Epilogue Arab Literature, World Literature

This chapter looks at the effects of autobiographical production in other languages and translation on the globality of national literatures and world literary study. It examines current theorisations of world literature and considers Arab autobiography within new literary systems.

Tahrir Memoirs: Radwa Ashour and Mona Prince

This chapter examines new Arab memoirs and the effects of the Arab revolutions in the twenty-first century on the genre. The genre of the Tahrir memoir, a form that focuses on subjectivity in the broader movement rather than solitude, reworks Arab memoirs in the twenty-first century. Radwa Ashour and Mona Prince wrote new memoirs that chronicle the writers’ involvement in Egypt’s 2011 revolution. The chapter focuses on Ashour’s Heavier than Radwa: Fragments of an Autobiography (2013) and the posthumously published The Scream (2014), including The Journey (1983) and Specters (1999), with Mona Prince’s Revolution Is My Name (2012). Both Ashour and Prince offer a new form in which writing, activism, the university campus, and Tahrir Square are deeply intertwined, with parts that focus on the writers’ medical or professional crises within Egypt’s revolution.

Revolutionary Solitude: Edward Said and Najla Said

This chapter examines Arab Anglophone memoirs by focusing on Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) and Najla Said’s Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (2013). Out of Place traces Edward Said’s cultural and literary journey from Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt to his education in the US. Edward Said’s self-representation rests on the dichotomy of his solitude during his formation within a history of dispossession and his career. The chapter rethinks Out of Place through the burgeoning of the Palestinian national movement and Said’s lifework. The chapter also compares Edward Said’s youth in the Arab world and Najla Said’s Arab-American background, Said’s journey to the US and his daughter’s return to her roots, to arrive at a rethinking of the genre that migrates across languages and cultures.

Palestine Song: Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti

This chapter explores a new form of poetic autobiography by Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti. The chapter explores the relationship of the poets to Palestine and its effects on autobiographical form in Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, his 1986 memoir of the Israeli siege of Beirut, and Mural, his 1999 autobiographical epic focusing on mortality and Palestine. Barghouti’s memoirs I Saw Ramallah and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here explore the poet’s return to Palestine. Darwish and Barghouti rework the genre to explore the life of the poet in relation to Palestine and the tension between the poet’s solitude and his public role.

Dreaming of Solitude: Haifa Zangana and Alia Mamdouh

This chapter concentrates on new areas of exploration of testimony and memory in unconventional forms such as the prison diary by focusing on the narration of torture in Dreaming of Baghdad (1990) by Iraqi writer Haifa Zangana and the prevalence of fear in The Foreigner (2013) by Iraqi novelist Alia Mamdouh. Dreaming of Baghdad, written in London during the 1980s, revisits Zangana’s experience of imprisonment in 1970s Iraq in complex ways. While Dreaming of Baghdad offers new forms for the exploration of the subjectivity of Iraqi revolutionary women by exploring the precariousness of memory and challenging taboos on testimony, The Foreigner explores the subjectivity and trajectory of Iraqis in the diaspora, focusing on the effects of violence and the infringement of taboos.

Revolutionary Memoirs: Assia Djebar and Latifa al-Zayyat

This chapter focuses on the autobiographical novels and memoirs of two important twentieth-century Arab women writers who provide models for the adaptation of the genre in colonial and postcolonial cultures: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade and Nowhere in My Father’s House, two Francophone autobiographical novels by Algerian writer Assia Djebar, and The Search: Personal Papers, a memoir in Arabic by Egyptian writer Latifa al-Zayyat. By framing autobiographical production in anticolonial national movements, Djebar and al-Zayyat rework the genre to comment on postcolonial cultures. Both writers contest colonial formations and offer revolutionary representations of solitude in the postcolonial nation: the Francophone Algerian writer’s challenge to the French archive of the Algerian War of Independence and the Egyptian writer’s reexamination of national culture and the history of the 1940s student movement. In the chapter, solitude is read as an emancipatory opportunity when the writers rethink the language of the new nation through autobiography.

From Solitude to Stealth: Taha Hussein and Sonallah Ibrahim

This chapter examines the foundational three-volume autobiography in Arabic literature by Egyptian reformer Taha Hussein and an autobiographical novel by Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim. The two works rework the form through important historical, cultural, and literary junctures. The chapter explores the ways in which Hussein’s The Days and Ibrahim’s Stealth blur the conventional borders between fiction and autobiography. One lays down the conventions of the autobiography of childhood and the other dramatically revises the genre. By focusing on a canonical autobiography and a seemingly conventional autobiographical novel, the chapter reads the reworking of the form from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries in parallel with national developments and through the cultural status of the writers.

Introduction Literary Solitude: Autobiography, Modernity, and Independence

The introduction provides a new assessment of autobiographical works in Arab literature within discussions of postcolonialism. It traces the effects of anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements on Arab autobiographical production in Arabic, English, and French in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.