FRAGMENTATION OF REVELATION AND HIDING BEHIND THE WALLS OF THE DISTANT MARGIN IN THE SAUDI FEMINIST AUTOBIOGRAPHY: An Analytical Reading of the Novel Madi, Mufrad, Mudhakkar/ Past, Singular, Masculine1 by the Saudi Writer, Omaima al-Khamis2

Abstract

If the biography is a narrative type with an unimaginable reference basis, the feminist autobiography is a narrative type with a reference basis, in which the author is a woman who admits and does not imagine, as if it were unnecessary to differentiate it from the masculine autobiography, or because the latter is the dominant and the more productive, or because the human being is a terrestrial being, that has no gender. The author can be a man or a woman. However, the work remains described as a non-specialized autobiography. It is not difficult to differentiate between a male autobiography and a female autobiography, but it would be in favor of the first, the second of which appears to be subordinate to it. The autobiography was defined as a literary genre in ancient Arab literature more than a thousand years ago, and until recently it was a purely male literary genre, if we exclude some narratives of female autobiographies that we received mostly through oral narration. The autobiography in modern Arabic literature is not considered an extension of the ancient Arabic autobiography as much as a tradition of Western models of autobiography. In Saudi culture, the autobiography is still unknown as much as the novel or the story and the play, and to be common it took enough time to emerge from the cycle of contempt, whether as a produced text or a receptive text.