"Rememory": Memoir and Testimony on Women's Human Rights in the Global South
Item
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Title
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"Rememory": Memoir and Testimony on Women's Human Rights in the Global South
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:7a586a915937:11247
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identifier
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11542
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Creator
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Williams, Joylette E.,
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Contributor
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Meena Alexander
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Womens studies | South African studies | Middle Eastern studies | Middle Eastern literature | African literature | North African studies | Egypt | Human Rights Studies | Life Writing | Mamphela Ramphele | Memoir and Testimony | Nawal El Saadawi
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Abstract
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When the life writer has experienced violence, injustice, and political unrest within her region, memoir and testimonial writing requires a process involving the writer as victim and as witness and the reader, who also becomes a witness. This multi-layered process is further complicated by patriarchal structures that manipulate cultural values and place the quality of women's lives in jeopardy, which often leads to trauma that the victim revisits throughout her lifetime. Incorporating Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory" as illustrated in the novel Beloved based on Margaret Garner's true-life experience of slavery, I explore trauma not as an isolated event, but as part of one's existence throughout a lifetime. Through the memoir Across Boundaries and through other writings by Mamphela Ramphele, I explore the author's writing process with attention to the ways she approaches injustice, violence, and loss. I preface an analysis of Ramphele's memoir with a contextualization of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's hearings, the testimonies of which powerfully represent the extent of injustices suffered by the South African people during the apartheid regime. Ramphele makes the effects of apartheid realistic and relevant in the anthropological research she conducts in the work hostels in Cape Town, and she reveals that the memories she is forced to revisit during the writing process continue to traumatize her. Nawal El Saadawi, a medical doctor in her early career as is Ramphele, also explores violence against women as a form of injustice within the context of dominant cultural norms in her native Egypt and throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Her essays and works of fiction reiterate the recurring theme in her memoir Walking Through Fire that rape, domestic violence, and inadequate health care must decrease if women are to be active participants within a new, democratic society.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
