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Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Post-Nakba Autotheoretical Biomythographies
Abstract
The Nakba (1948) was a catastrophe on the Palestinian people. It has ongoing traumatic effects for subsequent decades as the Palestinian people were displaced from their hometowns-not to mention their motherland. Suad Amiry’s memoir Sharon and My Mother-in-Law narrates the author’s strenuous travels across check points and artificially-created boarders within her motherland––Palestine after the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). Amiry lived in Ramallah in the 1980’s and had to go through the pain of crossing multiple check points to rescue her mother-in-law from the Israeli forces who were about to knock down the latter’s apartment. This paper attempts to read how the Nakba has exiled and marginalized a people inside their own country. Sharon and My Mother-in-Law shows how Palestinians live in a state of catastrophe––as the parts of Palestine under the authorities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization PLO are shrinking with time. Using the methodological tool of Adrienne Rich’s Biomythography (a combination of autobiography, theory, sociological and psychological awareness) and Lauren Fournier’s Autotheory (a combination of theory and its lived experience everyday) I argue that Suad Amiry’s memoir acts as a historical agent that combines the unfortunate lived experiences of Palestinian women with the disastrous political reality. Such insights (re)frame and refashion trauma literature in socio-political history. Through deploying these two interrelated theories, I illustrate how such a performative memoir reimagines Palestinian borders caused by the Nakba as sites of literary resistance. Since Biomythography and Autotheory and have not been read in tandem with literature by Palestinian women, my work departs from existing studies in this area and offers new insights on post-Nakba literature.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Arabic