Alif 29 Reviews

Autobiography is a protean genre: it covers so many forms and styles. When narrating one’s life, the narrator has to choose what he or she considers to be relevant and decisive. Beside the differences on what is fundamental in a life, the notion of the Self is culturally defined and thus varies from one place to another. The author of an autobiographical text may express only a fragment of his or her life, follow a thread in the trajectory through reminiscences, memoir, diaries, testimony, interview, letters, poems, etc. The author may declare openly that he or she is identical with the protagonist or may give the principal character a different name or no name. The author may depict private or public events, at times taking imaginative license or even including fantastic motifs. Autobiographical discourse is not only culturally conditioned; it is also symptomatic of the cultural moment. Thus it is important to explore the varieties of self-presentation, and not assume a fixed paradigm.

In this revisionist spirit that looks for different and alternative ways of recording one’s life, Alif presents the autobiographical drive in multiple contexts: ancient and contemporary Egyptian; nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Arab, Moroccan, and Iraqi; South African and West African; Canadian and American; Palestinian and Sudanese; English and Irish; and even that of a hybrid background Chinese American and Algerian French. There has been a tremendous surge in autobiographical writing in recent years, and the field has been redefined by literary and cultural critics.

From James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980) to Dwight Reynolds (ed.), Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), a range of works have appeared challenging established views and approaches on the subject of autobiography. The epigraphs (whose English translation is drawn from the works mentioned above) attest to the complexity and diversity of motivations in writing about one’s past life.

This issue of Alif focuses on trauma and loss and their presence in collective and individual memory. The question of traumatic events has been recognized in psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature, but scholarly studies have mostly concentrated on traumas enacted in the West—World Wars and the Holocaust. Contributors to this volume attempt to extend the field of trauma and memory studies to include other parts of the world: Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, India, Ireland, Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan, multi-ethnic America, and ancient Greece. The Lebanese civil war or the Peloponnesian war, the Nakba of 1948 or the Naksa of 1967: the articles and personal testimonies in this issue explore the impact of such tragic events on literary genre, films, fiction, folk culture, poetry, drama, and visual arts. Alif: Journal of Comperative Poetics 30 Contributors: Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd, Galal Amin, Gaber Asfour, Mohammed Berrada, Céza Kassem-Draz, Sabry Hafez, Barbara Harlow, Malak Hashem, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Richard Jacquemond, Andrew Rubin, Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri, and Hoda Wasfi.