Fadwa Tuqan, Assia Djebar, and Latifa al-Zayyat are three Arab women who are well knownfor their literary and artistic creativity, as well as for their political activism. Each has written atleast one autobiographical work charting her struggles in the personal, political, and literaryarenas, and each has chosen to express these struggles in terms of finding a voice that resistssilence but also acknowledges that silence is a form of resistance.1 In writing theirautobiographical works, these women are interested in creating not simply a femaleautobiographical tradition but, rather, a tradition that specifically does credit to their need toauthorize their voices without posing as authorities from above, to write narratives that aresimultaneously antiauthoritarian and authoritative, and to do so by speaking for and on behalf ofothers without appropriating them or subsuming them into their own agendas. Theirautobiographical works are thus marked, and ultimately enriched, by tension, hesitation, andanxiety, particularly regarding their own power and authority as authors. This hesitation enablesthem to express collective sorrows and dreams in this seemingly most individualistic ofgenres.2