The Authority of Writing and Self-Awareness in Latifa al-Zayyat’s An Inspection Campaign of Personal Papers

Abstract

Autobiographical writing is a writing of flesh and blood. It opens onto ontological experience and thus promises the specificity, or specificities, of creative experience. This article examines the interplay between these two experiences, as it seeks to capture certain particularities of women’s writing. It examines, on the one hand, how the writing subject’s self-awareness takes shape and, on the other, the writing subject’s ability to undertake a linguistic experience of her own. The wager of autobiography is to affirm self-awareness by producing a narrative identity through which the subject interprets herself. The task becomes more difficult when we recall that the autobiographer is a woman who confronts society in its own language and representations. This is what made Latifa al-Zayyat’s An Inspection Campaign of Personal Papers a feminist emancipatory project. In it, writing bears witness to a distinctive awareness and an earnest effort to engage with reality and confront authority. The realization of social existence thus becomes contingent upon the realization of linguistic existence. Here, language functions simultaneously as a mechanism of proximity and distancing. It affirms the woman writer’s tendency to transgress established order and depart from the familiar in a manner that is almost spontaneous.