Performing Literary resistance in Arab womens’ autobiographies.

Abstract

Writing the self for women has been predominantly received as a symbol of freedom or as a form of writing back. While both elements are largely embedded in Arab women’s autobiographies and memoirs, the literary, linguistic and aesthetic choices they make to articulate their selfhood are their main arena of struggle in defining and writing their subjectivity. By reading various autobiographies and memoirs written by Arab women, it is quite clear that the articulation of the self in the form of language poses several challenges to the female writer. Women writers, nevertheless, use confrontational and non-confrontational linguistic and literary features to express their opposition to the current norms and actions whether on a literary or social level. This thesis explores Arab women’s autobiographical narratives and seeks to identify literary strategies of oppositional writing whether in Arabic or in English. The focus on literary resistance means engaging with aesthetic features of the language that perform opposition to hegemony whether in the form of masculine, patriarchal discourse or another kind of oppressive system. Four disparate life experiences are investigated in the pages that follow, united by their authors’ intention to challenge the powers that be. Egyptian Marxist Latifa Al-Zayyat, mainly through her adoption of the Sufi language of love, challenges the patriarchal symbolic order. Laila Ahmed, an Egyptian-born North American academic, would seem to imitate the discourse of Western hegemony, but she does this only in order to deconstruct it. Palestinian ‘freedom-fighter’ Aisha Odeh ritualises her prison experience to challenge the authority of Israeli occupation. Finally, Lebanese publisher Mai Ghoussoub produces a narrative of the self that refuses to be in one literary category as a reflection of her being between continents, languages and cultures.