Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration and Translation
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- Introduction: Arab Women’s Life Writing and Resistance Literature: History, Theory and Context
- 1 Genre and Twentieth-century National Struggles: Arab Women Write the Resistance
- 2 A Bricolage of Genre, a Montage of Selves: Autobiographical Subjectivity, Generic Experimentation and Representational Contestation
- 3 Shahādāt Nisāʾiyyah: Testimonial Life Writing, Accounts of Women’s Resistance
- 4 Dissident Laughter: Diaries of National Struggles and the Aesthetics of Humour
- 5 Arab Women’s Digital Life Writing: Resistance 2.0
- Conclusion: Arab(ic) Resistance Non-fiction: Critical Trajectories
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - A Bricolage of Genre, a Montage of Selves: Autobiographical Subjectivity, Generic Experimentation and Representational Contestation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration and Translation
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- Introduction: Arab Women’s Life Writing and Resistance Literature: History, Theory and Context
- 1 Genre and Twentieth-century National Struggles: Arab Women Write the Resistance
- 2 A Bricolage of Genre, a Montage of Selves: Autobiographical Subjectivity, Generic Experimentation and Representational Contestation
- 3 Shahādāt Nisāʾiyyah: Testimonial Life Writing, Accounts of Women’s Resistance
- 4 Dissident Laughter: Diaries of National Struggles and the Aesthetics of Humour
- 5 Arab Women’s Digital Life Writing: Resistance 2.0
- Conclusion: Arab(ic) Resistance Non-fiction: Critical Trajectories
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In her autobiography Athqal min Radwā: Maqāṭiʿ min Sīrah Dhātiyyah (2013) (Heavier than Radwa: Fragments of an Autobiography), late Egyptian scholar and author Radwa Ashour (1946–2014) draws the attention of the reader to the psychological and cognitive processes of life writing as she herself experiences it. In a chapter entitled ‘A Short Essay on Writing’, Ashour metatextually reflects an awareness of the theoretical protocols of autobiographical narration which presume that:
[All] I need to do to write a strictly autobiographical text is to look around me, behind me, inside of me in order to see or to remember. As if I am only mediating previously written events, times, places, conversations, incidents, feelings and thoughts … the role and function of imagination is no longer needed as the mind’s only mission here is to retell what I have experienced, seen, heard or felt. (2013: 252, my translation)
While Ashour does not completely dismiss these conventional assumptions on autobiographical writing, she considers them to be ‘only partly relevant’ (ibid.: 252). She queries the importance of linearity in the process of life writing, the pre-existence of a plot and characters waiting to be mediated, the writer’s presumed prior knowledge and a clear sense of understanding of his/her life and relationships and the accuracy of memory and its relationship with fiction in the autobiographical act. Ashour closes her chapter with the following reflection:
The act of writing an openly autobiographical narrative such as the one I am embarking on here [Heavier than Radwa], is bound up, like other narratives such as the novel, with individuality in dealing with words, and with all that I have compiled, as the author, in terms of knowledge, experiences, convictions, emotions, taste, perception and attention. All of these elements compile to form a perception, my own perception of the world and of myself. (2013: 253, my translation)
Ashour dismisses the prescribed conventions of life writing which monolithically attempt to frame the practice within a single format and process, and in doing so tend to discard the idiosyncrasies of the life of the writing subject.
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- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023