[T]o fctionalize one's self is essentially an autofctional enterprise. If we are to believe Freud's theory on screen memories, according to which the memories we have of our childhood are only screens that hide repressed contents, autofction would in Laouyen's terms be a more authentic way. Authenticity is always related to subjectivity, and "lies and fction can give a truer picture than autobiography." (Sébastien Hubier cited in Ferreira-Meyers 2015, 214)

Below is an example of how Tau uses the autofctional in her work to play with the memory of her "self," and how the fctionalization of an aspect of her childhood points to repressed content.

In "Of Another Time When I Existed" (2020), Tau depicts herself at the age of fve. She wears a "Sunday dress" (one that would be based, typically, on a semi-formal European design), which required the fve-year-old Tau to assume a polished and lady-like demeanor. In the image we see a young Tau crouched on a chair, poised to launch herself from it, and thus disregarding the required "decorum" of her dress. Contrary to the elegant and adult-like demeanor that her outft demands, the rebellious position that Tau depicts shows the child straining against normative expectations of both behavior and appearance, the trappings of which point to European norms. For the child's caretakers, who have sought here to culturally "polish" her, the primary source of shame is her disheveled Afro (ruffed during her playtime), which Tau draws using smoke. Culturally, the young Tau's untidy Afro symbolized a child who was ungroomed, and it is no coincidence that the trappings of the cultural regulations toward which Tau points in this image are European. The purity and innocence in a child's defance of such regulations is what she seeks to remember of herself and preserve through this image. At the same time, she gives a subtle reminder of the fragility of this memory by representing it through a medium that could very easily disintegrate, just as the memory itself does with time (Wixted and Ebbesen 1991, 409–415). The blurry appearance of the smoke medium visually represents the opacity of autofctional practice. While it gives the impression of translucence or even transparency, upon closer inspection one discovers that it is impossible to see fully through the medium.

#### The "Trickery" Revealed

As autofction takes place between autobiography and fction—whether shifting between the two or situated as a midway point—it has the unique feature of maintaining a sense of transparency about the possible "trickery" which occurs in the process.

"I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then" (Fig. 9.6) is a self-portrait that Tau took in Saint-Émilion, France, where she resided in 2020. Saint-Émilion was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999 due to its viticulture and historic architecture: all the buildings have a limestone structure, which has been a trademark of the village since the eleventh century (UNESCO n.d.). The composition consists of three layers, superimposed onto each other. The frst layer is a façade of a limestone building in Saint-Émilion, the second is Tau herself taking the self-portrait, and the third is her artist's studio. The image testifes to Tau's desire to partake in the history of this space and to integrate as a resident during her stay. Revealing her studio space in the third layer

**Fig. 9.6** "I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then" (After Lewis Carroll), 2020. Digital Self-Portrait

of the image offers a glimpse "behind the curtain" or "through the smokescreen" that she has placed in the performative space of the self-portrait. Contrary to works like "The Look of Reading (After Garret Stewart)" (Fig. 9.1), Tau adopts the process of layering and superimposition when considering her cultural identity rather than moving between identities. The fusing of all the apparent layers together in such a translucent manner allows for more depth in the presentation of the cultural "self." Here, Tau can identify as a new Francophone, or one who participates in the historical, cultural space she fnds herself in, and simultaneously accommodate her other variations of "self." Using imaginative visual symbols, such as the translucent "smokescreen," as autofctional tools to integrate herself into the space, Tau creates a narrative where she has cultural ties to the space in which she fnds herself. She does this by attempting to visually fuse herself with the landscape, using the glass in the image as a translucent binding element for her refection and the refection of the buildings in the background.

#### Unrequited Love

The desire for inclusion in a historical-cultural narrative that runs throughout Tau's oeuvre conjures the notion of an unrequited love between Africa and Europe. It is this same desire that underpins the work of many African artists who, like Tau, do not form part of the cultural and racial group that has been institutionalized in the globally acclaimed visual art narrative, and who use their creative practice to fguratively insert themselves therein. This impulse toward self-inscription illuminates the painful reality of an unreciprocated reverence toward European subjects, as ethnic groups which fall outside of the Eurocentric norm are not given the same institutional value within the visual arts. While the white European body is omnipresent in the acclaimed tradition of self-portraiture, the ethnic body is virtually invisible. We see this in particular in the lack of representations of black protagonists in the canon. American self-portrait photographer Carrie Mae Weems discusses the idea of "unrequited love" in relation to the striking lack of representations of the black body in traditional Western art in her interview with The National Gallery of Art, which preceded her participation in the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series in 2015: she speaks of "unrequited love" toward the black body as subject matter in the works of the "Old Masters." The starting point for Weems's discussion is her own relationship as a visual artist to the representation of the black body in traditional Western art. The black body, she argues, serves as a background fgure or as decorative to white protagonists in the work of the Old Masters. As a means of exposing and resisting this imbalanced representation, Weems choose to use fctionalized techniques of either inserting the left-out subjects into contemporary visual narratives of the classic paintings, or drawing fgures who were originally part of the background into the foreground of the image. Weems describes this practice in the following terms:

At a certain point you realise that I'm not his [referring to Manet as an example] subject. This historical body [the black body] has not been the subject of these great painters. From the nineteenth century, to the twentieth century, even moving on to the twenty-frst century, it is not a part of their imagination. It is not a part of their fantasy … but of course, art has a lot to do with imagining the unimaginable. (Kleinburg 2015)

In Tau's own quest for multicultural representation in the visual art canon, she identifes one painting in which the black female is presented as the main protagonist: "Portrait d'une négresse" (Portrait of a Negress), recently renamed "Portrait de Madeleine" (Portrait of Madeleine), by Marie-Guillemine Benoist. The recent name change of the work points toward an effort to personalize the portrait, to portray its subject as an individual rather than as a generic representative of a racial group. The name change also demonstrates a signifcant effort to humanize the subject by changing the word "négresse," which was seen as a derogatory term, to the subject's own name. When analyzing the image, as well as its countless reproductions by other artists, it quickly becomes apparent that one of the most identifable qualities of the portrayed subject is her toplessness. Her bare breasts, for this reason, seem to become the key "qualifying" factor for her appearance as protagonist in this portrait. In her discussion of "Portrait de Madeleine," Cécile Bishop describes two initial reactions to Benoist's controversial work at the time. Created in 1800 between the frst abolition of slavery in France and its reinstatement in 1802, responses to this work from art historians and critics were divided between praising the humanizing quality of the image, as a rare example of a portrait which focused on a black woman, and critiquing its objectifcation of the black body (Bishop 2019, 1).

Perplexed by the seeming prerequisite of toplessness for the entry of the black female body into this visual narrative, Tau participates in the recurring tradition of reinterpreting this painting in her work as many other artists have done before her. "Portrait de Madeleine" is the only representation of a black female as protagonist in the Louvre and, as a result, it has been identifed as an important visual reference for black artists when negotiating their relationship with the canon. "Amour non partagé" (Unrequited Love) (Fig. 9.8) is the fnal self-portrait in Tau's 2020 series. It was taken in the courtyard outside of her residence in Saint-Émilion, as a closing ode to a language and culture that she reveres.

In a similar manner to Carrie Mae Weems, Tau exposes and resists the lack of reciprocity in the affection for Western languages and cultures in this image. She does so by projecting her body onto the sole portrayal of the black female as protagonist in canonical portraiture, playing the role of the "Negress" in Benoist's image. Tau wears her traditional Sesotho "seshweshwe" dress, as a fnal reminder of home and her Sesotho identity before "stripping bare" to a historical European landscape. Tau demonstrates the dual nature of autofction in this work by layering the aspects of self-projection onto the French landscape. Throughout her studio

**Fig. 9.7** "Portrait de Madeleine" (formerly known as Portrait d'une négresse), Marie-Guillemine Benoist, 1800. Louvre Museum, Paris. Picture in public domain

practice, Tau recognizes the "duality" in autofction which allows an artist (or writer) to present the self from an imaginative perspective, but which simultaneously exposes a sense of vulnerability as they reveal existing imaginative fantasies using the fctional platform that autofction implies. Formal elements of art such as framing and composition provide a desired perspective of the captured scene to the viewer, in this case, a perspective where one sees a close-up image of Tau and very little of her surrounding environment. In this way, Tau is able to juxtapose her African cultural roots with the European landscape in which she fnds herself. As an ode to Madeleine, who is depicted in Benoist's work, Tau endeavors to re-enact and remind us of the occasion when this European landscape, to which the canon of self-portraiture has long been limited, invited the black female body into its visual narrative. In this image Tau crops her face out of the image to offer her body as a universal representation of a black woman. Contrary to the effect of the personalization of Madeleine in Benoist's work (Fig. 9.7), Tau emphasizes the anonymity or "invisible" nature of the black female in Western presentations. By way of this anonymous posture, she appropriates the objectifying Western gaze onto the black female

**Fig. 9.8** "Amour non partagé" (Unrequited Love), 2020. Digital Self-Portrait

body, using the practice of self-portraiture to position herself as at once the subject to be consumed and the voyeur who consumes.

Finally, Tau draws attention to the windowpane through which this self-portrait is taken, a lens reminiscent of the viewfnder of a camera and which reinforces the virtual distance between viewer and subject. She makes subtle reference in this regard to the creation and staging of the image, as well as to the inaccessibility of the subject. By creating a barrier between the viewer and herself as subject, she creates an awareness of the spatiality of the photograph. Two spaces or "positions" become prevalent: the outside, which is represented by the position that Tau occupies in the courtyard, and the inside, which is occupied by the viewer, who is positioned where Tau's camera is on the inside of the residence, looking out toward her as voyeur. Drawing here on the social connotations of being an "insider" versus an "outsider," Tau brings the notion of inclusion to the fore. In this photograph, Tau, in her seshweshwe dress within a European landscape, and placed on the physical exterior, resembles an outsider to Western culture. The viewer, on the other hand, automatically occupies the position on the physical and metaphorical "inside" of the European culture, by way of the perspective provided through the camera's lens. By situating the viewer on the virtual "inside," an uncommon viewpoint, and placing herself on the exterior, Tau implies the power dynamic between viewer and subject, one of socio-cultural position and of authoritative gaze, due to the freedom to look at her body without the opposition of the subject who looks back at the viewer, challenging the voyeur's consumption of her body. Unlike the original portrait by Benoist, Tau removes the face of the subject, making her more vulnerable and accessible to the viewer's consumption. This, in turn, functions as a subversive displacement mechanism, as the "inside" position makes the viewer painfully aware that they are a voyeur to a vulnerable subject.

#### "Re-presentation": An Autofictional Strategy for Alternate Presentations of the "Self"

Tau's oeuvre showcases some of the key ways in which autofctional techniques are used to create an imaginative role-play in which an artist is able to project herself into varying lingual and cultural identities. In visual practice, these autofctional techniques may take the form of a "smokescreen," which blurs the lines between these identities and allows the artist to move between them. Language acquisition and assimilation into dominant cultures pose a potentially signifcant challenge to those who belong to external cultural groups. The concept of sacrifce comes into view where an aspiring polyglot or master of various cultural identities is left to question whether creating the space to adopt new cultural identities truly requires the erasure of the former identities. The endeavor to combine lingual identities that are on opposing ends of the cultural spectrum, such as Sesotho and French, in a single manifestation of the "self" necessitates an alternative lens through which to view the self. The use of the autofctional in contemporary self-portraiture provides this lens.

The unsettling nature of autofction, in which truth and fction are uncomfortably juxtaposed, invites us to question the former association between self-representation and truth, an association that is perhaps even more persistent in visual than in literary depictions of the self. Through the role-play it foregrounds in self-representation, the autofctional undoes former solidifed narratives based on the self and illuminates the multiple perspectives and subjective angles from which the self is always seen. Crucially, it creates a space in which alternative narratives of self can coexist. Adopting this autofctional approach is a step toward establishing more cultural inclusion and social cohesion in the tradition of self-portraiture, by challenging the pre-structured and compartmentalized views on self and singular cultural identity.

#### Works Cited

———. 2015. Autobiography and Autofction: No Need to Fight for a Place in the Limelight, There Is Space Enough for Both of These Concepts. In *Writing the Self: Essays on Autobiography and Autofction*, ed. Kerstin Shands, Giulia Grillo Mikrut, Dipti R. Pattanaik, and Karen Ferreira-Meyers, 203–218. Huddinge: Södertörns högskola.

———. 2018. Does Autofction Belong to French or Francophone Authors and Readers Only? In *Autofction in English*, ed. Hywel Dix, 27–48. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## Autofction, Post-confict Narratives, and New Memory Cultures

*Hywel Dix*

It has now been established that a reaction against the idea of the death of the author provided one of the contexts in which autofction developed in the 1970s. The autofctional rebuttal of the death of the author has been very noticeable among postcolonial writers, who, because their voices and experiences had been historically marginalized until the very recent past, are unlikely to accept the tacit silencing of those same voices that theories of the death of the author might entail. More specifcally, two of the elements of autofctional practice that have been of particular interest to postcolonial writers are its capacity to mediate between individual and collective forms of memory, on the one hand, and, at the same time, to radically destabilize notions of absolute truth and authenticity. Drawing on current research into the relationship between writing and forms of public commemoration, this chapter argues that the tools and techniques afforded by autofctional modes of writing have been taken up by postcolonial writers seeking to draw attention to a number of atrocities that took place during or shortly after the colonial period.

H. Dix (\*)

Bournemouth University, Poole, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2022 185

A. Effe, H. Lawlor (eds.), *The Autofctional*, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78440-9\_10

Through a discussion of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's depiction of Nigeria's Biafran War of 1967–1970 in *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2006) and Justin Cartwright's refection on the massacre of Zulus by Boers in 1838 in *Up Against the Night* (2015), the chapter will show how these writers contribute to new forms of public memory and hence to post-confict reconciliation. In doing so, their work can be said to make innovative use of some of the techniques associated with autofction—not so much because the historical stories they tell are exactly their own, but because these authors feel they have a personal stake in them. That is, Cartwright and Adichie use those techniques to draw attention to the fraught nature of the process of remembering and therefore both contribute to and complicate the process by which we collectively remember traumatic events that have been neglected for decades, if not centuries. At the same time, these authors also enrich our understanding of what we mean by the elusive term "autofction."

#### Singular Collective Voices

Analysis of autofctional texts has so far focused overwhelmingly on prose fction, with important theoretical studies by Vincent Colonna (2004), Max Saunders (2010), Lut Missinne (2019), and Marjorie Worthington (2018) treating textual exegesis of the printed novel as the primary objective of autofctional inquiry. Yet, as autofction presumes a close identifcation between author and protagonist, the only means by which this identifcation can be apprehended is through recourse to a range of paratextual material—the consideration of which shifts critical attention away from the bounded text. For this reason, Allira Hanczakowski (2020) has recently argued that works of autofction need to be discussed in the context of their paratexts. Even the briefest consideration of autofctional paratexts points to a dialogic interplay between intra-textual and extratextual dimensions in Serge Doubrovsky's original defnition in the blurb for *Fils* (1977), according to which autofction is constituted when the protagonist and author share a name and identity in a work which is designated a novel. On the one hand, the concern with the protagonist points inward toward the textual object, in a move orientated toward its interpretation and extrapolation on an aesthetic level. On the other hand, the generic categorization of any given work takes place just outside the limits of the text itself within its epitexts and peritexts, in all those material aspects of the work that are of the text but not in it.

This move from text to paratext has signifcant implications for how we think about the position of autofction vis-à-vis contemporary memory cultures. Within the feld of autobiography studies, the diminishment of the idea of a sovereign self was one of the occasions for Doubrovsky's development of the concept of autofction. In effect, it replaced the idea of the authorial self with a multiplicity of different textual selves. As character is a construct and constructs are historically contingent and variable with circumstance, a single ostensible author could evince as many different selves as there are narrative occasions for their expression. This, of course, is the basis of Camille Laurens's unconventional shift in conjugation of the verb "to be," from "I am" to "I are":

What interests me in particular, undoubtedly because I have seen its effects within myself, is the question of splitting. The ego is not fxed, we do not have a single monolithic identity, we are made up of the tensions between our different personal avatars. 'I are,' we should say. (2016)1

Pushing Laurens's idea of the multiplicity of selves a stage further, this chapter proposes that the conjunction of "I" with "we" implicit in the "I are" of autofction can usefully be articulated in the genesis of new forms of memory culture. This is because, as a mode of writing that involves a dialogic interplay between text and paratext, autofction has the capacity to recall to public consciousness brutal episodes from the colonial past which have been left to drop out of public memory, giving rise to a collective silence and forgetting which certain authors feel a direct personal responsibility for re-presenting. In the process, they challenge that cultural amnesia at simultaneously an individual and a collective level of discourse, so that autofction has the capacity to enact an integration of subjective narratives with concerns that are social and historical, or of "I" with "we," and so re-inscribe expressions of collective experience.

In my 2020 paper "Autofction, Colonial Massacres and the Politics of Memory," I explored how Fred D'Aguiar's *Feeding the Ghosts* (1997), Jackie Kay's "Lament for the Mendi Men" (2011), and Kamila Shamsie's *A God in Every Stone* (2014) engaged in a writing practice that attempts this re-inscription of collective experience in bringing to light a number of incidents from the colonial past that have unjustly been allowed to lapse out of public consciousness (Dix, 2020). Strictly speaking, their work is not autofction in Doubrovsky's sense. Although based on real historical events, the experiences narrated are not the authors' own, so it is impossible for the authors to appear as protagonists under their own names. This means that, if autofction is treated as a genre, these works cannot be assimilated to it. But simply debating whether a given text can be defned as autofction in a categorical sense is a theoretical cul-de-sac, at best a ludic game and at worst a critical distraction from the more important themes and questions that they raise. A more fruitful way of talking about these texts is in terms of autofctional modes of reading they enable. D'Aguiar, Shamsie, and Kay all seem to feel involved in what they portray, creating the impression that although the experiences are not their own, the stories are in some senses theirs.

These works contribute to new forms of memory culture by challenging hegemonic constructions of imperial history and inserting into them the voices of the forgotten, the dispossessed, and the defeated. If they can be considered autofctional in any useful way, it is because of how their paratextual apparatus invokes an authorial "I" that not only supplements but is actively conjoined with the subjective experiences of the different human lives they narrate. This dialogue between text and paratext points to a specifc way of deploying autofction, not necessarily as a categorical defnition, but as a mode of writing which fares up at specifc points in the text to affrm the connection between author and subject. In what follows, I suggest that in different ways Adichie and Cartwright also apply some of the methods afforded by autofction to re-inscribe themselves into narratives of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) and the massacre of Zulus at Blood River (1838), in stories which are not just theirs, but more than theirs.

#### Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's *Half of a Yellow Sun*

In a comparative study of the diasporic literatures of what he calls the Afro-American and Caribbean traditions, Ndubuisi Martins Aniemeka has argued that thematic preoccupations, especially of a political or historical nature, have received more critical attention than autobiographical writing in each case. Drawing on a model of textual kinesis proposed by Aderemi Raji-Oyelade (2000), according to which character construction and plot trajectory become incorporated into aspects of a physical or metaphorical journey in order to conceptualize and articulate experiences of confict, he then proposes a model of "characterology" (2019, 11), whereby authors are understood by their readers to have imbued fctional characters with aspects of their own experiences and/or aspirations in order to express "struggle, identity and cultural survival in purposively selected self-fctional text[s]" (10). Examples Aniemeka fnds of this purposive selffctionalization in the literatures of the Afro-American and Caribbean diasporas include Zora Neale Hurston's *Dust Tracks on the Road* (1942), Richard Wright's *Black Boy* (1945), George Lamming's *In the Castle of my Skin* (1953), V.S. Naipaul's *House for Mr Biswas* (1960), Michael Anthony's *The Year in Fernando* (1965), and Maya Angelou's *I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings* (1986). He concludes: "A plot characterology reveals the transmutability of the characters in the texts examined. Apart from such reconstructive ideology couched in the self-writings of these authors, the network of transformation is occasioned by the readercharacters' analytical mapping to awareness" (19–20). These comments suggest that the purpose of restoring a sense of biographical agency to the authors in question is to attempt a degree of social and political transformation through the raising of a new form of critical consciousness that combines individual experience with collective struggle, especially between dominated or marginalized communities and dominant ones. Yet, the awkward term "self-writings" does not quite succeed in elaborating a sense of how these techniques are different from those of straightforwardly autobiographical fction.

A somewhat different approach to diasporic writing is propounded by Amber Lascelles. In a discussion of Edwidge Danticat's short story "Caroline's Wedding" and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's story "Imitation" from the collection *The Thing Around Your Neck* (2009), she suggests that theories of diasporic writing have focused too greatly on the migrant subject's continued attachment to their country of origin, such that it becomes both mythologized, rendered the object of a restorative nostalgia, and cathected as the symbolic repository of both personal and familial value. Lascelles's point is not that these things do not happen, but that too great a concentration on the home country fails to make possible a dynamic conceptualization of the experiences of the migrant subject in the new or host country. This is especially true among second- or third-generation subjects, whose ties to the home country, though tangible in many ways, are likely to be less strong than those of their parents and grandparents. Moreover, since applying for such legal statuses as the right to work, right of residence, and ultimately rights of citizenship is also more prevalent among later generations, the refusal of the category of diasporic writers, in Lascelles's account, enables the expression of a greater degree of equality among second- and third-generation migrants with regard to the population of the host country than was the case for their forebears, who were likely to be extremely marginalized. This realization prompts Lascelles to bring forth the suggestion: "Reading [Danticat and Adichie's] stories comparatively allows me to explore whether new frameworks and terminologies, centrally the emerging term post-diaspora, are useful to capture the complexity of diaspora and its meaning in the twenty-frst century" (2020, 227). In the context of her wider argument, the adoption of the term "post-diaspora" by Lascelles seems like a logical choice to refer to the literature she discusses (although it should be noted that she also critiques the accompanying implication that the distinction between diasporic and post-diasporic writings is of a binary nature). Combining Aniemeka's attention to diasporic autobiographies and other forms of self-writing with Lascelles's insight into post-diasporic experience makes it possible to suggest here that autofction can be considered among the new frameworks and terminologies adumbrated by Lascelles.

Elena Murphy (2017) has shown that in many of the stories in *The Thing Around Your Neck* (2009), Adichie "adeptly queries Western ways of perceiving and defning the African *Other* from the position of different and diverse characters and, at the same time, the distance from Nigeria allows her to refect upon her culture of origin" (2017, 101). A similar description could be applied to Adichie's novel *Americanah* (2013) in which the main character Ifemelu migrates between Nigeria and the USA and blogs about her experiences. Miriam Pahl has shown that following publication of the novel, Adichie "transfer[ed] this fctional blog into the real world (wide web)" and continued it under the title "The Small Redemptions of Lagos" in order to demonstrate "a strong political and social commitment" (2016, 77). This leads Pahl to conclude that "[a]lthough the experiences depicted in the novel should not be taken as autobiographical information, they do elucidate Adichie's carefully honed public persona" (78).

These insights alone seem like fertile ground for approaching Adichie's work as autofctional, especially in the light of Bran Nicol's suggestion that one of the features of autofction in North America (where Adichie works) is that it is "best regarded less as a form which interrogates the complex workings of memory and their effect on subjectivity and more as evidence of the preoccupation with the conditions of authorship, especially institutional" (2018, 257). The current chapter, however, takes a slightly different approach, not merely classing Adichie as a writer of autofction but also expanding our theoretical understanding of the concept itself. It is to Adichie's novel *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2006) that we can turn for a fuller articulation of this new combination of post-diasporic writing with the collective potential of autofction as a means of building forms of solidarity with marginalized peoples and achieving alternative forms of collective memory.

*Half of a Yellow Sun* is a novelistic history of the Biafran War in Nigeria (1967–1970) focusing on fve main characters and alternating between their lives in the early 1960s and at the end of the decade, to situate the war in the context of the historical double coup that was the immediate occasion for it. This coup had occurred partly because the artifact now known as Nigeria itself had only been created by British colonizers during the imperial period, so that when its post-independence administration became corrupt there was frst a coup to remove it followed by a countercoup directed against the ethnic Igbo people who were the main protagonists of the frst and who were perceived to have become too powerful as a result of it, to the detriment of Nigeria's other ethnic groups, especially the Hausa and Yoruba. Moreover, the federal leader Gowon was thought to have betrayed the Igbo by forming a compromise between them and the central government, and so his counterpart Ujukwu declared Biafran independence.

At the start of the novel the protagonist Odenigbo is an academic in the university town of Nsukka, the town where Adichie was raised and where her father was also a university academic. Although the novel is not written in the frst person and so violates Doubrovsky's criteria for autofction, both setting and profession hint at a close alignment between the family of the author and the historical action depicted in the novel, but places it at a generation's remove from her. Adichie was born seven years after the Biafran War and raised on a university campus, not to mention in a country that had been torn apart by the war. So, although the characters in the novel are an invention, the historical story that her book narrates informs her life to a great degree.

There is a signifcant metafctional aspect to *Half of a Yellow Sun* because the main plot is interspersed with extracts from a book-withinthe-book, a manuscript entitled "The World Was Silent When We Died," which readers assume to be by the British scholar, Richard. This character is a conventional fgure of European cultural authority who had already attempted two books: "The Basket of Hands," which gets burned by Kainene when she fnds out he slept with Olanna; and "In the Time of Roped Pots," which gets left behind buried in his garden in Port Harcourt by his houseboy Harrison when he evacuates (Adichie 2006, 182, 170). Both are about the ancient art of rope making, how intricate and refned it is and hence how it demonstrates evidence of a sophisticated civilization and culture existing in Nigeria before the arrival of European colonizers (although Richard is rebuked by a guest at one of Odenigbo's soirées for expressing surprise at this). As readers are led to assume that the extracts from "The World Was Silent When We Died" are also by him, it is a surprise when the last line of the novel reveals that they are in fact by Odenigbo's old houseboy, Ugwu. Although the other houseboy, Harrison, has given up writing by then, Ugwu's new critical literacy may be a sign of hope for the future. This metafctional aspect is signifcant for two reasons. First, it allows Adichie to participate in the form of metafction that is particular to postcolonial writers struggling to overcome a common inferiority complex with regard to the apparently rich literary traditions of Europe. Second, it enables Adichie to bear witness to historical events which she did not, in fact, experience, but which nevertheless played a strong part in shaping the society in which she was raised and hence in her own life.

Reading *Half of a Yellow Sun* as an autofctional contribution to the building of a post-confict memory culture makes it possible to extrapolate the novel's retrospective reconstruction of confict as a form of testimony. The novel follows earlier autobiographical accounts of the Biafran War such as Elechi Amadi's *Sunset in Biafra* (1973), which narrates the author's bitter experiences with the authorities of Biafra during the war. Yet, a key difference is that, as Kalu Wosu points out, Amadi's war narrative "condemns the domineering attitude of the Igbos who, according to the author, dragged other ethnic minorities of the defunct Eastern region into a senseless and brutal war" (2018, 122), whereas Adichie wrote "out of solidarity for the oppressed Igbo people" (129) so that in *Half of a Yellow Sun* "all the characters killed during the war were Igbo, the theatre of war was the Igbo heartland, the refugee crisis affected the Igbo only, the Igbo suffered the Abandoned Property issue, and the pogroms took place only in the Northern parts of Nigeria" (Wosu 2018, 129). Such violence is represented in the novel when Olanna's Aunty Ifeka, Uncle Mbaezi, and cousin Arize are killed in the Northern town of Kano; when Olanna only escapes from Kano on the last train out of the town, on which she meets a woman carrying a calabash containing the severed head of her murdered daughter; when Richard has a similar experience trying to get a fight out of Port Harcourt and witnesses Hausa troops shoot all the Igbo people they fnd, including a young airport offcial executed for refusing to recite "Allahu Akbar" at the troops' demand because his accent would have given him away as Igbo (Adichie 2006, 152).  These details bear witness to the historical experience of the Igbo people during the war because as Wosu points out, although the precise characters are literary inventions, Adichie "relied on historical facts to craft her work of fction" in a way that "blends historical evidence with literary creativity" (Wosu 2018, 123).

On the other hand, Wosu also emphasizes that the nature of a historical experience like a civil war makes drawing a simple dividing line between aggressors and victims somewhat untenable. In the case of Biafra, this is partly because the Igbo were "part of the failed political leadership of the First Republic which led to the crisis" and partly because it is impossible to imagine that there were "no reprisal killings in the East in response to the pogroms in the North" or "even in the North, by Igbos who resisted the pogroms." Yet, *Half of a Yellow Sun* "is silent on this particular issue" (Wosu 2018, 130). Speculating on potential reasons for this very signifcant omission leads Wosu to three distinct fndings. First, that because Adichie's writing is a medium for both preserving and disseminating the collective cultural memory of the people of Biafra, the overall effect is that the book "makes a strong case for the Igbo nation" (130). Although interpreting Adichie as an advocate of Igbo nationhood is a somewhat extreme and unconventional approach to her work, this bears on the second fnding, namely that, because the post-independence nation of Nigeria was defned in a territorial sense by the parameters of the British colony there, the nation itself is in part constituted by its colonial history. This is both why Britain supported the republic against the secessionist Biafran movement during the war, and why its whole history has been constructed according to the logic of what Wosu calls "western logocentrism" (2018, 131). By centering her narrative on the Igbo rather than other Nigerian communities such as the Hausa, Ikwerre, or Yoruba, Adichie rewrites that logocentric history, revealing that the "binary opposition black/white is a western construct which, at the discursive level, seeks to give the European an imaginary ascendancy over the African" (131).

In making this point, Wosu performs a slippage from one form of binary differentiation (between federal Nigerian aggressors and traumatized Igbo secessionists) to another (between European colonizers and African colonized). There is a certain logic that makes this slippage possible, as the territory of independent Nigeria was geographically defned by that of the British colony which preceded it, so that to critique the yoking together of many different peoples and ethnicities on the basis of the shared experience of having been colonized by Britain, is to simultaneously critique both the post-independence state and its prior colonial determinants. Yet, if a refusal of the categorical distinction between black and white or between Africa and Europe is one of the philosophical insights to emerge from Wosu's reading of *Half of a Yellow Sun*, this refusal would presumably apply equally to both the Igbo people and the other ethnic communities in Nigeria. Given that the novel appears to recruit historical understanding for the Igbo in contrast to those other groups, it is diffcult to see how this commonality can be envisaged in the text in practice.

A solution to this challenge is suggested by Wosu's third key fnding, which is about how Adichie handles the relationship between fact and fction: "'Fact' still remains for us literally 'a thing done.' And fction has never lost its meaning of 'a thing made'" (2018, 124). This distinction usefully informs an extrapolation of the potential for reading *Half of a Yellow Sun* as a form of autofction, revealing that what we encounter in the text is not so much Adichie telling her own story as creating a collective story of the Igbo people (which includes her) and of Nigeria as a whole (which includes the Igbo). This creation is made in the service of forging a new form of reconciliation in the present, based on shared memory and an alternative collective relationship to the Civil War and to the past. Such striving would have been especially necessary a generation after the war because as Wosu shows, the "reconciliation, reconstruction, and rehabilitation which [Nigerian leader] General Gowon promised [after the war] ended up as a hoax" (2018, 131). That is, Adichie uses the novel to attempt a fctional version of the post-war reconciliation that the Nigerian state failed to deliver historically. Elena Murphy notes that Adichie "describes herself as belonging to the Engli-Igbo generation of Nigeria and this shows in her works, where what could be defned as a 'transcultural form of English' is employed" (2017, 99). English as a transcultural tool enables the novel to speak to and for all the different peoples within Nigeria and transcend their differences. This commitment to overcoming enmity, rather than the strictest representation of verifable, factual truth, enables Adichie to portray the war but also to begin consigning it to the past. Or as Wosu puts it: "Reality is thus relative, and the author tries to reconstruct it in her quest for a new wholesomeness" (2018, 130). The story of the Biafran War is not Adichie's but that of the people to whom she relates, namely, the Igbo. *Half of a Yellow Sun* can thus be seen as autofction on a collective scale. It not only narrates how Adichie and the Igbo ft into the Nigerian whole but actively works toward such integration.

#### Shared Heritage in *Up Against the Night*

Writing from a different context to Adichie, the South African-born writer Justin Cartwright (1943–2018) was interested in exploring different kinds of truth and investigating how subjective and objective truths complicate each other without easy resolution. For example, his 1993 novel *Masai Dreaming* is about a flmmaker, Kurtiz, traveling to Kenya in the 1990s to make a documentary about a female French Jewish anthropologist who had lived and worked there in the 1930s and 1940s. Her love affair with a Masai farmer, who was subsequently executed, so outraged her English lover that he demanded that she be tested for syphilis and while traveling to Paris to have this test she was arrested by the Nazis and sent to her death. Yet, in the flm made about her life in the 1990s, this detail is altered so that she escapes back to Kenya via Cape Town because the flmmaker feels such an ending is a better way of affrming the supposedly universal spirit of the Masai people, whose way of life was in fact on the brink of extinction. Through these plot details, Cartwright shows Kurtiz exploring a series of dilemmas about what a writer owes to art and to truth, and how these things relate to each other, especially with regard to the uncomfortable truth that a number of French people had been complicit in the Nazi roundup of French Jews at Drancy.

Cartwright's narrative exploration of the relationship between truth, art, and meaning continues in his next novel, *In Every Face I Meet* (1995), portraying a South African banker in London who has a powerful childhood memory of watching a tribal Swazi king dance at an annual ceremony of cultural renewal and who pins his hopes for redeeming the failed aspirations of Thatcherism on another tribal Prince, Nelson Mandela. Before he can fy out to watch Mandela's release from political prison he is mugged at gunpoint by a black youth and ends up on trial for murdering the mugger. Although he is acquitted, he feels somewhat morally ambivalent, even guilty, suggesting that his privilege as a white banker compared to the young black attacker might explain the original mugging even if it does not condone it. Interracial violence and questions of both forgiveness and reconciliation—which in South Africa in the year of Mandela's release had very broad and powerful implications for the whole society—are thus revealed to be highly complex and no easy answers are envisaged by the novel.

The role of art in mediating potential responses to the questions "What is truth?" and "What is good?" is even more explicitly the focus of Cartwright's later novel *The Promise of Happiness* (2004) about a London accountant who is pushed out of his own frm during a hostile takeover. The accountant and his wife retire to Cornwall to plan the marriage of their son to a glamorous but unintellectual South American model whom they doubt will make him happy. In turn the son has spent two years visiting his older sister in prison in America, where she was convicted for her role in fencing a Tiffany stained glass window believed to have been stolen from a cemetery years earlier, on behalf of her boyfriend, the British owner of a New York art gallery. She seems to have taken the blame partly to protect him from a longer sentence and partly out of guilt, as she had been too distracted by a love affair with an American writer to notice that the gallery was in fnancial trouble. Moreover, when she is released, a *New York Times* journalist discovers that the window was never actually stolen. Rather, an ambitious FBI agent eager to improve his clean-up rate for art crimes had orchestrated the affair. There are thus as many "truths" of the event as there are stories about it. As in Umberto Eco's *Prague Cemetery*, the scene in which the valuable window had originally been stolen is different each time it is re-told, and the role played by art and artifce in each re-telling is explicitly foregrounded by the novel.

An idiosyncratic feature of *The Promise of Happiness* is that although for the most part it is narrated in the third person, it frequently shifts into the frst to get inside the thoughts of whichever character is thinking at the time. At one specifc point during a meditation on the human propensity to imagine angels as a symbol for uncorrupted happiness, the phrase "The author…" is also used in this way:

Another thing about angels: they are not direct participants in life's struggle: they are above it. And that's why we like them. They are disinterested observers, impartial do-gooders. They only acquired wings in later centuries. The author thinks that they were a necessary invention, an antidote to the harshness of religion and a comfort in death. (2004, 138)

The technique of dispersed focalization shifting between one character and another appears to have given rise to a situation in which ideas cannot be conceptualized if they are not associated with the particular character experiencing them. So ideas not explicitly owned by a specifc character cannot be expressed in any other way than by invoking the author as a briefy active character, and the presence of Cartwright obtrudes.

This sallying forth of the authorial presence is even more detectable in Cartwright's fnal novel, *Up Against the Night* (2015), in which Cartwright returns to a number of themes that had characterized the works discussed above: the relationship between Britain and a number of African countries; experiences of migration between countries and continents on a global scale; the question of value, what confers it and what confers meaning on it; plus the matter of how art relays these questions to us while also being implicated in the very problematics it raises. Cartwright had already used the metafctional device of having a main character who is a flmmaker in *Masai Dreaming* (1993), and had associated his disillusioned banker's search for transcendental meaning with his own reading of current affairs in *In Every Face I Meet* (1995), so that an interest in the role of the artist in addressing questions of meaning, value, and ethics was already present in these earlier novels but without an explicit use of autofction. Autofction then starts to enter his work in *The Promise of Happiness* (2004), though only in a brief and occasional way at this point. In *Up Against the Night* (2015), Cartwright portrays a protagonist who shares a number of his own biographical details, and thereby more explicitly uses the techniques of autofction to explore the same themes that had interested him all along. In other words, he appears to have been gradually and increasingly attracted to autofctional modes of writing throughout his career and this process reaches its zenith in his fnal novel, which revisits thematic material that he had already explored in earlier work, with a greater degree of self-awareness and critical self-consciousness than before.

Read alongside the earlier texts, *Up Against the Night* thus reveals a higher degree of autofctional writing in its portrayal of the coming to terms with the uneasy colonial past in South Africa. The protagonist, Frank McAllister, is in his 60s and, having retired from a prosperous career in England, increasingly fnds himself feeling out of place and looking to South Africa, where he was born and where his mother died during his childhood, for a sense of belonging. His sense of not belonging is conveyed through minor details like the fact that he is in the process of separating from his spoiled, fashion-conscious wife Georgina. Frank's feeling of dislocation is also conveyed through the fact that his old friend and colleague Alec has made a fool of himself by allowing a young Latvian pole dancer whom he had promised to put through university to abscond with half a million pounds, has suffered a minor stroke since retiring, and later dies of a second stroke. The sense of alienation is further compounded by the fact that Frank's daughter Lucinda is in a drug rehabilitation clinic in California, and his distant cousin Jaco Retief has been imprisoned by the church of scientology in the USA and needs US\$50,000 to bail him out.

This last character is especially relevant in considering the novel as an autofctional contribution to emerging memory cultures in South Africa, as not only are Frank and Jaco both descended from Piet Retief, the nineteenth-century leader of the Boer settlers in the Zulu territories of what is now KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, but the jacket blurb of *Up Against the Night* tells us that this is also true of the author Justin Cartwright himself. It was noted at the start of this chapter that paratexts have a crucial role in signaling texts as autofctional, since autofctional texts raise truth claims that can be judged only by looking outside the text proper. The paratexts are the pivots between the words of the main body of text and the world to which it relates. In the case of *Up Against the Night*, the paratextual biography given in the blurb, and other paratextual apparatuses, such as Cartwright's obituary in the *Guardian* (Kean 2018), cultivates a strong connection between the protagonist and the author.

Like Cartwright, the aging Frank is portrayed as becoming both conscious of his own mortality and more refective of his South African origins, causing him to research the killing of Retief and his followers by the Zulu leader Dingane in 1838. The Great Trek across the Eastern Cape that Retief had led is often presented in Boer and Afrikaner folklore as a narrative tantamount to a foundational myth or moment of origin for the culture as a whole. But Frank's research causes him to feel that the truth is both more complicated and more morally ambivalent than this. Although the death of Retief took place in a massacre of Afrikaners by Zulus, which is narrated in the historical passages in *Up Against the Night*, Frank is unable to condemn the Zulu leader Dingane's acts, as it was clear that Retief did not intend to abide by the existing peace treaty, and in fact meant to dispossess the Zulus of their land. On the other hand, the fact that Piet was Frank's ancestor makes him feel a connection with him despite himself. He feels further ambivalence because in retaliation for the killings, the remaining Boers wiped out virtually all the Zulus in the Battle of Blood River, and this is again a history from which Frank cannot distance himself however much he may feel ashamed of it, because in an affective sense it is his own history, so that to deny it would be to deny a part of his own existence. Given that Cartwright has endowed Frank with his own Retief ancestry, although the plot of the novel is invented, Frank's dilemmas can in a meaningful way be described as Cartwright's own.

As often in Cartwright's oeuvre, artistic work is mobilized as a vehicle for exploring these dilemmas. One of the recurring motifs of the novel is a memory Frank has of watching a moving production of *Macbeth* performed in Johannesburg by a Zulu cast. This precise choice of play (about political violence, murder, and revenge) contributes thematic material to the novel's wider exploration of the rights and wrongs of a violent power grab in the historical past and of its long-term historical reverberations in the present. Moreover, the selection of a work by perhaps the most archetypally English dramatist, Shakespeare, being performed by a Zulu cast emphasizes Frank's dual heritage, in which the European and African elements complicate each other.

In his extended refective engagement with a dubious political past that can be neither fully embraced nor entirely disclaimed, Frank is thus an avatar for Cartwright. Frank's personal implicature in a heritage he deems morally repellent causes him constantly to seek endless alternative ways of belonging. The complexities involved in that attempt are contrasted with the character Jaco, an unrefective privileged white South African who continually laments the state of the nation since the ending of apartheid, criminalizes the black population, and, in an apparently self-fulflling prophecy, shoots a group of black armed robbers in order to rescue both Frank and Nellie, along with Frank's daughter Lucinda and the baby she has brought with her from America, Isaac.

Through this baby Cartwright brings the disparate relatives together, and in this sense follows a very common trope in postcolonial writing whereby the late arrival of a baby symbolizes uneasy reconciliation with the past and a feeling of hope for the future. In the quite convoluted plot structure—Isaac is the biracial son of Lucinda's ex-boyfriend's exgirlfriend, causing Frank to wonder if Lucinda is even legally permitted to travel with him as he is not her baby—this trope has an additional effect. The classic fctional plot device of the swapped baby hints simultaneously at a relationship of connection and separation. And this, of course, is what both Frank and Cartwright feel about their shared colonial ancestor, Piet Retief, so that like Adichie's *Half of a Yellow Sun*, *Up Against the Night* produces a feeling of autofction at one remove. Cartwright's book ends with Frank going to Sotheby's to collect a Howard Hodgkin painting Alec gifted him as a wedding present. Its abstract landscape makes him think frst of the descriptions of blood draining into the ground after the massacre of Piet in 1838, and then of the blood soaking his own house in Cape Town after the recent shooting. He realizes that his life, and in some ways the history of his family, has come full circle. There is thus a convergence between the content of the novel, which is entirely fctional, and the family history of the author, which is not.

#### Autofiction and Memory Cultures

In a discussion of Achmat Dangor's novel *Bitter Fruit* (2001), about a woman who was raped in apartheid-era South Africa and comes face to face with her rapist during the sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), through which the post-apartheid nation attempted to heal the wounds of the past, Ronit Frenkel says:

The inconclusive nature of such archaeological endeavours therefore becomes paramount to understanding the TRC and the construction of histories in South Africa, where the consequences of either recalling or suppressing the past are severe, because ultimately post-colonial pathos shapes all response and history cannot be redeemed. (2008, 84–85)

To a large degree, this comment could be applied to any novel that deals with the politics of memory and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa. *Up Against the Night* is distinctive for the way it evokes a sense of Cartwright being personally implicated in the process of coming to terms with the past. Such a feeling is then supported by the paratexts and enforced by the parallel plotlines about Piet Retief in the past and Frank McAllister in the present. To the extent that Frank is constructed as a discernible avatar of Cartwright, the novel can therefore be considered autofctional in its dealing with the politics of memory. It represents a conjunction of personal experience with collective history in its evocation of the diffculties inherent in building new forms of memory culture in a society emerging from historical confict.

Interpreting Adichie's work as an instance of autofction elucidates a different form of post-confict narrative and reconciliation. It was suggested above that there are many grounds on which Adichie's work could be considered autofctional: her application of autobiographical elements to fction, her careful control of her public persona as author, and the sense her work evinces that the stories she tells are almost, if not quite, her own. This last point is the main argument that has been developed here. The chapter explored how the autofctional dimension of Adichie's work enables an active engagement by the author with questions of public memory with regard to a conficted past and its reverberations in the present.

Both Cartwright's and Adichie's works create the feeling that the stories they tell in some senses both are and are not their own. They are stories of historical events that unfolded before either of them was born, but which nevertheless have cast shadows over their lives and played a powerful part in determining their subjectivities and those of the people in the societies they come from, in the present. Autofction in this context can be understood to open a narrative space in which those historical conficts and their latter-day ramifcations can be explored. Thus, the combination of autofction and post-confict narratives that has been discussed throughout this chapter provides a powerful means of contributing to new forms of public memory and to affective forms of reconciliation. In turn, this new combination expands and enriches our understanding of autofction itself.

#### Note

1. "Ce qui m'intéresse particulièrement, sans doute parce que j'en observe les effets en moi-même, c'est la question du clivage. Le moi n'est pas fxe, nous n'avons pas une identité simple et monolithique, nous sommes faits de tensions entre nos différents avatars intimes. 'Je sommes,' devrions-nous dire."

#### Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2006. *Half of a Yellow Sun*. London: 4th Estate.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Autofction as a Lens for Reading Contemporary Egyptian Writing

*Hala Kamal, Zainab Magdy, and Fatma Massoud*

Autobiographical writing and life writing occupy a visible position in Arabic literary history, but they are conventionally situated within biographical and historical studies and sociological/anthropological research. Consequently, Arabic literary studies cannot boast of a critical theory developed around autofction, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not yet been thoroughly explored as a critical approach to reading Arabic literature.1 The term "autofction" itself does not yet have an established equivalent in Arabic literary studies, though a few attempts have been made to translate the term into "al-takhyıl al- dha ̄ ̄tî" and "riwāyat al-dhāt."2 This chapter offers an original autofctional approach to three case studies

H. Kamal (\*)

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Z. Magdy Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt

F. Massoud The British University in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt of Arab writing, including one case of Arabic-Anglophone literature. In her study of the Egyptian blogosphere, Teresa Pepe refects on the history of autobiographical writing in Arabic literature as being characterized by the "mixing of fction and factual elements in life-writing" (Pepe 2019, 11), where she highlights the critical approaches to Arabic literature as being from an autobiographical rather than autofctional point of view. Pepe suggests using an autofctional lens in the study of Egyptian blogs, arguing that "Arab critics rely heavily on Western literary debate and have not tried to instigate their own critical debate on Arabic autofction" (10–11). In this chapter, we intend to start this critical conversation, taking an autofctional approach to the work of three writers who have not been recognized as mainstream literary fgures. Waguih Ghali is among the very few Egyptian writers of the 1960s generation who wrote and was published in English. It is only recently that his name has been revived through the publication of his diaries and the translation of his work into Arabic. On the other hand, Radwa Ashour's writings in Arabic (occasionally translated) have set her apart from the mainstream writers of her generation, primarily owing to her immense investment in (re)historicization, both in her autobiographical and fctional texts. In a different, but related, manner Miral al-Tahawy has established herself as a distinct voice among a rebellious and innovative new generation of Egyptian writers and artists. It is therefore perhaps only ftting that their three texts be read here from an emerging and original critical approach—namely, through the lens of the autofctional.

We discuss the work of three bicultural Egyptian writers: Waguih Ghali's *Beer in the Snooker Club* (1964), Radwa Ashour's *Specters* (1999), and Miral al-Tahawy's *Brooklyn Heights* (2010). The three authors have written other texts that have been classifed as either novels or autobiographical texts, while these three texts have been categorized by publishers as novels, and read by critics as autobiographical novels. Here we read them instead through an autofctional lens and suggest that autofctionality can be identifed in them in terms of not only genre but also technique. The frst section, on "Autofctional Identity," focuses on the fctional and autobiographical personas in Waguih Ghali's *Beer in the Snooker Club*, which was mostly read as a fctional text until its recent republication and translation into Arabic, after which it has been received increasingly as a representation of its author's life. The second section, "Autofctional Threads," offers a reading of Radwa Ashour's *Atiaf* (published in Arabic in 1999 and translated into English as *Specters* in 2010), with a focus on autofctional engagements with memory and experience. The third section, "Autofctionalizing Experience," addresses the use of personal memory in fctionalizing women's experiences in times of cultural displacement in Miral al-Tahawy's *Brooklyn Heights* (published in Arabic in 2010 and translated into English in 2011). Our reading of the three texts testifes to the affordance of an autofctional lens in reading Arabic literature. It allows new insights into these authors' constructions of identity, memory, and experience at the intersections of reality and the imagination, and in interaction with readers and critics.

#### Waguih Ghali's Autofictional Identity

Waguih Ghali (192?–1969) was an Egyptian Anglophone essayist and writer known for his one work of fction, *Beer in the Snooker Club* ([1964] 2010). It was not until 2006 that the frst translation of *Beer* appeared in Arabic, followed by another translation in 2012, while selections from his diaries were published still more recently in Cairo, with the title *The Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian Writer in the Swinging Sixties* (2017). The online publication in 2013 of his diaries, personal papers, letters, and an unfnished manuscript of a second "novel" has drawn further attention to his work.3

We focus on Ghali's *Beer in the Snooker Club*, which tells the story of a young, upper-class, Christian Egyptian man, Ram, who returns to Cairo after having lived in London for a number of years, in the aftermath of the 1952 Egyptian Free Offcers' Revolution against the British occupation. In love with a Jewish Egyptian woman and disillusioned with the "revolution" and his English education, while having no money of his own to keep up with his lifestyle or his class, Ram narrates a personal memoir-like story that moves between Cairo in the present and London in the past, creating an antihero with great appeal and charisma. Reading the text in its historical context brings to light the strikingly similar personal, social, and educational backgrounds, as well as the geographical associations, that Ghali and his protagonist share. Ghali chooses to write in English (refecting his colonial education) about a period in the life of a young bicultural Egyptian man, making reference to real-life locations during a particular socio-historical moment contemporaneous with the author's life.

The autobiographical traces in this work emerge not only in the biographical details that Ghali and Ram share, but in Ghali's utilization of an intimate frst-person narrator, in his sense of humor, which is apparent in Ram's witty and cynical comments and refections, and in the fact that the protagonist of the novel is known only through his nickname, Ram, thus allowing for a play on nomenclature. These three features create a verisimilitude of the autobiographical, as the frst-person narration allows for the possibility of reading *Beer* as a memoir despite the genre label (a novel) provided on the back-cover blurb. The fact that the protagonist is known only by his nickname prevents an autobiographical pact from being established, yet allows for the possibility that the protagonist/narrator is the author, as his frst name is never mentioned. This possibility is further enhanced by Ghali's humor, which is most apparent in *Beer* through Ram's refections, commentary, and behavior, thus connecting the author with protagonist and narrator. This humor posits a voice that seems to speak simultaneously for Ram and Ghali as it ridicules both self and society.

Such elements led critics to read *Beer* as "autobiographical fction" for many years. We propose, however, that *Beer* can be read more productively as an autofctional text. The comparison between autofction and the autobiographical novel, in generic terms, is signifcant in this context, because "[a]utofction follows the autobiographical novel, but transposed to our times in different ways partly because readers' text reception changed" (Shands et al. 2015, 8). Using an autofctional reading strategy makes it possible to move beyond genre labels when reading *Beer* and to closely examine how autobiographical markers pave the way for Ghali's autofctional identity. Reading Ghali via paratextual material serves as the foundation for this autofctional reading: it becomes clear that the reception of the text, when frst published and then republished 50 years later, is premised on the playful convergences between Ghali's identity and that of Ram. This chapter shows how autofction as a reading strategy allows us to see the book in relation to its textual and historical contexts but also to expand our understanding of it, seeing it as a novel about colonial reality for a Cairene of Ghali's/Ram's class. A focus on the autofctional in Ghali's book shows us how Ghali playfully creates dialogue between life and fction, and between the personal and the general.

#### *Auto/Fictional Gestures*

Ghali's text occupies a space between fction and memoir, manifesting what we call autofctional gestures: hints and clues that prevent the text from being read as just a novel or just a memoir. These autofctional gestures are present in Ghali's use of humor, certain nuances of the self that are internalized in the frst-person narrative, and most prominently from its very beginning, in *Beer*'s epigraph. The epigraph is a quote from Dostoevsky's *Notes from Underground* (1864): "Rather, we aim at being personalities of a general … a fctitious type" (Ghali 2010). Placed at the beginning of the text, the epigraph initiates the readers into a text that lies between the autobiographical and the fctional. The aim to be fctional characters sets the scene for the autofctional play that will take place in the text. The playfulness of Ghali's chosen epigraph gains a certain weight when his protagonist speaks of becoming a character in a book. When Ghali writes, and Ram states, "Gradually, I have lost my natural self. I have become a character in a book or in some other feat of the imagination; my own actor in my own theatre; my own spectator in my own improvised play. Both audience and participant in one—a fctitious character" (60) the statement connects to and reinforces the epigraph's notion of a possible fctionalization of the self.

As the epigraph indicates the blurred boundaries between the autobiographical and the fctional, when Ram asserts that "[t]hat moment of putting on my coat was the very beginning—the frst time in my life that I had felt myself cleave into two entities, the one participating and the other watching and judging" (68), a connection emerges between the "two entities" he describes and the roles of author/narrator and protagonist/character. The echoes of the fctionalized self are clear in the way in which Ram comes to observe himself and refect on the self he witnesses, and then narrates these refections. The interconnections between self and life in this act of refection blend author with narrator and protagonist and thus feel like an echo of the epigraph as an autofctional gesture. Read in conjunction with the above quotation, the epigraph connects the "auto" and the "fctional." It pays homage to the world of fctional writing, to an imaginary world that Ghali is looking to create. The epigraph could refer, on a surface level, to the way Ram feels as he separates into "two entities," but it could also offer insight into how Ghali weaves himself into his own fctive narrative.

#### *Contextual Identifcations*

Paratextual evidence points clearly to the way in which Ghali fctionalizes himself in the character of Ram. The text's socio-political context, historical background, geographical locations, as well as references to concrete events and places in both London and Cairo, all underline the autofctional identifcation between author and protagonist. This connection is consolidated by readers, critics, and reviewers who have focused on drawing out the autobiographical in the fctional. In Helen Stuhr-Rommereim's review, for example, she writes that *Beer* "is so clearly autobiographical that not only do the details of Ram's life match Ghali's but the man that Diana Athill, Ghali's editor, describes in her introduction as 'gazelle-like' is immediately recognizable as the narrator who is so immediately disarming" (Stuhr-Rommereim 2011). Based on affective association and known facts about Ghali, the reading process that Stuhr-Rommereim proposes transcends clear-cut differences between text and paratextual material. Assuming that the boundaries between "auto" and "fction" are being blurred, she writes, "Ghali himself committed suicide only a few years after completing the novel, and because it is so easy to confate Ram with his creator, learning of Ghali's suicide becomes the novel's tragic epilogue" (Stuhr-Rommereim 2011). Thus, autofction as a reading strategy shines a spotlight on the subtle convergence of life and fction in the text.

While reviewers of Ghali's text, when it was published in 1964, read it within its assigned genre (the novel), these reviews nonetheless reveal an early awareness of the intersections of the autobiographical and the fctional in *Beer*. Irving Wardle begins his review with the text's biographical note: "A PUBLISHER'S note describes Waguih Ghali as a young Egyptian now exiled in Germany" (1964). Connecting Ghali's state of exile to Ram's complaints about the "aliens department" and being denied visas, Wardle adds: "Assuming the complaint to be autobiographical, Mr. Ghali seems from his book to have fully recovered from the English curse" (1964). Wardle here uses the publisher's biographical note on Ghali as the basis from which to make an autobiographical assumption that any critique of British racism stems from personal experience. Similarly, when another reviewer, W.L. Webb, writes that "Ram, one guesses, speaks with his master's voice" (Webb 1964), it is evident that he connects Ram to Ghali through the frst-person narration. In this way, Webb and Wardle's readings of the text, which precede the development of theories of autofction, managed to identify the autobiographical in Ghali's "very attractive comic style" (Webb 1964). Despite the lack of strong paratextual material with which to support their claims of the autobiographical, the two reviewers were able to touch upon the playfulness with which Ghali writes his text and allows his "self" to take a place in the narrative through autofctional gestures.

#### *Epilogue of the Self; Epigraph of Fiction*

Our reading of *Beer* through an autofctional lens goes beyond trying to fnd the autobiographical in the fctional. While part of this reading process involves cross-identifying the author with the narrator/protagonist against and/or in the absence of paratextual material, a reading of *Beer* as autofctional is rooted in the playful gesture of the epigraph. If Ghali's suicide is *Beer*'s "tragic epilogue" (Stuhr-Rommereim 2011), then it could be argued that the act of fctionalizing the self comes through in the grand gesture of playing with autofction. Rather than taking Ghali's tragic suicide to be *Beer*'s epilogue, an autofctional reading allows for the self to exist in a text that resists generic limitations, so that the epigraph takes on full meaning when Ghali's suicide is contemplated, making *Beer* an epilogue to his suicide, as he lives on in his fction. Reading *Beer* through the lens of autofction thus intensifes the function of the epigraph as a paratexual interchange between Ram's life and Ghali's text.

#### Radwa Ashour's Autofictional Threads

Radwa Ashour's *Specters* (2010) is another example of a text situated at the generic crossroads of memoir and fction. The autofctional as a critical lens through which to approach the text reveals a mediated space between generic intersections where the author weaves a narrative from threads of her life, intertwined with fctionalized versions of "reality" that she had witnessed. Ashour (1946–2014) was a professor of English language and literature at Ain Shams University in Egypt and an active advocate for academic freedom. In addition to her academic career, Ashour was a prominent writer of fctional and non-fctional works, including novels, short story collections, and autobiographical writings, in addition to her contribution as a literary critic. In most of her writing—both fctional and autobiographical—Ashour infuses layers of factuality and referentiality with imagined environments, settings, and situations, which encourages the reading of her work through an autofctional lens. Here, Pierre Nora's concept of the "site of memory" (1989, 7) will be used to highlight the way in which the autofctional is manifested in Ashour's text, especially with reference to the intersections between authorship, fctionality, and referentiality.

*Specters* is divided into two parallel lines of action involving two academics: Radwa, a professor of English literature (the author/narrator/ protagonist), and Shagar, a professor in the History Department. The story moves between Radwa and Shagar in alternate chapters, frst recounting their childhoods, their social backgrounds, and their family histories, before continuing to narrate their interconnected lives as present-day academics. The story is set at Ain Shams University, which is also the place where Ashour herself worked.4 The chapters in which Radwa is the protagonist are narrated in the frst person, while the chapters focusing on Shagar feature an omniscient third-person narrator. Furthermore, Ashour herself remarks in one of her essays that she intended to write Shagar, the second protagonist, as a "Qareen or Ka" (2000, 91). "Qareen" is an Arabic word that means a companion—most likely an imaginary one—and *Ka* is a mythical Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic syllable that refers to "the creative energy which accompanies a person from the moment of his or her birth to the afterlife," as Ashour explains (2000, 91). Shagar seems to serve as a complementary fctional creation to Ashour's frst protagonist, Radwa, who bears the author's frst name, perhaps offering more creative liberties of self-expression not available to the frst protagonist (and, by extension, to the author).

Critic Marcia Lynx Qualey describes the text as a "twinned narrative" (2011, 31), one that displays two apparently separate structures which ultimately end up being interspersed and interlinked. Yet, on the whole, *Specters* has not received its due critical attention, mainly owing to its problematization of issues such as the lack of academic autonomy, university politics, and the exposure of corruption, issues that remain sensitive in most academic circles. In *Specters*, the relationship between the author, narrator, and protagonist is complex and layered. Ashour distances herself from her narrator's voice when she steps out of the narrative and enters a metanarrative space, addressing the reader directly in the authorial voice and refecting self-consciously on the act of writing:

What happened? Why did I leap so suddenly from Shagar the child to middle-aged Shagar? I reread what I have written, mull it over, stare at the lighted screen, and wonder whether I should continue the story of young Shagar, or return to her great grandmother, or trace the path of her descendants to arrive, once again, at the grandchild. And the ghosts—should I consign them to marginal obscurity, leaving them to hover on the periphery of the text, or admit them fully and elucidate some of their stories? (2010, 15–16)

Ashour's use of metanarration scrutinizes the process of writing Shagar's life, shifting between the narrative that we assume belongs to Ashour and the inner monologues of the protagonists Radwa and Shagar. Sometimes, the line between author and narrator is blurred to such an extent that it is diffcult to distinguish who is who. For instance, Radwa refers to the dilemma of her constant immersion in literature and history, and the fact that on occasions she unknowingly interweaves the two, when she says, for example: "Aristotle said something regarding this. He distinguished literature from history, as I well know. I'd better refer to his book" (74), while the readers are left wondering whose voice this is: the author's, the narrator's, or both intertwined. In Chap. 8, Ashour incorporates a memoir of Shagar's grandfather, which he had left on her desk shortly before his death, into the seemingly autobiographical narrative. The chapter is divided into sections with subheadings, each recounting a specifc episode in the imagined life of the fctional protagonist's grandfather, written in the frst person. This generic interpolation allows Ashour to experiment with the kind of autofctional narrative strategies that are usually used as "a matter of introducing an unknown subject to the audience" (Dix 2018, 4), namely, the historical experiences or narratives presented through the lens of memoir writing.

#### *The University as* **lieu de mémoire**

The two parallel narratives constructed in *Specters* are situated in Ain Shams University, the physical campus where the author had built her own forty-year career. The prominent presence of the university in this text has even led to its classifcation as an academic novel (Morsy 2009; Zidan 2015). The setting of the university in its physical and metaphorical manifestations can be seen as a "site of memory" as Nora conceives of it, that is, "the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists" (1989, 7). While Nora does not include universities among his typical sites of memory (1989, 12), the campus in *Specters* seems to ft his description of these sites as being constructed by collective, not merely individual, memory. Representing an authoritarian location, it offers a subversive counter-narrative, where the two protagonists fght to create a better place that would conform to romanticized ideals of the university as a place for intellectual rigor, resistance to the status quo, and the exercise of academic and public freedoms.  Ashour constructs the reality of the university as she lived it as an academic, and then complements the narrative with her own imagined alternative space (or site) of a better university, one which is actively engaged in social and political change. She establishes the university in this way as an extension, if not a microcosm, of society through Shagar's realization that "the university isn't outside society—what happens in society happens in the university, too!" (2010, 91).

Shagar also admits to facing challenges in her acts of remembering, challenges which might be interpreted as a dangerous obstacle to her position as a historian, and to the construction of her version of her life and struggles at the university. This, by extension, jeopardizes the legitimacy of the creation of a "truthful" subversive account of the established *lieu de mémoire* in the text. This process does not only rely on memory and reconstruction but also involves forgetting and states of forgetfulness. Shagar's refections on forgetfulness are narrated in the third person, opening up a shared space in which the author seems to also refect on her own fallibility and subjectivity:

Forgetfulness is a dodgy thing. It seems to a person that she has forgotten: she thinks that some desire, some idea, some reality, has slipped away from her, gone missing; the evidence is its total absence from her consciousness, she gazes at that river and sees upon it a thousand things—[…]. Then one day she realizes that this thing has surfaced all of a sudden, as if it had been preserved there in the depths, submerged in the water, solid as a coral tree or a pearl resting in its oyster. Forgetfulness is a dodgy thing […]. (63)

Forgetfulness is presented as a potential threat to Shagar's existence, whose life and work, as a history professor, is founded on reviving and commemorating historical moments. Similarly, forgetfulness is an unacceptable loss to Radwa, as a professor of literature who is fascinated by historicization as a conscious process toward remembering and away from forgetting. Author and protagonist alike (re)historicize important eras of Egyptian modern history, while situating the university (both as a physical place and as a metaphor for academia) as a witness—and sometimes instigator and agent of change—to historical events. Ultimately, both protagonists (Radwa and Shagar) fail in enacting the idealized view of the university that they had envisioned. Ashour offers two parallel endings in the narrative: one where Shagar resigns and admits defeat in fghting a corrupt dean, and another where Radwa refuses to admit failure and preaches optimism for a better university. Moreover, Ashour offers a critical refection upon her own literary practice, highlighting the importance of seeking "originality" in one's writing, noting that "the 'experience of the Self' is a very important aspect in looking at any text […]. Historical reality and the specifcity of the experience of the Self are two determinants of how *original* the work is" (2001, 97–98; emphasis added).5 In relation to *Specters*, she implements her conception of originality in the text by drawing attention to the interaction between personal experience and the author's referentiality both to self and others—to real places, people, and events. She then moves beyond referentiality to depict the university as a physical and metaphorical site of memory, reinforcing remembering, and commemorating the university as a place that infuses reality with imagination, disappointment, hope, defeat, and determination; and fnally, fghting the process of forgetting both individual and collective struggles within that site.

Memory is closely connected to the notion of subjective truth, which underpins personal narratives: "autobiographical truth is not a fxed but an evolving content in an intricate process of self-discovery and selfcreation" (Eakin 2014, 3). Along similar lines, autofction "is less concerned with faithfully reporting what its protagonist did, or even how that person thought and felt, and is more concerned with the speculative question of how that subject might respond to new and often imagined environments" (Dix 2018, 6). Ashour, for her part, creates a parallel imagined environment and a protagonist who complements parts of her life and consciousness. As was the case in *Beer*, the autofctional in *Specters* manifests itself through narrative technique as well as referential locations, which are verifable through paratextual references in Ashour's other writings to her own life experiences. The paratextual layer in this analysis serves to complement the autofctional manifestations within the texts themselves. An autofctional reading of *Specters* allows for emphasis on Ashour's agency as a Middle Eastern female academic, amplifes her voice, in which she expresses her views on many political, social, and academic causes, and stresses her commitment to fghting corruption, participating and/or writing about revolution(s), and fghting for a better Egyptian academia. Autofction affords a creative space where the author can situate her lifelong struggles within a fctionalized context that moves away from a strict autobiographical frame. In this space, Ashour can create multiple selves and personas that function in parallel and share common struggles that the author witnessed in her real life, a space which provides better access to, and interaction with, a diverse reading audience.

#### Autofictionalizing Experience in Miral al-Tahawy's *Brooklyn Heights*

In Miral al-Tahawy's *Brooklyn Heights* (2011), the fctionalization of memory plays a crucial role in grappling with the experience of cultural displacement. The protagonist's process of remembering the past is structured in parallel with the fctional narrative, where memory registers experience in fctional terms. Miral al-Tahawy (1968-) is a contemporary Egyptian writer, belonging to the generation of Egyptian writers who appeared on the cultural scene in the 1990s and who are considered to have created new spaces for artistic expression in literature, theater, and the cinema (see, e.g., Elsadda 2008, 2012; Anishchenkova 2017; Pepe 2019). This generation of writers has produced a distinct body of literature, identifed by literary critics and historians as foregrounding personal experience, breaking traditional literary conventions, and writing across generic boundaries, a trend known as "New Writing."6 Al-Tahawy is one of the foremost female writers of this period, most of whom continue to write today. She published her earliest pieces of writing in a short story collection entitled *Rım al-bara* ̄ *ri al-mustahı* ̄ *la*̄ (*Reem of the Impossible Wilderness*) in 1995, followed by her frst novel, *The Tent* (1996), which established her as an original voice in the Egyptian literary scene owing to her portrayal of women belonging to Egyptian Bedouin culture. In addition to its cultural specifcity, her writing is marked by the crossing of generic boundaries, where fction intersects with memoir. In our autofctional reading of *Brooklyn Heights*, we will focus on the specifc ways in which al-Tahawy fctionalizes identity, experience, and memory, and on the potential repercussions for the contemporary reception of writing by Egyptian women.

#### *Experiences of Displacement and Self-Representation*

*Brooklyn Heights* opens with the protagonist Hend's arrival in Manhattan with her young son and describes her attempt to settle down as an immigrant in the USA. Rather than striving for assimilation, she focuses on her estrangement from her new community, constantly remembering and being reminded of her past. She intentionally frequents immigrant neighborhoods and seeks the company of other Arabs with whom she can identify, as well as attending English language courses with other minority representatives, foreigners, immigrants, and asylum seekers. The text is structured around a series of shifts in time and place, and her encounters in the present bring to Hend's mind scenes from her recent past in Cairo, as well as childhood memories from her native village in the Egyptian Delta. Geographical, cultural, and personal displacement governs the whole narrative and seems to dominate the protagonist's experience from the opening lines of the text:

She fnds it on a Google map of Brooklyn as she hunts for an apartment, a narrow strip winding its way up to the long arching bridge that connects the two islands. […] She turns her back on Manhattan and chooses Flatbush Avenue from among all those myriad streets because it becomes her: a woman shouldering her solitude, a couple of suitcases, and a child who leans into her whenever he grows tired of walking. She carries a few manuscripts of unfnished stories in a small backpack along with the other important documents: birth and vaccine certifcates, residence papers, copies of degrees, employers' letters of recommendation, bank papers, and a signed rental contract for an apartment she's never seen. (Al-Tahawy 2011, 1)

In these lines, referentiality is established through the protagonist's detailed description of real places, relying on a "Google map of Brooklyn," with specifc streets and locations, as she walks in search of her destination. At the same time, al-Tahawy foregrounds Hend's sense of displacement in establishing her identity as an outsider, a foreigner who carries identifcation documents and "residence papers." Hend is also identifed as an aspiring writer, who, along with her documents, keeps with her "manuscripts of unfnished stories," stories through which author, narrator, and protagonist intersect in their identity as writers.

#### *Fictionalizing Personal Memory*

Memory is a central focus of *Brooklyn Heights*, both thematically and structurally, and is closely related to various acts of writing. Each chapter opens at a moment in the present in which the protagonist's experience in the USA triggers a memory from the past, and then takes us back to the narrative present.7 Hend seeks to fnd her own place in the new surroundings, attempting to set down roots in a place inhabited by people with whom she can identify, and who remind her of her past, as "everything around her invites nostalgia" (2). One of her main concerns becomes her continual attempts to remember, together with her conscious fear of failing to do so, as "she thinks about how she has begun to forget so many things—addresses, events, the whereabouts of documents. She worries that her keen memory is getting moldy" (4). The protagonist's strain to remember can be understood as a kind of equivalent to the author's technique of fctionalizing memory: while Hend is remembering scenes and situations from her past in her village and then in Cairo, al-Tahawy is weaving her narrative using threads from Hend's present and past experiences. The author creates imaginary scenes of the remembered past, foregrounding the connections between the past and the present, memory and experience, author and protagonist. That is to say, Hend's narrative voice as well as her experience, as an aspiring Arab woman writer, intersects with al-Tahawy's (herself an Arab woman writer who had recently moved to the USA); and the descriptions of the setting in New York, the Egyptian Delta, and Cairo are anchored not only in real life but specifcally in the life of the author.

In terms of the characterization of Hend, there is a clear convergence between her identity and that of the author, despite the lack of direct correspondence in names. The overlap is maintained when Hend identifes with the fctional character of Lilith, an aging Egyptian immigrant who is presented to us through Hend's eyes: all three are Egyptian/Arab women struggling to ft into the USA. It is the correspondence in experience rather than nomenclature that establishes the autofctional identity. Second, in terms of narrative voice, there is a clear convergence between al-Tahawy's omniscient authorial voice and that of the protagonist in Hend's interior monologues. Toward the end of the text, we read the following: "The notebook meanwhile remained innocent of writing.  More than anywhere else in the text, though not singularly, the protagonist's voice seems here to merge with the author's, their converged identities representing an autofctional narrative technique. Structured within the framework of individual and indirectly collective cultural memory, the fctional merges with the remembered. The whole text thus emerges as an example of a specifc form of the autofctional, where the "auto" stands for memory rather than for the self or identity.

Memory additionally carries a generic dimension, most evident in memoirs where the term itself suggests a process of writing/fctionalizing personal memory. The protagonist's identity as an aspiring writer is established from the opening pages of the text when we see her carrying her manuscripts among her documents. Writing, as an identity marker, is extended throughout the text through the connection between Hend and Lilith. Two plot lines focusing on the lives of Hend and Lilith seem to be running in parallel across time, until they unexpectedly converge when Hend introduces Lilith as follows:

She carries all her important papers with her in the pocket of her coat but she's terrifed most of the time that she'll lose them or forget them […] She also keeps a small notebook where she jots down the things she wants to remember […] She writes other things in a clear hand on little snippets of paper and then forgets where she's put them. (146)

This scene, describing Lilith's "important papers" kept in "the pocket of her coat," mirrors the introduction of Hend as carrying "a few manuscripts of unfnished stories in a small backpack along with other important documents" (1). The act of writing can be interpreted as a metaphor for a lost past for both Hend and Lilith as they try to write their memoirs to capture and relive their experiences, as well as for the displaced present, when subtle reference is made to a fragmented process of life writing:

Back then, she was still capable of living alone, of sitting on a park bench by herself and jotting down in a little notebook the sentences that she hoped would eventually become her memoirs. […] Her memory rebelled against the blank white pages. She was incapable of conjuring all the little details that make up a life. (155)

Hend comes across these papers after Lilith's death, and the connection between the two women is further augmented by Hend's total identifcation with Lilith's photos and papers: "I know that I've written every word in them myself, she thinks. This is my handwriting, they belong to me" (181). Memory in this situation not only maintains its signifcance as a thematic element and structural component, but acquires important generic signifcance, merging identity and experience with writing with

\*

reference to a particular genre, namely, memoir. An important metanarrative dimension surfaces here in which the author's writing of *Brooklyn Heights* is subtly represented in Lilith's fragmented memoir, which in turn is appropriated by Hend. Al-Tahawy thus establishes an autofctional effect by connecting Lilith and Hend through their experiences of displacement and their acts of life/writing, a process in which the voices and identities of author, narrator, and protagonist seem to merge.

#### *Autofctional Memoir?*

While in its original Arabic edition *Brooklyn Heights* is subtitled and classifed as a "novel," the English edition adds the subtitle "An Egyptian Novel," thus situating the text culturally as well as generically. Hend's personal experience is set against an elaborate transnational socio-cultural background. Reading *Brooklyn Heights* through an autofctional lens brings the generic hybridity of the text into view: it presents a fctionalized life-narrative while simultaneously employing one of the main features of memoir writing in its depiction of human experience against a specifc socio-historical background, that is, the experience of displacement and immigration from an Egyptian woman's perspective. Her voice, autofctionally echoing the author's, replaces the conventional passive representations of women in Arabic literature with agency, through active self-representation. Yet, by asserting its fctionality, the text destabilizes the tendency to receive women's writing as life writing, and thus affords an alternative space beyond an autobiographical reading.

It might seem that we are stretching the concept of the autofctional in our reading of Waguih Ghali's *Beer in the Snooker Club*, Radwa Ashour's *Specters*, and Miral al-Tahawy's *Brooklyn Heights*, but paratextual sources support the viability of such an approach. The current and widely circulating edition of *Beer* is published with an introduction by Ghali's editor, Diana Athill, derived from her memoir *After a Funeral* (1986), in which she writes about the years Ghali spent living in her house. Athill comments on Ghali and his text as follows: "He knew that as a writer he had only one subject, himself, and he saw his life as raw material for a work of literature which he had only begun in his frst novel" (2010). Although she identifes the text as a novel, a work of fction, she also points to Ghali's inscription of himself in his writing. Similarly, Ashour describes *Specters* as "a semi-autobiographical narrative, a partial record of my life intertwined with that of another character of my age and profession" (2000, 91). She further stresses the autobiographical, self-referential elements in her narrative and the integral part they play in shaping her experience (92). Her categorization of the text as a "semi-autobiographical narrative" manifests the absence (at that time) of a critical concept equivalent to her autofctional narrative, where she intentionally combines the autobiographical with the fctional. Al-Tahawy, in turn, remarks in an interview about her book, when refecting on her life in the USA, that "you're geographically in America, but you really live somewhere else when you close the front door—the place of your memory. I was really thinking about this when I was writing about Hend" (East 2012). In this quotation, as well as in other interviews, al-Tahawy acknowledges the connection between herself as author and her protagonist Hend, while at the same time emphasizing the fctional nature of the narrative. These sources show that, as both Dix's and Schmitt's chapters in the present volume underscore, paratexts can provide a crucial tool in an approach to the autofctional. Dix, moreover, shows that this is of particular importance when extending the concept to texts not typically considered to be autofctional.

The three texts we have examined in this chapter demonstrate the affordances of the autofctional as a literary strategy in negotiating identity, memory, and experience in the writing of Egyptian literature. In the absence of an established tradition of autofction criticism in Arabic literary studies, this chapter has argued for using autofction as a critical lens. We would like to end on a note about a potential topic for further discussion. Taking into consideration that we, as critics, enjoy various degrees of proximity to the authors (knowing them personally in the case of Ashour and al-Tahawy; or knowing people who have known them in the case of Ghali), another question emerges, about "autofctional critical practice"8 and "personal criticism" (Anderson 2011, 127). These author-critic connections raise further questions about the effects of personal communication and interaction between critic and author in real life and, in particular, about how such relations affect or create an autofctional reading of a text.

**Acknowledgments** This chapter includes two sections derived from the following PhD theses in progress: Zainab Magdy, "Representations of the Self in Works by and on Waguih Ghali," and Fatma Massoud, "'Autofction' in Selected Works by Radwa Ashour and Doris Lessing," both supervised by Hoda Gindi and Hala Kamal (The Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Egypt). The chapter combines three presentations originally presented in the panel on "Autofctional Modes in Contemporary Egyptian Writing" at the conference on autofction held at the University of Oxford in 2019. We wish to express our gratitude to the British Council Egypt Offce, and particularly to Ms. Cathy Costain, Head of Arts at the British Council, for supporting our participation in the conference.

#### Notes

#### Works Cited

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### Forms

# Autofction and Film: Archival Practices in Post-millennial Documentary Cinema in Argentina and Spain

*Anna Forné and Patricia López-Gay*

*What kind of common point can there be among the principal forms of resistance in the current audiovisual scene? I think—basically—the answer is memory. —*José Luis Guerín, "Work in Progress"

This chapter discusses some of the theoretical insights on autofction gained in the context of the international research project "Rethinking the Real: Autofction and Critical Discourse in Spain and Argentina." Coordinated by Ana Casas (University of Alcalá), the project is currently being conducted by an interdisciplinary group of scholars with the support of a research grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2017-89870-P).

Department of Languages and Literature, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
P. López-Gay Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. Forné (\*)

This chapter examines three autofctional documentaries produced in Argentina and Spain in the past decade that share a distinctive "archival impulse" (Foster 2004; Derrida 1995): not a will to totalize so much as a will to relate to, and explore, a misplaced past or present time. These archival cinematic works propose an order and a meaning in a very specifc political sense, which will be read here in relation to the contexts of the Iberian fnancial crisis and to the memories of political violence during the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). We will address the strategies through which the flmmakers use autofctional modes to "re-stage" the archive, so to speak, by adopting an aesthetics of ambiguity that intermittently destabilizes the evidential paradigm of the modern archive.

In the domain of literature, the autofctional turn that took place in the late 1970s, originating in France, was driven at least in part by the desire to render undecidable conventional dichotomies such as life versus text, historical versus literary discourse, life narration versus the writing body, and autobiographical writing versus the novel (López-Gay 2020, 25–33; 2017).1 In flm studies, several concepts are currently in use when referring to autofctional or autobiographical flms, such as "subjective cinema" (Rascaroli 2009), "the cinema of me" (Lebow 2012), and "frst-person documentary" (Piedras 2014), to mention just a few. As Matthias Christen suggests, the feld of autobiographical flm is vast and multifaceted, and cannot easily be outlined:

It ranges from narratives centered on a flmmaker's life, in an established documentary or diaristic mode, to the display of a personal sensibility in the avant-garde and experimental flm and broaches on the hybrid forms of web-based life-writing. The mode of authorship and subjectivity as well as the degrees of temporal coverage and personal presence of the flmmakers vary accordingly. (2019, 451)

Informed by its literary origins, we understand autofction as a contemporary cinematic mode that challenges, and at times subverts, the generic limits of documentary and fction flm from a self-refexive position. As a result of its transgeneric status, autofctional cinema creates a space inbetween which includes, but cannot be reduced to, documentary and/or fction cinema. Autofction is based on what Spanish theorist Manuel Alberca has described as an "ambiguous pact" established between author and audience (2007). Ambiguity not only permeates the form of the flms that we will analyze in this chapter; it also suffuses the poetics of memory that they deploy.

The act of archiving the real through the malleable trope of personal memory raises a number of questions that invite the audience to become active interpreters of a historical past or present. The term "archive" refers to both the act of archiving and its product. In autofctional literature and the visual arts, including flm, the term evokes the notion of a trace or an ordered ensemble of traces, as well as the repository where such traces are organized and preserved, following an artistic process of selection and aesthetization (López-Gay 2020, 17–23). In this chapter, the notion of the archive will encompass various kinds of objects, records, and documents, and more broadly, recorded images of a given historical reality, in addition to referring to the documentary flms themselves.

A decentered conception of the archive as something that is incomplete and thus open to diverse interpretations permeates the production of Argentine director Albertina Carri. In her autofctional documentary trilogy on recent Argentinian history—*Los rubios* (*The Blonds*) (2003), *Restos* (*Remains*) (2010), and *Cuatreros* (*Rustlers*) (2016)—Carri gathers and mobilizes archival documentation in her personal search for her parents, Ana María Caruso and Roberto Carri, who are among the estimated 30,000 people kidnapped and disappeared by the military during the last dictatorship in Argentina. The trials of the members of the military responsible for these crimes against humanity continue today, as does the painful search of many Argentine families for the remains of their relatives. Since the turn of the millennium, the artistic work carried out by the so-called second generation has reshaped the early narratives of the memories of dictatorship in Argentina that were articulated in the 1980s and 1990s. These children of the disappeared have abandoned expectations of certainty in testimonial writing and conventional documentary flm in favor of an autofctional mode that experiments with generic boundaries, and thus privileges ambiguity and uncertainty (see, e.g., Blejmar 2016). By means of staging archival material alongside fctional reproductions, metarefexive commentaries, and formal experimentation, Carri's oeuvre challenges its viewers to take an active part in the never-ending process of memory construction. Similarly grounded in a sentiment of uncertainty, Mercedes Álvarez's *Mercado de futuros* (*Futures Market*) (2011) and Víctor Erice's *Vidros partidos* (*Broken Windows*) (2012) illuminate the impossibility of documenting absolute origins, be it the origins of capitalism as it was experienced by the frst working classes or the origins of the ongoing fnancial recession. While these two cinematic autofctions are markedly self-referential, by calling obliquely for practices of countermemory of the crisis that focus on the creative appropriation of space by citizens, Álvarez and Erice draw attention not only to the status of these works as cinematic text, or art, but also to the need to move beyond the text and take political action.

The autofctional sensitivity of documentary cinema that these Argentine and Spanish flmmakers highlight challenges the assumption that Bill Nichols (1991, 154) famously ascribed to the genre, the idea that "what we see is evidence of historical occurrences, not fctional simulations of them." While their autofctional flms are documentaries whose propositions, tacit or explicit, target contemporary history, they suggest nevertheless that there can be no direct access to the past, and at times approach history through fctional, scripted simulations of human experiences, overt performances, and personal storytelling. The autofctional mode disrupts one of the fundamental principles in which documentary cinema is grounded: the presumption that each audiovisual trace is the direct, indexical imprint of a spontaneous, tangible reality. The flms from Argentina and Spain that we will explore unsettle in distinct, original ways the modern paradigm of the archive as static evidence of a given reality. They revolve instead around a newer conception of the archive as a selfrefective process, as an event that becomes the subject matter in its own right.

#### "But the Images Are Not There": Archival Excess in Albertina Carri's *Cuatreros*

Albertina Carri's flmic production on political violence in Argentina and her personal search for her disappeared parents expands in a seemingly inconclusive manner, without a clear beginning or an end. Carri's rhizomic cartography of political violence in Argentina began with the groundbreaking documentary *Los rubios* (2003) and continued more recently with *Restos* (2010) and *Cuatreros* (2016). The frst flm formally and thematically narrates the inquiry that Carri undertakes into the fate of her parents: the story in *Los rubios* is pieced together through the self-refexive staging and reorganization of a series of archival objects such as photographs, videotaped interviews, and toys. Carri makes the relationship between reality and construction ambiguous by means of metalepsis and reenactment (Forné 2017). In *Restos* she resumes the (re)search initiated in *Los rubios*. However, on this occasion, Carri does not follow the traces of her disappeared parents but undertakes instead to track down the remains of the militant cinema of the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina. The specifc flm she seeks is *Los Velázquez* (1972), directed by Pablo Szir and based on an essay by Roberto Carri (the director's disappeared father) entitled *Isidro Velázquez: Formas prerrevolucionarias de la violencia* (*Isidro Velázquez: Pre-revolutionary Forms of Violence*) (1968). Like its director, this never-released flm disappeared during the dictatorship. The material remnants of the audiovisual archive are incorporated and staged in *Restos*, putting together a spatio-temporally complex narrative on the militant cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and the devastating political violence of the dictatorship. Imaginary vestiges are manufactured to replace the lost pieces in a way that draws attention to the porous boundaries between fact and fction (Forné 2020).2 *Cuatreros*, just like *Restos*, revolves around the disappeared flm of Pablo Szir, whose script was based on Roberto Carri's abovementioned essay on the mythical fgure of the rural bandit to whom these two works owe their name: Isidro Velázquez. Behind the character of Velázquez, and the narrative of the symbolic role he played for militant intellectuals in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, is the fgure of the flmmaker in search of material traces of her disappeared parents.

*Cuatreros* opens with the voice-over of Albertina Carri, who for three minutes reads from the prologue of *Isidro Velázquez :Formas prerrevolucionarias de la violencia*. Even though its viewers are promptly informed about the origin of the recited text, the initial information on the research conducted by Roberto Carri could also be understood as a comment on Albertina Carri's own archival collection and its staging in *Cuatreros*:

A small research project in the feld, conversations with locals, the reading of newspapers and other periodicals that dealt with the case, exchange of correspondence with friends who live in the area, constitute the "empirical" basis of this work. Obviously, the material used can be questioned by serious researchers, but I have no problem declaring that this is of very little concern to me. The real crux of this problem lies not always in what Velázquez and Gauna did for a long period of their wanderings in the countryside, but what the vast majority understood Velázquez meant to them. (01:04–01:42)3

*Cuatreros* is an investigation into what happened to Szir's flm, and much like Roberto Carri's book, it makes use of "empirical" archival material, but does so in a highly fragmented way, dismissing observational, narrative-realist cinema from the start. In *Cuatreros*, Carri does not limit herself to suggesting the inaccessibility of the past and the impossibility of an immediate indexical imprint of "the real," but also formally evokes the unreachability of the real, abandoning conventional documentary ocularcentrism. The rapid pace of the voice-over, the multiple, parallel, and simultaneous screens, which show internally disconnected fragments of found footage, and the asynchronicity between sound and image, turn this flm into a highly demanding exercise for the viewer. Moreover, the visual absence of the narrator-protagonist further increases the ambiguity of the flm. Whereas in *Los rubios*, (referential) historical material is gathered and staged, albeit in a fragmented way, and in *Restos*, archival material in the form of found footage is manufactured, in *Cuatreros*, referentiality is unequivocally suppressed, foreclosing the possibility of a precise historical record (Fig. 12.1).

**Fig. 12.1** Albertina Carri, *Several parallel but thematically disconnected screens of found footage in Cuatreros*

In an interview by Horacio Verbitsky, Albertina Carri describes *Cuatreros* as a frustrated road-movie with no script but with a conventional structure, whose originality lies in its entirely archival and recycled character: "Somehow the script is not original at all, rather it is a genre flm with a classical structure. So what makes it original is that not a single new image has been generated for that script to become a flm" (Carri 2018). Indeed, in *Cuatreros*, Carri plays with the fact that the audiovisual medium is still more opaque and disruptive than written documents even as it appears, deceptively, to be more tangible as well as more transparent: "They seem 'closer' to the past they represent and are potentially seductive in their seeming transparent textuality: and although every trace, written or otherwise, is open to interpretation, indexical audiovisual recordings are especially resistant to full comprehension or interpretation" (Baron 2014, 4). Despite the excess of audiovisual documents staged in *Cuatreros*, every possible referential anchor vanishes when sound and image present two different narratives and the images are intermittently multiplied and decontextualized. This multiplicity of screens, according to the flmmaker, is not primarily an aesthetic device, but rather an ethical and political one, designed to awaken passive spectators who are accustomed to the grammar and semantics of conservative contemporary cinema (Carri 2018).

Although it is visually fragmented as well as sonorously layered, *Cuatreros* displays a series of discontinuous but recurring storylines—militant cinema, archives, political violence, disappearance—which all connect back to the entangled rhizome of the flmmaker's production. These narratives repeat endlessly, never rounding up to provide certainty or a sense of veracity, as would be expected in a conventional documentary. The sole approximately stable referent to be found in Carri's flm is the enunciating "I" of the flmmaker. As a consequence, *Cuatreros* does not seem to present a plurality of viewpoints, nor an opaque fguration of the identity of the director—two of the essential characteristics that Pablo Piedras (2014, 90–94) identifes in contemporary frst-person documentary made in Argentina, together with a broken linearity, a fragmented temporality, and narrative distance. Although not visually present in the flm, the identity of the flmmaker is clearly articulated in the narrative of *Cuatreros* and the point of view verbally presented is distinctively subjective. Albertina Carri is a central fgure in the Argentine cultural landscape and her intellectual lineage (as well as her ancestry) is well known, facts which are inserted into the narrative. Consequently, in *Cuatreros*, the narrator seeks to accurately represent herself, while the ambiguity of the representation, proper to autofction, lies precisely in the tension created between the personal memory and the public archive. This tension translates aesthetically as the friction between sound and image, that is, between the assertive narrative voice of the flmmaker and the arbitrary montage of flm clips found in archives.

In *Cuatreros*, the (hi)story of militant cinema is absorbed into, and then expelled once more from, the flmmaker's "damaged navel" in the sequence where Carri narrates her visit to Cuba. The disappointment she experiences while she is there, when the utopian dream of revolution for which her parents died is shattered, is diffcult to accept as a daughter of revolutionaries. In this short episode, Carri tells the story of her visit to the archives of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, in search of Szir's flm on Velázquez. The various sound levels—Carri's voice, the tick-tock of a clock, the breaking of glass, the clicking noise of an old flm projector, the crackling of the fre—which are superimposed onto a series of disconnected archival images of a clock, a crater, fre, and bottles, among other items, accompanies the voice-over narrative on the importance of Enrique Juárez's documentary *Ya es tiempo de violencia* (*Now Is the Time for Violence*) (1969) for Albertina Carri.4 The separation of images and sound is absolute when Carri informs the attentive viewer that this particular documentary reconciles her with the choices, despite their disastrous consequences, that her parents made:

Every time I watch it again, I'm reconciled with my dead parents. What's more, every so often I watch it to remember this feeling that made me bitter the frst time I saw it. If I had been old enough at that time, I would have done the same as them, as Juárez, as Szir, as Mom and Dad. I would have belonged to a subversive cell, without a doubt. But times are different, and I got this one. It gave me a such a sore belly button that I'm not able to get away. (Carri 2016, 24:32–24:59)

As well as its seemingly redemptive function in Carri's self-fgurative narrative, the documentary also has an impact on the fragmented and ambiguous aesthetics of *Cuatreros*. It is as if Carri's formal experimentation draws intertextually on Juárez's documentary—"the best Argentine movie that she had ever seen" (22:35)—which heterogeneously combines expository representation with avant-garde experimentation when staging different kinds of archival material (Luchetti 2015). Notwithstanding the entirely archival nature of *Cuatreros*, which is composed from found footage alone, the pronounced ambiguity and opacity of the flm forcefully disrupts the evidential paradigm of the modern archive. As Carri maintains (Carri 2018), the medium of cinema always unsettles time and is hence an "oneiric machinery" which resists any autobiographical truth. Indeed, the autofctional mode that Carri adopts in *Cuatreros* defes the main purpose that Bill Nichols (1991, 30–31) famously assigned to the mainstream documentary genre: the gratifcation of the viewer's "desire to know." Instead of flling in the voids of history, the staging of the archive in *Cuatreros* engages its viewers by means of its inconclusive narrative and ambiguous aesthetics. In the fnal sequence of the flm, Carri articulates the gaps that not even the material excesses of her archival recollection and staging are able to fll: "But the images are not there, the bodies do not appear, the trial does not arrive, and I cannot forget" (1–20:31–37).

#### "You Are the One Who Has No Memory!" Autofictional Cinema in Response to the Iberian Crisis

This section puts two autofctional flms about the current Iberian crisis into conversation: the long feature *Mercado de futuros* (*Futures Market*) and the short flm *Vidros partidos: Testes para um flme em* Portugal (*Broken Windows: Tests for a Film in Portugal*) by Spanish directors Mercedes Álvarez and Víctor Erice, respectively.5 Álvarez and Erice join a wide range of directors new and old who have explored the crisis in their cinema, including Isaki Lacuesta in *Los pasos dobles* (*The Double Steps*) and *El cuaderno de barro* (*The Clay Diaries*) (2011), Sergio Oksman in *A Story for the Modlins* (2012), José Luis Guerín in *En construcción* (*Under Construction*) (2002), and Joaquim Jordà's entire oeuvre. These flmmakers have experimented at the margins of the Spanish documentary flm industry by openly intruding on their object of cinematic inquiry, proposing a self-refective form of cinema, and showing a careful authorial preoccupation with the aesthetic component of their artistic work. Through the medium of autofctional cinema, presenting their work simultaneously as documentaries and fction flms, these directors break with the illusion that presupposes an unproblematized relation between the visual trace and its origin, personal memory and its referent, what is presented as real and reality itself.

The title *Vidros partidos*, or "broken windows," alludes to the name used by the current residents of Guimarães, in Northern Portugal, to refer to the Vizela River Factory. When it opened its doors in 1845, the factory brought electricity and trains to the region. Half a century later, at the time when Louis and Auguste Lumière in France made the frst short motion picture, it had become the second-largest textile manufacturing company in Europe. With their memorable, silent black-and-white documentary, *La Sortie de l'usine à Lyon* (*Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory*) (1895), the Lumière brothers had flmed a group of workers leaving their place of work. When making his documentary in a twenty-frst-century context, Erice asked a group of men and women to reoccupy the empty canteen of the Vizela Factory.6 Erice's documentary is best described as a participatory autofction: it takes the form of a visual archive of staged testimonies given by former workers who have remained unemployed during the fnancial crisis. From its subtitle, *Testes para um flme em Portugal*, the flm presents itself as an unfnished work, a series of screen tests for a documentary to come. As they pose in front of the camera, the newly converted nonprofessional actors attest to the end of their working lives: "I'd like to work again … They told me I was too old. I'm 56 years old, and it's all over for me" (1:00:38–53). On the canteen wall hangs a large group portrait in which we see hundreds of people who worked at the factory at the end of the nineteenth century (Fig. 12.2).

**Fig. 12.2** Víctor Erice, *Workers from the Vizela Factory: Close-up of Photograph in Vidros partidos*