Abstract
The 1985 autobiography of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003), Rihla Jabaliyya, Rihla Saʿba: Sira Dhatiyya, translated into English as A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography (1990), has been studied in diverse critical works. Unlike most scholars, I am attentive to interiority and psychology in A Mountainous Journey, which I read to examine the writing of self in relation to intimates in Tuqan’s life. I examine Tuqan’s writing of life-as-journey and the protagonist’s struggle to articulate a self in a traumatic family context the author experienced as committed to disappearing and containing her. I argue that this process works through disidentification, an ambivalent and unstable combination of identification and counteridentification.