ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the African female autobiography is a text that creatively deploys the narrative techniques of the filial voice for specific purposes. Deployment of the filial voice to foreground specifically biological and non-biological maternal relationality enables the autobiographical subject to excavate silenced female figures from familial and national history. El Saadawi is an Egyptian advocate of women’s rights, politician, medical doctor and renowned writer. A Daughter of Isis and Walking through Fire are two of her life narratives. Both autobiographies express El Saadawi’s disillusionment with Egypt’s religious, patriarchal and political autocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-Dutch-American women’s rights advocate, critic of Islam, politician and polemicist. Her two autobiographies Infidel and Nomad: A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations narrate Ali’s biological filiation to maternal and paternal relations and her ideological filiation to Somali group identities, that is, religious and clan, especially in exile, and diasporic Somalis.
