Shahrazad’s Sisters: Storytelling and Politics in the Memoirs of Mernissi, El Saadawi and Ashrawi

This essay considers three recent political memoirs, Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Childhood, Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison and Hanan Ashrawi’s This Side of Peace: A Personal Account, in order to examine the relation between storytelling and politics. Using Shahrazad of Arabian Nights as the paradigmatic narrator, this essay explores how each of these memoirists uses the power of narrative to move from being a carrier of culture to a shaper of it. Each woman’s memoir is not simply a mirror which either reflects or explains reality, but rather a prism through which reality is transformed. This essay argues that these political memoirs are a form of political action: eloquent testaments not only to the relation between the personal and the political, but to the relation between narrative (i.e. storytelling) and political struggle. Rather than merely being a source for history, these women’s memoirs are seeking to shape the popular living memory of their contemporary cultures. They are attempting to engage readers now in a struggle for narrative primacy and thus political transformation. These accounts invite us, through the power of their narrative dramas, to participate, to interpret and to judge the possibilities of living otherwise: these are texts as political action. Thus this essay argues that in writing these memoirs, with their potential to appeal with greater immediacy and drama to a wide audience, Fatima Mernissi, Nawal El Saadawi, and Hanan Ashrawi become in the richest and most profound sense, sisters to Shahrazad. By tracing an analagous relation between Shahrazad and these three contemporary memoirists, this essay seeks both to reclaim the legendary figure of Shahrazad as a political actor and to recognize that narrative is more than a “story-as-ransom”; it is a potent alternative form of doing politics.