The Geography of Identity: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf’s Sīrat madīna: ʿAmmān fī ’l-arbaʿīnāt

This study treats the masterpiece Sīrat madīna: ʿAmmān fī ’l-arbaʿīnāt (1994; translated into English as Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman, 1996) by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf. I read it through its unconventional and original formal and aesthetic choices in which the story of the city and the protagonist are narrated relationally in terms of each other. The goal of the present study is to deconstruct its multifaceted relational strategies, pinpointing the formal choices and thematic proclivities which situate the autobiographical subject in a particular social, cultural, temporal and historic sphere, and in constant tension with these same elements. It also pinpoints the text’s paradoxically obverse tendency to dissociate and distance the autobiographical subject by way of formal narrative techniques and content, ostensibly favoring the city as the focus of the text over the “self” of the protagonist. Under the surface, the autobiographical subject is constantly present, and is discursively constituted through the historical, cultural and communal accounts of the city. Finally, this study reveals that in Sīrat madīna, both the porousness of geographical boundaries as well as the traversing of personal boundaries are expressed through metaphors and accounts of death.Key words: Abd al-Rahman Munif, relational autobiography, modern Arabic literature, Arabic autobiography, diaspora autobiography, exile literature.