Tahrir Memoirs: Radwa Ashour and Mona Prince

This chapter examines new Arab memoirs and the effects of the Arab revolutions in the twenty-first century on the genre. The genre of the Tahrir memoir, a form that focuses on subjectivity in the broader movement rather than solitude, reworks Arab memoirs in the twenty-first century. Radwa Ashour and Mona Prince wrote new memoirs that chronicle the writers’ involvement in Egypt’s 2011 revolution. The chapter focuses on Ashour’s Heavier than Radwa: Fragments of an Autobiography (2013) and the posthumously published The Scream (2014), including The Journey (1983) and Specters (1999), with Mona Prince’s Revolution Is My Name (2012). Both Ashour and Prince offer a new form in which writing, activism, the university campus, and Tahrir Square are deeply intertwined, with parts that focus on the writers’ medical or professional crises within Egypt’s revolution.