The Father-Figure in Fadwa Tuqan's and Yael Dayan's Autobiographies

Abstract

This paper examines the father figure in the autobiographies of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003) and the Israeli novelist Yael Dayan (1939-present). In the early half of the twentieth century, Nablusi women, exemplified by Fadwa, did not have the chance to participate in the political life until the nakba in 1948. Women subsequently became freer and could gain more access to the social and political life which normally monopolized by patriarchs. In the same year, i.e. 1948, Tuqan's father died, so he was not present later to share the success of his daughter. Hence, the picture of the father that Fadwa draws in her autobiography A Mountainous Journey (1990) is mainly bounded to the domestic life. Dayan, unlike Fadwa, was given the infinite freedom to experience life since childhood. Although most Jewish women in the Israeli community obtained the same opportunities at the time, she was more privileged because she was the daughter of the famous Israeli leader Moshe Dayan. In her autobiography My Father, His Daughter (1986), Yael talks extensively about her father's political position and how it affected her life negatively and positively. This paper henceforth sheds light on dominant social and political patriarchal ideologies in the two autobiographies and how they are represented differently, that is: Tuqan's social father and Dayan's political father.