Narrative Strategies of Self-Definitionand Voice in Leila Abouzeid’sReturn to Childhood

A R I E L M . S H E E T R I T

ABSTRACT This article presents an analysis of theMoroccanwriter Leila Abouzeid’sRujuʿ ila al-

tufula (1993;Return to Childhood: TheMemoir of aModernMoroccanWoman, 1998) through the

prism of relational theories of autobiography. It exposes narrative strategies of voice and

language to bring out the autobiographical subject’s struggle to identify with and against

authority figures while forging her own voice. It highlights Abouzeid’s mother’s powerful

presence voicing indigenous and traditional perspectives and the father’s silent (and silenced)

voice, despite his patriarchal dominance. It unfolds the dynamics of “giving voice” to Abou-

zeid’s illiterate mother and grandmother while challenging the content and principles

underlying their utterances. These dynamics are further complicated by her father’s formative

yet problematic political stances. The final section discusses Abouzeid’s engagement with

tensions triggered by colonial encounters and postcolonial nation building.

KEYWORDS postcolonial female agency, Leila Abouzeid, Arabic autobiography, Moroccan

autobiography, Arab women’s writing

T he complex interaction between the individual and the collective is a conspicu-ous facet of modern Arabic autobiography and one of its central tensions. This

interaction is expressed not only in content1 but also through a range of textualstrategies and formal choices that bring out the intersubjective nature of self-defi-nition. Intersubjectivity is often performed through tactics that highlight theentwinement of the autobiographical subject with significant others and blur theline between individual and collective memory.

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A reading of autobiography that brings out how the self is inscribed in terms ofothers is especially relevant for conceptualizing the fraught and often paradoxicalspaces that produce Arab women’s subjectivities. Such writing often expresses thepressures of marginalization versus empowerment; conformity versus subversion;representing oneself versus representing others, especially unlettered others whoare less likely to represent themselves in writing; and women’s silence versuspresence in cultural and historical contexts. Arab women’s autobiography ofteninsists on including the individual and collectivememories of thosewhose voices aremuted in dominant historical representations.

I examine such autobiographical strategies in the original Arabic version ofLeila Abouzeid’s Rujuʿ ila al-tufula (1993), published in English as Return toChildhood:TheMemoir of aModernMoroccanWoman (1998). Abouzeid is awidelyread and well-known author in Moroccan and Arabic literature.2 My goal is toexpose the relational qualities of her coming to self and voice against the backdropofthe Moroccan nationalist struggle for independence and subsequent nation build-ing and patriarchal family dynamics. Abouzeid articulates the nuances of findingher place as a “modernMoroccanwoman” in a culture that freed itself from colonialdominationbutnotWestern concepts ofmodernity.Abouzeid’s identity struggle canbe understood in the context of Fatima Sadiqi’s (2003, 20) description ofMoroccanfeminism as “a result of the encounter of the Moroccan indigenous culture/civili-

zation with Western culture/civilization.” In Abouzeid’s account, her mother andgrandmother endorse indigenous cultural perspectives, and her father endorsesWestern and local patriarchal values. I demonstrate how Abouzeid uses narrativestrategies related to voice and silence to illustrate the relational roles of these rel-atives in shaping her identity and feminist sensibilities.

Over the last twenty years, autobiographical theory has been enriched byscholars who have exposed the “typology of the relational life” (Eakin 1999, 68) andchallenged “the fundamental paradigm of the independent self of traditionalautobiography, as well as the concept of monologic representation” (Davis 2005,42). Sidonie Smith andJuliaWatson (2010, 218) similarly suggest that “relationalitycontests the notion that self narration is the monologic utterance of a solitary,introspective subject that is knowable to itself.” Johnnie Stover (2003, 28, 15), whohighlights a “countergenre” in black women’s autobiography that ties the “self ” tofamily and community, argues that such writings introduce a “unique communi-cative text that expresses resistance.”Abouzeid’s text can similarly be read as caughtbetween overlapping marginal and hegemonic discourses that are expressed by“inconsistent points of view” (ibid., 30) and an unstable nonunified autobio-graphical voice. Stover (ibid., 37) notes that black women’s texts often reflect “bal-ancing acts” that characterize self and community and juxtapose multiple, ambig-uous, and conflicting tones and views.

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Multiple examples inReturn to Childhood indicate coming to self and voice inrelation to other voices that are distinct from the autobiographical “I.” These voicespunctuate the narrative and at some points compete with and even drown out thevoice of the autobiographical subject whose story is ostensibly the focus. Thus one ofthe main tensions in the text is between the protagonist’s efforts to reconstruct anduncover the voices of her illiterate mother and grandmother and her attempts toindividuate away from their authority to forge her own voice and path. The textposits a relational identity articulated primarily through the mother’s narrations,often configured as answers to the autobiographical subject’s questions or storiesabout family history. Paul John Eakin (1999, 86) considers such an individual to be“the proximate other to signify the intimate tie to the relational autobiographer.” Ialso highlight the contrast between the powerful presence of Abouzeid’smother andher father’s silent and silenced voice, when he speaks, despite his patriarchaldominance and privileges.

Return to Childhood unfolds the ongoing process of subjectivity and identityin relation to various forms of authority and against a background of national eventsthat directly impact Abouzeid’s personal life. This crucial facet of the text is found inits formal strategies,which refract personal identity through a threefold prism: thenarrative voices of her mother and grandmother; her father’s silences; and nationalforms of language,memory, and forgetting.Myanalysis takes into account scholarly

studies onAbouzeid’s oeuvre but is thefirst to consider the interplay of language andvoice inReturn toChildhood. I contend thatLeila’s voice increasingly intervenes andinterjects as the text progresses, a strategy that narratively constitutes the protag-onist’s coming to voice against other “infringing” voices. Past studies have treatedAbouzeid’s mainly fictional works in terms of language politics (Ellis-House 2011),feminism and Islam (Hunter 2006), East-West identity politics (Vinson 2007),portrayals of men (Bentahar 2012), and national history from the margins (Kozma1999; Sadiqi 2003).OnlyEvaHunter andPaulineHomsiVinsonexplicitly dealwithReturn to Childhood, although neither examines its narrative strategies.

Autobiography as GenreReturn to Childhood is autobiography inasmuch as it comprises a “retrospective lifenarrative” (Smith and Watson 2010, 4) unfurling the ontogenesis of the protago-nist’s multifaceted identity, beginning with her childhood in the years leading up toMoroccan independence in 1956 and continuing with the early years that follow. Asthe title affirms, the narrative thrust is a literary “return” to Leila’s childhoodbetween the ages of eight and fourteen. In the article I use “Leila” to refer to theprotagonist, “the narrator” to refer to the adult voice narrating, and “Abouzeid” torefer to the author. These distinctions are not so neat in this or any autobiographicaltext.Wemust take into account themerging or obscuring of these different “selves,”since “the narrator is both the same andnot the same as the autobiographer, and the

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narrator is both the same and not the same as the subject of narration” (Smith1998, 109).

Autobiography is “the slipperiest of literary genres” (Eakin 1999, 2), given thepenchant of authors to integrate novelistic and biographical techniques. Return toChildhood is autobiographical in content and to some degree novelistic in style andstructure. There are no accepted rules for the autobiographical genre inasmuch asgenresmaybe said to set forth rules. Instead, there is a tendency for individualworksto stretch and challenge the boundaries of autobiography. Such works often have“fluid boundaries and multiple shifts” (Al-Nowaihi 1994, 34), as reflected in Idwaral-Kharrat’s Turabuha zaʿfaran (City of Saffron, 1986) and mainstream andfoundational texts, such as Taha Husayn’s monumental and “most beloved” Al-Ayyam (The Days, 1929) (Allen 1995, 38; see also Gibb 1968, 279). Scholars havelong argued about City of Saffron’s genre classification, alternately viewing it asautobiography, novel, or both (e.g., ʿAbd al-Dayim 1974, 383, 433; Badr 1963, 297).The style and content of The Days raise questions of genre assignment that one canalso apply to other twentieth-century Arabic autobiographical texts.

There is no standard genre boundary for Arabic autobiography from whichcertain texts deviate. Instead, clear boundaries were never established to determinewhat “counts” as modern Arabic autobiography. There are different possibilities inthis mode of writing, and these differences should be explored to better understand

choices in literary representation. In Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies:Shahrazad Tells Her Story, Nawar Al-Hassan Golley (2003) ignores all genre con-siderations when she considers sociological and anthropological studies alongsideautobiographical works, since her ultimate concern is women’s subjectivity ratherthan autobiography in any particular sense. A compelling “definition” emerges fromDwight Reynolds’s (2001, 2) observations on premodern Arabic autobiography: “Itis the act of writing an account of one’s life and not the formal characteristics of theresulting text that defined autobiography for al-Suyuti and his [fifteenth-century]contemporaries.”Reynolds (ibid., 38–40)discusses the etymology anddevelopmentof the term sira, denoting a path or journey but used to denominate eighth-centuryArabic biographical representations of the Prophet Muhammad. This graduallyexpanded to encompass biography and then self-biography, “sira dhatiyya” (ibid.,39), one of the terms used to denote Arabic autobiographical writing to this day.

Inasmuch as Return to Childhood, which the author dubs a “memoir” in theEnglish translation, is a literary rendition of her life story, I refer to it as “autobi-ography.” It is to be distinguished from Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant ([1984]2011), a novel that draws inspiration from “real” aspects of the author’s life. Incontrast, Return to Childhood claims to unfold the author’s authoritative personalstory. It conflates the author and the narrator in a style that one may claim to be“novelized,” to use Yahya Ibrahim ʿAbd al-Dayim’s (1974, 383) terminology, or

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“novelistic” (Enderwitz 1998, 11). Such novelized or novelistic qualities include theinterplay of “various narrative voices,” repetition, and embedding (e.g., Malti-Douglas 1988, 97).These novelistic qualities, particularly polyvocality, invite the useof analytic tools and theories that are applied to novels.

The Voices of Grandmother and MotherIn Return to Childhood the grandmother’s and mother’s voices are ultimatelymediated and constructed throughAbouzeid’s literary Arabic, noteworthy since thestorieswere nodoubt relayed inMoroccanArabic.Through amultivoiced rhetoricalstrategy, Abouzeid relegates the autobiographical subject to a listener and notsimply a narrator, in one respect surrendering exclusive control of the text. The factthat the text draws so heavily fromhermother’s voice to complete her own illustratesthe force of hermother’smemories on her own subjectivity.Writing aboutReturn toChildhood, Vinson (2007, 96) observes that “the numerous embedded quotationsand narrations place Abouzeid’s written memoirs within a larger narrative of pri-marily oral female speech and transform her memoirs from an individual’s chro-nological review of her childhood into a series of multiauthored interconnected,episodic stories.” However, the text is not in fact multiauthored; rather than “oralspeech” culled from interviews, these are stories recalled by the narrator and ren-dered in Modern Standard Arabic. The voices cannot be separated in Abouzeid’s

account, creating an intersubjective dynamic that is intrinsic to Abouzeid’s narra-tively constructed self.

By incorporating the grandmother’s narrative voice, the autobiographicalsubject situates herself at the intersection of local women’s voices in communalgatherings. For example, the grandmother describes necessary tactics for banishingthe evil eye, a “facet of her grandmother” revealed at an evening gathering thatAbouzeid rejects as superstitious (92).3 This illustrates that Leila is formed througha community of women, family members, neighbors, and visiting friends, whofrequently interact during coffees,visits, neighborly chats, bath days,weddings, andother family occasions. The grandmother evokes local folklore and beliefs in thecultural atmosphere of the diyafat, or women’s gatherings, at her uncle’s house (21–26, 80–81) and rooftop umsiyat in the evening, where women get together to eat,talk, and sing (88–93, 93–95, 103).

In contrast to the grandmother’s communally grounded narrations, themother’s voice in Return to Childhood generally emerges from intimate mother-daughter encounters. The mother is the most present figure in the text’s relationalframework. Narrating large segments of the autobiography in her mother’s voiceexemplifies a “mutually critical double voicing” (Fischer 1994, 90) that expresses theambivalence of the autobiographical subject. She identifies through the mother’sanecdotes, stories, and values but also against them through questioning. In oneexample, the mother recounts to her young daughter that the father has been

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imprisoned, explaining the meaning of “homeland” (watan) and describing prisonas “honorable” in the anticolonial struggle (12).Yet the youngprotagonist doubts hermother’swords, because she nevertheless “weeps” (nahib), “sighs,”and “wails” at herhusband’s imprisonment (13).

Spurred on by the young Leila’s interjected questions, hermother narrates thefather’s arrest in an account that spans almost the entire second chapter, in a text ofonly four chapters. By incorporating her mother’s narrative voice, Abouzeid lendsthe text a certain authority, given the limits of Leila’s perspective as a child. Addi-tionally, it establishes the recounting of the story as formative for the protagonist, asher mother recounts the story repeatedly. Inclusion of her mother’s narrative voicealso enacts a historical or intergenerational dialogue betweenmother and daughter.The mother’s protracted accounts are filled with details of myriad characters andevents from an earlier era that include her mother’s visits to the prison and therepercussions of the father’s imprisonment for the mother, who was effectivelyabandoned and exploited by the father’s family. The mother recounts dragging herhusband’s family to court and winning the case. The judge says to the mother’sfather-in-law, Leila’s grandfather: “What can I tell you? You are a dog for saying hedivorced her” (49). Leila’s mother is constructed as audacious for taking her in-lawsto court and in the end as triumphant although having been victimized.

Tess Cosslett argues that such extended narrations reconstruct hidden,

silenced, or lost matrilineage for the protagonist in women’s autobiographies.Cosslett (2000, 142) asserts that in the women’s autobiographies she researched,“the identity of the subject is assumed to be dependent on or in relation to theidentities of her female ancestors.” Such an autobiographical strategy presentswomen ancestors as “grounds of her ownbeing”while at the same timewriting for oras them. This restores “subjectivity to the mother, and other female relatives,” andshows “their influence on the protagonist.” In Return to Childhood the extendednarrations highlight features of her mother’s personality that Leila shares orinherits. They also revive stories and experiences that would otherwise vanish in thevicissitudes of time.

Return to Childhood emphasizes that Leila’s mother’s anecdotes have beenrecounted repeatedly: “Then she would repeat her narration and recapitulate[thumma ʿadat tahki wa-taʿid]” (60). In another example, “I recall that from herrepeated recounting [adhkur dhalika min hakiha al-mutakarrir]” (107). Repe-ated speech reveals significance to Leila’smemory rather than the actual experienceof events. The adult narrator is discernible through iterative verb markers, as thecritic of Russian childhood autobiography Andrew Wachtel (1990, 27) writes:“Iterative markers indicate that the remembered scene is a composite, one thathappened so many times as to have been indelibly impressed on the mem-ory. . . .These verbs give the effect of stopped timeor of the simultaneity of action andits expression; they are the ultimate expression of the protagonist’s chronotope.”

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Wachtel (ibid., 28) argues that repetition could be called the grammatical expres-sion of nostalgia: “The iterative allows the narrator to go into a kind oftrance . . . [wherein] he can bring his past incarnation back to life and reexperiencelong-past events.”EdwardW.Said (1975, 87) underscores the role of repetition in theArabic novel: “Narratives do more than simply and generally repeat reality: theycreate another sense altogether by repeating, by making repetition itself the veryform of novelty.”

In Abouzeid’s text repetition creates a tension were iteration cyclically chal-lenges linearity. The stories are told to the protagonist not at a specific time but at alltimes, repeatedly.They are timeless.The telling is repeatedly experiencedandfinallyinternalized, underscoring the complexity of a relationally produced identity. Suchrepetitions challenge a precisely marked boundary between speaker and listenerand a precise time frame and context, connecting individual memory to groupconsciousness. Repetitions break up time and signify the merging of past andpresent, bringing to the fore the force and power of tradition fromwhich Leilamustbreak free to mold a future that has not been literally dictated by her past.

Eakin (1999, 71) points out that “sharing other people’s stories can beunderstood as an act of self-definition.”Asdifferent asLeila’sworldviewmaybe fromthat of her mother and grandmother, their stories and lives are bases of her pro-fessional and artistic identity. Their reconstructed narrations conjecture them as

models for the writer Leila eventually becomes, because they are portrayed as sto-rytellers, even if they resisted Leila receiving advanced schooling. Abouzeid laudsher grandmother’s talent for storytelling,which extends to “our women,” a categorythat includes Abouzeid: “My grandmother knew how to enhance and embellishwhat she told, to captivate her listener and leave him entranced” (80).

Coming to Individual Voice and SelfhoodReturn to Childhood reflects an ambivalent process where the text simultaneouslyrecovers the mother’s narrative voice and dissociates from it. Abouzeid recovers hermother’s voice through double-voiced discourse, “another’s speech in another’slanguage” (Bakhtin 1981, 324). The narrative strategy of incorporating otherspeaking voices bespeaks ambivalence between relationalism and individualism.Leila’s voice increasingly intervenes and interjects as the text progresses, a dynamicthat narratively constitutes her coming to voice. The merging or blending of themother’s speaking voice into the text is marked in the first two chapters, recedes inthe third chapter, and is nearly absent from the final chapter. Although hermother’svoice represents authoritative discourse that shapes Leila’s worldview, her state-ments are often cast as contradictory or otherwise problematic. Linda Anderson(2001, 113) notes a tendency for women to become autobiographers against iden-tification with the mother. This point is relevant to Return to Childhood, but it

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does not express the full ambivalence reflected by the mother’s presence and voicein the text.

In the first chapter, “Al-Qsiba,” Leila’s mother explains that the Nasara, orFrench Christians, imprisoned Leila’s father because he is a nationalist (12). Thenarrator exposes inconsistencies in the mother’s views of the honorability ofimprisonment by pointing out that she previously expressed the unfairness of beingimprisoned by the French and her sadness at her husband’s imprisonment. Thenarrator highlights that the mother’s wailing undermined the positive force of herwords. Leila does not voice this skepticism out loud in the account.

In this chapter themother’s narrative voice ismergedwith the narrator’s voice,blurring the distinction between them. For example, the mother recounts ananecdote about one of their neighbors inRabat,who, she says, appliedmakeup evenon the day Leila’s youngest sister died. Only at the end of the anecdote is it clearlystated that this ishermother’snarrative: “Mymother would smile and say,whenevershe told that story: ‘Shewas good,God rest her soul. . . . She stood byme at Khadija’sdeath, if only she had not used rouge’” (11). Leila’s youthful consciousness is per-meated by her mother’s stories and sense of the world, which were inculcated intoher verybeing.AlthoughLeiladoesnot experience the events directly or is too youngto understand their import, she is shaped by the telling. Her mother’s accountsconstitute “postmemory” narratives of the previous generation. These are powerful

forms of memory because of their “imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch1996, 662). The text reproduces her mother’s memories and their significance forLeila. The prominence of her mother’s narrative voice demonstrates what has beensaid of Asian American family memoirs, “the consciousness that the stories of one’srelatives are constitutive of one’s own story” (Davis 2007, 493).

The second chapter, “Sefru,” includes the mother’s voice punctuated by thedaughter’s criticism. For example, the narrator states, “I asked my mother themeaning of ‘the entrance and the departure,’ and she said: ‘Be quiet! When grown-ups are speaking, don’t speak.’And I was quiet. This expression continued to baffleme until I grew up and figured it out by myself ” (89). This anecdote illustrates thedistinction betweenAbouzeid’s authoritative voice as narrator of her autobiographyand her voice as a girl when she is a silenced listener. The tables have shifted, asAbouzeid the author may grant and silence her mother’s narrative voice. The idiomLeila does not understand is explained in the English translation (Abouzeid 1998,49) asmeaning that “a girl’s family set the divorce of aman’s first wife as a conditionto marrying his daughter.”As such, it foreshadows her mother’s predicament whenthe father leaves her to marry his chic,Westernized second wife without divorcinghis first wife.

In the third chapter, “Casablanca,” the narrator-daughter curtails hermother’svoice, foregrounding Leila’s developing perspective and newfound courage toquestion whose memories are whose and to assert her own opinions of events and

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choices. When we read the mother’s voice, it is framed and mediated by thedaughter’s criticism. For example, her mother depicts how she is cheated andmistreated by her father-in-law. Leila interrupts her mother’s story to criticize her:“Youweren’t sensible. Fromwhat you say’” (108). Themother replies: “Iwas obeyingmymother. That’swhat agitatesme. Iwould obeymymother, and nowno one obeysme” (108). Such interruptions increasingly occur in the third and fourth chapters asLeila comes into a mature independent voice.

Leila’s increased “interruptions” of her mother’s speech suggest a shift in thepower dynamics conveyed through narrative voice. They also reveal differences ofopinion regarding popular Islam as practiced by women in comparison to orthodoxbeliefs that shun themagical. An example of this occurswhenLeila exclaims, “Whenwill God rid Morocco from superstition?” (135). This interjection bespeaks Leila’sshift in values from her mother’s generation to her own. Significantly, the motherdoes not respond to the question but continues narrating, perhaps suggesting thatthese two views cannot be reconciled.

The narrative strategy of the final chapter, “Rabat,” reflects the most notableshift, since the first-person narrative voice of the autobiographical subject domi-nates.Hermother narrates intermittently, for example, about anational herowhoseremains were prepared for reburial in his current house after being removed fromhis previous grave (142–43). But overall, the mother’s silences are conspicuous in

this chapter. When Leila asks her what she can tell her of her father’s “conspiracy”charge, her mother answers, “Nothing.” Leila persists: “‘How did the news reachyou?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What do you remember from that period?’ ‘Nothing’” (150–51).Significantly, the autobiographical subject relates the anecdote in her own first-person voice. In a second example, after her father leaves her mother, Leila asks herwhy she nevertheless goes to court to support her incarcerated estranged husband.Here the text silences themother, as Leila preempts a responsewith criticism: “Nowthat you’ve heard with your own two ears, let’s not go, and don’t say, ‘They willreprimand me’” (153–54).

The Father as a Silent/Silenced AuthorityBy working through the voices and silences of others, the author of Return toChildhood resists the controls others have exercised over Leila and her stories. Thefather is a key relational presence in the text, relevant as much in his enforcedsilences as in his rarely speaking voice. I argue that Leila’s father in the text embodiesWestern colonialist values even as he fights against colonial occupation. In silenc-ing him, the text performs what Susan Sontag (2002, 11) has termed a produc-tive “resonating silence.” He usually speaks in short snippets filtered through themother’s speech. This dynamic subverts patriarchal norms, where men’s voicesdominate in public spaces andwomen’s voices are relegated to private spaces. Thereis a sharp contrast between thewriter’s intimate exchangeswith hermother and the

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exchanges with her distant father. The father’s socially sanctioned patriarchalpowers are conveyed by his dominance over the lives of the mother and daughters,which stands in contrast to his distance and lack of direct speech in a text brimmingwith narrative voices.

The father is not entirely silenced. Rather, his speech and his stories aresubsumed by female voices, dialogizing his voice through their own renderings andlayering his voice with their interpretations. He does not narrate any section ofReturn to Childhood, in contrast to Leila’s mother. He is not even afforded theintimate role of storytelling, in contrast to Leila’s grandmother. Similarly, whenexcerpts from his letters are rendered, they are embedded in the mother’s narrative(67). This strategy performs opposition to his dominance in Return to Childhood.

By virtue of being the man of the family, both husband and father, he givescommands thatmust be followed by his wife and daughters. Themother’s authorityover major decisions is superseded by the father, notably with regard to the girls’educations. A conversation between Leila’s mother and great-aunt about the deci-sion to send both daughters to school evinces the hierarchy of authority in Leila’sfamily (71). The aunt attempts to convince the mother not to send them to school,but Leila’s mother is adamant, because Leila’s father insists. Leila’s mother objects,but she cannot disobey her husband,who says, “Enroll both of them in school,” everytime she visits him in prison (72). The narrator cedes narrative authority by sharing

the narrative stage with her mother’s voice. However, ultimate authority over thedecision is in her father’s hands, as her mother has internalized his patriarchalauthority. He is not even present to actively enforce his demands, exposing a gapbetween the power of his words and his physical inability to see them through toaction. It is further ironic and yet telling that he uses his patriarchal powers todemand his daughters’ education, as nationalists commonly insisted,while his wifeandher aunt oppose this decision inkeepingwith commonskepticismregarding theeducation of girls at the time. Because of his insistence, Leila ultimately comes intoFrench andArabic literacy.Thus he plays a preeminent role in shapingLeila’s futureas a writer, intellectual, and educator.

The text’s tendency to mute Leila’s father’s voice is significant in several ways.It certainly reflects his physical absence from their lives. This is partially due to thehomosocial nature ofMoroccan society at the time,whenwomen andmen occupieddifferent social and spatial spheres.4 In addition, he was imprisoned by the Frenchcolonizers of Morocco and the postcolonial Moroccan government in the yearsfollowing independence. He also abandons Leila’s mother. Beyond this physicalabsence, Abouzeid denies her father a direct narrative presence,which accentuatesthe godlike power of his authority exerted from behind the scenes. This power iscommunicated through her mother’s threats, his menacing looks and coughs, andhis directives expressed in letters. As a child, Leila experienced her father’s authorityas ever present. Whenever she heard his cough from a distance, terror made her

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“freeze in her tracks” (32). The father looms large with a wordless presence thatconveys his power. This ability to control without physical presence or many wordsspeaksmore broadly to theworkings of patriarchal power,which is even reproducedby women.

In the last chapter the narrator reveals that in the early 1970s Leila’s fathervisited her and they had heated discussions about politics. Yet the text does notdisclose the content of these debates. In Return to Childhood her mother stands inthe background during these discussions, motioning them to stop lest people thinkthat they are arguing (155).A rich irony is generatedby this changingpower relation,wherein Leila and her father engage in debates as intellectual equals while hermother tries to silence them. It is significant that only the fact of the arguments isrecorded and not their dialogic content.

In the penultimate paragraph the narrative conveys Leila’s position in one ofthe arguments with her father without conveying his side of the repartee. Sheexpresses her right to work in any organization she wants, even if it opposes herfather’s views, and she criticizes her father’s political and social views in siding withthe opposition.Return to Childhood silences the father through the final paragraph,using the fact of argument to express her political opinion rather thanopening spaceforher father’s voice,whose silence reverberates. In thatfinalparagraph,which is theonly time Leila addresses her father directly, she challenges the authority of his

actions and ideas and questions his political allegiances. In addressing him sherecapitulates what she told someone who had criticized her “betrayal” of her father,defending her right to hold political views different from his. Specifically, shequestions his adoption of secular principles imported from the West. In this dra-maticmoment his response is silence: “My father did not say anything.He remainedthoughtful and did not say anything” (156). This lack of response contrasts with themother. The father’s voice is backgrounded or silent throughout the text and is notallowed to supersede the voice of the narrator. In contrast, coming to individualvoice and selfhood in relation to the mother is reflected by her increasing silence asthe text unfolds. In the poignant final scene the father’s lack of response expressesthediminutionofhis patriarchal power,which contrastswith thepower in the soundof his cough during her childhood. At the same time, the choice to end with thisscene emphasizes the force of his words and his silences for Leila.

The father’s political stance epitomizes Leila’s criticism of “the social andpolitical world of post-independence Morocco” (Hunter 2006, 149). The autobi-ographyhighlights the contradiction inherent in valuingWestern education for girlsas well as boys while exploiting amodern personal status law unfavorable to womenby abandoningLeila’smother tobewith aWesternizedMoroccanwoman.Leila askshow he can fight for something for the whole country but not apply it to himself(154). For the narrator, this paradox reflects the broader hypocrisy prevalent in thenewly independent country as indicated by government policies and her fellow

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Moroccans’ treatment of her father, which is worse than he experienced in Frenchprisons and reminiscent of how Leila was abused by a Moroccan police officer inindependent Morocco.

Leila’s father is the victim of Western colonialism as French colonial powersrepeatedly arrest and torture him. Yet after driving out theWestern victimizers, herfather victimizesLeila’smother andhisdaughters by abandoning them. InReturn toChildhood, I argue, the father personifies the intersection of Western and patriar-chal authority. He abuses his patriarchal rights without so much as repudiating hiswife, which would have allowed her to get the benefits allowed to her and the chil-dren by law, a central theme in Abouzeid’s novella, Year of the Elephant. By con-testing and silencing her father’s authoritative voice, Abouzeid by extension dele-gitimizes colonial authority and the postcolonial government that took its place. Atthe same time, every page of the autobiography reflects the influence of her father onher education and subsequent development into a woman of letters.

Crossroads of Self-Definition, Voice, and the National StoryAs in all situations of subject and identity formation, Abouzeid defines herself inrelation to “the same boundaries delineated by that dominant discourse” (Kozma1999, 389).5 Gillian Whitlock (2000, 189) discusses the tension inherent in post-colonial autobiographies because “autobiographical subjects are both agents and

victims in colonialism.” Abouzeid uses content and language choices to portrayLeila’s struggle to liberate an unencumbered voice as part of the nation’s struggle tofind its own voice through Arabic language and literature and an ethical politicalproject.

I argue that while Leila’s story can be read as an allegory for the Moroccannational struggle, the connection between autobiographical subject and nation isdeeper than an allegorical framework allows. The national story powerfully dictatesand impels her personal story such that the personal and the national are fusedtogether. The colonial and postcolonial situations dictated crucial elements of theprotagonist’s childhood. This embeddedness of self and national struggle is artic-ulated in sentences such as “We were politicized [mutasayyasin] youth whodebated in the style of resistance in developing countries” (146). “Developingcountries” is rendered bilad namiyya in Arabic, emphasizing the overlap betweencoming to selfhood and voice and national development.

In Return to Childhood the stories of self/individual and national/collectiveare imbricated. Leila’s personal story is expressed in relation to the nation. On onelevel the text can be read as a political allegory wherein the chronicles of the auto-biographical subject are symbolic of the nation itself.6 This kind of representativefunction of the protagonist occurs in other Moroccan autobiographical works(Rooke 1997, 303). This is perhaps an expected narrative posture, since the child-hoods of authors born in the 1940s correspond to Morocco’s struggle for national

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independence, which culminated in 1956. Tetz Rooke demonstrates that in each ofthe texts he analyzes, fusing the stories of life and nation fulfills different objectives,including social critique advocating a complete breakwith the past (inMuhammadShukri’s Al-Khubz al-hafi, 1993 [1980]), a monument to Arab cultural identity anda reactivation of classical heritage (in ʿAbd al-Majid Bin Jalun’s Fi al-tufula, 1968),and avision of personal and national identity rooted in folk and popular culture (inal-ʿArabi Batma’s Al-Rahil: Sira dhatiyya, 1995).

Indeed, Return to Childhood speaks to the importance of a broader Arabcultural identity and, like Al-Khubz al-hafi and Fi al-tufula, unfolds the autobio-graphical subject’s coming to literacy. This process is inextricably linked to Arabidentity and nationalism, just as the poem that inspires the Shukrian protagonist tolearn to read is a nationalist poem. Similarly, Leila’s love of Arabic language is linkedto the political discussions in class and her insistence on fasting in school during themonth of Ramadan, a way of asserting her national, cultural, and religious alle-giances.However, it is difficult to reduce the political-cultural underpinnings of thistext to unequivocal messages. For example, whereas the text is forthright inexpressing Leila’s opposition to popular superstitions, it nevertheless expressesmany folk stories and songs.

As Liat Kozma (1999, 389) has claimed regarding Abouzeid’s Year of theElephant,Return to Childhood can be read as a rereading and rewriting of “national

history through the first-person narration of a lower-class woman [here, several].”7

The autobiography offers a view of Moroccan history from women’s perspectives,particularly those of her mother and grandmother, “one that recognizes the unsungefforts of Moroccan women” (Vinson 2007, 96)8 and undermines a monolithic,male-centered, and top-down version of Moroccan national history. The noncon-ventional perspective this narrative offers on Moroccan national history is exem-plified by her mother’s ten-page anecdote instructing the Moroccan people to fast,explaining her husband’s first arrest and the great pains she undertakes (like otherwives of prisoners) to bring himpackageswhile in prison (63–73); recalling howhermother transports guns in her apron from city to city (130); and recounting hermother’s role in smuggling a man out of prison (134–35). These moments under-score the text’s political intervention as a “text of the oppressed, marginalizedsubject” (Anderson 2001, 104).

Unlettered women who are colonized subjects vividly portray this powerimbalance through many anecdotes. Indeed, anecdotes by the mother, grand-mother, and prisoners’wives (151) are often anticolonial. Similarly,women are oftenvisiting prisoners and smuggling weapons, contributing to the young protagonist’sawareness and coming to voice.

The protagonist’s identity and behaviors are constituted not only in relation toher family members but also in relation to colonial and neocolonial attempts toundermine the society’s Islamic fabric. Return to Childhood repudiates the colonial

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past and reclaims aspects of the indigenous and Islamic past, which can be read aschallenges to the persistence and dominance of colonial culture even after inde-pendence. The protagonist chooses to fast during Ramadan, challenging the“Christian logic”of theAlgerianwomanwhoprohibits fasting: “Eat, eat, or else Iwilllock you up” (140–41). In Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant the protagonist similarly“expresses a political stance vis-à-vis Islam” (Bentahar 2012, 9).

The text expresses nationalistic and anticolonialist sentiments along withopposition to the corruption of the postcolonial Moroccan leadership. Its aspira-tions for the nation-self are multifaceted. It advocates indigenous Arab identity asrepresented particularly by illiterate women’s contributions to culture and nationalindependence andbroaderArab identity. It simultaneously expresses andadvocatesso-called Western values of modernity and democracy, including in the classroom(esp. 146). The autobiographical subject’s personal story is entwined in a political-national frameof reference from thebeginning to the endof the text,whichbegins asmother and daughters are forced to relocate because of the father’s imprisonment.The constant movement in the text is largely compelled by the French colonialpresence, which stipulates the map of Leila’s burgeoning identity. Political cir-cumstances impinge on their personal lives and literally propel the narrative course.Movement from city to city and one narrative voice to another is established in thetextual opening: “The bus stopped on the road linking Fez to Marrakech” (9).

Leila, hermother, her two sisters, and an uncle descend from the bus and sit ata crossroads,waiting to return to their “home” in al-Qsiba. On receiving word of thefather’s imprisonment, they return to his hometown of Bani Millal. The road at theroot of the autobiographical process is contorted and tangled rather than straight. Itcircumscribes the boundaries of Leila’s childhood and adolescence. It parallels thesinuous structure of her memories and the ambivalences that characterize herentwined individual/national identity. The autobiography also ends at a crossroads,as the final scene takes place at Casablanca’s international airport, a border and asymbol ofmovement, transition, displacement,modernity, anddevelopment.Thesefinal textualmoments, depicting a distinctly personal encounter with her father, aresituated at a national-international crossroads, emphasizing the impossibility ofdisentangling the personal from national and transnational history.

The Voices and Registers of LanguageReturn toChildhood is one of thefirstmodernMoroccan autobiographieswritten bya woman in Arabic rather than in French, accentuating the radical nature of lan-guage choice.As aMoroccanwomanwritingher autobiography inArabic, Abouzeidbroadens the linguistic and literary horizon of contemporary Arabic autobio-graphical discourse. SinceFrenchwas theprimary literary language inMorocco andelsewhere in North Africa during the colonial and early postcolonial years and haspersisted in commerce and scholarship, it is the lingua franca of most Moroccan

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autobiographies. Abouzeid stands among the few, including Bin Jalun, Shukri, andal-ʿArabi Batma, who have broken with literary practice in Morocco by writingautobiography in Arabic rather than in French.9 As Elizabeth Fernea asserts in thepreface to the English translation of Return to Childhood, the decision to write inArabic is a political act (Abouzeid 1998, ii).

Return to Childhood indicates a significant textual silence regarding indige-nous Tamazight roots in Morocco, especially given that the author hails from Laq-siba, an Amazigh village. Abouzeid is reticent regarding her own indigenous roots.As Vinson (2007, 105) points out, “Although Abouzeid tells us that her father’smother wasBerber, she does not directly address the question of Berber language orcultural identity in Morocco.” She avoids an opportunity to engage coming toidentity and voice in a context of minoritized indigenous languages and feminizedoral traditions that exist in complex relationships with divide-and-conquer strate-gies of French colonialism, totalizing forms of Arab nationalism, and Islamicorthodoxies.

Language is a central issue in “ideology dynamics,” according to Sadiqi (2014,95), who stresses “the power of language in keeping or contesting the status quo inMoroccan society.” Arabization programs were introduced after Moroccan inde-pendence with the goal of establishing modern Arabic as “the foundation stone of aMoroccan national literature,” a goal that “has been constantly thwarted” by a

“persistent Francophone strand” (Armitage 2000, 41). Strikingly, it is Leila’s fatherwho insists that she learn French alongside Arabic (139) even after independence.This demand can be seen in light of his predilection for things modern and French,including the ill-reputed Westernized woman for whom he abandons Leila’smother. In light of this, the choice to write in Arabic is a rejoinder to the predomi-nance of French culture and language (144).

Abouzeid writes the entire text using literary Arabic without incorporatingMoroccanArabic except for the few literally quoted folk songs, althoughmuchof thetextual accounts are reported to be spokenbyhermother andgrandmother.One canassume they spoke Moroccan colloquial dialect. Moreover, as unlettered women, itis likely that they could neither speak nor read literary Arabic. This raises theproblematic of representing thosewho cannotwrite, speak, or represent themselvesin authorized language registers (Alcoff 1991).

Employing literary rather than Moroccan Arabic dialect to convey theirspeech enhances its mediation by an educated and modern daughter, who uses thelanguage register that has “the greatest share of prestige in the linguistic market inMorocco” (Sadiqi 2003,47).Abouzeid rejects afluidhybridismof language registersinwhich themain text is written in the literary language and dialogue is rendered incolloquials. This “literary trend” has gained momentum in Moroccan literaturewritten in Arabic “as a device of realism and creativity that reflects Moroccandiglossia and distinguishes Moroccan literature from Egyptian literature” (Ellis-

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House 2011, 463). In Return to Childhood Abouzeid conveys the speech of hermother and grandmother while simultaneously suppressing their language, dis-tancing the text from oral accounts and indicating ambivalence about inclusion ofmarginalized voices. This ambivalence bespeaks the dual status of orality in Mor-occan culture as both lower-class and a “powerful symbol of identity and authen-ticity” (Sadiqi 2003, 42). Abouzeid navigates between including these voices asbases for her personal and cultural identity and distinguishing herself from themby“translating” their self-expression into literary Arabic. When folk songs are con-veyed inMoroccanArabic (i.e., 29–30), their language register sets themapart fromthe rest of the narrative, emphasizing the gap between local oral cultures and high,pan-Arab literary culture.10

Nevertheless, “writing in Arabic is a profoundly transgressive gesture for aMoroccan woman, and Abouzeid uses this device to disrupt national and interna-tional gendered power hierarchies affected through language” (Ellis-House 2011,455). Abouzeid’s use of literary Arabic, “a high prestige language typically reservedformen,” not only subverts colonial influence but also expresses a “refusal of genderroles” (ibid., 458, 457). These decisions are for a Moroccan rather than a Frenchreading context. By excludingMoroccanArabic, the autobiography is situated in thegamut of canonical Arabic literature,which is doubly subversive for anArabwomanwriter. The language choices in Return to Childhood also reflect a commitment to

Arabic culture and literature, themes also expressed in the narrative. Thus languagechoices stake out a number of positions and senses of belonging that exceed Frenchcolonialism and postcolonial influence.

ConclusionReturn to Childhood is more linear than experimental or avant-garde in content.Nevertheless, I argue that reading it for narrative strategies in relation to voice,silence, and language reveals an intersubjective coming to self that resonates widelyin thepostcolonialMaghreb context.Reading for relational dimensions is crucial forthe study of Arabic autobiography. This is necessary not only for experimental textsin which “the biographer is also an autobiographer” (Egan 1999, 7), such as Hananal-Shaykh’sHikayati Sharhun Yatul (MyLife: An Intricate Tale, 2005), but also fortexts that use “linear narrative, emphasizing development, and projecting a unitary,autonomous self ” (Smith 2004, 61).11

Return to Childhood incorporates complex strategies where the mother,grandmother, and father are differently implicated through voicing and silencing.Thenarrative strategies reveal how the protagonist’s identity emerges uncertainly atfirst and then more confidently from within the stories, anecdotes, and directivesthat infuse her childhood. The dynamic interplay and interweaving of narrativevoices brings out the ambivalences of the autobiographical subject as she identifiesthrough and against the voices and ideas of her mother and father as well as dom-

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inant ideologies. As the chapters unfold, the mother’s narrative voice is less con-spicuous in the cacophony of voices, Leila is more argumentative and interven-tionist, and the father is practically absent as a directly speaking subject. Althoughthe mother narrates stories that are the grounds for the protagonist’s identity, theprotagonist increasingly undermines and contests her mother’s ideas and voice.Despite their differences, mother and daughter retain an intimacy that contrastswith a distant father-daughter relationship. The text reflects important languagechoices, as it is written in Arabic rather than French and literary Arabic rather thanMoroccan colloquial. This formalizes the intimate register of women’s autobiog-raphy and mediates in formal terms the everyday voices of the unlettered womenwhose opinions and lives Abouzeid integrates into the national-personal stories.The decision to write in literary Arabic reflects Abouzeid’s postcolonial Moroccanrather thanFrench cultural belonging andunderscores her associationwithbroaderArabic culture. The decision not to include dialogue in Moroccan Arabic indicatesAbouzeid’s ultimate authority over the text. It can also be read as a refusal of tra-ditional gender expectations that relegate women’s voices to oral traditions. At thesame time, the protagonist’smodernity recognizes that her coming to voice emergesthrough the ideas, beliefs, and stories passed down to her, including a forcefulmatriarchal genealogy. This technique of interrogation and challenge is somethingshe says she learned from her education in the West. Ironically, it is through these

tools that she interrogates Western legacies as well.

ARIEL M. SHEETRIT is a lecturer at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Arabic

language and literature and at the Open University of Israel in Arab film. She has

published numerous scholarly articles on Arabic autobiography, Palestinian literature,

Arabic women’s writing, the nexus of Arabic literature with Hebrew literature, and Arab

film. She is currently writing a monograph on modern Arabic autobiography. Contact:

amsheetrit@gmail.com.

AcknowledgmentThe author thanks Orit Vaknin-Yekutieli for generously sharing ideas and references on Berbers in

Morocco.

Notes1. Ewa Machut-Mendecka (1999, 511) brings out their “intricate . . . relationships with other per-

sons, especially with their own community” in the content of eight Arabic autobiographical texts.

2. InEnglish the author is widely referred to as LeilaAbouzeid. I use this transliteration throughout

this article. For a study on differences between the translation and the Arabic original in the

context of translation politics for texts crossing cultural and national borders, see Abdo 2009.

3. All page numbers refer to the Arabic text. All translations from the Arabic are my own.

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4. See Sadiqi’s (2014, 88) discussion of the use of space inMorocco to “segregate between men and

women.”

5. Vinson (2007, 104–6) discusses some aspects of identity proffered by the text.

6. Vinson (2007, 100) notes, somewhat imprecisely, that the “various levels of allegiance and

betrayal in Abouzeid’s family serve as a microcosm of Moroccan society at large.”

7. Sadiqi (2003, 29) asserts thatYear of the Elephant “brilliantly depictsMoroccanwomen’s agency

in the making of Morocco’a national history.”

8. Diya M. Abdo (2009, 9) calls this counterhistory “subaltern discursive practices.”

9. North African autobiographies in French include Abdelkebir Khatibi, La mémoire tatouée:

Autobiographie d’un décolonisé (1971), and Rachida Yacoubi, Mavie, mon cri (1995).

10. On the use and characteristics of literary Arabic versus the dialect in Arabic literature, see

Somekh 1991.

11. See, e.g.,my study (Sheetrit 2011) of al-Shaykh’sHikayati SharhunYatul, in which I examine the

paradoxical phenomenonof writing an “autobiography”of one’smother,merging several levels of

autobiography.

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