Gendered Voices of Youth and Tahrir in Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution

This essay is a critical reading of feminist representations of voice and nation in Ahdaf Soueif’s political memoir Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012) which critiques its attentiveness to both gender-inflected and family-oriented imagery. Relying on major theoretical works on autobiography and Egyptian feminism, and critical reflections of Egyptian women’s writing and the 2011 Tahrir Revolution, this essay situates Soueif’s personal and political account of the revolution at the edge of a long tradition of women’s resistance writing in Egypt. This essay also problematizes the memoir’s claim to representation because of political considerations that privilege a Western readership over a local one, despite its attempt to ingratiate itself with hybrid autobiographical writing across many intertextual mediums, a movement in contemporary Egyptian literature that has intensified since the beginning of the 21st century, revealing a need and urgency for the self-affirmation of voice and documentation of history from people’s perspectives as revolution unfolds.