UNIVERSAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: SERENADE CHAFIK AND THE LANGUAGE OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Scholars of human rights often note the paradoxical premise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” yet these rights require implementation and monitoring in order to exist. Furthermore, although human rights discourses are premised on a universally recognizable, abstract set of ethical norms, these norms nonetheless need to be enforced as laws by specific states. The period that has witnessed the emergence of human rights as the governing language of emancipatory politics has also witnessed a wealth of autobiographical writing that articulates resistance to oppression and injustice with reference to universal rights. How then do these autobiographical accounts negotiate the paradox of human rights? This article approaches this question through a focus on Egyptian-French feminist Sérénade Chafik’s 2003 autobiography Répudiation, which chronicles the author’s legal struggle in France to gain custody of her Egyptian-born daughter. The goal is to understand how “rights” are established in literary testimony, to illustrate how the territories of France and Egypt figure in the author’s search for a just social order, and to think through how autobiography registers the limitations of a human rights readership community.