Introduction

This chapter introduces readers to key issues raised in the book: What questions and struggles come to the fore when one shifts one’s gaze from men’s heroic political narratives to the struggles of women who had been entitled and accustomed to their support and protection? What did bearing witness to violence and the death of relationships do to their subjectivity? The chapter offers a brief review of Yemeni biographical writings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It includes reflections on life writing, methodology, and the modalities of Amat al-Latif’s remembrance such as the disconnection between time and space. It also informs readers about the ways the book deals with intergenerational memory and "memory transfer".

Ruptures

Pursuing a relational approach, Part II tells the story of Amat al-Latif’s childhood and early adult life in an elite household viewed through the prism of her intimate relationship with her father. Amat al-Latif’s narrative explains how the momentous events of 1948 – her father’s arrest, the collapse of the constitutional government, the sack of her city, house demolition ‒ have impacted upon her life’s trajectories, above all the loss of close relatives to disease and execution, early marriage and dispossession after the failed revolt. It dwells on the precariousness of everyday life in the aftermath of her family’s downfall and women’s exposure to destitution, and the ways in which she has dealt with violent bereavement. Amat al-Latif also had to deal with her husband’s father’s overbearing wife in her patrilocal household, refusing to subordinate herself to her. However, instead of employing the trope of resistance, it is argued that women’s noncompliance is frequently articulated within existing socio-cultural norms rather than the expression of an oppositional subjectivity.

The Rise and Fall of the Constitutional Movement

This chapter sketches the consolidation of the imamate since the departure of the Ottomans from Yemen in 1918-19, and the formation of an opposition movement against the autocratic rule of Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din in the 1930s and 40s. It highlights ‘Abdullah al-Wazir’s career as the prime negotiator and signatory of the Treaty of Ta’if following the first Saudi-Yemeni war in 1934 and as the supreme leader (Imam) of the embryonic constitutional imamate in 1948. Dealing with key data such as the failure of the constitutional revolt and ‘Abdullah al-Wazir’s and Amat al-Latif’s husband’s execution, this chapter provides the backdrop against which the following ones become intelligible.

Displacements

“Displacements” centers on Amat al-Latif’s endeavor to remake her world with her second husband in Beirut and Amman where they raised their three children. However, a couple of decades after having suffered grievous loss her life became overshadowed by her husband’s marriage to another woman. This part of the book includes her account of her mental torment and conflicting emotions after being confronted with a fait accompli she had dreaded all her life. It also deals with her children’s subject-positions vis-à-vis their father’s taking a second wife. Their mother’s narrative negotiates the disparities between men’s and women’s ethical reasoning and practice, offering insights into the gender dynamic of multiple concurrent marriages. In the United States, where the family settled at last, Amat al-Latif also had to endure her beloved full-brother’s terminal illness.

Epilogue

This chapter analyses central foci of Amat al-Latif’s life trajectory and memory world. Recounting her life from a relational perspective, Amat al-Latif wishes to establish an enduring memory of her relationship with her father and exonerate him from accusations of treason. Asserting that allegations regarding his involvement in Imam Yahya’s assassination were belied by his devoutness and disapproval of violent overthrow, she offers an alternative appraisal of the events of 1948. Exploring women and men’s biographies, this chapter unsettles the notion of gendered memory, and argues that the normative constraints of gender on processes of remembering cannot be analyzed adequately without taking class into account. Selective twentieth-century biographies written by Yemeni men reveal that gender does not foreclose men’s employment of emotive parameters. Nor are they necessarily characterized by a disavowal of the personal and the domestic, often taken to be central features of women’s life writing. The chapter concludes that all (auto-)biographies studied in Mirrored Loss are none the less implicated in the politics of memory in different ways.