Sami blir författare

Identitet, berättande och autenticitet i Sami Saids Monomani

Abstract

This article examines Sami Said’s book Monomani (2013) with a focus on the intersection between narrative and cultural identity. Monomani is a seemingly autobiographical account of Sami’s struggle to write Said’s debut novel Väldigt sällan fin (2013). It takes the form of a letter to his friend Sara where he apologizes for withdrawing from her while finishing writing his book.

                      The analysis takes its departure from a dilemma that Said has described in interviews and radio programs: he writes to express his true self, liberated from a limiting and falsifying identity imposed on him by others based on his ethnicity and religion; but when he writes about himself, he thereby also causes an inner division and a falsification of his own self. This dilemma is placed within a theoretical framework of narrative and cultural identity, focusing on the issues of authenticity and autobiographical narration. The theoretical discussion highlights, on the one hand, how authenticity in a both narrative and cultural context can be conceptualized in terms of what Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier have called narrative integrity, and, on the other hand, the critique of monological autobiographical identity both by autobiography scholar like Georges Gusdorf and Paul John Eakin and by theorists of selfhood like Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero.

                      Based on these premises, the analysis of Monomani shows how Sami, the narrator of Monomani, achieves narrative integrity by disposing of cultural identity and attaining the identity of author but that he can do so only through a monological narration which refers back to his fictionalization of himself in Väldigt sällan fin and which severs the connection between life and narrative. In the second part of the analysis, it is then shown how Monomani undermines the validity of this monological account by thematizing the scenes of address that, according to Butler, structure self-narration. The analysis concludes by arguing that, through emulation of Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical writing, Said creates in his two books an integrated autofictional work where the positions of narrator and reader are doubled and fictionalized, whereby the dilemma of an alienating cultural identity is returned to its dialogical foundation and turned into an appeal for recognition of identity beyond social categorization.