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The 1985 autobiography of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003), Rihla Jabaliyya, Rihla Saʿba: Sira Dhatiyya, translated into English as A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography (1990), has been studied in diverse critical works. Unlike most scholars, I am attentive to interiority and psychology in A Mountainous Journey, which I read to examine the writing of self in relation to intimates in Tuqan’s life. I examine Tuqan’s writing of life-as-journey and the protagonist’s struggle to articulate a self in a traumatic family context the author experienced as committed to disappearing and containing her. I argue that this process works through disidentification, an ambivalent and unstable combination of identification and counteridentification.

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Horane Smith, the Jamaican‐born award‐winning Canadian writer, reworks the Jamaican legend of Lovers’ Leap in his novel Lover's Leap (1999), to renegotiate the past and uncover what is hushed up in history and literature. He brings to light the white mistress's relationship with the enslaved black man, a topic largely unexplored by writers and scholars. The enslaved black woman/free white mistress dichotomy places Jerome, the Jamaican black slave, in a constant state of dissonance. The subjectivity of the enslaved African is underexplored in the critical literature on Caribbean slavery, and besides, psychoanalysis in Caribbean literature is an underused critical approach; I am thus enticed to braid Leon Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance theory (1957) with Frantz Fanon's “psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem” in Black Skin White Masks (1952) to delve deep into Jerome's inner self and examine how he responds to attitude and behavior inconsistencies produced within various contexts of hegemonic power.

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