“An Assemblage/Before Me”: Autobiography as Archive

As I was preparing to write this reflection on the rich and textured articles that make up this special issue, a welcome message arrived in my email box. Women United, a feminist press of long-standing based in Delhi, was promoting a new title: Distant Traveller: An Attia Hosain Miscellany.¹ As Siobhan Lambert-Hurley notes, I wrote about Attia Hosain’s 1961 novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, a decade ago, figuring it as a piece of autobiographical fiction.² Considering the articles collected here, I might now think of it as an autobiography to which the signature “novel” has been affixed (cf. Booth), and the domestic spaces it archives as “historical structures wherein subjectivities unfold” (Malhotra). I might even read it as a “hostage narrative” (Milani) masquerading as a bildungsroman—an interpretive move that has ramifications for the prison-house tropes through which women writers across many times and spaces have imagined their adolescence. But, with the publication of Distant Traveller, I will also have to re-think my reading in light of new evidence—in this case, previously unpublished writing that extends Hosain’s oeuvre and, in turn, challenges any fixed notion of her literary and political accomplishments. Beyond her published novel and short story collection (Phoenix Fled), Hosain’s archive has always been diffuse and fragmentary: snippets of interviews, radio scripts she did with the BBC, and other “faint strains” of memory and self of the kind that surface in this issue. With the publication of Distant Traveller, it is an ever more lively and dynamic assemblage: composite; created from scraps and shards; handmade.

Although they focus mainly on discrete texts, the contributors to this volume bring into view a range of autobiographical assemblages: material and symbolic composites of fact and fiction that make up the life-story. As the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would have it, assemblage is presumptively multi-dimensional with axes for content and for expression both.³ One effect of assemblage is a grid, the kind that “a consciously self-determined person” like Piro might imagine to evoke the worldly and the divine or that Begum Khurshid Mirza might give form to, even inadvertently, in her memoir. Another effect of assemblage is latticework, of the kind through which Zeyneb Hanoum saw, and then critiqued, the all-male world of British parliamentary culture (via its “latticed windows”). Without pushing the metaphor too far, assemblages are also a kind of mesh, throwing into bold relief “a variety of webs and networks” (Micallef) that risscrossed the worlds traversed by Hanoum and Vaka Brown. All of these possibilities enable us to appreciate the autobiographical form as reticulate, where reticulation is not merely ornamental or filigreed but vascular and resilient, like the veins of a leaf. And, as nearly all the autobiographers referenced here routinely show, when agency happens, it may occur by chance or by design—it may even be thwarted or interrupted—but it always leaves a trace in the dense, coagulate field of history rather than exclusively in the life of the writer.

Indeed, beyond their particularities, what is remarkable about each body of work we are given a glimpse of here is the archival possibilities they offer for new histories of women, gender, and sexuality in South Asia and the Middle East. Most obviously, autobiographies represent the lives of the women that tell them: their struggles and desires, their disappointments and dramas. That telling is itself generative: who will not delight in Milani’s rescue narrative, embedded in her account of Iranian women’s autobiographies, about her experience on the beach with American teenagers and her own daughter’s gentle prod, “let’s go swim”? It’s precisely in this sense that the autobiographical project is an ever-elastic archive, not simply of women’s lives or even of the conditions of their production, but of social, cultural, political, and economic histories of all kinds. In Milani’s case we find unanticipated evidence of migrant or diasporic experience at a very specific historical moment. Elsewhere we are witness to scenes of Turkish feminism, the micro-politics of Algerian...