Writing War, Writing Life: Examining Arab Women’s Autobiographical Narratives
INTRODUCTION
Since the second half of the 20th century, the Arab region has witnessed pivotal and transformative political events that have shaped its modern history. Anti-colonial movements, civil wars, and revolutions across the Maghreb and the Mashriq have significantly impacted the formation of modern Arab identities and shaped the ways in which these identities are expressed and reflected in creative and artistic means. Particularly, Arab(ic) autobiographical literature has flourished in these contexts to reflect the enduring effects of war and political conflict on the lives and subjectivities of individuals, and to engage with the complexities these experiences entail. A plethora of these texts have been written by women. This corpus grew during the 1990s, a period in which Arab women’s literary contributions to the genre gained more power and visibility. Since then, Arab women have continued to produce a variety of autobiographical texts, in different generic and linguistic forms (mainly Arabic, French, and English), that reflect their personal experiences of unrest and document the long-lasting effect of political conflict on their lives and identities.
This Essay aims to present a brief history of Arab women writing about their experiences of war and political upheavals in autobiographical texts. It also explores the different ways in which they present themselves and use the genre for socio-political purposes.
A TRADITION OF ARAB AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING
Autobiography has historically been a male-dominated form of writing. Foundational autobiographical criticism, which emerged as a field of inquiry in the 1950s, has attributed the genre to “great [western] men” of notable achievements whose lives were deemed worth documenting and sharing with a wider readership.1 This tradition excluded both ordinary men and women. Subsequent feminist and revisionist critics from the 1980s onward challenged this reductionist view of the genre and expanded the critical and academic focus to groups from different genders, social classes, ethnicities, and geographical locations. Arab autobiographical writings, however, have only recently been considered in the canon despite the fact that, as Dwight F. Reynolds points out, there is “a centuries-old tradition of autobiography in the Arabic language”2, and that the genre has been an integral part of Arab literary traditions.
Arab(ic) autobiographical writing has its roots in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry,3 and has developed in diverse forms of self-expression including oral narratives, travelogues, biographies, and lyrical poetry. Autobiography as a distinct form of writing was recognized and theorized during the Arab Renaissance (al-Nahda) of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The notable publication of Egyptian author Taha Hussein’s Al-Ayyam (The Days) in 1929 marked the onset of the modern Arab autobiography and paved the way for a rich corpus of autobiographical texts in the region.
Since al-Nahda, autobiographical discourses have become a major form of expression in Arab culture, flourishing from the second half of the 20th century onward. This includes a substantial corpus of Anglophone and Francophone texts in a variety of life narrative forms like autobiographies, testimonies, memoirs, diaries, auto-fiction, and prison accounts. The increase in the production of this literary form by Arab authors and intellectuals is closely linked to the rise of Arab nationalism and the history of anti-colonial and revolutionary movements witnessed in the region during this period.4 These critical historical moments and political stages caused fundamental changes in geopolitical landscapes, identity discourses, and cultural expressions. This ultimately led to the rise of new literary forms of expression that reflected the interplay between the private and the political, the individual and the collective, and the personal and the national. French sociologist Jacques Berque contended that the Arab self and identity are constructed as “country as self, people as self, history as self.”5 Autobiographical writings have thus become the perfect literary vehicle for engaging with and communicating such concerns.
WRITING WAR AUTOBIOGRAPHICALLY
The turn of the 20th century witnessed a substantial production of Arab women’s autobiographical texts. This was mainly the result of the rise in women’s access to education and publication, and their involvement in different feminist movements and national concerns. Between the 1920s and 1960s, Arab feminist movements called for women’s rights, equality, and national liberation from colonial rule. One of the earliest known autobiographical texts by an Arab woman reflecting feminist and nationalist concerns of its time, particularly the Egyptian revolution against the British in 1919, is Egyptian feminist and activist Huda Shaarawi’s Mudhakkirat Huda Shaʿrawi (The Memoirs of Huda Shaarawi) – published posthumously in 1981 and in English translation in 1986.6 Shaarawi was involved in the Egyptian nationalist movement and was the president of the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee. She recorded in her memoir the struggles she faced against Egyptian patriarchal institutions and her nationalist involvement in the anti-colonial movement. While Shaarawi’s memoir focuses on her personal and private ‘harem’ life and subsequent ‘emancipation’ in early 20th century Egypt, it also records her feminist activism against the backdrop of anti-colonial movements.
The autobiographical works of women published since the 1980s have often reflected the identity of the writers as intersecting personal and national concerns. A particular focus was placed on the role of women in Arab liberation movements and their growing feminist consciousness and personal journeys (often referred to as rihla, Arabic for journey) towards liberation and social emancipation. Some of the most prominent works of this period include Lebanese Anbara Salam Khalidi’s Jawlah fi al-Dhikrayat Bayna Lubnan wa Filastin (1978) (A Tour of Memories Between Lebanon and Palestine), Moroccan Leila Abouzeid’s ʿAm al-Fil (1983) (Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey Towards Independence and Other Stories, 1989), Egyptian Radwa Ashour’s Al-Rihlah: Ayyam Talibah Misriyyah fi Amrika (1983) (The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America, 2018), Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s Rihlah Jabaliyyah, Rihlah Ṣaʿbah: Sirah Dhatiyyah (1984) (Mountainous Journey: An Autobiography, 1990), Algerian Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985) (Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1993), Lebanese author Fay Afaf Kanafani’s Nadia, Captive of Hope: Memoir of an Arab Woman (1999), and Egyptian Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999).
While these narratives were geographically dispersed, written in different languages, and catered to each author’s private life and personal itinerary, a common theme that can be observed through these texts is the authors’ use of the genre to reflect their double fight against patriarchal and (post)colonial forms of oppression. Additionally, they all position their subjects within a nationalist collective sphere in which the political is unescapable, or rather impossible to detach from the daily life of each individual. For example, Khalidi’s memoir, which depicts the social life of Beirut between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, highlights the personal history of the author and her early feminist activism, including her public lifting of the veil in 1928, while reflecting upon key historical events and the rise of Arab nationalism in the region. Similarly, Tuqan’s depiction of her early years in 1920s Nablus and professional development as a national poet is set against the backdrop of Palestinian political history, including British Mandate Palestine and the history of the Nakba of 1948. Autobiographical writing, thus, functions not only as a reflection of personal experiences but also as a vehicle for providing socio-political commentaries and personal historical archives.
The post-colonial Arab region today remains a politically fraught zone. It is torn by sectarian wars, military interventions, armed conflicts, and popular revolutions. In light of these political complexities and since the uprisings that swept the region between 2010 and 2019, women continue to write autobiographies from the perspective of witnesses, participants, and activists. The autobiography genre is currently being used as a cultural tool against the systematic collective silencing of women and in the dismantling of the long-standing spatial divide that confined Arab women to the ‘home’ and men to the ‘battlefield’. One of the most recent examples challenging this spatial divide can be found in Yasmine El-Rifae’s autobiographical text Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (2022). Composed of a collection of interviews and personal testimonies of activists and survivors, El-Rifae explores and reflects on the ways in which public spaces have been used as political arenas of inducing fear and imposing silence upon women. The book, with its unsettling language and shocking scenes, is an example of how women across the region continue to be active agents during critical moments of political conflict.
In Palestine in particular, autobiographical literature is one of the major forms of literary expression resisting the erasure of Palestinian memory. By reviving the history of the Nakba, evoking Palestinians’ Right of Return, and recounting their daily lives under occupation, autobiographical writing remains one of the primary cultural tools of resistance (al-muqawama) for Palestinians. Palestinian women like Suad Amiry, Ibtisam Barakat, Ghada Karmi, and Najla Said continue to engage in counter-narrative projects through various autobiographical forms, most notably diary and memoir. These authors are committed to archiving the Palestinian national memory, in which the personal becomes inextricably linked to the collective experience of alienation, violence, and displacement.
Autobiographical texts by Arab women living in and/or reflecting on zones of war and political conflicts are also witness accounts which provide valuable first-hand testaments to the various forms of oppression women face. The genre is consciously used to produce archival documents that aim at recording war from the perspective of generations of Arab women. For example, in her memoir Teta, Mother, and Me (2005), Lebanese author Jean Said Makdisi explores the lives of three generations of Arab women as they endure turbulent moments of war and upheaval, navigating the social and political worlds of their times. In this memoir, Makdisi describes how her grandmother’s remarkable memory allowed her to preserve every detail, person, and place that she witnessed throughout the many wars and revolutions of her lifetime. This extraordinary capacity for remembrance made her “the unofficial chronicler of her time and place, a time and place inordinately susceptible to change, to movement, to the destruction of more permanent forms of records”.7 Makdisi also recounts how her mother, after the death of her husband, began writing memories of her childhood and early youth, as well as compiling records and exchanging letters with family members. According to Makdisi’s mother, who “opened [her] eyes to war,”8 autobiographical writing was imperative during the violent upheavals she survived in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. Writing down her memories on paper was a way “to trap the past in a concrete form for sanity’s sake”.9 For her daughter, Makdisi, this was “a matter of intense and urgent importance” which would enable them to have “a tangible, permanent memory”.10 Autobiographical narratives for these women, and many other Arab women, is a form of resistance literature.11 This type of literature aims primarily to combat the amnesia of official records and to articulate women’s experiences, while voicing their rejection of an imbrication of power discourses both political and social. Additionally, autobiographical literature, as described by Makdisi, constitutes an act “of self-discovery as much as of reconciliation”12 with the self and others.
The autobiographical genre provides women with the opportunity to narrate their own experiences from a personal lens and is viewed as an alternative version to essentialist, often male-centred, narratives. In her introduction to Tisʿa ʿAsharah Imraʾah: Suriyyat Yarwayn (2019) (19 Women: Tales of Resilience from Syria), Syrian journalist and author Samar Yazbek highlights the role of autobiographical writing for women as a tool in the face of “historical forgetfulness/erasure”13 which “opens up the possibility towards revising our history [as Arab women] and its truths.”14 In this testimonial book, Yazbek compiles witness accounts of 19 Syrian women who participated in the revolution against al-Assad’s regime and who often found themselves fighting at the intersection of dictatorship, ISIS, and national patriarchy. These women, most of whom were refugees at the time, explore in intimate details two main question: “where were you when the revolution started?” and “why did you join it?”15 Yazbek asserts that one of the reasons behind compiling and publishing these autobiographical accounts is their importance as historical testaments of women’s activism. They constitute, in her own words, a guide to “understanding the aspects of the Syrian tragedy” from the point of view of resilient women.16
TRUTH & POWER
The dichotomy of voice and silence is of paramount importance to the genre. The significance of Arab women’s autobiographical literature lies in the genre’s provision of unmediated literary access to personal voices and narratives in comparison to other literary genres such as fiction. By using the genre deliberately and creatively to assert their positions against socio-political power discourses, Arab “women coerce the multiple limitations of their traditionally ascribed domestic roles to raise their voices and assert their own priorities in the public forums of ideological debate and political struggle.”17
In an autobiographical essay entitled “I Write Against my Hand” (1999), Lebanese author Hoda Barakat writes “We [Arab women] write, I write in wars and civil wars because I have no power, no strength, no weapons and no soldiers. I write because I crouch in the cellar like a rat, raising my cowardice like a child in times of hardship. I belong to the dark dampness and the forgetfulness of those who have placed history in the streets. But I also write as the rat that gnaws at foundations and pillars.”18 As Barakat explains, writing for Arab women, particularly in the first-person form, is a medium for asserting historical and public engagement. Arab women use the genre as a space for “speaking truth to power[s]”19 against which their narratives emerge. Their stories are first-hand personal testaments that mirror political accounts. They speak against exploitative and oppressive constructions of womanhood in the region, and prevalent – often monolithic – discourses of cultural representation that tend to demarcate Arab women’s lives and participation in the public arena of political affairs.
It is the ongoing marginalization of women’s roles in the socio-political landscape of the region that compels us to turn our attention to their literary and creative discourses. For Arab women, writing non-fiction about their lived experiences of war, armed conflict, and political upheaval should not be seen merely as a cathartic or personal exercise, but as a form of voicing national commitment, civic engagement, and political intervention. Authors, activists, intellectuals, and ordinary women across the Arab world continue to engage with both regional and global concerns through first-person narratives. By doing so, they assert nationalist agendas, reclaim their subjectivities, and resist the reductive conceptions of their roles during crucial historical moments. These women challenge the tendency to confine them to the margins of history foregrounding, instead, their agency and voice.
Along with ongoing feminist struggles and socio-political battles, Arab women have persistently evoked, interrogated, and re-written (post)colonial histories through creative and self-reflexive means, raising urgent and complex questions about the relationship between the political and the aesthetic. Furthermore, the genre foregrounds the resilience, courage, and defiance of Arab women who speak autobiographically, bearing witness to their realities in the face of neo-colonialism, patriarchy, and systemic silencing. Their narratives remain vital, not only as historical testimony but also as acts of historical survival.
CONCLUSION
Arab autobiographical literature continues to flourish in different forms and through different media of expression. It is increasingly available in print, graphic texts (auto biographical comics), and in different digital formats, including personal blogs and entries on various social media outlets. Women in particular are increasingly using the genre as a creative tool through which they challenge the long-standing stereotype of the passive, silent Arab woman. Autobiographical literature permits women to assert their roles as speaking agents and their right for self-representation in moments of unrest and armed conflicts. The first-hand experience that this form of literature offers, and the effect it solicits, are some of the reasons why it is worth our consideration and attention as readers, critics, and academics.
The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute. To access the endnotes and works cited, download the PDF.
