The Construction and Projection of the Self In Contemporary Immigrant Women's Autobiography

Abstract

Maybe the most important reason for wdting is to prevent the erosion of time, so that memories will not be blown away by the wind. Write to register history and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten. Isabel Allende

In the four memoirs, Elmaz Abinader's Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey (1991), Arlene Avakian's Lion Woman's Legacy: An Armenian-AmeriCEn Memoir (1992), Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-AmeriCEn Memoir of Homelands (1996), and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage (1999), the issues of immigration and marginalization occupy a central position in human experience. In this particular case Iam additionally interested in exploring women's writing in the light of feminist theory which acknowledges the difference between men's and women's experiences,.as a result of social, political, economic and cultural circumstances.

This study is divided into two parts. Part One presents the theoretical framework, and is in turn divided into two chapters: "Women's Autobiography," and "Immigration and Ethnicity." Part Two includes an analysis of the four memoirs in the light of women's autobiography theory and immigration theory. In this Part, Idevote a chapter to "Life-Story and History" in which I explore the authors' representations of their journeys of immigration and the consequences of displacement, longing, belonging, and definitions of home. The next chapter deals with "Experience" as a process of interpretation. Ethnicity and gender are key issues here, whereby both are analysed in the memoirs through representations of the body: the ethnic body and the female body. And the intersection of ethnicity and gender oppression is shown as the motivating force behind the development and expression of feminist consciousness in the memoirs. The last chapter, devoted to "Writing," focuses on self-representation and self-assertion through memoir-writing. Here I look closer at the textual construct, the sources employed in writing, as well as specific 'technologies of autobiography' and of self-representation such as photography and the figurative use of metonymy in identity-construction. As academics, the four writers' involvement in memoir­ writing can be also seen as a process of 'theorising the self,' in which they combine historiography, theory, creative writing and autobiography.

In the Conclusion, and in the light of Edward Said's definition of intellectualism, the four writers emerge as intellectuals who in addition to exploring the dimensions of being women, experimenting with autobiographical writing and destabilizing the genre, are also actively involved in exposing discrimination and exploring various modes of resistance and self-assertion through reclaiming their right to self-representation. Refiecting on the memoirs of Elmaz Abinader, Leila Ahmed, Arlene Avakian and Shirley Lim collectively,Isee them in Caren Kaplan's terms as examples of out-law genres exemplifying "expansions or revolutions of generic boundaries." Thus, the four texts gain out-law qualities and emerge as belonging to autobiographical out-law genres. By focusing on the histories and experiences of women, by writing with.,n the 'trad.lflon' of women's autobiographical writing, and by producing texts belonging to 'out-law genres' they establish their marginality, not as a position of victimization and oppression, but as one of resistance, agency and self­ representation.