Conclusion: Arab(ic) Resistance Non-fiction: Critical Trajectories

Summary

Throughout this book, my aim has been to examine Arab women’s life writings as cultural sites of expressing and manifesting resistance to an imbrication of power discourses. I have demonstrated that the importance of Arab women’s autobiographical literature lies in the way the genre provides an unmediated literary access to personal voice and narratives – as compared to other literary genres like fiction. This autobiographical literature, therefore, offers intimate insights into the political, cultural and ideological mechanisms of national struggles as experienced by the narrating/writing subject. Life writing by Arab women embodies the intertwined relationship between resistance, (self-)representation and self-determination and captures a convergence of feminist, literary and historico-political issues. It highlights the interplay between literary production and power discourses as well as how forms of self-expression can engage with, interrogate and challenge dominant social, political and representational narratives. Through using the genre deliberately and creatively, Arab ‘[w]omen 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 public struggle’ (Harlow 1992: 33). By assuming and asserting the position of the speaking agent, Arab women life writers examined in this book attempt to dismiss representational mediation, or what Moroccan author Laila Laalami describes as ‘the surrogate storytellers’ (2020: 155), and to depict the political and cultural landscapes from the personal lens of experience. Driven by the desire to make their stories visible in their own terms, they use the genre as a space of agency to ‘speak truth to the power(s)’ against which their narratives emerge. Their stories are first-hand personal testaments that also constitute political statements. They speak against tyrannical regimes, exploitative and oppressive constructions of gender in the region, and prevalent – often monolithic – discourses of cultural representation that tend to demarcate Arab women’s life and participation in the public arena of political struggle.

My main purpose in this book has been to demonstrate that life writing subgenres are not merely concerned with voice and representation or challenging the long-standing stereotype of the passive and submissive Arab woman.