It was a massed display at a Melbourne airport book-store of the veiled bestseller genre, coded by the kohl-lined eyes of the purported narrator peering out seductively from the enclosing confinement of the burka or chador and veil, that led Gillian Whitlock to her latest study of autobiography. Collectively, she calls these new genres and forms of autobiography ‘soft weapons’, thus calling attention to the ways in which ‘the war on terror ripples in and through life narrative, a sign of contraction in the public sphere that is mediated in the private domain to political effect and emotional affect’. The narratives can become weapons of propaganda, but they also can wound readers in emotional ways that are capable of transforming our thoughts and feelings.

There are many ironies in the global transits of narrative, embedded as they are in powerful historical antagonisms that structure ‘us and them’ mentalities that divide East and West, Islamic and Christian, archaic and modern ‘worlds’. Whitlock’s timely study forces us to examine the complexities, contradictions, dangers and opportunities for transcultural dialogue presented by these new forms of ‘autobiography in transit’. For Western readers, they can be instrumental in fostering an ethical engagement across cultures on issues of social justice, women’s rights and human rights. But they can also reinforce prejudices and stereotypes, instil fear of difference and engineer our consent to the war effort. For the authors, they can commodify their lives and experiences for Western consumption in ways that reinforce Western fantasies and promote new forms of occidentalism. But they can also enable Muslim voices to gain prominence and legitimacy in terms that exceed Western ideologies and political agendas. The publication of Muslim life narratives in English is one of the ways that Muslim speakers participate in the West as modern subjects, challenging and contradicting Western presumptions of the foreign, archaic life of ‘others’.

Whitlock takes a deep core sample of what she imagines as the ‘rumpled sites’ in the contemporary field of Muslim life narrative. Soft Weapons offers readers a synchronic approach, identifying and analysing the coexistence of various forms, voices, styles and genres, studying their modes of production, transits of global and local circulation and patterns of audience response across high, middlebrow and popular cultures. The study offers a complex reading of popular autobiographical forms while also introducing readers to less familiar sites and genres of life writing, like the Internet blogsite of Salam Pax, the so-called Baghdad Blogger, and the comic strip narratives of Marjane Satrapi, for which Whitlock coins the term ‘autographics’.

Prior to hearing Whitlock give a conference paper on Salam Pax and Marjane Satrapi several years ago, I had no knowledge of them. Yet, as Whitlock observes, both brought new forms of autobiographical practice into existence. Pax, whose blogsite appeared in late September 2002, effectively utilised the Internet as public sphere. He provided a potent experience of what it was like to live through bombing raids in Baghdad and the invasion of Iraq. As ‘a virtual “I” that assumes flesh in that space of excess between language and experience’, he offered interlopers an affective immersion in the war from a civilian eyewitness, dramatically supplementing the manipulated coverage of the war in the Western media and providing an intimate account of the war that challenged the facile dichotomies of the Western propaganda machine.

Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian exile to the United States after the revolution of 1979, transformed the childlike form of the comic strip to produce a sophisticated visual language of contradictory signs and meanings in Persepolis (2003) and Persepolis 2 (2004). Constructing complex narratives in simple forms derived from Persian, Islamic, Western and Christian art and iconography, Satrapi offers biting and often irreverent satire from a dissonant point of view, deflating stereotypes and destabilising divisions between cultures in conflict. Both authors produce new forms of autobiographical address that challenge perceptions of self and other. Both force us to reconsider who counts in the global public sphere and whose human subjectivity matters; and both engage readers in a communicative ethics of global interdependency.

The central chapters of Soft Weapons cover more familiar territory: the legions of popular life narratives of Muslim women produced, commodified and branded for a Western audience, including ‘the hoax we had to have’, Norma Khouri’s Forbidden Love (2003). In juxtaposing her analysis of the plethora of ‘veiled best-sellers’ with Khouri’s contested text Whitlock brings into high relief pressing issues of truth, authenticity and the limits of representation in autobiography.

Readers may remember the controversy surrounding Forbidden Love. Khouri, who had immigrated to Australia prior to the book’s publication, purported to tell the story of her best friend, Dalia, with whom she opened a beauty salon in Jordan. Dalia became the victim of a brutal honour killing at the hands of her father and brothers for loving a Western man. Stereotypically written in the romance tradition of the ‘veiled best-seller,’ this book caught the attention of readers around the world for its passionate defence of Arab women living in an archaic and deeply misogynistic society. A human rights campaign jelled around the book, which Khouri promoted as an ‘audible scream … for justice and equal rights’. As it turns out, Khouri grew up in Chicago and had lived in Jordan only for the first three years of her life. No one in her ostensibly close-knit Jordanian neighbourhood could be found who had any knowledge of the author, her friend Dalia or the events depicted in her very successful but ultimately scandalous fabrication.

Whitlock examines the hoax to highlight the important question of why readers valued the text despite (and perhaps because of) its exotic and blatantly ethnicised stereotyping. Arguing with and beyond the arguments that Sidonie Smith and I put forward in Human Rights and Narrated Lives (2004), she details how such narratives underwrite a modernist discourse of human rights in multiple, indeterminate ways. They work through a circuit of affect that links readers with victims, reinforces a neo-liberal set of values and allows for the self-affirmation of readers as empowered agents of liberation through a universalist moral grammar of human rights. When a hoax occurs, it breaks the pact of trust between reader and author. More than a question of truth and lies, a ‘fake’ memoir undermines the whole pretext of the genre. It changes how we read and, in making false claims about a particular instance of victim abuse, disables the legitimacy of local campaigns by Jordanian activists for women’s rights. Whitlock juxtaposes Khouri’s text with Suad Amiry’s war diary Sharon and My Mother-in-law: Ramallah Diaries (2005), a book that offers dense discussions of complex lives of Muslim women, to argue for an ethical partnership and exchange, a kind of ‘fair trade’ agreement between producers and consumers of goods in global networks. More than giving Western readers insight into the lives of others, the narratives that Whitlock considers actually function to constitute Western audiences and identities, ‘the “we” who play and are played by this language game’. Soft Weapons advocates ‘our’ ethical engagement in the spaces of dialogue that memoir can offer. Each chapter offers nuanced and contradictory readings that accept ambiguity, tension and dissonance to demonstrate that, although these texts can manipulate what we know, how we think about non-Western subjects and how we become complicit with or resist the ‘war on terror’, they also allow Western readers as global citizens to engage humanely with the trauma of conflict and open up transformative spaces for feeling and apprehending oneself and others differently.