ABSTRACT
In April 2006 Ahdaf Soueif gave a lecture at the American University in Cairo in which she focused on the image of Arabs in modern Western literature (see Morgan 2006). On that particular occasion, the familiar Saidian subject of the politics of representation was not only discussed as a recurring theme in her own work, but Soueif further linked it to her own experience as an Egyptian writer in Britain. Thus, she spoke about the development in regard to her critical reception and the evolution of her own public persona: from the carefully constructed identity of a hyphenated Anglophone Arab writer and translator to that of an—at times polemic—activist, who openly takes sides with Arabs, Palestinians, and others neglected by official representations. Her medium of choice for the literary reflection of this process of personal politicization has been a collection of essays and book reviews called Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (2004) to, as Soueif put it herself, “mark time between novels” (Morgan 2006: 13). 1 In a similar vein, the Lebanese writer, poet, and painter Etel Adnan describes the origin of her seven essays that make up In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) as an endeavor that “was close to writing an autobiography, the past mixing with the present, each distorting the other, opening into the tensions of repetition” (Adnan 2005: xiv). 2
