IABA Europe Conference 2015 Dialogical Dimensions in Narrating Lives and Life Writing Funchal, Madeira (27-29 May 2015)
Expressing the self in exile. The idiosyncrasy of al-Andalus context * Laila M. JREIS NAVARRO University of Granada (Spain) Abstract Until the late twentieth century premodern Arabic autobiographies have been judged under the modern perception of what a self representation in writing should be (Kramer, 1991). These texts were rejected as expressions of their authors’ selves for their lack of presence of private life details and personal thoughts. Some scholars (Reynolds, 2001) understood the idiosyncrasy of those texts as premodern discursive strategies from which the inner selves of their authors emerge when we manage to disclose them. Diving in the discursive dimension leads us inevitably to widen our corpus of texts. Many works, as travel and mystic experience accounts, historical narratives in the boundary of memoirs, literary epistles, personal letters and prefaces of works, while holding an autobiographical character are sometimes in and others outside the so called genre. What we need is to relate all these texts that contain an individual expression of their authors to the context in which they were written. Understanding texts in their contexts “inevitably raises the specter of authorial intentions, whether conscious or unconscious”, and helps us to see them as “situated language uses” (Spiegel, 1997) instead of forcing upon them a preconceived conception of their typology. This paper will demonstrate through several examples of medieval Andalusian manifestations of the self, that when we move across genres disclosing discursive strategies and attending to the context we find a wider comprehension of distant identities and subsequently of ourselves. In Late Middle Ages the turbulent context of al-Andalus pushed many intellectuals to express their personal experience in exile so intimately and in so different ways that our need of empathy for them gains a polyhedral dimension. Configuring a picture of our past with all these different pieces shows us a complexity of meanings and interconnections that drive us to look at our limited data under new perspectives.
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This talk is part of the process that led to my recently published paper in the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies: “Contextos de autoexpresión. Voces andalusíes en el exilio de la convención”. The Original Manuscript of this paper is uploaded to my Academia.edu profile.
In this paper I will go through three main points: 1.
How some scholars developed the perspective of studying literary autobiographical texts in Arabic, specially medieval ones.
2.
What is the theoretical framework that helped to develop this approach.
3.
To what extent is al-Andalus context useful to perform a coherent interpretation of those medieval texts in modern times. Philippe Lejeune's definition for modern autobiography (1975) 1 has largely influenced
autobiographical studies in several literary traditions far away from Western ones and even from modern times. It was not long time ago since Martin Kramer (1991) 2 proclaimed the absence of critical narration and introspection in Middle Eastern lives and self-narrations. For him “it was the West that discovered a new and revolutionary way of telling lives”, one which substitutes divine intervention for human motive. This point of view was not just applied to modern but also to medieval Arabic textual expressions of the self, just as it has been done for medieval Western ones. Scholars sought a clear identification of individuality and personality through intimacy and privacy in interpreting self expressing medieval texts. These texts were prejudged as non-autobiographical writings for their lack of what a self expression should be in modern terms. The first attempts in Arabic literary studies for managing the corpus of self expressing medieval texts failed to include a large amount of texts where the author intention and sincerity were not clearly recognizable. It was not until the work of Dwight Reynolds and his colleagues (2001) 3 that the definition of autobiography was amplified to enlarge the corpus. Reynolds realized that for medieval authors “It is the act of writing an account of one's life and not formal characteristics of the resulting text that defined autobiography” 4. Autobiographers were not bound by a conventional genre - as was the case of biographers - and thus “the corpus of Arabic autobiographies displays a high degree of formal variety and includes a number of highly idiosyncratic texts”5. These authors reveal more about their personal lives in their texts than what was considered in the first place - in contradiction with what Kramer set as I have mentioned above-. This information 1
“A retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality”. LEJEUNE, Philippe. “The autobiographical contract”. In TODOROV, Tzvetan (ed.), French Literary Theory Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pg. 193. 2 Martin Kramer (ed.). Middle Eastern Lives. The practice of Biography and Self-Narrative. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991, pgs. 2-3. 3 REYNOLDS, Dwight F. Interpreting the Self. Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition. University of California Press, 2001. 4 Idem, pg. 2. 5 Idem, pg. 59.
needs to be disclosed through a close reading and “a thorough awareness of their social milieus and literary strategies” 6. Regarding to the latest assertion I want to recall what the historian Gabrielle Spiegel argues in her work The past as text (1997) about the necessity of reaching what she calls “the social logic of the text” 7, through its social and linguistic realities. We need to return to the social and political context of the text to understand it as a situated language use 8. And to situate texts in such terms is to recognize the active presence of the authorial consciousness without saying that the author is fully conscious of all his intentions and meanings when writing 9. It is to accept, in terms of agency, that texts are reflections of textual conventions and at the same time that contextual circumstances can influence authors to produce, using those conventions, a new use of language as a result. This is therefore a two-way path alongside which, in my opinion, we should take in consideration the reader response. Then, in medieval self expressing texts, considered as autobiographical by modern readers not with certain difficulties, there is an intimate expressing of the self veiled by the discursive strategies. These strategies were common to the contemporary readers of the text through established literary genres and shared cultural knowledge among others. When we, as modern readers, try to access to any meaning of the self bond by the language, we need to put the text in its context as a situated language use. We assume in this way that the social context has influenced the author in the moment of writing in both conscious and unconscious ways. This influence makes the author sometimes break with convention as a way of agency to create new textual forms of expression. This is to me an obvious explanation for genre evolution. Returning to the issue in hand, that is whether medieval self expressing texts are autobiographical and to what extent they reflect the inner voice of their authors, I want to list a few assumptions: - There were no fixed formal characteristics that could bound these texts to a clear genre in medieval times. They actually cross many of their contemporary genres. - As modern readers we can unveil discursive strategies connecting them to their contemporary literary and cultural conventions. - We do not need to identify modern autobiographical features as a genre in medieval texts to accept self representation in them. 6
Idem, pg. 30. SPIEGEL, Gabrielle M. The past as text. The theory and practice of medieval historiography. The John Hopkins University Press, 1997, pg. xviii. 8 Idem, pgs, 27-28. 9 Idem, pg. 35. 7
- We can no longer, after the linguistic turn, seek to grab clear intentions or veritable meanings from a text. - We can accept multiple readings of a text taking in consideration the possibility of the author intervention in his contemporary textual conventions situated in a particular context. I have chosen three paradigmatic texts from al-Andalus literary tradition that depict perfectly how these assumptions work in the specific context of exile. I will argue that the specificity of alAndalus historical and political context forced many intellectuals into exile, and this exile is precisely what made them express themselves through their works in many different discursive ways: The first one is Ṭawq al-ḥamāma (The Ring of the Dove) written by the Cordoban intellectual Ibn Ḥazm (994-1063) about the year 1022 in Xativa (near Valencia) after the fall of the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba. He was a young courtier who had to suffer exile from his comfortable high position bearing with the loss of a glorious age of territorial unity. His work is a treatise on the art and practice of love written as a literary epistle, called in Arabic 'risāla', which used to be a monographic essay addressed to a certain person. This work is special because he includes information about himself and his own experience during the heydays of the caliphate and even about its fall and aftermath. Though it was not written as an autobiography but as a risāla. He used this last genre to speak about himself, and most modern scholars, when referring to this work, cannot but see it as autobiographical because of its intimate and personal contents in addition to the first person narration. In the preface to his work the author denies any intention of expressing himself: “[..] I shall be quoting in this essay [risāla] verses which I have composed myself upon my own observations. Do not take it amiss, my friend, or whoever else may happen to see this volume, that I am here following the fashion of those who always quote themselves in their stories; such is the way of men who affect the writing of poetry. Moreover my friends make me shy to write about their adventures after their own private ways and habits; so I have been satisfied to mention here only what has occurred to me, within the terms of reference you have prescribed, in every case attributing the incident to myself. I have kept in this book to the bounds set by you, limiting myself to things which I have either seen with my own eyes, or I am convinced are true as deriving from trustworthy reporters. [..]”
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The author found himself forced to speak about his own experience as an active actor and a witness of the political crisis he was living. He was forced by the exile context to write about the IBN ḤAZM. The Ring of the Dove. A Treatise on the art and practice of Arab love. A. J. ARBERRY (tr.). London: Luzac, 1953.
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old days of his youth. He did so through the risāla genre, but even if he was not conscious of his self-expression we read it as autobiographical because we identify his intimate voice in modern terms. The second text is Kitāb al-Tibyān (The book of the clarification) of the Granadian emir ʻAbd Allāh Ibn Buluqqīn (1056-1095). The Zirids were the Berber Dynasty that ruled the kingdom of Granada, one of the little kingdoms in which al-Andalus was divided as a result of the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba. He was the last king of his dynasty and he lived the conquest of all the remaining territory of al-Andalus by the African Almoravids. After the loss of his throne he was forced into exile to Agmat (near Marrakesh) and there he wrote his so called “memoirs”. In this case the overthrown king wrote the history of his dynasty and of his own reign. He says in his work that he wanted to explain his mistakes to the next generations. Modern scholars, as we see in the English and also in the Spanish translation titles 11, classified this book as memoirs. Such genre was not known in al-Andalus literary tradition of eleventh century. The author used a modified chronicle genre to express his version of the events that he lived as an active actor of a historical moment. Those parts about his own reign expressed in first person were enough to interpret his work nowadays as autobiographical to some extent. Though he talks about himself in the first and last chapters, the bulk of the work is written as a historical chronicle. The following fragment is from the introductory one: “[..] My intention in this enterprise of mine is not to narrate some entertaining tale or some strange anecdote or an edifying or profitable notion. [..] That is unless it is a report which lends support to the author's argument or justifies an act that might have seemed ambiguous to an ignorant person or posed problems to a listener unaware of the true facts, thus leading him to speak irresponsibly and to support against the author such persons as were unlikely to lose much from their defamation of others, having slandered the absent and the dead who were unable to fend themselves. [..] The author may also show a skill and knowledge which will be recognized and spread after his death. [..]”
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The author expresses his main concern in this work which is to be misunderstood and misjudged after his death. So even if it seems to be intended as a chronicle, he tries to transmit his own version of the events, one in which the author as a historical personage tries to justify his actions and decisions, and eventually in doing so he ended talking about himself transforming to us the chronicle into “memoirs” of a defeated king from the eleventh century. IBN BULUQQĪN, ʻAbd Allāh. The Tibyān: Memoirs of ʻAbd Allāh B. Buluggīn, Last Zīrid Amīr of Granada. TIBI, Amin T. (tr.). Leiden: Brill, 1986; and El siglo XI en 1ª persona: Las “Memorias” de 'Abd Allah, último rey zirí de Granada destronado por los Almorávides (1090). GARCÍA GÓMEZ, Emilio y LÉVI-PROVENÇAL, E. (tr.). Madrid: Alianza, 1980. 12 IBN BULUQQĪN. The Tibyān, pgs. 33-34. 11
The third and last example is also from Granada, this time from the fourteenth century, during the government of the Nasrid dynasty, the last Arabic and Muslim rulers in Iberian Peninsula. This is a work of the vizier and polygragh Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb entitled Nufāḍat al-ŷirāb fī ʻulālat al-igtirāb (The shake of the saddlebags to entertain exile). This is a miscellaneous work in which the author includes all kind of materials related to his short exile in the Maghreb after the overthrown of the sultan who he was serving from the Granadian throne. He himself refers to it as 'riḥla', which is the Arabic term for travel writing genre, but for us it is far more than that. It is his exile memoirs. He was, as Ibn Ḥazm and the emir ʻAbd Allāh, an active actor, not just a witness of the historical moment he describes. In this work he goes beyond the riḥla as a genre and uses a variety of genres to express his exile experience: through his personal letters, his travel accounts, his poems, his biographical references, even the historical narratives, although he does not use the first person in these last ones 13. In his work, which just arrived to us partially, he also mentions the former emir ʻAbd Allāh's “memoirs”, and refers to it as 'tārīkh', which is the Arabic term for historical chronicle. This gives us an idea of how this work was read few centuries later making us aware of our modern perspective toward it.
All these texts were not the favorite ones for their contemporary readers, most of them have remained to us in a unique manuscript. They were not autobiographies nor memoirs, but literary epistles, chronicles, travel writings. In other cases, they were also poems, prefaces, biographies of the self - but not autobiography as an independent genre - and so on. These are the Ṣdiscursive conventions used by their authors to express themselves. But those texts were situated language uses, they were the result of the ever turbulent history of al-Andalus that forced their intellectuals into exile, to confront their existence in different terms. Out of their comfortable environment, they transgressed their literary conventions, they walked across genres in order to express this experience, in order to last as particular subjects. This is their agency that we, as modern readers, choose to see. We can choose to seek in medieval Arabic texts and even in contemporary ones, the expression of the self through a Western literary convention. Or we can try to offer an interpretation based on different discursive strategies, other cultural conventions, specific contexts of language use,.. When
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I have translated these travel accounts into Spanish in my PhD dissertation. For further information about this work see: JREIS NAVARRO, Laila M. “Cartas y noticias de ambos lados del Estrecho: el universo jatibiano a través de la Nufāḍat al-ŷirāb”. Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos (Sección Árabe-Islam), 62 (2013), pgs. 83-106; and “La riḥla jatibiana a través de la Nufāḍat al-ŷirāb de Ibn al-Jaṭīb”. In RODRÍGUEZ, Mª D., PELÁEZ, A. and BOLOIX, B. (eds.). Saber y poder en al-Andalus. Ibn al-Jaṭīb (s. XIV). Córdoba: El Almendro, 2014, pgs. 217-49. See the translation of one of these accounts with a short study in: JREIS NAVARRO, Laila M. “El extraño viaje de Ibn al-Jaṭīb por los agitados llanos de Tāmasnā. Estudio y traducción de la riḥla”. Anaquel de Estudios Árabes, 27 (2016), pp. 81-100.
we do so we realize that there are no ultimate truths that we can reach nor universal conventions that can be forced upon all literary traditions. We better question ourselves why, though these medieval Arabic texts present a feeble expression of the self in modern terms, still reach the readers of our time in such a special way that other medieval ones from the same tradition do not.
