Fadwa Tuqan was known to Arab pupils of my generation (at least) through their poetry textbooks. Her name is associated with Palestine and therefore with the Arab nationalist cause. Arab schoolchildren grow up with an almost mythological image of Tuqan as a resilient woman who fought against British and Israeli imperialism by the power of her poetic discourse. She stands as a public figure whose poetry is as highly valued as that of the "great" male poets of the Arab world. Tuqan's autobiography, however, comes as a shock to the Arab reader, who had associated her name with politics. For it discloses the unknown side of Tuqan, the woman who always found it difficult to be engaged in the political life of her country. Political poetry, which gained her fame, is not where Tuqan excels, as she emerges in her autobiography to tell us. While Tuqan is allowed a public voice as an acknowledged poet, the irony is that, instead of affirming this public voice, she has created a more personal one in her autobiography; a voice of alienation estrangement, displacement and longing for self-accomplishment. Tuqan's autobiography is accepted in Arabic tradition as a literary text. Most of the reviews written about it approach it as such, and the feminist aspect of the book is hardly raised. This paper is divided into three main sections. The first section, on modes of production, considers issues of the production and distribution of Tuqan's autobiography in its Arabic and English forms; sections two and three on modes of self-representation and section three on modes of oppression, are based more on my reading of Tuqan's original Arabic text.