The Self and Autobiography

Sherif Hetata
Egyptian novelist and medical doctor.

I was forty one years old when I started to write fiction. Until then despite the many novels I had read in Arabic, English and French, I wrote only studies and books related to politics, and sometimes to health. But at that time, after my release from fifteen years in prison, I had met the well-known novelist and feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi, and one year after that we married.

Nawal insisted that I had a gift for artistic expression, and encouraged me to write. So after several fumbling attempts I wrote my first novel. It was called “Al Ain That Al Gifn Al Ma’dani” Which means “The Eye with an Iron lid”. The novel was about prison and political prisoners, but I think it was different from the novels about prison I had read. What distinguished it was an attempt to reflect the inner thoughts, the dreams, the feelings, the images and memories which flashed through the minds of the main characters (men and women) as they lived their prison life, underwent torture, were on hunger strike, in solitary confinement, planning an escape, or facing death. How they survived prison, or broke down under continuous stress. What had made them join the revolutionary movement, or decide to abandon it. The jailers, the officers, the secret police, the judges and the prosecutors were included in this attempt.

Tracing the “self” of characters with whom I had lived, or whom I had known was what seduced me most and made me write a narrative about things I had lived.
In the six novels which I have written the “self” remains important in the text. The author’s “self” is always there following a devious path, or hidden here and there, unaware of what is happening to it as he writes or half conscious at certain moments that he has written “himself”. All novels to one or another extent thread the authors self into their cloth. Some of them like those of Henry Miller are very much the story of his life.

As the years go by, auto- biographical novels and autobiography have become more common. In a world where individuals are the victims of the global system autobiography emphasizes the value of an individual’s life. In Japan the pressures of an autocratic patriarchal society may be the reason why novelists have often tended to write about their lives. Many women writers reflect them-selves in what they write perhaps as a protest against the patriarchal norms that imprison their life.
I do not feel that we can draw strict demarcations between autobiography and fiction. This is particularly true when autobiography is not written to provide us with a chronology of events related to the author’s life, with an account of the things he has done, or which happened to him, but rather to narrate the story of his “self”, of its trajectory through life, of the experiences which have made him the human being he is.

Autobiography is at its best when it is written in a language, in a form which is close to fiction, when it moves freely in time, captures the imagination then lets it soar up on an independent flight. It should tell me how the author became who he is, his experiences, his choices in life, reveal the things we suppress, or fear, or hide, or show under false colours, the “truth” of the individual self, how it relates to the world, to society, to family, to a wife or a lover, to friends and rivals, to the system and values which govern our life. These are the treasures it can open up for us, the insights it can provide. Autobiography is a carrier of creativity an individual experience of life. This is its essence which must not be left to sink in a morass of events, of facts, of places, of developments which we can always read about in other books, in history or biography, or social studies or travelogues or in anything else. Auto-biography possesses something specific which differentiates it from other writings. Its subject is the individual self .

Most male authors of auto-biography, if not all, avoid writing about the “inner self”. Men in a class patriarchal society are accustomed to exercise power, to control, to construct, to bring order to chaos, to replace weakness with strength or conceal it, to mould things to their will. The “self” is a construction, an image which must be maintained. It is a part of the order in which they live, and they are afraid that like any construction it might collapse.

Within this outer construction the “inner self” remains hidden, carefully protected, like an oyster in a shell. Writing itself is a form of power, of influence over others and can be used to buttress this outer construction of the “self”. Language is composed of symbols, represents reality, but is not reality itself. Language can be used to create a construct of the author himself.

The self is riddled with weaknesses, with rationalizations and contradictions built up carefully to maintain an edifice. To reveal this is not easy. Novels often express indirectly what an author would not wish to say openly in an autobiography. To some extent they are an escape from individual and social pressures which prevent us from showing whom we really are, what we really think, or do.

This is particularly true of the Arab region. Autobiographies written by authors from the Arab countries are usually meant to win a battle (often political) over someone else, to give a different account of events, to describe the author’s prowess in one or more areas of life. The “self” of the author remains carefully hidden, takes great care not to reveal itself. The self, the inner secret self, is something a man (or a woman) in our region does not write about.

The social pressures to which writers are exposed in the Arab region are extremely heavy. Politics especially if critical of the powers that be (mainly the head of state) or the inner workings of the system is taboo. So are religion and sex. In Egypt neo-liberal policies have engendered a religious fundamentalist backlash. If women are mentioned in an autobiography it is always as loving mothers nurturing their children. Wives have no place and less so lovers, or prostitutes. Hetero or homo sexual relations are not mentioned. Occasionally a wife may crop up as a faithful appendage but men do not speak of their wives in an autobiography. Class patriarchal tradition remains deeply entrenched in Arab society even though extramarital sex and homo sexual relations are common.

Critics might argue that since autobiography is the life of the author it is inevitable and that it should reflect his vision of it. Yet most of them would agree that women write more easily about their “selves”.

I started to write my auto-biography in 1993 and finished the three volumes in 1998. It was called “Al Nawafiz Al Maftouha” which means “Open Windows”. Most of it was written while I was teaching at Duke university in Durham, North Carolina, almost ten thousand miles from home, living in a house surrounded by forest trees and a silence broken only by the rustle of leaves and the occasional song of a bird. Perhaps after reaching the age of seventy, I was reviewing my life from a distance, thinking that death was moving closer, trying to defeat it by living on in the written word. May be I was trying to say to myself and others that there was something worth while in my life. May be the oppression under which we live made me want to cry out, to say I am still here, to dispel the anonymity forced upon us by a global system which silences our individual voices.

For many long years I had remained a silent person. A Victorian English mother brought up in the ways of discipline, an unhappy family, a medical school ruled over by patriarchs of “science”, years in a clandestine party, and years in prison, sometimes in solitary confinement had surrounded my “self” with a shell it was difficult to destroy. It needed a woman like “Nawal El Saadawi” to set it free.

Perhaps it is women who will help men to write “real” autobiography. That is if literature, and art and other beautiful things in life will survive the neo-liberal fundamentalist crusade we are witnessing these days.