Orientalism, Edward W. Said’s (1978) critique of western attitudes toward the east, has instigated a great deal of criticism and feedback, forming a major body of writings termed “colonial discourse,” which has proved to be one of the most productive and fruitful recent areas of study.¹ Said was by no means the first to engage in colonial discourse analysis. Soon after the end of World War II, some third-world writers published their critiques of colonialism (actual occupation) and/or neo-colonialism (economic and political exploitation). Anouar Abdel-Malek (1963) saw the downfall of Orientalism in its own essentializing history.² Frantz Fanon constructed texts...

Plurality, multiplicity, and multiculturalism characterize our world today. Neo-colonialism is part of this reality, although it functions in complex ways. It has become more difficult simply to divide the world today into separate entities: colonial and colonized. It is not easy to decide who is colonized or liberated, nor to define the process by which domination takes place. Still, colonial discourse remains highly relevant when it comes to issues of marketing, editing, and reception of texts. These issues are considered in relation to every text I study. For example, in the case of the anthologies of interviews with women, in...

In this chapter, I look at a text by Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947) entitledHarem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist.¹ Huda Shaarawi must have been known throughout the urban upper and middle classes of her day for her leading role in establishing the first Egyptian women’s union and for her participation in the nationalist uprising against the British. Nowadays she is known to those interested in the history of the Arab women’s movement primarily through her memoirs.Harem Yearsis the only English-language book associated with her name. Shaarawi’s memoirs are a good example of early Arab feminism,...

Traditionally, autobiography has been studied and criticized from within a politics of genre that tends to be not only gender-blind but also class-biased and racially biased. Hierarchical values have always been implicit in gender distinctions, and class and race distinctions too, since Aristotle’sPoetics. Western genre theory, according to Celeste Schenck, remains largely prescriptive, legislative, even metaphysical, for it preoccupies itself with establishing limits and drawing exclusionary lines in order to protect a supposedly idealized generic, sexual, and racial purity.² Perhaps it was not until James Olney’s major contribution inAutobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical(1980), extending the definition of...

In the previous chapter, I traced the history and the major characteristics of autobiography in western literary traditions. In this chapter, I want to offer a similar sketch of autobiography within Arabic literary history in order, first, to challenge Gusdorf’s belief that autobiography does not exist outside western cultures and, second, to explore the traditions and conventions within which the women writers and tellers of their life stories whose texts I am studying operate. As in western traditions of literary criticism, autobiographical studies have only recently been receiving attention from Arab literary critics, which is why my choice of references...

In this chapter I examine three books published in the 1980s:Khul-Khaal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories, by Nayra Atiya;¹Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women, by Fatima Mernissi;² andBoth Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk about Their Lives, by Bouthaina Shaaban.³ As their subtitles indicate, all three books contain life stories of women from Arab countries. These books fall into one category not only because of their subject matter but also because they raise similar sets of questions relating to their technique and conditions of production. This chapter looks at the three texts jointly and...

Fadwa Tuqan, almost a contemporary of Huda Shaarawi (whose memoirs,Harem Years, are examined in Chapter 3), is known to Arab pupils through their poetry textbooks. Her name is associated with Palestine and therefore with the Arab nationalist cause. Arab schoolchildren grow up with an almost mythological image of Tuqan as a resilient woman who fought against British and Israeli imperialism by the power of her poetic discourse. She stands as a public figure whose poetry is as highly valued as that of the “great” male poets of the Arab world. Tuqan’s autobiography, however, comes as a shock to the...

Chapter 6 looked at three anthologies of interviews with Arab women whose stories and voices were heavily determined by the textualization of their spoken words carried out by the editors, who were themselves the interviewers. Chapter 7 discussed a written autobiographical text by an Arab woman and an extract from it translated, edited, shaped, and presented to western readers by a western writer. This chapter examines various modes of writing in which different rhetorical devices for saying “I” are used by one Arab writer, Nawal el-Saadawi.¹

I am dedicating a long chapter to this one writer for many reasons. First,...