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History Via the Unconsciousin Miriam Cooke’s
 Hayati,
 
 My Life
(Hager Ben Driss)“One cannot not speak of the scandals of an epoch. One cannot notespouse a cause. One cannot not be summoned by an obligation of fidelity” (11). This is the way Hélène Cixous has tried to answer “Andhistory?” in her article “From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Sceneof History.” This answer permeates Miriam Cooke’s narrative
 Hayati
,
My Life
. One cannot not feel Cooke’s engagement to denounce injustice, her espousal of a just cause and her fidelity to ‘truth’. Helene Cixous makes itclear in her article that “when it is a question of writing, it is always aquestion of, and can only be a question of, truth” (1).Whether 
 Hayati
,
My Life
is remindful of Cixous’ article or it is theother way round depends only on what text one has read the first. Butwhat is more important than the question of beginnings is that a theory of creativity, as articulated by Cixous, is not an idiosyncratic matter; it goes beyond individuality. Cixous’ article deals with the moment of writingwhich stems from the unconscious to become history. The unconscious iswhere dwells the darkness of the inside. Writing is an act of explorationwhere “one doesn’t know. One goes. I follow eyes closed, what I feel.Feeling does not mislead” (1).
 Hayati
seems to be written according tothis proviso: groping one’s way in the somber recesses of the self.Between Cixous’ text and Cooke’s narrative there is a subtle affinity. But
1
 
the metaphorical spatial line demarcating the unconscious from history inCixous’ article disappears in
 Hayati
. For the unconscious in Cooke’s textfolds history, envelops it.Because “writing is in the end only an
anti-oubli
”, Cooke narrateshistory as a strategy of remembrance “not in order to mourn the past,” asCixous warns, “but to become a prophet of the present” (Cixoux 1989:7).Indeed, history in
 Hayati
defies chronology, hierarchy and logic. Historyis not only poking in dirt, an institutionalized voyeurism, and anacademic gossip about the past; it is also a writing/reading of the present.
 Hayati
is a journey in history via the unconscious towards the present.Cooke’s narrative is a fascinating textual puzzle, somewhatremindful of Toni Morrison’s
 Beloved 
not only in its fragmentation, butalso in the poignant use of history/ ‘her-story’ to explore the inside.Actually the title itself,
 Hayati
, is an Arab word of endearment to a beloved person, ‘my life’. To sum up
My Life
is to enforce on the text alinear order that the whole narrative resists. After all, whose life is thetext really narrating? Polyphony as well as cacophony in
 Hayati
resists acenter, a beginning or even an end. It is the life/history of a whole population whose destiny is to live homeless in their own home, in thelast colony of the world, Palestine.Cooke treats their history “poetically”. For, according to HélèneCixous, history “had to be sung, … it should be an epic like the Iliad.History with its human face: Destiny” (1989: 12). The possessiveadjective “
My
” in the title,
My Life
, is a diffident, challenging stand toappropriate a life, a story, a history in the absence of a stolen land, astifled past and a hazy present. Hélène Cixous’ definition of writing
2
 
matches to the letter Cooke’s fight against oblivion or the surrender toindifference:
Writing is (should be) the act of reminding oneself of what is, in this veryinstant, of remembering what has never existed, remembering what coulddisappear, what could be put off limits, killed, scorned, remembering the far off, minimal things, turtles, ants, grandmothers, the good, first and burning passion, women, nomadic peoples, peoples who are exiled little by little, fightsof ducks. (1989: 7)
 Hayati
is a remembrance of all these and much more. It is a re-collectionof dreams, nightmares, hopes, fantasies, odors and tastes of the lost land.History in Cooke’s narrative is mobile. It is articulated byseveral voices from different points of view. And yet, history is containedin frozen moments. The whole narrative is fragmented into dates as atestimony of a mutilated and dismembered history. It is also ademonstration of Bakhtin’s premise that “Every specific situation ishistorical” (1981
:
33). Every date is a specific historical moment spoken by different characters. The narrative, then, emerges as a historiographyof individual voices in a flagrant challenge to the strategies of homogenization and silencing adopted by mainstream history. To havedifferent voices articulate the same historical moment is to declare war against the monopole of a monolithic record of the past –rather taxonomic, exclusionary and musculinist. History in
 Hayati
acquires thesame dimension of the Derridean concept of meaning: it is perpetuallydifferent and deferred.
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