolonial atlas that is pivotal to any reading of Arabic intellectual history since the 1950s. Playing out the role of a cartographer and holding hard to a feminist perspective, she allows readers to survey other geographies than Cairo where women’s struggle has visible directions and limits. Caught between forebears like Egyptian doyen of letters Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and the urge to write their selfhoods, women writers increased the dose of interiorization.

Other experimentations continue, as the next chapter shows, for it is the privilege of self-narrative to highlight specific turns in one’s life story. Chapter 6, Autobiographical Experimentation, like chapter 5, has three parts. The first, Jabrā’s Exceptional Spatial Hold, shows Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā’s autobiography as an important piece of narrative not only because it presents the childhood of a well-known writer and critic in minute geographical detail in both Bethlehem and Jerusalem but also because it situates this detail and Christian rituals in a national map that counteracts physical obliteration and devastation of ancient markers and places. Bethlehem as the house of bread is the city of national awareness and linguistic normalization and codification, where vernaculars are brought in harmony under the guidance of efficient grammarians and teachers. Its brilliant graduates attend higher schools in Jerusalem, which functions as both a centripetal and centrifugal center. The author presents these notions in a rich text of Christian rituals and festivities that dance in profusion and provide readers with an autobiography that has nodal turns different from those that appear in early twentieth-century self-narratives. The second part, "The Ṭarbūsh for the Turban: Aḥmad Amīn’s Ḥayātī (My Life), is different. The grand Egyptian author and scholar has to explain the growth of a mind, his own educational journey, in a social space that restricts selfhood but also challenges it to make a choice. His own choice of an open liberal education against a conservative one is drawn carefully to allow the father a large space that fathers in other autobiographies rarely enjoy in full. Cities, towns, and cafés are given their due, and Amīn unfolds as a human being whose cultural output does not hide his own sufferings and agonies. This is not the case in the third part, Fading Identitarian Sites: Sasson Somekh’s Baghdad Yesterday." The Arab Jew of Iraqi origin left Baghdad at an early age. But its hold on his memory remains pivotal throughout his life. His education there, community, and cafés saturate his memoir and present the narrator as a raving poet whose Baghdad is a first and last love. Writers see themselves inside a place; otherwise they are outsiders elsewhere. Such is the case in fictionalized self-narratives, as chapter 7 shows.

In this chapter, Autobiographic Novels: An Open Door to a Fictionalized Self-Narrative, writers take a number of roles to explore their own life itineraries. In the first part, "The Break with the Middle-Class Novel: Khairī Shalabī’s Wikālat ʿAṭiyah (The Lodging House), vagrancy provides a unique instance in the production of space. Different powers confront each other to claim space, own it, or invade it. A forked narrative with multiple perspectives is one way to approach heteroglossia in a place like the lodging house. Played out simultaneously as real and symbolic, this lodging house accommodates different social segments that participate in its production. The narrator functions as cartographer and detective while leading the life of a parasite. The second part, Maps for Contentment and Rage: The Autobiographical Seven Days of Man," addresses the other side of rural geography, its Sufi poetics, which also displays a hard life of the Sufi brethren as farmers or functionaries. Although the life of the young narrator unfurls, the narrative is not a bildungsroman. Its focus on an unfolding adulthood gains power through its substantiation of rural practices. There is faith and passion in this life that cannot die and that tinges retrospection in the adult’s account with some remorse for being callous or unsympathetic at times.

This passion for place and agony of recollection show forth more powerfully in poetry, especially the poetry of Maḥmūd Darwīsh. In chapter 8, Autobiographical Space, there are two parts. The first, Polygeneric Exilic Topographies, explores Darwish’s mythopoeia of the nomadic and the sedentary. It situates his odes and poems in classical and modern poetics to broach significant issues that connect ancient poetry to a present moment of loss and bereavement. His village and homeland speak out and reappear in dense topographic detail that defies erosion. The same takes place in the second part, "Narrative Cities: Basrayatha and the Narrator as Cartographer," where Basra takes form in Muḥammad Khuḍayyir’s Basrayatha. This narrative collapses the personal and the urban in series of images of war, peace, loss, and dream. Cities are not allowed to die hard, and a narrative voice enables them to speak up and relate their agonies under neglect, destruction, and war.

Taken together, these chapters and parts resist closure and open up the discussion for further speculation and exploration. Textual analysis is deemed necessary to enable readers to connect issues and have a panoramic perspective while engaging with particular cases and questions. In sum, the purpose behind this book is to present readers with a postcolonial autobiographical atlas.

CHAPTER 1

Theorizing Autobiography

When we read the word I without knowing who wrote it, it is perhaps not meaningless, but it is at least estranged from its normal meaning.

—Edmund Husserl (1900)

But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. . . . A man’s true autobiography is almost an impossibility. . . . Man is bound to lie about himself.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864)

There came a time . . . when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself. It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job.

—Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: SPACE, SCOPE, AND OBJECTIVE

Never before has autobiography drawn so much scholarly attention purporting to theorize its place in narrative as a genre or subgenre of its own. What the novel has long secured as the domain for theorization that cuts across cultural studies, literary criticism, and poetics has partially shifted attention to self-narratives. The reasons behind this shift are many, especially when predicated on a broader spectrum of sociopolitical consciousness that has generated a turn to self-narratives as significant components of history. On the other hand, this active climate of theorization has rarely touched on autobiography outside the European cultural center. Even the decolonizing or postcolonial efforts are less focused on autobiography.¹ Moreover, although the Arab region, with its eastern and western flanks, has been a field for research, Arabic literature and literary autobiography in particular have remained outside this focus. Exceptions have often involved scholars specializing in Arabic culture.² The neglect of Arabic and non-Western autobiography stems from a number of postulates that often center on Eurocentric presumptions regarding a Western origination of genres, modernity, and/or self-consciousness. In fusing a rising awareness of subjectivity in tandem with economic and social change with a Western cultural specific, Eurocentric scholars are betraying the prioritization of an outdated branch of philology. This postulation of a Western-cultural specific is often argued at the expense of the dynamics of transformation associated with the accumulation of capital, colonial expansion, and the industrial revolution. It also vaults on the politics of comparison, or Othering as applied to non-Western people and lands. Even Samuel Johnson cannot escape this in his History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), for all judgment is comparative, and we must humbly learn from higher authority—meaning the North.³ This argument in favor of a Western-oriented form, as aptly noted in Interpreting the Self,⁴ cannot be seen apart from the anxieties of European scholarship since the interwar years and thereafter. Presented in Eurocentric literary criticism as a cultural product unique to modern western civilization,⁵ autobiography is central to this idea but, conversely, no less pivotal to rising trends in postcolonial studies that have already begun to question and discredit such a premise. Scholars known for sustained engagement with autobiography, such as James Olney, focus on an English-speaking Western writing that excludes even Australia, India, and Canada.⁶

However, in such studies there is an effort to explain the rise of autobiography. Karl Weintraub associates it with self-consciousness: It may have such varied functions as self-explication, self-discovery, self-formation, self-presentation, and self-justification. Concerning self-consciousness, he explains: All these are centered upon an aware self, aware of its relation to its circumstances.⁷

This association is potentially significant if it can be reformulated in the light of what sociologists or anthropologists such as Pierre Bourdieu have argued with regard to disposition and habitus, leading the discussion away from Eurocentrism and situating it properly in theory. The origination of this association has already been made popular in Neo-Hegelian theory and with Marx’s notion of struggle against the gods of heaven and of earth who do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.⁸ The implications of self-consciousness arise, however, whenever it is linked to a modern European specific, something that in turn leads arguments into erroneous cultural-geographical claims of a Eurocentric specificity. Olney is on solid ground, however, whenever he links this specific to the circumstantial and temporal, a point I’ll address further in due time. He argues: "I am convinced that it was something more deeply embedded in the times and in the contemporary psyche, something more pervasive in the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere that caused and continues to cause a great number of investigators, thinkers, and critics to turn their attention to the subject of autobiography."⁹

Even so, while this sounds logical, no substantial theorization is offered to explain this turn or to place value on self and circumstance and its problematic within an epistemological construction, other than the common and obsolete presumption of post-Renaissance modernity and the alleged birth of individual consciousness as a Western specific.¹⁰ As shown in Dwight F. Reynolds’s edited volume, an underlying fallacy was rampant among European scholars like Georges Gusdorf and Roy Pascal—with the latter’s essentially European genre—and in Georges May’s belief in autobiography as a European invention linked inextricably with Christianity, something that also gets Europeanized outside its space and culture of origination.¹¹ In his Conditions and Limits of Autobiography, Gusdorf—who receives much acclaim in studies of autobiography¹²—advocates this canonization of a Eurocentric autobiography as follows: It would seem that autobiography is not to be found outside of our cultural area; one would say that it expresses a concern peculiar to Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own.¹³

Gusdorf suffers no qualms and has no scruples with respect to his ignorance of other cultures. He is pleased with this kind of reading. Even the colonized national elite are deprived of selfhood, for whatever they have is bestowed on them by whites . . . from beyond the seas.¹⁴ Eurocentric theorists of autobiography forget that Othering through geographical and cultural demarcation often tilts against itself, in that the birthplace of Saint Augustine—who is a cornerstone for this theorization—in the year CE 354 was the municipium of Thagaste when it was part of the Roman Empire’s province of Numidia. Thagaste is now Souk Ahras, Algeria. If geography matters, then Gusdorf has to take this into account. Like many of his type, he is pleased with his reductive and racially selective scholarship. In a pertinent remark on the historical consciousness on which Western man has prided himself since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hayden White writes: It is possible to view historical consciousness as a specifically Western prejudice by which the presumed superiority of modern, industrial society can be retroactively substantiated.¹⁵

The impact of such Eurocentric views on later scholars has been noticeable; every now and then, the same kind of reading appears, displaying an appalling lack of knowledge of literary forms, genres, traveling theories, and cultural phenomena. One such example is that of Richard N. Coe, cited in Interpreting the Self.¹⁶ In a succinct commentary on such approaches, Reynolds and his colleagues summarize the problematic of such a canonized opinion as one that marks a reorientation that seeks to distinguish fully formed, authentic, modern western selves from the incomplete individual consciousnesses of earlier periods, a notion that ends up with a conclusion that all selves are copies of an original, Western selfhood: inauthentic, facsimile selves produced by modern nonwestern cultures in imitation of their superiors. Reynolds and his coauthors add: Seen in this light, autobiography is positioned at the very crux of literary scholarship’s relationship to earlier historical periods and to other cultures and is currently privileged as a defining discursive marker for what it is to be ‘modern’ and what it is to be ‘western.’¹⁷ Whether unfamiliar with either cultural theory or theory at large, or reluctant to free themselves from such a rampant Eurocentric posture, a large number of scholars end up making sweeping claims that start from a platitude and finish up in negation. Questions relating to the cultural and social environment within which the individual consciousness unfolds are rarely raised. We end up with a series of abstractions that present autobiography as an out of place narrative. Yet more serious is the reluctance to move beyond European Romanticism and its individuation. Instead of turning to the high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce—with their use of the mythical method and objective correlatives to distance emotion and objectify experience—these scholars prefer to adhere to an oneiric understanding of self-representation, one that often overlooks the production of autobiographical space.¹⁸ The implications of this Eurocentrism are far-reaching, however, and we can trace them even in fictional works that are largely predicated on some readings in Arab culture. Thus, equivocating between irony and mere stereotyping, the postmodernist American novelist John Barth, for example, presents Yasmin in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor as somebody who was raised as she had been in a culture in which autobiography was all but unknown.¹⁹

Gaston Bachelard in Autobiographical Discussion

Although the spatial aspect should necessarily engage with, if not generate, consciousness, it often disappears in this emerging critical corpus. Spatial memory is put aside, as if it were a marginal element rather than, as Gaston Bachelard would have it, a central concept—an understanding that will remind readers of the topoi of the pre-Islamic Arabic prelude.²⁰ Speaking of that oneiric birthplace, for example, Bachelard argues that beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.²¹ While autobiographies penned by Arab writers negotiate their localities within the contexts of a global grid of information, journals, books, people, and economic transactions, rural backgrounds will often provide a more permanent imprint to impressionable minds and sensibilities. Local geographies also serve to endow prose with an expressive density, one that appears not only in the occasional outpouring of emotions but also in metaphors. Narratives of frontiers and borders acquire elements of density from the abundance of metaphors that derive their fecundity from the challenge of a crossing, a point that following chapters explore.²² Such perspectives disappear from autobiographical theory, which, despite some significant landmarks, remains thin.

Autobiographers often start with the notion of a place, a house, not only because it connects to a consciousness of roots and beginnings but also because it signifies the threshold, the entry in gravity, and, along with it, the new demands and joys of familial and social life. In his Baqāyā ṣuwar (1975; Fragments of Memory: A Story of a Syrian Family), Syrian novelist Ḥannā Mīnah (1924–2018) describes the house in which he was born as follows: spacious house with a dusty courtyard into which the doors of the damp, dark rooms opened. In a single panoramic view that gathers and collapses these old impressions, he dwells on that courtyard: The courtyard contained a motley collection of junk: along the sides were hearths and firewood, jerry can flower pots with jasmine growing in them, chickens and filth on the ground, a Ford car and a heap of oranges. In retrospect he recalls the scene that connects to the later adventures of his sick father, a father who was the man sitting on the fender of the Ford, hand on cheek, in a moment of loss and despair as he was regarding the heap of oranges while the children gathered in a circle around the car, stared at the oranges.²³

In its variegated stable or meteoric geographical shifts and implications for imagination, thought, and enunciation, space here is central to autobiographical exploration. Consciousness unfolds and operates in space. With that in mind, this book proposes to study Arabic literary autobiography in postcolonial spatial terms, laying a greater emphasis on the power of space in writing the self at a defining historical juncture. Although all Arabic autobiographies that are the subject of this inquiry were written either at a postcolonial nexus—a point of struggle against colonial powers—or within an unfolding selfhood in a spatially informing climate of ideas, the past has also had its own spatial markers that serve to initiate writing the self in certain spaces.²⁴ If we agree with Mikhail Bakhtin that the image of man is always intrinsically chronoptic,²⁵ then we can further argue that any sequential, interrupted, and ruptured temporality thickens in space. Bakhtin’s remarks can be more powerfully applied to the novel and Greek romance as genres: "Human movement through space is precisely what provides the basic indices for measuring space and time in the Greek romance, which is to say, for its chronotope."²⁶ As a genre, autobiography captures both elements and is able to navigate its movement in the intervening space so as to account for a self-narrative that is profoundly grounded in place. In particular, the childhood home—whether in village or town—is often retrospectively recollected as a microcosmic homeland, a waṭan that is bound to foster a sense of belonging to place. Many recent writings fall within a tendency to thicken this sense through a recall of a village, town, school, event, and whatever that occupies memory. Indeed, the Palestinian poet Murīd al-Barghūthī distinguishes nostalgia and loss from a physical meeting with a land and nation that were taken by occupation and invasion. Visiting his birthplace, and treated by the new colonizer as visitor or tourist, if not a threat, the poet writes: When the eye sees it, it has all the clarity of earth and pebbles and hills and rocks. It has its colors and its temperatures and wild plants too.²⁷ While there is an effort to retain the real as perceived in those formative years, the intrusion of the present moment with its thick spatial contours could, however, provoke an intense nostalgic tone and endow the past with more than its due. Hence historicity quivers. The nostalgic mode is often overshadowed by a disturbing disparity between the seriousness of teachers and educational programs in the past, on the one hand, and the laxity or even corruption that overwhelms the present, on the other. One of these recent writings that read more in space as soul and meaning is by the Iraqi scholar of geography Jamāl al-ʿAttābї, who is also a littérateur. His book Dākhil al-makān: Al-mudun rūḥ wa-maʿnā (Inside Place: Cities as Soul and Meaning) recalls his early childhood, his primary school, his teachers, and, more importantly, the emerging urban space from inside the countryside.²⁸ He argues against the neglect of space: The documentation of cities as soul and meaning has not been given due attention in our Iraqi culture. He explains: Visual memory is insufficient to recall the aesthetics of place. It has to take into account the human agent who gives space an identity.²⁹ Thus, his recollections place human agents in their situational roles whereby identity is a formative marriage between humans and spaces. In spite of their poverty, schools of old as well as teachers cut a positive figure in comparison to a faltering education in postoccupation Iraq. Despite the seeming disparity between the poet’s sense of place and the geographer’s, there is a rapport that brings them together, because the Palestinian poet would like to differentiate between rhetoric and the poetics of either nostalgia or resistance, on the one hand, and a compelling present, a long-awaited moment to see his land, on the other: It is no longer ‘the beloved’ in the poetry of resistance, or an item on a political party program, it is not an argument or a metaphor. It stretches before me, as touchable as a scorpion, a bird, a well; visible as a field of chalk, as the prints of shoes.³⁰ Both accounts also share with many autobiographies across the Arab lands a certain disenchantment with invasions, neoliberalism, its open-market economy, the absence of the state, and the rising tide of a corrupt apparatus.

Geometry and Geography

Modern Arabic autobiography is focused on literary geometry and geography, or what Franco Moretti summarizes in relation to the novel as graphs, maps, trees.³¹ When combined under the single rubric of homeland, these three dimensions sound insufficient. In a witty and somewhat sardonic comment on our effort to draw terms and borders for a homeland, the prominent Syrian poet and essayist Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ (1934–2006) wrote: During my weaning stage, while I was still crawling and shedding tears behind my mother as she abandoned me, being busy with sweeping, cleaning and shaking off dust, I used to eat all what my tender nails could reach from the earth of the threshold, the street and the courtyard. It seems that I have eaten my share of homeland since then.³²

The first few pages of every autobiography proper, and even a fictionalized one like Laṭīfah al-Zayyāt’s (1923–96) Al-Bāb al-maftūḥ (1960; The Open Door), confront readers with fences, wells, crowded dark places, winding streets, shops and markets, peddlers, minstrels, water carriers, carts, damaged automobiles, and also Qur’ānic tutorials (kuttāb) and other schools.³³ We may end up with a centripetal epicenter in The Open Door or an isotopic space as in Sayyid Quṭb’s (1906–66) Ṭifl min al-qaryah (1946; A Child from the Village).³⁴ Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā’s (1920–94) quarter in Bethlehem (depicted in Al-Biʾr al-ʾūlā, 1987; The First Well) is rocky, crowded, and poor; it survives on wells.³⁵ The first place in which he found himself was called a khān (caravansary), and his family’s house there was a large deep room on the ground floor of an old building on the public road behind the mosque. Located geometrically and cartographically this way, the child has to dwell further on what interests him more, the surroundings and their attractions: Near it were many shops of all kinds, from the grocer’s to the maker of belts and donkey saddles.³⁶

The map of the quarter begins to unfold, and centripetal occupations point to the needs of the quarter and also those of surrounding villages. In this opening paragraph what matters for him, in relation to the broader issue of space, is the room in which they survived: The room had no windows, and its iron door was big like that of a store. I could hardly move it because of its weight.³⁷ Each quarter creates its own social environment, which is often dependent on the center. Such are the Cairo districts of Manshiyyah and Būlāq in Aḥmad Amīn’s Ḥayātī (1950; My Life).³⁸ It is there that the parent, uncle, and later the growing child make their living and acquire their knowledge. Jabrā’s narrative underscores mobility under pressure and need: Whenever we wanted to move to a new house, the first thing we asked about was the well. Concerning such wells, the child’s family’s questions run as follows: Was there a well in the courtyard? Was it deep? Was it in good condition? Did its water taste good? Or had the well not been emptied of its silt for years?³⁹ In these childhood narratives situated in cities like Nablus and Cairo at the turn of the last century, there is a concentrated focus on wells, rain, and water carriers, on mosques and religious sites, courtyards, and whatever has a hold on a child’s memory and consequently leaves an impression there before the belated advent of urban transformations.

With the narrative skill and sharp critical mind that Jabrā had acquired before writing Al-Biʾr al-ʾūlā, he describes his unfolding consciousness as in a bildungsroman: I have preferred to track the development of one single being who daily grew in consciousness, knowledge, and emotion. He adds: This developing being was, of course, part of his environment: he was part of the houses, trees, valleys, and hills; and he was part of the sun, the rain, the faces, and the voices which he lived surrounded by and in which he discovered values and morals, beauty and ugliness, joy and misery—one and all.⁴⁰

This interaction between the unfolding consciousness, experience, and environment and place should be the proper field for discussion. Autobiography offers much, not only because it is history in retrospect but also because this unfolding spiral journey and consciousness take shape in space and thus should minimize the role of abstract theorization, which has often been the bane of criticism. Even in fictionalized accounts that relate only the narrative of a child eleven years old, place assumes other connotations and becomes loaded with conflicting emotions in a multidimensional social and political environment. In The Open Door Laṭīfah al-Zayyāt opens her third-person narrative with accounts of demonstrations in 1946 against the British, but in the context of a waning patriarchal tradition that regards young women as dependents in need of its control and protection. The sitting room in their apartment conveys this idea: In front of the round table that graced the center of the sitting room stood eleven-year-old Layla, a robust girl with skin darker than her mother’s. She was fiddling with a wooden cigarette box, her motions mechanical, and her bright eyes gazing into the distance, at nothing in particular. In contrast with this idyllic but also foreboding scene, there is life outside: demonstrations and assaults by police forces. Hence, Layla’s seething passions are running high: With a final, sharp tap to the lid of the cigarette box, she marched into the living room, but in doing so she was passing her seated father as she headed straight for the front door. She reached for the sliding bolt.⁴¹ Dramatized in the living room, the motion, defiance, seething anger, and gestures point to the volatility of youthful passion in a specific space where power relations either hold or undergo drastic change.

The open door becomes the analogy for this rebellious spirit. Space evolves as an arena for action. Doors, gates, rooms, shops, wells, streets, alongside occupations and services, present us with a space at the heart of autobiographical reconstructions. Indeed, the power of this production of space is so overwhelming as to compel Rajāʾ ʿĀlim, a woman novelist from Mecca, to give her Lane of Many Heads a voice in the opening pages of her novel Ṭawq al-ḥamām (2010; The Dove’s Necklace). I’ve learned to sit in the darkness, getting high on deep drags of the stink of trash and sewage, the clamor of discordant voices, like any old forgotten backstreet. If there is a turn to autobiography worth reckoning with, it should be sought in the unfolding powerful hold of space at specific moments in the history of individuals, communities, nations, and regions. As the Lane of Many Heads describes its role, I like to hold my breath for a few minutes before I slowly let it out through my mouth in rumors and legends and whispers of forbidden things.⁴² The implications of these rumors and tales are more problematic than what theorists of autobiography might think. Given a voice, the lane provokes a discussion of the impact of global capital and big companies like Elaf Holdings on lived and also absolute space,⁴³ the space that Henri Lefebvre presents as susceptible to encroachment and misuse.⁴⁴ These legends, narratives, and factual details in relation to space and place signify partially the spatial turn in autobiographical studies, and not rehearsals of an outdated centric self-consciousness. Furthermore, wars have engendered an acute awareness of space to a greater degree than stability and peace.

What is inviting in spatial autobiography is the particularity of space, its little geographies ranging from city to street, to marketplace, and home. Does this negate the rural? If we presume that most autobiographies are initially concerned with a rural or small-town background, how can we account for a spatial dimension that pales in comparison with urban geography and its production as theorized in Henri Lefebvre’s schema?⁴⁵ Is this rural space congruent with Lefebvre’s absolute space of nature, its rivers, mountains, caves, springs, and fields? What Arabic autobiographies reveal is, in Lefebvre’s terms, a substantially lived or representational space. And yet, as these intellects transfer to urban space, the rural brings with it a number of images, representations, and also some lexical and syntactic particularity. Regardless of its location—urban or rural or in between—autobiographical space is uniquely situated at the nexus of self, community, and space. But does urban space elicit more graphic detail? Does it entail more spatial density, one that involves syntax and lexis in complexity and thickness? Do modern Arab autobiographers demonstrate this difference? The urban produces a thick graphic detail and topographic density because the autobiographer turns into a spectator: watching, enjoying, or losing one’s self in such overwhelming crowdedness. In Al-Biʾr al-ʾūlā Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā says as much about his visit to Jerusalem from Bethlehem. His birthplace, Bethlehem, has the features of a small town, and since it is small, the boy is able to contain and thence reproduce it decades later in an autobiographical work. By contrast, Jerusalem appears as quarters, narrow streets, monasteries, churches, and markets. Whenever he is bent on providing a fuller picture of the city, there is always some detail that eludes him because his mind is more focused on monastic rites, something with which he is partly familiar from his days in Bethlehem. The challenge remains even for the adult, as in Muḥammad Khuḍayyir’s Baṣrayāthā: Ṣūrat madīnah (1993; Basrayatha: The Story of a City).⁴⁶ Although a reconstructed image of a once lucrative seaport and intellectual center, the narrative shows how devastating wars have produced a ghost city. From all the carnage and wreckage, the ruins of memory and history, the skillful short-story writer is able to depict a ghost city. He only retrieves the urban in mythical habitats. Between the silhouette and the origin there is a thin thread that allows a haunted memory to traverse spaces and reproduce them with a sigh.

This is not the city of Khuḍayyir’s short stories, with their panoramic view of what is perceived while participating in events and scenes or watching somebody biking fast,⁴⁷ portraying only shades, margins, and traces. On the other hand, the city of Menouf is captured through biking in Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī’s A Daughter of Isis, the autobiography of her early life. A series of images is accumulated, albeit through a hasty, encompassing lens.

Adult narrators are usually selective in compiling their urban catalogues. Taking his lead from Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris in order to compile his notes for Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin comes up with an assemblage of street offerings, commodities, and gestures that overwhelm the pedestrian: Arcades, fashion, boredom, kitsch, souvenirs, wax figures, gaslight, panoramas, iron construction, photography, prostitution, along with readings from Marx, Proust, Baudelaire, Saint-Simon, Haussmann, and many others.⁴⁸ However, of particular relevance here is Benjamin’s article on Naples and its porosity,⁴⁹ something that denies and defies capitalist structuration and social boundaries. In Naples, the public and private, the street and living room, leisure and labor, humor and depression, all come together in homes, streets, markets, and gatherings. An urban-rural, or peripheral and suburban quarter appears even in historical cities like Jabrā’s Jerusalem. His recapitulations may have received an extra dose from the adult writer, but they are nevertheless significant for our reading of this porosity as distinctively applicable to historical cities, cities that subsume the rural while urbanizing it with new interests and habits of thought, seeing, and walking. In his article on Marseilles, Walter Benjamin speaks of these outskirts as the state of emergency of a city, the terrain on which incessantly rages the great decisive battle between town and country. He assigns to this battle its own warlike features. It is the hand-to-hand fight of telegraph poles against Agaves, barbed wire against thorny palms, the miasmas of stinking corridors against the damp gloom under the plane trees in brooding squares, short-winded outside staircases against the mighty hills.⁵⁰ Jabrā, for one, does not depict the battle as fierce, but there is already an interior dramatic battle, not only in the compelling desire to move and even walk to Jerusalem but also in the poetic delineation of sites of difference—quarters, streets, monasteries, people, markets, and professions. An extra but diversified consciousness gathers at this particular crossroads, one that should unsettle Eurocentric theorizations of the specifics of a Western subjectivity.

The centrality of autobiography to our understanding of historical consciousness can be approached through Hayden White’s explorations in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Autobiography is probably more entrenched in this consciousness than novels and proper histories. The autobiographer, more than the historian or the novelist, is already performing a poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical [here autobiographical] field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bear the specific theories for his/her life records.⁵¹ In this tropological or prefigurative strategy, writers resort to one poetic mode or another. White suggests four of these, which in the case of autobiography may be amalgamated, but with one mode being more visible than the rest. These are metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.⁵² In the case of modern Arabic autobiography, one can suggest that Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Al-Ayyām (vol. 1, 1929; The Days) is primarily ironic in the sense that there is some inadequacy in the world whereby the self perceives the world as out of joint.⁵³ This is not Mīnah’s vision in Fragments, which uses traces in a synchronic mode to accord with a large philosophy of history. But the autobiographies of Hudā Shaʿrāwī (1879–1947) and Sayyid Quṭb are metonymic for being impelled to recall and authenticate experience.⁵⁴ Jabrā’s First Well and Fadwā Ṭūqān’s Riḥlah jabaliyyah (1985; A Mountainous Journey) are metaphorical because they allow the visible to say much while also suggesting a deeper level of experience that a child’s memory strives to fathom.⁵⁵

White’s four categories may get collapsed and even contravened in such a multilayered narrative as Imān Mirsāl’s Fī athar ʿInāyāt al-Zayyāt (2019; In Tracing ʿInāyāt al-Zayyāt).⁵⁶ The search and research by the author to find out the story and the case behind the suicide of a young and very promising writer in 1963 turns into a personal obsession, a commitment, and an exploration of a social solidarity malaise that overlooks unique instances of genius. What grows as an archival research project and a biographical sketch of a young woman writer and her friend and companion the famous Egyptian actress Nādia Luṭfī (also called Paula) becomes a critical history and biography of a period; and also the author’s autobiography. On the other hand, autobiography can challenge what we have already subsumed in a narrative terrain of fiction, autofiction as a combined narrative journey, and standard autobiography. The Iraqi woman writer ʿĀliah Mamdūḥ takes her experiment with living in Paris and her husband’s demand to return to Baghdad as the focal point for an overwhelming stylistic amalgamation of the ironic, the satirical, and the humorous to present herself, her cultural alienation, and her struggle to keep up with writing down her novels and autobiography. She aptly entitles her autobiography Al-Ajnabiyyah (2013; The Woman Foreigner).⁵⁷

Narrative Grammar

Multiple factors serve to augment consciousness, including migration, dislocation, recent orientation, change and challenge, upheaval or settlement. The unfolding consciousness often informs autobiographical patterning and provides thereby a narrative grammar of schemas, conventions, typologies, emulations, departures, allegories, analogies, and also an abundance of figurations. Grounded in literary sensibility and building on a treasury of previous readings, writers will often find in an experience or a book or both something insightful and informative. Moreover, the turn to cyberspace and the rise of social media and venues of digital technology are bound to enact consciousness in radical enunciations and formulations. Here, in line with Jean-François Lyotard (in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979]) but more focused on tactics as the exits for everyman, Michel de Certeau argues that the involvement of the individual diminishes in proportion to the technocratic expansion of these systems. All that remains is to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover, within an electronicized and computerized megalopolis, the ‘art’ of the hunters and rural folk of earlier days.⁵⁸ This may not apply to earlier autobiographical writing, but it certainly alerts us to conditions of possibility that have to be accounted for in our reading of the individual as the autobiographic subject.

Thus, while autobiographical narrative is gaining some insightful critical attention, the act of writing forces it to confront a number of challenges that relate, in one way or another, to its positionality and grammar. In terms of grammatology, some critics level the blame for this lack of theory on the referential dimension in writings on the art. For example, Paul John Eakin argues that most readers naturally assume that all autobiographies are based on the verifiable facts of a life history, and it is this referential dimension, imperfectly understood, that has checked the development of a poetics of autobiography. Perceived as problematic the moment it appears in writing, the self that is the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive character. Argued in this manner, the writing self passes through a process of what Eakin calls self-discovery.⁵⁹ This engagement interrogates the verifiability of autobiographical truth as a fixed criterion in a narrative that unfolds as series of recollections and self-discoveries. It also hits hard at the roots of standard autobiographical theorizations, which take for granted a Western individual consciousness and, along with it, a series of platitudes. Al-Ajnabiyyah, for example, by Mamdūḥ, the Iraqi woman writer, plays havoc with language and raves with humor and irony while it explores the first-person narrator’s own position in relation to herself and to others. She spares nobody, not even her looks and habits of thought. It is difficult to claim a deliberate narrative act in what sounds like a mixture of a stream of consciousness, a monologue, and a confession.

The problematic surrounding the Western-specific postulation of a Western-man consciousness as the driving force in autobiography can be better interrogated through Michel de Certeau’s reading of the social atomism. The positing of an elementary unit, or the individual, is worth attending to not only because it takes into account the enormous amount of research done by social science but also because it pursues this throughout the practice of everyday life. He goes on to suggest that analysis shows that a relation (always social) determines its terms, and not the reverse. He explains this further by saying that each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations interacts.⁶⁰

Whenever theorization takes its lead from the study of narrative or from enunciation (as in de Certeau’s Practice), it has a better chance of building a grammar through a process of archaeological excavation in self-discovery narratives, including fictionalized ones. A contrapuntal criticism that studies self-narrative as an art on its own, a process that involves author and reader, may open the art to a better understanding than what is offered in formulaic readings of autobiography. Its components shared with novel writing may well consolidate the autobiographical pact on the basis of verifiability and authentication, or what Eakin describes as the play of the autobiographical act itself, in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness.⁶¹ The complications attending the attempt to produce such a grammar derive from the assumption that self-narrative is necessarily a well-wrought urn⁶² or, conversely, a straightforward prosaic life record. Effective autobiographies are the ones that attempt to capture the moment of childhood and coming of age before the more controversial adult self-image systematization. In the first part of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Al-Ayyām (serialized 1926–27; in book form 1929; An Egyptian Childhood),⁶³ in Fadwā Ṭūqān’s A Mountainous Journey, in Jabrā’s Al-Biʾr al-ʾūlā (The First Well), and in Ḥannā Mīnah’s Baqāyā ṣuwar (Fragments of Memory), for example, there is an interdependent and constitutive relationship between the makeup of selfhood and the growing hold on literary discourse, a multilayered language that conceals, suggests,