The experiences of war and armed conflicts often impose new roles and identities upon individuals and give rise to new ontological and epistemological discourses that speak to the complexity of political crises and their effects on personal and collective subjectivities. Such experiences tend to affect conventional forms of autobiographical writing. Novel and creative modes of narrating life stories emerge to capture and reflect upon the newly imposed, and often dangerous, circumstances and the way they transform and shape individual and collective everyday lives. In their introduction to Writing War, Writing Lives (2017), Kate McLoughlin, Lara Feigel and Nancy Martin explain that during contexts of war and political unrest, standard forms of life writing tend to be ‘manipulated, stretched, broken and eschewed’ as ‘form-breaking, rebellious tendencies of writing lives are released’ (1, 5). Indeed, as I maintain throughout this book, contemporary life writing subgenres from war-torn contexts tend to be formally experimental in a way that reflects the conditions of trauma, tempo-spatial fragmentation, identity fraction, (neo)colonial oppression and material dispossession – to name a few – surrounding the narratives’ construction and production. However, literary autobiographical accounts emerging from contexts of armed conflicts and national struggles very often sustain a standard, serious register and mode of expression. They are predominantly characterised by the depiction of human suffering and tragedy which are intrinsic to the experience of war; the texts examined in McLoughlin’s et al.’s volume are no exception. However, what would certainly strike us as ‘rebellious’ is the comedic portrayal of such experiences, particularly from the side of the victims. War and national struggles are not inherently funny yet representing them in a humorous frame evokes the interplay between the tragic and the comic. It draws attention to the intersection of the two paradigms – national struggles and comedy – while highlighting the potential significance of humour as a narrative of resistance.

This chapter examines the strategic functions of humour in diaries that record national struggles by contemporary Arab women, namely Palestinian author Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2006), and Egyptian novelist and activist Mona Prince’s Revolution is My Name: an Egyptian Woman’s Diary from Eighteen Days in Tahrir (2014).