Virginia Woolf wrote her debut novel, The Voyage Out (1915) about a sheltered young woman who travels by ship to South America. The characters in the novel are loosely portrayed after Woolf’s family and the Bloomsbury Group. Critics often view the novel as a trope of a woman moving from a cloistered existence to a more open and global venue – a journey into the world with its joys and challenges. Soraya Altorki’s new book, Hayati kama‘Ushtuha (My Life as I Lived it), is equally about the voyage out, but it is not a fictional work; it is an autobiography that respects the autobiographical pact where the protagonist is the author and the rest of characters are real, neither fictional nor fictionalised. Although the memoirs of Altorki are anchored in reality and contemporary history, the work is a page-turner like any good novel. So much has taken place in Soraya’s journey, an odyssey of sorts, including moments of success, rebellion, and tragedy that her life seems punctuated by extremes of loss and achievement.

Soraya Altorki is an eminent anthropologist whose scholarly books made breakthroughs in the discipline. She is exotically attractive and firmly opinionated with a mind of her own. Dazzling and intelligent as she is, her discourse about herself has often been discrete or circuitous that even her colleagues at the American University in Cairo were looking forward to at last unravelling the mystery of Soraya and her exceptional trajectory through her recently published memoirs. What I discovered in reading Soraya’s recent book, Hayati, is the voyage-in as well as delineating the voyage-out. Soraya’s memoirs do not unspool past things that happened once upon a time but it is essentially her search for who she is and how she came to be this worldly person, Professor Soraya Altorki. It is this voyage within that is the subtext of her memoirs rendering the work an experiment in exploring the self or as Altorki uses the dictum of “know thy self”. Her command of Arabic, simultaneously accessible and occasionally embroidered with poetic verses and popular songs, renders her intimate search touching. This discreet “voyage-in” overlaps with her apparent “voyage-out” of the Kingdom. We may call the first the latent text and the second the manifest text.

Indications of Soraya’s search strike the reader from the first chapter, entitled in the form of a question: “From where do we start the narrative?” This is answered by “my father and my mother.”  The search is also emphasised in the title of the penultimate chapter, entitled “The search for identity? Who am I?” This invariably recalls the well-known poem of the Iraqi poet and women’s rights advocate Nazik Al-Malaika, commonly entitled “Man Ana?” (Who am I?).  Altorki presents herself in contexts—first, the parents, then the siblings, then the friends. The layout is helpful as the photos of parents, siblings, and friends are put next to the place where they are mentioned. Such introduction of the multitude of relatives and later professors, neighbours, etc, provides visual identification of her close contacts along with Soraya’s snapshots from childhood to adulthood. She identifies herself by emphasising the background that constituted her. Her father was from Najd, ‘Unayzah specifically, who settled in Jiddah and was loyal to Ibn Saud ruling dynasty, and had Wahhabi leanings. He was adamant that his daughters would only marry their paternal cousins—the preferred marriage in the Arab world. Yet, he was willing to permit his youngest daughter Soraya to pursue studies abroad. Her mother, on the other hand, was from the more sophisticated Hijaz, illiterate but with a passion for music and songs. Singing was forbidden entertainment in Altorki’s house, and the women folks had to be alerted by a servant when the father came home to stop and conceal musical instruments. That was the time when elite families in Saudi Arabia had slaves (slavery was abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962). The voyage-in then presents an album of characters that assist us in understanding domestic life in Saudi Arabia in the mid-twentieth century and after. More significant in the unfolding of the memoirs, we note how Soraya constitutes herself as she was impacted by her entourage. While this interior landscape of the protagonist is intimate, we come across moments verging on confession and remorse when she recognises how she took the place of her father in the carriage and how she silenced her mother. On the other hand, she does not show any regret for having hit her teacher (who insulted her mother), nor does she express remorse for having smoked and left her boarding school in Alexandria, without permission, to attend an athletic match in Cairo.

The multi-layered presentation of family, friends, professors, and partners in life when Soraya explores her identity, makes one feel that she is the outcome of traces of those people that marked her consciousness: She is singular in the mode of plural. She sketches others and presents their three-dimensional figures and we get to know not only their profiles but also their viewpoints and their contradictions. The best example is her brother Ahmed, enlightened and educated in England with progressive and leftist views. Yet, he too wanted Soraya to marry a paternal cousin bearing the name of Altorki. Ahmed, though supportive in many instances, treated Soraya oppressively because she went to the cinema with a girlfriend. Her elder sister Khadija also prevented her from attending the New Year party which she was looking forward to and had bought a special dress for the occasion. Soraya had always had a rebellious spirit, but when she graduated from University with a BA degree, she felt more independent and was willing to challenge traditional norms. The list of figures she points to in different stations of her life seems like a global hall of fame: From Taha Hussein and his wife Suzanne whom she encountered when taking the Ozonia ship for Europe to Princess Ferial (daughter of King Farouk of Egypt), who was a student in the same school that Soraya joined in Switzerland. Her mentors range from the legendary professor of philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Widad Said (wife of the Egyptian geologist Rushdi Said) to a prominent anthropologist at Berkeley, Laura Nader (sister of Ralph Nader, the attorney activist and environmentalist). Her classmates include the notorious Sana Hassan (wife of the outspoken diplomat Tahseen Bashir), who was the first Egyptian to normalise with Israel even before Al-Sadat visited the Israeli Knesset. In addition, Soraya’s family had a marriage connection with the Bin Ladens and a professional connection with the Saudi minister of petroleum Ahmed Zaki Yamani, as well as close neighbours with Faisal Ibn Saud when he was a prince living in Jeddah.     

 As for the voyage out of a sheltered existence, one should keep in mind that elite families from the Gulf sought summer resorts in Lebanon and Egypt or went there for medical treatment. This exposure to a region that partakes in Arab culture, but is more open to social and artistic activities, was the first step to a larger world. The family of Soraya with elder sisters married to diplomats stationed in the Middle East and Europe allowed her to travel and be exposed to different norms. Altorkis had friends and neighbors in Lebanese resorts and in Cairo neighbourhoods whose diversity hit the young Soraya—foreign-language speaking Muslims, Christians, and Druze. While her education started informally with a Moroccan tutor, Abla Zeinab, she was enrolled in a boarding English school run by missionaries in Beirut. That gave the 7-year-old Soraya a taste of otherness. She became aware of different prayer modes where ablution is not a prerequisite. This is perhaps the early observation of the budding ethnographer in Soraya’s trajectory. Later, Soraya enrolled as a boarding student in Alexandria’s prestigious Girls’ College which was the interface of Victoria College for male elites. Not surprising then that the girls and boys of these colleges met informally, frequented cinemas, and smoked. In the summer vacations, Soraya would spend time with her diplomat relatives in Europe where she first felt alienated in the Western continent. Her brother-in-law suggested that she enroll in Le Grand Verger, a Swiss summer school, to master French. During her adolescence, she was influenced by Egyptian literature specifically by the fiction of Ihsan Abdel- Quddous, where universities were presented as institutions of liberation and freedom. It was not easy to persuade her father to allow his daughter to join a coeducational college, but in the end, the younger men in the family including her brother and brother-in-law were supportive and she joined the American University in Cairo. At AUC she was nurtured and supported by her professors and encouraged to attend graduate work in the US, by an American faculty member of Lebanese origin, Thomas Naff.  He helped her get accepted at the prestigious University of California Berkeley and met her on arrival only to have her kept for hours at security as her passport, like all Saudi passports then, did not have a photo of hers.

In California, Soraya came to be active in politicised academic circles of Arab students where the question of Palestine and Arab unity were paramount. Her ideological aspirations overlapped with those of the left and the figure of Gamal Abdel-Nasser. During this period and going to academic conferences, she met a former student of Berkeley who was teaching then at Harvard, the German anthropologist Klaus Koch. He had studied Arabic and anthropology in Germany. He courted her and travelled frequently to see her. Their relationship started as a collegian friendship and ended in love. Her family opposed the marriage even though Klaus had converted to Islam. Before her marriage, Soraya went back to Saudi Arabia with the conviction that it would help to contribute to her country’s progress by teaching at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah. She found she had not been assigned courses, and the educational standard was that of a secondary school. Thus, Soraya went back to the US where she became a fellow at Harvard University and decided to marry Klaus despite her brother, who became her guardian after the passing of her father and was adamantly against the marriage. The wedding was in London with the support of friends; none of her family attended. Then both Klaus and Soraya were hired in the Department of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. Her mother, however, visited her and ended up close to Klaus. In a dramatic incident in their building where the couple were visiting a neighbour upstairs, Klaus tried to get back to their apartment via the balcony to retrieve their keys, lost his balance, and the tragic fall ended his life. This, of course, led to years of grief, with her family taking pity on their widowed daughter.

One day, an Iranian-American academic, whose economist father served in the short-lived government of Mosaddegh, visited her with a recommendation from a common friend seeking her help for research in Cairo. This scholar, Sharough Akhavi, was accompanied by his 6-year-old child whose mother had passed away. He ended up teaching at AUC for a year and a friendship developed as they shared the losses of their spouses. Their friendship lasted for twenty years before they decided to get married. Altorki family welcomed the marriage that took place in Washington, DC. The chapter in the memoirs on Sharough takes its title from a song by Abdel-Halim Hafez, “the day of falling in love with you was the most beautiful coincidence.” In the meantime, Soraya continued to fulfil her vocation as a scholar, publishing six books and dozens of articles. She was invited to teach in prestigious universities in the US and has been showered with honours.

Hayati is a story of success, but it is also a story of losses, one after the other. Soraya recalls all her family members and friends who passed away, adding: “I feel all the time that one does not die once for all, but dies slowly several times. This happens when one says farewell to beloved ones.” Even though Soraya comes from a privileged background, her autobiography demonstrates the diversity of challenges and struggles to be herself and to know herself. Her voyage-out overlaps with the voyage-in.  We can read this autobiography as a social and historical document shedding light on a case that demonstrates change from the enclosed to the open as well as reading it as a celebration of friendship – the partnership that she views as the most significant in human relations as it provides psychological and physical comfort. The autobiography of Soraya Altorki is, indeed, a paean to friendship.

Deptartment of English and Comparative Literature American University in Cairo.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 3 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly