Arabic Disclosures

The Postcolonial Autobiographical Atlas

Muhsin J. al-Musawi

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780268201661
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura de Oriente Medio

Arabic Disclosures presents readers with a comparative analysis of Arabic postcolonial autobiographical writing.

In Arabic Disclosures Muhsin J. al-Musawi investigates the genre of autobiography within the modern tradition of Arabic literary writing from the early 1920s to the present. Al-Musawi notes in the introduction that the purpose of this work is not to survey the entirety of autobiographical writing in modern Arabic but rather to apply a rigorously identified set of characteristics and approaches culled from a variety of theoretical studies of the genre to a particular set of autobiographical works in Arabic, selected for their different methodologies, varying historical contexts within which they were conceived and written, and the equally varied lives experienced by the authors involved.

The book begins in the larger context of autobiographical space, where the theories of Bourdieu, Bachelard, Bakhtin, and Lefebvre are laid out, and then considers the multiple ways in which a postcolonial awareness of space has impacted the writings of many of the authors whose works are examined. Organized chronologically, al-Musawi begins with the earliest modern example of autobiographical work in ??h? ?usayn's book, translated into English as The Stream of Days. Al-Musawi studies some of the major pioneers in the development of modern Arabic thought and literary expression: Jurj? Zayd?n, M?k????l Nu?aymah, A?mad Am?n, Sal?mah M?s?, Sayyid Qu?b, and untranslated works by the prominent critic and scholar ?amm?d? ?amm?d, the novelist ??liah Mamd??, and others. He also examines the autobiographies of a number of women, including Naw?l al-Sa?d?w? and Fadw? ??q?n, and fiction writers. The book draws a map of Arab thought and culture in its multiple engagements with other cultures and will be useful for scholars and students of comparative literature, Arabic studies, and Middle Eastern studies, intellectual thought, and history.

CHAPTER 1

Theorizing Autobiography

When we read the word “I” without knowing who wrote it, it is perhaps not meaningless, but it is at least estranged from its normal meaning.

—Edmund Husserl (1900)

But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. . . . A man’s true autobiography is almost an impossibility. . . . Man is bound to lie about himself.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864)

There came a time . . . when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself. It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job.

—Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: SPACE, SCOPE, AND OBJECTIVE

Never before has autobiography drawn so much scholarly attention purporting to theorize its place in narrative as a genre or subgenre of its own. What the novel has long secured as the domain for theorization that cuts across cultural studies, literary criticism, and poetics has partially shifted attention to self-narratives. The reasons behind this shift are many, especially when predicated on a broader spectrum of sociopolitical consciousness that has generated a turn to self-narratives as significant components of history. On the other hand, this active climate of theorization has rarely touched on autobiography outside the European cultural center. Even the “decolonizing” or “postcolonial” efforts are less focused on autobiography.¹ Moreover, although the Arab region, with its eastern and western flanks, has been a field for research, Arabic literature and literary autobiography in particular have remained outside this focus. Exceptions have often involved scholars specializing in Arabic culture.² The neglect of Arabic and non-Western autobiography stems from a number of postulates that often center on Eurocentric presumptions regarding a “Western” origination of genres, modernity, and/or self-consciousness. In fusing a rising awareness of subjectivity in tandem with economic and social change with a “Western” cultural specific, Eurocentric scholars are betraying the prioritization of an outdated branch of philology. This postulation of a Western-cultural specific is often argued at the expense of the dynamics of transformation associated with the accumulation of capital, colonial expansion, and the industrial revolution. It also vaults on the politics of comparison, or Othering as applied to non-Western people and lands. Even Samuel Johnson cannot escape this in his History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), “for all judgment is comparative,” and “we must humbly learn from higher authority”—meaning the North.³ This argument in favor of a Western-oriented form, as aptly noted in Interpreting the Self,⁴ cannot be seen apart from the anxieties of European scholarship since the interwar years and thereafter. Presented in Eurocentric literary criticism “as a cultural product unique to modern western civilization,”⁵ autobiography is central to this idea but, conversely, no less pivotal to rising trends in postcolonial studies that have already begun to question and discredit such a premise. Scholars known for sustained engagement with autobiography, such as James Olney, focus on an English-speaking “Western” writing that excludes even Australia, India, and Canada.⁶

However, in such studies there is an effort to explain the rise of autobiography. Karl Weintraub associates it with self-consciousness: “It may have such varied functions as self-explication, self-discovery, self-formation, self-presentation, and self-justification.” Concerning self-consciousness, he explains: “All these are centered upon an aware self, aware of its relation to its circumstances.”⁷

This association is potentially significant if it can be reformulated in the light of what sociologists or anthropologists such as Pierre Bourdieu have argued with regard to disposition and habitus, leading the discussion away from Eurocentrism and situating it properly in theory. The origination of this association has already been made popular in Neo-Hegelian theory and with Marx’s notion of struggle “against the gods of heaven and of earth who do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”⁸ The implications of self-consciousness arise, however, whenever it is linked to a “modern” European specific, something that in turn leads arguments into erroneous cultural-geographical claims of a Eurocentric specificity. Olney is on solid ground, however, whenever he links this specific to the circumstantial and temporal, a point I’ll address further in due time. He argues: “I am convinced that it was something more deeply embedded in the times and in the contemporary psyche, something more pervasive in the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere that caused and continues to cause a great number of investigators, thinkers, and critics to turn their attention to the subject of autobiography.”⁹

Even so, while this sounds logical, no substantial theorization is offered to explain this “turn” or to place “value” on self and circumstance and its problematic within an epistemological construction, other than the common and obsolete presumption of post-Renaissance modernity and the alleged birth of individual consciousness as a Western specific.¹⁰ As shown in Dwight F. Reynolds’s edited volume, an underlying fallacy was rampant among European scholars like Georges Gusdorf and Roy Pascal—with the latter’s “essentially European” genre—and in Georges May’s belief in autobiography as a European invention “linked inextricably with Christianity,” something that also gets Europeanized outside its space and culture of origination.¹¹ In his “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” Gusdorf—who receives much acclaim in studies of autobiography¹²—advocates this canonization of a Eurocentric autobiography as follows: “It would seem that autobiography is not to be found outside of our cultural area; one would say that it expresses a concern peculiar to Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own.”¹³

Gusdorf suffers no qualms and has no scruples with respect to his ignorance of other cultures. He is pleased with this kind of reading. Even the colonized national elite are deprived of selfhood, for whatever they have is bestowed on them by “whites . . . from beyond the seas.”¹⁴ Eurocentric theorists of autobiography forget that Othering through geographical and cultural demarcation often tilts against itself, in that the birthplace of Saint Augustine—who is a cornerstone for this theorization—in the year CE 354 was the municipium of Thagaste when it was part of the Roman Empire’s province of Numidia. Thagaste is now Souk Ahras, Algeria. If geography matters, then Gusdorf has to take this into account. Like many of his type, he is pleased with his reductive and racially selective scholarship. In a pertinent remark on “the historical consciousness on which Western man has prided himself since the beginning of the nineteenth century,” Hayden White writes: “It is possible to view historical consciousness as a specifically Western prejudice by which the presumed superiority of modern, industrial society can be retroactively substantiated.”¹⁵

The impact of such Eurocentric views on later scholars has been noticeable; every now and then, the same kind of reading appears, displaying an appalling lack of knowledge of literary forms, genres, traveling theories, and cultural phenomena. One such example is that of Richard N. Coe, cited in Interpreting the Self.¹⁶ In a succinct commentary on such approaches, Reynolds and his colleagues summarize the problematic of such a canonized opinion as one that “marks a reorientation that seeks to distinguish fully formed, authentic, modern western selves from the incomplete individual consciousnesses of earlier periods,” a notion that ends up with a conclusion that all selves are copies of an original, Western selfhood: “inauthentic, facsimile selves produced by modern nonwestern cultures in imitation of their superiors.” Reynolds and his coauthors add: “Seen in this light, autobiography is positioned at the very crux of literary scholarship’s relationship to earlier historical periods and to other cultures and is currently privileged as a defining discursive marker for what it is to be ‘modern’ and what it is to be ‘western.’”¹⁷ Whether unfamiliar with either cultural theory or theory at large, or reluctant to free themselves from such a rampant Eurocentric posture, a large number of scholars end up making sweeping claims that start from a platitude and finish up in negation. Questions relating to the cultural and social environment within which the individual consciousness unfolds are rarely raised. We end up with a series of abstractions that present autobiography as an “out of place” narrative. Yet more serious is the reluctance to move beyond European Romanticism and its individuation. Instead of turning to the high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce—with their use of the mythical method and “objective correlatives” to distance emotion and objectify experience—these scholars prefer to adhere to an oneiric understanding of self-representation, one that often overlooks the production of autobiographical space.¹⁸ The implications of this Eurocentrism are far-reaching, however, and we can trace them even in fictional works that are largely predicated on some readings in Arab culture. Thus, equivocating between irony and mere stereotyping, the postmodernist American novelist John Barth, for example, presents Yasmin in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor as somebody who was “raised as she had been in a culture in which autobiography was all but unknown.”¹⁹

Gaston Bachelard in Autobiographical Discussion

Although the spatial aspect should necessarily engage with, if not generate, consciousness, it often disappears in this emerging critical corpus. Spatial memory is put aside, as if it were a marginal element rather than, as Gaston Bachelard would have it, a central concept—an understanding that will remind readers of the topoi of the pre-Islamic Arabic prelude.²⁰ Speaking of that “oneiric” birthplace, for example, Bachelard argues that “beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.”²¹ While autobiographies penned by Arab writers negotiate their localities within the contexts of a global grid of information, journals, books, people, and economic transactions, rural backgrounds will often provide a more permanent imprint to impressionable minds and sensibilities. Local geographies also serve to endow prose with an expressive density, one that appears not only in the occasional outpouring of emotions but also in metaphors. Narratives of frontiers and borders acquire elements of density from the abundance of metaphors that derive their fecundity from the challenge of a crossing, a point that following chapters explore.²² Such perspectives disappear from autobiographical theory, which, despite some significant landmarks, remains thin.

Autobiographers often start with the notion of a place, a house, not only because it connects to a consciousness of roots and beginnings but also because it signifies the threshold, the entry in gravity, and, along with it, the new demands and joys of familial and social life. In his Baqāyā ṣuwar (1975; Fragments of Memory: A Story of a Syrian Family), Syrian novelist Ḥannā Mīnah (1924–2018) describes the house in which he was born as follows: “spacious house with a dusty courtyard into which the doors of the damp, dark rooms opened.” In a single panoramic view that gathers and collapses these old impressions, he dwells on that courtyard: “The courtyard contained a motley collection of junk: along the sides were hearths and firewood, jerry can flower pots with jasmine growing in them, chickens and filth on the ground, a Ford car and a heap of oranges.” In retrospect he recalls the scene that connects to the later adventures of his sick father, a father who was the “man sitting on the fender of the Ford, hand on cheek,” in a moment of loss and despair as he “was regarding the heap of oranges while the children gathered in a circle around the car, stared at the oranges.”²³

In its variegated stable or meteoric geographical shifts and implications for imagination, thought, and enunciation, space here is central to autobiographical exploration. Consciousness unfolds and operates in space. With that in mind, this book proposes to study Arabic literary autobiography in “postcolonial” spatial terms, laying a greater emphasis on the power of space in writing the self at a defining historical juncture. Although all Arabic autobiographies that are the subject of this inquiry were written either at a postcolonial nexus—a point of struggle against colonial powers—or within an unfolding selfhood in a spatially informing climate of ideas, the past has also had its own spatial markers that serve to initiate writing the self in certain spaces.²⁴ If we agree with Mikhail Bakhtin that the “image of man is always intrinsically chronoptic,”²⁵ then we can further argue that any sequential, interrupted, and ruptured temporality thickens in space. Bakhtin’s remarks can be more powerfully applied to the novel and Greek romance as genres: “Human movement through space is precisely what provides the basic indices for measuring space and time in the Greek romance, which is to say, for its chronotope.”²⁶ As a genre, autobiography captures both elements and is able to navigate its movement in the intervening space so as to account for a self-narrative that is profoundly grounded in place. In particular, the childhood home—whether in village or town—is often retrospectively recollected as a microcosmic homeland, a waṭan that is bound to foster a sense of belonging to place. Many recent writings fall within a tendency to thicken this sense through a recall of a village, town, school, event, and whatever that occupies memory. Indeed, the Palestinian poet Murīd al-Barghūthī distinguishes nostalgia and loss from a physical meeting with a land and nation that were taken by occupation and invasion. Visiting his birthplace, and treated by the new colonizer as visitor or tourist, if not a threat, the poet writes: “When the eye sees it, it has all the clarity of earth and pebbles and hills and rocks. It has its colors and its temperatures and wild plants too.”²⁷ While there is an effort to retain the real as perceived in those formative years, the intrusion of the present moment with its thick spatial contours could, however, provoke an intense nostalgic tone and endow the past with more than its due. Hence historicity quivers. The nostalgic mode is often overshadowed by a disturbing disparity between the seriousness of teachers and educational programs in the past, on the one hand, and the laxity or even corruption that overwhelms the present, on the other. One of these recent writings that read more in space as soul and meaning is by the Iraqi scholar of geography Jamāl al-ʿAttābї, who is also a littérateur. His book Dākhil al-makān: Al-mudun rūḥ wa-maʿnā (Inside Place: Cities as Soul and Meaning) recalls his early childhood, his primary school, his teachers, and, more importantly, the emerging urban space from inside the countryside.²⁸ He argues against the neglect of space: “The documentation of cities as soul and meaning has not been given due attention in our Iraqi culture.” He explains: “Visual memory is insufficient to recall the aesthetics of place. It has to take into account the human agent who gives space an identit...