Ruptures

Pursuing a relational approach, Part II tells the story of Amat al-Latif’s childhood and early adult life in an elite household viewed through the prism of her intimate relationship with her father. Amat al-Latif’s narrative explains how the momentous events of 1948 – her father’s arrest, the collapse of the constitutional government, the sack of her city, house demolition ‒ have impacted upon her life’s trajectories, above all the loss of close relatives to disease and execution, early marriage and dispossession after the failed revolt. It dwells on the precariousness of everyday life in the aftermath of her family’s downfall and women’s exposure to destitution, and the ways in which she has dealt with violent bereavement. Amat al-Latif also had to deal with her husband’s father’s overbearing wife in her patrilocal household, refusing to subordinate herself to her. However, instead of employing the trope of resistance, it is argued that women’s noncompliance is frequently articulated within existing socio-cultural norms rather than the expression of an oppositional subjectivity.