Memory and History in Radwa Ashour's Novels

Abstract

Memory and history have constituted significant material in many novels, as memory shapes the cultural identity of nations. Without memory, no civilization or nation can endure. The Arab and Islamic nation has been exposed to catastrophes and crises that shook its very foundations, and it clashed with the Other/West during a dark historical period. Its relationship with the Other—who represented the pole of modernity and progress—became one of subordinate to dominant, colonized to colonizer.

It was not easy to construct a self and an identity in the face of such a perception of itself and of the Other. That Other was viewed through two conflicting perspectives: one regarded it as the colonizer who came from afar to plunder the nation’s wealth, imposing itself through knowledge and power, and attempting to ascribe stagnation and backwardness to Arab civilization in order to entrench the roots of its own civilization in Arab lands. Thus, confrontation and a return to the past, with adherence to it, were seen as necessary for liberation.

The other perspective, however, saw in severing ties with the past and turning toward the Other a solution to overcoming the alleged crisis of stagnation.

Radwa Ashour did not overlook this crisis; rather, she engaged with it using her intellectual tools and expansive vision to examine the relationship between two civilizations. She did not perceive it as one of rupture, but rather believed that each had contributed to the development of the other. Arab-Islamic civilization once served as a torch that illuminated the world with the light of knowledge and civilization, and Europe today owes a debt to that earlier Islamic civilization.

She calls for understanding and rereading the contexts of renaissance, and for comprehending the structural foundations upon which society stands in order to preserve its identity in the face of an Other that imposed itself by force—so that the self does not drift behind it, dissolve into it, and lose its own essence.

Europe has manipulated memory in order to construct a new one. The aim of this new memory is to bring about a radical cultural transformation that reshapes the intellectual structure underlying the identity of nations and civilizations. It is a form of global acculturation, or imperial culture—indeed, a domineering paternalistic globalization that seeks adaptation not with the self that produces its own cultural forms, but with the Westernizing Other. Through its advanced technologies—especially military, economic, and industrial—this Other is able to erode cultures, consume their resources, and strip them of their will by mortgaging their future and dignity, rendering them subordinate to the trajectory of Western-centric civilization and revolving within its vast economic orbits. In such a state, they find themselves shackled by inescapable capitalist chains.