Talk of the Month

Arab autobiographies will continue to be restricted as long as the Arab climate of freedom is restricted, and as long as all documents realted to history are restricted and outside the context as well. But even those who try to become the leading writers of autobiographies should bear in mind the effect of what they are giving the public, and the magnitude of the danger that these testimonies represent in both their direct politico-social and their literary form. They must also keep their Arab society in mind with all its cultural history, have some courtesy towards their readers who still observe the religious, moral and social ideas which they have inherited from generation to generation, and not try to destroy this culture which is deeply rooted in their emotional life with one blow. For this might be a fatal blow that would destroy rather than build. 

The folowing lines are not an excerpt from a bold novel in which the author is trying to destroy a father's authority and his standing in the value system within an Arab family, but factual confessions and a testimony given by a son about his father in the first pages of the autobiography, of which the writer Suhail Idris published the first part inder the titles Memories of Literature and Love:

"The fact is that I did not love my father, since I felt that he was living an atmosphere of hypocrisy. A time came when I began to feel that my father was living two lives: a life with his wife and family, and a second life with others. One day I discovered him accompanying a young man of attractive appearance with fair hair, whom I used to see sometimes in the shop adjoining his at the harbor. He went with this young man into the reception room, and shortly afterwards I heard the sound of the inner door of this room being bolted, and the sound of the key turning in the lock of the door. I called my elder brother and told him. He nodded his head as if he understood what I meant, and muttered something in a disapproving tone. This incident was repeated, and I increasingly hated this double life of my father." Writing autobiographies is no longer a rare thing in our Arabic literature. The Arab World has been deluged with these autobiographies, memoirs and counter-memoirs. But these lines are unusual in their insolence and overstepping the bounds of social customs, particularly since their target is the head of the family and he is accused of homosexuality.

These lines are regarded as an insolent transgression against a phase when autobiographies presented their writers in an ideal light and attributed all shortcomings and defects to others.

These one-sided autobiographies only show half the truth - that is, if their aim to start with is the truth rather than settling accounts. Arab autobiographies have only rarely attempted to come near to a high degree of frankness and truthfulness in self-revelation. This may have been the aim of Suhail Idris when he was trying to write his autobiography, to offer something different and close to the type of autobiography written in the West, whose writer aims to expose himself, not only to confront himself.

But the problem is that autobiographies in the West come in a different contest of civilization and culture from the Arab situation. Many people who study them regard them as an extension of the process of confession which an individual makes in a church from time to time. In this confession a person relieves himself from the feeling  of guilt and the sins which he commits. He has to state it honestly and truthfully, in order to obtain the forgiveness to which he aspires. The atmosphere of intellectual freedom, respect for the privacy of others and democratic education have added other dimensions to the process of confession that have helped the writers of autobiographies to divulge all their virtues and shortcomings with a high degree of frankness. Western society's acceptance of the existence of a sexual relationship between two people if the same sex has helped to make many people confess to this matter.

An Obscene Cultural Pattern

This context of civilization is completely obscene to us. To this day the institution of the family is still the prime pillar of our society. The father still occupies the summit of its pyramid, for what he represents in terms of social status and family authority. The admission of such a kind of homosexual relationship represents a shock - for which there is sometimes no justification - in the pattern of relationships prevailing in our society, which condemns this and regards it as contrary to religion and custom. We must realize that the concept of individual freedom has not developed to the extent that makes us able to reveal these kinds of weaknesses and destroy such deeply-rooted values. I am not calling here for adherence to a rigid morality or concealment of faults and disgrace. But I would like this kind of disclosure to be useful in bringing us closer to the essence of truth, and not to be preoccupied with questions of homosexuality which are presented as the only truth worth revealing. We would be riding on a wave of imitation, while writing purely with the aim of sensationalism.

This leads us to the autobiography written by the Moroccan fiction writer Muhammad Shukri, entitled Barefoot Bread. In it the author reveals many kinds of this perversion. This has led Westerners to translate it and welcome it as a truthful picture of Moroccan  society sunk in its sexual desires. It is a spurious picture presented to the West in the way it wants and the form that it expects of us. If the memoirs of Suhail Idris have a kind of distinctive literary style, we miss this completely in Muhammad Shukri's autobiography. The picture which he presents of the city of Tangier makes it look like a large brothel in which there is nothing but sex, homosexuality, violence and narcotics. It is a picture that is unjust to that Arab location which is full of ordinary people who are working hard to earn their living.

The attempt to reveal the naked truth goes back partly to one of the oldest autobiographies offered by Western literature: the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth century French philosopher and writer. His opinions on education and enthusiasm for freedom represented a new impulse in European renaissance thought. I remember that when I read these memoirs at an early stage of my life, I was shocked by the boldness and frankness they contained in Rousseau's review of his sex life. The French writer Andre Maurois, in his book on the art of biographies and autobiographies, believes that there is a kind of exhibitionism which made Rousseau exaggerate about this subject in his memoirs. We cannot accept the idea  of a person being naked the whole time. A human being, whether we like it or nor, is a creature who wears clothes. Even during the Stone Age when clothes were impractical, he used to cover himself with animal skins. Hence the idea of a civilized human being is an image closer to the truth for us than a naked human being. The use of suggestion is much better than blatant description. The personal attributes of human beings include feelings and attitudes. Material and physical behavior - as Andre Maurois affirms - is ordinary and banal.

The Magic of Autobiography

But what is the magic latent in an autobiography? And why are these books best sellers, although their authors sometimes have nothing to do with the writing profession? The most famous of these books are written by former politicians, artists no longer in the spotlight, commanders who fought battles which they claim to have won, kings who were compelled to abdicate their thrones, and mistresses who were betrayed by important men or industrial tycoons who consider their success stories an example for others to imitate.

We are interested in these books, impelled by the magic of human experience and the desire to know the person who is the subject of the autobiography in a way that is as close as possible to the truth. There is more than one means to get close to that unknown creature called a human being. There is the means of literary creativity, whereby a writer tries to explore the essence of a human soul and refashion its experience so that it becomes the highest common factor between several people. There is the means of science, which subjects everything related to a human being - as living material - to scientific research. All of them try to answer that central question to explain human behavior in a particular age and under a certain circumstance. But the most effective way of getting close is when someone tries himself to present this answer. It is certain that every person is the absolute hero of his autobiography. If he is honest and objective to a great extent, he can present, from the inside, a rare picture of all his inclinations and passions, and all the psychological justifications and motivations which made him conduct himself in the way he did.

Throughout human history, people have not ceased to write their autobiographies. Primitive man did that on the walls of the caves in which he was living when, by means of drawing, he recorded all his fears of the wild animals which pursued him while he was  hunting by day, and in his dreams at night. Perhaps by this drawing he could tame these animals, freeze them where they were and remove some of the fear of them from inside him. Then people discovered how to carve on walls in the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Babylon and Assyria when they recorded the news of their kings and leaders. The hard stone has to this day preserved many lies and a few truths. Tablets of soft mud have also contained plenty of writings and biographies. Even wooden branches and the thin threads in carpets have helped to give a touch of permanence to the transitory shadow of humanity on this earth. The ancients were aware, through autobiographies and biographies which they wrote about other people, that these surviving lines were what gave meaning to these people's existence. It is these which enable one to draw a lesson and a moral from this brief period extending from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Religion was their prime incentive to be interested in people's lives. Religious values are easier to understand and apply when presented through the lives of God's prophets and righteous servants. Their lives are the lesson and the embodiment of all religious teachings and the way to follow them. The interest of many authors, who were concerned with writing in the phase after the divine messages had been revealed to the prophets and messengers, was in books which recorded the biographies of these prophets and messengers, their companions and the peoples who believed in them and those who disbelieved in their messages, and were pagans, and the types of punishment which befell them.

Challenge and Amendment

The history of Islam experienced one of the most rigorous experiments of precision and verification in the field of biographies of personalities. This occurred when scholars on specializing in the life of the Prophet Muhammad began collecting his sayings.

For this purpose they followed the principle of "challenge and amendment", which is a precise methodology that casts doubt on everyone who transmits sayings of the Prophet and, and investigates his own biographical details first before accepting any saying from him. It reached the point where, if they discovered that a person had lied, or gone around bareheaded once, no saying would be accepted from him. Dr. Ahmad Darwish, a professor of Arabic literature, commented on this: "If the strictness of challenge and amendment were applied by us objectively in the field of political and intellectual biographies, many pages of our history and our heritage would be changed."

The Arab heritage went through a phase of transition from biographies of others to autobiographies, when the Arab personality matured and was able to find the courage to put its image to the test. Perhaps the mo st important of these autobiographies was that of Usama Ibn Munqidh, who was a leader and a resistance fighter against the Crusaders in the twelfth century AD. He lived through the experience of being taken prisoner by the enemy, of his friends doing nothing, and of being released after hardship. Usama found that this eventful life was worth recording as an example to be imitated. Ibn Khaldun did the same thing in his autobiography entitled Introducing Ibn Khaldun and his Journey to the West and East. In it he described his journey through the Arab countries which were then going through a critical period of their history and were exposed to the danger of invasion by the Tatars. Indeed, he himself saw them capture Damascus and watched the tongues of flame rising from its buildings. Ibn Khaldun combined his autobiography with the places where he stopped on his journey, and used it to emphasize his theory of social development and the unrelenting conflict between nomadism and civilization. Perhaps the most distressing autobiography is the memoirs of Abu Abdullah Al-Saghir, the last King of Granada before he surrendered it to the Frankish kings. He drew a horrifying picture of all the intrigues and dissensions going on around him which weakened his throne and destroyed his state. In the end he wept like a child for a kingdom which he had not defended like a man.

Modern Arabic literature went through approximately the same phases: biographies of others, and then a shy changeover to autobiographies. Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad's books ignited the first spark for these biographies, when he published a series of brilliant works in which he considered the most important characters in Islamic Arab history. Taha Hussein did a similar thing in The Great Dissension. Arab critics consider  that the most complete of the biographies of others was provided by Mikhail Naimeh in his book on Gibran. But biographies took an autobiographical turn with Ahmad Faris Al-Shidiaq's book called Crossed Legs in what is the Difference, which is the sarcastic comments of a Lebanese traveller in a new city which might be Cairo. Then autobiographies poured out, directly or indirectly. Taha Hussein, for example, did not want to choose the form of direct confession, but he wrote his experience in the form of a novel and presented us his masterpiece The Days, which some critics consider the most perfect autobiography in our modern literature. Tawfiq Al-Kakim recorded the experience of his work in the public prosecutor's office in his book Diary of a Prosecutor in the Countryside. Sartre has described this work as one of the best human experiences in the remote countryside. In spite of his long lifetime and prolific output, Nagib Mahfouz is still hesitant about writing his autobiography directly. He has preferred to hover around it in more than one of his literary works, the latest of which was Echoes of Autobiography. And he has preferred to make lengthy statements about his life to more than one person, one of the most important of whom was the critic Raja Al-Naqqash, who published these statements in an important book. The well-known story writer Jamal Al-Ghaitani also did likewise. Nevertheless, Nagib Mahfouz has not yet said his last word.

Half-Truths

And yet, does the Arab autobiography in fact tell the truth?

This has not happened in most instances. It seems that factors for lying in our Arab society are more influential than the factors which encourage one to tell the truth. It is enough that we still do not know the truth about many of the great events through which our Arab world has passed, in spite of the huge flood of memoirs and confessions  about each one of these events.

To this day, after the passage of more than sixty years, we do not know the facts as they happened regarding the military and monarchic regimes that succeeded each other in power in the Arab world. The same goes for the great 1967 defeat, for which everyone shirked responsibility and cast the blame on others. Add to that the destructive Lebanese war which went on for nearly fifteen years, the October 1973 war, the Gulf wars and the war for the liberation of Kuwait, the rise of dictatorships, secessionist wars, border disputes and others. Everything that has been written about all these questions has been half-truths and mere unconfirmed personal opinions not authenticated by time or documents. The reason for this may be removal of the other half of the truth, by which I mean the lack of honesty.

In many countries of the world there is a specific period of time, after which the government reveals the documents in its possession, or some of them at least. This is important for all students of history, researchers and those who want to verify the truth of the documents. In the light of these documents it is possible to re-examine all the personal views, memoirs, independent judgements and even whims.

However, this is not recognized in most of our Arab countries up to now. Documents still lie in state files which are locked up with more secrecy, and the authorities prefer for them to be eaten by mice rather than to reveal them - that is, if we are optimistic and there really are files that have been preserved. Even a writer like Muhammad Hasanain Haikal, who is fond of documents in political writing, was only allowed to obtain some of the documents which he took personally when he was close to the summit of power in Egypt. But after that, all he obtained was from foreign sources.

The absence of documents leaves the field open to the whims of all the writers of memoirs and autobiographies. But it makes our political and social history a prey to lies  and falsified facts. This is the impression from most of our modern history, to the extent that one is led to believe - sometimes - that our Arab culture does not believe in history made by human beings!

But it is not only personal whims that affect the credibility of autobiographies, there are also particular factors linked to human na ture. Weakness of memory may be the greatest obstacle facing those who try to relate their life story honestly. Recollections of childhood dissipate rapidly from the memory, and all that remains of them is disconnected flashes and obscure feelings. The mechanism of forgetfulness works and fulfills its function throughout one's lifetime.

Misrepresentation is another reason for the lack of credibility of autobiographies. Everyone who writes his autobiography tends to choose the events that will influence th e receiver of the information. He also tries to transform the autobiography from a mere recital of events into a creative work. Consequently this requires erasing many marginal events, and at other times amending them. There is a censorship that one imposes on all things with which one is not at ease. Andre Maurois believes it is impossible for us to relate shameful attitudes with complete frankness: we either cast them into oblivion or make some alterations to them so that they become less shameful and more attractive. Bashfulness about remembering sexual experiences is an important factor, and fear of the effect on others of telling one's life story is a bigger and more important factor.

We must realize that an autobiography is a personal testimony that is related regarding the age in which one lives. For this purpose, its writer must be a fair witness who will offer future generations an experience close to the truth, and avoid stirring up enmities and settling accounts.